ArtsHub: Evolution, Revolution & The Mail Order Bride

See article in its original context here by Richard Watts for ArtsHub.

Image: Zulya Kamalova’s Evolution, Revolution and The Mail Order Bride. Photo by Sarah Walker.
Art outside your comfort zone

‘My shelf life as a diver is quickly approaching its expiry date,’ laughs gold medal winning Olympian Matthew Mitcham, when asked why he’s decided to embrace a parallel career as a cabaret performer.

‘I have always been a pretty creative person, I think, but I’ve never really been given an opportunity to develop that side of me. And I really think it’s important for athletes to work on their Plan B for their lives after sport. I’m not going to be able to dive forever, and when I stop the sport, whether it be prematurely or because of my own choosing, I don’t want to have to start to build up a career from scratch; I’d like to hit the ground running.’

The ukulele-playing Mitcham, who made his cabaret debut at Perth’s Fringe World this week with Twists & Turns, based on his memoir of the same name, is not alone in turning his hand to a new skill. Across the country, artists are exploring the new and the unexpected in order to challenge themselves and push their creative practice in stimulating new directions.

One such artist is ARIA Award-winning musician Zulya Kamalova, whose first-ever theatre production, Evolution, Revolution and The Mail Order Bride, opens in Melbourne this week.

‘I was always attracted to acting, and my performances had become more and more dramatic and theatrical, and I realised that I enjoyed that …  And as with any career you go through ebbs and flows, highs and lows, and you go “What can I do now?”,’ Kamalova said.

By challenging herself creatively, Kamalova was able to develop a new work for the stage which blends elements of both music and theatre. One of her biggest challenges, however, was working out what to call the work that resulted.

‘I don’t like to call it musical theatre because we have that association with the genre of something big and produced – and I realised that it’s really difficult to make theatre with music in it, or rather, it’s hard to define,’ she told artsHub.

‘It started as a cycle of songs but I wanted to tell stories as well. It turned into this theatre piece with songs, I guess, and I had difficulty with what to call it. I was going to call it a mini-opera but then I decided that was too much, so I settled on musical tragicomedy.’

A key component in the work’s development, she said, was finding the right creative partners.

‘I didn’t really know much about making theatre so of course I had to ask for some help from people in the know like Maryanne Lynch, the dramaturg, and Maude Davey, the director – who I guess is also the co-creator, because in the end we’ve really developed this together.’

Matthew Mitcham’s Twists & Turns is his first cabaret.

For Mitcham too, finding the right partners was integral to him developing Twists & Turns as a stage show. With the right creatives in place, what could have been an insurmountable challenge was considerably reduced.

‘I’ve had such a fantastic team around me. For me the most difficult thing has probably been the time management, because I’ve been doing all of this while at the same time maintaining a competitive level of training. I did the National Championships in the middle of this process; I’m going straight from Perth to Madrid for an international competition and then the day I get back from Madrid I have a show in Sydney,’ he said.

So would Mitcham recommend embracing a new creative practice to other artists?

‘I’d say go for it. You can’t ever predict whether something’s going to be successful but I don’t have regrets about anything – even the heavier themes of my life, my past experiences with mental illness and addiction – I don’t have any regrets about that stuff because I see them as experiences; and now I see them as positive experiences because I’m now able to share this stuff with people [in the show]. I’m drawing on these experiences and getting really positive outcomes out of it. So I don’t think that there’s any such thing as a wasted experience or a wasted opportunity because you always draw upon those things later in life,’ he said.

Kamalova is equally positive about the experience of writing her first theatre production.

‘It’s definitely made me work really hard and grow in ways that I otherwise wouldn’t have grown. And I’ve done it in a round-about way. I didn’t go to an institution to study something; I’ve practised my art and it has led me in a different path,’ she said.

‘It seems like it’s really hard to be just one thing these days, and for musicians especially; you don’t make a lot of money with music unless you’re doing functions or you have a very high-end career. It feels like the way the world is going we have to collaborate and we have to expand. I’m putting this theatre-musical together here for example; different art forms merge together and I think that if people are considering not changing professions but expanding [their practice], I think that’s just a sign of the times, and we have to embrace that.

‘It’s very exciting for me, and trepidacious as well, but I feel that for me it’s been like my whole life has not really gone to plan. Perhaps we would make plans for our lives but then things come up, and ideas come up, and you want to follow through and then they get supported or not supported. For example, I have also got this electronic music project and I’m quite passionate about it, it’s again a whole new direction. I’m just a little bit greedy I suppose – I want to try it all and do all I can before I’m too old!’

Matthew Mitcham’s Twists & Turns
Fringe World, Perth: 3-8 February
Additional Adelaide and Melbourne performances to be announced

Zulya Kamalova’s Evolution, Revolution and The Mail Order Bride
fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne
5-16 February