The Black Sequin Dress
Précis
A woman in a black sequin dress leaves the children for the evening and goes to a nightclub. The play begins. The woman arrives at the nightclub. She walks across the shiny floor. In a moment of indecision she glances back, slips and falls. The waiter helps her up, walks her to a table and gets her a drink. The premise that any ordinary action has extraordinary resonances is explored. The nightclub becomes the underworld and falling synonymous with her psychic state. We watch as memory, desire, dream, fantasy and myth serve to animate the descent into the underworld and her subsequent ascent.
Creative Team
Cast: Margaret Mills, Natasha Herbert, Mary Sitarenos, Helen Herbertson, Ian Scott, Greg Stone (with Romanie Harper as the girl’s voice).
Writer/Director: Jenny Kemp.
Composer: Elizabeth Drake.
Designer: Jacqueline Everitt.
Lighting Designer: Ben Cobham.
Choreography: Jenny Kemp, Helen Herbertson.
Film Maker: Cassandra Tyler.
Camera: Jesse Little Doring.
Musicians: Binneas String Quartet (Jeremy Cook, Judy Pile, Danny Simcic, Jamie Southall).
Stage Manager: Armando Licul.
Assistant Stage Manager: Rod Scanlon.
Writer/Director: Jenny Kemp.
Composer: Elizabeth Drake.
Designer: Jacqueline Everitt.
Lighting Designer: Ben Cobham.
Choreography: Jenny Kemp, Helen Herbertson.
Film Maker: Cassandra Tyler.
Camera: Jesse Little Doring.
Musicians: Binneas String Quartet (Jeremy Cook, Judy Pile, Danny Simcic, Jamie Southall).
Stage Manager: Armando Licul.
Assistant Stage Manager: Rod Scanlon.
Performance History
The Black Sequin Dress was first produced by the Adelaide Festival and the Playbox Theatre. It previewed at the Scott Theatre on March 2nd and opened on March 5th 1996. It then went to Playbox’s Merlyn Theatre, Melbourne (previewing 15-18th March) and opened March 19th and ran to April 6th. Then to Canberra Theatre Co. April 10 – 13th, 1996.
Writer/Director’s Notes
Black Sequin Dress is an investigation into the psyche and its ability to function creatively …. As you walk down the street you see the ‘everyday’ world but feel aware of an ‘inner world’ … the work attempts a dialogue with this disjunction.
Black Sequin Dress is predominantly about women and women’s consciousness. Based on the premise that any ordinary action has extraordinary resonances, the intention is to liberate the audience from the usual constraints particularly those of time, and provoke associative engagement with image, action, text and sound.
Memory, dream, fantasy, myth, and desire are integral and catalytic elements. The domestic daily world is continuous at times present at times absent.
The visual arts have played a strong role in my work, as they emphasize image and timelessness. A different balance exists between the image and the viewer, which I find very interesting, in particular the way the stillness of a painting can cause movement inside the viewer. The paintings of the Belgian artist Paul Delvaux have been inspiring for both the mis en scene and the design concepts. Delvaux’s paintings are for me, timeless, landscapes of the soul, where anything seems possible.
The intention of the work is to stimulate a relationship between audience and performance which allows a flexible interplay between the active and passive possibilities of both.
Black Sequin Dress is predominantly about women and women’s consciousness. Based on the premise that any ordinary action has extraordinary resonances, the intention is to liberate the audience from the usual constraints particularly those of time, and provoke associative engagement with image, action, text and sound.
Memory, dream, fantasy, myth, and desire are integral and catalytic elements. The domestic daily world is continuous at times present at times absent.
The visual arts have played a strong role in my work, as they emphasize image and timelessness. A different balance exists between the image and the viewer, which I find very interesting, in particular the way the stillness of a painting can cause movement inside the viewer. The paintings of the Belgian artist Paul Delvaux have been inspiring for both the mis en scene and the design concepts. Delvaux’s paintings are for me, timeless, landscapes of the soul, where anything seems possible.
The intention of the work is to stimulate a relationship between audience and performance which allows a flexible interplay between the active and passive possibilities of both.
Creative Team
Cast: Margaret Mills, Natasha Herbert, Mary Sitarenos, Helen Herbertson, Ian Scott, Greg Stone (with Romanie Harper as the girl’s voice).
Writer/Director: Jenny Kemp.
Composer: Elizabeth Drake.
Designer: Jacqueline Everitt.
Lighting Designer: Ben Cobham.
Choreography: Jenny Kemp, Helen Herbertson.
Film Maker: Cassandra Tyler.
Camera: Jesse Little Doring.
Musicians: Binneas String Quartet (Jeremy Cook, Judy Pile, Danny Simcic, Jamie Southall).
Stage Manager: Armando Licul.
Assistant Stage Manager: Rod Scanlon.
Writer/Director: Jenny Kemp.
Composer: Elizabeth Drake.
Designer: Jacqueline Everitt.
Lighting Designer: Ben Cobham.
Choreography: Jenny Kemp, Helen Herbertson.
Film Maker: Cassandra Tyler.
Camera: Jesse Little Doring.
Musicians: Binneas String Quartet (Jeremy Cook, Judy Pile, Danny Simcic, Jamie Southall).
Stage Manager: Armando Licul.
Assistant Stage Manager: Rod Scanlon.
Performance History
The Black Sequin Dress was first produced by the Adelaide Festival and the Playbox Theatre. It previewed at the Scott Theatre on March 2nd and opened on March 5th 1996. It then went to Playbox’s Merlyn Theatre, Melbourne (previewing 15-18th March) and opened March 19th and ran to April 6th. Then to Canberra Theatre Co. April 10 – 13th, 1996.
Writer/Director's Notes
Black Sequin Dress is an investigation into the psyche and its ability to function creatively …. As you walk down the street you see the ‘everyday’ world but feel aware of an ‘inner world’ … the work attempts a dialogue with this disjunction.
Black Sequin Dress is predominantly about women and women’s consciousness. Based on the premise that any ordinary action has extraordinary resonances, the intention is to liberate the audience from the usual constraints particularly those of time, and provoke associative engagement with image, action, text and sound.
Memory, dream, fantasy, myth, and desire are integral and catalytic elements. The domestic daily world is continuous at times present at times absent.
The visual arts have played a strong role in my work, as they emphasize image and timelessness. A different balance exists between the image and the viewer, which I find very interesting, in particular the way the stillness of a painting can cause movement inside the viewer. The paintings of the Belgian artist Paul Delvaux have been inspiring for both the mis en scene and the design concepts. Delvaux’s paintings are for me, timeless, landscapes of the soul, where anything seems possible.
The intention of the work is to stimulate a relationship between audience and performance which allows a flexible interplay between the active and passive possibilities of both.
Black Sequin Dress is predominantly about women and women’s consciousness. Based on the premise that any ordinary action has extraordinary resonances, the intention is to liberate the audience from the usual constraints particularly those of time, and provoke associative engagement with image, action, text and sound.
Memory, dream, fantasy, myth, and desire are integral and catalytic elements. The domestic daily world is continuous at times present at times absent.
The visual arts have played a strong role in my work, as they emphasize image and timelessness. A different balance exists between the image and the viewer, which I find very interesting, in particular the way the stillness of a painting can cause movement inside the viewer. The paintings of the Belgian artist Paul Delvaux have been inspiring for both the mis en scene and the design concepts. Delvaux’s paintings are for me, timeless, landscapes of the soul, where anything seems possible.
The intention of the work is to stimulate a relationship between audience and performance which allows a flexible interplay between the active and passive possibilities of both.
Reviews
“This is not ordinary entertainment, but rather an extraordinary twist in modern recognizably Australian drama which you should not miss.”
Frank McClone The Canberra Times 11/4/1996.
“Her arm goes down, her knees bend and she keels over, she faints off the edge of the earth, she falls out of the dead landscape…. There ensues a seemingly endless series of meditations upon that fall and all that it may mean. Meditations folded layer upon layer, text interlaced with visual image, the elements of the landscape carefully orchestrated, with Elizabeth Drake’s score providing the dynamic of ‘irrigous uncertainty’. Against the ground of Jacqui Everitt’s formal, slightly surreal nightclub, the psyche (decentered through four actresses) slips through the spaces in-between and ‘adventures’ underground. The image journey of death is present in the ever arriving train. Figures of myth and fantasy are encountered in the jungle of the soul.”
Richard Murphet Real Time. March 1996.
Jenny Kemp’s Playbox production The Black Sequin Dress was the most haunting, witty, tightly written and distinctive theatre I’ve seen for many years. Use of the dream-world motif too often produces indulgent work, but Kemp’s play successfully walked a fine line between external reality and the internal world of a woman’s imagination. Jacqueline Everitt’s design caught the spirit of artist Paul Delvaux’s work while the cast were impressively choreographed and disciplined.
Steven Carroll, The Age. Theatre Roundup Dec. 1996.
For more reviews please go to the further reading page.
Frank McClone The Canberra Times 11/4/1996.
“Her arm goes down, her knees bend and she keels over, she faints off the edge of the earth, she falls out of the dead landscape…. There ensues a seemingly endless series of meditations upon that fall and all that it may mean. Meditations folded layer upon layer, text interlaced with visual image, the elements of the landscape carefully orchestrated, with Elizabeth Drake’s score providing the dynamic of ‘irrigous uncertainty’. Against the ground of Jacqui Everitt’s formal, slightly surreal nightclub, the psyche (decentered through four actresses) slips through the spaces in-between and ‘adventures’ underground. The image journey of death is present in the ever arriving train. Figures of myth and fantasy are encountered in the jungle of the soul.”
Richard Murphet Real Time. March 1996.
Jenny Kemp’s Playbox production The Black Sequin Dress was the most haunting, witty, tightly written and distinctive theatre I’ve seen for many years. Use of the dream-world motif too often produces indulgent work, but Kemp’s play successfully walked a fine line between external reality and the internal world of a woman’s imagination. Jacqueline Everitt’s design caught the spirit of artist Paul Delvaux’s work while the cast were impressively choreographed and disciplined.
Steven Carroll, The Age. Theatre Roundup Dec. 1996.
For more reviews please go to the further reading page.
Article from Current Publication
From – Transfigured Stages by Margaret Hamilton
“Kemp has described her approach to an aesthetics of repetition in terms of a Chinese concept of time referred to as “field thinking” that situates everything around a significant event; “In Black Sequin Dress if you took the fall of the woman as a significant event what is actually important is all the things that belong to that event rather than that event having been caused by this and moving onto that. So that the idea of in a sense societal time dropping away somewhere and you’ve got this one thing being explored. And the Chinese also say that what is brought to bare in this one significant point in time are (sic) both the physical and psychic sides of that event. So if the woman falls what is clustered around that moment is both her conscious and unconscious in that fall.” (Kemp quoted in Shifting and Sliding 2004).” (Hamilton 2011: 101)
“Kemp has described her approach to an aesthetics of repetition in terms of a Chinese concept of time referred to as “field thinking” that situates everything around a significant event; “In Black Sequin Dress if you took the fall of the woman as a significant event what is actually important is all the things that belong to that event rather than that event having been caused by this and moving onto that. So that the idea of in a sense societal time dropping away somewhere and you’ve got this one thing being explored. And the Chinese also say that what is brought to bare in this one significant point in time are (sic) both the physical and psychic sides of that event. So if the woman falls what is clustered around that moment is both her conscious and unconscious in that fall.” (Kemp quoted in Shifting and Sliding 2004).” (Hamilton 2011: 101)