Candy Royalle + The Freed Radicals @ The Red Rattler
Working for The Red Room Company, I have begun to feel to comfortable with the colour red. Red reminds me to be bold, passionate, and confident enough to ask for energy.
Candy Royalle’s show on Saturday 12th May, extended my understanding of the colour red to include two very important things: to be unapologetically woman-identifying and to completely respect the universality of love. This all happened in the royal ruby shade of Marrickville’s Red Rattler Theatre. Days on, I still find it funny that red keeps following me around, and that the theatre is run on volunteers like myself. In this way, I am still admiring how special the space is.
Everything in the theatre is plush and velvet, and prior to Candy’s show, my eyes were greedy for the texturised space, as if the red wasn’t enough I needed to feel the almost poetry between my fingers and in my mouth. I think it is only poetry, in association to Candy Royalle, which really brings out this awareness of physicality. After all, during her set, she did proclaim herself as the high priestess of poetry, and I am very inclined to agree.
Like any concert, Candy Royalle gifted her audience with two very essential opening acts: Sea and Lorin Elizabeth. Even as appetisers for the show, I was already quite full on their masterful skill in the art of spoken word. It is the only form of language capable of giving someone complete awareness As both poets put into rhyme, rhythm, and perspective on issues such as: mental illness, refugees, culture and far off places with far off people, I felt completely conscious of the emotions that exist around me and around others everyday. Language is implicit to the creation of everything being and becoming corporeal.
Candy Royalle and the Freed Radicals know this best. Candy and the band know that language is able to manifest physicality, but they also understand, in a way not a lot of artists do, that music and the body is the full connecting fibers of physicality. One cannot truly be without the other. Candy’s artistic choice to put spoken word to sound and then to body through burlesque dancing (by the stunning Betty Grumble) is a potent method. She herself is forcible icon on stage, because her presence in different lights, in different songs, an enthralling metamorphosis each time. Candy controls everything physical, from her facial features, the structure of her words, and the shape of her fingers, to draw the audience in to a red and malleable power. Candy only gives what she is given back, and she shaped her humming audience into a single and fluid body – entirely aware of the authority in universality.
During her entire performance, Candy spoke through haunting melody of the pain of being a woman, the pain of love lost, the pain of refugees, the pain illness…but she also spoke about the pleasure of love, the pleasure of desire, the pleasure of rebellion and the pleasure self-definition. When Candy spoke about two people, travelling through the universe in endless circles, I am reminded of Kristeva’s notion about women’s circular time. How women’s time is not linear like men’s, but is simply repetition. To me, this is what Candy’s prominent use of language, music, and the body is representing. That, if women’s time is indeed cyclical, it might at first seem that women endure nothing but endless suffering. Candy’s art somewhat goes against this. Her physical ideas of love and open expression in the world show that women, in their circular time, can return back to everything lost. In this way, women can return to old loves and old memories to redefine themselves, something that linear time is incapable of.
I can only talk of Candy’s show as a grandeur call to her audience in this red space, to become, and continue to be, unafraid. To be unafraid of power, love, pain, loudness, presence, openness and connection. To, most importantly, be unafraid to feel everything physically, and be able to hold it (whatever it may be), to provoke good and wholesome change in the world.
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Want to know more?
Join Candy on Facebook, her website, and check out her upcoming shows here.
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Winnie Dunn is currently in her third year of studying a Bachelor of Arts Pathway to Secondary Teaching at Western Sydney University. She majors in English and Modern History. A sometimes blogger at winniereads.wordpress.com, she likes to spend most of her time reading books, people and shamelessly sharing a lavender-scented toy bear with her seven year old sister.