A Beau­ti­ful Har­mo­ny of The­atre, Music and So Mush Spore.  

I loved the nov­el for­mat of sto­ry­telling that ‘Con­cept for a Film’ deliv­ered. The scene opens with Max Bar­ton, sit­ting at a desk that faces the audi­ence, read­ing out the script for a film. These read­ings are inter­mit­tent­ly dis­persed with many dis­rup­tions includ­ing phone calls from his Moth­er, audio record­ings of audi­ence scep­ti­cal feed­back on the film and him shin­ing a torch on his face as he address­es us, the audi­ence.

The film script sto­ry begins in Pōneke. I appre­ci­at­ed how Max adapt­ed the script to cen­tre the sto­ry around Welling­ton and demon­strate he had spent time research­ing the area’s his­to­ry and whaka­pa­pa.

The sto­ry is accom­pa­nied by a score com­posed by Jethro using an inter­ac­tive mod­u­lar syn­the­sis­er, that he builds through­out the per­for­mance. The white cables that swirl across the floor and con­nect with each piece of equip­ment resem­ble a mycelial net­work and look beau­ti­ful as Jethro uses his hands, light and but­tons to build the sound­scape of the per­for­mance. Both the visu­al impres­sion and music cre­at­ed by this are very cool and a won­der­ful change from the use of tra­di­tion­al instru­ments for musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment. Intro­duc­ing a mod­u­lar syn­the­sis­er to this set­ting seems like a per­fect har­mo­ny with per­for­mance art. Gear heads will drool over the set-up.

Between the rapid-fire deliv­ery of each turn of the movie’s out­line, Max’s inse­cu­ri­ty about each sec­tion, his deter­mi­na­tion to rewrite, ques­tion and improve the script as we go and the bril­liant per­for­mance of Jethro’s live sound manip­u­la­tion. It can be a mind field to fol­low if you aren’t pay­ing atten­tion, but it works and the out­come is nov­el, fun and engag­ing. It is also a reflec­tion of how nature does not move in an inde­pen­dent lin­ear path, that we all affect each oth­er through our con­nec­tion with the earth.

Con­cept for a Film, is a show that will appeal to many types of peo­ple includ­ing music nerds, film buffs, envi­ron­men­tal­ists, pun enthu­si­asts and peo­ple who love mush­rooms. Def­i­nite­ly one of the high­lights of this years Fringe for me.