A year or so ago I became obsessed with the idea of conducting group therapy with an unwitting audience functioning as the collective therapist. It was perhaps one of the worst ideas I’ve ever had, yet I kept running back into it, again and again. After a while I started to realise that there was nothing particularly performative about it. Time and again I would be up on stage with a detailed intention only to realise I had nothing to say. I then hit upon the idea that what I needed to speak was not a script, but more adrenalin. The final attempt I made at this demented brand of therapy involved me getting on the little stage in The Old Bar, in front of a crowd eighty-odd deep, and piercing my knees and face with surgical needles. It didn’t particularly help me with whatever deeply buried psychological issue I was attempting to get off my chest, but it did look pretty dramatic.

Few event nights accept acts like mine. It’s most definitely not cabaret, comedy or any other open mike night theme. The only one I’ve found that comfortably includes bizarre performance alongside theatre, comedy, dance and contact acrobatics is The Last Tuesday Society.

Last time I performed there I went on stage dressed as a Scotsman to break a box full of asbestos only to be outshone by a woman lip-synching along to Judas Priest’s Breaking the Law with her vagina.

***

Surprisingly enough, The Last Tuesday Society is commonly held on the last Tuesday of every month in Yah Yah’s on Smith St, Fitzroy. While it seems to have shirked most mainstream press thus far, there is a large underground following behind it.

It is a Variety night like no other. Its nature cannot be boxed into any particular performance genre. It straddles every variety of live entertainment, from theatre to performance art, comedy to circus to song. The Last Tuesday Society is an open door for whatever live act is worth watching.

While it is a consciously curated affair, it is openly chaotic. There is a sense that everything is held together with duct tape. Fault isn’t sought, it’s inescapable. Last Tuesday exploits the unpredictability of it’s circumstance, creating a very lively, dangerous atmosphere of great possibility. This is a very strong element of the event’s appeal, for performers and audience alike. There is fear, real fear in the air that things could fuck up.

“The appeal is in the immediacy and spontaneity of performance,” says Glen Walton of The Suitcase Royale, a company among the Last Tuesday regulars. “Too often a performer can be pressured into performing a ‘perfect run’ all the time and not allow for the natural deviations that can occur when a performance can be fluid and not locked to a preconceived notion of ‘professional theatre practice’.”

Telia Nevile, the self-dubbed Poet Laureate of The Last Tuesday Society, views it as a forum, where a performer can “test out an idea on an audience and see if it works or not.” And the fear brought out by placing yourself in the lime light with an act that can potentially go arse up is a large part of the appeal. After all, says Nevile, “if you don’t shit yourself, why are you doing it?”

The instability of the environment creates not only a lively atmosphere, but it also encourages a decent amount of improvisation on stage. Genesis is on the floor and the audience are given the opportunity to watch as acts. This aspect of The Last Tuesday Society is a large part of its increasing success. “Other nights in Melbourne present short performances and acts,” furthers Nevile, “but they tend to incline towards more certain acts, things they are sure of, works that are complete, polished.”

And it works. The audience comes, in increasing numbers, because it works. There is an electricity to it all, a great sense of danger that something, at some point, is guaranteed to fuck up. The Last Tuesday has all the appeal of a model with a wooden leg; far more interesting than air-brushed beauty. Walton considers the atmosphere a “beautiful mess” that allows the performers freedom to relish fault as much as glory. “It is a place where a performer can feel safe to both succeed and fail, not be too precious”.

Whilst the aesthetic is shabby, it isn’t pure shit. A quote attributed to both Matt Kelly (The List Operators) and Justin Hazelwood (the bedroom Philosophers), both Last Tuesday Allumni, is that “shambles is currency, don’t spend it all at once.” Whilst instability is vital, it does not need to be sought. It’s already there. A lot of sweat and adrenalin is spent on keeping the show alive. Richard Higgins, the host and co-curator, spends the night perpetually ready to lunge in and breathe fresh air into a dying act. Like a ball boy, he squats at the front of the stage, ready to leap in and stop the event from keeling over. It is a high tension position, one that calls on an immensely quick wit, and Higgins is bloody fast at ad libbing. He seethes with energy, delivering hilarious monologues before each act. using a blurred combination of scripted material and improvisation. The first introduction he delivered for The Last Tuesday was entirely pre-prepared. He sat on stage in a giant buddha head, holding a tape recorder playing a recording of himself speaking. He’s since moved on to direct verbal communication.

Of course, there are undoubtedly dud acts, but only hobos and fools expect to enjoy everything in a buffet. The Variety-night style works in favour here, saving the audience from getting stuck in front of an unceasing, mind-numbing ordeal of limp entertainment. If you don’t like it, it’ll change in five minutes. It seems geared to appeal to a generation raised with a remote in their hands, breast-fed on sound-bites and advertisements.

***

Whilst the Last Tuesday Society is ultimately the product of a large number of different performers, the orchestration of the event boils down to two people. Bron Batten and Richard Higgins began the event in 2008 and have sweated (heavily) over it ever since.

If one was scrabbling in the dark for similes, one might compare their relationship to a pantomime horse. Richard is the head end, a hardcore networker and self-professed “publicity hound”. Bron is the hardened back legs, driving from behind the scenes and pushing the show towards a product that can stand up as a fully functioning beast. She spends the time between each final Tuesday labouring over the paperwork, the finances, the books, the films, the website. She compares her relationship to The Last Tuesday to that of a mother with a demanding child. “Always there, whining to be fed.” and one can see, in both their faces, the hardened flesh brought about only by prolonged trauma. That child has screamed through many nights. Without either part, the whole would not function, and the combined skills of the two are what keep the event alive.

It is not a commercial enterprise. There is a limited amount of money involved, though Batten and Higgins consciously split the door up amongst all the performers. The main fuel driving the enterprise is a virile cocktail of love, desire, frustration, mirth and madness. But those kind of Cocktails don’t pay bills, and as it stands The Last Tuesday remains a labour of passion rather than economics.

The demand placed on the two of them is gargantuan, from operating the monthly production, developing work, hosting the event and staving back the regular mental breakdown. “As soon as you’ve finished a good one,” says Higgins, “Bron and I go “Yay!”, get drunk and the next morning there’s this mortification that we’ve got to get up and get it all on again in another 28 days….Now we’ve got stage managers and techies and door people, but when we started it was just Bron and me.”

Early on all tech was run through a four track tape recorder by Higgins, with a chorus of buzzing and minor explosions. Mikes would continually short out, white noise would inexplicably pour out of the speakers. It as a frustrating time of constant maintenance and dodgy wiring. Eventually they got themselves a lap top and then a technician. People missed the DIY flavour. Higgins and Batten did not.

Added to this, both are highly talented performers in their own right. Both conduct their own acts within the structure of the Last Tuesday; Richard works closely with Matt Kelly on The List Operators and Bron has conducted the primarily solo segement Welcome to the Jungle. Both of these acts began within The Last Tuesday Society and have since branched off into full length works. The List Operators won the Best Emerging Producer’s award at the Melbourne Fringe last year, and the Golden Gibbo this year at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. They have recently returned from the Edinburgh Fringe and are once again performing in the Melbourne Fringe, though this time their target audience is more recently out of the womb. Welcome to the Jungle has been launched in this year’s Melbourne Fringe festival to fiery applause.

***

The birth of The Last Tuesday Society was no accident. Largely it began in an existing performance scene, closely associating around the north side of Melbourne. However, one undeniable root of the Last Tuesday begins in the eastern suburbs. They came, in many ways, from Deakin. Various Last Tuesday alumni were in the same course together, and had worked with each other in the Past. Bron Batten, Matt Kelly, Simoncee Page Jones (aka Sveta Dobranoch), The Suitcase Royale and Caravan of Love all trained at Deakin and had been working on each other’s performances for several years before The Last Tuesday Society. Caravan of love were running a monthly event called Kunst ist Sheisse. a cabaret into which they would invite guest acts. The Village Festival in the Edinburgh gardens, operated by Ian Pidd, also began bringing in many of the same people.

Bron and Richard met in the Village, working on Penny Machinations, a production created by Telia Nevile and Matt Kelly. They hit it off with an instant indifference, which bloomed into utter dependence as time flowed by.

The Last Tuesday Society’s title came from a group apparently founded by the author Henry James’ brother, William, at Harvard in the 1870’s. This Last Tuesday Society devoted itself more to lectures and masquerade balls than performance, with more dandyism and decadence at is core. It still exists today in London, sponsored by Henrik’s Gin, but as nothing more than it’s name touches the Melbournian Last Tuesday Society, so let us say no more of them.

One might just as easily argue that The Last Tuesday Society stems from the Last Thursdayism philosophy that denies evolution theory to such an extreme extent that the world may have well been created Last Thursday, and all memory prior is a part of its great invention. This one could apply to the immediacy philosophy of The Last Tuesday Society, it’s emphasis on the “Live” part of performance. However, one might be clutching at straws……

***

Independent theatre is a hard beast to work on; it gives little money and it takes a lot of time. It can be an isolating experience and people who devote their lives to making shows without economic backing can find themselves out in the dark. There is little means to make much money. Shows don’t pay enough to live on, grants are few and far between. Independent performance needs committed practitioners who are willing to get by with very little in order to make work, and without a community of support it can be very harsh. One means of making a decent bit of money on the side, to finance the next tour or pay for materials costs is by fundraising. As the Deakin companies and their increasing number of associates began to grow in reputation, a greater need for funding inevitably occurred. In this arena, born originally of economic need, Batten and Higgins discovered an untapped niche.

Says Higgins, “a few parties and fund raisers inspired it all. People were doing their big shows and then when anyone would have a fundraiser, people would do little acts, party pieces.” And he begins thinking, why not? Why not take these short acts, this atmosphere and this whole social scene and turn it into an event in it’s own right? Why not take all these acts Richard had been hosting an increasing number of fundraisers for various other companies. In each one he keeps seeing the same faces, the same performers, and each time completely different acts. Often he’d be working with Bron.

Bron was living in a warehouse in Northcote, that got taken over every time somebody wanted to run a fundraiser. All the inhabitants were involved in the Melbourne arts scene, one way or another, many of them working in performance. Much of it was the Deakin crowd, including members of The Suitcase Royale. It was a big enough space to set up an event night, run a bar, make enough money to drag a show around town. All kinds of performance were thrown on stage, from Burlesque through to all male Choirs. Everyone got a beer out of it and had a fine old time. They’re still great social occasions, though sporadic.

These kind of affairs require people running behind the scenes. While the fund hunters are often involved in organising the bar, hustling up the crowd, keeping the house functioning, ordering the acts, many others get embroiled. One common denominator in this side of things was Bron. Often she was performing in the Fundraiser as well as stepping up as house management. Rapidly she grew adept at operating in the ramshackle style that developed into The Last Tuesday Society’s house flavour.

Opportunity came knocking shortly after. A former housemate of Bron’s was Laura Castagnini, who worked with the O Projects art collective. The O Projects at the time were inhabiting the upper rooms of The Old Bar on Johnson St Fitzroy. They’d been running some exhibits but wanted to lean more toward performance art. Richard and Bron gripped the opportunity by the jaw, put a call out for acts and headed for the upper rooms of the Old Bar.

However, there was a slight chance of fate on night of the First Last Tuesday. Someone lost the keys. Upstairs was closed off to them. They then moved into the bar downstairs and found it far more suited to their needs than the upstairs room would’ve been. This faith was proved in the Second occurrence, which took place in the upstairs rooms. Richard and Bron decked the entire space out like a theatre set, labouring for days on it. The faults of working in the very small upper room were many. There was no rig, no chairs and only two power points. The third one moved the entire production downstairs again.

***

The theatre foyer is a social forum for politicking, to see and be seen. A place to socialise, create contacts and hunt collaborators. There is a sense of ritual deeply embedded in a theatre’s foyer. It is a formal space, of groomed manners. The audience, dressed in their best, attend in an expectation of looking at art. Few people below the age of thirty relate.

Occasions like The Last Tuesday offer a very different atmosphere, one born more out of pub culture than high art ritual. This brings in a younger crowd, a crowd very different from the grey-haired seas of theatre subscribers. For this, performing in a bar is a virtue.

“It gives it a gig feeling,” Says Batten, “the audience isn’t sitting back as they would in a theatre, disengaged. Audience participation, coming through the crowd… [the audience are] jammed in, yelling. It makes the atmosphere alive.”

All of this atmosphere feeds The Last Tuesday Society’s reputation as part of the new wave of rock-and-roll-style theatre blooming in Melbourne. This is a very different social forum. The atmosphere is far less formal. There is no fourth wall. The event thrives on being live, being unstable. Things can fail. Things can go horribly wrong. Things can be immensely disturbing. “Last Tuesday”, says Walton, “creates an environment where the audience is let in on the action and treated as a participant in an event, rather than a viewer of a spectacle.”

Without the lifeless white of a gallery space, or the rigid formality of black box stages, the last Tuesday is easily accessible to an audience raised around the notion that theatre is a place where dreams go to die. It’s a very different brand of pretence the audience carries themselves with. The performers wander out of the audience and on to the stage, more like a band than a theatre show. They watch each other’s acts and pick apart the night’s work. Acts are not considered completed work, in the terms most performance works usually are.

“The audience gives an honest response,” says Nevile, “not like after a Show show. If an act is shit, they’ll tell you. If something was utterly flawed, those flaws will be openly discussed. Very far from the false smiles and backstabbing often felt in a theatre foyer after a dog of a show.”

And Audiences are on the rise. “Originally the audience“, says the Poet Laureate, “was friends and people we’d performed with.” The numbers have steadily increased each month, to the point that many are now having to be turned away. At the last Last Tuesday the doors had to be barred. It‘s becoming the kind of event that has a queue. Like fish that no longer will fit in it’s pond, the Last Tuesday Society has moved from the Old Bar to Yah Yah’s to accommodate more audience.

Its appeal is undeniably in its atmosphere as much as in its acts. There is a limited amount of control the curators take for themselves, allowing things to run their own course, honing and clipping and adjusting and supporting where they feel they should. Batten, who learned her love of shabby aesthetic performing in small town dance schools as a child, and honed it in the gruelling and elite atmosphere of the VCA, is an avid crusader against dry art. A large part of the event’s mood stems from a desire, shared by both, to create performance that is not stifled by the rigidity of any singular form. The DIY style of The Last Tuesday is as much by choice as it is by necessity.

“People love to see the flaws, they love to see the workings of these things”, says Batten. “When we’re not as polished it lets them in, while normally, when it’s slick and lights and black out and everything perfect, the audience is at a distance. With the Last Tuesday Society, they’re able to feel more involved in what’s going on.”

As the entire event is curated, acts are chosen according to the obscure aesthetic of the event. It’s rather hard to work out what the aesthetic of The Last Tuesday Society is, being far easier to pick what its not. Far beyond a Variety show. It is way too weird for such a clean title. The Last Tuesday Society shirks the hang-ups of most vaudeville and Variety nights, never straying into the throw-back, token-retro nature of many performance event nights. The range is very open. It doesn’t have to be funny and acts are capable of being obnoxiously strange. This is a field where you can do work which can’t be done elsewhere.

Bron: We try and curate it away from–
Richard: People just promoting their shows–
Bron: And things that could go to other nights. Like too much stand up, too much open mike nights, there are nights that you can go to for that. It’s already catered for. We make our selections quite specific, because we don’t want to become too open.
Richard: We’ve had one stand up comedian
Bron: That’s not true, Justin…
Richard: He’s more musical comedy.

And so on, and so on, and so on….

It can be heartbreaking work, filled with the constant possibility of failure or unexpected brilliance. The tension in the air is real. The hosts, along with every other person in the room has no idea what might occur during the evening. Performers get tested on the floor. If they don’t suit the flavour and spirit of the event, they aren‘t invited back. “A strange place of semi-security“, says Nevile. “That is the humongous draw of going to it and doing it. If it was polished it would feel like it would have an end point. Because of the allowance for fault and failing, the incomplete quality gives it a nature which leaves open many doors of opportunity” Because of the openly flawed quality, The Last Tuesday Society progresses, with nothing ever complete or finished.

The line up is always changing, swinging between close associates and individuals scouted out by Bron and Richard. And they turn up in all kinds of places. Julie Atlas Muez, the mind behind the aforementioned singing vagina, had been hurled out of the performance tent at the Australian Open for being too offensive.

A combination of house regulars alongside new faces allows for a sense of familiarity and uncertainty; the key to every good drama. The audience gets to know members, the society alumni as it were, but without getting lumped month after month with the same old familiar routine. There is no combination that will please an audience completely, encouraging the continually unperfected atmosphere. “You’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t,” says Higgins. “Audiences complain if there’s no new faces, and demand familiar faces when the program contains no names they know.”

Oddly, this collaborative set-up has given birth to a whole array of individual productions. It has become a platform, launching and developing productions, including The List Operators and Welcome to the Jungle. This Fringe, The Last Tuesday Society has released their own program of events including Telia Nevile’s While I’m Away, Caravan of Love’s Pure Kunst and Bittersweet, a collaborative cabaret conducted by Higgins and Anna ‘Pocket Rocket’ Lumb. “Every month it motivates you to make new material”, says Batten. “After a while you turn around and go, fuck, I’ve a massive collection of work.”

The production house is booming, and many more ambitious works are in the pipe. In the upcoming Next Wave Festival, The Last Tuesday Society is taking over a theatre restaurant replete with smoke machines, massive plastic gargoyles and skeletons dangling from cages. The Poet Laureate looks out on a promising future, stemming from a shabby past. “We’ve grown from a Beetle to a Datsun 120Y to a Tarrago with air conditioning. Soon we’ll be a four wheel drive with a bull bar and shooting lights.” The future looks bright and littered with dead roos. Tours smell imminent and likely more works will be spinning off from The Last Tuesday’s stage and into their own productions.

Recently The Last Tuesday Society have found themselves hosting every Tuesday in the Comedy and Fringe Festival clubs. The festival crowds have a strange reaction. Says Higgins, “we’re too funny to be art, and then in the comedy festival we found we were to arty to be funny.”

But whilst prescribed audiences are yet to catch the curious style of The Last Tuesday Society, their own houses are filling up fast. It is a community affair, defining itself by its inability to be defined. Rapidly cementing itself by being purposefully unstable, The Last Tuesday Society is a gene pool that ever more hogs are coming to wallow in.

I haven’t performed there ever since my brother refused to lend me his one year old son to perform a breast-feeding-with-rabbit-traps routine. While I could’ve used a kitten, I didn’t particularly want to force it on to my nipple. After all, it’d probably bite. In a panic and suddenly denied access to children, I pulled out at the last minute. I don’t know if I’ll be welcomed back. I’m still waiting, wide eyed with hope.

Photos by Max Milne.

The Last Tuesday Society can be found at Yah Yah’s on the last Tuesday of each month, a couple of extra Tuesdays at Fringe right now (including Tuesday alumni Bittersweet and While I’m Away, or every day on their website.