Festival news
Nine Good Reasons To Be Cheerful
1st of February 2010
REVIEW: The Australian- 23 January 2010
THE pursuit of happiness is a strong thread running through this year's Sydney Festival and beyond. In Theatre of Image's production of The Book of Everything at Belvoir St Theatre (not part of the festival), Thomas Klopper, "nine, nearly 10", is asked what he wants to be when he grows up. "I want to be happy," he says, in an answer unsatisfactory to his stern father. But Thomas is unshakable. He wants, above all, to be happy.
A child's shining simplicity becomes something much more complicated in Shaun Parker's Happy as Larry.
Parker's theme isn't a statement but a question: Do we - and he's talking about adults - know how to be happy? He comes at this most fundamental of impulses from many angles, examining how it is sought, manifested, altered, distorted, manipulated, enjoyed, intellectualised or repressed, depending on the nature of the individual.
This sounds a heavy a burden for a 75-minute dance piece to bear, and to a large extent this is so. By the end you might think the question has been answered in the negative. Had it finished 10 minutes earlier (and there is a kind of false ending at that point), the answer would have been much more positive. But Parker chooses to let the group disintegrate and the final image is a wry, lonely one with only the slightest hint of possibility.
I don't think the choreographer is really so pessimistic, given the many preceding moments of humour, beauty and bravura. But the question is at best left up in the air, as the last seconds of the show imply, and that seems a bit of a cop-out.
The work starts with tight formality as Dean Cross - whom we must think of as Larry, and not very happy - draws with chalk on a huge rectangular block that will spin, be clambered over, danced around, hung on to, jumped from and written on. (Adam Gardnir's set is inspired: simple, imposing and surprisingly flexible.)
Happy as Larry has been devised with nine splendid dancers, each bringing a distinctive personality and physical style to a swift, impressionistic procession of scenes. Acrobatics, street dance, academic dance, roller-skating, basketball twirling: it's all there in a mix Parker manages to make look cohesive, something not to be underestimated.
While I think the deepest intentions of the work haven't been fully resolved, from a purely visual perspective the work is a delight, full of the unexpected and virtuosic. That alone is something to be very happy about.
