...to the reality of Fantasy

G’day Possums,

Shane and Dame Nellie Melba

As we said last week we were about to attend a re-union and celebration to remember Betty Pounder, legendary choreographer for J.C. Williamson’s theatre organization. Well we have and it was a good event.

For more Archival images Facebook: Sparkle Darlings.

The brainchild of and organised by Kevin Coxhead, "Sparkle Darlings" the Pounder catch-cry, attracted around 110 people, some travelling from West Australia and Queensland to attend Her Majesty's Theatre Melbourne.

Costuming from various musicals were modelled, anecdotal speeches made and there was an AV presentation of “Pounder’s” life before the night got down to some seriously hilarious catching up and reminiscing.

It was wryly amusing to see groups of people taking up poses similar to what they did when young and poignant observing some “come-alive” at the reminiscing and re-living of past experiences.

The banter too; so funny, theatrical, pointedly accurate but well meaning, with many observing that there was in the room the remnants of an era of professional theatre that we’ll probably not see the likes of again… a generation of talents across the board which has been corporatised from existence.

Very few in the room were still working professionally, some were teaching but all I spoke to agreed that regardless of the time spent, the theatre experience was one of the most formative periods in their lives.

What is it that makes that experience so rewarding, and so pervasive?

I think it’s the distillation of a life experience that is being expressed. It is in that expression and distillation a purely classical Grecian sense of order.

Peter Brook legendary English director said once that theatre was pure socialism with a dictator in charge. It was a practise, which in the abnegation of self to a shared and common cause the performer found true freedom. And in that freedom was a reality more potent than the mundane actuality of real existence.

Ahh, Petals, it is no wonder then that if people have this sort of experience you rarely ever find them to be dully conservative in their politics because that way lies the death of creativity, imagination and society.

 

Wombat Droppings

In a truly Byzantine stumbling meander through history, Chrissy “Bunter” Berg (IPA, Ineffectual) is now blaming Labor’s Chifley and Curtin and a 40’s wartime economy for “Cereal-Toyota-Killer” Hockey’s inability to sell his contemporary horror budget of 26 broken promises to anyone at all. He attempted to justify that welfare and social spending is bad idea when the rich few, get less from the many poor…or something.   The typical “Coots-With-Queer-Ideas-From-a-Parallel-Universe” fruit-loop, surreal-thought-bubbles from his foetid imagination seem only to be looking for a reason to prove his pay cheque is warranted.

They remind me of the Neo-Classical sculptor David d’Angers who, on seeing for the first time in London, the Marbles of the Parthenon asked himself, “…if his career had not been one long misunderstanding, a permanent confusion between the truth he beheld and the life he aspired to attain.”

I hope an art reference doesn’t “throw” these economic and cultural Neanderthals.

The Liarbril/Notional coalition is sounding like a chorus version of Irving Berlin’s “Anything you can do, I can do better,” as they begin to contradict each other over this patched together far right, IPA, free-market, budget insanity for Australia’s social dismemberment.

Prime Miniature “Rabbutt-the-Hun” had need, again to slap down Chwissy “The-Perfect-Prat-of-a-Prefect, Pyne “The Whyne” and Joe “Cereal-Killer” for example and reverse their statements that, Chwissy had no ideological problems with chasing after a student debt even if the student was dead and Joe thought it a good thing, too..

Now there’s a duo of front bench catholics with real hearts of gold.

Cold and hard….. and very bad Karma. 

Chwissy has done this so often; the fact that he hasn't been replaced only indicates either the dearth of ability / lack of imagination or both, within the Liarbril party.

Poll results after ten months of their hubristic incompetence show that they are about to implode into a black hole of their own creating as more and more Australians realise just what a mangy rabble these mongrels really are.

The IPA’s history of destroying those they “Help” is well known but some “Aspirationals” just never “get it.”

Others who didn’t get it were all the students at Whitehouse Institute of Design other than the Prime Miniature’s daughter and that of the owner who each received their $60,000.00 tuition fees as scholarships.

On merit. 

Of course.

Really. Truly.

Nothing to do with accreditation, etc?

Nahhh.

College President’s a Liarbril donor. So?  Whaddayamean, The Age of Entitlement is over?

As one, Tim Jones tweeted, “We trudge through the dumbest epoch ever and endure the worst PM ever. 
Abbott is just our stupidity made manifest.” 

And Tim wrote that before our taste/intellect challenged Prime Miniature made a mess of his speech about attending the “D”Day commemorations. “Rabbutt-the-Hun’s” latest gaffe is a video:  supposedly meant to commemorate the D-Day Landings where he is accompanying six or so surviving veterans to Normandy, “Rabbutt”, still unable to convert from opposition leader mode, railed about the price on Carbon, the mining tax and re-announced being open for business…. sullying the event in the most crass manner possible. At least one wit raised a few laughs commenting,  “I hope in Normandy, he doesn't say, “Stop-the-Boats!”

Oh dear… where are the Adults?

Billy “Poofter-Hunter” Heffernan brings a fake pipe-bomb into the Senate to demonstrate the poor security… like most things he’s done in parliament this stunt also fails to go off amusingly as well.

The Grown-Up’s are in charge?

Clive “Nearly-Our-Biggest-Miner” Palmer of the Pupulist- Partly-Loopy-Party arrived for the first day of parliament in his “Roller,” saying he was saving money not using a taxpayer-funded Com-car.  He didn't mention if he was putting a motion to the Senate that we all get a Roller to save money, as well.

But he had a nice dinner with “Von Ribbentrop” Turnbull (pretend Liarbril / softie) that had Andrew “Blot-on-the-Landscape” Bolt, foaming at the mouth again.

Poor Andrew… foams so often…. should he be humanely, put down?

Comments: recent…re: Von Ribbentrop T,

...wearing a better suit does not make you a better conservative.. it just means your price is higher.

Ahhh, a better dressed, Ineffectual.

....This government is descending into farce... can we have the grown-ups back now?

...whaddaya mean descending? They've never grown up in the first place.

Which is no wonder the overseas press is reporting Australia like this…

http://www.news.com.au/national/the-washington-post-says-tony-abbott-is-becoming-one-of-the-worlds-most-hated-pms/story-fncynjr2-1226928444994

or this..

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1y1ez7_tony-abbott-last-week-tonight_news

Oh, dear, oh dear, oh dear. And this is from those who preached that Gillard, Rudd and Labor were dysfunctional?

Perhaps dear reader, you understand better the attraction to theatre as this reality is too painful to bear.

Cheers, Possums,

Shane

...Facing the Music

Much of life is happenstance but there are the odd synchronicity of moments which this Wombat finds quite delightful.

Shane with Image Archive

Recently working on a dance video and shooting some stills for it, my attention went to the faces of the dancers rather than the general class or movement shot. 

There seemed to be in the dancer's concentration the essence of the theatrical or performing experience. 

Facing the Music. 



Although the "Music" we face in “Wombat Droppings” is of an entirely different and more nation altering order.

Ballet Theatre Australia

The synchronicity was an acquaintance contacting to alert me that there was to be a “get-together” of those who were either taught by or worked with the legendary Betty Pounder in theatre productions she choreographed for JC Williamson's theatres over many years.

Betty Pounder

On going to the FB site where the details were, I saw there were many images from a variety of productions and thought, well, I could probably add a few, too.

Pounder Class

"Funny Girl"

"Fiddler-on-the-Roof"

My Fair Lady

Robin Bailey

My Fair Lady

Fiddler on the Roof

Hayes Gordon-"Tevye"

Jill Perryman- "Funny girl"

MFL

Pounder Class

Some 260 images later I was a little surprised by the extent of my early productivity and very gratified by the responses of those seeing the images and who commented and seemed to appreciate the effort of scanning all these now quite vintage negs, prints and transparency’s.

As I replied to one comment, It‘s only when there is a filter of time in the works that you finally see them in the context of their own experience and see value.

It was interesting looking back to my beginnings of "facing the music" photographically and appreciating its visual development, too.

Wombat Droppings or Foetid News from Oz Politics.

Joe “Cereal–Toyota-Holden-SPC-Killer” Hockey is clamping down on debate by suing Fairfax Media over a story about his fundraising efforts on behalf of the NSW Liberal party. Having nothing to hide except free speech, Hockey doesn't want any public distraction whilst  going about perpetrating possibly the biggest defrauding of Oz politics when he hands down in conjunction with the Business Council of Australia’s and “The-Coots-With-Queer-Ideas-From-a-Parallel-Universe” (IPA), his single budget.

Unprecedented in the selective leaking, spin, lying, dissimulation, obfuscations and kite-flying over the past month this “Ugly American” mandated rabble (Liarbril Party) is about to fundamentally alter and cement into the national ethos for once and for all their conceptually dessicated idea of this country. The shambles they dishonestly but successfully projected in persuading the electorate to believe that all was Labor's fault, is now to be tipped over all of us in its full and total vileness.

No longer just a projection their foetid values will be fully manifest as they are about to swamp this land with legislation so that every vile notion of free market capitalism can be given free rein without restraint.

The Reign of the Reactionary Aspirational Bogan is here.

Gone, will be any pretence of the notion of fair play and egalitarianism.

Gone, will be universal healthcare.

Gone, will be access to education for all.
Gone, will be the effectiveness of our only public broadcaster.

These unimaginative Liarbrils have for years have been chipping away at these pillars which have made Australia a noted leader and by drawing closer to the right–wing of American “Tea-Party” politics they now see their opportunity to smash any of the remaining social contracts in preference for the “Free-Market"  insanity that in the main caused the Global Financial Crisis.

They will relentlessly bullshit the public through the right-wing, main-stream media and swamp the ABC with mendacious IPA clones (similar to the unbalanced coverage of Mandy “Il Patrone” Vanstone’s 10 minute free kick t’other night on “7.30” with Sarah “Rapportfurerin” Ferguson) and those other paragons of truth and civility, “Blot-on-the-Landscape”, Alan ”Bondi” and “London Toilet Fame” Jones and other similar shock-jock low-lives.

“We all have to do the Heavy Lifting,” says the man who has doubled the deficit by himself in six months, whilst single-handedly obliterating much of the country’s manufacturing.

“The Age of Entitlement is Over,” says the man whose party it seems is the biggest, most dishonest, slush-fund, paper-bag-wielding bunch of spivs we have ever seen whilst preparing at the same time to rip payments away from young people with disabilities…a man who thinks wind-farms are unattractive and coal mines, cool.

We are entering the abyss of a new Dark Age.

John Donne wrote,

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

 If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were:

any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind,

and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls;

it tolls for thee."

The Liarbrils and their moronic IPA lickspittles have yet to get up to speed with this C17th social lesson.

It strikes me that when a Government rules for a plutocracy and not the people then its promulgations have validity only for the plutocracy and can be ignored by the people.

Cheers Possums,

Shane