'can we afford this' Return to Home Page
premiered at the Everest Theatre, Sydney as part of the Olympic Arts Festivals celebrating the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.

PRESS RELEASE ... PRESS RELEASE ... PRESS RELEASE ...

This show will only be seen in Sydney, London and Hong Kong in 2000.

'Can we afford this' is one of the most ambitious shows DV8 has ever staged since its inception 15 years ago. Featuring an impressive cast of 17 outstanding performers from all over the world, can we afford this opens the prestigious Dance Umbrella season in London on September 19th.

DV8 presents a piece about perfection and pretence; of how society measures individuals and how we, in turn, value ourselves.

"This piece is about what we think we are, and what we think we ought to be," explains director Lloyd Newson. "We camouflage ourselves in conformity, put on a mask, smile, hide and pretend, so we too are invited to the ball. But what happens to those who don't get invited, who aren't perfect, who can't pretend?"

Warning: this production may contain scenes and language of an adult nature that some people may find offensive

PRESS REVIEWS ... PRESS REVIEWS ... PRESS REVIEWS ...

SYDNEY MORNING HERALD ... Monday Aug 21 2000
THE TIMES - Dance column ... Wednesday Sep 20 2000
THE GUARDIAN ... Thursday Sep 21 2000
THE FINANCIAL TIMES... Friday Sep 29 2000
THE SUNDAY TIMES - Dance … Sunday Sept 24 2000
THE AUSTRALIAN … Friday Aug 11 2000
THE TIMES - METRO - DANCE … Friday Sep 9-15 2000
METRO LIFE - DANCE REVIEW … Thursday Sep 21 2000

DV8 Physical Theatre's new work has piercing images and vignettes that you won't forget - that will make you think differently. At its best, it is a mixture of the shattering, the hilarious and the deeply affecting.

The cost of living, otherwise known as can we afford this, is partly a study in illusions: the masks that individuals adopt to hide their true feelings, and the visual variety that dazzles us at the circus. It also explores the toll that life itself takes on a human being.

This juxtaposition of humour and horror gives the cost of living its edge in a series of vignettes, anecdotes or merely fleeting images. Director Lloyd Newson has worked with a diverse cast of dancers who are credited with devising the piece. They range from the extremely able-bodied to a man with no legs, a woman in her 70s and a hugely overweight man.

Of them all, the legless David Toole makes the greatest impact. Toole has an astonishing duet with Eddie Kay in which the two move with a kind of rough equality as Toole's strategies counter his physical disadvantage.

Then, and in a later encounter, the body language says it all. In one of the spoken sections that works well - not all of them do- Toole maintains his dignity at ground level as a male dancer circles threateningly around him with questions about intimate details of his physicality.

This extra knowledge of Toole as a character makes his progress across a darkened stage with tall Kate Coyne all the more poignant. She is doubled over like a four-legged animal, he is balanced on her back, and it looks as though her legs are his. This is a man who is still jumping - with no legs.

The talents of Paul Capsis are not used to advantage. The large and the elderly are peripheral.

There are also brilliantly memorable dance sequences. Rowan Thorpe has a funky stream of consciousness solo, Kate Coyne and Vivien Wood have a witty duet with balloons. Eddie Kay makes his mark through a quick-fire personality that matches his dancing.

At the shattering conclusion, Newson strips off the mask of illusion. Yet this seems to confuse the audience. You can feel it around you. It is one of many moments that makes the the cost of living unmissable, despite some reservations.

"Blessed are the Average" reads a digital signboard in the newest work from Britain's groundbreaking DV8 Physical Theatre. Surely, in terms of art and entertainment, this is an inaccuracy. Don't most of us attend performances in the hope of seeing extraordinary people doing extraordinary things? But what qualifies as extraordinary? And in the wider arena of society, who are the arbiters of taste, beauty and acceptability?

These are some of the central ideas kicked around by the director Lloyd Newson and a cast of 17 in can we afford this / the cost of living. The engaging but uneven 90-minute show is the opening event of this year's Dance Umbrella, London's annual festival of international contemporary dance.

Newson, champion of the unpretty and unconventional, prides himself on perpetrating a more honest, provocative brand of movement-based theatre. Here he's gathered a particularly motley crew, from the powerful legless dancer David Toole to mature DV8 stalwart Diana Payne Myers. She says she has had four different lovers, all under the age of 30, since qualifying as an OAP. At least that's what she sweetly states in a mock meet-the-contestants parade, and why should we doubt her?

During this same passage, a cast member tells us he sold heroin for two years to support his dance training. Another blithely announces he has AIDS.

These are declarations, not confessions. Each contestant wears a ribbon, as if awarded a prize simply for being him or her self. The false notion that everyone's a winner is Newson and company's heavily ironic point.

The collage-like production, set on a ramped, walled expanse of grass-like carpet studded with trapdoors, is one of DV8's lighter-spirited efforts. It's like a garden party gone awry. There is literal clowning at the start but the humour always has serious underpinnings. This makes for a user-friendly, yet confrontational, evening that balances text and movement.

During a smiling ensemble balloon dance, a more conventionally built man slips in to replace the large (26 stone) American dancer Lawrence Goldhuber. To delicate waltz music, Toole circles beneath Amazonian classical dancer Kate Coyne's drawbridge legs. Later she bends forward while he rides atop her hips, as if her long legs were his.

There are other fine duets, plus an unexpectedly poetic, surreal section in which the stage appears to be covered in rolling clouds. Some parts feel vague and arbitrary, and the show is overpopulated. But, as with all of DV8's work, it demands a thoughtful response.

DV8's latest work, can we afford this was actually paid for by the Sydney Olympics Arts Festival, where it has just received its debut. But the cost to which it refers isn't that of producing dance theatre, but the price we pay for competing in a society obsessed by image. The work's huge and talented cast spend 90 minutes desperately shaping up, showing off and sometimes playing dirty with their rivals. The references to the Olympics are unmissable. But what gives the work its brutal edge is that personal disabilities and frailties are also part of the competition.

In a confessional line-up that is strongly reminiscent of a Pina Bausch production, the performers offer up their eccentricities and pain, like victims of some gruesomely inverted beauty competition. "I'm 72," states Diana Payne Myers, the sags and wrinkles of her tiny body exposed by a bathing suit, "and I've had four lovers under 30". We laugh encouragingly, but when another man baldly introduces himself with the announcement that he has AIDS, our titters falter and die.

Then there is David Toole, who has no legs but is possessed of a disorienting virtuosity. As he leaps and glides around the stage on his long, strong arms, at times addressing the audience with a cynically flirtatious wit, we start to feel cosy with his disability. He's extraordinarily gifted and funny: he doesn't need our pity. But when another performer starts hounding him with the questions we squirmingly want to ask- "Do you have a dick down there? Were you born without legs? - we're forced to recognise the humiliation Toole risks daily.

And it's a humiliation known to all performers. Paul Capsis, camp and ageing, is a vision of showbiz shame as his hysterical tactics for wooing the audience start to look increasingly forlorn. Dancer Vivien Wood tells us that since she's 40 and in her last show, she doesn't care how little she is paid. Lawrence Goldhuber is simply fat. He weighs 330lbs, and by way of apology he fixes us with the unwaveringly jolly smile required of the overweight.

Not that this is a freak show. Not only are the 17 members of the cast talented dancers, singers and comedians, they portray extraordinarily unsentimental, sharp-featured personae. They give us acting of a high order, and director Lloyd Newson has done an impressive job eliciting it. The problem is that he has too much material. Most performers appear on stage so briefly that we barely connect with them. And the work deliberately eschews the kind of formal structure that would knit the cast into some larger imaginative world, some larger journey. Our sense of being voyeurs isn't enough. Though we may momentarily feel warmth, discomfort or shame, our emotions are rarely more than pinpricks. Can we afford this is very, very entertaining but it doesn't draw blood.

"Blessed are the Average" says the illuminated sign that features in Lloyd Newson's newest staging for his DV8 troupe. His company, enlarged, opened this autumn's Dance Umbrella at the Queen Elizabeth Hall with a work commissioned for the Sydney Olympics Arts Festival, and the piece is very fine.

Over the past decade, Newson has cast a cold eye on sexuality, on emotional subterfuge, on the despairs and psychic role-playing that he sees as destroying happiness, even equilibrium, in social behaviour. But his chill gaze is counterbalanced by a sympathy for what produces the impersonations of normality and the average which he so excoriates. In his new can we afford this it is the subtitle "the cost of living" that indicates the real matter of the action. Here are the pretences that are the currency of life, the appearances which, like those cinematic sets that are no more than a façade deep, bolster up the existence of the supposedly and blessedly average, and cost so dear.

Newson's procedures are much as in the past. There is a dazzlingly good set: a sloping cavern of sage-green felt - the QEH stage transformed - which can change shape, reveal depths, provide oubliettes and secret exits, offer grand opportunities for theatrical magic.

In one sequence, projections of clouds turn this arena into a nightmare landscape through which strides a Bosch-like, Dali-esque creature formed by two performers. Variously awful popular music is accompaniment: that abominable ditty "Lucky, Lucky, Lucky Me" becomes a vitirol attack in these surroundings as the cast bounce, inanely sunny, around the stage. There us also especially composed and effective music as relief from this lurid wallpaper.

The cast features some Australian performers, notable Paul Capsis, who has the bright falsetto of Tiny Tim and even more copious locks, and is eventually flayed of every theatrical pretension in heartrending fashion. ("I can't see you, but I love you", he carols to the audience.) For the action, disjunct but subliminally taut, is about self-delusion and loneliness quite as much as about how people may delude others.

A key performer is David Toole, born without legs, whom we have admired with the CandoCo ensemble. In duets, or as an extraordinarily mobile trunk supported by his strong arms, Toole is both tragic and fiercely comic, seeming to grow from the torso of another dancer, or inspiring vivid dance sequences that are explored by other men in the cast.

In a work about social and physical lies, he cannot lie, and becomes all the more powerful because of this. This piece is more dance-rich than some of Newson's stagings, and the dance is uniformly apt, sure. A night scene in which men stalk each other in a park has the same edge of erotic danger as the encounters in Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men.

There are also terrifying verbal exchanges in which words are either masks for despair or - even more dangerous - scalpels to cut to the heart. Toole is subjected to a ferocious inquisition by an angry inadequate chap who has earlier failed to win the attentions of a girl. Toole is mute under this barrage of intrusive questions. Both performers are superb.

Humour there is abundantly, and sharp it is. Eddie Kay plays a Scots wide-boy, master of fearful asides and headbutting as dance. The wildly unlikely goes hand in hand with the too-dreadfully probable. An inattentive husband, berated by his wife ("Listen to me when I'm talking to you"), is suddenly forced by her into a grubby sexual encounter.

The piece is, ultimately, caustic, despairing, and it ends with a man shooting himself. yet there is such nervous and psychic energy to it, and there is the counterbalance of Newson's oddly generous understanding, that you feel braced rather than saddened.

Performances are everywhere excellent. The production is visually superlative and makes most imaginative use of the set. For everyone concerned, great admiration. To the makers of the programme book - a barely legible and affected oblong of modishness, printed on greaseproof paper - no thanks at all.

…crucial to Newson's ambivalence of tone in this piece is his use of David Toole, the legless dancer well known to us as a former linchpin performer with CandoCo Dance Company. Apparently weightless, Toole springs and shuttles on his powerful arms, his tiny torso clamping suddenly on two others' bodies with effects both hilarious and unnerving. He rides atop a statuesque Kate Coyne, who is bent double and plodding on all fours, and her sturdy legs become his. Weird, and rather camel-like. But when Toole is brutally interrogated by another performer about his nether functions - plumbing and sexual - we squirm inwardly.

David Toole… whom Newsom describes as "one of the most beautiful and extraordinary performers" he has ever seen.

Every appearance by David Toole delivers a punch, whether he is staring at the audience while a digital board blinks "Talk to me", or asserting just how able he is in a funky wrestling duet with Eddy Kaye.

A heart stopping coupling between legless dancer David Toole (brilliant throughout) and Kate Coyne, which has to be seen to be believed…