I wanted to write about this performance art cum multi-media boundary crossing theatre piece, not because of its red/green/black colour contrasts but because the first night I saw it, it impressed me as an extremely well-sustained piece, holding its audience with intensity from beginning to end.
Taking the simple concept of "The Car as Site", as a hanger for British writer Heathcote Williams' relentless script, Autogeddon, Tim Burns has looked at the beast historically in terms of its rationale, its design development and its eventual mastery of  those who designed it - we humans.
According to this piece, the car dominates our lives on every level, culminating in our downfall as a species. Having done this, the rusting hulks remain long after we have vanished. A bleak view indeed but one which makes for great theatre - everything from cool stylization to humour, angst, raw passion and explosive confrontation. The car is both site and sited in the constantly changing space of variety of venue, projected and split-level staged environments, as well as in the language of the text, scripted back in the early eighties, and resurrected by Lindzee Smith and Tim Burns as significant for our end of millennium reveries.

But in this particular reverie, nostalgia makes a temporary appearance only. It is used as the device whereby we are led into the politics of those engagements plotted in the text, and workshopped back by the actors drawing from individual diverse personal and cultural experience to make this a meaty local reading of the work - even if the Hammy Hill petrol heads did not sustain their involvement in the performance as Burns had hoped. (That was restricted to a furiously-revving decrepit vehicle, blasting forth burning rubber and exhaust which greeted the audience on their arrival at Tim's Shed.) The inclusion of Sher Williams guaranteed that one of contemporary Australia's great automobile sub-cultures, the Aboriginal one, also had a place in the content of this show. I really chuckled at the "girls' powder room, black/white, something to share, true's god, real live confessions" about their respective relationships with "Barry" and his car. I was told by Burns, famous for his short films, (eg."Luke's Party"), and performance art events in The Eastern States and the U.S., that the actors found their task a difficult one. The writer's approach is patronizing, the language declamatory, there is no clear narrative, and it lacks an "easy" character who by virtue of their alien or naive nature reveals to us our peculiarities, foibles, flaws or perils. Thus it is hard to find the action in Heathcote Williams' script, and so the actors had to work hard to turn it into a true en-semble piece, in order to sustain the intensity and importance of its content, regardless of staging assistance from projections, pyrotechnics and the like.
Consequently, the performance was different in feeling and being every night.

I missed the specially scheduled bus ride from Fremantle Railway Station to Hamilton Hill, complete with altercations and accident, a people mover and Public Transport protest combined, but friends who caught it loved it, saying that this established them as "participants" rather than "viewers" from the beginning, a status which they appreciated. So, having being created as "complicit" in the action, having negotiated the clouds of  choking exhaust from the afore-mentioned "bomb", we then walked into a cavernous darkened garage space whose side walls were strategically festooned with parts of car bodies, recreated dead roos, and other auto related phenomena. There was a blasting wall of sound and smoke from which emerged a fork lift carrying human cargo, immediately striking a complex and powerful metaphor for our condition at the end of this century, and the dilemma of our relationship with the automobile.

Why pretend? We are assaulted by this constantly on almost every level!

Initially dominant in a documentary-like mode, the projections served to hold together the separate performed events comprising Autogeddon. At times, they enlarged the acting, fusing it with a "filmic" vision, into filmic visions; at other times they were experimental in their own right, allowed to run according to an exploration of the possibilities of two video projectors, a live camera and a video-mixer. These effects were controlled to greater or lesser degree, and usually served to assist transitions and enhance the acted aspects of the piece. I was intrigued by the split frame effects, the films within slides and vice versa, the alternating focal points. Mostly, the array of effects worked, a tribute to Tim Burn's skill and lateral vision. It remained possible to switch one's attention amongst all these performance elements - but it was demanding. Autogeddon did ask its audience to give of  their attention and intellect in order to receive, and not be swamped or alienated by the experience, and I did see a Saturday night performance, which due to the crowd and the crowding, did not sustain the action and ambience as much as the weeknight version which I had enjoyed so much, and review here. I suspect that most of these party-night punters had come to see one specific section of the performance for its shock/novelty value alone.
Onya Lindzee!
I hope they also saw and pondered the metaphoric images created here.

But then, Autogeddon, Burns, Lindzee and their cast, crew and transportation experts were "putting on a show" in the best tradition of that saying, - one for the end of the C20th, and despite its problematics, a show informed by this century's rich streams of art, theatre and technical experimentation. In its salutary bleakness, it spoke also of the last millennium shift that any of us in that space will see - except perhaps for the tiny baby who came to star in it by accident.
Well, hell! Anything goes!