Speaker TV: Arts
Speaker TV: Arts
4/10/2018 LACHLAN GUERTIN
SONG FOR A WEARY THROAT – STIRRING, INCLUSIVE VOCAL & PHYSICAL THEATRE AT MIAF 2018
Are you looking to do something fun this Spring?
The Melbourne International Arts Festival is back on from 3 to 21 October 2018, celebrating dance, music, theatre and art in a number of venues across the city.
The Festival is one of Australia’s leading international arts festival, aiming to connect art forms, people and ideas, and break new ground in culture. It is notable for showcasing culture and diversity through a variety of mediums, and this year they are premiering the work of the Rawcus ensemble of performers with and without disability.
Song for a Weary Throat is a physical and vocal performance filled with powerful emotions, strong visuals and themes of trauma, heartbreak and failure. It follows the consequences of terrible loss that lead to glimpses of hope, whether they are real or imagined.
Despite being a wordless production, the vocals from the Invenio Singers create a heavenly soundscape that complements the unforgettable images on stage.
Invenio Singers is an ensemble that experiments with typical vocal choruses through fluid improvising, choreographed movement and conceptual composition.
Kate Sulan, artistic director of Song for a Weary Throat, says that the show follows a logic that is emotional rather than linear, and describes the teamwork between Rawcus and Invenio Singers as a “rich collaboration”.
“The design team and collaborators have created a world for us to play in, to dream in, and to get lost in,” she says. “What propels us to get up after trauma, after heartbreak, after loss, after failure? This question was posed to the Rawcus Ensemble, and Song for a Weary Throat is their collective response.”
Rawcus is a critically acclaimed ensemble of performers whose work is described as ‘a marriage of intense physicality and arresting visual imagery’. Since its debut in 2017, Song for a Weary Throat has received three Green Room Awards for Production, Ensemble and Music Composition and Sound Design.
The Age described the performance as “a brilliant and transporting work” that “possesses the sort of transcendent quality that leaves you feeling charged and changed”. Other reviews from Melbourne Critique illustrate the show as “the best piece of physical theatre Melbourne audiences have been treated to in some time, a rich and sumptuous vision that has been realised in full”, while Theatre People say it is “an electric and unforgettable hour of theatre” in a five-star review.
If you’re interested in emotional storytelling through powerful choreography and ethereal vocals performed by an inclusive cast of people with and without disabilities, then this is the show for you.