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'Dance Is A Different Language'

Sarah Barratt

"It is language beyond language."

Turning Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf into a play is no easy feat. Abrahams has, admittedly, been trying to do it for a while and quickly found it’s quite hard to adapt such a conceptual, abstract work into a short, live stage experience.
 
“A novel doesn’t lend itself to drama very well,” Gary Abrahams admits. “It is a philosophical novel. It is an internal struggle. It lends itself to contemporary theatre very well if you can move beyond narrative-driven, text-based drama.”

For this reason, Abrahams is now working with a cast of actors and dancers, moving the story away from anything resembling an adaptation. “People who are familiar with the novel will see evidence of the novel of course, but we’re also trying to veer away from it as much as we can.

“I have wanted to work with dancers for a long time now. I’ve discovered that working with dance is a different language. I don’t have a choreographer, so it was important that the dancers were good improvisers and choreographers. What I quickly discovered is that it takes a lot of time to develop dance. It is very time-consuming, hours of practice can come out of a few seconds of material, but it is kind of wonderful and it opens up my imagination. It is language beyond language.”

"It is very time-consuming, hours of practice can come out of a few seconds of material, but it is kind of wonderful and it opens up my imagination. It is language beyond language.”

The Lonely Wolf is in its production phase, which is where, for Abrahams at least, the magic of creating theatre is enjoyed the most. His desire is to contemporise Steppenwolf, as if it could occur at a party in Fitzroy and not just in a small German country town. “It is a theatrical imagining of the world of Steppenwolf. Steppenwolf happens over a period of time, a few months. I wanted to set it over one evening, sort of like Alice In Wonderland, where a character has a set of experiences and is spat out the other end.”

Another strong influence is psychologist James Hillman. “He was critical of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, of the often rose-tinted, self-help industry. Hesse was actually a patient of [psychiatrist Carl] Jung as well. [Steppenwolf] shows us the hypocrisy of modern, bourgeois trends in treatment. Being an artist you have a view of middle class life and the bourgeois, even though you’re a part of it yourself. You think of yourself as on the outer to it though.”

“The work is trying to be a guide for people’s understanding of themselves, but it is an incomplete guide. It is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but hopefully in a light-hearted, humorous way as well.”

ading. “It’s fucking stealing. I know so many filmmakers who have made films people have loved but never paid for, and these guys literally work at car washes. They hear all the time, ‘Hey, when’s your next film coming out?’ Well, they can’t make another film because you didn’t pay for the first one.”