Secrets

Watch out here's a mind stormer!
Secrets proves that Triffitt is an original.

Verbal soundtrack aside, Secrets is a richly imagined work. Nigel's appraoch is that of an imagist who paints in light and sound, drawing on his sbuconscious for inspiration.

If Secrets has a definable theme, it is that with each generation innocence is reborn. In the process of working out his theme, Triffitt and his collaborators create some dazzling, at times surreal, effects with fans, flags, binds, bamboo rods, swirling discs and lights. The puppets themselves have a curiously endearing and lifelike quality, all the way from an outsized hooded creature with torchlit eyes and stringy limbs to the little long-nosed glove puppet which at various points climbs inside a trenchcoat to take on human form.

Words themselves are inadequate to describe Triffitt's visually exciting new creation. It needs to be seen.

Success at Spoleto of the Australian show Secrets, a rapid succession of images rich in technical invention. rarely has it happened to me to find myself confronted by an explosion so fascinating in its invention and technical prowess.

This dance of objects and bodies is animated by perfect execution of every single movement. 33 year-old Triffitt shows us not only a collection of images and a puzzle of visions but also leads us on a very private journey through the labyrinths of the psyche. Its destination, a schizoid duality.

Under the rainy sky, at the final moments of the piece, the applause of the public was the most enthustiastic and intense that I have seen at this festival.

Handspan Theatre Australia did not stop at pure interpretation but deepened and amplified the ideas of the author.

One is seduced, one is drawn in, by these marvels which feed the imagination, but without trying to understand too much, it isn’t necessary, one is left lulled by the fantastic ephemera, a little foreign, which come to us from Australia.

In the sixty minutes of the show, Triffit, in short, confesses completely, as a man and as an intellectual: and certainly does not give us hope if the chilling image, from which you cannot free yourself, is the conclusive one: a parcel that opens in mid-air, reveals itself like a cubic grate, as in the concentration of the beam of light, there is a tiny foetus that shakes, coaxed and seized finally by a skeletal hand.

Aggeo Savioli in Il Messaggero in Rome said that: Handspan Theatre in Melbourne gets to work on a show that should, in some way, objectify its nightmares, its obsessions, the ghosts of its subconscious. But putting them in relation with the world outside. Secrets was born, and it was a huge success, both for the public and critics.

Secrets great strength is its non-verbal attack on the creeping complacency of mainstream theatre. Nigel Triffitt’s Secrets has hurled the art of puppetry irretrievably into the twilight zone”

Invitation to secret desires
Australia is not just hard rock or the divine Mad Max. It is also a rich theatre, abundant with Hibberd, Buzo, Sewell, Nowra… And Nigel Triffit, whose “Secret” can be seen at the Palais des Glaces.

The student has become the teacher: Australia has learned how to find sounds, images and words to express itself. Australian culture is no longer the umpteenth duplicate of an Anglo-Saxon world dominated by the American model. It has its own rock (INXS, its own cinema The Year of Living Dangerously, its own literature Patrick White: Nobel 73). Nigel Triffit is the product of this abundant culture, nourished by influences and mixes, of this strange, immense country with too short a history (two hundred years), where everything is starting again! Perhaps because almost half the population is “immigrant’, the course Triffit traces in Secrets at the Palais des Glaces is an invitation to travel. Confusion of spaces, of genres, of climates. Nevertheless, the itinerary that is revealed carries the mark of a subjectivity, even though nobody speaks. The words, the images, the sounds have the taste of a fortuitous encounter that one recognises in the bizarre meeting on a dissection table of an umbrella and a sewing machine.

The voiceover that speaks is only neutral, “radio”, background music. Repetitive, like the flashes of information, it speaks to those who listen, but what does it say? Intimacy seeks refuge in the most banal and universal reality: barbiturates, the death of Kennedy, massacre of Armenians… If you look a bit closer, you recognise the voices of James Dean, John Lennon or Martin Luther King. But this is only one element of this living image (tableau vivant), where the missing pieces are the most fascinating. What cues? It was in a hotel room in Amsterdam, in a fog from which emerged, interior world, grimacing heads, magical puppets as real as our fears and our hopes. These are battles, desirs, loves, disappointments, deaths and birthdays, a thousand bursts of story worthy of A Thousand and One Nights.

Are we in Arabia, in India, in China? Or in fact “here”? Which rites do we celebrate, black magic, white, red, what coming? Black anarchy, white absence, red revolution, the monstrous multidimension flower that evokes a “sick” spirit, hopeless without a single name. Game of fans, Star of David, constellation of signs (for you to awaken the meaning letter!) around a mysterious personage who arises in a bluish swarm, the fantastical weave of this dream confuses diverts the intellect to better invite hallucination.

In this voyage to the hells of a tormented soul, you must let yourself be drawn in, and above all never return. Manipulated in the same way as these puppets of dreams or of nightmares, provoked, attacked by the woven sounds of Vangelis, Talking Heads, The Doors and Arab and Oriental music, the spectator is progressively turned away from themselves, from the space and time they inhabit. Then the mist is torn away, and on a sea without end they embark for the country of their most secret desires.

An abundant and intense performance … the performers are, in this astonishing/breathtaking creation of vivid beauty, surveyors of the imaginary ... a thousand and one fears, a thousand and one worries, a thousand and one hopes …
a fascinating piece, unbelievable and monstrous, a fantastical dream.

The collapsed dream
Again, a dream that falls apart! I believed the Australian continent remained wild, populated by a few Aborigines, a few hundred marsupials, innumerable rabbits and most of all convicts, white men, rugged, coarse, energetic, obtuse, marvellously primordial, strangers to all refinement, completely sheltered from the subtle poisons of our decadent cultures, thanks to their healthy and brutal pioneer mentality.

Too late! The gangrene of aestheticism has also reached this part of the world, however secluded. Australia is not, will never again be, this land of asylum in which we thought to take refuge, if ever the civilisation that surrounds us became too noxious. Our last hope is gone. Australia is not what it was.

The proof? “Secrets”, this show exported to us by the Australians, of course with the aid of our Ministry of Culture and l’Association française de l’Action artistique. A mix of sub-sub-sub-Bob Wilson and sub-sub-sub-Bread and Puppet, fifteen years late. A series of hollow, pretentious images we have seen before, atrociously boring.

No story: a puzzle eternally undone. Still, for my part, I don’t enjoy a puzzle unless I can put it back together. If the pieces remain disparate, I see no interest in it. Once again, the alibi of fantasy serves to strike us with a series of totally arbitrary figments (or phantasms), images which in this case are not very beautiful.

Lots of noise: “An aggressive collage of voices and contemporary music” as the soundtrack. Lots of smoke as well: about every five minutes, a thick fog invades the stage and the room. The directors don’t get bored of this effect, which is of course not new. The sign indicating that smoking is prohibited in the theatre should equally apply to them. Or they should well have graciously given us gas masks, and earplugs while they were at it. Several puppets that gesticulate in beams of coloured light, worked by men in hoods. Lots of noise and smoke for no reason. In my opinion, you would do well to follow the advice of the director: rather than bore yourself for a hundred bucks an hour, instead choose a good book. One where the author doesn’t find it discreditable to tell a story.

Secrets is very noisy and it’s strange beyond belief or explanation; but it’s easily the most exciting thing that’s happened at the festival so far. On Thursday evening a packed house regarded it with a mixture of awe, dismay, sometimes open dislike, and often with the glazed stare that comes when people are thoroughly mesmerised by what’s happening in front of them. A few people got up and walked out, a few others hung on but left as soon as it was polite, and a few others simply sat in their seats when it was all over, gazing silently at the debris-strewn stage as if they couldn’t bear to leave a place that had held such magic.

Secrets seemed to me to be about nothing in particular except a very remarkable artist’s very striking approach to theater.

Secrets is non-narrative theatre which means it doesn’t have a story at all: there aren’t any characters going through an experience that begins at the beginning and stops at the end. This kind of theatre will seem familiar to anyone who knows Robert Wilson’s huge epic pieces. If this sounds perplexing, perhaps an anecdote will help.
In 1976 shortly before the New York premiere of the now-legendary ‘Einstein on the Beach’ I interviewed Wilson and asked him point-blank what ‘Einstein’ was all about. “it’s an honest question”, he said, “but it doesn’t apply to me. When you go to the ballet you don’t ask what it’s about, you look at patterns, at design, at movement, and your eyes are pleased and your emotions touched. That’s how you should go to one of my pieces: You listen to the pictures, you look at the music.”

That’s what I did at Secrets and it was most imposing pictures I heard, and enormously fascinating music I saw.

Each effect is so complex its pleasure doubles back like an undertow when you finally figure out how it is achieved.

Magic is the key word for Secrets. The effect of this spectacle of masks and puppets is positively hallicogenic Words dissolve into irrelevancy while eerie forms evoke ancient rituals on the smoke-filled stage.

What do we know about Australia apart from emus, the group Men at Work and some actors from telly. This piece threatens to destroy our preconceived images – the Australia shown to us by Secrets is a modern country aware of the multiple origins of its people – a country where influences meet and accumulate.

This performance threatens to destroy our preconceived images: the Australia shown to us by Secrets is a modern country, aware of the diverse origins of her people, a country where influences meet and accumulate.

A strange piece, a remarkable performance of an aestheticism sure of itself, reflecting assimilated influences. And the soundtrack: a collage of different artists and groups. For text, extracts taken from radio broadcasts in different languages, well-known voices and whatever they said, they say something else over these strong images. A unique experience.

Handspan Theatre from Australia got a standing ovation for its production of Secrets, an extravagently visual piece which uses a soundtrack not unlike performance artwork.

Secrets is visually stunning amalgam of images from various cultures. Handspan Theatre is conscious of Australia's 'young country' syndrome, conscious that is of not having any strong theatre tradition and is therefore trying to create something uniquely Australian through multi-cultural influences, technology and the visual arts.

The soundtrack suggests a number of states of mind, all of them extreme, all of them related to out-of-body experiences, or chaotic accidents.

Like most performance art, Secrets uses post-apocalyptic suggestions which, let's face it, have become tiresome, but it is astonishingly original in its use of imagery, and it is perfectly and beautifully executed.

A fascinating aspect of Secrets is the way the set is constructed and re-constructed during the performance, with a fluidity and ease that astounds.

“You will probably come away from Secrets without a clear idea what it was all about. But your sensory apparatus will have been watered a treat”

The gods were among us on Wednesday and Thursday… not real gods, of course, merely five young Australians.

He must have been brave, the author of this piece, to show all at once what for him is most subconscious, most repressed, his deep fears, his fantasies – his secrets as creator before the world, such as it is. He shows war, stupidity, cruelty, mankind… time passing… himself.

Secrets is an assemblage of themes and techniques shouting to the public who want very much to hear: watch out and pay attention!

You cannot describe Secrets; you feel it in the stomach, in the head, in the heart; you process these essential images like discovering a Jérôme Bosh painting for the first time.
The young people, who formed the majority of the audience, will have, after this emotion, a different idea of what theatre can be.

Strong in its images and in the vision it brings of a world heading for its own destruction,
it is the image of mankind, the human saga.

The first idea, 'are angels and demons really different?', that appears after having seen this piece is without the smallest doubt channelled by very strong emotions, produced by the images of astonishing beauty. Is it us who were in the midst of this flood of smoke and light, of cries and combat; and, is it our own representation; or is it the work of a visionary influenced by philosophers from all horizons showing the tomorrows that await us?”

Handspan shows that theatre can still be a powerful moment of emotion leading to profound thought. We were all moved and silent, emerging from the performance.

Ghosts from the Fifth Continent
Woven into magical circus nostalgia, shocked by horror film effects and transported to the deepest Orient with a gentle shudder, the European spectator attends an astonishing séance. The Handspan Theatre from Melbourne Australia isn't "handspun" in the sense of crafting with both hands but it cleverly mixes all secrets, that is, secrets that keep superstition alive in sub-religions of Brazil, India, Africa and the whole world to this day. The creation of spooky puppets, originally most likely the main device of a five-man puppet troupe, has now been so lost in technical magic and light effects that even the most enlightened spectator is left under an irresistible trance in the twitching, circling, creepily fogged-up semi-darkness. The fifth continent appears as an in-between world, where only ghosts dwell.

In addition to the visual-theatrical collage, the acoustic collage is crucial. What has been bundled together in suggestive sound by the Yellow Magic Orchestra and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark up to John Lennon, Martin Luther King, Mick Jagger, Sidney Poitier, heightens the surreal stage scenes in chaotic, garish and dark, threatening confusion. It is arranged as a continuous accompaniment to uninterrupted dream turbulence and is only broken through by faltering, ever-repeated recordings of English spoken phrases.

The Black Theatre, of course, is responsible for the foundations of such magic. But a "Mummenschanz", as announced, reminiscent of the Swiss pantomimes, is not presented to us. Rather, one can think of the Vienna Serapion Theatre. Only that instead of late romanticism the Australian spectre signifies and portrays fantastic horror. Literary reminiscences, however, are also present here: the hooded stranger with his suitcases, who wanders through these secrets of world magic to fathom them, has something to do with Kafka. And the baby carriage pushed by Madame La Mort and later by the African goddess of death has French ancestors. The fact that even von Schlemmer's geometrically ordered rods or the semiotic signs swirling in circles come into play is not convincing: it was precisely this illusion that the Bauhaus innovators did not want.

Illuminated Eyes Above a Baby Carriage
Nobody can fall asleep with this hocus-pocus, which is taken from the fund of various cultures as from Bolle's supermarket. A speech and music collage thunders across the parquet floor at the volume of the hard of hearing, a muddle of The Doors, Martin Luther King, James Dean, Ultravox and a thousand others. It rages and rambles. When it comes to acoustics, Australians know no mercy.

A large audience and one that was happy to be seduced (this is the only appropriate term) by a show like Secrets. The seduction begins with a dense fog that floods the theatre, confusing the view and lungs of the spectators. From the chaotic fog, the blurry, macabre, suggestive investigations are generated imposing themselves, evoking the east, the magic, the rites of Southeast Asia. The shapes and bodies, on stage, defy the laws of gravity, move on their own, just like air bubbles floating in space and then dispersing into nothingness, the East and its magic are evoked, and it alludes to the great American cinematography, that of the science fiction monsters with ember eyes.

Much applause, but not as much, in our opinion, that these talented Australians deserved.

The Australians of the Handspan Theatre group demonstrated great figurative rigor replicating the success already attained two years ago at the Festival of Spoleto.
Secrets is completely committed to images produced by the performers in sumptuous costumes reminiscent of kabuki, animation techniques borrowed from diverse experiences, from Arabic and eastern oriental, sounds and voices, mix with rock to mark rhythms of ritual and ghostlike images.

Secrets is performed with unnerving exactitude

For me it was a joy to be associated even briefly with Handspan. Secrets was a revelation for me, and even several decades and many, many theatrical experiences later, I can’t think of any production that I have found more magical and moving. Nigel Triffitt’s vision and the amazing skills of the Handspan troupe created something extraordinary there. It was difficult to photograph but we did get some great images to record it.