Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

February 1996

Welcome to RealTime 11 incorporating our first screen culture supplement OnScreen. With support from the Australian Film Commission, OnScreen aims to bring you engaging, critical and informed writing on film, media and techno-arts from across Australia. OnScreen will reflect RealTime’s broader focus on mixing genres and blurring boundaries, especially appropriate as aspects of screen culture become increasingly interlinked in the wake of technological, aesthetic and policy developments. Our first issue gives some indication of OnScreen’s scope: Media analyst Gil Appleton clarifies the confusion around the interminable policy permutations in Pay TV; Balkans commentator Eddy Jokovich casts a critical eye over Kusturica’s Underground; John McConchie interviews director of Bad Boy Bubby Rolf de Heer about his new film The Quiet Room; John Conomos surveys CD ROM based artform practice in his preview of the MCA’s Burning the Interface exhibition; two writers coming from very different perspectives size up Larry Clark’s Kids, Boris Kelly visits Stelarc’s web site and Anna Dzenis engages with the textuality of Lesley Stern’s new book The Scorsese Connection. We also bring you reviews of recent new media conferences, Flickerfest, the recent UNSW College of Fine Arts screenings, and new interactive media installations, plus previews of the Adelaide Festival film program, the MCA’s major retrospective of early film and the Mardi Gras Film Festival. We’d welcome your feedback, and hope you enjoy OnScreen.

Realtime 11 is strong on process in performance, dance and music, whether it’s Jenny Kemp and Cath MacKinnon on preparing new works for the Adelaide Festival, Tess De Quincey and Stuart Lynch planning ‘to dance Sydney’ in 100 performances, John Nobbs and Jacqui Carroll discussing performance and training for their Suzuki Tadashi-inspired Frank Productions, choreographer Graeme Watson shaping Antwatchers for One Extra, Deborah Pollard describing the evolution of a work with Indonesian actors and farmers, David Harrington on the Kronos Quartet ‘as process’, Ion Pierce and Nicholas Gebhardt musing on the politics of composition and Alice Cummins on the contribution of her studio to her work, as well as Jan Cattoni reporting on the making and teaching of documentary filmmaking in the Marshall Islands.

On the arts politics front the concern among artists over the restructuring of the Australia Council persists. The issue of artist representation appears to have been resolved with the Australia Council confirming its commitment to peer assessment and the establishment of a range of artform funds in which artists will be represented in the majority, as they will be on Council. MOB has also become a fund (MOF) but its members still don’t have an artist among them they can talk to about art! The Foundation for Culture and the Humanities, on which artists were poorly represented, has parted company with the Australia Council, apparently on the grounds that its brief is broader—“heritage, civics, centenary and Federation”, said departing director Craddock Morton, to which we could add Fundraising. The issue now is the fate of specific artforms in terms of funding strategies and programs. The second round of the consultative Australia Council forums have been suspended until after the elections. Meanwhile the restructuring goes on and the new coverall Handbook will be released in April. So much for consultation. The pre-Xmas forums were hardly models of excellence—brief meetings crowded with more questions than could be answered. A day in each city would have been ideal with carefully planned agendas, brief keynote addresses and ample discussion time. Too much to hope for?

Hybrid artists were alarmed at the forums to find themselves missing from the list of Funds and the list of closing dates for applications for funding, and ‘their’ funds allocated to an Advisory Committee to Council. And they were not to be represented on Council. In principle, an advisory committee could encourage all funds to think in terms of innovative interdisciplinary work, even talk to each other. However the Hybrid Arts has been supporting distinctive work in sound, the body, multimedia and interactivity. As the funded area most directly and critically engaged with the issues of Creative Nation it seems shortsighted to fail to acknowledge Hybrid Arts as a growing area of activity (not a form), as a Fund and as worthy of representation on Council.

RealTime Issue 11, February – March 1996, p12

Is this man a kind of Midas turning whatever he touches into the (Black &) Gold of pure art? And the whole world consisting of latent artworks waiting, like the bread and wine of reality, to be transfigured through some dark mystery, into the indiscernible flesh and blood of the sacrament?

– Arthur C. Danto

What is it about inscribing some text on a yellow car, chopping it into little bits and calling it art that captures the imagination? Like all true feats of marketing, Black & Gold Art had something for everyone: violence, colour, action, drama, merchandising, father-son conflict and a bit of theory. It was literally art for the whole family.

There’s something perversely pleasurable in seeing a car (that seemingly indispensable symbol of success in the taken-for-granted world of suburban must-haves) being destroyed by an angle grinder. The media certainly thought so, with Channels 7 & 9 and The West Australian all poised ready to capture the best moments to include in their ‘zany’ segments.

In Black & Gold Art, the sensational aspect was really only a function of necessity: how to get a full sized 1975 Holden Gemini Fastback through the half sized doors of PICA and up the stairs (PICA has no lift). Anyone who followed the car (piece by piece) into the gallery might have noticed the transformative function of this process.

Of course, the other point of fascination was the relationship between artist-son and mechanic-dad. Few artists have not experienced the frustration of trying to explain just what exactly it is they do to bemused parents who only want what’s best for their kids (Surely you want to be a lawyer?). Beyond that, the necessity to defend, justify and name in clearly descriptive and easily understood terms that which is not ‘real’ art is a constant both within and without the family circle. Artist-son’s solution (if not resolution) was to involve his mechanic dad in the project in his own professional capacity.

Beyond which, Mick Hender (the son) discusses the function of objects and their names. What is it that gives a particular object its defining nature and how is this mediated by the packaging and labelling of consumer culture?

The primary gesture of this project was the inscription of the words, “Black & Gold Car” onto the side door and bonnet of a defunct yellow Gemini. Black & Gold (the company) markets itself as a “no frills” corporation. Its strategy is to declare on the packaging of a product exactly what the product is. The text is printed in bold, generic, stencil typeface, in black on a yellow background. No photographs or images embellish the packaging.

The Black & Gold Car, as opposed to regular Black & Gold products, didn’t have any packaging—the text was printed directly onto the surface of the metal bonnet and door. In a sense, packaging and object become one and the object’s name and physical presence become inseparable. The text inscribed on Black & Gold Car, rather than distancing the object itself from its linguistic referent, actually gave the car its essence. Similarly, the assistants working on the project wore Black & Gold overalls. The gallery was painted gold with black lettering. We’re talking Black & Gold in overdrive.

Black & Gold Art also involved the printing of t-shirts to specifications laid down by customer/gallery-goers. The idea began with the printing of Black & Gold T-shirts as a parody of those brand-name t-shirts which function principally to advertise the manufacturer, and rapidly developed into a means of involving people more directly in the experience of Black & Gold Art. Directed by an extensive instruction sheet and order form, customers could designate their size and weight and the title to be printed on a t-shirt. Titles ranged from “Black & Gold Alcoholic Fat Bastard, 90 Kg Nett” to “Black & Gold Fucked Up Homosexual, 69 Kg Nett” to the more straightforward, “Black and Gold Academic, 140 Kg Nett”.

The nature of an object is often defined by what it is not. Ian Ground, writing in Art or Bunk, gives the example of an imaginary meteorite thought to be identical to a Henry Moore sculpture. Ground asks the reader to consider a set of words and their possible application to both meteorite and sculpture. His selections include “witty”, “crass”, “simplistic”, “vulgar”, “original” and so on. He shows that most of these adjectives are inappropriate to describe the meteorite but could, quite plausibly, be used to describe the artwork. Ground’s conclusion, that two identical objects can be different things is effective precisely because of his concrete (albeit imaginary) example. Similarly, Black & Gold Art exists as an example in action: a proposal about the defining nature of objects, products and their packaging.

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Black & Gold Art was the work of Mick Hender, the artist-son, assisted by Brian Hender, the mechanic-dad. Black & Gold Art was an umbrella project of the 1995 Artrage Festival at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Lucas Ihlein, who assisted on Black & Gold Art is a recent graduate of the School of Architecture & Fine Arts, University of Western Australia.

RealTime Issue 11, February – March 1996, p11

In “Rave New World” (The Good Weekend, Jan 6, 1996), Stephen Spears, after a few “horrendous days” in contemporary showbiz, rediscovers vitality, his youth, memories of by-gone days and, it would seem, an illicit thirst for life—all of this at a rave. It is—without wanting to downplay the importance of these experiences for him—a romantic view of the rave scene, a view that comes from a person wanting to rediscover life and not discover it. It is ultimately an unreal and isolated picture of the scene portrayed as untouchable and inaccessible. With a few funky graphics and blurred photographs it appears dreamy and poetically chaotic. Anarchy runs happily rife in a psychedelic, sweaty, beautiful-bodied, isolated dance.

A person loyal to rave culture could see this article as a great advertisement for the scene, making it more user-friendly and countering bad publicity such as that surrounding the death of the Sydney teenager Anna Wood last year. Perhaps this is what we should learn from Spears’ article: that we should respect the two sides to every story.

However, the story of rave culture is complex and the fact is that raves move and change. Spears’ article focuses on a dance party but raving is a way of thinking that manifests itself in a person’s lifestyle. Ravers think in terms of the big picture. The body and technology are considered interacting forces. Technology helps the body move faster and further. To be a raver is to consume technology and ideas and redefine them in an interactive environment. A raver is conscious of the world, the universe, the past, the present, the future, nature, technology and how these affect each other – an interlocking network of ideas and philosophies that one may completely indulge in or simply pick and choose from.

The most prominent aspect of the philosophy behind raving is the relaxed, friendly environment which is usually violence free. Raves are not sleazy pick up joints, people are there to dance and go off on the music. This is the essence—release and escape.

– Emma, Mel, Boba and more, “Rave Special: Dissecting The Rave” Beat Magazine, 1994

Alternatively, the rave can exist as part of a philosophical system. Raving is part of a means to fulfil a role in the world wide web of Gaia that calls upon the depths of mathematical and computer science to develop a web of life and consciousness that stretches out from traditional forms of hierarchy.

The ravers see themselves and the creation of their sub-culture as part of the overall fractal equation for the post-modern experience. One of the principles of chaos math… is phase-locking, which is what allows the various cells of an organism to work harmoniously…A phase-locked group begins to take on the look of a fractal equation, where each tiny part reflects the nature and shape of the larger ones. The ultimate phase-locking occurs in the dance itself, where thousands of… like minded young people play out house culture’s tribal ceremony…They’re on the same drugs, in the same circadian rhythm, dancing to the same 120-beats-per-minute soundtrack…It is at these moments that the new reality is spontaneously developed…

– Douglas Rushkoff, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace, Flamingo 1994

Rave music—or techno as it is universally known—does not have to be danced to. Like any other music it can simply be listened to. Trish, a DJ and journalist from Melbourne, said in an interview that she discovered techno after getting bored with gothic music. She appreciates its consistent originality. As DJ of a prominent techno show on Melbourne’s PBS radio station, she praises its accessibility for composers, producers, lovers of music or ravers. The rapid development in technology—particularly audio technology—has meant that people can create rave music easily. Making electronic music is not limited to the few who have connections in the music and recording industry. One can pick up an old Roland synthesiser or an apparently out-of-date Akai sampler, and with some imagination create sounds that are new, truly different and inspirational.

Ross Harley in an article on Volition Records recognises the creativity of techno and its romance with machinery and technology. (“Acts of Volition”, Perfect Beat vol.2 n.3 1995). In this essay on the history and development of one of Australia’s premiere techno music labels he writes of “the certain perversity that prevailed…for the original design and purpose of…machines” and how these machines could “easily be turned against the industrial uses they were made for”.

But there are other issues at stake in an understanding of the scene. The taking of drugs (whether smart-drugs, E, speed, acid, guarana) is an aspect of the rave culture that is so often held out to the public as the only exhibit in the case against the culture. The focus on the taking of drugs effectively casts a shadow on the ravers and parties that don’t use drugs. There is also the business of raves. What is the economic benefit of the scene to the promoters and the public? What about its history? The scene has moved from the ‘old skoolers’—who were just learning to integrate technology and this new way of being— to the recent split between ‘clubbers’—who go to mainstream clubs and don’t necessarily subscribe to a different way of viewing reality—and ravers.

The process of understanding the rave scene could lead to the development of discourses that would enable us to work on other contemporary sub-cultures, how they work and the interplay or non-interplay between them and how this effects the wider community.

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S.C.A.N. is a group of interested people gathering information and ideas about raves and sub-cultures. Contact Dena Christy on 0416 092 372 or 03 9646 4467 or Kit McMahon 02 798 3378.

RealTime Issue 11, February – March 1996, p10

In a picturesque flamboyant port town, a West Australian theatre company has matured into a community asset of cultural significance. Fremantle’s Deckchair Theatre, currently under the artistic direction of Angela Chaplin, is passionately committed to the exploration of “exciting and sensual theatre concepts and cultural images”, with a particular commitment to nurturing women artists and artists from non dominant cultures, as exemplified in their 1995 program: Wildgirl, Sweetown, Diving for Pearls and Tiger Country. Their ground breaking production Ningali began touring both within Australia and internationally during 1995, culminating in a Fringe 1st award for outstanding new production at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Ningali recently performed to capacity audiences for the 1996 Festival of Sydney.

Deckchair Theatre was founded in 1983 by Di Shaw and Brian Pedie at a time when figures released by the Australia Council showed that less than 7% of the Australian population went to the theatre. “We felt that theatre wasn’t relevant to real people in Australia. Most plays were about white middle class people and most were written in England and white middle Australia,” remembers Di Shaw. “It was limiting because they didn’t reflect Australia’s cultural diversity. They were also performed in venues where a lot of people were uncomfortable simply because they didn’t and don’t understand the rituals—when to clap, what to wear—these are rituals that only certain people have access to.

“We wanted to avoid theatres and instead perform in public spaces where people already gather—spaces which were important to people—interesting spaces where people wouldn’t expect to see theatre so they would come with curiosity.”

Deckchair’s first major production, Fleets of Fortune, emerged out of the chaos that was the victory of ‘the winged keel’ in Newport, Rhode Island and the consequent refurbishment of Fremantle in 1983, and it was performed under the stars at the Fremantle Arts Centre. Di Shaw met with much opposition from the state funding body: “The drama officer at the time thought I was foolish to be using so much of the company’s resources on this production, feeling that we should do something safe—something we wouldn’t lose money on. But I wanted to express aspects of Fremantle’s local identity so we did it and it was a huge success”.

Each year since, Deckchair has undertaken a major production for, about, and involving their local community. Promenade theatre and the animation of public spaces have been effective tools for celebrating Fremantle’s cultural mix while effectively uniting its diverse demographics. Their community production for 1995, Cappuccino Strip, wove these transcultural threads into a dynamic piece of promenade theatre which explored “the wonderland of coffee cups and chaotic cafe culture”.

Di Shaw returned to Deckchair as the Associate Director (with Angela Chaplin) on Cappuccino Strip with a strong background in, and views on cultural community development. The merging of art, economics and public spaces—according to Di Shaw—has “injected profound change in the treatment of community based projects”.

Performers and audience met on the platform at Fremantle Railway Station guided by the glorious sounds of The Joys of the Women choir. Actors Rose Lenza, Steve Shaw, Peter Findley and Jackie Kerin led audiences on a historical, cultural and theatrical journey through the streets of Fremantle, weaving their way through plazas, malls and coffee shops.

Aside from the four professional actors and musician, this exciting piece of theatre featured three choirs, a young dance ‘crew’ and initiatory aprons for the audience (you had to be there…). Cappuccino Strip adopted an interactive, democratic and celebratory approach to contemporary theatre. Open community workshops and extensive research provided a richly textured script taking as one key focus the life of Italian immigrant, Nunzio Cumina, who introduced Fremantle to the art of drinking coffee on the sidewalk.

Cappuccino Strip concluded with a parade by audience and cast members through Cappuccino Strip itself—the main drag in Fremantle—carrying large papier maché coffee cups on litters and singing an ode to the joys of cappuccino, macchiato, cafe latté and the long black. Apart from the general silliness and fun of taking over the street, the parade made reference to three major cultural events in Fremantle: the Blessing of the Fleet, the Festival of Fremantle Parade and the May Day March.

The rewards of working with a community active in its own decision-making processes are both subtle and profound—celebrating the cultural differences but simultaneously bridging the needs of sub-cultures. Festivals, parades, performances are all cultural rituals which can reclaim the streets with dancing, laughter, and innovation—the taking over of space.

–

Veda Dante is an electronic media journalist and media consultant resident in Perth.

Confronted on the cover with the growling faces and bared claws of five women acting, I wonder what is in store inside. A quick flick reveals few photos but there is a caption for the cover image—Women’s Theatre Collective presents Sacrifices: A Fable About the Women’s Movement. And in those words is told a story or two about this book which is a survey of the American feminist theatre movement compiled from interviews. The documentary evidence provides a readable account of the many small and intense groups formed as a result of the women’s movement in the 1970s, covering not dissimilar ground to Peta Tait’s book Original Women’s Theatre which is quoted by Canning—a significant first for an Australian theatre academic to be acknowledged in the US.

Its primary contention is that feminist theatre is drawn from women’s experience, and reflects and affirms women’s experience to its audience. Instead of problematising the idea of authenticity or the category of experience, parts of the book sound like the confessional forums of Oprah Winfrey with an American privileging of the personal voice: “I remember feeling totally affirmed as a woman…”. But how can the primary interest of all the interviews be experience? What about style, passion, aesthetics, theatricality, history, performance processes, the language or theatre itself? For anyone interested in those questions, the book provides little access—the index is mostly a list of shows and names, such as the “Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell—acronym WITCH” and the only general categories are ‘collectives’, ‘consciousness-raising’, ‘festivals’, ‘oral history’, ‘transformations’. And there lies another story which makes it seem ‘all wrong’ to praise, and not re-examine, the existence of an “It’s All Right to Be Woman” theatre.

Teiji Furuhashi died on 29 October 1995 in Kyoto, Japan, of an AIDS related illness—he was 35 years old.

I first met Teiji in Kyoto when I was researching the exhibition Zones of Love—contemporary art from Japan which toured Australasia 1991-92. Although he always denied that he was the leader of Dumb Type (or that there was any leader in the group), he was very much the public, internationalist face of the group and his energy was palpable even if his authority within Dumb Type was more covert.

Dumb Type began, and continues, as a loose group of theorists, visual artists, architects and performers. Most met each other when they were students at Kyoto University. Bored by the contemporary scene of the early 1980s and the vacuousness of much of Japanese society, but energised by teachers such as artist Yasumasa Morimura and theorist Akira Asada, Teiji Furuhashi and Dumb Type began to make provocative installations and then performances which quickly propelled them onto the international stage.

When I met Teiji in 1989 and watched the documentation of Dumb Type’s work I decided immediately that they would come to Australia and perform as part of Zones of Love. It is unusual to meet people who are so young, so organised and so specific about what they are doing—and Teiji was that. The work crossed media boundaries (video, film, performance, sound, architecture…) in highly innovative ways, and it addressed the contemporary condition of both Japan and the technological world in which we now live. Teiji never quite believed that I could achieve my aim of getting the group to Sydney because it was such an expensive project and because of the difficulty of raising money (the Japanese government was most reluctant to fund such work), but with a lot of help and two months to go, assistance was found and Dumb Type performed pH in Sydney at the MCA.

This piece electrified the audience with its energy, technological expertise and enigmatic performance styles which presented a bleak and elegant view of contemporary life. And each night after the performance the members of the group would change into drag of one sort or another and go to perform in bars around the city as Julie Andrews or the OK Girls. These people knew how to party.

In 1994 Dumb Type returned to Australia and performed their new work S/N at the Adelaide Festival. S/N deals explicitly with sexual and racial difference in the Japanese context. For Teiji, this was a painful piece because it was about himself and his journey through one of the world’s most rigid and conservative societies as a homosexual and HIV+. Again after each performance the party would begin, and later in Sydney at Newtown and Oxford Street clubs the novel drag acts would utterly delight the audience.

Over the last five years Teiji’s bouts of illness grew longer and it was with great regret that Dumb Type had to cancel a tour to Brazil during Mardi Gras in 1995. Teiji and the group returned to Kyoto from North America where his solo installation Lovers was being exhibited to much acclaim in New York and Toronto. Lovers is an homage to the artist’s friends and lovers, a complex and elegiac piece where Teiji and eight other performers become projections of light in a dark room—their actions mingling with words, sentences and the music for which Teiji was also renowned.

Dumb Type will continue to tour S/N to Hong Kong, New Zealand and Europe through 1996. Lovers is currently touring France and thereafter other European venues until the end of this year. A new Dumb Type piece, Monkey Business, in collaboration with the Danish group Hotel Pro Forma (appearing at the 1996 Adelaide Festival in Orfeo) and New York architects Diller + Scofidio, will premiere next year. Most recently Teiji featured in the SBS documentary Hell Bento!!, and a compilation of Dumb Type’s music is available from Spiral Garden/Wacoal Art Center, Tokyo.

Teiji was a perfectionist, an innovator and highly creative in whatever form he worked. His credo was “try harder”, and people always did.

Judy Annear is Curator of Photography at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Something that strikes me is that your work is very human, not abstract. In Inhabitation, at Sidetrack Theatre last year, the particular weight of those doors seemed very funny, because you had to wonder what these people were doing this for, carrying around these monumentally unwieldy objects. Similarly in D-VOID, recently shown on SBS TV, I liked the caricatures. I also wondered how aware you were of why people might find it funny.

AS I’ve been told that the concerns with which we’re working in the shows are not visible to the audience. Friends have commented that a Gravity Feed performance can be like watching the Twelve Tasks of Hercules, but that’s not the intention. In fact my interest is the opposite, to actually be anti-spectacular. Inhabitation demonstrated the effects of complying with or resisting gravity, of building and dismantling. It was about inhabiting the spaces that we built, the set and the theatre space, whilst in a constant struggle with that set.

AS The weight was incidental, but it was real. The humour is partly in juxtaposing types, selecting people of different sizes, body build, ages. We’re not trying to pre-determine where it’s going to be funny but we already know it will be because of the structure, those five people, and how serious we are about doing it. My interest in random events supports a respect for humorous content.

What the caricatures create is about people living in the world, a very human thing. When you or Ari Ehrlich are on stage, I don’t get the sense that it’s an act, despite the artistry behind it.

AB I think that’s a good thing. The body itself is our material, stripped, but marked by history, culture and upbringing. We inhabit multiple bodies: traditional, emotional, physical bodies, imaginary bodies, bodies of knowledge. In terms of Butoh, we strive to speak to an original or pre-cultural body, loading it down with imagery. The images Ari and I negotiate are not for the body, but are about the situation, and the tasks being performed within that. We don’t think about it as imaginary. We’re trying to generate an atmosphere—the performance event—and that atmosphere is real.

AS Density is certainly something that interests me. The strongest image perhaps is as if the body were inside a slab of rock, vibrating ever so minimally, suspended inside, matter giving way to matter, bodies pitted against other bodies, raw material. If we use doors, the body is pitted against the doors. If we use fire or ice, it’s more than metaphor. It’s direct substance of which we and our small world are made.

When you talk about the work, it sometimes seems quite different from what it can be about for an audience.

AS From my point of view, the work is developed from an intuitive response to the possibilities of a space. Then comes a long process, sorting ideas, references, options, possibilities, readings and misreadings. When it comes back down to working, it does tend to be physical and intuitive again. I trust that source material has become deeper content.

Do the sequences of events arise from the physicality of it or from somewhere else?

AS The work is about the atmosphere it’s attempting to establish. It isn’t made purely listening to the body dialogue. The sound environments created for us by Rik Rue are basically synonymous with what we’re doing now, and make it real. His apprehension of the world complements mine. As soon as I have a structure that can be communicated, I take him to the space. We won’t discuss the sound. Sometimes he’ll ask me questions, but usually he stops me before I’ve told him as much as I want to. And he’ll go away and come back with a composition which seems invisible when you first listen to it on cassette because it already fits the space.

When you talk about the space, it’s something that’s a physical, dense thing, full of matter already.

AB Traditionally, Gravity Feed colonises, inhabits, impregnates, infiltrates, reinterprets the venue. We’ll bring the 24 doors to The Performance Space as a metaphor for the fabric of our built environment. In Inhabitation many of the tasks dealt with moving the doors or building with them. The new show is a continuation of this, and we’re editing quite severely because we felt we failed in our contract with the audience the last time.

The new show will be based on our response to the presence of an audience. Perhaps the contract I talked about is not with the audience, but with ourselves—that we will more fully address their presence as inseparable from the event. My sense of obligation to the audience is that I owe them an intelligence which may be enacted in any number of ways. I also operate within a history of performance art, where the primary concept is being demonstrated either on the body, spatially or temporally. For example, the artist is hidden under the floor, or the event has already happened.

At The Performance Space we know many of our audience, the history of the kind of shows that have been there, almost every nook and cranny, how it’s been used. There are certain foregone conclusions which we want to undermine. Our focus is in looking at old things afresh, overlooked things, until they spring out again.

The members of Gravity Feed are Alan Schacher, Ari Ehrlich, Dennis Beaubois, Tim Rushton, Jeff Stein. In the House previews at The Performance Space, Sydney March 16 and 17, then runs 20-31 March.

Jacqui Carroll and John Nobbs of Brisbane’s Frank Productions talk with Julia Postle about performance and the classic text.

The reputation of Brisbane-based Frank Productions is slowly but surely spreading as they develop a body of work that includes The Tragedy of Oedipus, The Tale of Macbeth and Orpheus. The company is committed to careful development rooted in rigorous training and in sustaining an on-going ensemble, so it might be a while before an extended season of their work will be seen outside of Brisbane.

Why do you choose to combine the training method of Suzuki Tadashi with classical drama. Is it a logical relationship for you, or is it something more exploratory?

JC It’s pretty logical. To present the classics, the performers have to be, in a sense, as large as the material they’re presenting. But up there on stage you’re as tall as you are. To reach the audience, Oedipus has to be larger than life, the actor has to be totally convincing. Mr Suzuki was the first person who came into our lives who had investigated this and developed a series of exercises which made the actor physically more palpable for the audience. Instead of a person standing there, the actor was actually driving energy into the audience, occupying positive space, not negative space. And to do this you have to be amazingly energised, amazingly driven. You’ve got to wake the body up; you’ve really got to be there in the moment. At the end of the day, if you’ve got these actors who look like eagles, you can’t present works that belong to sparrows.

In your production of The Tragedy of Oedipus it’s that strength of the performers which is so powerful. It seems that the training is a really pervasive force then.

JC It’s not as easy as it would seem. Once you get it, you’ve got to keep working at it. If the body is not primed for action, then the voice isn’t. And the more we explore the text, we find it’s extraordinary how much more energised the actor has to be. You’ve got to do the training to get to that point, because you don’t even know you’ve got a body until someone forces you to do the training and makes you come up with answers to various problems. I wanted to develop the actor who could do it, and then I wanted to develop the works that would expose and reveal the actor who could do it. I was very much on a journey of not only getting into the body of the actor, but also making theatre works that would actually reveal what we have created.

The other thing we are very aware of is the audience. The only reason you stand on stage is for the audience. That sounds pretty obvious. But there’s often a feeling of people acting amongst themselves, to each other; as if somehow their personal exchange on stage will transfer across the footlights. But I’ve got to engage you. Mr Suzuki went back to the Greek ideal; that the actors were there to tell a good story, and to tell it to the audience. They were the ciphers through which the material of the story passed. That’s why they’ve got to be energised, because they’re carrying the weight of the text with them. You can’t just be casual about that; it’s got to be driven through the body to work. And nobody can just wander in and take a position with Frank Productions. They’ve got to go through the training, because they don’t even know what we’re talking about until they spend a year thumping the floor and standing on one leg, looking at you and engaging you. It’s extraordinary.

So how extensive is the research before the rehearsal process? You must really play with the texts?

JN You use many sources to gain different views of the work; rather than sticking to one thing we’re looking at all aspects of the myth. And Jacqui basically accumulates the text over many months and we then rehearse over a long period. It’s very important that it does take a long time so that we don’t have this last-minute rush business.

And we’ve come to believe in the power of repetition, because the more you repeat something, the more the false ornamentation falls away. So it’s very important to us that we do come back and do works like Orpheus —this will be our third performance over three years. We’re doing the same things we did before, but we’re making it interesting again. And most theatre groups eschew that, because they think it destroys the creativity. But if you look at something like the Dying Swan solo from Swan Lake, you’ve got to do the same thing that everyone else has done, but you’ve got to make it different.

JC You may say that you do a small work just to explore something because you’re on your way to something greater, but once you create the big work then you’ve got to hang onto that and keep exploring it.

JN Once you get used to the idea of watching the same thing, you can actually see something new each time. They might be very subtle differences, but they’re also strong at the same time. And then the audience gets a chance to see the same work again, with the same performers or new performers, and to watch people go through different journeys. So it’s about performing, it’s not about technology. And the text is the starting point for something. The text is the intellectual information, but the emotional and spiritual information comes from the actor.

And there’s also that idea of everything connected to the physical, which is probably related to your dance backgrounds.

JN When I stopped dancing professionally, Jacqui said to me, “You should get back to the stage, it’s where you belong”. I couldn’t recapture my dance career because I was that much older. But I was looking for a way to amalgamate acting with dance. Suddenly we found a way to do that; to amalgamate the specificity of the text with movement.

Deborah Levy is a mongrel. “I was born in South Africa and we left the hideous apartheid regime when I was nine and I then grew up in England. My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Protestant. So there I am stranded between all those points with all of them trying to claim me as theirs.” Not that Levy claims this as an exotic or even unusual perspective from which to view the contemporary Western world. Far from it. “The idea that there is a pure culture in our contemporary world is totally untrue. Our society is impure—no wonder cultural identity is what everyone is talking about.”

It is of course a perspective with particular relevance to Australia and its increasingly complex cultural landscape. In that context, Levy’s visit to Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane in late 1995 as part of the Playworks 10th Anniversary Festival, Playing with Time, was a welcome chance to encounter the writer and her work.

For what is fascinating about Levy’s recent theatrical work is not only that it celebrates cultural diversity on a social level but that it discovers that diversity within the individual herself. Any sense of gender essentiality or an individual authentic self are undermined during the fluid investigations of identity in The B File or in the careful and witty deconstruction of truth in relationships at the heart of An Amorous Discourse In The Suburbs Of Hell.

Theatre has long provided a stage for the interplay between truth and reality and Levy exploits this to its extreme. The B-File has a semblance of the form of personal confessional performances of recent years. But the kitsch costumes, the controvertible biographical facts of the five dramatis personae (all called Beatrice, although all supposedly of different cultural backgrounds) and the presence of an Interpreter as an unreliable bridge between us and them combine to make it clear we are witnessing not the tale(s) of a search for an authentic self but the careful construction of an image of inauthenticity in a world of difference. “A world without difference seems to me to be an appalling world.”

Levy’s fluid sense of identity has caused her, in her more recent theatre texts, to develop for each work a form that is an integral part of her “interrogation” of the themes that fascinate her. In other words, she has been forced to jettison both ‘narrative’ and ‘character’ as being too overdetermined for her shakily determined world. “I’m not in the least bit interested in narrative in the theatre (although interestingly she is becoming more so in her novels). I really don’t come to the theatre to be told stories that the playwright already knows.” This was not always the case. Her early work is structured along more recognisable dramatic lines. But Levy recounts with a mixture of joy and horror the experience of going to a performance of one of her plays—produced successfully by the Royal Shakespeare Company—and hating the result so much she realised she could never write like that again. In hindsight she realised how much the very form of the well-made play dictated the manner in which she could investigate her themes. “In my early days, when I called my texts ‘plays’, I was required to write scenes that I didn’t like and I had to write them in not because I wanted to but because the form of the play dictated it—and I used to dread it. And then I realised that if you wanted to zoom into someone’s head—their inner life—you could write that life and record it and present it as a part of the visual world of the text.”

In throwing off the cumbersome form of the dramatic play (a “dead and dying form that sits very uncomfortably with any kind of expression of the contemporary world”), Levy is able to concentrate on crafting distilled theatrical images that work simultaneously on several levels. The texts are closely choreographed visually in order to provide strict frameworks for her verbal language—a language both highly imaginative and filled with argot, advertising jargon and songs. This is the common language of the inter(mixed) nationalist. It is also a language of the eternal present and works with the eschewing of narrative and character to undermine the theatre’s obsession with cause and effect. “Naturalistic characters always come on the stage with too much baggage. They rarely allow the audience space to project onto. That’s why I prefer working with persona. It gives space for the audience to imaginatively construct and reconstruct what it is they are seeing. Theatre is obsessed with explaining every moment and its causation in a way that doesn’t interest me much.”

Levy, like her plays, is lively, inquisitive and, thankfully, full of humour. “My early plays were rather dour. I had this idea that humour was what you did in your life and in your art it shouldn’t be there. I find that absurd now. I think everything, even the saddest moments, should, perhaps in a dark way, be very funny.”

Performer Deborah Pollard went to Kalimantan and East and Central Java, Indonesia in 1993 with Canberra’s Jigsaw Theatre Company, performing Bruce Keller’s Treehouse, a play about environmental issues. In rural areas the company were mobbed by intrigued locals. The performances though were greeted with silence by children even though honey bears had been substituted for koalas and komodo dragons for kangaroos. The closer to the cities, the better the response. But what stayed with Deborah was a curiosity about audience response in a very different culture. “We couldn’t rely on our old tricks. They weren’t communicating anything to our audiences.

“I went back to Indonesia in 1994 on a quick self-funded tour to put my culture shock in perspective with a view to meeting contemporary artists and to see how their processes differed from mine and whether I would think that the work they were producing would translate to an Australian audience.”

Deborah asked to meet installation artists or performance artists. The latter didn’t mean anything. “Seni installasi” (installation art) was considered “a little bit wanky”, considered to be produced by “failed artists” who “have no skills”. “I said okay, I want to meet some of these failed painters. So I went to Jogjakarta, an arty city. It was fantastic. I met an abundance of installation artists and foremost, I would say, would be Heri Dono who’s visited Australia many times.

“As soon as I met Sutanto—he’s a journalist, a visual artist and a composer who works just outside of Jogjakarta in a little place called Mendut which is very close to the famous Borobodur Temple—I knew that he was the one that I could actually work with. Everyone had said ‘You must meet Sutanto. You must know, he’s crazy’. He’s eccentric but I wouldn’t say he’s crazy. He’s a very critical man and he likes to produce ‘happenings’, still pretty much an unknown form in Indonesia and seen as pretty bizarre. He’s out on a limb but because he’s a journalist, he has a huge press network. I went back in 1995 to work with Sutanto.”

Deborah also worked with Teater Byar in Pekalongan in Central Java, a town famous for its batik but not for performance. “I thought it might be interesting to work rurally as well as in Jogjakarta but it proved to be a very conservative, very Muslim town. We had to be very careful about what we put on so that it wouldn’t offend socially, politically or religiously. That’s one of the problems with working in Indonesia. The censorship is quite phenomenal. It’s embedded in the social fabric.”

She worked with an enthusiastic group including the local religious teacher, the tailor, the English teacher, someone who did batik, someone who sold chickens—a range of people. “There was no funding, of course, so they had to have a way to make a living outside of their art.” Before Deborah arrived, Teater Byar was doing text-based work in a culture committed to narrative. “After a month and a half I moved to Jogjakarta but the actors in Teater Byar were so overwhelmed with all the new information I’d given them in the workshop that they somehow found the money and a lot of them came to Jogja. They wanted to be in the next project. As a result of that, we had actors and farmers and visual artists working on a project with Sutanto called Postcards. It made a nice mix.”

In workshops Deborah offered Suzuki Tadashi training and drama games while the performers demonstrated how they created performances and the martial arts training base they used, probably learned from the military. “They loved the Suzuki. It felt very strange to me, teaching Asians another Asian form of theatre training.

“I wanted to introduce the idea of site-specific work which proved to be quite difficult. The performers were afraid of public opinion within such a small community. If they were seen doing strange things what would it mean? They wanted to use natural sites. I preferred the railway station but we used a waterfall: it was easy to reach from Pekalongan and was visually overwhelming. My role was to create a structure they could work in. They wanted to stand in the waterfall. We added umbrellas (I was encouraging them to think about irony and juxtaposition), and then they wanted to add choreography and beeps and whistles to go with the movements. The sounds were drowned out by the waterfall. They called the piece Nissa Hujan—rainy season—which is great because the work felt monsoonal. Their movement was influenced by traditional dance not because they’ve been trained in it but because traditional dance is still alive and kicking in Indonesia”.

The work Deborah created with Sutanto was Postcards. “I wanted to create a piece that was coming from me. I didn’t want to delve into cultural details that I didn’t understand or social issues that I could understand but felt I had no place in.” As an outsider she was always struck by the rice fields as beautiful and exotic even though they were part of her everyday life in Java. “I wondered how we might make the everyday activities of Mendut appear exotic or different to the local villagers and the first thing that came to my mind was changing the colour of their hats. They would stand out against the vibrancy of the green rice field. We thought this was a good starting point. One thing I learned immediately is that Indonesians don’t appreciate minimal art which is something I had picked up in Japan and quite liked. I was content to stick with the hats. When we tried them out, it worked. People stopped and looked and said ‘What’s this?’

“But everyone participating said, ‘Oh, but we’ve got to do more. We’ve got to entertain them. It’s boring’. I wanted to explain that I didn’t want it to be a theatre performance, it was an installation. They quite liked the idea and it fits in quite well with Indonesian audiences who are quite used to wayang kulit where you can scan, come and go and fall asleep. So we created a structure of three hours a day over three days and hoped that the local police wouldn’t shut us down. Every day Sutanto would come back and say, ‘Another day through. Aren’t we lucky’. We’d worried that the pink hats would be seen as Communist but the Indonesian flag is red and white, so the local police authorities could read the pink hats and white shirts as part of a patriotic performance celebrating 25 years of independence.”

Deborah gave the process over to the actors and to Javanese artists who embellished the work with everyday elements like traditional farming songs, the Islamic call to prayer, the formal rest time. Many villagers came to see the work and stayed a long time and tourist buses made quick stops to snap the eleven farmers and eight actors at work—like postcards.

“I don’t know if I had a higher purpose, other than my belief in being quite simple in the work and knowing that sooner or later it’ll have layered meanings. Other artists contributed, for example Untun who read the artists’ statement I’d prepared and said ‘That’s very different from the way that I work. I produce from here (pointing to his head)’. He talked about creating a farmer’s dream. He covered himself in mud and connected himself to a bamboo pole, which is what the water buffalo are usually tied to for ploughing the earth, to represent drudgery, while observing wealthy farmers singing and dancing, and speaking on mobile phones.

“Without Sutanto I don’t know how we could have done it. Many of these people speak Javanese, not Indonesian. Half the time they speak a dialect from Mendut. Sutanto had trouble communicating with them, let alone me. He ran workshops for certain sections of the installation in which the farmers would run riot with their farming implements, playing them like musical instruments, imitating animal sounds of the farm—Sutanto’s a composer and he loves working with sound—old farmers making frog sounds so different from our perception. Quite beautiful.”

Asialink, the Australian funding agency that provides artists and writers with, amongst other things, residencies and exchanges, is assisting Deborah to return to Jogjakarta for three months this year, to work with the Teater Asdrafi, something akin to a film and drama school—“some 20 very eager students, very creative in their movement and quite abstract, which I still find unusual when the main push within theatre is quite narrative”. She’ll work with Sutanto again and invitations will be sent to installation artists to participate. “The main thrust of this project is cultural perceptions about the sea in a site specific work delving into Javanese traditions, mythology and contemporary beliefs. I want to work with fishermen and streetsellers as well to keep contact with everyday life.”

Asked about the dynamic of her exchange with Indonesian culture, Deborah points out that “every familiarity is taken away from you, from language to food to how you sleep to your religious and cultural base—it’s all gone. You have to learn to go with the flow but at the same time you have to have a way of working as an artist: that’s what you bring and even that is challenged and that is good for an artist.” As for the influence of her Indonesian experiences on her work in Australia, she says that the brief work Mother Tongue Interference, with its dense context of 30 cups of Indonesian coffee, clove cigarettes, alien sounds and a litany of ‘copings’, is a precursor to her new, longer work coming to Sydney’s The Performance Space in May, Fish Out of Water. “I’ll be dealing with themes of culture shock and perceptions of the East from the West. I’m going to build a rice field on the proscenium arch of The Performance Space. It’ll be a cross between stand-up cabaret and performance art: a genre without a name—thank god!”

Deborah says that she’s not out to reproduce Asian culture, her work here is about the expatriate experience. “The radical pleasure of rootlessness?” “Exactly,” she says. Did she perform Mother Tongue Interference in Indonesia? “I was too scared. I performed it at an Indonesian Night in Australia and that was the scariest thing I’d ever done. I got out on stage with a basket on my head and I could feel the audience thinking, ‘What are you doing?’ But when I started speaking, in English and in my Indonesian bits, thank god there were people who could understand English. It took a while but when it clicked that I was making fun of myself, they found it hilarious, particularly the Balinese. They’d seen this batik clad person walking down their streets before.”

Tess De Quincey and Stuart Lynch brief Keith Gallasch about 100 collaborative, free, unrehearsed performances scheduled for Sydney in May.

Posing the questions “Can a city be danced” and “To what extent do artists form the shape, sound and feeling of a city?”, two Butoh-trained performers will collaborate directly and indirectly with Sydney artists (performers, musicians, visual artists etc.) in one hundred performances and sites. The discussion began with Lynch and De Quincey describing where they are working now and why.

SL We had been doing many performances across Europe and Australia and it was becoming difficult to do certain choreographic projects that needed a firmer base. So in a way, the next step was to form one base in Sydney and one in Denmark, and to see if that could work.

TD We’ve wanted to bring our work into some kind of arena which makes sense in relation to an Australian content as well, so that an exchange can take place. I guess I’m fascinated by the sense of a global basis and having people from different nationalities working together. I’ve been doing this for a long time, but I want it to make more sense, with a rich load of cultural referencing. I can find all nationalities in Sydney.

SL The idea is also that the project could form a formula, a module. More like a circle, not so specifically focused on two people. So we are collaborating with many different Sydney artists.

SL We’re not sure yet. Because of the ‘new’ Europe it’s in a very different frame of mind from Australia. On the other hand, very exciting things are happening in the arts in both places cutting across practices.

You’ve added a high level of chance by planning one-off spontaneous collaborations with a lot of artists.

TD This project is really built around people, artists from Sydney who represent varying aspects of artistic discipline and the city. They represent certain areas of language and definition. We wanted to get hold of this whole grid of what Sydney is and represents.

SL I’ve been coming here since ‘89, My father lives here but I grew up in England and with the myth of Australia. I don’t know it as well as people born and bred, but fairly well.

TD My mother was born here and her family is here. I wasn’t born here but my knowledge is strongly affected by my family background.

It’s good sometimes to have a sort of semi-grasp of a place, that outside-inside thing. Even for locals, it’s a tricky city. Like many a metropolis, it’s highly pluralised, hard to define.

SL The most difficult aspect is the size of it. To what extent can we deal with that?

It’s a time of rich exploration of the city in literature, visual arts and performance. There’s the debate about the Burley Griffin vision of Canberra, Richard Sennet’s new book about cities, Peter Greenaway’s big city projects, the 1996 Adelaide Festival focus on architecture, Adelaide and Canberra. Your approach, though, is quite different—involving many locals, very open-ended and looking for spontaneous responses.

TD We’re talking about a compression, a combustion, by bringing many things together. The immediacy of meeting and the ‘non-preparation’ can offer an enormous space to the collaborators. When we work we often have long preparation of basic training but we’ll actually put a performance together almost instantly. So we wanted to see how this would work in terms of meeting other people, A musician might rock in without any preparation and just do their thing on the spot. A visual artist might spend months thinking about it, or as long as we can give them when we first make the actual initial contact. We don’t want to meet and define whole areas of—“Well, are we going to do this, or are we going to do that?” It’s a matter of how we can make this space come together and open up the space for meeting through our practices.

SL What we’ve done is ask several people to choose for us, adding to the element of chance. We don’t want to send out some stiff questionnaire: “Do you want to be involved in non-narrative/narrative performance? Please include a CV.”

SL Yes and no. There’s got to be a middle ground. But I imagine each collaboration will define its own codes and parameters.

TD We did ask our consultants to choose on the basis of finding people who represent different areas, generations and practices. It has nothing to do with whether or not we relate to their work, absolutely nothing. That’s going to be the challenge when we meet these people.

SL We’re investigating different venues all around the city, and hopefully many of the artists will also want to choose a specific site particularly for this collaboration.

TD The cross-points that spark: “Oh, my grandmother’s bathroom would be fabulous to do something in,” or “There’s a nook just down the street that I’ve had my eye on for years”.

Will you begin these spontaneous collaborations with a performative element of your own which the other person slots into, or do you wait until you see what they do?

SL I think it’s going to depend on the relationships being made as we meet. Probably we’ll have to define new strategies for each collaboration.

You write about “assaulting the language of dance and performance’. Now, there has been an ongoing assault on the language of dance and performance in theory and especially in practice for many years. For example, you acknowledge there’s a lot of interdisciplinary work that has happened in Sydney. How will one hundred meetings with a wide range of artists intersecting by chance affect notions of performance and dance?

TD One of the things that sparked this project was talking with a sculptor whose work we were immensely impressed by. When we actually came to mention performing in that space she looked absolutely amazed and said she couldn’t possibly envisage it. Our jaws dropped because the possibility had been so obvious to us. Why is there this gap? It must be possible to bridge. Is the problem because sculpture is assumed to relate to inanimation? So we started out partly from frustration. The issue lies in the relationship and awareness between history and matter and space.

SL We want to work with people who might never have even considered it. Sometimes the practice and theory get lost, they don’t meet, and what we very much want is for the theory to come from the practice of working with these people.

So you’d rather work with those who don’t already have some kind of formulated notion of the interdisciplinary? Because in Sydney there’s such a strong interknit performance scene, it’s very easy to create self-fulfilling projects.

SL I hope it’s a danger that we will get over by asking others to choose artists who represent a broad range of language.

TD Yes, but on the other hand, the ‘assault’ is also on our practice: the reality of performing three times a day is a massive assault on us and our language. We’re really wondering what is going to happen.

SL Our language has developed not only from our work together, but also from our experiences in Japan, and from the people we’ve been working with over the past few years. For us it’s very much about how that language can define these collaborations, and meet each performance, but also how it can be changed. How strong is that language, and how will it meet and move with the challenge from artists coming to work with us?

There is a bigger question for us at the moment of the legitimisation of Europeans working within the Butoh tradition. What we see a lot of is European performers who copy the image of a Japanese making Butoh. Without being xenophobic, I think it necessary at present to cut out the middle man. The actual essence of the works can also be found in a non Japanese body.

You trained with Min Tanaka and the Mai Juku Performance Company. Did Tanaka’s performance Subject, where he travelled the length of Japan and performed every day for three months, inspire this event?

TD Laterally. This was 20 years ago. He was talking about “dancing the space” and “in the space in which you are the space”. There’s now a great deal of talk of kinaesthetics and the body in the environment. For us, it’s great. Suddenly we’re talking with people who hadn’t hitherto really understood how we work in terms of the body as environment and this is straight from the tradition of Min Tanaka and his company. To go back to your point about Compression 100 being done around cities and whether it’s a physical or architectural sense, I think the body is the city.

The word ‘dance’ crops up every now and again in your notes as distinct from performance. Do you make a serious distinction between performance and dance?

TD For me, performing in Japan has often been extremely different from performing in Europe. The nature of the language that exists around performance in Japan is different. There are things which are considered natural in Japan but for which there is no language in the West. If you’re working within a Butoh tradition it has another set of definitions. As soon as you move outside this tradition it can be immensely problematic: the whole question of nothingness and to dance nothingness and to be nothingness and to have emptiness. For a Westerner, there is no language around emptiness.

TD What I would consider to be dance, my audience won’t necessarily consider to be so in Australia. On the other hand it shifts around. If you’re in Paris there’s a lot more language around it because they’ve had Butoh performances since the seventies. But again, this has its own limits and it’s also very Parisian.

SL What’s interesting is that I do know when it’s dance and when it’s performance—I can recognise the differences, and yet where do they meet and where are they totally different? Are they ever the same? It’s a question of semantics. I very much want to go back to Japan and talk with Min again in order to ask him these questions. He’s always talked about ‘dancing the space’, so intrinsically it was ‘dance’ although his relation to ‘performance’ is strongly defined by ‘performance art’. He says ‘I dance the space’ Well, do you not ‘perform’ the space also? Whatever, we’re asking “Can a city be danced?” Or performed.

Sarah Miller explores the relationship between politics, art and policy in WA.

Talking about state governments in terms of their artistic policies can seem like a contradiction in terms. Historically, their role has been the provision of ongoing infrastructure support for flagship institutions: state theatres, state operas, state ballets, state museums, state art galleries, state libraries and their regional equivalents. These are understood as the mechanisms through which mainstream Australia articulates its traditional (sic) values and aspirations. These activities receive dominant support (financial, political and media) as the constitutive identity process of the culture.

The nature of these ongoing commitments may differ in degree and emphasis from state to state but, generally speaking, there is little left in the budget to support the activities of individuals, groups and organisations whose interests and concerns—stating the obvious—are rarely at one with the interests of government. Hence the emphasis in recent months on the structural changes taking place at the Australia Council—historically at least understood as the major provider of direct financial support to artists and contemporary practice in general and, perhaps most importantly, at arm’s length from the interests of government.

In Western Australia however, separated from what are understood as the primary centres of power (Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne aka the Golden Triangle), the issues are perceived somewhat differently. It’s not uncommon, for instance, to hear the Australia Council referred to as the ‘NSW Council’, perpetuating a popular myth about financial benefits accruing to artists and groups living in NSW. Bitterness also attaches to the fact that so-called national institutions such as the Australian Opera and Ballet, resident in Sydney and Melbourne respectively, rarely (if ever) make their way across the Nullarbor despite the fact that WA tax dollars also support these institutions. West Australians tend to be cynical about the notion of national institutions generally, from which they perceive they derive little benefit. This rather begs the question of just who does benefit but more of that on another occasion.

In Perth where around 97 per cent of the population of WA live, artists, groups and organisations take for granted a rather more direct relationship to their Parliamentarians and understand the Western Australian Department for the Arts (WA DFTA) as their primary source of funding (at least potentially), of information and of mediation.

Funding occurs in two streams. On the one hand are those institutions—collectively known as the Arts Portfolio Authorities—directly funded by government through the minister’s office: the Library Information Services of WA (LISWA), the Western Australian Museum, the Art Gallery of WA, Screen West and the Perth Theatre Trust. It is perhaps worth mentioning in this context that the overall budget for arts and cultural activities in this state is around $59 million. Well over 50 per cent of these funds goes to the aforementioned institutions with LISWA picking up the lion’s share with core funding of more than $26 million.

This leaves around $13 million to be distributed by the Arts Investment Division of the WA DFTA in support of various infrastructure needs, individual artist support and projects. Their brief is enormous, encompassing Community Arts, Music, Dance, Literature, Visual Arts and Craft and Theatre as well as—under one heading—Multi-Arts, Marketing & Youth Projects, Regional Arts, Aboriginal Arts, Touring, Conferences, Seminars & Special Events, Creative Fellowships, Arts Agencies Program Funding and ‘Other’. It is true to say that Western Australia provides more direct support for the Arts than any other State in Australia.

State departments for the arts (DFTAs) are utterly dependent on their employer, the government of the day—in particular, the minister for the arts—and are bound to further that government’s interests. Unlike the Australia Council, a statutory body at arm’s length from government, a state DFTA must conform to the changing tides of political fortune. Peer committees are a courtesy and the minister for the arts has the right—albeit rarely exercised—to overturn any decision made by those peer assessment committees. It leads to a certain schizophrenia in both clients and staff, as staff seek to ensure the dictates of government are met while at the same time addressing the realities of the broader arts community. This slippery relationship, where the government purports to represent the needs of mainstream Western Australia, sits at odds with a frequently paternalistic and even punitive approach to artists and arts workers—never understood as bona fide—let alone to tax-paying members of the WA public.

I do not consider arts funding a right, nor is it to subsidise an industry, nor to ensure employment of artists and arts workers. It is to enable arts activities and product to reach the people of WA.

– The Minister for the Arts, the Hon. Peter Foss MLC, in a 1994 letter to WA arts workers

This message from the Minister (ironically) brings State Coalition Arts Policy into line with the rhetoric of a Federal Labor Government as demonstrated through Creative Nation and a restructured Australia Council.

A similar discomfort might be discerned in the relationship between the State Coalition Government—headed up by the ultra conservative Richard Court and with more than the usual number of rampaging Baptists on board—and the Department for the Arts itself with their rather closer relationship to the real needs and concerns of the arts community. Economic rationalism, wholesome family values and good clean fun are all emphasised by the current government with a special emphasis on law and order. While Richard Court continues to grandstand on the evils of Native Title and the need to undo the Mabo legislation, the Coalition arts policy prioritises Aboriginal Arts as “the great lost opportunity in WA tourism”! It is up to the WA DFTA to find a way to turn this exploitative approach into a working and consensual reality for Aboriginal peoples working within and without traditional communities.

The last 18 months have seen considerable changes at the WA DFTA, beginning, in 1994, with the introduction of a significant change in terminology. The State of Western Australia no longer funds or even grants financial assistance to individuals, companies or groups. Rather it ‘invests’ in a range of cultural activities and services. One well known arts identity in Perth has described this policy as the “open pit mining approach to arts funding”—investment as exploitation as opposed to sustainable development.

Underpinning this change lie several well worn but idiotic assumptions: first that artists, companies and arts organisations exist as bloated parasites on the emaciated body of the hard-working tax payer; second that the most urgent cultural imperative this country faces is weaning artists and arts workers off the ‘iron lung’ of arts funding; and third that the arts generally takes food out of the mouths of starving babies, hospital beds away from the sick, and resources away from the disabled. In the future, artists (presumably assumed to be white, middle class and able bodied) will be not only self-supporting but make a profit as well.

Further changes in 1995 came with the appointment of Dr Margaret Seares to the position of CEO at the DFTA. Seconded from the Music Department of the University of Western Australia, Dr Seares has already made her mark in the position, being seen as not only pragmatic but also even handed and accessible. Following the announcement of the 1995 Arts Investment decisions, the WA DFTA held a public meeting to explain the rationale behind the decisions and to announce its new priorities: Aboriginal Arts, Youth Arts, Country Touring and that new and nationally acclaimed artform area, Marketing. Given the uproar from the field, which generally did not feel increases to various flagships reflected these priorities, the DFTA acted quickly, initiating a series of working parties and strategies to address their concerns. A Youth Arts working party, a Research and Development Policy, strategies to support the development of artists working in multimedia and considerable rethinking on the proposed marketing consultancy, reflect a desire to engage with the arts community, an attitude somewhat at odds with that of government.

The relationship between government, the DFTA and the arts community—perhaps fortunately—is fraught with such contradictions. The issue, as with any policy, lies partly in the rhetoric but more importantly in the interpretation and enactment of that rhetoric. Whilst the DFTA has certainly not been so crass as to describe their new priorities in the language of the Coalition policy, it is interesting to revisit that policy, subtitled “More Jobs, Better Management”. For instance:

Recognise the role of the Family. The family is and will continue to be the focus for this awakening of interest [in the arts]. Artists and arts administrators should always provide encouragement to arts development through families. However, even the most artistic family cannot supply all needs in this area and our education system has a responsibility to help give children a grounding in the arts.

I am delighted to be able to say that the guidelines and policy are currently being rewritten.

So whilst the language of economic (ir)rationalism predominates and the flagships continue to dominate the fiscal and political playing field, it has to be said that moves are afoot to address some of the more outrageous omissions and blind spots. Beyond which, if it is true that the people get the government they deserve, perhaps the same can be said of artists and arts policy. If artists and arts workers in WA are committed to change, we will all need to work hard at what Rachel Fensham (RT 8) has described as “the collective process of imagining … determining what is exciting or important to do now” which lies beyond vested and parochial interests or the presumed universalism of a colonialist aesthetic.

In her occasional series on dance studio practices Rachel Fensham interviews Perth’s Alice Cummins

Alice Cummins, a Perth independent dancer, has a studio in the heart of Northbridge, Perth, from which she teaches and develops performance projects. Not only a teaching space, it nurtures a creative community of other artists and city people. Last year she began studying with Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen at the School for Body-Mind Centering in the U.S.

AC Five years ago. I was doing a project which could support me financially and I had already given a series of workshops attended by about 80 women. The studio enabled me to continue my practice and the community classes so they run together, or in parallel. It is a privilege to have a studio and I always have to finance it with other teaching.

AC It is both light and airy, connected not only to the city and the railway line but to an older and mixed Perth skyline. And the old man opposite always has flowers on his window sill.

It’s near good public transport, and some people cycle from inner city areas. It is fantastic to have close access to PICA (Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts), for me personally, and increasingly, for my students. It is near the cafes and drinks on the hotel balcony after Friday night’s class is a time of rich sharing.

RF Because of the spillover into other networks the class doesn’t seem to end.

AC Another artist Tony Osborne, my partner, shares the studio, and we sometimes feel we are creating a community. Young students I have taught over the years in other places come here and then go on to do work for Artrage and PICA. They set up a lively dialogue with me and the diverse people they meet in the studio.

Now people are starting to work together independently of me, and my long absence this year encouraged one group to hire the space and meet on a weekly basis. I think of it as “naming oneself as an artist”. I am not a little proud that this space which I helped to discover has encouraged people.

AC I try to offer three a week. On Monday evening alignment and locomotion followed by a separate session of contact improvisation. And on Fridays improvisation and performance. I borrowed the structure of this class from Al Wunder and Lynden Nichols in Melbourne. Positive feedback allows people to discover their own movement by working from their strength. If they are confident with vocal work they can move into other things later.

One visual artist came who was terrified but she had the desire to move. Each student has a private session, in which we can focus on what I have been seeing or what they choose to work on. All I needed to say to her was “your desire equals your fear” and she has never looked back. She teaches painting at the TAFE and has also been a street performer and done performance pieces. She says her body was really missing in her work and I am sure movement will influence her painting.

AC I have been able to use the studio for projects, such as an Art in Working Life project and the Big Foot Dance Project with Ran Dan Club. In 1994 we brought Llewelyn Wishart from Melbourne to give Body-Mind Centering workshops. During Space Eaters Chris Ryan and I taught here and while I was overseas, Independent New Choreographers hired the space for six weeks. This not only helped me to keep the studio, but it can also be liberating for emerging choreographers to work in a non-institutional space which offers other ways of seeing.

Two years ago I taught a summer intensive which was very popular. People love to be able to use their bodies every day and they also enable me to develop as a teacher. I have also offered women-only classes and I would like to teach a ‘Dancing with Women over 40’ course like Deborah Hay in the States. It becomes a question of how many personal resources I have left after other projects.

I don’t want to teach from a place of exhaustion, I want to teach from a place of fullness. The rewards are much greater. If I drag my body through the teaching practice, then I teach ‘the exhausted body’, even if as a dancer I can camouflage it.

AC Instead of playfulness, openness. Strangely, this recent performance work I did has an enormous amount of tension, but I could do it because my personal philosophy is to not teach from a stressed place. It allows more humour to come through. I can attribute that to lots of things, such as my family growing up or that I don’t teach here every day, just to make a living.

From the day I took this studio, it seems the different parts of my work have been inclusive of one another. My performance work informs my workshops and vice versa.

AC My life as an artist in Perth has sometimes been extremely lonely. But I know that other artists, different artists, make your life less lonely. The last five years for me have been filled with great professional friendships, with writers, visual artists, photographers, composers. I have worked with them, taught for them, we’ve set up a dialogue and we discuss our work, and it provides a richer dimension to my creative processes. It has also satisfied the intellectual curiosity I have about dancing, which I haven’t had from the dance world.

AC I have done a lot of solo work or small works with just two people—either a writer or a visual artist. I have an ability to be very generous but I also need this very private, reflective or deep meditation. Once I am in the studio, the space itself takes care of me. On the rare occasions when the work is not easy or the practice is difficult or a huge fatigue comes which you hadn’t expected or it is an emotional time, I give over to those feelings or move through them. I have developed a strong discipline in the gentlest meaning of that word. And it gives me immense pleasure.

It is about me coming here for three hours every morning to focus and to have a deep and slow preparation for moving. I don’t speak to anyone, people ask if they can ring me but I would never have a phone. Rarely does anyone knock on the door. I might do my yoga or write. It continually and quietly gives me space to imagine or to restore my imagination. I know that if I go to the studio, the ideas will come.

It is as if my body holds all my ideas, if I can just be there and listen, then they will arise. I am learning to be very astute and it is almost as if you can feel an idea emerging and to not push it. Just have the pen and paper close. That has given me an amazing sense of assurance and trust. It is always the practice. And it won’t happen at home or in a coffee shop, it will happen in here. Here I am allowed to not think about my domestic life or the turmoil of anything else. Here is like a sacred space.

In a search to develop an expanded awareness of human physicality, many contemporary dance artists find the boundaries of their familiar territory becoming blurred and indistinct, as if the more well practised and known a body’s motions become, the less fertile grounds they are for engendering meaning. Meryl Tankard’s Songs With Mara doesn’t so much blur these bounds as step over them, leaving them largely intact.

Within the series of 16 or more traditional and contemporary Bulgarian songs and instrumental pieces, inspiration for the movement seems to come not so much from the words, which have a simplicity of their own, but from within a compelling unity created by the dense homophonic voices and syncopated instrumental texture.

The first view of the dancers shows the women seated, spaced around an earth strewn stage, some with their own private pool of water at the foot of their chairs. With naked backs to the audience, they are lit as if to suggest an intimate female sensuality. They are still for a long time. Slight measured gestures—fingers at the back of the neck, stroking long hair—might wish to convey hidden sensual depths, but later it is certainly the complex sound textures, the movement of plucked strings and percussion and voices of Mara Kiek and the dancers that are immediately engaging.

Reminiscent of her Pina Bausch experience, Tankard’s Songs With Mara embraces a body image that has a familiar stylised elegance. Lyrical abandon in the upper body and arms, an ingenuous angularity and awkwardness of legs, all enacted with a classically well turned ankle, seems to do for the female image what short black frocks and stilettos have also done. There’s restrained passion conveyed by boundness: knees close together, a motif of hands tied at the wrists, the classic baring of the throat proclaiming vulnerability. Only the movement and weight of long hair expresses escape, tossed in arcs, drenched in the shallow pools, hurling water drops over the stage. These flung trails catch the light, making their own dance.

Choreographically one interesting piece uses a canonic progression, where the women, one by one, start a deceptively simple, imitative sequence of gestures. Travelling across the stage, their movement “voices” come together and separate again in small waves. At the side of the stage the men play a vigorous drumming.

The dancers sometimes enact working or washing motifs, the villagers’ sweat and toil perhaps reflected in the strategic aesthetics of water and earth. Because of the staging of some of the songs, it’s easy to read the role of Mara herself as if she is every rustic Bulgarian village’s wise woman. Her presence seems almost nurturing, setting rhythm and pace for a lot of the action, and as we know many of these performers were not previously skilled singers, their vocal work seems quite special and has enviable richness.

There was evident challenge in presenting both dancers and singers alike in a non-competitive, “communal” tradition. Everyone worked together and often you couldn’t be sure what the performers’ speciality was until their individual expertise was revealed in more virtuosic material. Even so, the worlds remained largely separate. Intimacy and warmth in a smaller venue than the Seymour Centre’s Everest Theatre might have fostered a more complex fusion. The relationship between a highly virtuosic theatrical tradition and the apparently simpler, more ritualised toing and froing of everyday existence was often expressed incongruously in an assumed rusticity and a coyness between the men and women, lying awkwardly with both the plangent vocal technique and more seductive body image.

In the context of ‘theatre’, dance and movement-based performance have typically been understood, and often practiced, as anti-intellectual and under-theorised. Similarly, dancers have been seen as bodies without minds, having a sort of animal vitality, having a certain commodity value in the market place, but incapable of intellectual rigour or analytical discussion and oblivious to the shifts in interrogative thought in other art forms which may or may not have implications for their own practice.

Hence Dancers are space eaters: directions in independent dance, a three week program which sought to create a context in which information could be shared, ‘intelligence gathered’, the theatrical deployed and the hierarchy between dance and other body-centred practices examined. Week 1 presented the touring program, 4 on the Floor curated by The Performance Space, Sydney. Week 2 comprised four movement workshops focussing on differing approaches to performance. Week 3 consisted of forums, performances, papers and screenings, bringing together self-producing artists from Perth, Melbourne and Sydney.

Generally speaking, what the final week demonstrated was the vitality of so-called ‘independent’ artists—a much debated and closely interrogated term—whose practice would seem to offer not only new physical but also new intellectual challenges; and to suggest just how far the term ‘dance’ might be stretched to encompass myriad practices and concerns.

Beginning this final week was the forum, Don’t Stop at Movement, Part One. Tony Osborne reflected on definitions of independent dance, government policies and funding priorities—don’t stop at movement; don’t stop movement. Nikki Heywood spoke to the issues of performing inside a body that is aging, decaying, that recognises its own mortality. Chris Ryan’s extraordinary video, Get over it; get on with it; get fucked and accompanying paper addressed many issues pertaining to performance, sexuality and gender, censorship and life with intelligence, poignancy and compassion.

Following this were Jon Burtt’s witty choreography performed by Setefano Tele, which moved from self parody to an hilarious (embodied) commentary on the naff earnestness of much contact and release based dance; the muscular grace of Richard Talonga’s That Woman; Sue Peacock’s choreography for live performance and video; and Chris Ryan and Dean Walsh demonstrating, as is their wont, Theatrical Abuse and Other Cheap Tricks.

Another session devoted to performance encompassed the sparse postmodernism of Shelley Lasica and Sandra Parker, Rakini’s classical Indian dance—mutating into a cross cultural hybrid—and the elasticity of Olivia Miller’s Wax.

In her paper, Smart Moves & Dumb Shifts, Jane Goodall invited dancers to stop going somewhere and just flounder. The body is understood, she says, as a series of networks renegotiating movement as a process of intelligence gathering, dance that moves away from species specificity to that of the hybrid.

Lullaby by Alice Cummins is a lament of return sharpened by protuberant bones and the welcoming of internal movements of yearning, a body that showed its familiarity to stillness and yielded to the pulse of its need for location.

Bizircus performed Where There’s Smoke : fire caressing arms, fire in motion, wheeling in darkness, juggling fire and spinning flames, smoke and the intoxicating smell of kerosene. The body became monstrous, spawning three headed hydras, with a woman, a human torch on top, spinning a flaming hoola hoop against her naked midriff.

In Jean/Lucretia by Nikki Heywood, the silhouette of gnarled branches preceded the performer’s entry into the shadowy space, anticipating the knotting of the grandmother’s body. A limb is twisted, the trunk bends and in the crushing defeat a gardener’s soul is broken. Heywood’s bitter sweet singing of The Rape of Lucretia became an elegy for the thwarted growth and neglect of an ordinary woman.

In We’d, performed by Chris Ryan and Dean Walsh, a virtuous woman enacted her sad parody of drag, naked in white heels or sheathed in solemn dress but begging for attention. Her whoring was underscored by the litany of voices from the labels offered in silence from a seated and blindfolded performer. He lifted cards from the table to complete words, all of which began with ‘re’—’reinterpret’ or perhaps ‘reindeer’. The one removed the other bodily from the space.

The program note for Tricia … case study by Bill Handley read, “After 18 years of confinement within a concrete enclosure, Tricia the elephant had to learn how to walk again”. This work is a dancer’s parable with disintegrating wheelchair. His patient observation of the dynamics of flex, boot, ball, broken frame and wheel revealed a tender love of the banal, and the awkward angle of the head and the little rhythms of the feet touched a nerve.

Tony Osborne arrived gruesomely with stockinged head only to become a glittering cabaret entertainer who told racist and sexist jokes that caught out the unwary while others squirmed. His interventions with the audience’s displeasure were unexpected and provocative.

In Closet: Paul Schembri’s attention to a channel of light marked the closet in the space. The stretch of the leg and gentle pull and reverberation of the arm against the body were container and refuge but also exit and escape.

Don’t Stop at Movement, Part 2 exhilaratingly broke through the isolation of dancers and encouraged them to reflect beyond their experience in order to talk about wider issues in performance. Shelley Lasica reflected, “My memory erupts through the holes in my body” so that for her, dancing is a template. Jim Hughes, wondering where movement comes from, said, “Don’t stop at movement; don’t start at movement”. Alice Cummins spoke of working in ways that feel related, responsible and relevant. “My body is familiar to me. Is my body familiar to you?” Jon Burtt, on the rebound from the vertical structures of dance companies, questioned the silent space of the dancer in which one person making the work does all the talking and the person doing all the work does all the steps.

The final forum rather stuck on the politics of the audience, the breaking down of barriers between different groups of dancers, and the necessity for more talk. And why weren’t there any members of the existing dance companies there, the students or graduating students of the dance institutions, or the more general public? But then in any city in Australia, a crowd of thirty on a Sunday afternoon after a glut of fine performances, debating the future of dance would be a good wrap up.

Dancers are space eaters, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, November 22-26, 1995, curated by Sarah Miller.

The Third International Interactive Multimedia Symposium was held over four days at the Hyatt Hotel in Perth, January 21-26. A myriad of sessions ran concurrently in four different conference rooms of the hotel with a major central session occurring every now and then in the main ballroom. Very much the format you see at many of these conferences, especially the ones focussing on multimedia. And haven’t there been a lot of those lately? Seems like every time you turn around there’s one on, and its the biggest and best and for god’s sake, you’d better not miss it or else you’re gonna wind up in the information superditch. With a title like “The Third International Interactive Multimedia Symposium”, one may well have been forgiven for thinking that this was an all embracing encounter with multimedia from around the world with speakers and experts from all fields.

In fact most of the speakers were Australian and many of those from W.A. It was also captioned “The Learning Superhighway” (don’t you wish they’d discard that “life’s a long road” metaphor). The caption actually referred to the fact that this symposium was primarily focused on uses of multimedia in education and issues surrounding multimedia as an educational delivery tool. In accordance with this, nearly all presentations were of this theme.

Typical of the sessions were “An Interactive Multimedia Approach To Disseminating Engineering Standards” and “Open Math: An Integrated Course for the Teaching and Learning of Foundation Mathematics”. Many others were similarly specialised and I’m sure that even some educationalists would have found themselves searching for subject matter of direct relevance. The education professionals did indeed make up the bulk of the audience. The number of multimedia artists and industry people who did attend, may well have found the pickings relatively slim in terms of new and relevant information.

Some of the exceptions dealt with more across-the-board subject matter. One in particular by Mr Z. Youlo entitled “A Maintaining Solution For Publishing Documents On The World Wide Web” addressed a very real problem: web server maintenance of links once changes have been made. His organisation has designed a database node solution which automatically updates links thereby greatly reducing maintenance needs. Welcome news if you are running a webserver or maintaining a website. In general it was surprising that internet issues did not receive more attention than they did.

The gee whiz prize was taken by the people from the AMES Research Centre at NASA who demonstrated some pretty amazing three-dimensional techniques to illustrate processes in fluid dynamics. Art for science’s sake, you could say. It’s funny how science and education end up using art if they want people to absorb information or pay attention for substantial periods of time.

It’s impossible to attend all sessions at a conference of this scale. Thus, despite some of the intriguing rhetorical titles such as “Multimedia On the Net, On Disk: Are The Universities Ready For It?” and “Clinical Medicine: Can The Computer Replace The Patient?” one was forced to pick and choose those of most pressing interest.

The only artist I could find in the whole four day program was a certain A. Lusk, who delivered a paper at Tuesday lunchtime, “Virtual Reality or Virtual Unreality”. Mr Lusk’s presentation meditated on virtual reality and its implications for art, artists, concepts of illusion, postmodernism and the nature of representation—centrally, the notion that the lines between reality and illusion, art and everyday-life are becoming increasingly blurred. I would have thought a glance at an Oprah Winfrey Show audience would have demonstrated this truism, never mind flash 3D walk-through environments. But the new environments are interactive too, and thus the audience is no longer simply a passive recipient but now a powerful participator in production. The individual genius (dictator?) is banished in favour of the democracy of authorless interactive collaborations. Like ants making an anthill.

This was an interesting paper, for me at least, and I came away wondering why there had not been more of this sort of debate at this symposium. The universities, after all, are home to many extensive art, philosophy and literature faculties, many of whom have taken an active interest and energetic participation in multimedia production and debate. They were conspicuous by their absence. As for international developments in this field, who knows? Murdoch University’s wonderful publication Continuum has, for me, run one of the best forums for debate on these areas in Australia in recent times.

By the end of day four I’d picked up quite a lot about cognitive tools, educational psychology and empirically tested learning behaviour models, (largely against my will), but precious little in other areas. Perhaps the educationalists should have broadened their vision and the scope of debate in relation to what multimedia and online interaction is and can be.

The Internationale Music Zentrum in Vienna is a forum and information network for music and dance executives in the television and recording industries. The people in the room—buyers, impresarios and executive producers—were probably the closest many artists would ever get to reaching a television audience.

The test tape on the screen freezes the conductor in the act of shaking the concertmaster’s hand.

The public television channels represented here are frozen in the electron stream of the information highway as perceived in its internet test-bed stage. Congress sessions were intended to explore the implications of this and other technologies and the impact they would have on the mediation of the performing arts

An archive of some 200 program tapes and a row of booths for previewing them: all were empty.

Independent program makers, the other main group represented at the Congress, deal with anyone who helps to raise their budget. They will become media publishers, matching artists with audiences using the most appropriate medium: book, cable, CD-ROM, cinema, computer network, gallery.

In the multi-channel environment it becomes possible for the consumer to observe, or even live with, another culture.

If publishers are encouraged to nurture their local talent, encourage difference and diversity, the matrix of mythologies from the Irish-language soap opera to the Czech home improvement item, all with English sub-titles, this will become compelling competition for attention on the international networks.

IMZ Vice President asks, “Where are the Asian cultures at this Congress?” IMZ President replies, “They don’t need us.”

Robyn Archer introduced the final day of sessions, “The Artist and the Media”, in terms of the “current tensions between the artists and new technology” and the effect this was to have on “the richness and danger of live performance”.

Technophobia was omnipresent—the main concern that artists working in the performing arts should, it seemed, make sure the new technology was incorporated into their work. Lazy arts administrators of course encourage them in this belief, feeling that if multimedia is the flavour of policy then of course all artists should be using it.

Hans Peter Kuhn, the sound artist, gave a presentation which successfully demonstrated that performance people like himself have been integrating multimedia into their work for many years. As a performance artist he had always worked with the tools appropriate to his needs using the approach which gave the audience…the chance to listen.

Then with a staccato and rapid delivery aided with the authority of the slightest of mid-European accents, he developed a wide-ranging analysis and critique of technological development affecting the arts over the last fifty years. From television to net art, all were demolished quickly as being private forms quietly destroying the broader cultures they touched, their ‘significance as culture’ being suspect as the outcome of political decision. This process placed technology in the service of the more irrational human behaviours—the regressive, the defensive, the paranoid—which had managed to place ‘creativity’ in the position of being a threat to global survival. Scratch, dub and techno he identified as being more socialised, politicising forms, with ‘astonishing things’ on the horizon. Such glimpses of optimism he extended to include the post-historical period which we were now entering: “writing, memory and history followed reassuringly linear patterns. Using non-linear media, post-history would be the outcome”, about which he felt optimistic’!

The lecture integrated three projected video images of Hans Peter Kuhn standing at the podium whilst four channels of surround-sound FX overlayed his amplified address.

Philippe Genty introduced his well known oeuvre as bringing “puppetry into the adult world”, and he emphasised its physicality and its ‘magic’—the inner place, and the outer, or what Peter Brook called ‘empty space’. “Theatre must find other languages”, he felt, and contemporary dance and the work of artists like Laurie Anderson progressed because of the ‘disintegration of words’. The mission of ‘le audiovisual’ was simply to explore the achievements of theatre!

On tape, a naked woman struggles to hide herself inside an enormous brown paper bag—having succeeded, the bag transforms into wodges of fluff flying in the air.

The final session showcased Australian artists. Sydney multimedia producer Bill Leimbach described the ‘market-driven area’ of multimedia with a zany CD-ROM production linked with ‘world music’. Melbourne artist Ian Haig extolled the value of writing code, deploring consumer software and the notion of the Artist in a Shrink-wrapped Box, and showed extracts from Astro Turf, the ‘kooky-looking’ Flintstones of the 21st century. Julie Martin of Bondi had already given a short demonstration of live performance in conjunction with projected images, computer designed to enhance three-dimensional illusion. Michael Buckley, another Melbourne animator, showed extracts from the sublime Swear Club which “elevates the vulgar and precocious 5 year old performer to the status of cultural icon—on which you click to ‘Shut-up!’”

This part of the Congress was remarkable for the absence of TV executives, who clearly considered that actual demonstrations by practitioners of the recent technologies, on CD-ROM or straight out of the computer, were clearly beyond their briefs, especially as the work shown was made by ‘the local talent’. Hard-pressed as ever, these executives, with lists of international contacts to see before jetting-out, what more can a poor artist expect? Well there may be comfort in the fact that these ‘determiners of cultural significance’ are to metamorphose, as broadcast gives way to narrowcast cable and as fragmentation of ‘the audience’ continues. Those of us working at the edge, cutting or joining, have not really known audiences as any thing other than the kind you build and re-build. The computer network technologies, for instance, offer some further potential. The purveyors of cultural spectacle are unlikely to endorse a medium which a priori requires active response, where their notions of audience are based wholly on consumption. The videotape recording as artefact of performance spectacle remains their stock-in-trade—it seems they feel that technology simply aids or embellishes that process.

At the end of the (long) day, it was not at all surprising that no one considered how the audience would be changed by the technologies and their use of them, and therefore how their expectations of live performance would be changed. The sub-cultural precedents are there, they have been actively feeding the dominant culture’s fashions. But the convergence of television and the computer is shortly to move into the mass scale and therefore a different dimension. From which time ‘new technology’ will become ‘new performance’.

Experience of multiple media is as ancient as a feast day with dance, ornament, incense and orality. Three recently installed artworks in Sydney—Frontiers of Utopia at Roslyn Oxley9, Epileptograph: The Internal Journey at Artspace, and Mind’s Eye—a journey into sound at the Australian Steam Navigation Company Building, The Rocks—provide leverage for thinking about contemporary multiple media works with a component of viewer interaction.

For an interactive multimedia (IMM) work, success can be gauged in the combination of the various media, ability to produce an experience of immersion (intellectual and/or emotional) and in the challenges presented in navigating the architecture.

Jill Scott’s disc-based Frontiers of Utopia has female characters speaking from different temporal and geographic locales: Irish-Catholic rural Australia circa 1900; modernist urban America circa 1930; Aboriginal outback Australia circa 1930; Italian immigrant Australia circa 1960; contemporary Sydney electronic artist; expatriate Chinese professional in the contemporary Australian desert. The trajectories of their lives meet in the space of the work.

Frontiers is structured in an accessible way, appropriate for its intended museum exhibition. The viewer discovers through the characters’ individual addresses to camera the symbolic objects contained in their suitcases, and through their interaction with other characters across time and space in two-hander video sequences. As with Scott’s previous Paradise Tossed, there is an illustrative use of contemporaneous media, and a thematic interest in the role of technology in women’s lives and in the seminal moment of realisation. At Roslyn Oxley9 the work was shown as touchscreen plinth-mounted, with simultaneous projection making the best of laserdisc video sequences.

Isabelle Delmotte’s Epileptograph: The Internal Journey is composed of elements from a continuing project. Epileptograph maps the internal space of an epileptic reviving from a seizure. Suggesting the impossibility of representing what is the moment of electrical ex/implosion in the brain, Delmotte has concentrated on the slow rebuilding of consciousness.

On display were several large transparencies, beautifully executed, and simultaneously amorphous and finely detailed. Horizontally displayed text chronicles the experience: the loss of identity and the painful reawakening; a soundscape, textured, hypnotic, jagged, contributes to an atmosphere seeking to emulate the turning inside-out of the mind. The work is successful in suggesting the sense of the struggle to regain consciousness coupled with the desire to manifest precisely this experience through media that in their electronic processes replicate the synapses of the brain.

A really immersive and interactive experience, Mind’s Eye, by Nicholas Wishart, Peter Woodford-Smith, Joyce Hinterding, Vaughan Rogers and Stephen Hamper was accessed through a low-tech wardrobe door. From there, the interface is the sophisticated construction ‘listen and touch’, as the hapless punter mediates a journey of aural and sculptural exploration through a pitch-black labyrinth. The sounds are varied in tone, pitch and amplification, producing a dimly perceived spatial differentiation we visual people usually get via sight.

My party quickly joined hands and shuffled on. Others, alone or with tendencies to claustrophobia, fared less well. Outside, the success of the installation could be measured in hearing usually blasé first nighters affected to the point of freak out. Mind’s Eye worked physiologically, delivering a gut-level experience that stimulated and confronted in ways that more intellectualised works rarely do.

If there is any single connection in the diverse offerings that forms the Adelaide Festival’s film season In Spaces Unsuspected, it is a theme of dislocation. This is not intended as a reductive comment: the season is diverse with films from Australia, Eastern and Western Europe, Japan, with a feature from Israel and Tunisia thrown in for good measure. The selection includes a couple of international premieres (Rolf de Heer’s The Quiet Room) as well as films that have already had at least limited releases, such as Tracy Moffat’s Bedevil. A variety of genres have been selected: features on both 35 and 16 mm, work shot directly onto video, a performance piece by Adelaide artist Stephen Housten, shorts both local and international, experimental work including a retrospective from the Brothers Quay as a prelude to their inaugural feature Institute Benjamenta, and a comprehensive selection of electronic art. Even a current release, Emir Kusturica’s extraordinary Underground, has been included, an indication that program director Cecelia Cmielewski has aimed for works which may sit somewhat uncomfortably together but consequently are required to enter into an intense dialogue with each other.

Eastern Europe’s tentative experiments with Western democracy form the most obvious examples of dislocation. It also reveals that this is not so much experienced through space, but history. The former Yugoslavia currently represents the bloodiest outcome of ancient wounds both real and imagined, but for that very reason it is the hardest to understand: it is the unimaginable brought to life. Our own media certainly prefers to represent the Balkans in ethnic terms (as if those concerned weren’t all Caucasian), therefore something naturally inevitable. History in this context is rarely mentioned.

But this is where the program’s thesis comes into play. It extends well beyond issues of representation into its role as historical process: time, memory and enigma. Gary Lane’s trilogy of shorts The Stream, The Lake and The Bridge expresses this perfectly. Each film uses striking visuals to set up a conundrum of protagonists caught between impossible choices. The first and the last draw on the Balkan experience: a bridge no longer connects but becomes a site of callous betrayal, a beautiful forest stream is where a woman is driven to murder those she loves just to survive. It is Lane’s centre-piece that recalls that such horrors are not the prerogative of the former Communist block. The Lake depicts Western democracy’s own historical aporia. A young Jewish woman who conducts tours of a concentration camp is horrifically attacked by a neo-Nazi. Her successful attempt to escape leaves him drowning in a lake. Should she save him? In depicting history as personal aporia, Lane succeeds in representing it not as linear inevitability but as a riddle, as profoundly disturbing as the oracles of the Ancients. History is not what we remember, it’s what we forget.

This is also central to I Was Hamlet, in part an extended interview with the German playwright Heiner Müller. It is impossible, he says, to speak truthfully about what was East Germany. He can’t condemn it—everyone else does—nor defend it. It represents the cause celebre of the moment, the ultimate criminal state, unique in that its secret files have been exposed for all to see. Its real function now, he argues, is not to reveal the truth but to overlay the memory of Nazi fascism, to disrupt the accuracy of an already imperfect memory of Germany’s recent past. That I Was Hamlet also uses a variety of digitally generated effects to build on Müller’s commentary is no accident. It recalls that ultimate essay-film—Chris Marker’s Sunless—which examines the role of cinema and, by implication that technology which will supersede the cinema, in filling in our historical aphasia. Like Marker’s project, In Spaces Unsuspected uses cinema to investigate these aphasic effects in a variety of situations: the women of Tunisia, the experience of contemporary Japan, the experiences of Australia’s migrant and indigenous peoples.

As Marker shows, it requires extremely sophisticated accounts to successfully apply concepts like aphasia, repression and foreclosure to history, let alone to connect the massive shifts of historical process to the intimacies of personal recollection. Accordingly, the program undertakes an exploration in interior worlds, mapping phantasmagoria as a mirror of more material forces. Included here are diverse films: Chantal Ackerman’s Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels, and Rolf de Heer’s The Quiet Room. It includes a selection of electronic work curated by Kari Hanet under the rubric of New Territories, dedicated to notions of memory and identity. It also provides the perfect place to insert the Brothers Quay, whose films extend the Surrealist’s pre-occupation with the unconscious into their own uniquely visceral landscapes.

Such intersections of the personal and the political lead to two Adelaide produced shorts: Tony Kastanos’s In Search Of… and Patricia Balfour and Joya Steven’s Atavistic Traces. Traces renders this intersection in mythic terms—the newly dead gathering up the footsteps of their mortal lives—thereby rendering the familiar as strange as an analogy for the migrant experience. Liz Burke’s salute to Australian horse-racing, The Needy and the Greedy traverses similar terrain from a very different cultural perspective. And anyone familiar with the films of Ross Gibson and the videos of Geoff Weary and Mark Jackson will also understand how their own pre-occupations fit this theme.

Mark Hawker’s Zombietown returns us to the former Yugoslavia, specifically Belgrade. It demonstrates how resistance to history’s relentless tanks genuinely does occur in the least suspected places. In this case it is Belgrade’s youth adopting a post-punk culture centred on a quasi-legal radio station, an act of cultural defiance in the face of the inexplicable, and in a city that should by rights be browbeaten and haunted but is surprisingly dynamic.

The relationship between memory, record and technology which marks out the cinema’s unique powers has been given full throttle. Given its context within a festival dominated by live performance, this provides a particularly suitable emphasis.

In Spaces Unsuspected screens at the Mercury Cinema, Adelaide March 7-13 with session times of 5.30, 7.30 & 9.30pm plus Saturday March 9 at 2.00pm.

http://www.merlin.com.au/stelarc/ [expired]
The Stelarc Web site is a triumph of simplicity. Given the weighty complexity of the technological and theoretical terrain inhabited by Australia’s most enduring and original performance artist it could easily have been otherwise. Images of the artist suspended sixty metres above a Tokyo street; operating his robotic third arm; or microfilm representations of his internally implanted ‘stomach sculpture’ elicit the kind of fascination reserved for the truly exotic, in respect of which Stelarc is in a league of his own. The artist’s Web site is useful in that it allows the viewer to understand something of Stelarc’s intentions in making works of art which can be so viscerally affecting as to obscure the intellectual property which supports them. It does so with the simplest of devices.

The Home Page presents an arresting collage of images from Stelarc’s performances which can take some time to download, so after an initial visit it is advisable, if using Netscape, to switch off Auto Image Loading. The menu offers a selection of documents, each a brief statement from the artist, alluding to a particular phase of his work. Titles include: Amplified Body, Fractal Flesh, Obsolete Body, Redesigning the Body, The Hum of the Hybrid and The Shedding of Skin, among others. The statements are succinct, transparent and provocative. For example:

It is no longer a matter of perpetuating the human species by REPRODUCTION, but of enhancing male-female intercourse by human-machine interface. THE BODY IS OBSOLETE. We are at the end of philosophy and human physiology. Human thought recedes into the human past.

Stelarc’s preoccupation is with the transcendence of the body beyond its biologically determined, psycho-physical limits in preparation for an extraterrestrial future. On this point he is quite explicit, particularly when referring to his Shedding of Skin project, the intention of which is to develop a synthetic skin capable of photosynthesising chemical nutrients. In Stelarc’s work, Deleuze and Guattari’s Body Without Organs strives to find a material form.

Off the Earth, the body’s complexity, softness and wetness would be difficult to sustain. The strategy should be to HOLLOW, HARDEN and DEHYDRATE the body to make it more durable and less vulnerable.

Elsewhere the artist has suggested that to remain on Earth would be a suicidal mistake for the human race and that the best option is extraterrestrial migration facilitated by a hybridisation of biology and technology of the kind speculated on in Stelarc’s work. In holding these views the artist finds himself in the company of luminaries like American spacecat Dr Timothy Leary who, since his ‘halcyonagenic’ days in the 60s, has busied himself as an advocate for and investor in the intergalactic removal business.

Stelarc proposes, without a hint of the romantic, that redesigning the body should be driven by its need to match the efficiency of technology, which at present it does not. Instead of moaning about post-modern disorders such as ‘information overload’ we should hybridise machine and body so that the human form can function efficiently in the face of unrelenting, technological forward motion. Once the skin is shed we literally begin to exist outside the obsolete construct of the self. Even our dreams, imagination, images will run more efficiently in a technological as opposed to a biopsychic medium. According to Stelarc:

Virtual reality technology allows a transgression of boundaries between male/female, human/machine, time/space. The self becomes situated beyond the skin. This is not a disconnecting or a splitting, but an EXTRUDING OF AWARENESS. What it means to be human is no longer the state of being immersed in genetic memory but rather in being reconfigured in the electromagnetic field of the circuit—IN THE REALM OF THE IMAGE.

The Web site, which also contains brief biographical notes, forces the visitor to engage with the ideas which dwell behind the raw shock of Stelarc. In this respect it is well conceived and designed with a minimal elegance by Gary Zebington of Merlin Integrated Media. Having gained an insight into the motivations and intentions of the artist one is better equipped to appreciate the power of his performance work. However, those who enjoy the exquisite kiss, the quiet joys of digesting a long lunch or the sensation of time as vapour in daydreaming may not be so enthusiastic about Stelarc’s preferred future. Indeed, some would suggest that Stelarc—who has unsuccessfully applied for inclusion in a NASA mission—should get on board the next departing Timothy Leary Intergalactic Express.

I have secretly held until now a hairbrained theory that Mars was once occupied by Europeans who, having expunged that planet of all carbonaceous life to the point of a chafed redness, transmigrated their way of life to the nearby blue planet. This would explain the current preoccupation with effecting a similar scenario here on Earth in the late 20th century. Stelarc’s work and the Blade Runner ideas informing it represent the most blatant form of abdication of responsibility for the viability of human life cloaked in a rational, dispassionate discourse. Having visited his Web site I suspect my hairbrained theory is at least as plausible as his nightmare vision and, for the record, I for one have no intention of surrendering my organs nor quitting the exquisite kiss.

One of the most quoted aphorisms of the century, ‘The medium is the message’, comes from Marshall McLuhan, joint founder of ‘media studies’ worldwide and anticipator of the ‘new technologies’. Derrick de Kerckhove, associate of McLuhan and now director of the Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, in his recent book, The Skin of Culture, continues to use aphorisms. Besides being economical with language they impose that moment of reflection which allows the reader to explore and extract a full meaning, if not several. Such interaction is at the core of de Kerckhove’s concern and is both the form and content of his book.

The discourse covers the ‘era of television’ to the ‘Age of the Mind’ (or the collective intelligence made possible by the meeting of minds via the net). The work of various theorists and scientists, many unfamiliar but intriguingly presented, aid in the development of the description. The currently converging aspects of our technologies and systems of communication are inflected by de Kerckhove’s acknowledged expertise on language and literacy theory. The alphabet as software for the platform of Western culture is the paradigm maintained—literacy is the attendant who has strapped us into a straitjacket. Other cultural practices and beliefs are either similarly trapped or provide clues to movement for the new social architectures.

He describes, for instance, two modes of listening: “…oral listening tends to be global and comprehensive whilst literate listening is specialised and selective…Greek tragedy is nothing but the literary and dramatic response to new sensory conditions introduced by alphabetic literacy”. Similar conditions accompany every new technology, and are tracked to the present day with much extemporising on the consequences of developing world-wide telecomputers and other “psychotechnologies”. These “define any technology that emulates, extends or amplifies the powers of our minds”.

The cultural shift that comes about with a new medium marks movement away from the (literate) “private universe of mind to the public world of the cathode ray tube”. It is here that for the first time a collective intelligence is being developed and tested. It is where modes of ‘listening’ are being re-defined and he mentions the work of some ‘media’ artists, though too few—David Blair’s Waxweb project for instance—who develop in the oral tradition many of the issues raised by this book.

Empowerment and the ability to participate is raised at various points but little reference is made to the ‘psychotechnologies’ developed by the corporates through the earlier period of the ‘Age of Information’ and which were, and remain, significantly participatory—8mm film, sound recording, video and more recently the handycam and snapshot photography phenomenon. Practised at a popular and artisanal level these recent mediums might have provided illustrative as well as evidential material.

Maybe it is De Kerckhove (or this reviewer), who is happiest with the sections that communicate in the ‘literate’ tradition. Besides various cognitive aspects of ourselves, topics also include an insight into Japanese culture, and a description of the bogey-world of neural nets. As a long-time and frequent visitor to Japan he usefully describes the phenomenon of ma, which “connotes the complex network of relationships between people and objects”. Based on analogue rather than digital processes, these nets respond to a range of values, rather than the binary values which characterise the digital computer, and mimic the human brain’s skill at comparing patterns of interconnections between thousands of sets of variables. The series of interconnected neurodes or receptor/decision points adapt and learn. Already neural nets have many industrial applications and move ever closer to the HAL machine of Kubrick’s 2001.

De Kerckhove suggests that we “create political mechanisms to protect universal access and freedom of expression as well as right to privacy on the net”, having established a few pages earlier that as an organic, self-organising entity, “Our obsolescent political notions are going to be thoroughly trashed by it”. The creation of many such mechanisms are long overdue—and we are yet again confronted with the option of the commune. De Kerckhove’s general optimism may overcome, but he advocates ‘business’ as the ‘collective mind’ to determine and build the wired world he clearly favours. In support of this notion we should remember that it is a commercial computer network operator that the German government has recently made moves on in order to restrict access to the internet’s vociferous newsgroups.

Ironic that it was a German, Georg Lichtenberg, who in developing the art of the aphorism in the 18th century devised one which the advocacy associated with the McLuhan Program would appreciate: “There are many people who won’t listen until their ears are cut off”.

In his book De Kerckhove addresses the psychological and cultural most convincingly—by directing us away from the prescriptive of the literate ear and towards the associative of the oral ear—again with another aphorism: “Our neglect of the ear may be one of the prices we have paid for literacy”.

Derrick de Kerckhove, The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality, Somerville House Publishing, Toronto. ISBN 1-895897-45-9 Pbk

In the wake of the Creative Nation cultural policy document, launched in October 1994, the much touted new media technologies of our post-computer epoch—especially the current hyperbole heralding the internet and CD-ROMs, amongst other popular forms of emerging computer-inflected media—require a sustained deconstructive analysis of the complex dialectic existing between electronic media, culture, gender and power.

We live in an increasingly mediated world where the computer and its related techno-utopian myths of artifice, control and rationality are instrumental in creating a sense of reality that is becoming more intricate, more contingent. Given that we are becoming more reliant on digital languages of representation—where the discourse between images and knowledge, cognition and epistemology is being radically transformed—it behoves us to formulate the awkward questions that analyse the cultural mechanisms of Western representation, questions about our socio-cultural institutions and ourselves and our prevailing dependency on spurious modernist paradigms and their legacy to Cartesian perspectivalism.

When examining interactive CD-ROMs as the popular mode of digital media technology, we have to ask why this is so? How do we precisely locate them in consumer culture, contemporary art practice and the older cultural forms and outcomes? How do we approach interactive CD-ROM art in a meaningful dialogic manner? If we are going to probe beyond the current penchant for defining CD-ROMs as something more than an expedient commercial down-loading technology so Australia may enter the post-broadcast world of satellite communications, then we should not avoid addressing the difficult cultural, gender and phenomenological issues. We need to remind ourselves (something that Creative Nation conveniently overlooks) that our academic and popular discourse about electronic media (including CD-ROMs) should negotiate the key problem of aesthetic and ethical abdication (Felix Guattari) and the substantial significance of the more marginalised artists and their oeuvres, artists who have been central (since the historical avant-garde) to the little understood, (in)visible historical narrative of electronic art.

The forthcoming show Burning the Interface, curated by media artist Mike Leggett and curator Linda Michael at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney is the first major survey exhibition of international and local artists’ use of CD-ROM technology that seeks to address these critical issues. It will italicise through its 30 or so diverse examples the range of ideas, forms and approaches informing this new interactive multimedia medium.

Curatorially, as a comprehensive showing of interactive CD-ROM, the exhibition thankfully does not subscribe to the worst critical excesses of intellectual fashions of the post-aesthetic, post-auratic and post-philosophical strands of contemporary thought. For it also contests the glib euphoric double-talk and ethical solipsism that still characterise our critical approach to the digital arts and the persistent tendency to evaluate them in terms of the more established forms of cultural production. This signifies the hermeneutic necessity to question how many examples of new media—including interactive CD-ROMs—exemplify conceptual, formal and technological facets of a “boy’s own adventure narrative” and the overall problematic cultural mind-set that the personal computer suggests “a dialogue with the infinite” (Iain Chambers), or if you prefer, the thematic premise of Disney’s fully computer-animated feature Toy Story (1995) of “infinity and beyond”.

Burning the Interface aims to advance popular and specialist interests in examining the potential of CD-ROM interactivity for experimental artistic expression and casts a fairly wide net over artists who are already navigating the medium. The curators decided not to include works that are archival/documentation or artist CV in emphasis, nor works that are primarily developed as computer games. From over 130 proposals from fourteen countries (publicised through the internet that is metamorphosing into a gallery space—a curatorial phenomenon that will rapidly expand as we witness the dynamic growth of cybersalons, etc.) the show will exhibit works from overseas artists like Eric Lanz, Luc Courchesne, George Legrady, and David Blair, and locally Troy Innocent, Phil George/Ralph Wayment, Linda Dement, Brad Miller and John Colette.

These works were chosen for their experimental engagement, reflexivity and humour and share a major conceptual and technical interest in using the CD-ROM interface to permit the user to navigate (with varying critical success) image (still and moving), word and sound, to experience differing levels of conceptual and technological immersion. In the main, this show is interested in exploring the complex aesthetic facets and possibilities of the CD-ROM interactive encounter and in presenting works that explicitly address a reflexive take on the limits, contradictions and experimental innovation of interactivity. It endeavours to go beyond Creative Nation’s mistaken corporate emphasis of CD-ROM technology as a marketing/instructional medium.

Amongst the eight or so Australian exhibits, three examples of local interactive CD-ROM art come to mind : Michael Buckley’s elliptical sound-driven The Swear Club (1994), Brad Miller’s Deleuzean-inspired A Digital Rhizome (1994) and Phil George and Ralph Wayment’s interactive installation meditation on cultural displacement and memory Mnemonic Notations 5 (1996).

Buckley’s humorous and inventive The Swear Club displays a diverse cross-disciplinary interest in experimental film, sound art, animation and graphic design. Its pronounced visual and verbal pun-encrusted concerns and minimalist audiovisual style reflect Buckley’s non-didactic playful critique of the more familiar ‘point and click’ technological determinism that often flaws CD-ROM art. The Swear Club’s Art Brut influenced graphic and typographic features are ideal for its autobiographical subject matter based on Buckley’s personal father and son motif.

Miller’s reflexive computer-generated screen and mouse interactive A Digital Rhizome, is structured on the central notion of the rhizome as stated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s “schizo-analysis” philosophy, and represented by their book A Thousand Plateaus (1987). The evocative digital images of this exhibit are based on sophisticated image-processing software and operate as a fairly reflexive digital collage. Its Quicktime movies, still images, sampled soundtracks and multilayered graphic design allow the user to form his or her own elaborate connections and links. Further, the artist’s digitised appropriation of Deleuze and Guattari is structured on an unobtrusive interactive interface, so as we follow numerous flights of intensities and relations we have entered into an interzone where identity, the body, space and scale are in constant transition.

George and Wayment’s Mnemonic Notations 5 (1996) is an interactive installation in a darkened room consisting of a large screen, a fish tank, and a black plexiglass table where the user can utilise a mouse to manipulate the work’s highly compressed collage images of cyberpunk mythology, postmodern science, Tantric Buddhist symbols, Celtic mazes and Orthodox Greek mysticism. Inspired by John McCrone’s 1990 paper “The Ape that Spoke” this installation explores in vivid spatial and metaphorical terms George’s long standing interest in postcolonial identity and memory. Between the table and the screen is the fish tank featuring carp that activate (via surveillance software) the installation’s soundtrack.

The international CD-ROMs, like the local examples, feature an experimental inventiveness that suggests a questioning approach to the orthodoxies of modernism, postmodernism and the computer tools of interactive multimedia production. Characteristically, they also display a diverse array of thematic and formal interests: cybernetics, cultural histories, subjectivity, the body, autobiography, language, and sexuality.

Luc Courchesne’s deftly constructed Portrait One (1995) features a female ‘virtual being’ conversing in three languages (English, French and German). The conversation that unfolds as we interact with the exhibit’s minimalist interface depends on the answers, questions and comments we select from the available sets on the computer screen. Portrait One’s ‘face to face’ encounter with the virtual subject resonates with irony considering the complex philosophic issues relating to computer-generated interactivity, choice, and participation. Nevertheless, its overall engaging textual approach suggests an inventive humorous simplicity in terms of interactive design.

Tamas Waliczky’s The Forest (1994), like Courchesne’s work, manifests an uncomplicated design approach to CD-ROM interactivity (particularly if exhibited as an installation). Its intricate 3D forest imagery and appealing soundtrack of bus or tram sounds suggest the work’s prefigurative tradition of the ‘ride’ movie of the early twentieth century. In this context, it also suggests many links with virtual reality arcade games (especially the “third window”(Virilio) variety of racing cars and jet planes). Through its omni-directional ‘clicking’ design emphasis we can journey through Waliczky’s atmospheric forest in any given direction. In another critical sense, interacting with The Forest resembles an elaborate long take or dolly shot in classical cinema: there is a pervasive sense of unstoppable movement as in the case of the celebrated extended long take in Murnau’s Sunrise where the couple travel by cable car from the country to the city.

Finally, George Legrady’s documentary styled An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War (1994) represents an “inventory-archaeology” of home movies, personal objects, recent collage videos, archive propaganda films, and stories delineating the artist’s own history in the context of the Cold War. The main structural motif that defines the exhibit’s interactive interface are the floor plans of the Former Hungarian Workers’ Movement (Propaganda) Museum Palace of Buda Castle (Building A) Budapest. These floor plans constitute Legrady’s memory-aid text (echoing similar conceptual and formal interests in Woody Vasulka’s subjective documentary video The Art of Memory) as we navigate through the various rooms of the artist’s personal history. Its ‘non-linear’ subject matter functions as a paradox in the context of the CD-ROM’s colourful linear floor plans.

Burning the Interface is not only a survey showcase exhibition of the more creative instances of personal CD-ROM art but it illustrates how these multimedia exhibits are transforming many of our assumptions about what constitutes art and to be ‘human’, and are an integral part of our ‘lifeworld’ and its growing non-neutral deep technological concerns and textures.

AMC ANAT was established as a project of the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide in 1985, and its brief is to support artists working across a range of scientific and technological media. As an organisation with a national brief to foster links between the arts, sciences and new technology, ANAT essentially acts as a networking, advocacy and service organisation. We are principally funded by the Australia Council, and we undertake a wide range of functions including intensive skills training programs, grant programs through our R&D fund, publication, and exhibition and conference organisation, for example, hosting the Third International Symposium on Electronic Art (TISEA) in Sydney in 1992. ANAT also maintains a database of artists working with new technologies throughout Australia, and we publish information in our newsletter and on our website. Since its inception in 1985, ANAT has been at the forefront of the movement to position artists as active participants in the ‘information age’.

AJ You took up your position in November ‘95. Could you reflect on ANAT’s track record prior to your directorship?

AMC ANAT has always been in a difficult position. One of its primary problems is that it’s always been seriously under-resourced, so that, with its broad national brief, its profile is not what I think it could be. However, the outcomes of its training programs have been fantastic for artists who have skilled up and gone on to develop national and international reputations. Similarly, in the grant programs, quite small amounts of money have supported many innovative artists who have subsequently achieved national and international acclaim in the media.

AJ ANAT is based in Adelaide, yet the focus of much new media activity, and particularly now, multimedia development, has been along the east coast axis.

AMC I think it’s an overstatement to suggest that the focus of activity has been on the east coast. There’s certainly significant activity on the east coast because of the critical mass of people, but there are also exciting developments throughout Australia, exemplified by the fact that ANAT grew up in Adelaide, and that one of the first two successful Cooperative Multimedia Centre (CMC) bids was a Perth-based bid.

However, developing a higher national profile within the arts community, in industry and amongst the broader community, is something that’s high on my agenda for ANAT. For example, I’m establishing a national advisory committee which will assist me to formulate policy on the development of ANAT’s profile nationally, and that of artists working with new technologies across all artforms.

AJ As you’re aware, recent cultural policy has established a range of initiatives to support the development of a multimedia industry in Australia. What is the role of ANAT in the development of such an ‘industry’?

AMC Creative Nation had a very strong focus on multimedia. However this focus has been economically driven, and the support has predominantly gone to industry development, not to art and cultural imperatives. Many artists are understandably finding that problematic. ANAT has a role to play in making clear that the only way we’re going to develop a sustainable industry is by ensuring that artists are integrally involved from the developmental stages. The CMCs for example should be supporting artists’ research and development and providing digital skills training opportunities. We clearly cannot establish a genuinely innovative and viable industry unless artists have opportunities for R&D and experimentation within that industry sector.

AJ There’s also been criticism of late of the Australia Council’s response—or lack of it—to new media and technology-based arts practice in the wake of Creative Nation. As director of an Australia Council funded organisation, what is your assessment of their response?

AMC I’m pleased to report that the Council has recently provided ANAT with a one-off allocation of $90,000 to increase support to artists working in this area. It’s not a vast amount, but it will double our research and development fund to $80,000. The funding will also work towards helping me to establish a national profile for the organisation.

I think the Australia Council was particularly slow off the mark in developing policy: I haven’t seen any demonstration of any Australia Council policy on art and technology presented publicly to date. At the same time, Council was put in a difficult position, insofar as it was presented by Creative Nation with an imprimatur to support artists working with new technologies—in order to get ‘creative content’ onto the ‘information highway’—but it wasn’t provided with any financial resources dedicated to this area. As far as developing effective and responsive policy, it will be critical that Council looks to genuine consultation with artists—not just policymakers, but artists working with new technologies in formulating policy directions.

AMC Australian artists have been experimenting with new technologies and digital media for many years, and there’s a great diversity of practice, from installation work in conventional gallery settings, to online work, to video exhibition, to interactive CD ROM, through to electronic sound. There’s also a groundswell of extremely interesting work at an ‘underground’ level in collectives like Clan Analogue who produce electronic sound and installation: work that doesn’t fit into an ‘art’ milieu but is culturally very interesting. There are established digital artists like Jill Scott and Peter Callas who are absolutely at the forefront of these areas internationally. There’s also online work: ventures like Parallel in Adelaide which runs an online gallery and a journal developing discourse around these areas. I’m particularly interested in supporting the grass-roots experimental edge of technology-based practices that are emerging in Australia.

AMC My first priority is to develop the profile of ANAT nationally, because I believe that by doing that you assist in developing the profile of artists working in new technologies. ANAT also has a role to play in enhancing Australian artists’ capacity to network internationally, and I’ll be furthering our relationships with international networks such as ISEA.

It’s critical that we continue to support the development of art practices through our art R&D fund by providing direct funding to artists. But it’s also critical that we develop exhibition opportunities for artists to present work in a critical context, whether that be in conventional gallery spaces—there’s a major need in Australia for venues properly outfitted to show technology-based work—or online, which presents fantastic opportunities for experimentation with the medium. I’m particularly keen in this regard for ANAT to develop its online presence so that we can further develop the profile of artists and assist them to better promote and market themselves. The development of the field relies on the potential to promote, exhibit, discuss and develop a critical discourse around technology-based practices. I’m aiming to achieve that critically important balance between support for artists’ production, research and development, and support for presentation opportunities within a critical discourse, while working to build the profile of the organisation.

Graeme Watson explains to Eleanor Brickill the ideas and processes behind The Antwatchers for the One Extra Dance Company

GW I’ve often thought about the notion of surveillance and how it establishes criteria for ‘normal’ behaviour. Anything breaking from normality is questioned, maybe disciplined or punished. Surveillance can be used as a protective device but there’s also a predatory aspect, and there’s the pleasure in looking as well. We enjoy watching a baby grow, protecting that child as it develops. A child’s curiosity might lead to unacceptable behaviour followed by a chastising, but you could be chastising them over a lot of nonsense.

EB You’re talking about a kind of behavioural web or shell whereby somebody’s power to watch another person might limit their experience too severely?

GW That surveillance disconnects us from our senses and they become as if fossilised. We can’t fully explore them and our behaviour alters. Sometimes I feel when I’m trying to make dance, that the dancing body itself has become fossilised.

GW The most difficult sense for the dancers in Antwatchers to work with was smell as a form of surveillance and protection and territoriality. It carries such huge memories of both good and bad behaviour. As they explored ideas of self-surveillance through smell, it started to look the same as self-surveillance with the eyes.

GW In public spaces, there’s a certain privacy in, say, walking down the street in a crowd. As an individual you don’t feel totally revealed. But now there are cameras up on the buildings and people accept that intrusion.

EB But it can be very personal even in a crowd: passing a busker, say, who’s playing something with a rhythm that you can’t avoid walking to. You think the busker’s watching you do it, because inviting that response is one thing that buskers occasionally do. Suddenly it’s intrusive. A camera on a wall isn’t like that.

GW A camera can “steal” your image because you’re not aware of it. But if a busker does it, that’s like kleptomania. Surveillance has become insidious in our lives. Dance itself has become increasingly market driven: surveillance of the type of material you create. If it fits within the prescribed image then you’re fine. If you depart from it, challenge the criteria set up, you feel like the right for your body to have an imagination is being questioned, that it’s suspect, or perverse.

So we’re basing the work very deliberately on the idea of morphing movement. How do you establish something that’s public, and then how do you discreetly morph it so that the surveillance system can’t identify it any more?

GW Yes, you can’t track a human image morphing into being an ant because attached to that human image are all these behavioural criteria. And an ant doesn’t behave like a human being.

GW Yes, but rather than using video-image-making, I’ve turned back to the body and its extraordinarily rich imagination. In one exercise we looked at the idea of shifting scale, how an ant moves through space, its speed, its definition of time. We define the ant by our sense of time. If you were to bring it up to human scale, it would be four times the size of a cheetah and be able to travel at the speed of a cheetah. The dancers tried to morph their human movement into ant time.

Also, if you look at ant motion, really you’re just looking at the top of it. To examine it you might have to get down to the ant’s level, still maintaining the visual scale. However, if you bring in some technology like a magnifying glass you can see more detail and so forth, but in doing that you start to separate that individual from the larger picture. You might see someone behaving in a particular way, and surveillance says, well look, this is not normal, or this doesn’t meet the criteria, but that’s looking at an individual out of context. You have to understand that the video frame is very selective. It only shows you part of the picture.

One thing that we are trying to do is to turn that surveillance onto the process of making dance itself. I’m trying not to go into a storytelling narrative process; I’m letting the body establish its own feeling, do its own thinking.

EB But even then, the body has already been created in the image of the watcher.

GW Here’s a question I was asked yesterday: “Do you want it to be dancey or pedestrian?” Another comment was: “You know that section there? Well, we’re only improvising”. You just have to hear the words “We’re only improvising” to know that fixed material is seen as much more important.

So this week, I created a little eight pulse phrase. I made it very “Graeme Watson”, my idea of how I approach space and movement. I said to the dancers, “This is the public version. Now, you escape from it. One dancer’s response suggested to me that she was feeling torment. Then there was a vomiting motif. When I looked at another dancer I felt like I was intruding. In breaking the phrase down, they were making a comment about my categorisation of myself: “You’ve set this so I have to move in a particular way. Now I have to break it down and make it invisible, re-assess it.”. In this process, they seem to have developed an extraordinary sense of the internal, as though that is the area of the body that feels most protected from surveillance.

The One Extra Company, Antwatchers with dancers Felice Burns, Lisa Ffrench, Rachel Roberts, Alison Dredge, Taryn Drummond, Charlotte Moar. Choreography and direction by Graeme Watson, music by Antony Partos, set by Eamon D’Arcy, lighting by Rory Dempster, costumes by Jacques Tong. Live music by Ju Ju Space Jazz and DJ Zeitgeist. St George’s Hall, Newtown, from Thursday March 7.

Tess De Quincey and Stuart Lynch brief Keith Gallasch about 100 collaborative, free, unrehearsed performances scheduled for Sydney in May

SL The idea is also that the project could form a formula, a module. More like a circle, not so specifically focused on two people. So we are collaborating with many different Sydney artists.

KG You’ve added a high level of chance by planning one-off spontaneous collaborations with a lot of artists.

SL I’ve been coming here since ‘89, My father lives here but I grew up in England and with the myth of Australia. I don’t know it as well as people born and bred, but fairly well.

TD My mother was born here and her family is here. I wasn’t born here but my knowledge is strongly affected by my family background.

KG It’s good sometimes to have a sort of semi-grasp of a place, that outside-inside thing. Even for locals, it’s a tricky city. Like many a metropolis, it’s highly pluralised, hard to define.

SL The most difficult aspect is the size of it. To what extent can we deal with that?

KG It’s a time of rich exploration of the city in literature, visual arts and performance. There’s the debate about the Burley Griffin vision of Canberra, Richard Sennet’s new book about cities, Peter Greenaway’s big city projects, the 1996 Adelaide Festival focus on architecture, Adelaide and Canberra. Your approach, though, is quite different—involving many locals, very open-ended and looking for spontaneous responses.

SL Yes and no. There’s got to be a middle ground. But I imagine each collaboration will define its own codes and parameters.

SL We’re investigating different venues all around the city, and hopefully many of the artists will also want to choose a specific site particularly for this collaboration.

TD The cross-points that spark: “Oh, my grandmother’s bathroom would be fabulous to do something in,” or “There’s a nook just down the street that I’ve had my eye on for years”.

KG Will you begin these spontaneous collaborations with a performative element of your own which the other person slots into, or do you wait until you see what they do?

SL I think it’s going to depend on the relationships being made as we meet. Probably we’ll have to define new strategies for each collaboration.

KG You write about “assaulting the language of dance and performance’. Now, there has been an ongoing assault on the language of dance and performance in theory and especially in practice for many years. For example, you acknowledge there’s a lot of interdisciplinary work that has happened in Sydney. How will one hundred meetings with a wide range of artists intersecting by chance affect notions of performance and dance?

KG So you’d rather work with those who don’t already have some kind of formulated notion of the interdisciplinary? Because in Sydney there’s such a strong interknit performance scene, it’s very easy to create self-fulfilling projects.

SL I hope it’s a danger that we will get over by asking others to choose artists who represent a broad range of language.

KG You trained with Min Tanaka and the Mai Juku Performance Company. Did Tanaka’s performance Subject, where he travelled the length of Japan and performed every day for three months, inspire this event?

TD Laterally. This was 20 years ago. He was talking about “dancing the space” and “in the space in which you are the space”. There’s now a great deal of talk of kinaesthetics and the body in the environment. For us, it’s great. Suddenly we’re talking with people who hadn’t hitherto really understood how we work in terms of the body as environment and this is straight from the tradition of Min Tanaka and his company. To go back to your point about Compression 100 being done around cities and whether it’s a physical or architectural sense, I think the body is the city.

KG The word ‘dance’ crops up every now and again in your notes as distinct from performance. Do you make a serious distinction between performance and dance?

Find

February 1996

– Arthur C. Danto

– Emma, Mel, Boba and more, “Rave Special: Dissecting The Rave” Beat Magazine, 1994

– Douglas Rushkoff, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace, Flamingo 1994

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