April 1995
Spin has been initiated entirely by the dancers within the company as Chrissie Parrott herself is on sabbatical in France. The dancers decided to take a radical approach and invited me, as a visual artist working with hybrid art with a particular interest in collaborative processes, to work on the project with them as visual consultant.
The idea of the season is to create an unusual and exciting event for the audience. This huge old warehouse will be completely blacked out (no mean feat as the roof has acres of skylights!) and the audience will be led by a surreal guide through the space, from one event to the next. Each event will be like a strange fragment of thought that emerges out of the blackness in different parts of the space and then disappears. Each of the company members will choreograph one of these fragments and there will be an additional one from guest choreographer Sue Peacock. I am working with each choreographer to develop the best possible use of the space, lighting and the use of colour in the sets, costumes and props.
Claudia Alessi decided to combine gymnastics, circus skills and dance in her fragment. Her work will use ropes, trampolines and mesh walls. Helene Embling, the French aerialist, has been brought in to work with the dancers and develop the necessary rope skills. As Claudia wanted the audience’s eye level to coincide with dancers in full flight—up on ropes and jumping up from trampolines—her work is positioned down in the loading bay of the warehouse with the audience up above on the ramps around it. The piece will use a landscape of ropes, side lighting and slides projected up through the trampolines onto the dancers. As the predominant colours of the ropes and trampolines are greys and browns we decided to restrict the palette of the slides and to work with etchings and drawings.
One of Claudia’s central idea is an exploration of the human desire to fly so we concentrated on this and will use the extraordinary Leonardo drawings of flying machines as projections, interspersing them with his anatomical drawings of the body.
Paul O’Sullivan wanted to develop a solo in which the only light source came from lights strapped to his body. We are using smoke in the environment to make the shafts of light emanating from his body more visible. We are presently working on making his fragment more site-specific—his climb up into the roof will make the audience aware of the height and scale of the building and the piece will start to explore the relationship in scale between the dancer’s body and the huge old warehouse.
Lisa Heaven decided to explore a dark, emotional stasis. Through extended conversations an austere aesthetic emerged in black and white lighting and black costumes. The physical presence of water appeared as an important element for her. We decided to introduce a slight shimmer of water falling like mist into the circle of light in which she is dancing. A solo cellist will improvise in another circle of light. The other element is a male dancer suspended on a wall and transfixed in a beam of light, which travels the length of the warehouse to make a circle of light around him. The circle of light parallels the Da Vinci drawing in that it transcribes the exact limits of the reach of his limbs. Throughout the work, the dancer traces the limits of his body. The distance and blackness between the elements in the piece and the lack of contact between the performers heightens the dark sense of stasis central to the work.
Sue Peacock is choreographing a fragment to take place in the centre of the space. She wants to investigate lasting human values and emotions and has positioned her work in the heart of the space. Her work will be viewed in the round and is to be lit by a ring of fire.
Jon Burtt’s fragment takes place within a sculptural form composed of eight vertical shafts of light in a ring. It is an interactive work, which has been developed by myself, Jon and John Patterson, a sound artist and uses information technology to create an environment of sound and light, which allows the performer to generate sounds through his position in space. It becomes a tool to allow Jon to extend the potential of improvisation.
We also worked with performance artist Matthew Ngui, originally from Singapore and who has lived in Perth for around five years. We asked him to sing the first Chinese song that he could remember—a haunting and beautiful tune. It turned out it was the theme tune for a Chinese TV show! The dancer moves slowly within a circle of lights, which shine vertically onto the floor. When he moves he triggers short snatches of the song (via sensors) like half recalled memories. As these snatches of song start to layer over each other a reinterpretation develops which explores different understandings of time and memory.
Kylie-Jane Wilson is interested in extreme athleticism and fast, intensive movement. She suggested the use of Intelligent Lighting and we are working on developing ways of using it with smoke to generate huge sculptural forms in space—cones and sheets of light that inform the choreography by delineating areas within which the dancers move.
Peter Sheedy decided to explore the nature of work. His piece, “Grind”, looks at the fragmentation and specialisation of tasks, which have occurred in the workplace since the industrial revolution. He is using a gestural, minimal and repetitive movement language to reflect this. We decided to further investigate these ideas through the use of lighting states, which only partially reveal the space and the dancers in it. One of these states is a horizontal channel of light at waist height, which reveals fragments of the dancers locked into repetitive, gestural movement sequences, which echo the processes of workers on an assembly line. Another vertical shaft of light partially reveals a person suspended, working on a chain hoist.
The final sequence is danced with the dancers’ backs to the audience, their faces never revealed. The lighting shines from behind them towards the audience through a chicken wire fence. The patterning of the shadows cast by the mesh fragments and conceals the bodies of the dancers.
It has been an intriguing and challenging experience for me as a visual artist to work with seven choreographers with such differing aesthetics, collaborating with them to help develop visual environments that complement the full intention of the works. I hope that this radical initiative taken by the dancers of the Chrissie Parrott Dance Company will pave the way for many more such inter-disciplinary collaborations.
RealTime issue #6 April-May 1995 pg. 4
Multimedia Forum One—’Government Support for a Creative Nation’—at Sydney Town Hall on 8 March, was the first of a series of forums arising from the interactive multimedia (IMM) initiatives announced in the commonwealth’s 1994 cultural policy, Creative Nation. The event was primarily an information dissemination exercise—it provided a platform for besuited bureaucrats and corporate types to deliver monologues on the various programs established under the $84 million allocated in Creative Nation to the development of IMM in Australia. Absent from the vast bulk of the day’s proceedings was discussion of the role of creative artists in the ‘new’ medium, or indeed of the content of the multimedia “product” the emerging industry will be assiduously merchandising.
Richard Heale of the Australian Interactive Multimedia Industry Association kicked off with a hubristic SWOT analysis of multimedia in Australia (that’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats to those uninitiated into the arcana of corporate doublespeak). Heale advocated “harnessing the opportunities created by the new technologies to grow our own industry” based on the production of domestically and internationally saleable content. We must steer clear, he helpfully cautioned, of “multimediocrity” and “multimundanity”. His glowing reference to the establishment of the Telestra/Microsoft on-line network exemplified the total lack of a critical register in much of the thinking around CD-ROM and the infobahn, especially given the spectre of Australia as a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. Tellingly, Heale warned of the “susceptibility” of the industry to “market intervention” by big government, which he believes can “distort the IMM marketplace and retard its development”. Paradoxically, he simultaneously applauded the proposed 150% tax write off for CD-ROM R&D, a replay of the infamous 10BA scheme which, in the words of one conference delegate, was “one of the biggest disasters ever to befall the Australian film industry.”
Communications and Arts Minister Michael Lee stressed the need to focus on content and to develop a coordinated approach to industry development to ensure that Australia is not swamped by overseas product. Lee underlined the importance of the development of an “open access regime” guaranteed by government for the on-line services coming our way. He emphasised the “hybridity” of the nascent media zones of the late 20th century and the need for “collaboration” between software and creative producers. Noble sentiments, but the remainder of the forum provided little opportunity for the articulation of exactly how such a collaboration might be effected.
Gwen Andrews from the Department of Communications and the Arts reported that the Australian Multimedia Enterprise—a Commonwealth owned organisation allocated $45 million under Creative Nation— will fund, through one off grants of between $200,000 and $700,000, “state of the art”, “world class” interactive titles which demonstrate significant “innovation” and “creativity”. Title development kicks off with the Australia on CD program designed to showcase Australian cultural endeavour by developing 10 CD-ROMs that focus on national cultural institutions. The Department of Communications and the Arts is currently calling for applications for funding under this scheme.
The AFC and the AFTRS are also winners in the world of Creative Nation. Jason Wheatley outlined the AFTRS’ plans for its $950,000 over 4 years allocated to fund the establishment of a multimedia laboratory and to extend the AFTRS’ advanced professional training in multimedia related areas. Michael Ward reported on the AFC’s $5.25 million over four years for developmental multimedia projects. The overall objective of the new AFC funding is to encourage initiatives which explore the creative potential of multimedia. The Commission will be targeting arts and entertainment in the form of interactive movie projects, computer game development and artists’ projects.
Ian Creagh from Department of Employment, Education and Training outlined the Cooperative Multimedia Centres (CMCs) program which has been allocated $56.5 ($20.3 million over the first four years) for the establishment of up to six CMCs around the country. The primary aim of the Centres—which will be operational by mid 1995— is to “facilitate the formation of the skills required to meet the needs of the emerging interactive multimedia industry”. Trouble is, it seems little thought has gone into developing a cogent picture of exactly what skills are required and who should have access to the training. How, moreover, are existing cultural producers—visual and electronic artists, designers, filmmakers, performers, scriptwriters—going to access the prospective cornucopia of training and industry development opportunities? How will their involvement, and their access to the brave new technologies of the information revolution, be ensured? Will the energies of the new techno-bohemians whose creation the CMCs will ‘facilitate’ be directed totally to, in the words of one conference delegate, “turning a buck”, or will there also be space for research, experimentation and a critical engagement with the formal and aesthetic properties of the medium?
Interestingly, the sole presentation by an artist—Tom Ellard of Severed Heads—elicited the most enthusiastic crowd response. Ellard demonstrated the CD-ROM Metapus which documents the band’s recording and performance history. His advocacy for the key role of musicians, i.e., artists, in the development of interactive multimedia in this country set in sharp relief the almost total absence of any engagement, on the part of the apparatchiks of the state and business, with the question of the involvement of individual creators. The only other moment in the day which drew a comparable response was Michael Lee’s collective mea culpa about the disgraceful treatment of the artist-architect Jorn Utzon by the myopic and philistine bureaucracy of the 1960s. Perhaps there’s a message there for the incumbent engineers of the ‘multimedia platform’ of the putatively creative nation. Stay tuned for further forums—the next series, on cultural creators, may hopefully address the key factor largely omitted from the first series.
Information on future forums is available from the Department of Communications and the Arts. The forum series will travel to Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra.
RealTime issue #6 April-May 1995 pg. 24
