AUSTRALIA ~ WORLD PREMIERE ~ ADELAIDE EXCLUSIVE
by Rosie van Heerde.
As one half of internationally recognised and award winning theatre company, Finucane & Smith, Moira Finucane is a powerhouse of talent, her passion evident not only in her artistic endeavours but also in the way she discusses both her art and audience alike. Finucane & Smith’s provocative style of variety show has toured to five continents, played to more than 600,000 people, been acclaimed in 13 languages and garnered 15 theatre awards including the Patrick White Playwright Award for director Jackie Smith, Scotland on Sunday’s Hottest Temptation Of The Festival, a plethora of Green Room Awards, Australia Council’s coveted Theatre Fellowship, as well as the highly regarded Contribution To Cabaret Award.
Their shows are consistently described as subversive, transgressive, erotic, exotic and altogether explosively exquisite, leading to sensational critical praise wherever they go. In 2013 they were the first Australian company to be invited to the Festival International de Buenos Aires and in 2015 won International Presentation Of The Year across Cuba, when they became again the first Australian company to be invited to Cuba’s Havana International Theatre Festival in its 30 year history.
The Clothesline chats with Moira, over the phone, and is immediately struck by her gregarious sensibility as we ask her to discuss what can only be described as a truly ‘divine’ life. She is a woman of many talents and even more labels, it would seem.
You have been called “Empress Of Intimate Spectacle” and “Mistress Of The Macabre”, among many other things – do these labels sit well with you?
“They’re all part of what I do, I love them all and every year a new one comes”, Moira begins. “I think I am a collector and a purveyor of the exquisite. I think that’s what I am and I do it in my own performance”.
Having been called ‘exquisite’ a number of times, Moira eventually looked up the word for herself.
“It means unusual, unique, unlike anything else, exotic, rare and I thought, ‘Yes! all of those things are true’. It has a jewel like quality and when I think of the artists that I respond to, that I program in my work, they are also in their own way exquisite. It’s a lovely word – maybe I’m ‘The Empress Of The Exquisite’,” she laughs.
We ask about how she started in this crazy business and what kind of art she is interested in creating for her audiences.
“I started performing in late night underground clubs and salons – having not trained as an artist, the kind of art I loved since a kid was the art that makes your hair stand up on your arms – whether it’s a haunting song or beautiful piece of artwork on the wall or an amazing book you can’t forget,” she says. “And that’s the kind of art I’ve always been excited by and the only kind of art I’ve ever made. Unless an artist is transcendent in some way, they are never going to end up in one of my shows.
“Paramount is the performers’ love for the audience,” she says. “It’s not something that can be taught she believes – either you are capable of loving and respecting your audience or you are not. I never treat my audience as numbers or that they should just sit there and appreciate me. I view my audience as a group of people who have had life experiences that I can’t guess at. They’ve made an immense effort to come and see me and I treat them with extraordinary respect.”
We ask Moira to describe the professional relationship she shares with her partner Jackie Smith and how this is evidenced in the works they create together.
“Jackie is a Patrick White Award winning playwright and she has a completely different style”, Moira says. “She grew up in the country, she trained in fine arts and fell in love with theatre and trained in theatre, whereas me – not so much [laughs]! I grew up in Boston, moved here and became a surfer and trained as an environmental scientist. My love is based in fairy tales and poetry and magic realism and wild dreams. Everything I do is larger than life whereas Jackie’s work is quite minimal and very authentically Australian.
“Jackie also has a great love of humanity so that’s something we share” Moira adds. “We also have a shared fascination for people and that’s what has led us to find all those different artists that we work with as well as creating those relationships with the audience. And once you’ve got a joint leadership like that it’s the differences and the similarities– it’s the tension between those shared visions that keeps things going.”
What are your shows actually like for the audience?
“People talk about freedom when they see our shows. If art is joyful, exciting and provocative and really loves the audience – and my art does – you can take the audience anywhere with you because they know you love them,” she enthuses. “Finucane & Smith shows are famous for the detail – when you’re up close with us our costumes still look beautiful. When it’s bare flesh it’s bare flesh, it’s not covered in modesty mesh. It’s a combination of the beautiful raw human and an exquisite showcasing of them (including sumptuous costumes).
“The heart of what we do is intimacy and detail. Our worlds are immersive worlds – you don’t just see us onstage – you are part of the glamour from the table you sit at, to the artist that sweeps past you in a cloud of perfume and mystery; you are inside that world and it’s so different from the horrors of audience participation which scares the bejesus out of people!” Moira laughs. “Our audiences now expect that when they enter, they will be transported somewhere to some wild dreamscape – and we’ve got to live up to that!”
No Moira Finucane interview is complete without asking her about their most well-known work, The Glory Box and whether Adelaide audiences can look forward to its return some time soon.
“The Glory Box is going to last for another 20 years. It was created 10 years ago as The Burlesque Hour and it has been in constant evolution ever since,” Moira says, before going on to describe a letter she received just when they were ready to ponder how to take the show into the next decade. The letter was an invitation to perform The Glory Box in Cuba to ‘symbolise intercultural dialogue, freedom, liberty and great theatre as a reflection of our lives today’.
Moira is clearly extremely proud of the invitation and is quick to point out that Finucane & Smith is indeed the first Australian company to be invited to Havana International Theatre Festival. Hence the start of the next 10 years of The Glory Box revolution so the answer is a very clear with audiences poised to look forward to its return soon. She also takes great delight in explaining how her upcoming show, The Birds, was actually conceived right here in Adelaide.
“I was in Adelaide with The Glory Box a few years ago, and I had this incredible dream of all these wild birds, flying falling, preening, plumage, predation, and I woke up and decided that that’s the next show!”
That was in 2014, and as luck would have it, she came across Rockie Stone, an ‘an exquisite aerialist’ and Mama Alto, ‘the world’s only beyond gender countertenor diva’, both of whom will be performing in the show. Moira continues to describe what drew her to the artists taking centre stage in The Birds.
“I saw Rocky scaling a rope with her fingertip and I said ‘yes!’ I saw Mama Alto singing like an angel in a 6ft beyond-gender body and said ‘yes!’ I was in Europe performing a show and I passed the door of a nearby Spiegeltent and I heard this voice, like a mist of smoke in the dark, and now she’s in the show – Clare St. Clare.”
We ask Moira to tell us more about the show itself.
“The Birds is exquisite, it’s lush and it’s dark – Edgar Allen Poe meets Daphne Du Maurier meets 3am Paris! It’s a wild salon full of purples and acid greens and the creatures in it are like birds of paradise.” she exclaims. “It will be more of a dreamscape than a narrative – like a dream weaving through a night sky. Unlike The Glory Box where there’s a thousand different influences everything in The Birds will in some way connect with the idea of birds and angels and flight and beauty so on. And birds are one of the few creatures that are sacred in every culture – all sacred for different reasons – and it says a lot about the culture, about dreams and about what people treasure.”
Moira points out the traditional presence of robins on British Christmas cards for instance, or the detailing of the finch in artworks containing the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus.
“There’s a lot of connection between humans and birds in terms of the ideas of flight and ascendance, all over the world,” she explains.
Finally we give Moira one last chance to pitch the show to cabaret audiences.
“Come and see The Birds because we are world-famous, extraordinary, home-grown creators of provocative variety that everyone around the world rushes to see but we are in YOUR backyard, and we are flying high into a midnight sky! So dress up and come and join us in a luscious black sequined, purple velvet, acid green wild flight of fancy!”
Finucane & Smith presents The Birds at Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, from 10pm on Wed 22 Jun until Sat 25 Jun.
Book at BASS on 131 246 and bass.net.au. Click HERE to purchase your tickets.
Image courtesy of Jodie Hutchinson
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