Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

October 1998

During May of this year I attended the first international symposium on net.radio, Berlin net.radio days 98 on behalf of Adelaide based net.radio station r a d i o q u a l i a.

Due to recent developments in free software technology it is now possible to broadcast (‘stream’) audio and video material live over the internet from your home computer. net.radio is “desktop radio”; another triumph of software environments over arcane technologies. About 60 participants were brought together for 5 days of lectures and discussions on this exciting new field.

There are few intersections of purpose within the net.radio community. Its members are largely pioneers drawn together through a passion and fascination for exploring this exciting new medium. Hence the practice of net.radio is enduring a mildly uncomfortable adolescence, asking questions about the identity and purpose of the medium. There does seem, however, to be a very clear idea of what net.radio is not. It isn’t web radio, the practice of retransmitting commercial radio stations on the internet, and it is not simply net.art.

While the debate about exactly what makes net.radio distinct from these 2 disciplines is largely unresolved, it is possible to use 4 broad categories to describe net.radio. There are those such as Pararadio in Hungary and Backspace Radio in London, that utilise net.radio to contribute to inner city youth communities. Others such as Berlin-based Convex TV are ‘alternative’ radio practitioners, that value net.radio as an important distribution channel for their interviews and music. There are the radio.art and net.art practitioners who are drawn to net.radio because it is yet another opportunity the internet has provided to utilise new technology in broadcast art (Kunstradio and Radio Ozone). Then there are those who use net.radio (mostly where oppressive governments reside) to open channels for the expression of important political or counter cultural perspectives (B92).

In addition to live audio, it is also possible to add live video to internet broadcasts. There have been some forums such as the 1998 Art on the Net Awards that examine this practice, however most internet broadcasters confine their broadcasts to audio. Although free software such as RealVideo make it easy to broadcast video on the internet, the time and cost involved to produce the content is often prohibitive.

There were about 15 presentations over the 3 days in Berlin with lectures covering a broad range of topics including digital broadcasting, midi audio technologies, net.radio collaborations, historical perspectives on broadcasting, and streaming media software. I found all these presentations interesting but some were only obliquely relevant to the practice of net.radio. However some talks were wholly captivating.

My favourite was an extraordinary speech by Convex TV’s Martin Conrads on the intersection of net.radio and pop-culture, delving into many radio icons within popular literature. Included was Isaac Asimov’s Harmoniums, a story about birds which feed on radiowaves. This story led to a beautiful quote from Conrad that has given me much to muse on—“radio does not have to have content.” An interesting panacea to the belief that all broadcasting should be strictly about content.

There were also some astonishing live performances, one of them by XLR. They mixed live digital music, commentary, and additional nuances provided by the limitations of streaming media technology, together with audio provided live from Canada, Latvia and London. The experience of being immersed within this broadcast was incredible. If you add a beautifully clear Berlin summer night, 60 people who only wanted to talk radio, and cold beer on the banks of the canal, you can understand why it was hard to come back to Adelaide!

The conference also provided the opportunity for many debates including a public forum at the end of the last day. However, as with any conference, it was after the scheduled events that the really interesting discussions occurred. From these informal talks I feel my practice has been wholly altered. The most important consequence is that I now consider net.radio as an important broadcasting innovation. It has opened the door for many to experience the thrill of broadcasting and add an alternative voice to mainstream radio and television. While net.radio is still in its infancy it is rapidly maturing and I believe it is only a matter of time until it is an ingredient in many people’s daily media diets. Berlin net.radio days 98, though not a triumph of modern organisational practice, was one of the most efficacious and interesting symposiums I have attended.

–

The writer’s attendance at Berlin net.radio days 98 was sponsored by ANAT and ARTSA and assisted by the Media Resource Centre (Adelaide) and Virtual Artists. The Conference was held on June 10 – 15, in various venues in Berlin.

Adam Hyde is an online conference manager, web developer and artist in New Zealand where he managed several radio stations and established Australasia’s first free-to-air community television station. He recently moved to Adelaide to work as a business development manager for Virtual Artists, and to investigate online broadcasting.

–

RealTime 27, October – November 1998, p42

Mollie Kelly and Louisa Duckett, Thresholds

photo Ian Dun

Mollie Kelly and Louisa Duckett, Thresholds

Dance Compass packed Thresholds at Theatreworks with what seemed a loyal following and a varied, textured program of both forthright and meditative dances. Martin Krasner’s Stop Go Man is a teetering exploration of balance, overbalance and sass. Colin Davey’s slide image shows wonderful whimsy: 20 men atop telegraph poles, a hard-hat ballet, chrysales ready to peel out and fly.

Simon Ellis’ Touch with improvised voice by jazz singer Christine Sullivan begins with his body suspended over a thumbprint block-mould on the floor. Who/what makes contact? The thumbprint-gelled hand-torch picking out body fragments, stretching shadows, is beautiful. But if light touches, so too could sound: there is little sense of voice shaping body too. Ellis’ strength in his and others’ pieces is his quirkiness, which needs to be extended and encouraged, rather than his tendency to smoothness which is lithe but does not ring as true.

For Reflections in Y, Jillian Pearce uses some standard teaching exercises to choreograph a work on rockclimbing (but one can be too knowing an audience). Alongside its literal ideas are nice realisations in movement and musculature, playing the edge between hard labour, desire, and ecstasy as these dancer-climbers come close to simulating flight.

Robin Plenty’s An Echo Early opens with 5 bodies like brain cells computing the world. A delicate sense that hiatus divides, rhythm unifies. Echoes slip, memory opens. Two bodies sway together for a while: my brain turns. This work is very fine.

Dance Compass is a positive choreographic force, producing enjoyable and highly intelligent work, the eclectic background of its dancers no doubt feeding the diversity of its practices.

Thresholds, Dance Compass, Theatreworks, August 6 – 9

RealTime issue #27 Oct-Nov 1998 pg. 14

Michael O’Donoghue and Wendy McPhee in The Fragile Garden

The Hobart Theatre Royal Dance Subscription Season Made to Move has been a boon for Tasmanian dance enthusiasts and it is both exciting and appropriate that the home-grown company Tasdance has been included in the 1998 series. Vital Expression, a broad mix of contemporary styles, is an innovative, high quality, triple bill featuring leading Australian choreographers.

In The Fragile Garden the curtain rises on a haunting, gloomy set, dancers languidly reposing on chairs against a rich black velvet backdrop, the set simultaneously electrifying and chilling with its striking crimson velvet central couch and a huge slash of vibrant red cascading from the heavens. The work, created for Tasdance by Sydney choreographer Chrissie Koltai in collaboration with the dancers, is no ordinary narrative work but a fascinating “picture book of emotional landscapes” performed to a variety of music from soul-melting classical and atmospheric harmonies to the confronting discordance of Jeff Buckley. The audience is taken on an emotional joyride, alternately entrancing, jarring, sensual and aggressive. We journey through myriad responses overlain with a confusion of personal entanglements, as the dancers variously become lover, mother, father, brother, sister…

Whilst the work was not entirely captivating, there were moments of great poignancy—the playfully provocative floor work between Jay Watson and Michael O’Donoghue and a powerful “pas de trois” featuring Wendy McPhee, O’Donoghue and an armchair…a dance fragment which aptly represents “love that hurts”, rejection and desire rolled into one. Experience and a long, successful working relationship between O’Donoghue and McPhee is evident in this segment—power in motion. One of the most striking images is of O’Donoghue apparently melding into the chair (it has a personality of its own) to become a kind of mythical headless creature.

The eclectic emotional content of The Fragile Garden is in stark contrast to the ‘pure’ dance of Graeme Murphy’s Sequenza VII named after the accompanying Luciano Berio score. Created in 1977, this vintage Murphy offering was received with appreciative chuckles from the audience. Performing in the original 1977-style costumes—white sleeveless bodysuits taking full advantage of bodylines were quite revolutionary at that time—Watson, McPhee, and O’Donoghue weave their way as one through an array of shapes and patterns, evoking kangaroos, horses, flautists and other instrumentalists emerging and re-configuring with split-second timing. Leaving nothing to chance, this fast-paced, exacting and tightly structured work is playful, witty, and thoroughly engaging.

The final piece, Gideon Obarznek’s 1994 work While You’re Down There, with music by Joey Baron and Melt, opens with some startling, body percussion involving work boots, caterpillar movements and singing by the performers. A quirky mix of solos, duos and trios, this fast, physical and funky work further explores Tasdance’s individual and collective versatilities.

The company took Vital Expressions to Canberra as part of Ausdance’s 21st birthday celebrations. It is very apt that they included Sequenza VII which was created 21 years ago.

–

Vital Expression, Tasdance, artistic director Annie Grieg; The Fragile Garden, choreographed Chrissie Koltai; Sequenza VII, choreography Graeme Murphy; While You’re Down There, choreography Gideon Obarzanek, Theatre Royal, Hobart, August 12 – 15; toured to Launceston, Queenstown, Ulverstone and Deloraine in August and The Choreographic Centre, Canberra in September.

RealTime issue #27 Oct-Nov 1998 pg. 13

http://www.wollongong.starway.net.au/~mezandwalt/
A chaotic landscape of new language. Words crossed out become strong enough to explode. A challenge, this cybernetic form like Shakespeare, inventive and striking. Fleshis.tics, an erotic mo[ve]ment, a roll of the code. I am getting overtaken by square brackets. The question at the bottom of the scroll bar r u cur[e].i.ous? and yes, I am, I am in a hurry to control and master these strokes, these unconventions. Some of the links won’t work. Is this part of the design r u paranoid?

I want to break her coded terms and become unhinged. With Man, bi[y]tes of dating pain and seduction, SHOT, a pulsing target of pump-started action jampacked with wor[d]ks to explore. A disgruntled book of wizzdums is, like gashgirl, infused with blood and anger where women become“frisking corpses that will leave plastic fragments in the ground”, voluptuous words of spite and pleasure:

If I am lucky I will be empty, void;
and get a job – from 9 to
5, get married, screw
barmaids and abuse my
children like everyone

http://www.feline.to/ [expired]
Feline. Click on her animal eyes, exotically tattooed in leopard markings and enter the grrrls own zone, signposted by primitive drawings and spiritual messages and z’s instead of s’s. Wordz and wit (mmm…) with some nice techy stuff; as you pass your mouse over the poet, the name appears, hovering, insubstantial. Poetry includes Holly Day’s frigid, words over chiaroscuro light through fractured window, streams into stereotype, and Susan Jenvey’s On the Shortest Day, realaudio and sound effects about pain and isolation. There’s not much text online yet; only 3 prose pieces, 2 by the same writer Karen Boulay. Too Late, her affectionate hymn to the anally retentive, has an effective blocked rhythm, the splash of routine. My mouse starts to get twitchy around any section called Mind, Body and Spirit. That new-agey, chakra-healing, re-birthing, go-with-the-flowing means content as dull as a hippie kid’s lunchbox. And believe me, I know.

http://www.thetherapist.com/index.html
The Company Therapist. Welcome to Dr Charles Balis’ comfy couch. If you can’t wait the week to visit Dr Katz, or if your own therapist charges a hundred bucks an hour, check yourself in for a daily dose of psychobabble. (Not suitable for hypochondriacs or avoidance personality disorders.) Daily transcripts, weekly updates of filing cabinet contents, patient files—that delicious feeling you are spying, ransacking the sock drawer for clues, evidence, even medication. Will Alex continue to be stalked by Regina? Will Katherine find her father in Alaska? Will Herb ever get over his drug addiction? Will the identity of The Anonymous Faxer finally be revealed?

I’m sorry, your time is up for today…

RealTime issue #27 Oct-Nov 1998 pg. 16

The pneumatic conjunction of hypertext and fiction should have by now spawned a whole happy brood of bastard mongrels. Apart from the inevitable neologism (hyperfiction), however, there’s not been much hybridity. Some prefab plug-in-addicted multimedia extravaganzas, yes, a few shrink-wrapped join-the-dots novellas, lots of frustratingly static and linear word-processing (put text on template, add pictures, upload, watch users get scroll-bar-RSI) and much hopscotching (recipe: chop text into ungraceful and/or illogical small chunks, string a few links or loops between them, add colour and backgrounds, season lightly with gif animations and stew; do not stir; do not cook; do not improvise). Tristram Shandy did it all better, faster, funnier, 200 years ago.

Having got that small rant out of the way, let’s look at some of the modes, genre and shapes of hyperfiction currently available, starting with the most compact and least scary. Stand-alone hypertexts (which aren’t online and often aren’t html in format: anyone remember HyperCard?), despite their generally precarious positioning as intermediate technology, are still produced at a steady Big Mac rate.

In America especially, programs such as Storyspace are enduringly popular, perhaps specifically because they don’t rely on the extras to go online. Storyspace has also gained ground in schools and universities here (eg RMIT) as an authoring environment, a concept-mapping or storyboarding medium, or a pre-structuring device for websites, but in the US it’s absurdly successful in Composition classes and for hypertexted novels (see http://www.eastgate.com/ for fiction samples and program details). This hermetically sealed version of hyperfiction runs on scaled-down or simplified components of its web-based counterpart and, since it’s not networked out into the vertigo of the www, it’s somewhat easier to manage: you can see the horizons of the text and juggle between precise, comprehensive overviews in ways that aren’t possible on the web.

That means a stand-alone hyperfiction (and don’t forget the steady dribble of Big Name Authors like Carmel Bird who are now releasing novels on CD-ROM) can be domesticated and authorised, processed back into the paper-pulp mainstream. Witness the Norton Anthology of hypertext fiction. Or the new academic journal (sponsored by Eastgate), Modern Fiction Studies, devoted entirely to Storyspace-based hypertextual fiction. Sad.

Meanwhile, the web venues you’d expect to be most amenable to hyperfiction—web journals or ezines—largely perpetuate the inertia caused by still thinking of The Page as the basic design unit, and print analogues as default settings. The seductive properties (and opportunities) of hypertext thus get truncated or overstructured, bad-metaphor-stretched or literalised. The sense of a projective imagination responsively immersed in a fictional environment (with all its gaming potential), the experience of being a semi-free agent inhabiting a narrative sequence, the 3D solicitation to co-construct the story…they all lose out to the legitimation of either The Anthology, The Short Story Collection or The Literary Magazine. Which nearly always means cut-up-n-pasted-n-mounted Text + Graphics = Onscreen hyperfiction.

Read Janet H Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York: The Free Press, 1997), bypassing the hype as you go, to get a feel for what’s being passed up when hyperfiction becomes hypedfiction (inert at one extreme and overbusy with whizzbang whatsits at the other). Have a look at the TextBase site (http://www.skynet.apana.org.au/~samiam/textbase/textbase.htm – expired) to see what can be done when the word ‘hypertextual’ can be unembarrassedly applied to all dimensions of the writing.

There is no reason, given that hypertext allows a synthesis and synaesthesia between text and graphics, for traditional genre borders to remain impermeable either. House ’97, for instance (http://house.curtin.edu.au/ – expired), based at Curtin University, had elements it called ‘comics’ that were nonetheless effective narratives looping through other live-radio and webcast events, stage performances later reworked for the web, and ‘ordinary’ short-story-type fiction. Haiku theatre and other forms of dramaturgy (like soap opera) become meshed or framed or reworked by hyperfiction in the Venew site (http://www.aftrs.edu.au/venew/ – expired). GRAFFITO, a political satire journal, manages to be hypertextual despite being in the form of plain-text emailing list: though it’s posted without graphics or formatting, the poems and rants and stories build on each other, sequel each other, refer allusively and hilariously to each other and current events, and reflect the juxtapositional, jumpy logic of hypertext in the reading experience.

More fundamentally, the text versus graphics ‘illustrative’ relationship so beloved of almost-print designers is satisfyingly sent-up and subverted (as per theorist Gregory Ulmer’s influence) in the Parallel sites (http://www.va.com.au/parallel/x1/index.html) with their artificial and unsustainable separation between ‘gallery’ and ‘journal’ while engaging multidisciplinary and multimedia artists to produce pieces that interact or correlate beyond And Here’s A Gif Of That Too. Moreover, I think we’re seeing a slow generic version of continental shift, as fiction writers become their own designers of elements usually relegated to the practice of poetry (line-length, scansion, extended rhythmic patterns etc) and graphic artists (typeface, colour, texture, framing, pictures, etc). All of this, of course, is irrelevant where the venue for the hyperfiction is either a web journal with a standardised ‘house style’ or a kind of onscreen/online brochure appendage to the ‘real’ print version.

At the level of narrative, the text-vs-graphics relationship between plot and story, and between structure and genre, can be inventively played with rather than imported wholesale from print. So the ‘narrative logics’ of hyperfictions can productively be experienced (to reduce them to metaphors for the sake of categorising): as a series of nested funnels; as branching sequences of choices and nodes; as counterpoint or fugue; as mirrored or paralleled characters and/or stories ; as spliced montages or found-object film; as multiple layers or collages; as bricolage, with your active involvement in 3D construction; as Tinkerbells (from the old Disney story-reading records where Tinkerbell would tell you when it was time to turn the page) read left-right-top-bottom with a button to read further; as loops or cycles; as boardgames (sets of steps or ‘moves’, some chance rolls of the dice, then back to some starting point again); as an automated public-transport ticket dispenser (lotsa buttons taking you nowhere); as braided river-deltas (Kirsten Krauth noted this in an earlier piece); as concordances (with links and other material working like references); as weeds or ‘rhizomes’, spreading across surfaces without clear beginnings or ends or structures.

And when more than one author is involved, or more than one version of a given piece of writing, or enough overlap among pieces to function as an cumulative hypertext, then it becomes even more interesting and complex, with all kinds of interleaving, turn-taking, switchboard, chorus, and other narratorial or narrating possibilities. Ditto for multiple or competing timeframes or characters’ versions of events. Ditto for multiplying techniques of reader-orientation (whose voice is this? is that a site-map? will this button do the same thing each time?), pacing (the sequencing of lines of narrative), web-effects (animation, dynamic html, movies, sounds) and resolution (The End? no ending? several options? ambiguity levels?).

Expectations of this ‘new’ medium and mode for storytelling are perhaps unfairly high, resulting in exaggerated irritability if the message isn’t massaged for the media, but it means many of the old rules of conventional and convention-driven narrative can be bent, broken, ignored, renovated or reinvented.

Even better, since there are no set conventions for onscreen rendering of fiction, every design vector can be extrapolated or modelled from the story itself (I’d say ‘organically’ but that’d be too romantic and optimistic). At the risk of vested-interest, look at the ways a story can be enacted (rather than literalised), a piece about an increasingly psychotic wife who (jealous of her husband’s love for his grandfather’s house) dismantles the house while pretending to renovate it, in the new Extra! journal: http://members.xoom.com/olande/callahan2/index.html [expired].

Why do we have to wait till someone starts up a competition (like the now-annual stuff-art contest run by Triple J, ABC Online and the Australian Film Commission) before onscreen and online writing appears that exploits the medium, mode and emergent genres? Why are so many print and magazine conventions being hauled over hypertexts like an alien diagnostic apparatus? Why are the very design and material components of paper publishing still being translated, literally and often crudely, to the monitor? Why aren’t there more Oz web journals willing to broker, sponsor, solicit, commission and house hyperfiction that earns and enacts its prefix? And if it’s out there, or you’ve been doing it, why aren’t you writing about it for this series on hyperfiction in RealTime?

“We no longer have galleries, we have art portals.” Mmm, it doesn’t quite have the elegance of McKenzie Wark’s aphorism “we no longer have roots, we have aerials,” but it does point to a future for art in the era of the internet.

The term ‘portal’ is used today to refer to information nodes—such as Yahoo, Netscape, and Wired—which provide ‘on-ramps’ to the internet. On a less grand scale, the art world has begun to accommodate itself within this new architecture. A number of these art portals have opened in Australia, such as Screenarts (http://www.screenarts.net.au – expired), Screen Network (http://www.sna.net.au/) and the Australian Film Commission’s ‘exhibition’ of net art, stuff-art (http://www.stuff-art.net.au – expired). Criticism is new to this medium, so we need to do some ground work.

These domain names provide the online equivalent of traditional physical spaces such as galleries. Where does the gallery model stop? Curators, catalogues, openings, reviews, sales, even exhibitions—how many of these fit through a modem? While it is more efficient to minimise infrastructure, do we forgo aesthetics in the process? Do we end up with just a ‘bunch of stuff’?

There are 2 obstacles in casting a critical eye over net art. First, the fixed medium of print is by its very nature alien to the fluid medium of the internet. Today, the liveliest response to net art comes not from magazines, but mailing lists such as net-time, rhizome or locally recode. In these lists we find an abundance of artist interviews and theoretical arguments in the new mode of ‘net criticism’, which is political rather than aesthetic in concern.

To abide by email, though, is to limit criticism to a live event—without durable record. Without the inertia of print, there is less opportunity for the medium to acquire a history. Without a history, there is little chance for the evolution of an argument, and greater stress on work of immediate sensation.

The second obstacle to criticism is more pervasive. In a ‘post-critical’ environment, it is difficult to locate oneself in the neutral position required by conventional criticism. Today, most of what passes for criticism is mere advocacy. Artists and their friends form the core voice for promoting sites and articulating their meaning. This arrangement suits work with a political edge, though it often fails to locate itself within a broader field of practice. Newspapers with their indentured critics provide some guarantee of independence, though the specialised role of the critic is increasingly challenged by client-friendly editors.

Let’s see what can be done. One reasonably neutral act of criticism is classification. Provisionally, we can identity three genres of net art: boxes, windows and hives. Box-sites offer stand-alone electronic versions of readymade art forms, with combinations of image, text and sound. Though the classic WaxWeb (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/wax/) was partly developed in moo-space, its final version is readily packaged as a stand-alone CD-ROM. Window-sites attempt to work within a medium that is specific to the internet. Sites by Heath Bunting (http://www.irational.org/_readme.html – expired) and jodi (http://www.jodi.org) champion transparency as a means of undermining the commodification of information. And finally, hive-sites make art from contributions by visitors—artists are the beekeepers and visitors are their bees. Persistent Data Interface (http://www-crca.ucsd.edu/~pdc/ – expired) demonstrates what a rich mixture can be creamed off visitor confessions.

These 3 genres represent different horizons for web art. Box-sites use the web as a means of delivering ready-made material. The critical strategy of window-sites is to expose the medium by which the information is conveyed. And hive-sites attempt to dissolve the role of individual artist-creator for the collective consciousness of web users. With this provisional classification, we have the basis for some kind of critical judgment. How well do these genres realise the possibilities of net art?

The 8 works for stuff-art are mostly box-sites. Like watercolour for painting, web for CD-ROM enforces limits on multimedia and rewards elegant economies. How does this reduction affect content? The 6 stand-alone pieces in stuff-art range from comic to epic. John and Mark Lycette’s Illustrated Alphabet is a line-drawing animation of whimsical violence. A more complex interactive is Leisl Hilhouse and Simon Klaebe’s Harrowing Hell, which takes visitors on several journeys to hell. In content, it could be compared to Cosmology of Kyoto, but leans towards cheesy in character types. Mindflux’s enigmatically titled EN_T presents a fly whose leg can be twitched to scroll randomly through testimonies of paranoia. Wordstuffs by Hazel Smith, Greg White and Roger Dean contains abstract hypertext about ‘body’ and ‘city’, but also includes a java-based cluster of works that can be jerked and rattled. And a tromp l’oeil window-site is provided by Alex Davies’ Subcutaneous: one element invites registration for a chat session that turns out to be pre-scripted, regardless of visitor input. This deviousness makes up for the otherwise predictable content. Though mostly deft uses of Shockwave, these 5 pieces seem slight in content.

Against the comic trend is Andrew Garton’s Ausländer Micro, which tells an epic tale of a refugee who finds himself as much without sanctuary in the afterlife as he did in war-torn Europe. The depth of this tale stretches the bandwidth of stuff-art, though Garton develops some clever tricks for keeping our attention. Animated graphics in the top frame offer opportunities for manipulation and roll-over icons move text focus between libretto and story.

Though Ausländer Micro deserves praise for effort, the small screen seems too slight a medium for its operatic themes of war and death. Unlike the proscenium arch that frames stage and big screen, the monitor is still wedded to the everyday concerns of the desk. In the end, a tragic theme may be more convincingly developed through a mundane path, such as one of the many mortality indexes online (eg http://www.austunity.com.au/cgi-bin/morcalc.cgi – expired).

The 2 remaining sites draw outside themselves for content. The screen for Gary Zebington’s Repossessed is crowded with quasi-scientific graphics that suggest ‘deep programming.’ The visitor submits a word for ‘sacrifice’, which is then recast into a dialogue. For example, ‘Bone’ becomes ‘What does bone-ly? Under antiquity.’ External sites can be drawn into this information feed. The coding skills used in this construction are quite impressive, but the results suggest a clumsy machine intelligence, rather than the omnipotent digital consciousness promised by the opening graphics.

Finally, Mark Simpson’s Ephemera Engine provides a window of search terms, web cams and real audio grabs from unnamed locations. Transmission is occasionally interrupted by questions such as “Do you sometimes feel you are somewhere else?” As suggested by its title, Ephemera Engine dissolves eventually into a kind of mindless traffic-watching.

The works in stuff-art demonstrate technical creativity, but struggle to find a content that is both meaningful and appropriate to the online environment. What can be done? From the artists, opportunities for genuine visitor participation might be helpful. From the Australian Film Commission, it’s worth considering to what extent its mock title ‘stuff-art’ helped form the kinds of works it harvested. Though perhaps prompted by the Stuffit Mac program used to compress files, broader connotations of the title have a bearing on how the site is approached.

At first glance, the use of the word ‘stuff’ seems to cater for the neo-Neanderthal consumer—the kind appealed to by companies like Iomega (‘Because it’s your stuff’) and Pepsi (‘Get stuff’). This reduction of the world to mere substance seems hardly a promising framework for a new artform.

Yet there may be a more serious aesthetic embedded in this vernacular term. Implicit in ‘stuff’ is a modernist attitude to meaning as material, in the way that Jackson Pollock used paint not as a language but as mud. This accords with the modernist quest to strip the world of its pre-existing forms and confront things in their raw state—‘get stuff’. Is modernism a good starting point for net art? Yes, the modernist quest is a useful rite of initiation for any new art form, helping to define it separately from others. But then it needs to move to expressive possibilities which extend beyond self-definition. The ability of hive-sites to tap collective experience provides one way ahead.

Like much Australian net art, stuff-art shows great promise, but we might hope that something with more conceptual bite evolves out of the primordial stuff online. The emerging hybrid artist-curator-apiarist may eventually lead the way. Get honey!

stuff-art, Australian Film Commission, online at http://www.stuff-art.com.au [expired]

Why do we still talk of “new media”? Are we in the grip of a persistent cultural logic of digital neoteny? In a refreshing riposte to this desire to keep new media forever young, Mousetrap curators Martine Corompt and Ian Haig inform us that “in 1998 digital media is no longer a big deal.” While not overtly polemical, Mousetrap was as much an exhibition about digital screen culture, to be remembered for cutting the new media umbilicus. Any new medium is quickly absorbed into a culture (this is straight McLuhan 101), tarnishes with ubiquity, and ossifies into style. The laws of media are unforgiving. At a recent forum on visual design at Swinburne University, Christopher Waller (21C, Diagram) noted how the style of glossy, hyperreal power-imaging we associate with the 90s has already dated, and that nostalgia will eventually mentor its revival. Mousetrap demonstrated that la mode retro is a creative force to be reckoned with in contemporary screen culture, though not for anything of so recent a vintage. The diverse range of local and international work garnered for this exhibition declared a “longing for potentially obsolete analogue materials, such as over-exposed film-stock, yellowed paper and photographic grain.” Forget the future, digitally-created art looks like it has re-emerged from the past, “secondhand, tactile, decayed and disordered.” Pace Bruce Sterling, there’s no such thing as a dead medium. The experimental arts will always find a use for such things.

That out of the way we have another problem. Despite the diacritical impetus behind the exhibition, Mousetrap could not avoid falling foul of the regulation pigeon-holing as “multimedia” any artistic practice that in some way uses computers. The film festival organisers may have been trying to capitalise on the popular belief that the term multimedia is sexy. Or perhaps they simply didn’t know what else to call it. Either way, the work is partitioned off as being in some way different, and not necessarily integral to the screen scene created by the festival. To be fair, though, it is more important for this work to be included in such festivals than not. But the continued use of a term that has outlived its usefulness worries me. Multimedia was invented with a technical meaning in mind, referring to the incorporation of multiple signifying modes within the same apparatus. Inflections to do with new modes of creativity or sensibility made possible by this apparatus have never been part of its meaning. These days anything on a CD-ROM or the World Wide Web, or produced using Director, is automatically labelled as multimedia, often with little attention to what is actually going on from a representational or formal point of view. There is no question that discrete forms of screen-based arts, such as video, cinema and digital animation, will continue to thrive, and sustain their own forms of critical discourse. But at a time of energetic experimentation in the screen arts, as we are experiencing now, the continued use of narrow and historically specific terms such as multimedia is like the proverbial can tied to a dog’s tail.

It’s time we stopped using multimedia as a generic term to describe the very specialised and often idiosyncratic work being done by artists who happen to use computers. I propose the use of an alternative term which already has currency in the digital world (we’ll have to do something about that “digital” soon). The word is intermedia. Intermedia, with its suggestions of hybridity (a fusion or cross-fertilisation of different media forms) and intransitivity (between commencement and closure), recommends itself as a more apposite descriptor for the cultural production of the experimental screen arts.

The urge to graft and appropriate diverse media into a synthetic, intermedia environment has been around for some time (why multi rather than mixed media in the first place?). Digital techniques, while offering decisive enhancements, are best understood as enabling technologies that facilitate the importation of different signifying textures into a screen space, and the ability to recombine them in surprising, even unprecedented ways. As Ian Haig noted of the Mousetrap screening program, many of the works “employ digital tools to fuse together cell animation, live action, comics, stop motion animation and found imagery, often producing new hybrid forms of animation, which would not have been possible previously.”

The interactive exhibition offered a range of work that displayed the changing architectures of interface design and principles of interactivity. Presided over by one of the acknowledged masterpieces of intermedia, The Residents’ Bad Day on the Midway, it suggested a sharpened understanding of intermedia as being concerned with spatial relationships and immersive environments, rather than game-playing or puzzle-solving. This poetic was persuasively supported by Jim Ludtke, who emphasised in his artist’s talk the continued importance of exploration and narrative in intermedia (“the story’s the thing”). But the screening program was really the nodal point for Mousetrap’s intimations of intermedia. In bringing together national and international work that determinedly explores the poetics of hybridity, Corompt and Haig have charted more than trends and developments. Their astute sense of what is happening with the screen arts scene suggests that if there is such a thing as a digital body politic, it is being mutated from within by the recombinant force of bricolage. This process can be seen in the collagic, appropriationist style of Rodney Ascher’s punkish grapple with ultra-fundamentalism, Somebody Goofed (1997), which cleverly fuses 2D computer animation and print ephemera (comics, kids’ books, album covers) into a highly distinctive, estranging allegory of betrayal. It is also evident in Laurence Arcadias’ Donar Party (1993), a colourised steel-point etching twitched to grotesque life, which exploits the suggestiveness of a VRML walkthrough to document the pitfalls of a pre-electric surgical scene from the 19th century. As well, Adam Gravois’ atmospheric and decidedly low-fi Golden Shoes (1996) captured the dual intermedia aesthetic of recombination (it looks like a film, but it isn’t) and bricolage, the fine art of making do with whatever is at hand (such as low cost computers and software).

Mousetrap demonstrates that intermedia practice is more concerned with a type of sensibility or attitude preoccupied with all available media, than with the potential of digital technologies per se. Indeed, as Haig advances, the “works shown in Mousetrap expose the possibilities of what can happen when you fuse computer hardware and software, together with…an attitude which embraces the culture of underground comics, contemporary anime, and weirdo cartoons.” New media is dead, long live the re-animators.

Mousetrap, curated by Martine Corompt and Ian Haig, Melbourne International Film Festival; screenings State Film Theatre, interactives Melbourne Town Hall, July 23 – August 9

British Bulldogs screened as part of the Game Theory series of events presented by Experimenta Media Arts. The program title however is misleading, perhaps deliberately so.

On the whole Game Theory had an inconsistent relationship with the usual Pavlovian stimulus-response-reward scenario clichés that dog many forms of interactive gameplay. The Click Click, You’re Dead component addressed these scenarios fairly exhaustively via mainly commercially produced games; the Game Play exhibition featured playful game related local artists work and the speaking program discussed related topics.

Any behavioural analysis of the artist-viewer relationship would consider the shifting parameters of the ‘rules’ of ‘the game.’ Crucial to modernism, such considerations also can apply to a viewer’s approach to post-postmodernist exhibition: one does not have to decode so much as negotiate the packaging of curatorial conceit.

Through its title (a traditional British playground game) and vague allusions to “playing games” in the program notes, British Bulldogs strategically forged an oblique relationship to the theme, but the videos bore little relationship to games or gaming. By all but ignoring its obligatory thematic context, British Bulldogs became programming by stealth.

It was actually a solid program of recent British video works. Drawn from the catalogue of London Electronic Arts it mercifully avoided the self-conscious carryings on of the Young British Artists and their recent discovery of the camcorder, concentrating largely on a body of work tracing a number of interleaving, parallel concerns and experimental approaches.

In A.Z0.IC by St. John Walker, eerie morphed faces twisted into foetal shape-shifted animal forms accompanied by childlike rhymes (“…we had a dream last night, we had the same dream”). Blake’s Tyger, Tyger and floaty ambient music evokes some quasi-mystical synaesthetic cyberspace. George Saxon and Gina Czarnecki perform electronic prosthetics to create a mutant legless centaur with four torsos able to conceal and produce video cassettes, headphones and video monitors from within its person(s) in Homo-Cyte. Clio Barnard’s Headcase is a glorious mix and match; a self-referential, hammed up, mock-documentary, camp horror home movie about the benefits, thrills and dangers of all things connected with drilling into, removing and secreting heads from their bodies. While The Persistence of Memory by Anthony Atanasio is a far more conventionally stylish montage of associational image consciousness with advertising/music video aesthetics, images of extreme close-up faces, religious gesticulations, crucifix lamps in constant flash-back faux noir collision.

While these works explored the technological transformation of psycho-corporeality, their cross-genre quotation is a reminder that much of the experimental work produced in Britain is commissioned for broadcast funded by a combination of Arts Council and television. In spite of the predictable consignment of the works to the arts-end of programming this has meant that broadcast television has consistently been an important exhibition site and perhaps facilitated a certain degree of hybridisation. It also means that television isn’t necessarily perceived as some sort of low-cultural form ripe only for political interventionism or ironic appropriation.

Other works in this program reflected on the relationship between ‘human’ time and perception and a deeper, geological time span. John Smith’s Blight consists of a montage of largely static ‘still life’ images of a community of houses in the East End of London being demolished to make way for a new motorway. Smith selected fragments of former residents’ reminiscences about the houses and their lives there, “don’t really remember…don’t really remember much…” Set to music by Jocelyn Pook, it is elegantly edited to construct a sort of documentary song from a patchwork of voices, a contemporary folklore protest piece.

Withdrawal by George Barber presents a family walking across a field with a backdrop of hills, mountains and clouds, digitally manipulated so that ‘generations’ of family members disappear and landscape features recede at each repeat of the sequence. Fragments of dialogue about death and religion and trippy ethereal atmospherics suggest a cyberspace of deep time. This and Laws of Nature by Tony Hill evoke a less objective relationship with notions of time and ‘nature’, than might be suggested by the apparently romantic themes and subjects. Starting out looking dangerously like a new age tree hugging adventure Laws of Nature becomes a 25 minute visual poem. Through 360°, elegantly paced swooping camera movements across landscape features, rolling hills and English woodlands, with subtle time-lapse and double exposure, the film is an exploration of mechanically mediated perspectives without humanist ‘subjectivity’ in favour of extended geological space-time. In this sense it is, formally and conceptually, closely related to Michael Snow’s La Region Centrale in eschewing the human viewpoint (literally and perceptually) and the romantic gaze. Yet it has an aesthetic quality far less landscape-formalist covering a number of aesthetic techniques and hundreds of miles of England.

The transitions between millennia, while arbitrary, will it seems always have an impact on the political, cultural and social life of a country. In Britain this is happening in tandem with the devolution of Scotland and Wales which will lead perhaps to an examination of English ethnicity. The works in British Bulldogs suggest that this examination can be coupled with a reflective, but also adventurous, decentring of perspectives and perceptions. Blimey!

Game Theory, British Bulldogs, dLux media arts and experimenta, curated by Keely Macarow, Kaleide Cinema RMIT, Melbourne, July 16; Chauvel Cinemas, Sydney, Sept 29

With the advent of new biomedical technologies and collateral reconfigurations of human and non-human forms and practices, interdisciplinary endeavours by cultural producers have consistently questioned the often mutually antagonistic spheres of ‘art’ and ‘science.’ Stage one of Oran Catts and Ionat Zurr’s Tissue Culture and Art Project contributes to such endeavours by lending ‘artistic expression’ to tissue engineering experiments in cell and molecular biology.

Catts and Zurr have taken care to avoid the viewer tedium that often comes with pictures hanging on a wall, choosing instead a variety of display techniques for their microscopic enlargements of lurid skin tissues and cellular forms. Light boxes protruding from walls, digiprints on canvas, images behind perspex situated alongside miniature glass figurines suspended in candy coloured solutions, and an image fastened to the surface of a makeshift table are some of the novel arrangements in this display.

One of Catts and Zurr’s strategies to make accessible this abstract science, to render its strangeness familiar, occurs in the ‘Monster’ series of images. Akin to a high-tech rendition of Rorschach inkblots, we can recognise such things as digitally enhanced eyes, accentuated teeth, a hint of lipstick, flared nostrils, a mouth gorging its own distended webfeet.

Elsewhere, a slide-show installation accompanied by a trip-hop, techno-pop soundtrack ensures a certain appeal for ‘youth’ audiences. The soundtrack includes a lame refrain—”What about the future?”—as the exhibition’s single ambivalent gesture toward the ocularcentrism of biomaterial digitisation. A pile of laboratory paraphernalia is placed inanely as debris at the base of projected images. A similar indication of concept formation on the run can be seen in one of the perspex boxes: behind a tissue culture image and resting atop more lab plastic is a taxidermied rabbit—the sort you can hire for a couple of bucks from the WA Museum—and crammed inside its mangy ears are 2 pipettes. This works, I guess, as a crude juxtaposition of the late 19th century scientific art of taxidermy and a late 20th century obsession with gene cloning (remember ‘Dolly’?). In different ways, both refer to a cultural refusal of the expiry date of life. In the corners of this same exhibition space are arrangements of basketball-sized sponge spheres, also spiked full of pipettes.

Exception to this kind of haste can be found in what I consider the most developed component of the exhibition—the non-interactive website. Along with clicking through an image gallery, we read excerpts from the catalogue, an interesting dialogue between Catts and a typically candid Stelarc, an interview with tissue engineer Fiona Wood, and, most engagingly, Catts and Zurr’s Honours theses.

In addition to attracting an exceptionally large contingent of sponsors from public and corporate sectors, Catts and Zurr have gone to some effort in acquiring the necessary laboratory skills in cultivating skin tissue and cells onto non-organic materials (glass and plastic figurines) in preparation for microscopic enlargement and digital manipulation. Coupled with their previous studies in eco-design, digital imaging and photomedia, these artists have a disciplinary versatility that in future might result in artworks that more astutely negotiate the signs and conventions distinguishing art from science, as well as the traversability between and beyond these 2 zones of inquiry and expression.

Indeed, Catts and Zurr would seem to concur, writing in their rather confused catalogue introduction on the cultural and social urgency for art to engage critically with its arbitrary other—science—and advocating an “art that can be seen as the optimal medium to generate a discussion and a debate dealing with the contradictions between what we know about the world, and society’s values which are still based on old and traditional perceptions of the world.” Implicit in this statement is the suggestion that worldly and progressive ‘knowledge’ is synonymous with science, which is fettered by reactionary social values manifest in established modes of perception vis-à-vis art. The technotopian logic here is that with new technologies of perception comes a potential equivalence between knowledge and society.

The thing is, art and science in this exhibition are overwhelmingly fixed in their respective modern traditions: art deals in and dares not transgress aesthetics, while science concerns itself with the identification and analysis of veritable data for utilitarian and commercial purposes. Strangely, then, the exhibition operates as an exemplar of artistically and critically overdetermined paradigms whereby the “artistic documentation” of tissue engineering is somehow justification in itself of the “artistic merits” of the artworks. The very notion of “artistic merit” is never problematised, its particulars never identified; in catalogue statements by 2 university-based scientists researching the field of tissue engineering it is taken as a given, and legitimated as that which pertains only to aesthetics. Ironically, the culture of science—its habits of expression, its techniques of action, its situations beyond disciplinary boundaries—is largely absent, represented only in the transfiguration of the optic of medical technologies, and disclosed in the authorising views of the 2 scientists’ catalogue statements.

In an exhibition of wildly abstract and racy coloured images, these scientists in effect see the Tissue Culture and Art Project partly as a public relations exercise, “providing a realistic image of scientists” and “creating a positive image” so as to presumably counter such myths as the ethically corrupt or socially myopic scientist. Arguably, however, myths of science peculiar to 19th century Gothic literature, Cold War era paranoia, and B-grade sci-fi and horror movies, no longer prevail if R&D funding levels for science are any guide. Indeed, one need only tune in to the many medico-dramas and human body specials on TV, or catch Hollywood megablitzes like Jurassic Park, to recognise that the cultural-economy of ‘science’ fares pretty well in popular consciousness. Yet, as historian of science Donna Haraway, and cultural critic Catherine Waldby have argued, there are valid reasons for ethical and political concern about ethnocentric and commercially motivated ideologies underpinning scientific research that incorporates biomaterial imaging technologies, such as the Human Genome Project and the Visible Human Project.

As an interdisciplinary project, this exhibition’s nowness—its ‘currency’ as both fashionable vocation and high exchange value within the techno-cultural marketplace of arts funding—is contradicted in its fatigued representation of art as primarily a spectacular rather than critical aesthetic enterprise. (This exhibition’s aesthetic is without crisis: the social and political import of tissue engineering is left waiting; its ontology is elsewhere, its territory belongs not to this situation, and it needs to.) Such traditional views on art from large sections of the scientific community (to say nothing of those in the humanities) can be taken without too much surprise; the worry is more the seeming acceptance of such precepts by these artists, as is made apparent in the exhibition’s display techniques.

My frustration with this project’s otherwise exciting interdisciplinary encounter turns on its lack of self-reflexivity. Disciplinary limits and presuppositions are neither made apparent nor critiqued, thus restricting any proliferation of alternative narratives. Rather, the exhibition paradoxically celebrates an unsurmounted divide between art and science, shoring up the disciplinary boundaries which separate the two cultures. Comfort zones remain intact. To be fair, my reservations have left aside the genuine goodwill of the exchange between these spheres of inquiry, and it’s this kind of basis from which critically innovative artworks may hopefully begin to emerge in later stages of the Tissue Culture and Art Project.

Tissue Culture & Art Project, Stage One, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), August 5 – September 6

The Australian Ballet’s Collaborations program and Dancehouse’s Mixed Metaphor and their associated forums were my first experiences of MAP as an event. The first had me worried, the second hopeful and together they represented the very different approaches to “movement and performance” and accompanying critical engagement that MAP was expected to encompass.

The Australian Ballet (AB) forum was ultimately hampered by the chair, James Griffin from Radio National, chosen by Ross Stretton the artistic director of the AB. His lack of knowledge about dance placed him—and consequently the discussion—at an alarming disadvantage, which left me questioning Stretton’s logic. With so many informed, engaged dance commentators in the audience, this was an unnecessary impediment.

With Stretton by Griffin’s side, the conversation hinged around the AB’s “new” direction in inviting four “new” choreographers, Bernadette Walong, Stephen Baynes, Natalie Weir and Adrian Burnett, to create work on and for the AB dancers. Baynes’ comments on inspiring dancers, referring to his experience overseas in the company of dancers such as Marcia Haydee, made sense of this scheme while words failed Walong. Her difficulty was discomforting as she spoke about sound and memory in relation to her original score for Slipstream, surrounded as she was by Mahler, Astor Piazzolla, techno music and the instruments of Ghana.

Magnanimous statements from Stretton about “innovation” punctuated discussions on the novelty of pointe work in a contemporary context (“What about 20th century ballet?” from the audience was greeted with silence from the panel), and the alarming physicality of this new work described by Griffin as “intimate” or “erotic.” Natalie Weir countered this by saying she had never intended her work to be sexual and didn’t consider it so.

Baynes’ attempts to suggest that classical and contemporary are not so discrete were overwhelmed by an insistence upon the “traditional” and the “innovative.” Stretton’s comments about the importance of maintaining the classics in the company’s repertoire, keeping this “tradition” as “the point of reference” was particularly ironic with Walong sitting on the panel. Her tradition picked its way en pointe through a river of stones.

Innovation was not mentioned over at Dancehouse where the question was not why but how. This forum seemed to articulate a real anxiety about the place of the body in a dance-based multimedia environment. The discussion finally seemed to crystallise with Tony Yap and Mixed Company’s highly charged Saint Sebastian epitomising “presence” and Margaret Trail’s Hi, it’s me, “absence”; Trail’s work placed her live interaction amidst pre-recorded voices that introduced a performance place elsewhere.

Keynote speaker Angharad Wynne-Jones opened with a definition of metaphor and mixed-metaphor and a description of the project of performance in articulating a persuasive example of one or the other. (For Wynne-Jones, Mixed Company’s piece seemed sure of its methods/media and therefore presented a persuasive metaphor.) She spoke of the position of the body within this context as “vulnerable” and the difficulty of controlling the expression of the body particularly when you are creator and performer—how the body “leaks” meanings.
Tony Yap’s description of the “organic” creative process that his group underwent seemed to challenge the more methodical approach that Angharad suggested and Philipa Rothfield introduced Christos Linous’ active, invulnerable body to the discussion.

Methodologies, processes and ideas replaced the design, music and space of the AB forum and the discussion flowed without interruption or clunky changes in direction. At Dancehouse the the line between audience and panellists became indiscernible, with choreographers, practitioners and participants spilling across what had been an uncomfortable divide at the Malthouse.

Collaborations forum, The Australian Ballet, The Malthouse, July 7; Mixed Metaphor forum, Dancehouse, July 5

Talking dance, in the context of doing it, appears to be seriously on the increase across Australia. Sydney’s The Performance Space will present its second antistatic in 1999 (curated by Rosalind Crisp, Sue-ellen Kohler and Zane Trow), PICA (Perth Institute of Contemporary Art) will present its bi-annual Dancers are Space-eaters in the same year, and in Brisbane the Body of Work dance conference was held recently. In Melbourne the demise of Greenmill left a gap which was quickly filled by MAP.
RealTime became part of MAP (Movement and Performance), a new dance event in Melbourne featuring a season of dance works and a 2 day symposium at the Malthouse. In this edition (which first appeared online in August), a team of RealTime editors and writers (Zsuzsanna Soboslay, Philipa Rothfield, Suzanne Spunner, Eleanor Brickhill, Katrina Philips Rank, Elizabeth Drake, Simon Ellis, Virginia Baxter, Keith Gallasch and MAP symposium co-curator Erin Brannigan) respond to the dance works and symposium themes and debate they experienced at MAP.

Waiting: empathetic evolution

Choreographer Sandra Parker tells us she has a bank of movement phrases, fragments, unformed images that she brings to the creative process. Composer Lawrence Harvey too, she says, brought different sounds to the studio; “the sound grew as the dance grew, a lovely experience, movement and sound filling the space at the same time.” Harvey notes that in this cumulative process he would find what direction the dance was going, “geometrically, not just gesturally.”

Someone asked how Waiting came about—from the quotation for Romeo and Juliet? “No”, answers Parker, “that came later. I was experimenting with how still you can be for how long.” Someone else asks, “How do you convert motion into stillness? Music always sounds like movement.” A dancer responds, “When waiting you create a diversion, you’re never quite still, and Lawrence picked up on that.”

Stung: trust

Darrin Verhagen tells us that Sue Healey was in Russia when the work finally came together in Melbourne, that she knows that he knows what she likes, “pops, scratches, tiny sounds”, and that he didn’t know the work would be humorous, it was not discussed, not that it mattered.

Live Opera Situation: languages

For Shelley Lasica “music is like a parallel text”, in this case several parallel texts—an obscure Polish opera and Indian music that the dancers listened and rehearsed to (but not heard in performance by the audience, but maybe ‘heard’ by the dancers) and then the composer’s offering added last. A dancer declares, “It was difficult, we had these other rhythms and then we had to match them with Franc Tétaz’s.” Another dancer says, “We establish our own rhythm, our own score, add another and have two sets of rhythms.” Franc Tétaz adds, “I was doing something very similar to you, though we speak very different languages.” Lawrence Harvey says that he “strives towards a common language through watching, through talking with dancers.”

Franc says he likes “to create an environment to invite the audience into Shelley’s work.” Something in Lasica’s body language suggests, ‘No, that’s not it.’ Lasica says, “It’s a matter of how music and dance intersect,” that she “creates a gap between movement and music.”

Dancers and music

The dancers say, “We always draw on the energy of the music, but sometimes it’s better to be grounded, to not go with the rise of the music, not get whipped up by it, just pick up on the cues, resist the music. Though with Darrin’s music we could get into it…but with Franc’s we had landmarks.” Tétaz muses, “I composed as if I was writing for scenes.”

Harvey declares, “The body is already polyrhythmic, the heart beat, the breathing, the issue of psychological time.”
Lasica closes, “Movement is not generated by music, but by many things, music is another layer.”

Dance Works, DW98 forum, July 24, Wesleyan Hall, Albert Park, July 15 – July 26

As the MAP Symposium unfolded, RealTime charted some responses on audio and videotape. Here are some samples.

Rachel Fensham It’s really about the question of the will to know, which seems to me to be split between those who are choreographers now (Chrissie Parrott and Gideon Obarzanek) and those who are dancers. It’s the question of knowing through seeing, and the extension of seeing through the camera. Whereas what Trevor Patrick, and to some extent Duncan Fairfax (though he’s not a dancer), was saying was about the will to know being developed through the multi-sensorial body. Now I don’t want to dismiss the will to know through the technos but for those people to deny the multi-sensorial in relation to the technology when it’s in their own histories as dancers working in companies is a great loss. When Gideon was talking about watching someone’s tensile movement, his excitement suddenly came into play. Now he’s trying to use that through the technos but it is actually about the knowing of bodies in relation rather than just bodies through the eye.

Rachel Fensham What Libby Dempster said was that we have a white, foreign, illegitimate dance history in ballet. I think she’s absolutely right. It is about the colonial heritage and our inferiority in relation to the rest of the world. But if you take that on board, the flipside is that you might want to celebrate it. Sometimes the benchmark might be going to see the Australian Ballet and watching it as a complete parody of what our culture might be. Concomitant with that there is imperialism, power, exploitation, degradation of the land, denial of the existence of Aboriginal people. Can we really just celebrate that? Or does that version of our dance history imply some other kinds of questions. … It’s interesting that for all the problems with the Bangarra liaison [the Australian Ballet-Bangarra Rites of Spring] in a way it is the Australian Ballet that creates the first mainstream cross-over.

Keith Gallasch When ballet was addressed it was always about the Australian Ballet, not for example William Forsythe’s engagement with postmodernity. Here’s a choreographer who reads Deleuze and Guattari and Derrida and works with new media artists, and who has an architectonic view.

Rachel Fensham The point about ballet re-inventing itself is almost the more interesting one, the ways that ballet can change.

William McClure Silence is not what I was advocating but a sense of silence that comes between phrases which is the question of what is going to come next. There’s an ambivalence, an equivocal sense of how you’re going to get to the next phrase…where you might think, there is no natural necessity which is pushing me on to make the next decision. It’s ungrounded.

Rosalind Crisp It’s grounded by certain choices that you make and the elimination of others. I don’t think there is a state of nothingness. It’s more a state of listening and, depending on the sensitivity and awareness you have in your body, you might make certain choices of movement over others. When I come to craft a work, I’m making choices about certain parameters.

Richard Allen In the moment of nothing is the moment of meditation. I remember when I was working on a piece called The Frightening of Angels, I had this sense of an incredible dark cloud within me and my necessity was to move that dark cloud out of me and into the space, into the light. If there was a sense of nothing, I wouldn’t have done it.

William McClure It’s not an intellectual process I’m talking about. It’s a way of confronting what is happening in a way that doesn’t come with criteria, background, tradition. It’s an existential position.

Rosalind Crisp I find accidents the best creative moments. I’m working in the studio and someone drops by and interrupts me. I keep working while I’m talking to them and suddenly I realise I’m doing something more interesting, more connected. I think it’s a dialogue between pathways that are established in your body and a space where there isn’t anything pre-coded. If I direct myself to feel a part of my body so I’m more aware of it, it might make me do something (HER ARM SHOOTS UPWARDS) within a certain sort of parameter. It doesn’t feel like nothing. But there has to be a space.

William McClure What I’m saying is that the “nothing” is pregnant with sensation. It’s ambivalent, it’s equivocal, it doesn’t give itself away. So whatever representation you lay on top of that sensation or nothingness is then endless possibilities.

Peter Eckersall Companies like Zen Zen Zo in Brisbane are directly appropriating a post Dairakuda-kan style—shaved heads, white body paint. Some members have also worked with Tadashi Suzuki, so there’s a crossover. They have a very particular idea about Japanese performance which I find a bit rigid. It’s very homogeneous, essentialised. Obviously within the company are different opinions but some seem fixed on this idea that, you know, this mysterious, spooky oriental form allows us to discover ourselves as performers. Butoh doesn’t exist in order for late 20th Century Australian artists to discover themselves. Maybe it exists in order for us to discover our own problematic culture or identity as a nation.

Virginia Baxter There is Butoh and Suzuki-inspired work in Australia in which the Japanese form has been so deeply absorbed into the practice that it no longer looks like Butoh or Suzuki, as in the work of artists like Deborah Leiser, Mémé Thorne or Nikki Heywood in Sydney

Peter Eckersall Deborah Leiser’s work is very much about identity. The Japanese influence in her work is not obvious, it’s not worn on the surface. It’s been absorbed through a series of processes. If you’re going to engage in an experience of another performance culture the trick is then to locate it in the context of your own.

Yumi Umiumare [Classical ballet] is probably still inside my body. It’s a centredness or a direction. I think it’s very important for technique. I had to get rid of certain kinds of steps, certain rhythms. I had to chuck it out to learn Butoh. It takes a while. I was often told by Butoh teachers, you’re useless because you step. You are good at movement. But in Butoh you shouldn’t “move.” In ballet you need the technique to achieve more quick movement. You have to slow down in Butoh.

Peter Eckersall The idea of an Asian body needs to be dismissed very quickly. Does somebody who works in the rice fields in the north of Japan have the same body as a Balinese shamanistic trance dancer for example? Where this gets very ideological is in Japan where there’s a debate within Butoh about a Japanese body, with some Butoh artists who’ve achieved semi-guru status saying, this is the Japanese body. It’s essentialising the Japanese body, saying we are all one. It’s not acknowledging the pluralities, the minority cultures within that culture.

This is a rare opportunity for Sydney audiences to experience a classic music-dance-theatre work. A solo dancer, a cellist, an instrumental ensemble, a live snake, and the Images of Vesalius (14 engravings by the great 16th century anatomist from flayed gallows specimens) are the potent ingredients of music theatre innovator Peter Maxwell Davies’ Vesalii Icones (1969). This is not a music theatre dialogue between voice and accompanying instruments, but between a modern Christ, the dancer, moving through the Stations of the Cross, and instrumentalists with a theatrical life of their own, principally the cello, described by Paul Griffiths in Modern Music after 1945 (OUP 1995) as the dancer’s shadow, partner, or ideal.” Griffiths regards the work as “the most intense” of all Maxwell Davies’ creations, its blend of high seriousness and parodic pastiche a kind of violence—“the violence shown on stage is a violence which the music is doing to itself.” Patrick Harding-Irmer is the dancer, one-time Australian Dance Theatre artistic director Jonathan Taylor directs and choreographs, and Mark Summerbell conducts The Seymour Group.

Vesalii Icones, Music Theatre Sydney, Newtown Theatre, October 8 – 10. Bookings 9519 5081

There’s a moment in Gideon Obarzanek’s C.O.R.R.U.P.T.E.D 2, the final work in Chunky Move’s latest offering, Fleshmeet, when a solo dancer in diaphanous clothing moves in white light to a slow walking pattern beside a vast tilting screen. The scene startles with its scale and starkness. The movement is beautiful. But too soon the moment evaporates. After the sharply evocative opening, the architectonic relationship between dancer and screen dissolves and what was a vertiginous, ominous presence assumes a secondary role to the enactment of more predictable trios and solos, as impressively fast and lyrical as they are from the fine ensemble of performers. C.O.R.R.U.P.T.E.D 2 feels like a work awaiting its full realisation.

Paul Selwyn-Norton’s The Rogue Tool is a reverie on transformation, an engagement with objects as supports for and extensions to the body. It’s a more sustained piece that gives the audience time to decipher and enter its disturbing world. Dancers move purposefully into position and rigidify, propping each other up with poles like prostheses. People become objects. Their stillness is total, eerie. Through this strange landscape skirts the fabulously dexterous Luke Smiles in routines reminiscent of vaudeville but extending way beyond the limits of time and body. Damien Cooper’s lights have their own rhythm, cutting out in the middle of a movement or coming up to full strength at the end. Fred Frith’s unusually lyrical guitar is sublime, recorded with perfect clarity and played as it should be—loud and clear.

No doubt about it, C.O.R.R.U.P.T.E.D 1 is virtuosic. While sections of the audience revel in Obarzanek’s hyper-animated parody of soap opera, for others its strangely old-fashioned with none of the moral urgings of contemporary soap. It’s classic farce—accelerated action, comic personae, simple suspense, clever detailing of body movement especially from Fiona Cameron in a fabulous dress that seems to have a mind of its own. Like some entr’acte from burlesque, the piece is performed on the forestage in front of the curtain. The sexual politics are as musty—repressed wife discards spectacles and blossoms in momentary sexual dalliance with TV repairman. What satisfies at the level of virtuosity and dramaturgical inventiveness, in substance doesn’t connect beyond cliché. Chunky Move has power and precision, and now in evidence a sense of delicacy, but the pleasures of the company’s work still appear to rest on the surface, something darker, more thoughtful waiting just below, unseen.

Fleshmeet, Chunky Move, choreographers Gideon Obarzanek , Paul Selwyn Norton; performers Fiona Cameron, Brett Daffy, Lisa Griffiths, Kirstie McCracken, Byron Perry, Luke Smiles, David Tyndall; Seymour Theatre Centre, Sydney, September 12 – 26; Melbourne Festival, C.U.B. Malthouse, Melbourne, October 21 – 31

Produced and presented by Mark Cleary, director of the Newtown Theatre, with artistic director Norman Hall, the annual Bodies season showcases a range of contemporary dance from independent choreographers around Australia. The event has become a firm part of the Sydney dance calendar offering the opportunity to see the work of a distinctive group of practitioners. This year’s Bodies include Paulina Quinteros (winner of an Australian Institute of Classical Dance [AICD] Dance Creation choreographic award this year in Melbourne), James Taylor, Jan Pinkerton, Virginia Ferris, Solon Ulbrich, Ichiro Harada, Deborah Mills, Cathryn Magill, Jacqui Simmonds, Jamie Jewel, Norman Hall, Veronica Gillmer, Derek Porter, Sydney Salter, Kate Denborough, Kenny Feather, Elizabeth Lea and Peter Cook. The supplementary Youthworks program features student choreographers and dance works every Saturday during the Bodies season.

Bodies, Newtown Theatre, Wed – Sat 8pm, Sun 5pm, October 21 – November 8 tel 9519 5081

In an unusual combination of talents for dance, or rather dance-theatre, the usual role of choreographer as director becomes two roles, Janet Robertson directing and Sue Healey choreographing. They’re collaborating with designers Eamon D’Arcy (space), Damien Cooper (light) and Julia Christie (costume) in One Extra’s Territory, a dance-theatre work devised by Robertson. Jad Macadam designs the sound environment, Sarah Hopkins has created a series of evocative compositions for cello and voice. Performed by One Extra affiliate artist Lisa Ffrench and newcomer Angeline Lai with a guest appearance by Marilyn Miller (Bangarra Dance Theatre), Territory traces time lines and patterns of migration. At its centre are the journeys of an English bride of the 1890s and an Asian bride of the 1970s both travelling through an unfamiliar landscape. As their ground is mapped and divided they cross paths with an Aboriginal woman whose land lies locked behind cattle gates. Explore Territory at the York Theatre, the Seymour Theatre Centre, Sydney October 8 – 9, 14 – 25. Tel 02 9364 9400

Do bodily suffering and the etching of emotion and identity go hand-in-hand? Is the quandary of living, breathing (and hence performing) concomitant with agony? Classically speaking, an agon is a trial or contest between humans and the gods. What humans are we? And, in performance, whose gods are being served?

1. Saints: Tony Yap, St Sebastian

St Sebastian lies bound downstage in a white square. Four mourners (are they?) approach through a curtain of incense, in distilled expressions of hope and/or despair. The piece is a kind of apotheosis of Tony Yap’s work: the best crafted, the most unified of his visions, with (thank god) the almost trademark suffering taken off the female body (or male body in a skirt) at last. I smell Renato Cuoccolo and IRAA here, as I have in all of Tony’s work: the slow group walk, the contained, strained emotion, the sense of a cruel enormity. But, as with much of Renato’s work, I wonder what we are being called into, the purpose of the event beyond the actors’ portrayals of suffering. St Sebastian’s references are Mishima and the Holocaust via Gorecki. Yet what’s Mishima to him, or he to Mishima, that he should weep for him? The escalating voice reading from Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask is a give-away: a steady crescendo from whisper to bellow that leaves little sense in the words. There is a titter in the audience—a response, I think, of laughing at the artifice. Says my companion, tellingly, “Why do they have to make it sound like Orson Welles?”

Whose suffering is it, and rendered to what end? I do not feel for, with or about the performances onstage. Watching becomes voyeurism, perhaps less so here than in Yap’s earlier works because of the sweeping immediacy forced on us by the inherently internalising power of the tear-jerker second movement of Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3. But, as Mishima himself warns, the “intoxication” found in the “conjunction” of spiritual impulse and music can be “sinister”, and the sado-masochism (not to mention homo-eroticism) of this source is, it seems to me, quite dangerously at odds with Gorecki’s dedication to the Gestapo-incarcerated 18-year old (Yap unthinkingly writes “await(ing) her punishment”!). One has to be careful with one’s sources. Mixed metaphors indeed.

2. Sinners: James Welch, Gretel Taylor, Blindness

Blindness seems to me a work of good intentions, tackling a situation of hidden domestic violence. Its source is the “installation” (really a simple exhibition) of photographs of shuttered windows by James Welch. Structurally, this piece suffers from an unvaried rhythm, each channel-switched episode of equal length, dulling the dance’s emotional potential. This feels like student work, albeit with chilling moments, not prodding far enough in movement or concept into the violence and complicit silence it seeks to expose and in some ways understand. Like a newspaper report, it fails to make one recognise one’s own violence in order to help change the givens in the world.

3. Weldschmertz: Sarah Neville, Heliograph

Applause for Heliograph was loudest for the highly accomplished visuals and sound track. The dance—an amorphous body in a torrent of urban environments—moves to one rhythm whatever the source, the face is placid throughout. We may be amoeba, but we are also human: to dance one and not the other denies evolution of substance and ideas, and it could be argued that even free-floating molecules have consciousness and will, which the best Butoh work (which this tries to emulate) understands.

4. Tigers: Lou Duckett, Kate Sulan, Hanna Hoyne, Kitesend

Miss seeing you. See missing you…The kites flown in Kitesend are the people themselves, the holders of the strings, a motley trio each lining different clouds. One is ruggedly nuggetty, one a controlled hysteric, the other an Issey Miyake mistake completely covered in an avalanche of paper folds. Her own eyes papered invisible, she waves from atop her plinth to the others who do not see. The gesture is poignant and powerful in its minimalism. She slowly concertinas to the floor, supine to the others’ erect continuous. An audience member gently pats her in her isolation. The moment is incredibly moving.

Mixed Metaphor Week One, Dancehouse: Heliograph, Sarah Neville, sound Matthew Thomas, light Nick Mollison, image Nick Gaffney, text Becky Jenkin; Blindness, concept and design James Welch, movement Gretel Taylor, co-dancers Renee Whitehouse, Telford Scully; St Sebastian, director Tony Yap, music arrangements Jennifer Thomas, performers Lynne Santos, Ben Rogan, Adam Forbes, Dean Linguey, Monica Tesselaar, Pauline Webb; Quartet, Jennifer Thomas, Jasmine Aly, Siona McLoughnane, Mark Gandrabur; Kitesend, Lou Duckett, Kate Sulan, Hanna Hoyne; Dancehouse, North Carlton, June 25 – 28

Excuse me for staring but…Have you ever had sex? Do people in your country have washing machines? Do you have a drinking problem? Want to go walkabout? Excuse me for asking but…Do you cry when you’re upset?

Four faces peer out from behind rope bars. Four figures enact 4 stories of ‘difference.’ The Indigenous woman, the migrant man, a woman with cerebral palsy, a male CP-er too. But against what or whom is this difference reckoned? Which is precisely the point of writer-director Lowana Moxham’s Which Way’s Up.

This is a performance work made up of composite parts—thematically, stylistically and in terms of the artists who’ve contributed to its development. Specifically, inside and outside of ‘the world of the drama’ are 4 people thrown together because of the perception of others; but Elizabeth Navratil, Guiliano Perez Reyes, Sharman Parsons and Michael Pini emphasise in their wittily ambivalent stage presence the dubious quality of ‘us/them’ definitions.

Two actors and 2 dancers, the 4 performers make their way through a series of vignettes depicting the world of ‘difference’ from either side of the line of dangling ropes which transforms itself from frame to prison cell to patio lattice to, as overarching metaphor, the weave and weft of the small moments that define us. Their actions are given added texture by musicians Simon Sheedy and Martin Lippi, although these 2 performers are themselves removed from the drama (a missed opportunity?).

In one of the show’s most powerful sequences, a couple (Navratil and Pini) are dining at a restaurant. She needs a straw; he has a ready supply; the exchange is deeply sensual. In comes a waiter, impatient yet polite, moving the wheelchair out of the way with exaggerated care, again, and again, and again. Eventually, seizing the day, the couple simultaneously climax in a shower of pink straws—and the waiter is left open-mouthed at the possibility of…sex?(!) He’s the one who seems strangely limited.

Moxham aims to show up old prejudices and break down stereotypes by a careful analysis of the everyday. Not for her a broad sweep through her ideas but rather a playful interrogation of gesture, look and silence. Which Way’s Up is a little uneven in its assimilation of action, artforms and performers but the intentions—and integrity—of the work are clear.

Which Way’s Up, director Lowana Moxham, designer Kate Stewart, movement consultant Scotia Monkivitch, lighting design Geoff Squires, featuring Elizabeth Navratil, Giuliano Perez Reyes, Sharman Parsons, Michael Pini, original music by Simon Sheey, Martin Lippi, Metro Arts Theatre, Brisbane, July 21 – 25

Every cloud has a silver lining as the saying goes and the sad demise of the Chrissie Parrott Dance Company in early 1997 has meant that Perth has benefited enormously from the flowering of a range of independent dance practitioners. There are of course the usual problems: the small audience base, the lack of profile for such practitioners and the rather more intangible sense of lack—we don’t have a real dance company. Yet aside from the obvious financial problems suffered by the Chrissie Parrott Dance Company, there has been little or no discussion of the ramifications of one company playing to the same, tiny population year in and year out; the undisputed pressures on a single full time artistic director/choreographer and subsequently, what other models might develop, should they be given the opportunity to do so without the constant pressure to perform, to market and to present a commercially viable product.

Aah yes—to market to market—and therein lies a sorry tale. When will the powers that be recognise that, in order to market, there has to be somewhere—if not something—to market (or even just publicise) into, if you want that audience reach.

Yet on the far side, there may never have been more opportunities to engage with contemporary dance in its many manifestations than at the present time. These productions have run the gamut, from project-based dance companies such as David Prudham and Dancers—whose aesthetic and repertoire bears a strong resemblance to the Sydney Dance Company for whom he worked for many years—to the techno pop aesthetic of skadada and the rather more ambient performances of Fieldworks as well as a number of emerging and mature independent practitioners.

You could say that dance in Perth is thriving. In fact, given the paucity of contemporary performance work at the moment, it is dance that has provided the most interesting experiences of the past few months and frankly, the longer that Perth resists the pressure to lock itself into one company, the better. Not unless a lot more money becomes available than seems likely at the moment…

The trick of course is to get audiences to see this work. Audiences are small for dance at the best of times. Yet one of the major problems confronting local dance artists—as is no doubt the case in other states—is the lack of a reliable, regular and affordable vehicle through which to publicise work widely. The West Australian newspaper carries no daily or even weekly listing. They apparently believe that a daily performance listing would mean losing income from display advertising so they prefer to exclude smaller companies and individuals altogether. On top of which, the standard of reviewing in The West is awful—dull, badly written, not interested and ill-informed. This is justified—as elsewhere—by that favourite newspaper response: their reviewers represent the views of the broader community. Oh really!

So you have the experience of a respected company like Danceworks from Melbourne performing in absentia recently and the best the reviewer can come up with is that it’s one line short of a narrative. The lighting, by national and international award winning designer Margie Medlin, is dismissed as “too bright” or “too dark” (the lighting and projections were fabulous). That this particular reviewer clearly knows nothing about dance or its histories, that she is clearly incapable of distinguishing between work that is polished and work that is not, that the fine performances by all the dancers are completely ignored, that she has no ability to address the sound composition by young composer Amelia Barden etc etc, just has to be endured. There is no choice. I don’t give a flying !*@? whether a reviewer likes a work or not. There are differing views, different tastes and many aesthetic positions. As someone who is paid to reflect on work in public, I expect a certain degree of responsibility, consideration and information. I expect a reviewer to have the nous to admit when they’re out of their depth or it’s not to their taste or they’ve had a bad day and look beyond to what is happening in the work.

Perhaps skadada had the right idea when they screened their first short narrative video at PICA. It was free. I didn’t see any review at all. They had a full house and people loved it. Auto Auto is a bright piece of urban pop featuring Claudia Alessi, her big red cadillac and a car wash, on her way—endlessly sidetracked—to a job interview as a dental assistant. Very cute.

Paul O’Sullivan’s Hanging in There was an equally charming piece of work that explored such questions as why aliens never kidnap intelligent people; the relationship between yoga and classical ballet; lapsed Catholicism and the effects of sleep deprivation (a new baby) on the independent practitioner. There’s a kind of paradox for me in this friendly piece of work which addresses life’s endless frustrations with such patience and admirable good humour, but then maybe that’s because I’m the grumpy type. Paul, on the other hand, uses the simplest means to create a modest but engaging performance that should have had broad audience appeal but, sadly, only attracted very small houses.

Danielle Michich and Natasha Rolfe are two of the brighter young dancers currently ‘emerging’ as choreographers. Danielle (or Dank as she’s known) presented the outcome of a recent creative development period at the Blue Room Theatre in collaboration with Natasha. On Contact was an exploration of—you’ve guessed it—contact inspired movement. It was both skillful and engaging but for me, didn’t have quite the edge that their respective performance works for PICA’s Putting on an Act had earlier in the year. Their works for that season were far more streetwise and witty, but then they were ‘performances’ as opposed to an exploration in movement.

I’ve only mentioned a few of the projects that have taken place over the past 3 months. Maybe Spring has sprung, but I for one find the fact that there is so much going on great cause for pleasure. Given the opportunity, these artists will continue to develop in both range and maturity. If, however, the level and calibre of movement-based activities continues to go unacknowledged by local media and audiences, we’ll be left to wonder, yet again, where all the birdies flew off to.

in absentia, Danceworks, PICA, August 9 – 23; Auto Auto, skadada, PICA, July 19; Hanging in There, Paul O’Sullivan, PICA, August 5 – 16; On Contact, Blue Room Theatre, August 23

FEET. We are seated in a semicircle, as if we are the audience. Six pairs of feet askew, leathered pairs. The softness of mediating what we’ve seen, the trying to prod further questions open. Still, as in any of the performances, we are on display. I hope my haircut is forgiven.

ANKLES. I go weak at the ankles without my daughter in the room. She is three months old. Amazing what constitutes our being, our vision, our capacity to absorb. At the moment, without her my eyes are nothing, my tongue is dry. With her, the world opens. I am not divided. What are the parallels that keep us closed to dance?

KNEES. My knee-jerk reactions. Techno-ethics. Gideon likes to be “in control”; Chrissie is playing digital until she gets her dancers back. Keeping in work. Being paid or not. I shudder shudder. There are ethics in the calling forth (or failing to call forth) of movement from the body of another being. I speak of the censoring of movement: corridors, shadows, dance, not-dance. Studio vs public work, said Eleanor. The right next move, and not the wrong one. The ugly and ungainly—does it have a place? The multiple, beautiful, untrammelled dancings of a child. Listening to doubt. William McClure’s suspended moment is an inclusion for which we can be thankful as a reminder of how much goes on in the nothing, no-thingness. Sue-ellen silk-slips in, around, a small turn: dancing an option without her shoes on. What opens from silence.

THIGHS. Support. 1) Those impossible squat-walks in Butoh. 2) Ros Crisp talks of classical dance-training as a ticket to ride. Like a plastic card opening the doors to teach—almost anywhere, almost anything else. This is muscle-power; background steroids, still legal. 3) There are four babies here. Rose Godde says next time they will organise a crêche. The inclusions are starting to happen.

PELVIS. Sue-ellen had made a piece following an accident. Others clearly make pieces just out of a desire to (watch the body) move. Sometimes watching motion is enough, sometimes not. Macbeth was in a bad mood when he said we are but shadows and dreams. Strutting, fretting, yes, but there’s always a context out there. Our histories leak into our bodies and sometimes these stories cannot be ignored. The personal is political as soon as it steps into a room.

PELVIS/HIPS. Someone talks of being an “empty vessel” for the choreographer, yet of fulfilling herself as an individual in the dance. (The man next to me says he is horrified, “Think what she’s saying!” Residual oil from salad days in our mouths.) This is not Zen. Trevor Patrick talks about the interrelatedness of outside and in. This is Zen. Tony Yap wonders how we share presence, presuming that sharing as a given. Is this Zen?

WAIST. Who helped unbind the feet, release the waist. Russell Dumas gets two guernseys.

SIDES. Where (some of us) began. Bend and stretch, reach for the sky. Stand on tippy-toe oh so high.

SHOULDERS. Response-ability, and who’s to blame. There can be laziness in whatever we do: technologising or non-technologising, looking, making, sensing. You have to do the work of seeing—audience too.

ARMS. I embrace you, you adoring audience. Matthew Bergan’s film where dancers enact and debunk their bows.

We FACE up to ourselves sitting down, rise to drink coffee and tea, dine on frittata and hams. We wanted to trace/find the ground. Does the old Greenmill sink or swim from here? Mapmakers copyright mistakes—one added road, an extra contour—to protect their pages from the unscrupulous. Pity the driver lost in a phantom street or drowning in a fake causeway. But at conferences, the value is unmappable. It’s the whisperings in the brain, in the body, the troubled slip-ups in corridors that, like ghost spirits never mapped, stir the next journey on.

One of the arguments rehearsed during Melbourne’s MAP Symposium concerned the place of ballet in relation to contemporary dance practice. According to Libby Dempster, the dominance of ballet is such that all modern dance in Australia is conceived in relation to ballet. In other words, ballet ‘others’ the rest of contemporary dance. Dempster further argued that no significant counter-tradition exists in Australia.

The view is that ballet is identified with dance (ballet = dance), and anything else is necessarily other to that identity. There are those who took issue with this position. For example, Amanda Card gave a brief history of a dancer, Sonia Revid, in the 1930s whose contributions have never been acknowledged. The implication is that there are subjugated histories of non-hegemonic practices—the trouble is that they are not written and, more critically, have no inheritors.

From the point of view of history, this is fair enough. Theory often skates over the historical in order to make its claims. But what do we say today? Is ballet the controlling term in the governing imaginary of all contemporary dance in Australia? If one were to look to money as the criterion of dominance, then one would have to say, yes. Who else is funded to have a 60-strong company, a school and a secure audience around the country? As regards education, one would need to look at all the institutions across the land in order to ascertain how they stand in relation to ballet. What about the practitioners themselves? A number of performers who had trained in ballet were asked about the influences felt from such a training. Given the histories of those consulted, it was not possible to conceive of a practice which did not in one way or another emerge from ballet. And then there is the question of the audience.

To compare ballet with contemporary dance is to raise matters of power. So, also, is the question of whether there are other dance traditions which significantly contest that ascendancy. What fuels the view that there are no challengers is the fact that we lack the genealogies of British or American dance, a lack which can never be “made up.” Given that there are alternative practices (if not traditions), how influential do they need to be to challenge the singular dominance of ballet? What does it take to challenge? Is a challenge only a challenge if it actually topples a given order of power? Did the resistance expressed in the recent waterfront dispute challenge the new/old Right’s attempt to disempower unionism?

Finally, what of the hegemonies of contemporary dance in Australia? Russell Dumas’ name came up a lot in relation to personal histories and the undoing of ballet training. What is Dumas’ place in the topography of Australian influence? In terms of political economy, what of companies such as Chunky Move (Gideon Obarzanek), Sydney Dance Company (Graeme Murphy), Expressions (Maggie Sietsma), Dance Works (Sandra Parker), Meryl Tankard’s Australian Dance Theatre and others. And I haven’t begun to speak of Indigenous dance in Australia, or of the place of heterosexism and other sexualities (a matter which seems to come up more in contemporary performance).

Questions of power are complex. They involve overlapping histories of domination, recognised histories and unspoken viewpoints. Perhaps I could finish with a position which completely contradicts the foregoing. Susan Manning defines postmodern dance as a break with one (or both) of two conditions of modernism, (1) “the reflexive rationalisation of movement” and (2) “the dual practice of modern dance and modern ballet” (The Drama Review, vol 4, 1988). In a break with the dichotomy between modern dance and ballet, as in Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room, what happens to the domination of ballet form? Does it inevitably re-emerge or is it transformed? And where would we look for an answer?

MAP Symposium, The Bagging Room, C.U.B. Malthouse, Melbourne, July 25 – 26

Even at the initial stages of organising the MAP Symposium, there was a sense of apprehension, as if great care was needed if something unpleasant was not to seriously damage the fragile health of our national dance community. What was needed therefore was a good dose of comfort food, a sweetened porridge of common ground. And so, via the unifying elements of ‘space’ and ‘time’, it was thought, a safe, polite environment might be provided in which differences of practice and tradition could be rendered harmless.

In the spirit of fair play and equality, each panel had its even spread of philosophical approaches. But in panels of only a few people, such broad scope often seemed to leave gaping holes between speakers, gaps which the speakers themselves sometimes despaired of crossing.

‘Binary’ was a term I heard used often to describe the state of an argument, and in my ignorance, it seemed that it meant something bad, not wholesome, dead-end. There were histories, known and unknown; ballet and its ‘other’; the embodied and the out-of-body; subjective and objective bodies; public and private spaces; pop and elite culture; the ‘railway tracks’ trajectory of choreographic choice versus that ‘moment’ of losing touch with a known repertoire of choices. I took the ‘binary’ to describe a way of thinking which forced an impasse, precluded creative development, maintained the dependence of each ‘side’ on the other to reinforce their differences. If the ‘binary’ approach was loosened, perhaps the ‘sides’ might disappear and things would be less contentious and much more pleasant for everyone.

Sally Gardner brought to my attention a brief comment—I can’t remember from whom—which suggested that perhaps, speaking of ballet, one might “be more spontaneous” as if that, somehow, would change everything. And a private rejoinder suddenly opened, for me, a crack in the niceness which threatened to descend on all of us: this idea of ‘spontaneity’ lies at the heart of the matter. ‘Being more spontaneous’ is a glib description of what a different dance tradition might encompass. Because there are not just competing practices, but competing traditions and all that they imply: learning to think differently, to see differently, to feel differently, to occupy a different intellectual and psychic space, to develop work along different trajectories. One doesn’t just leap from one tradition to another.

It became obvious to me in several of the forums (for instance, “Ballet and its Other”; “Next Steps: In Search of the Body”; “Performance Space”; and in the comments from some of the artists in Matthew Bergan’s video interviews, Arrival and Departure) that a level of frustration was evident among proponents of philosophical stances other than the balletic tradition. One problem seemed to be that often speakers were trying to discuss not so much actual conscious practices, but the traces left in behaviour, the hard wiring of the nervous system. One is unable to easily slough off what is not simply a movement technique, but a way of thinking, a set of assumptions about the world and about human values. Libby Dempster was not only discussing conscious practices or beliefs, but a kind of unconscious stance, beliefs which are imagined as fact, values not normally available to scrutiny without profound changes in perspective.

Proponents of balletic tradition have rarely sought to investigate this. Many of the artists who work within that tradition were smart and articulate, being able to discuss their own ideas freely. But they seemed to demonstrate little understanding of the ideas of their fellow speakers. Frustration arose, for example, when William McClure and Sue-ellen Kohler proposed the possibility of a different sort of matrix by which choreographic decisions might be made.

Paula Baird-Colt spoke well about her understanding of ballet training and the capacity for choreographic and technical diversity within a company, suggesting that within a ballet company’s fairly stringent technical requirements, that one could see markedly individual differences in dancers and choreographers over time, that in fact it too could be concerned with diversity and individuality. But my experience of ballet is that its primary requirement is that the dancers are physically and technically similar, that differences outside a slim margin are not really tolerated; and it is only after being able to see work many times, close up and from an insider’s viewpoint, that the differences in dancers and choreographers are amplified, becoming inadvertent but lovable idiosyncrasy.

My point is that Paula (and many like her) does not need to understand what her fellow speakers are saying. There is, as yet, no compulsion for change within balletic practice in Australia. And if there is to be dialogue, it will be forced into the ballet arena by virtue of its inability to go outside its own understanding. One can afford to be magnanimous and tolerant of other practices when it is evident that those practices need never pose a threat.

Amanda Card mentioned some early pioneers of Australian modern dance traditions, and their lost history, as if this history might be reconstructed via its traces in the media. But while we can know the theatrical conventions of earlier periods, the ways those artists were represented to the public, we can never know about their actual practices. Our assumptions might be that their work was radical, revolutionary. But the fact is we don’t know what it was, because we did not see the bodies moving. It’s very easy to discuss different practices from an historical viewpoint as if we know what we’re talking about, because words are inexact descriptions of real experiences. And real understanding of the differences in practice only comes with actual experience of these practices, not just as a kind of cook’s tour variety of experience, but as serious study.

I started this article with a touch of cynicism because I thought it was only too evident that language by itself was inadequate to clarify real diversity in practice. Sue-ellen Kohler said about dance on film that there ought to be another word to describe what one saw there, because it was too different from a live body to be called the same thing. Similarly, one can continue to talk about ‘alternative performance venues’ or ‘different practices’ and continue to hear the words repeated as if they are understood, and the words themselves might gain political currency of their own, but without actual experience of the differences, the words are empty.

It is frustrating, in the event of this lack of full understanding, to be so contained by the need for ‘unity’ and common ground, that those very differences, the diversities in practice and values that we are trying so hard to elucidate are in danger of being swallowed in the effort to render them acceptable, tolerable and benign.

As well as giving us a meticulous and enlightening survey of footwear at the MAP Symposium (I almost wore my gold glittery tap shoes), the RealTime-hosted closing session demonstrated how very close to the beginning of discourse and debate this ‘dance community’ that had gathered in Melbourne was. Trajectories beyond the weekend were signposted by this session, along with questions from the floor throughout the weekend that fizzled before they could be bounced around and discussions at the bar that had no place in the ‘public’ body of the event.

As the curators of the symposium, Vicki Fairfax and I were asked to present a “legend” that would facilitate a reading of the current “topography” of dance practice nationally. With an emphasis on “new choreography” and “cross-form development”, the forum was to draw on the associated performance program to develop this map.

The inclusiveness inherent in MAP’s agenda can be traced back to the spirit of Greenmill, the annual dance festival whose impetus MAP was expected to build upon, and the Project Control Group set up after the demise of that event. This group represented a real will within the Melbourne dance community to maintain a discourse across genres and included Josephine Ridge from the Australian Ballet, Angharad Wynne-Jones from Chunky Move, Hellen Sky and Sylvia Staehli from Dancehouse and Paul Summers from Dance Works.

Coming from Sydney, I was struck by the determined insistence in Melbourne upon a notion of dance community, something that remained problematic for me throughout the project. As Eleanor Brickhill said to me, butchers and bakers perhaps have more in common than some of the dance practitioners involved in MAP. What they do have in common is movement and performance, and even so, the “Performance Space” session certainly gave the idea of movement and spectatorship a good going over. A community, by definition, involves some kind of agreement and people’s attendance at the weekend was proof of this. But what actually constitutes this ‘agreement’ still bears investigating.

Given that we were mapping a community, where were the parameters set? We were asked where the Indigenous content was by an audience member during the closing session. But where indeed was the Indian and the Spanish dance which are now negotiating cultural and disciplinary boundaries in an Australian context? The speakers in the “Asian Connection” session were proof of the enlightenment non-Western practices can provide. In Yumi Umiumare’s description of her creative process—in the dark moving towards the light, the process as the art—I was reminded of Sue-ellen Kohler’s struggle with the competing histories within her body. And Tony Yap’s description of ecstatic religious mediums from his childhood was a perfect illustration of William McClure’s body in “the moment of dispossession.”

Bound as we were to the performance program it became, in fact, a welcome framework. Our decision to include as many practitioners as possible was based on the program’s richness and a belief in the value of the artists’ dialogue in accessing the true state of the art. This strategy also provided a means of overcoming binaries by not conflating the individual with the institution, looking at the ‘grey area’ of particular cases rather than the black and white of theoretical and exclusive ideals. Talks by Lucy Guerin, Yumi Umiumare and Shelley Lasica, just to name a few, were invaluable and I cannot believe students did not flock to hear these people speak.

This raises the issue of who this event was for. For the dance community? For the arts community at large? For students? What about all those people interstate who couldn’t make it? In terms of attendance, there was a tension between answering the needs of the practitioners and advocacy issues. DJ/composer Jad McAdam told me a good story. He was telling his friends in Sydney that he was going to Melbourne to talk about popular culture at a dance forum and they said, “Oh, are they trying to make dance more popular?” Incidentally, the session that McAdam participated in, along with Gideon Obarzanek, Lucy Guerin and director Michael Kantor had the highest attendance outside the film session.

The big question for us was—how can you maintain an inclusive agenda without jeopardising the rigour of the discussions? What ‘common ground’ could offer us a means of getting beyond niceties? Space, technologies, training, cultural cross-referencing—these topics allowed for discussion across disparate practices. There was also an idea to open the forum up beyond the dance community in order to broaden perspectives. People like Michael Kantor, McAdam and philosophers William McClure and Duncan Fairfax provided an ‘outside eye’ within sessions.

Another problem was overcoming the binary which we decided to deal with up front in a session on classical and contemporary dance practice (“Ballet and its Other”). Interestingly, as a few people pointed out, it was the contemporary practitioners who attended the sessions with some degree of commitment and there was a general impression that the ballet ‘knows its place’ well enough not to require much further discussion. In regard to “new choreography”, perhaps there were issues that could have been raised had Stephen Baynes been available to attend. The scarcity of choreographers working in this idiom was one of the realities that surfaced throughout the process, a fact that perhaps should be addressed directly.

The video that Matthew Bergan and I made, Arrival and Departure, grew out of the necessity to create a bridge between classical and current practice. To this end, it focused on the fact that nearly all of our dancer-choreographers began their training with classical dance. If Libby Dempster was asking why we have no “significant counter-culture” to ballet in this country, then here we had the answer—an homogeneous form of dance training dished out across geographic and cultural borders (and shores as well if we consider Butoh artist Umiumare’s initial classical training in Japan). There was some idea about looking honestly at the current state of affairs in order to move ahead; confronting our demons if you like. The ‘Utility’ section of the film sign-posted a negotiation process that some practitioners are undergoing—attempts to deal directly and thoughtfully with their personal histories. One way or another, this area ‘between’ is where our current map is most dense and it is an area that is offering solutions as well as problems.

As Keith Gallasch pointed out in the final session, the binarisms articulated in Libby Dempster’s opening paper did prefigure a whole series of other oppositions. (Dempster couldn’t believe we were still talking about them when she returned for the last session). These included Eleanor Brickhill’s rhetorical “ideals” in regard to performance space—the proscenium space and the studio space, pop culture and counter-culture, the ungrounded body of technology and the grounded body of the dancer. In retrospect, the agenda of the weekend perhaps created a need to describe or reiterate these relationships before proceeding. If, in an ethics of discourse, “we are obligated, through our mutual adherence to the logic of the discussion, to be open to the possibility of the other”, as Duncan Fairfax has said, then perhaps there is still a need to establish who the other is via these binaries.

Taking this possibility into account, the MAP weekend in fact did what it set out to do. It ‘mapped’ the current state of dance practice by mapping the discourse across forms, and the issues this raised, demonstrating in the process ‘where we are at’—collectively. How useful this is in terms of particular practitioners is uncertain, but what it does reveal is the willingness of some to question their position, the choice of others not to do so, and all the struggle that lies in between. There is a danger, I believe, that we could have a repetition of the type of hierarchy that has stymied dance in this country, with new forms taking an intellectual position where ballet had enjoyed a cultural one. What MAP did was to uncover this difficult terrain. What is important now is to move forward and keep accumulating the knowledges shared at these events so that we don’t have to spend forever on introductions.

What MAP didn’t do, to some degree, was allow room for more explicit and penetrating investigation. One of my greatest regrets of the weekend was the disappearance of issues raised by participants such as Trevor Patrick. When someone asked during the closing session if technique is a technology, I wondered whether there had been a lack of desire to listen, or an ability to hear amongst so much detail. For me, the “Ungrounded Bodies” session pivoted around the practice described by Patrick in relation to his film, Nine Cauldrons. Cinematic technology and movement technique became equal partners in this alchemical fusion of forms, the technology of the moving body challenging the technology of the camera to meet its demands. Here was rich ground for the case of overcoming binaries in the form of practical evidence, ground that fell away through a desire to cover more—quickly, rather than less—thoroughly. This problem was perhaps symptomatic of the brevity of the event.

With interstate participants strictly limited due to the budget and myself drawing on contacts in Sydney, participants from that city almost equalled those from the host city, Melbourne. (Chrissie Parrott from Perth and Natalie Weir from Brisbane were the exceptions.) Rachel Fensham’s comment at the end of the weekend that she could see MAP becoming a festival focusing on new movement practice, overlooked antistatic in Sydney which was inaugurated in April 1997 and will return next year under the curatorial direction of Sue-ellen Kohler, Rosalind Crisp and Zane Trow. antistatic focused solely on the dense area of dance research and, given time to develop, should give that sector of the community an effective forum. There was a conscious attempt to make links to antistatic at MAP in the hope of building on issues covered there, and I imagine that two such events could work together in future to provide rich ground for discussing dance and its related issues.

MAP Symposium, The Bagging Room, C.U.B. Malthouse, Melbourne, July 25 – 26

1. Up there for thinking…

In Sandra Parker’s very musical choreography for Waiting movement is syncopated through bodies, space and time. In the post-show forum she says that once she heard Lawrence Harvey’s music, she could have just kept going. The composer says the collaboration alerted him to all the things to which he was blind.

In Shelley Lasica’s elegant Live Opera Situation music is used contrapuntally. The dancers rehearse to other musics (Indian music, opera), then internalise those patterns and absorb them with others from composer Franc Tétaz. The instability of the relationship between the music and the dancers’ bodies is one of the aspects of the work that the choreographer suggests the audience may experience, but not necessarily.

In Sue Healey’s Stung it’s not humour but strangeness that grabs. The stricture imposed on dancers to embody bees perversely allows us further into the human bodies. Without hands as the logical extension of arms, we concentrate more on the subtleties of shoulders and backs. With new rhythms we observe the ways a body can buzz. This work began with Darrin Verhagen’s music. He’s worked with Sue Healey before and knows what she likes. He knew it would be about bees but is surprised by its humour.

The post-show forum with choreographers, dancers and composers was intimate, relaxed and tentative. It reminded me of the discussion after the screenings of the Microdance films at Intersteps in Sydney last year. Listening to choreographers fresh from the collaborative experience speaking about the difficulties and pleasures of working with film and music, it occurs to me how much more there is to know.

All three collaborations in DW98 broached potentially interesting topics for discussion. What would happen if Sandra Parker had kept going? What is the relationship between Shelley Lasica’s agenda and her audience’s; what if bees were not funny at all? Watching these and other works like them, I can’t help wishing for more—more investigation, more time to refine, more performances and of course, more thinking and talking about the process of creation and its reception by audiences.

Organisers of the MAP Symposium, responding to a “burning need” for critical appraisal, proposed bigger and, on the surface, more crucial questions than these: the place of ballet; the impact of technology; the indelible inscriptions of training; Asian influences; attitudes to space; pop culture. There’s an urgency in the tone of the promotional material suggesting that dance is at a watershed with lines between forms blurring, disappearing. The implication is that dance may have lost its way and that one of the aims of MAP is to “locate” contemporary dance once again in all its forms in our time and along the way, while maintaining crucial distinctions and countering hostilities, to bring it back into conversation with ballet.

One way into this conversation was an interesting prototype shown at the MAP Symposium, Mathew Bergan and Erin Brannigan’s video, Arrival and Departure. Young Australian choreographers talk about the ways they accommodate and make use of their ballet training. Formerly with Bangarra, Bernadette Walong likes working with the dancers from the Australian Ballet but finds herself trying to “soften their joints”; Garry Stewart likes to re-contextualise ballet vocabulary in his work; Brian Carbee is surprised to find himself returning to it. In a later forum Lucy Guerin says she uses its disciplines as a platform for departure. For Rosalind Crisp, it lends a level of legitimacy that gets her teaching work to support her contemporary practice.

Beyond this, the weekend symposium presented a huge array of dancers attempting with varying degrees of success to connect bodies of work with the designated topics. Some prepared papers, some extracted from longer ones. Others improvised. One showed a film. Only one danced. While considerable ground was covered, for me nothing came quite as close to crucial as the more intimate discussions I saw after DW98 which might be why, in the rare breaks between talk, I began to compile a taxonomy of shoes and some sketches towards a choreography of the panel.

2. …down there for dancing

A democracy of Blundstones pervades the MAP Symposium with some notable exceptions, like Vicki Fairfax trying to set the tone at the opening session in blue suede pumps and Op Art stockings. First up, Libby Dempster and Amanda Card and Chair Robin Grove introduce a sober topic (“Ballet and its Other”) in buckles and brogues. Dempster ventures a binary or two—Ballet is the governing tradition in Australia and counter-traditions don’t exist. Philipa Rothfield jêtés from the audience, “Must the other be counter?”, down and up again, “What about Iragaray’s idea of difference as plenitude?” More diverting are Dempster’s gestures at the fictions that sustain the mind of the ballet—the ballet dancer’s body as signifying not simply harmonious beauty but efficient functioning of musculature with nothing wastefully complex; an extroverted body; a phallic body; the female ballet dancer’s body as a public body, freed of interiority, a body fit for bearing universal values.

In a classical ballet scenario, Amanda Card would be the wise maid with the basket on her hip, deftly plucking fragments from a forgotten history of contemporary dance in Australia and, finger under chin, casually questioning the importance of a local, distinctive dance product. Her final comments, more in keeping with Card’s contemporary training, spring from internal stimuli, abandoning all identifiable technique. Australia’s history she says, legs out and crossed at the ankle, is full of ideas of the foreign, the colonial, the illegitimate. Our uniqueness may be our lack of uniqueness. The place is an afterthought, a dumping ground (to which, thanks to Jerry Seinfeld, we can now mercifully add an anus).

In the question time that followed we experienced the first of the always awkward dance between the “any old bodies” in the audience thinking on their feet and the “superior bodies” of the panellists whose steps have been choreographed into refined arguments.

In session two (“Ungrounded Bodies/Escaping the Body”) panellists individually tango round the topic of technology. Gideon Obarzanek shares boots with Duncan Fairfax in refusing it—though for different reasons. Gideon takes inspiration from television (especially animation) and film (especially editing) but using technology to create dance doesn’t interest him. He talks about creating a hyper-real, an “animated look” on stage and of working with the idiosyncratic bodies of his dancers—choreographing the by-products of yoga in Narelle Benjamin’s body, coming to terms with Luke Smiles’ tensile, fast logic. I move him into a sexy duet with Chrissie Parrott in high heels at the other end of the panel. She’s hooked on Motion Capture for good reasons (choreographic possibilities) and controversial ones (a desire to remove the monotony and potential injury for dancers in rehearsal). In the audience, Christos Linou, fresh from his performance dealing with drug addiction and AIDS, shifts uncomfortable at the mention of the disappearing of the dancer’s pain from the choreography. Chrissie teeters on her heel then glides forward, imagining her digital dancer wandering the net picking up choreographic ideas. Duncan Fairfax raises his eyes, “Gee, I’m gonna seem like even more of a Luddite now”, but dives in, executing a few grand jetés along the way. I was expecting wild applause or hisses as he concluded his paper on dance as among other romances “the primordial experience of being” as opposed to technology which “forces us into a picture.” But no. In the choreography of the panel, a polite symmetry pervades. Good dancers don’t bump into one another. Opposing ideas line up and, like the panellists, rarely touch. In one small (very Australian, I thought) gesture, Duncan sends a smile in Chrissie’s direction as if to say, “nothing personal.”

Anticipating splinters, Trevor Patrick wears earth shoes to elucidate—hands poised perfectly on either side of his papers—the subtle body in his impressive work Nine Cauldrons (Microdance). I’m struck by the difference between the speaking artist (slight man in cardigan) and his dancing self (intense, hip, wry). He pulls us inside his calm bubble, talking softly about the subjective camera versus the static stage, the way the moving eye takes the audience closer. “Of all the Microdance films”, says Rosalind Crisp in time, his is the one that “lets me into the body.” Zsuzsanna Soboslay, rocking the baby Mir Mir, whispers in the panel’s ear that theatre audiences are more alert to the subtle body than they might think. Before the shutter was open, she believes, they were already letting themselves in.

“In Search of the Body”: hyphenated dancers in a leggy line compare histories of training. Ballet dancer Paula Baird-Colt joins Jennifer Newman-Preston and Sue-ellen Kohler vamping till ready in medium high boots while stage right Italian booted philosopher William McClure argues for moments of pure passivity of thought between moves, something like…fainting. In a shocking move, Kohler removes her shoes and in the middle of one of William’s sentences (“Dance is a form of…”) adds a few phrases of her own (sinewy squats, high stretches). “…thinking”, they conclude. In her recent work Premonition with Mahalya Middlemist and William McClure, Sue-ellen spoke more eloquently on the subject of next steps than this environment permits. Attempting to explain her position, she stretches her fingers and shakes them in the air, casts her eyes up and out. “When I look at dance, I look at dancers she says, “At people, not technique.”

The tradition of talk I gather is not strong in ballet circles. Nevertheless, Paula Baird-Colt in long and certain sentences lays to rest the notion that for this dancer anyway classical ballet limits individual expression (“There may be 60 dancers but also 60 different ways of dancing even though we’re all being swans together”). Of her relationship to choreographers like Kylian, Duarte, Tharp, she says, “They are you. You offer them things.” How can there be any conversation between this dancer and the one next to her, thinks Rosalind Crisp in the audience, her toes curling inside her shoes. Paula’s position is totally objectified. But then she executes a perfect pirouette: “Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room I would perform for myself every day without an audience”, she says.

In the lively boot-oh session (“The Asian Connection”) colour is suddenly an issue: brown Blundstones for Chair Rosemary Hinde; Yumi Umiumare in lace up bovver-boots; Tony Yap in brown Docs; Michelle Heaven, recently returned from Japan with Sue Healey and company, still has dust on her tan riding boots; Peter Eckersall anticipating a quick exit from even vaguely essentialist agendas, opts for grey leather scuffs. Eckersall worries at the transition of forms—Butoh is about the body in crisis and sprang from a set of social conditions in Japan. The Australian version, he fears, ditches the politics and replaces it with a new-agey version of the oriental as meditative, Zen-like, primitive. I contemplate a cast change and shift Yumi Umiumare and Tony Yap to the panel with Kohler and McClure. Both are engagingly fluid in their talk-journies. Yumi trained in classical ballet from 9 years of age, lost herself to the intensity of Butoh and is in the process of retrieving her body’s memory in Australia. Due to a clerical error in his home town of Warrnambool via Malacca, Tony Yap became a visual artist instead of a performing one. Re-directing himself via Deborah Hay and Grotowski-inspired companies like IRAA he wound up with his own Mixed Company creating dance-theatre inspired by Taoist traditions in which he attempts to achieve an emptiness, a method not of training but of being human. “Before a performance” he says, “I want to die.”

In the familiar territory of performance space, Angharad Wynn-Jones’ boots are well-travelled. Eleanor Brickhill’s, like her essay on studio practice, appear nicely polished. Shelley Lasica wears rubber soles and Natalie Weir half-boot, half-shoe. For Shelley, explaining her attitudes to space is a writhing dance. Words must be substituted, sentences restructured for precision. She speaks about the space between speaking and doing, space as behaviour, about bringing the audience into the space of personal enquiry. She has updated her thoughts to make space for those of speakers at the forum just before this. Natalie Weir is a little nervous and moves in straight lines. Creator of works for companies such as Expressions and Queensland Ballet, Dance North and recently The Australian Ballet, she sees space as defined for her. She works within proscenium arches, many of them in regional centres. Her works must tour. Space is self-contained (“as in real life”). She is excited by dancers, their breath, their energy, the way they charge and truly create the space and, sure, she’d like audiences to experience more of this but often she must work with front on staging, the audience looking as if at a picture. Eleanor Brickhill steps tentatively forward to address the unbridgeable gap between.

Popular culture unleashes the sneaker. While Philipa Rothfield time-steps in lace-up boots, Michael Kantor, unlaced, freeforms his desire for a vulgar, provocative, unaesthetic theatre of ideas (“Prepare to be hated”). Before he started working with dance companies, DJ Jad McAdam believed that dance was something to do, not watch. Now, displaying the word “Simple” on his shoe tongue he queries the counter (to what?) while Gideon Obarzanek in dyed Docs pays homage to the popular culture that’s modelled him more than any other. Lucy Guerin neatly marks out in mid-heels the way she uses popular culture (especially music). “Trash and profound thought may co-exist.” In Robbery Waitress on Bail she takes a tabloid story as a starting point, projects it so the audience’s desire for narrative is satisfied and then attempts to dance the endlessly elusive everything else. A woman in the audience comes up with one of the best questions of this popular, though (except for Lucy Guerin) oddly culturally unrevealing session. She asks McAdam “How come club music is getting better and better while club dancing is getting worse and worse?”

I remember in a collaboration with dancers in the early 80s being warned by the choreographer not to overtax the dancers with talk because their bodies would seize up. In one shocking moment I learned that dancing and talking about dancing are different. Up there for thinking. Down there for dancing. Postmodern dance readjusted my centre of gravity. For very different reasons MAP has temporarily tipped it off balance again which is no bad thing. Now I desperately need to see someone dancing.

DW98 and post-show forum, Danceworks, Wesleyan Hall, Albert Park, July 24; MAP Symposium, The Bagging Room, C.U.B. Malthouse, Melbourne, July 25 – 26; Arrival and Departure (video), director Mathew Bergan, producer Erin Brannigan

Overheard: “…independents need guidance—they’re flailing about with spoken word and new media.” “I thought that’s what independents are supposed to do, flail about, get lost, go their own way…”

Maps come with a purpose, with exploration, measurement, verification, namings. Maps offer hope and certainty though they can be inaccurate and knowing how to read them is a whole other matter. Maps can be confining. Maps capture a moment, only a succession of maps tells a story. One map can be overlayed with another—same terrain, same time but different story. So it was at the MAP Symposium, a genteel reading of half-formed dance maps, chance meetings, misdirections, losings, fallings off of the edge of the known.

Although only an acronym (for Movement and Performance), the MAP title and aims represented a conscious choice, a suggestion of let’s get everyone on the same terrain (hence the ballet presence), let’s help find a way through the barely charted paths of new media and popular culture and the competing spaces for dance—the theatre, the studio, the site.

For a symposium aimed at harmonious mapping, there was no more provocative way of setting out than with guides Libby Dempster and Amanda Card. Not that anyone actually got upset and pulled out of the expedition, but we were left bemused, pondering two maps, both of occupied territory—the imperialism of 19th century ballet and subsequently of European and American modernism over Australian dance.

Dempster’s map was at first glance binary in form, but every inch of the terrain she revealed turned out to be occupied by ballet, ballet and ballet, its self-mythologising and its fundamental denial of the feminine—ballet’s ‘other’ was pushed off the map, if it was ever on it, a lack rather than a counter-force or a substantial difference. Nowhere to go. Map? What map?

Amanda Card looked at the dance landscape and saw “not the hegemony of the classical but a society of bricolage” and took us off on a dialectical jog on which she established first that because we don’t remember a dance counter culture it doesn’t mean there wasn’t one: “lack of a memory of a counterculture—not a lack of a counterculture.” We went with that and she led us back through the century to the life and imagined work of Sonia Revid in Australia to…a dead end. Revid left no legacy, no inheritors, no school…Just when we thought we were getting a footing, the map was whisked away, it had no history. Dance is not literature, words are not enough. It’s about bodies and the embodiment of tradition.

But Card was kind enough to lead us a few tentative steps in a new direction on a new map, one that acknowledged that the choreographers and teachers that came after Revid did leave a legacy that was, yes, European or American, with a reminder that we ourselves were “foreign, colonial, illegitimate.” She pronounced, “our uniqueness is our lack of it,” declared us “the ultimate postmodern culture” and threw down a collaged map which Australian dancers have created from foreign traditions, imitation and sheer bricolage. But what kind of map was it—she deftly removed the romanticised Australian landscape, noting various attempts by Graeme Murphy, Jill Sykes and others, even Russell Dumas, to make the time-honoured link between the arts and the bush. We were left standing about looking at what was left, wondering is it any good? and what’s wrong with a tradition from somewhere else, if we’re still part of it? Will we go on?…But our guide had gone. Both of them. And we’d only just set out.

Of all the art forms in Australia, dance is the one that seems most beleaguered by the weight of imperial tradition, the same weight that crushed Indigenous culture and guaranteed imitative white arts in the colonies. The other arts don’t have anything quite like the ballet as bogeyman, though the opera and symphony orchestras can be similarly if less devastatingly invoked. Whatever, the Dempster-Card mapping was mildly received. Had their audience heard it before? Had they been ‘hegemonised’ into silence by ballet? Were they shocked at the small space offered them on these maps and their apparent insignificance? Well, it’s not always easy to read the mood of a conference in Australia; participants are slow to formulate questions, issues are not pursued, chairpersons these days have become ‘facilitators’ instead of interrogators, disparate papers are read in queues, connections are not made, no one wants to appear too smart. And there were many at the Symposium for whom this ballet issue was not worrying or they’d accommodated it in some way—as illustrated in Mathew Bergan’s video with ballet-trained choreographers who’d moved into other dance. They were interested in other maps. And there are those who think that we are at the end of a period of domination, in an era of manifesting our own identity, drawing still on the overseas traditions of which we remain a part, but making our own distinctions. It’s a pity therefore that (and for a number of good reasons the curators explained) there wasn’t an Indigenous component in the symposium.

Even more than our white colonial plight, the initial repression of Indigenous culture and its recent ‘acceptance’ (as art, as spirituality, as cuisine, but not too readily as politics or ownership of the map)—is even more telling about this place we are mapping, in the relationship between Indigenous and modernist dance traditions, say, in the constant querying of Bangarra about its syntheses.

Some places we were led turned out to be mapless, the paths evaporating and reforming in a few dialectical turns—“dance is a dematerialisation of modern life…an ethics of dwelling”; dance is “ungrounded…(but)… located in the entire phenomenal world.” These came from Duncan Fairfax in a session on dance and the new technologies. Fairfax had been citing Heidegger, “Dance’s purpose is to open us to a primordial experience of being, a verb, not a noun.” While this was satisfying for the true believers, a nice interplay of the physical and the transcendent, its claim to convince us of the problems inherent in the deployment of new media in dance were problematic in their absolutism—technology “denies corporeality”, puts us at a greater distance from our bodies, it’s “a new drive for control”, “it reinforces rather than transgresses.” Dance is good, technology bad, no dialectic here, no steadying ground on which to map our present. The baddies are Stelarc, Orlan and Robert Wilson—“rumoured”, said Fairfax, to want to replace his performers with techno-substitutes!

From the other side of what was soon to become a session of vaguely competing cosmologies (well, that’s what it felt like, another kind of mapping), Chrissie Parrott did an interesting if undialectical turn. On the one hand, motion capture technology for her is functional, a tool for choreographing without dancers and for saving dancers pain and injury. On the other, the result, which Parrott described with loving lyricism, is an animated dancer (built from the performance of a real one), a very real creature with the potential for an ethereal internet life of its own, exploring various choreographies.
A queasy floating sensation brought on by hovering between Fairfax and Parrott’s opposing universes was relieved by Trevor Patrick, working with the old technology of film, but technology nonetheless, and declaring a Taoist “impulse to unite mind, body and universe” in “a performance about transcendence, self transformation and change.” He said he saw “film as an important adjunct to performance” (something that Parrott was insistent on too, but watching her video presentation, we weren’t really sure what she had in mind). Patrick spoke of the “experience more and more of going into my own body, but people were not necessarily seeing that”, so he turned to film: “dealing with the desire to show what I felt.”

I felt my feet touch the ground and then caught Gideon Obarzanek’s declaration that he was not interested in dance on film, or new technology, but in making films (not about or necessarily including dance, as in his film Wet), and that in dance, picking up on the lingo, his “dancers’ bodies are grounded”, that he works from “the qualities of the bodies, pushing the limits, achieving a hyperreal quality.” The blur between self and other in his own work is through choreography; he said of working with Fiona Cameron recently: “It’s true that I’m not on stage but it’s hard to tell which movement is hers and which is mine.”

The ground had shifted, the conceit of dance as a terrain, a map of competing forces and traditions had shifted to a philosophical, even spiritual, plane and onto the body as map. But it was no ‘mere’ body, but the body as psyche, the body philosophical, ‘hard-wired’ (the techno-talk in the symposium for the inscription of ballet on the body), transformable, the cyborg even.

William McClure, abetted by Sue-ellen Kohler in a rare physical/existential moment in the symposium, took us off the edge of the map of received technique and stepped into…“pure sensation, unmediated by culture”, with the next step, “not a technique, but to keep feeling”, a moment of forgetting…and finding that meshed in various ways with the primordial of Fairfax and the selfless states of Butoh described by Yumi Umiumare and Tony Yap (“you have to stop the mind thinking”) in a session on Asian dance experience (where this time Peter Eckersall tried to keep our feet on the ground). Is this a quest for a new map, or no map? Were we also heading back to the Dempster-Card ‘maps’ when we heard McClure oppose “dance as a type of memorial…and European at that” and ask, “Does the next step have to have its authority in the past?”

In the closing session I noted the flood of binaries (male/female, culture/nature, body/technology, theatre/studio, high culture/low culture, ballet/other, tradition/moment etc) across the weekend, not as a bad thing, but interesting given the attempt to bring a range of very different artists and topics together, and also to indicate that there was much that was ‘in opposition’ that was neither resolvable nor worth fighting over with any intensity. You don’t think of maps as binary, but as complex representations of difference. However, they are mostly two dimensional, drafting the high and the low, pointing north and south, east and west, and like binaries in general providing ways of thinking…as long as they don’t become the only way of thinking, ignoring the third factor (the dialectical spin-off), change, or all the points in between. A map is as good as it is useful, as long as it is current, as long as it can be queried. Maps in MAP were variously fatalistically fixed, liberating, pragmatic, cosmological, fluid, physical, generated by dance, abandoned. As postmodern diversification of forms and the ideas that go with them persists and intensifies, the likelihood of drawing a common map in an event like MAP steadily declines. Occasional points of contact can be made, interests shared, common causes fought for. Some maps simply cannot be overlaid without creating something unintelligible. Nonetheless, the poetry of these sometimes competing maps was the most striking thing about them, the strangeness of their envisioning, the metaphysical yearnings, the blurrings between choreographer and dancer, artist and technology, the autobiographical impulse, the existential moment that took us off the map.

The MAP Symposium, curators Vicki Fairfax, Erin Brannigan, The Bagging Room, C.U.B. Malthouse, Melbourne, July 25 – 26

The concept of judging new dance works created specifically for a choreographic competition would appear to go against the dance community’s best efforts to value process over product, and its well-founded scepticism at assessing quality. And yet on July 10 and 11 at the National Theatre in St Kilda, the Australian Institute of Classical Dance (AICD) presented such an event in the second biennial Dance Creation choreographic awards. This year’s event fell under the umbrella of MAP, Melbourne’s eclectic response to the demise of Greenmill, and both the AICD and MAP must be congratulated for taking another step towards bridging the often tedious cleft that exists between classical and contemporary dance organisations.

As is any reasonably significant junior sporting event, nervous excitement permeated the air, mixed with healthy doses of cliché concerning the value of participation in such competitions. Much of the text in the program alluded to the importance of developing choreographers by giving them an opportunity to present their work. For Rosetta Cook, the winner of Dance Creation 96’s Robert Helpmann Award, winning is not paramount, whereas having a work seen is. Personally, I am not convinced that having work seen is nearly enough to help choreographers develop a thorough understanding of the subtleties and nuances of dance-making. At most, it’s a start. Without setting up some form of dialogue concerning the works (particularly between judges and competitors), the event becomes a void in which a would-be choreographer presents a collection of movements only to learn whether the work is a winner or not.

There were 20 works entered in Dance Creation 98, 12 less than in 1996 which might immediately suggest that the lure of prize money alone is not enough to entice emerging and established choreographers to create work specifically for a competition. Disappointingly, the 1998 Edouard Borovansky Award for student choreographers was cancelled and the handful of student works were judged as part of the non-professional Peggy Van Praagh award.

Watching the works themselves, I gained immense pleasure from seeing so many dancers moving in such extraordinarily diverse creations— from the stripped back formalism of Francis D’Ath’s Praw to the romantic theatricality of Tanja Liedtke’s Thru Time. Sadly though, in this most human of forms, the majority of works ignored the subtle intricacies, quirks and gestures of human movement. Also, the choreography tended to lack any discernible editing. Perhaps this problem was exacerbated by the AICD’s time regulations which, ironically, restricted the range of works and made most of them far too drawn out. Martha Graham (“Every dance is too long”) must surely have been turning in her grave over the course of the two evenings.

The most bizarre and disturbing aspect of Dance Creation 98 was the simplistic judging mechanism. Judges gave each dance a mark out of 10 without being required to adhere to standardised assessment criteria to do with form, content, innovation or design. On the first night, this led to a great deal of uncertainty as to why some dances were rewarded places in the finals whilst others were not.

I do not doubt that the AICD had the development of dance in mind when organising Dance Creation 98, but I’m not so sure that this particular model of choreographic development gives value for money. In this event, perhaps only the two winning choreographers will benefit from the competition and that as a consequence of receiving some fiscal support. For the others, simply placing a work in a competitive environment does not necessarily constitute development. In future, it may be worthwhile to consider how each choreographer might be provided with feedback that will in itself inform their choreographic process and develop their creative abilities. There is nothing more disheartening to any dancer or choreographer to create without feedback. It is a void bereft of the potential for anything other than self-doubt, uncertainty and, inevitably, apathy.

For the record, the Peggy Van Praagh Award ($5,000) for non-professional choreographers was won by Yumi Sollier for Sensing the Undercurrent, a coherent if overly-long work filled with suitably raw subterranean imagery, and marked with surprising displays of virtuosity. The Robert Helpmann Award ($10,000) for professional choreographers was won by 1996’s Van Praagh winner, Paulina Quinteros, for Fie—compelling evidence of Quinteros’ ease in creating rich and complex movement phrases, and then immersing them simply into a tight thematic structure.

Dance Creation 98, hosted by the Australian Institute of Classical Dance, National Theatre, St Kilda, July 10 – 11

The three short works in DW98 —Waiting, Live Opera Situation and Stung—involved three different choreographers and three different composers. Works by two of these composers were played two weeks before, as part of somewhere nowhere, an evening of sonic experimentation, at the gallery space at 200 Gertrude Street.

At somewhere nowhere I arrive late and am preoccupied with the number of chairs, 40 for an audience of 200. A space provided. A space where the audience is the event. A gallery space filled to overflowing, four speakers, one in each corner surrounding the audience who sit or stand in the centre. The chairs are in 2 or 3 rows. You can lean against the wall. I speak to strangers. I find them interesting.

We are invited into a space somewhere between our own living room and a public space, between our own living room and a dance club. This ambiguous middle ground. The crossover from popular culture into acoustic art. Pop music sensibility in an art music context. An impure art. Two of the works do not involve a performer. We are there in their place. We talk, our voices mingling audibly with the voice(s) in the speakers. Later on I listen to the same works on CD in my studio.

The LP record can be seen as an archive, accompanied by extraneous noises which we have trained ourselves to ignore. In the work of Darrin Verhagen these artefacts (as he calls them) have been separated from the music recording and given musical focus. Artefacts, glitches, crackles, little clicks and pops, hiss, scratches, distortion, overloads, these have been used as musical content. In the work 3ppp there is a long delicate section made up almost entirely of clicks and pops. In another section distort is at assault levels.

In DW98, the composers Franc Tétaz and Darrin Verhagen, whose works we heard at 200 Gertrude Street, have composed music for the dance works by Shelley Lasica and Sue Healey. Here the space produced by the (absent) performer is occupied by the dancers and the audience is seated in a block or clump in heavily raked seating. The music is played through speakers high in the church roof. It charts the space for us, causing us to move into the height and the width of this large hall.

The dancers are on the floor. I feel too high looking down on them. This feels like an unintended dislocation. A rift, a separation. I expect the dancers to become airborne. To swing in the space with the music. To cross over into the trajectory of the music. To play in the air. The dancers focus towards our block. I wish they would leave by another door, look somewhere else. We are in a clump. They have the whole floor, the whole space, all the other walls, and yet they turn towards us.

In the program notes for Lasica’s Live Opera Situation we are told that there is an unheard (of) opera, The Haunted Manor by Stanislaw Moniuszko, which has informed the choreography. It is interesting that there is no reference to this opera in the music composition, given that such quotation would be well within the genre of computer processed music. Instead a series of small fragments have been recorded on different instruments, a piano, a Fender Rhodes electric piano and various percussion instruments, and processed electronically. The dancers have not rehearsed to this music. They maintain their rhythm and tempos from the rhythm and tempos of the opera. There is no attempt to mirror this musical information in the composition. We see movements that seem unaccounted for. We become curious. We puzzle over these inconsistencies. “There is a sense of worlds colliding. The different elements do not always sit comfortably together. It is necessary that a slender thread of light search out not other symbols, but the very fissure of the symbolic.” (Barthes) A fissure, a narrow opening. At these moments something within me is activated. I feel a shift of perception. I feel there is an exchange. No longer a showing but an exchange.

I write this as a process of memory, surprised by what I remember. Like an involuntary memory I have returned to these events uninvited, to invoke a voluntary memory from which to begin. Memory issues strict instructions. To be true to the memory, to the recollection, less so to the actual event. It is to the memory that we pay our respects. To our own desire to see ourselves, our desire for the impossible.

Thirty years ago I remember staying up until the small hours of a freezing winter night to watch the first worldwide live satellite broadcast on television. The high point was watching The Beatles perform All You Need Is Love in a London studio. The Great Cities of the World all fed in short live segments and I recall Melbourne’s featured the first tram of the day leaving the Kew depot.

Standing in Swanston Street at midnight, stamping my feet in 2 degrees of winter, watching touchwhere by Company in Space recalled that event in 1968. touchwhere was a realtime online performance by two dancers—Louise Taube in Melbourne and Hellen Sky in Orlando, Florida. They danced across the globe, “the earth beneath their feet”, the same dance together but separate, mirroring and replicating each other’s movements in the reflective pool of the video camera and the computer. The dance duet was projected on three large screens set into the portico of Melbourne Town Hall—two at street level, on the same level as the live, present performer and the third in the upper balcony level, the place (as a matter of symmetry) where The Beatles stood in 1962 to wave to the assembled populace of Melbourne.

The intriguing thing about touchwhere was the way in which it gathered and placed its audience. The performance was free of charge and available to anyone who chose or happened to be there, passing by on foot or in one of the many trams whose route takes them along Swanston Street.
So there were huddled dance-goers outside McDonalds, watching the dance from the place I was told was the intended viewing position on the other side of Swanston Street. Directly opposite us was a fortuitous audience—couples in tuxedos and ballgowns, clutching bunches of helium balloons who’d just left a ball in the Town Hall where they’d been dancing.

Many of them sat on the steps and watched mystified as a dancer in a silvery sort of space-suit made movements, tracked by a video camera. The audience was placed effectively on raked seating (the Town Hall steps) watching Louise Taube’s live performance in front of a triptych comprising two wings—the video screens projecting her dancing with Hellen Sky and in the centre, in the far distance, on the other side of the street, another audience—us watching them.

From time to time our view was obscured by a passing tram whose passengers, watching out of either side windows, could see the performance and two of the three video projections as well as two differently disported and attired audiences. For the ball-goers, the whole thing was framed by a proscenium arch—the Town Hall portico.

Meanwhile, we watched almost the whole thing—the live dancer whose presence was as significant as the trams, the ballgoers and the three video screens. These various modes of spectatorship were all animated as well as the imagined other audience in Florida. The resonances with De Chirico drawings of figures within architectural spaces or the image in a mirror in a Van Eyck painting were all there too.

At the end of the live performance there was another show—more like a cheerio segment or a chat show as the gang in Melbourne talked and saw themselves talking to Hellen Sky in Orlando about what it was like to be here— freezing cold, but on time tonight, and what it was like to be there—cold in the sense of lacking an audience or space of reception. And the people over there said they wished they were back here with us. The contrast between the exponential advances in technology which make an event like this possible and the smallness, ordinariness of the desires of the participants to make face to face connection was strangely moving. Cyber space is at once so vast and so domestic, so indifferent and yet so intimate.

touchwhere was more event and spectacle than performance. In the role of indented audience, you took on the part of artist advocate to explain to the confused, accidental audience filing past McDonalds who wanted to know what this was. You were also constantly drawn to the other elements constituting the event: the behaviour of the other audiences; juxtapositions—like watching dancers through tram windows; the melding of the images of the dancers responding to the virtual but actual other on the screen; the coolness of the lone, live performer who was centrally placed on the stage from any of these myriad vantage points but who was somehow not the focus of the event.

Company in Space, touchwhere, devised and designed by John McCormick and Hellen Sky in collaboration with sound designer/composer Garth Paine, choreographer and performer Hellen Sky in collaboration with Louise Taube; computer graphics Marshall White; performed live simultaneously and interactively between SIGGRAPH 98, Orlando, Florida, USA and MAP, Melbourne, Australia, Melbourne Town Hall portico, midnight July 20 – 24

It’s time again for pause at Dance Works, DW98 being their last season at the Wesleyan Hall, Albert Park, a space which has been integral to a number of the company’s works. For me, it’s reminiscent of an earlier Dance Works closing season, 1987’s Last Legs at the Y, then under the directorship of Nannette Hassall, with so many of those dancers having been the teachers and choreographers for members of this current company. So (it seems from my sporadic vantage) this program marks not only another change of venue, but yet another generation of dancers and choreographers. And it seems appropriate too that the season features prominently in the MAP program which is itself a new-generation Greenmill. So what are they up to now?

Sandra Parker, the current artistic director of Dance Works, has created the first piece in a triple bill, Waiting. She sets the scene with a program note, a quote from Romeo and Juliet which describes that condition of intolerable impatience, the infinitely prolonged expectation before a promise is fulfilled. We see 5 dancers in the hall, the oddly angled walls and vaulted ceilings, the decorous light. These women are sparsely placed, reclining, but not settled, leaning in torpor; they shift weight and place with small, almost purposeless gestures—vacant, somniferous, distanced too, as if by a glitch in time, or a video freeze-frame function. The actions never quite stop, but also seem never to run properly to speed. Forward-stop-forward, stop, back for a moment, fast forward, pause—as if the audience might be moved to think the obsessive thoughts of these women who wait, over and over.

Another scene comes to mind—a speedy solo, under a low ceiling far to the side of the main floor. It’s as if we happen to glance through a high window, and catch sight of this dancer, waiting under a railway lamp to meet a train. Matched with another simultaneous, almost languid unison trio, there’s that same stop-start, fast-slow, forward-back juxtaposition.

But Waiting struck me also with its clean and immaculately rehearsed quality, with its strong rhythm and line which never faltered, despite the fraught theme. And it was this, along with the delicate lines of vaulted ceiling, pillars, and shadowed corners, which rendered the piece more pleasantly harmonious in the end, than something disturbing or passionate.

Shelley Lasica’s Live Opera Situation, on the other hand, created its own dissonance, a kind of weird but subtle gawkiness of action and relationship in a piece which, because of that, moved with wit and comic understatement. A general feature of Lasica’s work is that it’s hard to know whether her movement quality is deliberate or not, but whatever it is, the 4 dancers managed to recreate it in a sort of benign but fiddly orchestration of starts and stops, overextended joints and slack muscle tone, which was really a relief after the generic beauteousness one is more likely to encounter in dance.

Lasica has used an operatic conceit as the starting point for Live Opera Situation, examining the behaviour of a quartet of characters, their spatial, physical, emotional, and musical relationships being revealed in this work more as purposeless posturing as they act out the emotional and relational dynamics, if not the actual moves, of the conventional operatic ones. It is also strongly reminiscent of the dynamics of Melrose Place.

The movement is often behavioural, jerky, stop-start, idiosyncratic, lacking in much adhesive unison, although there is a lot of stylish, layering of beige costume fabric. The curiously unfinished feel of each of the character’s sequences sets up a kind of awkward, unrehearsed, ‘conversational’ quality in their relationships. They come together in duets, separate, cluster in cameos, and bounce off each other unpredictably. But these relationships are the central feature of the work, providing the humour and the interest. The music too, from composer Franc Tétaz, provides another unifying aspect, a sense of time passing, as if a clock is slowly striking for this particular soap opera.

Coming out of left field was Sue Healey’s Stung, with the dancers in Adrienne Chisholm’s purple bee costumes, including little hats with feelers on the sides, suspiciously suggestive of WWI aeroplane pilots’ helmets, and little wings etcetera. With the dancers doing a lot of bee-like buzzing and humming and quivering and vibrating and so forth, with their bodies and limbs, especially their elbows, its seriously-silly quality gave it a sort of grand hilarity.

The design of the space was fantastic: Efterpi Soropos’ hexagonal spots, honeycomb-shaped beams on the floor and walls, as well as a number of long stemmed red flowers, weighted at the bottom, which could be moved around or stand in variously shaped clumps, and fall down when required.

Inspired by the children’s “Billy Bee Song”, the program also notes Sue Healey’s interest in the complex social behaviour of bees and other animals, including their territorial desires. And whether this is a serious investigation or an excuse for some light relief doesn’t seem to matter much, because while its choreographic complexity belies any suggestion of naivety, Stung’s imaginative inventiveness and capacity for wilful child-like pleasure is of a sort that’s hard to find any more.

Carlee Mellow, Rachel Roberts, Joanna Lloyd (hidden), Belinda Cooper, Live Opera Situation, DW98

According to Gestalt psychology, every perception always involves a figure and a background. At any moment, a perceptual foreground may be in focus whilst its background isn’t, and vice versa. We, as perceivers, actively focus upon the objects of our experience. In order to do so, inevitably, other objects fall out of focus. One of the famed examples of Gestalt psychology is a drawing of a shape—looked at in one way that shape is a cube; observed in another way, it becomes a square with lines emanating from its corners. The three pieces of Dance Works’ 98 season variously evoked Gestalt’s perceptual divide, here a split between the abstract and the real.

The first piece, Waiting (choreographer Sandra Parker), progressed from the real to an increasingly abstract terrain. Perhaps inspired by the snippet from Romeo and Juliet quoted in the program notes, Waiting opened with lots of getting up and down, posing, pausing and stillness spilling into motion. At first, I wondered at the meaning of all this. Then it struck me—the unforgiving temporality of yearning, waiting (“…so tedious is this day/As is the night before some festival/To an impatient child that hath new robes/And may not wear them…”).

Rather than evoke a recognisable lexicon of emotion (not to forget Umberto Eco’s claim that “I love you” is so trite a statement that it is now emptied of all meaning), Parker chose to illuminate her theme in much more abstract terms. Having acknowledged the plane of representation as non-literal, I found the kinetic landscape of Waiting became increasingly surreal. This peaked for me where one dancer occupied the middle of a rather Gothic looking scene—a dark red, barely lit, former church with a tilting floor—while three others moved underneath a stone window lit in silhouette, and a fourth pensively roamed an antechamber. At that point, my perception flipped and the space became a mind, populated by columns and bodies, the connections between dancers, neural synapses. It is not clear to me whether the 5 dancers were one entity, facets of the one entity or more than one being. Nor, ultimately, do I know what happened. What interested me about the piece was the way in which my perception shifted gears away from the real, and further and further into an imaginary landscape.

Live Opera Situation choreographed by Shelley Lasica followed suit in its allegiance to the abstract. The motivating premise of the piece was articulated pretty clearly in the program notes: this is a work exploring the ways in which 4 “voices” work together and separately, as in operatic forms. The juxtaposition of choreographic difference was asserted throughout the piece, emphasised by costuming, music and a surprising array of gestures. Although much of the movement had the mark of Lasica’s distinctive corporeality, the dancers were given very divergent tasks. Various fronts were assumed, sometimes implying interaction, sometimes not.

If there was harmony to be found between the 4 elements (dancers) it was not represented by repetition or similarities of movement. Any sense of harmony or coherence had to be built upon difference rather than erasing it. Over time, it did seem that a certain unity was forming, partly achieved by an interaction between the dancers who, increasingly, constituted a kinetic and spatial intertwining. I also think it was an effect of having experienced this piece over time. Like those 3D computer graphics, letting go of a narrow focus allows other elements to come into play. What might initially be perceived as pure heterogeneity is able to become something else. Is that what harmony is, a set of differences perceived as a whole?
After Waiting and Live Opera Situation, I found the very grounded nature of Sue Healey’s Stung difficult to take in. I was stuck in the abstract register of the first two pieces, whereas this one required a somewhat different appreciation. Not everyone seems to have shared my difficulties. Some who didn’t like the first two pieces found Stung a welcome relief. They laughed at its humour and earthy subject matter. Darrin Verhagen’s music also cited familiar rhythms and recognisable allusions.

A work about the life and times of the bee, Stung also touched on bee sociality. Although the work was not simply direct representation of bee-hood, its strongest moments for me were in its most literal references—to the swarm, and to bees crawling over honeycomb. Some of the movements had a sensual delight about them, the best being a bee solo of wiggled hips and curled arms. Spatial coverage and speed were used more consistently in this piece than the others, suggesting elements of design within Healey’s choreographic vision.

I am quite struck by the divide which seems to have applied to the appreciation of these three pieces. It seems that the perception of the first two works required something quite distinct from what was required of the third. The variety of views here, in conjunction with the heterogeneity of values manifest in the MAP Symposium, just goes to show the inadequacy of the response “it was/was not good” (a banality I myself have been using for years). When we judge a work, we speak not only about the object of our judgement, but about the subject who judges.

DW98, Dance Works: Waiting, choreographer Sandra Parker, composer Lawrence Harvey, costumes Adrienne Chisholm, dancers Belinda Cooper, Joanna Lloyd, Carlee Mellow, Rachel Roberts, Sally Smith; Live Opera Situation, choreographer Shelley Lasica, composer Franc Tétaz, costume coordinator Shelley Lasica, dancers Belinda Cooper, Joanna Lloyd, Carlee Mellow and Rachel Roberts; Stung, choreographer Sue Healey, composer Darrin Verhagen, costumes Adrienne Chisholm, dancers Belinda Cooper, Joanna Lloyd, Carlee Mellow, Rachel Roberts, Sally Smith; Wesleyan Hall, Albert Park, July 15 – July 26

Away from the pressure of subscription season tyranny, the Australian Ballet presented Collaborations, a program of new Australian choreographic works. Under this title 4 experienced choreographers teamed up with designers, musicians and composers to create the “new ideas, new blood, new music and new creativity” that Ross Stretton proudly proclaims as part of his unique vision for the company’s future. Collaboration by definition is the working together of various individuals to realise or sustain a shared vision. This is notoriously difficult to do, involving far more than effective communication and a desire to work with another artist.

Working in conjunction with set and costume designer Hugh Colman and lighting designer Rachel Burke, Natalie Weir in Dark Lullaby investigated the potential of a surreal and vaguely ominous environment. In this Caligarian world comprising two massive structures, an industrial fan-like apparatus and a bookshelf, a mysterious drama of sorts was played out. Although the plot was elliptical, one could not fail to notice Weir’s use of familiar archetypes: Hero, Seductress, Villain and Virgin danced by Geon van der Wyst, Nicole Rhodes, Robert Curran and Lisa Bolte respectively. The simplicity and clean lines of the design suggested a black and white frame of reference that sustained the valid use of such archetypes. Throughout, collaborative vitality was evident in the close association of choreographic and design ideas, producing a sophisticated work that ought to be included in the Australian Ballet’s repertoire.

Shorter though no less striking was Stephen Baynes’ El Tango, a light-hearted duet to the seductive tones of the tango. Astor Piazolla’s treatment of this musical form elicited from Baynes’ comic nuances in timing and composition and was danced by Vicki Attard and David McAllister. The choice of these two dancers was insightful. Their ability to identify the cliché in both musical and choreographic scores and to then emphasise this with a look, a pause or sinewy stretch showed the importance of a dancer’s interpretation. This may not have been a radical piece, but I suspect it was liberating for Baynes to present a study in a subscription-free context without having to create a masterpiece. The subtle wit of El Tango is evidence that this venture paid off.

Despite the Australian Ballet providing fabulous technical, administrative and artistic support for those with their necks on the blocks, there was no one work that stood out in terms of audacity. Two works initially displayed this potential. Bernadette Walong’s Slipstream unfortunately fell short with too many undeveloped ideas and an over-enthusiastic lighting design. As lights flashed and drew focus with increasing persistence, we waited in vain for concepts to develop—the sounds of stones on corrugated iron, cocoons suspended mid-air, a tractor tyre tutu lined with fur skins and three women draped in metres of clear, thin sheets of plastic. Slipstream alluded to meaning without providing the necessary developmental links needed for the interpretation of symbols. It was as if we had been invited to a sacred space where life flourished but, like the story of the Japanese Santa Claus nailed to a cross, signs seem to have become confused in the cultural shift. The three women in plastic became rubbish floating downstream and the rubber tyre remained ridiculous.

Adrian Burnett’s Intersext had happier results. With percussionist and Australian Ballet dancer, Roland Cox, a collaboration was established that afforded Burnett a good deal of creative freedom. Unpretentious and completely engaging, this work experimented with and responded to a variety of percussion instruments and rhythmic scores. Burnett’s work is most successful when he moves away from traditional ballet moves—which he does most of the time in this piece. His reversal of gender roles in the duet form is an example of his eagerness to go beyond tradition, crossing into contemporary and club dance genres. He seems to be at home in this context and more likely to be at his innovative best when exploring dance through ‘alternative’ perspectives.

Not every venture in Collaborations paid off, but with more new blood, ideas and less emphasis on elaborate stage production this event could become, with the Australian Ballet’s commitment, an exciting annual one.

Collaborations, The Australian Ballet: Dark Lullaby, choreographer Natalie Weir, design Hugh Colman, lighting Rachel Burke, dancers Geon van der Wyst, Nicole Rhodes, Robert Curran, Lisa Bolte; El Tango, choreographer Stephen Baynes, composer Astor Piazolla, designer Michael Pearce, lighting Rachel Burke, dancers Vicki Attard, David McAllister; Intersext, choreographer Adrian Burnett, composers Matt Rodd, Roland Cox, Andrew Jones, percussionist Roland Cox, dancers Matthew Trent, Daryl Brandwood, Joshua Consandine, Benazir Hussain, Rachel Rawlins, Felicia Palanca, designer Richard Jeziorny, lighting Rachel Burke; Slipstream, choreographer Bernadette Walong, composer Brett Mitchell, designer Judy Watson, costumes Jacques Tchong, lighting Pascal Baxter, dancers Gabrielle Davidson, Lynette Wills, Paula Baird, Lucinda Dunn, Christopher Lam, Gaetano Del Monaco, Alex Wagner; C.U.B. Malthouse, Melbourne, July 1 – 4

1. Tolerance: Christos Linou, FIDDLE-DE-DIE/safety and uncertainty
He enters, descending a ladder, (literally) loses his marbles, walks backwards in, a towards that is also away, his shadow looming as he walks, enlarging, taking over. Later, he talks to it: a man in sheep’s mask, coercing his own shadow. Video shows legs running, stompings in corners of white floorless rooms. Voices invade, aspirations fail. This is a painfully fractured self who can barely tolerate himself, whose own ladder, his place of beginning, falls on top of him. Linou has devised a performance “dealing with drug addiction and AIDS”, the first of which is apparent, of the latter I’m not so sure.

At first, I am bothered by the angular restriction in Linou’s upper torso, though conjecture it may be appropriate to the portrayal. It is an empathetic piece on fractured self-obsession, that nonetheless might be trying of nerves, with its relentless calling, yelling and falling. I saw the piece only on video document (at the artist’s request after I had been called away), where the camera’s more intimate frame helpfully rendered both intimacy and distance.

2. Tributes: Angie Potsch, Temporal
Reading Thomas Rimer’s account of working with Grotowski, about creating work from personal myths. Grotowski is punishing on Rimer when he keeps trying to be huge and meaningful, Rimer noting the way others slowly built long pieces from the smallest of honesties. Potsch’s piece seems to me to have such beginnings: glass, candlelight, the music of glass drawn round the perimeter of a water bowl. The body dancing here sometimes visible only as a fracture. Moving memory(ies). This is a piece which takes time with its qualities—simple elements built into a whole via an exquisite sense of rhythm. The only unfortunate segment is the “hair dance” (like the proverbial “hair acting”) where a private moment—perhaps of grief or loss—is veiled and kept introspected beneath all that lusciousness for too long.

3. Traces: Margaret Trail, Hi, it’s me
Hello, who’s speaking? the voice, vocaliser, or cyborg? Trail’s tripartite Hi it’s me progressively disappears the body, using strands of speech like rope, dissecting speaker from spoken and reknotting the weave. Part One is a jibbering of paranoid and more liberal selves, enacted as a dialogue between her real time, embodied voice (as Trail alternately sprawls, lounges and wriggles in a chair with an almost-endearing self-consciousness) and several taped versions. We next view her, “live with headphones”, seated at a mixing desk. She listens to her own recordings, wiggles her toes, occasionally calls out edits to a phantom producer, like Plato calling out for more light. The third part is a sound-and-light sequence in a darkened room: the edited tape and glimmers of colour like ribbons of remembered substance of the body(ies) which once spoke or telephoned. Are “bodies” ever more than this? I like this last piece, finding it very fine; the first two segments for me a little trying in real time.

4. Pellucid testings: Philipa Rothfield, Logic, with Elizabeth Keen and Jenny Dick
Philipa Rothfield’s Logic tests an intellectual proposition but does so in a way that engages the physical space. The body itself undergoes computations, negations, patternings; a parallel between a body thinking and a mind teasing out its own processes. The proposition of recited text and formulae projected on overheads, the body moving in a distinct yet parallel (con)sequence, sets the stage for the final “body solo” where the formulae, suggestions and patterns are allowed to follow their own logics, double, invert and redouble in a kind of gestural mathematics that is nourishing on many parallel planes and very finely honed. This is a thought-full and feeling-full piece with a gentle, sinewy strength that lingers long.

Logic makes no attempt to render the relationship of performing to seeing as a = b in a literal sense. The “equation”, if you like, is a matching of equal complexities, equal respect, between mind and body, audience and performers, maintaining their distinct qualities (speaker, writer, dancer, see-er). The performance, framed deliciously in a spare rectangular frame of light with projection screen behind, allows both space and fullness of response. Meaning comes through the way one takes a breath—before one equates an association.

These dancings are tests of the time, struggling with the threats of ideas, emotions and disappearances, questioning what is human, looking to what survives.

Find