Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

February 2001

Publications relevant to the sound arts are cropping up with increasing frequency, but not necessarily within earshot. A real gem from the past couple of years is the catalogue from Terry Fox’s exhibition at the Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken in 1998. Fox’s work is similar to Joseph Beuys or the earlier Vito Acconci, but much gentler. He has worked primarily in performance and installation, and his Children’s Tapes (1974) is one of the most outstanding videos from that period. He has become known over the years for his sly spiritual attention to sound which is detailed in this catalogue (book), Terry Fox: Works with Sound, in German and English from Kehrer Verlag in Heidelberg. Matthias Osterwold, now at The Institute for Music and Acoustics at ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst and Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe) has written an excellent essay for the catalogue and descriptions of the works are very informative. The ATARAXIA compact disc is included, which has also been available independently.

Speaking of ZKM, as part of their “digital arts editions” they have published a wonderful CD-ROM called Small Fish: Chamber Music with Images for Computer and Player by Kiyoshi Furukawa, Masaki Fujihata and Wolfgang Münch (available from Hatje Cantz Verlag, www.hatjecantz.de). The child-like sensibility of Paul Klee, e. e. cummings or Satie come to mind when encountering this work, so too their subtlety and sophistication. In fact, it was a gift to my 8-year-old daughter (she loves it) before I became addicted to it, composing innumerable chamber pieces and soundtracks late into the night. Furukawa’s music and Fujihata’s graphics seem to encapsulate so many styles of the 20th century—a little constructivism here, 30s percussion music there—but never seem derivative, and the interaction is effortless and engaging, with new devices becoming obvious as time goes by, thanks to Münch’s programming. This past year it has been a real favourite among my media arts students at UTS.

The Wire magazine from London is often a good place to get information but, then again, they just discovered sound art a year ago. The way they announced it, you would think it hadn’t really existed before. This is odd because only a few years ago I attended a conference in Sunderland that had the explicit purpose of introducing England to sound and radio art. Perhaps that was too far north of London? Plagued by the conservatism of the BBC and bereft of the type of institutions here amenable to the sound arts, England has not been a hub of activity. Meanwhile, Australia has the most solid tradition of sound arts and theory in the Anglophone world and is into at least a third generation of artists and writers.

The Wire is mainly musical, but as they exhaust certain areas they move on to others. The move to include sound art was signaled when David Toop, a resident journalist with the mag, wrote an ill-informed article. This proved to be a dry-run for his catalogue essay for Sonic Boom, the sound art show at the Hayward Gallery in London, which he curated. This second essay shows a bit more thought but there’s still little familiarity with how the sound arts have developed in the past couple of decades, or the issues and opportunities artists confronted. The show is heavily weighted towards musicians, some with little or no prior exhibition experience, and not one Australian is included. (A similar thing happened a few years ago with the big German show Sonambiente, its coffee table catalogue in German from Prestel entitled Klangkunst.) While the show had some notable pieces, the consensus fell behind Christian Marclay’s Guitar Drag, a video of a live electric guitar being dragged behind a pick-up truck on a dirt road in Texas—the meanings, like bits of the guitar itself, fly off in every direction, but stem primarily from the incident in which an African-American man was murdered a few years ago in the same manner. The catalogue (available from the gallery’s website, www.hayward-gallery.org.uk), apparently meant as a souvenir, is inadequate as a source of information, although the two audio CDs included almost merit a purchase.

Finally, the latest issue (no. 5, Fall 2000) of the Baltimore arts journal LINK includes a CD worth chasing down (www.baltolink.org). Curated by Steve Bradley, a media artist who runs the net radio art@radio, the CD contains some old stalwarts—Charles Amirkhanian, Susan Stone, Francis Dhomont—as well as a number of very interesting artists from the Baltimore area. Many of the pieces attend faithfully to the issue’s special theme of hysteria and none are more hysterical than David Snow and Peter Kougasian’s Freud in Konzert, an archival recording of Freud (speaking in English no less) when he was a stand-up comic playing the “small clubs and Wursthäuser along the Tyrolean ‘Schnitzel Belt’”, as the artists explain in their notes. The recording reveals that he is facing a tough house, their difficulty with his jokes arising no doubt from not having read his book on the topic, an unfazed Sigmund gesticulating his cigar like Groucho.

Among others, Christian Marclay will be part of Art/Music: rock, pop, & techno at Sydney’s MCA with performances at The Studio, Sydney Opera House, March 21-June 24.

RealTime issue #41 Feb-March 2001 pg. 34

Cazerine Barry

Melbourne new media artist and dancer Cazerine Barry began producing performance and film in the late 1980s and founded the company Multi Dimensional Performance Enhancer in 1994. In 1997 she was awarded an Asialink residency at the National Institute of the Arts in Taiwan. In 1998 she directed HELP:the remix, a 3D projected aerial dance work and Separate at Earth, a performance with transparent screens where projected video images represented characters in a disintegrating family. She has recently completed an Australia Council New Media Arts Fund residency at Canberra’s Choreographic Centre culminating in Great Fakes, which she describes as “a condensed marathon simultaneously testing both sides of my brain.

“The objective was to examine the volumetric precepts of actual space and their relationship with 2D image projection. Monitoring the relationship between the design of the projection surface area with the ratio, scale and dimension of the projected image allowed me to create seemingly 3D spaces from a single video source…The outcome allows performers to move freely about illuminated sets which can transform their appearance. The sets are adjustable to combine a multitude of image-related shapes consisting of foreground, middle and background divisions. The resulting image-driven environments create magical, illusionary places that behave as metaphors of habitat for the dramatic intent of the work.”

The full production of Cazerine’s work Sprung can be seen at the L’Attitude dance event at the Brisbane Powerhouse in September 2001. Currently, Cazerine is researching the facilitation of digital media integration in performing arts internationally thanks to the Ewa Czajor Memorial Award 2000. RT

RealTime issue #41 Feb-March 2001 pg. 27

Trisha Dunn, Mad Sky

photo Paul Scambler

Trisha Dunn, Mad Sky

In HYPER_mobile, a recent TasDance highlight, artistic director Annie Greig presented the work of 4 important young choreographers, including 2 locally based artists, Michael O’Donoghue and Fiona Reilly, working with an augmented company of 7 dancers. Linking the 4 short works was the hypermobility of the dancers’ bodies, choreographed distinctively and with panache.

HYPER_mobile opens with Lucy Guerin’s Gift, initially commissioned for a Chunky Move presentation at a Melbourne dance club. The 5 dancers are clad, or decorated, in cellophane. The wrapping and unwrapping of this bright, shiny but ultimately ephemeral material, accompanied by energetic group and solo movement (to eclectic music), clearly speaks of “image”, the “packaging and commodification of the body” as the program puts it. There is also some intriguing use of gaffer tape as the male dancer is temporarily immobilised. Simple elements used to great effect and a sustained, unbridled energy level make Gift an infectious work.

Mad Sky, choreographed by Anna Smith in collaboration with the 7 dancers, explores “underlying tensions creating a whirlwind of electric energy before the point of downpour”—a black-costumed, dimly lit beginning where working in pairs, then groups, the dancers use running, floorwork and falling sideways onstage from the wings to capture the ambience of an imminent thunderstorm—a sudden end neatly evokes the unpredictability of the storm’s arrival.

In Michael O’Donoghue’s exotic and successful counterpoint, Fantasy Masquerade, 2 pairs of dancers (with the occasional nod to classical, Spanish and ballroom dance) convey many changes of mood and music as the subtexts and implications of a fancy dress ball are accurately explored. In Fiona Reilly’s Nursery Mimes, the dancers, dressed as toys and dolls, are made tiny by an oversized bed and props. An acrobatic performance with slapstick antics and the odd sad moment make for a satisfying evocation of childhood fantasy.

–

HYPER_mobile, TasDance, choreographers Lucy Guerin, Anna Smith, Michael O’Donoghue, Fiona Reilly, performers Tara Bollard, Joel Corpuz, Trisha Dunn, Lisa Griffiths, Leanne Mason, Kirstie McCracken, Ryan Mortimer; Earl Arts Centre, Launceston, November 9-11; Collegiate Performing Arts Centre, Hobart, November 16-18

RealTime issue #41 Feb-March 2001 pg. 28

Igneous, The Hands Project

An obvious thing about people is that over time they change. Babies not only grow bigger but they also develop; into children, then young adults, and then older ones. Hands grow: remember trying to put on your mother’s nail polish when you were 4, playing jacks as a 10 year old, or the calluses which grew on your fingertips when you first started playing guitar? What about the feel of silk, the touch of lover, a slap in the face? Hands do more things now than they did 100 years ago, do things differently in this country than in others less computerised. People do not wave their hands about quite so much here, or get them callused in quite the same way. Children use finely tuned motor skills for playing tiny computer games, instead of larger muscle groups for more expansive activities.

One impetus that Suzon Fuks and James Cunningham have had, as artistic directors of The Hands Project, is the idea that groups of performers and audiences alike tend to be rather homogenous and don’t properly reflect real human difference. The Hands Project offers a cast widely differing in age, background and capacity, a profusion of ideas, a tumble of images reflecting, above all, human diversity as expressed through the hands: from the fine needlecraft of an elderly woman embroidering to a baby’s tenacious grip; from the particular expertise of an able-bodied dancer to the manifold dexterity of a one armed/legged woman; from the clinical slap and scrutiny of a researcher to a lover’s lingering caress.

It’s likely that this profusion creates both richness and difficulty for the audience, who need to constantly change their focus and position in the space, simultaneously avoiding members of the cast and each other, and mobile slide projectors, while keeping track of a complex stream of images created by soundscape, lighting, slide and video projections and live performance, much of which might occur simultaneously in different rooms. The spaces between bodies (yours, 2 lovers on a bed, little boys chasing each other brandishing prosthetic arms like swords) and images (a moving car, looming silhouettes, a baby’s hand too large for comfort) start to narrow and fill with noise, until you realise that this is a microcosm, a day in the life of…, a street full of apartments with no facades, rooms with people sleeping, working, playing, in pain and in love, simply living, touching and holding onto things with a sliding scale of intensity and purpose and a variety of grips.

Some of the ideas work better than others. There are the ‘researchers’ with white lab coats, clipboards and severe demeanour, who create an unintentional but pervasive atmosphere of ominous disquiet throughout the piece. They might have been mad doctors wielding mind-altering drugs to helpless inmates, but they seem definitely in control, directing our attention one way or another as they silently observe and take notes. The best images are often quite simple: an Alice-in-Wonderland illusion is created when a dancer (Eddie Kay) enters onto a doll-sized raised platform through a small, half-concealed doorway behind it. This corner is constructed to create a false perspective against which another film image of a woman is projected. She seems to inhabit the space, walking in and out, as if 3-dimensional. Later in the work, a young boy begins a vividly eloquent sequence where he is palpably being tickled; we can feel and see his helpless giggling, mounting hysteria, and then the sudden crossing of some invisible line where helplessness turns into serious anger and retaliation.

The Hands Project, its Sydney showing a further incarnation of work first presented in October 1999 in Lismore, is indeed a ‘work in progress’, and it’s conceivable that it might stay this way for a while longer, as the material which Igneous is attempting to embrace seems potentially infinite. While the human body itself draws our attention to its own condition, our hands are often our most eloquent communicators and agents for change, without which we are still in many ways mute.

The Hands Project, Igneous, Centre for Performance Studies, University of Sydney, Jan 26-28.

RealTime issue #41 Feb-March 2001 pg. 27

Richard Giblett is a traveller, and as a practicing artist of 10 years he has moved through artforms as varied as landscape photography and ephemeral installation to detailed drawing and sculpture, his work largely informed by several years of nomadism, and exploration of predominantly Asian countries. Currently Giblett is preparing to transplant himself and his practice to Korea for an Asialink residency at Ssamzie Space in Seoul, the 4 month residency arising from the consolidation of elements in his work in 2 recent group exhibitions, Playtime at the Fremantle Arts Centre and Chiasm at PICA.

I had this impression that Asialink supported artists researching specific, traditional artforms…so I was surprised that you were chosen for the Korean residency.

The Korean residency really stood out at Ssamzie Space. Basically because it’s a new experimental art foundation in Seoul…a 7 storey building with about 3 gallery spaces. From what I’ve read it’s a fairly cutting-edge gallery situation, and they exhibit a lot of performance work, video, new media. It’s also located near a university, which forms a kind of cultural hub.

When you were studying at Curtin in the late 80s, the work you were producing was site-specific, documented installation…quite ephemeral. I still consider that your current practice is dealing with many of the same issues, of impermanency…only the materiality and scale is object-based.

I did a lot of work where I would gently intrude in an environment…that was probably a lot more popular back then, but it didn’t feel authentic because I didn’t live there. I’m working through those processes in a way, but using the urban landscape instead. If there’s to be an underlying theme to what I do, I suppose it’s all about the disintegration of things. So I did those initial works in the environment with natural materials which would eventually just disappear.

Giblett has spent the last few years redefining his position and practice within the urban landscape by developing work around the objects and imagery of the everyday. His most recent work has involved the life-sized replication in cardboard of a skip bin, an escalator and a set of security cameras, and the continuation of a series of intricately detailed drawings of urban and corporate environments including libraries, gaming arcades and views of the city from office windows.

In terms of material for my large drawings it’s difficult to find a space that really resonates, but I know it when I see it. So I’ll take a slide photograph, project the slide and work by turning the projector on and off, drawing from one corner, top to bottom. It’s quite a boring sort of exercise really…boring image of a boring space, but they’re environments that we all inhabit at some point. It was only after I’d finished the Tokyo Wars (an arcade game) drawing that I realised they were all representations of places where people sit in individual, enclosed areas. There is another drawing that I want to do which sort of deals with the same thing, but is a bit more gruesome in a way. In the new CTEC centre at the University of Western Australia, there’s a state of the art room where they basically dissect cadavers. I went down and took some photos. It’s just all of these tables with lights and high-tech computers everywhere…a really loaded space, just a place to look at the dead.

I was interested in the way that these works identified the physically isolating aspects of technology and over-designed environments, as opposed to the romantic discourse of unity and bringing people together that’s often used to promote them.

Isolation is definitely an issue I’m pursuing, and I think the idea is present in some of the other works…like the skip-bin and the escalator.

From working on a smaller scale, with vastly different materials, how did you come to commence this body of work with cardboard?

Basically I saw a skip bin one day down the end of an alleyway, full of cardboard boxes, and I had the idea to use it. There was something about the object, the thing, that I liked. So I just thought it would be great to transform the bin, and make the inside the outside. As I began working I realised it was a great material, you can do a lot with it, it’s free, very easy to cut and it’s quite strong and you can layer it like wood. The cardboard was obviously really important to that bin but for the other things I just wanted that uniform look. It becomes a model, only life-size, of the real thing. They’re works that are useless re-presentations of useful things…they just sit there.

The work is disabling in the context of the gallery because all the objects you have made sit so comfortably within it. Despite, or even due to, their imposing scale and the rigour of their making, punters will still leave their wine-glasses on them, try to mount them…or in the case of the security cameras, fail to even see them. I suppose…they expose the patterns of behaviour we develop to interface with changing technologies.

The idea of taking a banal object like an escalator, which for me is an integral part of your first experience of a new place, and re-making it expresses the experience of being both comforted and scared of it as well. The escalator somehow embodies modernity in a way…it’s basically just a set of stairs, which have been around for thousands of years, but it’s also something entirely different.

A large part of my new work is about replication and the idea of super-modernism…where everyone wants to look the same, and the same things are shipped all over the world in this global commodity exchange. You could land in the middle of any city and you wouldn’t know where you were…eventually you would recognize difference through language, but in a department store you could be anywhere. I was talking with someone who’s been to Seoul a few times and asked him what it was like, and he just said “Oh it’s a funny place, it’s a lot like anywhere else really.” I thought that was great. It’s just a big modern city…which is what I was after.

Richard Giblett’s residency is an Asialink project supported by the Australia Korea Foundation and the Australia Council.

(L to R) John Rodgers & Jeffrey Erbacher (Hydromys Chrysogaster), Jill Barker, Jay Younger (Curator) and Jeremy Hynes. (Adam Donovan is currently overseas)

Queensland’s new Centre of Contemporary Arts, due for completion in July 2001, is one of the winners in a state government initiative, Art Built-in which requires capital works projects worth over $250,000 to allocate 2% of the budget to public art. Curator Jay Younger and artists Jill Barker, Adam Donovan, Jeremy Hynes, and Hydromys Chrysogaster’s John Rodgers and Jeffrey Erbacher were selected by Arts Queensland to develop a collaborative, integrated artwork suitable for the Centre of Contemporary Arts. Barbara Bolt talks with Jay Younger (JY) and commissioned artists Jill Barker (JB) and John Rodgers (JR) about the progress of the project.

JY There is a long history of relating architecture to the body and that became useful to me to think about public art and how to integrate it with the building as a whole. I envisaged the building as the body and the public art as the prosthesis. I didn’t want to see public art as being static, permanent ‘plonk’ art that becomes irrelevant in a certain time frame. One of the major aims was to create an infrastructure that could actually show temporal work. Work will be programmed into the infrastructure for a certain lifespan and then other artists who show casework in the space can use that infrastructure.

JB Because we were able to work with the architects before the building was renovated, we actually looked at things that could be absolutely built into the building, for example videos and screens. And then the art, the content, becomes something that you plug in. If the art that we make for that infrastructure can be plugged into it, then so can any other work…art the tenants want to insert while our work is running, or afterwards, or a combination of both. It makes it very flexible.

While the project was designed as a collaborative one, the selected artists didn’t have a history of working together; in fact, they didn’t all know each other. What motivated the choice of participating artists and how did you imagine they would work together?

JY It became a question of looking at the various kinds of skills and trying to get differences in terms of disciplines, philosophy and ways of working. For example, one of the things that interested the Public Art Advisory Group (PAAG) was Jill’s minimalist aesthetic and her restrained approach to relating her work to the body. Some of the artists are quite excessive in the way they produce. When you draw together a number of people who wouldn’t necessarily produce an homogenous result, there are tensions and conflicts and agreements and strange kinds of things that go on between these different ideas and people and ways of working. You don’t have control; the result can never be something you would predict because of the way it takes you somewhere else.

JB The work is minimal, but I don’t know that I’d call myself a minimalist. I just think everyone else is maximalist. I guess my work is economical, finding the simplest way of doing things. I think I edit a lot before anything actually happens and in that way there is an economy.

How then did you as an “economical” artist negotiate working with artists who could be seen as excessive or maximalist?

JB I think part of it is generosity, going in there fairly open and talking about things and then seeing what happens and interests people. I try not to have very defined intentions. That’s part of the economy of working. It doesn’t help to have your intentions already formed at certain points.

JB I think that’s really important. At some point it is a matter of holding up everything as a possibility and at other points obviously some of those possibilities have to coalesce, become probabilities or definite. It is knowing when to do that, when to hold everything up in the air.

JY It becomes a really interesting situation though when it is about the polarities of where something is solid and where something is fluid. I guess in terms of collaborative process, people may be reticent to take control or be seen to be overbearing. While the artists all have collaborative experiences, the one formed here is unique. The artists decide what is acceptable and what is not. A particular approach is created between the participants and a specific process and language emerges.

JR We had an impossibly small introduction to each other’s work and that’s all in some cases that we knew. And then we spent 2 weeks around a table bringing stuff in, talking about it. And at the end, it did have a shape.

JB We actually came up with quite a number of proposals of various kinds so we didn’t fix on the final work at that point.

In the conceptual phase you can imagine anything, you can afford to be generous. What happens when it comes to decision time?

JB At that point we went to a meeting with the Public Art Advisory Group and the tenants.

JR We did come up with the notion of ghosting and that’s how it managed to hang itself together. ‘Intangibility’ or ‘ghosting’ seemed to cover the range of things people wanted to work with. My media, sound, is a perfect one for something that is very intangible. Because there were plug-ins, we wanted it to be something that was changing and ethereal and resonating.

JB It also seemed to connect with the nature of the building and its history, and the idea of bodies ghosting is like the final prosthetic, the final prosthesis of the body: the last thing that is left of the body could be thought to be a ghost. We weren’t really thinking of it in terms of ghost quite so literally, so we chose the word ‘ghosting.’

JY I guess it is about form mutating, something that might have been solid at one point has become intangible.

JB We were also linking it to the idea of contemporary art in the sense that what art is, is really hard to pin down. We then prioritised the ideas which seemed to have some kind of flow through the building, conscious of how they would operate for visitors entering the public spaces. The infrastructure for the works is like a haunting of the building.

JR You mean, what you would actually experience entering the space? The obvious thing is the video ghost, which involves a large sloping glass wall as you walk into the building. Behind this glass wall presumably there will be a restaurant. A video image reflects down onto this glass from the ceiling and you experience this as a reflection a further distance behind the glass…a ‘ghostingly’ real presence in the restaurant.

JB It can be programmed video material interacting with live performance with sound in 3 dimensions in the space.

Tos Mahoney has been doing his part for the last 20 years to sculpt, pursue, organise and otherwise conjure up new music for the public of Perth. Mahoney became involved with new music as a musician, playing impros on the flute with Jon Rose, Lindsey Vickery and others. His shift to administration began with the organisation of improvised music festivals in 1985 and 1986. “Or was that 84/85?”, Mahoney seems unclear. “It was a long time ago. I was doing some things before that. It was an incredibly energetic time…and then EVOS got created.

“EVOS was a new music organisation, a management structure. Specifically, EVOS was about putting on new music. It had concert series, residencies and commissioned work, radio work, things like that.”

What began in the mid 80s (Tos Mahoney trading as EVOS Music) quickly developed into a substantial incorporated body providing support and funding for new music practitioners as well as developing the local audience base. Then, in the mid 90s, EVOS sank; triennial funding, inaugural Australian Music Centre award and all. Down but not drowned, Mahoney did a name change. “One of the most sensible financial decisions I’ve ever made”, says Mahoney, “a few dollars, a new name and we had a brand new organisation.” A pause. “Well, sort of. It was definitely a new direction, different people.”

The new company was, and continues to be, Tura Events and Mahoney is on the board of management. The Mahoney/Tura combo began with the first Totally Huge New Music Festival, now heading into its 4th year. Tura has also successfully established Club Zho, the regular locus for the public performance of new music in Perth. With a monthly gig at the Monkey Bar, a Northbridge hotel, it has recently hosted performances by Ross Bolleter, Axis 21 (directed by Lindsay Vickery) and percussion ensemble Tetrafide as well as the electro-acoustic of David Wardell and the noise of Cat Hope. Eclectic.

Mahoney insists that Club Zho be open to new and untried work. “Otherwise, what’s the point. That’s what we’re here for, not just new music but new new music.” This policy has resulted in the occasional disappointment. “Yeah sure, with untried work, with new music, with impro in particular, you’re going to have a few duds.”

An example of success is Hannah Clemen whose sliding ambient soundscapes are given an industrial edge when she collaborates with Petro Vouris, a sculptor-turned-musician whose concrete music proclivities are balanced by a dry and incisive humour. Clemen’s current direction is towards further investigation of psychoacoustics and the human body’s physiological responses to sound. Both Clemen and Vouris have worked extensively at Lindsey Vickery’s Studio for Research in Performance Technology at the Western Australian Conservatorium of Music.

With the fourth Totally Huge New Music Festival arriving at the beginning of April, Mahoney is showing some signs of disenchantment with his administrative role, evasive when asked about his motivation to continue as the festival’s CEO, and in reply only quips, “…because I never really got a proper qualification…” (In 2000 he had to withdraw from a Master of Arts course due to the pressure of the festival.) “I don’t think I’d do any of it if I hadn’t been a new music practitioner. That gave me a lot of passion for the creation of it…the lack of opportunities for both audience and practitioners to experience new music was, and still is (despite Totally Huge) ridiculous.” After thoughtfully looking around the room he concludes, “Another year then.”

His diffidence about his position as CEO is not reflected in his supreme enthusiasm for the festival’s artistic content. Each year has built upon the success of the previous. Last year involved 97 local artists, 14 from interstate and 5 from overseas in 103 performance pieces. This year sees Ikue Mori return to Australia with her cinematic sampling, voice and electronic synthesis. Jon Rose will present a new mass violin and sampler work to be performed at Wogarno Station. Other overseas artists include Canadian multi-instrumentalist duo Derome Hetu and Mike Cooper from the UK. Interstate sound installation artists Philip Samartzis and Rik Rue are also performing/presenting.

“The most exciting part,” says Mahoney, “besides some specific events, is the festival’s eclecticism. The clashes and tensions that that creates are exciting—obviously things like (Jon Rose’s) Violin Factory because it involves so many people. It’s bringing a whole new audience, a whole new bunch of players to the festival, and new music itself…and then you extend that to the regional environmental event (at Wogarno Station). What do I say about Ikue Mori? When did you last experience her playing live, let alone be able to talk with her?”

Beyond the festival, Tura Events has funding for a concert series of chamber music featuring local and other Australian composers. In May, Tura and Magnetic Pig are co-producing Lindsey Vickery’s opera noir Rendezvous. Underway is the commissioning of radiophonic works for 2002.

“I find the art of programming quite exciting. The who and what goes next to each other is a creative process in itself. I’d always like to keep my finger in that a bit. But I’d like to gradually withdraw from the managerial, administrative side. I am a practitioner, although not so much in recent years. That’s something I’m going to return to.”

First up is a gig in January with his long time colleague and friend Ross Bolleter. The rest, he says, “…hasn’t been firmed up yet…”

Rosalind Page’s Macula lutea, dedicated to flautist Kathleen Gallagher, was inspired by the artwork and writings of Wassily Kandinsky. “Envisaged as an allegory of light, time and colour, the piece draws not only from the visual arts but also from concepts arising in the fields of astronomy, opthalmology and analytical trigonometry”. The work shared the prize at the 1999 Sydney Spring Music Festival for the Most Outstanding New Composition. In the scheme of things Rosalind Page’s reward came with the accolades of her peers. She added the award to her CV and moved on to the next composition. Another world premiere, another good Australian idea shelved for posterity.

However, along with an increasing number of composers and musicians, Rosalind Page is interested in presenting new music beyond the one-off premiere in second, third and more performances. As well as wanting to reach a wider audience, they are anxious to explore different arrangements, to include other instruments. She says, “A composition should be like the cosmos—in a constant state of evolution and flux.”

In Celestial Sites and Sounds, an evening of compositions with astronomical and cosmological connections, Sydney audiences have a chance to hear new work by Australian composers including a piece for amplified solo cello by Damien Ricketson. As well as revisiting Macula lutea, Rosalind Page contributes Extrema: A Galilean Sarabande—a hypothetical journey to Jupiter, accompanied by Kandinsky and Bach, composed for cellist Geoffrey Gartner. She also sets to music two poems by the Surrealist Apollinaire. Nathan Wilson’s new solo piano piece, Heartbroken Glass, will be performed by Clemens Leske and another composition winner of Most Outstanding Composition at the Sydney Spring Festival of 1998, Ian Shanahan, presents his work for alto flute Dimensiones Paradisi. The program also includes works by Peter Sculthorpe and Claude Debussy.

Weather permitting, the audience is invited to continue the astronomical adventure after the performance as Jupiter and Saturn put on their nightly show at Sydney Observatory, a short walk from Bangarra Dance Theatre. RT

Pungent kerosene lamps provide the only light source as we ascend the stairs of Hobart’s Old Net Loft, the locale for IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory’s work in progress, The Tesla Project.

The life of Nikola Tesla, son of a Serbian-Orthodox priest and an inventor-genius, provides the dramatic impetus for Constantine Koukias’ production. An ominous atmosphere is established with smoke, sand sifting through suspended white cones and a thunderstorm’s unrelenting menace: the terra familias of the Gods.

The world of Nikola Tesla’s light laboratory is evoked by Maria Kunda’s stage design. Members of the audience face each other across a narrow divide. This design device is a metaphor for the alternating current (AC) system developed by Tesla. The performers continually move to and fro along this narrow corridor transmitting the harmonic voltage of Koukias’ soundscore.

Two women sheltering beneath black umbrellas move down the long aisle. They are Tesla’s long-serving secretaries Miss and Miss (Debra Pridgeon and Sara Jones). Their highly stylised walking is emblematic of Tesla’s obsession with counting his footsteps until they were divisible by three.

IHOS Music Theatre performers rhythmically stamp their way along the central conduit. Their white shirts and black trousers embody the familiar dualism: the alternating domains of dark and light. Tesla’s AC system was in direct competition with Edison’s DC experimentation. The setting for Tesla’s secretaries and laboratory assistants is reminiscent of Kafka’s bureaucratic confinement and conformism: desks, typewriters, paper, frenetic activity and repeated sound motifs.

The largely unaccompanied singing of the IHOS chorus is as stylised as the walking of Miss and Miss. There is little room for the energetic variation of a spark, or the individual passing from voices to voice in an aural flow that enhances the suggested conductivity of Kunda’s design.

A group of children from the Helen O’Grady Children’s Drama Academy provides animated energy and transition. Representing New York broadsheet vendors they bounce basketballs, skip and cycle.

In a beautiful sequence introduced by cellist Brendon Conway, the concentration of Tesla’s team is interrupted by the illumination of electricity. Fifteen singers move through the central space each carrying a brilliant light globe. They intone electrice more and a larger globe (sculpted by Dianna Graf and Mark Cornelius), symbolising the world of light and creation, is held high. The shape resembles the Greek omphalos, a stone marking the central point of the earth. The chorus is immersed in a tiara of radiance. When the fluorescent bulbs are illuminated the laboratory team shows little exhilaration. Instead they offer a fascinated, yet contained homage.

Tesla’s AC system was used to light the 1893 World Exposition in Chicago. Dvorák’s Symphony No. 5 in E Minor (From the New World) was premiered at Carnegie Hall in the same year. The haunting second movement from New World is a recurrent refrain throughout the Tesla Project and provides a concurring coda of loss and light.

Constantine Koukias’ work is infused with the basso profundo emphasis of the Orthodox tradition. His commitment to developing bass voices in the Music Theatre Laboratory is evident in the fine tonal qualities of Russell Bailey, Matthew Dewey and Craig Wood. This connection with earth’s solidity and timbre is established in the percussive scattering of birdseed. Tesla was fond of pigeons, which here are carried in cages by a procession of children.

In the final scene Tesla’s research notes are impounded. The assistants and secretaries slowly and reverently transfer books along the central space. Excerpts from Dvorák’s melody and continual percussion accentuate their gravitas as the weight of Tesla’s genius is deposited in a locker.

IHOS has produced a powerful tribute to a brilliant and eccentric inventor. Tesla held 700 patents including a dynamo, transformer, induction motor, radio and the Tesla coil. In 1908 a massive explosion devastated Tunguska, a remote area in the Siberian wilderness. Scientists attributed the devastation to a meteorite strike. It is now speculated that a death ray developed by Tesla was responsible.

Tesla has been commissioned by the West Australian Opera. Koukias will showcase sequences as work is developed. The second sequence offered Hobart audiences the opportunity to experience an intense work in progress. Like Tesla, IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory is working to realise a vision through the interaction of energy, light and complex theatricality.

The Tesla Project, IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory, director Constantine Koukias, designer Maria Kunda, production director Werner Ihlenfeld, libretto development Marianne Fisher, music Constantine Koukias, lighting design Don Hopkins, sound operator & tape electronics Matthew Firth; Old Net Loft, Hobart, Nov 30-Dec 2.

The opportunity to be immersed in an aural environment created with the care and attention to detail that all art deserves is rare. Curator Garth Paine gave us such an opportunity at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art late last year with the second in the Sonic Residues series. The event involved concert performances and installation works by more than 60 composers and sound artists from across the globe. As Paine indicated in the program notes: “Electro-acoustic music is a viscous, fluid and engaging media; a form that promotes sound as an exhibitable object, as well as a totally immersive environment.”

Occupying almost all the available spaces at ACCA, including the rear garden, sound installations drew listeners into multi-dimensional aural worlds. Single point sound sources hung on walls; multiple point sources relocated sound from distant places, creating soundfields to be explored; interactive technology encouraged listeners to become participants, to contribute to or dynamically modify the soundfield; and confronting visual images of the human sound production mechanism provided stark contrast between the physical and the emotional constructions of the voice. These installations allowed listeners to contemplate sound at their own pace, to focus on the macro and the micro within each work and, with the aid of the program notes, to consider both the composer/artist’s intention and its realisation. It is precisely this unhurried consideration that is essential to enter the world of sonic art, since it is perhaps the least understood and least appreciated branch of composition, far behind film sound and virtually all forms of music for most listeners.

Indeed, it is the lack of understanding of sonic art that Sonic Residues sought to address. Paine presented a range of works by established, internationally recognised composers as well as emerging artists, all eager to present their work to new audiences and to hear them performed in a large space using state of the art audio technology. It was the performances that most captured my aural imagination. Seven evening concerts, each of approximately 90 minutes, were held in the large gallery space at ACCA. Such a space is inherently limited acoustically. Paine and assistant curator Ian Stevenson attempted to improve the acoustics with curtains and cushions and achieved a fair degree of success. But the heart of the concerts was the high fidelity, 8 loudspeaker, surround sound system supplied by key sponsor System Sound and arranged evenly around the listeners. Using a professional mixing console, it was possible to send any sound source to any or all of the 8 speakers, providing a unique opportunity for total 3-dimensional immersion in the soundfield. Thus the audience could experience the concert works in a tightly controlled environment approaching the quality of professional audio recording studios.

While many of the performed works were realised as stereo recordings, during their reproduction they were diffused by concertmaster Ian Stevenson throughout the acoustic space. Stevenson applied his knowledge and sensitivity for the works and the technology to pan the 2 channels of sound around the 8 speakers, perceptually creating discrete sources as part of an enveloping soundfield. The sense of motion of sounds around the space was at times breathtaking, adding a new dimension to the works. There were also several works created using discrete 8 channel recorders, which were reproduced from that format. Here, the true point source possibilities of the 8 speakers were explored, with the accuracy of spatial location and the depth of the aural envelopment as testimony to the quality of the composition and the fidelity of the reproducing technology.

Two forums completed the program, with the first an enlightening overview of the theoretical, technical and creative aspects of aural spatialisation by Ian Stevenson. Coming as it did in the middle of the concert series where Stevenson applied his considerable skills to diffuse the performed works, this proved an appropriate forum to consider and debate this aspect of performance realisation. The artistic diffusion of a stereo work into a multi-speaker environment is a little like having a colour wheel illuminating a Brett Whiteley. Every now and then we get true stereo as originally intended, while the rest of the time we hear sound sources all around. The results may be artistically skilful, interesting, even exciting, but are they a true representation of the composer/artist’s intentions?

The second forum brought together composers, artists and academics in a moderated debate concerning the current state of sonic art practice, listener perceptions and academic review. From the distinguished panel, including Philip Brophy, Ros Bandt and Jeff Pressing, emerged a sad reflection on the position of sound research and education. Within music schools nationwide, the first academic position lost is usually electro-acoustic music, and music is often the first department lost from a humanities faculty. Film sound is a small part of cinema studies, radio only a minor component of cultural studies and within multimedia and online technologies, audio often receives only cursory consideration. And where are acoustic principles in architecture and interior design? Consequently, there is little education available about sound and its artistic possibilities, which leads directly to a significant under-representation in galleries and in small attendances at events like Sonic Residues. It is ironic and, in light of the previous observations, disappointing that the concerts in this series that had the greatest number of listeners were those with visual elements, either as instrumental performers or video artists. For an aural person like me, these visual performances were often the least interesting, particularly the tired, cliché ridden video art pieces.

Overall, Sonic Residues presented electro-acoustic music and sound art in a manner that best represented the quality and diversity of works by national and international composer/artists. Garth Paine has used his extensive resources to bring together both established and emerging talent and added to it his own considerable ability as a composer and artist. The opportunity to experience sound art with high fidelity in a largely sympathetic acoustic space, to experience spatial location and aural envelopment with accuracy and depth and to be immersed in a soundfield that excites the aural imagination is a rare and enriching experience. Combined with exciting developments in the surround sound technology of DVD home theatre systems using DTS and Dolby Digital encoding, there is the emerging potential to deliver true spatial location and aural envelopment as part of these explorations in acoustic space. With support from funding bodies, this series may tour regional areas, attempting to fill the void of sound art in galleries, with the hope that in time, more people will experience these soundfields rather than simply read about them.

Sonic Residues: Electro-acoustic music and sound art. Installations, performances & talks curated by Garth Paine, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, November 18-December 3

UK dancer and choreographer Russell Maliphant is in Sydney in February to run a 2-day workshop and perform with his company at Performance Space. Russell began developing his own work in 1991 and now tours extensively creating work for companies such as Ricochet Dance Company in England and Batsheva Ensemble in Israel. He also teaches internationally, having developed a practice integrating various disciplines including the Rolfing Method of Structural Integration.

You have worked with numerous and varied companies and individual choreographers: Royal Ballet and Sadlers Wells, DV8 Dance Theatre, Michael Clark and Company. How did your obvious openness to different ways of working inform the formation of your own company in 1996?

I consider my experience working with those companies to have been my apprenticeship. However, I didn’t think about making pieces myself until I began to work on improvisation methods with Laurie Booth. During the first project of his which I worked on, he taught me possible methods to employ during an improvised performance. That was my first contact with ways of creating relationships to other performers in the space, and relationships to music, to light, to the stage as a blank canvas on which to paint. During that work and subsequent projects together, the issues we were dealing with were those of instantaneous composition, working with a motif, repetition, level and placement in space, energy, focus…

It was the work with Laurie that presented me with the tools and the personal challenge to create. It was not until I had begun to explore those tools that I had a context to make use of what I had experienced in companies like Sadlers Wells, Michael Clark and DV8. It was also at this time that I met Michael Hulls, who is the lighting designer I have been collaborating with since 1995.

Working with a broad range of companies has afforded me opportunities and exposed me to very contrasting and, at times, conflicting viewpoints of what is important in creating movement-based work. And this has made me reconsider my own viewpoint.

So there has been a clear demarcation in your career between being a dancer and being a creator of dance. Was this related to the company structures where you did your “apprenticeship”?

When I was working primarily as a dancer I felt that all the explorations I wanted to do, and had time for, were to do with things like quality, articulation, and exploring techniques that would benefit me as a performer. That’s what led me into exploring exercise/movement-related forms like Pilates, Tai Chi, acrobatics, Capoeira, and Yoga. I didn’t have a desire to explore my own creativity outside of that terrain.

How do you strike a balance between recognising the value of these various methodologies and deciding on what works for you?

I feel that my visually based aesthetic has grown from the qualities and dynamics I have seen and experienced over the years. The ‘shape’ vocabulary I choose tends to sit with aesthetic concerns I must have picked up from sculpture and painting as much as concerns I have learned through my dance experiences (such as the idea of ‘line’ from classical ballet). I think the methodologies are now used at the service of my aesthetic viewpoint.

Some people will be familiar with the film version of Critical Mass (directed by David Hinton) which was shown here last year. Is there a continuity across the program at Performance Space between this work and the other two pieces, Shift and Two you’ll be presenting?

Shift and Two are more lighting-driven pieces and the primary relationship (from my point of view) is between the performer and the light. They are both solos. Critical Mass is a duet, with less emphasis on the relationship of light to the choreography, because the primary driving force is the dynamic between the two performers.

The collaboration with lighting designer Michael Hulls and an exploration of the relationship between movement and light is clearly central to the work of your company. Why, in your opinion, does dance seem to offer so much in terms of the use of lighting within performance?

Light has the ability to sculpt the body and manipulate the space. It is a fluid medium of change, as is the body, and therefore offers a multitude of possibilities for representation. I am interested in how the body and light can shape space and construct environments of mood and contrast through which meanings may be engendered.

So perhaps they are all duets, with light providing the ‘partner’ in Shift and Two—another kind of outside, manipulative force?

Does your collaboration with Hulls begin from the very genesis of the work? The ‘duets’ with light are obviously more visual processes than the creation of a danced duet. How do you proceed?

Each process has, up to now, been different. On our first duet, Unspoken, we wanted to reverse a more regular approach where music is used from the beginning and light is put on at the end. We began with light; Michael designed and set-up a rig and we began to work with that over several weeks. The composer came in after about 3 or 4 weeks when we had already mapped out a lot of material.

This process has not always been possible, as it requires a theatre and can be expensive. We have been fortunate in building relationships with venues that have co-commissioned work, so have always had at least some time in a theatre during the creative process. We have also been fortunate in having had development periods unrelated to having to produce new work, which has often fuelled ideas for future creations, giving us something we want to work with before having any particular project in mind. Other times, it has not been possible to get space with light and I have begun by making work in the studio, bringing lights into the process in the third or fourth week (for a week or so) then continuing in the studio.

Shift happened very quickly—1 week working together, 3 days with lights. I had worked with some movement ideas for a while before, but I abandoned these once we saw what worked with the light. Two took 15 days in the studio to create, but we had already discovered the light-to-movement elements that we wanted to explore.

The compatibility of light and movement is something cinema has recognised for some time. Is there anything cinematic or photographic about the work?

In a bid to encourage filmmakers working in regional areas, the FTO recently announced its Regional Filming Fund which will provide grants to productions in NSW—features, TV series, mini-series, documentaries—being made outside the Sydney metro area.

If you’re a filmmaker living in the Illawarra, the Short Sited 5 Film Festival is open for submissions. Films under 7 minutes can be entered in the open, doco, experimental or western categories. Deadline March 15. If you just like to watch, the shorts are screening at the Project Centre for Contemporary Art, Wollongong, March 23, 7.30pm. For more info check out the news section at Film Illawarra.

Siren Entertainment and Pinefilm Entertainment will begin sell-through DVD distribution in March with a catalogue (finally!) of foreign arthouse and Australian cinema titles from the last decade. The first round includes The Interview, Idiot Box, Lost Highway, The End of Violence and Secrets and Lies. Siren MD Nigel Rennard comments: “…this dual acquisition places us in the box seat for independent DVD distribution. This format is exciting for the film fan, and these films will all carry top of the line packaging and DVD features.”

SAFC has announced some new, welcome initiatives. The Producer Support Scheme will subsidise marketing and financing costs and provide professional development for producers who have made at least one feature film/broadcast drama/doco in the past 2 years. Up to $20,000 is available. Deadline March 9. The Documentary Incubator Scheme will help develop doco projects, offering a mentorship with an experienced practitioner for 3 months. Deadline February 16. The Script Incubator Scheme aims to encourage development of high quality feature scripts with a mentor available to help participants polish their first draft. This year they’re after comedy projects.

Columbia Tristar won two 2000 Multicultural Marketing Awards (Commercial Award for Big Business; Grand Award for most outstanding entry in all industries) for their Silk Screen programme of Asian Cinema (see page 13). Hosted by the Ethnic Affairs Commission, the awards recognise organisations that promote cultural diversity in Australia. Hopefully this will encourage Columbia to continue programming Asian films.

How’s your BAS coming along? If you haven’t already given it to the Performance Space for their upcoming project, and you are struggling, the AFC has published an 80 page manual on “The Film and Television Industry and the New Tax System”, covering GST, ABN and PAYG, producer investment contracts and exports. It also includes handy forms and a cashbook layout so you too can become an accountant. The manual is available free in hard copy or downloadable from the internet.

Wishing Popcorn Taxi could get to WA? Kitchen Sync is a new film night at the George St café, East Freo, screening local filmmakers’ work. Every 2nd Thursday will feature screenings, discussion, guest speakers from the industry and a chance to get some feedback on your films. Join their email list.

Teen movie energy is commonly signified yet grossly misrepresented in the cinema. Its signage is obvious—a grab-bag of whatever the art department thinks will make the film hip—yet its representation is vacuous and ingenuine. In most permutations of the genre, teen energy is thematically articulated: writ large and unimaginatively onto the screen as convincingly as a water-based tattoo transfer. ‘Youth’ is the deodorant of this cinematic corpus; teen movies accordingly stink of youth. They smell of adults remembering, redressing, inventing, and plainly, fucking with youth. Adult guilt in representing youth is typified by neurotic vacillation between cruel flippancy and maudlin yearning. Many teen movies walk a fine line between intentional expression and reactionary dismissal, squirming on their own psychiatric couch as they figure youth with wildly conflicting emotions and perspectives.

This is why teen movies are so derided: their apparent ‘celebration’ of youth is registered at the level of formal narrative construction as if designed with clear authorial guidance. The contextual reality of most teen movies is that highly problematized psychologies author their texts. Fucked-up parents are the ones making most of these movies. It would be rare for a teen movie to textually and thematically admit that it is so far removed from its subject that it cannot help but generate an invalid and suspect text. (This, for example, accounts for the last decade’s worth of ‘age-shift’ movies, where an adult suddenly inhabits a kid’s body and vice versa.) Self-loathing has been a major modulating current in 90s teen movies due to that decade’s own liveliness of pop cultural trends which, as they do each decade, mark the gaping distance between the veracity of true ephemera and the presumption with which filmmakers depict currencies and fads. Each new teen movie knows it’s dated, yet its maker wants to claim accuracy in depicting ‘what kids are really like these days’. (Larry Clark’s Kids is a sublime exception: he allows kids to be their own energy irrespective of their age and era.)

The main reason for teen energy’s overwhelmingly affected and underwhelmingly effective display in the movies is to do with the obvious fact that teens or youths are not the filmmakers. Picture teen energy—the embodiment of some such force within the psycho-sexual vessel of the body of youth—as a voice: a material manifestation of identity with precise characteristics. Picture teen movies—he dramaturgical diorama for the staging of that force—as mimicry, impersonation, caricature. Like a comedian doing Stallone or an actor doing a valley girl, their reference hinges on complete acceptance of their illegitimacy. Teen energy is most noticeable in social formations, group gatherings and public spaces. In place of a voice that can either be controlled, copied or codified, you have a din, all talking at once, each the centre of its own stage. Screaming, yelling, shouting, gaggling.

Consider that sonic image for a moment. Now amplify it a thousand fold. The noise you now hear is the sound of Bring It On. The dramaturgical diorama of Bring It On is one that commits to presenting this scenario, and with such intensity that there can be no room for smarminess, irony, hipness or satire. I’m sure many people equate cheerleaders with the image through which they have been branded by countless attacks on their subculture: from serial killers to comedians to punk bands to arthouse movies. I thought Bring It On was going to be some para-indie Sundance-hip (yechhh!) witty critique of an obvious bimbo-target like cheerleaders. But Bring It On is so aware of the cheap (and dated) idea of ‘critiquing pop culture’ that one scene brings up the infamous mother who hired someone to kill a cheerleader competing against her own daughter, then dismisses it instantaneously. If you can understand why a mother would be that obsessive, you wouldn’t make fun of such an event; you would accept its deviancy as normal. For Bring It On is literally about the absolute drive which pumps adrenaline through the youthful corpus. It embraces the competitiveness, rivalry, sexuality, sexiness, hysteria and exhaustion which vibrate the world of the cheerleader.

Bring It On is a sign of an appositely progressive cinema which cares zero for the jaded counter-cultural dialectic which erroneously equates critique with intelligence and awareness. Like Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion (the ultimate 90s ‘re-teen’ movie), Bring It On generates something that critical strategy can never manage: a wholly inward perception of self which simultaneously negates the external world while totalizing a sense of place within the world. Or, a presentation of dumbness which is so unproblematized that one feels stupid in having highlighted it in the first place. Unlike the dominant teen movie setting, Bring It On presents not just a bunch of rowdy kids in a mall, but a group of cheerleaders whose job it is to yell and scream and go crazy to whip up a crowd at a sports event. And, get this, their main aim is not just to be cheerleaders for any one sports event or season, but to compete with other cheerleaders in a national cheerleading tournament, where a mass of other people cheer them as they act out how they would cheerlead a sports event audience. The feedback loop of an audience cheering the routines of a cheerleading group is both ‘stupid’ yet also epicentral to designing the contained sonorific arena for Bring It On’s depiction of a teen energy space.

The sound of voice and music are vital ingredients in the creation and sustaining of this teen energy. The main approach to voice placement entails hyper-compaction. The whole soundtrack, especially when music is sounded, stylistically and technically employs the type of compression and ‘ducking’ which allows radio presenters’ voices to talk over dense music presence while never seeming to be on a separate volume plane. ‘Ducking’ is an automated process of compression which involves feeding a vocal track signal into a music track signal so that when no voice is present, the music is boosted to optimum level, and as soon as the voice comes in, the music instantly drops down and back up in every pause between the speaker’s words. When used to a high degree (as in AM talk-radio broadcasts) its psycho-acoustic side-effects induce a breathless claustrophobia wherein no gaps are allowed and the passage of time is rendered thick, imposing, congested. Narrative film sound design generally disallows this for 2 reasons: voice is typically rendered as being embedded within a location (or locatable) environment which includes occasional yet slight interference to the voice, rather than placing it in an aural void; and narrative crafting conservatively favours classical ‘peaking-and-troughing’ which stimulates drama through variance in dynamics, rather than pummeling the audience with a sonic onslaught.

Most scenes in Bring It On start with the explosive introduction of a music track as if you have jumped in a car and turning on the engine has simultaneously turned on the radio at full volume. The music then sits underneath the dialogue of the scene, but never low enough to feel separate from the socio-musical realm of the characters. Kids listen to music loud, so they must talk loudly over it. It is arguable that conventions of sound mixing for film are out of synch with people’s ability to hear ‘through’ the noise which surrounds us, so it is refreshing when a film acknowledges the currency of this through its mix. Bring It On recreates the aural energy of being in a space where volume is an issue which affects communication; the hyper-compaction of the vocal ducking facilitates this well.

Editing rhythms both support and enforce this aesthetic. The contemporary template of this type of hyper-compaction is found in Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing of the dynamic bind between voice-over narration and song-over score in Scorsese’s Goodfellas. Bring It On is like a screaming teen energy version of Goodfellas’ ‘solo voce’ opera; the former unleashes its energy in a flashing present, while the latter orchestrates its energy in a contemplative past. Both films rely on a clearly defined integration of aural levels and sonic rhythms between the cut and the mix. One operating in ignorance of the other would deliver an unbalanced combine, as in American Pie which clearly separates voice from music from score from film in a clinical and totally unerotic way. Bring It On drives on its energy like a fuel within the body of the text: the cheerleaders are always engaged in responding to music, through being energized by its erotic pulsation, choreographing body movements to it, and chanting slogans and call-signs over its amplified presence; song has a distinct use-value for the film’s characters and its placement is rendered compatible with their physicality.

The finale of the tournament and its confrontation between the East Compton team (as black as) and the Burbank team (as white as) takes place in the ground zero of American teen energy: Fort Lauderdale, Miami, site of many an atomic detonation in the movies (see Sean Cunningham’s Spring Break for the most frighteningly pornographic version). An interesting musicological schism culminates here in opposing the LA (Hollywood versioning) sound of energetic dance pop (exemplified by the Euro-House sample stabs reimported into the West Coast by the likes of CC & Factory’s Everybody Dance Now) against the multi-faceted fractalized cut-up of the current Miami mutation between old school Miami Bass (a regional take on East Coast Electro) and the UK sound of Jump-Up (a collision between Hip Hop, Drum & Bass and Electro). While the Burbank team originally went for pop, they learnt from East Compton the power of underground sound. In the climactic finale, both teams use similar tracks which provide a breathless and breath-taking soundtrack to the dynamic body scores of their routines, like watching a group version of an aerobics doubles tournament. Surprisingly, the underdog team (East Compton) wins, enabling a form of social justice to overcome dramatic resolution, another progressive element which other so-called non-mainstream films would not consider due to their intent to craft a ‘well-told resolved story.’ Again, it is refreshing that an American film foregrounds race when dealing with music, considering the tense history (and present) of criss-crossing racial appropriations of pop and folk forms which gives life to so much music.

Bring It On is dressed in the narrative regalia of competitive sport. Sports should allow people to kill each other. That way, the winners can be ultimately victorious and the losers can become martyrs, like tragic fools whose boats capsize in rich corporate yacht races. All competitive team sports enact militaristic stratagems, suggesting that deep down people like war, but they moan about it to feign worldly concern. Bring It On collapses dance, sport and spectacle in a way that the base death drive which compels someone to play or support sport is erased by the vitality with which the cheerleaders expel, eject and ejaculate themselves across the screen. Its stage is a healthy pornorium within which teen energy—compounding sexual, bodily and musical electricity—can both combust and regenerate to the sound of the crowd. Bring It On is healthy and, believe it or not, it’s not bad for you.

Bring It On, director Peyton Reed, writer Jessica Bendinger, distributor Roadshow, Australian release December 14, 2000.

Like many other analog media forms, photography has spent the past decade being digitised. The photochemical sensitivities of film and paper have been gradually edged out by the recording, manipulation and reproduction of images as arrays of numerical values: pixel-grids.

Editor Mike Leggett introduces Photofile’s August 2000 edition, “Tekhne,” with the declaration that “the pixel, the byte, the inkjet and the photographic are seamlessly integrated into contemporary practice.” That integration, and that practice, are the subjects of this edition. Leggett has assembled a mixture of essays, artists’ statements, images and reviews that give some sense of the range of contemporary digital photomedia in Australia.

Leggett’s introductory statement, “The Speed of Light,” sets the digital transformation of photography within a continuum of technical change; the image-making process is inseparable from a technological “evolution” spanning the glass lens and the computer monitor. “Tekhne,” Leggett reminds us, is the Greek root for “technology”, but originally meant “art.”

This etymological union doesn’t negate the tensions and torsions involved in photography’s latest evolutionary step, as Leggett hints. Les Walkling gives an artist’s perspective on the downside of digitisation in “The Desensitisation of Photography.” Walkling is refreshingly up-front, quoting a friend’s frustrated exclamation: “Digital imaging sucks.” It replaces the “honesty” and “inevitableness” of the photosensitive surface, and its corresponding capacity to “remember” its process, with a shifty, duplicitous array of data. The digital image doesn’t accumulate traces, Walkling argues, “its memory is one of loss”: transformations are absolute, erasing previous values—worse, successive transformations degrade the image data. “Digital imaging archives its own destructive tendencies.” Not only that, but the absorption of imaging into the computer workstation robs the artist of those kinaesthetic and sensory subtleties of the darkroom, replacing them with pre-fab tools and a low-resolution display.

While Walkling’s protests sound a bit like media-nostalgic griping (“if you don’t like the screen, use the darkroom!”) they are motivated by an artist’s desire for a better, more supple medium. Walkling points out that digital imaging needn’t be so bad; the now-defunct imaging software Live Picture solves many of these degenerative problems, and returns a more photographic sensitivity to the digital domain. In “Thinking Imaging Software”, Leggett takes up the story of Live Picture and its ubiquitous competitor, Adobe Photoshop, detailing the commercial and technical machinations below the consumer-surface, and giving an interesting case study in the way digital media practice is profoundly shaped by the discourses and processes of the software industry. Leggett once again argues that transformations in tools and processes have long been integral to the creative practice of photography, and suggests that artists’ involvement in imaging software might be reclaimed through a distributed, inclusive, open-source approach; doing a “Linux” on Photoshop.

These protests and speculations are a little slight; happily here they are mixed in with the work of some fine photomedia artists. The colour reproductions are excellent, and easily worth the cover price in themselves. The stills from Patricia Piccinini’s The Breathing Room are gorgeously grotesque—folds of intricately textured amorphous flesh, with blank glistening orifices. Murray McKeich’s images are just as fleshy; decaying chimeras with that characteristically metallic sheen. These two prominent locals are joined by Austrian artist Dieter Huber, who also uses the digital surface to invoke reshaped and fantastic bodies. Huber’s Klones are mutant plant forms: seed pods in loops, a cactus growing in an impossible torus. Also included are an enticing set of stills from video work by Perth collective Retarded Eye, images by Indigenous artists Rea and Brook Andrew, and a diverse gallery of local work from artists including Marty St James, mr snow, Lui Xiao Xian , Rebecca Cummins and Carolyn Brunet.

The texts around these images are generally less satisfying than the images themselves. Darren Tofts’ essay “Terrible Beauty” discusses the work of Murray McKeich alongside other notable exponents of dark, mutant viscerality: Hans Bellmer, Frederick Sommer, Francis Bacon and Pierre Molinier. These comparisons are all well made, but they leave no room for a discussion of what the contemporary significance of McKeich’s work might be; certainly, as Tofts says, it involves a “poetic, defamiliarised meditation on the culture of the cyborg”—but I’m sure there’s more to it. Ricky Cox attempts a survey of net-based photomedia—an enormous field-and the result is inevitably much broader than it is deep. Edwina Bartleme’s discussion of the work of Rea and Brook Andrew, “Multiple Realities: Digital Imaging & Contemporary Queer Art”, walks us through postcolonial identity-engineering in prose which lacks the wit and energy of the images.

There’s more focus to the 5 reviews that round out the volume—Teri Hoskin on Bill Seaman, Kathy Cleland on John Tonkin, Paul Thomas on Retarded Eye, Daniel Palmer on Suzanne Treister, and Anna Munster on Linda Dement. Meanwhile the artists’ writings drop some oblique and elegant hints about the potential rewards and agendas involved. Lui Xiao Xian offers a neat way of imagining his doctored Victorian-era stereographs, as 3D-images stretched through time—the “fourth dimension”—to create cultural and historical identity-parallax-errors. Marty St James’ text fragments reveal his digitally-smeared figures as virtual “performance/sculpture”—“art as a reformed feeling of existence/(captured and engineered between worlds).” Despite the reservations of artists like Walkling, digital imaging technologies have fostered an active creative culture; not photographic, but perhaps as Leggett suggests, “post-photographic.”

Photofile, “Tekhne”, edited by Mike Leggett, Australian Centre for Photography, August 2000, www.acp.au.com

empyrean, Melinda Rackham’s online multi-user VRML world “that questions the nature of virtual space” has won the Sound-Space Award (for interactive sound works in the 3D space of the internet) at the Stuttgart Filmwinter (www.filmwinter.de) in Germany. Incorporating sound design by Mitchell Whitelaw with additional scripting and modelling by Horst Kiechle, empyrean can be viewed at www.subtle.net/empyrean. The jury commented, “Rackham’s visual style, use of sound, and her deep existential inquiry into the colonisation of cyberspace made her the Sound-Space jury’s unanimous choice.”

Submissions are open for CD-ROM and web-based work to be highlighted at MILIA, the interactive media market at Cannes from February 10-14. The AFC will showcase Australian work that has been completed in the last 12 months & distribute flyers on upcoming projects. Contact Rachel Sinclair, 02 9321 6436, r.sinclair@afc.gov.au/.

Cyber Cultures: Sustained Release, the Casula Powerhouse’s touring digital arts exhibition, will be launched at Mercury Cinema in Adelaide on March 2. First of the 4 modules is Animation Playground, followed by Post Human Bodies at Ngapartji Multimedia Centre. New Life begins in May and Infectious Agents in October. Contact Adele Hann, 08 8410 0979. Check out the RealTime website for reviews and an interview with curator Kathy Cleland in our Working the Screen feature.

Fuselage, an interface between digital arts and design in the form of a new magazine, website and regular exhibitions, was recently launched in Sydney at the Rubyayre Gallery, Surry Hills. They are looking to promote the work of emerging artists. Unusual and challenging work will be featured.

trAce (www.trace.ntu.ac.uk/ [expired]) has just changed its name to trAce online writing centre and its new-look site is easy to get around and full of great info. The annual trAce/Alt-X New Media Writing Competition was won this year by Talan Memmott for Lexia to Perplexia (www.trace.ntu.ac.uk/newmedia/lexia/ index.htm/ [expired]). Memmott is an artist/writer from San Francisco who has been active in the web-based hypertext scene, serving as Creative Director/Editor for BeeHive Hypertext Hypermedia Literary Journal (beehive.temporalimage.com/index.html). He comes to writing via visual arts, having worked in video, installation art, painting, and performance art. You can chat with Talan at the trAce website, February 4 @ 9pm GMT.

Poets and Writers Magazine (www.pw.org/mag/index.htm) has a special section devoted to “Literature and Cyberspace” this issue with articles by Rob Wittig, Nick Montfort, William Gillespie, Stephanie Strickland, Justin Martin, and Eastgate’s editorial team Diane Greco and Charlie Bennett. Two articles are available online: Martin’s “Preserving the Word” and Wittig’s “Observations from Here”.

In New York, to step out onto the street is to be immersed in a delirious river of speech. It seems (to this visitor, used to Australian reserve) that everything is on the surface. New York playwright Mac Wellman delights in this and draws the excess and rhythms of the American everyday into his work. He writes, “I believe, along with Beckett and Handke and Witkiewics, that the depth is on the surface. The inside is on the outside” (“Poisonous Tomatoes: A statement on Logic and the Theater”, The Bad Infinity: Eight Plays by Mac Wellman, John Hopkins University Press, 1994). Meanwhile half a world away in Australia, Keith Gallasch (“The Plight of the New”, RT#40, p26) expresses a hunger for theatrical experiences that offer “different surfaces, new rhythms, that induce reverie and contemplation…”; that trade a moribund theatre’s obsession with depth, character, plot, for an attention to the play of surfaces.

In New York, where hyperreality (in Umberto Eco’s sense) is the dominant mode, the experience of cultural surface without depth or centre is mediated by sheer speed: you’re moving too fast to sink.

There’s a similar energy, an incantatory quality to American speech, on the street and sometimes, hallelujah, even in the theatre, that strikes you with a physical force. The manifesto, the shout chorus, the sermon (Martin Luther King Day has just passed as I write) are embedded in the rhythms of the language, which is palpably shaped by the strong African-American presence in the culture. There is a vocal tradition here, black and white, that connects to an embodied musicality: Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray, some of Williams and O’Neill, are animated by these cadences: African-American dramatist Suzan-Lori Parkes exhorts writers to dance around the room as they write; and to encounter her extraordinary The America Play is to hear the body in the words. Aishah Rahman talks of a “jazz writing” and in her play, Only in America, bird-woman Cassandra stammers a kind of rhythm-based gibberish for the entire first half of the play. A history of struggle writhes in this speech and unlike in Australia, where the cracks in the White-out of our history have only begun to open into public discourse (think of the stuttering, paper-shuffling and anguish around that one simple word, “sorry”) in the US the wound of a deeply divided and racist history is not so much pasted over into an uneasy silence as danced, sung, spat out. It continues to animate and energize a profoundly polyphonic language. Or so it seems, here on the surface of things.

And that’s just on the street: what’s going down in the theatre? In search of exciting non-naturalistic work, in one weekend in December I saw 2 off-off Broadway productions: Mac Wellman’s Cat’s-Paw at the Soho Rep, and the US premiere of British dramatist Sarah Kane’s Crave at the Axis Theatre. The production of Cat’s-Paw was exuberant, accomplished and performed with a kind of dark glee appropriate to Wellman; however, Crave fell terribly flat. The disappointment was more acute because I had eagerly anticipated the full production, having first encountered this play in a reading directed by Chris Mead on the rooftop of an East Sydney pub. Then, I was moved by the rhythms and repetitions of Kane’s writing and the way that states of obsession, desire and frozen memory are played out through these rhythms as much as by the content of the language.

Kane’s play revolves around 2 men and 2 women: the men, A and B, are respectively in (occasional) dialogue/connection with the women, an older M and younger C. The mode of speech alternates between reverie and dialogue, which is written as a rhythmic interplay on certain speech motifs rather than conventional dramatic interaction. There are suggested pathways of exchange but relationships are hinted at rather than developed: dialogue functions as collision, which spins the solitary balls back into their own orbits. A longing for love so strong that it consumes its own object; a moth-to-flame relationship to troubled memories of abuse (“she can’t remember and she can’t forget”) and repeated attempts to connect and to distance from a possible affair constitute the landscape of this play.

The New York production of Crave begins strongly: the Axis set is spare; no props, but a dappled light plays over a grey space, with minimalist sound/music creating a similar aural effect. Hung from the low ceiling are 4 video monitors that play continually through the performance. The actors move little, delivering their lines more to us than to each other. However, from the moment the video monitors begin the text begins its long struggle against the production, finally to sink without trace beneath an effortful recreation of psychological depth. The production works hard to create coherent subtext from Kane’s luminous fragments and neither the text nor the production survive the attempt. This is evident not in the staging, which remains austere, but in the visible thought-chains of the actors, struggling against the cadences of the text to create a subtextual inner journey for each character. Just in case their efforts are not enough, the video footage fills in the gaps by linking the text to an external ‘real.’ The 4 video monitors play continuous footage of the actors in real spaces: a bedroom, a café, drinking, smoking, enacting lonely angst. Where place-names surface briefly in the text (“Florin’s” and “Rudi’s”) these are seized upon by the video and screened in all their NYC veracity. Differently edited, the footage could work—another level of displacement—however it’s put to work in anchoring the real in a way which adds to the nett effect of failed and overwritten naturalism.

The attempt to drag ‘depth’ to the surface, thereby dulling the shimmer of Kane’s language and the pathos it enacts through its missed connections, was at its most marked in the older male character’s monologue on love. The actor turned this obsessional litany into a coherent monologue from a young man, perplexed in love, recalling the ups and downs of a relationship with a difficult young woman (poor dead Sarah Kane, perhaps). The contrast with Mead’s directed reading in Sydney could not be starker. There the same monologue was performed with a pleading stammer and lack of tonal variation: an astute choice—against the stumbling voice the yearning in the words floats light as cobwebs, only nominally tied to the possibility of a ‘real’ other. To imbue the narrator of this speech, as the Axis production attempts, with potency and hope of love is to fatally wound the writing. Kane’s cadences, drowned out here, are those of a fragile spell against loneliness: the mumble of prayer that expects no answer, the child rocking itself to sleep only after the longed-for parent fails to come.

Deflated but not defeated, it was time to head downtown a few blocks for Mac Wellman’s Cat’s-paw. On the way I wondered: is it true there’s no irony in America? Is it the gaps and silences in Kane’s writing that make it hard to stage in the US? The wonderful Cat’s-Paw—admittedly a play employing very different strategies of language—restored my belief in a certain vein of American irony that works not through understatement, but by excess. Wellman’s writing employs the hyper-real in the sense of fashioning a mode of dialogue scarily close to the surface. His work skims the river of American speech and draws on it as found object, with its elisions, loops, interruptions, excesses, brutal lack of listening, animal cunning, rather than crafting the dialogue of that familiar form of naturalistic theatre where motive, plot and yes, psychological depth of the shallow sort, prevail. By contrast, Sarah Kane’s work (4:48 Psychosis was briefly reviewed in RT#40 by Aleks Sierz, p4) comes from, and extends, a tragic strand within British writing which conjures a severe beauty from the condensed lyricism of its language: Edward Bond, Martin Crimp, Howard Barker predate and share elements of this line of writing. Subjectivity in Kane’s Crave is fractured from within rather than from without: with Wellman, the hectic collision of dialogic surfaces infuses the writing with a kind of demonic glee.

The Soho Rep production of Cat’s-Paw is directed and performed with energy, wit and a real relish for the hyperbolic curves of Wellman’s language. Kyle Chepulis’ set creates a simple and vertiginous space—a long black and white floor elevated above a drop of several feet at either side and the front, and raked upwards as it recedes—creating a false perspective: upstage seems very far away. This platform is the setting for 4 movements, played out like a game of chess: the first 3 take place high above the city, at the observation towers of the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center and inside the Statue of Liberty. The first movement pairs mother-daughter couple Hildegard and Jane Bub. They speculate on how long it would take to hit the ground if you jumped. There are dark references to Bermuda (or is it Key West?): “I don’t want to talk about Bermuda!” hinting at torrid affairs, at triangular disappearances or even the fashion disaster shorts of the same name. The second duet is between friends Jane Bub and Jo Rudge; again they speculate about suicidal drop-time from the platform, and struggle over the revelation and interpretation of dark pasts. In the third scene Jo Rudge and her adolescent daughter Lindsay break into the Statue of Liberty.

In one of the funniest and sharpest passages, Jo speaks to her daughter in familiar liberal-left platitudes about depth, human connection (not surprisingly, given Wellman’s iconoclasm, it’s also the territory of the heart-warming well made play) and yet we are refused the familiar pay-off of psychological revelation: Lindsay demolishes her mother’s beliefs with a machine-like relish and a kind of Ayn Rand commitment to personal supremacy. Lindsay praises the beauty and severe survivalism of the cockroach, falling in love with a “roach motel” (cockroach trap) and souveniring it. Jo attempts to explains the “cat’s-paw” of the title, an intricate game played with string wound around the player’s hands, but Lindsay isn’t interested.

The final movement brings the 4 women together outside the Federal Courtroom, where Jo and Lindsay have been arrested for stealing the roach motel and, in their escape, breaking the Statue of Liberty’s arm. In a wonderfully sharp digression which muses on the mutating nature of narration, Hildegard Bub attempts to tell Lindsay a story, beginning with “once upon a time” and Lindsay refuses such a premise as illogical and disturbing: Lindsay is only interested in the “continuous present.” Hildegard is reduced to the ‘real’, within which mode she enchants Lindsay with a contemporary news item involving a woman engineer who unsticks a ball of grease and sludge that blocks the sewage system of an entire town.

The content of the dialogue is oblique, almost baroque in its excess: its vision of a radically conservative youth demolishing the platitudes of baby-boomer liberalism is funny and acutely pertinent to the current US political landscape. The patterns and shapes of Wellman’s language-games recreate a sense of struggle, familiar to many mother-daughter dyads where connection is maintained only through keeping the string of the cat’s-paw tight: as with water in a full cup, always threatening to spill and saturate, it’s the surface tension that holds everything together.

Cat’s-Paw, writer Mac Wellman, director Daniel Aukin, performers Nancy Franklin, Alicia Goranson, Ann Talman, Laurie Williams, Soho Rep, 46 Walker St, opened December 15; Crave, writer Sarah Kane, director Randy Sharp, performers Brian Barnhart, Kristin Dispaltro, David Guion, Deborah Harry, Axis Company, 1 Sheridan Square, NY, closed December 23

While Stretching It Wider is the name of the whole show, there are 2 other pieces, Glory Holy! and Madame. In this program Glory Holy! is reworked. It’s still the same piece in structure and text from a year ago, but the gestural element has changed. I thought I’d try to find a new place, go somewhere else, play with new rhythms. The text itself was pretty much ingrained, and I didn’t have to study it, but I’m finding new things coming out. I want to become reacquainted with it, let it tell me a few things instead of me determining it all the time.

Glory Holy! shifted very quickly through extremes of characterisation. For instance, that pervasive mother character who called at inappropriate times.

Yes, that phone call from ‘mom’ was from another piece, In Search of Mike. I thought it would be fun to see how mother would go in Glory Holy!. There was a montage of characters: a truck driver leaning out of a window; a person in a box at a fairground; a dog in a kennel. The preacher was pretty much the central character though, on his soapbox.

On the surface it’s about death, consumerism, sin, sex, all the big things. On a deeper level it’s about intimacy and isolation. It’s what that set is about, that booth/confessional/box office thing, where the central interactions occur through a little hole. There’s an element in that box which is like a womb, the greatest place of intimacy really. And that’s why the mother visited, to support that sense of female, even though it’s in a very male environment.

What about the food images, mother’s little aphorisms that constantly filtered through?

My mother’s conversation was all clichés. But they were far from meaningless. She had her own unique set, and as I got older I discovered they were unusual, completely particular to her. There’s a surface conversation that makes a kind of trivial sense, but there is a deeper level you can get to. And just that lack of being able to communicate speaks volumes. It makes you ache a little bit.

I remember sex and food and religion, and the selling of all of that, and how it all merged. Was that really what it was about?

A lot of elements of popular culture, like consumerism and sex, are advertised, and the preacher is the consummate advertiser. He sells God; he sells morality; he’s a moderator of thought. He’s right up there on his pulpit, preaching his faulty gospel. It’s all so corrupt. And yet, those extremes are part of a mix; extremes dictate each other, help to define each other. So it was a mix, too, with the sexual thing. The booth was a place of false intimacy, but also quite intensely intimate.

Madame had its genesis—and this is by no means what it is—when I worked with Jean Genet’s The Maids. I’m not really dealing with any of the issues of that play. I just wanted to take that character out for a walk, basically, to see what else she can do. I think the whole program is about intimacy and isolation, about 2 people trying to make a connection. In Madame, you might wonder whether making a connection is a game, because it’s really about not making it. The characters, they both get off on that. A lot of people do that: being thwarted, people thrive on it.

Stretching it Wider is about walking into that rehearsal room and not knowing what we’re going to do, me and Dean Walsh and the composer [Drew Crawford]; just let’s go somewhere. We’re looking at how bodies connect, and what that connection yields, and ways in which bodies act, react and over-react. It’s tending towards the over-reaction, but that’s Dean and me.

And again, it’s turning out to be lots of fun. The whole thing of stretching it wider has sexual connotations, for Mardi Gras, but it’s also looking at art practice, stretching that a bit wider, too. We’re working with blindness, taping over our eyes so we actually have to feel and connect, seeing how adventurous we can be in that realm. And you do feel a real dependence there; and you feel anxious when you lose that contact. But that was one of the precepts, to challenge ourselves, make it risky and make it work.

The 2 coins we tape over our eyes suggest a death image. It’s physically very striking, with black tape around our heads, very bondage. But more than anything I like it to be about Dean and I having fun. If it’s not fun, not pleasurable, then especially at my age, I don’t want to do all that big stuff. I’m 10 years older than Dean. Let him do all the wild stuff. Dean’s also in Madame. I’m Madame, though, and that’s a big change, getting Dean out of drag. But it really is a Mardi Gras program.

Glory Holy! is very Mardi Gras. I hadn’t actually seen that hidden, secret men’s business on stage. In the gay community it’s still an area that people don’t talk about, don’t own. It’s very much a place of non-communication; people don’t talk. And because it’s a place where people don’t talk, they don’t talk about it, either. This piece does have a gay sensibility, but then Dean and I are very queer in our own beings, so the sensibility is there. But I would like to see Mardi Gras just do work by gay artists, and not necessarily gay themes. I think that might be an important direction for the festival to go.

Stretching It Wider, Brian Carbee and Dean Walsh, produced by One Extra Company, Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, Downstairs at the Seymour Centre, February 28 – March 2

Among the galleries active in Sydney, 2 in particular exhibit distinctly hybrid tendencies. Grey Matter Contemporary Art Projects and the Asia-Australia Arts Centre at Gallery 4A, however, are very different galleries. The first is housed in the modest Glebe residence of its tenant, Ian Gerahty, while the second occupies a large, well-equipped heritage building in the heart of Chinatown. Grey Matter is free for exhibitors although Gerahty stresses that it is not merely a ‘rental space.’ Gallery 4A is also not rental based. Its director Melissa Chiu, alongside a board of artists acting in advisory roles, considers proposals annually. A percentage of those artists accepted pay a fee to utilise the premises.

What tentatively unites these galleries is their focus on international content. Gerahty, an ex-Londoner, benefits from his contacts in the UK and is firmly committed to the cross-cultural exchange of ideas. Chiu is similarly inclined towards the presentation of a strong overseas (in this case East Asian) component. Both Grey Matter and Gallery 4A also show the work of local practitioners, helping them to develop their careers and experiment with concepts.

What separates the galleries is their mode of operation. Gerahty is essentially a one-man band who generates the shows he exhibits. With relatively few resources and limited physical space, he is dedicated to the critical exploration of the art process, and encouraging interaction and debate in the local terrain. The Asia-Australia Arts Centre receives funding from the Sydney City Council as well as corporations. Significance is assured with its specific targeting and promotion of contemporary Asian art, especially timely as it places Australian culture firmly within an Asian rather than exclusively European context.

The entrance to Grey Matter is located in a back alley in Glebe. Its success, aside from the gallery’s extensive mailing list, depends largely on word of mouth. Physically the gallery consists of a narrow corridor leading to a modestly proportioned room. This is connected to a small, enclosed balcony overlooking the street. The entire space is painted a uniform and pristine white. Psychologically this locates the gallery just outside its obvious domestic origins although it is this aspect that makes Grey Matter unique. Gerahty points out that in London and in Europe such duality is not unusual, and during the 80s Sydney boasted numerous temporary exhibitions in disused commercial and industrial spaces. At the same time, Art Hotline hosted an ongoing series of surreptitious shows in a variety of unexpected locations. Grey Matter appears to be rekindling the ‘do-it-yourself’ in the face of real estate constrictions, escalated prices and lack of other suitable gallery spaces.

Gerahty hopes visitors are not merely taken by the novelty of the gallery’s domestic spaces. The emphasis is on exhibitions as concrete and ‘serious’ as any seen in alternate spaces, commercial or otherwise. Gerahty is convinced of the necessary role played by all types of galleries in the prevailing artistic micro-climate. It would be difficult to regard Grey Matter as ‘alternative’; the easy dependence on such terminology is restrictive to the open and democratic presentation and reception of contemporary art. Also rejected (well, perhaps not entirely) are ready-made notions of ‘site-specificity’ although particular projects staged at Grey Matter like The Palace of Exaggeration and Everything are unlikely to be simulated in commercial galleries in Sydney. In this exhibition, every available space—bathroom, toilet, clothesline, kitchen bench—was utilised by exhibitors. The result was closer to an environment than a simple ‘exhibition’.

The Asia-Australia Arts Centre represents quite another position. The gallery is contained in a large brick and timber building owned by the city council, with the ‘project space’ at street level providing room for artists to explore their ideas in a visible context. With its large windows it also provides 4A’s public face. Upstairs the main gallery is subdivided by means of a series of large mobile partitions. These supply multi-purpose solutions to hanging requirements and potentially serve both wall and object-based work. To one side of these partitions is a list of gallery sponsors including James Fairfax and Chinta Ria, the pan-Asian restaurant located at Darling Harbour. On the same wall, potential sponsors are guaranteed (in return for financial support) a portrait of themselves by established Sydney artist Lindy Lee. Such a model of patronage is obviously a long way from the ‘as-it-goes’ (though by no means less ‘professional’) approach of Gerahty. Overall, the Asia-Australia Centre has an institutional quality that places its aspirations somewhere between the artist-run gallery and the museum, especially in its current format which is a long way from the gallery’s initial office-less incarnation. While this first space was cramped, it promoted an immediate and social relationship with the gallery and its director(s). The centre’s increasing success as a quasi-corporate entity has made its role vaguely ambiguous. While its vitality continues, this ambiguity results occasionally in displays of an amorphous and rather conventional ‘multiculturalism.’ At their best, the centre’s exhibitions reveal aspects of contemporary experience that are illuminating and culturally specific.

Gerahty’s homespun approach is conditioned partially by his own artistic practice. The internal knowledge this provides, combined with empathy for the position of artists, helps sustain exhibitions that are open-ended and close to the generative core of contemporary art. Sometimes this open-endedness affects the coherence of exhibitions but, rather than being detrimental, a willingness to take curatorial risks ensures Grey Matter’s on-going discursiveness and relevance. Currently exhibiting is a group of ‘young British artists’, a term currently harnessed for varying ends. The show appears at times a little too self-consciously reliant on deadpan chic but when viewed as a whole it offers a rare glimpse of contemporary cross-continental art practice.

The Asia-Australia Arts Centre is presently showing The Mandala Project. The title, intentionally or not, suggests universalist western theories of eastern spirituality. Surprising, however, is the exhibition’s embrace of collaboration and temporality. Here, the image of the Mandala coalesces over time and is celebrated with a gallery closing rather than the usual opening.

The divergent nature of these exhibitions indicates the range of Sydney’s contemporary galleries. While Melissa Chiu argues for widening models of popular and commercial patronage for artists, Gerahty at Grey Matter forcefully demonstrates the artist’s responsibility in fostering independent creative opportunities.

Grey Matter Contemporary Art, 1st floor, 35D Ross St, Glebe: The seat with the closest view, artists Adam Chodzko, Anne-Marie Copestake, Steve Dowson, Volker Eichelmann, Gareth Jones, Hilary Lloyd, Victoria Morton, Eva Rothschild, Gary Webb, Toby Ziegler, January 13-February 4; Asia-Australia Arts Centre, Gallery 4A , 181-187 Hay St, Sydney: The Mandala Project, January 16-February 3

The Year of the Dragon was a very good year for Asian film around the globe. A long essay in the New York Times of January 14 on “the sudden ubiquity of films from the Far East in art and commercial theatres, both here and in Europe” dubbed the phenomenon the “Asian Invasion.” Asian films took many of the European Film Festival awards in 1999 and dominated the US in 2000. Edward Yang’s A One and a Two was named Best Foreign Language Film of the Year by the New York Circle of Critics and awarded Best Film of the Year by the National Society of Film Critics. Contesting this choice was Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which scooped LA Film Critics Best Film of the Year, Time Magazine Best Film for 2000, The Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Feature Film and is in hot competition with Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood For Love to do the same at the Academy Awards.

Australia, though geographically much closer to the countries collectively referred to as Asia than either Europe or the USA, only saw the beginnings of the Asian cinema boom in 2000. Only 3 Asian films were released by major motion picture distributors in Australia in 1999, a sad decline from a high of 13 films 10 years earlier (Motion Picture Distributors Association of Australia).

It was in this climate of thriving global interest but much slower local market for Asian film that Columbia Tristar in Australia packaged 5 Asian films together, launching them as Silk Screen. Suzanne Stretton-Brown, National Marketing Manager, told me how it came about. “We were seeing an increase in Asian product that was coming via our production office established in Hong Kong to produce and acquire local Asian films and also Sony Classics. Through the 2 avenues we were all of a sudden faced with a slate of Asian titles and that was obviously a challenge in thinking what was the best way to distribute these films, to do each one justice and ensure each one realised its box office potential. It was then we came up with an idea how to manage that release and that was how Silk Screen evolved. It was for the purpose of creating some continuity in the area of our distribution and sales but it was also a wonderful marketing concept where under one banner we could promote 5 films.”

The package was launched with considerable fanfare with the release of the first film, Zhang Yimou’s The Road Home on July 6. Shower, an audience favourite at Sydney Film Festival, was released on August 24, Chen Kaige’s Emperor and the Assassin on October 5, followed by Takeshi Kitano’s Kikujiro on November 16 and the jewel in the crown, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on January 4.

The films were released simultaneously on 11 screens nationwide—3 in Victoria, 3 in NSW, 2 in WA and 1 each in the ACT, QLD and SA. “It was always our strategy to go with the more arthouse cinemas, the houses that perform well with this style of film and already have a very loyal audience.” In return for taking a package of films, the cinemas were offered “exclusivity”, guaranteed up until 25 January, when Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the film which carried the greatest expectations, was released on more than 40 screens nationwide.

Was Silk Screen a success? “Definitely, absolutely. It’s done particularly well in all markets. Interestingly, some films did better than others in different markets. Queensland is traditionally a difficult market for foreign language films. The program up there has been very very successful, in particular The Emperor and the Assassin. Perth also has had tremendous success. Two cinemas—the Windsor and Luna—shared the market and have done exceptionally well, so across the country it has been consistent.”

Two cinemas I spoke with were united in their support. Andrew Pike of Ronin Films, distributor of many of the Asian films released at independent cinemas during the 80s and early 90s, said Silk Screen had been very good for Electric Shadows, the Canberra cinema he manages. “I think it’s been a very important thing that Asian films have started attracting mainstream attention and Silk Screen has been a great achievement in the circulation of these films.” According to National Exhibitions Manager Michael Eldred, Dendy Cinemas was originally offered the Silk Screen package on more screens but declined. “Columbia were very much encouraging us to take it in other locations and have more exposure but it was a new concept and committing yourself to a year’s worth of film was highly irregular. In hindsight, we could probably have used it in the other theatres. Some films were stronger than others. I think Columbia were aware of this and that was part and parcel of why they were delivered to us in a package.” Eldred said the package concept worked in favour of the films. “The customers loved being able to know what films were coming up in a few months time and what to look forward to.”

The most anticipated film was the last in the programme, Taiwanese-born director Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Lee’s record establishes him as one of the most versatile directors anywhere, jumping genres from Sense and Sensibility to Ice Storm to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. What next, The Incredible Hulk? Well, yes, he has just been signed up. It is a mark of Lee’s standing that he could attract funding from Columbia Tristar to make his first Chinese language film since Eat Drink Man Woman. Three generations of Chinese actors—Cheng Pei Pei (the star of King Hu’s 1965 martial arts classic Come Drink With Me), Hong Kong star Chow Yun Fat, Malaysian born Michelle Yeoh and a new star from China, Zhang Ziyi—were united from across the Chinese- speaking world for this celebration of culture and tribute to China’s cinema history. Intertwining love stories along with the dynamism of the swordfighting scenes (choreographed by Yuen Woo Ping) has made the film a hit with audiences worldwide and a true crossover success. Michael Eldred commented: “It’s getting people who would never usually go to see a subtitled picture. I noticed the TV advertising doesn’t mention it being subtitled. So they’re coming, but they’re not disappointed because it’s delivering. It really is great from all angles.”

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has emerged as a phenomenon. It is the top grossing foreign language film in Australia, easily outperforming the Italian film Life is Beautiful. In its 3rd week of screening, it was earning over 4 times the screen average for the top 20 films (Urban Cinefile). Co-funded by Columbia-TriStar, hopefully its success will encourage greater investment in new talent and more risk taking in acquisition. The groundbreaking element to Silk Screen is the success of the series as a package not just in the selection of films. All of the directors but Zhang Yang are well-established, and Australian audiences have been familiar with Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige’s films since Ronin Films distributed a series of Fifth Generation Chinese films back in the 80s. While not disputing the quality of the Silk Screen films, there is far more to Asian film than “sweeping historical epics, blissful provincial fables and magnificent scenery and costumes.” The 3 films which best fit that description—Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Road Home and Emperor and the Assassin—were the films that performed best. Those about the newer realities of Asia—Shower, about the demise of community and tradition as it is bulldozed to make way for China’s new economics, and the one Japanese film, Takeshi Kitano’s Kikujiro—did not benefit from the branding of the package.

Silk Screen is not the only Asian cinema screening in Australia, though it had the financial muscle (and by consequence the ubiquity) to appear so. Actor Andy Lau’s 100th film, A Fighter’s Blues, was screening at Reading Cinemas, Market City in Sydney (before going to Canberra and Perth) at the same time it was number 1 at the box office in Hong Kong. Six films from Korea, currently considered the most exciting industry in Asia, have had short seasons at Reading Cinemas. (For regularly updated listings of Asian films screening across the country, check out www.heroic-cinema.com.)

Silk Screen’s success owed much to having Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as its trump card, but its overall impact may usher in a new era for Asian cinema in Australia. Early signs, such as Dendy Films’ slated release of In the Mood For Love in April and a retrospective of the films of the great screen actresses of 40s-60s Hong Kong cinema (planned for the second Sydney Asia Pacific Film Festival in August) all point to the Year of the Snake as Australia’s year of Asian cinema. Suzanne Stretton-Brown hints that another Silk Screen may be in the offing: “That decision will be made in a few months. We would like to (do it…but) we won’t do Silk Screen this year unless we have the same level of product we had in 2000.” A second Silk Screen is likely to include Time and Tide, a new film by Tsui Hark (Chinese Ghost Story) produced by Columbia Tristar. As Michael Eldred said when I asked him if Dendy Cinemas would be willing to go with a second series—“Bring it on!”

Building: challenges, spaces, visions

Art isn’t always meant to be easy—some would say ever. Often appreciation comes with personal interrogation or contemplation over time. In current discussions of art and its reception where accessibility is sometimes confused with simple populism, it’s possible to lose sight of the pleasures of encountering difficult, unfamiliar or unexpected ideas through art. In this issue. Our RealTime writers articulate some of these pleasures. Christine Evans plots the luminous textual cadences of Sarah Kane and Mac Wellman’s “skimming the river of American speech”; listening to Radiohead, Mark Mordue likens to skating a pond in Winter; Philip Brophy relishes the hidden sonic depths of the teen flick; Rachael Swain describes the complexities of finding common ground with Indigenous artists in Crying Baby. Philipa Rothfield wrestles with the paradox of work, man and actor in Brian Lipson’s A Large Attendance in the Antechamber.

The significance of surfaces is also reflected in our coverage of some bold new buildings—Linda Marie Walker reads the subtle sense of the Aboriginal Cultures Gallery in Adelaide, Zane Trow tracks the audience trajectory at The Brisbane Powerhouse; a group of artists talk to Barbara Bolt about designing a collaborative public art work for another Brisbane innovation, the Centre of Contemporary Arts. International new media artist Jeffrey Shaw describes his VR installation destined for Cinemedia’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne’s Federation Square (opening November 2001.

RealTime 41 features interviews with artists Richard Giblett, Tos Mahoney, Brian Carbee and UK choreographer Russell Maliphant, famed for the way he uses light in dance. We continue our series The Arts? What Next, this time addressing issues of globalism and vision. Sarah Miller takes a wary look at the discussion notes from the Australia Council’s New Media Arts Vision Day and the WA Ministry for the Arts’ Building Community through the Arts. Ben Goldsmith reports on a conference on globalisation and cultural diversity staged on the edge of an extinct volcano.

As well as the interview with Jeffrey Shaw, OnScreen features Juanita Kwok’s account of the success of Columbia Tri-Stars’ Silk Screen program. Kwok talks to distributors and cinema owners about how the program worked and whether or not Silk Screen II is likely. OnScreen editor Kirsten Krauth tries to match the media fuss over Dennis O’Rourke’s Cunnamula with her rich experience of the film. Kirsten also quizzes Australian International Documentary Conference director Richard Sowada about significant directions he’s taking the conference in. Tina Kaufman investigates the fine tuning of the AFI Awards, wonders just how judging the if magazine awards worked, and why the results looked conservative. She comes up with some interesting findings.

Demolishing: the ABC

Protest seems to be having little effect on ABC Managing Director Jonathon Shier’s reshaping of the national public broadcaster. Before Xmas there was a flurry of email campaigns, including one initiated by RealTime. Responses from some politicians were almost instantaneous (the ready-to-go email missive), with Bob Brown first off the mark and a string of Liberals saying, yes, what a pity, but if the ABC wants to go in new (media) directions the money has to come from somewhere. Democrat Senators were responsive, but Labor was very quiet. However, Senator Rosemary West summed it up for the party declaring support for an independent, non-privatised, “adequately funded” ABC “so that it can meet its community service obligations and fully embrace the opportunities offered by the introduction of new technologies.”

The Australian Labor Party will set out our express financial commitment to the ABC prior to the next Federal election. While we acknowledge that some would like us to give an express commitment sooner, we simply do not know what condition the ABC will be at the time of the next election and therefore what level of funding will be appropriate.

No email from Senator Richard Alston, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, but a letter (3/1/01) in the post in response to our call for the government to cease Shier’s restructuring. His Broadcasting Liason Officer writes:
“Government provides an overall level of funding for the ABC, but has no role in deciding internal funding priorities. Accordingly, concerns relating to internal ABC decisions should be directed to the Managing Director of the ABC.”

Letters of protest continue to circulate on the net, at this stage presumably hoping to restrict the amount of damage Shier can inflict. It’s a tricky one, with a number of artists wondering what, outside of Radio National and specialist units like science, they’re defending—the wretched state of ABCTV and Classic FM? But, for the moment, there are real principles at stake that have to override our ambivalence.

Out of the building: the new head of NSW Arts

In NSW, Evan Williams, head of the NSW Ministry for the Arts has retired, to be replaced by Roger Wilkins, Director-General of the Cabinet Office. With a salary increase of a rumoured $10,000pa, Wilkins will double as Director-General of the Ministry for the Arts. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Kelly Burke (January 13) reports Premier Bob Carr as saying, “We believe in lean government.” Burke comments that “cost cutting benefits…are likely to be negated by the Government’s plan to appoint a deputy director-general to the Arts Ministry.” While the appointment was cautiously welcomed by the Opposition and the Australia Council Chair Margaret Seares (“It is interesting and probably positive to have the Cabinet Office so closely involved in the arts”), many an artist’s heart sank at the announcement, as once again bureaucracy/middle management takes the arts reins. While low key and cautious (many a NSW artist has looked enviously at developments in Victoria and Queensland in recent years), Williams, a former journalist and still a film-reviewer for The Australian, was nonetheless felt by many to be a part of the arts community. Our hopes for reform in policy and practice in NSW arts funding now rest probably not with Wilkins, but with the Deputy-Director General, hopefully someone responsive to the Ministry’s fine project staff and to the community of NSW artists. Apparently Wilkins will not be in the same building as his Ministry for the Arts (which was moved from its geographical proximity to the Premier’s Office in 2000). VB, KG

Zane Trow, Artistic Director of Brisbane’s Powerhouse, is positively electric. A steady current of unabashed enthusiasm about his first year at the new arts centre and the promise of the 12 month program he’s announced for 2001 flows down the phone line.

It’s a significant move for a contemporary arts centre to announce an annual calendar of events, tied as such venues are to artists and companies waiting on the outcomes of government arts funding cycles. Doubtless this plays a role in Trow’s scheduling too, but Powerhouse funding levels, box office income and co-production deals, along with an accessible, attractive venue with several performing spaces and a good bar, allow him a choice of artists and appropriate hirers that will add up to a distinctive program. As Trow says, “co-production is crucial. That’s the future. We operate this organisation far more like a festival than an arts venue. It’s a mixture of commissioning, sponsoring, co-production, investment.” In a short period the Powerhouse has proven itself attractive to audiences and artists and is a highly desirable venue for touring interstate artists. The 2001 calendar includes, from Melbourne, Crying in Public Places, Handspan Theatre, David Chesworth Ensemble and desoxy Theatre; from Sydney, Rosalind Crisp and stella b., The opera Project, Andrew Morrish and Taikoz; and from Brisbane, Vulcana Women’s Circus, Frank Productions, Elision new music ensemble and 2 appearances each by Topology and Rock’n’Roll Circus. There’s more in visual arts, new media, dance and community events—as you’ll see on the Powerhouse’s website: www.brisbane powerhouse.org. Almost a year after the centre’s opening, Trow’s enthusiasm is undimmed, he’s already achieving many of the goals he set himself, his staff and the building.

The 12 month plan

Creating a 12 month program is a struggle but it worked for us in our first year. We did a certain amount on the run and we were nervous about it—various marketing gurus said we should have a quarterly program but the 12 month one worked for us. People held on to it. More and more the website keeps people in touch with the program as it goes along. That seems to be working.

There’s no subscription scheme, but we’ve got some packages this year where you can buy a taste for the year of a range of projects, for example if you’re interested in contemporary music. I really think that relying on a subscriber base is a bit of a chain around your neck. Most national initiatives start from a premise of trying to convince subscribers to like contemporary performance. You know, how are we going to convince our subscribers to give something risky a try; rather than saying, here’s all this risky stuff that does have an audience, how are we going to expand that. It’s a different way of thinking. Last year in audience terms was extremely successful for us. More successful than anyone had predicted. That gives us a basis to build on the idea of diversity.

Audiences find a home

Part of what we’re doing is recognising that Brisbane does have an inner-city culture. It has an audience that’s probably between 18 and 45, that is interested in risk and probably has a range of entertainment options that is about risk but has not had that live performance option in Brisbane before, and in one place. That has served us very well. Our core audience is younger, comes to the Powerhouse more than once and has an interest in a whole range of aspects of contemporary performance culture. That’s been important with the Spark Bar up and running really well this year. In March we’re opening the Watt Cafe by the river so we’ll be able to offer regular visitors food and drink as part of their ticket package. We’re developing incentives, loyalty programs if you like, but we’re not locking it all down and trying to pre-sell a program 12 months out and then worrying that we haven’t got enough subscribers.

We do an initial push at the beginning of the year and then we sell show by show. We use the mailing list effectively, I think. People tell us what they like and don’t. We love the internet because we can talk to people directly. The website is very well used and we’re constantly developing new ways to use it. This year you’ll be able to go to the website and every couple of weeks get a regular update.

It’s crucial that people begin to come here for a whole variety of reasons and just hang out. The idea of the cafe and the atmosphere in the building is really informed by a small and medium scale European and UK art centre aesthetic—the bar and relaxed food atmosphere as much as the theatre or the bookshop. It’s those kind of models we’re drawing on to do the business plans for the Powerhouse. So far it’s working.

Given all the conversations that have gone on over the last 12 months about the Saatchi & Saatchi Report, it seems obvious that if you want to get people to enjoy art that is challenging and risky then it’s probably better to give people a relaxing and enjoyable environment and to break down the formality of the high art idea that you have to get dressed up to go. My experience tells me that when you’re able to do that, when you do create a happy and relaxed environment, the art is actually served well and audiences appreciate that and might, in fact, take a risk on something that they wouldn’t ordinarily.

A place for artists

That’s something that we really try to foster—a place where artists can come, over and above simply presenting work. In a professional sense, in terms of development, I’ve actually managed to achieve a level of residency program here that I’ve tried hard to do in the last few years in Australia and have never been able to pull off. We have artists in residence throughout the year, focussing on performance but not exclusively. We have people working in new media and installation and visual arts. That begins to foster the idea of a contemporary hub of ideas. The kind of atmosphere we’ve tried to set up in here is very different to the standard arts centre interval bar that nobody in their right mind would want to sit in talking till 3 in the morning. You’d go somewhere else. Whereas here we’re trying to foster an environment, for artists and audience, where you could come for the whole night, see a show or not and you can sit around and engage with an aspect of contemporary culture—which is the building itself.

Getting the work on

I’ve got development projects up to the end of 2003 and there’s a real demand to work here. We’re also being recognised as a place where you can bring an initial project idea that may be left of centre and get a critical, supportive response. That’s brought a range of projects which are attracting a level of support they might not have enjoyed in Brisbane. That’s part of the rationale of a place like this, to be able to respond to interesting ideas.

With the kind of independent and smaller company networks we work in, I think co-production is crucial. That’s the future. We operate this organisation far more like a festival than an arts venue. It’s a mixture of commissioning, sponsoring, co-production, investment. There’s a mixture of models about how a piece of art gets made. We try and retain a flexibility in the way we work and in our budget to be able to respond in different ways.

There are certain organisations nationally that we’re beginning to work regularly in partnership with so that you’ve got a mixed level of investment into a project that perhaps 5 years ago could have got away with maybe one funding source. We’re working with other arts funding agencies internationally to support overseas artists coming here. We’re looking at cross-producing work with some Queensland companies that are annually or triennially funded. They still need $10,000 or $15,000 extra to get what is in fact their annual program up. It’s so important for an arts centre like us to maintain the program funding we have and to be able to have the flexibility to choose where to invest it. I think that idea of a mixture of investment, sponsorship and co-production and commissioning is a model that could be used far more in Australia in an arts centre sense—The Powerhouse is a bit of a new model.

Robyn Backen, the building that speaks, public art installation, digital image courtesy of the artist

Of course it’s relevant

The issue is about a balance of investment between heritage culture and new work. In a forum we hosted with the Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy in their response to the Australia Council’s Promoting the Value of the Arts campaign (www.gu.edu. au/centre/cmp/rtfs/ PVAworkshop.rtf) we reached a couple of conclusions. The first was that clearly there is a contemporary practice in Australia that actually does address, and has done so historically, a lot of the concerns expressed in that report. None of those organisations or initiatives, it seemed to us, were heritage culture. If you talk about 70% of Australians wanting the arts to be relevant to the way we live now, if you take that quote out of the Saatchi & Saatchi Report, well it’s pretty interesting, isn’t it?

If art is to be relevant to the way we live now, I doubt very much whether the Opera and the Ballet and the proscenium arch can deliver that in a consistent way—occasionally perhaps. Whereas it’s the contemporary practitioners of the nation who are involved in how we live now. Those things seem to us blatantly obvious. The question is how to convince the policy makers that it really is that simple.

It’s hard but I think we’re very lucky here at the Powerhouse because Brisbane happens to have at this time, regardless of diminishing project grants nationally and locally, a great energy.

Lifting the cloak of invisibility

In the 7 months we’ve been operating we’ve made just under a million bucks earned income, mostly in ticket sales with some stuff like hire and events. That gives us a good argument to go back to the Brisbane City Council and say that the “mad idea” they had to form this independent business is actually viable. It also proves that if you present this art, people will come and see it. For some of the more conservative strains of the arts industry in Brisbane this has come as a bit of a shock. The majority of the work we develop is hand in hand with local artists and organisations who have been “invisible” in Queensland for a long time—in terms of coverage in the media or in any genuine sense of local pride in what these artists might do. And we’ve certainly removed that cloak of invisibility and demonstrated that the work has an economic value.

We have an annual subsidy of $1.5 million and we do everything with that. It covers the overheads and we basically have to double it to stay alive. That puts us into the Major Organisations kind of bracket, but we’re a bit of an aberration because it’s rare that $1.5 million a year is spent on this kind of independent contemporary work. Just that small investment isn’t very much when you compare the arts subsidy in Australia with what one can spend on farming. It’s a pittance. But if there is energy and commitment and vision and there are artists who want to do good work in this contemporary culture, small amounts of money in our networks go an awfully long way. I think what we present is an argument that says yes, that’s true but if you take this culture seriously, if you were to invest in contemporary culture to the level that you would normally invest in straight theatre you will also see a significant return and you will see work that is recognised nationally and internationally. That’s part of our role, to say it is possible for Australian contemporary culture to get an audience and to make money. What it needs to achieve that is respect, trust and flexibility.

Beating bad press

The Courier Mail implied that the Powerhouse was turning into an elite centre for the gay and lesbian Mafia of Brisbane. There was a certain amount of local politics involved in all that but also the issue of invisibility. Once we pulled off the cloak what was presented to the more conservative end of town was a culture they hadn’t really looked at before. And it was clearly seen to be something that people wanted. For example, our Queer Film and Video Weekend was a 98% sell-out last year. If you are involved in arts and culture and your main involvement has been in a major organisation, whether you’re audience or arts worker, you haven’t really noticed all this contemporary culture before. You’ve got no reason to. In our collaboration with Brisbane Pride Festival, for instance, we’re not doing anything that hasn’t been done in Brisbane before, it’s just that we’re doing it with a new level of visibility. If you look at a program for any contemporary arts organisation, it’s full of bodies, photographs of bodies. Therefore the whole thing (according to the Courier) must be about sex and, not only that, deviant sex! One of the conservative critics thought it was appalling that we got so many young people in the space. Now there are some arts organisations who have spent 20 years desperately trying to get young people in. This critic was actually offended that the bar was full of nose rings and tattoos and she couldn’t believe it, so she thought, right, they must all be deviants. I don’t think she’d actually been in a bar full of young Australian people recently.

The article did come as a surprise. The program had been in the public domain for months before the article happened. But it has not affected attendances, ticket sales, project development at all. It’s basically an aberration and most of the people who have visited and the arts organisations in Queensland we’ve worked with thought the article was so bloody stupid that it was almost embarrassing. It certainly caused debate on our board which I think was a very healthy thing. The board is incredibly supportive of the directions we’re taking in programming and supported the idea that the venue should be gay and lesbian friendly. So it did raise some issues. Over Christmas there was another article in the Courier Mail. The headline read “On track despite the critics.” During that period there was the 25 year anniversary of the IMA and its director Michael Snelling in his speech said that the history of contemporary culture in Brisbane could be seen as a 25 year struggle with the Courier Mail.

We got an awful lot of calls of support. It’s interesting because if we follow through the strategies of audience development for contemporary culture that our betters and masters are currently so keen to have us do, my theatre foyer full of 18-25 year olds having a great time with art that hasn’t specifically been sold to them as Youth Arts—they’ve come because it’s an interesting product and they want to see it. On the other hand it’s a great threat to the status quo. I think there are some people in the arts here in Brisbane who think, it can’t possibly go on, we’ll have to pull that risky strategy back.’

New media vs hybrid arts

We’ve taken Cyber Cultures from the Casula Powerhouse in Sydney’s west and we’re supporting a number of residences. We have new media artist Keith Armstrong and performer Lisa O’Neill and in the visual arts there are some new media works as well. I’ve left it to the artists themselves to try and score the money from the New Media Arts Fund of the Australia Council. I think there is great potential here in Australia to develop a performance technology research and development arm of the culture. There’s a range of companies you can think of who have been working in that way for years. There has been a feeling that the New Media Arts Fund is in danger, in the long term, of becoming a digital arts fund rather than a multimedia and hybrid arts body. Perhaps it’s that, overall, the Australia Council is struggling with a Federal Government that wants to push it in particular directions. There’s been a lot of investment in rock ‘n’ roll recently and some good investments in international marketing and whatever but we still haven’t had a decent increase in basic grant funding for 20 years. One of the great jokes of the Saatchi & Saatchi Report is that the majority of work that could probably address its concerns about audience development is lucky to get $15,000 a year. Meanwhile, $15,000 wouldn’t even wipe the nose of the Australian Opera’s education program. What’s going on here?

The 2001 Program

There are a number of local artists and artistic directors who have a look at our venue and just laugh—‘never in our wildest dreams would we ever perform there.’ Others, like Michael Gow, Artistic Director of the Queensland Theatre Company, see the theatre as a great opportunity. Hopefully our relationship with the QTC will be ongoing. The interesting thing about Richard II, in the 2001 program, is that it’s one of the few standard scripts throughout the year. I suppose if you’re going to have a scripted play you might as well have Shakespeare!

In the 2001 program there’s a strong emphasis on physical theatre and an expanded contemporary music focus which is important because the new music scene here in Brisbane is very strong. I hope our relationship with Elision and Topology and other groups will develop over a number of years. I really wanted to develop the music program to a point where it looked coherent and reflected the diversity of talent here. To the local groups we’re adding the David Chesworth Ensemble from Melbourne and Taikoz from Sydney.

Having established the strong physical theatre focus last year, we’ll continue that too. There’s Vulcana Women’s Circus, two shows from Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus, Frank Productions, plus desoxy from Melbourne. We might see some long term development out of interstate visits—Taikoz and Frank Productions have been talking for years about trying to do something together. With the Powerhouse as a kind of broker those things can happen.

Brisbane Powerhouse, 119 Lamington St, New Farm. For 2001 Calendar of Events see www.brisbanepowerhouse.org.

…objects are not dumb but inexhaustible, capable of an infinite range of readings and re-readings.
K Moore, Museums and Popular Culture, Leicester Uni Press, London & New York 1997

Usually I don’t like visiting museums. I never know quite what to look at, I never seem to ‘see’ very much, and I’m acutely (and depressingly) aware that I’ve missed ‘seeing’ more than I’ve seen, and to top it off I become weary almost instantly. I have the same experience in department stores. All in all I feel defeated by museums (and department stores).

However, I finally (and with hesitation) visited the Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery at the South Australian Museum which opened in early March 2000, along with an overall museum refurbishment. I’d anticipated being, once more, overcome by my own inability-to-absorb. It didn’t happen, I enjoyed being there. I felt like staying, wandering around, reading, listening, looking; I felt calm, instead of choked, and puzzled, curious…happy even. It was a strange response (for me). (I spent as much time watching the children as watching the displays—I’ll return to this.)

A couple of weeks after this initial visit a friend from Cardiff went to see the gallery. He was impressed; he said he didn’t feel “beaten over the head” by the politics of Aboriginal issues. He said he’d gained some understanding of a complex and elegant culture, and that even though the gallery was of a traditional museum design (in many respects), it had somehow subverted the common, and over-arching, intention of the museum—a heavy didacticism, a sort of grim inertness.

There are around 3000 objects on display, which is 10 per cent of the museum’s Aboriginal collection, as well as many archival photographs. At several locations, and in relation to particular Australian regions, there are video-screens with head-and-shoulder footage of Aboriginal people telling stories. They speak directly to ‘you.’ These screens are placed in such a way as to be discrete and at the same time clear and compelling. One simply comes across them. The voices do not interfere sound-wise with each other. The stories told are everyday, personal, and insightful (about relatives, cooking, singing, hunting, art, pain).

There is no directed way to view the gallery. One can follow the walls, or move through the curved passages, coming to ‘themes’ by chance (like ‘food and water’ or ‘aesthetics’), as well as ‘regions’ (like ‘South East’, ‘MacDonnell Ranges’, ‘Western Cape York’) and ‘technologies’ (like ‘spears’, ‘drugs’, ‘watercraft’, ‘string’). It’s tempting to move back and forward, criss-cross, or linger; things and ideas link up gradually; correspondences, relationships, and surprises slowly seep in. And by the time one sits down in front of the double screen in the second floor theatrette, where a series of anthropological films have been recut into shorts, and are shown with contemporary footage, and with relevant objects—illuminated in a sequenced way—in 2 cases (one between the screens)—one/I/you is a (potentially) slightly different person. Not because one has been given a lesson, or been overwhelmed by masses of artefacts and difficult (sad) matters, but because one has been touched quietly/softly and decisively by the beauty, innovation, richness and subtlety of objects, materials, rituals, and knowledges. The displays manage to give information both matter-of-factly and expressively, not tying down, or stitching, the exhibits into single or determined narratives.

Sometimes I wished for slightly brighter lighting, just to see in more detail what was there, to see the contours of small containers, or the exact marks on a fire-stick, or the colour of seed pods, and sometimes I wanted a little more text about particular exhibits—pieces of jewellery for instance. I was told by David Kerr, Head of Public Programs at the Museum, that there will be slight changes to the lighting over time, and more wall texts and labelling will be added.

As well as the individual video-screens and the theatrette, there are a number of larger monitors which run programs of archival film and video “providing contextual imagery for the objects on display. Significantly this is not explicitly the Museum voice of authority, but an independent witness, with the visitor making the connections between the film and the display” (David Kerr, Artlink, Vol. 20, No 3). And on both floors there is bench-seating along which are positioned touch-screen monitors on articulated arms. These contain multi-media data-bases of story-lines; they are simple to use, and the stories are well-organised and accessible. When I was there many family groups were gathered around, and discussion was animated, with children making associations between displays and stories.

The gallery also has an Indigenous Information Centre on the second floor, where Indigenous museum staff deal with inquiries about the collection, using CD-ROMs, databases, books and videos as well as providing Indigenous people with details from the museum’s genealogical archive. The Centre shows Aboriginal artists’ work—presently there are paintings by Ian Abdulla. Downstairs there’s a small dedicated exhibition space which can be used as an art gallery or for the temporary display of more pieces from the collection.

On entering the gallery one comes face-to-face with a layered display of black and white archival portraits, among which are two video screens with the animated faces of Aboriginal people. They look out at us, alive, nervous, waiting, and warm (we meet these people later as they talk to us from the video-screens inside). We are reminded from the start that we are in the presence of people, of a culture made, and being made, by people. A soundscape of voices, birds (and I’m not sure what else) plays above and around. It is unintrusive, and comes and goes in one’s consciousness. Upstairs there’s another soundscape, and at one point the laughter of children drew me to a display case where a silent video-screen shows children playing, as well as a number of toys.

So far I have several favourite displays: the string bags and nets, the shell jewellery, the medicines, the masks made from kerosene tins, and the exquisite carved glass spear heads (and the football segment in the theatrette).

Over the last decade there’s been an enormous amount of research and writing about ‘the museum’ and ‘museum-display’; about what ‘the museum’ was, is, and can be, and about its cultural-display role (and consequently, amongst other issues, about history, community, interpretation, ownership). This is due, in some measure, to recent theoretical and philosophical thinking regarding interdisciplinary and non-linear practices of meaning, working, creating and teaching. Especially important in displaying a culture (or in the display of history, science, art, and so on) is the seemingly ordinary concept of sense. How is sense made? What sense do we make, and why? How do we keep sense open, available?

The museum, the exhibition, is about seeing, reading, listening. The type of order the museum creates/imposes, the way in which its curators, researchers, archivists see, read, and listen, affects the memory of individuals, and of cultures themselves—the cultures which it displays and the cultures which come to visit, to view. The museum is a type of memory and dream; a space for memorising and dreaming. The care of memory and dream is the care of remembering, forgetting, and imagining, and it’s the care too of detail, possibility, and infinity. There are countless ways to make sense of every single thing; every single being brings themselves to bear upon the seen, heard, read event. The interaction, the potential for conversation, inner and outer, is where the moments of becoming ‘a slightly different person’ could be. “In dream space, many things might tumble through our minds: bits of songs, half-written shopping lists, things left unsaid. The shape or shadow of something, its texture or colour, the operation of space and the people moving through it can be triggers to an endless range of personal associations. Therefore, in accepting…[the] idea of the dream space, we have to accept more fully the imagination, emotions, senses and memories as vital components of the experience of museums.” (G Kavanagh, Dream Spaces, Memory and the Museum, Leicester Uni Press, London & New York, 2000)

Which brings me back to children. I watched the way children in the Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery went about making sense. It was haphazard, unruly, restless. They stopped, wondered, pointed, or moved on, swiftly, careless; they saw one thing and returned to another. They used the touch-screens like video games, a bit brutal, expecting the equipment to work fast. They read here and there, not from start to finish. The gallery tolerated all of this. It seemed to give them a chance to play, or at least to remain in the mode of play. I thought, as a result, that in time, this gallery will make a big ‘difference.’

The Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery Project Team were: Philip Clarke (principal curator), Philip Jones (preliminary brief), David Kerr (content coordinator), Franchesca Cubillo, Chris Nobbs, Root Projects Australia (project management), Freeman Ryan Design in association with X Squared Design (exhibition design), CDP Media (multimedia consultant), Clinic Design (Speaking Land interactive), Bollman and Bietz (Contemporary Voice films).

Kid A, the fourth release from British group Radiohead, was one of the most awaited events of the musical calendar. Perhaps because no other ‘rock’ band of the present era had the newness of presence and the experimental vigour to qualify for what most critics, some a little less consciously than others, saw as a millennial statement, a chance to push the boat out into the 21st century.

Both REM and U2 were due to release recordings at the same time. There was no doubt these ‘grand old men of rock’ still knew how to set an influential pace: that each document would be received as a major statement, and that each would be looking to affirm their liveliness. But even these musical giants seemed to have accepted their more historic place after long careers and bowed their heads to a new pathfinder.

REM singer Michael Stipe was quick to tell the world a few years ago, “Radiohead are so good it scares me.” U2’s Bono was more recently quoted saying that the previous two Radiohead CDs—The Bends (1995) and OK Computer (1997)—“are among the best things ever recorded in pop music.”

The more experienced point men of contemporary music had a new champion walking beside them. Most critics and recent music polls agreed with them. And what did the new leader say when he arrived?

Recited in a manner—on a new song called Optimistic—that suggested maybe he/they can’t, that singer Thom Yorke and Radiohead are as lost as anyone.

Pre-publicity and hype around Kid A proposed something so experimental and aurally unexpected—strong new electronic influences, a drastically reduced use of Radiohead’s trademark guitar sound and Thom Yorke’s high, sweet-sad voice—something so musically strange we would have trouble even listening to it.

This was going to be a high art event. A record you struggled with. Half-baffled, half-admiring reviews are still perpetuating this lie. The truth is Kid A is beautiful. Complex textured music, yes, but driving and melodic, filled with luminous energy.

Most Radiohead fans will have long ago detected a utopian coolness at the heart of their sound. Everything from the band’s CD artwork through to Thom Yorke’s fluorescent lyrical ache—think of songs like Fake Plastic Trees and Paranoid Android, let alone their CD titles (Kid A betrays a fascination with biogenetic engineering)—have added to that surrounding mood of futurist uncertainty. This is tomorrow’s music from today’s romantics, struggling to maintain emotional efficacy in a world increasingly iced by electronic light: the internet, surveillance, reality TV, automated transactions, voyeurism, a denatured and alienated global communications ‘village’ where contact is byte-sized.

In no way, however, do Radiohead present themselves as rock ‘n’ roll primitivists (‘we really mean it man’), or Luddites opposed to a technological culture inside or outside of music. If anything, in today’s scene they are regarded as the last word in modern rock ‘n’ roll-up to the minute and beyond it.

If you wanted to place Radiohead into a ‘tradition’, you’d refer to acts like Kraftwerk and Pink Floyd, as well as the Bryan Eno-influenced exoticism of early Roxy Music (those brassy squalls and cool angles) and the Berlin digressions of David Bowie and U2 (the same pop alienation). Peers like the British avant-dance act Underground, and Britpop’s most intelligent act, Pulp (in songs like The Fear), are also a relating influence, estranged partners, along with electronic leaders like Aphex Twins and Autechre. And of course, mid-career Beatles at their creative, if shadowy, peak in the studio. Revolver, Dark Side of the Moon, Achtung Baby, The Man Machine… these are the musical moments that Kid A lodges itself beside.

In a like-minded way, Radiohead are straining at the boundaries of the pop-rock form and their own identity as a group within it, ranging over epic and neo-classical territory in a manner that is both aesthetically and technologically interesting. Despite the complexities, the coolness, there’s an undoubted exhilaration to this, the sheer thrill of new space.

Unlike the bloated ‘progressive rock’ movement of the early 70s (Yes, Genesis, ELP), which tried to instill rock music with classical seriousness—a movement Radiohead are said to have re-energised in Britain (though groups like Muse, Coldplay and The Doves are hardly acts to feel ashamed of)—Kid A shows discipline, tension, focus. Radiohead are also part of a re-intellectualisation of the British music scene—smart, sensitive Oxford boys who provide a relieving and awesome contrast to the road weary, lads-on-piss attitude of bands like Oasis and the cheapening magazine culture that followed them like bulldogs down retro-lane.

It’s possible to argue that Radiohead are a post-Empire blues band. No longer a vital economic entity, Britain depends on ‘culture’ for its post-colonial identity. It uses pop music, graphic design, fashion, and media aggression to reassert its prominence while its physical and social conditions emanate decay. The British, you see, are still set on world domination: they just operate their imperialist tendencies in a different matrix these days.

In songs like Kid A and The National Anthem you hear this put into an unsettling position. An indecipherable vocal croon distorting like something out of a 1920s microphone, a disembodied music hall lament from history; a splenetic rush of BBC, like orchestrations thundering and broken. ‘Great’ Britain in sickness more than health. I suspect Radiohead, with these allusions and their generally elusive atmosphere, are refusing to take on a more culturally chauvinistic role as yet another English musical export a la ‘Cool Britannia.’ They are also making music in anti-heroic mode, which includes forsaking cliched rock rebel poses: the bad boys, the decadents. No, Radiohead offer something more reflective, even traumatised.

If you’re the investigative type, you may have already discovered a booklet hidden beneath the back packaging of the CD. Once lifted and revealed you’ll find a lengthy poem inside, constructed, Burroughsian cut-up style, out of newspaper headlines and magazine phrases as well as song lyric fragments, culminating in the repeated phrase “the gap between you and me.” There are a few drawings and portraits of cartoon violence and organic isolation amid this typographical chatter. A native, dystopic soul is at work here: Thom Yorke’s lonely, ugly-funny, beautiful-sick sense of things, in a form that might be classified as ‘art brut’ or ‘outsider art’: the kind of disturbed creative expression usually associated with eccentrics and schizophrenics.

But in almost everything they do, Radiohead exhibit a profound sadness that goes way beyond the facile psychologising of Thom Yorke’s depressive inclinations and his past history as a mental hospital orderly. There’s something ‘social’ embedded in their sound, a broader grieving that picks up on the communication problems of the brave new world. They seem materially plugged into something, armed and disarming at once: exactly because their technical sophistication is dependent on the culture that troubles them. It’s a riddle.

Kid A accordingly resists anthems, providing instead a soundtrack—diving and resurfacing, often melodically pretty, inevitably sheeted with that touch of Radiohead ice, that surface over a deep pond feeling—that is hard to resist. I’d go so far as to liken listening to Kid A to the experience of skating over a pond in Winter: so pleasurable and cool, terribly alive to something childish and risky and temporary, easy on top, disturbing below.

Musically the recording could certainly be regarded as a retreat into childishness, a spasm of infantile panic. There’s a fixation with something funereal, explicitly conjured in the organ sound and heavenly harp of Motion Picture Soundtrack. And a need to transcend and back away from that darkness. That attitude infuses the entire recording with a regretful light. A womb-like yearning for lost warmth most easily heard in the lullaby mood of the title track and the bioscopic sound effects that colour the entire CD.

This ‘retreat’ sees the band backing away from easy musical hooks, erasing standard song structures, and therefore side stepping simple analyses. The band’s own identity almost fades away at times. They are literally lost in space. The decision to release no singles or promotional videos is part of this dissolution, while their ‘i-blips’ (brief images with soundtrack samples from the CD) on the internet accentuate, at most, a fleeting take on self promotion.

Perhaps Kid A’s affirmation of a struggle for humanity and spirit just off the edges of our individual consciousness—out there in a world of science, mass media and the internet—is one reason why I resort to the poetic rather than the analytical when I speak about it. That’s no bad place to be. From what I’ve read, critics are struggling to pin this one down, warning fans not to expect to like it, or even understand it. That’s so far out. I think they will manage more easily than expected and, if not, rumour has it the band have another recording of more straight ahead, conventional Radiohead tracks ready for 2001 release; for now they’ve put the experiment first, the career second.

At a time when pop music is more than ever an industry of empires, a world of units shifted and niche markets carved, Radiohead are happy, strangely happy, to be mysterious and elusive, a ghost in the machine. Or as Thom Yorke so eloquently put it in the wonderfully named song How To Disappear Completely, “I’m not here. This isn’t…”

And what is the next word that he says? Unhappiness? Happening? It’s hard to hear him. Like so much of this record, the message is unclear.

Maybe he says both. The song rolls on: “I’m not here. I’m not here. In a little while I’ll be gone. The moment’s already passed. Yeah it’s gone.”

On Kid A, it’s not what Radiohead say or declare that matters, but what they don’t know. This record is about loss, absence, a heavenly and hellish sense of space: mortality caught in a new technological web. Where so many people may have expected a major statement, they’ve thrown up an eerie question mark. And we are all the better for it.

The humidity is high, the temperature is way above Sydney’s mild Summer average and the air is utterly still in Tamarama (next door to Bondi Beach) where Marrugeku and Stalker director Rachael Swain and her husband, company technical director Joey Ruigrok Van Der Werven, live…from time to time. But, despite having just completed a week of hot stilt-walking practice at Stalker’s less-than air-conditioned Marrickville studio and having to coordinate an incredibly large and complex group of performers and staff (25 people from Broome, Perth, Oenpelli, the outstation Markalikbarn, Goulburn Island, Melbourne and Sydney), there’s a cool air of quiet confidence in the old shopfront house before the company fly out to Perth—for an all too short onsite rehearsal in the Quarry Ampitheatre. Joey breezes out to pick up a new back-up VCR for the show and Eddie Nailibidj, a key performer in Crying Baby sits in on the interview with Rachael, nodding agreement, answering the odd query, relaxed deep into his armchair but nevertheless exuding a restless energy that says dancer—traditional, break and stilt dancer.

After a rapturously received preview of Crying Baby at the 2000 Darwin Festival (see RT#40 p10), the Marrugeku Company, an ongoing collaboration between Sydney-based Stalker Theatre Company, urban Indigenous dancers and musicians from WA and the Oenpelli community in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, premiere their second work at the 2001 Perth Festival. Like their first work, Mimi, Crying Baby is destined to become an arts festival favorite. As we go to press there is hardly a ticket left for the Perth show and there are more offers from major festivals than the company can contemplate.

The rehearsal in Perth will allow the whole company to rework the show, accommodate various cuts and changes, make technical adjustments and add some cultural nuancing for urban audiences now that the show has left its Oenpelli home. Rachael calls the Darwin showing an avant-premiere and this phase the 5th stage of the show’s long gestation.

Stage 1 was the end of 1998. We had the whole company up there for a month. We went up with the question, is there a new show to make? We really wanted to approach it very openly to see if Mimi was just a one-off. But very quickly we moved into a whole lot of new territory together.

It took the work on Mimi for us to understand one another enough to be able to explore more complex issues. There’s always been a fascination with each other’s vocabularies. That’s been a backbone of the work. The community-based artists love the physical theatre work of Stalker. And we really enjoy their amazing mastery in traditional dance and music. The urban Indigenous artists in the company have vocabularies from a number of places. For example Dalisa Pigram from Broome has been trained in the traditional dance forms of her people. She also did a lot gymnastics from when she was quite young, so she’s learned the aerial work in the show very quickly. She also went to the Aboriginal Music Theatre Training School in Perth that Michael Leslie set up. I met her just after that and we taught her the stilts.

Mapping stories

In Kunwinjku culture, the Djang (the closest you can get to the meaning is what whitefellas call Dreaming) exists in the land and as stories that have moved across the land. But there are also Djang stories we would think of as historical and built out of post-contact history. And because Stalker works either with large scale outdoor touring works or more site specific works, this whole idea of a story in a landscape is something that is part of the process of our company. That’s a shared understanding or the ground that we stand on together, that we build from.

The text for the new work was in fact a map which took in the Djang of the area, including the history of the first white man in the area, a man called Mr Watson. Thompson Yulidjirri, who’s the elder for this work, the storyman, tells his own history in the area. And Marrugeku, over the 6 years we’d worked together, we have our history there.

It took us days to make this big map with all these stories on it and that became our text for the show. We used it spatially but also as a group of narratives as well as an understanding of how the Djang stories, the contemporary stories and the historical stories could weave together into a narrative. It started on a piece of A4 paper and then we got another one and another one and then we got a big piece of cardboard and then we stopped; then we got 3 pieces of cardboard and started again-it went on and on. In the show, as Thompson is narrating he draws out the map and in the film [projected in the performance] Aboriginal filmmaker Warwick Thornton has made a montage of the telling.

One day, in the process of doing the mapping, there was this little circle on the map and I said to Thompson, what’s that one there and he said oh, that’s Mr Watson. And I said, who’s this fella Mr Watson? And he told me the whole story of his father’s people along with other tribes being taken from their land and the setting up of a mission on Goulburn Island. Reverend James Watson was the first white man to come through this area. We then went and researched Watson in the National Archive and managed to find a copy of his diary.

With the company there for a month, we listened to lots of stories and went to quite a few places. At the end, I said to Thompson, last time we looked at the Mimi story; if we had a Djang story now, what would it be? And he got that furrow in his forehead and he said: the Orphan story.

The Orphan or Crying Boy Dreaming is from a place called Gapari, the country where Thompson’s father lived. It’s a story Thompson’s custodian of. It’s a place he goes and visits. We’ve been there with him a number of times. It’s a story of neglect. This little boy was neglected by two tribes and a form of the Rainbow Serpent became angry at the tribes for not looking after the boy and she turned them all into rock. That’s the short version. Because Thompson grew up on Goulburn Island and Eddie grew up there too, the Crying Baby Dreaming already had quite a strong resonance. One of the crafty things that Mr Watson did was to take these different tribes from a place thick with stories to a place where there was no Djang. There was no dreaming on Goulburn. The people said it was very arid and a stupid place to go and live. Not so much tucker.

When we started this project, Thompson said to us, we’ve gotta look at the whitefella story this time. We can’t just look at that blackfella story. The other side of that was, I said to him, well let’s also look at the contemporary story from your country. You can’t just sit back on your heels as traditional men and talk about your Djang. What’s going on there now? And that, of course, is incredibly difficult for me as a director and for him as an old man. It’s something he cares about enormously but also a very hard thing to tackle because there’s so little hope there. And it’s so complex. There’s so much violence, so much culture being lost every day. Old people are dying and losing stories. So many of the kids have big petrol sniffing problems. A large percentage of the parents are alcoholics. Kids are growing up in chaos. For Thompson, as an old man, a big part of his life is teaching stories to the young people. What he’s finding now is that the young people don’t want to listen.

So these were our starting points. The Orphan story, the question about white Australia and contemporary life in the community. Thompson talks about this story in relation to the Stolen Generations but also in relation to white Australia. The film also carries quite a lot of the narrative. I made a film about a lost white girl in the bush. Often when there’s a Watson scene, there’s this lost girl who’s telling a white version of the orphan story. In Australia there’s this thing about Aboriginal children being taken from the bush but also a paranoia about white children lost in the bush.

Representing the whitefella

It was interesting reading Watson’s diaries. He comes across as very gung-ho. He was a madman really. He tried to ride a bicycle from Darwin to Kunbarrllajnja (Oenpelli). He had so little water left that he started drinking the oil from his bicycle chain. I’ve juxtaposed this quite maniacal character with this disoriented figure suffering a kind of blindness. In the beginning there’s a whole lot that he doesn’t see that happens around him.

When it came to the part of the show where Watson meets the Aboriginal people and asks them to go to Goulburn Island with him, I handed that over to the guys from Oenpelli who were dancing in the show, to see how they wanted to play that scene. Harry Thomson had a lot of ideas about how it should be. And what was really interesting for me is that they made it very funny. Everybody in the community knows the story of that first missionary taking the people away from their country and how it was the beginning of a lot of change-it’s a very heavy thing. But they play it very slapstick. It’s going to be interesting to see how that translates from playing it in front of a community audience to playing it to an urban, festival audience. It’s quite strange and of course, Katia Molino is very good at it and it’s a bit Buster Keaton sometimes.

In the beginning the Dreaming, historical and contemporary elements are separate but towards the end of the show they start to break into each other. At the end there’s a scene where Watson has a fight with a devil-devil figure—Katia and Trevor Jamieson, one of the dancers from Western Australia, have a great aerial dance on bungy with pulleys. It’s a moment where Watson’s starting to see the spirit figures and also fearing that maybe he hasn’t really been doing the right thing—moving into a phase of doubt. In his diaries he actually appears to have stayed in his myopic, aggressive mode. But when I imagine him up there in Arnhem Land licking the oil from his bicycle chain and completely surrounded by such a foreign culture, what he’s written in this diary has to be a falsehood. Where’s the doubt?

Remembering the words

The music is a mixture of live and recorded. There’s the Marrugeku band that was in Mimi with the same lineup: Lorrae Coffin from Broome who plays bass and the composer Matthew Fargher who plays violin and keyboard. Bruce Nabegeyo is the main songman. For this show he’s singing quite a lot of songs in kunbarllang which is his mother’s language. He’s remembered these kunbarllang songs. It took him a while.

For the dancing, Eddie speaks a number of languages but some of the other guys didn’t know these songs so well so it took a while to remember how to dance to them. The dances come from Croaker Island. Eddie moved around a lot as a young man. He’s quite special because he’s been trained in a number of the dance forms. He has an incredible vocabulary to draw from. Sometimes he’s teaching the old men. When he started on the stilts, he was trying to learn what we do. Then one day he said, okay that’s it, I’m gonna do it my way. Suddenly his stilt walking got better. He could do a lot more, moving from the basis of his own traditional dance vocabulary rather than trying to copy our copying of them. Eddie does a scene in which he breakdances. It’s great to see him playing a role other than dancing painted up in his narga.

Reading the audience

When we did the pre-premiere it was programmed as part of the Darwin Festival. We had 2 shows just for the community and then 3 more when the Darwin community could come in. In fact, I think most people from the community came every night. They knew the show off by heart. It was important for us to have that Darwin audience but I do think a Darwin audience is educated to a slightly different way of reading things than, say, a Sydney or Perth audience. Some things I’m changing. I don’t believe in the Peter Brook universal theatrical language idea and because we make works spanning remote community audiences, urban Australian audiences and international audiences, we rework the shows for each place. Also I’ll learn from seeing it in Perth. It’s a groundbreaking time. I’ve had to make guesses about how things might be read. For example, in the physical vocabulary there are moves that can be read by a Kunwinjku audience, simple things, like a hand signal that means Rainbow Serpent. We need to think of a different way to communicate that.

We’re asking the audience to listen in a different way. And we’re looking at narrative in a different way. One of the things I’ve learned from Kunwinjku stories is that they have a simple structure but layers of meaning. And as we weave the Watson story and the contemporary story, I hope that the audience will accept our invitation to listen and think in a different way about what reality is. About what they see, about what’s going on, about how much impact the history of this country has had on the present, how much impact the spirit stories have on the here and now.

A lot of grounding for the collaboration is that our physical vocabulary for the stilts and the aerial work has always moved in between the realms of the spirit and the human. Stalker has done that since early works like Angels Ex Machina. It’s something we’ve been obsessed with as a company and I think it supports this idea of a connection between Dreaming, history, and the contemporary.

One of the areas that’s been most challenging with this work has been to look at the contemporary scene. So the prologue is set in Oenpelli with everyone in the company sitting round campfires. We’ve tried to really blur the difference between the audience and the performers. Everyone is sitting around together and there’s no starting-of-the show moment. It’s just a very slow fade into the performance. We’re limiting the audience number to 800 which for Stalker is quite small. We’ve played other shows for up to 1200. In the community we were playing to 500. Our Darwin limit was 300. Crying Baby is more intimate than Mimi and more complex.

Cultural negotiation

We go through more and more together, we grow closer and we trust each other more, especially people like Thompson who essentially writes the shows with me. He’s got to the stage now where he’s often standing on the outside almost directing. He’s standing out there shouting at these boys in Language if they get it wrong. I love that. I think the territory that we can go into together, there’s so much more understanding and we can go deeper, and that’s more satisfying.

But I think the issues that the company deals with and what the people in the company are living through certainly don’t get any easier. The “humbug” as they call it up there doesn’t get easier. The issues facing the urban Indigenous as well as the remote community-based members are really tough. There are mandatory sentences being handed out to members of the company. The alcoholism, families in Perth and Broome that are struggling with the number of kids being looked after, people having no money and trying to get food, the health issues…they certainly don’t get any easier.

When we were in the community there was a lot of trouble going on. Someone got murdered and there was a lot of payback. It was very heavy. And we were making scenes that looked at or referred to trouble and characters not so strong in their traditional culture. But the scenes I’m happiest with are the contemporary scenes even though we had been really worried about making that kind of work and showing it to the community. The issues are lived out on a daily basis. And so, in that way, I feel like the company is an example of trying to live through reconciliation.

Cultural liaison with the traditional owners in all the countries we go to is a really big part of what we do. There’s a lot of advance work that goes into it to contextualise the work in terms of site and the local culture. There’s always a welcome by traditional owners of whatever country we’re in. With Mimi, and we’re hoping with Crying Baby, someone from that country tells the stories in their language. In Manila, we told stories in Tagalog. In New Caledonia they were in French and Kanak. The Noongar mob in Perth are doing a welcome for us and hosting a barbecue when we get there. So those relationships need to be set up properly. When you’re bringing a Djang story, you’re bringing a living entity to a place and so there’s a certain amount of negotiation around that. When we took Mimi to Perth, it was the first time we’d performed the show and we didn’t set up those relationships and there were a lot of people who had bad dreams about Mimis at that time and it caused a bad feeling about the production in that place.

Stalker

We’ve just started a new work called Incognita. We’re working with writer Paul Carter and Koen Augustijnen from Les Ballet C de la B. He and I are co-directing, co-choreographing. After making Crying Baby, I had this absolute need to look at a whitefella story for this country. So the piece looks at what it means to live in a country with a buried past. It’s a kind of remote white outback Australian setting. One of the starting points was what it means to recreate life on the site of a massacre, a place where there’s been extreme violence in the past, what kind of characters would evolve out of that. It’s pretty heavy. The process of making Crying Baby has been heavy. And it seems that having worked with Marrugeku really propels us into another way of looking at content.

First thing I can say, I think its gamak [very good] that new story and old story go together. I will start with Crying Baby, this place, somewhere behind Coopers Creek. The story starts at Croaker Island, finishes up at Gapari. That little boy, he was crying, all the time crying, all the time crying for food. If you let that little boy crying all the time, little boy will make rainbow come, will kill you all. Like this mob, white man came and take children away, might be I can’t see them when they grow, they go away from mother and father, no one looking after them. I draw that story in that book. White man collect all them children. Take away, never come back. We have to look after them kid, or then that rainbow angry, coming to kill all.

The Marrugeku Company, Crying Baby, Perth Festival, Quarry Amphitheatre, February 1 – 4

In the 3rd of our series on future directions in the arts, Ben Goldsmith reports on an international conference on the impact of globalisation on the arts and the organisations taking shape in response to it. We’ll have more on those groups in the near future. On the local front, Sarah Miller casts a wary eye over 2 documents, a new, apparently enlightened arts policy out of Western Australia and a Discussion Draft from the Australia Council’s New Media Arts Vision Day.

For or against, or finding a third way to think about it, globalisation is on everyone’s lips. Andrew Ross, Artistic Director of WA’s Black Swan Theatre, comments in an interview (page 12): “I think the notion of the flagship company now has a lot more to do with what WA contributes to the rest of Australia than the way its repertoire correlates with other flagship companies—this is a by-product of globalisation—the necessity to produce distinctive, regional works. Each company has to chip out their own aesthetic and cultural position within that framework.”

Sophie Hansen’s report—in our last instalment of The Arts: What Next? (RT#40, p6)—on the British arts funding policy that ties all grants to community activity, was greeted with near disbelief by several RealTime readers: “You’re not suggesting it’s going to happen here?” So it was interesting to read in Sarah Miller’s report on the Western Australian Ministry for the Arts’ Building Community through the Arts: An eight year strategy that “It states, quite unabashedly, that the arts are good for us and that they do add value to a whole range of social justice areas.” Not at all the same thing as the British phenomenon, but a reminder how justification for arts spending has increasingly to rely on what’s value-added.
Editors

Less than 100 miles north of the Minoan centre of Knossos, the Greek island of Santorini is a most fitting place to debate the arts’ end of the world. The Cycladic island’s rich history, like that of neighbouring Crete, interleaves stories of natural disaster with invasions and great maritime wars, all of which have had dramatic and at times apocalyptic impacts on island cultures and ways of life.

Within the space of 2 centuries, Knossos was devastated by a series of cataclysmic events: fire, invasion, earthquake, volcanic eruption, tidal waves. In that same period about 3 and a half thousand years ago, earthquakes and volcanic eruption forced the abandonment of the thriving 2000 year old port of Akrotiri on the southern tip of Santorini. The town lay buried under metres of lava and ash for centuries, and has only recently given over some of its riches to eager archaeologists. Trained and expert minds today piece together fragments of Bronze Age life and hypothesise about the rituals and routines depicted in the intricate and extensive wall frescoes. Some of the more excitable even claim Akrotiri is the mythical lost city of Atlantis.

But these are not just stories of loss and desolation. They are also stories of cultural renewal. One of the most striking things about the Akrotiri excavations is that, to date, no human remains have been uncovered. This would suggest that the inhabitants had time to flee before the eruption to Knossos or other centres, dispersing stories of the events like clouds of volcanic ash around the eastern Mediterranean.

Most of the hardy souls who live on the volatile island inhabit Fira. There they enjoy cinemascopic views of what is said to be the largest caldera on earth and share their island with throngs of tourists cruising or island hopping or backpacking their way through Greece. Fira is the largest town on this island of lost cities, artists, volcanoes, goldsmiths, and grapes which grow stubbornly and stoutly in fertile volcanic soil on windswept slopes, into a sweet dessert wine for which the island’s 3 vineyards are justly famous. The town is also the home of the most stunningly sited conference centre in the world where afternoon speakers regularly lose their audience to the view from the windows of the sun setting into the sea.

In September 2000, 70 writers, artists, teachers, students, circus performers, curators, musicians and media folk gathered at this conference centre to discuss globalisation and cultural diversity. Representatives of non-government organisations from around the world shared common concerns about the homogenising impulses of globalisation, and the threats posed to global cultural diversity by the removal of barriers to international trade or the implementation of new intellectual property agreements. They urged restraint on trade negotiators who may seek to bargain away the capacity of their governments to make cultural policies which protect, promote and help build audiences for the work of artists and cultural workers. They sought to learn from and connect with other activist networks, and to represent cultural interests and values in a policy environment in which they seem to have less and less purchase on the ethics of government. And they formed a new international body, the International Network for Cultural Diversity (INCD; www.incd.net), to advise and coordinate the activities of non-government cultural organisations, and attempt to ensure that cultural considerations are given due weight in this current Millennium Round of World Trade Organisation negotiations on further international trade liberalisation.

In February 2000, discussion of a new and more comprehensive General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) began in earnest. While the exact agenda for these discussions has not been made public, the United States has signalled its intentions to seek broad agreements not only on audiovisual services—the issue which almost scuttled the last (Uruguay) round of negotiations in the early 1990s—but in a range of “cultural service sectors.” In acting as an information exchange and alerting service, the INCD will play an important role in ensuring that governments do not enter into any future agreements without taking close account of their impacts on cultural diversity both domestically and around the world.

A comprehensive round of negotiations on trade in services is intended and cultural workers and audiences are likely to be affected in a variety of ways if any international agreement is reached. A number of networks (like the INCD) have been established in recent months to link national cultural ministers, professional associations of artsworkers, academic cultural research centres, and arts support agencies like the Australia Council. These networks are testament to gathering interest in the value of sharing information and engaging in dialogue on issues not only for their own sake, but in order to meet the challenges posed to cultural diversity by emerging international free trade regimes, media convergence and the digital divide. The foundation meeting of the INCD was held in Santorini in September because the island was also hosting in that month the 3rd annual meeting of the International Network on Cultural Policy (www.pch.gc.ca/network_reseau/), an informal network of cultural ministers from around the world. That network was formed to allow dialogue to continue between governments on policy and diversity issues, following a major UNESCO intergovernmental conference on Cultural Policies for Development that was held in Stockholm in 1998. That conference provided the first opportunity for cultural ministers to meet in 20 years. At the initiative of the Canadian minister for culture, Sheila Copps, ministers met later that same year in Ottawa to form the INCP, which now meets in a different country every year.

Canadian agencies, organisations and government departments have played leading roles in both the INCD and INCP, as well as in the new International Federation of Arts Support Agencies which was launched at the recent World Summit on the Arts and Culture in Ottawa in December (www.culturenet.ca/cca/index.html). This network, whose secretariat will in the interim at least be hosted by the Australia Council, was formed to connect the many arts councils, foundations and public cultural agencies which have been founded around the world in recent years. In many cases these arts councils represent new partnerships between the public sector, the non-government sector and the private sector in the administration, promotion, production and preservation of cultural activities. Through the Federation, these councils will be able to use knowledge gained from international counterparts to shape domestic cultural policy.

Australian artists, agencies and organisations have a great deal in common with their Canadian counterparts but our organisations are only just beginning to play prominent roles in international debate on cultural diversity. This may be because the Australian political environment is less attuned than the Canadian to the challenges to cultural industries, diversity or expression posed by economic globalisation. Of necessity, Australian arts organisations tend to focus attention on the effects of domestic policy changes such as the introduction of the GST or the activities of the Australia Council. They are often poorly informed about the potential impacts of international trade agreements on the capacity of governments to make cultural policies which subsidise cultural production, instrumentalise commitments to cultural diversity, discriminate on cultural grounds in favour of domestic producers, and ensure a space for public appreciation of domestic cultural expression. As the trade negotiations roll on, Australian organisations would be well advised to participate as fully as possible in these international debates. Economic globalisation could have similarly dramatic effects on cultural life and activity as the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have in Santorini. The new international cultural networks including the INCD will play a role in determining whether those effects are productive or destructive, and in keeping a place for cultural values to offset the grosser inequities and most harmful effects of the rules-based trading order.

Since the advent of Creative Nation in 1994, there has been an almost tacit consensus that Australian governments, whether state or federal, should have in place some kind of policy framework from which to ‘deal with’ the arts. From an arts perspective it’s not hard to see why the ‘guarantee’ of a formal manifesto, allowing us to assess the value placed on the arts by government, might be vaguely comforting. From government’s point of view, particularly as the arts aren’t seen as having any ‘door-knock’ appeal, an arts policy offers a framework for justifying current expenditure.

A policy document may fulfil several functions but often it’s a form of marketing: a means of promoting the arts to the average taxpayer. Given the profound faith that governments and their variously affiliated bodies have in the efficacy and expertise of highly paid consultants, an arts policy is assumed to be beneficial in and of itself. It establishes a kind of imprimatur. It stands for good intentions. This is despite the fact that while such policies may lead to restructures of varying degrees, they rarely result in real benefits or improved working conditions for the 80% of artists and arts professionals working outside the major organisations. The Nugent Report, of course, focused on the financial woes of the major performing arts companies.

To develop an arts policy, you need a vision. Historically, vision has been understood as a form of imaginative insight, a prophetic apparition or sagacity in planning. These days, vision has less to do with imagination or prophecy and the judges are still out on sagacity. Nowadays, to get a vision you need a committee. To get a committee, you need various forms of expertise. You might draw on people who work in the arts sector and exploit their experience, expertise and ideas. Or you could choose people who are successful in other fields of endeavour (preferably commercial or sporting) and hope that their success rubs off. There should be a formula. There must be a solution. In recent years, ‘youth’ have been a popular inclusion, presumably because young people are distinguished from their elders by virtue of their wild and unfettered creativity, an absolute necessity when developing a vision by committee.

There are several arts policy documents currently in the making. The 2 I’ve been reading are notes from the Australia Council New Media Arts Fund’s Vision Day: Planning for the Future and the Western Australian Ministry for the Arts’ Building Community through the Arts: An eight year strategy. The former came to me in the form of photocopied notes whereas the latter is a 100 page highly produced document. At first glance they don’t have an enormous amount in common.

Cynicism aside, the state based document (mightily flawed as it is) is quite an achievement. This is the first time that the State of WA has articulated a framework and rationale for ongoing support of the arts. At one level, it is a profoundly optimistic document in that it displays no postmodern anxiety over the value and role of the arts in contemporary society. It states, quite unabashedly, that the arts are good for us and that they add value to a whole range of social justice areas. It also asserts (with substantiating figures and statistics) that the arts contribute both cultural and economic capital to the state of WA; that the arts are, in fact, good for business. In its celebration of the status quo, it is a rather conservative document, best understood in terms of ‘strategy’ rather than ‘vision’ per se. It seeks more to redress past and current neglect and to celebrate current initiatives than to provide a vision for the future, and in this lies both its strength and its weakness.

Building Community was developed to provide a case at Cabinet level for improved resourcing for the arts in WA. As such, it looks to quite pragmatic developments to achieve its ends. Its key concerns are described under 3 broad headings: “Engaging the Community”, “Building for Culture and the Arts” and “Resourcing Culture and the Arts.” These might be translated into, firstly, promoting the arts to the broader community in order to increase audiences; secondly, doing something about the poor conditions and inadequate facilities in most arts and cultural venues; and thirdly, money. There are other concerns but they tend to be either descriptive in function or motherhood statements from the statutory authorities that make up the Ministry of Culture & the Arts, including the Ministry Business Units, ArtsWA (funding agency), ScreenWest, the state gallery, state museum and the Library Board of WA.

In December 1999, after much behind-the-scenes lobbying by the Perth arts community, Mike Board took over the arts portfolio from the then Minister and Attorney General, Peter Foss. While Foss saw himself as an exceptionally high achiever for the arts, the general view was that his arrogance, inability to listen and unwillingness to lobby on behalf of the arts at Cabinet level was causing serious and ongoing damage to the sector. Mike Board quickly made it clear that he was ambitious to achieve change on behalf of the arts, to make his mark as it were, and put together a Ministerial Arts Advisory Council, a mix of eminent persons and “key industry stakeholders”, primarily from flagship organisations.

Building Community is the outcome of nearly 12 months work undertaken by the Council with some input from Perth’s arts advocacy group, Arts Voice. “In looking at the future facing the arts and cultural industry, the Council was concerned [as well they might have been] about the ability of existing structure and programs to sustain outcomes into the future. The age and state of cultural venues and facilities were identified as high priority issues.”

In financial terms, the objectives are to “broaden the base of support for arts agencies and cultural events; expand the scope and scale of private sector support for the culture and arts industry; and encourage a shift in perceptions about arts funding from arts spending to an investment in the arts” (my italics). The latter, presumably, is to allay potential anxiety about increased spending and to rationalise research and development as opposed to the interminable emphasis on marketing.

One of the key initiatives is the proposal to index funding to those “major subsidised arts organizations not covered by the Major Performing Arts Inquiry funding initiative”, most of which (including my own, PICA) have been functioning on static funding and diminishing resources for more than a decade. The question now, with a state election almost upon us, is whether the proposal to translate this strategy into real dollars and action will ever be realised. Mike Board is keen to realise substantial change. It appears, however, that the state coffers have all but run dry, meaning that whichever party wins government, massive cuts to recurrent spending or tax hikes are infinitely more likely than increased spending in the arts. Both major parties are fixated on the election winners: ‘family friendly’ and ‘law and order’ policies. Labor has not, in any case, been forthcoming in declaring their support for the arts. For Labor, the arts seem to carry the ‘taint’ of both Keating and strangely enough, Kennett, both understood as election no nos. Interesting times.

Notes from the New Media Arts Fund’s Vision Day are rather more art and artist focused despite, ironically enough, a recurrent sense that ‘artists’ as a group and ‘art’ as a practice may well have had their day. Participants included artists, curators, producers and artistic directors alongside Australia Council staff and Chair of the Fund, multimedia consultant John Rimmer.

This group was concerned with developing a shared vision for the future of new media arts. The questions seemed to focus on envisaging the year 2010. What will be hybrid in 10 years? What will be driving change? What will make change? It seems an impossible task. Who can forget Creative Nation’s misplaced belief in the CD-ROM as the driver of technological change? Perhaps what is most disturbing about this document, however, is the assumption of the leadership role to be taken by the Australia Council. Certainly, many of us have urged the organisation to take a more effective role when it comes to advocacy and lobbying government. It is, however, simply hubris for the Australia Council, whether at Council, staff or Fund level, to assume responsibility for determining the future of arts practice. What seems clear is that the day offered a wonderful opportunity for people to talk about current artform issues and ideas; there should be more of them, more often, with more participants. What is less clear is what policy or decision-making framework exists to translate all this talk into action and how much freedom practitioners really had to determine the day’s agenda.

It would be premature to comment definitively on the outcomes of the various artform Vision Days. Ultimately, they will no doubt lead to the development of the next set of funding priorities (see your forthcoming Australia Council handbook). Here too, it seems unlikely that new policy initiatives will be accompanied by any increase in funding, making the future look a lot like the movement of deckchairs on the Titanic. Past experience, and a healthy degree of cynicism, suggests that such visions simply mean more hoops for artists to jump through; well that’s my prophetic vision. It is to be hoped, however, that the Australia Council restrains its somewhat programmatic tendencies and retains the flexibility to respond to what artists and organisations are doing rather than just what the Australia Council thinks they should be doing.

In the long run, if there’s no money to back new ideas and initiatives it won’t matter a damn whether it’s a ‘strategy’ to resource and enable the imaginative insights of artists or a ‘vision’ created by an impeccably credentialed committee. Without money, all those meetings, all that talk, all that ‘vision’ and ‘planning’ will become nothing more than an expensive waste of time.

Discussion Drafts from the Australia Council’s Planning for the Future Vision Days are available for public comment (by April 10, 2001) at http://www.ozco.gov.au/issues/ppf [link defunct]

The Vision Thing Forum – An open discussion for artists on vision and funding is the next of the ongoing RealTime-Performance Space free forums. Performance Space, March 26, 6.30pm.

At the beginning of his 10th year as Artistic Director of Black Swan Theatre, Andrew Ross talks about the development of a different kind of theatrical aesthetic.

When Black Swan was set up, the central objective was to have a theatre company that engaged with the mainstream of cultural, political and social life of Western Australia, rather than just the theatre ‘industry’ of Australia. We were interested in giving a theatrical expression to WA’s cultural life, rather than the imitation of repertoire of other companies elsewhere.

It’s my sense that there was a deal of cultural resistance to the company at the outset. Do you think that has changed?

I think the resistance was political. A lot of that controversy over the Black Swan’s program was motivated by industrial issues concerning employment. Also, in the early 90s the view of what could constitute mainstream theatre was for the most part borrowed from elsewhere. For a time the 2 models co-existed, but it was inevitable that both could not survive.

I think the notion of the flagship company now has a lot more to do with what WA contributes to the rest of Australia, than the way its repertoire correlates with other flagship companies—this is a by-product of globalisation—the necessity to produce distinctive, regional works. Each company has to chip out their own aesthetic and cultural position within that framework.

When we set the company up 10 years ago we wanted to emphasise certain things that were important to us. The first was the development of WA plays: we’ve done a large number over the years and currently have 5 projects in various stages of development. Trevor Jameison and Scott Rankin (Box The Pony) are working on a play that deals in part with Trevor’s family’s (Pitjantjatjara) dispossession by the Maralinga nuclear tests, with the working title of Dust Will Fly, while Ningali Lawford and Ali Torres are developing a show reflecting on the lives of their mothers on Kimberly properties during the 60s and 70s. Black Swan has been commissioned by the Centenary of Federation Council to create a work on Sir John Forrest and his role in Federation. This is being researched and written by Phil Thomson and a production is aimed to be on stage around September or October 2001. Over the years we’ve shown a close interest in interpreting the literature of Randolph Stow and to follow up on our success with Midnite, Tourmaline, and The Merry Go Round In The Sea, we have begun work on the stage adaptation of To The Islands.

We have also felt it important to define that regional identity within the context of the Indian Ocean region. This aspect was slow to develop at first but has gained momentum in the last few years with touring productions from South Africa and, latterly, Indonesia with The Year Of Living Dangerously, where a group of artists from Surabaya in East Java participated in the 1999 Festival of Perth production.

We are working closely with the Taman Budaya (arts centre) in Surabaya, helping to develop international funding support for the formation of a new annual arts festival called Festival Cak Durasim. Actually, Surabaya shares some characteristics with Perth: relative isolation, a distinctive regional culture and propensity to view Jakarta in much the same light as we regard Sydney!

WA has a sister state relationship with the province of East Java which takes the cultural component of this relationship very seriously, beginning with the gift to the people of WA of an entire Gamelan orchestra. Over the years there have been a number of cultural exchanges and tours—Chrissie Parrott Dance Collective’s Satu Langit (One Sky) among others—but what I’m interested in building up is the long-term intimate relationship between the two artistic communities.

There were a couple of other developments in the region last year: a group of musicians toured Malaysia, holding workshops and performances that explored the acculturation of many traditional Malay songs into the music traditions of northern WA. This influence arose during the early days of the Broome pearling industry. Black Swan’s general manager Duncan Ord visited Shanghai and Singapore, while you visited Kuala Lumpur to further develop the possibility of touring and exchanges in the region. Regionalism has also influenced Black Swan’s interpretation of the ‘classic’ repertoire...

We have explored the classic repertoire within a regional context through earlier productions, such as Twelfth Night and Waiting For Godot. We haven’t moved on this area as much as we’d like to lately, though a cross-cultural, Indian Ocean region production of The Tempest is scheduled for 2002/3.

We have been involved in producing and touring foreign and Australian contemporary plays such as Closer, Art, Trainspotting, Popcorn, Dead Heart, Away and Cosi.

Finally, and very importantly, we have had the opportunity to help develop the talents of Indigenous performers and creators such as Jimmy Chi, Jack Davis, Sally Morgan and Trevor Jameison.

I believe we’ve remained true to our original artistic principles. Sometimes we’ve had to change the way we’ve gone about things while waiting for the resources to become available but we haven’t seen the necessity to reinvent ourselves in the process.

Dickon Oxenburgh has worked with Andrew Ross on several Black Swan productions, most notably adapting Randolph Stow’s The Merry Go Round In The Sea and Christopher J Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously.

Everybody in the contemporary performance and dance scenes (and not a few in theatre) in Sydney knows the familiar figure of videomaker Peter Oldham shooting from the shadows in the back row or upfront, snaking through the curliest of performer-audience configurations. Since the early 80s, Peter has recorded most of the significant performance works around a variety of venues, theatres, galleries and outdoor sites. With a small grant from the NSW Ministry for the Arts, Open City (publishers of RealTime) is currently facilitating the establishment of The Oldham Archive with the Centre for Performance Studies at Sydney University. Not only does Peter Oldham know the territory and like the work, he knows how valuable a professionally produced video can be for artists and how much they can afford to pay for it. For a while now Peter has been noticeably off the case, a consequence of increased costs for equipment hire and artists’ shrinking access to adequate funds.

The Australia Council’s Audience and Market Development and Arts Development divisions have jointly funded Performing Lines to organise the provision of high quality promotional video material for independent performing artists and groups.

Performing Lines has established and will oversee a small video production facility, based in Sydney, but available to artists and companies nationally. This facility will co-ordinate the services of Peter Oldham.

The video production unit consists of a Sony DSR-250P 3 chip digital camera along with a Final Cut Pro Edit Suite operated on an Apple Macintosh G4-500 Dual Processor Computer. Peter will have the use of this equipment and, for a reasonable fee, offer his services to artists and companies to coincide with the first production and/or tour of their new works

Says Performing Lines’ Director Wendy Blacklock, “Most independent artists allocate small amounts of their budget towards the production of some print and video material. Some establish websites and produce CD-ROMs. However, too often, their efforts are undermined by the fact that they did not produce good enough material in the first instance—particularly videoed footage of their productions. With an increased emphasis on marketing Australian arts internationally and the need for an historical record of the innovative work being produced, this service will assist in redressing this imbalance.”

What this offers to the performance community is freedom from the costs of hiring camera and editing equipment. Because they only have to pay for labour, this represents a key reduction in costs and already, according to Peter, artists are making good use of the service. RT

Along with the press releases handed out at the launch of their new program (Volvo presents Bell Shakespeare’s Roman Holiday 2001) at the Opera House in January, we get a free copy of the Volvo magazine.

The company is upfront about its corporate connections and its strategic direction: “The Bell Shakespeare Company is committed to being a commercially viable national organisation. Whilst we have the imprimatur of Government, we believe that as an enterprising and energetic company we need to be in charge of our destiny.”

Everyone from the company who speaks about the 2001 program is careful to pay homage to the sponsors sustaining this company now in its 11th year. In the otherwise laid back atmosphere you hear a faint crack in the ice in Marketing Manager Jill Berry’s drink when Associate Director Des James says his Actors at Work! team travel around the regions not in a Volvo Cross Country but a Tarago. The publicity shots of John Bell on his “Roman Holiday” projected onto a screen for the launch suddenly scream Vespa and not S60 sports.

Looking at the lineup, you can only marvel at the art of the Bell Sponsorship and Marketing team and at the range of players at the money end of town taking a crack at Shakespeare. Volvo gets top billing as Principal Sponsor, responsible for the expanded Education Program. “And It’s not only children who have benefited. Bell’s fresh, innovative approach…has received very positive feedback from customers and dealers who have attended the productions…some of whom have not experienced Shakespeare since their days at school,” says Managing Director Richard Snijders. Volvo see that “(Bell’s) mission, to change the perception of Shakespeare and bring it to the wider community reflects our own commitment to bring our newly designed and innovative motor vehicles to the Australian population.” (Coming soon to a garage near you?)

Another big player, the NSW Ministry for the Arts, with a 3-year allocation of funds and a supporting cast including Volvo and Fujitsu (“the possibilities are infinite”) picks up the tab for Bell’s expanded national touring program to major cities and towns in regional Australia.

Without BHP, Sydney Water, Edison Mission Energy and AGL, Bell could not turn on its Education Program Actors at Work! in which the team Jeremy Brennan, Patricia Cotter, John Turtwin and Nicole Winkler directed by Des James take scenes from Shakespeare’s plays to explore a set of curriculum-sensitive themes for Junior and Senior Secondary students. Director’s Cut for students at Years 8-12 expands the repertoire to contemporary Australian plays, movie scripts, poetry and songs in an examination of the Australian character. For Years 2-8 Chris Canute adapts and directs the award-winning children’s book My Girragundji by Meme McDonald and Boori Prior, a real life tale of country life and early manhood through the eyes of a young Aboriginal boy. The company also arranges special schools performances of the mainstage plays, workshops and master classes for students and teachers.

Spear carriers for Julius Caesar include Salomon Smith and Barney, Object Oriented Pty Ltd and Wesfarmers. Meanwhile Ericsson takes on Antony & Cleopatra and Australia Post delivers The Tempest (directed by Des James). A host of bit players tackles special events. And I wonder what exactly it means to John Bell to be personally sponsored by Orange who also host the website (www.bellshakespeare.com.au).

As you might expect with a monopoly board of moolah, a large part of the proceedings is taken up with talk of turnover, statistics, issues of scale and reach. Even the mileage covered by Australia’s only national company is calibrated (110,000kms). In the remaining time John Bell explains the major shift in the company’s artistic aims for 2001.

From its inception in 1990 until 1995 Bell Shakespeare accrued an ensemble of actors. In 1996 they changed direction with productions featuring a variety of innovative directors including Barrie Kosky, Jim Sharman and Lindy Davies. Though the strategy paid off in some truly memorable productions, what went missing, according to Bell, was the company culture. In 2001 he has decided to grow that side of the business with an ensemble of 13 including Robert Alexander, John Batchelor, Caroline Brazier, David Davies, Paul Eastway, Darren Gilshenan, Genevieve Hegney, Ashley Lyons, Robert Meldrum, Katrina Milosevic, Sean O’Shea, Oliviero Papi, Esther Van Doornum. Rowena Balos and Lindy Davies will regularly tutor in voice and Gavin Roberts (ex Legs on the Wall) in movement. In a season titled The Romans 2001, John Bell directs the ensemble in both Julius Caesar and Antony & Cleopatra, 2 plays written 8 years apart but presented as “one continuing epic story…offering audiences the opportunity to follow the brutal and passionate history of the Roman Republic.” (Not quite the Roman Holiday of the breezy brochure).

The ensemble will be joined throughout the year by guest actors (including Michael Craig, Christopher Stollery and John Adam (Julius Caesar), William Zappa and Paula Arundell (Antony & Cleopatra) and director John O’Hare, for the off-Broadway hit adapted from Shakespeare by American playwright Joe Calarco, Shakespeare’s R & J. This production is set in a regimented boy’s school where the play has been banned because of the sexiness of some scenes. “Four teenage boys find a copy and decide to act it out and in the process, their adolescent hysteria transforms (the play) into something more profound.”

Bell Shakespeare is an Australian success story: a company which started small with a specific focus to create a contemporary Australian theatre by making classics meaningful to young performers and new audiences. The company is fuelled by John Bell’s vision shared with his artistic and management team. That is the strength of the company whose survival over 11 years has been heavily dependent on finding other than government sources of income. Though now one of the Australia Council’s major performing arts organisations and assisted in no small part by considerable sums from the public purse, it’s the corporate sector that stars in the company’s acknowledgements.

At the launch, it was good to hear the shift in John Bell’s voice as he spoke about the new ensemble and to see amongst both the company’s and the principal sponsors’ releases words like “innovation” rating more than passing mention. In recent years, Bell Shakespeare have attracted a new audience with some remarkably radical productions. It is to be hoped that the future business of Bell factors in more of the same.

The tourist brochure reckons all roads lead to Cunnamulla, a day’s drive from Brisbane, Sydney or Adelaide. It’s famous for a Slim Dusty song (Cunnamulla Feller), the Annual Lizard Races at Eulo and this documentary which, in true blue style, caused a media blitz and recriminations on A Current Affair, mainly from people who hadn’t seen the film. Local Councillor Jo Sheppard argued the townsfolk felt betrayed and angered by the portrayal: “It’s being presented as a documentary and the title is Cunnamulla. My concern is that people who watch it will presume it is an accurate reflection of life” (James Clark. “The man who betrayed a town like Cunnamulla”, Sydney Morning Herald, Dec 16 2000).

Ahhhhhh O’Rourke. You’ve done it again…and how little the debate has changed (in the mainstream media anyway) since the lessons of The Good Woman of Bangkok. The tenuous relationship between filmmaker and subject, the subtle blending of fiction and non-fiction, the prevailing sense that the documentary maker should be morally responsible, “a social worker with a camera” (John Power, “An Unreliable Memoir” in Chris Berry, Annette Hamilton & Laleen Jayamanne, eds, The Filmmaker and the Prostitute, Power Publications, Sydney, 1997) are ideas that O’Rourke has explored, embraced and headbutted throughout his career.

From 18 to 24 I was on the lam. I was nobody, I was nothing. I was shoplifting to eat…

A quote not from Cunnamulla but from O’Rourke. He goes on to say, “They were the best years of my life. The criminality was an expressed intention of antipathy to the establishment” (Ruth Hessey, “Bad Sex”, The Filmmaker and the Prostitute). Brought up in a working class family in a country town in rural Queensland, where he went to school with Aboriginal children and had “no exposure” to the arts, you hear his documented comments iterated throughout the film. Paul, the young Aboriginal man heading for jail, says he’s had “no culture or nothing”. Neredah says, “if you’re a good dog I’ll give you that”, and we wonder whether she’s speaking to the filmmaker or her blue heeler, both out of frame, patiently waiting for rich morsels and cold Christmas leftovers.

I can’t stop thinking about Neredah, wife of taxi driver Arthur. And Herb, scrap merchant: proudly displaying his bullet-ridden speed signs. And Marto, local DJ: “I don’t like the drugs but the drugs like me.” And Jack, a dark embodiment of the father in The Castle: sitting in front of his fan, relaying grim visions. And Paul, not really worried about going to jail, while we see his sister cry. And Irene, toothlessly singing “One Day at a Time” to Neredah, who says, “Jesus wants Irene for a sunbeam.” And a puppy, screaming, shot and dumped: I shield my eyes from the festering Animal Tip. And the spindly Aboriginal boy who carefully points to a dead lizard on the road with his toe: “someone ran over him…I felt bad cos I like lizards.”

I can’t stop being moved. I can’t stop asking why we can’t make heaps of good Australian drama/comedy with lives like these. Strong and striking and structured, with hyperlinks as seductive as Short Cuts or Magnolia. O’Rourke’s intense sense of these fragile networks means Cunnamulla is a knockout. It is stylistically rigorous—an extreme closeup of a character’s face means we imagine she is talking directly to us, filtered through the filmmaker. It is a shock when the camera does a slow sensuous pan to reveal a best friend, or boyfriend, or father—maybe, but not always, watching or listening. Palpably present. Out-of-the-frame becomes acute; we are sharing this making with others in the town. This style offers absolute intimacy, in complete harmony with the fierce loyalties of a drifting generation, lying on their beds in the sweltering heat, languorous limbs thrown over bike handlebars and each other.

Most of the ‘controversy’ surrounding the film centred on Cara and Kellie-Anne, teenage girls speaking unguardedly (or perhaps exaggerating for the camera) about their sex lives. Nothing they say will come as a shock to any girl who’s grown up in a small town (and probably not to most teenagers anyway) but what’s interesting and frightening is the hostile reaction to the film propagated by the argument (mainly put forward by Cara’s father) that O’Rourke made his daughter out to be a “slut” (a shot of graffiti—“Cara is a slut”—illustrates that this perception/lie existed in the town prior to the film). The media attention surrounding this notion of young women as ‘sluts’ illustrates not only a father’s obvious shame (and denial) but, more importantly, a collective irresponsibility and reluctance to confront the heart of the issue. These girls expose the hypocrisy inherent in community attitudes and the men’s and boys’ actions/beliefs; the old double standard that never seems to die. These girls are given a voice. They seem to relish it and no wonder.

In Cunnamulla the boys express their desires with “gissacrackatcha.” The difference between those who are “careful” and “not careful”? The careful ones try not to ejaculate inside. (A Current Affair didn’t bother examining why the safe sex message hasn’t reached rural Queensland). Eventually, the boys seem to wear them down. As Kellie-Anne says, “we’d rather be friends.” The girls play up for O’Rourke—freckled, apologetic, coy, delirious, giggly, upfront, naïve, wise, embarrassed, naughty—but what we see is their constant, unswerving desire to get out as their faces turn, in sync, to the louvered slats each time a car hurtles down the street.

The annual lizard race features on the Country Link brochure. “The most boring entertainment I’ve ever witnessed,” according to Neredah, who’s seen a lot; she observes for a living. Local contestants are rounded up and placed in a large circle. First to the line wins. No worries, this’ll be a quickie, but what happens? Overcome by collective inertia, they will not, cannot, move. A man stomps. Nothing. Is it lethargy, fear or an attempt to fit in that’s holding them back? Cara and Kellie-Anne know the answers but they’re in a bus heading to the big smoke…

The townsfolk of Cunnamulla should not feel betrayed. This careful and intricate portrait has enough shards of joy to make it one of the most elegant and absorbing Australian films in a long time.

Cunnamulla, writer/director Dennis O’Rourke, distributor Ronin Films; currently screening in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Brisbane with Perth, Adelaide, Hobart and regional cinemas to follow February-April. Dennis O’Rourke will be a guest at the Australian International Documentary Conference in March (see p15); Cunnamulla Visitor Information Centre, tel 07 4655 2481

For a long time before I saw this film I knew what I was going to see, even when I knew nothing about it. “I’m going to see the new Coen Brothers’ movie,” I said, and people understood what I meant, though they knew as little about it as I did. “What’s it called?” they said.

That’s what it’s like with the Coen Brothers. Everybody knows what it’s about before they know anything about it (unlike the typical Coen Brothers’ protagonist who should always expect the unexpected, remain frozen in a reaction pose of horror, bewilderment and fascination at whatever is coming down the track). The darkened humour, familiar faces (John Goodman, John Turturro), a knotty plot to unravel, the careful use of landscapes and background colour—the Brothers may move historically and geographically but, emotionally and stylistically, they stick to a well-worn groove.

This time we’re in Mississippi, enjoying a picaresque prodding at the prototypical parts of deep Southern sub-cultures—manacled chain gangs and gangsters with tommy guns, the Great Depression and old time radio, hobos and the Klan, hill-billies and Baptists; XXXX moonshine from a demi-john and pies left to cool on the window sill—these are a few of their favourite things. There’s a down-at-heel hero (George Clooney) battling dark forces to realise a simple dream, play-acting alongside his quirky sidekicks against a sepia-toned backdrop-all mustard yellows and washed out whites-and some rip-snorting musical interludes.

There’s also a Homeric underpinning which is kinda neat, a source of in-jokes for those who know their Homer—and no doubt there are many such allusions for the cognoscenti to collect—although the film has nothing instructive or informative to say with these comparisons. It’s like a reflex action, responding to hidden references as if that, in itself, is somehow sufficiently illuminating, the means to an effect. The Coens take the collective comic unconscious and hold it up to a dappled light, banking on a frisson of familiarity, the tiny pinpricks of pleasure which come from half-recognising a clue and making the connection. Their films trade in these moments of mutual recognition, sparks of shared sentiment like flashbulbs in a darkened stadium.

The musical accompaniment, one of the film’s strengths, also highlights its weakness as a cinematic experience. Instead of adding to the visual intensity of the film, the emotional pull of the songs seems to suck it dry, so that what we get is a series of musical fixes operating on a law of diminishing returns. The various set-pieces are unveiled with an almost anthropological fastidiousness but, ultimately, the only image which remains is that of a silver CD soundtrack spinning softly somewhere on a state-of-the art sound system.

It may look, feel and sound like a genuine Coen product but, in the end, O Brother doesn’t deliver as expected. Maybe that’s just as well; it goes to show that even when they’re being predictable, the Brothers can still throw in a surprise or two.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?, writers Ethan Coen & Joel Coen, director Joel Coen, distributor United International Pictures

I tend to fool around the edges. I think of myself as an observer…I don’t think of myself even as a filmmaker…All I can do is capture glimpses…incidentally it has almost nothing to do with verité (which means “the truth”) but to create this feeling of being there.
Richard Leacock*

The Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC) is held every 2 years and democratically relocates around the country. The 1999 Adelaide jaunt was a successful amalgamation of screenings, conversations, deals and forums. This March the conference opens in Perth and, again, looks more tempting than most film festivals around the country with a relevant and engaging theme (The Edge of Reality), a market for filmmakers to pitch their wares (DocuMart), emphasis on evolving forms (self-funded filmmaking, reality TV, web-based storytelling, crossovers between fiction and docos) and a good-looking screening component (the REVelation film festival which will only focus on docos this year). Guests such as Ricky Leacock continue the interest in cinema verité and its implications for today’s generation (Albert Maysles spoke with Peter Sellars at the 1999 conference).

I spoke to Richard Sowada, festival director about his hopes for the conference. He chose The Edge of Reality as a theme because he’s “attracted (addicted?) to forms, styles, and filmmakers who…push the way documentary makes meaning…they hybridise the form, particularly with regard to the more political films…documentary is such a highly constructed form that it’s easy to forget that it’s all about dramatic principles and a high level of mediation.” This theme is reflected in sessions like The Art of the Narrative that will explore what doco makers can learn from writers in other areas including reality-based drama: “Reality TV is just one of those hybrids. You may like it…you may not…but the central point is the fluidity of the observational form…I am also interested in the notion of surveillance. In programming the event, this area was one which we always argued strongly about…that’s worthy of a session.”

The AIDC publicity places heavy-handed emphasis on the “new” with a current crop of filmmakers: refered to as “outlaws” and “revolutionaries.” This jargonish insistence on the current generation—Dan Gifford (Waco: The Rules of Engagement), Greta Snider (Hard Core Home Movie), Craig Baldwin (Spectres of the Spectrum) and Dennis O’Rourke—being like no other, detracts from what Sowada knows: that what’s most interesting is how filmmakers are working with forms that are evolving and re-moulding and incorporating the digital realm.

One of the failings of the Adelaide conference was limited exploration of the implications of digital technologies—for the creative process, distribution of work, opportunities for networking, self-funding—-and for documentary itself, with data storage, archiving and constantly evolving materials allowing a long life and access to new audiences. This year, a number of sessions examine these issues head on. Marcus Gillezeau hosts a masterclass, Storytelling for the Web and DVD: Space, Audience and Mediation. Sowada says, “As with other styles, we are particularly interested in the way these [web-based] works relate to the audience…the way the stories unfold and the way they explore the resources open to them. We will be running a craft session on how to use the technology for remote product acquisition (ie being in the middle of nowhere, shooting, editing and streaming) as well as a business-based session on distribution for the web…there’s a long way to go in what people consider to be web-based documentary and so I’m very keen to move this debate forward.” In addition, a series of sessions on self- and semi-funded works will explore how access to cheaper technologies—digital cameras and editing, internet for marketing and distribution—is changing filmmaking practice.

A popular component of the Adelaide conference was DocuMart, where filmmakers pitched their product to a panel of international media buyers. There was a huge turnout for these anxious, high risk, often very funny session where ideas were sold, swapped and dumped on. This year it’s on again: “…there’s no question that Australian filmmakers are compelled to make films for an international market. International market interest is the key in accessing funding. This doesn’t mean you cannot tell local stories but filmmakers have to start telling them in different ways…there is a tendency for many filmmakers to think the end point of the filmmaking process is ‘making the sale.’ Very few in the programming consultation process of the conference ever mentioned ‘audience.’ This was interesting to me and I think indicative of the powerful market forces at work…How does this encourage signature works? It doesn’t…which spells real trouble for the fostering of a unique ideas based industry…Filmmakers often feel they must tailor their work to these strands and streams and hence perhaps allow themselves to be distracted from the central issue…the story and how to tell it. There are some notable exceptions in Australia such as Tom Zubrycki and Dennis O’Rourke.”

The documentary screenings that are an important part of the conference will come under the banner of the REVelation film festival. Criteria for selection is that films “have to try something different…We are screening all manner of works from 3 minute micro-docs to 2 hour epics and ranging from the most low-fi to the incredibly lush…but ultimately they have to speak to an audience…Even if sometimes as an audience member you don’t quite get it…Over the past few years, the strongest REVelation performers have been documentaries and so we anticipate our selection meeting with a high level of public interest and success. For the filmmakers, this interaction is of major importance. Seeing how audiences respond to your work is a rare thing…usually with documentaries audiences are sitting in their lounge room and it’s the broadcaster telling you what they like and what they don’t. With a public film festival, you can actually look into their eyes. It is also particularly important in an environment like Perth (which is sometimes fairly underserviced in screen culture) that audiences have a chance to experience a fine selection of international works.”

A lucky dip into the screening schedule pulls out Cinema Verité: Defining the Moment, where conference guest Peter Wintonick traces the history of cinema verité (cinema direct, Cinema Eye, free cinema) while also considering its legacy in fiction/non-fiction crossovers like Blair Witch Project, Cops, Homicide Life on the Streets, and implications for a human rights organisation like Witness that trains activists to use digital cameras to capture and expose injustice; their advertising slogan: “you can’t say what you just saw never happened.” Blair Witch producers Gregg Hale and Robin Cowie play with this slogan in fiction, understanding the power of verité to simulate reality: “this [cinematic] language you inherit…it’s there.” They argue that the home video (of family events) is today’s “aesthetic of reality…often shaky, badly framed and sometimes out of focus.”

Spectres of the Spectrum (conference guest Craig Baldwin, experimental filmmaker from San Francisco, uses found footage in video collage) promises a history of speculative science in the shape of a pirate TV broadcast, where propaganda from the 50s is manipulated to examine the “culture of worship” of the latest gadget: “I call it a jujitsu move, to use the weight of this absurd, preposterous, blind belief in technology being the big fix and [I] turn it around and critique” (interview with Ed Halter, “Science in Action”, New York Press, www.nypress.com/fram.cfm?content_id =414, 13/01/01). Another interesting contender is Benjamin Smoke (Jem Cohen and Peter Sillen), a biopic about Atlanta band Smoke and lead singer Benjamin, his voice and lyrics a mix of Waits, Ginsberg and Ellroy, wavering between brain-mashed incoherence and exceptional insight into HIV, addiction, small town life and creativity, cross dressing, music and death. Fast forward frenetic domestic scenes intercut with slow sensuous songs echo Benjamin’s druglaced life; you need patience for this film’s raw power. His perspective truly embraces the edge of reality, an artist who “wasn’t trying to get to a place where people liked what I was doing.” One person who does count though is his hero Patti Smith and she gives him the ultimate dedication, in lyrics that outlive him: “Have you ever seen death singing…in the straw coloured light.”

Although the AIDC program is still to be finalised, the elements are adding up to a vibrant and challenging mix. Sowada seeks to encourage a culture of debate by merging interests and practitioners in areas often kept predictably separate: “it is crucial to really look hard at the craft…I think we have a strong critical foundation. Many of the attending academics will be chairing what are traditionally more market sessions in an attempt (I hope) to spin things a little differently. We have highly respected academics such as Michael Renov (documentary theorist, University of Southern California) and Joe Camacho (University of California; his focus is on Indigenous filmmaking in Southern USA and Micronesia) attending…We have attempted to embrace all industry sectors, providing them with platforms and allowing them to engage in discussion which I think affects all filmmakers.”

*Leacock quotation from an interview with Chris Buck, “Do Look Back: the story of Cinema Verité”, Popped, www.popped.com/articles98/cinemaverite/ veriteleacock.html, 12/01/01. [link expired]

Australian International Documentary Conference, Sheraton Hotel, Perth, March 6-9, www.aidc.com.au

Professor Jeffrey Shaw is an internationally renowned Australian new media artist, with The Legible City (1989-91) and its variants possibly his most famous work, and the big inflatable pink pig for Pink Floyd the one people mention least. He’s the Director of the Institute for Visual Media at the ZKM Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. In November 2000, he gave a (startlingly comprehensive but concise and accessible) lecture, “Future Cinema”, in the Digital Media Fund series at Melbourne’s Cinemedia.

I believe you’re developing a piece for the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, to open in Federation Square in 2001?

It’s called Place-Urbanity: it’s a computer-based interactive media installation that will be part of the permanent collection at the centre. It evolves out of a series of earlier works, Place—a Users Manual (1995) and Place-Ruhr (1999), and is connected with my somewhat obsessive interest over the last few years in creating new kinds of interactive cinematic installations.

To give you some sense of the physical shape of the piece: there is a 9-metre diameter circular projection screen that is about 3 metres high, inside of which is a round platform about 2-and-a-half metres in diameter on which the operator stands. On this there’s a modified underwater video camera: it has no video functionality but you use its buttons to control the work’s navigation parameters. There’s also a projector on the platform projecting images out onto the circular screen: not the whole screen, only a proportion of it. Because the platform rotates, so does the projection ‘window’, and in that way the operator can explore the full 360-degree panoramic view. The functionality of the interface offers you control of the rotation of the image on the screen, and you can also move your point of view forwards and backwards within the virtually represented space.

In this work I’m creating a virtual landscape of Melbourne, populated by about 15 cylinders: these are video recordings made with a ring of cameras, so one achieves a complete panoramic video recording of each location. These panoramic cylinders inhabit a virtual landscape: they have an architectural presence there, and if you enter these cylinders you can view their respective 360-degree surround video scenes. It’s a strategy for making what you could call cinematic haikus at different locations in Melbourne, and putting them all together in a semi-fictional landscape. The visitor can then navigate through this narrative space and choose different places they want to visit.

From a content point of view, the piece intends to give a mirror to Melbourne, especially in terms of its remarkable ethnic diversity, so I’m choosing locations that are the centres for various immigrant communities. In each location you will find a comedian who belongs to that ethnic community telling a joke: jokes that reflect the idiosyncratic conditions of these various communities…these comedians are not standing upright in front of their respective panoramic locations, they are hanging upside down and seen from the waist down, telling their jokes directly to viewers.

And it’s not a simulacrum, it’s not like The Legible City, where there was a visual semiotic one-to-one mapping. Instead you’ve chosen delimited locations so it’s a bit more like de Certeau’s idea of walking through the city, producing your own grammar, connecting up points.

Yes, what I’m doing is building up a new ground-plan of Melbourne constituted by this set of ethnic community locations, each inhabited by its joke-telling protagonist. It follows from the Situationist notion of the psycho-geography of a city, and the fact that you can restructure or redefine an urban identity in relation to a set of psychological co-ordinates. As I’m putting the work together there is a new geographical form emerging, a kind of inverted Y shape with the respective locations distributing themselves along these axes, and the Yarra cutting through the middle. This new map will constitute the virtual environment where the video recorded panoramas are located, and on the interface camera there is also a LCD viewfinder where you can see a bird’s-eye view of this ground-plan in relation to your actual position.

And will you use text, text as architecture, as you have in the past? Michael Joyce and Judy Malloy have characterised you as a hypertext writer in 3 dimensions, though you also use text as sculpture or machinery or real-time mapping. Does Place Urbanity do this?

I’ll be using text here too. It offers me the opportunity to create another set of narratives that can run parallel to the gags spoken by the comedians. The interface device, the underwater camera, has a microphone that is sensitive to the viewer’s voice. It doesn’t take account of what the person says; it only wants to hear something spoken. And then it works like a switch: it releases prepared texts into the virtual world. These texts appear about 8 metres away from you, in the middle of the virtual space and always scrolling to the left. The appearance of these texts is relative to your movements through this urban landscape, to your trajectory there. If you start to move forwards, each letter will slide off further into the distance, creating a diagonal line of text. And if you’re turning the platform you’ll start to ‘sweep’ the text into curves, spreading or compacting the letters depending on the direction of the rotation.

While you are exploring the work you are laying down traces of text that ensue from and represent the paths you’ve taken ; as a result the text can become very scattered and chaotic. This becomes a kind of ‘concrete poem’ that’s splayed out inside the urban landscape. It’s quite personal for each visitor because it’s something they have brought into the space with their voice and movements. At the same time these texts are short-lived, impermanent; they have a lifespan of around 3 minutes and then they gradually fade away. Each person entering the installation inherits the temporary traces of where previous people have been, while adding their own. Human presence is signified by text, language occurs as the residue. Especially in relation to the increasingly distended cyberspace created by the internet, it strikes me that this is an apt contemporary representation of human presence, a presence embodied by just a density and complexity of text traces.

And the intrusion of text into the virtual landscape also breaks the simplistic ‘VR’ contract, where the user’s senses are meant to be tricked by consistent realism. It’s as if you’re trying to elicit a conversation between the individual user and ideas about interactivity—and about interface—dramatised by the work, so it’s reflexive, based on conventions.

You are touching here on something which is fundamental and important to me. I’m not at all interested in virtual reality per se. Rather, virtuality is used as a strategy to reconstitute something essential about the real. Rotating the projection window gradually reveals a panorama view that is assembled as a whole in your own mind, in memory, which is what happens when one is observing the real world. This is a level of realism that even goes beyond what conventional cinema can achieve.

In an interactive work like Place Urbanity the apparatus is spliced into the argument: the panoramic screen, the projector, the rotating viewing platform…these are blatant yet also fundamental to the point and storyline. In all my work the technological devices are present, visible, but at the same time they signal the thematic lines that extend from their operation. It sounds a little abstract but it’s important to me that the interface camera for Place Urbanity is an underwater camera because of the associative implications of such a device.

Like Cousteau in a bathyscope wandering round Brunswick…That’s something visitors to your works pick up on, I think: the interface familiarity, and then the defamiliarisation and retraining, learning how to work it.

Yes, in all the works there’s a variegated exploration of interface strategies. In Place Urbanity, the underwater camera interface is familiar but given a new identity in the context of the work: endowed with other functionality, figurative value and a metaphoric resonance.

Jeffrey Shaw lecture, “Future Cinema”, Cinemedia, Melbourne, November 20; Place Urbanity was funded by the Digital Media Fund’s Interactive Screen Arts Program. For more info, visit www.cinemedia.net/DMF/ [link expired]

Artificial Life was the theme of futureScreen00, curated by Leah Grycewicz and organised by dLux media arts, in collaboration with The Powerhouse Museum, Australian Centre for Photography and Artspace. A 3-day symposium and a series of exhibitions, Artificial Life: Hard/Soft/Wet explored, manifested, challenged and sometimes confused the discourse and scientific/technological/artistic practice of artificial life (a-life).

To begin at the beginning, which in this case is a very confused point, Chris Langton, professed ‘founder’ of artificial life, gave a “Millennium Retrospective” of a-life in which human evolution moves inexorably from microbial organisms towards virtuality and artificial life, propelled by technological development and cultural evolution. Inversions are common in this scenario; the map becomes the territory, the code (be it genetic or computational) is independent of the medium or host, natural life is superseded by the next hierarchical level of organization, which happens to be ‘artificial life.’ Despite the hair-raising simplifications Langton managed to pull out of some fairytale hat, his examples gave a good historical footing and his ‘retrospective’ a fairly clear map of the conceptual field, including complexity theory, emergence and evolution.

The next paper cut through some of the conceptual quagmire Langton’s ideas had generated, by outlining the relevance of a-life for artists. In “Metacreation: Artists Using Artificial Life”, Mitchell Whitelaw identified “meta-creation”—or the making of a creative process, rather than a work in itself—as one of the key characteristics of a-life art. Whitelaw surveyed a range of artistic approaches, discussing works using artificial evolution and genetic algorithms to “breed” images; interactive ecologies (such as Jon McCormack’s Eden, concurrently exhibited at Casula Powerhouse) and artworks generated by cellular automata, of which Ima Traveller by Erwin Driessens and Maria Verstappen (exhibited at Artspace as part of the event) is exemplary, both for its technique and for “re-engineering a-life science in both artistic and conceptual ways.” Ima Traveller, with its continuous zoom towards a landscape or object that is never reached, invokes the vertigo of perpetual specular journeying and speculation. As the “landing” is infinitely deferred, the beauty of the images and the seductive pull of the zoom develop uneasiness. Moving forward (think progress) becomes hyperbolic and fatal. Zooming quickly becomes falling; the inability to land becomes the impossibility of stopping.

This sense of being on some kind of juggernaut towards the immaterial was echoed in Jon McCormack’s presentation “(Re)Designing Nature.” Making the fundamental point that “nature is boundless while the artificial requires a container”, McCormack cautioned against replacing biological evolution with technological evolution, as this involves a redefinition of life in terms of the product of mechanisms rather than any particular materialisations. In that respect it is synthetic and reductionist. Crucially, McCormack discussed the anthropomorphism and supervenience integral to a-life rhetoric. While it’s common to project biological behaviors such as mating or eating or dying onto a-life creatures on the screen really, he stresses, we’re only looking at pixels, representations rather than organisms.

While a-life enthusiasts often like to present their creations as cute, lovable, evolving little entities, the uglier side of all this code rarely rates a mention. Michelle Barker’s beautiful and very powerful Praeturnatural, exhibited at ACP, opens up the monstrous as a dimension of scientific discourse, biotech and genetic engineering. Both this artwork and her symposium presentation “Digital Physicalities” revealed the kind of ‘distortions’ of supposedly rational systems (such as a-life and genetics) that develop under the weight of reductionism on the one hand, and market forces on the other. The preference for code over content, form over matter, creates a closed system that can hardly replicate the openness of life processes. These, Barker argued, have an essential relation to time, space and environment, factors that produce variation, difference, mutation and evolution. Similarly, the elimination of ‘defects’ in the human form is deeply influenced by consumer prejudices, a point well made in Praeternatural, when a semi-fictional survey asks a series of questions that elicit contradictory responses (in a test case, GMO foods were unacceptable, but the genetic manipulation of embryos didn’t raise an eyebrow).

Barker identified important beliefs that shape the discourses of a-life and genetics: that living organisms are kind of machines, that code is independent of and superior to the medium in which it is housed, and that genetic makeup and evolutionary imperatives supersede both the environment and individual responsibility. These were elaborated in Professor Lesley Johnson’s paper “The so called ‘Book of Life’ and what it means for humans and animals.” Johnson made a number of important connections between new evolutionary psychology and genetic research which, for instance, has allowed researchers to argue that core personality traits, IQ, sexual preference, race and ‘characteristics’ like homelessness, are genetically determined. As such, they are beyond questions of social justice or responsibility and may ultimately be manipulated through gene therapy. Equating living organisms with machines is part of a process of redefining life to suit certain interests, a dumbing down that loses sight of the different levels of organization of living systems and their incomparable complexity. “Molecular explanations for human organisation and culture,” she argues “turn the eyes of society away from political solutions…to seeing it inside the individual’s biology.”

Johnson began her paper with the observation that the unravelling of the Genome has been reported with references to “the code of codes”, the “book of life” and “reading the mind of God.” The religiosity of biotech and a-life was emphasised by Steve Kurtz, from Critical Art Ensemble (US). Kurtz’s interest in a-life and biotech has a lot to do with the ideological crises that both are provoking. Nature, he stressed, “is our primary legitimiser, a metanarrative of how we know what’s good and what we think we should do.” Its technological redesign has created a mass of contradictions that provide fertile ground for artists. For instance, transgenics transgresses the ‘like must be with like’ law that has dominated the notion of species intermingling, and allowed capitalism to deem separations based on class, race or gender, as ‘natural.’ A ‘double think’ is now necessary as capitalism sees wonderful opportunities to control food resources at the molecular level. Similar contradictions haunt notions of progress and technological development as the material abundance, increased leisure time and great convenience technology has promised fails to materialize. So, Kurtz asks, “what’s happening with the various pitch cycles? Well there’s only one rhetoric left and it’s Christian, and right now, it doesn’t have such a bad reputation.”

By far the most provocative moment in the symposium resulted from an entirely different order of emergence than the one being discussed. Tom Ray’s remote presentation “A Wildlife Reserve in Cyberspace” was divided into 2 distinct parts. The first was a eulogy for the absolute immateriality of cyberspace and virtual being; the second was, in contradiction, devoted to his project to develop an artificial “wilderness” in cyberspace. With great enthusiasm, Ray demonstrated how the different “species” would “breed”, how their DNA would couple and multiply, how evolution would work its way through this global artificial system. In response to heavy criticisms from the audience that he was too liberally borrowing metaphors from the biological sciences to represent his computer simulations, Ray answered that he was “interested in evolution, regardless of the medium, whether it’s digital or biological.” But although evolution might be the new progress or the mega-code, it is not, apparently, a speakable word in the state of Oklahoma, from where Ray was broadcasting. Mention of this fact immediately grounded Ray’s discourse of immateriality in a particular locale while, coincidentally, the interruption of his tele-cast by a hurricane warning, grounded it in time. This particular space-time turned out to be a hurricane prone, fundamentalist Christian, creationist preaching state in a part of the US that is probably uninsurable due to the effects of climate change. If Ray’s presentation showed how close evangelism—either Christian or techno—is to this area, it also reveals the extent to which religious fundamentalism and the reality of another non-linear system, global warming, is shaping the discourse in entirely unexpected, non-rational, non-linear, emergent, but scarcely artificial ways.

FutureScreen 00: Hard/Soft/Wet Artificial Life, Symposium, Powerhouse Musuem, Oct 27-29; Exhibition, Artspace, October 5-28; Exhibition, ustralian Centre for Photograph Oct 20-Nov 19, 2000.

In the Adelaide Festival Centre’s Open Space, artists are invited to test new works and new forms, and use the Space Theatre’s facilities as they wish. Following the successful 1998 season, the second Open Space involved 20 ensembles over 5 nights and promised much.

Dance predominated: Ingrid Voorendt’s Pinchu Macha and Me and My Shadow were strong, dancer Naida Chinner standing out. The Beltane company’s Spell of Harmony and Fire of Becoming were tight and energetic. Katrina Lazaroff’s Seeds of Groove Roots was a sparkling parody of the disco scene, with a tight 3-piece funk band backing 2 dancers, vocalist Liam Gerner showing much potential. Movement merged convincingly into theatre in The Waiting Room by dance company Pani. They portrayed the dislocation of the individual’s private space, with a man “climbing” over a woman who tries to maintain composure by ignoring his intrusion.

Two themes recurred through the season: troubled relationships and youth sub-culture. BudgieLung’s Je regret, a performance of music, movement and speech, depicted couples’ attraction and ensuing unhappy relationships. Different spoken languages were used to universalise the theme. The audience responded positively, though the work did not always maintain dramatic tension. In Fish Kiss’ satirical theatre work We’re all gonna get cancer anyway! the performers ponder the dangers of unprotected sex, intravenous drugs, mental illness and health generally in a disposable society—a strong text but staged in a simple soliloquy form that needs development.

Two theatre works stood out: Chimaera Productions’ Achenputtel was a charming adaptation of the Cinderella story, birds taking the role of the Fairy Godmother. Yashchin Ensemble’s Loco was a powerfully rendered take on the dysfunctionality of the incestuous family, where sexually-oriented neurosis and fear push the individual over the edge.

Michelle Luke, Caroline Farmer and Tommy Darwin’s The Mechanics of Subtle Persuasion, which appeared in the Moving Image Festival in August, has been revised and now includes music by Steve Matters. Two 30-somethings meet and become lovers, their taped voices revealing their private thoughts. The text remains strong, but the revisions have not improved its delivery. Previously, the actors entered at the commencement with video cameras strapped in front of their faces to relay continuous close-ups to a cinema screen. In this rendition, the actors enter part-way through, their faces on screen now dissociated from the voice-overs, reducing the immediacy of the text. The actors’ skates and skateboard, which symbolised slipperiness and uncertainty in the first version, are now gone and their movement is less focused. Design coherence is especially important when multiple media are used.

The highlight of the season, Reminders, was based around the recitation of a poem of that name by Geoff Goodfellow. Staged by Dancenet Contemporary Dance Collective, it begins with a video of the poet in his kitchen making breakfast. A male dancer with a large white sheet enters and in the foreground performs a slow, intense sequence before retiring to an armchair centre stage. Two dancers inside funnel-shaped tubes of white cloth then begin to move, suggesting a mind/body in sexual turmoil. A female dancer performs on stage while the video shows her emerging from the shower. The work culminates in the screening of Goodfellow reading his poem about a now absent lover. This is excellent theatre, with strong choreography by dancer Caroline Lawson, blending the various media effectively.

The major video work of the season was Unit E’s The Republik Opera, Andrew Petrusevics’ computer-based satirical video of the history of Australia since Federation. Petrusevics’ project continues to grow and develop. This time it was accompanied by actors hitting ping-pong balls into the audience with golf clubs, an element that seemed unrelated. The work would be stronger staged as short video in a booth of the kind increasingly appearing in art galleries.

Each evening ended with a musical performance, often augmented by projected imagery. Fiona Beverage’s Liz Dooley is a singer with potential; move over Sinead! A band called January’s lyrics are absorbing, even quoting Shakespeare.

This year’s Open Space was characterised by fewer ensembles attempting to blend disciplines but where they did, some good work resulted. Open Space provides an unparalleled opportunity for experimentation and the development of new forms. Some performers in the 1998 season, like Da Whyze Guize, have gone on to better things, and some of this season’s should too.

Theatre director Richard Wherrett’s autobiography has just been published, his direction of the Johnny O’Keefe musical, Shout, acclaimed, and he’s been given his own slot in the Radio National breakfast program. And he’s made a speech. Wherrett has witnessed what he thinks is a malaise in Australian theatre, “a terrible deception, a monumental con, a giant fraud”, that “from the moment we enter the yawning chasm (sic) of the auditorium we seem to enter a willing conspiracy that what will follow will be an event of great pith and moment, and seriously important to our lives. That it ought to be is beyond question. That it is is far from the case.”

Wherrett’s hit and miss assault on standards in theatre practice, writing and reporting at the National Performance Conference (January 19; edited version Sydney Morning Herald, full version smh.com.au, Jan 20) grabbed sizeable media attention, generated an odd collection of letters to the editor and sound responses from playwright Beatrix Christian and PACT Youth Theatre’s Lucy Evans in the Sydney Morning Herald’s open access commentary spot, Heckler. Doubtless, like provocations from Barrie Kosky, John Romeril, Katharine Brisbane, Robyn Nevin and others in recent years on a variety of platforms, Wherrett’s call for rigorous public debate will evaporate into the arts ether. A major reason for this is not necessarily artist or public indifference to the seriousness of some of the issues raised, but the absence of any sustained debate about them in the press, on radio and especially television. The infotainment era doesn’t encourage extended argument. These passing storms are quickly forgotten, usually until the next round of Rex Cramphorn or Philip Parsons Memorial lectures.

This is not to say that these surges of critical energy don’t share, at least on the surface, some common motivation, or solutions: Kosky has railed against the preoccupation with funding at the expense of vision; Brisbane and Jack Hibberd have proposed moratoriums (5 years I think) on funding in order to reinvigorate Australian arts; and Wherrett, while proposing we take to the streets to demand more arts funding, suggests we “ban all new Australian works from the stages for 5 years with the note ‘write better.’” He says funding is not the issue but how it is spent. Beatrix Christian retorts: “…Wherrett, like many Australian theatre practitioners, considers the act of playwriting as a thing apart. It’s not. Ultimately, playwrights become as provocative, ambitious and compelling—and as technically polished—as their theatrical culture allows them” (SMH, Jan 23). Asked by The Australian to detail his solutions, the banning of new plays was not mentioned, replaced it seems with a call for “separate funding for research and development wings” for companies (something that several flagship companies are already embarking on). “If the plays are finally not up to scratch, then they should not get done” (The Australian, Jan 19). Who’s to decide this—cultural commissars clutching 5 year plans in the guise of Wherrett-like gents of good taste?

Wherrett also proposes audience size as a significant criterion for funding: “I would propose any company or project reaching audiences of less than 60% per performance be carefully reconsidered” (The Australian). What then are we to make of this proposition from his address: “If you compared the Railway Street Theatre Company, Griffin, Sidetrack and Urban Theatre Projects in terms of actual dollar assistance in relation to the number of performances mounted, the size of the audience reached, and the resultant value for money in terms of subsidy per seat, you would find huge discrepancies.” Is that surprising? What is the cost of innovation? What is the cost of developing new kinds of theatre for regions and communities and for artists who work outside the mainstage, and for nurturing writers? Had the seminal Australian theatre of the 70s been assessed on audience numbers, where would we be now?

I have to say that I wearied quickly of people who enthused, “Good on Richard Wherrett. At last someone’s come out and said what had to be said.” “Which bits of what he said or do you really agree with all of it?” I’d ask. The particular impact of Wherrett’s wide-ranging tirade is, I think, because of its specificity. He names names and he names shows. This is not common to such speeches. There are things you can agree with, like the disgrace of Leo Schofield’s Olympic Festival, bereft of new Australian theatre works (and much else), the limits of much arts journalism (“How can two of our major arts journalists spend months of valuable column space obsessively speculating on the successor to the Australian Ballet”), his disapproval of certain productions, and the need for the arts community to unite on the demand for more funding. However, his call for “rigorous, selective and artistically assessed assistance” is as abstract as that which he condemns : “I feel there is at work, federally and statewise, principles of criteria for support that are dangerously idealistic, abstract, indefinable, and worst of all politically determined…” Wherrett’s calls for the return of heart over head in direction, for “thematic potency”, for the need to “entertain and uplift our audiences” and “the experience of shared communion,” evoke a cozy, cliched humanism, a dream of one theatre without the tiresome diversity that enrages him: “Should political correctness, which I assume is driving the STC’s selection of women directors, be banned?” Wherrett argues strongly for more funding, but the very absence of it allows him to deplore “spreading the jam too thin.” If empowered would he give out all the funds if they became available? I doubt it. His agenda is clear. Wherrett’s speech really adds up to little, a flurry of vagaries, dislikes (the things he would banish), abstractions about what he wants of theatre. There’s no vision here, just blind swipes. The end result is pathos, all that fury expended, signifying little. You know that when you ask yourself, “what exactly am I being rallied to do?”

All this, just when I’ve been enjoying going to the STC more often, sensing excitement, experiment, intelligence. And getting it, mostly in the Blueprints program, not always agreeing with the outcome, but unlike Wherrett not expecting every visit to the theatre to change my life forever. As I argued in RT#41 (“Plight of the New”, p26) there are many different kinds of experience to be had in the theatre, something confirmed by a group of innovative performances I’ve witnessed over the last 2 months in various venues. Not surprisingly, given the dated frame of reference Richard Wherrett springs on his audience, there’s little room for these kinds of work in his sorry vision.

Sydney Theatre Company, Fireface

The rare pleasure here is of seeing a recent German play, Paul Von Mayenburg’s. Fireface. Benedict Andrews’ intense production provides a voyeuristic widescreen theatrical experience, an irregular letter-slot view of family life, so confining that even the family has to stoop at one constricted end of the stage (designer, Justin Kurzel, lighting Mark Truebridge). A huge space behind, a pit inhabited by a multitude of fluffy toys lit with day-glo brilliance, is only ever the point of entrance and exit for the brother and sister who leap or crawl in and out of it, an evocation of the borderline child-adult place of these incestuous siblings where neurosis can and does become psychosis, passing from one to the other like a virus. This is serious pathos. There are no tragic insights, no room for sympathy, a little for empathy. We watch the spread of an appalling condition. It’s in their solo moments of raging pleasure that we recognise release and transcendence—the voice of the sister (Pia Miranda) pitches up and a tear winds down a cheek as she gives voice to the absolute pleasure that pyromaniacal conspiracy has unleashed in her. The brother (Matthew Whittet) is a crazed visionary (obsessed with his birth, the very moment of it), an irredeemable Hamlet (“you’re a mother, don’t try to be a woman”, he screams at his naked mother in the bathroom); his madness is simply inexplicable. His parents might be obtuse and ordinary, but there’s nothing to blame them for except their failure to recognise the monster in their midst, who’ll hammer them to death and await his own immolation, regretful that he ever needed his sister’s complicity.

Although a play from a new generation of German playwrights, this is theatre that seems to merge a Franz Xaver Kroetz family, a disoriented individual out of Botho Strauss, a Fassbinderish perversity and fatalism with an unpredictability common to all 3. True to all of these writers, the mise-en-scene is bizarrely cinematic. Matthew Whittet is physically and emotionally frightening as the brother, Pia Miranda provides just enough normalcy in counterpoint, Lynette Curran and Anthony Phelan play the parents with restraint (shorting Von Mayenburg’s satirical instinct) and dignity, and Socratis Otto is the sister’s boyfriend, the right mix of sensitive and obtuse, embraced by the parents. Not everything works: there’s a mix of playing styles most evident in vocal delivery; an excess of entrances and exits, especially by the parents, kills some of the cinematic drive; and the ending is muffed. Is Fireface the last instalment in a Benedict Andrews trilogy about identity and morality—the experiment with innocence in La Dispute, the invention of a life in Attempts on Her Life (including the imputed evil of the terrorist Anni) and the fundamental evil of the brother in Fireface (circling us back to La Dispute)? It’s been a fascinating inquiry, boldly conceived and directed, and without concession to the dogged demands for heart and sympathy called for so often these days, as if the recognition of otherness and the sheer struggle to understand identity stand for nothing. Wharf 2, Sydney Theatre Company, opened Jan 6.

PACT Youth Theatre: Pre-Paradise

Just as impressive in its own way, if more innocently performed by its cast of 15-25 year-olds, is Caitlin Newton-Broad’s finely crafted production of the Fassbinder-derived and inspired Pre-Paradise with dramaturgy by Laura Ginters, I have distant memories of seeing/hearing about productions of Pre-Paradise Sorry Now in the 70s, but more familiar here was the sense, if not always the actuality, of characters and situations from Fassbinder’s prodigious film output, brief melodramas here played larger than life: the story of the woman socially maligned for marrying a migrant worker, a misogynist butcher in desperate need of affection (he talks economics to a doll), seriously disturbed upholders of the law, ruined soldiers and repressed homosexuals. Here they are fragments of characters in a turbulent milieu, self-possessed, barely aware of each other, perpetrating and battling the tyrannies of common sense (invoked by giggling children at beginning and end as a kind of geometric certainty) and unfathomable personal drives (“I like myself and won’t let anyone get in between”). Common sense rules, embodied in appalling cliches and double-bind killers: “You’re beautiful. Beauty doesn’t last.” At the centre of the social whirlpool is an innocent, an alien, Phoebe Zeitgeist, not unlike Handke’s highly abstracted Kaspar. Because she has no language, she is not seen (like the hero of Patrick Susskind’s Perfume who emits no smell) and is free to witness human society. She collects the sayings she hears perpetrated on others and innocently turns them on society. Shorn of their everydayness and the familiarity of family knots and the catch 22s of love, the commonsensical utterances kill—society falls down dead, murdered not by an alien, but by itself, by language. Fiona Green makes a very good Phoebe Zeitgeist, even if the mapping out of her journey is not always as clear as it could be. The cast vary enormously in talent but Newton-Broad and her collaborators (Regina Heilmann and Chris Ryan) somehow draw emotional, if not always physical, conviction from the least likely performers. Movement is boldly choreographed, only the absence of a coherent vocal strategy detracting from the force of the work, but Fassbinder’s overarching fable is always made rich by the moments of social observation and Brechtian wit, and not least by the terrible sadness at the core of these earthlings’ lives, the pathos that they know no other meaning. PACT Theatre, Nov 23- Dec 9

Urban Theatre Projects: Manufacturing Dissent

Fireface is a relentless hypernaturalistic portrayal of madness in a family scenario. It demands attention to experiences beyond our own. For all its dissociative and distancing elements it remains recognizably a play. Pre-Paradise is a fable packed with quasi-naturalistic micro-narratives, 60s/70s pre-revolutionary (pre-paradise)—the enemy is ourselves, not simply the state or the family, and can be found in our voices, embodied in us in language. The play itself is no longer revolutionary, that moment has passed, but its strangeness still acts on us and its moral is felt. The experience is not of seeing a museum piece, though at times Broad’s refusal to pervasively contemporise it made me feel at times that we were supposed to be admiring a classic. In an utterly different way, Urban Theatre Projects’ Manufacturing Dissent evokes and reproduces classic manifestos and performances from the 20th century history of the theatre of opposition while returning again and again, with grim contemporaneity, to the plight of the refugee. This is theatre as essay, a discursive, chatty talkshow of a performance at a very long desk (with microphones and texts a la the Wooster Group) where performers can drop in and out of various personae, address us directly, turn inward, histrionic, comic, pathetic. They read manifestos aloud, turn jury, enquiry, newsreaders, singers, slipping deftly in an out of roles that occasionally evoke characters who might return later (or not)—like the woman who, alone at a microphone, struggles across the evening to sing a song (is it Vietnamese?) full of pathos…and finally does. I don’t know what she’s singing, but it sounds nostalgic, full of yearning and, finally, release.

A friend, who knows about these things, tells me a few days later that nostalgia is a serious business. It was once recognised in 19th century Europe as a psychological condition that could kill—people died of nostalgia. It was common to soldiers and invariably it was tied to the loss of homeland.

For those in the know, Mayakovsky, Brecht, the Living Theatre, Boal, Community Theatre, Müller, all make their appearances one way or another in the course of the show, sometimes facilely (the sorry evocation of the Living Theatre), sometimes cheaply (a nonetheless hilarious litany of the buzz words of 80s community theatre), sometimes painfully (the revolutionary theatre company with their wooden guns who can’t spill blood when it comes to the crunch). The show’s multimedia dimension includes Philip Ruddock’s favorite—video footage of Australian wildlife and deserts sent out as a deterrent to would-be refugees. (Brenda L Croft, at a PICA-Perth Festival forum, apparently said she wished Indigenous people had had that tape 200 years ago.) And there are moments of provocation (familiar to some, a surprise to most): a woman performer asks, begs, demands someone from the audience spit on her (no takers this night, but some on others). Throughout, a man (Woody Chamron) in a wire cage with a potted palm (evoking Australia’s refugee detention centres), has been sitting with his back to us watching the Olympics on television. At the end he introduces himself and tells the story of his escape from Cambodia. He says we can leave at any time. But it’s hard; even though his story seems interminable (if finely delivered), it would be like spitting on him. What is interesting is that he is presented as real, he plays himself. And that he’s not an unhappy refugee. He’s home, though it’s no longer Cambodia. There’s hope. Well, there was once for refugees to this country.

Manufacturing Dissent sets itself a tough task, one which sometimes sets it teetering on the edge of impotence and cynicism when rattling superficially through the history of radical theatre; the performers don’t always seem at home with their material; and the show occasionally loses its shape and momentum (the potential of the team at the desk hasn’t been realised). But Manufacturing Dissent has stayed with me because of its insistent questioning about how to make performance as protest and how it manages to walk the fine line between accessibility and challenge, embracing an audience largely unaware of a (predominantly Western) tradition of resistance in the theatre. But it was the topicality of the refugee issue in Australia, the directness, humour and anger with which it was addressed that kept open the possibility of theatre as protest. Made by the UTP Performance Ensemble with John Baylis and Paul Dwyer. Director, John Baylis. Performance Space, Nov 30- Dec 10.

De Quincey Etc: Walking Species 1

Three women in raincoats walk the perimeters of the room, each at her own pace, in her own time, until we absorb their rhythms, glimpse images and texts on small video monitors in corners, a landscape projection on a wall (finally an electrical storm), absorb sounds—from the swish of coats, feet, Wade Marynowsky’s score. Rhythms change, the trio intersect, speed becomes collective, the bodies almost in competition to hold the space. The raincoats, worn reversed, are now right way about and open, the bodies naked, self-contained, the journey as insistent as ever, even if it goes nowhere but in and out of itself—or is it a space being claimed, and we, the audience, intruders. The facility of performance to evoke states of being (in contemplation, under physical duress, both here it seems) is nowhere more evident than in this kind of work. Although as yet lacking the definition and certainty of their director’s famed movement (De Quincey doesn’t appear in this show), the performers (Tina Harrison, Victoria Hunt, Marnie Georgiette Orr) move with such purpose and focus that their quest is convincing. Emerging from the second instalment of her Triple Alice project, De Quincey connects the performance in the end with the Irati Wanti campaign by Indigenous women to prevent their land being maintained as a radioactive dump (a legacy of the Maralinga bombs). Then other meanings flood back across our memory of the performance. Artspace Offsite Event, Imperial Slacks, Sydney, Jan 5-7.

Morphing from Brian Lipson to Francis Galton, A Large Attendance in the Antechamber

The Author is desirous to address the provocations of Mr Brian Lipson’s A Large Attendance in the Antechamber. The piece, written by same, is based upon the life of Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911). The portrayal of Sir Francis fluctuates between the Actor’s representations of the Man, and the Man’s attempts to speak through the Actor. The latter project—the emergence of Sir Francis’s genuine voiceover and above that of his representative—is doomed to fail. After all, unless the Actor is clairvoyant, History can only speak through a veil of artifice.

Not only that, we, the Audience, have the benefit of hindsight with respect to Sir Francis’ dubious scientific theories. This is less the fault of the Man than that of his Time. It wasn’t until quite recently, last century, that scientific experiment became a matter of teamwork, and that the topics of experimentation were not simply reflections of individual interest. Thus, Galton’s demography of pretty girls in Great Britain or physiognomy of Semitic noses in London would not, in its day, have attracted any controversy on the basis of its racist and sexist tendencies. Mind you, I would not be surprised to see such theories welcomed today in some quarters.

We are thus presented with somewhat of a paradox. How are we to judge the Work, the Man and the Actor? From the present point of view or that of the past? Is it a question of authenticity, pure amusement or, to sup with today’s Devil, infotainment?

If we are to regard the project from the perspective of the past, the vicissitudes of Time and all its insights must disappear. Furthermore, under such conditions, it would be impossible to appreciate the Actor’s efforts, and include the reactions of the contemporary viewer.

If, on the other hand, we are tempted to judge the matter from the present, then the very heart of Galton’s integrity appears absurd. This is the man who conceived of eugenics. He scientifically investigated the making of tea, the attractiveness of women, the physical appearance of Jews, and went to Africa (twice) to participate in the annihilations of colonialism.

The Author raises these matters for your deliberation because they are raised within the performance itself. The work is not presented as a seamless historical window upon reality, and yet, neither is it completely alienated from its Victorian mise en scene. In Melbourne, In the Antechamber was performed in the Royal Society of Victoria’s lecture theatre. The halls of this building are lined with photographs of bearded men, presidents past of the Royal Society.

The Author understands that Galton himself was president of the Royal Society of England. A moment of Victoriana in the State of Victoria. Is this what Lyotard meant when he said that the postmodern was already contained within the modern? Are we to suppose that the present is already contained within the past; that the serpent’s egg is ready to hatch and bite its own tail?

I put to you two metaphors by which we might approach the matter. The first is a Victorian device—the diorama—in which a layered reality is presented to the viewer. The set of In the Antechamber is an impossibly small Victorian study, wood panelled and lined with books. It is placed inside the Royal Society’s lecture theatre, itself wood panelled and lined with books. The Audience views a world within a world, one real, one virtual, the effect of such layering being an infinite regress.

The second metaphor by which we might approach the matter is a contemporary device—the hologram-in which the viewer witnesses the collapse of Space and Time. Accordingly, In the Antechamber can be located beyond the categories of reality, both in its time, and in our time. Its performance is both authentic and apocryphal; the product of research and fancy. The Audience is witness to both the Actor and the Man; and the Author is both real and a proper name alongside a series of marks on a page.

Author’s Note: I have chosen to write from the present in the manner of the 19th century because A Large Attendance in the Antechamber itself plays between its own Victorian style and a postmodern treatment of the paradoxes of performance and authentic representation. My own vacillations between past and present are intended to mirror those offered by the performance itself.

A Large Attendance in the Antechamber, An Encounter with Francis Galton, director/writer/performer Brian Lipson. Royal Society of Victoria, Melbourne, January 15-19; Sydney, January 15-20

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