Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

October 1995

Shoppers in Newcastle’s Charlestown Square Centre Court are met with a seemingly arbitrary assortment of contemporary “labour-saving” devices— white goods (tumble dryer, fridge, microwave oven), kitchen and cleaning appliances, communications technologies (touchphones, computers), electronic leisure and entertainment items (video camera, TV/video monitors). We have touched down at ‘Home Base’ and passing through it, notice other objects which also suggest everyday domesticity and housebound labour: a chevalier mirror, sofa and treadle sewing machine. Amongst these wander individuals dressed in identifiable work clothes and uniforms, name-tagged. Yet this at first apparently random mix of household and electronic goods (especially the numerous monitors placed atop stacks of packing boxes featuring the Future Tense logo) bear more than a passing resemblance to a product display. But that fridge has leather bound volumes in it, a vase of flowers and a sort of shrine.

A sandwich board indicates a schedule for three Showtime performances, and an EDU provides project information and text such as “Victoria Spence as Casey Case New Age Babe” … “What time is it?” … “Future Tense”… “Showtime.”

A blurring between the senses of viewing a promotional product display and awaiting an imminent performance generates both inquiries about the purchase of items and recollections of the experience of the popular and high cultural mix of spectacles and entertainments offered by local shopping malls—like, but not like—Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, hand-crafted glass sculpture displays, Miss Newcastle Showgirl heats, Indigenous art exhibitions, appearances by local identities such as football heroes, Senior Citizens’ Week concerts…

The workers/performers hand fliers to those who are diverted from the disciplined calculations of the purchase and pleasures of (voyeuristic) consumption. According to the flier, Future Tense promises an offering of:

“Contemporary performance and multimedia forms which will both complement and subvert the shopping centre’s dual atmosphere of leisure and consumerism, provoking an encounter between the intimate and the social. The technologies… incorporated in the show, which include computer applications and video footage [were] developed to encourage interaction and demystify some of the concerns that workers may have about new technologies.”

What time is it? Not long ‘til the scheduled Showtime. Loud techno music signals a beginning, as does the miked performers’ taking of position. They move around Homebase, striking exaggerated poses, repeatedly announcing “Showtime.” More shoppers gather around the space and on the mezzanine level above. Performers move intently about the space, some utilising appliances and goods: here one is sewing (piecework?), there another (a journalist?) is engaged in agitated phone conversation and entering data on a computer, another (a migrant worker?) discourses about cheeses, a retail services employee addresses us, a child is sent off to “virtual school” by a mother: “Don’t forget we’re going teleshopping tonight.” Video monitors display images and a journalist reports on a woman who is lost in a shopping centre. Much activity. Lots of talking. Poor amplification. The performers are very watchable, each simultaneously engaged in their story. Fragments are heard. Confusion.

Most people stay a while, watching, curious, for maybe 10 minutes or so then move away. Others replace them. Teenagers dangle their limbs and shopping bags over the rails that border the mezzanine viewing space. An older female shopper wanders through the show—for her, there are no clear boundaries between performers, products, workers, shoppers and onlookers. She asks questions of one of the project arts-workers. Self-conscious realisation: I’m in the middle of a show!

More conventional shopping centre performances may provoke pleasurable senses of reading competency and knowledgeability amongst familiar audience members as the shows play upon recognition of popular cultural characters and local knowledges. Showtime, although having identifiable and familiar character types, scenarios and objects, presented a bewildering melange of sounds, images, spoken narratives and actions, and not many stayed for the 40 minutes.

Rather than showing a sustained engagement with the performance, people curiously viewed both the installation and performers for a relatively short time before returning to the (more reassuringly familiar?) everyday goings on in the shopping centre.

Did Showtime deliver its promise to “complement and subvert the shopping centre’s dual atmosphere of leisure and consumerism?” Both the Homebase installation and the Showtime performance provided an arrestingly ambiguous complement to our experiences and knowledges of promotional displays and shopping centre shows. Subversion? ‘It’s Showtime’, but what time is it? Intervention? Showtime effectively intervened in the culture and space of the shopping centre in that it arrested and redirected our attentions away from usual shopping centre activities (to perhaps reflect on their everydayness and its difference). Most of us looked on for a while.

Yet this was a different sort of looking. It was neither the kind of gazing of window shopping in which a succession of images are (pleasurably) consumed, nor was it the close, engaged attention that may be provoked by a popular pantomime/spectacle. There was a cool distance between most onlookers and performers. Remote and bemused spectators rather than rapt voyeurs or audience. Lack of audibility presented a great problem.

Future Tense and Showtime aimed to “explore the implications of new technologies, and their particular and potential inter-relationship with the working and private lives of women.” The artists possessed expertise, experience and knowledges of these new technologies. Yet their experience and knowledges did not seem to resonate with those of their onlookers, especially the knowledges and expectations provoked by the experiences of shopping centre culture.

The gap between the intentions of the project and the more familiar lives of the people present at the event suggests that the everyday (particularly the cultures of shopping centres themselves) would have been a most fertile field for research. Such research, in addition to the interviews conducted with women about the impact of new technologies and changing work structures, may have afforded more resonances with onlookers. And it could well include attention to the relationship between shopping centre culture (especially the surveillant use of video monitoring in the privately owned ‘public’ space of the centre) and plural notions of performance (of selves both looking and on display, and of centre spectacles and entertainments).

Future Tense, both as a public event and a community cultural development project, was a daring move beyond the more conventional realistic plays so often associated with the concerns of ‘Art and Working Life’. As such, it took on the not insignificant challenges of both contemporary performance and multimedia forms, and our experiences of everyday public spaces. We hope that Future Tense signals further engagement with such challenges.

Future Tense with the Sidetrack Performance Group and guest artists (featuring performances, video, computer applications and sculptural installations over a full shopping day) at Charlestown Square, Newcastle, 19 August 1995. Concept and direction, Peggy Wallach; research and performance text, Catherine Fargher; producer, Sidetrack Performance Group; sound and computer applications, Sandy Indlekoser-O’Sullivan and Ali Smith; video, Maria Barbagallo and Tina Stephen; vocal workshop and ‘Lost Woman’, Bernadette Pryde; performers, Robert Daoud, Jai McHenry, Victoria Spence, Meme Thorne, Rolando Ramos.

RealTime issue #9 Oct-Nov 1995 pg. 4

The Eugene Goosens Hall at the ABC Centre in Ultimo was the setting last month for the second Digital Radio Conference organised by the ABC to provide a forum for the discussion of rapidly developing technology. The conference attracted some 200 delegates from across the industry.

The number of forums, conferences and seminars about the digital future attest to the fact that we are living in a digital age. The reality is that most of what is being discussed is actually happening now, or is at least possible. Those working with the technology generally know exactly what the machinery can do or achieve. It’s just the poor consumers who are in the dark. To illustrate: in the generous folder handed out at the conference there’s an introductory page on ABC Radio’s output. “There are six ABC Radio networks,” the leaflet boasts, “the newest being the around-the-clock news update service, News Radio.” A generation ago a small group of young ABC producers put a submission to the Maclean Inquiry into the feasibility of FM broadcasting. The year was 1974 and the substance of the submission was that the ABC should be running at least six networks rather than two.

In the early 80s at Metro Television, a community access TV outfit located in Paddington Town Hall, a mixed group of broadcasters, artists and assorted ratbags set up a so-called ‘slow-scan’ audiovisual link with a conference of performance artists at MIT in the US. With a little technical help from Telecom, ‘TELSKY’, as it was called, this was a very early experiment with the sort of technology that is now being routinely used on the Internet. The point about these anecdotes is that it is very often the on-the-ground workers, artists and performers who realise the potential for new technologies and put the pressure on to get it developed.

At a break in the conference a senior ABC Manager asked me what I thought and I said there seemed precious little to do with the creative side of things. “It’s a technical conference,” she hissed. And touché, she was right. Minister Lee promised to light up the airwaves with some test licences to begin digital broadcasting. This is great news for the technos, but as it will be some time before there are any receivers available there won’t be much for the rest of us to talk about, much less any creative content.

Because of the way it was structured, the conference was essentially an opportunity for technocrats to strut their stuff and lap up the latest from o/s. Nearly half the participants were from the ABC, which is understandable but hardly balanced. Of these 90, only two were program makers! There was a sprinkling of people from commercial radio—all managers. Only SBS and community radio managed to send any ‘real’ people along and naturally they didn’t get much of a look-in when it came to participating.

The keynote speakers introduced us to the wonderful world of interactive radio where we will be able to get instant traffic updates (whoopee) and order concert tickets at the press of a button. While admitting that content was what it was all about, Steve Edwards, the hot Canadian tech exec of the moment, said “Radio’s prime focus will continue to be companionship and high quality music entertainment.” I can live with the music bit, but companionship! Sadly the conference never got much beyond this pathetic put-down of an exciting and creative medium. If Brian Johns is really going to encourage creativity at the ABC, they’ll have to do better than this.

RealTime issue #9 Oct-Nov 1995 pg. 13

“We pipped them at the post in 1993 when we realised (guitarist and composer) Guy Delandro’s Pool of Reflection. Everyone was talking about multimedia in music and we produced Guy’s album with interactive liner notes,” explains Peter Higgs, until recently Chairman of Sydney-based multimedia technology company, Pacific Advanced Media, of the interactive CD-ROM programming his company has developed called Active Audio.

“This still had the Track One problem but as a concept for an album no one had done interactive liner notes for a popular CD until we did. Six months later came Peter Gabriel with his CD-ROM. Gabriel’s CD-ROM has no Redbook. It’s designed purely for playing through the computer. You hear the music but it’s not the full 44 kilohertz stereo, not Redbook.”

The major innovation that has given Pacific Advanced Media the advantage is in overcoming that ‘Track One problem.’ This is where Track One of a CD is used for the interactive information to be read by your CD-ROM. If you want to play your CD as audio software, unless you remember to skip Track One, you’ll find yourself listening to a lot of very unpleasant noise for anything up to 20 minutes.”

“We had a contract from BMG Records that said that we had to deliver a CD by a Sydney-based girl group GF4 with Track One solved. The main technical problem to overcome was to hide the computer data from the audio CD component, and deliver it cost effectively. In other words, producing a computer program that you can use over and over again for many different titles, which keeps the cost of production right down.

“If we hadn’t developed that, we’d be in the Peter Gabriel CD-ROM position of having to re-program each title from scratch, with an attendant cost of between $150,000 and $200,000 per project. We’ve brought production costs down to around the same as an average video clip, $25,000 to $35,000. What we’re aiming at now are the hundreds of bands out there that can afford to spend between $30,000 and $60,000 on adding an interactive component to their audio CDs, rather than merely on a clip.”

Pacific Advanced Media, utilising their ActiveAudio system, have already created three titles for BMG Records Australia—the multi-platform CD-ROM single, Sooner or Later by GF4; the album Born Again by Boom Crash Opera; and the single, Truckload of Money by Anti Anti—and one for Warner Music Australia, for hi hop/R&B quartet Kulcha.

As well, Melbourne-based label, Gotham Records, distributed by BMG Australia, have released two AudioActive titles—guitarist Richard Pleasance’ Colourblind, and the eponymous debut album of Melbourne group The Lovers.

“We’re working with all the CD-ROM driver people to make certain that their drives run it, because no-one’s ever done anything like this. There was nothing to comply with except the Redbook Standard, which is the native audio signal, which plays through your CD player. So we took a technology path that gave us 100% compatibility on Macs and about 60% capacity on Windows. Now we’re working on that other 30% or so.”

“These discs work on what’s called a tri-platform basis. They work ‘Native’, unadulterated, in the normal way as a simple CD. You can put them in a Mac and in Windows and they work fine. We’ve also been testing them on Pippin, which is the Apple competitor to Sony’s PlayStation and the Sega and Nintendo games machines and they work on them too.”

Pacific Advanced Media are currently finalising details of a joint venture with Japan and joint ventures currently being negotiated with the US and UK.

RealTime issue #9 Oct-Nov 1995 pg. 16

Calling his musical project Digital Primate was a bit of a pisstake, says Christopher Coe, a little bit pompous – but he wanted to get across the idea of evolution. He started out like any other lounge-room musician by demo-ing a set of songs on guitar before throwing them away. Hadn’t he done this stuff before? This time the species had to have room to mutate. Rules had to be broken.

Digital Primate began as a conceptual musical experiment—setting up a conversation between the organic and the technological to explore what he thought was a dichotomy. “It became just as important to turn on the computer switch as to think of a melody in my mind,” Coe says. “Watching the lights blink on the reverb unit was just as inspiring as reading Tolstoy. Every machine was used as an instrument in its own right.”

Coe has spent the last couple of years working on a Virtual Reality installation in cahoots with performance artist Stelarc—well known for his ongoing probes into the parameters of the human-machine interface. Their major collaboration was “developing a virtual environment that created music when you walked through it and manipulated objects.”

Watching Stelarc merge his body with various elements of technology—both physically and virtually—gave Coe food for thought. His preconception that there was a dichotomy between body and machine began to alter, morphing into what he now describes as “an articulation.” A connection became apparent between physical human movement and “the way we move through technology.” On Coe’s Digital Primate CD, Stelarc ended up as a new “body of work” archetype. By committing his blood flow, brainwaves and muscle strain to tape, Stelarc donated an electronic signature, a digital omnipresence. Using Doppler bloodflow and biofeedback units, Stelarc’s sonic corpus became the backdrop to the entire work.

Fiber, the first track on the CD, is a good example of the techno-collective’s ideal – a kind of loose format into which things just evolved. At least that was the way it seemed to work out.

“Fiber started as purely a techno track, then Arthur Arkin jammed on it for an hour. Then I analysed it and edited it, then came back with Helen Mountfort’s cello and live percussion. It became the organic and the technological working together to create a very fluid, balanced piece of music – from the high-pitched squealing of Stelarc’s brainwaves up in the top register right down to the cello.”

Coe’s friend Maria Tumarkin added some Russian vocals over the top of the hybrid, turning the piece into an icily sensuous mantra. “I gave her a list of fibres to work on, then she came back to the studio and we talked about what we were really saying by listing all these fibres back to back,” Coe says. “We came up with this hypothesis on the direction that society’s going. The fact that fibres are going in certain directions.”

He suggests optical fibres being laid under the ground as an obvious physical thing, but contends the existential or spiritual side is just as important. Tumarkin’s Russian sequence echoes that idea, including everything from cotton to muscle, tendons to electrical cables—through to the moral fibre of society. She put the vocal track down in one take, and as Coe says, it sounds like poetry from another world.

Ideas and musical genres–from rock and funky rap through ambient atmospheres and even some searing white noise–meshed in what became a fluid synthesis. By chance and synchronicity, various collaborators played a vital role in the final recording of Digital Primate. Ollie Olsen, a musical techno-primitive from way back – beginning with Whirlyworld in the late 70s, then in Orchestra of Skin and Bone, No, and more recently Third Eye–was one who sat in. “Ollie liked the idea from the beginning,” Coe explains. “He came down to the studio where we did a full-on acid track, Invoke Your God, probing the harder side of technology.”

On Obsolete Body, Stelarc contributes a trademark rave about the inadequacy of the human body’s soft tissue structure in the face of the inexorable evolution of technology. And in a chance meeting, Killing Joke vocalist and fellow musical explorer, Jaz Coleman, provided a crucial link to the album’s finale–Evolution Ends. By invitation from a mutual friend, Coe dined with Coleman and invited him back to the studio. It was a chance meeting which helped Coe nut out a troublesome keyboard part. “He came in with this very fresh attitude and said: ‘Nah, don’t worry about that, do it like this.’ It was a nice, inspiring random collision.”

The common philosophical thread manifested in the overall work, Coe says, is how humanity is dealing with what’s happening between ourselves and technology. Concurrent with this was his own incorporation of different musical genres, “and the connection of digital music to the re-wiring of the world as we know it.”

To define exactly what the album attempts to communicate, Coe defers to the liner notes written by his ‘reality advisor’ Johannah Fahey: “The binary oppositions of previous philosophical and critical systems are displaced by more fluid motions. What was live is reproduced as technology, and technology is subsequently played live. The epoch of simultaneity, of juxtaposition, and of the dispersed infringes on us. Sharp divisions are blurred. Sound is mobilised and transitory. At some moments it is distorted, at others it is pulled back into focus. There are no lines, only links, articulation replaces demarcation. Music is a nomad that violates all boundaries. The aural revolution continues…”

RealTime issue #9 Oct-Nov 1995 pg. 17

The recent evolution of The Crab Room in Brisbane is an indication of the developing strength of the community of independent dance artists away from the putative nucleus of the south. Pioneered by Clare Dyson, Rachael Jennings, Brian Lucas and Avril Huddy, The Crab Room exists as an alternative performance and installation venue for artists and also runs contemporary dance classes and workshops.

In May this year, the new space was officially opened with a season of solo works entitled, Tripping on the Left Foot of Belief.
The unprecedented support of Brisbane audiences for this season was an explicit endorsement of The Crab Room project. The democratic, collaborative ethos of the collective encourages the showing of new work, and the second season at the space entitled, Raw, was the materialisation of this spirit of acceptance and openness. Raw presented a series of four-minute encounters with several genres including movement, visual art, circus performance, music, photography and song. The works were united only in their duration, and this promoted a diversity of experiences for the audience.

Various artists released helium balloons from which were suspended delicate wooden cages in Rachael Jennings’ Maybe Even Until I’m Seventy. “Yes, it’s my heart. Somebody left the window open,” was the adage as the balloons drifted across the ceiling and over the heads of two sweepers who brushed away words in sand. The work was both symbolic and ethereal, the images moving with languid charm through the space, with music from Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern augmenting the visual.

The Soup Waltz, a quirky creation from Lisa O’Neill and Christina Koch, departed quite radically from the serenity of Jennings’ work. The two artists experimented with the weight of their bodies: in one section they leaned heavily against each other, legs splayed out from their connected heads and shoulders, as they both attempted an awkward and affected motion—without success. The comic characterisation O’Neill adopted in her previous work, sweet yeti, (see RT7), surfaced again in the incongruous stoicism of The
Soup Waltz.

A more familiar approach to movement was apparent in John Utans’ piece. Loaded—a search for meaning was just that; slide projections containing text and images provided a fragmented narrative for Utans’ choreography. Visual statements such as “You are reading this” made explicit the interaction between performer and audience, and the multiple readings/meanings engendered through performance. Loaded… embraced theatrical elements of performance but did so in a witty, self-referential fashion.

Choreographer Jean Tally created Dance Essay 3: Dis’passion which, despite its political content, read more as personal journey than manifesto. Tally reintroduced voice in this piece, an aspect of performance that she has not explored since her time as co-artistic director of Still Moves in Perth. Tally’s repeated, frantic jumping onto and falling from a stool in a corner of the space gave an increasingly breathless quality to her song. Her adamant voicing of “No!” to female victimisation was supplanted at the end of the piece by the spoken and danced question, “How can I re-embrace ‘Yes’?” The travelling, seemingly celebratory movement language Tally utilised in the final moments lifted the work out of the aggressiveness of the opening section.

The politicisation of the body that Tally investigated contrasted with the pure movement of Jan Russell’s piece, Can you see me?, an exploration of the body in space, and particularly moments of connection between the moving body and light. With an approach to movement informed by the essence of eurhythmy, Russell traversed the performance space and the spotlight in the centre. She moved with a highly developed awareness of her joints and limbs and with an articulation of arm and hand movements that was both refined and sensitive.

Brian Lucas continued to clarify his idiosyncratic, satirical mode of dance theatre in Frightening Livestock, performed two weeks after Raw. This was a more personal exploration for Lucas; an examination of the sexual self which traced a trajectory of identity, marginalisation and affirmation. His fusion of movement and text resists definition; the relationship between the two elements is neither solely disconnected, in juxtaposition, nor symbiotic. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to refer to the movement and text as co-existing in this artist’s work.

Brian Lucas also radiates a very open attitude to his aesthetic: “I’ll grab anything from anywhere if I feel that it actually suits the purpose; any style, or just an everyday movement, or a caricature of an everyday movement,” he says. Popular culture occupies a significant position in his practice. With his ironically sincere quotation of Lionel Ritchie—“Hello, is it me you’re looking for?”—and his appropriation of the Grease soundtrack, in Frightening Livestock, Lucas constructs a complex map of references and associations. With training in both drama and dance, he asserts that he “never really fitted into either category.”

Early October, The Crab Room hosts Done like a Dinner, the logical extension of Raw. This season will present four longer performances from some of the artists involved in the original
Raw. Rachael Jennings will follow with an installation performance work later that month. Despite the jammed schedule, The Crab Room’s fate remains uncertain. The four independent artists who are currently managing the space do so without funding. It’s an ambitious enterprise existing outside the conventional hierarchical company structure—as Dancehouse and Dance Base have proven—but The Crab Room may just succeed against the odds. Brisbane needs it to!

Given the galaxy of stars and heavyweight institutional support, the Dance Exchange work, entitled … and yet, promised far more than it delivered. It may be unfair to criticise a project for its ambition, but perhaps a more modest approach, in terms of the number of participating “directors” and the length of the video “interventions” may have made for a project more befitting the talent of its contributors. Twenty-one artists and theorists were given short black and white video footage of two dancers (Josephine McKendry and Nick Sabel), performing extracts from Russell Dumas’ A, B, C, D, E, F, G, together with access to an editing suite and artistic carte blanche. A great idea, but the overwhelming impression of the resulting video pieces screened back to back on two monitors, one at each end of the otherwise empty Artspace, was of unfulfilled potential.

The less than innovative use of video as a medium and frequent disregard for the sound dimension of the work were particularly striking in light of the project’s avowed “hybrid” nature. I suspect this testifies not to the inherent limits of the medium, nor to a lack of imaginative ideas, but rather to a shortage of time and technical support for those participants not familiar with the creative manipulation of video. For my money, I would prefer to read an essay by Meaghan Morris in all its length, nuance and complexity, than listen to a standard voice-over of some snippets of it on action cinema overlaid on a fairly straight piece of video. Another theorist, Rosalyn Diprose, used exactly the same technique, with only the text and the voice differing. I would argue that the poetry of Nietzsche’s “Dancing Machine” is better evoked without the literal contextualisation in footage of contemporary dance.

Lack of technical support should be no excuse, however for seasoned video practitioners. Perhaps the circumscription of the subject mater was the villain instead. Both Stephen Jones’ 70s rock clip psychedelia— initially enticing in a rare use of colour and distortion—and Reva Childs’ juxtaposition of cosmetic surgery digital-dreaming with the dance, ultimately lacked impact. Similarly, the narrowness of the raw material made for rather forced subject conjunctions in the works by Helen Grace, Laleen Jayamanne and Solrun Hoaas. Here the dance figured as extraneous rather than integral to the conceptual project.

While this apparent incommensurability is an interesting feature in itself, with its suggestion of the inevitable essentialism of dance, the argument was not developed. It is as if the video makers never resolved their original discomfort with the brief. Susan Norrie, for example, addressed this dilemma through minimal use of the dance footage, momentarily overlaying just two almost still shots of the prone dancers on mesmerising slow motion scenes of a rippling, treacly sea. Seductive surfaces and origins mythology made for an appealing if somewhat familiar work.

That this discomfort with the nature of the project prevails in so many of the works is all the more apparent when one sees Joan Brassil’s piece, which alone handles the dance with great assurance. This is not a token use of solarisation and juxtaposition, but a considered choice of video effects to heighten the ephemeral energy and textural complexity of the dance. Brassil’s sound component is also successful—a deep, insistent aspiration that struggles to anchor the fleeting nature of the images.

Also assured is Debbie Lee’s Sound Folly 3. The screen is broken into six jagged parts, the images appearing and disappearing as if cut and whipped into place by the beat of a session of martial arts or torture. Lee’s choice of image from the dance footage—close-ups of jumping feet—her video manipulations and dramatic soundtrack work seamlessly together to create the violence of a body going through its paces.

Effective soundtracks also rendered Andrée Greenwell’s and Ion Pearce’s contributions interesting. Greenwell’s jazz impro in rehearsal mode, complete with “Once from the beginning!” and impromptu laughter, and Pearce’s intercutting of his cello-machine with its random but melodious sound and aesthetically balanced design, both made some sense of the dance. Sandy Edwards’ soundtrack, the C&W ballad, “Beautiful Lie”, worked surprisingly well as accompaniment for the dance, although the intersection of a photo narrative of Edwards’ evocative black and white images with the dance footage was not successfully resolved.

The project could claim hybrid status merely on the breadth of its participants: artists working with sound, video, installation, painting, photography and music; writers on film and cultural theory; responding to the videotaped work of two dancers and a choreographer; in the context of a live dance performance. Judging by the catalogue testimonials, many of the participating “directors” personally experienced a certain hybridising of their practice—some coming to video for the first time, some realising a long-held desire to collaborate with Dumas. While this process is undoubtedly important, the project must also be judged on its exhibited finished works, and here, I would argue, the potential for crossover was not fully realised. Rather than reading as a hybrid work, the components of … and yet remained separate entities, a contemporary dance, and a set of video pieces, the majority of which did not come close to stretching or bending the medium beyond well-tried expectation.

… and yet—new work by Russell Dumas. Interventions video dance installation: various artists and SBS TV, August 21-September 10, 1995, Artspace, Sydney.

Jim Hughes is preparing for a new Fieldworks production working with three very significant figures in Australian dance—Lucette Aldous (world renowned ballerina and currently Senior Ballet Lecturer at Western Australia’s Academy of Performing Arts), Elizabeth Cameron Dalman (founder of the Australian Dance Theatre based in South Australia and creator of some thirty works for that company) and Cheryl Stock (performer and choreographer and, for ten years, Artistic Director of Dance North in Queensland).

JH Lucette hasn’t performed professionally for about ten years, well maybe even longer. She had no notion of wanting to perform, and how I cajoled her into doing that, I’m not quite sure, but she’s doing it.

JH What a lot of people don’t realise is that my early training was in classical, and I knew Lucette in London when I was training. See, I was a rebel in that area, and she was the purist. And my feeling is that she’s got a bit of a rebel in her, and somehow there’s been some recognition of the work I’ve done and the desire on her part to work with me.

JH Did you see Solo when it toured early this year to the Sydney Festival? That connected me with my classical past and my whole life.

JH Individually because of the short period of rehearsal, the problem of getting these three together because of their busy schedules. I’m trying to do as much work as I can before rehearsal so Cheryl has just sent me a lot of notes.

Now Cheryl Stock happens to be a very good writer. And her material is very, very interesting, including the extent that she wants to go with her autobiography, which includes a car crash.
Lucette wanted to feel confident about doing the show so we’ve started rehearsing bits and pieces. I also knew what her expectations would be, for me to choreograph in a more ‘legitimate’ way than the way I usually work with Fieldworks.
It’s been an absolute joy to work with her but it hasn’t been that easy for me personally to get the material together. It’s working out.

JH I think she sees it as a sort of contemporary classical or modern ballet, and that’s interesting because of a choreographer who’s had an enormous influence on contemporary thinking—(British choreographer) Antony Tudor. We both have a great love for Tudor. And my feeling is, if she can go as far as Tudor in terms of contemporary thinking—because he went right over, and actually has had an influence on postmodern dance—that will be very good.

RT So what length work would you expect to yield from a fairly short rehearsal time?

JH It is substantial, but my feeling is with the contemporary dancers that being able to improvise and create quickly, it’s not a problem.

JH She doesn’t want her piece to be autobiographical, unlike the others. I’ve got a strong visual idea about how I’d like to work with her, using silhouette.

JH In the theatre at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts, not the kind of space I’m used to. I’m a gypsy, so are Liz and Cheryl. And I’m bringing in a designer, Kristin Anderson, who’s done some great work with the Deckchair Theatre Company. Usually I do the design myself, but I need the security of a designer while I’m working with these three artists. I’m working with three stars and I never work with stars.

Funnily enough, it’s the kind of show that could give Fieldworks a reputation it couldn’t otherwise achieve and spill over into the other work we do. But I’m not doing it for commercial reasons. It’s something I want to do. It’s something these dancers want to do.

In the first of a series on dance studios, rachel fensham talks to shelley and wendy lasica in Melbourne

Extensions studio, Carlton was opened in 1980 by Margaret Lasica, a leading modern dance figure in Melbourne. Initially established as a space for her company, the Modern Dance Ensemble (MDE), over the years it has been a focal point for a diversity of dance activity, including classes, rehearsals, performance, lectures, seasons of new work and workshops offered by visiting artists, including Simone Forti and Mary Fulkerson. Several generations of Melbourne dancers have been exposed to modern and postmodern dance by doing classes at Extensions.

SL It’s a double space, one larger without columns, and a lower space with columns. Two different floor surfaces, upstairs a sprung floor with a permanent dance surface, and downstairs a composite cork. Mirrors on one side upstairs. Downstairs a couple of smaller mirrors. The upstairs space is very light. It’s close to the city.

WL Her teaching was constant and initially she was very active with the MDE. As people left, she shifted her involvement from choreography to facilitation.

SL She started the Image seasons, which involved artists from all over Australia and overseas showing work and giving talks.
They began in 1984 and ended in 1990 and were some of the first forums for discussing and seeing a range of approaches to dance.

SL Individuals and small groups use it for specific projects and on an ongoing basis. There seems to be a real desire on the part of this generation of artists to have a regular space to work in. Perhaps they realise they need time alone in the studio.

SL There’s Aikido training and various Melbourne based people teach at different times—morning and evening. In the last few years, Margaret became less interested in teaching vocational classes and more in teaching people who just wanted to move, to find out about their bodies and extend their functional use.

SL I’ve tried to keep that going so that in a class you can have people with different motivations and backgrounds; some you know well, some are completely new.

SL In a studio there is always time before and after class, or ideas that are being thought out during the class.

WL When the assessment element is taken out, the teaching is based on the acquiring of knowledge about the body, about space, about the repertoire of movements. There seems to be more room for experimentation, even within class it doesn’t matter if you fall on your face.

SL Cleaning the floor (laughs). It took many years to get used to being able to work by myself. I still find it difficult although I have more understanding of when it is a waste of time. Or when it’s OK to look out the window, listen to some music or play games with myself.

WL We knew Stephen Petronio was coming to Australia and invited him to teach in Melbourne. We were awestruck by the response—people came in carloads from Sydney.

After that success, we decided to set up a program inviting dancers and choreographers, interstate and overseas, to teach in different parts of Australia and in different situations; sometimes in studios, sometimes in institutions and sometimes in companies. At the same time, we’re encouraging them to look around at Australian dance, to foster some kind of interaction between what they bring and what they see. Last year we brought David Dorfman, Bebe Miller and Lance Gries. And they all taught interstate as well as in Melbourne.

SL Now people know we are keen to use Extensions for teaching, they’re approaching us. We have also had Gregory Nash, who was in Australia for an Australian Opera production, Russell Maliphant, Lloyd Newson and Lucy Guerin…

WL …with a broad objective of trying to show different processes for working with ideas in dance. We’d also like to extend this into performance and if they don’t do solo pieces, they might make a work. Or dancers might attend workshops here and then work with the same choreographers overseas on a project. Sowing the seeds and setting up opportunities for other things to develop.

WL Stephen Petronio and Lloyd Newson have different politics, different aesthetics and different ways of working.

SL When Stephen was working here in 1993 the discussions were about taking the Alexander Technique into dancing. Whereas Bebe Miller was curious about composition and the conversations after class were about ways of generating and structuring work.

SL Many local artists have worked in Britain, Europe and America so generally, international choreographers are keen to know more about the context for Australian dance.

WL When they come for a major festival, they are just asked to perform and even though audiences are interested, local dancers don’t always learn about the artists’ backgrounds or approaches. In some cases, we are connecting festivals with teaching situations.

SL Dialogue is certainly possible although there are some conditions specific to Australia. In the studio, the differences are usually not to do with geography so much as particular interests in dance. I might have a really hard time talking with someone based in Melbourne but a wonderful time working with someone in Denmark.

RF How has the function of the studio changed now there are so many graduates in dance?

SL The establishment of vocational courses clearly changed the focus of the studio. When Margaret began teaching there were none in Australia but their expansion seems to have bypassed studio practices. Most graduates see the dance profession in relation to companies and funding, and there’s a lack of understanding of other histories of dance.

WL Studio culture has always changed in response to changing conditions. And with our current projects, Extensions is still leading in providing movement opportunities for dancers.

LG I think the most significant thing was the dance community, which is really strong and very supportive. Starting to choreograph there was easier for me than here. Somehow, you’re not so much on view. There’s so much happening, you’re just one more person doing some little showing somewhere. Here, I always felt so exposed. People are responsive, I think, because it’s so hard to keep making work. It’s a matter of course that people have jobs and dance in their spare time, even really successful, established people. In ten year’s time, I can see myself showing work at the Joyce or at BAM or City Centre, doing quite well, but still waiting tables.

EB Sometimes working on other people’s material is like doing your own work, because there’s something that feels so right about what they do. Was there anyone in particular like that?

LG Tere O’Connor’s work was most like that for me. He wasn’t interested in spending hours getting the right this and the right that. It would just come out in this kind of gush. It was about a different thing, not the movement. Mostly, the way people are in civilisation, the way they interact with each other, how they’re isolated. There are not that many things that preoccupy us. There’s love, there’s probably power, there’s God knows what else. The point for me is basically a stylistic thing.

EB So how do you decide what material to use? What’s the basis for these decisions?

LG It’s just instinctive, really—I use what pleases me. I like things with a conceptual base, and because of the way they work in the space, rather than through any emotive content. I don’t think of dancers as people who are trying to express themselves. In the beginning, they’re more like abstract concepts.

LG I still love the visceral sense of really pure movement. But since I started choreographing, I got bored with movement for its own sake, so I tend not to look at that fine detail. I want it to mean something more. I don’t think I’m naturally that sensual or luscious. I like moving fast, using hard, classical lines in my choreography—over-indulging. You know, ballerinas who distort movement through their own intensity and verve? Sometimes I’ll set something up and then subvert it, undermine it somehow, in opposition all the time to itself. I like my movement to be affected by more emotional elements. Not love, or hate, or anything like that, but by a sort of tone that’s beyond just moving.

LG Well, the last piece I made, called Incarnadine, which means ‘blood red’, I had a 25-minute unison duet with Becky Hilton juxtaposing very large movement and very small movement, quite rigorous and relentless. Pretty much all my pieces deal with duality or extremes. Then I had a trio come in after about ten minutes, all in pinks and reds, very interdependent, and mutually supportive all the time. They held on to each other a lot, used the whole stage. It was a lot more lush. An initial idea for that little one was that very small movements can have huge consequences. You’re standing on a cliff, and you just take the tiniest of steps, and it results in death. (Demonstrating) I had to move to this place, not really knowing…what it was. Testing out positions, not really being fully committed to them.

EB I made a piece once where I just fidgeted—trying to get into the right position for a photograph. That’s all. Finding the quality, the tone: trying to fit in, find the right place, being uncertain about what ‘right’ was, but in a forthright sort of way.

LG Yes, that’s what I mean by tone. It doesn’t happen that often that you find something really special in your body where the movement has its own life. You spend a lot of time in the studio, trying to come up with something that’s not re-hashing, just a bit of this or a bit of that part of your history.

EB In (musician and sound artist) Ion Pearce’s work, Practice (1995), at The Performance Space, you used old material and some new stuff.

LG Yes, the first two bits were from that duet in Incarnadine—the one that went to the floor a lot and that little one. The third, more dancey one was especially for the piece. Solo material for myself always tends to look dancey. Because it’s from the perspective of being a dancer, it lacks that directorial edge. That’s what I mean about having a conceptual base to start from. Then I can really push the material, be much more disciplined with how I make it. I won’t just make nice movement.

LG I can’t make pieces about someone’s life, or political issues. I can’t ever get interested in that kind of connection to reality. It has to remain abstract, which is why it sounds like I’m waffling all over the place. Usually my pieces are about how I make sense of human existence, which sounds extremely grandiose. The thing is, it doesn’t usually get more specific than that, and ends up being a bit unwieldy.

EB Yes, the ideas are so all encompassing, how do you ever say, “That’s not part of this dance?”

LG Often I have to get down to questioning the basis of existence for a while. That’s really tedious. I have a difficult time by myself in studios. I start off thinking in a very abstract, almost philosophical way. After two hours I’m crying. It’s so far from movement. By myself it’s always really confronting, but I’ve come to see that as the important step: to have these two opposing forces, a dialogue. Incarnadine, with that static duet and the flowing, expressive trio, was about different approaches to how you deal with your life. Do you just go with the flow, and allow yourself to fall apart, and then come back together? Or are you very rigorous and resist and try to be really strong all the time and hold your ground? Both things seem really beautiful. I love those people who are really strong, but they have their limitations. And people who can be manipulated really easily, they’re more like water, finding their own level. That’s the dialogue, looking at choices. That’s the movement. But then people who work just purely with movement would argue that it’s really the same thing.

EB Perhaps they’re really working with a whole lot of other things, and just haven’t noticed… It’s just not a credible place to be anymore.

LG No, everyone yawns. There are obviously a lot of other things going on so why not just admit it.

Over the years, Russell Dumas has developed unique material, stuff of classic lineage. His work, … and yet, has phrases I’ve been seeing since 1978, rendered in qualities and contexts which always seem to defy repetition. But there they are again, and with Dumas’ seemingly infinite aesthetic will, always appear in ways that make you wonder why you didn’t think of them yourself.

… and yet seems at first to be spread thinly. There’s a lot of old material, some phrases from Envelope, to name some, shared between a potentially unwieldy assortment of performers, a lot of new dancers, several older ones, and a diverse bunch of visual artists, all trying to assimilate in their own ways this core work. I was glad I saw both the first and third weeks’ performances, quite different in effect, because each threw clear light on the other. What was missing in the first week was there later on, so that the sense of the whole work came over time, not all at once.

… and yet might be described as an exhibition of various qualities of absence and presence, which might sound like a mouthful. But, no, it really was. Ostensibly, there’s movement and there’s video. But really what you get are different qualities of presence, a terrain shaped by Margie Medlin’s lights, playing in her special way, in a sculptured and mobile space.

In this particular manifestation of the material, a few serendipitous logistical problems highlighted what I think could have been the core of the work. At first, the opening week’s performance seemed no more than charming but, I hasten to add, that probably wasn’t Dumas’ intention. It seemed almost as if he was trying to turn the presence of the dancers into a kind of absence, wishing them away by throwing the focus, like a ventriloquist’s voice, in another direction.

It might be simply an artefact of Russell Dumas’ style, which leaves an impression that you’ve just called the dancers to the door in the middle of the night, woken from a deep sleep, T-shirts rumpled and hair sticking up like cat’s fur. Their motion is so intensely and carefully wrought, as if the impulses to move are coming from somewhere very deeply buried in their bodies. When you watch someone with real expertise you feel that’s the only valid place for it to come from. There are no tricks, but a passionate sensitivity and will for precision, and an almost plant-like heliotropic moving and growing together. In experienced bodies, it’s pristine. In the students’ less cultivated bodies, it occasionally gets silly.

I imagine the first problem was how to actually use these inexperienced bodies so they became a part of the environment rather than a feature of it. One possibility was to shift the focus so there seemed to be a landscape of presences in the space with a capacity to appear and then dissolve into it in various ways. The vertical pillars, the length of distance from one far wall to another, the long horizontal shadows, the low receding roof, became architectural features: an environment, not a performance. As I stood in the semi-darkness, I became aware that people I saw standing quietly, or inching hesitantly through the space could equally be members of the audience or performers; the action sometimes resembled a distant game, too far off to hear the sounds of calling out. The sidelines were anybody’s territory, dancers in a camouflage of track pants and T-shirts looking remarkably like part of the crowd as they stood, also waiting and watching.

I remember various scatterings and clumps of gaunt figures, a long way off, shifting slightly; dancers, alone or in twos and threes, clinging, sliding and rebounding from a far wall, amongst shadows. Their relationship to what they were doing was not playful, but could have come from that. It wasn’t grounded in physical accomplishment, though it might have come from that too. Mostly, they were dwarfed and overtaken by their own looming shadows, much more the real presences in the space, able to extend further and move faster than flesh could, at times a teeming, flighty crowd.

In the back of my mind was an awkward idea that there was a video loop going on somewhere in the space and I was meant to appreciate it somehow as part of the same venture: 21 three-minute contributions by visual artists, who cut and manipulated footage of Dumas’ work with other material of their own, to their own tastes. And there it was, flickering away ineffectually to the side, a lot of probably fabulous material stuffed into a tiny box with the volume off.

Boundaries for this work are typically ambiguous. The architecture and the presences of people and shadows, the light, the time, space, shape, medium, personnel, are all fluid and shifting. Who can tell where the work might begin or end? This ambivalence of focus, the ‘other-sidedness’ is to me what is important in … and yet.

After such spacious and lofty design, the last performance began for me with the feeling that there were just too many people, and an awareness of the awkward indecisiveness of the audiences’ herd-like behaviour. Shall we go there, or there, or maybe there? Gee, I don’t know. So everyone stood milling around foolishly in the middle of the space, trying to keep out of the way while maintaining a degree of dignity and a decent vantage.

Personally, I enjoyed the whole upending of the previous situation. I remembered the recent Next Steps program in which various attributes of the space became a central focus for the work. In that case almost everyone, performers included, seemed to be at the mercy of the environment. In this case, it was just the audience. There was nowhere for them to be, or to go. People jockeyed for position, competing for space with the dancers they had come to see. The dancers were unfazed and made sure they were not the ones to lose possession, relentlessly manoeuvring their way through the herd, handling with authority what had obviously become their own territory over the past weeks.

This unexpected authority was the really good part, an interesting flip-side to the first week’s apparent quiescence: a firmly established practice, the richness and density of the material, the solidity and weight of the light. You suddenly realised what had been missing: physical expertise, the sense that the material was more complete, better rehearsed and the relaxed luxuriant appearance of some of the interstate dancers—Judy Oliver, Reyes de Lara and Sally Gardner, whose contributions lent a pleasant acerbity. Gardner’s opening solo seemed to bind the dissipated focus of the crowd to her, as she moved with the limpid clarity of a dancer whose dance is simply and importantly the play of her own body.

While the quiet distance and architectural spaciousness of the first week had been dismantled by the presence of so many seemingly uninvited guests, there was a welcome clamour now, a sense of work and purposefulness, and a kind of comfort in the warm, human presence of dancers and audience in close proximity.

… and yet, Dance Exchange, Artistic Director Russell Dumas, Artspace, Sydney, August-September 1995.

Find

October 1995

realtime