VAMP

Malthouse Theatre 2008

Sydney Opera House 2008

Original music and lyrics: Iain Grandage and Meow Meow
Director: Michael Kantor
Musical Director: Iain Grandage
Designer: Anna Tregloan
Lighting Designer: Paul Jackson
Sound Designer: Russell Goldsmith
Dramaturge: Maryanne Lynch
Choreographer: Shawn Parker
Performed by: Meow Meow and The Wild Dog Orchestra

An array of fabulous and ferocious women stampedes its way nightly through my head…

Anita Berber, Theda Bara, Sarah Bernhardt, Mata Hari, the Marchesa Casati, Lola Montes, Pola Negri, Madonna, Louise brooks, Alla Nazimova, Valeska Gert, Gertrude Hoffman, Maud Allan, Anna Pavolva, Ida Rubenstein, Maria Callas, Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, Cleopatra, Marilyn, Ann Margret, Mae West, Lulu, Ishtar, Lilith….

And then there are the heroines with no names, the unsung, unstrung girls, the rubble women, the women who wait, and the ones who just slipped out of life…

"Sarah Bernhardt's missing leg", or something like it, was the tantalising title of a play I heard about and never saw in my youth…I've been thinking about the deconstruction and dissection of women ever since. And their resilience. Images of voracity and veracity.

The curse of Salome - the dual empowerment and disempowerment of the body and its sensual or ridiculous dance. The punishment of the femme fatale through history, art, film noir, the media, Oscar Wilde's Tetrarch – "Kill that Woman!"

The long term story of the "vamp" – not just the perceived glorious moment of iconisisation in the public eye,..but the lonely hotel rooms, the battles with politics and change and age, the solitary "femme fatale" dying poverty-stricken and alone..or hiding away from the world behind veils and soft lenses and Parisian apartments. An effort to retreat into memory? Or to maintain the mythology of untouchable beauty...The image of the Mother Courages of vampdom... Sarah Bernhardt performing after the amputation of her leg and dying (aged 78) whilst still preparing for a film. Nazimova, though losing a fortune on her film of "Salome", pioneering Ibsen and Checkhov throughout America.  I use the notion of Vamp broadly. Perfection would be terrible.

The ambiguous politics of Hans Bellmer's Doll, Kokoschka's Alma Mahler replica that he publically slaughtered, the Marchesa Casati's wax reproductions of and for herself, Theda Bara poised over a human skeleton as a publicity still, Lola Montes on the Victorian goldfields, Anita Berber's dances of "depravity, vice and ecstasy", Nazimova ("Herself") -  far from peacocks and pearls -  in a Lucky Strike advertisement, Bernhardt photographed sleeping in a coffin to "better prepare herself" for tragic roles, her keening, "golden voiced" recordings for Edison when she happened to be in New York, her performance for the condemned inmates of San Quentin prison. The exotic beasts and vipers all these women possessed, their capacity for self-sensationalism, the business of the body, the business we call "Show"

The footage for the theatre piece came mainly from my travels in Shanghai, Paris, the Camargue, Berlin and New York City, my obsession with beauty in the ruins, the battle of history with so-called modernity…. You are inside my head along with my ghosts, my blackouts, my memory lapses and my passions. Welcome to the Last Show on Earth, the moment before the explosion. A Concert for Lost Souls.