Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

April 1998

Meryl Tankard’s Australian Dance Theatre, Possessed

Regis Lansac

Meryl Tankard’s Australian Dance Theatre, Possessed

Prelude: The industry

While watching Performing Arts Market performances I was struck by the presence of performance stalwart Katia Molino, seeing her one day performing with Stalker, on another with NYID, both shows requiring considerable physical fitness and dexterity. It was a reminder that there is a broad body of work loosely defined as physical theatre within which various subsidiary forms exist and across which a number of performers participate. Thor Blomfield, one time performer with and now Marketing and Project Coordinator for Legs on the Wall, commented that given “there’s an increasing crossover between companies, for example Legs people working with Stalker”, just how valuable last year’s Body Contact Conference, convened by Rock’n’Roll Circus in Brisbane, was for an area of performance he describes as “encompassing a range of contemporary circus, physical theatre and street theatre groups.”

Blomfield said of participants Circus Oz, Rock’n’Roll Circus, Bizirkus, Club Swing and The Party Line, artists from Darwin, Legs on the Wall, Desoxy, Stalker, some overseas artists and others that “it was an interesting combination that had never come together before. The sense of community in physical theatre has been growing but this conference was the first time we’ve come together formally. It’s timely now to discuss where we all want to go and what we need to do in regard to training, funding and touring. The base for our work was in circus, in the foundation of Circus Oz 25 years ago and that was uniquely Australian though with the influence of Chinese training. Now physical theatre has moved into taking on more European influences and other Asian physical performance traditions.”

Asked why is it important for these groups to talk about the future, Blomfield explains that there are industrial issues to discuss, training proposals (a national circus school), the exchange of information (being informed about overseas work, the rare opportunities to see each other’s work), understanding how companies operate artistically (Desoxy, Stalker, Mike Finch—ex-Circus Monoxide, now director of Circus Oz—spoke about this on a Body Contact panel) and issues like the role of the director, which can be critical for ongoing ensembles working with guest directors. He indicated that there was some preliminary debate about what the proposed training school should do, whether it should provide conventional circus skills or also include, for example, courses in Butoh and various training regimes.

A committee was formed at Body Contact to hold a conference in October 1998 so that these issues could be pursued in more depth, perhaps even to consider whether or not to form an association of companies to promote the standing of physical theatre, which Blomfield describes as being sometimes treated by the broader theatre profession as “the little kid they really don’t know about”. Belvoir Street’s inclusion of Legs on the Wall’s Under the Influence in their 1998 subscription season could be the start of something. Other areas Blomfield would like to see explored include marketing (making the most of marked US interest), physical theatre’s relationship with dance (choreographer Kate Champion has directed Leg’s Under the Influence; one of the Legs’ team was advising Meryl Tankard’s ADT on the use of hand loops for their Adelaide Festival production Possessed) and speech in performance. Physical theatre has proved itself an elastic form, one rich in hybridity and political range as well as being eminently marketable: doubtless for the artists and companies in this area to confer regularly, to see each other’s work, to debate training and artistic issues, to think collectively on industrial and marketing issues, can only enrich their work.

Physical theatre dances

Legs on the Wall, Under the Influence
Adelaide Fringe Festival, February 25

I didn’t know what was cooking, the sausages sizzling at the entrance to the ‘performing area’ situated on the seventh floor of the carpark, or the audience beneath the tin roof in 40 degree heat plus lighting, say 45. Either way it wasn’t a good smell. And yet, Legs were cooking, giving a virtuosic physical performance despite being awash with sweat. They pretty much held their audience though it wasn’t clear how Legs were managing to hold each other. This is a company blessed with a kind of performance ease, physical feats are achieved without ‘drum rolls’ and the acting is laid back and lucid. To ease into this, a prelude of apparently casual exchanges and acrobatic events (and their ‘accidents’) unfolds as the audience enters asking has the show begun—well yes and no (except to say that this particular postmodern gag is a bit overripe and is somewhat scuttled when lights etc finally do mark a start. A pity.)

Physical theatre has always lent itself to the choreographic impulse (doubtless inherited from the lyricism of the circus trapeze artiste), and is certainly evident in Desoxy and The Party Line, but here, under the direction of choreographer Kate Champion, it goes further, not into dance per se, but into a dextrous patterning of moves and holds that provides a magical fluidity for the work, everything from small gestural motifs and work with domestic objects and clothing to large scale sweeps of movement and a coherent dance-theatre totality. It was fascinating to watch the thoroughness and the inventiveness of the movement and I found myself surprised at how much the performers must have had to absorb choreographically when already faced with considerable physical challenges. Legs are not to be underrated. As for the show as theatre, this early version was too discursive, key images (as the broad narrative works itself out) seemed to repeat themselves as long in duration as their original incarnations, one-off numbers looked more than suspiciously like unintegrated individual performer favorites, some scenes wandered too far from the dangerous intimacies central to the work, too many lines fell short of funny and into whimsy, personalities were just a little too abstracted, and the overall shape plateaued early, a not unfamiliar problem for physical theatre with its constant battle to escape the string of tricks. But for all of this it’s very good and by the time Under the Influence reaches its Sydney season hopefully everything that already works—the physical skills, the choreography, the ease of playing, the sensual energy and cheery fatalism—will be sustained by tighter scripting and shaping.

Dance does physical theatre

Possessed
Meryl Tankard Australian Dance Theatre
Ridley Theatre, Adelaide Festival, March 14
Possessed is the next stage of Meryl Tankard’s adventure with dance that leaves the ground, seen first in Furioso but also evident in another way in her choreography for the Australian Opera’s Orfeo. I have a vivid memory clip of her dancers as Furies flinging themselves relentlessly at a giant revolving wall. It looked dangerous. There is some harness work (first explored in Furioso) in Possessed’s central scenes, but the impressive new material that frames the show in the first and last scenes suspends the dancer by wrist, or by both wrist and ankle, using loops. While doubtless placing enormous strain on joints and muscles, there are advantages for fluidity and freedom of movement for the dancer in the air. Of course, it’s not a trapeze and they’re starting from the floor, so there’s not a lot they can do by themselves without help from the ground, the push that leads to swing as their earthed partner determines the direction of the swing and acts as catcher and cradler (and assistant). That said, once airborne, the dancer can amplify their swing and create delicious physical shapes and defiant arcs out over the audience. It looks dangerous as the arcs extend and the dancers swing fast and low over the fence around the big stage. It’s exhilarating because it looks so free, so unencumbered. And these dancers look so at home taking the grace they defeat gravity with on the floor into the air. The opening scene featured male pairs, generating a surprising intimacy, the aerial device allowing them ease at lifting the fellow male body, leaps into space being taken off the body of the ground dancer, returns from space greeted with great care. That aside, the women dancers provided some of the most spectacular and unnerving flights. If Possessed has any meaning, it tells of an obsession with flight and the defeat of gravity. Psychoanalyst Michael Balint called these possessed “philobats”, lovers of flight, and suggested that we all have some of that obsession in us, though we’re mostly happy to let others do it for us, at the circus for example. Not surprisingly then, the audience for Possessed clapped and cheered at every stage of these flights.

Another possessed body appears in the second scene—an obsessive sporting body, its centre of gravity low to the earth, absorbing everything in its almost militaristic path (shades of NYIDs’ monopolistic one-dimensional fit body at the Performing Arts Market), first possessing individuals in separate gender groups and then obliterating even that difference, taking with it every expression of pain and anxiety and the strange shapes that pitifully express them—a clawing fall to the floor or a wipe to the eye. A later comic scene has a group of men parading like women in a beauty contest—high heels and parodic stances (but around me the audience broke into shrill cheers exclaiming, “the Chippendales, the Chippendales!”). A line of women in red dresses challenge the men to do it right and all but one fail and exit, the victor taking his place centre line, locked in the same smile he began with, totally absorbed.

Much else in the evening seemed incidental, making it a show of bits and ultimately a bit of a show, despite the consistently powerful contribution of the Balanescu Quartet. The first, second and the final scenes of Possessed could be assembled into a powerful work instead of the sprawling entertainment it unashamedly is. Some in physical theatre might see Tankard as appropriating their aerial space, and there are times when the showbiz of it all seems to say so, but physical theatre is not all circuses these days and Legs on the Wall have a choreographer-director who’s worked with DV 8. Stalker have come down off their stilts and are working the air in other ways. It’s an intriguing physical moment.

Gravity Feed, The Gravity of the Situation

photo Heidrun Löhr

Gravity Feed, The Gravity of the Situation

Embracing the unbearable

Gravity Feed, The Gravity of the Situation
Bond Store tunnel, The Rocks, Sydney
March 19 – 22
Gravity is upon us, from above and from beneath. It is weighty, it sucks, it pulls, it compels and commands from all sides. We act because we must, bound to this archaic form the cube which contains nothing yet everything. This is the tabernacle of damned creatures, and in its lightness is the source of their constant anxiety. Program note

Part of me wants to read this show literally. I resist. This is performance. We all inch our way in past signs that intimate danger. We are in a high ceilinged tunnel not in a theatre. Men in tired suits, some unshaven, hair straggling or shaved creep and dart about, oblivious to us, gathering lit candles in paper bags, placing them on a high ledge above a tall ladder, or in a cluster on the ground further down the tunnel. Me, I think I’m witness to some tramp ritual, a subterranean fire-worship culture, such is their care for their charge, fire that disintegrates that which is heavy into flame and ash as light as air. A soundtrack rumbles the resonant tunnel into a hymn of unremitting threat and mystery. It doesn’t let go of us. One of the men tugs at a huge metal cube walled with what looks like triple-ply cardboard (light but remarkably tough) and lets it roll down the slope of the tunnel, barely impeding its speed with all of his bodyweight. This is the first of the journeys of the cube, a miraculous device, Prometheus’ boulder to be rolled endlessly up the slope, a self-generating Platonic ideal that grows new walls as soon as old ones fall away (great design and construction), a perfect material to ignite (it takes and then refuses, glowing like a Red Milky Way), a tabernacle for unwilling worshippers whom it sucks to its centre from time to time and then once and for all. I can read The Gravity of the Situation literally, not as a tramp fire cult, of course (but what about those swinging buckets of flame?); it’s what it says it is, its heavy heart upon its sleeve. But lightness is as feared as much as gravity in this inverted Manicheanism. In a delicate and suspenseful moment the men hold the cardboard walls they’ve liberated from the cube vertically above their heads and criss-cross the space fearfully, juggling the surface area of the walls against the air in the tunnel.

The Gravity of the Situation is something more than the beginnings of the great work we’ve all been expecting from Gravity Feed after The House of Skin. What it needs now, now that the scenario is there, the shape is there, the marvellous cube is there, is for all the attention possible to be lavished on the choreography of bodies and space, a distillation of the opening, the establishment of a surer relationship between performers and Rik Rue’s awesome sound composition, and even perhaps opening space in the soundtrack so we, the congregation, can hear the performer bodies groan against the weight of the light and the heavy. In the past, Gravity Feed works have evaporated. Isn’t it time to embrace the unbearable lightness of being?

–

RealTime issue #24 April-May 1998 pg. 33

Brett Daffy and Kathryn Dunn in Bonehead

Melbourne’s very own contemporary dance company Chunky Move will headbutt its new audience at a preview screening on Saturday May 16 at the CUB Malthouse with their new hour-long dance film Wet commissioned by ABCTV, choreographed and scripted by Mr. Chunky himself, Gideon Obarzanek, and directed by Steven Burstow. A cluey collaboration—Burstow is one of a very few Australian directors interested in exploring the interface between arts live and on TV.

In a city full of fancy footwork, Chunky Move aims to do its bit to shift the boundaries of conventional performance in dance. The company’s move from project-base to three-year funding status will allow it to realise works on a larger scale and to reach a wider audience. Let’s hope that it also buys the company some of the time it needs to seriously develop new work. At the Adelaide Festival, companies like Belgium’s Les Ballet C. de la B. made local mouths water with the relative luxury of their work processes—18 months non-stop for La Tristeza Complice. Nurtured over time, the works are developed further over a number of productions. Robert Lepage (The Seven Streams of the River Ota) says he doesn’t write anything down until the 200th performance!

At this stage, the program is looking decidedly chunky. First up will be a remount of their recent work, Bonehead for performances in Melbourne in May following a tour of the work to South America in April. Gideon Obarzanek sees Bonehead as a work about the body as utilitarian being or object. “At one time,” he says, “the body is able to be an hilarious caricature of a vulnerable victim, while at another, it is seen number-crunching frenetically through virtuosic movement combinations, reducing it to a mechanism of bone, sinew and muscle.”Bonehead features some of Australia’s most skilful dancers: Narelle Benjamin, Brett Daffy, Kathryn Dunn, Byron Perry and Luke Smiles and newcomer, VCA graduate, Fiona Cameron. A tour to Germany in June will be followed by a collaboration with Paul Selwyn Norton (UK/Holland) after which the company goes into intensive development for Hydra, a large scale work combining performance and sculptural installation which moves dance out of the theatre and into the pool. Hydra has been commissioned by the Sydney Festival and will tour Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and internationally throughout 1999. In June next year, a new triple bill will premiere in Melbourne including a commission for Lucy Guerin.

RealTime issue #24 April-May 1998 pg. 40

Shelley Lasica, Dress

photo

Shelley Lasica, Dress

In addition to her many solo dance performances in non-theatre venues, Shelley Lasica has developed an extensive repertoire of collaborative works with dancers as well as artists from other fields. In Character X at the 1996 Next Wave Festival she collaborated with architect Roger Wood, composer Paul Schutze and visual artist Kathy Temin. Following her series entitled Behaviour spanning four years and six performance works, a video and a publication, Lasica embarked on a new series of theatre pieces. The first, Live Drama Situation, was shown at the Cleveland Project Space in London last year. The second in the series, Situation Live: The Subject, is a performance about theatrical interaction, loss of memory, coincidence and the subject of space. This time, Shelley Lasica collaborates with dancers Deanne Butterworth and Jo Lloyd, writer Robyn McKenzie (editor of LIKE magazine and visual arts critic for the Herald Sun in Melbourne) and composer Franc Tetaz who works as a composer and sound engineer with artists as diverse as Regurgitator and Michael Keiran Harvey. Situation Live is about what happens in the interaction between spoken, written and movement language.

In Dress, Shelley’s collaborator is fashion designer Martin Grant who created the 10 striking dresses with Julia Morison for the exhibition Material Evidence:100-headless woman at the Adelaide Festival. In Dress we see the way a body behaves and is arranged by the physical habits of clothing. Rather than making a costume for a performance, Martin Grant has designed an outfit that both defines and resists the performance of it. Dress was recently presented at Anna Schwartz Gallery as part of the Melbourne Fashion Festival. RT

Situation Live:The Subject and Dress: a costumed performance will be presented for three nights only at The Performance Space, Sydney, April 15-17 at 8 pm

RealTime issue #24 April-May 1998 pg. 40

Some dance writers make it a point of honour to avoid personal involvement or knowledge of the dancers or choreographic process prior to seeing a performance, hoping that the work might somehow be less tainted by their own biases, and they will be clear of ‘irrelevant’ distractions, more objective, a state counted as desirable and attainable. Indeed, it would be silly to pretend that having seen a dancer’s work over many years, liking their attitude, understanding the process with an intimate kinaesthetic awareness, a viewer wouldn’t enter a performance with certain expectations, a particular focus and set of assumptions, all of which carry a high intellectual charge.

With this in mind, my understanding of Ros’ work is a long one, having, in this particular project—part of her MA honours thesis at UWS—been invited to document over five weeks the three dancers’ internal thought processes, even to intervene by suggesting what they seemed to me to be doing, and requiring them therefore to respond by explaining in words that very intuitional improvisational modus operandi.

So, with the feeling that any ‘performance’ is just a momentary crystallisation in an ongoing process, I watched this particular manifestation. And in fact, the lights, designed with Iain Court’s delicate touch, and the palpable expectations of the audience induced a feeling of closure, pinning down some of the ideas, and making invisible some of the more vagrant possibilities in the work, threads of ideas I had seen before, too errant to become part of this ‘performance’ pattern.

What I have often seen which distinguishes Ros’s work is that its subject matter tends to be open and layered, inviting contemplation. Each performer can be seen not as a technician parading various accomplishments, but as an individual with a uniquely developed personal language and physical demeanour. The motives for movement are different for each of the performers. Even though my ‘outside eye’ might have relied on its ‘dancerly’ experience, in the absence of a studied choreography, I was drawn more often to what seemed like ordinary, if heightened, behaviour, thoughts and feelings and their physical expression, the ‘non-dancing’ character of each, the parts that can get submerged beneath specific styles.

Julie Humphreys, in her dance Telling Stories to the Sky, has a most distinctive improvisational persona. Perhaps it is not her intention, but her dancing seems to draw from a slightly eccentric emotionality, a whimsical, funny, secret shyness, a state of mind that anyone might remember having been in: not feeling sure, being vulnerable, self-conscious, and aware of your own foolishness, in a place where there is no hiding, and no alternative except to be yourself. It is not about epically beautiful feelings or lines, or ‘aesthetics’, and indeed she is not hidden behind any ‘dancerly’ performer’s shell. What you see is Julie Humphreys being really funny, breathing and laughing, sitting with awkwardly folded legs, running, gesturing, looking sideways, communing with something as if she’s watched, being herself, and reminding us about the soft, secret, silly side of being human, in this particular rather difficult and distracting environment, this public exposure called performance.

Gabby Adamik’s solo, Tidal, seems more straightforward in its dynamics. She works not so much with a muscular strength as with a central physical core to her body, undergoing seizures by waves and currents, pulling her to extremes, and back to calm, being thrown around, but clothed in a more indeterminate flesh which plays little part in these internal ebbing tides. Gabby’s is a short, contained and well-formed idea, a strong and supple solo, with a rich, clear texture, a rising-ebbing symmetry.

Ros Crisp’s duet with Gabby, Audible Air, has a similarly uncluttered structure: the dancers commence, widely spaced and obliquely angled, on either side of the stage, moving around and past each other, to change places. There are meetings in this dance, responses, awareness of each other’s presence, self-containment, listening. It has a cooler, less intensely personal quality. You might see only one dancer at a time, widely separated as they are, depending on which side of the space you sit. I was aware of their changing spatial relationships, creating a deep and acutely angled field. The image of a blurred distant figure behind one which was very near and crisply focused, made a strange photographic image, emotionally more removed than the other pieces.

Ros’s solo rendition of Audible Air, opening the program, also works with a quiet physical listening, not so much concerned with perceiving external sound, but with a slow internal cyclic resonance, waiting for the seep and swell of sensation and attendant imagination through the body cavities, through the breath, along axons, charging synapses, waiting, filling and emptying again from her body’s contours.

On one level there is a clear dancerly beauty in her energy and gesture. Her expression has a practised and refined emotional sensibility about it—unlike Julie’s more unravelled quality—which rests easily on a long and established physical practice. If speed, control, flow and precision are not primarily what she is concerned with, those qualities come to work inevitably and extraordinarily, providing a compelling focus for those who might find unsettling any departures from orthodoxy.

In the program notes, she has quoted Claudel:
Violaine (who is blind): I hear…
Mara: What do you hear?
Violaine: Things existing in me.

–

Omeo Dance Project, Four improvisations directed by Rosalind Crisp: Audible Air, Solo—Rosalind Crisp; Duet—Rosalind Crisp and Gabrielle Adamik; Telling stories to the sky, Julie Humphreys; Tidal, Gabrielle Adamik. Omeo Studios, Newtown, February

RealTime issue #24 April-May 1998 pg. 40

Wendy Houstoun, British performer and director of dance theatre, is on the move. She returned from teaching in Vienna to perform in a platform of British contemporary dance in Newcastle. She next travelled to the Adelaide Festival, to perform her solo trilogy, Haunted, Daunted and Flaunted. Before that she completed a site-specific commission for the Spitz cabaret club in London and conclude a mentoring project for emerging choreographers at The Place Theatre. Houstoun has been to Australia before, having toured with native Lloyd Newson’s company DV8. She has an affinity with Australians. “People often think I’m Australian”.

Houstoun’s trademark melange of monologue, movement and mood swings, hovers around the fringes of the contemporary dance scene; uncomfortably in the UK, where she is often criticised for subordinating movement to theatricality, more easily in Europe and beyond. In Newcastle she was programmed into the marginal mid-afternoon slot, but still stole the show with the international promoters. Her part time manager has been avalanched by offers for touring. “The Italians didn’t understand a word I was saying”, Houstoun shrugs, “but they still wanted to buy the work”.

Working on the Spitz commission when we met, Houstoun was remarkably chipper about her lack of progress: “That excruciating first step can take ages. One minute of dance can take five days to make”. On her own again, Houstoun is nevertheless clear that solo shows such as the trilogy are not the way forward. “Haunted was a way of breaking with Lloyd,” she admits, referring to the many roles she has created for DV8. “We were in a bit of a trap. We always started from devising and patterns would emerge and we’d repeat them and become sort of mutually dependent. It became hard to change or accentuate our ways of working. I would always end up cranking up the energy to get on the edge and become manic.” The links are not broken however, “Lloyd still comes to have a look at what I’m doing. He can see what is under the work”.

Houstoun is not in any hurry to get back onto the treadmill of international touring. “The trick is to keep free. There’s a degree of ordinariness in my work which I want to maintain. It’s to do with the claims you make for what you do. I want to avoid raising too many expectations. I can still change direction pretty easily.”

She’s at a turning point again: “I’m looking for a more internal way of performing now. I want to make smaller, quieter work. All this expressiveness is a bit juvenile”. The trilogy could already be seen as a first step towards this aim. There are traces of the confrontational characters Houstoun created for DV8, however this work allows a range of personae to take the mike. “I don’t see it continuing”, Houstoun says, “The whole idea of a trilogy was a bit of a joke. It just sort of carried on. The next thing should be quite different”.

Should be. Following Adelaide, Houstoun will work with theatre director Neil Bartlett on a series of performances in British cathedrals. “There will be a choir of 100 people, actors, dancers; anything could happen”. As we discuss the relationship between text and movement in her work, we stray into her experiences as movement director for the Royal Shakespeare Company and Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre. Houstoun continues to feed off theatre but reaffirms her commitment to dance as “the best way to get at human interaction. Acting is boring in the end. I get tired of the relationships the actors have with each other, with the director, with the text. They’re always talking everything through. Dancers take direction better, they take on shape without needing to know why”. Directors she admires (and she has workshopped with the best of them) are those who, like Deborah Warner, exhibit, “a light touch”. “Deborah has more of a manner than any specific technique. She leaves a lot of room around things. She’s not subscribing to any school of thought”.

There’s no doubt that the actorly dimension in Houstoun’s work will remain. Houstoun loves words and used them as the starting point for the trilogy. “Words often come way before the music. I often have to switch off, suspend thought to make the movement and to put the two together”. The words she wrote for Haunted were stored away long before the idea of the performance emerged. “I looked at the structure of a few plays. I pinched the odd quote. I’m interested in ways of talking to people, not so much what the words mean, but what they suggest. Speech as resonant of something else.”

In Touch, the short dance film Houstoun made with director David Hinton, there are no words. “A lot of the ambiguity goes out of words in film.” The medium still appeals however, “I enjoy the rigour of film, the way it eats ideas”. The pseudo-documentary she made in 1997, with Hinton again, taught her some lessons. “Maybe Diary of a Dancer didn’t work as a dance film. It was too long, gentle, lyrical. Not slick. It’s genuine. It has helped me to get away from some of the hardness too.”

And Houstoun is back to the impetus behind the steady progression of her career. “I need to negotiate ways to keep on making interesting work.” Whilst she cultivates a self-effacing modesty, it’s clear from the patterns of her career that she is always one step ahead of her current project, retaining the most interesting parts and moving on.

“How do you mature with your work?” she asks searchingly. “Credibility and respect are hard to negotiate.” Yet as the enthusiastic response to the trilogy and the offers of innovative collaborations with directors, musicians and choreographers keep on coming, Houstoun appears short of neither.

Haunted Daunted and Flaunted, Adelaide Festival, Price Theatre, March 10 – 14

Why do people begin to cough during silences; do they wait for silence. Why do they want to be heard; are they really coughing. No wonder Saburo Teshigawara includes coughing in this work, I Was Real– Documents. It does define a space, small and sudden, where others can’t be. It marks terrain, which is communal, and yet exclusive, like the “sshh” does.

I was a little anxious about seeing this show. I’d seen it in London and loved it. Here it was even better. I was closer for one thing. But, there was something else, something extra that is difficult to describe: perhaps ‘tougher’ hints at it. Something that defied exhaustion, or passed borders, or dissolved desires.

The work is composed of several distinct parts or movements (like music), which flow into one another. These are bracketed by a beginning which is dark and slow, and an ending which is light, brief, and strangely, falsely, idyllic. Teshigawara uses air, air as material, to make space come about for the body, sculpting it with a relentless and often frantic style of dance that is so full of detail and nuance that it saturates the gaze. Looking changes as one understands that ‘air’ cannot be owned, that it, here translated into ‘moving’, is free. Space itself dances; breath is the material of the constant present and the tense and tension of this fact, as force, creates the next moment (or gives it reason to arrive, as ‘thing’, new and surprising). The bodies of the dancers are distinct and alone on the stage. There is only one time when they touch each other, and then it’s as if, in brief closeness, they establish separation by voice, by calling, screaming. In this particular movement or ‘document’, where the voice is amplified, and at once beautiful and painful, it’s clear that every cell of the body holds memory, and as the body pushes its limits, by repetition and commitment to detail—that in some sense is only the extraordinary possibility of every lived second—the idea of air and breath is put into doubt. I mean, the idea of what each is, as space and time, as language, is questioned. These ‘documents’, as they are shown, side by side, are themselves archives, and are, overall, from another larger archive. Each body, in its isolation, in its knowledge of being only itself, carves a world that is complex, abstract, and delicate.

Teshigawara himself, dressed in white and then black, is compelling; he draws one directly into the dance, to where he is, into his bare fluid aesthetic, into the body he makes for you. Emio Greco is stunning, I hope I don’t have to wait another 12 months to watch him dance again.

Perhaps seeing Documents in the Playhouse, where I was closer to the dancers, made them more ‘real’ and intense. And the experience was overwhelming. I’ve hardly touched the surface of the work, I’ve not mentioned the sound, which is a dimension in its own right, or the costumes, or the projections, or the…

These ‘documents’ pay respect to what it is to be human and to remember and to breathe; and this ‘is’ makes nonsense of wanting to re-define the word ‘sacred’, of wanting to loosen it a little here and tighten it a little there. It too ‘is’.

I Was Real–Documents, Saburo Teshigawara & KARAS; Playhouse, March 11, Adelaide Festival 2000

One of the problems of writing about performances is the difficulty of notetaking in the dark. The disruptions it causes to other audience members, its potential to distract the performer, not to mention your own thoughts, are all reasons to avoid it. At the beginning of the festival I bought a pen with a light in it but it’s March 12 and I haven’t used it. Anyway, while you’re writing something down, you risk missing something else. The other difficulty is actually deciphering the notes you make afterwards. It’s like trying to remember dreams. The only words I wrote at the conclusion of Wendy Houstoun’s Haunted Daunted and Flaunted were her final ones. Who knows why I felt the need to write them down. I think endings in the theatre are given way too much importance, like nothing else has happened up to that point. I smiled when Hans Peter Kuhn said in the Forum on Tuesday March 10 that he and Junko Wada worked for a set time on Who’s Afraid of Anything? and when the time ran out, the work was complete. So much for endings.

Anyway the words I thought I scrawled on my program after Wendy Houstoun’s performance were “You can hear the human sound we are sitting here speaking” but looking at the scrawl I found “icnsethehunanoisewersittinghermak” or “I can see the human noise we are sitting here making”. A friend said she thought she heard something about “cities” which just goes to show how imprecise are the twists and turns of memory—more or less the territory that Wendy Houstoun is probing in this remarkable work.

After a festival full of words, my notebook holds a collection of such sentences—impressions, paragraphs scratched over drinks after performances, addresses, snatches of sudden poetry, eavesdroppings, meeting points, restaurants, snippets carried around in my head until I could find a place to write them down, headlines (like the one that appeared the day after the Barbara Hanrahan book was released—“Diary from the Grave” and Friday’s mysterious “Drug Dog in Limbo”. At this stage of the festival there’s an impulse to make connections so today Jenny Holzer and Wendy Houstoun meet on the page.

In note form, Jenny Holzer reads: “Repressed childhood/desire to paint 4th dimension. Art school—attempts reduce daunting reading list distilling books to sentences. Public posters/inflammatory essays/truisms”. (I almost broke my rule and stood up at question time to tell her about Ken Campbell who when he was in Sydney a few years ago performing his show The Furtive Nudist, spent days at the Museum of Contemporary Art writing a list of questions to which Jenny Holzer’s statements might be the answers). “Now installations. Latest work Lustmord—installations of words taking in whole body experience (where the eyes go). Words backwards/forwards/ reflected, juxtaposed with human bones to be picked up and read. ‘Resorted’ to writing, she said, because there are many places it can go but it doesn’t come easily.” Of the many sentences in her presentation I wrote down this one which came from a friend who was assaulted by a policeman: “When someone beats you with a flashlight, you make light shine in all directions”. “Nowadays—romantic inclination—writing text on water—as light—from multiple perspectives.” In Lustmord she writes as the perpetrator, the victim and the observer.

Wendy Houstoun too is all three. Before she enters, a voice from the speakers announces some random violence has been perpetrated on a woman. The voice appeals for witnesses, tells us that an actor will recreate the incident. The work is inspired by the BBC’s Crimewatch. True to life and art after this, my memory of the precise order of events is not sharp. Well, I have sharp memories of incidents. How sharp? Very. Particular movements? No. I’m not a dancer but I’d like to be. Details? I don’t…wait a minute, I remember a sequence where she took us through her dancing life by decades, going way back to the foetal position in 1969. I remember fragments of movements shaking her body. What kind of movements? Well like I said, I’m not a da…but they were unpredictable, unfamiliar, beautiful, no wait, wait, some were memories of other choreographies. I remember there was a Swedish bell dance she had learned which turned out to be incredibly useful, and I agreed with what she danced, sorry, what she said about jazz ballet and the Celtic dance revival. But that makes it sound satirical which is not what I meant to… What do I mean to say? Well the subtlety of… How? Well I remember she said she spent a year moving in two dimensions and how funny she was. But that makes it sound…There was much more. How much? Like I said, all I have is fragments, commentaries on her own body. She let us into her body and showed us her fear. That’s what I said, fear.

Wendy Houstoun is from Manchester, I think. Holzer’s crisp monotone is US mid-West. She is dryly witty, measured and fluid in the flesh. The words she exhibits electronically are short, sharp, sometimes savage. When someone asks her to explain what she means by “Protect Me From What I Want” she laughs and says “I don’t think I can”. Wendy Houstoun’s text is continuous, reminding us just what a physical act speech is. Unlike much dance using the spoken word, here it is not segregated in patches, or voiced-over, or used for interruption or pause. Words are inseparable from her body. She doesn’t enhance them with movement. They are partners. She does little more than speak them as she dances (no mean feat)—speaking of which, how Wendy Houstoun’s bare feet show the shape of a dancing life. And this work could not exist without the words. Without them the wonderful sequence of visual jokes (“Two small movements go into a bar”) would fall flat. The argument from people who don’t like the idea of dancers speaking is that dance has its own meaning and words get in the way. In Wendy Houstoun’s hands, feet and neck, the meanings of both words and movements begin to open up.

On an earlier page of my notebook is one of my first festival experiences, La Tristeza Complice, and as I flip the pages, Les Ballets C. de la B. become the bodies of Jenny Holzer’s “It takes a while before you can step over inert bodies and go ahead with what you were doing”. I wish she had seen those bodies dancing.

Haunted Daunted and Flaunted, Wendy Houstoun, The Price Theatre, March 10; Jenny Holzer; Artists Week Keynote Address, Adelaide Festival Centre, March 11, Adelaide Festival 2000

For a long time I’ve wanted to compose musical scores from bits of text and coloured paper, and stack them on a shelf as a slowly amassing single work, or sentence (called ‘Litter’ perhaps), “as if the logic of fiction is one that pertains to the emotions” (Brenda Ludeman, Visual Arts Program); I’ve wondered what it would sound like, I always wonder what writing sounds like as music, or looks like as dance; and I’d been watching Junko Wada for a while before thinking there was something familiar about her movement, not something I’d seen before, or understood, but something I recognised faintly, or more likely imagined; then it came: she’s writing; it was like watching words come-about, pause, float briefly, and join-up like beads; I didn’t like this thought, I chastised myself for misreading the contorted hands and the calm feet, and the body separated into many parts, all at once; it seemed that each move interrupted itself (like a minor subversion) in its middle so that it was seen, insisted on being seen, and was isolated from what was otherwise fluid; still it persisted, this thought, the horrible ability (want) I have to align various forms to ‘writing’; her body a type of stylus, acute, accurate—each move equivalent to the next—inscribing her dance into me, lightly; the engraving did not occur by harsh cuts, rather by repetitious and concentrated (condensed) strokes; the performance wasn’t about grand vistas, it was some other spatial knowledge: a topology of small dove-tailing details: “(s)he is the worker of a single space, the space of measure and transport” (Claire Robinson, in Folding Architecture).

Junko Wada is not going anywhere (she’s staying put, digging in), there is no journey other than thought (where she was sending me), and this thought is restless and malleable; it is simultaneous thought of here and of that other place so far back there’s no known path; she writes: “back to when I was an amoeba-like single cell”; she’s showing a confined, restricting space, small white empty, to be intricate (to be an architecture folding and unfolding, to be flesh: “Her architecture would be…a local emergence within a saturated landscape” [Claire Robinson]) and endless; that is, the space is strange—in parched geometry there is the naked written and writing body—and this strangeness is left alone by the soundscape of Hans Peter Kuhn; so, therefore, there are two separate works which throughout the performance remain distant (he’s building, she’s building, apart), parallel, creating, for me, yet another space (a third) which belongs to neither, which belongs to the audience (a gift, if you want); the soundscape is as minimal as the dance; and I don’t remember its shapes, instead I remember single sounds, single events–—rain, and to my chagrin the almost too-human ones, his whistling, his voice singing a Marlene Dietrich song, the pouring of the white wine into two glasses, and his footsteps across the floor to where she stood, waiting, and the handing to her of a glass, to toast the idea of ‘ending’ (I liked the music because it did not mark the dance, it did not drive or state, it was comfortable being there, present, and available at will) and this brought me right back, with a thud, to the ‘real’ of human display—to humans performing for humans, in diverse and delicate ways—which chronicles and archives the immeasurable and the unchartable, fleeting fragments (have I told you of the three dresses, red, yellow, blue, of how they worked ‘against’ the body, making its utterance somehow more live, and awkward too?)—and then not so much as ‘noise’ but as ‘objects’ or ‘positions’ in the space where I was, where the watchers were, skirting the dancer’s square, leaving her ‘room’, her work, to her; the third space is a prolonged interval then—where thinking is invited, a thinking between, in this case, movement and sound, or dancing (as it comes from the inside out), and music (as it goes from the outside in); and this making, imagining, of the interval, or plane, by bringing into proximity, but not interweaving, two very considered forms—one that stretches, reaches to the limit, and another that rests, resides with slight tension—collects nowhere else but in oneself (who is saying nothing, while the gathered cells, a universe, are now at the bar taking their first post-show sip, putting themselves in, edging themselves toward, a state of speech [to borrow from Barthes]).

Who’s Afraid Of Anything?, Junko Wada/Hans Peter Kuhn; Space Theatre, March 5, Adelaide Festival 1998

Faced, as Jan Lauwers put it in the Festival Forum on design, with the empty screen of the computer, dreaming a starting point, how to enter, how to begin testifying to the disturbance and disruption being caused within me and within the company I keep (strong disagreements abound), faced not simply by any one show but by the sheer monstrous Animal of the Festival itself. Knowing that the moment I enter that first word on the screen I will have made my entrance like a performer onto an empty stage. That breathtaking feeling of actually having to begin the irreversible momentum of the show. Wang Rong-yu, waiting for the rice to begin its unstoppable flow as the eternal wanderers emerge and the red drapes rise. Leda, with the uneasy music enveloping us in the dark, poised to fuck herself with her puppet Zeus, thus beginning the unending human saga of the interplay between eros and death. The American soldier, camera in hand, stepping on to the gravel path outside the Japanese house, about to face the horrors of Hiroshima and with one ejaculation to fertilise a 50 year comi-tragedy of East-West relations. Iyar Wolpe, on the brink of the white cloth stage (screen? page?) of the Bible, opening with those words which are at a soul-point of her race and which seem to speak for so many of the (Judeo-Christian) shows I have seen so far: “My heart is sore pained within me…” It’s there in the names: Burn Sonata, La Tristeza Complice, Snakesong, The Waste Land, Possessed. I appreciated the direct concern in Naomi’s question to Lauwers in the Forum: “Why is your show so painful?” And equally I understood his response (to paraphrase and shorten): “Because the world is a painful place”.

Never was this pain so vivid than when (by chance scheduling) I went, with the wanderers’ song still filling me, to hear the snake’s lament on the destructiveness of power mixed with erotic desire. The very belief system that Songs of the Wanderers, with its final unifying spiral, represented was rent asunder and its loss painfully evident in the disintegrated world of Snakesong. But the need for an aesthetics with which to express this rent and this loss gives rise in the work of both Belgian companies seen here this year to a charged and intense theatricality. It is one which, to use the words of Rudi Laermans in describing Meg Stuart, an artist we saw in the 96 Festival, “inhabits the realm of the uncanny” and is thereby sacred in its own perversely relevant way.

The harmonic completeness of the Taiwanese work, its organic rhythm, with scarcely a step or a move or a shift of tone out of place, the sheer lavish, joyous power of the rice-saturated spectacle, the layers of image and sound are all woven into an impressive, comforting, impermeable texture. It is not a cultural purity that creates the strength and impermeability. The touches of Western modernist expressive dance mixed in with the Eastern ritual journey and the sound track of Georgian folk songs are oddly disjunctive elements. But the artistic force, the accomplishment of the work seemed to me to be one of synthesis. Lin Hwai-min’s previous work Nine Songs is described in the Souvenir Guide as containing “disruptive moment(s)…when the audience is forced to experience a critical estrangement”. I felt no such estrangement in Songs of the Wanderers, from my position in the dress circle watching the map of the journey written into the rice. Here was an example of what Rudi Laermans, in talking from a different angle about the very different work of Meg Stuart, calls an “essential” (stage) image: “these images are so much ‘image’ that they never transform into words…(they) do not affect because of their ‘meaning’ or content, but by their ‘being-an-image’”. And later: “An image cannot be reduced to the metaphorical addition of a number of qualified poses, movements, or gestures. An image always keeps these elements together, and synthesises them into a particular…image”.

The power of a work like Songs of the Wanderers is at times overwhelming, undeniable. But it is for me at one with its limitations. I see it, I hear it, I feel it, I am in awe of it but it remains outside me, choreographed to the point of completion. How do I get in there? Despite Lin’s professed interculturality, this was also a question of cultural difference, of course. Wanderers is at the sacred end of the spectrum. It contains none of the profane late 20th century savvy I witnessed (and recognised) in the Taiwanese work on show at LIFT in London last year. The limitation is not in the work so much as in me—a profane Western voyeur both seduced by and resisting the seduction of Orientalism. I was enormously grateful for the final meditation upon the spiral as time to allow the spell of the work to move through my veins before I re-entered the Adelaide sun to let it sweat out.

Needcompany’s Snakesong/Le Pouvoir demolished all the tenets of artistic form and sensibility upon which Wanderers was based, putting a grenade under the belief in art as a force of synthesis. Snakesong had holes in it open enough to breathe through and deep enough to suicide in. In traditional terms it was undramatic, a-theatrical, inconsistently performed (the acting/performing dualism raised by Keith Gallasch in one of the Festival Forums was here the bloody knife edge upon which the very nature of identity rested), scenographically ‘ugly’, with scant respect for its audience, too loud, too laid back and unresolved thematically. And yet for all this it was liberating, witty, intriguing, confronting, irritating, satisfying, disturbing and with complete respect for its audience’s future.

The image seed from which it evidently grew was that fragment of the Lascaux cave paintings in which a man with a bird’s head and an erect penis lies prone next to the dead body of a bison. What a starting point! There at the birth of Western art is the eroticism of death, the fatality of sex, the paradoxes which have haunted it ever since. Following the opening darkness, the tortuous music and the twisted images of classical myth, the shocking interrogation scene drives hard into these paradoxes with unflaggingly overt histrionics. Did Leda die in sex (the little death) or was her death violent and meaningless. “Did you die (come) together?” The debate powers on and on through double translation. It really matters to them, these investigators, these actors, it is an issue to engage with fully, one important enough to keep chasing through the pain and the boredom, even though they know it is insoluble. It is rare these days to see such raw commitment to an argument on stage. The issue is still crucial enough to make demands on our passions. The myth is still with us, insoluble. We still suffer from it, as the gathering in the contemporary Antwerp scene makes all too clear. The competing egos, the lack of focus, the ache of betrayal, the lack of motive or certain cause, the inability of the characters to work from the heart when the actions needed are so simple and so necessary. The men and the young women are affectless, disengaged, able only to relate through violence and denial. The ‘room’, with its plinths and microphones and objects of a civilisation’s failed history is an empty mix of classical ruins and postmodern kitsch. This is a wasteland of the Millennium. It is little wonder that the extraordinary central woman, whose determination, courage, indomitability and dry dismissive wit is the only whiff of hope in the entire play, ‘dies’ out of it, orders the others off and leaves the mess for us to deal with. Her final wry smile at us is horrifying in its implication.

Needcompany—even the name is a cry for help. “Help me! I’m Belgian!” as the actress in La Tristeza yelled out. ‘Belgian’ in this late 20th century has, through the power of its theatre companies, come to mean ‘human’.

Festival Forum, Design; Songs of the Wanderers, Cloud Gate Dance Company; Le Pouvoir/Snakesong, Needcompany; Adelaide Festival 1998

My father played a button-accordion, for ‘old-time’ dances. And he was good. He was a sought-after musician, everyone could dance to his music. My mother was a good dancer. My parents took me to these dances, once a month, and taught me all of them. Occasionally at Christmas my father brings out his accordion. And we all sit around the lounge-room and eat and drink. I think my father should be in this festival. I grew up, in the country, with accordion music and dancing. I also grew up with dark nights outside the Mt McIntyre Hall where the cars were parked, where the fights started.

I always wondered what anguish or despair, caused the punches, the smashed bottles, and the violent speech. I wanted to be in the carpark and the hall at the same time. To see both, as if layered. I think I’ve seen this now. The carpark was dangerous, and the dance-hall wasn’t. A thin wooden wall separated them. In La Tristeza Complice (The Shared Sorrow) no wall separates living and dying, just invisible honour. And this dying is not literal, it’s living death. It’s sorrow. And the sharing of sorrow forms tenderness that is so terrible, so resisted and resented, that it barely exists as that. Still, it does. There’s no denying it, thank god. It’s energy that makes each of the ‘characters’ so full of life that they almost burst. It hurts to watch them play it out. Their bodies take a beating, or, they beat their bodies. It’s brutal, and sensual, to watch. There are awful, funny, scenes, yet one can’t laugh, one forbids oneself (somehow), and here lies the tenuous border.

The pacing of the work is careful. It swings from menacing calm to harsh chaos. Neither are deadly, yet each carries death like a precious weight which lifts now and then, leaving the person in a state of even greater loss, as if death holds cells together, is a friend. And this manifests when the winged break-dancer arrives with his small magic carpet, a silly Hermes with a silly message, a trickster whose one prop is a clue, too literal to be trusted—and someone covers it with broken glass for him to dance on. He’ll dance anywhere, be tortured anywhere. Calm and chaos append each other, one beckons the other. There is no rest, even in sleep. The finely tuned roller-skate segment declares the company’s tough poetics; a sustained poetics that keeps ‘faith’ to the bitter end; faith summoned up by one great indignant sentence: “So, who decided all of that”.

The whole work is composed of tiny, fragile, passing events that infect each other, changing the dynamic and dimension of ‘life’. You see a dozen young beings, together but totally alone, and sure of their aloneness. And this is perhaps Platel’s clearest intention: that despite the goings-on of others nearby, or in real contact, the self insists on its utter difference, its own expression; it cradles its own story like a gift. This is powerfully told when the black girl begins to sing her sorrowful song—“if love’s a sweet passion, why does it torment”—and the transvestite crawls all over her, pulls and bites her, drags her this way and that, covers her face, but cannot stop her song.

La Tristeza Complice, as political performance, respects the self whose screams are reduced to single syllables—no, damn, shit, how, bang—and to brief statements—“I’m Belgian, I’m from Belgium, I’m Belgian”. It’s that simple. The transformed Henry Purcell music (mostly from The Fairy Queen) is played by the ten accordionists from the Conservatoire in Antwerp, the soprano sings, the dancers dance. They all might die, they all might kill. It’s about (if ‘about’ is a fair word) circulating desire (for love and sex). Marguerite Duras wrote of this fierce, sly, worn currency. She also wrote of the gaps within desire and body: “Sometimes they look a hundred years old, as if they’d forgotten how to live, how to play, how to laugh…They weep quietly. They don’t say what it is they’re crying for. Not a word. They say it’s nothing, it’ll pass”. (Summer Rain)

I saw La Tristeza after the opening of the Adelaide Biennial, All this and Heaven too (at the Art Gallery of SA), and before watching the spectacle of Flamma Flamma (at Elder Park). That is, I saw the strong epic black and white texts of Robert MacPherson and the quiet domestic solitude of Anne Ooms’ chairs, lights, and books, and then listened to a Requiem (Nicholas Lens’ Flamma Flamma), and watched the hundreds of children carry their glowing lanterns, and embrace the river-lake, and inbetween witnessed people brutalise and comfort each other. It was like being burned by flames of every intensity, and squeezed to life.

La Tristeza Complice, Les Ballets C de la B and Het Musiek Lod, Playhouse, February 27, Adelaide Festival 1998

This is a strange experience; not weird, not wild, but odd. The odd opportunity to see one video several times and to read it differently (or not) each time because its soundtrack changes, each video voiced in a new way. I say voice, because voice, sung and spoken, is pivotal in this performance. Onstage three female singers, sometimes four, synch into spare soundtracks, adding to instrumental and/or vocal lines, or going it on their impressive own. As a music concert it’s mostly great, and gets better as it goes.

Often we don’t ‘hear’ soundtracks (even when moved by them), unless they’re as obtuse as the Titanic’s or packed with favorite tunes, unless we’re soundtrack addicts. In Voice Jam & Videotape image and music are almost in equal partnership. “Almost” because it’s the films in this performance which are repeated, not the musical compositions. Each video enjoys the benefit of two or three accompaniments. Although this is a Contemporary Music Events’ gig, it’s still a matter of music servicing the videos. (CME has produced a show where you sit in a cinema and listen to music without film.) Kosky tries to keep the balance by placing his singers next to the screen. By the last screening, I know what I’m inclined to look at.

Tyrone Landau, Rae Marcellino, Elena Kats-Chernin and Deborah Conway have created compositions that warrant multiple hearings. This could not be said of the viewing of most of the videos. Elena Kats-Chernin’s score for Judy Horacek’s animated The Thinkers, about The Stolen Children, was exemplary, matching this artist’s whimsical style with a musical cartoon language just serious enough to sustain the message. It markedly improved my still limited appreciation of the video, amplifying its moments of magic—especially the images of flight. David Bridie’s score for the same video, including the voice of Paul Keating, while politically pertinent, laboured the point, making the cartoon curiously twee, not up to the weight of the soundtrack. Deborah Conway’s composition for Lawrence Johnston’s Night, a Sydney Opera House reverie built from close ups of roof-shell details (tiles, edges etc.), added an aural density and a sense of the architectural space dealt with—many voices inside the Opera House, spare visual detail on the outside. Conway appeared (discreetly in the dark) adding her own voice to the multitude, the musical quality not dissimilar from that she helped create in the marvellous soundtrack for Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books.

The one video that worked for me and that worked at me with the help of its composers, was Donna Swann’s dis-family-function. I’m usually not fond of narrative short films, but the almost silent movie, family-movie innocence of the work with its blunt edits and nervy close-ups (and none of these over-played), is engaging and I was more than happy to watch it twice. A gathering for a birthday party for an ageing mother starts from several points until the characters converge for a backyard party and the giving of gifts. Landau’s reading is relatively dark, male voice and piano, other male voices added, finally joined by the live voices of the onstage women singers. There’s something faintly disturbing about the score, a kind of restrained (almost Brittenish) poignancy, an inevitable unravelling of feeling and never a literal response. The onscreen image of the mother sinking into herself after the giving of gifts (dog bookends, dog statue, dog pictures, a real new dog—in the presence of her elderly-barely-willing-to-budge old dog) is sad. Rae Marcellino’s score is just as good, but much closer to what I imagine the videomaker might have had in mind. Its opening, rapid lines of “ma ma ma” immediately signals a lighter, everyday mood, and you don’t go looking for the video’s simple seriousness, that just hits you later. But in the choral work, as in the Landau, there’s something oddly holy generated as we watch these strangers—the mother, the dog, the son with his Indian girlfriend, the gay couple, and the young parents with baby, lolling in the sunlight, the near-but-never-to-be drama past.

Voice Jam & Videotape, curated by Barrie Kosky for Contemporary Music Events, Mercury Theatre, Adelaide, March 6 – 8; Salvation Army Temple, Melbourne, March 13 – 15

One moment you’re immersed in festival fever: running projects, racing to shows and exhibitions, talking about stuff in foyers and forums, grabbing inedible food at disgusting hours of the day and night and still getting to work on time in the mornings. Suddenly, the festival(s) recede, leaving you fishlike, stranded and gasping, over-tired and frumpy in a world full of incessant deadlines and all the things that have been left undone that should have been done last week.

I began the Festival of Perth with the light and fluffy Titanic and the now hotly debated (over two cities and two festivals) The Seven Streams of the River Ota by Robert Lepage’s Ex Machina. Seven Streams was an interesting work. The seven hours of viewing were not arduous. In fact the no doubt necessary pacing/tempo made it very easy to sit through. Without going into descriptive detail (of which much abounds), I found the first three sections visually exciting, witty and incisive. It seemed, nonetheless, a fragile work, easily thrown off its stride. I started to have misgivings in the fourth section or stream, which represented the legal suicide of one of the key characters who has contracted AIDS; misgivings that turned to irritation in the fifth section, dealing with the Holocaust—lots of tricks with mirrors and the familiar images of a displaced population struggling through a non-specific but clearly European winter landscape.

Given the number of works in both the Adelaide and Perth festivals, that have attempted to deal with humanly inspired catastrophe, including exhibitions such as Jenny Holzer’s Lustmord (Bosnia) and Adrian Jones’ Cadaver (the genocide committed against Aboriginal people) at PICA, as well as a range of talks addressing everything from terror and morals in Perth and the sacred and the profane in Adelaide, the questions I am left with have everything to do with the possibility of the appropriate ‘staging’ and/or ‘exhibition’ of grief or despair in the face of overwhelming brutality. Finally it is the considered and subtle collaboration between Adrian Jones (WA) and Marian Pastor Roces (Philippines) which has been the most compelling in terms of a thoughtful self reflexivity in relation to these complex terrains.

In Seven Streams, my initial discomfort turned to dislike in the final three sections. What had previously seemed to be the deft touch of the director carefully avoiding the pitfalls of easy resolution, became simply glib; the politics naive and the visuals clichéd. The relationships articulated across the 20th century between the survivors of the Holocaust and those of Hiroshima seemed contrived and twee and something more (or less) to do with innocent (albeit gauche) America and ravaged Japan—an all too familiar trope.

Being the Festival of the long night, I also spent five hours watching Cloudstreet, presented by Black Swan Theatre in association with Belvoir’s Company B at the Endeavour Boat Shed in Fremantle. A beautiful space with a fabulous cast assembled by Neil Armfield, this was the absolute crowd-stopper of the Festival. Whilst I think it could well do with some judicious editing, particularly in the first and third sections and the little girlie stuff is a bit ham for my taste, this was a work defined by outstanding performances. Having said that, Cloudstreet is a relatively easy show, dealing with the familiar and the happily parochial—designed for an enjoyable night in the theatre. My enjoyment was somewhat hampered by the fact that, seated as I was, towards the back of a very large and steep rake, it was very hard to hear this very verbal piece much of the time.

There’s not much to be said about Germany’s Theatre Titanick. A mildly entertaining bit of fluff which is perhaps more interesting to look at in relation to Stalker’s Blood Vessel in Adelaide. A more embryonic work, Blood Vessel has so much more going for it in terms of a beautiful rig (designed by Andrew Carter), the sound (Paul Charlier) and the substance (Rachael Swain and the company). Whilst Blood Vessel has a long way to go in terms of both its content and its choreography, and the relationship between its strong visuals (physical and filmic) and material base, previous experience suggests that it will be a much more exciting work than Titanic by the time it reaches Perth audiences in 1999.

My pleasure in Uttarpriyadarshi (The Final Beatitude) by the Chorus Repertory Theatre from Imphal (India) came from the fabulous cacophony of image, sound and story telling derived from a rich synthesis between traditional Indian styles in juxtaposition with contemporary techniques. An elephant, richly caparisoned for war, creates a dramatic and fabulous moment surrounded by the shadowy silhouettes suggestive of great armies. Women wail in varying extraordinarily pitched registers or cackle like banshees whilst the fires of Hell burn. Buddhist monks perform something akin to the antics of the Keystone Cops and unlike Lepage’s much cooler Seven Streams, there is no sense of embarrassment or measure.

I didn’t make it through the entire program of the Lyon Opera Ballet. The first offering, Central Figure by Susan Marshall, took a quite formal dance vocabulary and made it into something simultaneously dull and sentimental. The second, Contrastes by Maguy Marin, relied on parody and caricature and was positively offensive. I was grateful to catch up with Teshigawara’s I Was Real—Documents in Adelaide and in this much more considered and technically meticulous work, get the artificial taste of saccharine out of my mouth.

The absolute highlight of the Festival of Perth was the Belgian (Flemish really) company Les Ballets C. de la B. and Het Muziek Lod with La Tristeza Complice directed by Alain Platel. Interestingly enough, audiences in Adelaide responded with infinitely more enthusiasm than those in Perth. This is a work that took on all my pet theatrical phobias (performers doing ‘mad’ and/or ‘street people’ is a particular hate) and hung ’em out to dry. In this landscape, people unfolded and retreated, hung out and persevered, danced into stillness; inhabited the space against the extraordinary sound of ten piano accordionists performing the Baroque music of the English composer, Henry Purcell. This is a work for experiencing not describing but the relationship between the performers (whether professional or inexperienced) was exceptional and their ability to focus on the vulnerable, the imperfect and the ugly, made it a performance of extraordinary beauty and tension.

Cloudstreet, Black Swan Theatre/Company B Belvoir, The Endeavour Boatshed, director Neil Armfield; Uttarpriyadarshi, Chorus Repertory Theatre Imphal, written and directed by Ratan Thiyam, Winthrop Hall; The Seven Streams of the River Ota, Ex Machina Company, directed by Robert Lepage, Challenge Stadium; Titanic, Theater Titanick, The Esplanade; Central Figure, Lyon Opera Ballet, director Yorgos Loukos, choreographer, Susan Marshall, Contrastes, choreographer, Maguy Marin, His Majesty’s Theatre; La Tristeza Complice, Les Ballet C. de la B., director Alain Platel, music by Het Muziek Lod, Regal Theatre; Cadaver, Adrian Jones, PICA. All events part of the Festival of Perth, February 13 – March 8

A sizeable fold gathered at the very smart (or ‘bourgy’, depending on your perspective) Ngapartji Multimedia Centre in East End Rundle Street for FOLDBACK, the day long forum exploring media, sound and screen cultures, organised for the festival by ANAT (the Australian Network for Art and Technology). Richard Grayson gave a user-friendly welcome invoking the the 10th anniversary of the other summer of love—“the famous event in south-east England, where techno ecstatics transformed the urban psyche of hyper-decay and escalating pan-capitalism into trance and psychedelic experiences” (ANAT newsletter)—stirring our barely repressed British memories of driving minis through Essex out of our gourds, on the lookout for parties we could never find. Paul Brown who says he actually found the party, stirred some of the same nostalgia in his account of the slow emergence of multiple media practice as 30 years on the fringe, citing rampant conservatism behind the form’s status in the artworld as part of a global salon des réfuse. There was some sense in this hankering that “legitimacy” meant legitimacy in the visual arts world which suggested perhaps a narrower engagement with the arts than expected. This was happily contradicted in subsequent sessions that demonstrated the vital relationships between new technologies and writing, sound and performance. A very writing-based day all round.

Cyberwriter Mark Amerika re-traced his steps from underground artworld, performing “acts of voluntary simplicity”, through his swerve into publication with the cult hit The Kafka Chronicles, which hurled him unwittingly into the public sphere and onto the digital overground. While he was busy collapsing the distance between author and reader, his online publication network, AltX (www.altx.com) was attracting the attention of international money marketeers. Like a lot of the international guests at the Adelaide Festival, Mark Amerika seems to be able to pat his head and rub his tummy at the same time. He may have achieved some fame and a little fortune as web publisher, but he’s still addressing the frictions between electronic art and writing. His writing-machine (Grammatron) still grapples with spirituality in the electronic age, asking questions like “Who are I this time?” (www.grammatron.com).

ANAT’s first executive officer, cyber-artist Francesca da Rimini, took some of her own advice (Quick! Question everything) rudely interrupting her own spoken text with others emanating from her cyber pseudonyms gash girl, doll yoko and gender-fuck-me-baby.

In *water always writes in *plural Linda Marie Walker and Teri Hoskin, from the Electronic Writing Research Ensemble, linked up live with Josephine Wilson (WA) and Linda Carroli (QLD) who have all been part of the first joint ANAT/EWRE virtual residency project, writing together online to create a work entitled A woman/stands on a street corner/waiting/for a stranger. Duplicating the act of writing for a live audience was an interesting if slow process, producing some nice accidents of speech: the odd poetry of phonetic translations, the Simple Text voices reproducing typos; suggestive intervals between writing and spoken text. You can read the piece on http://www.va.com.au/ensemble/water

Programming Linda Dement after lunch was a brave move. Still, it was soothing to hear a female voice in the dark still in love with the possibilities of technology for realising her expert if sometimes gruesome images. You would expect a sustained sequence of bloody bandages accompanying a diatribe on censorship to empty a room but here the pleasure of seeing the work of this former fine-art photographer projected on such a scale and in such vivid detail held too much fascination. Me, I spent a lot of time looking at the floor. Afterwards, diatribe met diatribe when a man in the crowd accused Linda Dement of male-bashing, citing “the situation in Bosnia” and then “all of history” as reason enough to censor, presumably, any statements along gender lines.

No wonder the cheery Komninos Zervos with his Underground Cyberpoetry received such a warm response after this error type-1. His CD-ROM was produced while Komninos was ANAT’s artist in residence at Artec (UK) last year. Using performance-poet delivery and adopting an assortment of streetwise London personae, Komninos playfully navigated his word animations. Screen became spin dryer, words tumbling as Komninos moved among us. The performance potential of multimedia works is really only beginning to be explored in Australia. Outside groups like skadada in Perth and Company in Space in Melbourne, we don’t see a lot of performance engagement with the new media. It’s an area that ANAT clearly see as important.

nervous_objects is an eclectic, accidental experiment in internet artistic collaboration. They met at ANAT’s 1997 Summer School in Hobart and have continued to collaborate online, in locations as remote as Perth, Woopen Creek and New York City exploring notions of realtime internet conferencing and manipulation of artistic pursuits in virtual and physical space. In their first project Lingua Elettrica (http://no.va.com.au) at Artpace and created for ISEA 97, they built an interactive website and publicly destroyed it. In a day otherwise free of technological accidents, nervous_objects encountered a few, making it sometimes difficult to decipher their precise intention. Their calm in the face of calamity produced a laid back form of subversion.

The stakes lifted when Stevie Wishart entered. Not an Adelaide Festival accordion in sight but improvising with medieval hurdy gurdy and live electronics she extracted an amazing array of sounds and tones. Real Audio was streamed from Sydney and mixed as it came through. As Stevie played, Jim Denley navigated the new CD-ROM track created with Kate Richards from Stevie’s new CD (Red Iris, Sinfonye, Glossa Nouvelle Vision GCD 920701).

In the energetic Q and A session, Mark Amerika brought up the need for new writing about multiple media, citing the likes of George Landau and Gregory Ulmer as critics who practice what they preach and engage with the work on its own terms. Chair of the New Media Arts Fund, John Rimmer, asked just how much technical difficulties (lags, delays, congestion) are intrinsic to the work and how they might develop given more bandwith. For nervous_objects, if it gets too fast, too polished it’s not interesting anyway. There was some discussion of Garry Bradbury’s score for Burn Sonata using pianola and digital technology. When someone in the audience thanked nervous_objects for sharing their process. Garry begged to differ, accusing them of utopian dreams of machines generating ideas. The nervous_objects said it was something that pushed them and they certainly didn’t expect the machines to generate ideas. Working with content issues was what they were doing. Afterwards all repaired to the Rhino Room for the launch of the excellent new CD by Zónar Recordings, Dis_locations, Incestuous Electronic Remixing, coordinated by Brendan Palmer. RT

FOLDBACK, ANAT, Adelaide Festival, Ngapartji Multimedia Centre, March 8.
An accompanying exhibition, possibly to tour, was exhibited at Ngapartji for the duration of the Adelaide Festival’s Artists Week. http://www.anat.org.au/foldback

Sound Mapping is a participatory work of sound art made specifically for the Sullivan’s Cove district of Hobart in collaboration with the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Participants wheel four movement-sensitive, sound-producing suitcases around the district to realise a composition which spans space as well as time. The suitcases play “music” in response to the geographical location and movements of participants.

The prime mover behind the project is Hobart-based musician Ian Mott. Mott holds a BSc from the University of Queensland and a Graduate Diploma of Contemporary Music Technology from La Trobe University. His prime artistic activity is designing, developing, building and composing for public interactive sound sculptures—currently in collaboration with visual designer Marc Raszewski and engineer Jim Sosnin. Ian is also a specialist in real-time sound spatialisation and the real-time gestural control of music synthesis and interactive algorithmic environments.

“Sound Mapping”, as Mott explains, “creates an environment in which the public can make music as a collaborative exercise, with each other and with the artists. In a sense the music is only semi-composed; it requires that participants travel through urban space, moving creatively and cooperatively to produce a final musical exposition. Music produced through this interaction is designed to reflect the environment in which it is produced as well as the personal involvement of the participants”.

Sound Mapping uses a system of satellite and motion sensing equipment in combination with sound generating equipment and computer control. Its aim is to explore a sense of place, physicality and engagement to reaffirm the relationship between art and the everyday activities of life. For Mott, “Digital technology, for all its virtues as a precise tool for analysis, articulation of data, communication and control, is propelling society towards a detachment from physicality”.

For music, the introduction of the recording techniques and radio in the early 20th century broke the physical relationship between performer and listener entirely, so that musicians began to be denied direct interaction with their audience (and vice versa). Sound Mapping addresses this dilemma, for Mott believes that “while artists must engage with the contemporary state of society, they must also be aware of the aesthetic implications of pursuing digital technologies and should consider exploring avenues that connect individuals to the constructs and responsibilities of physical existence”.

The Sound Mapping communications system incorporates a single hub case and three standard cases. All the cases contain battery power, a public address system, an odometer and two piezoelectric gyroscopes. The standard cases contain a data radio transmitter for transmission to the hub and an audio radio device to receive a single distinct channel of music broadcast from the hub.

Prior to the project’s commencement, Mott anticipated that “the interaction between onlookers and participants will be intense due to the very public nature of the space. The interaction will be musical, visual, and verbal as well as social in confronting participants with taboos relating to exhibitionism. This situation is likely to deter many people from participating but nonetheless it is hoped the element of performance will contribute to the power of the experience for both participants and onlookers”. From my observation, these are precisely the reactions that the project did receive.

There is some precedent for Sound Mapping. Mott explains: “Participant exploratory works employing diffuse sound fields in architectural space have been explored by sound artists such as Michael Brewster (1994) and Christina Kubisch in her ‘sound architectures’ installations (1990). Recently composers such as Gerhard Eckel have embarked on projects employing virtual architecture as means to guide participants through compositions that are defined by the vocabulary of the virtual space (1996)”.

As a participant myself, I found three-quarters of an hour of wheeling a quite heavy suitcase rather draining. I think of myself as reasonably fit, but I reached the stage where just dragging the case was as much as I could do, despite Mott’s repeated urgings to swing and swerve the trolleys through space in more creative patterns, so as to generate more varied sounds. Not an activity for the frail.

I have to say, however, that I liked the concept of the work very much and was struck by the visual and aural impact of the piece on the several occasions when I encountered groups of engrossed participants making their way around the wharf area. Certainly, well executed public events such as this one enliven the sometimes staid atmosphere around Hobart. It is good to see art-making genuinely getting out into a wider and participating community. The lively nature of Hobart’s wharf area over summer—Tall Ships and all this year—made it a good venue for such a project.

Sound Mapping, A Sound Journey through Urban Space, by Ian Mott with Marc Raszewski and Jim Sosnin, in collaboration with The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, January-February 1998, Hobart

Pillow Songs is amongst the most powerful installations I have experienced. Entering the installation through a light trap I was immediately immersed in a darkened space, an aura of deep blue incandescence emanating from the single light bulbs hovering above three simple beds. As I lay down and my head came to rest on the pillow, an oceanic space rippled by sonic waves rolled out before my closed lids, and began to gently propel me across its textured surface.

I was hearing a subtle blend of the synthesised and the found. Extreme long fades in and out (mostly beyond immediate detection); modulations of pulses and beats, time-signals and thunder; the sounds of a radio tuned to the warbling between stations; a dog barking in the fog of winter dusk; sounds I had not encountered since I lay as a child with my first transistor radio hidden under my pillow long after my family had gone to sleep; drifting in and out of consciousness, hearing a voice, a passage of music, the rain on the roof and the hiss of off-station static.

Aware of the subjective nature of my response, I could also sense the broadly recognisable character of many of these sounds. My dreaming was but a single current stimulated by the stream of the artwork in which I was immersed.

Poonkhin Khut has been working with sound, installation and performance since 1987, and graduated from the University of Tasmania in 1993. Pillow Songs exemplifies his clean, minimal approach. Significantly, Khut makes conscious use of the space between sounds to define their quality, and to animate the role of silence as a sonic texture in its own right. His use of digital sampling and recording enables him to retain a “digital silence”, and this in turn facilitates his manipulation and layering of what he characterises as “wet” and “dry” sounds. Samples are bounced from DAT to computer and back until the right texture is attained, and these tracks are then edited onto CD.

The gallery installation realised an interesting alliance between low and hi-tech in that the computer mastered CDs were played through three conventional CD players programmed to deliver a selection of tracks that were re-mixed each day. These signals were then channelled to each of the three beds. Much of the success of Pillow Songs can be attributed to the consistent strength and individuality of these primary tracks, and the generous acoustic space which Khut allows to exist between the combined tertiary elements. The mix manages to maintain a tension between the mysterious and the recognisable whilst remaining open and suggestive.

Pillow Songs, an audio installation by Poonkhin Khut, Sidespace Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre, January 16 – 30

Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate
Steven Johnson
New York, Harper Collins, 1997

In the emerging discipline of “interface criticism” there is an unfortunate tendency to de-historicise the relationship between people and information spaces. The idea, a la Borges, of the digital world coming into being five minutes ago, with no memory of a past, is a nonsense. In Interface Culture Steven Johnson has impressively treated this cultural amnesia and set the record straight, hopefully once and for all, on the history of the interface. There have been other studies of interface development and design, however Interface Culture is written with such verve and modest authority that it resounds as the most persuasive and engaging work on the subject to have appeared so far.

Interface Culture is thoroughly researched and fluently written. It covers all the familiar bases and offers a succinct account of what could be called the standard genealogy of the interface. This incorporates its founding moments and decisive breakthroughs, the usual suspects, such as Douglas Engelbart, Ivan Sutherland and Vannevar Bush, and their signature technologies, the graphic user interface, Sketchpad and the Memex, respectively. It also outlines the predominant conceptual models of interface design that can be traced back to the late 1960s and the pioneering work done by Engelbart and researchers at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre. Johnson maps out the dramatic, transitional stages and trends within interface design, such as the shift from command lines to windows, desktop metaphors and the principle of direct manipulation which liberated the user from the need to remember esoteric strings of code. In its place the graphic user interface (GUI) offered a more intuitive, visual representation of different modes of operation—it revolutionised the way people conceived of information space by creating an illusion of information as something representable in comprehensible terms, and by allowing users to control the illusion by moving information around (cutting and pasting etc). Johnson also teases out the social and cultural assumptions behind such trends within interface design, quite rightly demonstrating that there is a lot more to the stages of the interface than technological determinism. Drawing on the work of Sherry Turkle, Johnson suggests that the shift from the “fixed position of the command line” to the “anarchic possibilities” of the windows environment traces the route of the subject in Western philosophy, from the breakdown of the unified Enlightenment self to the proliferation of multiple viewpoints, contingency and relativism; the state of being otherwise known as the postmodern condition.

This is not to say that Johnson touts a doctrinaire, postmodernist line, replete with clichés of non-linearity, indeterminacy and fin-de -everything. On the contrary, He is astute and cautious in his development of a critique of interface culture. He clearly has no truck with the cool, aphoristic posturings of the post-literate set, arguing that if a new way of writing is upon us it is not the offspring of cyberpunks or hackers. More specifically, he redresses the default theorising which relegates old media to the dustbin of linearity, and supplants it with the multiplicity of new media, such as hypertext. In the admonitory spirit of Ted Nelson, Johnson refreshingly advances that much web-based writing is “unapologetically linear” and one-dimensional, and is a far cry from the free-form, revolutionary poetics customarily associated with the web. Johnson denounces the theme of “disassociation” as it pertains to hypertext, and elegantly articulates how the navigation of information space is a synthetic, rather than fragmentary act, “a way of drawing connections between things, a way of forging semantic relationships”. In this he has consolidated the emerging field of interface philology, which recognises that the digital age is not a break with the past, but a continuation of it, a transitional moment in the evolutionary drama of the grammar and technology of language.

This is nowhere better illustrated than in the inventive historical links Johnson articulates (he describes Interface Culture as a “book of links”), connections between desktop metaphors and Gothic cathedrals, hypertext and the metropolitan novels of the 19th century. He develops a series of fascinating and at times disarming conceits, in which a remark from the poet Coleridge (“The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable”) becomes an heuristic device for conceptualising the way the interface structures and represents abstract information; or the tumultuous reception of modernist art works, such as Ulysses and The Rite of Spring, and the early responses to the GUI; or more significantly, that the identification of information space is as profound as the discovery of perspective in the visual lexicon of the Renaissance. It is not only that such parallels have the ring of rightness about them, as they are deftly woven by Johnson’s measured prose, but that they fit into a much larger perception of the residual effects of cultural change. While we may no longer live in a world in which the novel, as an art form, fulfils the needs it satisfied in the 19th century (as people grappled with the technological effects of the industrial revolution), its underlying structure, or logic, prevails in the interface, which “performs a comparable service”, namely, of providing intelligible maps of the “virtual cities of the twenty-first century”. The significance of this Johnson makes compellingly clear, observing that the “way we choose to organise our space says an enormous amount about the society we live in—perhaps more than any other component of our cultural habits”. For too long the interface has been delimited as a pointy-clicky way of working with information, when it is more profoundly and more fundamentally a semantic gestalt that has taken many guises over the centuries. The GUI is its most recent manifestation.

Interface Culture is a timely work that makes a vital contribution to current debates about interface design, information space, and the status of literacy in the age of the digital network. But even more than this, it is a wonderful archaeology of remembrance, a testament to the cultural memory of this thing called the interface.

crosSeXXXamination is a collaborative website project by New York artist Beth Stryker and Australian artist Virginia Barratt (ex-VNS Matrix). The exhibition was the culmination of Stryker’s artist-in-residency at Artspace and was the first public viewing of the crosSeXXXamination website.

The site-specific installation housed two Powerbook computers in circular cubicles with plastic curtains creating a sense of privacy and intimacy while offering voyeuristic glimpses of the interior to those outside the cubicles. In the window frontages of Artspace, small video screens projected images of bodies and body parts supplied by guest artists. Opening night also featured a performance where audience members were invited to be examined by solicitous plastic-clad attendants, their tender ministrations given a sinister twist by the fact that the ‘consultations’ took place on top of a dissection table.

Timed to coincide with the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, the project has been influenced by Alan Turing, well known for his work on artificial intelligence. In his paper “Computer Machinery and Intelligence” Turing described a game where a man and a woman each sitting at remote computer terminals try to convince a third party who interrogates them that they are a woman. In the now famous Turing Test it is a software program that competes with a human, both trying to convince the interrogator that they are the human. The idea of the test (which has become a popular benchmark for testing computer ‘intelligence’) is for the computer to convincingly perform as human or ‘pass’ as human. These boundary crossings—male/female, human/computer, deviant/straight—echo throughout the crosSeXXXamination website. Turing himself was forced to undergo organotherapy, a hormonal sex change, as a supposed cure for his ‘deviant’ sexuality after he was arrested for consensual homosexual sex.

crosSeXXXamination parodies and subverts the way in which medical discourses seek to discipline and pathologise socially ‘deviant’ subjectivities and desires. On entry to the crosSeXXXamination site, the user/subject checks a number of randomly generated statements before being processed, eXXXamined and classified.

Your subject code classification is an indecipherable hieroglyphic (my most recent was ‘Bxxx.LB.brut’ which didn’t tell me much—kind of reminiscent of those arcane squiggles doctors make about you in their notes when they don’t want you to know what they’re doing!).

You can then click your way through to the next section where you ‘claim your body’. Having been interrogated, classified and assigned a body yourself, you can now interrogate and examine the revealed body parts (yours?), cut-up image fragments of head, torso and legs. Clicking on each segment reveals new images which disintegrate on further clicking to reveal new images. If you haven’t already guessed it, yes, you are still being interrogated; the images that you show a particular interest in determine where you will next end up…this can take some patience as you need to keep clicking on ever smaller segments.

Finally, you move into one of the various examination rooms designed by the artists Beth Stryker, Virginia Barrat and guest artists Sarah Waterson and Rea where you will be met by one of a variety of eXXXaminers. Unlike the situation in the Turing Test where it is a human examiner interrogating a software program, in crosSeXXXamination the tables are turned as the computers interrogate, provoke and question the human users/subjects.

After you have concluded your examination, you can choose another body by clicking in the graphics at the top of the screen. This will take you to a new section where you can scroll through and select various different bodies (text descriptions), for example, “inmate autopsy brutal softcore”, “butt lesboy autopsy invert”, “alien blueboy Other softcore”.

crosSeXXXamination is a technically ambitious, conceptually provocative and visually intriguing website. However, navigating the site can be a frustrating experience with lengthy waits while images load and an absence of instructions about how to progress at certain stages.

Users can quickly get confused and irritated if they are not given sufficient guidance or feedback that they are doing the right thing. It is difficult to know how much of a site you have seen. How do you know when you are finished? A number of users I spoke to got stuck in the Body Shop, confused about how to progress any further or whether that was all there was to see.

Some users will also have problems if their computers do not handle Java well (Java is programming language for the web). PCs generally perform better than Macintoshes in this area and there is still the odd bug that needs to be ironed out. This is a website that requires patience and perseverance (and a reasonably fast system!) but it’s worth the effort.

One of the particular strengths of on-line art projects such as crosSeXXXamination is their dynamic nature. As well as users being able to interact with the work in real time, aspects of the site are themselves randomised, so that users will have a different experience every time they visit the site. On-line work can also be adapted, modified and added to over time. The creators of crosSeXXXamination (along with guest collaborating artists) plan to continue the development of the website and tour the work in its exhibition incarnation both nationally and internationally.

crosSeXXXamination, http://203.35.148.178/xxx/ [expired] A collaborative website project by New York artist Beth Stryker and Australian artist Virginia Barratt, Artspace, Sydney, February 5-28.

SIGGRAPH is the Special Interest Group in Graphics of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). I first got there in 1981 and followed the event fairly religiously throughout the 80s. If my memory is correct ’81 was the last year that you could turn up with a videotape in your bag and have it shown in the Electronic Theatre. It was also the first year the event included an art show. As an artist myself it was like going to wonderland. After years of being marginalised for my work in art and technology I found myself in a “birds of a feather” session with 50 or so others from around the world who all shared my vision and interests.

Throughout the 80s SIGGRAPH was an exciting melting pot of talent and ideas. Computer graphics (CG) were “a solution looking for a problem” and specialists from many diverse disciplines rubbed shoulders to share the latest techniques and gossip. In 1986 there was a panel on the film industry. Looker (Crighton, 1979), Tron (Lisberger, 1982) and The Last Starfighter (Castle, 1984) had all used computer effects (CFX) and, although all went on to become cult movies, none did well at the box office. At the panel a frustrated producer joked that it was easier to get a location helicopter than agreement to use CFX and studio execs reiterated the conservatism of Hollywood.

In television the situation was different. By 1986 the digital video post-production boxes had had a significant impact particularly on current affairs, news and the wealthy commercials sector. Digital systems were helping to push video as a master production medium with digital production gear like vtrs, switchers and cameras hitting the marketplace. The video post houses grew as the 16mm film facilities, which had relied on regular TV work, closed their doors.

SIGGRAPH 86 was a turning point. New York photographer Nancy Burson was there to promote her new book Composites which documented her digital imaging. In a press session she proclaimed that the era of “photographic truth” was over. At another “bird” session a group of creatives claimed CG as their own and predicted that, in ten years time, SIGGRAPH would be their event. Back then we were a distinct minority. SIGGRAPH belonged to engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists. Many laughed at our claim. They didn’t even like the increasing number of creative and media people getting elected to SIGGRAPH committees. At one point its parent society, ACM, expressed concern that its integrity as a professional society was being compromised by these outsiders.

Now, in the 1990s, computer imaging has found its own vertical markets and a whole host of new conferences, trade shows and symposia have sprung up to exploit demand. For many of us the expensive trip to SIGGRAPH has become less essential. So it was good for me to be invited to be a judge for the SIGGRAPH 97 Computer Animation Festival.

Los Angeles in August was in heat wave and the air-con for the 15 storey glass atriums at the LA Convention Centre was having trouble keeping up. Over 47,000 people milled around, mostly to see the trade show. In addition to the technical papers core (now a minority draw) were panels, screening rooms, the art show, the major trade show, the “start-up” park, the Electronic Garden, the education program, the outreach program and a host of lesser events. The Computer Animation Festival (CAF) offered four evening and three matinee performances in the Shrine Auditorium (home of the Academy Awards). Then there were the unofficial events, shows and parties all over town.

A chance meeting in the bar of the Hotel Figueroa best illustrates the changes in SIGGRAPH over the past decade. A schoolteacher from Malibu was down for the day to see the show, her first visit to SIGGRAPH. She explained that, if she hadn’t had been told in advance that it was a CG show, she would have assumed it was just another film industry extravaganza.

For me the domination of Hollywood is a problem. Glasnost and the drying up of Defence Department contracts have forced the military supply industry in the US to diversify. Many have moved into the entertainment sector. This union of Silicon Valley and Hollywood is being described as either the Hollyvalley or Sillywood depending on your point of view.

I hope I’m not just an aging internationalist academic who is concerned about the power, parochialism and lack of ethics of the military/entertainment complex. The interdisciplinary foundation of SIGGRAPH, arguably its most attractive feature, is under threat. I spent much of my week discussing this with SIGGRAPH officials. If they don’t succeed in reframing the show with a broad-base appeal it will become just another tool for the Hollywood propaganda machine. Links to the film industry are not helped by the decision to host SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles then Orlando on successive years.

Next year will be SIGGRAPH’s 25th anniversary and the committee are keen to explore historical links and re-establish the cross-disciplinary emphasis. They may not succeed.

The Shrine Auditorium, like so many places you’ve seen on TV, was seedy and disappointing. First impressions were the smell of dirty carpet and the need for a fresh coat of paint. As a jury member I was a privileged VIP and found my way to what had been described as the best seat in the house (centre, front row, balcony) ahead of the crowds jamming at the doors. This was my first mistake. Minders moved in around me and, just before the show started I was surrounded by suited studio execs. The Japanese to my left. Caucasians to my right. They ceremoniously crossed the aisle to shake hands, bow and exchange business cards. Trusted lieutenants whispered essential data to chiefs…“that’s xxx CEO of xxx, spouse’s name xxx you should go and say hello”…before the ritual. This is a world that I neither inhabit nor aspire to.

I regretted not taking a seat in the stalls, 20 rows from the front, sharing in the vicarious rage of the crowd and enduring the inevitable crick in the neck. Studio chiefs don’t rage, they clap politely, talk incessantly and clearly have trouble in comprehending why works by students, pieces of scientific visualisation and other unnecessary stuff is cluttering up the show.

But it’s precisely that egalitarianism that makes the SIGGRAPH CAF (and before it the legendary Electronic Theatre) such a valuable and exciting event.

My favourite was The DNA Story a fascinating piece of biological visualisation from Digital Studio SA that tells the story of the “transcription, replication and condensation of a mitotic chromosome”. Students’ work was well represented with three pieces from Ringling School of Art including Sharing a lyrical tale of ice cream on a hot summer’s day and 10,000 Feet the tragic story of a talking Teddy who mistakes his speech tag for a rip cord. Australia was represented with extracts from Jon McCormack’s Turbulence, and Changing Heart, a spectacular IMAX theme park opener from Animal Logic. The Hollywood studios were represented by Titanic, The Fifth Element and Lost World. CFX specialists Pacific Data Images fielded their usual high calibre down-time production in Gabola the Great.

People said it was a good show but, there again, I was wearing a badge that proclaimed my jury membership. Reliable feedback suggests that the show was good but, over the past three or so years, has levelled out. Not such a surprising outcome when you consider that major annual ‘quantum jumps’ that accompanied SIGGRAPH throughout the 80s and early 90s are no longer possible. The medium is maturing, the big picture has been painted and innovation now remains in filling in the details and, of course, telling good stories.

Back in the mainstream film industry I was surprised when jurying to discover that most of the puppies in 101 Dalmatians were computer generated (by ILM). On reflection it was obvious. The cost of maintaining a pack of trained, live and constantly growing puppies would have been prohibitive. CFX have arrived and their success is precisely that most audiences don’t know they are there. Dinosaurs, volcanoes and tornados are obvious but the major use of CFX in Hollywood today is more mundane and practical. Things like wire removal, retouching and compositing.

It’s here that digital post, which hit video in the mid 80s, has now hit the film industry. Every Disney animation feature since Rescuers Down Under has been mastered digitally. Most opticals are now “digitals” done on systems like Kodak’s “Cineon”, Quantel’s “Domino” or one of the new crop of “shrink wrapped” film-resolution app’s for general purpose workstations and personal computers. One industry specialist I spoke to claimed that there is only one optical house still trading on the West Coast “…and they’re only doing titles”.

Specialists also predict a major shake out in the CFX industry before long. The margins are too small for a competitive international industry. One example I was given was a quote from a UK company of $200,000 versus $1,200,000 from one of the big California CFX houses. The larger companies like ILM and Digital Domain are expected to go into full production and contract out SFX work to “one off” companies who set up to service one production with short-lease premises, rented computers and fixed term contacts from a growing talent pool of freelance CGI specialists.

In fact this is already happening and many regret the passing of the large specialist companies who can sustain the in-house research and development that has been an essential component of the medium’s development to date.

Launched at SIGGRAPH and essential reading is Clark Dodsworthy’s Digital Illusion—Entertaining the Future with High Technology, published by ACM SIGGRAPH and Addison Wesley.

Sydney Intermedia Network (SIN) will screen the Electronic Theatre program from SIGGRAPH 97 at the Chauvel Cinemas, Paddington, on Tuesday May 26 (information tel 02 9380 4255).

Hollywood Road winds its way along one of ‘the Levels’ on Hong Kong island. Its naming precedes its more famous counterpart by a couple of hundred years, being one of the original streets laid down by the British colonial traders. Antique businesses have since colonised the area, providing windows onto the artefacts produced by Chinese artists from the past several millennia. It is as if each diorama, viewed through the barrier of glass, reveals the vast wealth of craft skill and applied imagination in order to mock the ephemerality of cinema and its attendant real estate culture that throngs throughout Hong Kong and the New Territories. Within this context of the popular and the traditional, contemporary artists in Hong Kong are making determined inroads both locally and internationally. But in order to comprehend this, we need to go back again.

In June 1997 the British Colonial Authority “handed over” the administration of the region to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This was a highly promoted and publicised international event whereby one of the world’s biggest commercial centres, home to eight million people, changed owners.

The event was represented as the end of the colonial era and a return to the motherland. The people of Hong Kong are quite philosophical however, regarding it as saying goodbye to one coloniser and hello to another, for they are Cantonese and make up 90 per cent of the population, with the ex-pats (predominantly Europeans, mostly English of course, Americans and Australians), mainland and others making up the rest.

During the British colonial period, Hong Kong’s cultural activity was divided along ethnic lines with little integration and even less encouragement and support—until ten years before the British departure, when public money was invested into Museums, Galleries, Arts Centres, University art departments and cultural non-government organisations such as Videotage.

Videotage (www.enmpc.org.hk/videotage) was formed in 1985 as a video artists’ collective to organise screenings of work in Hong Kong and overseas. By 1996 it had established some non-linear post-production facilities, and gained the resources to maintain an office, library and archive, and administer events including the annual international Microwave Festival of media art. Its current director is Ellen Pau, a widely exhibited video artist who, like many Hong Kong artists, supports her practice outside the arts—she is a hospital radiographer.

In 1997 the Microwave Festival invited Kathy High (USA) to curate several programs of video, myself to curate a 10 day long exhibition of artists’ CD-ROMs (a long run by Hong Kong standards), and Steve Hawley (Britain) as artist in residence. The works selected gave a profile to the concerns and discourse prevalent amongst contemporary artists working within the ‘western’ aesthetic and language tradition. The audience were mostly under 30, had Cantonese as their first language and received the work within the multicultural context that is modern Hong Kong.

Computers are not expensive and CD-Video is a major consumer item. Software can be obtained cheaply if necessary—$AU7.00 will buy a CD-ROM with 30 top-line Mac applications, illegal copies like these being protected by the Pirates Union! Artists are just beginning to work with digital media as the opportunities become available through the universities and access centres like Videotage. Artists like Brian Wong, having pursued post-graduate study overseas, are not only beginning to produce challenging interactive multimedia but teach its basics in the universities.

The Microwave conference and seminar were well attended by artists, students, educators and members of the booming web industry. Many of the issues were, in parallel with realpolitik, about transition. From linear video art to options for interaction; and fears for the negation of one form by another; on an institutional level, in galleries and university departments, a tendency to hasten the eclipsing of one form by another, especially in those areas being driven by marketed technology. Repurposing the technology was felt to be a major component of any artistic enterprise and that this was not just restricted to technology but also to people and the wide range of skills and disciplines that, likewise, converge toward a multimedia outcome.

This expertise and experience has been around for 15-20 years. The performance group Zuni Icosahedron (www.zuni.org.hk) has at its core Danny Yung, a well known performance artist who spent some years in the USA, and is currently director of the Centre for the Arts at the University of Science and Technology (HKUST).

Para/Site is an artists-run gallery (“the first of many” according to Danny Yung) which acts as a focus for people from a range of disciplines who publish artists’ books, including some digital output around the largely site-specific work, and also organise on-site forums. One writer explains that “it is necessary to think primarily in terms of ‘borders’—of borders as parasites that never take over a ‘field’ in its entirety but erode it slowly and tactically”. “The dominant group will have a well planned strategy to guard its field”, warns another.

Meanwhile the well established Hong Kong International Film Festival is now entering its 22nd year, showcasing the famous local industry and world cinema. The Independent Film and Videomakers Awards, a Cantonese-culture vectored event is run by Jimmy Choi at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, a multi-artform venue in the newest part of the CBD in downtown Hong Kong. Entries come from all over the world, representing an alternative viewpoint to that of the Film Festival and, intriguingly, reproduce the deliberations of the Awards Jury verbatim in the catalogue.

Funding for much of this activity (only a fraction is described here) originates with the government (the Provisional Urban Council), which devolves to the HK Arts Development Council (similar to the Australia Council and currently employing ex-pats Hiram To and Jonathon Thomson).

A double analogy could be made between the complexity of the many Chinese cultures and the many cultures on the internet, in comparison to Mandarin culture and the efforts of Microsoft Corp. According to Tung Kin Wah, the CEO of the Urban Council, “Hong Kong would be more stable if there are fewer dissenting voices…” Clearly there is official concern about accentuating differences between vibrant Hong Kong and cautious China. Since many Hong Kong artists, not only those working in the media arts field, speak about the issue of identity, the terms under which the 50-year window will be maintained will be central to their ability to contribute to the wider development of the regional as well as the national community.

Hong Kong Video/CD-ROM Festival, December 1997; Videotage, director Ellen Pau (www.enmpc.org.hk/videotage); The Microwave Festival, December 6 – 12, 1998; Hong Kong International Film Festival, April 3 – 18 1998; The Independent Film & Video Awards are in January 1999, director Jimmy Choi, Hong Kong Arts Centre

In London, I saw John Tavener at a performance of one of his cello works. Very tall and resplendent in dark suit, shock of white hair matched with equal shock of white leather slippers and a profile like Franz Liszt, his presence matched the soaring quality of the strings. There is yearning in the pull of his cello pieces, yearning and a human growl that has been subsumed in a battle of soul and animal with the ethereal realm. Appropriate, too, for Gary Rowe to have chosen Tavener’s Chant and Eternal Memory for solo cello/cello with strings for units of his Twelve Seas, interspersing long silences between the pull of strings. This is an elegant, meditative piece that seems awash with the blues of melancholy, waves, memory; of the loneliness of being marked by a ghost who is you/not you, a mirror not quite of the same substance. Four dancers slide and pivot across and into the space, meeting only in the general hum of time, but never in the specifics of a handshake, birthing, wartime. The movements are flags marking moments of longing; moments caught leaning against a ship’s rail. Even an eyeblink is long—what you see between the sheets of skin with which we view, sense, absorb the world.

The arc of an ocean marks the opening, a projection with voice-over. The projections are held to this vista: only the sun moving across to mark a progression in time. Fundamentally, we stay on a long sea journey throughout the piece. There is no landing (although there is, perhaps, the desire to land); Poseidon’s element, perhaps the song of corpses thrown in.

Ruth Gibson enters, sliding backwards, her arms stretch ahead, behind, a gesture from the heart into the world. She is vulnerable, with her backward slide, but also engaging, strong. This is the gift one makes in entering: an egg’s offering. This is the risk one takes: to extend and meet, perhaps, no more than a curved line.

Two men enter, backwards. Mirrored by the two women; fisher-people pulling nets along the square. So quiet, this crossing the grid of the world. The men flick their feet like a horse its tail. Heads lift, dreaming of balloons. I watch their limbs: Gibson’s arches as they slide, Fifield and Widdowson’s foot-edges flickering turns, Sky’s arms going for a dive.

I’m not impressed with publicity touting a “fusion of movement, design, music, and text”. A piece this sure doesn’t deserve to have its elements stated like starting blocks each at a different race. Image and music are subtle and discrete, text spare; success or failure rests on the quality of embodiment and the diffusion of physical force, in relation to an almost personified sense of time. There is a moment where Gibson’s elbows bend, then knees, arms reaching up (foot stretched ahead) as if lifting a block of turf into the sky. This is a lovely moment, where muscle meets cosmos, time enters the blood. Less successful is when Fifield and Sky, for instance, become too translucent, as if force, leaking at the elbows, no longer fuses out to the world.

Ships horns sound: departures, long journeys, salt air. Couples re-enter, carrying one another. Is memory carried, or the carrier? One spirit with four legs—two that walk, two that fail to touch the ground. Another with four arms: a pair that hold, a pair stretched like the mast of a ship, ready for sail. Motion propelled not by volition but another force. Each action has its shadows.

Hellen Sky as Gibson’s double shadows Gibson’s opening solo movements like the wind prodding and provoking her turns. The volition to move is the push of something else’s hand. This is the force of another, an outside, who yet fails to copy, to mirror exactly, because not quite of the same blood. This is appropriate and quietly taunting, leaving a great sadness when Gibson next enters the space alone. “I have chosen you before, in other lifetimes, other centuries”, says the voice-over. The Double is a lonely accompaniment. Two can be stranger than one.

There are other moments of syncopation between the men, I suspect unintended, because these fractured moments are not quite exact enough and the synchronicity for the most part is so good. And yet I like the idea of them, these fissures, breaks in coordination: they fit the bill, intellectually, psychologically. They seem caused, mostly, by a subtler elasticity in one body, a different catch of breath in the ribs. Widdowson in particular seems to me to dance with a rubato which could be quite exquisite if given rein.

In the end, “the sea takes its colour back”. What is given is returned, goes back home. I must admit I dreaded the idea of a piece about this subject, fearing it exhausted before the dance began by a decade of theory and projects and plays; but Rowe has created an elegant, subtle and quietly disquieted piece that hovers in the place that expands and cools like ocean water, rising, falling in a day. This, too, is the who, the we, the I, the self that dives and dissolves and reforms as it swims. The subtle interplay of grasping, mirroring, and release, the residue of salt lining our human rims.

Dialogue with Gary Rowe

GR I worked from the text The Coral Sea by Patti Smith to create the movement/choreography—the ‘poetic’ images from that writing became the source/resource which defined/redefined the process of improvisation/composition. I also listened to We shall see Him as He is by John Tavener which too became a score (albeit a loose one) during the composition of the material.

ZSM What do you look for when you work with your dancers? What is the dialogue?

GR I work with people that I know personally as friends and colleagues and I try to work also with the same set of people—that really allows a ‘shorthand’ approach to work when time is limited (we both know what we are getting!). All the performers are practising artists in their own right and work from widely differing backgrounds of study and training—they are all involved in their own artistic research and development. I implicitly place my trust in them, in their ability to create and perform. All material created comes from an improvisational process which then is directed by myself into some form. I ask of them to enter fully into a process of creative development that hopefully allows their own personalities to come through. The dialogue is one of creator/performer and director, which evolves through time. I think that we all know each other well enough, and the demands of the work, to be able to be ourselves in the roles that we lay out. I am totally reliant [on] these people as they ‘become’ the work. I ask them to enter my ‘image’ world and to inhabit it with their own connections and to be there developing a language in movement.

ZSM The students in your workshop made much of how you trained them in sensing relationship, enabling improvisations with four, six, eight or nine students together on stage. How is your training of this skill different from that of other dance teachers/choreographers?

GR The difference is difficult to highlight. My teaching method has evolved from being ‘taught’. I don’t think I have one way of training a skill in perception. I would not want to claim such a standpoint. What I do pursue, challenge and encourage students to do is to work from a place where visual/choreographic strategies are as one. Training in how one ‘sees’ the world (both an external and internal process—a moment, a fragment of time, the larger picture) is central to how one sees language. Movement is located for me in that matrix—what we choose to see or to be seen. The choices inherent in this process are central to my teaching methodology.

ZSM Another description was about how you encouraged them to “open the body”. What is it you think you “open” bodies to?

GR I hope that I ‘open’ bodies to the multiple complex of possibilities that arise from working and the taking of responsibility and action for one’s imagination/creation and to make that manifest in some way.

ZSM The text for Twelve Seas was sometimes exquisite. Still separable, though, into moving and spoken parts. Although I work differently myself, I didn’t mind it in this piece, due to its meditative nature. Sometimes the words functioned like music, like rhythms interspersed with the strains of Tavener’s piece. This is perhaps effective because the cello itself has such a human voice.

I’m wondering, though, whether you ever have speech more linked with movement? Do you ever get your dancers to speak as they dance?

GR I have as yet to make a piece where the dancers speak. This I feel requires a special skill and creates a different kind of work to what I am interested in. The text when used in the work is read by actors, sometimes live. The next work is being made in collaboration with [Melbourne dancer/academic] Philipa Rothfield and will be a series of five solos each with a philosophy paper attached. Themes of lying, death, love, place and acceptance/resistance will be explored. The text will be read by a female actor, delivered as a paper, whilst the dance proceeds.

Twelve Seas, Exploring themes of the double. Gary Rowe Company (UK). Conceived and directed by Gary Rowe. Created and performed by Andrew Fifield, Ruth Gibson, Alan Widdowson, Hellen Sky. Photography by Jim Roseveare. Sound: Michael Burdett. Dancehouse, Carlton, February 5.

not hyper real
not virtual real
this is just real
watch your back
wear sensible shoes
and be prepared
to play ball
from Ecstasy poster

When the publicity for The Ecstasy of Communication came out, I found it difficult to envisage just what Ecstasy was going to be. The title gives nothing away other than its implication, perhaps, of some engagement with illicit recreational substances. In fact, it’s taken from a work by Jean Baudrillard questioning the credibility of much of what is presented by the mainstream media.

A project of Salamanca Theatre Company, the piece is a joint effort involving Hobart and Sydney-based artists with no traditional use of script or story-line, but a multitude of images and environments. Salamanca caters primarily for school-aged audiences (without any patronising theatre-in-education-type agenda) and also presents some theatre for a wider audience.

Ecstasy is co-directed by Salamanca’s Artistic Director Deborah Pollard and Alicia Talbot from Sydney. The designer is Samuel James of Melbourne, who constructed the maze along with Don Hopkins. Sound design and video installation are by Nicholas Wishart. The performers are from Salamanca, 14 of them rotating the roles each night of the season.

This novel collaboration between emerging artists incorporates a variety of visual artforms, video, photography, computer-generated images and soundworks, along with integrated grabs of live performance, randomly encountered as one travels through the maze. Alicia Talbot described the event as “a bit like being the ball inside a pinball machine”. A local newspaper came up with another analogy: “a website made into a real space, a maze with corridors and illusions in which it is entirely possible to get lost”.

The idea is this: audience members arrive at the scheduled starting time, are organised into groups of about 10 and, at 10 minute intervals, are invited into the “reception area” of the maze, where a hyper-efficient, slightly hysterical “secretary” (very amusingly played on opening night by Sarah Chapman) “interviews” them, gives a few suggestions for negotiating the maze—and off they go, more or less separately from that point. (You find your own way, you don’t have to stay in your group and you go in whatever directions the fancy takes you.)

The first obstacle is the entrance proper, which starts as a passage but becomes a low tunnel through which one has to crawl. From then on there are choices of mysterious doors, concealed entrance ways, intersecting corridors and specially constructed rooms, nooks and alcoves. Everything is in semi-darkness. Each space has a raison d’être; there are artworks here and there (nothing conventional, of course), an interactive, a video to watch, or a peephole, a sound installation or walls of textures to explore, or… The attractions are ingeniously simple but very seductive: a phone and answering machine installation with messages “just for you”; a TV showing a video by, for example, Matt Warren from the Empire Collective (featured in RealTime 23), complete with a box of TV Snax; a tableau photograph by Craig Blowfield staged as a visual pun on Bernini’s Ecstasy of Theresa and itself constructed as a photo-collage—a postmodern in-joke for Art History groupies; a red room carpeted and lined with fake fur and padded satin, to caress and roll around in…or whatever you choose; a closed-circuit TV where you can be the star, a fairground-style mini-theatre where you direct the actor…

Negotiating the maze was a fascinating experience and particularly notable for the camaraderie the whole exercise engendered between participants; as you ran into people in the various nooks and crannies you engaged with them, enthused with them about the experience—whether you knew them or not. It was that kind of event—much more people-friendly than even the most wine-soaked exhibition opening!

Interestingly, for an interactive piece incorporating technology with live performers, there were none of the embarrassingly forced “audience participation/humiliation” components beloved of stand-up comics…the sort of thing that makes one uneasy about sitting in the front rows at some theatres.

The contribution of several teams of personnel deserves mention. There was a rotating team of Salamanca Theatre performers, many of whom also worked on the volunteer construction team. Besides those cited earlier, multimedia works for Ecstasy were provided by Robin Petterd, Sean Bacon, Mark Cornelius, Sally Harbison, Brian Martin, Sarah Greenwood, most of them former or current students at the local School of Art.

It’s difficult to make any unfavourable observations about The Ecstasy of Communication. It occurred to me, that the event may not be suitable for people with limited physical mobility. However, the availability of different entrance ways and access-points permitted some flexibility in this regard. The event generated a lot of interest amongst local schools and teachers. The prospect of accommodating largish groups of school-age visitors, let loose in a semi-darkened maze seems, to me, likewise a bit daunting—but again, not an insoluble challenge. I understand student visitors entered into the spirit with excitement and got the most out of it.

These are minor speculations, really, in the scheme of things. The sheer vision and inventiveness of Ecstasy, its ambition and scope, the skill and effort that went into bringing it to fruition—the pleasure and the surprise of the whole interactive experience—these are its achievements. The over-used and often incorrectly ascribed description ‘unique’ is, in this case, perfectly accurate.

The Ecstasy of Communication, Salamanca Theatre Company, The Long Gallery, Salamanca Place, Feb 2 – March 13

Find

April 1998

Prelude: The industry

Physical theatre dances

Dance does physical theatre

Embracing the unbearable

Dialogue with Gary Rowe

realtime