"Waterproof, at Melbourne City Baths, running until tonight (sorry), is interesting for completely the opposite reason. Is there a renaissance of female theatre-making in Melbourne? After years of smart young men, are women finally collaborating too? Put together by Marita Fox, Waterproof is something very unusual: piling up Beckett, Plath, psychology and Japanese rituals among the inspirations, and with a voice-over clearly marking a connection to the world of drama, it is still, and mostly, a postdramatic event. (I was going to write theatre plus swimming, but that seemed glib and rude.) And one very unusual such event: a deadpan not-quite-horror, not trying to create illusions, and not stuck into some theoreticall alley either. I thought of Kafka, strangely enough. And I thought of Godard, particularly Alphaville: the way Fox played with the theatrical form, to create something that was partically ironic, partially deeply felt and partially just fun, reminded me a lot of Godard’s approach to cinema. I even thought of Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, the swimming pool nightmares of visibility and responsibility. There were plenty of shortcomings to Waterproof, most pertinently that the motivation or sense of meaning got lost very early on, but that seems less important to me than the fact that it had an aesthetic (in this case, since it was anti-representational, a way of us all being in the same space) that was absolutely original and unlike anything I’ve ever seen in Melbourne. In particular, if I may add, since Melburnian theatre women sometimes seem wedded to the most traditional ideas of theatre this side of Broadway, it was exhilarating to see something so boldly new coming out of a woman’s brain. I will be very interested to see where Fox goes next."
- Jana Perkovic, Guerilla Semiotics, May 2, 2010
Link: http://guerrillasemiotics.com/2010/05/melbourne-news-news/
Waterproof also reviewed by
-Allison Browning in The Enthusiast, April 27, 2010.
Link: http://www.theenthusiast.com.au/archives/2010/review-waterproof/
