Moira Finucane & Jackie Smith

Moira Finucane defies easy definition.

Exotic, passionate, funny, queer, political, physical, striking, surreal, compelling, moving, joyous, romantic, creepy, wicked, intelligent, delightful and, of course, gothic.

Her work is sometimes shocking, sometimes hilarious but always compelling. It is hard to look away when she performs, but why would you? The theatre space she creates for her audience is intense but relentlessly inviting.

Based in Melbourne, Moira Finucane has been a performance artist for over 10 years, creating and producing award winning theatre which has toured, successfully, both nationally and internationally. A strikingly physical performer, she is pale and sinewy with an extravagance of dark hair. Finucane is an intelligent, generous, thoughtful and compelling artist, with a perspective that is both nostalgic and razor edged modern.

She is perhaps now best known for her collaborative work The Burlesque Hour, which is currently enjoying a third season in Melbourne at The Famous Spiegeltent, this season is said to be its very last return performance. (But more of that later)

In conversation, Finucane strikes me as a kind of cultural bower bird - mining and blending the resources of a variety of cultures. Born Irish Catholic, with “quite a bit of Spanish thrown in”, she utilizes her own background “in a few different ways, I think, imaginatively a Catholic background is full of incredible imagery… the lives of saints and their stories are so gory, but they’re so full of redemption. I mean Catholicism at its best gives an enormous opportunity for reflection on the nature of good and on the nature of qualities such as mercy and redemption and joy. At its worst it’s an excessively patriarchal religion that is trapped in a bygone era and really needs to wake up and shake itself out.”

Over a pot of tea in a homey North Fitzroy cafe, she tells of a research trip to Rome and talks readily of sources as diverse as author Angela Carter, the Catholic church and camp icon Dolly Parton. As a cultural bower bird she absorbs and resuscitates an eclectic range of influences. Her work is meticulously researched, which is an aspect of the creative process she revels in - “I think that if one’s work is political, one of the ways that you can make it politically credible is to get all the historics right. Because you know, when you’re watching a naturalistic play and they do something that you don’t believe, you lose credibility.”

That grounding then enables her work to enter fantastical realms. She refers to author Angela Carter to illustrate her use of archetypes and gothic fairy stories, explaining that they both use these genres “to pursue complex moral issues without the necessity of creating normal credibility around these issues… The burlesque Jackie and I have created over the last 10 years tends to take icons and archetypes of femininity and explore and explode them. Working in archetypes for me is a really powerful way of exploring cultural beliefs and liberation, in a way that combines quite complex politics with quite accessible forms of entertainment and that’s what really excites me. I guess that’s kind of what you would call my core exploration.”

Finucane’s long time director and artistic collaborator is Jackie Smith, they have worked closely together for the past eight years. According to Finucane, she and Smith have a motto, which reflects their esteem for the audience, that is “to cherish and to challenge. That’s the hallmark of our work. It’s challenging, but… cherishing the audience is incredibly important to us.” She recalls a performance of The Burlesque Hour in Edinburgh - “one guy came up to me on closing night, a very proper English gentleman, about 60 years old and said ‘I’m terribly sorry I had to leave’. And I thought ‘I don’t [think I] want to know why he had to leave,’ and I said never mind. Then he said to me ‘I had to leave because I was so moved and I hope I didn’t disturb the show… I have never been so moved before’. It was just, it was extraordinary. We had people come back to see the show five times and people consistently saying that they’ve never seen anything like it and that’s true here as well… it was very exciting for us to get that kind of overwhelming response.”

Clearly, the work of Finucane and Smith is also firmly grounded in a passionate belief in the concept of social justice - “I think probably at the core of everything I do is liberation and oppression. I come from a very political background. Before I started working as an artist I worked in social change, conservation and human rights areas, and I continue to do human rights work up to this very day. I have a great passion and a great grounding in the belief in human rights, and an understanding of what happens when those human rights are ignored and not recognized. That’s a very strong driving passion for me and [is reflected] in my work as an artist…its not something that I set out to do when I started to be an artist. But what has happened, as my art form developed, is that those complex politics that I want to explore are combined with incredibly popularistic art forms. What that means is that such issues are explored in a way that really invite the audience into a discourse. I’m not interested in didactic or agitprop work. I’m interested in work which invites the audience in. The Burlesque Hour really reflects that approach. It’s my great belief and, as an artist my experiences absolutely support this, that people are very open to change.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, her international success Moira Finucane clearly relishes the view of herself as a distinctly Australian artist. “I think it’s true to say that we cross genres. We are quite iconoclastic in Australia, in terms of the way we make theatre. Not all of us, but I think that [for example] when you look at the kind of circus Australia produces, it is a very different kind of circus, it combines theatre and comedy and acrobatics and traditional circus and politics altogether in the form of something like Circus Oz…that kind of genre busting nature of it all. That’s something I have a reputation for in Australia - the Edinburgh audiences, although they are international audiences, they were completely gob smacked, completely overwhelmed and very excited.”