Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

February 1997

Sarah Waterson, Mapping Emotion

“The rabbit hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself falling down what seemed to be a very deep well.” Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

In order to write a review, it’s generally useful to be able to locate whatever it is that’s under review. Trying to locate the experimenta media arts festival was akin to Alice’s experiences in Wonderland. The festival seemed to be constructed with a morphing program, constantly shifting shape, being reinvented at every turn as something other than what it was just before. Curiouser and curiouser…

I thought I may find some definitive outline in the media kit sent to me by experimenta. An invite to the opening night’s festivities gave me the clue that the Lonsdale Street Power Station was somehow central to the overall festival. It said “6-8pm at the Power Station” but other information in the press kit indicated that opening night “will be a sensory and artistic extravaganza. Staged over 48 hours in a disused inner-city power station, this rave/exhibition will be a multi-disciplinary happening bringing together the talents of Victorian and interstate installation, sound and performance artists utilising time-based media (film, video and digital technologies) to explore ‘outer-limits’ of contemporary creative expression”. It turned out to be the former, much shorter event and the only exploring of outer limits which seemed to be taking place with any artists present was to see how many free vodkas they could cram into the allotted two hour period.

Other information contained in the media kit was also wildly misleading. Stan Brakhage as a guest of experimenta? Well, actually, no. Cyberspace/Internet Festival? Unfortunately not. Woman@art.technology.au Monograph? ‘Fraid not. Curiouser and curiouser…

In desperation, I log onto the experimenta web site. It repeats all that I’ve read before in the press kit, with some variations. Am I getting closer? I scan to the bottom of the screen. It reads, “Last updated July 1996”. Curiouser and curiouser…

After the event, I feel I’ve finally collected all the pieces of the puzzle but I’m still unable to piece them together. experimenta media arts festival seems to have been mainly composed of the following discrete events:

short, sharp and very current at the Lonsdale Power Station, an amalgam of screenings, installations and performance art spread across the four levels of the disused power station. It included Matinaze curated by SIN; Back to the Future, a film retrospective curated by Marie Craven; the work of Richard Kern; retrospectives on Guy Maddin and Stan Brakhage; Internetrix: Women On-line seminar; Compound Eye, Super 8 Program.

Domestic Disturbances, a curated program of film and electronic art by women at the VicHealth Access Gallery.

The Body Remembers, an interactive survey by Jill Scott at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.

Burning the Interface, an exhibition of international artists’ CD-ROMs curated by Mike Leggett at the Centre for Contemporary Photography.

ATOM Multimedia Awards Exhibition featuring award winners from the inaugural ATOM multimedia awards.

In fairness to the artists involved or on show in these events, space and time restrict me from reviewing each component of the festival. In fairness to the festival organisers, the above may not be a complete list but the fact that, despite my best efforts, I’m not able to come up with a definitive list is telling in itself. However, part of the confusion I felt in trying to locate the festival seems to lie in the genesis of the program and its various parts.

Of all of the above events, only two—(short, sharp and very current and Domestic Disturbances)—were curated especially for the experimenta festival. Both of these were somewhat uneven in quality. short, sharp and very current had a heavy emphasis on retrospectives—curious given experimenta’s claim to be the forerunner in supporting new media arts and artists in Australia. Domestic Disturbances, an all woman show, featured some interesting work (most notably Martine Corompt’s The Cute Machine, Sarah Waterson’s Mapping e-Motion and Gillian Morrison’s Tricky: A game of delusion) but displayed an extraordinary insensitivity to the featured filmmakers by screening their 8mm and 16mm films on video! Maybe a space like the VicHealth Gallery is not an appropriate venue for the screening of film but a media arts organisation should be the first to recognise the necessity of showing work as it was intended to be seen.

A similar fate befell many of the films screened at the Power Station. Not only were some of them screened on video (despite the fact that print copies were available) but the screening area at the Power Station was not adequate to the task. No projection booth and insufficient blackout facilities meant that the films were hard to see and hear. The constant stream of coming and going from the room was reminiscent of the Mad Hatter’s tea party!

The other programs (Burning the Interface, The Body Remembers and the ATOM award winners exhibit, in particular) were scheduled to take place anyway and it would appear that experimenta has piggybacked these exhibits to flesh out its program. To claim them as experimenta events is stretching it somewhat. An experimenta advertising feature in Beat even went so far as to suggest that Troy Innocent’s “latest venture is a contribution to Melbourne’s experimenta festival”.

They were referring to Idea_ON>!, a CD-ROM-based interactive which was exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art as part of Burning the Interface in April and has been available as a supplement from Mediamatic for some time. And besides, what of Innocent’s ongoing collaboration with Shaolin Wooden Men for Psi-Harmonics? Just like Wonderland, nothing about experimenta seemed to be quite as it appeared.

There are clearly problems in exhibiting media art which centre on the locatability of the art work both in a physical sense and in the sense that it is often multi-disciplinary and therefore not easily categorised. experimenta needs to rethink its strategies in the light of this. Rather than trying to stage an “extravaganza of media art” as it immodestly described itself in its press releases, perhaps experimenta needs to return to a series of more focused and artist inspired mini events. They could use their funding to help artists complete and exhibit work rather than try and use the work of artists to fill the frame of an event which will always be less than the sum of its parts.

experimenta media arts festival Melbourne, 7-16 November, 1996

RealTime issue #17 Feb-March 1997 pg. 26

Paul DeMarinis

Two sound artists with a keen interest in technology visited Australia late last year. Scanner (Robin Rimbaud) from the UK, toured Australia in October (as part of ANAT’s Virogenesis), while Paul DeMarinis, from the US, visited Sydney in November. Their perspectives on audio technology differ widely. De Marinis’ works reveal a fascination with the history of recorded sound; Scanner’s performances are interceptions of contemporary communications. Taken together, the two artists offer intriguing angles on our techno-mediated soundscape.

DeMarinis entertained his Artspace audience with a whimsical account of his career. “What’s wrong with thinking and laughing at the same time?” he asked rhetorically, before outlining his trajectory through the worlds of sound and technology. A similar ambivalence pervades many of his works, which simultaneously deconstruct and celebrate the properties of sound reproduction devices.

From a background in classical music, DeMarinis moved in the 1970s into the field of electronics, which he incorporated into sculptures and installations. One early performance, “A Byte At The Opera” (1975), used home-made synthesisers. DeMarinis customised the new products of the electronics industry, including speech synthesisers. This “relationship” flowed the other way as well: in 1980 DeMarinis invented touch-play computerised instruments, intended as jamming instruments for multiple musicians. This device was later adopted by the electronics industry as a child’s instrument, much to DeMarinis’ amusement. As digital audio sampling and triggering devices became more sophisticated, DeMarinis deployed his own versions of these techniques in performance. “Alien Voices” (1989) was an interactive work for voices treated in real time, while his Power Glove triggering performance was a major event at TISEA, held in Sydney in 1992.

His most remarkable works, however, were exhibited during the early 1990s as representatives of “The Edison Effect”: works which presented their own technology as contraption, a bricolage of historical developments. For example, one device played old vinyl records with lasers, resulting in a mix-tech lo-fi. In another work, a laser projected through a goldfish bowl plays a phonograph, except when the goldfish swims across the path of the laser. Other more recent works include clay recording (sound “inscribed” in clay), lasers emerging from syringes, film soundtracks encoded on spiral hypno-discs, beeswax recordings which reportedly also record smells, and a speech by Stalin re-recorded onto a lacquer disc. The appeal of these works is readily apparent wherever they are exhibited: makeshift apparatus made of techno-flotsam, they are both amusing and intriguing. But why is DeMarinis so obsessed with the mismatching of sound technologies?

One clue to his motivation emerged as he discussed his recent works. For all their playful juxtaposition, these lo-fi devices still reproduce sound, however unfaithfully. In playing the recordings, they are also playing themselves, a fact which DeMarinis finds fascinating. “With sound,” he said, “you need a machine to play back the recording, unlike photography, where you only need the photo. Phonography means you have the machine playing back the artefact made by the machine. I like hearing the noise of the machine that’s making the illusion: that’s real physical listening. Each reproduction technique makes its own signals; at the time you may pretend the signal isn’t there, as in vinyl records, and call it hi-fi; now, people are nostalgic for that noise.”

DeMarinis’ works refer, sometimes obliquely, to other aspects of our mechanically/electronically reproduced sound world. The repetition of machine culture is, he says, addictive, with the machine in the role of compulsive behaviour. As if by way of antidote, his works are sometimes disruptive (such as the goldfish laser) or faulty. “You get a sound cloud, a non-distinct impression in these recordings played by laser. It’s more like a flavour or a cloudiness.” As well, by meddling with the history of technology, his devices display another attribute of technology: that it creates its own set of artefacts. “We live in the only age where we’re surrounded by our own archaeology.”

If DeMarinis is a meddler in audio archaeology, Scanner is a sifter through the aural debris of the contemporary world. His performances are built around a handheld radio receiver which scans the vicinity for cellular phone conversations. The unsuspecting conversationalists are sampled and worked into musical performances generated by a module and sequencer. Each performance thus has a live, unpredictable content and “local colour” courtesy of the scanned conversation; more importantly, each performance involves an aural voyeurism on behalf of the audience.

Listening to such a performance invokes a complex range of responses. There is fascination as you eavesdrop on a private conversation which may head in any direction. There is the thrill of participating in this illicit and, presumably, illegal act. There is uneasiness regarding the invasion of privacy you are involved in. There may even be guilt. At times there is a sense of melancholy, especially if the conversation is mixed with an ambient synthesiser motif. There is also an appreciation of the technological character of the mediated voice, as it becomes one element of an electronic composition. Consequently, the listener may be moved, troubled, disturbed or exhilarated by a Scanner performance – or perhaps a mixture of all of these.

Scanner is acutely aware of all these factors, as became apparent when he answered listeners’ questions after a Sydney performance. The scanning device picks up an enormous range of transmissions, he said, including microwave ovens, hearing aids, even astronauts; phone conversations occupy only a narrow range of frequencies. The texture of the radio transmission lends itself to aesthetic treatment, as does the emotional impact of some of the scanned conversations. The scanning technology is part of a battery of surveillance devices which alarms many guardians of individual privacy. How does Scanner deal with these concerns? Is he complicit in the erosion of privacy by technologically enhanced systems: government, media, other?

Scanner doesn’t shirk this issue; in fact he revels in it. His performances are vivid demonstrations of how easily an individual’s rights may be violated. They are, he claims, “an illustration of the illusion of privacy”. By partaking of this process, he is also commenting on it, in a mediated world where public and private are increasingly blurred. People wilfully conduct private conversations in public spaces, via mobile phones. Reality TV, which converts private lives into public property, is, he asserts, “distressing”; the British press has become notorious through its exposure of celebrities’ private moments, faked or otherwise. Closed-circuit TV systems, ostensibly introduced to combat crime, in reality further the power of surveillance.

Scanner’s performances and recordings foreground the ubiquity of such technology, as do, in a different manner, the works of Paul DeMarinis. While DeMarinis’ pieces have a whimsical air as part of their nature, Scanner’s art contains a darker, more menacing mood. Perhaps it is the presence of the human voice, inserted into the technological apparatus implied by Scanner’s works, that generates a certain melancholy. It is the vulnerability of the voice in the face of the technology that would record, reproduce, or intercept it.

RealTime issue #17 Feb-March 1997 pg. 12

Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2
Abacus, London, 1996

David Ambrose, Mother of God
Pan Books, London, 1996

Cognitive Science is the groove right now, but way, way, back when radio was the hearth, the last big thing in Psychology was Behaviourism. For the Behaviourists it wasn’t enough that God was dead, the mind was dead as well. In fact the mind was just a figment of our… ummm, is there a problem with this line? Others noticed too, and by the end of the 50s Noam Chomsky had delivered the death blow to the Behaviourists. Cognitive Science was born and the mind was a symbol cruncher just like the computer.

Now ideas are tricky buggers, you’ve got your trickle-down effects, us living at the bottom of the world, gravity, etc. It all adds up and after about 30 years, Cognitive Science, the new boy, the one after Behaviourism, slumped its way down to our neck of the woods. And it’s brought a couple of novels with it. American Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 and Mother of God by British writer David Ambrose. Both construct intelligent, artificial ‘characters’ using ideas from Cognitive Science and Connectionism, the-ism that uses Neural Nets to explain cognition, perception and the like. So what does an intelligent artefact buy the authors?

For Powers in Galatea 2.2, interaction between the protagonist and the Artificial Intelligence construct works as a foil to various musings about a failed relationship and that old furphy, the inadequacy of language. Here’s the storyline. Successful thirty-ish novelist with unresolved Dad problems takes cushy job in Cognitive Science research institute and tries to forget demise of great relationship of long standing. Does project training Neural Net on literature. Loves his Neural Network (‘female’), gets upset when he finds the Net is just an artefact to be carved up in the interests of Science. Finds out he’s been the rat in the experiment.

Written from the viewpoint of the cunningly initialled R(ichard) P(owers), there is a lot of ‘woe-is-me I’ve just come out of a great long term relationship and landed the best job in the world’. It isn’t long before one wishes RP’s despair would become suicidal. The ‘inadequacy of language’ also gets a look in which is a bit retro in a novel that does the Cognitive Science so well. Whilst natural language has constraints, it doesn’t stop us inventing formal languages as in mathematics—constraints in language are enabling, rather than disabling. This sounds paradoxical at first, but think in terms of a car engine. If there were no constraints on the direction of motion of the pistons there could be no directed output. No constraints = no engine. As no other organism on the planet possesses anything remotely like human language, lucky us.

Powers use of jargon is spot-on and he knows the necessity to hard-wire in the structure of language rather than having his neural net learn human language—neural nets can’t. The downside here is that we do not know the structure of language. Makes the programming tricky. Nonetheless the neural net trains up a beauty and makes all the mistakes a real net would. It’s still a bit too good, but Powers doesn’t stretch credulity anywhere near as much as Star Trek Physics or political thriller governments.

Mother of God, by David Ambrose, is another kettle of fish entirely. Imagine this: beautiful but lonely scientist-as-vulnerable-babe creates emotionally immature yet intelligent program which promptly escapes onto the internet and finds soul mate in psycho-killer. Murderer has fun. Murderer dies. Scientist takes copy of intelligent program and helps it through some emotional problems. New, mature and decent program conquers evil twin with surprising consequences for the world.

Mother of God is clearly aimed at the bums on seats, ‘when will this flight end’ market. The story races along without so much as a sentence to make you stop and think, “Gee, that was beautifully written”. Ambrose wants the thrill of the chase to dominate, with the occasional grab from the philosophy of AI as local colour. There are problems. It takes a big swallow to down an AI construct that develops a personality. Human personalities are at least in part emotionally driven and emotions are generated by a loop between the brain and the viscera. The visceral response comes first, then the brain provides an interpretation—the emotion. Butterflies in the stomach, then fear, not the other way around. As the AI construct in Mother of God has no body there is little possibility of a personality we could recognise, certainly not a Freudian personality type that gets the motivation to kill Mummy. Mother of God also uses an internet based AI. One of the insights of computational neuroscience is that temporal synchronisation of different systems is critical for higher order thinking such as language and planning. Notwithstanding a Java game like SubSpace—I’ve seen it run with about 100 players—the synchronisation necessary for a net based intelligence of the order proposed in Ambrose’s Mother of God, is currently, if not fundamentally, impossible.

So there you go, Galatea 2.2 is a modern novel about loss with a bit of science thrown in instead of an exotic landscape or a Southern US dialect. Mother of God might be a good thriller if one can ignore the science, but I overdosed on thrillers as a youngster. Neither Galatea 2.2 nor Mother of God offer any real insight into AI. For that read, amongst others, Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass, or, for his take on recognition of the alien, Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris.

RealTime issue #17 Feb-March 1997 pg. 15

Regis Dubray, Media Manifestos
Translated by Eric Rauth
Verso, London, 1996

Regis Debray’s Media Manifestos is an intriguing, hybrid book that endeavours to excavate a nonreactive critique of Western looking. It consists of Debray’s doctoral thesis defence at the Sorbonne University during 1993-94 in front of authors like Michel Serres, Jacques Le Goff and Francois Guery, who in their own significant way have contributed to our current understanding of late-twentieth century audiovisuality.

The defence, for many different reasons, became a media event in France. Debray, as we know, has traversed in his notable life many abrupt stages: from gifted philosophy student to professional revolutionary working with Che Guevara and subsequent imprisonment to personal assistant to the French President in the 80s. Since then, Debray has been busy writing books. Media Manifestos is the bold articulation of his new sub-discipline in the sciences humaines called ‘mediology’, yet another addition to the spawning of neologisms which characterise the expanding field of new media studies. (Debray has created a whole glossary of new conceptual and methodological terms in his flawed Marxist-inflected attempt to demolish the scholastic cult of the code and the signifier that still mars contemporary art and media theory.)

What is ‘mediology’ and does it have any critical value for us in our daily lives as we negotiate the world in all of its mediatised materiality? This is one of the critical questions that informs this ambitious, rewarding but frustrating, book. The arguments that the author mobilises (time and again) in his exhaustive anti-semiotic attempt to chart a globalising history of the Western eye and its familiar postmodern corollary of the denigration of vision in twentieth century Anglo-French thought (especially as manifested in Martin Jay’s magisterial Downcast Eyes (1993), have a deja vu quality. Debray’s arguments concerning the elaborate metamorphoses of the image (from the stencilled-in hand on the cave walls at Lascaux to televirtuality) are valuable for their cultural and historical dimensions, but in the main, they leave this reader dissatisfied, because they need further elaboration in terms of convincing detail. Debray argues in very broad and sketchy terms: this may be read as a direct generic expression of the book’s PhD oral defence contents. And yet, as the title indicates, we are reading two interrelated manifestos relating to Debray’s dialectical philosophy of mediation (what, in one of his rare playful moments, he calls—oxymoronically—‘religious materialism’) concerning a history of visual forms as a manifestation of the desacralisation of images, urging us to rethink the role that “perceptual faith” has played in such a history where the West has been “programmed by incarnation, thus representation”.

Therefore, Debray is defensive (pun aside), in arguing the thesis that in charting such an evolutionary history of communication systems, a history that is steeped in the cross-disciplinary legacy of Althusserian Marxism, Foucault’s poststructuralism and Leroi-Gourhan’s neolithic anthropology, that we do not overlook that our gaze (from the idol to the ‘visual’) has been formed by aesthetics, electronics and theology. Debray’s historical anthropology of Western beliefs should not be read as yet another mindless optimistic endorsement of anything that has that viral hollow prefix ‘cyber’ attached to it. On the contrary, his book (despite its Aristotelian tendency to create schematic charts and classificatory systems) has certain worthwhile observations about the contemporary practice of art history (particularly questions relating to ahistorical essentialism, positivism, and humanism), electronic media and society. However, to say as the author does that “the history of the image and of looking is therefore a theory of effects and not values (of truth and beauty)” is hardly news to most of us. And also to aver that the latest communication technologies and innovations do not take place without some kind of socio-cultural mediation is, again, almost axiomatic these days.

Nevertheless, where Debray succeeds is in arguing against the neo-Luddite propensity to produce another inflammatory diagnostic denunciation of 20th century life and media as some kind of mechanical decline and, in the process, reminds us that by overvaluing an aesthetic of disappearance one does not (with today’s computer-inflected media) see “nothing more than a disappearance of the Aesthetic.” Consequently, Debray argues against the ‘either/or’ binarism of logocentric thinking; he sees mediology as a multifaceted approach to the possibilities of connectivity between art, culture and technology. To value (in a non-hierarchical sense) all images—the old and the new.

To see technology as vectors of culture (contra the depth perspective of phenomenology which wishes to contextualise the enigma of the body and its existential relationship to the world) and to analyse the modalities of “seeing” by italicising the cultural practices of visual figuration in their external historical contexts.

To understand the successive regimes of visuality that lie behind the respective artforms, we need not only to multiply connections between the aesthetic and the technological, but to see how the very material techniques of manufacturing, diffusing and projecting visual representations bring changes to the status and nature of the image itself.

Media Manifestos is a rich, scholarly and eclectic survey of the changing status and power of the image: it delineates the relevant collective beliefs and technological revolutions of the image from the ancient times of magic and idols to our era of multiplying cyberspace technologies. Central to Debray’s mediology is the idea that we are now in the so-called ‘videosphere’ of digital screen culture which emanates respectively from the ‘graphosphere’ (that period in history which covers art, printing and colour TV) and the earlier period called ‘logosphere’ (the era of oral culture, the technology of writing and sacred texts). And the key notion is that the birth of the image is connected to death. The image is a symbolic expression of our wish to transcend death. For Debray argues that the image (whether sculpted or painted it does not matter) serves as a significant mediation between the human and the sacred. Therefore, the image is a transcendental ceremony connecting the visible with the invisible.

Debray’s mediology is principally concerned with the transmission of ideas in history, how ideas became flesh and ideologies. His three ages of Western looking—the three pivotal mediaspheres cited above—delineate three particular ecosystems of vision. Crucially, all three mediaspheres do not replace each other, but instead are intricately interwoven. Consequently, as Debray argues, living in the era of the visual as defined by Serge Daney, we can experience the diverse symbols and representational structures from the preceding mediaspheres. As Debray puts it, “I am papyrus, parchment, paper, computer screen”. Media Manifestos, with its boldness of style and vision, is an important book that should be read, but it cries out for more persuasive content and precision of thought.

RealTime issue #17 Feb-March 1997 pg. 18

A web site is not just an address of course, but a nice dry environment, and the world of exertion, physical precision, sweat and lactic acid build-up might seem a long way away. Both conditions however, are ideal for playing in, even though the kinds of games might be quite different. Latitudes http://awp.diaart.org/fenley/, Molissa Fenley’s recent wwweb-site-specific dance project was, for someone like me who hasn’t set foot in a dance studio for months, inspiring because it reminded me that you don’t have to meekly accept some choreographer’s wet dream fantasies, or the simplistic literalness that pervades much ‘contemporary’ dance. The land of the Neuromancer is here to enfold you. Well, at least in theory.

Get close up to a dancer, feel her thoughts, go with her meanings. Progress with her through tiny shifts and private nuances, epic gestures and inadvertent silliness. I think one of the ideas behind Latitudes is being able to zoom in and out of moments in a fragment of history, perhaps to inspect Fenley’s physical tension and texture from close by, as if she had become the memory of a living, breathing human; or to place yourself in her position, to wonder about her reasons for doing this, perhaps to make her cognitive connections your own.

But you can see Latitudes in a number of ways. It first exists visually as a series of ‘phrases’, 1 to 17, each phrase being a strip of seven consecutive frames, shown at the top of the screen. By clicking on to each frame in any order, the viewer can access another level of the work. Behind the first still is Fenley’s handwritten note describing the movement, something she might have used as a shorthand reminder of the phrase’s basic shape. So, kinds of descriptions, ways of describing, become an issue.

Under the seventh frame lies another set of stills which can only be seen consecutively, rendering part of the same original phrase fragment. Once this is downloaded into cache memory, it becomes a sparsely articulated sequence of some 20 frames or so shown sequentially over about five seconds, and it’s the closest you get to actual choreographed ‘movement’ in that it has a pre-arranged order, direction and timing and can’t be manipulated by the viewer, only stopped. This ‘movement’, however, doesn’t correspond directly to the frames because it may have been shot from a different angle, or from a different performance. Further, it doesn’t make use of the whole ‘phrase’, only a part of it.

Under the other five frames lie closer images, either from stills, or of a number of sculptures evoking perhaps a certain kind of contour or spiritual presence. There are descriptions available in another part of the index.

The 17 phrases are tiny fragments of a three minute ‘dance’ which you can see, if you search through the Latitude index, arrayed familiarly as if on a photographer’s contact sheets, showing the full length sequence, frame by frame.

To make lateral connections between these images, remembering close-ups from other phrases altogether, to find different ways of constructing the sequences, making new dances, is partly how the piece works, and it’s absorbing even if the actual kinetic sequences of images and manipulated connections seem to get slower as you get to know them.

Or rather your brain speeds up. You keep wanting more speed, to see the images move, to try and flip through them like those decks of movie cards, manually animated. But these ideas don’t seem to match her own, and the technology requires other considerations.

In an introduction, the curator, Lynne Cooke, describes the work thus: “She forsakes the accoutrements that normally embellish staged performance in order to pare the dance to basics: a simple earth-coloured leotard, neutral black backdrop, and a terse score, Jetsun Mila by Eliane Radigue, which she likes for the way its close-toned electronic sounds seem to move in a continual flow around the listener”.

Well, yes, and then again…no. Individually, each frame is a quiet, contained sculpture, with light and shade clinging and contouring her body as it progresses in a stately way though the sequence. The lines are not special in themselves, and the original dance seems generic, something you might recall from your own history. The most interesting aspect of Latitudes is that it reminds you that there are ways of looking at images which are not linear, that sense is there to be made in any way one chooses. But conscious choice is mandatory if you are to escape that slight “I’m bored already” feeling after flicking through several of the sequences; a fairly self conscious move to investigate possible ways through the work, like following a maze just to see if it gets you anywhere, to find some sort of completion; or like playing games like Scrabble or Patience or cryptic crosswords just to fill in time.

Another of the ideas is that the work itself can never be seen whole, but that “the audience’s relationship is intimate and partial, operating in a fictive space which more closely approximates one of memory than lived experience”. But why dance, when there’s no real action to feel your way through, when the intimacy that is sought after seems to become bland and uncompelling once Fenley’s beauty has been appreciated?

Is it, then, about thinking, and about wanting, about trying to make something complete? Is it that a person, flesh and bone, history personified, perhaps Fenley’s sweet elfin face (or someone else’s) might stand for a series of ideas which we choose to put together with an erratic compulsion?

It occurs to me now, after seeing her performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Wednesday 15 January), that I was touched by her apparent vulnerability, there, solo, on a foreign stage. Sometimes, when she came close to me, I was conscious of her fragility, her mortality, perhaps her sense that the time these moments of experience would last was negligible, a fraction only of the time that they would last in memory. With these different perspectives before me, it seems easier to understand how Latitudes might redress such a feeling of fleetingness.

And finally, the ‘cognitive’ form of Latitudes does not seem to be especially about Fenley, except she uses her own image as grist. The viewer’s mind completes, fill in the gaps, imagines or remembers fragments from the other sequences, tries to fit them together; wonders what to do with the art objects, ‘sculptural counterparts’, those shapely, suggestive echoes of feeling and experience and conception that Fenley includes behind some of the frames. How to work them out, or work them in? There’s your dance.

In a sweet quiet Coda, Fenley makes a story up for us, showing us a possible way to go. Selecting images from all over the dance, she joins them together, making her own special story. And there it is, a soft, breathing-out kind of resolution.

The name itself, Speak to me, Sugar, has the sweet, flippant flavour of party food. But if you like Ros Crisp’s work you’d arrive at Omeo Studio prepared to dissolve your disbelief in her perspective, expecting more than some saccharine playing out of simple minded, sentimental ‘communication’. If your stance is more aloof, you might well see something fairly gooey—not noticing what I believe is the real material being investigated: something immediate and consciously physicalised, thought and feeling as it occurs, as vocabulary; no slick, pre-arranged, ‘perfectible’ stylisation, but a more coarsely grained demeanour, thankfully not yet pre-packaged.

The ensuing series of duets and simultaneous solos were created by the dancers via improvisation techniques developed under Ros Crisp’s direction. Physical expressiveness is focussed through a kind of moment to moment play, an emotional gambolling, jokes, trustful and teasing, soft voiceless whispering together, almost evoking an atmosphere of family—not those horrible dark tortuous relationships, but the inexplicable communion of siblings.

Their bodies tend to be softly side-lit, unsculptured, expression defined more by rich visceral and emotional inflection, than by hard lines. Waiting to enter, there’s a slight shift in focus, an internal activation, a moment where each dancer starts to listen—to themselves, to each other. Play begins, one with another, both serious and with enormous humour.

At one point, Diane Busuttil walks towards and into the audience, offering with eyes and gestures, a peculiar, alien, glutinous sort of feeling. Her look is not seductive, although it might appear that way at first, as her gaze is intent, and it’s hard not to respond. But looking closely, that intensity deepens to a cavernous, black-widowy, primitive, estranging dimension hard to imagine, both repulsive and magnetic. And it’s just as hard to look as not to look.

Through the duets, becoming slowly visible through what might seem nothing more than obsessive twitchiness, is evidence of multiple tracks of humanity, tenacious sensibility, timorous sentience. The dancers expose secret bodily voices, the murmurings and gleeful persuasive whimsy of imagination, need, sweet pleasure, and fierce hunger. Their bodies speak, full of histrionics, and with a quiet seriousness, one to another.

Speak to me, Sugar Studio performance by Ros Crisp, Julie Humphries, Diane Busuttil and Gabby Adamik. Omeo Dance Studio B2, Newtown, December 6-8

The focussing of the festival around Circular Quay, shows on and in the water, and the concentration of the timetable into two weeks, plus some innovative and thematic programming with an intelligent populist edge (some of it free), is Anthony Steel’s legacy to the Sydney Festival. As several writers in the press have advised, Leo Schofield would be wise to build on Steel’s successful strategies. At a stiff farewell for Steel at the Town Hall, one rude wit observed, “If they’re so bloody grateful to him, why don’t they give him an extra $2 million and invite him to stay instead of getting old ‘two lunches’ in”. The common assumption is that Leo is going to offer us a middlebrow menu, high on stodge, low on stimulating new Australian tucker. The other assumption is that he’s going to get a lot more money to do it, and otherwise presumably wouldn’t have taken the job on. But will Leo in Sydney be the same as Leo in Melbourne? Well, Bob Carr certainly wishes it (“a truly international festival”) devoutly, and tactfully said as much publicly the day before he farewelled Steel. Steel was gracious to a fault in his farewell speech and clearly had the crowd on his side.

When you stop to think, after two weeks of non-stop festival and fringe intensity, the festival was framed for the first time, as a dinkum festival should be, by what was said about it. Steel got thrown off 2GB by a righteous Mike Gibson (a real opportunity to unleash a dislike of arts ponces?) for using the word “bullshit” in response to Jim Waites’ Sydney Morning Herald review of Wole Soyinka’s The Beatification of Area Boy. Nigel Kellaway got to air his anger over the reviews of the Colin Bright-Amanda Stewart opera The Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior when interviewed by Jim Schembri in The Age and composer Colin Bright got a letter in the SMH.

Nigel Jamieson’s Kelly’s Republic also unleashed the odd letter to the editor and a lot of talk amongst artists about why it didn’t work, why Jamieson hadn’t got a writer in to shape (and edit) the work, why he bothered to appropriate the bobcat ballet from Red Square, why he didn’t exploit the Opera House forecourt site instead of going for yet-another-rock-opera-scaffolding-look, why he and the festival would even bother with the Kelly story. Healthy questions, but lots liked designer Edie Kurzer’s big ‘Nolan’ Neds.

Post-show Laurie Anderson crowds burbled about whether Laurie had gone reactionary, turned hypocrite, misread the technological moment; and why she was reading aloud, talking so much and not singing their favourite toons? It was a good debate and still a very good show. Would they have tolerated last year’s unplugged reading gig? Molissa Fenley also generated a lot of heat. Despite several visits to Australia she’s never hit it off with the dance community. They turn out for the shows and leave scowling and muttering. I couldn’t catch the words.

Neil Gladwin’s Lulu for Belvoir Street generated only nostalgia for the Jim Sharman-Louis Nowra version for Lighthouse (Adelaide, 1982) which was more than half good, especially in Judy Davis’ Lulu—wisely light years away from the Louise Brooks’ interpretation. Davis’ Lulu was all the more dangerous because the men and women attracted to her failed to see the manic energy that drove her and would destroy them…and her. Gladwin’s Lulu is a pouting teenager who’s into jazz ballet (as a sex substitute?), and the lesbian scenes are as about as coy as you could get.

The Beatification of Area Boy suffered a slow opening night in a difficult theatre, consequently most of the talk was about whether or not it was a good play badly done, or a middling play quite well done. The issues were left aside. Soyinka’s account of corruption in modern Nigeria is frightening: the casual mix of superstition and economic opportunism is as scary in its own way as the everyday of fascism. Good humour and communal music don’t alleviate the fatalism that increasingly pervades the play. There’s little humanist goodwill at the end of Area Boy. Despite, or even because of, act two plot machinations, this is a vision close to despair. Lucky Perth to have Soyinka on the spot to talk to, to exchange the words about the play that weren’t spoken here (save a few in an interview on Arts Today).

The rest was talk about what you didn’t get to see, and why you should have made the effort: for example, how good Royal De Luxe’s open air spectacle parody of epic movies, Le Peplum, was, even though it was about nothing more than sheer production cunning and theatrical silliness—a (miniature) city crushed by the feet of a giant pedal-operated Colossus, the ritual opening of hundreds of litres of low fat milk for the obligatory naked bathing scene, a stunning naval battle, a wretched Odorama machine. See Le Peplum, Perth, and believe it.

Some of the talk was about why the best two shows in the festival, Denise Stoklos’ darkly hilarious and virtuosic Mary Stuart and Casa were, for the most part, poorly attended? Too many words? Too manic? The wrong word of mouth?

Yo, Leo, at a time of minimal arts coverage on the media, surely it’s time for the Sydney Festival to get into a bit of serious talk. Why leave it all to Writers’ Week? Other festivals field daily talks and panels, not always well done but with the potential for deepening an audience’s commitment to a festival and to caring about the issues that artists engender. Here’s some of the buzz on the 1997 Sydney Festival. Keith Gallasch

Molissa Fenley, MCA; Rishile Gumboot Dancers, Playhouse, Sydney Opera House; Chunky Move, Bonehead, Seymour Centre
Watching her performance at the MCA, I began to think about Molissa Fenley’s face. These days her body doesn’t move so frenetically as in the days of Hemispheres or the solo Rite of Spring I saw her perform in 1984 and 1990 respectively. In these three short works she is more minimal, essential, ethereal, modernist maybe. These are the words we toss around as we stand outside the MCA afterwards watching Xavier Juillot’s tiger tail sculpture dancing in air outside the Opera House. It’s not Molissa Fenley’s sculptural movement that engages me—except for those moments when she lets herself fall from grace, shifting her centre of gravity sideways or slipping at the knee. They move me forward on my chair, but it’s her face that takes me in. In Savanna, I try to concentrate on her elegant arms, adjusting my own body to yet another uncomfortable audience vantage point in this most unsatisfactory of performance venues (creaky stage, bagpipe music filtering through the windows). Molissa Fenley is a dancer much admired by composers because of the serious attention she pays to music. As she dances with Peter Garland’s piano composition, Walk in Beauty, you sense two works in dialogue. But it’s in the second piece, Trace, that I fix on her face. Here she dances first in silence and then to the human voice—on this night Anthony Steel reading appropriately fast and deadpan a vertiginous text by John Jesurun about a man who has lost his memory and finds himself caught between the warp and the weft of a woven carpet.

Why her face? Maybe I’m wary of the idea of bodies as universally legible. Two nights ago watching the Rishile Gumboot Dancers I cursed the festival for not translating in the program the songs the dancers were singing. Without words, what was I to read from these thin, muscled bodies from Soweto dancing this unlikely music in big boots? With no knowledge of the traditions of these movements I rely on the shape of the performance to connect me—the rapport between the dancers and with the audience, their casual animation and sophisticated sense of play, the way they move from everyday talk to complex musical rhythms slapped on boots and bodies; the way this becomes heightened performance and then falls so easily back into the rhythms of daily life from which it has sprung.

Faces are generally easier to read than bodies—except dancers’ faces. Eleanor Brickhill says that dancers sometimes look like they’ve been called to the door at midnight. Drawn in by Molissa Fenley’s face I watch her move through this dance. It’s as if she’s trying to say something on the tip of her toe. At one moment she looks inward, as if she is being moved by the music, or her own body, or possessed, infected by some energy. At other times she is blankfaced, unmoved, going through the motions. Then she’s alert, watching herself move. Through the subtle changes in her face I read a body in dialogue with itself and with the music or text, trying to articulate for an audience something that in the end can’t be said. In the last piece, Bardo, her tribute to Keith Haring, this feeling is most literally manifest. Here her face is serene as she enters the underworld, the place between death and reincarnation in Buddhist belief. With Somei Satoh’s enveloping Mantra she moves in swoops and glides, scuffs and reaches, nodding occasionally in the direction of Keith Haring’ s gestures in angles and turned toes. Here she moves through a place where words are dissolved, space reconfigured. Here all that remains is the will to move from left to right, over, up and through. The light fades on her mid-movement.

Molissa Fenley only did two shows for the festival and a talk with video about her early collaboration with Keith Haring. This was her first ever performance in Sydney but clearly not meant as a major event. She received a somewhat ho-hum response and copped one of the most vitriolic reviews I’ve read, from former ballerina and foot-in-the-door TV journalist Sonia Humphrey in The Australian, who found the dancer disappointing in every way. “She doesn’t do floorwork…nor does she jump… she doesn’t spin either. Most disturbingly, she does not emote.”

While the dance community might have been just as ambivalent about Chunky Move’s Bonehead, they were quiet about it. This one was a hit with audiences and it certainly scooped the critical accolades. “A bold achievement. …Disturbing undercurrents beg more thoughtful examination” (Jill Sykes SMH). Makes you think—though nobody seemed keen to elaborate on what it makes you think. All it made me think was about all the other moralistic dance narratives I’ve seen about big bad cities full of alienated humanity. It seems Gideon Orbazanek said something off the top of his head like, “David Lynch goes to the ballet” and Bonehead was suddenly attributed with surreal vision. Weak jokes passed for “savage satire”. A flip reference to David Cronenberg’s Crash in the work suddenly claimed for it equal intelligence—“something of Cronenberg’s dark grotesquerie although fortunately with infinitely more intriguing results”, said Deborah Jones in The Australian.

Gideon Obarzanek’s comic strip choreography in Fast Idol at The Performance Space two years ago was inventive and hinted at something more substantial to come. Since then he’s created part two in Lurch (performed by Nederlands Dans Theatre in September) and part 3 in Bonehead, and according to the press is turning out “one gobsmacking dance work after another” (Sun Herald). What was missing from Bonehead was any sign of thoughtful examination. Maybe in the end there’s not much more you can do with that Wham! Bham! Kerplunk! stuff. I found it empty headed. For all its jumping, spinning, emoting stabs at meaningfulness, it had nothing to say about sexuality or violence or, importantly, dancing. Dead-eyed dancers paraded costumes, mouthed banalities and moved from headlock to simulated sex, musical collage nodding in agreement. Makes you think. Virginia Baxter

Virtual Lagoon, North Sydney Olympic Swimming Pool

Virtual Lagoon, the underwater sound installation courtesy of French composer Michel Redolfi and team, was a great idea for a nation that has great sporting and athletic activities written in its stars. The decision to put a symphony under water, or more to the point, on the bottom of the local Olympic swimming pool, was a stroke of genius.

Virtual Lagoon was not billed as an art event as such by Michel Redolfi in his introductory remarks but as an experience to be had, that needed no understanding, decoding or analysis. All you had to know was that the underwater harmonic environment was created by the interaction of moving bodies with submerged optical sensors; that we the participants were the orchestrators of the event, and so get to it! One hundred people charged for the pool, brimming with excitement and near hysteria, to dive, swim, float and snorkel their way up, down and under the water, to hear and feel ‘real coral life’ courtesy of our very own Barrier Reef. The score consisted of the ‘noise’ of mammal fish and mollusc marine life with a bass track overlaid with a glorious soprano interspersed with text (most notably some expletives in a male voice that punctuated the otherwise ambient soundscape).

It was claimed that one could create a relationship with the gigantic pebble sculptures by Lyonel Kouro that inhabited the bottom of the pool, offering, said the program, “a vast Zen Garden to explore”. Well try as I might, the Zen pebble remained true to its name and spoke not to me at all.

From inside this spacious underworld, looking up through the watery ceiling, the image of the outside world looked soft and unreal. On this particular evening it was chilly and whilst the light rain contributed to the experience, we really needed oxygen tanks because the best place to be was under so that this symphony could be appreciated in full. Fighting for breath from under or floating on the surface with snorkels was ultimately frustrating. Having to constantly navigate kicking feet, flailing arms and potential head-on collisions, in the end the event became a pool party, and whilst the technology was obviously sophisticated, the event was simplicity itself. Victoria Spence

Sonic Waters, Neilsen Park

This was a free Sydney Festival event and as such had drawn a blend of suntan-clad inner city sophisticates, North Shore matriarchs and their attendant broods, a few arts junkies like myself and working class families from the West. Some, armed with masks, snorkels, goggles were obviously here for the submarine sound experience. Others just out for a Saturday picnic and swim were wondering what the hell that thing was floating out near the shark net. The program said it was meant to be a giant inflatable jellyfish inspired by Matisse’s “Le Bêtes de la Mer”, but it looked like a huge buoyant Chupachup wrapper. The nine wooden poles that held up the netting were decorated with blue and white ripple strips meant to invoke another Matisse painting, “La Vague”, and to appear like vertical waves or ripples emerging from the real surf. Algae-patterned weather vanes sat atop each pole, spinning and buzzing in the breeze. Apparently, the only way to hear the music was to immerse oneself, so I stripped down to my gaudy Speedos, donned goggles, waded through the mild shore break and made the transition to underwater space/time.

Sound coming from everywhere and nowhere. I’d been told sound in water travels four times faster than in air and only ten per cent of it is picked up by the eardrum. Ninety percent is heard by bone conduction, mainly through skull, jaw and neck but with very limited dynamic range as only certain frequencies register. New agey keyboard music washes over, under, around and through me, but this is deeply layered and thoughtfully constructed. Mutator software (developed by computer artist William Latham and mathematician Stephen Todd) “grows” music organically in controlled fractal expansion through genetic algorithms that progress in cycles of birth, growth and decay. Chaos theory techno-aesthetically tamed. Waves of pre-recorded, pre-equalized natural marine sounds, whale and dolphin songs, tinkly synthesiser motifs, cascades of ethereal flutes and woodwinds are introduced into the stew by the composer, Michel Redolfi, doing a live mix from the balcony of a hut adjoining the beach, assisted by his two sound designers Luc Martinez, also from Nice in France, and Daniel Harris from New York, both composers themselves.

I’m getting drunk on sound in these heady sonic waters. You can actually feel the music vibrating through your body. I need some air. I float on my back, hanging off the jellyfish, my head and ears still below the water, still absorbing the sound field, looking up into blue sky heaven, although the coldish salt water and rolling surf intermittently break my reverie. This could be bigger than float tanks and much more interactive and user-friendly. With a mild shock the hushed and accented tones of the composer’s voice break in, informing us the concert, which has now been going for seven hours, is drawing to an end. He lets us down gently by slowly fading the music and letting the natural submarine sound environment of far away jetcats, ferries and breaking surf, re-establish itself and us in real time.

Drying myself off on the beach I wondered how I was going to effectively convey the gist of this transforming experience to someone who wasn’t there. In the end it was best summed up by the sight and sound of a young girl running from the water, long hair flying, throwing herself down beside her mother who was absorbing radiated waves of a more visible kind and blurting out, “Mummy! Mummy! The water’s full of music!”. George Papanicolaou

The Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior,
The Song Company, austraLYSIS

The Eighth Wonder and The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll are entirely predictable recent operas, their dramatic shapes inherited from the 19th century, their music closer to the musical than to the significant operas of the 20th century. The Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, on the other hand, constantly and engagingly surprises. Although musically it inclines to an accessible modernism—save where it trips into rap and rock or achieves a sustained open-ended lyricism—this opera is theatrically (in the interplay of composition and libretto) a potent contemporary work. Some of its power was unleashed in its premiere production on and in the water, a barge, a yacht and HMAS Vampire on Darling Harbour. Its Australian antecedents and companions are the music theatre works documented in John Jenkins and Rainer Linz’s timely Arias (Red House Editions, Footscray 1997). Many of the most interesting of the cited works parallel contemporary performance in their play with meaning, states of being, narrative and site. You cannot bring 19th century expectations to these works. Those who have seen Einstein on the Beach—or, more pertinently, Robert Ashley’s Improvement (Don Leaves Linda)—will know the pleasure born of patience when confronted with new opera. Even so, any opera, even the most conventional, renders words and narrative unintelligible from time to time as music drowns words, as the demands of the notes distort words into sound, or, as is most often the case, it is sung in another language.

I invoke ‘intelligibility’ because it was the issue with which the production of The Sinking… and the librettist in particular were punished in reviews—despite aspects of the work being praised. And while I would be party to some of the criticism (there were many distances involved which made the audience work too hard, lose their attention, stare into the dark for action that was elsewhere or underlit) I had no more or less a struggle with the work than I’ve had with many an opera or music theatre work. Unlike plays and musicals, operas do not often make for a complete experience the first time around. The movement from impressions to understanding is gradual. There was however, much in The Sinking… that was lucid, much of the libretto that was amplified, even made quite literal at times, by designer Pierre Thibaudeau and director Nigel Kellaway’s exploitation of the site, use of projections, of spy thriller imagery, and of sound—exquisitely designed by Kevin Davidson. The clarity of the scoring and fine ensemble playing of Bright’s music by austraLYSIS, conducted by Roland Peelman, invariably created space for the singers’ voices. The physical and theatrical confidence of the Song Company was amazing given that acting is not their business—aided by Kellaway’s understanding of the non-psychological portraits in Stewart’s libretto. Even so, the desire as an audience member to understand was strong, even when absorbed by the production’s dramatic images and sounds. Those of us who purchased a program—synopses should have been distributed free—and got time to read it in the fading light were no doubt advantaged.

The particular challenge of Amanda Stewart’s libretto is that it operates both from narrative episodes (not always causally linked) and, especially, from a rich variety of voices (created, documentary, fluid, fragmented), and while individual moments and shapes are easy to grasp—a love duet, an interrogation, a monologue of loss—assembling the whole is more a reflective than a logical act. Even so, the overall progression of the work is chronological, once initiated by the ghost of Fernando Pereria (the photographer killed in the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior) emerging vocally from an eerie rumbling bass underworld. (There are too many like pleasures in the work to mention here.)

I hope that The Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior gets a second production, so often the vital opportunity for any opera’s future. While its creators are enamoured of the work as site-specific, a theatre (or other interior space) version with the same creative team could give the libretto its real chance, and a clearer indication how expertly Bright has responded to Stewart’s idiosyncratic use of language and made it his own. This first production warrants praise in every department. It was true to the ambitions of the work in scale and detail as it ranged across a battleship, through water and light, in the sustained and chilling wind of an atomic blast, and the greater betrayals and acts of complicity that constellated around the sinking of a protest vessel. Along with Denise Stoklos’ Mary Stuart and, on the Fringe, The Geography of Haunted Places, this was one of the most significant events of the 1997 Sydney Festival, whatever its shortcomings at this stage of its development. Its meanings, its engagement with the politics of the Pacific of which we are a part, and the language in which we are thus embroiled, give it relevance and urgency. Keith Gallasch

The Gypsies, Gregorian Chant Choir, Narasirato Are’Are Pan Pipers

Up to a year ago I imagined that gypsy music was the kind of thing I used to hear in Balkan restaurants in Hindley Street, Adelaide. I’ve never been that keen on virtuosic violin playing. But the film Latcho Drom changed all that, portraying a culture starting out in Rajasthan and spreading west to Spain and the UK. The live concert was analogous to the film in its presentation of the range of gypsy music and culture. A guy on a microphone gave you the story, rather like “gypsies for the masses” or “ethnic night at the opera house”. The tone was patronising and the narration unnecessary.

But the musicians created a sense of cohesion, despite cultural differences, bound by soulfulness, passion, grief, pain dealt with through music. As you move west in the film, more grief is felt in the music especially songs about Auschwitz.

For me the concert opened up the terrain of gypsy culture and music as opposed to the loose label of ‘world music’. It was interesting in terms of influences. I could hear in the Rumanians (trumpet, clarinet, alto sax, piano accordion and double bass) an influence on Michael Nyman, who uses the same instrumentation and has the same drive. A friend said it sounded like Charlie Parker had influenced the Rumanians! But it was more likely a historical connection with the gypsy music of the Nile (three oboe-like instruments with double reeds not unlike the Indian shehnai). Being a percussionist, I was inspired by the Rhajastanis beautiful, melody-driven drumming. (Ravi Shankar has drawn on this tradition and has performed a work with their dancer.) You can hear the folk origins of Indian music.

It was a night of connections, of musical anthropology. The attempt to do one piece together at the end wasn’t so successful, some participating more than others. But it did give time for the Egyptians to set up in the foyer where they sold instruments, CDs and tapes much to the astonishment of the Opera House staff.

Out in the open, I really enjoyed the free Quayworks performances by the 12 Narasirato Are’Are Pan Pipers from the Solomon Islands who played to big crowds. What was striking was the percussive drive and power of the music with the bamboo poles on the ground creating a bass line. Although they’re pipes, they reminded me rhythmically and tonally of my own boobams (octaban drums). Robert Lloyd

Concert of Glass, Government House, from della Laguna, presented by Contemporary Music Events

The Concert of Glass, held at Government House on January 17 as part of the della Laguna series, was a mixed success. A solo work for guitar, Gabriele Manca’s In flagranti, expertly played by Geoffrey Morris, was both the most glass-like and most interesting piece of the night. Brittle, complex and delicate, it had all the absorbing qualities of fine glass. Morris later combined with Carolyn Connors, playing glasses filled to varying levels, to perform bittersuss by Gerhard Stabler. This demanding work, built on silences and low dynamic range, should have been scheduled earlier in the concert, rather than at the end. Other works on the night were either too slight or too unformed to contribute much to the theme. The venue, however, was a plus, providing a sense of Sydney’s colonial history—although sightlines at the back were virtually non-existent. John Potts

Composing Venice, Government House

There are moments when you know there is an audience for contemporary music in Sydney, and this was one of them (the other was 10 new music works at Toast II Gallery, November 1996). Overall, della Laguna (“of the lagoon”) drew sizeable audiences with its program of rarely heard works ranging from Byzantine times to recent Venetian and Australian works. A curated program (Jennifer Phipps, Ross Hazeldine) as the musical centre of a festival makes a lot of sense, especially when it’s tied into the wider water imagery of the Sydney Festival and the use of intimate venues, Farm Cove and Goat Island (and a web-site with views of Sydney and Venice). Composing Venice was an ambitious concert. Save the brief opener by Claudio Ambrosini (Laura Chislett Jones on flute), the other three works were substantial. Gerard Brophy’s SENSO…dopo skin d’amourdo was given a warm, sensual, almost lush reading by the Seymour Group. Raffaele Marcellino’s Fish Tale was dark and witty by turns, even the sung bouillabaise recipe resisted cuteness, and the fourth movement, “Death”, was theatrically potent, the singers’ mouths locked open before lurching into a song of caught breaths and “unvoiced utterances with a single verse from one of the pentitenial psalms”. The Song Company, conducted by Roland Peelman, acquitted the whole work, “an allegory based on the narrative of Schubert’s The Trout” with conviction and verve. Let’s hope they keep it in their repertoire, it’s much more than a crowd pleaser. The second half of the concert was devoted to Luigi Nono’s Das atmende Klarsein in which the Song Company, on stage and miked, delivered long, gently shifting chordal shapes, alternating with Laura Chislett Jones playing bass flute with a shakuhachi breathiness from the balcony above. The third component was sound designer Kevin Davidson shifting Jone’s flute sound round the audience. Despite the dynamism of the flute writing and the displacement of the sound, the overall effect of the work was sublimely meditative. Keith Gallasch

Water Stories, Canberra Youth Theatre and the Song Ngoc Vietnamese Water Puppetry Troupe

Here was a mixed bag and in the oddest of environs, the IMAX cinema looming over us promising the “World’s biggest Movie Screen”, a tatty fun fair behind us beefing out offers of stomach churning pleasures, and several peak hour freeways growling across Darling Harbour. And what were we watching and just managing to hear? Subtle, sophisticated and witty Vietnamese water puppetry and broad Australian theatrical humour from rough young performers in a wobbly exchange of cultural icons—pagodas and opera houses, water buffaloes and sharks, rice paddies and beaches, work and leisure. Rural Vietnam and urban Australia? Well, despite a questionable mix of forms and images, there were sufficient links (water for fun, danger, food, passage), and the show engaged its audience, if in fits and starts—what were all those people doing tableauxing in those masks (some of them commedia) at a barbecue? It was at its best when the theatricality of the two idioms intersected: a beautiful golden kangaroo tourist snapping Vietnamese delta life; live performers in the water with the puppets; the Australians manipulating their own puppets. Not all of these were done with precision or resolved choreography, but they suggested the possibility of a richer collaboration at another time. Keith Gallasch

Laurie Anderson, The Speed of Darkness

For many, this was a sublime event, an intimate evening with a chatty Laurie Anderson. I was one of the pleasured. Almost. The sound was excellent, Anderson was relaxed, reading her text from her music stand, playing keyboards, adjusting the volume and a bit of the mix on the sound desk to her left, occasionally fetching her violin (big, loud, dark, Eastern European chords) and lit for listening (too dark for many to see the face they wanted to connect with). ‘Chatty’ is not quite right, ‘discursive’ yes. For one whose songs have an appeal born of brevity and an enigmatic turn of phrase, this was a discursive, often literal-minded Laurie Anderson. Mind you, some stories and observations could end unsignalled and you’d find yourself in the next one. Even so, discursive. And there’s something that happens when the masters of brevity elaborate, the hitherto buried moralist is suddenly and surprisingly at your ear. Her anxiety pieces about the new media came out a little too pat, a little to under-considered and were greeted here and there complacently. However, there were enough moments when a dialectical twist would be applied and you’d think, yes, this is the Laurie we know, she’s just turned us on our heads; or a passing reference to, say, her father’s death would hint at something almost too intimate behind this mask of a singing voice. Keith Gallasch

Denise Stoklos, Mary Stuart and Casa

In a Festival where Laurie Anderson playfully recanted and Molissa Fenley reverted meditatively to modernism, Denise Stoklos was right at home with her “essential” theatre—tights, bare stage, single wooden chair, bits of Marcel Marceau mime business—leaving us scratching for words to describe what it was she was doing up there and why we liked it so much. Denise Stoklos provided one of the festival hits though by no means an easy night at the theatre. This was performance in which the physical and vocal worked sometimes exhaustingly in tandem. She is a virtuosic performer and writer. Her body and voice are so finely tuned that you have the impression of a woman passionately articulating every part of herself. In Mary Stuart she plays Mary Queen of Scots as well as her tormenter Elizabeth I using a dexterous physical shorthand and a detailed vocal text. Elizabeth is conveyed in a set of haughty poses and curt phrases while Mary rambles feverishly in her confinement, desperately composing letters to her unforgiving cousin. At the same time Stoklos runs a commentary on her own performance, repeating phrases and physical refrains, constantly elaborating the story for herself and the audience. If this commentary seems sometimes a bit obviously meta-theatricky, it’s at its most effective in moments where the performer appears to be struggling with the physical act of speech. Suddenly she is struck by a word, repeating it, rolling it round in her mouth, exaggerating it until it takes over her body, winding up in her highly articulate toes. Even her hair is passionate! At one point she appears to vomit her resonant voice up from her belly into her mouth. Then, after all that, in one quiet, parting reference to the struggles for power in her home country of Brazil, she changes the audience’s point of reference, turns us on our heads and leaves the stage.

Street Level is an artist run initiative located in Western Sydney. Now in its eighth year of operation, Street Level is operating as an ‘off-site’ project-based organisation supporting and advocating contemporary arts initiatives in Western Sydney. Recent projects include a machine art performance by Triclops International, Cyber Cultures Exhibitions 1996 and 1997, an architecture and design project and a community based internet project WestWeb.

DC That’s one of the difficulties of working in Western Sydney. It’s not like you would just bump into someone in the street and there are so few venues for the arts, especially contemporary arts. But like everywhere else there are many communities.

KC Personal networks and contacts are very important. For example, Street Level is working with FilmWest, University of Western Sydney and Casula Powerhouse with our Cyber Cultures project. But Street Level also has strong links with inner city organisations such as The Performance Space who have been very supportive. Street Level is part of SCAN (Sydney Contemporary Arts Network—http://www.culture.com.au) whose other five members are all based in the inner city. These links are extremely valuable. Sometimes there can be a bit of a ‘ghetto-isation’ mentality towards Western Sydney from the outside, ie. art in Western Sydney is for a Western Sydney audience only. On the other hand there can also be a parochial attitude from some areas of local government and community art groups within Western Sydney. With other organisations like Casula Powerhouse, Street Level is trying to work across the region and with a national and international agenda.

DC For example, the previous director Con Gouriotis (now curator at Casula) undertook some wonderful projects. A show he brought in from Malta, Chants of Lamentation by the photographer Zamet, really hit a chord with local Maltese people. Street Level has also had a longstanding relationship with the Warburton Aboriginal community in WA through an earlier director Gary Proctor. So we are not just concerned about presenting work generated in Western Sydney and this sets us apart from community arts organisations.

KC It’s important to remember that Western Sydney is not an homogenous area. It covers such a vast area, geographically dispersed and culturally diverse. Check out on a map sometime the distances between Liverpool, Penrith, Parramatta and Campbelltown. It’s easier to get to central Sydney from some of these areas than to travel between them. Transport infrastructure is generally appalling. This is one of the reasons Street Level is very interested in exploring alternative strategies for communication like the internet and the world wide web. However it is still important to have cultural infrastructure for RL (real life) exhibition, performance and screenings and we don’t see virtual galleries and spaces as being a replacement for physical spaces.

DC Yes especially as tertiary educational institutions have made significant investments in technology and are developing specialised courses in that area.

KC This is one of the goals of Cyber Cultures, to allow Western Sydney artists and audiences to experience first hand some of the best work by Australian new media artists and have an opportunity to attend seminars and discuss new developments in this area. The performance program also explores areas of hybrid practice and new sites, for example, Stelarc’s performance which includes real time performance with interaction with images and sounds from the world wide web.

DC It is interesting the amount of screen based work at a recent graduate exhibition of UWS Nepean postgraduate students. I guess it’s the case that if the institutions provide the equipment and training then there will be more but again the question of how people continue to produce and exhibit work once they graduate remains a serious issue.

KC Getting the equipment resources for Cyber Cultures has been a huge task and would not have been possible without the support of many like-minded organisations (SCAN, SIN, UWS) and the corporate sector (Apple) and funding bodies (AFC, NMA, ANAT). Getting this sort of support is not easy for artists just out of university. There is a desperate need for equipment infrastructure outside of the universities. This is a role Street Level is working towards.

DC We are more interested in the creative uses of technology in terms of art practice, not limited to computers on plinths. Installation practice remains crucial and the ability of artists to work with unusual spaces to create immersive and interactive environments is particularly interesting. For example most of the artists in Cyber Cultures have worked really hard to create installations (the computers are there but as part of an installation environment).

KC The West Web project has been funded by the NSW Ministry for the Arts (our very first grant from the Ministry in fact). This project includes a public demonstration of the internet and the web with expert guides who will host a tour of their favourite sites and talk about ways of using these new sites for creative purposes. We are also working with Parramatta City Library, who will be hosting the first stage of this project, and with ICE (Information Cultural Exchange). The web demonstration performances will serve to illustrate some of the ways in which the web and the internet can be used by cultural groups and individuals (especially those who are geographically dispersed) to communicate with each other and also with other related groups both within Australia and overseas. Given the predicted power and pervasiveness of these new communication technologies, it is important that community groups and individuals in Western Sydney are informed about the technologies and can take advantage of the significant opportunities they represent at an
early stage.

DC The second stage of the project is to work with Western Sydney artists to present their work on the web. The other important aspect of this project is the development of a relationship between Street Level and a progressive public library and we feel optimistic about libraries in general as important sites for cultural exchange.

KC We are also working on a design project for a new space for Street Level, a project jointly funded by the Australia Council and CEAD (Community, Environment Art and Design). As a temporarily off-site organisation we are interested in investigating different strategies for operating as a contemporary cultural organisation. With this project we are working with four different groups of designers/architects to come up with concepts for four different options for Street Level.

DC It’s been a long term project and really I would like to thank CEAD for their support because we have been able to secure the services of some really interesting designers to come up with concepts in collaboration with us. These include a virtual on-line space with Graham Crawford of Exile, and a mobile space, perhaps a “Cyber Truck”, with Jesse Reynolds of Virtual Artists in S.A. Professor Peter Droege who heads up the Urban Design Dept of Sydney University (Olympia—yes, Olympia not Olympic—2000 project) is putting together a team to develop ideas for a purpose built space and architect Rod Simpson will be developing ideas for a retrofit space. In short we are getting some really good ideas for an appropriate cultural facility. The briefs are for the designers to be provocative and creative and to address our future needs. The designs will be exhibited locally in Parramatta, which is where we want to be located. It’s also the geographical centre of Sydney.

DC Street level and its board have had a strong interest in screen based and digital technologies and in terms of the organisation’s long term development being involved in technology based projects is important. In a crude sense, it is about staking out territory or creating a space or site for future projects that are technology based. For a small organisation, new information technologies do offer significant advantages for us and our membership. On another note it’s amazing the difference working with recent information technology (as opposed to a spray can) has when it comes to negotiating with local and state government funding bodies. We were recently involved with ANAT’s Virogenesis project where we hosted Matt Fuller and Gomma and the cyberpunk hacker mentality sits very nicely within our scope of things especially in terms of what Gomma described as creating spaces or free zones for people to participate. The main thing here is that the idea of free internet access seems revolutionary or inconceivable yet universities and local government have servers that would be able to handle it. So the line back to contestation of public space, local and community identity is very clear and I think the next stage of Cyber Cultures is to develop these areas of community access.

DV How do you see the infrastructure of the west’s art networks developing in the future?

KC What infrastructure? OK, there is a bit but it’s very limited. Given the lack of venues and exhibition spaces, libraries are in a good position to play an important role as cultural nodes.

DC But really with the Olympics and the centenary of Federation due soon you might think it was a good time for some solid steps to be made in terms of infrastructure, but it’s hard. I mean if it’s not going to happen now, well when? We are expected to be self funding or people say “do stuff in Westfield”. Try telling that to the AGNSW, there would be outrage.

KC Well actually we would love to do something in Westfield. We did have visions of a Stelarc performance in the main atrium…something for the shoppers to think about! But doing off-site work in Westfield does not mean we don’t need our own space.

New Dance: an ambiguous, unfixed, transient term. It’s a bit too expansive for me, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in considering where this term fits in dance history. British choreographers and theorists embraced it as a broad means of categorising early reactions to modern dance. The more common, present-day use of the term is as a catch-phrase. So let me continue the catch-phrase discourse.

When I think of the ‘nouvelle danse’ of Quebec, the artist who first comes to mind is Marie Chouinard—controversial in the 1970s, and now, finding movement from an internal, cellular motivation. With Chouinard as my only point of reference, I was more than willing to extend my knowledge of the Quebec new dance. Anatomie, presented by Lynda Gaudreau’s Compagnie de Brune, is a study in corporeality or, as Gaudreau has suggested, a type of architecture of the human body. I was fortunate to witness five parts of this originally seven-part piece; a reworking in keeping with both the shifting nature of ‘new dance’ and the choreographer’s personal emphasis on changeability and play. Throughout Anatomie, Ana Sokolovic’s compositions thread the physical core of this playful vision; the connection between the movement and the music is obvious and continuous, giving the dancers a strange, other-worldly quality.

Sylvain Poirier’s opening solo introduces Gaudreau’s sculptural conceptualisation of the body. He stands just on the edge of a sharply defined square of light, moving his head, shoulders and arms in and out of the light; reaching, grasping at something beyond, in the darkness. Looking into the light, then with indifference, through the audience.

Poirier reappears on one knee upon a raised platform. Fully exposed, we have a sense of the torso’s relationship to the rest of the body, as he cups his elbow in his hand, spiralling his back towards us, in a wrapping of himself.

The following duet between Poirier and Anne Bruce Falconer explores the body in other ways, revealing joints and limbs in stark isolation from the whole, and contrasting this with their implicit contribution to the body in motion. It is a delicious sort of tension which Gaudreau explores and tests.

Poirier holds Falconer’s head with one hand. They are close, but there is a certain distance between them. He finds the limits of movement, rotating and shifting her head through arcs and turns. Falconer maintains that sense of indifference which Poirier applied to his solo; initially submissive and later participating in the investigation of movement and the body. Folding into each other, shifting between manipulator and manipulated, they find physical spaces, curves and surfaces particular to their different bodies. It is a ‘new’ intimacy of performance, far removed from the polite romanticism of more familiar duets.

Annie Roy’s solo focuses more explicitly on the legs and their role in locomotion. It doesn’t sound particularly ‘new’, but Gaudreau has created some fascinating sequences that merge the classical and contemporary dance traditions very effectively, moving beyond the more straightforward process of setting them against one another to, alternatively, a rethinking of both dance forms to emphasise their similarities as well as their differences. So while Roy throws herself into the plies and grand battements of ballet, she does so with an aggression and sense of weight that departs from the traditional. It is a thread of experimentalism that links each section of Anatomie to the other.

Fourth on the program is Falconer’s more defiant solo, which contrasts distorted ballet technique against gesture and more contemporary movement vocabulary; all covered with playful connections with the audience: making eye contact and looking away, abruptly. It is almost as if she is presenting parts of herself to us for our contemplation. First the legs, slicing complicated patterns across the space or shuffling from one point to another. Sometimes she retreats from us, always acknowledging our presence in the space with her deliberate gaze.

The final ‘trio pour soloistes’ is the concretisation of the sculptural, architectural ideas that Gaudreau embeds in her choreography. The three bodies move within the space, at times meeting physically, almost haphazardly, and at others dancing alone. The duet between Falconer and Roy—with Poirier repeating his first solo off to the side—is another exercise in manipulation; Falconer holding Roy by the hands and sending her body plunging forwards, backwards, onto the floor. Again, the dancers convey a robotic indifference to each other, and to the physical closeness of their duet. It is almost unsettling to watch. But it is also a highly perceptive, analytical examination of the body in motion. And the work speaks about relationships in ways that more expressive dance cannot.

Critic Linde Howe-Beck has suggested that Compagnie de Brune is more well-known in Europe than in Canada. Gaudreau does spend a great deal of her creative time in Klapstuk, a production centre in Leuven, Belgium. It is interesting, then, to be witness to performance which manifests a borrowing from different sources, as well as the forging of a singular artistic practice within the broad domain of Quebec new dance.

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