SOME ROOMS

CHOREOGRAPHER’S NOTE

In Some Rooms choreographer Graeme Murphy has chosen four rooms to reflect different aspects of the human outlook.

“The character of The Voyager is on a journey of discovery,” explained Murphy before the premiere season at the Sydney Opera House in 1983. “The rooms are a metaphor for thoughts and the inner space of the mind; place that people have created for their own purposes, whatever those purposes might be. Each of the rooms has a different set of characters.

Sometimes The Voyager is a person passing through a room, becoming part of other people’s lives. Sometimes he is a voyeur, simply observing them”

“I think of Some Rooms as being more like a film than a ballet. There is a feeling of it being edited, in the way that video-clips tend to jam in as many images as possible so that each time you see them, you find something else. In many ways, Some Rooms is like that.”

“The bedroom deals with youth and dreams. There are no hard-edged objects in the room at all. There are no realities.”

“The bathroom is a bit of a battleground, all chrome and cold porcelain: you put on your face to do battle with the world. It is about the religious connotations of the cleansing ritual. It is also a place of dual options: You can be so tense you can cut yourself shaving… or so relaxed you can practically leak out along with the bath water.”

“In the changing room, there is a play between personality and sexuality. It has more to do with the changing of personalities than of clothes. The clothes are seen merely as a symbol of sexuality. You can peel off that outer skin, layer by layer.”

“Then you come to the conclusion in the reading room that all this nonsense is so unimportant and that what really matters is the mind and the intellect.”

From a Jill Syke’s interview with Graeme Murphy
Sydney Morning Herald (November 5, 1983)

Review (re-staged in 2004)

Videos Tab: Some Rooms’ excerpt from the documentary Astonish Me (with interviews)