Presented by Amy Bodossian
@ Ambassadors Hotel
SUNDAY 26 Feb (until March 11)

Amy Bodossian has been called one of Australia’s top female performance poets. She’s also someone with an incredibly vast array of expressive personae. Indeed, one of her most out-there alter egos, Graaahm, was a guest at last years Falls Music and Arts Festival Village.

Bodossian has certainly earned the recognition that’s come her way. She has co-written, produced and performed in numerous Fringe and Comedy festival productions over the last ten years (including the sold-out Phlegm Fatale at last year’s Cabaret Festival) and has been awarded the prestigious Green Room Award for excellence in cabaret, dance, drama, musical theatre and opera. In 2008 she won the SA Young Women’s Writer’s Award and has also self published a collection of illustrated poetry.And that’s before mention of her musical talents, performing with 20s jazz-styled Big Bobo Band and then “electro-pop surrealist” duo The Bad Father, which saw her close an episode of Spicks and Specks to around 1.4 million viewers.

Her current show is designed as an exhibition of the performer’s own eccentric and off-kilter personality, taking the form of a song, dance and performance driven trip through numerous unheimlich life events, conjoining the everyday with the downright unusual and deliberately confronting – Amy’s stage presence is a combination of soothing welcomes and awkward stares designed to place viewers outside their social comfort zones.

Upon entering the upstairs stage area, suitably jaunty swing jazz played through speakers while a pink feather boa hung suggestively from an easel in the corner. We all sat down at square dining tables as the lights dimmed and two finely dresed men ascended the stage behind drums and keboard. The Ambassadors Hotel is not her usual venue, preferring to play more specialist cabaret spots like Tuxedo Cat. She told me afterwards that some elements of this set-up hadn’t gelled properly with the show. Certainly this second night’s small attendance numbers weren’t helped by the somewhat formal seating arrangements, which tended to discourage audience interaction. The show opened with an impromptu live art session, an invitation to sketch the night’s star on our table’s white paper coverings, textas provided. I’m not sure if anybody did, although it took me a few moments to realise what the bit was. Amy said afterwards that dragging in some more intimate couches might have improved things.

Nevertheless, I thought the general feel of the place was appropriate. Its large chandeliers and sense of fading grandeur went nicely with the jazz chanteuse elements of Amy’s show. There was also talk of some technical and sound issues, although none were noticeable to me.

At this point I must confess that certain types of confessional spoken word poetry are not entirely my cup of tea (neither is tea, for that matter. I’ll have coffee – good, hot, black coffee). They too often feel forced, overflowing with hackneyed self-pity and overdone emotional punchlines.

Let me say that Amy Bodossian’s talents are far too great and varied to allow such a production. Amy, for the most part, surpasses such confessional cliches with her more complex, multi-facted take on classic tropes like the socially and sexually repressed housewife, the often shallow and fleetting search for modern love, or that old chestnut – some women’s supposedley unyielding desire to “change” manifestly horrible men with whom they’re in love

My earlier self-indulgent reference to Agent Dale Cooper is not entirely tangential, either. Amy’s sensibility has much in common with that of Twin Peaks creator David Lynch (though he obviously takes it to more horrifying lengths), with its off-beat humour, jazzy soundtrack and exploration of suburban domesticity’s strange and sometimes dark underside. Her musical and poetic ability have a wonderfully bohemian, conversational edge, with observations of “sushi rolls and suits” walking past or “the sun clocking on for his morning shift” giving the impression of a female Tom Waits – the same jazzy blues, the same unpredictable blend of cynical humour and melancholy romance.

Yet it still feels as if the full range of her talents are somewhat constrained by a battle-of-the-sexes bawdiness that verges into the obvious. A case in point was her song about it being “easier to be a man”. Her gender-bending impression of a self-described and self-delusional chick-magnet, complete with blokey accent and obscene gestures, was hilariously spot on and suitably cringe inducing. But would anyone watching be challenged or confronted by this caricature? It’s been written of Amy’s work that she “empowers the women and illuminates the men”, but I fear the ones who might benefit from such basic cultural satire probably won’t be in her audience. Those who were simply laughed at a well executed, amusing impersonation of what they already consider a ridiculous male identity-type.

Still, there’s much to like and be charmed by in this vaudevillian combination of song, dance, confession and satire. Just don’t try and win a staring contest with the woman on stage. You will not succeed.