Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

December 1995

Attending Robert Lepage’s Elsinore is like watching Citizen Kane for the first time. Or more accurately, it’s like seeing Citizen Kane in 1941 for the first time. Lepage’s one-man multimedia version of Hamlet is a virtuoso exploration of a developing technological form; like Kane, it fuses astonishing technique and original artistic vision.

Elsinore premiered in Montreal in November; Lepage presented the first three acts to participants at ISEA in September. The work’s melding of performance and technology (video, computer-generated visuals, sampled and digitally treated sound) is an indication of the way Lepage is heading. In Quebec City he has acquired an old fire hall which he is converting into La Caserne—a multimedia laboratory equipped with satellite links and technology designed for live interactive performance.

The greatest virtue of Elsinore is not its array of technology. This is no production hypnotised by its own apparatus: Lepage is an artist first, technician second. Many of the other works presented at ISEA, particularly in the performance and sound fields, suffered from a heavy-handed over-use of digital techniques. Computers programmed to “play” genetic codes as music; performances swamped with digital delay and a deluge of samples; onslaughts of computer noise in the absurd name of the “post-human”…these and other travesties were vindication of Jacques Attali’s maudlin prophecy of the 1970s. The artist as cybernetician, he warned, “is transcended by his own tools”. Too often at ISEA we were left with barren sounds and spectacles: the machine playing itself.

Elsinore, then, was an enormous relief. Here was an artist who deployed technology in pursuit of an aesthetic goal. Lepage has focussed on Hamlet’s famous indecisiveness, narrowing the action into his own solitary person, using the technology to externalise the poetry and drama of the protagonist’s thought. The result, as Lepage claims, is an “X-rayed” Hamlet. While the action apparently takes place in the protagonist’s head, it occasionally has the look of an encephalogram.”

Lepage plays every character, with the exception of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are “played” by observation video cameras. The two hapless rascals are represented by their points-of-view: we see Lepage as Hamlet from the different perspectives of the cameras, projected onto screens. Digital audio treatment allows Lepage to play Claudius (his natural pitch lowered a tone or so) and Gertrude and Ophelia (raised in pitch). The dexterity of the audio technician in rapidly switching between “voices” is one of the many marvels of this production.

The presiding marvel, however, is that none of these techniques appears gimmicky; each has an integral function in the work. A Claudius speech is accompanied by a green voice analysis wave-form, projected onto Lepage’s face: this adds to the mood evoked by the character. The set is washed with grey-blue video, summoning an emotional landscape to parallel the Elsinore setting.

The music score is played live by composer Robert Caux, seated at the foot of the stage with his keyboards and equipment. The sound design incorporates synthesiser effects, quasi-period music (sampled lutes), and treatment of Lepage’s voice. The latter technique is especially effective, sampling a phrase or key word, looping and detuning it, superimposing the treatment over Lepage’s speech. The effect is used sparingly and with a poetic grace that could serve as a model for the use of sampled sound in performance.

Like Orson Welles, Lepage is at heart an illusionist; Elsinore is full of ingenious tricks achieved with minimal means. Hamlet’s doublet, undone, becomes Ophelia’s dress, which, with lighting effects and malleable stage, becomes the pond in which she drowns. Lepage uses some brazenly low-tech tricks in this hi-tech show; creaky stage machinery is at deliberate odds with the seamless electronics. A vigorous dialogue between Hamlet and Claudius is achieved via a simple block of wood as stage prop, serving as, alternatively, stool and footrest.

And, finally, the whole thing would fall in an over-ambitious heap if Lepage couldn’t act. But—most emphatically—he can (in both English and French.) His Hamlet is convincing : quiet, controlled, complex. Neither Olivier-effete nor Gibson-blustery, his is a Hamlet of the interior. And he’s not too bad at all the other characters as well.

Elsinore received a tremendous ovation at ISEA, as a work-in-progress. Such a momentous project deserves to be seen around the world. Australians can take heart that Lepage, who has toured here with Needles and Opium and Bluebeard, at least has us in mind. In describing the virtues of his new hi-tech lab, he told a Montreal magazine: “We will be working via satellite, experimenting with performances that take into account that when it’s midnight in Quebec, it’s noon in Australia.”

RealTime issue #10 Dec-Jan 1995 pg. 21

one: Let’s rehearse the electronic order of things: within cyberspace, which is both a new frontier and a new mode of existence (or perhaps, in the way of fascists, somewhere to get it right once and for all) and an economically driven zone of deregulated cultural action; a range of translucent or even transgressive identities struggle to shape the future of art and life: a revolution of sorts. Now where’s the thought in that…?

two: In a city devoted to malls of every kind, interconnecting tunnels, subterranean relationships, there was something inevitable about the primacy of the net. Of course we knew what we were looking for: a large seventies tower in suicide brown where the less important sessions (artists describing their work) drifted towards the top while what went on below sounded like a Baptist revival meeting.

three: The concept of electronic art is bound to various assumptions about the artistic field. There is the language of revolution, the heightened expectation of death and transfiguration: post-humans, post-politics; expanding networks and shifting morphologies; the utter belief in communication as the essence of life; and the shift to non-linear systems.

four: Metaphors curl and splice, gathering into themselves the metaphysical changes that might occur, setting up a series of other worlds, nether worlds, off-worlds; meanwhile great chunks of reality are sliced off, segued over, turfed out, by an endless cycle of endless science fiction fantasies in which artists get to make it all glow and gloom and flow.

five: Thought is replaced by the power of the market, by hyperbole. And the full range of accepted analytical categories—class, race, gender, ethnicity—are flung and plastered and floated through everything as though to merely use them is to guarantee one’s radical credentials as an artist, as a thinker…

six: And this by way of avoiding the question of art altogether, assuming that the components of the image are secondary or even irrelevant; that the frame is simply a window onto another world; that the connections to painting, to sculpture, to music are like that of a Mercedes to a model T Ford…As though abstract art or conceptual art, minimalist art or even cinema had never engaged with the critical potentiality of aesthetic practice.

seven: What becomes apparent is that the thinking surrounding electronic art assumes its own structural presuppositions (in the sense of networks, codes, instantaneity, simultaneity, synchronicity, etc.) as the universal model for all communication, and therefore, for all of life.
eight: There is a fundamental conservatism embedded within the ideology of interaction, of screen-based processes, of immersive environments: the demand for feedback (from our machines, from our lives); the primacy of exchange; and the kinds of lives that come to be lived in the very process of embracing this model of sociality, that eventuate from an aesthetics that all too readily pre-empts its own systematic transcendence.

nine: After a keynote address by the performance artists Arthur & Marielouise Kroker that oozed ethereal metaphors, empty signifiers, and bad puns to sustain its apocalyptic fervour, an audience member was heard to say, “It’s the Protestant ministry all over again. Fear of the flesh, end of the world, redemption, all that kind of hocus pocus…Where’s the thought in that?”

ten: I kept returning to the idea that “…no aesthetic or artistic practice, for fundamental reasons that derive from the determination of the very essence of art, can declare itself politically innocent.” In a city where the question of national identity was peeling back the layers of post-war hegemony, where the economic influence of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) continues to reverberate across the political landscape, the very question of politics was subsumed, suppressed, by an overwhelming sense of determinism, by the laws of technology and of the market.

eleven: What was ignored except for a couple of isolated, and therefore, exceptional, commentaries, was a complex analysis of the modern state and modern corporate forms. In this context, we realise the degree to which the image of art as a screen-based phenomenon replicates the very structures of multinational and military-industrial distribution and production it sets out to oppose.

twelve: As paper after paper proclaimed the power of technology to change lives, to reconstitute the globe as a massive web of interconnected subjectivities, you begin to wonder, how is the artist/thinker to resist the ideological imperatives of networks and codes, of informatics, of a naive futurism, of technological determinism? What are we to call art in a world where the difference between a ride and a revolution seems to be in the type of operating system used?

thirteen:
I do not know which to prefer
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

Wallace Stevens, from Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird.

RealTime issue #10 Dec-Jan 1995 pg. 18

Silicon Graphics, darlings!…ISDN lines, darlings!…Mac AV’s, darlings!…computer manipulated video playback, darlings!… heat sensors/light sensors/audio sensors!!!

The exhibition component of ISEA 95 incorporated sound and visual arts, electronic cinema and performances. As a curated event with the theme of Emergent Senses, the works were all able to contribute to the discursive, artistic and media practices surrounding the corporeal and social effects of electronic media.

ZKM (Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologies/Centre for Art and Media technologies) at Karlsruhe, provided a coherent taste of the kind of work produced through the support of artists in this centre. Bill Seaman’s Passage Sets: One Pulls Pivots At The Tip Of The Tongue is a highly poetic work which encapsulates the term multimedia in its potential multidisciplinary approach. A series of stills, moving images and texts which map a visual poem are able to be manipulated by the user at a podium with a responsive scrolling device, the images are seen on a large screen via a data projector. The user concurrently interacts in a highly subjective manner, rather than following an established direction, and appreciates the visual delicacy, architectural illusions and poetic interpretations of “notions of sexuality in cyberspace”.

Keith Piper’s piece Reckless Eyeballing (Britain) was one of the few works which addressed difference and stereotypical representations. Keith works from London and his work “considers black masculine subjectivity through media imagery” (Catalogue notes). Reckless Eyeballing uses 3 podiums from which different commentaries emanate. They are activated by multiple users, reinforcing the way in which group dynamics effect stereotypes in society. A large screen at one end of the gallery has projected onto it various texts and images regarding three representational categories: Sportsman, Musician, Threat.

The playful elements of Piper’s piece insinuate the user into the discourse of the piece through provocative invective: “Remember when Ben…fucked up / Remember when Mike…fucked up”. The user acknowledges the stereotype and is led to a larger comprehension of some of the complexities surrounding representations of the black male gaze.

Maurice Benayoun (France), whose 35mm computer generated Les Quarks is programmed for the In Spaces Unsuspected program of the ‘96 Adelaide Festival, is a video artist and special effects art director. His Le Tunnel sous l’Atlantique was housed in the Montreal Contemporary Art Gallery and simultaneously in the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris. The ‘explorers’ at either end of the tunnel discuss and navigate its virtual images with the assistance of the joy stick and a supervisor, until they see each other’s faces when the virtual meeting occurs.

The logistical and technological innovations were very impressive, particularly given that it is unusual for an artwork to be able to call up such resources. On either side of the Atlantic the tunnel used an ONYX SGI, Indy and Next stations, A SGI digital camera, Sharp projector, RINS (ISDN) line and quadraphonic sound system.

In the same gallery, Osmose (Canada) was again logistically and aesthetically impressive. An immersive virtual reality based on Char Davies’ experiences whilst deep sea diving, Osmose relies on interactive participation of the user to fully explore the possibilities of the piece. Her aim is to create “an experience where people can play with becoming more open to representations of nature, more receptive, more contemplative”. The digital imaging was developed with Softimage and played through several SGI platforms, however the interactive sound aspects of the piece were the significant innovation. Dorota Blaszczak (Poland), is a sound design engineer who developed the programming in collaboration with Rick Bidlack (Canada) who also composed the music score. The breathing and movement choices made by the navigator construct the form of the sound track. In effect, the navigator is involved in the sound design of the immersive experience. Whilst virtual reality is hailed as an ‘out-of-body’ experience, there is an ironic relationship with the body in Osmose. To take advantage of the piece, those navigators who have a strong awareness of their bodies’ functions, particularly controlled breathing and movements, are able to more fully explore the potentials of the sound and visuals.

A very playful and ironic piece Invigorator (Bosch and Simons, Netherlands) consisted of 28 wooden boxes joined together by large metal springs both horizontally and vertically. Attached to the boxes are motors controlled by a computer. The fantastic noises and movements of the springs are driven in such a way as to almost imperceptibly move from co-ordination to chaotic discord and then back again. This cacophonic choreography invoked a metaphor for capitalist modes of mass production, and the cycles of consume and produce.

Several virtual sculptures were included this year. Nigel Helyer’s Hybrid (Australia), and Cantin’s La Production du Temp / The production of Time (Canada), amongst them. That works in progress and conceptual visualisation were included in ISEA 95 establishes the difficulty artists and mediamakers encounter in completing a project. The demands of high-end technology and the imagination working beyond the realms of the technology are contributing factors.

La Production du Temp was a series of documentations of previous work and a double channel video installation. Cantin explores the idea of what constitutes an image. Light is employed as a metaphor for time, which he describes as his material. The works are very elegant lenses through which are projected either video images of a light bulb suspended in water, or bulbs with specially made filaments that create an image of time, and images about image.

George Legrady’s interactive CD ROM/installation An Anecodoted Archive From The Cold War was shown in ISEA 94, and the interactive Slippery Traces exhibited at ISEA 95 maintains his interest in narratives. It is about creating a narrative—a collection of images on related themes exist on a data base which can be accessed visually. The images are projected via data projector onto a large screen. The user weaves a story by selecting one of the five hotspots on the 300 possible postcards. These hotspots are linked to a different image from the data base selected on a set of values which may be literal, semiotic, psychoanalytic or metaphoric. The algorithm will eventually be able to review the user’s choices and give an analysis of them. The aim is to have the audience look at a work and the work look back at the audience.

Australian works at ISEA were mostly CD-ROM based with the exception of Dennis Wilcox’s Zenotrope #2 and Oscillator and Jon McCormack’s Turbulence. The vast distances from the global centres in some way dictate the form of Australian works. Whilst hypermedia may dissolve some of these difficulties, it remains the case that locating larger sculptural or visionary works often preclude them from being installed at greater distances. Similarly for Australian audiences the exposure to larger scale interactive installation/cinematic works from overseas is limited due to expense. Stelarc (Australia), of course, has been intimately involved in the place of the corporeal within electronic and kinesthetic works for his entire career. More of a global nomad than identified with any nation, Stelarc represents the outer edges of the discourses of the cyberbody, and is producing concepts and works which will continue to demand attention, challenge the theory and mark out the edges.

RealTime issue #10 Dec-Jan 1995 pg. 19

British artist Graham Harwood was in Perth in October as part of a national visit co-ordinated by the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT). It was standing room only at his presentation, Virogenesis: Letting Loose the Multimedia Rogue Codes, a testimony to the huge interest in new media art. His work holds up a mirror to Britain’s social status quo: class, consumerism, the art world, the failure of left-right politics, the revival of nationalism, racism and homophobia.

Harwood’s presentation opened with examples of his early photocopy works, among which were included copies of money that were seized and subsequently became the subject of a House of Commons select committee on counterfeit and forgery.

This led him to a course in computers “for unemployed people, that cost a fiver a year for two days a week”. Thinking, “this is a good idea, I might have to never draw again…great, just feed the images in and it happens”, he produced a Gulf War satire—Britain’s “first computer generated comic”. The style—Saddam Hussein morphed out of Commando comic book childhood memories.

One of the restrictions of publishing in Britain is that if you have no money (and can’t be sued) the printer must assume liability, leading to an effective censorship by printer rather than publisher. Such restrictions led to the production of Underground, a free newspaper pasted up all around London, financed from the proceeds of two rave parties. One issue featured a computer enhanced John Major, with a dick where his nose should have been, right when his own PR people were announcing a recent nose operation. Harwood got interested in “giving famous people diseases”. Images of businessmen and politicians were distorted and “computer enhanced” so as to appear monstrous yet recognisable.

More recently, Harwood replaced brand labels on grocery items with rather more satirical and subversive labels: “The fun thing about technology is that Saatchi and Saatchi have the same computer as you can get hold of. They invest millions of pounds to make people believe you need to put bleach down your toilet, and you can usurp it in a very swift way.”

Rehearsal of Memory, the primary focus of his Australian presentation, is a forthcoming CD-ROM made in collaboration with residents of Ashworth Maximum Security Mental Hospital. Ashworth is home to some 650 people, 70 per cent of whose crimes include murder, manslaughter, rape, arson and criminal damage. The CD was commissioned for Video Positive, an international art festival in Liverpool.

Harwood’s interest was partly personal, in how domestic violence might ‘rehearse’ through generations. He also stipulated that the work be exhibited within the international showing, not pushed off to the fringe.

In the hospital, Harwood’s options for involving the patients were heavily restricted. He was not allowed to take photographs of patients, so he scanned their skin, tattoos, hair, genitals directly into digital form. These personal fragments were combined with the patients’ own texts, recitals, interviews and songs. When we see a palm pressed against the screen it is the hand of a someone who killed a complete family. The same hand strums a sweet guitar melody, and hearing that music is unsettling.

NB What I liked a lot about Rehearsal of Memory was the texture of the skin of the whole thing—like a terrain, like a game. A lot of multimedia we see is hooked into that screen-mania, button-mania thing where you’ve got everything in little boxes. Push this, prod that.

GH Yeah, the idea was to sort of make the technology transparent so that as soon as you know how to use it—which is very quick—then you can forget about it. You know, when you watch a film, for maybe five minutes you ‘know’ it’s a film, then you suspend your disbelief and you’re away.

The whole piece is designed like the nakedness and vulnerability of the figure. You get closer to this figure than you would a lover, or at least as close, and the machine is acting like an interface between you and them at the closest possible level.

NB You don’t know how much of the terrain there is, like the human body as a landscape. I also liked the way you used heavy monochrome throughout. But anything slightly coloured appears like a rich gem out of the greyness.

GH You know why I used all the monochrome—because you do multimedia…

NB Just to make it run faster?

GH That’s right!

NB I thought it was interesting that whereas Linda Dement has turned images of ordinary sane people into ‘monsters’, you’ve taken what society would call monsters and created a piece of work which brings out the human side.

GH Francesca di Rimini said she thought it was interesting that blokes using bodies keep them whole but women using bodies in their work cut them up. Your common sense would assume the other way round.

One of the weird things about the piece is, ‘cause I scanned myself too, some of the bits of flesh are my flesh. It’s only pixels on a screen but when you start merging your own flesh with people that have killed or self-mutilated, it’s like somehow you’re becoming part of them.

NB There’s a text from a patient who’s there for self-mutilation, that was very close to the bone.

GH I was really scared that I’d meet someone that didn’t value human life. When I got there I didn’t find that at all. I was talking to people to find out what happened—I mean we all think about killing people, we just don’t do it.

In the discussions, the single thing that patients talk about is that moment when no-one loved them at all—it completely does you in. That’s why with his text I couldn’t even edit it. I found another editor who had 25 or 30 years of editing experience. It was really hard for him too.

NB Were the patients able to see the finished work?

GH The success of the thing was measured in that they brought their own chocolate biscuits along, which I was told is like a real sign of acceptance. They’ve sort of become my friends, but you’ve got to remain suspicious—like you don’t say “Give us a ring”. One of the things people usually say to me is, “Aren’t you exploiting these people?” and I say “Yeah, but because they’re exploiting me!”

At the moment they can’t actually talk outside the institution itself. The deal is, if it’s art and the internet can be art, then this could give these people access to the World Wide Web and enable them to talk about their own condition and the conditions of the staff in a very direct way. So the deal is: I exploit them and they exploit me—we’ve come to an understanding.

Rehearsal of Memory is to be published on CD by BookWorks in early 1996.

RealTime issue #10 Dec-Jan 1995 pg. 20

skadada are imagery and movement paced with a rhythmic beat. The ‘music’, situated somewhere between a club and the hubbub of a kitchen, utilises synthesised samples from the everyday: factories, shipyards, foundries, backyards, train tunnels and kitchens. skadada explore the hyperrealism of their/our confused consumerism and in their own words, “the body and the emergent senses”, a body transformed, extended and amplified by technology.

From the huge banality of projected bar codes to the eroticism of Burtt’s bald head spinning, twisting as a beam of video light, Katie Lavers’ computer manipulated video images achieve an iconic status. The large-scale projected Burtt is balanced by the real time and minimalist, physically articulate Burtt. The interactive body with a twitch of an eloquent shoulder blade, a finger tip, triggers events in the performance space. He spins inside a vertical column of light, lifting his arms to cut the beams—a cylinder of interactive pin spots. As the light is broken, a sound is triggered: Patterson’s midi system broadcasts a round of Chinese song—courtesy of and sung by artist Matthew Ngui—a melodic canon generated by Burtt’s body. “Red Yoyo” is hypnotic and mesmerising.

skadada@pica is skadada’s first extended performance work. It takes the form of a kind of techno cabaret. Short stories told by Burtt link image and movement, reminding me of Laurie Anderson. The form is episodic. “Jacques Tati’s Jug” for instance, tells the story of a washing machine which performs a perfect samba; “Flip Book” looks at remote control and TV dinners whilst “My Hat “ asks, “well what does a hat sound like?” The mood is cool and droll, the images seductive and the sound moves from the melodic to the cacophonous.

skadada reviews the everyday. Burtt’s movement reminds me of mortality. Few of us will ever move as well, ever have the dexterity of motion that situates Burtt as a blur between images and idea, generating actions that spawn, actions that give. Burtt, Patterson and Lavers have created a unique yet utterly familiar vision. This is not Louis Nowra looking for the real in a clichéd mélange of symbols. This is local voice and colour creating meaning, effecting displacements and minute variations, commenting and modifying those realities our mainstream arts agencies avoid or describe as if in the latter stages of drought. This is not high art but it is essential art.

Of course, this young skadada had some downsides. Some of the direction was rather too pedantically tied to the technology, causing the staging to be overly tight. Some images were a little glib, despite their relationship to other content elements. Overall, however, the technology, encompassing touch-sensitive floor panels, infra-red triggers, slide and digital video projection was witty, urbane and intelligently integrated into the landscape of the performance. Image and sound combined to complement and enhance Burtt’s performance yet operated as powerful works in their own right.

If skadada are able to continue, as I believe they should, they will no doubt have a hard time of it. Australia wastes its human resources. skadada may, as so many before them, edge close to the mark—their best performances reserved for the few. In their autumn years will they turn to each other and ask, “what happened?” I hope they remember the names of the enemy—our major and ‘excellent’ (sic) theatre companies who, mob like, pretend to be doing, but haven’t got a hope in hell of achieving more than derivation and imitation ad absurdum. Yet skadada are essential viewing if one is to gather a complete picture of contemporary performance in Australia.

We’ve seen so much of this in Australia: average work, amazing work, profound work, all kinds of work but work which seeks to expose and explore the spirit of the under-encouraged and underground. The best, like skadada, follow their own voice and employ a tenacious discipline to realise their ideas. What a joy it would be to see a linking of these energies with the so-called mainstream. I imagine an intelligence and growth; some see a calamitous infection. There will be no important growth in Australian theatre and performance until artists like skadada are sought after for their opinions, ideas and skills. This is the source culture—the grass roots—let them grow!

skadada@pica performed by Jon Burtt, visuals by Katie Lavers, sound by John Patterson. Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. September 6 – 16, 1995.

TD I think our concerns are mostly digital. And I think possibly, through a process of osmosis, everyone’s concerns are going to become increasingly digital, though perhaps not mostly digital.

TD I think so. No-one can predict what will happen in the future, I think it is futile to do so, but digital technologies will infuse themselves into society, perhaps the way telephones did. I don’t think Alexander Graham Bell predicted the impact of the invention of the telephone.

TD A need for information about legal rights, about the law, and what you can and can’t do, especially with other people’s work. Also there is apprehension, certainly amongst people who have yet to touch a computer, including a lot of creators who work in traditional media. We want to reach those people, and reassure and perhaps encourage them to get out there.

TD In terms of the law, certainly. You have to look at how other people are going to use your work. There are a lot of concerns at the moment about artists signing away the electronic rights to their works for a song, in the belief that electronic rights really will be an ancillary form of income for them. In the future electronic rights may be a primary form of income.

TD Artlines has been sent to all Arts Law members, but it is aimed at all people who are interested in the creative applications of new technologies. Film makers in particular should really be taking note of the new issues. To an extent, it is also aimed at lawyers, and lawyers need to learn to deal with these issues and they also need to learn how artists think as well. There is always a disjunction between social practice or between the way artists work, and the law. Copyright is a good example. Certainly in the age of appropriation, copyright can’t come to grips with the way a lot of artists work. Amongst the creative community, it is aimed at those people working with new technology. They need to know what they can and what they can’t do, who they should be seeking permission from. So there is a quite pragmatic focus.

TD At the moment, the strategy is to let the creative community know about it and get it to them on paper. We are ‘dead tree publishers’ still. Sooner than we originally planned to, we will also be getting it online. It is a lot cheaper and in the case of Artlines, we will be really getting to the people interested in the area. Most people working in digital media have gone online. Six months ago, everyone was talking about CD ROM, now no-one is talking about CD ROM. They are talking about publishing on the World Wide Web.

KG The content transcends legal advice with examples of recent Australian multimedia, CD ROM and online work. But you also give examples, like Negativland’s scrap with U2’s record company. The article doesn’t seem to me to come down on either side of the argument and we know that U2 themselves were not unsympathetic.

TD Negativland taped U2, and they taped some out-takes of some well-known disk jockeys in the States, and combined them into a new recording. The legal and artistic community is ambivalent about the question of copying. I suppose copyright, since the 19th century at least has always looked at trying to balance the rights of users against the rights of creators. Where you set that balance, in each case, will probably be different, and it is very hard to say what is right and wrong. I suppose one way of looking at it is that you should treat others the way you yourself would wish to be treated. We have to maintain a stance of ambivalence at this stage.

TD There are other issues like trademark law which is designed to protect business reputation, to protect logos and images. But a lot of people have pointed out that our social selves are increasingly constructed out of trade marks. An American scholar has said that perhaps the only shared cultural memory in America is the death of Bambi. “Bambi” is a registered trade mark of Disney Corp.

KG I went to a lexicography seminar where I heard that Velcro was giving the Pocket Oxford, I think, a hard time for using ‘velcro’ as a verb. They wanted it to appear only with a capital V, only as a noun, and with the copyright marker. They were not happy with what was being said with ‘velcro’ in Australian English.

KG You feature an interview with Hou Leong who has incorporated his head and sometimes body photographically into iconic images of Australian men. What kind of procedures does he go through to be allowed to use some of the images, like the “I’m Australian as Ampol” image?

TD I guess it was an ironic comment on the mass media’s acceptance of multiculturalism. Hou sought and got the permission of Ampol and the advertising agency. The question as to whether or not he should have done that is unclear. A lawyer will always say be safe rather than be sorry. He was advised by Arts Law that the safest thing to do is to write a letter to these people and get permission.

KG It raises issues about the artist as subversive, doesn’t it? As soon as you ask permission you compromise yourself to a degree.

TD That’s right but Hou wasn’t interested in that, only in the final image. It’s also interesting that he could only have produced the works using digital image manipulation. But at the same time, he doesn’t see himself as a digital artist. In his view it is another tool.

KG Artlines also provides definitions of techno-terminology (bandwidth, flaming, hypermedia) information on Australian Film Commission and other sources of assistance for multimedia developments, e-mail and Web addresses for artsites, as well as publications and seminars pertaining to the legal issues. How long will Artlines have to go to print and what is its majority audience?

TD We had a conference recently on getting started in multimedia and online publishing. It was excellent to see the large number of artists turn out at the Art Gallery of NSW. We do get a lot of what you would call ‘suits’ at our seminars, but at this one they were in the minority, so that was good sign that artists are interested in the issues. I suppose we are in a transitional stage between the offline and the online world, and during that transitional period at least, there is a need for a continuing, printed source of information and public seminars.

http://wimsey.com/anima/ANIMAhome.html [expired]
I never knew what a synarchist was until I discovered ANIMA. A synarchist—derived from synchronous, synthetic anarchy—“is an individual linked technologically, socially, collaboratively and professionally in organic spontaneous relationship webs instead of in rote linearly defined or institutionally directed roles”. So there. Making this anti-system possible is a computer assisted community network facilitating intercommunications within the “nomadic virtual tribe”. There are no meetings, no dues, no qualifications except the self-declaration of participatory engagement: “I network, therefore I am”.

ANIMA is a multimedia cultural information service for the internet which provides a forum for artistic expression, critical analysis, educational outreach, experimental projects and research information. The overarching focus of the project, according to chief WebWeaver Derek Dowden, is to research net design, which makes ANIMA a site for experimentation with online multimedia publishing interface, structure and design. The web becomes both the subject and medium of dissemination of the group’s work. Work on the site began in 1993 and the project launched in March 1994. ANIMA currently runs several hundred html pages and GIF images. In designing the site the group has tried to take into account the frustration of excessively long download times for images and have attempted to strike a balance between visually appealing graphic content and low bandwidth speed. A particularly welcome design feature, given the vast acreage of the site, is the Fast Find Index which presents the entire web node in a logical hierarchical structure for top sight access—a methodology which, theoretically at least, defies ANIMA’s underlying synarchist principles but, hey, who’s complaining.

Following a fairly standard structure ANIMA is divided into zones, each with a particular focus: ART WORLD—images, ideas, sounds and experiences of digital art spaces on the net worldwide; SPECTRUM—a selection of new arts and media publication on-line; ATLAS—a resource and reference library; NEXUS—artists’ projects online; TECHNE—research on interface, immersion and interactivity; PERSONA—community voice/vision—forum for individual exploration and community discussion of the evolving world media network; and CONNECTIONS—special events from around the world.

With so much to choose from I freaked out and decided to go just down the road to the Australian National University Art Serve location offering an extensive collection of art and architecture mainly from the Mediterranean basin. This server offers access to around 16,000 images—1.6Gb of data—all concerned in some way with the history of art and architecture and claims to have over 14,000 accesses per day which, if true, would make it an opportunity missed by prospective advertisers. The site has a mysterious logo on its home page indicating it has been designated the honour of being amongst the top 5% of web sites, but no-one seems to know who is responsible for the award or what criteria are used to determine it. But in my opinion the honour was deserved. The use of thumbnail images to allow for the pre-selection of full-screen graphics was welcome for the savings made on download times. It’s a feature which should be standard on the Web where so often the images, when they finally do appear, aren’t worth the wait. The thumbnail gives you the option of choosing to look at an image in more detail or of overviewing the collection in a single screen as was the case with the Leni Riefenstahl examples from Olympiad (1936) and Triumph of the Will (1934).

I was immediately struck by the inclusion of Riefenstahl as the only artist listed in the otherwise categorical main index of the site and wondered why a 20th century photographer was given such prominence. So I e-mailed the webmaster and asked, only to be curtly told that Leni Riefenstahl was one of the most prominent filmmakers of the 1930s but, perhaps, I just had a problem with fascists. Naive as I am, I imagined the only people who didn’t have a problem with fascists were, well, fascists and given that only the day before the Sons of Gestapo had bombed a train in the USA I didn’t quite know what to say or think. So I clicked and moved on.

But it must have been the phase of the moon which led me immediately to the work of one Antonio Mendoza whose personal gallery was a lusty cornucopia of pornographia which I’ll leave readers interested in such pursuits to discover for themselves. More sobering was the OTIS site: http://sunsite.unc.edu/otis/otisinfo.html#what-is [expired]—an acronym of Operative Term Is Simulate, a place best described as an open-ended collective of artists where works can be posted and ideas exchanged. Any type of original art is welcome. Photos, drawings, raytracings, video stills, paintings, computer-assisted renderings, photos of sculptural/3D pieces, photocopier art, zine covers, quilts, tattoos and pyrotechnic displays are all mentioned.

Although OTIS’ focus is still-image, it does have space set aside for animations, self-executing slide-shows and multimedia works. Instructions, including copyright information, are posted for prospective exhibitors. OTIS comprises an archive of thousands of images, a list of participating artists, tips on compression, resources, links and so on. Frankly, what I saw on OTIS was less than spellbinding but it is a fact of life that most images on the net take on a homogeneity of surface and colour quality which immunises the viewer against the possibility of pleasure. Nevertheless, the desperate or foolhardy may wish to paste something on the virtual walls of OTIS.

ANIMA is a project financed by the Canada Council (Media Arts), the City of Vancouver and the University of British Columbia and although a worthy enough enterprise it suffers from trying to do too much. There is a lesson here for Australian public sector organisations wishing to construct grand joint ventures on the internet. I imagine the ambitious ANIMA concept may have looked great as a project description in a grant application but my tour of the site reminded me of Warhol’s aphorism “Always leave them wanting less”. At this stage in the development of online services it is wise for developers to adopt a less-is-best approach to design both in terms of download times and interactivity. To some extent we have to assume that users will be frustrated by the cumbersome, arcane qualities of the net by the time they get to our site, so we should give them a break by providing high quality content which is technically transparent and functional.

The Creative Nation statement (one year old in October), though admirable in its elevation of the arts to commonwealth policy status, served up slabs of grandiloquent spindoctoring: a curious alliance between instrumentalist goals of increased efficiency (“the government intends to develop programs aimed at improving the [cultural industries’] management efficiency and links with other industries”); economic rationalist shtick (“we need to ensure that good ideas can be turned into commercial product”) and the appropriation of notions of creativity to support a deeply jingoistic nationalism: “Culture is that which gives us a sense of ourselves … Culture … concerns self-expression and creativity. The work of writers and artists like Lawson, Roberts and Streeton offered an Australian perspective of Australian life—a distinct set of values … reflecting a distinctly Australian experience.” Personally, I prefer these sorts of sentiments in the original German.

Amongst all this hubris was a clarion call to arms at the dawn of a new epoch: “we must address the information revolution and the new media not with fear and loathing, but with imagination and wit.” How? In the view of the architects of Creative Nation, this means mobilising significant amounts of revenue to support a “vibrant multimedia industry”, “ensuring that we have a stake in the new world order” while retaining a “distinctly Australian identity”. In dollar terms, the price of our ticket to the new world order translated as a cool $84 million over four years: an allocation of $45 million to the Australian Multimedia Enterprise (AME), $20 million (over the first 4 years) to the Cooperative Multimedia Centres (CMCs), $7 million to the Australia on CD program, about $4 million to the Multimedia Forums program, around $5 million to the AFC, about $1 million to the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) for multimedia education and training and some $700,000 to the Australian Children’s Television Foundation.

It doesn’t require much RAM to work out the tilt of the playing field here. The AME, for example, intends to invest in commercially viable ‘product’. Run by a corporate lawyer and staffed by young industry top guns, the AME is, by its own description, a venture capitalist aiming to catalyse the production of demonstrably profitable multimedia titles and services. Applications for investment funding are now open, and the Enterprise has announced its first successful proposals.

The CMCs were initially vaunted as sites for research and development, as well as for the education and training to develop multimedia skills (the “critical pool of talent” CN says is required). With the government’s decision that they should become self-funding enterprises, they look increasingly to being driven by short term commercial imperatives. Early in the piece, there was a degree of optimism amongst some artists and arts advocacy bodies involved in the consortium development process that the Centres would, as an integral part of their function, broker access to high-end multimedia technologies for artists—that is, if they were genuinely committed to creative R&D, a process which takes time and doesn’t necessarily provide an immediate financial return. With bottom lines now setting the CMCs’ agenda, the involvement of artists, let alone integrally, is looking far less certain. Paradoxically, the very viability of the ‘industry’—its ability to innovate and create new forms—is itself dependent in the longer term on the high-end experimentation and R&D which is the stock in trade of contemporary artists. There are plentiful instances State-side of the medium-to-long-term flow-through effect from techno-artists’ research and experimentation into quality ‘product’. Myopic policy makers would do well to take note.

Throughout this year, some 18 consortia submitted proposals for funding of CMCs across the states. Two were funded: the Access Australia CMC to be headquartered at the Australian Technology Park in NSW, with a consortium comprising major NSW universities and industry partners; and the IMAGO CMC in WA, similarly, a university/industry group. Both come equipped with voluminous business and strategic plans and very chi chi logos. Other states are currently vying for the remaining Centres and results are expected to be announced this month.

The Australia on CD program, “designed to showcase a wide range of Australian cultural endeavour, artistic performance and heritage achievements” has already seen some action. Five CDs of “national significance” have been funded in Round One, and will be distributed to every school in the country. Here’s the “wide range”: Did we get one about Australian art? Too right -Under a Southern Sun, a catalogue of 50 great Australian works of art. (We’re thinking Streeton, Nolan, Roberts, Drysdale, Boyd, McCubbin…or maybe Nolan, Drysdale, Boyd, Roberts, McCubbin, Streeton…). How about the war? No worries. Australia Remembers does WW11 in son et lumiere. Then there’s the Tales from the Kangaroo’s Crypt, our national prehistory via the fossil record. But let’s not forget Backstage Pass— “an exciting performing arts concept with an on-stage and behind the scenes focus” —with hot links to a do-it-yourself guide to Stelarc’s stomach sculpture performance…not. A WA project called Mooditj will look at the relationships between contemporary Australian indigenous arts and cultural heritage. Applications have closed on Round Two and successful projects will be announced before the end of the year.

The Multimedia Forums were an object lesson in how to disenfranchise the arts and intellectual community and defuse debate on the social, aesthetic and political implications of multimedia. Suits, business cards and cellulars were mandatory at all three 1995 sessions (on “the government’s multimedia initiatives”, “creative aspects of multimedia” and “export markets”) which, despite their diverse monikers, spanned the gamut of issues from fast bucks to, well…fast bucks. Perhaps this is not surprising. At a recent meeting a high ranking functionary from the Department of Industry, Science and Trade which administers the program was asked whether the government’s intent in supporting multimedia is primarily commercial, or primarily about cultural and creative concerns. (Naive? Perhaps. Some would even say artificially dichotomising terms which need not be mutually exclusive.) The DIST operative shot back with an affirmative on the former objective: no ambiguity in his mind on the exclusivity of the terms. Forums planned for 1996 will focus on online and new technologies, copyright, marketing and distribution and—in a laudable attempt to make good on the program’s past failure to accommodate creative artists— “building bridges between the creative community and industry”. They’re going to need the Golden Gate.

All this is not to suggest that industry development policy, and government support to kickstart industry viability, is necessarily a bad thing. (It’s commendable that the incumbent Labor government has had the foresight to deliver a reasonably resourced policy on new media, with some good open access initiatives in relation to users—as opposed to producers—of content; and too abominable to contemplate the consequences of a Coalition win next year.) However, any genuine attempt to engender the kind of “creativity”, “innovation” and “leading edge” practice the government purports to be fostering requires that a diverse range of objectives share the policy agenda: critical, aesthetic, cultural and social as well as economic ones. A number of Australian artists, though their own efforts and against the financial and geographical odds, have established themselves at the forefront of the cultural and intellectual community’s version of the microeconomists’ ‘world best practice’: witness the disproportionately large representation of Australians at the recent International Symposium on Electronic Arts in Montreal, and the status of artists like Jon McCormack and many others in international new media art.

Direct support for artists developing multimedia works has been left squarely to the Australian Film Commission and its $5.25 million over 4 years (which works out to 6 cents in every dollar out of the $84 million over four years allocated overall to multimedia). The Commission intends to fund projects which are exploratory, innovative, geared to lower budgets and high risk: projects which, in other words, are unlikely to be funded under the objectives of the other multimedia initiatives set up under CN, notwithstanding the rhetoric. A number of works have already been funded, including a collaboration between multimedia artist Brad Miller and writer McKenzie Wark. Miller created the CD ROM A Digital Rhizome, based on Gilles Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus, and Wark is the author of the book Virtual Geography. Another project to receive funding is the development of a prototype multimedia game title by the cyberfeminist electronic artists VNS Matrix, based on their ongoing work All New Gen.

It might be asked what the Australia Council has been doing in all this. Apart from channelling the genius of Hugh Mackay, dismantling peer review and heaping invective on artists, not a great deal. As their self-promotional hyperbole goes, they have been supporting electronic and media artists for years, and indeed, artists in these areas have been receiving support, predominantly through the Hybrid Arts Committee. But, 13 months after CN, Council has yet to establish any public policy position on support for multimedia arts practice. Council plans to announce its new initiatives in early 1996—in terms of the cultural policy, a mere year and a half or so after the event.

In the interim, artists will doubtless continue to work critically and innovatively with the new technologies, helping to ensure that multimedia culture in this country develops beyond—in the words of digital artist John Colette—the “acumen of a computer sales presentation”.

by Rebecca Coyle and Philip Hayward
Power Publications, Sydney 1995
“Holography is a tantalising medium”, we are told in the opening sentence. Holography may be, but after its seductive black cover, Apparition remains a pretty straight piece of empirical documentation, comprehensive if tinder dry. Coyle and Hayward set out to address “the characteristics of holography as an expressive and artistic medium; discourses around art and technology which impinge on such work; and Australia as a site for such activity”, devoting most of the book to long semi-biographical chapters on early Australian and British holographic artists such as Margaret Benyon and George Gittoes. With the issues around art and technology so current, documenting early collaborations between holographic artists and scientists is undoubtedly relevant to Australia’s new wave of multimedia practitioners, but extrapolation to current developments could have been more vigorously explored. Indeed, one gets the feeling that some of the tough theoretical questions, such as the development of a critical discourse apposite to this medium and the light it might shed on high technology art have been sidestepped for a narration of significant scientific events and specific artistic works. While this documentation is of value, an opportunity for valuable speculation has been missed.

There’s a lot of spectacle out there—colour and movement, sumptuous images, fabulous techniques of all sorts, a real party, but the more dance I see, the less idea I have of what other people are actually looking at. Little girls fall in love with their favourite dancers, aspiring to embodied ideals with intensity and passion. For others, there’s all that flesh, sexy tumultuous glances, the heat and sweat, quivering sensitivity, swathed in the very height of fashion, re-drawing the images of what is desirable.

I’m usually interested in all the wrong things, and what I see is not what others see. Perhaps I just miss the point, but I don’t want to live vicariously through someone else’s fantasy, constructed on someone else’s terms with pre-digested ideas about how I should view my body, other bodies, the way people live and relate to each other and the world. Frequently I feel I’m being asked to discard my own hard won individuality and jump into that glorious shared heaven of living fantasy that is there for me, if only I could just think differently, loosen up a bit, not be so demanding, maybe be someone else. Well, that’s me.

I’ve been able to enter into the spirit of some of it, without too much of the aforementioned anxiety. However the experience has been coloured by renegade publicity, inviting, for example, a view of “Sydney’s hottest dancers/performers” (Four on the Floor), which rather sets the tone of a ‘fashion statement’, implies something ephemeral, transient. But some of these works, and certainly the artists, might last considerably longer than that. Even so, a few older pieces, for example Dean Walsh’s Hysterical Headset and Ros Crisp’s On Lucy’s Lips, had been worked over to the point where the fine lines, ambiguities and loose threads had been tidied away, as if they had been mistakes. For me, particularly with On Lucy’s Lips, the unfinished and vulnerable quality of the original performance was an aspect I missed this time.

The four programs of Dance Collection ’95 really were what the publicity said: a forum for playing, trying things out and working out what you think is important in dance. Meanwhile, it strikes me that times and ideals have changed, and the irony is that the primary aim of the growing number of Sydney’s ‘independents’ is to flock together for mutual support. There must be a better name for them. Even so, it’s a shame the organisers want to foreclose their open door policy and act as curators, because a place where artists can feel relaxed and informal rather than pressured to create a finished product is a rare treat for most performers.

With Link Theatre at the Museum of Sydney, the program invited me to see “a dance that utilised the inherent design of the exterior of MOS … both architecturally and thematically inspiring”, a commissioned ‘site specific’ work, Site Lines, which seemed in the end itself to reflect the same environmental insensitivity, or more politely, a cultural strangeness that the first settlers might have experienced on this very spot. We see in the dance material and design the same curiously blinkered reading of both body and environment. The permanent MOS installation Edge of the Trees, by Janet Laurence and Fiona Foley, demonstrating the passage of time in the weathering and layering of physical and cultural material, was used as a set for the new work. However Link just appropriated some superficial visual effects for their own purposes and ignored the inherent potential interactivity and delicate soundscape already part of the installation.

Another vivid collision of material occurred when an old lady wandered across the square, as anyone might have done, walked up to the dancers, stared at them briefly, and started imitating them in an engagingly oblivious way, after which she proceeded to roll up the leg of her pants, demonstrating to a group of young boys her aged and wrinkled knee. A well-meaning administrator tried to lead her away, stop her interfering in the ‘real’ event, but only in her own time did she wander off, much to the relief of the dancers whose performance task was, at this point, to pretend nothing was happening.

The unspeakable eloquence of this episode encapsulated my feeling that the actual present and highly visible layering of cultural values that is in front of us every day, speaking through all our bodies at every turn, with the real passage of real time, continues to remain unacknowledged right here and now, afflicted as we still seem to be with the same cultural obtuseness of 200 odd years ago.

Not entirely, though. There were two short works both of which illuminated in their different ways that very aspect of cultural difference: Mother Tongue Interference , a performance work by Deborah Pollard (Four on the Floor), and Karmagain by Simone Baker, subtitled “A Western Woman’s Eastern past life” and performed as part of Cha Cha Cha, the fourth Dance Collection ‘95 program. Both works expose facile perceptions of cultural displacement and assimilation. Deborah Pollard has gone straight to the difficult bits, where the pretence of bridging impossible cultural gaps is simply unbearable, leaving her witless and inarticulate. Karmagain highlights a westerner’s short-answer response to the culturally inexplicable, with idealisation of classic stereotypes being like a first stumbling attempt at cultural understanding.

And speaking of stereotypes, The Sydney Dance Company’s Berlin is composed of a multitude, all redolent with the nostalgia and romance of Berlin’s theatre and film tradition. If you haven’t already seen Wim Wenders’ film, Wings of Desire, then perhaps you should do that first, because, entertaining though it might be, Berlin doesn’t come close to its beauty and depth. Surprisingly, there is no mention of the film in the program despite the fact that it appears to have stimulated many of the ideas, and only a vague mention of “ghosts and angels”. Nor are any of the other sources acknowledged. Maybe it is simply too obvious to be worth bothering about. For heaven’s sake, Iva Davies and Graeme Murphy look for all the world like the two angels watching benignly over the human world of pleasure and wanting.

Sex, drugs and violence, both nasty and poignant, make their obligatory appearance. Janet Vernon is entirely at home in a tired sort of way as our Marlene. I caught a glimpse of a more contemporary Pina Bausch chorus line from 1980. The Wall is represented too, both the climbing up and the coming down, as well as the militaristic influences of now and then, blond boys perpetually bullet-headed, innocent, power hungry.

But what about the dancing? I hear you ask. Yes, it was there, and I was right up close, not more than 3 or 4 feet from the performers. We could see through the wire mesh, (another image from Wings?), the elasticity, the resilience and flow of dancers caught up in something they have done all their lives, the perfectly timed slippery partnering of duets, and the complex and articulate ensemble work in parts like Angel Life, and Complicated Game. To understand dancing, I need to ask, “What are these bodies saying to me? What do they make me feel?” and I often get stranded with all those unacknowledged physical habits and empty gestures, which lie in that impossible gulf between what they might want to say and what they do say.

In August Tony Osborne attended a one-month intensive workshop in Berkeley, California with improviser Ruth Zaporah. She originally trained as a dancer but for the last thirty years has been stretching the boundaries which enclose dance and developing her own style of improvisational performance which she calls Action Theatre.

RZ When I originally coined the term, Action Theatre, because I’d come from dance, I needed to make the distinction that there was a whole instrument at play rather than just dance and its techniques. Dance is theatre for me. Theatre is when one or more people get up in front of another group of people and create a fantasy world. That’s why politics is theatre. A politician gets up there and creates a fantasy world and we all believe it. That too is theatre.

TO Did you get bored with the lack of attention to what the body is saying? Was there a dissatisfaction with technique? It seems to me that dance languages have a sort of bathos built into them.

RZ That was always the problem my teachers had with me. They always said I was too dramatic. I didn’t clean out enough. I didn’t just do the technique. I was always visible. I kept switching teachers until finally I started teaching… looking inward for the teacher.

TO So did the idea of teaching what you do now come before you met other improvisers? Did you meet Al Wunder before this point?

RZ Before I met Al Wunder I was teaching improvisation on the east coast. I got a job with a theatre department teaching movement to the actors. I looked at these actors and I knew that my dance class was not going to be possible. So I asked them what they wanted and they said they wanted to embody their characters. At the time I didn’t know what ‘embody’ meant because that was not something that we were taught in dance classes. I didn’t know what character was because that’s a theatre term, not a dance term. So I said, “Okay, walk, sit, pick up something” etcetera, and I just started improvising and seeing what was coming back—this was telling me what I wanted to see next. Then I had to figure out some kind of framework. That’s how this all started. Then when I moved to San Francisco [in the 1970s] there was this guy, Al Wunder, who was teaching a much more formal kind of improvisation that he’d learned from his teacher, Alwin Nikolai. So Al and I hooked up and put a studio together because we were both interested in improvisation.

TO Improvisation means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Theatre and dance practitioners might employ it in certain specific and varying ways but people like yourself and Al Wunder have created the genre of improvised performance which, paradoxically, doesn’t necessarily relate to theatre or dance processes generically, even though it employs both.

RZ Al Wunder’s work was always very dancerly but I haven’t seen his work in a long time. (Al Wunder has lived and worked in Melbourne for over ten years).

TO I think Al Wunder’s Theatre of the Ordinary is very much about creating form; finding form in all sorts of stuff.

RZ Well, this work isn’t really theatre improvisation in the traditional sense because theatre improvisation deals with situation. This work doesn’t ‘set up’ situation and it doesn’t fit into any genre of dance because it deals with situation.

RZ I don’t think so, because its not like I studied dance and I studied theatre and then figured out how to put them together. What happened was I just extended myself from dance and kept on extending from a body-based form—expanding the avenues of experience and expression from body-base to include language, speech, vocalising. Its all body-based to me. Its all dance. Then that includes content which just grew out of my original body-based interest in action which started with dance. The action extended into my mouth and language.

TO You talked earlier about embodiment and in your work you talk a lot about inhabiting or ‘filling out’ an action in performance. It seems to me that in a lot of dance and theatre the body is a bit absent; that is, there’s a lot of text or intellect going on but the performers’ bodies are unconsciously telling a different story.

RZ The body’s just supporting the text? Propping up this instrument so that the mouth can…

TO Yes, with very little connection between text and body—something in the body tells you that the performer is lying. It occurs to me to ask why this work isn’t more prevalent in training institutions.

RZ That’s a very good question. I’m not very good at promoting myself, I guess. I just keep on doing my thing. I think they should at least check out what I’m doing. I’ve never had anyone to take care of that side of things for me, you know, like an agent or secretary.

RZ I’m just beginning to because I’m going to be sixty next year and at some point I would like to retire, and so I would like to make some money, although I can’t imagine retiring. If I had set this whole thing up in New York, I think it would be different at this point. I think this work would be much more known. Out here [San Francisco] it’s like, in a sense, the boondocks. It’s like a little town in a way… I’m not a hustler and don’t go after it … maybe having a book out will make a difference.

TO What made you write a book about the one month ‘trainings’ which you conduct twice a year?

RZ For about ten years I’ve been wanting to write a book about this work… because I think it’s really useful and I felt like for me to just hold it for myself was very selfish in a way. I don’t feel like it’s mine. I feel like I worked this out with all the people that have been working with me for the last fifteen or twenty years. It just got too big for me to hold as my private stuff. I know that I probably work with a couple of hundred different students every year and I know that a lot of them go back and teach this work in their own way. In order to protect the integrity of the work I wanted this book out so that they could have that.

Action Theatre: The Improvisation of Presence is published in the U.S. by North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California.

Eleanor Brickhill talks to Norman Hall about the impulses behind a new dance double at The Performance Space

NH I’ve had an idea in mind for quite a while to do co-productions, to work with other independent artists. As a complementary program to Aida Amirkhanian’s Credo, for three women, and as a contrast, it was practical for me to do a program with two men, called Two Men. The men are very different, experience, technique and personality-wise.

NH They both have dedicated many years to dance work, Patrick Harding-Irmer for twenty-five years, and Derek Porter has been dancing since he was about 13 and professionally since 1990.

But more and more I am interested in individuals, because you have got to have strong performers, or very individual performers, people who can actually work with material and not just have it put on them, who can integrate it. That seems to come with experience.

Superficially, I think Derek’s talent is in his incredible flexibility. I have often wondered if he had average flexibility, how that would affect his performance. And I still think he would have that incredible stage presence. He is so focused on what he is doing that it comes across, even without those legs and that very supple back and the things he can do with his body that just amaze people.

EB With Patrick there are similarities, they share that same clarity of line and focus.

NH I think both of them are so intent on what they are doing that the audience would have to be asleep to not be drawn in. As far as the program is designed, they do two solos each and two duets, so you have a chance to see them in work that brings out different qualities. Derek is doing a piece called Divine, to a mass. Very dancey, although not in the usual way. It’s more fluid and organic. I try not to make steps.
The second piece is Toilette, from the Dance Collection ’95, a totally different work, more of a sculptural piece. People find it quite whimsical. We got that basically roughed out in about two weeks, working an hour three times a week, because all we were doing was working with shapes and images. It was a nice foil to some of the more serious works.

Patrick has made Birthday Card to celebrate his 50th birthday, and he is also performing a solo from a work by Siobhan Davies called Bridge the Distance. She made that in 1985, when Patrick was 40. There was a BBC program about it, about the mature dancer, and this was before Jiri Kylian formed Nederlands Dance Theatre Three, the mature dancers’ group. Over the last five years, in particular, the focus on the mature dancer is coming through.

NH I don’t think all people of that age have it. It goes back to the intent, the focus, the performance strength. As people get older they start to appreciate all the training they have, all the fine tuning, from performing, from life, over many years. It’s the fineness, the delicacy, and a kind of subtlety of meaning, doing more with less. You suggest without doing big things.

EB So the whole aesthetic quality becomes quite different, doesn’t it? The whole point is different.

NH Jiri Kylian said you don’t ask of these older dancers what it is they can’t do anymore, but what it is they can do better than anybody else? I spent a lot of time with that company, NDT3, and I saw younger choreographers who haven’t realised what it is all about.

EB Until you get there, you don’t know what questions to ask, what material to work with. But that is one of the beauties of the independent dance world. When you are able to use that wealth of experience, it is always very much an individual statement.

NH I think independent dancers and choreographers are actually producing the most interesting work at the moment, and doing it with very little support. I like to do small, very intense pieces. I call them ‘boutique pieces’. Something like Toilette could be done in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, as a self-contained work. It wouldn’t need any lighting, just take the prop there, and just do it. And of course, I actually enjoy making smaller, more personal works rather than doing the grand production where the detail of the dance just gets lost.

Credo by Aida Amirkhanian with Elizabeth Cameron Dalman, Paige Gordon & Aida Amirkhanian, percussion by Andrew Purdham; Two Men produced by Norman Hall with Patrick Harding-Irmer & Derek Porter, musician Patricia Borrell. The Performance Space, Sydney, Thursday Dec 14-17.

Richard James Allen and Karen Pearlman delineate for Keith Gallasch the impulses behind Tasdance’s new work, the epic Thursday’s Fictions

KG Your work is distinctive on two fronts. First is the the role of voice. Second there is a narrative interest which is not typical of a lot of contemporary dance.

KP Richard and I both feel very strongly that dancers are not dumb and that means both that they are not stupid and that they are not mute, that the voice is a part of the instrument known as the body, and the body is the instrument that you have to work with in creative dance. With voice we have tried to develop a language as sophisticated as the physical. The level of writing for the voice has to match the level of choreography, and vice versa.

KG How do you get that quality of voice you need in performance, since from the earliest days of a dancer’s training the focus is so much on the body.

RJA I was chatting last night with a guest actor in our latest show and he said, sort of jokily, “I’m not sure you really need me, because all of you dancers are so good at speaking and dancing. Most actors couldn’t do the physical things they do and be so clear.” That was a nice comment. In the ten or more years Karen and I have been working together we’ve developed both conscious and unconscious ways of training the body so that you can use the voice fully as well as the body fully. There is a sense of freedom in the use of the voice.

KP When we were auditioning we looked for great dancers and we had more than enough to choose from. Then we asked them to speak. First of all they had to be willing to speak, willing to open their mouths. Dancers are so often trained to be quiet. It is very much a part of dance culture, especially in classical training and that is a way of showing your respect.

KP The first thing an actor has to do is to ask “why”, and that is the last thing a dancer ever does. We are now getting dancers to ask us why, and it certainly pushes the thinking of the choreographer.

RJA If the choreography can’t be discussed, then it can’t be pushed further, particularly in this case where we are creating physical and verbal characters. It requires a full understanding by the dancer-actor, of why they are doing what they are doing.

KP We look for dancers with clear, simple speaking voices, unmannered and malleable, which is a similar thing to what we look for in their bodies, that their years of training haven’t left marks on them that have to go.

KG Presumably, Richard, you compose this text that is to be spoken well prior to the rehearsal process?

RJA I’ve been writing Thursday’s Fictions for three or four years. It’s an epic poem and part of the process has been to make a stage adaptation of it. We went through a creative development period with a whole series of guest artists from Tasmania and Sydney, working with us on imagining different ways of staging this text in performance.

KP The creative development project was part of the PAB-funded Time and Motion project allowing us to bring in Don Mamouney to work on the acting, Mémé Thorne on the Suzuki approach and many others from Tasmania and beyond. We had Scott Grayland working at the cross-roads of aerial work, dance and acting. We had Theresa Blake and Dan Whitton from Desoxy at the nexus of acrobatics and acting. Everybody brought ideas to the process. Don stayed on as co-director.

RJA Ultimately, Karen was the dramaturg, creating ‘with the knife’. We worked on it together, and I’d say, “Yeah, that sounds good, but put that back in!”

KP We had a lot of help also, Greg Methé and Ruth Hadlow of Hobart’s Terrapin Theatre were involved in the creative process both on design and dramaturgy. Their design background makes the question always come up, “Do we need to say this in words. Can’t we say it physically or visually?”

RJA To me this was, in a way, a workshop for defining what is a performance script. It’s is not a traditional play, and it is not a poem anymore. It is now a performance script, and that was a lot of hard work and a lot of discussions and a lot of actual trying out.

KG How much of Thursday’s Fictions is driven by the narrative, how much by dance’s sense of the moment?

KP It’s structured by the narrative and it is also character-driven in the sense that each of the sections offers a quirky individual around whom we can centre our images and ideas. While it is a very rich and fascinating plot, it doesn’t move at the speed of lightning. It goes off from side to side, in a sense, and gives us horizontal views into the minds of these people. The dancers play several roles. They play the poems, Thursday’s poems, which are this central object passed from hand to hand. They play the left and right half of Friday’s brain. A set of triplets, all named Monday, run a funeral parlour. Later on, they torture Tuesday on the rack. Three dancers combine to play a large blue spider, looking like a cross between a praying mantis and a chandelier.

KP I think there are some new directions. One of the places that modern dance has got stuck, in a way, is in the development by individuals of dance vocabularies that they call their own. So you can look at a dance and know immediately that it is a dance by Martha Graham, or a dance by Russell Dumas. I feel those vocabularies—like Trisha Brown’s—are wonderful, and they are rich, but they have a limited range of emotionally expressive possibilities.

KP Right, and when we get into our idea of narrative, where have the full spectrum of psychological and emotional vocabularies to work with, we are in a sense trying to let the characters develop their own vocabularies, rather than the choreographer work on his or hers.

RJA That doesn’t mean that we don’t create it, but it does mean that we are trying to create specific vocabularies that suit those characters in those situations.

KP There are moments in the dance where you might look at it and say ‘Martha Graham’ because one of the things she was really strong on was torture. There is a section in which I am tortured and I am really trying to make myself think in terms of very hard, bound, striking movements, as opposed to soft flowing gliding actions, which are completely inappropriate for torture, even though they are things which I personally enjoy doing.

KG Given that Thursday’s Fictions is character and narrative-driven, what role does ensemble dancing play?

KP A significant role in the sense of ensemble acting. There is no corps de ballet here at Tasdance. We have really selected people who are very distinctive. They look different, they dance different, they talk different.

RJA It is a company of soloists, a complementary mix rather than a sort of bland sameness.

KP The composer and sound designer Andrew Yencken is using live musicians, recording them and manipulating the sound to evoke travel through time. He has references from moments in music history. He is also working with radio mikes on us, the performers, and he is modulating our sounds and words into the sound design as well as we perform. There’s also a pre-recorded radio component (involving a number of Tasmanian actors) which plays a surprising role.

KG You say Thursday’s Fictions is a fairy tale, but its themes and sometimes graphic violence and sexual content make it definitely not for children.

KP The theme of the work is the power of art to live on past us. The question at the heart of the work is, “Is it possible for a human to create something better than themselves?” Kids just aren’t going to be interested in that. I think it is adult also in the sense that it requires a very attentive audience. It’s also the question of whether the language of dance is universal in the sense that people who don’t speak your verbal language could easily understand your dance language, including children. I have a lot of problems with that.

RJA I am personally very interested in yoga and Buddhism but Thursday’s Fictions isn’t a work of religious instruction. It is a spiritual work in the sense that it deals with issues of where we are and what our lives mean. I don’t think people are going to walk out of the theatre thinking this, but if someone was to reflect on it for a long time, they might decide that at a deeper level they’ve experienced a dialogue between a western spiritual vision of heaven and hell, and an eastern vision.

KP In the first instance, we are creating a spectacle. If people can come to it without deciding in advance what dance is or what theatre is, then they will get a lot out of it.

KP No, but do I think that dance is the most ephemeral of art forms, and poetry is one of the least ephemeral artforms. Dancers disappear and poems don’t.

RJA There is another medium in Thursday’s Fictions, other than dance, acting, design, sound and radio, and that is print. Thursday tries to get her poems buried with her, so she can pick them up and keep writing them in the next life. In the end, you never hear the poems on stage, but the program contains Thursday’s 24 poems. And you can take them home with you in the innovative Paper Bark Press publication which doubles as program and poetry volume. You see these poems in the performance buffeted through time and history, and different people care about them or not, and by some miraculous chance they end up on your lap.

Tasdance, Thursday’s Fictions. Text—Richard James Allen. Dramaturgy, direction, choreography—Karen Pearlman. Don Mamouney—co-director. Andrew Yencken—composer and sound designer. Dani Haski—costume designer. Greg Thompson—lighting design. Simeon Nelson—rack designer. Ben Little—radio producer. Karlin Love—music production coordinator. Dancers—Joanna Pollitt, Gregory Tebb, Kylie Tonatello, Samantha Vine, Richard James Allen, Karen Pearlman. Actor—Michael Edgar. Earl Arts Centre, Launceston, Dec 7-10; Peacock Theatre, Hobart, Dec 14-17.

Dance, Modernity and Culture: explorations in the sociology of dance
Helen Thomas
Routledge, London and New York, 1995

Sociological approaches to the study of dance are few and far between, and Thomas makes a most significant contribution to the development of this relatively uncharted terrain. The book focuses principally on American modern dance of the early twentieth century; plotting the connections between a metamorphosing cultural context and the beginnings of what is now the institution of modern dance. Thomas proposes that through investigating such connections, and through closer analysis of artistic practice—Martha Graham is the primary consideration of Thomas’ case study—new understandings of modern dance may be provided through sociology. The relationship between dance and its context is further refined by a differentiation between extrinsic and intrinsic properties and perspectives; that is, examining dance from an external sociological viewpoint as well as investigating the cultural symbolism of a movement language.

From a comprehensive theoretical framework which acknowledges the influence of cultural studies, feminist studies, anthropology, philosophical theories of dance, poststructuralism and postmodernism upon sociology, Thomas canvasses the historical significance of early theatrical dance in America. Of particular interest in the second chapter is her account of the controlling forces of Puritanism and Protestantism upon the freedom of performers in the theatre and initial cultural encounters with ballet.

By providing an overview of conspicuous figures in the pioneering of modern dance in America—including Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn—as well as more detailed analysis of Iconoclasts from Denishawn—Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey—Thomas traces a history of the modern dance movement which is embedded within the elaborate socio-cultural history of twentieth century America. Thomas’ final examination of Graham’s Appalachian Spring (1944) is the culmination of the study, demonstrating how the symbolism of movement may represent a more expansive, reflexive cultural voice for its context.

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December 1995

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