Autobiography of Red
Autobiography of Red
Created and Performed by Luke Mullins
after the book by Anne Carson
Geryon was a monster everything about him was red.
In an autobiography begun as a five-year-old boy, a young man who is also a winged red monster bares the volcanic terrain of his inner and outer worlds.
A healthy volcano is an exercise in the uses of pressure.
In the hands of an abusive brother and an affectionate but ineffectual mother, Geryon finds solace behind the lens of his camera, and in the arms of Herakles - a cavalier drifter who abandons Geryon at the peak of his infatuation.
Confronting the pain of desire and a destructive love affair, Autobiography of Red delves into the mythic underlying our everyday. It is an exploration and expression of an epic but familiar character, realising the fantastic accident of who he is.
Through sound, vision and physical language, Luke Mullins and some of Melbourne’s most exciting young artists explore the landscape of an exquisite chronicle based on the Greek myth of Herakles in the verse novel by Anne Carson, one of North America’s most celebrated writers.
Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.
Created and Performed by Luke Mullins
Composer / Sound Design- Jethro Woodward
Physical Text Collaborator and Project Mentor - Leisa Shelton
Co-Designers - Anna Cordingly and Adam Gardnir
Lighting Design- Richard Vabre
Video Design - Nicholas Verso
Dramaturge- Kate Sulan
Presented by Malthouse Theatre
Supprted by The Australia Council for the Arts and Arts Victoria
Such precise language requires a concomitant precision in performance, but it also needs an answering passion and emotional nakedness. Mullins is more than equal to these demands. As he progresses from impassioned lover to desiring and nauseated ex-lover to, finally, bitter but liberated self-knowledge, Mullins is riveting. In turn seductive, ironic, witty, broken or desolate, he embodies for us Carson's bittersweet paradox of romantic love. - Theatre Notes
" Perhaps what is most admirable about (Mullins') adaptation of Autobiography of Red is how he manages to physicalise the text without compromising its nuance and complexity. He does this primarily by accessing the eroticism of performance, the dynamic of desire that - as another poet, Muriel Rukeyser, points out - vibrates between audience and stage, effectively translating what Carson does with language into the four dimensions of theatre.
Mullins, one of the talented group of artists which orbits around Stuck Pigs Squealing, narrates this story through a mixture of stylised physical performance and pre-recorded audio/visual material. The first images of the performance - half-lit images of one naked male body raping another - herald the ingenuity and sensory power of the physical vocabulary that Mullins invokes throughout this solo performance. Carson's literary framing is hinted in the chapter headings, words written on boxes and signs on the set that are illuminated as the story moves from one "chapter" to another, but for the most part Mullins has wisely concerned himself only with the story of Geryon, the abused monster who learns to embrace his monstrousness and so gains the power of flight.
He has created a kind of theatrical aria which accumulates power as it progresses, reinforced by an evocative score and soundscape by Jethro Woodward. It makes the beauty of Carson's complex synaesthetic language rivetingly and sensually present.
Such precise language requires a concomitant precision in performance, but it also needs an answering passion and emotional nakedness. Mullins is more than equal to these demands. As he progresses from impassioned lover to desiring and nauseated ex-lover to, finally, bitter but liberated self-knowledge, Mullins is riveting. In turn seductive, ironic, witty, broken or desolate, he embodies for us Carson's bittersweet paradox of romantic love.
The set looks beautiful, set against the stripped-back brick walls of The Tower, and is moodily and inventively lit by Richard Vabre, with moments where Mullins is holding a torch or lighting effects at crucial moments that imitate the explosive shock of a flashbulb (photography is a major metaphor through this piece)." - Alison Croggon - Theatre Notes
