There are performances that you watch. And then there are performances that you move through, absorb, and carry home with you whether you intend to or not. Ostinato is emphatically the latter.
Created and performed by Michelle St Anne, Artistic Director of The Living Room Theatre (LRT), a company that has spent two decades making work about the female body, trauma, and systemic injustice.
This production, Ostinato, does not invite you to sit and observe. It draws you into its body, leads you physically through its spaces, and implicates you in its systems of looking.
The performance begins in the foyer of LRT's Marrickville home at 21 Shepherd Street. A roller door rises on the loading dock to reveal a single woman's high-heeled shoe on the ground. A vehicle in the dock is started, its headlights illuminating the space. The roller door descends. It is a brief, wordless image, but the missing shoe returns to haunt when St Anne herself appears, dishevelled and in distress, wearing its partner on one foot.
That quietly devastating detail speaks volumes before a word is uttered.
St Anne leads the audience through a corridor and into the first performance space, where she stands on a chair and whispers into a microphone. We hear a torrent of frantic self-justification, rationalisation, and the instinct toward silence that assault so often enforces.
Around her, the four male ensemble members, Jim Denley, Daniel Raymond, Alex Tucker and David Turner, serving here as both musicians and as dramaturgical presence, produce improvised sound from percussion and saxophone. It is by turns cacophonous and barely audible, mirroring the fractured state of a mind trying to make sense of what has been done to it.
The audience is then led individually, one by one, by St Anne herself, into a second space, where the men now sit at identical desks, passing paperwork between them in a performative, meticulous cycle of collating, checking, filing, and beginning again.
This is the bureaucracy of complaint. The machinery of investigation that prioritises process over victim, procedure over justice.
One man reads from a legal document. The language is concerned less with the crime than with how to appeal the finding. The paperwork is eventually rinsed in a mop bucket, squeezed dry, handed on, placed on the floor beside others. The system absorbs and continues. The assaults continue.
St Anne, meanwhile, begins placing chairs in the space. Thirty-one in all. Some hold a manila folder. Each represents a woman killed in Australia through domestic violence so far in 2026.
The audience is then returned to the first space, where the cycle begins again. Sound, whisper, rationalisation, frustration.
The ostinato of the title, that persistent repeating pattern, now fully understood as something lived, or worse.
Nikki Heywood, providing an objective lens on the work's intentions, worked with St Anne to reinforce the structural clarity that is evident in how purposefully the piece dismantles the idea of the passive audience.
The decision to lead individuals physically through the space is not a novelty, it forms with the work's central argument. To be led is to understand something about what it is to have one's movement controlled, one's visibility managed, one's testimony processed and set aside.
This is not comfortable theatre. It is not meant to be. St Anne and The Living Room Theatre have been making work of this nature for twenty years. The terrible truth the work confronts is that two decades of such rigorous, necessary art-making still needs to make its statement. The chairs keep multiplying.
Ostinato is demanding, deeply figurative, and at times difficult to sit with. It is also an important piece of work to encounter. Some works ask to be seen. This one asks something more of you than that.
Ostinato, performed at The Living Room Theatre, 21 Shepherd Street, Marrickville. June 2026
(Images: Nat Cartney)
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