(sex, Sex, Sex)

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday July 10, 1997

STEPHEN DUNNE

As Josef Christianson prepares to be beastly in the Sydney Dance Company's Beauty and the Beast, he tells STEPHEN DUNNE that strange beds make him happy.

Josef Christianson is calling from somewhere in the wilds of Queensland.

"I'm in Gladstone. It's north, north of Nambour. We've got an aluminium smelting factory just across from us ... It's actually really pretty, and the weather is absolutely gorgeous."

(When I point out that in downtown Marrickville it's wet and freezing, Christianson has only one thing to say - "Suffer!")

He's up north with the Sydney Dance Company, touring Free Radicals around the country before returning to Sydney for another season of Beauty and the Beast. Still, Nambour reminds me of the town's

premier tourist attraction, Australia's greatest fruit monument - the Big Pineapple. I wonder if it's a Sydney Dance Company kind of thing.

"Yeah, exactly. Everything's big and glitzy, that's us," says Christianson, laughing. You have to like a dancer who can make fun of his company's stereotypical label. But the tour's been good: "The audiences were fantastic, really receptive." He loves touring:

"I'm a bit of a gypsy. For me, being on tour is more like being home than when I'm at home. I get bored if I'm in one place for more than a month and a half. I start to get really edgy and think I should be somewhere else living out of a suitcase. And strange beds. I'm probably just a slut, I don't know! I was maybe born to be a prostitute - strange beds make me happy. It's a worry."

Strange beds have taken him a long way from his birthplace in Woomera, South Australia. He most recently spent a year doing contemporary dance in Turkey. A travelling friend got him in:

"He said, 'I've found a modern dance company here, I'm going to stay and choreograph a couple of new works. Why don't you take six months off and dance here for a while?'"

Christianson took up the offer.

"It was the first contemporary dance company that's ever been in Turkey. They're struggling to keep it alive really, against a whole lot of the bureaucracy and red tape. As far as the passion and enthusiasm of the dancers to want to make it work, there's nothing I've been with that's been so passionate. There was nothing glitzy or commercial about it, because there was no money to be made from it. I think that was a really beautiful thing to be a part of, something so new desperately trying to keep itself alive, in that political climate," says Christianson.

Still, frustrated with Turkish bureaucracy, Christianson's back with the SDC for Beauty And The Beast.

"Yeah, it is probably a bit of a Christmas classic, and it

probably should be taken in that light as well. It is a glitzy, glamorous dance fest. It's basically there less for its plot and story rather than for some really strong entertainment and dance sequences."

Christianson is the Prince (a role that's been expanded for this revival). At the end, no longer a beast, the Prince arrives on stage:

"He's half-naked ... The flesh is supposed to be representative of being fresh and newborn. I thought he should be dripping with placenta and afterbirth and stuff like that, but Graeme [Murphy] wasn't into that. He probably thought it was going too far," says Christianson.

I ask if Beauty and the Beast is a "crowd-pleaser".

"Yeah, absolutely. The crowd love it. There's no getting past that. I think you almost fight against it going 'arrgh', but you can't help yourself. You wanna go with it, you wanna go where it wants to take you. So the audience end up loving it, they really revel in it, in all that corn and soap stuff. I don't think that's a bad thing sometimes."

Beauty and the Beast runs at the Opera Theatre from July 12 to August 16.

© 1997 Sydney Morning Herald

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