Directing the dead with Cathy Hunt.
Director and dramaturg, Cathy Hunt, directed her first play, The Maids, at the age of 23. For various reasons, it was some time until she directed her second. Hunt has had a busy year in 2018 however, directing the opera Les Mamelles de Tiresias for Lyric in April and the immersive show Her Father’s Daughter for Hotel Now in May. To further develop her craft, Hunt has been working on Chamber Made’s current production of Dybbuks as an Associate Artist.
“After The Maids it took me a long time before I directed my second work, mainly because I didn’t know of any women directors. I was working at a theatre company in Sydney, Belvoir, and wanted to make my own work, so I started my own independent theatre company,” Hunt recalls. “Part of this involved working with writers to shape their plays for performance which is where dramaturgy came in. Working at Belvoir I was steeped in all the processes of making, writing and creating work for the stage and began working with writers like Brooke Robinson, Jessica Tuckwell and Tommy Murphy. Suddenly there were more women directors around and several whose work I deeply admired, such as Adena Jacobs, had trained in directing at the Victorian College of the Arts, so I went there to do that course, in 2014 as a post-graduate.”
Part performance, part concert, and part exorcism, through the Associate Artist program, Hunt has been involved in various aspects of Dybbuks which is devised from S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk, about a malevolent demon that possesses a woman’s soul. “As well as shadowing director, Samara Hersch, throughout her creative and collaborative process of making this work, I had a specific role which I’ve loved, of liaising with the choir of women who sing in Yiddish and provide vocal texture throughout the piece,” Hunt tells me. “We began rehearsing in mid-July, at the Kadimah, the Jewish cultural centre in Elsternwick and the choir began by sharing their favourite Yiddish songs and the stories that made them special.”
“For several of the women, Yiddish was their first language, their parents as Holocaust survivors chose not to speak other languages to their children as they grew up in Melbourne, some very close to Theatre Works. There was once a Jewish kindergarten just around the corner in Robe St, which a few of the choir attended. It has been incredible getting to know the amazing women in the choir and working with them, learning some beautiful haunting Yiddish songs and being an adopted member of this special community whilst making the work.”
With Chamber Made’s practice of making art outside of boundaries and reimagining works, Hunt jumped at the chance to work with them and Samara, who conceived Dybbuks. “The way Chamber Made deliberately venture into the unknown, exploring what might happen when performance collides with sound and intersects with music in a theatre context, strongly appeals to me,” she explains.
“I have been deeply drawn to works that Samara has made previously, including META and We All Know What’s Happening as well as the gorgeously unexpected event Dybbuk which Samara curated at the Malthouse in 2016, an early exploration of some of the ideas which charge this piece. Earlier this year I directed an opera for Lyric and am drawn to exploring how sound can heighten states of intensity in theatre and be used in unexpected ways in my own practice both as a theatre maker and in more sound-based works.”
Being an Associate Artist on Dybbuks has provided Hunt with the experience, knowledge and skills to consider her own practice and how to bring these ideas to her own theatre making. “Working with Chamber Made; with Artistic Director Tamara Saulwick who is sound dramaturg on Dybbuks and with Chamber Made artists including Jenny Barnes who uses her voice to improvise & musician Aviva Endean on clarinet, has been revelatory, particularly witnessing the impact of rhythm, silences and juxtaposition in the improvised score,” she says. “The close collaboration between Samara and composer Max Lyandvert to achieve their shared vision for the work, has given me an insight into the deep precision and passion needed to achieve the unstable open balance that this work aims at.”
“I have begun to imagine alternate ways of approaching and opening up complex and ambiguous ideas through music and sound. The fragility of the human voice and the way juxtaposition works – the combination of what we do and do not understand and the layers that can build within a work using elements of different art forms,” Hunt explains. “This transformation through blurred boundaries, overlapping between a body and a voice is something I would like to explore further in my own practice. The very personal, participatory and ritual nature of this work is also a rich source of inspiration – the way it attempts to answer questions that are perhaps unanswerable. How we can be with the dead? Huge questions and the richness of the gaps we leave for the audience itself to fill in.”
Dybbuks is on until Sunday 26 August. For bookings: https://bit.ly/2njRopV
Production images by Pia Johnson.
