Above: Mia Rashid danced before a changing backdrop at the M2 Gallery space in the most recent production from Lights On Theatre . This and featured image supplied.
‘What the world needs now is love, sweet love’, was how Hal David lyrics went in the Burt Bacharach song of 1965. One year after this hit’s release, Joni Mitchell shared ‘I really don’t know love at all’, an honest admission in the centre of her poetry which linked the heart to nature, especially clouds.
One and a half centuries before Both Sides Now impacted the world, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote his piece The Sunset. This storyline on the fragility of love uses vivid imagery to wed nature with our passionate, keen-to-nurture parts of the human soul. It was set to music for voice and string quartet by Respighi in 1916.
How we love, why we love things, or activities or humans were processes illuminated searchingly, candidly, cleverly and just very beautifully in the latest entertainment from the bold creative and performing team at Lights On Theatre. Led by head creative and transparent, talented mezzo soprano Spark Saunders Robinson, the team in this work delved gently and candidly into the glaring, cloudy, noisy passions of surviving love, loving it and losing it.
What was striking about this kaleidoscope of light, movement and music mashups was the concept’s diverse packaging of current philosophies on human love. In a packed-to-the projector transformation of the M2 Gallery space in Surry Hills, classical music for piano and voice, pop music and pre-recorded vox-pop voiceovers telling stories of love and lover svarious were mixed to lead us elegantly and engagingly through our modern approach to finding and keeping love or losing it.
Watching the shifting, nuanced flow of In The Presence of Light, it was obvious that we were in the presence of capable, out-of-the-(light) box creatives, keen to combine powerful elements in their creation of environments. Nathaniel Kong’s pianism and sound design consciousness added much to the tapestry. As onstage accompanist he excelled in supply of sympathetic support for Spark’s layered interpretation of Respighi’s setting of Shelley’s words in Il tramonto.
Kong’s solo nuturing of Sibelius’ postcards from the world of trees (in the movements of the composer’s Cinq Morceaux)- was well paced, nicely shaped and had smooth filigree. This playing possessed colour and precision. It moved us with a pleasing momentum that gave dancer Mia Rashid much to work with in front of the screen. This energetic and elegant dancer was swathed in shadow plus coloured lighting work which changed as deftly and impressively as her dance stories.
Above; Mia Rashid dances in the light . Phot: supplied.
Spark Sanders Robinson is a versatile, vocalist with a solid technique. She delivered a penetrating operatic-style vocal for the Respighi work. She also shifted to and from spoken word to discuss love and loss and her personal loves and human nature’s emotional environments surviving in parallel with the flux of nature. Her final shift with flexible, pared-down voice to deliver Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now was next level. It was one of the most powerful and intricate treatments of the loaded lyrics I have heard for some tme.
These are complex, savagely contrasted threads with which to weave. In this production’s brief but detailed swoop the strands are evocatively packaged by designer Jacqueline Chapman. The shifts between musics, commentary, dance and interactions off and on stage and from the vocalist have been streamlined to smooth success by co-director and dramaturg Victoria Abbott.
The various deliveries and successive sections of this piece were effectively meshed together- whether they emerged fropm darkness with hand-held pinpoints of light or through projection and shadow puppetry effects, to artists performing haloed by patterns of unique colour mix plus textures. The periodic return of human voices discussing love and emerging from dimmed lighting in honest interview response mode had great impact on the crowd, which laughed and nodding in empathy.
The theatrical and human results of this morceaux of caring were well-crafted and as beautiful as it was challengingacross multiple shifts in content types. It was ultimately accessible and absorbing – possessing a well-performed mix of the visual, of ‘classical’ and pop music moments sitting accessibly side by side and of inspiring modern choreography drenched in artistic and functional manipulations of light.
This latest offering from Lights On Theatre shines a keen torch on our interiors. This is theatre that is thought-provoking and intimate in its searchlight storytelling. The discussions leave a warm glow in our broken, rebuilding and developing hearts, presenting the old study of the power of love in a very new light (pun intended).
Hopefully this particular work will be presented again, and then more clever atypical projects like it. The integrity and frank nature of the communication gilded by great music and light effects has so much potential to bring new audiences and thrill again returning ones.
This blending of performance disciplines, genre-defying music, honesty, back-to basics themes all arranged into a fine mosaic definitely make it a light in the dark that needs to live way past the next sunset.
