Merrigong X presented Landed by Frumpus at the IPAC
All-women performance group, Frumpus, returned to IPAC with their new show, Landed. Their nonsensical performance left audiences with a wonderful but strange feeling of confusion.
The group, made up of Cheryle Moore, Lenny Ann Low and Stephanie Hart, formed in the 90s and after a few years has made a come-back to the stage.
Cheryle Moore said “a Frumpus show always aims to push the boundaries of performance, comedy, dance and theatre. We draw on humour and absurdity, the surreal and unexpected beauty and have developed a unique style of pastiche performance/ comedy. We love to make audiences laugh.”
“Our style developed out of a desire to celebrate the introvert, the underdog, the awkward body and moments of failure and success. We never speak, but use a lot of music, film, props, costumes and voice over.”
Their shows, Strumpet, Runt, Crazed and Crazed 2, along with countless short works, have appeared at Performance Space, Carriageworks, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney Festival, Melbourne Fringe, Adelaide Fringe, Melbourne Festival, Gurlesque, Spicy Friday and ABC TV.
Exploring ideas embedded in pop culture surrounding beauty and the grotesque, their frumpy red tracksuits and audacious silliness became a trademark for pushing boundaries, celebrating the underdog and puncturing ideals of female perfection.
I had the pleasure of interviewing one of the performers, Stephanie Hart. Here’s what I found out.
SERENA: Could you just start by telling us a bit about the show and what you’ll be doing?
STEPHANIE: Yeah, great. So, we’re accidental legends of the performance arts scene by the mere fact that we were kind of big in a niche way in the 90s in an alternative anarchic kind of scene. So, we’ve been called legendary a few times lately which is quite exciting for us because, you know, we were fine young things and now – well, we’re fine, a-fair-bit-older things. So, we’re all in our 50s now and we were in our 20s, so we’ve done a lot in between. So, we’re returning to the stage although we haven’t ever really left it fully. We did a lot in the 90s but as I said we went away and had kids and got other jobs and all that sort of stuff. And now we’re back. We’ve been on a slow boil for the past couple of years and now we’re back doing a full-length show. We’ve done a couple of developments at Merrigong and also in Sydney with BrandX. So, we’ve done a couple of developments and we’re back with a full-length show which is a total celebration.
SERENA: How does feminism work within the show and what feminist message does the show convey?
STEPHANIE: Great. Well, it’s an interesting one because we’ve never set about to particularly and explicitly share feminist messages. Which has meant that, by the mere fact that we are and have always been an all-women troop and we’re playing with women and power and beauty and hierarchy and a lot of stuff about the underdog and the yearning for success and the great never-ending hunt for the feeling of joy. So, it’s a very subversive way that we have ended up doing it. We don’t set out to do it explicitly, we do it almost accidentally and hope that it appears accidental. We actually set out to create fun, interesting – I guess we punctured the idea of womanhood, but we built it up and tore it down. It’s more ourselves and our characters that do that and the audience will see what they see. I guess the whole thing is, what is feminism? It’s an exploration of women and power, beauty, hierarchy and the whole place of equality and equity. All of those things get explored but we don’t set about to do it in a methodical way, we set about to reveal things in a quite joyful and subversive way.
SERENA: Have you noticed any change in reactions from your audiences over your years of performing regarding womanhood and the themes you explore in your performances?
STEPHANIE: We’ve always been boundary-breakers and we’ve always loved to dare to go places that people [find] slightly challenging, but not in that sort of cliche challenging. But I’ve always been a big part of some cultures in an alternative world – I mean, I’ve gone through a Bachelor of Creative Arts at Wollongong myself and graduated in 1991. So, it’s always been a very different world and we’ve always sort of seen ourselves as an open-minded part of the spectrum of life, you know, occupying the fringes. But yes, when we’ve come back to create theatre this time around, we’ve been very mindful about what we can toy with. There’s definitely a new mindfulness that has come to the creative process. It’s actually been really great for us because instead of just going ‘oh that’s great, what are people gonna think of that,’ we’ve sort of in a way left people to think and interpret things a lot more. So, in this phase of our creation we’ve had to really look at what that interpretation might mean for different groups of society. We’ve actually had to dig deep and do it ourselves rather than leave that to the audience. But, the result of it has been that we have got a lot more out of it by actually exploring those layers by ourselves rather than leaving a lot to the interpretation of the audience. So, it’s still all out there for the audience to take what they get but we’ve delved deeper ourselves because we felt like we needed to be more mindful and more careful than people were in the 90s but it’s been really beneficial and interesting and given us a new sense of creativity and looking at things in different perspectives.
SERENA: How do you organise your chaos on the stage? What is your process in creating this organised chaos?
STEPHANIE: Part of it is that we’ve been working together so long that we’ve already got a little bit of our ground work done in that we have a way of working together – like atoms moving in certain directions and things. So, we have a historical serendipity that is built into our cellular memory. We can have an idea and we can run with it in a way that we feel each other and know where we’re going. Lenny in the group, she’s quite often coming in saying ‘oh, look I’ve just found this’, so it might be that someone’s found something. Cheryle, who is the creative director, might have a bit of an image in her mind or it might remind her of something or a version of something that we’ve done years and years ago. It might be something in the news. We’ve even got some AI in this one, which makes us feel very modern I must say, but even with that we were careful of the AI images and working out if they were ok. So, we generally start with something that has interested us or amused us and what the Frumpus character and process seems to be is that you take that and you go with it and then you go a bit further and then a bit further and then a bit further still. The chaos kind of comes out of when you might naturally stop or reach an endpoint, it goes somewhere else. And, we’ve always loved a lot of props and costumes and we quite often wear the red jumpsuits which are the Frumpus thing, but we quite often have other costumes underneath. So, the chaos can come from the changes in costume and the debris that ends up on the stage that might not get cleared up. It’s like an evolution in itself. The show starts off with a bit of a bang and it ascends and descends and it evolves – and, hopefully it feels like you’ve been on a wild ride or a strange party and ended up thinking ‘gosh, not entirely sure what all that was about, but I really bloody loved it.’
SERENA: Is there a meaning behind your silence?
STEPHANIE: So, Cheryle started before Lenny and I joined and she goes and looks at a lot of archival footage – whenever we’re doing a show we also use a bit of video as well. And, we were talking about that the other day. In the very early days I think there was even a slight possibility that a Frumpus character might eventually say something. But, certainly in the 25 years, it’s just been that it worked. It worked without speaking and I think we came up with a little sentence for this one which was ‘wordless but with plenty to say.’ And, I think when you take out the dialogue and that whole element, you just get a more powerful sense of the actual urges within the female Frumpus character. And, with actually just using our faces and bodies – it just feels like the feeling can transcend in a sort of more obvious but more joyful way. By taking out the language, gives more emphasis to the other elements: the visual, the physical, the facial. And, because we use a lot of music, sounds, lights and sometimes a little bit of lip-syncing, it just gives it what we wanted it to have so we’ve never had to go back to voices or toy with it.
SERENA: Is there anything else you would like to add?
STEPHANIE: So, both Lenny and I did the Bachelor of Creative Arts at UOW. That’s where we met and have been best friends for life. And, we’ve just got Darcy who is finishing Theatre Tech, and they are our stage manager. We’ve all performed in different capacities and around the world but this is a little bit like a home-coming. So, it feels very local and very lovely.
Creative credits:
Created, devised and performed by: Stephanie Hart, Lenny Ann Low and Cheryle Moore
Artistic director: Cheryle Moore
Lighting design: Cheryle Moore
Sound design: Cheryle Moore and Lenny Ann Low
Sound engineering: Guy Freer
Costumes: Stephanie Hart
Animated images: Lenny Ann Low
Animated text: Olive Swinton Low
Short film: Sam James
Duty Tech: Corey Potter
Lighting and sound operator: Hayley Metcalf
Stage manager: Darcy Catto-Pitkin
Technicians: Ryan Scofield and Anthony Keen
Photo credit: Provided