The Age
July 15, 11
Cameron Woodhead Reviews: The Privilege Gene Version 4:
A select audience emerged from the final instalment of Lloyd Jones’ The Privilege Gene. We spoke softly and askance, the way I imagine witnesses to a mass UFO sighting might do, or mourners after a sparsely attended funeral.
Aliens and death do play a role in this sequence of performance art, though not in the way you might think. The title alludes to Richard Dawkins’ 70s tract, The Selfish Gene, which explained human behaviour in evolutionary terms, and just as influentially, introduced the idea of the ‘meme’ – the cultural equivalent of a gene.
A large ensemble embodies Australian cultural DNA and – in an ephemeral, grave and slightly surreal way – explores the legacies of oppression and inclusiveness embedded in our national consciousness.
Jones’ work has the potential to be the biggest wank ever, and in a previous incarnation, I thought it was. Not this time.
Expect strangeness, though. The show begins with a man carrying a bloodied, dismembered leg towards the audience. It ends with an indigenous elder leaving the stage. A liminal figure, he disappears into the sound of the didgeridoo, and emerges a one-legged skeleton swinging in the wind.
In between, scenic choreography and suggestive, barely audible murmurs create a dim, fragmentary beauty amid the horror and conformity of Australian history.
Nationalism as a kind of zombification, or an ‘alien nation’ embracing the cruelty of the crowd, come to dominate more optimistic, recessive, diverse, and physically marginal voices: a black woman greeting us in French, or a schoolboy typing an essay on asylum-seekers in the corner.
The Privilege Gene is unnerving ambient theatre that resembles a cross between backyard Bertolucci, and the kind of experimental ‘Happenings’ of the 50s and 60s. As Allan Kaprow, who coined the latter, wrote: “Visitors to a Happening are now and then not sure what has taken place, when it has ended, even when things have gone ‘wrong’.”
Right or wrong, Australia’s mottled conscience resonates deeply through this piece, transforming public history into private revelation.
