SWF: Alleyway Honour



My personal Sydney Writers' Festival technically started last night with the Premiers' Literary Awards, and the opening address is tomorrow night, but tonight felt like the start to me, probably because it's the first event I've been to with my best Festival-going pal, PJ. Alleyway Honour was in the Bankstown Town Hall, and we -- three of us -- had a delicious, though rushed, Lebanese meal before the show, at the Summerland Restaurant just half a block from the Town Hall.

The show, in which 'five Western Sydney emerging artists weave in and out of stories from Bankstown’s heart', was excellent. Unlike most readings, it was tightly directed -- no umming and ahing, no pause for applause, no self-deprecatory or metatextual introductions, just five people sitting in a row, each with a light overhead, standing to read their pieces in thoughtfully contrapuntal order. Ivor Indyk, of Heat and Giramondo fame, had a hand in it, and so did impressive theatre all-rounder Roslyn Oades. But the moving spirit behind the show and its most dynamic performer was Michael Mohammed Ahmad, who read a long short story about a bit of suburban biff with great aplomb: it was broken up by soft, reflective poems by Fiona Wright and rapidfire surreal pieces by Luke Carman. The other readers were Andy Ko and Peter Polites. Together they kept us alert and alive for the full ninety minutes. Evidently they intend to take the show on the road, although it looks like being a very short road, with maybe only one stop on it. But they do plan to keep doing this sort of thing. I know it makes sense to have staged this in Bankstown, because the work was mainly reflective of the Western Sydney region, but I'm sure it would work well with the much larger (though older, more sedate and less veiled) audiences at the main Festival venue.

I'm daring to hope that my original sense of foreboding about this year's program was ill founded.

Posted: Tue - May 19, 2009 at 10:01 PM           |

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