Remnants of a relinquished world reach out from crumpled pages of discarded knowledge. The sonorous strains of Cathy Petocz’s original cello composition, played by Lizzie Nicholson, haunt the narrow introductory exhibition space of the National Library of Australia where old encyclopaedias encircle the emerging figures of the Body (Glen Veitch), Mind (Lee Constable) and Spirit (Olivia Newton). Body strives purposefully for meaning, repeating with urgent necessity directions Left, Right, Up Down, Backwards, Forwards. Mind reiterates numbers; One. Two. One Two, compelling order and logic from the chaos of a crumbled past. Spirit’s voice glides through the empty air, a sound without body, without mind and recalling the lost and forgotten world of true knowledge.
Hurriedly, the audience is ushered into the larger entrance foyer, in the midst of a construction site and projected images of people proclaiming the ruin of an ordered universe, against the grating background noise of a helicopter’s rotor blades, chopping through the soundscape. Above, the black figure of a giant moth, looms from the balcony, flapping its wings in a threatening display of destructive force. Quickly, with Mind, Body and Spirit as their hosts, the audience is swept upon a journey of discovery, realization and reflective contemplation of sacrificial loss through the various rooms of the library, transformed by Louise Morris’s remarkable, evocative installation designs and peopled by the ghostly, dusty figures of the past, costumed chiefly in Matthew Aberline’s nineteenth century, gothic designs. Desolation and decay denounce the loss of a past that now must be retrieved. Moths slink through the corridors, claiming their domain, devouring its collection and menacing the visitors who would disturb their labour of destruction.
Kimmo Vennonen’s sound design urges us on – into lifts, through rooms, set up with banks of monitors constructing binary codes, past a Guru (Humphrey Goldstein), searching for enlightenment in an unenlightened world, into the room where Pandora (Farnoush Parniavashi), trapped within a steel rotunda spouts forth the words of Prospero, powerless and disembodied after having unleashed the furies of the digital age: down to the stacks and the wheelchair bound Isis (Hannah Lawson), bound with the tubes of an archaic call-up system. Everywhere the images of loss, entrapment and decay permeate through the forest of trees of knowledge, the cobwebbed passages of dead reference and the discarded memories and objects of private recollection. As the journey through the derelict remains of a glorious past of treasured knowledge comes to a close in the library’s Reading Room, the audience is witness to the dramatic ingestation of the Audience Member (Miriam Slater) by Sam Kentish’s Mega Moth.

It is the terrifying proclamation of devoured hope.

“Go! Go! Go!” exhorts the Keeper of Knowledge (Tsee-Yee Teh). “This is a Construction Site.” As I leave the library and Canberra Youth Theatre’s ingeniously devised performance installation, I am struck by an overwhelming sense of loss. Have we sacrificed the treasures of our past, the knowledge and experience housed in the many chambers of the nation’s custodian of knowledge and memory? Are we the victims of our bedazzling digital revolution, compelling us to consume the magical marvels of Facebook. Twitter, iphones and the Google Guru? Is Canberra Youth Theatre’s production of Retrieval nothing more than an anarchical death rattle of a Luddite desire to cling to an irrelevant past, or is it a salutary warning to humanity that the irretrievable loss of past knowledge and literary and oral tradition will in time fall inevitable victim to the devouring predators of New Age technology and knowledge?

Retrieval is theatre that confronts, questions, challenges and provokes response. Former Artistic Director, Pip Buining’s original concept is both innovative and prophetically chilling. Current Artistic Director, Karla Conway, with co-director Joe Woodward, weave the journey throughout the National Library with theatrical skill, surprising us with compelling imagery and intently positioned moments of intense performance from Canberra Youth Theatre’s 2010 Actors Ensemble. Perhaps we pass too swiftly by in a wave of promenading urgency, failing to savour the moment, the image, the faded writings and the details of Louise Morris’s creatively inspired installations. And yet, the journey seemed overly long. I sat, relieved, in a chair in the Reading Room for the final scene, almost oblivious to the words that passed over me and entranced by the image of the Mega Moth and its hapless victim.

Ideally, I would need to return several times to devour the power of each image at a less frenetic pace, but even though I may have been robbed of the opportunity to savour every detail of this imaginatively staged event, I am compelled to confront the consequences of the age I live in, its dissemination and collection of knowledge and the consequences of a lost and valuable world. The ambitious conceptual sweep of this production has enveloped me with provocative thought and emotional response, which lingers long after I leave the building.

And that is the true mark of another Canberra Youth Theatre success.

Credits