What do you do when three extraterrestrial creatures arrive on stage in a swirling UFO flight landing – with red flashes and slashes of green and purple light? You are a captured earthling! You are so enraptured by the ‘The Look’ that you applaud!
The alien’s dramatic entrance is heralded by the resounding boom of a big temple gong that strikes and alerts the amazed children (and adults) in the audience to their presence on earth, by accident, during their flight through space from the galaxy of the ‘Drawing World.’
Crimson and green beams flicker through the stunned audience as the words ‘Drawing Show’ is traced out in chalk light beams. This ‘Show’ draws from their experience on earth, as they communicate with earthlings with dance, body language and art and drawing – their favourite pastime.
‘The Look’ are three aliens who frolic with earthlings – one waves a fleuro-pink lurex scarf, like a signal, as he melts into a prop and a man’s profile emerges! It’s not magic – its Art!
‘The Look’ delight in their paint splattered outfits. They prime their paints by squirting tubes over the stage and beaming tubes into the audience. These lighting special effects are extraordinary!
The ‘Box Man’ alien does some interactive manoeuvres which leave the audience squealing and cajoling him. ‘A Look’ does a drawing on a T-shirt, then squeegees it, pops it on a hanger, then wraps it in plastic and gives it away to a lucky (but gasping!) audience member.
The next artistic event is the most intriguing of the performance. The hair-in-chopsticks-Look draws with a charcoal stick a black and white sketch of smoke and cloud wisps around a lake with billowing bamboo. Then suddenly a bright blue liquid waterfall flows out of the painting! The audience gasps and claps at the same time! And there are more surprises!
We are on a tour of an art gallery – with quite a few twists:- A Vincent Van Gogh look-alike in a yellow sombrero has a real head and limbs – even background haystack detail. Box-Man does a rendition of Starry Starry Night and with his fingertips and a poignant ‘how he suffered for his sanity.’ Then by contrast, the sombre face of Yi Sun-sin a hero of the Chosun Dynasty – is drawn in black and white – a mighty Korean Warrior (not to be confused with a Japanese samurai) and we see the Pagodas, the licking flames of the fire and a battle horse bearing the Warrior with Napoleonic hat.
With more awesome gasps from the audience, as a sepiah triptych turns into colour. We watch as Botticelli’s Venus rises from a fluro-pink shell, with Lady Godiva following on her horse! a Mona Lisa cameo – complete with Red Nose and a gauzy Marilyn Monroe cameo with Red Nose.
We glimpse at Michaelangelo’s David and the sequential creation of a Man in Soccer Boots! And we have enjoyed the marbling of Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers.’ If there is any reader who finds trawling through Art Galleries tedious then ‘refresh your visual appetite’ and watch art come to awesome life in ‘The Drawing Show.’
It comes as no surprise that Director Kim Jin Gyu’s ‘The Drawing Show’ was featured with the Torch Relay at the Beijing Olympics.
What an extraordinary unique artistic and cultural event this was for the Sydney Fringe Festival 2012.
THE DRAWING ROOM played the Italian Forum Theatre, Norton Street Leichhardt between the 21st and 23rd September, 2012.
© Esther Rothfield
15th October, 2012
Tags: Sydney Theatre Reviews- THE DRAWING ROOM, Sydney Arts Guide, Esther Rothfield