UNDISCOVERED LAND - VOYAGE 2
A WOMAN'S STORY.
Conceived and created by Jepke Goudsmit & Graham Jones,
Electro-acoustic Score by Roger Dean. Featuring Sephardic canticas and Allegri's “Miserere”. Premiered ‘97 at The Edge in Sydney.
The second part of our dyptich dance-drama across time stretching a virtual millenium, with performers, space and objects are continually transforming.
The story: a dramatisation of a diary kept by a woman undergoing regression therapy. She enters a time vortex. Her perspectives span the tragic, the comic and the absurd. She re-experiences her youth as the rebellious daughter of repressive parents in post-war Sydney; plunges in and out of one past life as a young Jewish woman living in 15th century Andalusia who is betrayed to the Spanish Inquisition; and another as the comedienne wife of Moliere in 17th century France. Her intuitions, nightmares, dreams and trance memories take her across centuries, from palace to dungeon, from abortionist's kitchen to stake, from stage to sacred space. She unravels a pattern of oppression, and emerges empowered in the now.
A KINETIC ENERGY signature piece, inspired by the question:
“What has mankind learnt in the last millennium in relation to equality, freedom of Faith and opinion, and gender politics?” Today, state imposed terror, fear-mongering and racism convulse whole communities. Gender conflicts continue within power structures and personal relationships. The play was published in Allen & Pearlman's anthology of contemporary Australian theatre “Performing the Unnameable” (Currency Press, ‘99).
“I was stunned by their supreme polish, expert timing, wit and grace, and the power and inventiveness of their physical theatre imagery. And... they are artists with something to say!”. (Richard James Allen, The Big Issue)
“Jones & Goudsmit combine a depth of training and experience in movement and voice with eclectic research... Thus they can jump from one scene to another, from one era to another, while maintaining a continuity and fluidity of thought and action”. (Colin Rose, SMH)
WHO DIES?
A CELEBRATION OF LIFE.
Conceived and created by Jepke Goudsmit & Graham Jones. Electronic Score: Roger Dean. Piano arrangements: Kevin Hunt. Deep-space & Sun slides: Dr. David Malin (AAO). Featuring music by Art Tatum and Chopin, ballroom dancing and a floating set.
Premiered ‘90 at The Edge, Sydney .
A play about death and dying, about transcendence and enlightenment. It looks at attitudes to death within contemporary, traditional and ancient cultures. Inspirations: The revolutionary work on the dying process conducted by Swiss bereavement psychiatrist Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. The ground-breaking research of Jungian psychologist Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz in the area of Dreams & Death. Our own field work in The Sacred Heart Hospice, Darlinghurst. And Plato's “Simile of the Cave” (4th Century BC). Plato's cave with its strange prisoners “bound so they can look forward only at shadows cast on the wall in front of them”, is a powerful metaphor for life, its denial and its confusion of truth & fiction in our society today.
In Plato's story, narrated by Socrates, a benevolent guide leads an individual along a painful and perilous pathway from darkness and bondage to light and freedom. The person experiences a gradual untangling of illusions. This ancient story parallels the spiritual bondage of the modern human condition, while pointing to a path of enlightenment. In our reinterpretation, the cave becomes a hospice and the search for enlightenment becomes the dying process of Jinny, a patient there. A modern Socrates takes the audience on a guided tour through the hospice. He assumes other roles: A nurse. A visiting entertainer. In Jinny's memories he is her husband, while in her dreams he personifies her subconscious (or animus). Ultimately, he is Death itself. Unlike other patients in the hospice who stay stuck in states of anger, fear or denial, Jinny is prompted to face and accept her death. As she reaches beyond fear, death becomes the key to life.
More theatrical magic than in a thousand hydraulic sets...
The piece stacks up image and sound in a coherent substitute for straight narrative... Death, when it comes, is strangely real yet beautiful and liberating”. (John Shand, SMH)
“It is understandable that people in the audience have wept... The final effect is revivifying.” (Gail Brennan, SMH)
