Image: Still from Aschenputtel
Jessica recently went down to Hobart for the MONA FOMA festival, taking her dictaphone with her. We’ll be bringing you her dispatches over the next few weeks.
I’m sitting in the Theatre Royal, Australia’s oldest theatre, in the hush of dimmed lights and velvet curtains. It’s early in the morning, and the hush is not entire; in fact it’s broken, regularly, by the many small voices piping up out of the darkness. We’re here, children and adults, to watch Icelandic instrumental group Amiina perform its hypnotic, melancholy, looped-string magic, to a backdrop of animated silhouettes.
The band starts to play, and the movie starts to play. A murmer goes through the crowd as, early in the first clip, Aschenputtel’s stepmother calls her a slut—a sound that is mild consternation from the parents in the room, gleeful comprehension from those children old enough to read. The story is distinctly Aschenputtel, not Cinderella; animated by Lotte Reiniger in 1922, it’s a messanger from a time when fairy tales were gruesome morality plays, not Disney time-whilers. Reiniger’s style is delicate and precise, like an otherworld Hannah Hoch, making the dark humour running through the film doubly compelling.
We talk a lot about fairy tales at Dumbo Feather. For whatever reason, themes tend to recur: Jungian analysis, shamanism, fairy tales, Marxist ideology. Most recently, Sara Savage suggested the value of fairy tales—at least the old, gory ones—lay in their power to rehearse fear. Sitting in the dark, though, I feel myself being swept along by something more primal. It’s in the certainty of laughter, the small titters and stifled gasps; it’s a feeling of children, a whole horde of them, being swept along the gleeful tide of vicarious nastiness.
And why not? The centrepiece of the festival is a museum of sex and death; the woman who comes to make up my room every morning tells me she probably wouldn’t take her two-year-old there again, but he doesn’t seem to have suffered from it. Right now, in the theatre, Amiina’s complex and almost-soothing harmonies are scoring a small revolution in feeling, a palpable joyfulness at the silhouetted drops of blood that cross the screen as Aschenputtel’s sisters carve away at their own feet, hacking desperately at their identities in an attempt to deceive and disguise.
It only lasts a minute, and then order is restored; the prince arrives, the shoe fits, the evil stepmother explodes with rage. Backstage after the show, members of the band mention that children occupy a different sphere in Iceland; that they are not performed to often, nor involved in the arts. It’s to MONA FOMA’s credit then, and to Amiina’s, that the live current running between children and performance, mesmerising in its ability to enrich and terrify, is preserved in all its unsettling power, here at the bottom of the earth, with the lights out, in the dark.