Tristan: A Song for the Superior Man. Written and directed by Chenoeh Miller. Co-written and performed by Oliver Levi-Malouf, Chris Endrey, Nick Delatovic, Raoul Craemer and Erica Field. Composition/Sound Design by Dane Alexander. Dance Choreography by Alison Plevey and Oliver Levi-Malouf. Little Dove Theatre Art. Ralph Wilson Theatre, Gorman Arts Centre, Elouera Street, Braddon. agac.com.au/event/tristan-a-song-for-a-superior-man.
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Writer-director Chenoeh Miller says Tristan: A Song for the Superior Man is a show that celebrates the goodness of men. It's a combination of physical theatre, story, song and dance.
"It's really quite simple and sweet," Miller says.
Tristan is a new Australian work presented in partnership with Little Dove Theatre Art by Ainslie and Gorman Arts Centres as part of the 2017 Ralph Indie program in 2017.
The inspiration for Tristan came when Miller was on social media and noticed a barrage of posts from women talking about their terrible experiences with men.
"Men were being supportive but I was not hearing voices being supportive of men - I wanted to seek out the male voice. What do the men in Canberra have to say? How do they see themselves? How do they see other men?"
She also read David Deida's The Way of the Superior Man, "a spiritual guide for men", which inspired the title along with the tragic love story of Tristan and Isolde.
Miller says she is "really fortunate to see some really good, kind men" and she's cast some of them in the show. They are filmmaker and drag queen Oliver Levi-Malouf, comedian and musician Chris Endrey, musician and performance artist Nick Delatovic, and "actory actor" Raoul Craemer ("I think he's the finest actor in town") as well as one female actor, Erica Field (:"She's been in almost every show Little Dove does - I bring her up from Melbourne").
Miller's company Little Dove Theatre Art has an aesthetic based on a fusion of influences with a major focus on butoh dance, live art and contemporary performance. Miller, choreographer Alison Plevey and the cast collaborated during a development period on the work so the men's own stories could be the basis for much of it.
Miller says, "It is the men involved in the creative development that have defined the content - how they deal with violent tendencies, romantic relationships, coming out of the closet, and the unfair expectations that are so often placed on them to be tough, resilient and providing."
But she has added her own touches too: "I don't think I could do a show without some kind of '80s reference" - in this case the opening song of the show - and she has the men singing numbers by female artists such as Gilllian Welch and Christina Perri.
The singing, at least, was in the comfort zone of Delatovic, 35, though he found Tristan challenging in other ways. He says that as a white, heterosexual, middle-class man he could get by without having to do much self-examination, or investigation of issues such as masculinity and its effects and one of the things Tristan did was give him the chance to do that.
"It's a worthwhile challenge to take part in," he says. Challenging, but also edifying, he adds, and he hopes the audience finds it that way, too.
"The highlight to me was - I think of myself as self-aware and aware of the tropes and [other things] that make up narratives ... But Irealised how many I stil find inside me and how I've internalised ideas about how to behave in socially expected ways."
He says that as the show contains one woman in an otherwise all-male cast he would sometimes find himself defaulting to gender stereotypes in the way he interacted with her. But something good came out of it.
"You go through a whole thought process after you recognise you're doing it and it makes you think differently."
