The performers were particularly strong in the comic scenes. The exuberant outward physicality of Hart and the more internal and reserved foil of Morrison combined perfectly and had the audience roaring with delight – I have never seen a show so enjoyed. These scenes included two Aboriginal teenage girls at a dance, a Kangaroo court charging Hart with being a ‘coconut’, cooking damper on a glitzy cooking show and a telemarketing advert for the ‘Mobulator’ – a coat hanger with lots of teabags tied to it.

Some of the comedy scenes were noticeably darker than others and concerned the horrible experience of living in a mission and the problems of skin colour for a contemporary Aboriginal. These scenes were very powerful and deftly evoked complex experiences that are not usually given voice.

Two of the tragic scenes stood out above the rest. They involved the recounting of what it was like to be a child of the stolen generation and a conversation between two sisters who had just been re-united. They evoked that deep empathy and acknowledgement that is the sign of great drama.

It is great to see stories like these being told, especially when they are done so with such strength, vitality and vigour.

Alex Wolman

On stage she’s elaborately costumed, as is her assistant, the Evil hate monkey. He’s a well trained monkey, we’re assured, and he does a fine job of pouring champagne. But that doesn’t mean he won’t succumb to more primitive instincts.

They’re on full display in Prima Primate, a striptease routine that won Monkey the Vegas ‘King of Boylesque’ title in 2010. It’s a heady combination of the elegance and dress of a ballerina and the aggression and throwing skills of a monkey. It’s the first time I’m able to realise that monkeys and ballerinas have great agility in common.
Trixie herself is bendy beyond belief, demonstrating her flex whilst appearing under the guise of Gypsy Little, and alternately, a giant banana. She sparkles, even when she’s significantly reduced her glittery costume décor, and her sassy dialogue keeps the level of wit in line with the level of tit.

The duo out from New York have been touring for a decade, but their roots show. Calling themselves ‘shamelessly eccentric’, where else but New York does a show cross from banana-themed to yoga-inspired feats of strength and an homage to the Kama Sutra on trapeze? It’s vigorously modern, fresh and heartfelt.

The show’s originality is really endearing, which is an odd thing to admit from something billed as ‘trapeze and striptease.’ Yet Trixie and Monkey have the audience rapt; they’ve got a level of chutzpah that you need to convince the guy they drag on stage to horsey-ride Monkey around the tent.

Trixie and Monkey: definitely something different on stage.

Looking like a set from a Guy Richie film, The Black Box had a grungy feel to it that suited an underground film festival perfectly. The venue itself remains the highlight of the evening and is definitely worth a trip, for one of the few Fringe shows left this week preferably.

The screening takes place inside a confined space adorned with black theatre curtains, a projector screen, and a series of ramshackle seats that range from couches, to folding chairs, to small stools covered in fake grass. After a quick word from the presenter who bristled with delighted excitement, handing out hand-written audience favourite ballots, the festival got started.

For opening night, we only saw Programme A, and hence my review is limited to those short films. All are West Australian made and there’s a sense of enjoyment in that. You recognise landmarks (Hyde Park and The Moon Café make appearances), revel in an Australian accent instead of the typical American, and even laugh at the classic slang that defines our country.

Unfortunately, the quality of films wasn’t always at the same level. A few suffered from post-production issues but festivals like Outpost are the first step in ironing these out. Overall, the screening was enjoyable and contained a few very heart-warming shorts, standout ones include “Blue” by Keir Wilkins and “Picnic” by Grace Macri.

Outpost Film Festival is the new kid on the block. From the very start, the team behind it stated that they hoped to not just be limited to Fringe World and to continue throughout the year. It’s a festival that has a lot of heart and a lot of promise, particularly with Western Australia having such an understated amount of film talent currently. If you’re after something with thousands of dollars worth of funding and high definition quality, try Tropfest, but if you want something with a lot of potential and a ton of personality, dig a little deeper to The Bakery.

Outpost Film Festival is showing at The Bakery Black Box every night until Thursday, February 21^st.

While it might feel as though each change in direction is leading you further away from a resolution, though, it is true that there is a solution hidden somewhere within the logic of the puzzle. You can take comfort in that much.

From this premise Michael Burke crafts an endearing analogy: life too has the character of a Rubik’s cube. You can think you’ve got the hang of it, only to zoom out and find you’ve missed something integral. You took a wrong turn. It’s time to start over.

It is at this juncture that we meet Cubehead, an extra-terrestrial hominid form with a Rubik’s cube for a head. Cubehead is dealing with a thoroughly existential crisis, wrestling with a form of anxiety Sartre termed as “bad faith”. It seems that the pressure to conform comes at the cost of one’s innate freedom, and before he is stultified into submission Cubehead must depart. He hopes, like many before him, that by leaving home he will find himself.

If the metaphor seems wafer thin – Burke himself was wrenched from a promising job as a lawyer by an interior, peripatetic impulse – then it is because it is supposed to be. A charming and effusive guide through his own personal crisis, Burke is self-reflexive without ever seeming overly contrived. He effortlessly combines his stand-up repertoire with character skits and oddball theatrics, a one-man comedy styling that he more or less accurately describes as “Dada Surrealism”.

The show reaches its conclusion with a surprising gust of pathos, Burke and Cubehead’s anxieties reconciled and resolved in a bittersweet revelation. As if recoiling from his own sentimentality, Burke quickly ushers an audience member on stage to help him smash a pinata. If it is a moment supposed to distract us from the message of the show, though, on this score Burke has failed. The sweet treats of the burst pinata spilling over the stage and into the audience, it seems that Burke might have accidentally stumbled upon another potent metaphor for his personal philosophy.

All this and more can be experienced first hand in Lifted!, a punchy, energetic play that sees the Castello Theatre turned into a Bankwest Tower lift for an hour.

In the lift, a team of talented actors play out a series of short skits, seamlessly strung together by the smarts of The Kitchen Sink Collective and The Australian Institute of Theatresports.

During each skit, an unassuming businessman stands in the corner of the lift. He comments on the commotions going on around him, and as the play progresses he reveals small hints of his character. Things reach a peak when we find out why this man likes to linger in the lift for his entire lunch break…

The Castello Theatre is a cosy one. There is sneezing, arguing, brawling, farting, dancing, singing and scheming all from a distance where an actor’s spittle might land on your nose. But this is a small price to pay for a good injection of fun.

Lifted! runs until Sunday; 8:45-9:45pm and is part of Fringe World 2013. Tickets are available from www.fringeworld.com.au

Five short films, volume dulled, are shown against a blank white wall. Beside the projected images sit the alternating forms of five sets of musicians.

It is the task of the musicians to bring to life, through their craft, a new interpretation of their assigned film. A program that highlights foremost the power of music to guide our interpretation of the visual, The Cinematic Scores is a tour-de-force of ecstatic ekphrasis.

Accordionist David Sergio Kaloczy and clarinet aficionado Philip Everal begin proceedings, pitting their smoky melodies against Man Ray’s The Starfish. The duo do well to cultivate an atmosphere of 1920s Parisian bohemian chic, extending an invitation to the audience to join them in the moment of the film.

After the audience have recovered from the temporal-lag of their Midnight in Paris experience, it is Mark Cain’s turn to breathe life into early 20th century ethnographic documentary Nanook of the North.

Cain fashions a quirky soundtrack befitting the lighthearted tone of the film, even stealing the show at points with his range of exotic woodwind instruments.

Here the program shifts in tone, with volume taking precedence over melody. Chris Kotchie and Sam Gillies, equipped with guitar and laptop, supply a soundscape awash with feedback and recursive drum loops to match the vertiginous visual forms of Marcel Duschamp’s Anemic Cinema.

The score provides a perfect counterweight to the industrial fetishism of the Dada avant-garde’s short film, a performance that retains Duschamps’ gift for simultaneously entrancing and alienating his audience.

A similar feat is achieved by the three noise merchants of TheIntensoBand. To George Melies turn of the century cinematic triumph Journey to the Moon they provide a stochastic assemblage of jazz drums and abrupt synthesised wheezes. It’s a sound which seems, at times, asphyxiated by its own pace. Not entirely unlike the frenetic action of Melies film, of course.

Necks sufficiently wrung by TheIntesoBand, it’s time again for a change of pace. Paired with an edited version of Sergei Eisenstein’s landmark piece of Soviet propaganda, Battleship Potemkin, is all-male choir Voicemale.

There’s a certain dramatic irony to Voicemale’s song choice, one made possible by the fact of historical retrospect. As the subordinate seamen of the Potemkin oust their captain and hoist gaily the flag of freedom, for example, the choir belt out, con brio, the chorus of Tears for Fears’ Mad World.

The result is a mournful repackaging of Eisenstein’s revolutionary zeal as a remnant of an expired utopia.

By the end of the night, we have come full circle. From the rose-tinted romanticism that accompanied Man Ray through to Voicemale’s sanguineous soundtrack to socialist upheaval, curators Alex Courtin and Tom Muller have compiled a program that runs the full gamut of historical interpretation.

The Cinematic Scores is an event that renders splendidly the power of music to shift our interpretive faculties, a challenging but rewarding experience for performers and audience alike.

Taking three of the stories traditionally classed as part of the ‘marriage group’ in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Part Two follows the lead of the first in repositioning them within disparate genres.

Perhaps wisely, The Wife of Bath’s Tale does not stray as far from the original, being depicted as a faux-Shakespearean medieval romance. This avoids the awkwardness of transplanting into a modern setting the alien moral, whereby a knight is ultimately rewarded with happiness and love for avoiding the death sentence given to rapists.

This alien quality, which is to be expected in a seven centuries old text, is captured in an intergalactic sense with the transformation of The Franklin’s Tale into an episode of science fiction. Featuring a more than passing resemblance to a particularly beloved series that starred a young William Shatner, the pop cultural references and technobabble evoked more than a few laughs from the audience.

Even with its outlandish nature, of the six tales presented in both part one and two, The Franklin’s stands clear as the most successful translation of the original Chaucerian story into another genre.

Conversely, the version of The Merchant’s Tale that follows is the least successful. Embracing Victorian melodrama as it does, January loses all of his character’s nobility and with it any sense that an injustice is being done to him by the tale’s end.

The humour of Part Two remains as broad and fatuous as Part One’s, though considering that has been nominated for an Artrage award, the KNUTS theatre company must be correct in thinking that is what people want.

The Canterbury Tales – Part Two runs until February 19 at The Moon House Tent and is part of Fringe World 2013. Tickets are available from fringeworld.com.au.

This is the genius of his show: to err to blur the lines of stand-up comedy. Also known as “winging it”. On Thursday, Conway kicked things off by getting to know the crowd. He talked shop with Eric down the front, played muffin-tennis with a young hipster, and discussed breakfast cereals with a group of Canadians.

Once everyone was settled in and chuckling away, Conway let rip on some hilarious, high-energy material, which he self-critiqued as he went along. He even backpedalled on one of his jokes to try out a range of different punchlines.

Conway also likes to branch-off on schizophrenic tangents just to see what will happen. At one stage what happened was an audience member spinning around saying “Chocolate milk”. At another, Conway himself was screaming “Instagram, Instagram, Instagram”.

The show is manic, but not inane. It is absurd, but not thoughtless. Through his rollicking banter on small bars, sausage fests and backyard pizza ovens, Conway points to a deeper truth: that this world is absurd, and absurd is, well, funny.

Conway is the Pied Piper, leading his audience up a mountain in his jodhpurs. He is screaming “Freedom from the drudgery of this business-suit world”. Go see him.

The New Conway Vibe runs until February 24 and is part of Fringe World 2013. Tickets are available from fringeworld.com.au.

Cast members circulate through the waiting crowd before the show, collecting object and adjective suggestions into skull-shaped pots. When combined with the result of a coin toss, the title of the play is determined, with that night’s being “The Most Esteemed Comedy of the Flighty Knickerbocker”. A random number shouted from the audience is added to the mix, which in this case meant that seven marriages were to occur before the show’s end.

Knickerbockers may have been interpreted as a type of lacey undergarment a woman might wear and the marriages all but forgotten until the last ten minutes or so, leading to some speedy romancing, but all of this just added to the absolute hilarity of what was occurring on stage.

This applies equally to the Shakespearean influence, which that night was mostly manifested in the show’s format and the peppering of the players’ dialogue with “doth”, “thou” and the suffix “–est” in both appropriate and inappropriate places.

The embracing of coincidence and overly elaborate plans that never should work suggested a lampooning of the Shakespearean formula, but whether this was purposeful or just a byproduct of the improvisation is difficult to deduce.

What is clear is that every member of the cast is a deft improviser, who enjoys what they do as much as the audience clearly was. If the rest of the performances maintain the standard set by the opening night, you would have to be as averse to pleasure as Malvolio to not have a riotous time.

Shakesprovisation ran until February 17 at Noodle Palace and was part of Fringe World 2013.

A thought of this sort clearly occurred to a member of the KNUTS theatre company, which is staging two productions based on Chaucer’s Tales. Directed by Stephen Lee, they present three tales each, with Part One’s being those of The Pardoner, The Miller and The Reeve.

The intent of the production, as stated by the characters of Chaucer and The Host in the play’s prologue, is to avoid the educational and provide audiences with what they want. Accordingly, the three tales presented in Part One, are transposed into different genres across time, with their language updated to suit modern ears. The Pardoner’s Tale is recast as a Western, The Miller’s Tale becomes a Carry On film and The Reeve’s goes quiet, as a silent movie about two cyclists.

This last choice is particularly inspired, as the original Reeve’s Tale is marked by its emphasis on the physicality of the characters and their actions, as opposed to their use of language.

It does, however, make it an even more curious decision to open with The Pardoner’s Tale as opposed to that of The Knight, which forms a kind of thematic trilogy with the Miller and Reeve’s, marked by a downward class shift and, as suggested by Seth Lerer, “a decay in linguistic stability”.

Eschewing any of the real Chaucer’s subtlety, as he balanced the comic and serious moralising, this production aims for the easy laughs and always receives them. Cringe-worthy at times and often ridiculous, it may not be the final word in adapting The Canterbury Tales, but it is an amusing one.

The Canterbury Tales – Part One runs until February 13 at The Moon House Tent and is part of Fringe World 2013. Tickets are available from fringeworld.com.au.