Dance / “Red”, Liz Lea. At The Playhouse, April 29. Reviewed by SAMARA PURNELL.

FEATHERS, flair and fierce determination are the enduring elements of Liz Lea’s life
as a dancer.
Lea pulls props from her on-stage treasure-chest of a suitcase, as she talks, dances, and sings the audience through the life of a dancer with endometriosis.

Her life.

“Red” is a one woman show detailing the journey of Lea’s crippling condition. It does not shy away from graphic descriptions of what she suffered, nor the gory details of extensive surgery. This one woman, representing many, tells her life story, her love story, her horror story and a story of determination.

Film of Lea floating through water, running barefoot and dancing near the ocean in swathes of red, flowing dresses punctuated the on-stage performance. These clips portrayed a sense of freedom, tinged with sadness, a life of joy and fulfilment, poignantly keeping at bay a yearning for the love and family that did not eventuate.

Voice-overs reciting her doctor’s notes are both confronting and humorous, as is Lea’s performance. One minute she is addressing the audience directly, or chatting to the Auslan interpreter making sure she can keep up with the cracking pace Lea gets up to, before an uncomfortable description of the sexualised
remedies offered by practitioners during her time in Africa and India as a young girl.

From dramatic upgrades to her hat and renditions of her less-than-successful nights out looking for a potential baby-daddy, to a punch in the guts as Lea shares the excruciating side-effects of endometriosis and surgery. Incontinence being one. Narrowly avoiding a colostomy bag was another. Yet Lea forged on,
strutting off the stage in a bedazzled, adult nappy to highlight the point.

“Red” is Lea’s story of the highs of travelling and performing across the world, the inability to bear children, the search for love and connection and the sheer determination to dance… and perform, through the pain, intoxicated by the lure of the stage.

At times, this stoicism did not serve her body’s needs well, and when surgery became the necessary option, Lea looked at that too, as a performance.

In show-girl outfits, long gowns, sparkles and heels, Lea imparts sage advice on safe dance practice when on a creative high from post-operative pain-killers and rues not having worked “hard enough” to require a knee reconstruction.

Lea’s extensive Indian dance practice informs the choreography, along with cabaret and a plethora of other styles. At times the dancing is brash, at others, poignant. But always raw and honest.

Since her early performances of “Red”, at Gorman House, Lea has taken her show overseas, including to Dance Base in Scotland, dancing during the festival there and in India, where Lea was genuinely worried she may be imprisoned for the performance. She wasn’t and in fact it was received as if she had presented
“Bollywood on crack” Lea said.

This iteration of “Red” was performed in a much larger theatre, (The Playhouse) with some elements such as the inclusion of other dancers omitted. It worked well, was impactful and filled the space. Occasionally Lea was lost in the darkness when in her black costumes.

The addendum to this performance of “Red” is that now all of us have lived through covid lockdowns, a challenge for most artists, and after some respite for Lea from her surgery at 40 years old, the last couple of years has given way to the onset of menopause, requiring further surgery and challenges for Lea.

“Red” was a letter to a 13-year-old girl, warning herself, comforting and championing her for all that was to come. From a girl arriving in Malawi in her ballet exam skirt to now, as Lea puts “Red” to bed and turns elegantly and stoically to face the next chapter – dancing into menopause. She’s ready.

As Dance Week kicks off in the ACT, the message from Chinese dancer Yang Liping is: “In my hometown, there is a saying: ‘If you have legs but cannot dance, you have wasted your life in vain’.”

Lea has a crippling condition, but has danced her way through it – there will be no “wasting of life in vain” for Liz Lea.