Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

February 1999

Deborah Hay

photo Phyllis Liedeker

Deborah Hay

There are those who have seen Deborah Hay perform and wondered why others in the audience seem to be getting something they do not. A recent review of Hay’s solo, O; The Other Side of O, noted that “Australia’s numerous devotees appreciate her ability to be absolutely present in a theatrical moment” (Kim Dunphy, The Age, December 8, 1998). Even though I would count myself as one of these “numerous devotees”, I do understand why her work leaves some people unmoved. I have, at times, been unmoved. It has to do with looking, how one looks, and what one looks for. We watchers of the dance are used to the corporeal delights of kinetic display. Dance is, more or less, a kind of physical action, a nuanced flow of bodies in movement. What, then, are we to make of a performance which offers so few physical tidbits to its audience?

Hay’s performance work is totally stripped of dancerly display because she wants something else to shine through. That something is the bodily manifestation of an intense form of perceptual practice. Although some people might call it a play of consciousness, I think this detracts from the bodily aspect of her work. The meditational quality of her perception and the mantra-like status of her utterances should not lead one to think her work is not in and of the body. The title of Hay’s forthcoming book, My Body the Buddhist, gives an indication of the sense in which the body is seen to be the ground and source of her work. But it is in the context of her teaching that these matters attain clarity.

Whilst Hay is utterly committed to the experiment of her own learning, it is her teaching which has made the greater mark in the world. This is partly because of her own immersion in the practice that she tries to convey. She is not someone who knows so much as someone who tries and is willing to share in that trying. Over the years, she has worked with and on certain epithets—the body as 53 trillion cells at once perceiving; the whole body as the teacher; invite being seen; now is here is harmony. Whatever constitutes her own practice is offered to her students. In turn, they attempt to make sense of these thoughts in action. One of the features of her workshops is the effect of working in a group. Her community dances are often very large, and the experience of working with so many people creates a certain energy. Added to this is Hay’s exhortation to observe others as if they are similarly committed to the work.

This leads me to another issue: the question of truth. Hay does not claim that her utterances are ultimate verities. Rather they are strategic puzzles which may or not be productive. This rather postmodern approach—that practice is strategic rather than representing some essence—nevertheless aims towards particular goals with rigour. It is not a case of anything goes. Rather, that which is aimed at is a quality of perceptual engagement within movement (and utterance). There is an attempt to de-centre subjectivity (imagine your body is 53 trillion cells changing all the time), to multiply the number of perspectives which may attend movement, and to be utterly present, focused and open to inspiration wherever it may come from. Of course, no one manages this all the time. There are frustrations, disappointments, at best an intermittent focus. Hay herself claims there is nothing (no-thing) to “get.” Rather, we are all students of this kinaesthetic form.

That said, Deborah Hay does seem to maintain her own focus more often than not. Her dancing often inspires others, and the workshop sessions can become very charged. It is not particularly easy to keep with one’s movements, not to daydream, fantasize, let alone remain open to change at any point, whether initiated from the multiple sources in the self or inspired from beyond. Nevertheless, this is what she attempts in her solo work. No attempt is made to distract her audience from the perceptual, kinaesthetic, focal nature of the work, resonating Yvonne Rainer’s “No to spectacle no to virtuosity…no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer” (TDR, T30). Having cleared the space of these expectations, Hay hopes to be seen dancing to another tune.

Deborah Hay Returning, A series of workshops held in and around Melbourne, including The Art of the Solo, Zen Imagery Exercises, Conscious Community Dance and Choreographic Theatre, October – November 1998

RealTime issue #29 Feb-March 1999 pg. 29

West Ryde. Sydney. Australia. Noon.
Through rented white lace to a clumsy rusted clothes line. Dark colours in a harsh New Year’s light. Petunias fighting with weeds. A roaring herb garden, salad smells, lemon balm, Vietnamese mint, laksa dreams, pennyroyal. Green tomatoes staked yesterday and zucchinis big enough to kill. Milka’s beans snaking through from next door. Our garage roller door is shut. Hiding unused, secretive, bought-on-a-whim things. A brick barbie covered in Wandering Jew, native trees—bottlebrush and banksia—give no shade. Green lawn as long as a terrier’s fringe. Still. Waiting for cool change.

The Noon Quilt, trace online writing community, (http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/quilt/info.html – link expired) is a java patchwork of time impressions, a delirium of techno-hippiedom, the irresistible idea of words and moments linked around the globe. Singapore. Brisbane. Arizona. Paris. Brazil. Japan. Manchester. I am touched and transfixed at noon on this hot day.

A world view made of little windows: Trevor Lockwood sees a “fat publisher” who confronts writers at the end of his driveway, begging to be seen in print. Simon Mills writes from the basement. No windows. About his cat who fell off the window ledge. Fell a few storeys, “landed unscathed yet embarrassed.” Val Seddon sees the bench on the patio, where her father used to sit, “lit and warmed by memories that are my protection too.” The teenager forgets to do his English homework and creates a funny and dark view. Phil Pemberton feels like a detective, “Marlowe-like observing the crowds but never getting no closer to the girl.”

There are many women contributors; quilting was always women’s work and there is thought in these patches, a binding of stories, of light and dark shades. I am careful unravelling this hand-me-down, slowly savouring the stitches of time and memory

Helen Flint. Bournemouth. UK. Noon.
At exactly noon, Bournemouth this Seagarden Paradise is upright, shadowless; my front Boycemont Ericstatue and goldeneyed fishpond proscenium the porch I sit on, ten doors from the Channel between fuschia chapters I have just written. And parading past me go paleskin families or solitary on-the-prowl bods dragging huge inflatable plastic moulded floats; oh, 4 hours later they will much slower return floating back up my road, their angry red skin deflating and scorching them.

Some writers, like me, take the view literally, wanting to preserve my frame, where I am right now, my nondescript backyard. Others move cleverly to other frames, the television set, the photograph, a computer screen or a fictional window onto other lives. People use constricting wall views to leap off into imaginative air. Sue Thomas constructs her view in a LamdaMOO, floating “adrift in the endlessly shifting landscapes of a thousand virtual imaginations.”

Characters emerge and re-emerge. An old man drags his feet. Drags cartons of beer. Drags a trolley loaded with corrugated iron and timber. Where is he going? JD Keith finds “empty buildings, idle trucks, and peopleless homes indicat[ing] the Exodus.” Where have they gone? There are unresolved narratives…and notes of new beginnings.

Riel Miller. Paris. France. Noon.
At noon I see tomorrow forming, a tear drop shaking its way down, nourishing the earth, feeding the sky, rushing along twisted pipes, quenching desire, a trickle of satisfaction.

The Noon Quilt trace online writing community, http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/quilt/info.html [link expired]

RealTime issue #29 Feb-March 1999 pg. 16

And then Princess Di is barrelling towards me, head down, Uzi cocked, the veil of her coronation dress streaming back from her face like a dirty grey curtain. There is death in her pixilated eyes. And I know: She’s gonna wax my republican ass. So I panic. I’m not afraid to admit it. I slap the keyboard, switching from a pistol to something with a little more visceral kick: something involving missiles. I punch the space bar. The launcher exhales. But Di is too close, and even as she detonates (tiara spitting jewellery and giblets in equal amounts) my modem disconnects. I’m dead. (Again). I’ve been soundly thrashed by some 10 year old kid from Arizona. (Again). My only satisfaction lies in the thought that at least I took the ‘People’s Princess’ with me.

It’s about 5 a.m. I’ve been online for almost 3 hours, alternately trudging through the occasionally (read: hardly ever) interesting Australian arm of Ultima Underworld online and slaughtering foreigners with portable artillery in Quake 2. To most people, no part of those last 3 hours had anything to do with hypermedia, the arts, or (worse) self-expression. To me, electronic entertainment is as valid as any other art. To a trained psychologist, thundering about a 3D maze dressed up as a deceased member of the royal family has a lot to say about that 10 year old kid from Arizona.

The idea that hypermedia is limited to extensions of the (more) traditional arts is to limit an already excruciatingly misunderstood idea. Hypermedia as an ‘interactive’ medium which offers the reader/user pathways as opposed to linear narrative should be more than a series of static pages connected like a Choose Your Own Adventure novella. Add pictures and we still haven’t gone very far. Even a Quicktime movie and a soundtrack are nothing but bells and whistles on what is essentially still a piece of ‘straight’ fiction with pretensions.

Hypermedia should give the user a new way of interacting, not merely a new way of reading.

Note: This is not a complicated way of redefining the question so that I can shoehorn video games into a discussion of hypermedia. I can do that easily enough under current definitions. Here goes: Online capabilities in video games are fast becoming standard on the PC, even beginning to bleed over into the lower-end game systems. Sega’s upcoming 128 bit console, the Dreamcast, will have in-built online capabilities allowing users to network and play anywhere in the world.

An important thing to remember is that video games were born on, and exist only on, computers. Unlike pure text, they are the rightful heirs of the digital age, not its bastard children. The ‘links’ between text fragments become the doorways between rooms rendered in 3D. The text ceases to describe or refer to the image, and begins interacting with it, fleshing it out, giving it greater depth. Your average game player becomes blind to the fact that s/he is making choices between fragments, and their reinterpretation of the game becomes fluid. S/he ceases to be an external force acting on the text and becomes another facet of it.

Moreover, unlike hypertext, more than one user can be involved in the same piece at one time. The user passes other users. Their experience is altered by the experiences of others, the ‘text’ moves in more than one direction at one time. The screen updates—unlike new ‘scenes’ created by following links—are invisible, and choices are made on the fly.

To an extent, video games become more hyper than hypertext. As well as offering users the chance to interact with a text/art ‘world’, they allow them to redefine themselves and re-experience it. That kid from Arizona may go for a mock-up of Prince Charles next time. He not only chooses how to interact with the text, but who interacts with the text.

Note 2: Most new first-person shooters (Unreal, Syn, Dark Forces 2, Quake 2) allow the user to download or create their own ‘skins’ for online characters. Fan sites offer homebrew characters for other players to use. (I once saw a naked man streak past me, weapon at the ready. I once saw Gandhi.) These alterations come complete with changing in-game perspective, weapons and sound effects. A selling point of these games has become their flexibility and user definability.

However this choice of personal representation can become far more complex than what ‘skin’ to use. Ultima Online, although flawed, expensive and generally tedious, is a prime example. It allows players to create a character and then ‘live’ it for as long as possible, in real time. The world inside their computer progresses, unlike traditional role-playing games, at the same pace as our own. If you don’t go online for a month, you’ll miss a month of activities. Your house could be burned to the ground by brigands. Your pewter Royal Wedding souvenir mug stolen. The attractive element of the exercise is that you don’t have to follow traditional role-playing staples. You don’t have to be a ‘thief’ or a ‘brigand.’ You could play as a farmer. You would have to buy seed, plant crops, work the field, harvest them, and then find a real person to buy your food. All in real time. Hopefully someone else has chosen to run a shop.

Ultima Online has been heralded as the first of a new generation of games, but it isn’t. It’s really only a step up from the MUDs (Multi-User-Domains) of yesteryear, in much the same way that hypertext is a step away from pure text. MUDs were/are text based adventures which allowed players to move freely, with other users, through a world based around blurb-style descriptions of places and events. Like Ultima Online, there are people, ‘Avatars’, whose job it is to make sure that people a) play in character and b) don’t play like jerks unless (of course) their character class was ‘jerk’, in which case they have to make certain that they play like jerks.

To that extent, MUDs can also be seen as among the earliest and best exercises in hypertext. Their stories are alive, active, and involve hundreds of other players concurrently. I had friends who disappeared into the weird innards and politics of MUDs, never to return. Testament to their addictive qualities and, better yet, to how real a few lines of fictional text (when typed by some ‘real’ kid in Arizona) can become.

Video games in hypertext, like genre fiction in mainstream literature, will probably always be a little uncomfortable. More people may use them and they may often do a better job than their bigger brothers, but that same popular appeal means they’re unlikely to be acknowledged. Perhaps hypermedia, populated as it is by the (hopefully) techno-literate, will take the opportunity that any discussion of ‘new media’ brings, go have a look at their kids playing Nintendo in the basement, and see it as something that could be a little more than a drain on the Christmas budget.

I’m back online. I’ve been doing finger weights. I’ve had a lot of sleep. There are 3 empty coffee mugs beside the monitor. Out of the corner of my eye I see the Queen Mother. She has an anti-tank launcher taped to the crossbar of her walking frame. A bald globe swings back and forth overhead. She looks left and right down a deserted intersection, undecided. The chrome on her walking frame catches the light. She hasn’t seen me. I swing around behind.

The Ultima Online website can be visited at: http://www.owo.com/ [link expired]. There are a slew of online gaming sites; one of the best, Heat Net, can be salivated over at: http://www.heat.net/ [link expired]. Get yourself some new skins, mod files (levels) and patches for your favourite games at http://www.fortunecity.com/underworld/quake/370/filez.html [link expired] (for Quake 2) and http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Dunes/6250/downloads/index.html [link expired] (for Dark Forces 2).

RealTime issue #29 Feb-March 1999 pg. 16

You could never envisage all the camera has seen, countless images scattered at random in time and space like the fragments of a vast and ancient mosaic…you will never comprehend the totality of such a fabulous and excessive montage…
Scott McQuire, Visions of Modernity, Sage Publications, London, 1998.

It is hard to think of this year’s Dance Lumière program as a totality. So different were these shorts that I started to wonder what it is that characterises the “dance film.” This year’s curator, Erin Brannigan, spoke briefly before the showing, delineating 2 forms of classification. One of the categories is a performance which has been filmed, a dance documentation. Many of the films in this category were reminiscent of those Royal Shakespeare Company films of plays staged on sets. The setting is usually the original performance space, the staging the same as that for the performance. An exception to this was Scenes in a Prison (Jim Hughes, Graeme McLeod). This work was (re)located in a prison, admitting a plurality of perspectives upon the unrelenting nastiness committed by its “inmates.” Another notable exception to the staged paradigm was Falling (Mahalya Middlemist and Sue-ellen Kohler) which played with the temporality of the movement, turning the work into something quite different from live performance. Falling comprised a sepia tinted fractal of movement, progressing as if frame-by-frame, the fluidity of movement reduced to staccato images. What I loved about this film was the space for thought created in its snail-like progress. The rest of the filmed performances—Elegy, Body in Question, and Subtle Jetlag—were interesting because the performances looked interesting, not because of their being films.

The other espoused form of classification was the “Dance Film”, that is, a film specifically made with dance. One would expect these films to offer more in terms of a cinematic aesthetic. Perhaps so, but they certainly did not ascribe to the same cinematic values nor to the same interpretation of dance. Some of the films shared a sense of dancerly composition: Sure (Tracie Mitchell, Mark Pugh) showed a beautiful warp and weft of dancing bodies, and Dadance (Horsley, Wheadon, and Elmaz) a surreal 1930s play between visual art and dance. But others, such as Hands (Jonathan Burrows, Adam Roberts) and Greedy Jane (Miranda Pennell), involved urbane forms of movement which were carefully crafted and represented.

What is it that film brings to dance? Film can do things performance cannot. The perspectival nature of the camera, the suture of film montage, the reduction to black and white (Sure), the enhancement of particular colours (Greedy Jane), the distortion of time and motion (Falling, Dividing Loops) are specific features of the filmed image. Added to this is the fact that we are viewing a conjunction of dance and film. Perhaps alchemy is a better word, for it suggests that a transformation has taken place. Film is not merely the camera ‘recording’ dance. As a medium, it has its own character, its own form of corporeality, texture and temporality. It is out of this body, the body of the film, that the more familiar dancing body emerges—perhaps defamiliarised, transfigured, hopefully enriched.

Dance Lumiere, Luminous Movement: Dance Created for the Camera, curated by Erin Brannigan, Dancehouse, Melbourne, Dec 12, 1998

RealTime issue #29 Feb-March 1999 pg. 30

EB Through your experience travelling and collaborating with people around the world, how do your experiences in Australia differ? In your Writings On Dance article (Issue #14), you talk about travel as an opportunity to test the flexibility of your perception. What “new muscles” of perception did you have to flex here?

LN My work explores how we use our senses, how we have built our survival skills, how these habits influence and underlie our movement, our dancing, our appetite for moving, for being seen dancing, and how we develop our opinions, what we like to see and do, how we compose our realities. In the exotic (to me) dance subcultures that I’ve had the good fortune to share this questioning with, this dialogue has been met with enthusiasm. I’m always fascinated when there appears to be a consensus of desire or opinion in a temporary, incidental group of dancers.

For the most part I dare not make comparisons, for each gathering is so context-laden. Yet I can’t help but notice…One thought I had on my return trips to Australia was how a people who perceive themselves as living in a relatively isolated culture make a lot out of a little. I’ve run into that cultural self-image in various parts of the world, in Hungary and East Germany shortly after the walls came down, in the Midwest and rural US, in Argentina and mainland China just last year.

We can imagine that ‘having little’ can lead to a habit of mining a deep mine, going way behind or beyond the surface of things. And it can provide a vast, blank canvas for the imagination. I found that willingness to dig and the facility to imagine striking in the students I worked with in Australia each time, in 1985, in 93, and 97. This was a great pleasure. As was speaking English to English speakers for a change.

EB I’m particularly interested in your thoughts on performance—the engagement between performer and audience. How did you feel this engagement differed, if at all, in Australia?

LN My visits have been very short, and until last year I’d had little exposure to performance work down under, other than the work of Russell Dumas who I first met in Europe in the early 80s. I have seen his work on 3 continents and think of him, most certainly, as a dance artist with a thoroughly international perspective. I was curious, in 1997, to see how the perceptual flexibility and imagination I enjoyed so much in the workshops would manifest in performance, and I got my chance during the Festival of the Dreaming and Sidetrack’s Contemporary Performance Week in 1997. However, in this first exposure, I found it hard to look beyond my own familiar Western references and sources—which is not a surprise—but I am curious to see more…to begin to perceive the character, direction and purpose of Australian dance and audience behaviour in relation to its own history.

EB We recently had a conference in Melbourne where the hegemony of ballet in this country was discussed—a notion that makes Writings on Dance and antistatic rare public forums for discussing ‘alternative’ dance practices in Australia. Did you have any sense of this situation during your visits here?

LN A quick note about dance thinking and support for the arts: I’ve been co-editing and publishing an alternative dance journal, Contact Quarterly, out of the US for 22 years now. The writings all come from dancers and movement artists themselves, and except for a very few years, the readership is the sole support for the magazine. The labour for producing it has almost been entirely volunteer and it seems to sustain itself by the unflagging need for dialogue outside of the institutions.

I always have my eye out for writings by dancers and have been reading Writings on Dance (WOD) probably since the first issues when one of its editors, dancer Libby Dempster, whom I met in the mid 70s in England, sent me one. I’ve found it to be a remarkable archive of analysis of the new dance practices which have been, and continue to be, extremely marginal, and at the same time significantly influential to the mainstream Western dance over the last 20 years or so. In WOD, it has struck me, that often (not always) the source or tools of analysis are semiotics and feminist criticism, both academic approaches and somehow a very narrow base when applied to dance. I often wondered why this emphasis and yearned for more personal and wider sources in this elegant publication. I gathered on my last visit how much dance comes out of the university system in Australia, and that dancers learn to validate their work based on these systems of analysis. I imagine, somehow, this dominant way of thinking enters the work they make. Yet there is also something that has come through WOD’s effort to put dance in print that is helping to create a body of thought and stimulate the field beyond the continent of Australia.

I read RealTime for the first time on my last visit and noticed a similar language in much of the writing, however I was thrilled by the range of voices and sheer volume of activity and desire to be heard. These are precious publications, evidence of passion, discipline, self-criticism, and practice “in the face of…” It seems that personal voices and developments in dance, theatre and performance in the West have demonstrably not developed through institutionalised training and support.

Young artists usually have enough fuel to push through lack of support. The tragedy comes when artists have to quit before developing into maturity, leaving few models, few inspirations, and all that implies for the culture. We try to survive the same stupidity in the US.

Bodyworks is Dancehouse’s annual curated event, a 3-week season of works by established choreographers. The content of each season ensues from a set of choices made on the basis of applications, many of the works not yet made. As such, Bodyworks has the ability to take risks, and the works themselves the opportunity to achieve a range of outcomes. There are many ways to look at a work and the notion of outcome—the work as a completed entity—is only one of them. I found that some of the works this year invited a perspective more related to their sense of project than of outcome.

The Castle of Nothingness, by Zjamal Xanitha was one such work. Coming from a deep place, both personal and spiritual, this piece attempted to convey the profound nature of ritual, quest and journey. The dilemma that the piece faced was how to achieve such a goal: whether to give the audience an experience or description of such matters. Zjamal’s intentions seemed to waver between these 2 poles. In experiential terms, this work tended to leave its audience behind. I don’t think people actually felt they were taken on a journey. There was, however, a certain richness which came from observing Zjamal’s own journey. In the end, the work was the journey of making a work, one both heartfelt and revealing.

The other piece which communicated itself most strongly in terms of its endeavour was Negative Space by Deanne Butterworth and Alicia Moran. The title derives from the visual arts, where negative space is the field which surrounds a drawn subject. In this work, negative space was the space not occupied by the simultaneous performance of 2 solos. The aim of the work was to somehow transform our sense of negative space in virtue of that which is performed within, as it were, positive space. An alluring idea, a great deal of effort was required of the audience in order to comply with the intentions of the piece. There was, by and large, a lack of synergy between the 2 solos, leaving the viewer to do the sums to work out the negative space. More time and direction could develop a piece yet in its infancy into something quite remarkable.

The last piece which suggested itself as a project was Rosalind Crisp and Ion Pierce’s Proximity. Emerging from a sustained period of improvisation, Proximity purported to play between proximal (near) and distal (far) forms of motion. Proximity consisted of a series of kinaesthetic essays which played with various points of the body compass. For example, one section involved rotations around a spinal axis, ending with a meditation upon the peripheral play of fingers. The proximal or distal character of the various body parts was partially conveyed by the dancer’s facial forms. This led me to wonder whether the head itself is considered distal, away from the trunk, or proximal, a centre of movement. Our head is so central to where, how and who we are, not to mention its housing for the brain. Yet, nowhere is the entire body more a multiplicity of centres than in dance.

The Long March, by Sally Smith, juxtaposed the uniformity of a calisthenics team with the conformity and dissent of a singular body. These Foucauldian, docile bodies were both hilarious and fascinating. I found myself drawn to one member of the team who kept looking at the audience when all but she looked straight ahead. Such inadvertent non-conformity was even more intriguing than Sally’s own conscious departure from the group because it challenged the apparent stability of calisthenics’ universal sameness from within.

Watershed by Sue Peacock and Bill Handley was a polished, entertaining duet on and around a bed. Its most exciting moment was at the start when a film projection of Handley was superimposed upon his actual body; a virtual Doppelganger sprung from loins made of flesh. What followed was a series of carefully crafted, beautifully timed and danced interactions. Plots, Quartered and Suspended was a group work (Whitington, Santos, Davey, McLeod, Papas and Corbet). This was a landscape of simultaneous performances, each interpreting “plot” in its own fashion. On a pleasant stroll around the space, between the works, moving on at will, the audience itself was given a great freedom to make choices about viewing, walking, resting and chatting. Finally, Silent Truth, a posthumous exhibition of the life’s work of Jack Linou who died of AIDS, curated by his brother, Christos Linou. Paintings, video clips, even a notebook placed under perspex, the pages turned daily. What to make of a life lost, of the remnants of creativity, frustration and despair?

Dance works generally invite viewing somewhere towards the end of their lives. Or at least that is what the idea of the work as a product would lead us to believe. Some works, however, convey a sense of not yet being fully developed. Others look like they have changed pathways from different modes of presentation, perhaps more improvisational. On the one hand, performance is a finality, a presentation but, on the other, as a representation, it is just one facet, whether in the lifework of its maker(s) or in the more complex setting of danced culture.

Bodyworks 98: Festival of Moving Arts: O and The Other Side of O, Deborah Hay; The Castle of Nothingness, Zjamal Zanitha; Watershed, Sue Peacock, Bill Handley with Graeme McLeod; Negative Space, Deanne Butterworth with Alicia Moran; Plots, Quartered & Suspended, Cherie Whitington, Tim Davey, Nick Papas, Shaun McLeod; The Hard March, Sally Smith; Silent Truth, Jack Linou, Christos Linou, Dancehouse, Melbourne, Nov 26 – 29, Dec 3 – 6, Dec 10 – 13.

Viewing a lot of dance videos while in London recently, I decided that solo dance on film was my favourite. The intimacy specific to the camera is best employed dealing with these discrete subjects, who may not have spatial relations to anything but the camera (become its very own creature). Seeing Wendy Houstoun perform her new show, Maid to Drink presents Happy Hour, first at Jackson’s Lane and then at the Purcell Room at Royal Festival Hall in London, I realised that solo dance itself is the intriguing thing, with or without the camera. A spoken monologue on film or stage has words hanging in the-space-between; the solo dancer, particularly the performer/choreographer, invites you in closer to where, in the best examples, the body cannot lie. By the end of the show, I had Houstoun’s particular physicality tucked away as if we had actually spent endless nights making the most of Happy Hour. She had become my very own creature.

Houstoun had me peering through the dark, straining to close up the space in an effort to catch every nuance of her intricate dance. As has happened before, my eyeballs dried out with looking. Choosing the theme of drinking, she is able to explore a range of movement that is located beyond normal motor-sensory activity. A technically virtuosic performance, Houstoun recovers and plays with action from the place beyond physical control.

What is also remarkable about Happy Hour is that the spoken word dances as well, has the same qualities—half-formed, murmured, lost phrases and words, carefully chosen and deployed. When Houstoun invites us into the piece—“what’ll it be…what’s your poison…?”—her eccentric barmaid gestures swing and bounce along to the rhythm set by her words. These same gestures repeated with different dialogue become, not the habits of work, but a struggle; the ‘job’ becoming a problem under the weight of new discordant words. At another time, the precarious joke-telling skills of the inebriated give Houstoun a spoken rhythm of joke fragments that accompany her hysterical poses—“no…wait…wait… wait”, “this one’s going to kill you”, “what do you get…”, “this one will make you scream.” The failing, senseless joke ‘bits’ create a tragic pattern, an eternal parade of misplaced punchlines accompanied by desperate postures.

Like alcohol, Houstoun mutates from seductress to mate, from abuser to comforter, from sentimental to political. This happens as quickly as a drunk can ‘turn’, but it’s never as simple as this either. It’s always the transitory moment, the where-did-that-drink-go moment when logic dissolves and anything is possible. The improvisatory nature of the show heightens this giddy feeling. In Happy Hour, inebriation provides a model condition in which to move between these various states. Houstoun’s physical mastery recreates the malleable moment between confusion and realisation. A sentimental Houstoun builds up her friend—“you’re so lucky, you’ve got everything”—falling to pieces herself as she works through the list. A dance sequence with accompanying bites of conversation is repeated with reducing facility, Houstoun never losing control of her movement but the character losing a grip on her life.
In one of the final scenes, humanity’s ambiguous relationship to alcohol is given a striking image. Houstoun bounces herself out of the bar—“who do I think I am”, “if I knew what was good for me I’d head out that door right now”, “what do I think I’m looking at?”, “I’m not going to tell myself again.” At the Purcell Room, this scene was stretched to the limit, as was the joke scene, the discomforting pathos becoming painful in the way only a drunk can be.

The observational backbone and kind of realism that this brings to Happy Hour is shunted sideways by the sophisticated and intricate use of movement and text I’ve described. But, while the spoken word intrigues, it is Houstoun’s movement that seduces. The loose, malleable body of the drunk is combined with a skilful crafting of each ‘character’ that creates an uncanny effect—lost and found all at once. The peculiarities of Houston’s physicality carried across the work make this a journey and it’s our increasing familiarity with, and investment in, this particular way of moving that takes us with her. A delicate and minimal Hawaiian dance with a gentle rocking rhythm and repeated, intricate gestures that swing softly now, unlike her rather frantic barmaid dance, is dropped into this ‘bar scene’, as a quiet oasis. There is also a disturbingly lonely disco dance at the periphery of a spotlight.

When Houstoun announces that the bar’s closing and we have to leave, no-one wants to for fear of missing something. I’ve never felt an audience so caught in indecision. Should I stay or should I go? Maybe just one more for the road.

Maid To Drink presents Happy Hour, created and performed by Wendy Houstoun. Royal Festival Hall, London, September 28 – 29. Invitation-only performance, One Extra Dance Company, Ice Box, Sydney Jan 23.

The last decade has been marked by the convergence of many things, but one of the most interesting has been the convergence of art and digital technology. Artists working with new technologies have sought to familiarise themselves not just with the technical apparatus but with scientific theory as well. More generally, the explosion of interest in popularised science—including evolutionary theory, physics, neuroscience, chaos/complexity—has intensified awareness within the humanities of recent developments in science and technology. While academic post-structuralism now seems dated, lacking the persuasive power to reach a broader community, many non-science-based readers have at least a passing knowledge of debates within the scientific community on the nature of consciousness, or of time.

Various organisations have sought to facilitate the interaction of artists, theorists, scientists and technicians. Conference events such as the International Symposiums on Electronic Arts (ISEA) and Ars Electronica have drawn exponents together to show work and discuss ideas; in Australia, smaller-scale groups such as the Sydney-based New Media Forum have attempted a similar synthesis of art, theory and technology. In all these instances, ambition has been high, expectation even higher…and the realisation often not quite as elevated.

Perhaps the project has been simply too ambitious, or perhaps there exists a gulf between the artistic and scientific community that will never be breached (Einstein much preferred the music of Mozart to that of his Modernist peers Schoenberg and Stravinsky, while Cage, who dared to play dice with the musical universe, must have been a big no-no). Whatever the reason, none of the broad-based forums could be called an unqualified success, although they can produce stimulating, even exhilarating moments (ISEA’s best year was probably the Third International Symposium, TISEA, in 1992 in Sydney). Often the problem is that the open-minded approach of humanities exponents is not matched by the scientists, whose disciplines tend to be more narrowly defined.

A recent attempt at the art/technology synthesis was made by dLux media arts in the Immersive Conditions forum, held at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, in November. As part of dLux’s larger futureScreen program, which included exhibitions of new media works, this one-day forum concentrated on immersive technologies: virtual reality, artificial life, and various forms of interactive technology. The scope of the forum was admirably ambitious, bringing together artists, scientists, theorists and educationalists. Although virtual technologies no longer claim the media spotlight (now well and truly switched to the internet), there has been a long and fruitful intersection of artists and scientists in the field of computer-generated 3D technologies. Immersive Conditions was a successful attempt, for the most part, to illuminate the important aspects of this intersection.

A great strength of this forum was its structure. The proceedings took their cue from opening address by Dr Darren Tofts, Chair of Media and Communications at Swinburne University. Tofts’ presentation was that rare thing: a discussion of contemporary technologies within a historical and philosophical context. Moving from the familiar metaphor of Plato’s cave, Tofts traced an intellectual history of eidetic spaces, expressed in the mental constructions of the Roman ars memoria, and the inner spaces of memory related by St Augustine. This long theoretical tradition left Tofts impatient for a more fully realised immersive experience than the often clunky VR technology can generate; the goal is “the immediacy of the experience without the boredom of the conveyance” (Valery). Looking ahead, he advocated the pursuit of more elegant solutions to technological problems, with the fictional vaporware of “The Wire” in Kathryn Bigelow’s film Strange Days as a useful heuristic device; in theoretical terms he took a lead from the breakdown of the spectator/spectacle binary in quantum physics.

This presentation was an excellent opener for a forum of this kind, attentive to technology and aesthetics, machines and philosophy. Its hybrid approach embodied the potential of this convergent area. Almost as an aside, Tofts also questioned the helpfulness of the term “virtual reality”, suggesting as an alternative “apparent reality”: the substitute term embraces the sensation of presence, while acknowledging the awareness of “a here and there.”

Multimedia artist Justine Cooper followed with a discussion of her work within the theoretical context outlined by Tofts. Rapt comprises a virtual body generated by Magnetic Resonance Imaging, a technique which represents the body as axial slices (see RealTime 26, page 27). The various formats of Rapt (an installation version was exhibited at Artspace) allow the virtual body to be experienced both internally and externally. Cooper provided a useful interrogation of her work’s relation to contemporary medical science and technology, while positioning the objectification of the body within an historical framework (the mirror is a technology 5,000 years old).

The middle section of the forum was devoted to the benefits of research into computer-based technology. Dr Henry Gardner from the Computer Science department at ANU spoke wittily and enthusiastically about the “hot area” of immersive technologies, showcasing the WEDGE, Australia’s first walk-in VR theatre, installed for futureScreen in the Powerhouse. Sean Hart, on behalf of Professor Paula Swatman, represented RMIT’s I-cubed (the Interactive Information Institute), which pursues research projects in partnership with commercial ventures. While this presentation held limited interest for a general audience, it provided valuable information for artists working in multimedia and immersive technologies.

One such artist was Troy Innocent, who gave an enlightening account of his latest interactive work ICONICA. This work attracted much attention when exhibited at Artspace, although few users would have grasped its complexity. Innocent revealed some of that complexity, describing the work’s basis in artificial life research: the constructed world of ICONICA builds entities like DNA strings, comprising specific languages or codes. Intriguingly, users can ask these lifeforms what they are made of, and the creatures are only too happy to reply.

Not everything in Immersive Conditions gelled with the overall format. Dr Anna Cicognani from Sydney University missed an opportunity to develop the notion of cyberspace as a linguistic construct, which would have resonated with Troy Innocent’s work. However, dLux media arts director Alessio Cavallaro ended the forum on a high note, introducing fly-through video documentations of the Canadian artist Char Davies’ works Osmose and Éphémère. Davies’ sophisticated immersive virtual environments are probably the most celebrated achievements of this emerging art form; the insight into the recent Éphémère was particularly appreciated by the audience.

Immersive Conditions was a rewarding forum, certainly more successful than most attempts at the art/science synthesis. It also served to highlight the impressive level of achievement by Australian artists and scientists in this exciting field.

Immersive Conditions forum, presented in conjunction with the Powerhouse Museum, November 21; ICONICA, Troy Innocent, Artspace, Nov 12 – 28; part of futureScreen, organised by dLux media arts, Nov 12 – 28, 1998

A popular means of grasping life online has been via the lexicon of architecture. Given the overwhelming presence of architectural metaphors in describing cyberspace, it is inevitable that architectural critics should in turn reflect on the extent to which cyberspace is transforming architecture and its relationship to the human body. Digital Dreams by Neil Spiller (1998) is one of a growing number of architectural texts that maps this change.

Spiller is unequivocal in his assessment of this change. The architectural profession, he argues, is facing a future in which “advanced technologies, such as cyberspace, molecular and tissue engineering, genetics and the theories of complex systems, will drastically change our environment—and therefore our architecture.” However, unlike more skeptical architectural critics, such as M Christine Boyer, who regard this future as something of a crisis for architecture, Spiller embraces it as an “opening-up of a series of new spatial frontiers.” Moreover, in sketching these frontiers, Spiller foresees a range of metaphysical philosophies as the keys to building a future ‘online.’

Digital Dreams is Spiller’s ‘laboratory’, a textual space in which to examine this technologised future. Yet, like so many books purporting to chart a future in which “technological advances are currently contorting space beyond all recognisable limits”, Digital Dreams must first come to terms with the technologised space of the book.

Digital Dreams is structured in a ‘dialogic’ format with intersecting textual strands. The intention is a symbiotic relationship between the textual strands, with the meaning of one strand informed by a reading of the other. Unfortunately, though, for the most part the dialogic structure of the book does little in the way of “blurring the conceptual boundary between the two texts”, as is the stated intention. Even the overlaid titles sometimes read like naff Gen-X anti-advertising slogans—“Meaning in architecture is dead.”

The images that accompany the text are more successful. While primarily architectural in content, stylistically these images approximate digitally created Manga illustrations. This correlation is interesting in the light of Steven Johnson’s observation that computer games (and here one can add Anime) are where the future of virtual reality technologies are located. Whether or not this affiliation was a conscious design choice, the result is suggestive of Spiller’s greater comic book vision—the convergence of the technological and the biological in a future world, however absurd this vision might be (“nanotechnology will be able to produce Spidey and the Hulk for real”).

Like the formal aspects of the book, the content of Digital Dreams offers the reader a similarly mixed bag. As a commentary on future challenges to existing tenets of architectural theory and practice, Digital Dreams offers much that is thought provoking and fresh. For example, Spiller claims that the architect’s ability to “morph, mutate and hybridise” three-dimensional representational images in the ‘cyberspace’ of computer software renders obsolete the ‘form follows function’ dictum of architecture.

A second, equally charged suggestion is that emergent spatial environments (and architectures) will ultimately explode the classical notion of the Vitruvian ideal of the body. “Architecture as we know it is to a large extent influenced by the scale of our bodies,” he writes. “In the future this scale will not remain consistent.”

While the challenges faced by architecture in a technologised future are ostensibly the topic of the book (and one that, for the most part, is competently handled), the real theme is actually the technologised future itself. Digital Dreams is in equal parts a prediction of the manifold and untold ways in which ‘advanced technologies’ will transform the future, and a celebration of these changes. Unfortunately, however, it is as a soothsayer of a technologised, cyberspatial future that Spiller is at his least convincing. Spiller’s position on spirituality and cyberspace is a revealing example.

It is a curious irony of the computer age—an age closely aligned with postmodern philosophies that blithely proclaim the ‘death of (Enlightenment) God’—that so much attention should be paid to defining some sort of metaphysical, or spiritual dimension to cyberspace. Much recent work explicitly examines this, including critiques by Barry Sherman and Phil Judkins, Michael Heim, David Whittle, Douglas Rushkoff, and the more traditional Douglas Groothius. Add to these Spiller’s Digital Dreams.

The (non)place of traditional, Western religion in a post-human digital future forms a leitmotif in Digital Dreams. “As the body changes, so will religion”, Spiller claims. In rejecting traditional, organised Western religion, Spiller (after Rushkoff) suggests that the best (spiritual) guide to cyberspace is nevertheless one who is fully immersed in some sort of transcendental aesthetic. Unfortunately, however, all that Spiller can offer as a religious alternative amounts to little more than a cobbled-together amalgam of voodoo, shamanistic teaching, Aboriginal Dreamtime mythology, and alchemy. As a paradigm for a new metaphysics (read religion) of cyberspace, it is ill conceived and unconvincing—little more than a high-gloss, repackaged form of pop religious pluralism. For a new and uniquely ‘cyberspatial’ religion, we are still waiting.

Moreover, Spiller merely pays lip service to the aforementioned philosophies. The true religion of Digital Dreams is Spiller’s unabashed ‘techno-boosterism’ (to borrow Steven Johnson’s phrase). And, if techno-boosterism is the religion, then nanotechnology is the church, Eric Drexler the prophet, and Drexler’s Engines of Creation the bible through which Spiller divines the future. Spiller believes that when it comes to the future of architecture and humanity “Nano holds the key.”
Indeed, the second half of Digital Dreams reads like a veritable nano manifesto in which Spiller extols the virtues of nanotechnology for shaping the future. “We are on the cusp of the Nanolithic Age: at the beginning of Nanotime.” The transformative potential of this technology reaches its apotheosis in the end-time—what Spiller terms the Protoplasmic Age, a Promethean vision: “when virtual reality becomes real, the liberation of the bit is complete.”

Spiller’s ‘digital dreams’ openly embrace the possibility of a post-human, cyborgian future—even to the point of describing those who balk at some advances in surgery and robotics as ‘flesh chauvinists’ and ‘flesh Luddites.’ Needless to say, according to Spiller such a post-human future will only be possible if we are prepared to participate in “visceral escapology”—escape from the prison of the flesh.

Digital Dreams is not short on dogma or polemic. While certain minor qualifications are made, the fiercely techno-boosterist line that is pushed in Digital Dreams leaves little room for critical evaluation or circumspection; it is this lack of critical distance that is the book’s main weakness. As an architectural text, Digital Dreams offers much; as a blueprint for the future, it leaves a lot to be desired.

Neil Spiller, Digital Dreams: architecture and the new alchemic technologies, Ellipsis, London, 1998

No matter how hard one tries to ridicule multimedia, interactivity and online presence, there are trillions of real estate agents, CompSci students, Star Trek fans, cyberpunks, digital artists and WIRED subscribers to whom such sarcastic folly falls on deaf ears. To the list of Christians, parents and junkies, we now must add ‘digitalists’ as yet another sub-species of rabid, compulsive fundamentalists whose enlightened state is “I just don’t understand.” Like, if I don’t believe in God, how can I understand Christianity? If I haven’t had a kid, how can I really speak about social concern? If I haven’t taken smack, how can I say it’s bad?

Ian Haig’s Web Devolution—subtitled a “Digital Evangelist Web Cult Project”—firmly and deftly targets this incredulous mania of belief which has caused otherwise rational persons to make the most outrageous, extravagant and embarrassing claims for ‘new technologies.’ Presented as an installation, Web Devolution set itself up as a crackpot media station positioned in the centre of the gallery. Its ugly vertical assemblage resembled a mutation between a monstrously customised ghettoblaster, a Santiero altar, a Christian zealot’s placard and a homeless person’s commandeered shopping trolley. Cheap loudspeakers played a barrage of digitally processed noise (expertly crafted by electroacoustic composer Philip Samartzis) which served to intensify the effect of the station being a broadcast beacon desperately drawing all toward its higher cause of cyberbabble. Festooned with grafittied slogans and scraps of logo images, this was less an art object offered to further creativity in new technologies and more a piece of junk vomited forth from the overproduction of crappy new media art.

The actual online project lay buried in a maze of frantically flashing links displayed on a monitor nestled amongst this noisy pile of garbage. Once online, one truly gets lost in a world of sloganeering that evokes the balderdash of everyone from Negroponte to Stelarc to Leary to Lucas. The targets are obvious—Star Wars, Heaven’s Gate, Mastercard, Yahoo—but it truly is fun to know that when you click on a link labelled “Chewbacca” that right there is the punch line. You either get it or you don’t. Similar dumb jokes are embedded in the visual/iconic/linguistic hyper-narrative of the project: links go nowhere, images are grunge-res, mystical passwords are void, pull down menus give absurd options, animated GIFs flash their nothingness. All these non-sequitur pathways constitute a colon of digital Babel which is less concerned with contemplating the higher states of consciousness achieved by online/interactive exchange and more intent on reflecting the deluded aimlessness so typical of web navigation. Referencing Devo’s theory of devolution and its sardonic reflection of cultural exchange, Web Devolution celebrates the retrogressive puerility which lies at the heart of the nerdy ponderousness we call ‘being digital.’

But don’t miss the point here. Like anyone who has looked realistically at the digital and/or online technologies we have used for at least 8 years (and sound people have the jump on all you eyeballers), Haig is not a Neo-Luddite. Technology is all around us. Plumbing, road maintenance and air travel are complex marvels of human ingenuity and chaotic organisation—but I ain’t signing up for a 3-day conference on radical re-inventions of S-bends. Whereas so much New Media Art quite pathetically imports some ‘heavy concept’ via a few scanned images and hypertext links with hot buttons (take your pick of ‘hot topics’: surveillance, the body, medical science, glitches, crash, viruses, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, the city, consumerism, corporate control, ecology, etc), Web Devolution astutely probes the hysterical and frighteningly uncritical support of the most banal effects of new technologies.

Ian Haig, Web Devolution, game theory, Experimenta, Span Galleries, Melbourne, July 6 – 18, 1998

It was another strange Canberra summer’s evening. The sun was hanging low in the sky and there was a strong cooling wind as we drove along the lane to the Old Canberra Brickworks. We were given a map and a torch for our journey, and so set off to experience Spices—the latest project for Clare Dyson and Rachel Jennings. It began with sustained stillness. Five individuals sat, backs to us, on an old pergola-like structure; their visual backdrop the trees and their aural backdrop the rustling leaves and bird calls prompted by the setting sun. Beneath them: still water and a line of brick stepping stones through the pool. When movement began, it was slow and gentle—rolling, torsos hanging over the edge, a lifting of legs. Then one of the more resonant motifs of the work—the kicking and dropping of stones into the pool below. From here, the work heightened our awareness of the workings of our senses and the relationship between sense and memory. We later moved through a brick passageway and passed by a series of isolated vignettes: a representation of lust and desire, with a blindfolded woman caressed and whispered to by 2 others; a woman sucking from passionfruit, spitting the luscious flesh onto her thigh and then smearing it over her skin. It is the communication between artist and audience that is so well-developed in Spices. The use of water and fire, the fresh smells of passionfruit and lemons, and the placement of voice and song, light and darkness. Our journey is a completely sensory one. It is Dyson and Jenning’s keen awareness of the power of detail through these elements that connects with their audience. With its combination of superb design by Jennings—so well-placed in this setting—and Dyson’s interrogation of movement and gesture, Spices has a deeper, more personal connection. This is soul food.

Spices, created and directed by Clare Dyson and Rachel Jennings, a choreographic fellowship with the Choreographic Centre, old Canberra Brickworks, Yarralumla, Dec 9 – 13, 15 – 17

The biennial antistatic dance festival will be held March 24-April 11 at The Performance Space and is curated this year by Sue-ellen Kohler, Ros Crisp and Zane Trow.

antistatic 99 aims to foster critical debate and enquiry into contemporary dance practice in Australia. In particluar it looks at differences between practices and the values that underpin them. What kinds of work do dancers and choreographers want to make and why? And what is the cultural, historical and international context of their work?

Artists presenting work at the event include Trotman & Morish, Helen Herbertson, Jude Walton, Rose Warby, Alan Schacher, Rosalind Crisp, DeQuincy/Lynch, Jeff Stein, Tony Yap, Yumi Umiumare, Susie Fraser, Julie Humphreys and Helen Clarke-Lapin. International guest artists Jennifer Monson, Ishmael Houston-Jones and Lisa Nelson will all present workshops and performances. The Oaks Cafe/Cassandra’s Dance, a new work by Russell Dumas’ Dance Exchange kicks off the festival at The Studio, Sydney Opera House.

Forum talks will be presented by artists, writers and academics including Sally Gardiner, Susan Leigh Foster, Julie-Anne Long and Virginia Baxter, Anne Thompson, Eleanor Brickhill. There are also installations and screenings from Margie Medlin, Adrienne Doig, Tracie Mitchell and others.

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February 1999

realtime