Sleeping Beauty at the Fringe

Post

Subscribe

Posted 2016-01-24 by Douglas Sutherland-Bruce ⇒ follow

Tue 02 Feb 2016 - Sat 06 Feb 2016

Stories are important. Stories about Gods, fairies and the supernatural are important. To educate, to warn, to instruct and to elucidate the mundane world around us.

Eons old, reaching all the way back to the elders retelling stories around a fire as the dark, filled with hungry and fearsome eyes, peered in.

Many fairy stories are old beyond knowledge, far older than paper and writing. At each generation's re-telling they change until codified into a thick leather-bound book by Messrs Willhelm and Jacob Grimm .

Even then they change - the horrible and rough facts are smoothed or omitted. The Ugly sisters no longer cut their toes or heels off to fir into the shoe and no longer get their eyes pecked out, rolled downhill with their mother in a barrel filled with nails and then drowned. A version somewhat different to Mr Disney's vision of Cinderella.

Revisionist history abounds here - think only of Gregory Maguire's novel Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister which tells the story from another point of view entirely.

Many fairy stories have crimes in them - Hansel and Gretel is filled with child abuse, not to mention later abuse of the elderly.

It is in the spirit of these that Renée Newman and Ian Sinclair bring their understanding of Sleeping Beauty's story relevance to today's world to you as part of the 2016's Perth Fringe World .

There isn't much in theatre that Renée Newman hasn't done - performer, writer director, performance maker and academic and I an Sinclair melds in performance perfectly with her.

As told by Newman and Sinclair, with music by Mei Saraswati Sleeping Beauty is 'a tale of nothingness, honesty and beauty that takes a wry and quirky look at the simplicity, and complexity, of life.'

Sleeping Beauty runs from the 2nd to the 6th of February at 9:30pm at PICA Perfromance Space, in the Perth Cultural Centre, James Street, Northbridge.