Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

June 2001

At the fifth of the RealTime-Performance Space series of forums for artists working in contemporary performance, 50 performers, academics, emerging artists, students and teachers of a range of skills and body regimes gathered to discuss the meanings, functions, effectiveness and availability of training. Visiting scholars and artists from Victoria, Queensland and Western Australian joined in the dialogue which was informally hosted by director and performer Nikki Heywood and RealTime editor Keith Gallasch.

This transcript records most of the discussion, but not all of it. Tapes had to be changed and we ran out towards the end.

Nikki Heywood
I wonder, can we feel our training in our body. How aware of it are we? How useful have those training methods been and what particularly attracted you to the particular discipline?

Mémé Thorne (performer)
My specialty is the Suzuki Method otherwise known as stomping. I started in 1989 doing classes with Nigel Kellaway who was probably one of the first Australians to go to Japan and study with Suzuki Tadashi and his company at Toga. So I found the classes most enjoyable and useful. The Suzuki Company came to Australia in 1991 and performed The Trojan Women. What excited me most about seeing that show and the demonstration of the method of training afterwards on stage was that although Suzuki was working with something like 35 people on stage it was possible for me to look at every single person and feel, wow, I’m getting something from every single one of them. What is it that they do that enables them to harness this kind of energy, this kind of presence and make not just the principals interesting and able to engage your attention? Even those who didn’t speak a word. Even the one who stood for an hour and 10 minutes without moving! So I wrote to Suzuki and asked if I could participate in some kind of training with his company which I did in 1991. In 1992 he invited me to go back to Japan and train as a teacher of that methodology and I’ve been teaching it ever since.

There was a moment of realisation that it was possible to find a training method which would prepare me for performance in such a way that I could harness that energy and translate it so that audience members would look at me. That, after all, is what we’re after as performers on stage. You want to stand there and you want to say to everyone look at me. And I believe it worked. LAUGHTER

NH
Had you gone to performance before that and not found that sense of presence?

MT
I use the word “presence” but, of course, the word encapsulates so much more. If you stand on stage, you want to be able to say something and have it received in the way you mean it. And I think that’s a difficulty for a lot of performers. You have an idea of how you want to be received and what you want to say but often the two pictures don’t come together. Through the Suzuki training I have found it more possible to arrive at those two ideals and bring them together. It happens because through the training I’ve been able to understand what it is my body does at any given moment while I’m on stage. I can do away with extraneous gestures, I can be crisp and precise and I can make a clear picture and I’m talking not just about what I say and do but the visceral qualities, the aesthetics of the whole thing. To me it’s much more possible to bring that to fruition through this methodology. I think you can do that with other regimes as well. This is what worked for me, but in conjunction with other training. I don’t do Suzuki exclusively when I prepare for any performance that I do but that is my main focus.

Simon Woods (Performer, Zen Zen Zo, a Brisbane-based performance group)
I think MéMé has summarised what the Suzuki Method can give you in a really fantastic way. We also found that there were a lot of wonderful benefits in the training which I believe transformed our company and took our work to a whole new level but there were also some elements that we found a bit limiting. It’s a highly structured style of training, very formal. We found when we were working only with Suzuki Method in rehearsals and eventually performance, a lot of the acting was rather stilted, a bit lacking in freedom and vulnerability. We’ve looked for other systems that might complement the Suzuki Training and bring out other elements of the performance. Our main influence has been not so much the Suzuki Company of Toga but one of their children, the City Company in New York run by Anne Bogart. Our training now comprises Suzuki as well as the Viewpoints Training which is much more improvisatory and much more freeform.

KG
Could you describe the Viewpoints Training?

SW
I thought how am I going to describe this if I get asked. It’s like all of these training systems, very difficult to describe. Suzuki is very much focussed on the individual, on your sense of concentration, your energy, your focus and your relationship to the audience. It certainly takes into account the group dynamic but it’s much more about you as a performer. Viewpoints is about the group. It’s a series of improvisational exercises that allow the actor to take into account their relationship to the rest of the company. It focuses a lot on spontaneity, on creating material in the moment, on reaction to the other performers. There are actually 9 different viewpoints that enable the performer to create that awareness. There is a book, a collection of articles called Viewpoints and it was put together at a conference in the states. It’s been a fantastic influence for us. And as well as that, we do yoga and some Butoh exercises to work on the emotions more.

Alice Cummins (dancer, teacher)
I enjoyed the first part of your response because I was thinking oh, your approach and discipline has gone straight into performance. I think mine is doing something else but I’m not sure. In 1985, I think, thanks to Russell Dumas I first met Lisa Nelson [an American teacher of Contact Improvisation] in Melbourne and in the process of working with her she said one day, you might like to read this article on Bonny Bainbridge-Cohen [Body Mind Centering] from Contact Quarterly and I was smitten. I saw the light. Something tucked itself away and I was deeply curious. But I had to wait until my children grew up and I got Australia Council funding to go to do the study because it’s hugely expensive, especially from Australia. And I did that study, as Silver Bud did who’s also here, from 1995-98. I think one of the things to say about Body Mind Centering is that it’s an approach, not a technique and it’s really hard to be specific. It informs all of my work. I don’t necessarily always teach a Body Mind Centering class but it informs everything because it’s part of who I am now, part of my bodily intelligence and how I approach both working with people one to one or in a group or in a performance situation.

Yana Taylor (performer, teacher)
There are people of many different ages here today and that’s fantastic. And people with many different experiences both in Sydney and around the world. Physical practitioners are a very mobile mob and they go lots of places and come back. So I take you all as members of this broad church, this grouping made up of a set of networks taking in contemporary performance and physical theatre and that whole gamut. I have a series of questions related to that so we can all see who we might be.

I’d like everyone to stand up who has found only 1 of his or her training backgrounds useful in performance, whatever exciting thing it is that hooks you and engages you. How many people have found 2 things in their background that they’ve carried? OK 3, 4, 5, 6? (this is much more than I’d thought), 7, 8, 9, 10? Put your hands up if you think I haven’t reached your point yet…11, 12, 13, 14? Stand up anyone who thinks their training has been totally useless for them.

I did this to see how you might think and partly because of my own experience. I have a range of training backgrounds. The short list of decisive ones: years of classical ballet, quite a substantial amount of work in corporeal mime, Suzuki, I’m a tap dancer and I’ve done a lot of other things but in some ways all of those things have a relationship with where I am now. I remember one of my earlier teachers who came from Europe. A very fierce person she was but I worked with her for about 4 years. And one of the things she kept saying about Australians was that we were all dilettantes who didn’t take ourselves seriously and that we would therefore be cast out into the cultural tundra. And something about my rather adolescent and flimsy wavering sense of what I was doing still went ‘No, I’m gonna stick by this dedicated eclecticism’ as I’ve come to call it and see if in fact I might find others who are in the same situation because they live here too.

KG
Celia White, your background is in physical theatre. When you wrote to us you said when a regime becomes “useless” it should be thrown away. This is quite different from everyone else so far who’s spoken as if they’ve found heaven.

Celia White (director, physical theatre performer)
I started performing because I got seduced by circus and the idea of it–not circus circus but circus tricks as an avenue to doing other things with them in the late 70s. That was to do political theatre that became feminist theatre when there was the idea of making the female body strong. There was also the ooh-aah factor, the kind of spectacle that you could access really easily with circus. This is an interesting thing for a body like mine. There was no training. There was make-it-up-as-you-go and probably hurt-yourself-in-the-process. I love Feldenkrais now. Then that idea of whatever circus theatre was, which we never really knew, became very limiting and we found ourselves calling it something different. And in the process I grabbed at anything that was passing by. I have a dance background and I rebelled, unfortunately perhaps, and stopped because my teacher was my mother. So it’s interesting I don’t have a training as such. I’ve invented my own training. But there’s still that little sense that I haven’t had a regime to hook into and perhaps I’m looking for one…but perhaps I’ve missed the boat. The idea of another regime on this body seems impossible now.

KG
You can train in these methodologies and these are often about getting into a state of being or certain preparedness for a work but they can be quite different from the work itself.

CW
I think that’s an interesting question. People can be working on particular skills but when they take them into performance there’s something missing in terms of how to create the performance of the work. There’s a sense that your training won’t quite give you all the things you want for a particular performance. We’re opening things out all the time and creating new work that we’re not perhaps comfortable with. It is that sense of visiting as many things as possible to find for yourself what resonates for performing of your skill.

NH
There are so many layers here. One of them is where does aesthetic of the discipline start to shape the aesthetic of the work we make and how does that break new ground and create form?

SW
In Zen Zen Zo we’ve found the relationship between performance and training to be a very circular one. You go from training into performance and that creates problems and issues and question and then you’re back into training to address those issues and back into performance to test the answers. One of our founding members has been in most of our shows since 1992 and every time we do a show together it’s almost like we’re asking fundamental questions. He’s very good at the work, the best person in the training room in terms of ability and skill level, but when he goes into performance it raises for him a whole lot of new things which he has to address in the training.

NH
The training becomes the research and the performance becomes part of that research.

SW
It’s nice to have that ongoing context outside of the performance space where you can address performance issues.

Young performer
I’m just learning. When you’re starting out, is it better to go into these techniques and be totally open to them or do you try and gauge it in terms of your own person?

AC
You’re constantly making decisions. Unless you have no ego at all, you would be making decisions about what it is you enjoy, what it is makes you physically strong, what stimulates you intellectually, makes you curious, makes you a better performer. You’re not just going be a blank piece of paper that constantly stays blank. It’s not possible. There’s interaction.

Shannon Bott
I'm Shannon Bott, a dance-theatre maker from Perth and really new to it. I remember back to my training in dance at the WA Academy of the Performing Arts–the one question for me the whole way through was, who am I in this technique and is anybody going to ask me that for the 3 years I'm here? I’ve found a way into the self and the emotional self behind and with the movement. But I can see that you can be encouraged to separate yourself so that you become rigorous. So as someone asked earlier, when are you ready for performance? For me, I don’t know if there’s ever a “I’m ready now” but if I’ve been asking those questions and the awareness is there as the development and the process is taking place, then you’re ready when you’re ready.

Amy Salas (performer)
Could I combine a couple of things with the idea of when you are ready for performance. I came originally from a very strict gymnastics background with an Eastern Bloc-style coaching that was very intense. I found through that and through the subsequent acquisition of skills in circus performance that once you are starting to accomplish life-endangering skills, that your ability to turn on and turn off in a conscious performance mode refines itself. So I have found when that question is asked of me, when am I ready, the answer has been since a young age–always. What happens in the performance is another matter. [WAVES HER CRUTCHES. LAUGHTER] If you’re ever hesitant about whether you’re ready for performance, the best thing you can do is to develop the ability to put yourself into a physical position where you’re in danger of falling and then prove you can catch yourself. It’s not necessarily the rigour of training that pushes you to that point. You push yourself to that point, no matter what training you have.

KG
Gavin Robins, you’ve worked with Legs on the Wall but you’re also working on movement with actors in the Bell Shakespeare Company. Why are you doing that and what do you hope to achieve there?

Gavin Robins (performer, teacher
When I think what attracted me to physical theatre it was also about what I wasn’t getting in my training and the kind of theatre that I didn’t see and I wanted to see. I felt that the virtuosity that you see exemplified every Saturday at the VFL finals or even any sporting arena around Australia, that risk-taking wasn’t apparent in the theatre. But I’d walk down to the Dance block–I did a drama degree at Kelvin Grove in Brisbane–and I’d see virtuosity there and I’d see some of the Physical Education people doing it and I’d say,, why can’t theatre embrace this and why can’t actors be as developed in their physicality as they are in their intellectual ability and their vocal skills? I was driven by that. When I went to the NIDA Movement Course I saw a lot of stuff and I was involved in a lot of conventional work, as you are there. It’s a very classical training, and it was boring and kind of anti-physical and it really got up my nose. Then in 1994 I saw Legs’ on the Wall’s All of Me here at Performance Space and it was that first step towards a merging of virtuosity and eloquence with storytelling–the text maybe wasn’t as well integrated as other things but it was a step towards a vision. So part of my experience with Legs has been touring throughout the world and performing and really locking myself into a system. After a while I thought that’s it, I need to go out and apply these skills in other areas. I think you know when that time comes. It’s a gut feeling. Just as you’re attracted to something on stage or you’re not. You just feel it.

And Bell is an exciting company for me to work with at the moment because John has embraced this notion of the ensemble. He has 11 core performers who work with him for the whole year and I teach them yoga and basic balance acrobatics–things to empower the actor so that they might be able to lift a person above the chorus or have Ariel run across the backs of people. And then it’s a question of how that language furthers the theatrical aesthetic–does it say the same thing?

NH
And does the director integrate that physical language?

GR
He’s attempting to and I’m attempting to and I’m on this other learning curve about how that works with text. That’s why he’s got me there, to train the actors on the one hand and to look at the theatrical challenge of making a Shakespearean work something other than head acting. That’s where it’s brought me and that’s my desire. We see examples of it working in great companies like Théâtre de Complicité who have a seamless merging of so many skills. And it is that search for holism that I’m excited by and dynamic, eclectic training. And I think that’s what we should be striving for.

YT
Physical theatre has become a bit of a genre in Australia and it’s kind of different in other parts of the world, and in the ways people have reflected on it here. And I think what I’m hearing from you, Gavin, is that it’s Bell’s commitment to the ensemble, ie bodies in space and places, that actually provides the ground for any of that sort of exploration to take place. That's one of the thing that afflicts this network, that training regimes are considered an uncreative area and are very hard to support and fund unless it’s a creative development or rehearsal because it’s considered somehow unconstructed. This is why I respect the project of the Omeo Studio [Sydney] crew because they’re working really hard to create the kind of milieu where training is possible. And without that, these things stall despite all the sacrifices from generations of performers in a whole range of related work.

One of the things that I think I might be seeing here tonight is that institutional practice is all right–it’s okay to go to Kelvin Grove or WAAPA but it ain’t enough. And beyond that these tracks are ones of people self-teaching and finding their own path through. There needs to be room for that and it’s getting increasingly difficult to find space for it.

Fiona Winning (director Performance Space)
Omeo is a really interesting example in that there are a range of artists who have decided to have an ongoing practice and through this very fundamental decision are able to link a whole lot of training and research and performance imperatives in the one place. Unfortunately, too many artists who have all sorts of excellent training don’t have that opportunity or drive to make their practice ongoing.

YT
Some of it has been by subterfuge. A lot of people have been very creative in how they’ve used creative development and rehearsal.

KG
One of the most contentious areas of contemporary performance is the voice. You have the situation where you have a marvellous rhetoric of the body which is trained and a funny little voice pops out. It’s not always the case, but companies will employ a dramaturg if they can but not very often will they address the issue of voice.

Matthew Fargher (performer, vocal teacher)
My training is largely in physical theatre and traditional theatre via Philippe Gaulier and people like him, Yoshio Ida, a Japanese actor in Paris and subsequently a bunch of voice teachers who had a very body-based approach–people like Linda Wise. I feel like I have absolutely no light to head towards. There’s no really interesting physical vocalists performing that I’ve come across anywhere in the world probably because I haven’t had time to go and look for them. A lot of my time over the past 10 years has been spent really just saying, okay I have these disciplines side by side in myself, as a musician and an actor and a singer and someone who has a physical training and someone who does a lot of work with physical performers. I work a lot with Stalker Theatre and that’s recently taken me to be working with Aboriginal dancers and singers in the Marrugeku Company.

My understanding of the relationship between the body and the voice came from an accidental moment in the lead up time for a class I did for a Contemporary Performance Week at Sidetrack in which I went partially deaf due to an ear infection. Suddenly I realised that I could hear my body from the inside. I could hear my breathing and suddenly sense the whole voice thing at a kinaesthetic level and suddenly it was like, there’s the clue. You can translate all of that body approach, feel the interaction between yourself and the space and yourself and another, whether that’s from a contact improvisation point of view or any discipline that puts an individual in a space with a degree of sensitivity. You can suddenly translate a lot of that work into voice work. And subsequently, I feel like everything that’s come in since then has made sense in the context of that discovery. I feel like I don’t need to say I follow such and such a training. It’s just me and everything that comes in and then everything that goes out. It sort of changes a bit depending on where I am at the time.

The tricky thing is then deciding what you can actually do with it in terms of performance. And maybe this is yet another question. The discipline of getting an individual or group of people to do physical work and then translate that into voice–I’m doing it every week with the choir I sing with. We do a lot of physical work in the lead up. Every time I work with a choir that doesn’t do that, they’re like, oh, you mean, you can kind of move before you sing? It’s a revelation. I think it’s easier to bring physicality to people who use their voices already and have an effect than the other way around. And maybe it’s because I haven’t really had the opportunity. Even in the work I was doing with you Nikki, there was an emphasis on the voice in where we said we were going but in the voice and the training I was the shag on the rock making noise all the time amongst these beautiful performers for whom the noise was limited to what comes out of the body by shlapping about on the floor.

I would love to see it as a discipline and find a way of using it but part of the problem is what do you look at to give you an example of where to head? And part of the problem with all the disciplines that have sprung up in Australia in the last 20 years is that they have created some specifically Australian languages of physical performance and you could say that there’s this school and that one. But apart from a few individuals who make noise while they perform there isn’t anything like what you might call a school of vocal physical performance. So I’ve had to look elsewhere within Australia to see if there is a cultural lead and the obvious thing for me is the way that the Cook Islanders and a lot of islanders perform because they have a very physical way of singing and the singing and the gesture are one. So there’s a lead. There’s probably a number of examples like that.

Interestingly, a lot of the other places where there is a strong vocal tradition and a strong dance tradition, like Africa and the Aboriginal traditions, often voice and movement don’t go together. I’ve had to develop another understanding about the relationship between the sound and the performer, another traditional form. I think there are examples of that where you have someone doing physical performance and somebody singing and the relationship that can develop between the two. There’s myriad traditional examples of that throughout the world and I think quite a few good examples in performance here. But it’s the other one that's the issue– people moving in space and doing physical performance who yack on as well or sing or whatever.

KG
Mémé, in the Suzuki Method you've said the approach to voice was of muscularity rather than relaxation.

MT
It’s quite contentious. I don’t know how many people here have any idea of how the voice is used in the Suzuki Method. In terms of talking about training “regimes”, the Suzuki Method fits. It is quite militaristic and the vocal work tends to be that way too. It’s the way you apply it that tends to be completely different. It’s a means of arriving at a certain point of preparation as a performer. That’s how I see training, it doesn’t matter what the regime is.

In terms of the use of the voice, the basis of the Suzuki Method is to place yourself physically in a state whereby all your means of vocal production is harnessed in a powerful and dynamic way. For instance, while I’m speaking now, I’m placing my body in quite an arduous position. I’m holding myself in such a way that my thighs, my abdominal muscles are actually being held. What happens while I do that is that my diaphragm is engaged and for me to create the sound, I have to use my diaphragm quite strongly to push my words out. In other words, to use my body physically, strongly, I free myself to project because the means of vocal production are being utilised. You’re training your muscles to memorise the state in which you are able to produce that sound, or that emotional quality or whatever it is. You use the training to prepare but when you walk on stage you leave the training behind and you take with you onstage the sensibility and the sensitivity that has brought you to that point from your preparations. I’ve worked with Linda Wise, Bill Pepper with Mathew Fargher and most vocal training relies on learning how to breathe in order to accommodate and facilitate the sounds you want to make, whether you’re speaking or singing or just breathing. They generally work from a point of relaxation and opening up and allowing your lungs to fill up. It’s the same in Suzuki except that you also harness your physical strength as the base from which to create the sound.

Silver Budd
I’m not sure whether I leave my training behind when I go on stage. I’m a Body Mind Centering practitioner and I actually feel that through that technique I get tools or ways of working with myself. Say, right now I’m having to talk and I feel nervous and so I’m looking for my belly and I’m looking for my blood and I’m looking for what connects me more with the earth and I’m going into my body to find what can soften in my organs, how can I make more space in my throat and all the time. I’m using this inward vision that I got from Body Mind Centering which very much has taught me about all the different systems of cells in my body that are making me be here at this moment, the way I’m being here.

I was interested in the answer to the question about when you might be ready for performance, when you can do life-endangering things, and I just immediately had the response, oh yeah life-endangering is also about psychologically and emotionally life-endangering. I’m an improviser. I don’t actually do cartwheels with no hands or triple somersaults or anything but I think performing is about wanting to give my presence and my self, my very specific self which can also be life endangering.

KG
You speak about differentiation, about relaxing or controlling certain parts of the body. How do you reach that state?

SB
It’s really quite simple. Whenever you read descriptions of Body Mind Centering, we always go through the system–the fluid system, the bone system, the nerve system, the glandular system, the muscle system. The thing I love about it is that it gives you a total full-time practice which is to learn about those systems and drop into them any time all the time. So I jump, not always in a disciplined way. I check out my ligaments and then I think are my glands all working together to really help me produce myself, project outwards. Am I being more central, am I coming out to the periphery? Tons of different questions that I can ask on any level.

KG
Sue Broadway, what happens to your body in performance? You’re calling on everything from tap dancing to whatever?

SueB
All of my training from when I was quite small right up to more recently is the exact opposite to Silver’s, starting from the external. I’ve only come to learning about any kind of internal training much, much later in my career. I counted 20 training regimes for Yana and I was only counting the ones I'd done for a month or more, including some exotic ones like Peking Opera and Balinese mask and Kathakali. You can learn a duet in Peking Opera where 2 people learn it in different rooms and then stand opposite each other, someone says go and it works. And you don't hit each other with the sword! I think I'm with Mémé, I think they all become so ingrained and in the body that when I go out to do the work I feel all of that at a subconscious level, in the muscles and not in the brain at all.

I started training as an actor. In fact, I failed NIDA at 17 and in the last 5 years I've come back to talking–I didn't talk as a performer. Surprisingly, all of that voice training actually returns. It's amazing. I haven't touched it for years. I had to dig it out but it was there waiting for me. So that was good. Now I take risks–the risk of making a complete idiot of myself. I do things where I can be standing in front of an audience with broken glass all over the floor. A lot of the things I do are about focussing on getting one throw right. You know when the object leaves your hand, you know as you take the beat, you know whether you've done it or not. It's not in the body but in the state of mind that you've managed to locate, a tempo in your body that repeats the action for you.

AC
You do it in your mind but your mind is in your body. Your intelligence is all over your body. That the Body Mind Centering training. Intelligence isn't just from the head up–this is this thing that reacts and responds unconsciously. It's bringing it into differentiation and consciousness so that it can do whatever it needs to do–save your life. That's what your reflexes will do for you. That's how you know when you throw at that moment, you know it hasn't come together the moment it leaves your hand.

Lowell Lewis (academic, anthropologist)
My embodied theatrical practice is university lecturing, an unusual form of physical theatre but somebody's got to do it. And I'd just like to return to this idea of voice in motion. For me there's an interesting dynamic in the strength of vocal training. Can you run across the room while holding the tongue, for example. And you can learn to do that. It's a strength thing. So that you can run across the room and not go ah-ah-ah-ah. There's also an aspect of vocal training that is the relaxing part. Some bits have to relax while others are tense. And different trainings work with different dynamics to do with how much tension and relaxation. It becomes embodied in your intelligent body. By the way I agree with what you (Alice) say although I think it's a duality. I call it the embodied mind and the intelligent body, trying to get to a third place that is somewhere in between. Somebody brought up this notion of rapping and hip hop where the vocal and physical do come together. But when they start breaking, they don't sing. You try singing while spinning on the top of your head. It's like another degree up. The artform that I've worked on quite a lot is Capoeira, the Brazilian martial artform which also involves singing. And the best players can actually do Capoeira and sing at the same time. Although they'll only do certain movements. They won't do the really strong acrobatic movements–because nobody has that degree of strength–where you can go into a headstand or handstand and still be singing.

The limits are kind of interesting. Could you do a breakdancing routine while rapping at the same time? That would be a big ask. So there are reasons why these have been divided and some interesting limits that are involved in that.

MF
Absolutely. I think the big question there is the appropriateness of training. There has to be a different training involved in trapeze work from certain softer forms of performance that require an incredible sensitivity. And an incredible sensitivity is difficult in certain kinds of circus because it just hurts too much.

CW
I remember there was certain work we were doing in Legs on the Wall in a show like Hurt. A physical action takes an incredible amount of focus especially in balance acrobatics or trapeze–whenever someone's holding you and you're supporting someone else. Whenever you're responsible for somebody else as well as yourself, there's an incredible amount of concentration required. Then there's the performance–your interaction with the audience with your co-performers. Then there's the speaking, the text, the song. And it was like, choreography, words, concentration and it was like…and it took…time. To do this kind of work you've got a 4 week rehearsal period if you're lucky you might be able to stretch it to 6. In that time you've got your training as well as rehearsing. You're finding repertoire and training and putting it in performance. Somewhere in there you're speaking. You're thinking how the hell do you find the money or the time to train plus integrate all those things together to make it work effectively?

David Williams (performer/producer)
That's actually where a lot of trainings came from, from performance, from trying to work out how it is possible to do all of these things at the same time. For instance, the Suzuki training came out of the SCOT (Suzuki Company of Toga) performances and it developed over a long period of time and it's constantly being updated. Simon Woods was talking about rehearsal feeding back into training and if you do look at the history of Suzuki for instance, it came out of the actual work. So if the training is not about the work, then why train?

Alison Richards (academic, performance studies)
I wanted to address the person who was asking, well what should I do? I was interested in Yana's experience talking about her first teacher who came from a really structured tradition and for whom that was the only gate–‘No person cometh unto performance but by me.’ And then Mathew talking about putting different trainings together. I think it's really important to understand that every training produces a different you and comes in at a different point. It isn't just static. It's dynamic and you are making yourself all the time as you do it. So in a way, it is really interesting to hear from people who are all at different stages of their journeys because in some ways it's always a dance, if you like, between certainty and uncertainty and at different points in your life, you're ready for different things. You can only ever respond to what is calling you and sometimes you can only respond to what's there.

GR
I think whether you've got an eclectic approach or if you follow one path, whatever style it is, you follow it right to the end. You're in it for the long haul. And you've got to polish the diamond yourself. No one else is going do it for you. And it takes a long time.

YT
But I think you can polish the diamond by rubbing up against other bodies.

MF
The thing that I come to more and more in body training the voice is that the best practitioners for what I want to do are the under-3s. I've just been watching my 2 year-old doinging up and down on the bed and singing “doinga doinga doinga.” It's such a perfect synthesis of movement and sound and joy and everything wrapped into one. There's a whole school of vocal and body teaching that very much focuses on that state of being of very young children who have a strong sense of connection with the base of the brain and the systems we have evolved that produce sound and movement etc. If you start bringing disciplines together, the root of everything is that we have these systems that function within the body that can go places. There's things that you might want to do with them that we weren't designed to do like ride on unicycles, or throw each other around at extreme velocities.

YT
Or sing opera.

MF
Or do co-ordination things that babies weren't designed to do. And in a way, if you start with those 2 things in mind, it doesn't really matter whether you start with an internal approach and try and re-find something or you learn tapdancing and become so perfect at it that it's just a state of being. It almost doesn't matter. In music you find a lot of people who've gone beyond their training or people who are way before their training and they're just like poetry. And in between is agony for years.

Paul Selwyn Norton
Choreographer, autodidact, I never went to formal school. I'm interested in what you say. If your kid said Dad, I really want to perform, where would you send the kid?

MF
Because I live in the eastern suburbs, I'd probably send him off to do Capoiera because it's a very integrated form that encapsulates a spiritual tradition as well as a martial arts one, as well as a musical one, as well as a body one. And I like the people who teach it and they play soccer.

PSN
You like the holistic approach?

MF
Yes. It almost could be anything. It would probably be easier to decide what instrument to start a kid with. If I wanted to lead them towards music I'd say look, sing all the time, but probably start with anything you can get a sound out of quickly. Don't start with a bassoon. Start with a piano and it's probably a similar thing with performance. Choose something you can get your teeth into and jump somewhere.

NH
Paul, what, would you put your performers through if you wanted to make work and they weren't trained dancers? You work mostly with highly trained dancers?

PSN
I was very fortunate to be taken off the disco floor and put on stage at the age of 23 so while I didn't do any formal training. I had quite a strong sense of proprioception, this ownership of what we have here.

Andrew Morrish (improvisor)
I was taken from a disco floor too but asked to stop doing that! LAUGHTER

PSN
You are asking what training I would put dancers through to be able to approach the poetics of my work. Well as a choreographer I believe I'm privileged to be able to manipulate body/space/time mechanics which is what we all do as artists. That's fundamental. So if I was working with say, a gymnast, I might teach them a sense of musicality, rhythm, timing. If I have a room full of gymnasts and I want them to approach my sense of choreography, I would have to reorganise them. That's what I do. I just put them through different spatial, body, time modulations or ways of moving in order for them to be able to approach my way of choreographing. There are many, many systems that I've picked up over the years. I spent my first 4 or 5 years dancing for other people, not too happily, and ended up having to choreograph by default. I became a hunter-gatherer for resources that suited my poetics best. I think the poetry governs the work and you find the tools which will best express the poetics of that work. For me it's the poetics that govern the work, not actual technique.

KG
Nigel Kellaway has said that significant Australian dancers have either been trained by Russell Dumas or Leigh Warren. Russell Dumas has yielded a body of very distinctive work over the years. What do you expect of people who come to you in terms of training?

Russell Dumas (choreographer, dancer)
Access to an embodied heritage. My own practice embraces the modern and postmodernism and I worked with Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown and Twyla Tharp and everyone in between. I think it's interesting in the last 20 years, for reasons that I think are associated with (economic) rationalism and globalisation–by which I mean Americanisation and free markets and the way this is playing out–that there are no significant breaks to the canon. It's habitus, this notion of what you need to forget so that you can have a present. It's more what you can have–you need to forget the past so that you can have a future. But you also need to have a practice to have a future. And having a practice in Australia is like being a homosexual in a Roman Catholic seminary. It's all right as long as you're not out.

You're talking about technique, but what for? This whole thing is like some Foucauldian notion of bodies and disciplining bodies. About 30 years ago I came across the notion of the thinking body and experiential anatomy. Basically it comes down to the sense of touch, the fundamental, or lexical sense of touch. It's probably the first sense and the one through which we know the other senses. That relationship to touch is distinctly related to the mother's touch and it's often denied as a sense of knowing or a way of knowing.

You're also talking there about embodiment. There's a history of denial to do with the body. We're always talking about the body of knowledge, the body of wisdom, the body incorporated but what's the relationship of my body to Dance Exchange Incorporated? What's the relationship of the private and the public of this body? It's not so much about the visual.

You're talking about wanting people to look at you. I became interested in dance as a homosexual growing up in central Queensland where I did ballet and became interested in the notion of a performance of absence. If people looked at you, you got bashed up. The performance of absence was something that later was quite useful to me. Cunningham asked me to work with him because he was interested in that quality. It also got me jobs with any number of people.

The notion of when you're ready to perform I think is something that is profoundly about when you lose yourself, when you're not there. So that someone looking at what you're doing is not in this didactic relationship. It's like fascism. The notion of a text that involves an audience and how they might respond and the way that text is created and where the meaning is created is what interests me more. So I don't care about the number of bodies I work with and the different bodies. Probably the most interesting bodies I've worked with have been the untrained ones like Keith March and Nick Sabel. The other ones are either very trained, who have had ballet training. In a sense I'm interested in the notion of a colonial ballet practice and how people talk about Republicanism with this world of dance. It's something that's barcoded into children's bodies.

But anyway, the thing that interests me is a sense of touch that is not suppressed by visuality. I think the relationship of visuality to patriarchal society is the issue. We have a room full of practitioners who are on the edges. Meanwhile you have all these companies that all do ballet. The dancers all applied to the Australian Ballet School and the ones who didn't get into the ballet companies then become the contemporary dancers.

KG
At university you might get a semester or a class or a module in some aspect of physical theatre or voice. Elsewhere various artists and groups offer short term courses. What about the lack of availability of ongoing training?

Performer
I rediscovered performing last year through the Impact Ensemble at PACT. I'd been studying at the Centre for Performance Studies which has also fed what I'm beginning to see as a practice. I've subsequently started up a group meeting once a week to continue practicing and pooling our money to have tutors come in on a needs basis, depending on what we want to work on at the time. By feeling what we need we try to access that through who we know of the more established practitioners. I've had an incredible support from those practitioners.

AS
I've struggled with this since I finished with gymnastics because I found the process of doing gymnastics 6 days a week 30-40 hours a week both fearful–I was scared of it–and painful. And I've tried to be a producer and I've discovered something wonderful that has helped me. It has to be integral. I find it hard to get motivated for all sorts of reasons and I have to start right from how I get up in the morning, how I have a shower, and how I organise my day to day practice, I need to stick to repetition. While I'm ironing, I'm doing my knee evaluations. When I'm in the shower, I'm waking up my system turning the hot and cold and giving myself a vocal warmup at the same time. For me it has to be continual consciousness.

DW
As a young person, who doesn't always feel very young, I can feel my current embodied practice of lifting heavy things professionally in continual lower back pain. I used to find it very easy to train, to go and pursue workshop training extra-curricular to my studies. I studied at the University of Western Sydney at Nepean. Yana Taylor was a pivotal teacher in a way because she addressed my dissatisfactions with what I was learning and said, go to these other places. Subsequent to leaving university and subsequent to the Contemporary Performance Week milestones that I had come to know, these are all disappearing. We all know what they were–Open Week at Performance Space, Contemporary Performance Week at Sidetrack. There were structures, people practicing who had workshops so I could do a workshop with Mémé Thorne and then several workshops a week with Mémé Thorne. They were good. More recently, I'm interested in putting on shows. I have to earn money to pay for these shows, so I am engaged in lifting heavy things professionally. This really compromises my ability to train. And this is not a sob story. This is just observation. There is no ongoing practice. There's a series of influences, a series of trainings that I draw on in particular circumstances. But no ongoing practice and I feel the loss.

YT
The opportunities and support mechanisms around them have become thinner on the ground. At the same time, the appetite for them has been circulating. So we are actually at an interesting point. I can think of some ordinary things to do–when people are making applications to funding organisations, that there is some support for the idea that training is part of the creative pursuit and intimately woven into it. At the other level is the way the field's run for a long time. Making do, bartering, exchange. But in Sydney there's less and less infrastructure for that to happen ie space, time and access to it.

Art>Music is full of visual and aural images connected at some point with the music world, specifically with music and popular culture. In presenting such a show, the MCA is stating that the connection between art and music is important, and the ideas and concepts around such a practice worth pursuing. Perhaps the biggest problem with this exhibition, and the MCA itself, is that a number of issues and questions have been raised that require answers and discussion, but there are no avenues for such conversation. An open forum is needed where the gallery can answer questions and detractions face to face, with the art community, academics and the various satellite cultures which cross in and out of the area covered by Art>Music. This has not happened and many are left thinking that the MCA does not understand (critically) what is happening within the art/music scene.

The basic tenet is an exhibition presenting works by “visual artists who make and record music, collaborate with musicians or whose work is strongly influenced by the styles of rock, pop and techno.” The show simply does not do this; it breaks away from its brief almost instantly. At points of possible rupture, the exhibition is at its weakest displaying a lack of research into sound art, 20th century audio and rock/pop/techno.

Questions must be raised. What is the point of having such a show? Who is it for? What does it mean for an institution to curate such a show from the outside (are they on the outside)? Curator Sue Cramer has written the sole catalogue essay. Does this mean that we have one viewpoint in an environment filled with outsides and nearbys, insides and arounds, squeaks and mutterings, squeals and feedbacks? Where are the other voices in the catalogue—the sound theorists, art critics, the artists even?

In her catalogue essay, Cramer states that the connection and interaction between art and music is not new, fine, but then goes on to state that Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground are “perhaps the most famous example.” Do the general public really know the work of the Velvets, do they even know the Warhol project?The Velvets must come way down the chain. What is this art pop, this art rock?

The question then is who is this show for? Is it meant as a groundbreaking museum piece, opening the minds of the masses to new ideas, and even the possibility that there might be a connection between art and music? If so, why use Warhol? If not, then in whose terms are Warhol and the Velvets the most famous example?

If we are to make any sense of Art>Music we need to ask what the terms of reference are. What is ‘techno’ for example? The way it is positioned in relation to contemporary dance culture is all over the place. Does techno relate to the whole genre of electronically generated music or does it specifically relate to a sub-genre within electronic music. The difference is huge and the term is often used in both settings. The same goes for the ongoing shift in the meanings of ‘pop’ and ‘rock.’

Finally, why was so much left out and so much included? Was the brief simply too large? Did it need mural sized record covers (how does Julian Opie interact with Britpop beyond merely painting the cover of a release)? Do we need to see a painting of Nick Cave (how did Howard Arkley interact with post-punk and Nick Cave beyond a portrait)? If this is included, then what of the thousands of portraits of musicians? Where were the photographs? How does the Kylie fan room fit next to the Sonic Youth room? How was the music box selected and why were there artists in the box and not in the show? Why include all those records/CDs in one room? What makes them art, more interesting than hundreds of thousands of other releases, and how has this moved on from Broken Music, part of René Block’s Sydney Biennale in 1990?

These questions have been asked in relation to sound and art for many years, yet this show seems to add little in the way of answers or understanding.

Art>Music: rock, pop, techno exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, March 21-June 24

RealTime issue #43 June-July 2001 pg. 38

Cathryn Krake, Arcade

photo Anya Van Lit

Cathryn Krake, Arcade

The flâneur hails from the mid 19th century. Poetically depicted by Baudelaire, and discursively dressed by Benjamin, the flâneur strolls the streets of Paris. His emergence coincides with that of capitalist industrialism and urbanisation. Somewhat at odds with these developments, the self-styled flâneur parades the marketplace, strolls along the boulevards, and glides across the arcade, passing all that he sees in review. The arcade becomes for the flâneur a world in miniature, a cosmos of the commodity form.

Chunky Move’s Arcade is an invitation to stroll amongst the vestiges of a past century. It is ingeniously staged on the 1st floor of Melbourne’s Nicholas building, whose ground floor still boasts an L-shaped series of quaint shops. Located in the heart of the city, once home to the Jewish schmutter trade, Arcade hovers above the trams and the heroin, in the ether of the 21st century. The period is grimy Edwardian; old heavy lifts, stained glass ceilings lit milky white, tiled floors, beveled glass, small shops.

We, the audience, are also relics of the past. Time is splintered here. We line up, awaiting regimented entry into encapsulated moments of performance, ready to consume our prey, like Moira Finucane’s black widow piece The Dress Shop. The work of several directors, most of the pieces have titles that relate to the theme of (art as) commodity: 100% Off, Massive Reduction, The Dress Shop. Quaint (Lucy Guerin), weird (Moira Finucane), dark (David Pledger), romantic (Stephanie Lake) and startling (Gideon Obarzanek), the night belongs to the hallways.

Marx didn’t think much of commodity production, in part because it represents the reduction of labour into anonymous items of exchange. In 100% Off, Obarzanek offered tactile glimpses of naked bodies, boxed up and lit by neon morgue lighting. The sensual pleasures on offer agitated some audience members who felt morally bound to leave well alone. Others delighted in the curve of a breast, or the roll of a testicle. What are the moral sensibilities of today’s audience? Are we ready and willing to consume anything? How did these people in boxes feel? Will we ever know? I found myself drawing the line at the gyrations of the Johnny Young Talent team, not because these sexlings were there for our amusement, but because the made-up faces of children signals sexual danger.

Lucy Guerin’s 1950s period piece was witty and well packaged, involving the comic actions of 2 shopkeepers who enticed then shrunk their customers. Moira Finucane gave a demented performance, her prey swinging and sewing for her carnivorous delight. David Pledger created a photographic pastiche, disturbed and disturbing, and Stephanie Lake came up with a warm and trippy corseted dance to the music of Bob Dylan.

Because Arcade breaks with the linearity of perception, and the pieces themselves were unconnected, it is hard to draw it all together under some single judgement. Perhaps there is no more to be said. I don’t think Arcade is meant as a critique of commodification. Rather, it is what it is, a manifestation of the seemingly inevitable consumerism of our times.

–

Arcade, Chunky Move, created by Gideon Obarzanek in collaboration with Lucy Guerin, Stephanie Lake, Moira Finucane and David Pledger, cnr Swanston St and Flinders Lane, Melbourne, May 9-19

RealTime issue #43 June-July 2001 pg. 33

Tony Briggs, nyid, Scenes of the beginning from the End

photo Lyn Pool

Tony Briggs, nyid, Scenes of the beginning from the End

In the beginning, slow moving bodies silhouetted against footage of fast moving roads. Compelling and beautiful athletic bodies but crouched; they are not yet human and definitely not yet car. Are we going to or coming from (looking back at) a landscape of orange dust, blue sky, cloudy green river water and sand? The roads lead to all-grey cityscapes, then a suburban street with colour, from a red car and a blue car, as if these have stolen colour, driving out through the landscape and bringing it back. I loved the sensory wash.

At the end the audience was divided; one half allocated name tag messages by a ubiquitous corporate security company and videoed for the other half to watch. The show ends (or begins) with scenes of bodily confinement, surveillance and a street intersection filmed from panoptic video cameras. Scenes of the beginning from the end consists of intersections of live bodies and filmed (e)scapes, physical talk and verbal football; cars as cultural fantasies of freedom set against fears of social monitoring. Echoes of Foucaultian regimes but not punishing dismemberment in this Australia. Performed in Melbourne’s Public Office car park, NYID’s show becomes high-octave realism as the remaining parked cars are driven out during the performance. The soundsc(r)ape of cars parking, electronic pips, feet pounding.

Fleshed bodies, motionless, breathing audibly, and intermittent hisses and pips from the bush, intersect with grumbling cars that mutate into the traffic of continual electronic noise. Three cars star–a white panel van, a green Torana LX 1976 coupe with the mega-sound system and a gold Renault. They resonate cultural difference if not clashes. Safety regulations aside, I want these metal bodies to move around us, to perform, as cars do in circus rings.

NYID successfully recycles the grand contemporary performance traditions of moving the audience around, car parks as performance spaces, and directed spectator participation intersecting here with television studio audiences. What failed to interest this spectator, however, were most of the spoken dialogues about life in suburbia, which remained like workshop exercises from 1970s Australian drama without 1990s irony. Why were these scenes not delivered as body texts? NYID’s bodies in motion are skilled, dynamic and captivating. Admittedly, feet pounding unforgiving concrete surfaces is a reminder that too much movement in spaces designed for other body-types wrecks fleshed bones.

There is wit to be found though with a potent, playful televised sequence of dialogue as if it taken from Neighbours, performed in English by Kha Tran Viet and Yumi Umiumare (as Charlene)–instantly recognisable to the younger audience members around me–and then repeated in Vietnamese. This provides the harbinger of the show’s last sequence about televisual simulations that reflect back falsely; a reminder that screen images speed over live realities and their collisions.

Not Yet It’s Difficult, Scenes of the beginning from the end, director David Pledger, dramaturg Peter Eckersall, producer Paul Jackson, performers Paul Bongiovanni, Greg Ulfan, Tamara Saulwick, Louise Taube, Tony Briggs, Natalie Cursio, Cazerine Barry, Public Office car park, March 20

RealTime issue #43 June-July 2001 pg. 31

It’s some time since a young performance artist has achieved major recognition. It’s also a while since an artist violating the boundaries of the skin even got a mention. Unlike others a la Stelarc and Epizoo who explore the futuristic body in relation to machines and technology, Monika Tichacek’s work is very much engrained in the now, but also in the nostalgic past.

She recently won the $40,000, 2001 Helen Lempriere Travelling Arts Scholarship with her work Romance, exhibited at Artspace, Sydney. Tichacek completed her Honours (Bachelor of Fine Arts) at COFA (College of Fine Arts, UNSW) in 2000 and has exhibited at various Sydney galleries and at IPS in New York.

When you meet the 26-year-old, take heed of her words: “It may not taste as sweet as it looks.” But instead of the shock value of much extremist art, her installation performances are extremely beautiful.

Tichacek’s interest in plastic surgery and medical procedures is very specific: “I’m not for or against these practices, it’s more a fascination. When you look at how science has taken over, especially genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, it’s frightening.” Although technology may be the subject, it’s not the medium. Earlier pieces like Once Mother Read Me Rapunzel (1999) were made of latex, dolls and hypodermic needles.

She began invading her body with pins in I am not my mother 2 (1999). Together with Lisa Cooper, she inserted whitetipped pins along the contours of her body as part of the Dissonance exhibition at Performance Space. “I had been making objects, but really wanted to use my own body. I became interested in fashion-patterns, trying to cut to body shapes along set lines. I also went to medical libraries, and was fascinated with how they would draw lines all across the body before operations.”

Monika claims to be more a part of the installation than a performer. She consistently sets up the space as a walk-in environment. It’s not performative, but almost decorative, with all the trimmings. “I see it as interactive sculpture as opposed to inanimate objects. It’s a live body in the space, and usually I’m extremely passive, there’s not much action.”

By their very nature the works are personal. In Lovesick (1999), the tattoos of Tichacek and her partner, artist Emma Price, were illuminated by light boxes. This is not the first project she collaborated on with Emma. Homecoming King (2001) was an installation made for the Mardi Gras festival. “It was based on our tour to Memphis, and was a reaction to the shabbiness and sadness of the Heartbreak Hotel.” In this piece, the room was decorated as the ideal bedroom. It’s here that the motifs in Monika’s work are seen again, the exquisite needlework in the immaculately sewn headboard, and the towels emboidered with “Elvis” and “Priscilla.” In the video component, the 2 artists played out the couple. “I am also fascinated by drag and the constructions of heterosexuality, including male sexuality. I love mainstream romance. The old soaps. Kitsch love hearts.”

In I Wanna be loved by You (2000), Tichacek lay inside a long box, a Rapunzel-like wig fastened to her forehead with needles, with long blonde locks that spread throughout the gallery space. The audience could look through a glass peephole showing Tichacek’s distorted and heavily made up face, reminiscent of pixilated TV: “TV is very important to me. I get a lot of inspiration and disgust from it.”

The TV was an integral element to the winning piece Romance. In the live version of the 2-hour work she lies still, in the traditional reclining nude pose. The room is a white surgery with white chocolate moulds on the walls. Her face is pulled and threaded with separate needles, in post surgery positions. Puffy, freshly siliconed lips, high cheekbones, flared nostrils. It’s only via a video monitor that the audience can see her. The space is un-enterable.

So, are these actions necessary for her art—and there’s no denying it’s for the sake of art—or is there an element of personal satisfaction? “I hope that the audience won’t just focus on the piercings. In my work I’m dealing with the body, so it seems useless to use fake props like latex.” But what about the pain—it’s hard to ignore these instruments of cruelty when taken out of the hospitals and stuck in the gallery: “They add an extremity and urgency to my work that contrasts with the serenity and sterility of the surroundings.” As with much so-called ‘Mutilation’ art—a term she eschews—it’s an issue of transforming the pain into something else. Her work alludes “to changing the past, making it become good. The body stores many precious and sentimental things.”

So what about survival? “Funding is difficult…sometimes it’s as though I don’t fit in. There is some money out there for performance and theatre, but it’s difficult to sustain any art practice, especially one that is not a commodified piece.” Monika is also very involved in the Imperial Slacks Gallery, one of the few artist-run spaces in Sydney. As part of their policy, they try to encourage as much performance and experimental art as possible.

With her prize money Monika hopes to travel and learn with Mathew Barney in New York. “I think Barney is the ultimate in this type of practice. There’s total excess of all levels in his performance installations.” It’s this area especially that intrigues her. “His works are productions, massive big-scale events. I would like to be involved and work in that environment.”

If you think of a Handel opera as something akin to an excellent German car model, then El Inocente resembles the aftermath of a car smash where the fragmented bits are creatively reassembled, somewhat Frankenstein-like given the mad results. Or, with the campery involved, should that be Frank’n’furter?

The Burgermeister here is of course Nigel Kellaway, our avant-garde’s own Colonel Sanders/Krusty the Clown, all Bumptious Bravado, Buggery and Baroque, who decided some years ago that he wanted to cut up the tuneful bourgeois meal we call opera into tiny bits before devouring and then regurgitating it with relish in front of a paying public. ‘B’ is the new ‘D’ cup that runneth over in the consuming passion we call cutting-edge theatre, where a whole lot of B for Brawn, Brains, Braggadocio & Bullshit is laid at our table in a bedazzling feat of D for Deconstruction.

I know this for a fact because a couple of hours before the final performance of El Inocente I drove straight through an intersection and into the side of a flash BMW. I staggered into the Performance Space (a bit like a stand-up comedian in search of a skit) only to walk back through the experience under the august helmsmanship of the bewigged Burgermeister himself.

El Inocente collides the spirit of the baroque (more exactly the music of Handel reconsidered by Richard Vella) with the tragic tale of an innocent girl who could well be Erendira from the famous Marquez short story. In the very least, Kellaway admits the ‘fabulist’ story-line has a South American literary influence.

Collaborating closely with Kellaway in the creation of this new work are performers Regina Heilmann, Katia Molino and Lynn Murphy; composer Richard Vella; Simon Wise on lighting design and production; with Melita Rowston and Paul Cordeiro assisting. Most have worked with him before, along with several other substantial talents, on this series of productions exploring the nature of the artform we call opera.

One attends a Kellaway event with a very real sense of anticipation. He has been one of the leaders of our avant-garde for at least 15 years and in that time participated in the creation of some astounding events. Among them I would include his work with Sydney Front (The Pornography of Performance, 1988; Photocopies of God, 1989; Don Juan, 1992), The Nuremburg Recital, 1989; This Most Wicked Body, 1994 (a 240-hour performance marathon involving among others restaurateur Gay Bilson, and in a shorter version at the 1998 Adelaide Festival). He also directed for the Song Company the opera, The Sinking of The Rainbow Warrior (1997) and has worked with a range of other companies including Stopera, Stalker and Urban Theatre Projects.

Since 1997, he has been working on this series called The opera Project. With co-founder Annette Tesoriero and dancer Dean Walsh, they began with The Berlioz – our vampires ourselves, a production I still think to be one of Kellaway’s best ever works. It was successful because the story was played out in the actions, the action vivified the story. Even the overt campery had a vital role to play.

Remarking on the inspired convergence of dramatic idea and physical gesture in that work, I noted that Kellaway had “never shied away from risks and on many occasions he has been punished for the results. While never less than imaginative, it is understandable that not all the experiments would hold.”

For days since seeing the last performance of El Inocente, I have been struggling with what to say. It is easy to be smart and parody Kellaway’s felicitous imagination and taste for over-the-top imagery (see my introductory paragraphs).

But scouring through dozens of pages of commentary and reviews of his many works I see few have ever been able to adequately grasp what is actually going on. That’s fine when we like the work—praise rarely demands (certainly from the artists) the same level of critical interrogation (they’re just so relieved someone liked it!). But when a new production seems less successful than others we have seen, it’s quite a daunting challenge to speculate: why?

Having only a short time earlier just missed killing myself and possibly several other people, I could not be sure whether I had been professionally alert enough to pass judgement on this work of art. Was I paying enough attention? Was I really there? The short answer of course is: If the production had enough going on, it would have insisted itself upon even the most distracted imagination. It did not.

What characterises this latest production is the heavy emphasis on story-telling. Large slabs of the action are literally read by the actors sitting at a long table. These segments actually hold most of the key elements in the narrative which, if enacted, would be seen much more clearly and convincingly to push the story forward.

The displacement might have been deliberate but, so disorientating is it for the audience in this instance, we leave the theatre wondering if we have actually seen anything true. The secret to the art of the stage lies in its 4 dimensions—actor/audience/ time/space. Despite thousands of plays written over the centuries, words are not a ‘core promise’ when budgeting for a work for the stage. Even in Shakespeare, the words decorate and dance upon the ever forward-moving ‘pattern action.’ While comparing one with the other can prove illuminating, it’s not what people say on stage that counts, it’s what people do.

We are convinced of a work’s veracity because we see the events enacted. We have all experienced bad theatre and wondered why it made so little impact. Denying the audience living breathing ‘evidence’ of what happened is, unwittingly, an attempt to deny the existence of time as a fundamental component of the artform. And why call on time if you don’t need it?

Okay, the material has been ‘deconstructed’, but in this context what is that supposed to mean?

Deconstruction is a very powerful tool which calls on a philosophical system to be judged by its own terms. It is based on the idea that no system can embody ‘absolute truth’ no matter how often this claim is made. And the only way to test the authenticity of such claims is to turn the internal critical mechanisms of the system (such as they are) on the system itself. Inevitably the system’s grandiose claims at infallibility fall short, and the relative nature of all truths is the only truth confirmed.

To apply such an endeavour to a genre, as in ‘opera’, is not so different to the current meaning of ‘deconstruction’ in the fashion industry where it indicates the showing of seams, flaunting rag-bag assembly and op-shop scraps posing as haute-couture. The theoretical ‘application’ really means ‘applique’. What we have in both the frocks of Michelle Janke and El Inocente is collage—show and tell, an endeavour of a much lower intellectual order.

I am also bothered by the claim that The opera Project is a project. It implies that some useful by-product exists outside or alongside the actual works produced. If project implies progress, how do we explain that the final work is so much weaker than others in the series? What are we, those of us in the stalls, meant to have taken away from this research experiment?

This work identifies itself as brave, radical and cutting edge. Unfortunately, it’s bogged down with formalist cliches—quotation, parody, dislocation, collage, collision, distancing, camp.

To return to the car crash, vehicles are made these days to crumple on impact. So even when one does run straight into a late model German vehicle, there is actually very little impact on one’s own body. I drove straight into that car at a considerable speed, but I felt almost nothing. The shock was absorbed by the design components. That is how it was with El Inocente. It made almost no impact, almost no lasting impression. This is a far cry from The Berlioz, which still lives in my body/mind.

A few days earlier I witnessed an incident on the Jerry Springer show that will also remain burned in my memory (alongside the Mike Tyson ear-bite which I saw live—the still shots were not able to capture the full horror of this momentary descent into the animal kingdom!). On Springer was a man who had, after being turned away by the medical system, cut off his own penis in a desperate attempt to have a body that even faintly resembled the woman he felt himself to truly be.

It wasn’t the theatricality of that gesture which stuck me as so extraordinary (he had rushed from the family dinner table and hacked it off with a steak knife). It was his preparedness to face his ranting and abusive wife and family, Springer himself, Springer’s ‘doctor’ (a PhD in TV journalism, I think), and a hostile and mocking studio/world-wide audience.

El Inocente is about a young girl, Helena, also forced to suffer at the hands of society (personified by her cruel grandmother and the many men to whom she is sold for sex). But never once during the production did I feel for her or her predicament. This man who cut off his penis had suffered so much in his life that nothing more could hurt him. He had moved to a new level of existence beyond pain. He went on the show clearly in an act of revenge, to humiliate his wife and family in front of the rest of the world to expose them for what they were. It was an extraordinarily courageous, dare I say it, cutting-edge performance.

In these times of post-handover politics and crouching tiger opportunities, the Hong Kong Film Festival has faced a tough time to maintain its position as the major showcase for new Asian cinema. What we got this year, with few premieres but a range of diverse seasons, was an opportunity to consider the dispersed achievements of East Asian cinemas.

If there was one masterpiece, it was Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (A One and A Two). This is the work of a great filmmaker with an enormous sureness of touch. The small business people of earlier Yang films such as Taipei Story have done well out of high-tech, though they are not sure how. Events nudge them into an unaccustomed introspection. This film has a much warmer tone than most of Yang’s work. Eight year old Yang Yang takes photos of the backs of people’s heads to help them see things afresh. There is a reference to Yang’s own methods here, which have always been based on indirection and distance. Dialogue scenes are done in extreme long shot, or from behind, or through narrow openings, or in reflection. This holds you away from characters and ensures that your relation to the narrative isn’t straightforwardly emotional. When the emotion does emerge, it is mature and contemplative, and hence stronger for it.

The great thing about the commercial Hong Kong industry, on the other hand, is that it works so hard to deliver a maximum of force with the minimum of waste. I like to see the ads for contra deals in the credits. Here is a cinema that carries its own suitcases out to the car. Let’s take Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai’s Needing You. It’s a romantic comedy, a genre for which fan-boy culture has never had much time. It often seems that the couple in a HK romance don’t want to go to bed together so much as to play together. Johnnie To keeps the camera close in to the action and then moves the characters around quickly so the camera whips after them as they snap through the frame. This is filmmaking intent on exploiting every ounce of kinetic possibility.

Juliet in Love is a small triumph. It pulls off the difficult combination of sentimental love story (complete with chubby baby) and hard-edged observation of globalisation in southern China. Sandra Ng is a waitress who lives in a New Territories development where the concrete was poured yesterday, across the road from the shanty town. She faces a losing battle to keep her grandfather off the bottle—the Coke bottle. This sad but inspiring film uses Coke as a motif which establishes the parameters of the characters’ lives, before killing them in the end.

Gen-Y Cops also represents a dive into the global. It is that happy combination of popular film which kicks arse while having every bit as much to say about the new world order. Cool Canto-dudes take on evil homies with robots along with the arrogant Americans who think they own the world. Have I mentioned the latest in crime-fighting technology developed by the People’s Republic? If only they can stop the arms from falling off. And the French robot, named in honour of Jerry Lewis? There’s all the geopolitical allegory you could want here and then some. The central question for popular youth culture—and for the Hong Kong film industry—is how to be hip, how to be hot, how to be chilled out bro, and yet how to be proudly and identifiably Chinese at the same time.

Tsui Hark is back from a season in Van Damme and ready to show us how bad dudes really do things. Don’t expect to be able to follow the story of Time and Tide. The film doesn’t want to narrate, it just wants to smack you silly. As far as I can make out, it has something to do with a Latin American gang, a mercenary whose wife is heavily pregnant (I’m sure you can see where that one is heading) and a pretty boy wannabe. Those who have seen The Blade will have a sense of the dark, jagged vein in which this film works. Tsui doesn’t move the camera—he thrusts it, accompanied by the whoosing sounds that normally go with martial arts moves.

If I can open a parenthesis concerning narrative incoherence and global politics, I’d like to mention Miklos Jancso’s Damn! The Mosquitoes from the international season. From a Hungarian perspective, the grand narratives of history have lapsed into a confusing opacity. So what kind of films do you make? Perhaps something like this, which resembles the Three Stooges performing a Brechtian improvisation. Some critics have tried to read this as allegory, but it seems more like an attempt to capture the texture of an historical moment rather than its linear trajectory.

One of the most interesting emergent sources of Asian cinema is Korea. Barking Dogs Never Bite might become its breakout film. It works the familiar territory of the soulless centre of Asian economic miracle, but it does it with humour and vibrancy. To pull this off through a story about eating dogs is no small achievement. It balances its urban distopia against the idealism of its young female protagonist. Girlpower might not rule, but at least it endures.

The more prestigious Korean film was Chunhyang. This big budget film screams national culture. Subtract the Shaw Brothers martial arts film from Crouching Tiger and you might get something like this. It is a relentlessly picturesque folktale interspersed with on-screen narration by a pansori singer. The aim is to revitalise national culture by stressing its power to connect with a contemporary audience.

On to the Japanese youth film with Ryuichi Hiroki’s Tokyo Trash Baby. Let me type that again: Tokyotrashbaby, tokyotrashbaby. Of course, no film could ever be as cool as this title. What we’ve got here is a solid character study of a young woman who attains her fantasy only to find out that she has no fantasy left. The film is well constructed and certainly not trashy—which may be good or bad, depending on your aesthetic.

In this brief sampling of Asian cinema, if Hong Kong wasn’t at the cutting edge, it still did a pretty good job of filling in a lot of the recent and historical background. Hopefully we’ll have a chance to see more of these films in Australia riding on the back of the current crop of arthouse successes.

Yi Yi (A One and A Two) is screening as part of the Sydney Film Festival, State Theatre, Sydney, June 8-22

For a nation that likes to think of itself as a bit cheeky, a bit exuberant, something of a larrikin, we do a great line in po-faced Federal Institutional architecture. Canberra’s Parliamentary Triangle is all restrained greenery, manicured lake foreshore; the elegant neo-Classical-whatever of the Library, the High Court peeking through the trees, and the buried centrepiece with its very earnest and very shiny flagpole.

The building which has recently appeared on the opposite shore of the lake could hardly be more of a contrast—a gaudily coloured riot of loops, grids, portals and stripes, it turns its back on its neighbours, focusing energy inward on a mad plaza, a kind of backyard of the national imaginary. Other than a predictable minority of nay-sayers, it’s been well received. People seem to recognise its energy, its multilayered semiotic gags, and particularly appreciate the way it invigorates, and messes up, the carefully constructed stateliness of its surrounds. John Howard could barely conceal his displeasure at the building he called “almost un-museum-like”; I swear I heard a gleeful chorus replying, “Exactly!”

Inside is a collection of exhibits which, luckily, live up to the promises of their extraordinary shell, and an organisation that seems to be thriving on the buzz. The presence and impact of that shell can never be underestimated: in particular, the National Museum of Australia’s deployment of digital media really begins with the building. This is a scheme that is hugely informed by, and enabled by, digital media technologies. The site is conceptualised as a tangling of the axes of Burley-Griffin’s Federal layout: they form a complex three-dimensional knot, which expresses itself as both solid forms and voids in the building. The design takes on the spatial plasticity of computer-aided design and applies it to a meaningful conceptual task: rather than just conveniently permutating floorplans in a multi-storey Meriton monster, the CAD system gets a 3D-workout. It’s no surprise to find, in an exhibit detailing the design process and philosophy, references to complex systems sciences, and figures such as the Lorenz attractor—the original “strange” attractor. Like these sciences, the Museum project uses visualisation technologies to turn abstract complexities—in this case layers of spatial and semiotic data—into sensible forms.

Inside, the initial impression is of the sheer density of media-surfaces. There are screens literally at every turn, in all shapes and sizes. Discreet and very sleek touchscreens, installed PC-based kiosks, video projections, arrays of flat-panel displays, a full-size cinema and a VR theatre. No visual monopoly, either; individual listening stations and installed speaker arrays are widely used. There’s an overall balance throughout the space between museum-type objects (there’s even the odd display case) and dynamic media elements. That balance is striking in that it’s remarkably even: the media elements are never secondary to the objects or vice versa. The 2 are more and less prominent at various points, but work as equal partners in forming the exhibitions.

There are 5 big nodes in this media-field—what Stephen Foster, Head of the Museum’s Content and Technology Division, calls “musclemedia” elements. They are ciRcA, a revolving theatrette; kSpace, kid-oriented interactive VR; Imagining the Country, an interactive map-based display; the Welcome Space in the Gallery of First Australians, an interactive corridor of video projections; and a huge video-wall at the other end of the same gallery.

While there’s something slightly comical about the idea of a revolving theatrette, ciRcA carries it off well. The installation is clever. A small slice of seating moves in stages through the 4 quadrants of a circle, over the course of around 10 minutes. The quadrants house 3 video installations, corresponding to the museum’s themes of Land, Nation and People; each is a multi-screen, multi-channel linear video. The video content is bright, snappy, very accessible and cleverly organised. There are hints of that high-production-value TV-ad Australiana which has been prominent recently—iconic landscapes, intense colours, exhilarating helicopter shots and snapshot montage—but here, thankfully, there’s no sun-browned Aussie narrator trying to sell us airline tickets. There is an eye-opening gimmick: in the Land installation, 5 big plasma-screens are mounted on vertical tracks, so that they slide in front of a huge rear-projected video wall; their motion is computer-controlled in sync with the video. They almost look silly, whizzing up and down with robot precision, but are saved by some neat integration with the video content, as when a rainforest stream cascades gently across the wall, from one screen to the next. The other 2 installations are less startlingly kinetic, but both generate rich, multiplexed video textures, and present material conveys a diverse, self-conscious and self-critical nationalism, leavened with a wry sense of humour.

kSpace, by comparison, is straight high-tech; this kid-focused exhibit was created with input from the Vizlab visualisation team at the ANU Supercomputer Facility. As you enter, a digital camera snaps an ID photo. Touchscreens in lime-green plinths offer you the chance to design a vision of the future, in the form of either a vehicle or a building. Through a simple series of choices (this chassis, those jets, that antenna) a custom-designed form appears—in my case a purple and fawn possum-headed rocketship, in glorious 3D, wobbling on the screen. On to the little VR theatre, don a pair of LCD shutter-glasses, and fly through a lurid fantasy city, studded with custom-kid-designed buildings and buzzing with weird flying objects, each of which proudly bears the mugshot of its creator. There’s some nice tongue-in-cheek VR Australiana here—including a huge silhouette of a Nolan Ned Kelly—and the B[if]tek soundtrack is seriously funky. Great fun, and I imagine it has the target demographic climbing the walls in delight. The fact that it was still all fully functional after a busy opening month of visitors is a sign of some bulletproof design and engineering.

Upstairs, the Gallery of First Australians is devoted to Indigenous history and culture, and the space draws visitors in through a wide corridor lined with shimmering video projections of Aboriginal dancers. This Welcome Space functions as a transitional zone, announcing Indigenous culture and identity, but it’s also a sensory oasis—a drop in the density of the museum experience. Hurrying through, you may see the figures dancing—sometimes in tribal dress, other times in street clothes; dancing traditional or contemporary moves—richly overlaid with painterly textures. Slow down, and some subtle interactivity becomes apparent: walking in front of the figures sends the image rippling, and triggers transitions between sequences. There’s a quiet invitation to engagement here (on several levels): interaction is designed to require a certain proximity to the video-figures—if you want to play, you’ve got to get up close. The system design is by the Interactive Modelling and Visualisation Systems group at CSIRO, and it’s strikingly effective.

The most iconic of the musclemedia spectaculars is Imagining the Country, otherwise known as the Big Map. The concept is relatively straightforward: a huge map of our wide brown land acts as a screen for a constant stream of interactive video-projected sequences. Some are info-overlays for the map, showing geographic data on land-use, rainfall, population density, and so on. Others are thematic montages or snippets of archival footage, tied to a particular location—like surfing at Bondi in the 60s. It’s visually snappy, clear and informative, and it unrolls in a continuous stream mixing hard data with cultural and historical artefacts. The map silhouette shifts roles: at times it’s an almost-kitsch backdrop (think of those wooden Australia-shaped clocks), and at others it’s a geological terrain, a dwelling-place, a set of historical location-points. The constant stream of material creates a sense of residue, a layering of different imaginary countries. The interaction occurs through a set of high-res touchscreens mounted around the viewing area for the map: they carry a parallel set of content, also based around the map and its historical, social and geographic layers. Every so often one of these screens is given the option to trigger the next set of content on the large map—so a personal process of interaction can open out into a shared, public display.

While these high-profile elements are important, the proof of the museum’s commitment to interactive and electronic media comes in its wider integration into the collection as a whole. Stephen Foster describes the museum’s approach in terms of exploring the relationship between object and media—that balance described above. It’s a fruitful partnership: the object retains its rich thing-ness (the form and fibre of an Arnhem Land fish-trap) while media elements contextualise, expand, and animate that object. Linear and interactive media are used to draw out the strata of story and experience which the object only hints at.

The museum’s work in the media sphere isn’t limited to its permanent collection; Foster promises an ambitious program of media-rich temporary exhibitions following the current Gold show. With built-in TV and radio studios, the site can act as a broad- or narrow-cast source, as well as a venue. As Foster points out, things get even more interesting when this capacity is combined with broadband internet and the existing, and growing, database of artefacts and media content. The museum may come to form an online repository of cultural memory and social history—a national mediabase, a keyword-searchable electronic attic. There’s significant promise here for local producers, who will be called on to keep up the supply of fresh content, but also for local museum and media culture and the wider public.

My childhood memories of the neighbour’s house are marked by a slightly edgy fascination. Just next door, and yet completely unfamiliar, full of unknown lives and strange smells, un-homely. It proves the difference between the house, a plan or structure, and the home, the setting for experience and memory.

Bronwyn Coupe works with both layers—plan and memory—in this interactive installation. Five pressure mats, snugly illuminated by 50s desk lamps, form an interface which reveals corresponding rooms on the plan of a remembered house—the childhood home of the work’s composer, Mary Anne Slavich. The rooms in turn lead to video-memory snippets. The dizzy-making swing in the backyard; piano practice (and Greensleeves, and the ice-cream man); the toybox; drives in the car. Basic, common-currency evocations which send us all back to a suburban childhood, even if we never had one. What makes this more than simple nostalgia is the quiet, drifting, slightly eerie quality of the video—in one sequence time-lapse shadows creep across a box full of stuffed toys. Slavich’s piano-based score is warm, lyrical, simple, and evocative in itself.

The work as a whole is marked by a quite beautiful sense of lightness and simplicity. There isn’t a mass of content, or a deep, multilayered structure, and that’s just fine. The mapping between memory-house and gallery floor means that unlike many installed interactives, the piece works well with multiple users. It also places us squarely inside the neighbour’s house, walking from bedroom to lounge, watching someone else’s memories, and thinking of home.

Bronwyn Coupe, The Neighbour’s House, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, March 24–April 21

In the Sydney Morning Herald’s The Guide, May 28-June3, ABC Classic FM’s new programming manager, John Crawford, “outlined his plans for the network, which include dropping…Soundstage and reworking The Listening Room.” This leaves radio drama with the half hour Airplay, Sunday afternoons at 3pm, and a new 1 hour 8pm slot, Saturday Night Drama, both on Radio National. Saturday Night Drama is broadcasting British imports for the moment, presumably because the 30% budget cut won’t allow for much new Australian product in the short term. In the long term 60 minute Australian works will be commissioned, but nothing longer.

Crawford has effectively banished radio drama to mono transmission, to diminished duration, to a lower budget and to a Saturday night homebody audience —“he would like to broaden the station’s demographic from 55-plus to attract the 40-to-50 market”, says The Guide, “as well as those he calls the ‘grey nomads’—the retirees traversing Australia in their camper vans.” What ambition!

Soundstage and The Listening Room are consistent award winners with international reputations. That one has been destroyed and the other is to be “workshopped” (in the context that word has never sounded so chilling) smacks of cultural vandalism. Crawford is damaging audio artforms that have a rich history and which have employed and nurtured an enormous variety of writers, actors, directors, composers, sound designers and musicians.

Ironically, Crawford has not been hostile to the new. He has consistently supported contemporary Australian music for over a decade, even when Classic FM inclined in recent years to easy listening. You would think that he would be supportive of 2 programs that offer composers other ways of working and take up little of his air space.
In a new century where there’s a substantial interplay between art forms (of which The Listening Room has been prophetic as well as exemplary) it seems odd that innovation counts for so little. And as the possibilities for radio performance writing expand, that radio drama should be deprived of quality transmission with aural breadth and depth.

Why so draconian? In reference to Soundstage, The Guide invokes ‘costly.’ Crawford cites listener requests for less “spoken word.” Two hours of drama is two hours too many in a 168 hour week? Of course, writers and other artists will continue to find work on Radio-eye and, Crawford’s workshop pending, The Listening Room. Nonetheless, a significant artistic terrain has been laid waste.

Perhaps because audio art seems fundamentally ephemeral, we tend not to regard its demise with the same alarm we might experience over the destruction of a painting or a Buddhist statue, or a favorite building, or the environment. You can’t see the damage. You can’t tour the ruins. There are no CDs. There’s just silence.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña creates what critics have termed “Chicano cyber-punk performances.” He uses his art and writing to reveal the labyrinths of identity and the precipices of nationality. He is internationally renowned for developing multicentric narratives from a border perspective.

Gómez Peña and his collaborator Juan Ybarra will be in residence at Sydney’s Performance Space in June to produce a multi-disciplinary performance utilising an “ephemeral troupe” of Australian artists. During the residency, the Australian artists—Valerie Berry (performer), Caitlin Newton-Broad (performer/director), Rolando Ramos (performer/multimedia artist), Victoria Spence (writer/performer), Vahid Vahed (video artist), Jorge Cantellano (multimedia artist), Claudia Chidiac (performer), Barbara Clare (sound artist) and Brian Fuata (writer/performer) will be exposed to Gómez-Peña performance methods and asked to develop a “hybrid persona” based on local history as well as their own complex identities and personal sense of race and gender. At the end of the residency a season of 6 performances will take place. Eds.

Tecnofobia

Mexicans are simple people. They are happy with the little they got…They are not ambitious and complex like us. They don’t need all this technology to communicate. Sometimes I just feel like going down there & living among them.
Anonymous

My “low rider” laptop is decorated with a 3D decal of the Virgin of Guadaloupe, the spiritual queen of Spanish-speaking America. It’s like a travelling altar, an office and a literary bank, all in one. I spend 70% of the year on the road, it is (besides my World Link phone card of course) my main means to keep in touch with my agent, editors, collaborators spread throughout many cities in the US and Mexico. The month before a major performance project, most of the technical preparations, and last minute negotiations and calendar changes, take place in the mysterious territory of cyber-space. Unwillingly, I have become a techno-artist and an information superhighway bandido. I say “unwillingly” because, like most Mexican artists, my relationship with digital technology and personal computers is defined by paradoxes and contradictions: I don’t quite understand them, yet I am seduced by them; I don’t want to know how they work; but I love how they look and what they do; I criticize my colleagues who are acritically immersed in las nuevas tecnologias, yet I silently envy them. I resent the fact that I am constantly told that as a “Latino” I am supposedly “culturally handicapped” or somehow unfit to handle high technology; yet once I have IT right in front of me, I am tempted and uncontrollably propelled to work against it; to question it, expose it, subvert it, and imbue it with humour, radical politics and linguas polutas such as Spanglish and Franglais.

Contradiction prevails. Two years ago, my main collaborator Roberto Sifuentes and I bullied ourselves into the net, and once we were generously adopted by various communites (Arts Wire and Latino net, among others) we suddenly started to lose interest in maintaining ongoing conversations with phantasmagoric beings we had never met (and that, I must say, is a Mexican cultural prejudice: if I don’t know you in person, I don’t really care to converse with you). Then we started sending a series of poetic/activist “techno-placas” in Spanglish. In these short communiques we raised some tough questions regarding access, identity politics and language. Since at the time we didn’t quite know where to post them in order to get the maximum response; and the responses were sporadic and unfocused, our interest began to dim. For months we felt lonely and isolated (it’s not hard to feel marginal and inconsequential in cyber-space). And it was only through the gracious persistence of our techno-colleagues that we decided to remain seated at the virtual table, so to speak.

Today, despite the fact that Roberto and I spend a lot of time in front of our laptops (when we’re not touring, he is in New York and I’m in San Francisco or Mexico City) conceptualizing performance projects which incorporate new technologies and redesigning our websites, every time we are invited to participate in a public discussion around art and technology, we tend to emphasize its shortcomings and overstate our cultural skepticism. Why?

I can only speak for myself. Perhaps I have some computer traumas, or suffer from endemic digital fibrosis. I’ve been using computers since ‘88; however, during the first 5 years, I used my old Mac as a glorified typewriter. During those years I probably deleted accidentally here and there over 300 pages of original texts which I hadn’t backed up, and thus was forced to rewrite them from memory (some of these ‘reconstructed texts’ appeared in my first book Warrior for Gringostroika, Greywolf Press, 1994). The thick and confusing user-friendly manual fell many times from my impatient hands. I spent many desperate nights cursing the mischievous gods of cyber-space, and dialing promising “hotlines” which rarely answered, or if they answered, provided me with complicated instructions I was unable to follow.

My bittersweet relationship to techology dates back further to my formative years in the highly politicized ambience of Mexico City in the 1970s. As a young ‘radical artist’, I was full of ideological dogma and partial truths. One such ‘truth’ spouted that high-technology was intrinsically dehumanizing (enajenante in Spanish); that it was mostly used as a means to control “us”, little techno-illiterate people, politically. My critique of technology overlapped with my criticism of capitalism. To me, ‘capitalists’ were rootless (and faceless) corporate men who utilized mass media to advertise their useless electronic gadgets, sold us unnecessary apparatuses which kept us both eternally in debt (as a country and as individuals) and conveniently distracted from “the truly important matters of life” which included sex, music, spirituality and “revolution” California-style (meaning, en abstracto). As a child of contradiction, besides being a rabid “anti-technology artist”, I owned a little Datsun; and listened to my favourite US and British rock groups on my Panasonic importado, often while meditating or making love as a means to “liberate myself” from capitalist socialization. My favourite clothes, books, posters and albums, had all been made with technology by “capitalists”; but for some obscure reason, that seemed perfectly logical to me.

Luckily my family never lost their magical thinking and sense of humour around technology. My parents were easily seduced by refurbished and slightly dated American and Japanese electronic goods. We bought them as fayuca (contraband) in Tepito neighbourhood, and they occupied an important place in the decoration of our “modern” middle-class home. Our huge colour TV set, for example, was decorated to perform the double function of entertainment unit and involuntary postmodern altar—with nostalgic photos of relatives, paper flowers and assorted figurines all around it; and so was the humongous sound system next to it with an amp, an 8 track recorder, 2 record players and 17 speakers which played all day long, a syncretic array of music including Mexican composer Agustin Lara, Los Panchos (of course, with Edie Gorme), Sinatra, Esquivel, Eartha Kitt, tropical cumbias, Italian opera and rock ‘n roll (in this sense, my father was my first involuntary instructor in postmodern thought). Though I was sure that with the scary arrival of the first microwave oven to our traditional kitchen, our delicious daily meals were going to turn overnight into sleazy fast food, soon my mother realized that el microondas was only good to reheat cold coffee and soups. The point was to own it, and to display it prominently as yet another sign of modernidad (in Mexico, modernity is conceived as synonymous with US technology and pop culture). When I moved to California (and therefore into the future), I would often buy cheesy electronic trinkets for my family (I didn’t qualify them as “cheesy” then). During vacations, to go back to visit my family with such presents ipso facto turned me into an emissary of both prosperity and modernity. Once I bought an electric ionizador for grandma. She put it in the middle of her bedroom altar, and kept it there—unplugged of course—for months. When I next saw her, she told me: “Mijito, since you gave me that thing (still unplugged), I truly can breathe much better.” And she probably did. Things like television, short wave radios and microwave ovens and later on ionizers, walkmans, crappy calculators, digital watches and video cameras were seen by my family as alta tecnologia, high technology, and their function was as much pragmatic as it was social, ritual, sentimental and aesthetic.

It is no coincidence then that in my early performance work, cheap technology performed ritual and aesthetic functions as well. Verbigratia: for years, I used video monitors as centrepieces for my “video altars” on stage. Since then, fog machines, strobe lights and gobos, megaphones and voice filters have remained trademark elements in my low-tech/high-tech performances. By the early 90s, I sarcastically baptized my aesthetic practice, “Aztec high-tech art”, and when I teamed with Cyber-Vato Roberto Sifuentes, we decided that what we were doing was “techno-razcuache art.” In a glossary which dates back to 1994, we defined it as “a new aesthetic that fuses performance art, epic rap poetry, interactive television, experimental radio and computer art; but with a Chicanocentric perspective and a sleazoid bent.”

Mythical Differences

The mythology goes like this. Mexicans (and by extension other Latinos) can’t handle high-technology. Caught between a preindustrial past and an imposed modernity, we continue to be manual beings: homo fabers par excellence; imaginative artisans (not technicians); and our understanding of the world is strictly political, poetical or metaphysical at best, but certainly not scientific. Furthermore, we are perceived as sentimentalist and passionate creatures (meaning irrational); and when we decide to step out of our realm, and utilize technology in our art (most of the time we are not even interested), we are meant to naively repeat what others—mainly Anglos and Europeans—have already done.

Latinos often feed this mythology by overstating our “romantic nature” and humanistic stances; and/or by assuming the role of colonial victims of technology. We are always ready to point out the fact that social and personal relations in the US, the land of the future, are totally mediated by faxes, phones, computers and other technologies we are not even aware of; and that the overabundance of information technology in everyday life is responsible for America’s social handicaps and cultural crisis. Paradoxically, whether we like it or not, it is our lack of access to these goods which makes us overstate our differences: we, “on the contrary”, socialize profusely, negotiate information ritually and sensually; and remain in touch with our (still intact) primaeval selves. This simplistic and extremely problematic binary world view portrays Mexico and Mexicans as technologically underdeveloped, yet culturally and spiritually superior: and the US as exactly the opposite.

Reality is much more complicated: the average Anglo American does not understand new technologies either; people of colour and women in the US clearly don’t have “equal access” to cyber-space. Furthermore, American culture has always led the most radical (and often childish) movements against its own technological development and back to nature. Meanwhile, the average urban Mexican is already afflicted in varying degrees with the same “First World” existential illnesses produced by high technology and advanced capitalism. In fact the new generations of Mexicans, including my hip generacion-Mex nephews and my 8 year-old fully bicultural son, are completely immersed in and defined by personal computers, Nintendo, video games and virtual reality (even if they don’t own the software). Far from being the romantic preindustrial paradise of the American imaginary, the Mexico of the 90s is already a virtual (and therefore mythical) nation whose cohesiveness and fluctuating boundaries are largely provided by television, transnational pop culture, tourism, the free market and yes, the Internet. But life in the ranchero global village is ridden with contradictions: despite all this, still very few people south of the border are on-line, and those who are wired tend to belong to the upper and upper middle classes, and are related to corporate or managerial metiers. Every time my colleagues and I have attempted to create a binational dialogue via digital technologies (ie link Los Angeles to Mexico City through satellite video-telephone), we are faced with myriad complications. In Mexico, the few artists with ongoing access to high technologies who are interested in this kind of transnational techno-dialogue, with a few exceptions, tend to be socially privileged, politically conservative and aesthetically uninteresting. And the funding sources down there willing to fund this type of project are clearly interested in controlling who is part of the experiment. The zapatista phenomenon is a famous exception to the rule. Techno-performance artist-extraordinaire El subcomandante Marcos communicates with the “outside world” through a very popular web page sponsored and designed by Canadian liberals (it is still a mystery to me how his communiques get from the jungle village of La Realidad, which still has no electricity, into his website overnight). However, this web page is better known outside of Mexico for a simple reason: the Mexican Telephone Company makes it practically impossible for anyone living outside the main cities to use the net, arguing that there are simply not enough lines to handle both telephone and Internet users.

The cyber-migra

Roberto and I arrived late to the debate, along with a dozen other Chicano experimental artists. When we began to dialogue with US artists working with new technologies, we were perplexed by the fact that when referring to cyber-space they spoke of politically neutral/raceless/genderless and classless “territory” which provided us all with “equal access”, and unlimited possibilities for participation, interaction and belonging, especially “belonging” (in a time in which no one feels that they “belong” anywhere). Yet there was never any mention of the physical and social loneliness, or the fear of the “real world” which propels so many people to get on-line and pretend they are having meaningful experiences of communication or discovery. To them, the thought of exchanging identities on the net and impersonating other genders, races or ages, without real (social or physical) consequences seemed extraordinarily appealing and liberating (and by no means, superficial or escapist).

The utopian rhetoric around digital technologies, especially in California, reminded Roberto and I of a sanitized version of the pioneer and frontier mentalities of the Old West, and also of the early century futurist cult to the speed, size and beauty of epic technology (airplanes, trains, factories etc). Given the existing “compassion fatigue” regarding political art and art dealing with matters of race and gender, it was hard not to see this feel-good philosophy (or theosophy) as an attractive exit from the acute social and racial crisis afflicting the US.

Like the pre-multicultural art world of the early 80s, the new high-tech art world assumed an unquestionable “centre”, and drew a dramatic digital border. And on the other side of the tracks, there lived all the techno-illiterate (and underfunded) artists, along with most women, Chicanos, Afro-Americans and Native Americans. Those of us living south of the digital border were forced to assume once again the unpleasant but necessary roles of undocumented immigrants, cultural invaders, techno-pirates and virtual coyotes (smugglers). We were also shocked by the benign or quiet (not naive) ethnocentrism permeating the debates around art and digital technology, especially in California. The master narrative was either the utopian language of Western democratic values (excuse me!!!) or a perverse form of anti-corporate corporate jargon. The unquestioned lingua franca was of course, English, “the official language of international communications”; the theoretical vocabulary utilized by critics was hyper-specialized (a combination of “software” talk; revamped post-structuralism and psychoanalysis), and de-politicised (post-colonial theory and the border paradigm were conveniently overlooked); and if Chicanos and Mexicans didn’t participate enough in the net, it was solely because of lack of information or interest (not money or “access”) or again, because we were “culturally unfit.” The unspoken assumption was that our true interests were grassroots (and by that I mean, the streets in the barrio, our logical place in the world), representational or oral (as if these concerns couldn’t exist in virtual space). In other words, we were to remain painting murals, tagging, plotting revolutions in rowdy cafes, reciting oral poetry and dancing salsa or quebradita.

This essay originally appeared in -cross, a quarterly magazine of visual arts and contemporary culture published in Milan, Italy and is reproduced here with the generous permission of the writer and the publisher.

I’m recovering from the excesses of a film festival opening. Beginning to understand the appeal. Free grog and food. Everyone re-created equal. Well-lubricated vultures picking at the red carpet. Sometimes the films seem less important than the glass in your hand, the silver plate parading past too fast.

The community film festival scene in Sydney and Melbourne (and around Australia as festivals are increasingly touring nationally) is just too vibrant. Every week a new one is announced. In the past month we’ve had European, Spanish and a taste of Greek and earlier, Arabic and French. Coming up at the Sydney Opera House is the Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander celebration of film and music Blak Sounds/Blak Screen. Last year brought us Sydney Asia Pacific, Hong Kong, China, Italian at Goat Island and a sold out Tibetan festival. Films clash. Festival guests parade. It’s feverish.

I’m sitting in Cinema Paris. A chorus of “que tal?” echoes. A Hoyts executive makes a well-rehearsed attempt at a new language and all-round talent Monica Trapaga’s Spanish is guttural and grand. Her mother Catalan, her father Basque, she recounts San Fermin fiesta recreations (including the bulls) in a suburban backyard, to the surprise of the local Seventh Day Adventists. Her passion for the cultures of Spain and Latin America extend well beyond the music she’s famous for, as she cites Spanish shoes (I look lovingly at my San Sebastian boots), Picasso’s Guernica and Almodovar amongst her inspirations. As she walks out, elegantly wrapped in a floral shawl, she says to the crowd: this is the quietest Spanish theatre I’ve ever been in.

Soon I become a part of the screen, swallowed up by the Spanish film festival’s opening night flick, Carlos Saura’s Goya en Burdeos (Goya in Bordeaux), a rich play on subconscious desires where (as with the impressive Love is the Devil about Francis Bacon), Goya’s paintings begin to live, confronting him too with the fear and joy they inspire at close view. As Goya recounts memories with a younger self, I drift into weary-legged days at the Prado in Madrid, tongue-tied attempts at ordering a Rioja—increasingly easy as the night wears on—and the intensity of Dali in Cadaquez, Picasso in Barcelona, El Greco in Toledo. Watching Goya my body breathes within his paintings, like wandering into the water lily pond at Giverny, breathlessly stunned. I surface from this bold and beautiful film into a swarming sea of hands reaching for Freixenet and tapas trays. But I remain in Spain.

Maybe this is the secret to the popularity of film festivals that revolve around specific communities. If I was only in Spain a few months, imagine the experience of such films on people who were born there, spent most of their lives there, speak the language. Film helps re-inflect and recreate our own memories, the intense ones of travel, too.

At the Greek film festival in Norton St I bum out completely. Of course, I’m paranoid that all the films I miss will be really good, but Cheap Smokes and Female Company look like they might have been made 20 years ago. Cheap Smokes is full of quirky characters spouting poetry and men talking about why they want to date supermodels and a woman in a neckbrace. Horrendous. Female Company deals with 5 women who, tired of their husbands’ affairs, hire a room to get off with local hunks. Meanwhile, their amorous activities are being filmed and broadcast on the internet (via a surveillance camera). A pretty interesting topic considering Big Brother but this film reeks of hypocrisy and, let’s face it, misogyny. It’s all apparently about women reclaiming their sexuality by finding a room of their own, but in every conflict situation the tension is resolved by a man beating a woman. And, worst of all, this is not questioned, the women get beaten and the men keep beating.

I’m sitting in the gorgeous old Roxy Theatre. The Arabic community is the largest ethnic community in Parramatta (and NSW) but their representation on our screens and in the arts is limited, summed up in 3 words: the bad guys. Doris Younane, a popular face on Australian TV from Sea Change and Heartbreak High, opened the proceedings. Born in Parramatta, she spoke of her experience as an actor with an Arabic background: “we do not exist in Australian TV/film.” In 15 years she has only played one Lebanese character. She supported the Arabic film festival as a chance for Arabic-Australians to challenge negative stereotypes and question a lack of representation: “I hope many of the future storytellers will come from this room.” An interesting selection of shorts featured on the opening night including Paula Abood’s satire on “image distortion disorder”, a reconsideration of the media’s portrayal of young Arabic men in gangs in Western Sydney—Of Middle Eastern Appearance—as a threat, as racialised ‘other’; and The Wall, starring an expanse of virgin-white wall, a canvas in action, framed so we can’t see the top, the characters choreographed in a gritty Les Ballet C de la B style. Funny, frightening vignettes: a paranoid man yells “what are you staring at”; two kids draw around each other, frozen in time; a chicken squawks; a man lets loose with a pickaxe; another dangles bleeding. A truck arrives and whitewashes all traces of the everyday away. An effective portrait of a community struggling to have its voice(s) and culture(s) heard.

The popularity of such film festivals reflects the gaps in popular culture—TV, Hollywood film—offering a chance to hear new voices. Although SBS regularly screens films from around the globe, even here there is a great deal of repeated programming and a degree of sameness in content (also reflected on cable Tv’s World Movies). Lots of old men ogling nubile wenches. Saucy and schlock horror seems to be the current fad. It can be hard to get a fix on contemporary cinema outside the English-speaking world. In Sydney, there’s surprisingly little choice between the mainstream and ‘alternative’ cinemas. Dendy and Palace appear to be playing pretty much what’s on at Hoyts. In some ways this is good because it means that challenging cinema has hit the mainstream in the past year. Just look at Traffic or Memento. On the other hand, this infiltration by defined ‘independent’ cinema (which really isn’t) has meant fewer and fewer foreign language films. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is an obvious exception but it’s a Hollywood-style film, a Mills and Boon action story. The Chauvel and revived Valhalla are important because they screen older films that deserve to be re-aired and promote smaller Australian offerings like Cunnamulla. However, they too seem more reliant on English language films, usually with a sexy edge to get the punters in.

Film festivals can have a political edge and this spices things up, a reaction against the dominant culture, and a bid for communities to reclaim their own portrayals. They’re also a good chance to screen the works of a range of filmmakers from Australia exploring notions of identity within these communities. Hopefully more of the festivals, taking the lead of the Arabic and Sydney Asia Pacific festivals, will open the floor to discussions about place and hybridity, and encourage us all to get out of our armchairs and turn on new worlds.

Books translated to films can be an easy bet and highly successful. Looking for Alibrandi, American Psycho, All the Pretty Horses have already garnered an audience who go along knowing what they’re in for. Then there are the duds. Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. Oscar and Lucinda. Sometimes you dread to hear that a favourite text is being transported to celluloid. E Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News is on its way, as is Captain Corelli’s Mandolin with Nicholas Cage. I guess Barbara Kingsolver will be next. My favourite writer of the moment, her novels The Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Summer have large-show-off-ensemble-cast stamped on every page. Then again, mum and I had a great few hours casting Kingsolver’s characters—it’s a delicious egoistic delight, manoeuvering our fantasies off the page and onto the screen.

The Monkey’s Mask—the book—is a rare treasure: a verse novel with sparse design that punches you in the guts. The 1998 theatrical adaptation downstairs at Belvoir Street was disappointing (RT#26 p42) and the film too, elegantly designed, shot and acted, lacks the raw, stomach churning power of Porter’s detective text. Too slick. No suspense. A travelogue of NSW. From the misty Blue Mountains to slippery shiny highrise sex, it’s beautiful one day and perfect the next. Where’s the dagginess and the real dirt? Susie Porter as Jill doesn’t look like she (or her heart) would ever wear pink tracksuit pants, as her monologue suggests. Her face is carved, toughly vulnerable; she doesn’t fit into this imagined poet’s world, where everyone seems to be a high flier, but who would? These types are monstrous; little Johnny will use this film as proof of the elite arts he no longer wants to fund. Thank god for Mickey—a wonderfully self-obsessed and insular performance by Abbie Cornish from Wildside—who disappears off the screen all too quickly.

Dorothy Porter can hit a raw nerve because she’s an observer from within and her eagle eye and ear capture perfectly the resonance of poet wannabes: the young female victim dying to be Sylvia Plath, the born-again poser keen to take advantage of his own moral goodness, the middle-aged bore at every pub reading who keeps saying ‘just one more’ as he sinks into his own sunset. Everyone’s shady. Deborah Mailman, playing Lou, the least sympathetic character in the book, does a surprising turn and rounds out this nasty piece of work, finely tuning her comic talent with a neat sinister edge. Kelly McGillis, who I was admittedly skeptical about after her Take My Breath Away days astride Mr Cruise-Missile in Top Gun, is magnificent in the role of Diana. Powerful, androgynous, sharp, she sucks us into her life/death world where the boundaries are unclear; a great modern day femme fatale.

The Monkey’s Mask is mostly about obsessive love between 2 women where the upperhand is determined by how much they know. For a relationship that revolves primarily around the physical—sex/games that go too far—their shared scenes are cold, uninvolving, behind glass. It’s rare these days that a sex scene moves the audience. (Praise is the last film I can remember that experimented with the usual roleplay.) Tear clothes off. Pash. Get on bed. Touch/kiss breasts. Camera pans down naked woman’s body. Actor on top moves slowly down, kissing. Camera follows then discreetly stops at waist. Pan back up naked woman’s body. Her face experiences delirious delights that we all know she isn’t having. Yawn. What am I after? Big Brother bondage thrills? Well…maybe. Not necessarily explicit (although why not in an R-rated film like this) but honest or imaginative or, well, sexy.

To enjoy this film, you need to not read the book. I was mouthing the lines before the actors did; not a good look. Better still, grab the paperback instead, settle into bed with a good red, and cast your own characters in a sexy, witty thriller that sets a pace this film can’t match.

The Monkey’s Mask, director Samantha Lang, writer Anne Kennedy, adapted from the book by Dorothy Porter, Arena Films, national release May 10

Ranters’ earlier show, Features of Blown Youth (premiered 1997), was set in a share-house, open to view, filled with chance meetings and relationships developing through proximity rather than commitment, and underscored with a menace not easily absorbed or dealt with by a loosely organised group of urban youth. Their latest show, St Kilda Tales, which opened at Playbox in May is less spatially defined. Anna Tregloan’s set is a field for action, at times interior, at times street. With its various levels, its steel constructions and soaring girder-like poles, and backed by the rear of a line of huge flats, the stage looks like an abandoned building site. Within it, a motley group of inner city dwellers wander, prowl, wait, seeking or avoiding the chance encounters that gradually weave them together in a careful choreography of event disguised as haphazard. Here the menace is internalised, spread in more evenly divided shares in a dog eat dog world where finally life itself is the menace without pity. In this context, it is less easy to locate the malevolent force within one character, although yet again Robert Morgan’s irresistibly evil stage presence does the job of corralling the disparate energies into a vitally contained theatrical force.

The Cortese brothers are charting new horizons of what can only be called ‘reality-theatre.’ The piece is plotless in any conventional theatrical sense, although the stage-field provides a fertile plot within which these vignettes of low-life can take seed and grow. The writing, much of which emerged in response to ensemble improvisations, draws no attention to itself. RaimondoCortese is growing in skill and confidence in the economies of this pared-back style. Adriano’s direction is loose-limbed in its attempt to suggest the randomness of real street life. At times it was reminiscent of the kind of stage occupation practiced by Les Ballet C de la B in shows like Iets Op Bach. It certainly had that same rhythm of alternating slackness and static electricity, breaking through expectations of the well-organised play or performance piece.

If St Kilda Tales is about anything it is, finally, about avoidance—of commitment, of care, of self-fulfilment, of sex, even of violence carried through to its final conclusion. Alcohol and drugs are the substitutes, of course, and a nervy hysteria of mood grows as the evening progresses. The ecstatic Tasso and the hopeful Lucy seem like the possible positives, but Cortese is not so sentimental as to leave us with them. We end on Olivia’s yearning: “I wanna great orgasm! Eh?! Where?! Am I dreaming?!” and with the hysterical laughter that she and Pan cannot control in the face of the hopelessness of it all.

This is a very particular cross-section of ‘St Kilda’ life. It contains no Aboriginals, no ethnicity, no senility, no yuppies, no backpackers. The suburb is the ‘springboard’ for a stage event. Its power is deliberately presentational rather than representational. In the context of Playbox, the critique it presents is finally less of society than of the way that theatre has represented it. The Playbox management should be congratulated for supporting the venture. The joy of the young audience attending is the invaluable payoff.

St Kilda Tales, by Raimondo Cortese, director Adriano Cortese, Playbox, Melbourne, May 15-26

version 1.0, The second Last Supper

A bunch of multinational corporation hondos gather, adopt the names of saints (name tags available on the table) and transform global capitalism into religion in a Last Supper of seductions, pratfalls, vigorously declaimed hypocrises, careless contradictions and violence. Like the bourgeoisie of Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel (where wealthy, partying citizens find themselves locked in a mansion by a hidden force and turn on each other), these saints are nasty, cynical, and easily diverted (“is the armed struggle possible when the cricket’s on?”).

It’s a provocative show. Some loved it, some hated it. I was in the former camp on opening night. It was a real pleasure to witness a new work with more new faces than old, a discursive scenario, a show that actually ran longer than an hour, and one that was eccentric, even surreal. And it was full of talk, wild, wilful, provocative, cheap talk, ranging from hilarious stand-up from a chameleon host (Stephen Klinder in brilliant form) to spontaneous exchanges and mock manifestos delivered over the monstrous corporate dinner table that traversed the performance space. Performance loves risk and endurance. In The second Last Supper, real wine is quaffed by the cast from beginning to end. Perhaps this added to both the ease and, sometimes, the intensity of the performance. Whatever, the improvisational tone, always a hard call, was sustained, vocal projection carefully contained, yielding a strong sense of ensemble reinforced by a physical ease in the space and with each other. Sam James’ sublime video projection of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper was a constant, slowly overlaid with shopping malls and other imagery and, later, flickerings portending storm and collapse.

For all its many strengths, The second Last Supper still feels like an evolving work, perhaps it always will be, it has to be that loose to be what its brave and talented cast make it. However there’s room to tighten, to focus, to reduce the volume of much too familiar pomo quippery, of performance cliches (if modern theatre is 90% cliches acquired over 400 years, performance too has accumulated its fair share over the last 30), and of times when it seems it just doesn’t know when to stop…or when to sustain an image, a thought, a monologue just a little longer. This is a show to keep in repertoire, a refreshing new vision in performance.

Devised & performed by Stephen Klinder, Jana Taylor, Chris Ryan, Daniele Antaki, Rohan Thatcher, David Williams; Performance Space, Sydney, April 5-15

Leiser, Heilmann, a room with no air

It’s an anxious pleasure to encounter this demanding work again in which the Jewish and German children of WWII parents live out a ‘would you hide me if it happened again’ scenario. The set (Leonie Evans, Clarissa Arndt), a beautiful but oppressive, brilliant red wall, is like the relationship, full of doors, cupboards, nostalgia and horrors. The everyday, in the form of shoes, potatoes and an exchange of recipes (for the same dish), becomes terrifying in a dance of aggression and intimacy. Heilmann and Moore are physical and vocally dextrous, funny and frightening. Nikki Heywood’s direction is a perfect act of visual composition. A room with no air is a more coherent work than its 1998 premiere, and much improved, although at some loss, especially when the magically lateral turns doggedly literal. Those few moments aside, this is an enduringly powerful work.

Kropka Theatre, Convict Women— Lifetime Exile

A “seance in 14 acts” (that yields the utterances of angels), Convict Women begins eerily and inventively enough before settling into a more conventional, illustrative documentary theatre when the women arrive in Australia. Director Anatoly Frusin makes admirable use of the performers’ bodies and some especially evocative lighting (Stephen Hawker) to generate changing place and mood as the women are cut off from their cultural roots and learn that their terms are in fact life sentences. Jolanta Juskiewicz, Angela Bauer and Janine Burchett play the women with simple intensity and an unexpected and rarified gentility. The text is over-elaborate, short on the cultural specificity it promises, but rich in detail and incident. Transforming historical documents into theatre is always a challenge: this production suggests the need for another level of editing and synthesis.

What are the implications of teaching about live contemporary performance when students cannot view performances and cannot read about the productions in what they perceive as the ‘exciting’ theory texts from overseas? This article is concerned with the way that the available resources–publications and productions–might implicitly impact on students’ perceptions of Australia's performance cultures. These comments are based on teaching performance studies, subjects on postmodernism and embodied performative identity, and a decade of incorporating some study of Australian contemporary performance into theatre and drama subjects.

This discipline field is three-fold: the study and making of contemporary performance, applications of performance theory to widely varied cultural practices, and research questions addressed through performance outcomes. I assume that I do not need to give yet another justification as to the validity of these processes or their distinctiveness from theatre as professional craft for colleague readers. While contemporary performance is experimental, its practitioners would recognise an artistic momentum if not also a movement. Pedagogy needs to convey a sense of a milieu to students as well as considering specific texts and forms. In the extreme, perhaps it should facilitate access to networks something like the intention of the theatre ‘industry.’

I have been wondering what an introduction to, and the study of, contemporary performance means for most younger students who enter our courses as undergraduates attuned to theatre and with little prior exposure to performance? If applications of performance theory or performance research seem to be more successfully taken up at present by individuals in fourth year and postgraduate study, there are undergraduates who gravitate to making performance pieces. However, does performance studies have a lasting effect on these students even if only to become educated audience? Or does it remain university praxis? It seems easier for students of dance and music to engage with a contemporary performance culture.

It is arguable as to whether pedagogy about performance that has happened, and that our students will not see, is teaching about a contemporary milieu. At times I have found myself juggling this odd hybrid of theatre with elements of performance in order to provide students with some sense of the immediacy of live work. Opportunities to see contemporary performance do not necessarily coincide with subject offerings, semesters or geographical location. Copyright problems and financial costs restrict the use of video resources for teaching. Like the study of theatre, the understanding of performance is greatly enhanced by viewing the work. Admittedly, students can see other students' work developed in class so does it matter if they do not have much opportunity to see performance in the wider artistic context? It may be self-evident but opportunities to see innovative professional performance can impact profoundly on the work students create.

Certainly, contemporary influences on artists are not straightforward, and there can be major restrictions on viewing of innovative performance by other artists. In one extreme example, the Russian director Kama Glinkas told John Freedman that he had created his image-based theatre from his conceptions of Western performance, derived from seeing (still) photographs rather than productions (John Freedman, “Russian Theatre is Not a Time-Killer”, TheatreForum, No. 12. 1998). This is the approach of a mature artist and cannot be assumed to be viable for novices. My colleague, Meredith Rogers, describes this as rendering visible a performance work process, which is common enough but not usually acknowledged.

Here is the crux of my concern. Performance has evolved as a particular specialisation, in that it is very rare for the text to be produced again by anyone other than its original creators even if there is the occasional opportunity to remount it. For the artists involved in performance making this presents particular challenges since each show will be a progression but remains a new work. It may also involve different combinations of artists. By informing students about previous Australian performance works, which they will not see in production, they are studying what has become like a history of Australian contemporary performance. (In theatre, however, dramatic texts are often restaged, and although it may be argued that this is not the case for many new Australian plays, scripts of these are often published as a result of one season.) If lecturers like myself encourage students to study contemporary performance from available photographs and, at most, script extracts of what were often movement based and extremely visual texts or installations, there is an implicit message that these are fragmented parts of a larger, original text. Admittedly, if students workshop these fragments they are learning about the process of performance making as assemblage. However, what students encounter are ghostly traces of an absent whole text. Therefore we implicitly communicate an idea that most contemporary performance is elusive, existing in the memories of those who saw it. How can students move beyond this to an understanding that such texts belong in a larger milieu or movement?

Despite students’ apparent fascination with performance making projects and available videos or other resources on contemporary performances, given the opportunity to make their own work without a lecturer guiding otherwise, in my experience most undergraduate students return to making theatre. I have been trying to make sense of this tendency over several years. At first it seemed attributable to theatre’s dominance of the form. These days I wonder if it is difficult for students to conceive of the momentum of performances grouped together like they encounter repeated theatre productions. While students might make short performance pieces as a component part of a bigger project or program–pieces akin to performance art–the possibility of making a longer sustained complete text remains much harder to envisage.

In some ways the practice of performance making in pedagogy is easier to effect than undertaking pedagogy about Australia’s performance cultures since the early 1980s. The practice might be neatly understood in the doing and making with students working together to create their own performance work or working with an experienced practitioner. However, if we are to encourage experimentation after university, students need to engage with a milieu that might also be a movement. If we do not teach at least some of its artistic legacy, which is an ongoing influence among experienced practitioners, we are restricting the capacity of young practitioners to contribute to its progressive development. But this is not the same as exposure to a contemporary milieu.

Some students in major centres have opportunities to work with leading practitioners who can offer an overview. Performance Space (PS) in Sydney offers a tangible ongoing focus for work that is not always available elsewhere. In 1991, 17 of my students were involved in 2 weeks of performance making in the PS gallery, but to my knowledge only one of those students had performed there again by 1996. Until 1996, presenting the concept of a performance milieu was a somewhat disjointed process dependent on a lecturer's personal resources and knowledge. Since 1999 we have had Performing the Unnameable, with which to consider an accumulated body of works. While I welcome even the inevitable canon, I am left with the same concerns. It is crucial to teach about previous work, but I am concerned that the study of Australian performance making does not become elusive, fragmented history. Thankfully RealTime has revolutionised communication about contemporary performance as it happens nationally.

However, resources like RealTime provide written records but not written texts and pictures. These are intended as supplements to participation in the event. This raises concerns similar to those found in the study of theatre. For example, there are problems with teaching about certain kinds of theatre when the most accessible resource is a drama script, even if it is workshopped in class. The written mode, which is invisible in theatre, continues to dominate perceptions of it in pedagogy, and recent productions are accessible only through written reviews.

The performance milieu may not need productions by young ensemble groups emerging from our institutions. Such processes may belong to the late 1980s and early 1990s, as Angharad Wynne-Jones observes about transitions at PS. Yet it is difficult to create even solo performance work without a network of interested artists. The impact of the Australia Council’s emphasis on project funding means that artists are brought together for one project and this compounds the problems of the one-off performance culture. Ironically, for a time in the 1990s, young performance makers would probably have been more likely to get an Australia Council grant than anyone submitting a conventional play script. How do young performance makers develop the track record to be successful with funding applications? Perhaps this means that we need to be developing solo performer, writers or directors, which invariably undercuts any effort to establish networks of performance makers.

There are 2 other complications as to why the potential of performance making eludes interested student practitioners. Firstly, the writing process in acclaimed contemporary performance often remains invisible. I suggest that it is very difficult to make performance if some entity, the director or group (or even a writer), is not undertaking this writing process in the development of the work. In making performance, students become aware that ideas seem to evaporate or become simplistic in a process that does not structure and/or concentrate them into layered significances. For example, the effectiveness of Virginia Baxter's What Time is This House (Australasian Drama Studies Association Teaching Texts, 1992) for pedagogy is that it provides a complete script with which to begin conceiving of, or even making, performance.

Secondly, the problem of perceiving a milieu for performance lies with the paucity of contextualisation of Australian performance. Important references by overseas theorists that engage our students, and particularly those who are drawn to make work using theory, do not cover Australian work. Yet the milieu that nurtured our performance cultures, while subject to international influence, has its own perspective and this has regional variations. The availability of these publications undercuts the Australian artistic milieu. Journals that allow for theoretical analysis like the seminal Performance Research or the extremely useful TheatreForum, which gives wide coverage of contemporary performance internationally, have alleviated this problem in recent years. The contributions in these journals about Australia are selectively dependent on academics and critics who will do extended analysis of texts, and cannot also be expected to contexualise this work. Recently, as I edited a volume on the available research on Australian contemporary body orientated performance (Body Show/s: Australian Viewings of Live Performance) I became aware of huge gaps in our own unique and original performance culture.

I teach performance to students in Melbourne while my knowledge is influenced by what I have seen from the 1980s to the 1990s at PS. Melbourne has an extremely rich performance culture of its own, much of which I did not see. While performance cultures may be city specific, practitioners are not. Individuals work between these different cities, which raises a further set of interesting concerns for academic knowledges and the documentation of performance cultures. The interdependence of artistic collaborations in the production of performance texts should be recognised and the possibility of artistic influences from individual practitioners tracked down. Performance analysis needs to accommodate this mobility to make sense of influences and developments in city specific cultures.

Is it possible for academic writing to capture a sense of a milieu given its dominant discursive approaches? Like theatre, performance cannot be studied as the work of one author even if the director is the seminal force, but involves a number of artists working in collaborative ways. All these artists should be acknowledged. (Solo performance is definitely easier to study.) Performance projects that bring collaborators together in unique configurations mean that each contributor has a performance past as well as that of the production, which delivers a metatheatrical configuration with its hybridity of form. A multiplicity of interpretative significance seems an inevitable consequence of the instabilities of 'good' postmodern performance in its theoretical reception. This may mean that theoretical interpretations cancel each other out. Admittedly, meanings that slide through the gaps in fixed interpretations can be problematic in academic analysis unless they are accepted as co-existent. The difficulties presented by research that combines the work history of practitioners delineated as the problematic authorial intentions alongside efforts to conceptualise the reception of the text might be alternatively considered co-existent. Perhaps they can be written as a separate section even if to only mention the names of comparable performance makers. This would present ways of acknowledging a momentum of contemporary performance.

At the 2000 Australasian Drama Studies Conference, Brazilian colleagues from the Drama Department at the University of Brasilia claimed that during the 1970s and 1980s they were more likely to see a British Council funded production from England touring to Brasilia than one from Rio. Do we have similar problems in Australia? It may be an exaggeration but these days it seems like we are more likely to see an overseas performance production in Melbourne than one from Sydney or Brisbane.

Lecturers in performance usually have some practice that spans the theoretical pedagogy and theory in performance making. Because universities barely recognise theatre as an 'industry' let alone extending to one of contemporary performance–if these are industries they are both subsidy dependent–performance lecturers tend to emphasise what will be recognised within university culture, that is; investigative research with performance outcomes. Moreover, I am not convinced that weekend conferences that suit this performance with research outcomes convey a sense of context or milieu for contemporary performance. Festivals like Melbourne’s Next Wave are useful if students can afford to attend more than one production.

Performance cultures vary regionally and student performance makers are caught up in even greater dispersal. The possibility of knowing the work of other students is serendipitous and unpredictable. This might appear to be a sort of postmodern fragmentation in the field but it is counterproductive to perceptions of a performance milieu.

I am considering how we might interest a wider cross section of our students in continuities in Australian contemporary performance. Our efforts to nurture an appreciation with locally produced work might be momentarily engaging but it loses significance if it remains isolated within the institution rather than linked up to work happening elsewhere. I would argue for a concerted effort to bring an experience of performance happening in other places to our students, even in other parts of the same city. They need to do more than read about performance although reading about student work might assist this process.

I'd like to suggest a strategy for facilitating student exchanges. Recent developments with new technologies and electronic arts might alleviate some of these concerns outlined above although not necessarily access to a complete text. I appreciate the problems with new technologies in class work as my efforts have not been continuous, and remain contingent on circumstances. However, finding ways of using new technologies to capture aspects of the larger live work might alleviate some of the fragmentation and limited access to different types of work. For example, a Melbourne production in June 2000, The Secret Room, directed by Renato Cuocolo and performed by Roberta Bosetti, was talked about enthusiastically by our fourth year students. This was encountered either as a live show and/or as it was broadcast on the net. It was referred to frequently in discussion about our 10 minute prerecorded performance available on the net. These students who usually make theatre have been talking about The Secret Room, which is recognisably performance. The potential of new technologies as a broadcast medium for this type of open-ended viewing is exciting. Granted it requires an extra adaptation for the camera and perhaps some theoretical investigation into its qualities of live bodies and liveness, and reconfiguring the spectator and performer relationships. Given that students will not reproduce past performance cultures, and these seem to have become like a history lesson for them, it is important to develop approaches that open out new exchanges in Australian contemporary performance.

Wild Blue: Notes for Several Voices is the sort of title that conjures up images of vast skies or oceans or ephemeral things that cannot be pinned down. Belgian filmmaker Thierry Knauff admits to choosing the title deliberately so that the audience would not come to his film with preconceived notions.

Knauff was recently in Perth as a guest of the AFI and has been touring Australia as part of the European Film Festival, which touched down in most Australian capital cities during May 2001. Wild Blue picked up an award at the San Francisco International Film Festival, was selected for Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2000 and was in the running for the Camera d’Or.

Knauff is cautious about describing his film as either documentary or drama and seems happier to use the word poetry. There is almost no point in trying to pin down Wild Blue as it doesn’t fit neatly into descriptions usually applied to film. It has an internal rhythm, juxtaposing beauty with violence, images of stillness with the movement of the wind.

“Violence and beauty exist side by side in the world,” explains Knauff. “That is what I was trying to show. I didn’t set out to make a film with a theme of violence or of beauty and I don’t really like to talk about the film in terms of themes. I’m not trying to provide people with the answers, but I do think they should be asking the questions.”

Knauff takes you on a slow meditative journey through the history of violence around the world. His film draws you in by concentrating on images, almost as though you are looking at a still photograph, the camera tracking at a slow and even pace until you are face to face with the object under observation. There is no violence depicted in the film but it is discussed, in different languages and circumstances, by a chorus of women from around the world.

In Ireland they kneecap the disloyal. In Vienna the anti-aircraft gunneries built by the Nazis to last for 4000 years still stand against the skyline but are not referred to on any maps of the city. A young girl is raped and put to death in Asia for writing in a journal that she hated the government, and the Hindu shrine desecrated by Portuguese Jesuits 400 years ago in India is photographed in all its damaged beauty.

Knauff uses black and white film to create stark and beautiful images: African children and Irish men on crutches, damaged buildings and damaged people, are shown in exquisite detail and with a resonance that can only be achieved with black and white film stock in expert hands.

Motifs of women, children, hands and music recur mesmerically throughout the film. Repetition of the stories of violence and hatred caused by religious and political difference drives home a nail of misery. The question reverberates: “Will we ever learn?”

Knauff is not only interested in exploring the nature of violence, but also reactions to it. As he says, almost as soon as a massacre occurs it is ‘media-tised’–the statistics of death are broadcast around the world. It seems, however, that the higher the number, the more people dead, the less ability we have to actually take in the loss. “It’s not the journalists’ fault that they can’t identify the life that each individual lived, and be aware of the pain of loss, but it is something that we need to recognise in ourselves, when we react with indifference to news reports.”

The pace of Wild Blue doesn’t allow you to dismiss the deaths, whether of an individual or whole village. It is not a recreation of a 3 minute news item, but a contemplation of the constant repetition of the brutality and violence that co-exists with the natural splendour of the world.

Wild Blue, director Thierry Knauff, toured nationally as part of the
AFI's European Film Festival

The ABC’s worst enemy

Dear Editors
Regarding the slashing of the ABC's Radio Drama budget, it's time to be brutally frank and say that this action is the work of cynics or fools. And they're not all politicians. Consider the following: The ABC once had a Radio Features department. I wrote radio features, thereby learning how to use radio to tell a story, as well as working with professional actors for the first time. This activity was cut over eight years ago. The ABC used to commission writers to translate foreign plays. I did this, thereby coming into contact with, and learning from, some great foreign theatre and radio plays. I couldn't have written my best theatre work without this apprenticeship. This activity was stopped about seven years ago. The ABC used to encourage long radio plays on big issues. I wrote one with Peter Garrett, called Outlanders. It won an Australian Writers' Guild AWGIE for best radio play. A few years previously, Michael Cove won for his play The Robe.

The ABC has put an end to all Australian drama over 60 minutes long. Both of these plays would have been ineligible for broadcast. I learned my writing craft from the opportunities the ABC gave me. But over the last 10 years, funding cuts have caused the ABC to end or curtail every production outlet that formed my skills as a playwright or radio writer. I am lucky. I learned my craft before Armageddon. What about new writers? The sad fact is, we don't need vicious politicians any more. Like a house-trained poodle, the ABC does it to itself. For example, five years ago I put to the ABC that they should seriously consider marketing radio plays as a sellable series of audio tapes, much the way that the BBC did with both radio plays and the interminable Talking Books that clog up the average ABC Store. It was “too hard.” Now, Radio Drama's budget has been slashed, no doubt because it doesn't pay its way. But were they ever helped to pay their way through the promoting of Australian writers and their work? It's also been known within the ABC that the FM “Fine Music” boffins have intensely disliked any “spoken word” programs like plays or experimental sound-pieces. Given a dreadful budget situation, the ABC ends up turning on itself. It's widely agreed in the general community that ABC TV is stagnating. The rot is only disguised by comparison with the irredeemably bad commercial stations. But what's less well-known is that the ABC once trained the future stage, film and radio writers of this country. It also used to enculturate its listening audience with a diverse range of fictions and documentaries. The experience I've outlined above suggests that audiences and artists alike should realise how bad the situation has become, and protest accordingly.

The MCA and the elite

The saga of the Museum of Contemporary Art's (MCA) future seems to have . The winning designs (by the one team) for either a new building or a new building partially encasing the old 30s government-department-deco building (the old Maritime Services Board Building at West Circular Quay) are unimpressive. The eagerness of Lord Mayor Frank Sartor and others to banish the MCA to some other site, the low regard the Premier has for the gallery's collection and the public's fear of even more damage to Circular Quay, have stalemated progress. The MCA's Director, Liz-Anne McGregor, emailed MCA supporters about the Sydney Morning Herald's “unbalanced reporting” and urged protest, declaring that “All the public briefings [about the new designs] so far have been positive.” Detailing the issues, she writes: “The MCA's mission is to bring the work of living artists to a wider audience. It's not just for specialists. People drop in here now in their lunch hour which is what we want to encourage. Moving us to a site where people have to make a special journey would reinforce the message that art is only for the elite.” ( Eds.)

Dear Editor
I am sending you my reply to the list-serve notice of Liz-Anne McGregor's call 'to all MCA supporters' as a “specialist”—a group that was sadly maligned in her email, and composes a reasonable section of the intellectual, academic, and art community. It has always seemed a shame to me that the MCA's principal mission—at least under Liz-Anne's directorship—has been to bring art “to a wider audience.” And she is prepared, in her role as Director, to publish her preference for attracting 'lunch hour' visitors instead of determined art seekers. And thinks that the message that 'art is only for the elite' is a bad thing. In the first place talk about elites in terms of an overview of Australian society is a misnomer. Even a casual, or anecdotal, glance at recent Australian history will tell that a consolidated cultural elite still doesn't exist here—even if there is a sort of exclusive caste slowly forming (around capital and poor taste probably). Where is that group of people–wealthy or no—who are prepared to voice their constant and vociferous disdain for second rate cultural production? Or a publishing infrastructure that addresses itself in a high-minded way to a high-minded audience? Or an integrated institutional infrastructure—that consistently presents work of a high calibre (don't forget Opera, Ballet, Theatre, Orchestral, and Chamber Music)? Or a small set of critics who occupy a solid ground and have a real determining sway over broader cultural opinion making? Or an intelligentsia who have the ear of Government? Or a Government with an ear for that matter? They don't exist. Meanwhile an institution like the MCA could, theoretically, act like a beacon for agressive cultural aggregation. The formation of an elite, if you will. Or at least founder the site of a forward looking cultural consensus. By it's very nature Contemporary Art as we have come to understand it since the mid-19th century has been produced as a deliberate counter-point to Bourgeois taste (maybe the terms broad, conventional, conservative, traditional should be thrown in). And its leading critics and advocates (since Ruskin and Baudelaire) have taken this in stride. It is exactly at the point that Art becomes lunchtime fare for besuited strollers that it dies in a sense. The Museum as Boulevard is a 'nauseating' concept indeed. So I see no good reason for necessarily keeping the MCA at the Quay. (And governance issues as to what might appear in its place are another separate argument altogether. That can probably left in the hands of the heritage architects). In fact we need to ask, what service is done for Art when its specific and often elegant language has to be wreaked for an illiterate audience? And what can be learned from that illiterate audience by artists, curators, and writers? Nothing much. And this is the audience that proliferates at Circular quay, and seems to be held dearest in the minds-eye of the MCA and its collaborators. I would rather see and read arguments for the necessity of the existence of a high-culture in Australia for its own sake. (With a reminder to Bob Carr that the Manets he loves in the Louvre in Paris were once the stuff that caused a stir. They were Contemporary Art). In the last 10 years, governments and the arts “industry” have been gripped by museum and gallery building (even contemporary art houses). Convinced that edifices to culture are concrete proof of their dedication to it. But this has in fact been a deleterious affect—built on ideas about artefacts, and collections, and paintings on walls, a sort of safe-house mentality. When in fact art is more than all of those things and now comprises a range of more ephemeral moments and objects that can exist without million dollar architectural structures. And if every dollar that was poured into concrete had been given to existing institutions, and artists, writers, and curators themselves, I would suggest a whole lot more would have percolated. Art builds audiences over long periods of timeÑthere is no quick fix here. So putting them at the forefront of cultural debate is useless. I frequently attend concerts by composers like Schoenberg, Debussy, Berlioz, Weber (when they are played at all) that receive tepid responsesÑparticularly from the corporate and subscriber section of the audiences. Their response always indicates they thinck this non-canonical work is a little bit difficult or risky. For fuck's sake they've only had a hundred yearsÑthe whole of the 20th century – to get used to it. Go figure! Forget the building. Forget the mass audience. Argue forcefully for “multi”-culturalism to rightfully include an elite, to commensurate “high”-culturalism. Bludgeon government with the fact that it is their moral obligation to support the expansion and telling of national narratives. One of which happens to be Contemporary Art attended by Contemporary Art Audiences.

The Sydney Morning Herald isn't the problem, it's a symptom. The skewing of the MCA-debate is the problem. Give me a public transport nightmare trek across town to see some daring art in the quiet-white of a well designed gallery/exhibiton space, rather than a salt-air and espresso experience (that includes dumb architecture and dumber programming) anyday. More to the point I would rather get my art from a nest of intelligent white mice than a dumb White Elephant.

Business columns and programs are cropping up everywhere, slicing into ABC TV news, offering investment advice and share sale panics, so why not in RealTime.

The Australian Taxation Office provides extra tax information for some occupations. These publications are simple summaries of taxation rulings and they explain claims that you can and cannot make by looking at the common expenses you might claim as a performing artist. You may find this information helpful when completing your tax return. To get a copy, see the ATO website or ring their publications distribution service on 1300 720 092 for the cost of a local call.

Business 2: The Australia Business Arts Foundation

(AbaF) has received increased half a million dollars extra federal funding to a total of $1.6 million. According to AbaF Executive Director, Winsome McCaughey “Australia's growing pool of creative talent can return business, artistic, social and community benefits but neither government support nor box office returns are enough to sustain the arts. With only 1% of business supporting the arts, there is huge potential to grow corporate commercial and private philanthropic support for the arts.” So far some 160 cultural organisations have attended AbaF business case training workshops in all capital cities, part-funded by the Australia Council. Corporations are being assisted to develop and complete their business cases for cultural investment. Information:
Brian Peck, 03 9658 0211 or 0417 587 932

Business 3

Innovative Adelaide cross-cultural performance company doppio-parallelo has linked with global technology giant Motorola in a business-arts partnership “designed to boost the skill sets of both organisations.” Motorola has donated its time and $32,000 worth of computers and related technology to help doppio upgrade its infrastructure for projects and artists working with new media. Richard Burford, Managing Director of Motorola sees the relationship as “based on synergies of creativity, innovation and community access via technology and cultural diversity.”

Business 4

In further trickle-down effects from the collapse of the HIH Insurance Company, Marian Street Theatre has lost its $250,000 sponsorship which theatre director John Krummel describes in SMH (May 30) as “a catastrophic blow”. AbaF's Brian Peck, however, sees this as “a crucial lesson for arts companies to diversify their sponsorship sources … It's imperative they spread their risk, to use an insurance term. Companies should also do plenty of research into their potential partners,” Peck said. Yeh, right.

Business 5

Meanwhile, arts organisations work overtime to invent ever more imaginative services to the corporate sector. Bell Shakespeare has taken some creative steps to extend “the breadth of product offering” (Nugent, 1999:23) organising “Shakespearian leadership workshops in which actors from the company perform a scene from Henry V while actually sitting among participants at the pseudo-board table. Later the scene is analysed, applying a conventional behavioural model to theinteractions…”

And the New Zealand Orchestra with its corporate partners has offered “Music Paradigm” created by American conductor Roger Nierenberg in which corporate executives learn about 4 management principles (communication, co-ordination, team work and leadership) sitting amidst the orchestra performing. This item came to us via www.fuel4arts.com who got it first from the Australian Financial Review. If you join the dots (Telstra Adelaide Festival, Emirates AFI Awards etc) we should perhaps prepare ourselves for the suits as permanent fixtures on our nation's stages. Forget “Is this a dagger I see before me ?” and make way for Macbeth, assailing a staffer clocking up overtime in excess of his workplace agreement with “Aren't you Duncan from Accounts?”

INTERNATIONAL MOVES

Frank in Croatia

And while we're on the Bard: following their participation in 2 previous festivals in Frank Austral Asian Performance Ensemble, directors John Nobbs and Jacqui Carroll return in July to Pula in Croatia for the 6th International Festival of Youth Theatre to conduct another 10-day International Suzuki Actor Training Workshop. This year, as well as the workshop, Frank actors will join Croatian workshop participants (who also come from Czech Republic, London and the US) to present a bi-lingual version of Frank's production The Tale of Macbeth: Crown of Blood in Pula's fully preserved Roman arena. Arena…everywhere

Speaking of which, Arena Theatre Company's multimedia production Eat Your Young which toured the Taipei Arts Festival in May, travels to the Singapore Arts Festival in June while their kids' show Schnorky the Wave Puncher! tours to Vancouver. Arena's General Manager Katherine Crawford-Gray says, “To have 2 productions playing almost simultaneously on opposites sides of the globe is pretty wild…especially when you consider that Arena is a small to medium-sized producer.”

In Moscow…In Repertoire

Simon Barley and Melbourne's well-travelled BAMBUCO are in Moscow this month building a Ship of Fools on the River Moskva. You can check on their progress from around June 18. BAMBUCO, Arena and some 50 other Australian companies of similarly small scale and big international ambition are featured in the forthcoming In Repertoire: Australian Contemporary Performance, another publication (edited and produced by RealTime) from the Australia Council's Audience and Market Development (AMD) division which will be distributed initially at the Singapore Arts Festival's first ever Performing Arts Market.

Breaking into Europe

AMD and the Music Fund of the Australia Council are behind the International Pathways program to assist export-ready contemporary Australian musicians to tour overseas and develop international markets. 5-piece improvised jazz ensemble theak-tet toured Scandinavia, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK during April and May and live electronic music group Rhibosome will tour 9 UK venues in June. “These international sectors are unable to be reached without leaving Australia,” says Fremantle-based band member David McKinney. With a number of Australian jazz festival appearances already under their belt, the long-term goal for theak-tet, says band leader David Theak, is “participation in the European Summer Festival circuit and a recording contract with a European record label.”

WA writer trains with trAce

The trAce Online Writing School has recently opened its doors to students around the globe and, with its history of encouraging web/creative writing of all kinds, it's a good place to start. The tutors include some of the best writers on the web: Talan Memmott (RT#42 p22) on advanced literary hypermedia, Canadian novelist Kate Pullinger on writing short fiction, Alan Sondheim on cyberculture & literature, Liz Swift on writing an online family history, Carolyn Guertin on textual machines, & Peter Howard teaching animated poetry in Flash. Courses in development include screenwriting, becoming a playwright, novel writing & writing for children.

RealTime has selected WA-based writer Jo Gray to do the course in exchange for a detailed report on the experience. She will start in early June. 23-year old Jo has recently commenced her PhD at the University of Western Australia in the department of English. Her work is centred on the use of metaphor as communicative tool on the internet. We wish her luckÉand look forward to her responses.

Australia Council vs Sweeney

Australian audience support for the performing arts is greater than it has ever been according to figures released in April by the Australia Council. So there! The record number of attendances and the healthy rate of growth stand in marked contrast to the grim conclusions of the Sweeney Arts Report which signalled a fall in audience numbers based on a survey of 1500 people. The most significant growth for the major performing arts companies occurred in contemporary dance and ballet. Comparable comprehensive data is currently being gathered for Australia's small and medium-sized performing arts companies as part of an overall examination of the sector. The Chair of the Council's Theatre Board, David Whitney, already reports that of 12 smaller theatre companies across Australia 10 increased audiences in the last year. These include Fremantle's deckchair theatre, Brisbane's La Boite, Adelaide's Vitalstatistix and The Flying Frutifly Circus from Albury-Wodonga. The same was true of dance with Melbourne's Chunky Move doubling its audience and Perth-based Buzz Dance showing a healthy 25% increase.

Full in Melbourne

Full is the new dance performance devised by choreographer Simon Elliswith sound by Jacqueline Grenfell, light by Alicia Hervey and photography and design by Elizabeth Boyce. The work examines the internal world of an 87 year old woman who is uncertain whether she is walking or being pushed. At Glass Street Gallery, North Melbourne,
June 20-30 at 8 pm.

Fierce in Darwin

Tracks Inc premieres Fierce, a new outdoor performance event at this year's Darwin Festival in August. Featuring the Warlpiri Yawalyu women of Lajamanu, local performers Tania Lieman and Nicky Fearn and guest artist Trevor Patrick with other community members, Fierce is an evocation of the eccentric artist, anthropologist and naturalist,
Miss Olive Pink.

Artificial snow

snow.noise is an installation featuring performance, scientific experimentation, electronic music, drawing, photography and video by young German contemporary artist Carsten Nicolai aka noto. This artist's work mixes new technologies with old, recreating in this case the first invention for the production of artificial snow from the 1930s as its centre-piece. “Constructed from metal and glass, this object is slowly surveyed by a camera, against the crackling and buzzing of Carsten's computer generated music. His paintings, drawings and photographs recall images from science manuals or are abstractions suggesting barcodes or angiograms that parallel the looped rhythms of the music.” It opens with a 40-minute performance of Carsten's electronic music based around the theme of snow crystals. It's free at the Art Gallery of NSW,
6 pm, Friday 29 June.

Talan Memmot

If you followed up Tatiana Pentes' review of Talan Memmot's work in RT#42, you might want to check out the new heap of art at Nio featuring some suggestions on new forms of music/multimedia, “hopefully a new, popular alternative to the music video”. Nio is a commission of New Radio and Performing Arts Inc for its Turbulence website.

DVD-ing

SAE International Technology College is taking enrolments for their new Digital Video Director course starting in June, the only course in Australia to teach DVD production. The 9 month DVD Director course will take students through the entire film-making process. Each student will learn to fine tune their skills, producing, directing and editing a number of projects, using the state of the art equipment and technology at SAE. Students will also learn the art of making documentary and music film clips. SAE is a training institutions which combines hands on experience with theoretical training from industry professionals. The DVD Director course starts June 25. For more information contact Lyndall Farley,
02 9212 2444.

Successfully SciFi-ing

It's a rare thing for a sci-fi writer to win a literary award. So nobody can have been more surprised than Adelaide writer Sean Williams when he picked up the 2000 SA Great Award from the SA Writers Centre. Others have seen it coming. This young writer's short stories have been published around the world. All of his novels have been nominated for awards, his collection New Adventures in Sci Fi won the 2000 Ditmar Award for Best Collection and last year he landed a substantial grant from the Literature Fund of the Australia Council to complete 3 young adult fantasy novels to be published in September. And now Sean and co-writer Shane Dix have been contracted to write the next 3

Star Wars novels. The 2 attracted attention in the US after making the sci-fi best seller lists with their Evergence trilogy for Harper Collins. “Every year I think it can't get better than this”, he says to Tim Lloyd of Adelaide's Advertiser, “and every year it does.”

CCP goes German

Continuing their commitment to showcasing and critically engaging with contemporary documentary practice, the Centre for Contemporary Photography is presenting The world as one, an exhibition of 1990s documentary photography in colour featuring 17 groups of works by 19 photographers from Germany born between 1955 and 1971. The exhibition consists almost entirely of independently researched projects devoted to complex themes including the effects of German reunification and the precipitous pace of economic and social change in the Far East . CCP Gallery, June 8 – July 7

Performance Space a Gay winner

In announcing its glittering prizes this year the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras gave a Special Festival Award to Performance Space as “an important space in the Festival for dangerous and innovative work.” The Mardi Gras has had a continuous relationship with P Space since 1995 co-producing works that, according to Festival Director, David Fenton “access an audience that delights in extremely diverse work with a particular commitment to emerging artists.” P Space hosted 4 visual arts exhibitions and 2 performing arts events for Mardi Gras including Queensland artist Stacey Callaghan 's when I was a boy which took out a prize as “a dynamic piece of physical theatre that explored why we separate our bodies, minds and spirits and how we can learn to trust again.” Awards also went to Hey Hetero!, a witty public art work by

Deborah Kelly and Tina Fiveash highlighting the privileges of heterosexuality and to Brian Carbee and Dean Walsh for Stretching it Wider—”a sexy, beautiful and intelligent production.” Festival David Fenton stressed the importance of Performance Space as a resource for artistic communitiesÑ”Mardi Gras would be the poorer without their contribution”. And so say all of us.

Denmark's Hotel Pro Forma, remembered here for their Orfeo, premiered a new work Site Seeing Zoom in March. The work reflects the complex nature of human memory using the digital medium as tool and artistic idiom. “We travel in the landscape of memory, zoom in and out, change angle, speed and height. We map and catalogue human ways of expression. We use the navigation in a virtual architecture as the composition and the narrative style. The movement of the journey is projected on screens as sequences of images that are doubled, reflected and repeated like living memory itself. The audience walks around the cross-structure of the screens and experiences the performance from different angles. A guide finds himself between the physical and virtual worlds. He is seen as movement, as shadow, and as scale in relation to the projected images. Everything is virtual, he says, smiling as the pot plant strikes the skull.”

Hope

Radio Eye 2-part special, writer Mary Zournazi talks with philosophers around the world about their idea of hope and how it can, and must, be sustained in the midst of cynicism and despair. In the program are Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Michel Serres, Chantal Mouffe and Alphonso Lingis. Part 1 is broadcast Sunday June 17 at 8.30 pm, part 2 on
Sunday June 24.

Radio Throughout June

The Listening Room is on the nose beginning with Nostalgia's Nose, Paul Carter's adaptation of the novel Baroque Memories; followed by Schnoz by Natalie Kestecher, featuring readings from Gogol's The Nose and excerpts from the musical version by Shostakovich; Odourama, Robin Ravlich's sonic spectrum of odour in the world and Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered in which Gregory Whitehead navigates among other anatomies, the bloody nose of Casanova. ABC Classic FM Monday 9 pm.

Self-Accusation,Peter Handke's key work in the German speaking anti-Theatre movement of the 60s, has neither character nor scene nor narrative. Instead it is a deconstruction of the societal, political and physical forces that shape the identification of a self. The play is performed by Adelaide's Brink Productions. Music by Christopher Williams, Soundstage, ABC Classic FM, Wednesday June 13 at 8pm.

A leading Australian figure in the area of electronic and multi-media music, Ian Fredericks died in March this year. Performance artists Tess De Quincey and Stuart Lynch worked with Ian on a number of projects. De Quincey recently dedicated her eloquent Nerve 9 performance to Fredericks while Stuart Lynch, currently working in Europe, sent the following, an excerpt from a personal obituary:

“The day I met Ian I had the most extraordinary dance experience of my life. It was in February 1997 and within an hour of us being introduced I had heard and danced to Requiem for a Planet. Until that moment I had always doubted dance. At the age of 20 I broke both my legs in a motorcycle crash and 3 years later I changed careers for dance. This was deemed ludicrous by my doctors, considered a result of some latent madness, or the inherent inability to make right choices. I persisted dancing all through the 1990s, always accompanied by doubt. The exception was when I was dancing that first time to his compositions. Then, I had no doubt about dance and its potential. Then, I was clear about its beauty and godly grace. Then, both of us were in tears. Be sure, that in the music of Ian Fredericks, one hears the voice, and love of God.”

Angus Grant, Alice McConnell, Catherine Moore, Jodie Harris + Rita Kalnejais, Dolores in the Department Store

Many things happen at once in Dolores in the Department Store, which is difficult to get clear in the mind because it is not about clarity of mind. Richard Murphet’s text is poetry, rap, witness statements (“I, Dolores…”), dream images, psychoanalysis and chat, shopping lists and bills. The setting is contemporary culture–half stage, half catwalk–with a doctor on one side and an actress on the other, with the store above and the domestic scene below. The swamp, the deep pit that we all walk past, is sensed somewhere under the stage.

Story, soundscape and movement go in under the skin in pieces, not caught in the sieve of reason. Music, ads and original songs full of irony flow thick and fast with feeling. Cultural images and theatrical portrayals of the crazy woman (from “Out, damned spot” onwards) flash past.

There is more than one person being one person who is more than one person: Dolores is 4 actors who are all Dolores, who has multiple personalities. Dressed alike, wigged alike, they are the same but different as sisters, clashing, speaking in each other’s minds. This small flock of Dolores illustrates tension and flow within one person. She moves up the steps towards the doctor’s door, split within, changing her minds. There is the violence of an iron in her hand as one tries to throw it and one pulls back. What is she trying to smooth out, burn away? Dolores 3 stares deep into the pit, seems drawn in. The story is that something came out–a swamp man, her father–and pushed himself into her 11 year old self. Swamp man dead inside her. She split.

Consumption returns in multiple forms, an appetite for things that at the same time devour us. The store has everything: bright lights, culture, all the endless lists of stuff bought and brought home to fill an empty place. The store sells people as they should be, smiling and whole, desirable people who manage, dressed in Chanel, with little assistants at their feet. Dolores 2 wants red stilettos and a vamp dress. An appetite to devour or damage another is sexualised. Her husband desires something in Dolores, but his appetite consumes him as well. He is filled, animated with a surging violence that aims at Dolores 1 but seems to hurt him, to empty him. He has no self-control, perhaps no self, perhaps only control of her. Maybe the dress gives Dolores power over somebody who has power over her, but only if she can split. Being 2 allows her to stand behind him while he empties himself into 1. A puppet-child, cut from the same cloth as her mother, floats around these dangerous adults. There is no help
for her.

Images of the sexual woman, red dress and stilettos, or smoking in her satin wrap, in a boudoir, blend sickeningly with the ‘incest survivor’ as vamp, drawing violence to her. Very film noir, very spider woman, dressing the commerce of her sexuality as his trap.

The other consumption is one we participate in. We watch actors empty themselves to be others for us. A young soapie actress tries to reach an audition to play the part of this woman with many parts. Making her way through the department store–or her career or drama school–she is lost, clutching the wig and dress, wanting someone to come and take her home. The appetite of audience and industry devours young performers in their own success, to be desired, losing the self to other temporary inhabitants pushed into them. At the end, the Dolores approach the audience, not acting any more. But we can’t see them because this is theatre and they are performers we only watch being others.

Richard Murphet, Dolores in the Department Store, directors Leisa Shelton & Richard Murphet, Company 2001, performers Alice McConnell, Catherine Moore, Rita Kalnejais, Jodie Harris, Angus Grant, Luisa Hastings Edge, Simon Aylott, Amanda Falson, Peter Cook, Patrick Brammall, Aaron Halstead & Luke Mullins, VCA School of Drama, Grant Street Theatre, Melbourne, April 6-11

Angus Grant, Alice McConnell, Catherine Moore, Jodie Harris + Rita Kalnejais, Dolores in the Department Store

She is one woman bruised into four. Dolores is a work about a woman so disturbed in childhood she seems to have leapt to the side of herself and sent 4 emissaries thereafter to negotiate the world. This is a prismatic work where not only Dolores splinters, but every image that has accompanied her since childhood seems to as well. Does her nightmare revolve around a ditch, or a swamp? Was there a bridge she crossed every day, or not? Whose bloated body was that hauled from the mud–a lover of her father’s, on which he committed necrophilia? Or was the body hers, the corpse a metaphor for her own death and her psyche’s traumatic dismantling?

The 2 produced versions of Dolores (the first being October last year) effect an unnerving of our perceptions, of the way we might measure our place in the world. A child approaches a bridge; a hand approaches a psychiatrist’s door; the psychiatrist’s eyes reach towards her knees. He watches “the pad of her finger trace the stockinged skin of her knee”, the distance to her mysteries. Such is his care-taking. Dolores is a violated entity: the 4 of them can hold together the parts. Her body speaks herstory, fabricates it too, is both truth-teller and liar. Who can be an adequate mirror to this prism? Her “mentors” look-after, look-into her with selfish desire. Does her body ever know itself as its own?

And yet there is a unifying consciousness, a singular Dolores who holds herself at the apex of the pyramid. The four D’s cradle, implicate, cajole, antagonise, yet ultimately support each other in an overarching dialogue, both uncovering and ultimately discarding memory, helping themselves survive.

Indeed, she does better than her stuttering husband Frank, tragically inarticulate, so virile and volatile; a jumpy phallus, his only constancy the marauding of her body, his lording of their home. He is undone by her miscreant spending, her pleading “not tonight” is enough to rive his mountain. His lava almost erupts just speaking to his worried child. He first appears folded behind sliding doors in a tiny dumb-waiter space crouching his nerves. His wife is a snowflake breaking, his head starts to cave; his only respite is watching television, climbing women and poles.

The shopwalker, too, is a tragic figure, despite the pseudo-glamour of his role. What is a would-be Trojan warrior without the myth? It is this man, slippery across the department floor, promising a kind of immortality of outline. He doubles as a TV producer in a weird but psychologically-right ploy, as the department store is elided into a casting studio and Dolores’ ironing board takes a starring role.

What I find in version 2 is an undoing more Brechtian and brash, the former production’s psychic vortex replaced with an initially more ironic commentary and detachment; and yet in both versions we end up, moist-eyed, accompanying the Doloreses down a forest path, elms, willows (is it Ophelia’s re-emerging?), their synchronised bodies wavering like water. The backs of their hands vein like leaves, they speak as part of the pattern of all things.

Dolores’ survival is exquisite, powerful, but ambiguous: in what way is that soft merging a real survival in a world full of Frank and Trojan’s manquees? And what is redeemed of the relationship with her daughter, who has spent much of her young life combing department stores looking for her mother? There are no answers; ambiguity remains strong.

Both times, I wept on seeing Dolores, for it captures how raw and humiliating it is to have fallen apart, and know oneself as fallen, and yet somewhere, within a truth that cannot quite reveal itself, one’s soul knows the reason. I am astonished at the merging of emotional verisimilitude and stylish structure in the piece. I remain amazed that it has been written.

There’s a just-vacated feel to the Metro Gallery the afternoon I walk in. A spooky sense of things in motion, time running on, but no flesh-and-blood body to explain the heavy presence of something in the air. Sun streams through the long windows and falls onto the wooden floor and a rumpled bed. A picturesque interior almost, but not quite. I am unnerved.

Moving further into the space, I hear as well as see and feel the resonance between the artworks comprising Fader, a show (curated by Sandra Selig) featuring the work of 5 young Brisbane visual artists. It is these works that inhabit the space, murmuring and whispering and beckoning to each other in a language that is familiar but again, not quite. This conversation is equal to its parts; it is compelling–chilling–seductive. It is the play of sound, light and space; it is the absence of set pieces and the weight of intangible connections; it is 5 artists who are refusing representation while presenting the unrepresentable. I feel as if I have stepped into a scene from Double Indemnity crossed with a time-and-motion study.

I am focusing on the collective effect because it hits me hard. Selig had this as her aim, although not in these words. She speaks in her curatorial essay of a desire to draw together different explorations of time, in particular technological times and the “more unpredictable bodily or conceptual durations”, and their relation to installation practice. Although she acknowledges this is her fit rather than the artists', I don’t think she is straining to make the point.

The first experience in the gallery is an aural one–the weird keening sound that gives the space such a palpable spookiness. This turns out to be from several sources, the nearest to the entrance being Mat Fletcher’s sonic installation, Interrupted Fields (on the stratification of the analogue), visually tagged as 4 small speakers hung from the walls at hip height. Out comes what might be the music of the spheres except that harmony is not the principal effect. Instead, like wind through telegraph lines on a big brown plain, the off-key ‘singing’ thins out and also fills up the space around it without leaving a trace. Here Fletcher turns away from the history of representation with one small movement. (As for the analogue reference in the title, that’s another discussion.)

Jess Hynd follows this idea through with a visual demonstration. Less is More includes a familiar motif of her practice, the ‘house-box’, in this instance constructed as a small house-shaped white object at an angle to a mirror. On an opposite wall sits a larger wooden cut-away looking like a doll’s house with upstairs and downstairs and the rest. In front of this interior is a chair, made of the same wood, situated at eye-level for the sitter. The two ‘house’ moments are separated but mutely speak to each other. It is as if looking should give up an answer to something but fails the task completely.

Hynd carries her work further into the space with 2 rumpled beds at either end of the gallery and a TV monitor in between. The latter is a little superfluous in that it describes what she has already depicted through absence. The screen shows her and another performer moving through the installation spaces without finding a ‘comfortable’ resting-place. Hynd emphasises this uneasiness with written text (Full or Loose/Move or Win) at one end of the gallery but, again, I’ve already had my fill of emptiness.

Domestic interiors are also a visual reference in Chris Handran’s open sky (2001). The most obvious feature is the installed white venetian blind, through which sun is falling as ideally as any Stepford wife might wish on the day I’m here. Another monitor, facing this, is blank but I suspect not intentionally–I am looking, rather literally, for my sky. (Later I’m told that I should be seeing cumulus clouds slowly floating by on a sailor blue background.) Again there’s nothing to hold onto here but nonetheless no space to move–I am inside this moment but it doesn’t exist. Another installation by Fletcher, sound, a circular speaker set in the wall nearby (with CD player on the floor underneath), shudders and thuds and sonically enforces this idea with its disruption of any sense of careful composition.

Around the corner, a constantly forming dialogue between video projection and speaker in quick long rhythms that never quite fulfil the promise. This is to by Chris Comer, and I am caught up viscerally in the scintillation of the aural and visual a/rhythms. The projection catches the attention, sliding across the wall at an angle and offering the occasional glimpse of a detail, but it’s not the detail that’s important, or at least that’s how it seems to me. I am distracted, situated, not sure. Palpable presence but what, where, when?

And finally, tucked away in a little space all of its own is the most perfect discovery to make as I am leaving: Krissy Collum’s sill–a tiny moment of caught time. White sand spills from a window sill into a white room, like light, like poetry. One of the 2 windows (not this one) is covered with what looks like rice paper–enough to obscure but not conceal the natural light outside. There’s a deliberate confusion of experience: I can see and (if I’m bold) touch this pearl of an installation but it trembles on the edge of being– I know, a bit overblown, but this is the effect it has on me.

Fader is one of the last exhibitions instigated by Metro Arts Artistic Director Joseph O'Connor before his departure in March of this year. Metro Arts is now working without a curated artistic program, and its activities are being watched closely by people in the arts concerned about the future of one of Brisbane's major alternative art spaces.

Fader, curator Sandra Selig, artists Krissy Collum, Chris Comer, Mat Fletcher, Chris Handran, Jess Hynd, Metro Arts Gallery, Brisbane, April 5-May 25

Great composers typically get started while still students. Kat McGuffie's student recital and the number of commissions she receives portend greatness.

The recital opened with Cumulonimbus, a gentle, rhythmical work for 2 guitars, flute, violin and cello, whose minimalism is punctuated by developing layers of brief, lyrical gestures to evoke tropical rain. Selected for the Australian Composers Workshops in the 2000 Darwin Guitar Festival, Cumulonimbus encourages the virtuosic performer, despite its deceptively simple form and light mood.

24 for String Quartet creates tension through radical shifts in mood and metre. An intense, slow, dissonant first movement gives way to a faster second movement. The quiet third movement recalls the pace of the first, with mournful violin passages. Opening powerfully, the fourth progresses to a series of competing solos. McGuffie used chance, by throwing dice, to create variations on the initial, improvised theme. Despite the chance elements, the work has coherence and final resolution.

Doon for James Cuddeford is a solo violin work written for and performed by the eponymous 2nd violinist of the Australian String Quartet. Cuddeford is a new music enthusiast, and here he can demonstrate his capabilities and love for the genre. It includes alternating and sometimes simultaneously bowed and pizzicato notes, the voices interplaying through a series of sharp gestures and thematic statements to create an idiosyncratic language reminiscent of Ysang Yun's complex, passionate ruminations. This is mature work that invites repeated listening.

For the Cameo Trio was commissioned last year by that trio and was performed strongly here by another–Louise Nowland (clarinet), Sarah McCarthy (violin) and Leigh Harrold (piano). Beginning brightly, the piece develops more reflectively with prolonged, introspective solos for the clarinet and violin. The disparate voices coalesce before the finale's return to the forms of the opening.

Most interesting is little coins are put here, written last year for cello, theremin and vocoder. Live readings by McGuffie of the text from a TV show on Buddhism, superimposed over tapes of that TV show and the work's first performance, are blended by the vocoder to create a low mumble, which underscores the dramatically gesturing cello line. The theremin's electronic whine heightens the work's neurotic feel.

The haunting Sharcoon (1999) is for 2 flutes, clarinet, violin and cello, the flutes and clarinet producing a piercing blend of tones with building tension and abrupt shifts. The Three Short Solo Piano Pieces (2000) come to life in the assured hands of Leigh Harrold, their quirkiness and teasing structure combining enchantingly with the piano's rich tonality.

The recital concluded with the dramatic Elizabeth Smith for saxophone quartet, based on a gaming machine tune, which was performed at the Montreal World Saxophone Congress in 2000. Whether composing for assessment or for commissions or for fun, McGuffie's work has an inherent musicality and strength.

A student of Flinders St School of Music, McGuffie has been commissioned to write for a major SA theatrical event, celebrating Federation, in October. She has already accepted numerous other commissions, and was Vocational Student of the Year and a finalist in the SA Youth Awards Showcase in 2000.

Kat McGuffie and numerous ensemble players were at the Performing Arts Technology Unit, Adelaide University,
April 30

Cinesonics conference: the line up

Cinesonics enters its 4th year as the only annual conference on Film Scores & Sound Design in the world. Organised by RealTime columnist, Philip Brophy, this year’s guests are Skip Lievsay (NY sound designer who’s worked with Scorsese, Spike Lee & the Coen Bros) & Simon Fisher-Turner Skip (composer for Derek Jarman). An Australian industry panel will include Clara Law & Jamie Blanks (Valentine). Local speakers include Megan Spencer, McKenzie Wark & Jodi Brooks. For information on the last 3 conferences, there is a complete archive. A new book to be launched at the conference, Cinesonic: Experiencing the Soundtrack, features transcripts from the 2000 conference. RMIT, Melbourne, June 22-24.

QLD stars of the future

Warner Roadshow’s 15th Queensland New Filmmaker Awards were announced in April with The Big Picture (Peter & Michael Spierig) winning best overall film, Best Producer, Best Actor (Robyn Moore) & Best Independent Drama (shared with The Irving Hand Prophecy). Their film screened at the Rotterdam Film Festival earlier this year. The new Reconciliation Award was won by Cairns filmmaker Greg Singh for Breakdown. Robin James, CEO of Pacific Film & Television Commission, commented: “the response from the public has been tremendous. People lined up the Queen St Mall to watch public screenings.”

Fast filmmaking BIFF style

The BIFF Fast Film competition has been launched & the special ingredient is the number 10. The national short film competition gives competitors 50 days to write, shoot & edit a 5 minute film, which must include ‘10’. Finalists’ screenings are held during the Brisbane International Film Festival so get cracking! All entries must reach BIFF office by July 12. Entry forms can be downloaded, 07 3220 0333.

Akira! Akira! Akira!

Silicon Pulp gallery is celebrating this anime classic with an exhibition of rarely seen cells, artworks & manga. (It took 160,000 animation cells to make the film.) An installation by Italian artist Ludovica Gioscia—combining Akira’s soundtrack with digital footage—will accompany the exhibition. 176 Parramatta Rd, Stanmore,
02 9560 9176,June 8-August 4

Tracking a director online

Rolf de Heer’s new film The Tracker is in post production & you can read his diary online for insights into shooting on location in the Flinders Rangers & the Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary. The film premieres at the 2002 Adelaide Festival of the Arts.

Local screenwriting achievement

Linda Aronson’s book Scriptwriting Updated: New & Conventional Ways of Writing for the Screen has been shortlisted in the Australian Awards for Excellence in Academic Publishing. The book has been a huge hit in the States, with the UFVA (the leading conference of screenwriting teachers) organisers trying to schedule a special session on Aronson’s parallel narrative theories. Next year Aronson will join Linda Seger & interactive expert Carolyn McQuillian in Australia for a lecture series on new narrative forms.

Indigenous filmmakers hit Berlin

A festival of contemporary Australian Indigenous films, organised by the AFC & Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade, will screen at the Anthropological Museum in Berlin, June 7-17 as part of Ethnifest. Rachel Perkins’ One Night the Moon will open the festival & Perkins will attend along with Sally Riley, Warwick Thornton & Erica Glynn. The festival will then travel to Munich & Frankfurt.

ACT filmmakers’ network

Launched June 6, the network aims to be the link between filmmakers & industry & offers members access to events & meetings, an online database, equipment for hire & training. 02 6251 6936

Funding increases for Victorian film industry

Victorian Premier Steve Bracks recently announced an additional $12 million to be invested in Film Victoria over the next 2 years, with direct production investment increased by $3.9 million each year. The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), due to open in Federation Square in early 2002, will receive $13.2 million over 4 years for operations & $13.8 million next year to complete the technological infrastructure. ACMI will feature a screen gallery, specialist cinemas & lounge areas for watching animation, games, film & digital work. How about one in
every state?

Serenades at Byron Mapp Gallery

Mojgan Khadem’s Serenades is the latest Australian film to be supported & distributed by Palace Films. Opening May 31, it traces the little known history of Afghan camel riders & their liaisons with Aboriginal & missionary communities in Central Australia. Coinciding with the release is an exhibition of the film’s stills by Mark Rogers at Byron Mapp Gallery Sydney. Lvl 1, 18-24 Argyle St, The Rocks, 02 9252 9800

Chabrol emerges from the woodwork

Opening the recent European Film Festival, Claude Chabrol’s taut new thriller, Merci pour le chocolat is one to look out for, getting under the surface of that bourgeois musical-genius genre we know so well. For more than 40 years Chabrol has “delivered a devastating series of pathology reports on provincial France.” A retrospective of 6 of his films is touring nationally. Brisbane, State Library, until July 1; Sydney, Chauvel Cinema, June 11; Melbourne, Cinemedia, until June 7; Adelaide, Mercury Cinema, June 4-25; Canberra, Electric Shadows, June 14-20; Perth, FTI, June 6-20. For session times call 1800 069 009.

VCA students hit Cannes

Keep an eye out for Martin Four, an exploration of a son & mother’s love & fantasies, selected for the cinefoundation category for Cannes this year. Produced by VCA students Ben Hackworth, Tim Symonds, Anthony Pateras, Katie Milwright & Joan Kelly, the short screened recently at Popcorn Taxi & will no doubt be doing the rounds of film fests this year.

AFI’s big changes

The AFI has recently announced a number of changes including a new logo, corporate image & adjustments to feature film judging in the awards process. The film community has been either outraged or relieved at the new process, which limits films nominated to those with a theatrical release. Features will not be re-screened so it’s up to members to see Aussie flicks at the cinema. It’s bad news for those indie films struggling for distribution, with theatrical release defined as “publicly exhibited for paid admission in a commercial cinema for at least 7 consecutive days in a minimum of 3 Australian cities, including Sydney & Melbourne, throughout the awards year.” Meanwhile, paid-up members are waiting months for their new membership cards—come on guys!

Moral rights bill finally passed

The Australian Screen Directors Association announced in its Autumn newsletter that as of December 2000, directors & producers are officially recognised as authors under the Australian Copyright Act, a real victory for Australia’s creative community: “…while copyright is about the protection of ‘economic’ rights, moral rights are about protection of ‘creative’ rights. Moral rights exist to protect the completed work, ‘the film’, from being altered without the permission or consent of the authors…They are about ensuring that the reputation of the film & the film’s authors are maintained…”

Off the Edge—ScreenWest winner announced

Emerging WA writer Vanessa Lomma, producer Melissa Hasluck & director Melanie Rodriga were awarded $500,000 recently as winners of the ScreenWest/SBS Independent Off the Edge initiative, for their script Teesh & Trude, a low budget feature on the lives of 2 hardened women on a diet of soapies & sarcasm. The initiative was established to give filmmakers the chance to move beyond short films & create feature-length scripts.

Looking for women’s shorts

The WOW International Film Festival is calling for entries for their short film competition. A grand prize of $30,000 in goods & services is a good incentive. Cate Shortland, director Flowergirl & Joy, is a previous winner. The winning films screen at the WOW festival in October at Chauvel Cinema, Sydney, & tour to regional & city centres nationally. For entry forms, phone 02 9332 2408. All entries must be under 40 minutes & either directed by a woman or, if directed by a man, both written & produced by women.

The apocalypse according to Herzog

The MRC in Adelaide is screening 9 films from Werner Herzog. Screening every Thursday night, 7pm from June 7, the series includes Fata Morgana, Signs of Life, Even Dwarfs Started Small, Aguirre, Wrath of God, Heart of Glass & Strozeck. It’s a good chance to see Herzog eating his own shoes. And it’s free!

Filmmaker with a new vision of Indonesia

As reported by Vivienne Stanton on scoop, filmmaker Tony Sarre went blind at 16 and at 19 hitchhiked solo around Australia with a white cane & a camera. A Murdoch University film student, he recently received a ScreenWest grant to make a 6-part doco series about Indonesia, where he handed the camera to locals he met along the way. Sarre says that being vision impaired can be an advantage: “Because I couldn’t see, people would talk to me, tell me about what they were seeing, give me their slant…In my mind the world was so varied, it wasn’t just me seeing it, it was everybody that I travelled with. It was very exciting & I wanted to put that experience into film.”

Online asylum seekers

MIME Migrating Memories is a new website where refugees & asylum seekers tell their stories. With the help of teachers & museum staff in their newly adopted countries, participants relay their adventures online. MIME, co-ordinated by Malmo Museer (Sweden), Museucentrum Variikii (Finland) & trAce online writing centre (UK) consists of 4 parts: workshops with young immigrants, a dramatised travelling exhibition, a website & a 2 day seminar.

New cinema spaces at COFA

We’re used to sitting in the dark with strangers watching films. But what if the environment changed? Evidence of a Viewer—Cinema in the Unexpected Space, presented by College of Fine Arts & Sydney Film Festival, looks at cinema in new spaces, often impacted by digital technologies: multiple screens, with surround sound, the internet, in an art gallery, & how different spaces alter audience perceptions. Kathy Cleland evaluates The Gallery Space, Amanda McDonald Crowley explores The Public Space & John Conomos questions The Cinema Space. A number of experimental works will also be screened. COFA Theatre, EGO2, Selwyn St Paddington, June 16, 2pm. Contact: Carolyne Gilbert,
02 9385 0734

Interactive storymaking in Perth

FTI is hosting a series of nights on writing/designing interactive games. Jackie Turnure returns to her home town (after 9 years in the US) to talk on “The Agony & Ecstasy of Interactive Games for Kids”, a seminar presented to a packed house at the Australian Special Effects & Animation Festival. June 22, 7-10pm. She will also look at Writing for Interactive Games, June 23, 2.30-5.30pm, & Designing Interactive Games for the Global Market, June 24, 2-5pm. 08 9335 1055

Digital resources

Newcastle groover Sean Healy from Octapod has just updated their website with lots of interesting digital pickings including visuals for raves; interviews with Phil Jackson about Fractal Music; Ian Haig on Web Devolutions; Kat Mew on electronic arts & Flash wiz Braingirl; & grabbing my interest, Greg Jenkins, who composes & makes music
with a cactus.

National digital access initiativ

e
A new scheme launched by Arts Minister Peter McGauran will equip state film resource agencies OPENChannel, Metro, Media Resource Centre, FTI & QPIX with the latest in DVD computer software, hardware, digital video camera & sound recording equipment in state of the art production units, designed to teach filmmakers how to complete projects on DVD or for web streaming.

Aussies take over ELO nominations

Wollongong writer Mez, Gold Coast based Komninos Zervos & SA’s Geniwate have been shortlisted for the 2001 Electronic Literature Awards. 16 judges chose a shortlist of 12 works from 165 entries. Scott Rettburg, director of ELO, commented: “Collectively, these works represent the efforts of a nascent literary movement that takes the electronic media not only as a new means of distributing literature, but also as an interactive space that can be utilised to create entirely new kinds of literary art.”

Ruined Dreams

Man Ray’s photograph of dust drifting like grey tumbleweed on the surface of Duchamp’s The Large Glass perfectly evokes the death of aura that might once have determined an artwork’s status as reified relic or authentic original. Part of the Veronica’s Revenge Perspectives on Contemporary Photography at the MCA, Dust Breeding reminds me that dirt and time can transport once vital, precious objects to a fuzzy, faded netherworld. For Walter Benjamin, who famously diagnosed photography’s link to the death of the aura, dust is a metaphor for the ruined nature of dreams in modernity. No longer able to evoke the romantic state of imagination, dreams, he proposes, are doomed instead to enter the degraded sphere of everyday life (Celeste Olalquiaga on Benjamin’s “Dreamkitsch”, The Artificial Kingdom. A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience, Bloomsbury, London, 1999).

By documenting exactly this degraded sphere—a kind of domestic, low art performance-without-subjects—then elevating it to high art status, Man Ray transports us from the realm of sight to the space of thought and imagination. Both Dust Breeding and Mike Kelley’s 1994 interpretation—a frieze of dust balls in close up—symbolise the concerns of Veronica’s Revenge and the Art Gallery of NSW’s World Without End, Photography and the Twentieth Century. Photographs are not presented in either exhibit as a means for capturing ‘the real’, but as a springboard for contemplating the internal life of dreams, the imagination and subjectivity within specific historical, cultural and political contexts.

From the death of the aura to the death of the author, issues of reproduction and representation are evident in the postmodern works of Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman at the MCA. Levine takes a leaf from early photographer Karl Blossfeldt’s oeuvre and kills the author at the same time. His contemporary reproductions of Blossfeldt’s intricate plant studies of the 1920s (featured at the Art Gallery) are some of her many reappropriations—she also rephotographs works of Walker Evans and Edward Weston. Levine’s ‘stylized kleptomania’ is often considered deconstructive (in the way it highlights the impossibility of originality, inserting herself into a predominantly male canon of modern art) but more interestingly as an enthusiastic, devotional act of fandom. (See Susan Kandel’s “Stalker”, Art &Text, 59)

Sherman and Prince reframe familiar gender types from advertising, film and TV. Prince enlarges details from Marlboro cigarette ads to subtly expose unseen aspects of the original, giving them fresh significance. A sepia close up on the cowboy’s hand reveals his skin is more leathery than the gloves he grips but also emphasizes the smoking cigarette between fingers; this tough guy’s nicotine dependent. Prince’s bucking horse-and-cowboy composition reveals another version of freedom that’s literally being reined in; the cowboy’s lasso makes a halo round the animal’s head.

These works suggest the curatorial agenda of Veronica’s Revenge—a kind of incandescently-lit, jam-packed trip through a contemporary art supermarket; pause at Warhol’s Brillo boxes, race past Sherman’s festering foodstuffs and Barbara Kruger’s sloganeering ‘I shop therefore I am’ and abandon your trolley at Matthew Barney’s cultish fiestas (Goodyear Chorus). These are worlds drenched in the grainy pixels of TV stills or the sleek, over-bright articulations of film and advertising. Fully aware of the vicissitudes in trying to capture a singular reality, many of these artists seem more interested in providing new frames through which ideas and associations might accumulate. Knowing that to represent is to conceal as well as reveal, theirs is an aesthetics of excess (Janine Antoni’s pregnant, three-legged Momme in 70s cheesecloth) and humour (Damien Hirst’s cadaver portrait With Dead Head, Paul McCarthy’s Girl with Penis) as much as it is of loss.

Prince and Sherman suggest the performative rather than the essential qualities of gender ‘types.’ As does the work of Claude Cahun, the French photographer (regarded as an early Sherman) featured in both shows. Cahun’s theatrical cross-dressing and playful interpretations of character from the 1920s-30s were the private activity of herself and her female lover, never intended for public consumption, while Sherman’s photographs are a most public series of acts. Sherman’s take on the Madonna-with-child suckling a plastic breast (Untitled No. 223) from 1990 continues to resonate. I think of toxic residues from leaking silicon appendages passed to the child through breastfeeding. From this corrupting view of maternal nurture, it’s no big leap to contemplate Sherman’s over-sized, candy coloured abject matter, congealing and mouldering on a nearby wall and then reflect on Kruger’s gnomic warning (and exploding cigarette?), You are an experiment in terror (1983).

The Unhomely: Rites and Rituals

Personal exposure is both the subject and fascination of Nan Goldin’s narrative sequence featuring the life of her friend, Cookie Mueller, at the MCA (Goldin’s accompanying text in a childish script begins, “I used to think I couldn’t lose anyone if I photographed them enough…”). Shot with the flattening blare of flashbulb in claustrophobic interiors, Goldin exposes with great tenderness the social rituals of a very specific life, and death. After the image of Mueller in a coffin, the final print reveals the empty, familiar interior of her loungeroom, a space that requires human presence to dream it into homeliness. The fishbowl sits without signs of life, and 2 stuffed unidentifiable animals perch as if in eternal vigil at either end of the couch.

Goldin’s work has all the tender empathy that Larry Clark’s Tulsa (1968-71) lacks in its frank sequence on heroin addiction. Emerging from an interest in the anti-sublime of the everyday, such exposures might invite the voyeur’s impulse but suggest to me how rituals, whether productive or destructive, reveal our difficulties with contemporary life and our great capacity for it. They call up what Susan Sontag calls the photograph’s talismanic quality, its capacity to “contact or claim another reality” (On Photography, Penguin, London, 1979).

A close encounter with the ‘Other’s reality’ is the subject of Nigerian Fatimah Tuggar’s blended first and third world scenes. These digitally composed, inkjet prints pick at problematic rhetorics on ‘globalism’ and the liberating power of new technologies to break down cultural borders. In People Watching (1997) the double meaning of the title is played out through the superimposition of a jeep full of camera-laden tourists on safari who gaze back at a duplicated figure in tribal costume. These grainy shots of tribal life evoke the 60s colour and style of that armchair traveller’s guide to ‘otherness’—National Geographic. Tracey Moffat’s Up in the Sky offers a less clear cut, but just as politically pointed, narrative about black/white relations in postcolonial Australia, though these remote, dusty settings, dreamy inhabitants and nightmarish scenarios evoke the anywhere of a Paris Texas.

Gregory Crewdson and Barney offered glimpses of the underside of the real at the MCA. Crewdson’s abject, unhomely landscapes (Natural Wonder, Mutated Gourd), leaking stickily or butterfly-plagued, have all the mortifying drama of museum dioramas. (Bizarrely, a billboard promoting the Sydney Morning Herald’s property liftout features a butterfly infested front lawn of a desirable property and seems to have taken its cue from Crewdson.) Barney’s fauns, nymphs and extravaganzas of corporate uniformity in Cremaster I: Goodyear Chorus and Orchidella investigate the secret excesses of underworlds whose exteriors promote propriety and restraint.

False Documents

August Sander’s Blind Children of 1921 represents as much about the nature of photography as it does about its subjects. Sander’s portraits of human ‘archetypes’ hang at the Art Gallery alongside Blossfeldt’s gelatin silver prints. Where Blossfeldt’s plant studies are architectural and sensual, Sander’s work is more ennobling than it is classificatory (and was sufficiently sympathetic in its treatment of both Jews and Gentiles to be confiscated by the Nazis). The arrangement of these works highlights photography’s roots in the endeavour to objectively record, its links with science and its paradoxical relationship to the real.

Despite a staunch belief in his own objectivity, Sander is of course doomed to capture only what blindness might look like to him; what it feels like, its particular sensory nature can only be suggested. Neither sympathetic nor ‘scientific’ in her depictions, Diane Arbus’ vision is harsher, less elevated. Her New York subjects from the late 60s (Teenage Girl on Hudson Street, Two Women Smoking at the Automat) might ‘compose’ themselves for the camera, yet Arbus’ gimlet eye famously seeks out that which they might not wish to reveal.

Curator Judy Annear does not attempt a comprehensive survey of 20th century photography here, but represents aspects of particular artists’ works within the context of photography’s proliferation in recent history. Glass cabinets containing historical, theoretical and journalistic texts on photography jut through the exhibit prompting us to consider the role of the photograph throughout history—as convicting evidence, a tool for propaganda, an instrument of power and conquest in anthropological studies, and as part of art and popular culture.

The photograph as widely circulated record of atrocity comes reappropriated by Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura who transforms Eddie Adams’ famous 1968 photograph of the street execution of a Viet Cong soldier into an illuminated memorial inside a wooden cabinet (Slaughter Cabinet II). Morimura restages the original with himself playing soldier and executioner. Opposite and blown up wall-sized is Adams’ original (Vietnam Execution) and Australian Frank Hurley’s composite works from WW1. Hurley’s sepia drenched, bombed-out buildings or sludgy fields beneath spectral clouds present war as stunning spectacle; theatrical and almost sublime. They remind me of the Futurists’ description of war as “beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns…creates new architectures, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages…” (Marinetti in Walter Benjamin, Illustrations, trans. Harry Zohn, Collins, London, 1970). Their proximity to Morimura’s cabinet and the oversized original makes the Adams shot look stagy. Interestingly, Hurley’s composite arrangements are not revealed as such in their labelling—perhaps to suggest the composed nature of all photographs…

Morimura’s funereal frame with its carved hearts has the ornate claustrophobia of a coffin (a kind of final frame in itself) and functions like a miniature stage. It gives Adams’ famous shot a new gravitas and suggests Maurice Blanchot’s warning—that what is truly disastrous about the disaster is the process of forgetting, the dissipating evidence of our passivity to events. Slaughter Cabinet II counters the dulled sensory impact (compassion fatigue) of widely reproduced images.

The world opens up in works that document the experiences of childhood and old age. American Weegee worked in the cloying darkness of cinemas to capture the unconscious gestures of rapt young thumb-suckers and chair-grippers mesmerised by the screen. Like Walker Evans’ surreptitious Subway Portraits of the same period (late 30s early 40s), the subjects here are caught unaware and appear suspended in a halfway place—less brutal, gentler seeming than William Klein’s gritty child-dramas taken a decade later on rundown New York streets.

Wendy Ewald’s works also have a dreamlike aspect—but Ewald gives cameras to children to capture their intense rituals and preoccupations. The resulting view is direct and unsentimental and records the delicate attention that kids across cultures pay to all areas of their lives. Denise Dixon depicts the cocooned, flattened features of her twin brothers, their stockinged heads dreaming themselves up as aliens in an armchair spacecraft. This intimacy is also evident in Donigan Cummin’s Pretty Ribbons (1988-91) which depicts the last stages of an elderly woman’s life. Framed in a context which suggests both the accumulation and sloughing off of life’s last moments—stranded objects, a stained bare mattress, ornately beaded eveningwear—the subject of Cummins’ rich colour and black and white portraits reveals the bone-shapes of her ageing body in a series of frank exposures. All these works evoke Sontag’s dictum that “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability…all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt” (Sontag, On Photography).

Relics and Traces

The MCA title Veronica’s Revenge refers to the woman who wiped the brow of a suffering Jesus and came away with an imprint of his face on her cloth. Now a holy relic (in St Peters, Rome) this transfer of bodily emission retains only the trace of Veronica’s (and Jesus’) visceral, sensory experience. Like the photograph, which according to Marguerite Duras, “promotes forgetting” by replacing the physical, sensual realm of experience and memory with a “fixed flat easily available countenance…a confirmation of death”, Veronica’s reified cloth with its trace of bodily suffering can’t evoke the sensory aspect of Veronica’s encounter (Duras, Practicalities, Flamingo, London, 1991).

Which brings me back to Sander’s Blind Children posed in concentration over the white leaves of their braille books. One girl faces the camera to reveal only the opaque parts of her eyes, a blank stare reminding me of what can’t be represented or retained, what lies beyond, beneath and inside.

Veronica’s Revenge. Contemporary Perspectives on Photography, curator Baroness Marion Lambert with Susan Kramer, LAC-Switzerland, MCA, January-March 4; World Without End. Photography and the 20th Century, curator Judy Annear, AGNSW, Sydney, December 2-February 25

Lyndon Terracini is an eminent opera performer. He has worked extensively in Europe, with Peter Greenaway and David Freeman among others, and committed himself to new Australian music theatre, appearing in Michael Smetanin and Alison Croggan’s The Burrow, Paul Grabowsky and Janis Balodis’s The Mercenary (which he commissioned), as well as touring his own music theatre production of The Cars That Ate Paris. He established NORPA (Northern Rivers Performing Arts) in Lismore NSW, a breakthrough in regional arts, presenting a year-round international arts program alongside locally produced work (like The Mercenary and The Cars That Ate Paris). We celebrated Lyndon’s first Queensland Biennial Festival of Music with a bottle of red wine as the ebullient Artistic Director described a unique event designed for musicians, urban and far flung communities, and all music lovers. (eds)

The festival is like a great tree, under which musicians from everywhere meet every 2 years to play. Ever since the first arts festival I went to, in Adelaide in 1973, I thought yes, festivals are places for audiences but they’re also for artists to get together.

Salvo Terracini

I started playing in Salvation Army bands and then I played a lot of jazz in pubs around Sydney when I was young. I grew up in Dee Why. Went to Manly Boys High. I remember doing Music for the Higher School Certificate and I actually didn’t have a music teacher. I sat in a room on my own! For a year! With no-one! I started doing a lot of concerts with the Renaissance Players. It was great. I played the knackers (a medieval percussion instrument) in that because I played timpani in the Salvation Army as well. And did a South-East Asian tour. We did 35 concerts in 5 weeks plus travelling. 1974. It was a really hard gig. Michael Atherton was on that tour. Graham Pushee, Jonathan Rubin. It was a great band but people got really sick and it was really hard work. I was at the Opera School, then I went to New Opera in South Australia. Justin Macdonnell offered me a contract there. It was the first job I’d had that was longer than a week. And I sang in Janacek’s The Excursions of Mr Broucek as my first gig. And loved it. Then the Australian Opera offered me a contract and then James Murdoch asked me to do Henze’s El cimarron (about a runaway Cuban slave) at the 1976 Adelaide Festival.

El cimarron

I got the score and I thought, God, I know how to do this piece. It was a combination of having been an instrumentalist and performer in a number of areas—I’d played in orchestras and bands as a trumpet player, did jazz, sang medieval music. I’d also worked as a session singer when I was at the Opera School and in fact sang at the first variety concert at the Sydney Opera House—a duet with Rolf Harris. I did commercials, did backings for Kamahl, Olivia Newton-John, Helen Reddy. And I came to El cimarron and all of those things were in it and I knew how to do them. The only difficulty for me—well, not the only one, it’s a very very difficult piece—I was frightened about just getting through it. And I’d never done a piece like that before, as big as that, singing flat out on your own for an hour and a half. Extreme stuff. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. I turned the page for the last section and the first line was “Maybe I will die tomorrow”, and I looked at it and the first thing I thought was, shit, I’m gonna make it. It was a great concert, a fantastic time. Hans Werner Henze was there and he directed it.

He invited me to sing the premier of Don Quixote later that year. It was the first time I’d been to Italy and I remember getting off the plane in Rome. The first thing I did was take a photo of a car with a Roman number plate! I thought I’d never get back. But it was a great experience and really conceptualised for me what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it.

Lismore

We were living in Italy and Liz, my wife, got really sick with lung problems and I was singing in Switzerland a lot and we went to a specialist there and he said, look we need to take a lung out. I thought that was pretty drastic and so we asked what the alternative might be and he said, well, I suggest a hot, humid climate. We were coming out to Brisbane because my brother was getting married and it was Christmas time and I’d had to dig the car out of a snowdrift in Zurich to get to the airport. We got off the plane in Brisbane at Christmas and drove down to Byron Bay through Bangalow to Lismore. And that time of year, you think, what is this place. I mean this is Paradise. And it was hot and humid and so we thought we’d try it and Liz has been a million times better. [And you happened on a place with an Italian history?] Absolutely. It was incredibly fortuitous and it’s been a really happy time. [And you’ll stay there?] I love living there. [And it’s still the centre of your performing universe?] Yeah, it is.

The job

They offered me this job as director (of the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music), I didn’t apply for it. Initially, I got a phone call asking if I would be interested. I thought about whether I wanted to do it and what it meant. I wanted to do it for a number of reasons. One, because I thought I could do a festival that was about 20th century music and new music and make it work and get an audience for it and do pieces that had a lot of substance that people would really enjoy. And secondly, I was really attracted to the fact that, because it was statewide, we could do something about connecting regional Queensland to Brisbane and connecting community music making to concert music.

In Lismore we’ve programmed a lot of work that’s got larger audiences than in Sydney—like ELISION for example. And I was heartened by that. And I still believe that there’s a huge misunderstanding from the larger arts organisations about audiences outside of capital cities. It’s presumed for some reason that your IQ is a lot lower than if you live in the metropolitan area. There are a lot of people who now make lifestyle choices about wanting to live in the country and they don’t have the same access to cultural activity that you do if you live in the city. So a festival like this gave me the opportunity to do that. I like to think we have a reason for doing a festival and that people will feel connected to it.

Barcaldine

Part of the theme of the festival is about making music and what that means. I’m suggesting that it starts with composers, the people who are the original makers of the music, and obviously performers who make music together in the concert hall or pub. But it also has to do with instrument makers. So in Barcaldine, in a town of 1500 people, 200 have signed an agreement to make marimbas and learn how to play them. They do it from May right through ‘til when the festival’s on. They don’t pay for the tuition or the workshops and then, at the end, they get to keep the marimba. Barcaldine is 6 hours drive west of Rockhampton. You can only go as far as Longreach and the road stops. It’s way out.

Chermside

I’ve asked Stephen Leak to write a new piece, a musical round for the people of Chermside, a suburb of Brisbane. 400 kids from the schools have signed up to sing it and I’ve asked him to base it on the bird calls of the Brisbane wetlands belt. So if they do that and then ideally, when they see that Messiaen’s Turangalila (Reinbert de Leeuw conducting the Queensland Orchestra, July 21) is based on bird calls, hopefully they’ll make a connection too. We’re bringing 150 people from Barcaldine to Brisbane on the Spirit of the Outback and they’ll play at Southbank and they’ll also play in the Chermside piece. We have an instrument-makers expo in Curroy. And really what brings all those threads together is Experimentum Mundi (the artisans from an Italian town who play the tools of their trade as instruments) which is about music making being connected to everyday life, not divorced from it. So there are cobblers and pastrycooks and coopers.

Rockhampton

Elena Katz-Chernin is writing a symphony for Rockhampton. I think that’s a first. There are 400 people on stage and I had to say no more because we can’t fit any more. They’re really excited about it. Elena came up and talked to them and I took her to hear the Capricornia Silver Band—they can really play. They were preparing for a big competition and they started playing a hymn tune. It was so beautiful, we were both sitting there with tears in our eyes.

Rockhampton has a tremendous history of choral music, brass bands, and an orchestra. And they also have a really beautiful botanical garden with a lot of rare trees. It’s a gorgeous place to be with a lagoon with water lilies, with different performances (like the Song Company) happening throughout the gardens so people can spend the day there with their picnic hampers. At the end of the day they go into a valley, sort of like a natural amphitheatre, and they hear the big symphony. Elena and Roland Peelman, who’s conducting, will be there 10 days before the premiere. Elena’s written in 7 short sections. They want to have one of those sections as a kind of anthem for the City of Rockhampton and would like to keep the score and have it in a display case. And I said, do you know how big it is? For 400 people, it is HUGE. But they’re right. A score is an artwork. I want to have a score for the Turangalila in the brochure. So people can actually see it and think, my god that is music.

Mackay

In Mackay there’s a street spectacle created in a collaboration between Opera North, Circus Osmosis and the QTC. There’s a new piece in the local church hall where Sherbet once played—a kind of installation music-memory-piece of that building. In The Lagoons area, Indigenous singers and dancers will be joined by the Dutch percussion group Anumadutchi.

Logan

In Logan, in the bible belt of Australia, there are a lot of new age Christians and new churches. When I first went through there I saw all these churches and I thought, maybe they’d like a gospel music festival. They fully embraced it. It’ll feature Tony Backhouse and the Cafe at the Gate of Salvation choir, the Heavenly Light Quartet and some young Christian based rock bands with the most un-Christian names, like Dumpster.

Guys and Twins

In Rockhampton there’s a great pub called the Great Western and in the pub they’ve got a rodeo ring that seats 3,000 people. It is massive. So you’re literally sitting at your table, eating your steak and there’s a rodeo ring. So I’ve put the Topp Twins in the rodeo ring. They’re also playing in Townsville. The Scared Weird Little Guys from Melbourne are like the Marx Brothers. They’re going to Townsville too, because there’s a Barrier Reef Orchestra there and a big choir. The Guys do a version of the Hallelujah Chorus where they get a kid out of the audience, ask him his name and sing it. Rus-ty Thom-as. Tim-my Bry-ant. It’s fabulous. You see kids of 7 years of age, going “Yes!” The audience love it. The Guys are great musicians too. In Lismore we had an audience of 600 for them, they went ballistic. Overnight they learned all the local landmarks around Lismore and put it in their show. It was extraordinary.

Powerhouse

The Brisbane Powerhouse is at the centre of the festival. Paul Grabowsky’s Australian Art Orchestra and the Indian percussionists Sruthi Laya Ensemble are doing Into the Fire (ABC Classic CD 465-705-2), Synergy are doing Steve Reich’s Drumming—it was one of their great concerts I heard last year—and Orkest de Volharding from the Netherlands will play the Louis Andriessen music for Peter Greenaway’s M is for Man, Music, Mozart—as the film is being screened. The International Critics Symposium is there. Local groups Topology and Loops are doing a new piece, airwaves, a show about the history of radio.

We’ve got an interesting late night gig called Playing by Numbers. It’s for all the musicians in Brisbane and in Queensland. They turn up and take a number out of the hat and the number determines who they play with. You could get the most fantastic combinations. As we all know, there are some serious rivalries in music circles so ideally people who wouldn’t speak to each other will have to play with each other.

We have a film night, Notes on Celluloid. There’s a film about Paul Bowles whom I’ve always found a really interesting character. I was reading The Sheltering Sky when I was in Barcaldine and it made a hell of a lot of sense out there. There’s a documentary about Venancio Mbanda who’s one of the percussionists with the Anumadutchi percussion ensemble from the Netherlands. He’s a really interesting guy. Runs his own festival right in the middle of the jungle in Mozambique. You have to trek for a couple of days to get there. He’s a revolutionary, leads workers, an incredible character. We’ve also got a DJ festival at the Powerhouse and a festival club.

Elsewhere…

We’ve only got 2 shows at QPAC (Queensland Performing Arts Centre ) —Turangalila (there isn’t another venue where we could do it) and Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale. There’s Brisbane City Hall where we’re presenting Anumadutchi and the Queensland Orchestra playing a new piece by Gerard Brophy. The Song Company is at St Mary’s in South Brisbane, ELISION at the Customs House, Core Ensemble at QUT, the Stuart Series at QCC Auditorium. The rest is at the Powerhouse.

The Critical Mass is interesting. I asked Stephen Stanfield to write a piece about homeless and marginalised people. A lot of those people go to St Mary’s Church in South Brisbane. There’s a soup kitchen and the priest there is sensational. Middle class people go there as well. When they go to the mass, they’ll experience this new work. The congregational songs they will sing are part of the piece and the liturgy that Father Peter Kennedy is delivering is about homelessness. Stephen’s been with the social worker from the church to interview homeless people and snippets of their conversation will be in the music installation. (Performed by Symbitronic Electro-Acoustic ensemble with the QUT Academy of Arts’ Student Choir.)

The music of criticism

Andrew Clements from London’s The Guardian will be here for the Critics’ Symposium. His specialty is new music and, apart from the Song Company program, nothing in this festival was written before the 20th Century. In fact Turangalila is probably the oldest piece in it. Elmer Schonberger is coming from the Netherlands. Roger Covell (Sydney Morning Herald) is going to give a keynote address. I had lunch with Chris Mitchell (the Editor of Brisbane’s The Courier Mail) and said, I’d like you to speak at the Critics Symposium and I’ll tell you why. Basically, I’d like to know why reviews are regarded like race results and why music is not discussed in a serious way and why music reviews are only 250 words. It would be great if you would speak about those and other issues related to arts criticism and commentary from the perspective of Editor in chief of a major daily paper.

We’re calling for papers to be submitted from the general public too. It seems to me that the role of the critic isn’t perceived to be as important as it used to be and I think we need to say, as artists, that this is an important issue. We want serious criticism, we welcome it. The newspapers all seem to be playing to the lifestyle crowd.

It’s interesting to read reviews from Germany. It’s a completely different cultural attitude. As a performer, if you’re lucky, you might get your name mentioned at the end. And that’s fine because there’s a really serious discussion about the piece, philosophically speaking as well. Not just ‘the orchestra played shithouse and so and so was good.’ That’s why I wanted to get Elmer to come to give that perspective and how it is writing for a European journal as opposed to….Why is a review like a race result here?

Driving the festival

I’m in Brisbane during the week. I drive home to Lismore on the weekend. It’s about 2 and a quarter hours away. I can listen to music, like Turangalila and all the music I need to listen to for the festival. Doing this festival is like doing a new piece. I don’t see it as being a festival director. I see it as doing a new show. It just so happens that the show stretches over an entire state.

Queensland Biennial Festival of Music, July 20-29, bookings QTix, 136 246, Brisbane Powerhouse, 07 3358 8600

Totally Huge New Music Festival 2001 was a truly significant Australian sound/music event. We asked the festival’s technical director and RealTime writer, Andrew Beck, to step back from the controls and tell it how he saw and heard it. Eds.

This year’s Totally Huge ranged over 12 days with 26 events and 100 artists, the Perth-based festival had local, national and overseas artists from across the new music spectrum.

The festival opened with Melbourne sound artist and academic Phil Samartzis and Danish performer and programmer Rasmuss Lundig. Samartzis, known for his work in immersive sound environment installations, also has a history of collaboration with Lundig in a live performance environment. In the Performance Space at PICA, Samartzis’ liquid ambient soundscapes rose and fell against Lundig’s percussive and edgy live and sampled sound manipulations. The marriage in performance of their distinct styles heralded much of what this year’s festival was to produce.

The teaming of Canadian multi-instrumentalist duo Joanne Hetu and Jean Derome with Ikue Mori’s sequenced electro-percussion, and local artists Chris Cobilis, Hannah Clemen and Rachael Dease with Jon Rose on the Australian variations of Rose’s Violin Factory, stimulated similar reactions to the co-billing of Rose and Rik Rue—issues of musicianship and performance were re-visited.

Several days into the festival, talking about audience expectations of live performance, Lundig said, “I have heard the arguments here in the last few days…It is not so important for me to see a ‘performance.’ I guess it’s a matter of temperament. I don’t have to have a lot of action to enjoy the music. It’s what comes out of the speakers.

“When I am live onstage it is always very nervous whether the robots will work or not, or even my computer; sometimes my guitar (playing) is not so good. These are the things that make a live performance, regardless of playing a traditional instrument or a computer…What Phil (Samartzis) does is an art in itself. All those CDs and minidisks. His choice of sound, his control of the mixing into 4 channels, particularly when we are playing together. I suppose Phil is not a musician, more of a sound artist. But, if you fuck up and you’re playing live, it is the same for everyone. Sometimes it is very hard work…I enjoy a virtuosic performance, people pay to see a performance. It’s in our comprehension of what a stage is, what it is for. But, whether you play a laptop or a kazoo, it’s what you do with it.”

While Samartzis’ presence at the festival continued as the installation Soft and Loud at the Central TAFE Art Gallery, Lundig later performed solo at PICA with his robots. A result of ongoing research and development based on the Lego Mindstorm RCX processor and microcontroller at Aarhus University’s LegoLab in Denmark, Lundig’s robots beat out percussive patterns in response to external stimuli.

Lundig, with guitar, sat bare footed on a small area of the stage floor in the centre of a circle of his robots and effects processors. The tiny robots played on found surfaces, soft drink cans, cardboard. The various found surfaces were equipped with contact microphones to pick up the sounds from the minuscule drummers. Surrounded by what appeared to be rubbish connected by wires and held in place with tape, Lundig performed a most remarkable and frenetic set. The sight was strangely affecting. The only problem was that the PA was not loud enough. The FOH engineer was trying to avoid broadcasting “extraneous noise” from the contact microphones picking up sound through the stage floor—Lundig’s turning and spinning as he switched processors in and out of the loop, and the backwash of the other instruments. It all added a depth and musicality to the performance. Afterwards, when asked about the extraneous noise, Lundig replied: “Yes, I like this too. It is another layer and it has its contribution to make.”

While Derome and Hetu performed at various gigs, their first collaboration with Ikue Mori was an impromptu trio at the Subiaco Theatre Centre. Originally programmed as separate performances on the one bill, the 3 decided to play as a trio. The plasticity of performance line-ups within the overall programming structure was one of the festival’s ongoing strong points. At first, the exuberant and vigorous acoustic style of the Canadians and Mori’s programmed electro-percussion sequences failed to find a point of mutual engagement. But common ground was found and explored within a soundspace that evoked a vast marshland populated by strange rhythmic creatures. Often interrupted and temporarily silenced by squealing, wailing and ululating interlopers, the creatures evolved their own complex patterns. If you can imagine Les Gilbert’s Kakadu Billabong set on a wild metallic planet, you may be halfway to the experience. Quite remarkable.

The Young Composers Night provided a public platform for local composers and musicians at the beginnings of their careers. While there was much to be enjoyed, some material was simply pretentious. James Lee’s short cello piece was an exception as was Rachael Dease’s cross-genre chamber music composition for voice (her own) and strings.

Returning to the audience expectations of live performance, Rik Rue commented: “I was playing with Ikue Mori at the ABC for John Crawford’s new music show. During the recording the joke was that we were like 2 bad typists with laptops…It is a problem. I’ve developed a stage presence, but performing, for me, is sometimes difficult. I wobble around, knock things over looking for things…it’s not a stage act but it seems to have developed into that. I’m not a poser turning knobs in a theatrical manner. I don’t artificialise…Being myself, that’s my theatre.” His Sunday performance was broadcast live-to-air on Bryce Moore’s Difficult Listening (RTR FM 92.1, Sundays, 9-11pm). Sitting behind his machinery, Rue delivered a distressed urban soundscape. Modulated as if it were the soundtrack to a modern silent-movie, the piece continually shifted from familiar house beats to threatening, antagonist samples and assaults of random static. Reflecting both the horrors and comforts of contemporary, western, amenity-based lifestyles, his performance was ultimately quite disturbing. Rue also had an installation, the open ear, at Artshouse Gallery.

Other installations included Sound Spaces, curated by Hannah Clemen at PICA, and Natasha Barret’s Rain Forest Cycle, overseen by Rob Muir and installed in the Garden Week site in King’s Park. The latter, a 10 metre triangular pyramid with 4 speakers set one at each vertice—emitting sounds recorded in a Costa Rican rainforest—was a mixture of success and failure. Walking through the Garden Week site, a retail plant nursery and allied industry promotion, the audience had little reason to focus their attention, and more importantly their time, on the sound pyramid. Against the surrounding commercial bustle and the diverting smells from the catering area nearby, the subtleties of Barret’s work disappeared.

Jon Rose premiered Violin Factory II at the festival. While Lindsay Vickery conducted the string orchestra, Rose both manipulated live samples and conducted the percussion section. This performance in Winthrop Hall lacked in commitment. The string orchestra was adequate but the percussionists were tentative. The video projection, onto 2 large screens either side of the performers, was erratic. Lely Evans, who played the part of a Chinese guard alternatively berating and exalting the workers/performers below her scaffold platform, worked hard in her very first performance of the piece. There had been no prior rehearsal by the complete ensemble. And this was reflected in the performance.

Very different was the variation, Violins in the Outback, at Wogarno Station, 600 kilometres northeast of Perth. An audience of almost 700 enjoyed a vigorous and flawless performance. Chris Cobilis, one of the percussionists, remarked of the Wogarno experience, “We could see the light at the end of the tunnel. We knew where we were going. Before (at Winthrop Hall) we were playing blind.” Energised and confident, strings, percussion and voice all performed with depth and precision against a backdrop of outstanding video projection across the walls and roof of the shearing shed.

On performance and musicianship, Jon Rose commented “I think an audience does need a set of parameters, like, OK, here’s a guy with a violin. We know what a violin sounds like. Now, what can he do? He can’t go any lower, he can’t go any higher. He can’t go that much faster, he can’t go that much slower. He’s only got 2 arms, 2 legs. Like, there’s the setup. The 4 strings. What can you do with that? And that’s a level of scale that we’ve lost. Now, with MIDI you can just hit return and have 16 channels of anything. It becomes meaningless. I think scale, physicality, is something we require as a musical expression. That’s why the voice is the last thing on the budget to go. Because people will understand that more than they’ll understand anything.”

The Totally Huge New Music Festival, Perth, March 30-April 8, Midwest, April 14-18

Hanging onto the tail of a goat. A Tibetan Journey is not just another migrant story. Tibet has been decimated. Its people scattered. Its beliefs increasingly embraced in the West. To be Tibetan has a certain cachet and thus, with great anticipation and generosity, the full house at the Gasworks Theatre received Tsering Tsewang’s poignant but playful solo work.

The senses were delighted. On entering the space I could smell the fragrantly acrid presence of incense; hear the near, far, approaching ring and clang of bells—a different tone for each goat in the herd; and hear also their bleats and cries and stampings. Around the stage a circle of instruments and effects: a Tibetan lute, a drum hanging in space, cymbals, a flute, banners suspended and emblazoned with that eternal knot, ritual beakers, a small silvery white shawl. Towering behind, a huge greenish projection of the sacred Mount Kailash. The form of a man appeared in the core of the mountain, moved slowly towards us as a deep chant of invocation—“May Tibet be a Zone of Peace”—emerged and filled the space.

Writer Jan Cornall has worked with Tsering’s stories to produce a cyclically anecdotal (perhaps overly long) reflection of this man’s life. The tale loops between recollections of a happy child on the cold desert plateau of Tibet, to a refugee fleeing the Red Chinese, to the student of Buddhism and musical monk in Dharmsala, to migrant and factory worker in Australia. Serene and profoundly distressing visual imagery accompanies the narrative, crafted with fluidity by director Brian Joyce. Tsering Tsewang moves between each instrumental site offering us a suite of traditional and modern Tibetan folk songs, chants, invocations and dedications. He is a truly beautiful musician and it is clear that this is where his talent lies. Tsering is also an excellent mimic who amuses us with witty and no doubt accurate portraits of his beloved grandfather, an assortment of Aussie work mates and the Dalai Lama.

Hanging onto the tail of a goat uses humour and lightness to tell a story redolent with loss, injustice and suffering. As my companion observed, “A whisper can be louder than a scream.”

The jaded postmodern eye is surely confounded by this ingenuous, peaceful and honest work. There is very little theatrical drama, no tension or angst. With all the injustices and atrocities, hardships and disappointments that this man has suffered you’d expect to see anger, grief, resentment or questioning in the face of the loss of his country, wife and child. But there is none. Instead, a gentle recount delivered with respect and equanimity. Tsering Tsewang demonstrates rather than tells the practice of Buddhism and refuses hectic and exhausting emotionalism. Under floating video clouds he allows us to contemplate the paradox of happiness, injustice and impermanence. Almost infuriating, but not.

Hanging onto the tail of a goat. A Tibetan Journey, created & devised by Tsering Tsewang, Jan Cornall & Brian Joyce, performer Tsering Tsewang, writer Jan Cornall, director/dramaturg Brian Joyce, Gasworks Theatre, Melbourne, May 2-20

Virginia Hilyard and Varsha Nair’s first collaborative project your hand opens and closes and opens and closes grew out of an opportunity to work together in Bangkok. There are 3 variable elements: 2 video projections with sound, woven mats from Thailand, and the smell of linament. This scent overlays the significance of the visual imagery and the material of the woven mats with particular reference to certain kinds of cultural practices. The video projections are slowed down sequences of Thai boxing and massage, where lyrical imagery transposes the conventional meanings of these events: the force and speed of boxing, and the nurturing, medicinal connotations of massage are manipulated to imply their opposite. The boxing becomes a delicate, graceful dance, drained of violence. The passivity of the hand being massaged is almost painful to watch as the viewer hears the quick heavy slap of hands and fists on the body.

Firmly located in the trajectory of experimental film, the subtle formal and technical processes—the treatment of the original video, including a positive/negative reversal, and the draining of the colour back to duotone—are seductive. They direct the viewer from an almost abstract movement of tone (carefully framed details that add layers of signification to the imagery such as the boxers’ decorative arm bands, the flecks of sweat flickering across the screen, the background text) to a questioning of the location, particularly the cultural location, of the work. The mats provide a reference—the arena specifically and Thailand generally—and even to the scale of the massage table, folded as they are to body size on the floor. As with all their work, the space of installation, here Darwin’s 24HR Art, is a working part of the experience of the piece.

screen, the second collaborative work, is made up of 2 large scale black and white duratrans. (A duratran is a photographic transfer process where the image is developed on opaque plastic: it is designed to be backlit and has a luminous quality when lit that diffuses the light through the image.) The first is a close-up of a mouth held open for the inspection and intrusion of the dentist’s tools, confronting the viewer with the border between inside and outside, and with the vulnerability of an open mouth—open to the violence of a medical apparatus—and the simultaneous sensation that at that moment the body shuts down, protects and closes in some internal way. Redolent with filmic reference, and medical and even sexual violence, the image refers us to the heroine’s scream on the one hand and our own personal trauma on the other (in Buddhist terms, always just outside the frame, the suffering of the human condition at the least).

At the centre of this image is the figure of the filmic frame, the fade to black: the perfect circle of the dentist’s mirror reflects only the grain of the film and the play of black and white, a cypher for the abyss, the frozen moment of breathless anticipation through which interiority is marked, an identity constituted, sense made of interpretation. The mirror does not reflect, signification is not transparent but distorted and ‘open’ to our individual reading.

The companion image in the piece is a blown up reversed x-ray of a pair of hands, held up for the medical gaze, but in that gesture both open to receiving and closed to shield, and again protect. Do they cover the vulnerable mouth, ward off a blow, contain signs of age or illness, or are they caught in the moment of coming together in prayer? While almost body size there is a delicacy and fragility about them, and a conceit about a Western will to knowledge and mastery that, even when dissecting the body, misses the unseen or the non-material.

The duratrans are lit from behind by the careful placement of linear fluorescent tubes, which echo the structure of the images: 2 hands held up moving outward from the wrists, the horizontal of the mouth flanked by the handles of invading instruments. This draws the images into the space and into an awareness of a physical relation to the work, at once inside and at one remove. Indeed, what lies behind is a crucial metaphor: what is hidden, what is beneath the skin, what is beneath our understanding, is the substance of the work’s allusions.

screen is accompanied by an intense and insistent soundtrack, the slowed down syncopated rhythm of crickets droning and humming: a piercing sound that insinuates itself into the mind and echoes in the body. This oppressive aural attack extrapolates the work of the images in leading the viewer to a very physical experience of open and closed, inside and out.

The third installation in the exhibition is Hilyard’s The Room which, located in close proximity, extends screen into other visual and rhetorical domains. The images are backlit duratrans of 2 drawings: the rubbing of a large antique steel security door, its solidity, strength and heavyness translated into the translucent lightness of a sheet of paper, and its form fractured, torn and lifted from its past use and materiality. Again, it serves as a sign for open and closed (the internal relation implied by a door—never simply open or closed), the physicality of exit and entry, the space of containment and security, and as a metaphor for the body under the impact of a psychology and an emotional terrain.

It is accompanied by an image of a multilayered rubbing of a coat, structured along the axis of a row of pebbles in the place of a spine, and a frenetic coil of rope in the place of internal organs. The disparate elements come together in a seamless and coherent weave of signs, alluding again to interiority and a range of emotional and psychological identifications. The Room, this room, is a claustrophobic space, anxious, frantic even, which has been set in thin sheets of opaque light-permeable plastic, confounding ideas about external and internal, imposed constraint and self-imposed strictures, resonating across a cultural divide to Buddhist ideas of impermanence, suffering and the illusions our minds create.

The work of Hilyard and Nair requires and rewards time and attention and is a series of visual, aural, olfactory and spatial encounters that play on our ideas of introspection and interpretation, always refering richly outside their frame. A range of visual codes explores the particularity, detail and personal encounter, as well as what it means to encounter culture, and the culture of another. The viewer is led through an identificatory process, physically at least, if not emotionally, psychologically and then, perhaps, spiritually.

Virginia Hilyard and Varsha Nair, your hand opens and closes and opens and closes; screen; The Room, 24HR Art, Darwin, April 27–May 19

In late April, Rosalind Crisp’s Omeo Dance Studio celebrated “5 years with 5 days of dance”, a mini-festival including new work traffic and et al. (billed as “a part-y of embodied history”), a forum, and the eleventh Rushing the Sloth, a monthly improvisation event curated by Andrew Morrish.

traffic and et al. represent 2 facets of the activity that Omeo Studio has been supporting over the past 5 years. Firstly, it has provided the space and environment for Crisp’s continuing production of finely honed and consistently developing choreographic work, represented by the piece traffic. Secondly, the profile of the studio—having grown organically from Crisp’s own vision and needs as an artist—is a distinctive one within the Sydney arts scene and has become a base for dancers, choreographers and affiliated artists with shared interests. With regular classes and showings, Omeo manages to be many things to many people and this was well represented at the Saturday night, shoes off, wine guzzling party, et al.

traffic has an accumulative structure which has become a signature of Crisp’s group works for her company stella b. The economy with which this is processed (22 minutes) intensifies its structural motif both in terms of the movement of bodies in space and the composition of the choreography itself. Nalina Wait begins creating simple, clear shapes at the back of the room as if feeling her way into the space, marking out trajectories with the dimensions of her body as she goes. This is a ‘beginning’ physically written through with all it must establish. As the work intensifies with flurries, shimmers and twists replacing the carefully delineated, static poses of the opening, the driving techno score by David Corbet makes itself felt. The work suddenly takes off at this point and expires just as quickly, leaving me wondering what hit me. stella b. have taken another leap with this work, towards the concise, hard-hitting and neatly packaged.

et al. was a party with occasional performances scattered inside the studio and projected outside the windows onto Gladstone Steet. Food and wine passed around the room, Andrew Morrish hosted the evening in his disarming style, and animated conversations petered out as attentions were focused in this corner or that. I admit to not catching it all—due in equal parts to the crowds, apparently uninterruptable conversations, and a kind of general party-induced fatigue. Highlights included The Fondue Set (Emma Saunders, Jane McKernan and Elizabeth Ryan), party girls who wriggled their way through the crowd with plates of food and wine and put their duties aside for a nifty dance of combined social gestures and party moves. Fonduette McKernan presented a neat and minimal little solo before a microphone stand that evoked the sometimes fascinating gesticulations of pop singers.

Eleanor Brickhill baffled and bewitched with a comfortingly incongruous display of sleeping positions. She reappeared, rehearsing postures before a mirror manipulated by Crisp, and there was also a presentation of her writing read aloud by Morrish. It was satisfying to see Brickhill being recognised in this way for her significance as a passionate commentator on Sydney’s dance culture. Helen Clarke-Lapin showed off her always impressive contact skills with David Corbett, drawing Morrish briefly into the mix. And Nikki Heywood stole the show, shuffling into the room in a borrowed suit with plastic covers over her shoes, postulating poetically on the studio space, evoking the bodies that have worked there and making them resonate, while providing a schizo-commentary on her own performance.

traffic, stella b. (Rosalind Crisp, Nalina Wait, Katy Macdonald); et al. various artists, sound design David Corbet, lighting Mark Mitchell, Omeo Dance Studio, Sydney, April 25-27

War is noise. Tactical land warfare reconfigures space as an amplified terrain of threatening sonic occurrences whose indistinction and multiplicity confer sound as noise—as a complete collapse of decipherable sound. From faint rustles in the bush to simulated bird calls in the jungle to rebounding echoic gunfire on mountains, the key signifiers of sound—its origin, source, perspective, orientation, content and purpose—are rendered invisible and hidden; disguised and undisclosed. In its life-threatening and death-affirming din, war thus becomes the penultimate dislocation of sound from image. It is no surprise, then, that so many survivors of the battlefield suffer a variety of forms of shock. Their psyches still reverberate, wrack, shudder and flinch with psychoacoustic replays of military ‘noisefare’ encoded into their being and looped into uncontrollable and unpredictable cycles of playback and feedback. From the actual sonic event in the past, to its acoustic resemblance in the present, to its imaginary recall in the mind, all sounds can trigger the same disorienting asynchronism advanced by the audiovisual dislocation in war.

The postwar body—from the aged veteran to the youthful discharge—experiences the sonic landscape of peaceful territories in a way deeply removed from our non-militarized comprehension of urban, suburban and rural space. We have little collective understanding of how the sound of what one has experienced on the battlefield can transform one’s inhabitation of the space beyond. Shallow understanding of the relation between sound and psyche irresponsibly verges on ignorance in the hands of so many healing sciences of the mind. Unmitigated dismissal of the importance of the sonic and psychoacoustic in audiovisual media plays its part in painting a landscape of deafness in which psychology maintains its scopic mandates of inquiry.

When Francis Ford Coppola embarked on the making of Apocalypse Now (1979) he outlined a swelling body of documentary footage from the era as a field from which to paint an intentionally accurate picture of the American intervention in Vietnam. One key documentary cited was Eugene S Jones’ observation of US Marine field combat with the Viet Cong in 1966, A Face Of War (1968). Coppola even requested a print of the film to screen to his actors on location in the Philippines. Their contact prompted Jones to provide what was to be a revealing document that precisely described what it was like to hear the sounds of war. Jones submitted a 26 page letter to Coppola’s film company which included 16 pages of detailed sono-spatial notes on just about every piece and component of weaponry and ammunition used in the Viet Cong field and jungle conflicts. This information undoubtedly formed a valuable aural topology for both Coppola and sound designer Walter Murch. It has taken decades for their collaborative work on this landmark cinesonic film to be openly acknowledged as a major force in the shaping of American modern film sound—but little has been noted on how important Jones’ sound documentary was in guiding Coppola and Murch’s work. The Vietnam era has been historically mediarised as a McLuhanesque rupture of the domestic by the electronic image (televised images with little location sound and maximal voice-over reportage), leaving us to presume that the sonic, acoustic, spatial and psychoacoustic had no role to play in ‘Nam and interventionist conflicts around the globe since.

If we are deaf to how the post-war terrain betrays a silence wherein sonic memories, vocal traces and aural scars operate beyond our emotional and psychological listening range, we are just as likely deaf to the importation and exportation of music and song in the shattered shuttling between zones of war and spaces of peace. Heddy Honigmann’s Crazy (2000) has grasped this in an intuitive and exploratory way. Soldiers, aid-workers and counselors who have spent military duty and/or peace-keeping time in places like Seoul, Saigon, Phnom Penh, Lebanon, Kosovo and Rwanda are interviewed about what songs they cherished from their time spent in those places, and what memories the songs bring back. Then, in a recall of the camera gaze shared by Warhol and Ackerman, we watch their faces as they listen to the songs. The beauty of the film is not in what many will probably misinterpret as a humanist celebration of the will to survive beyond the ravages of such hellish experiences, but in its foregrounding of how song—in its most consumerist guise and outright commodification—can transcend just about every damning critique of pop music written by stodgy old farts who think Bob Dylan and Van Morrison define the pantheon of modern song form.

The film opens with the phased churning of a chopper intermingling with strains of The Three Tenors singing Nessun Dorma (from the Puccini opera Turandot). Despite the oft-ignored fact that opera is about the clash of beauty with death (and hence a grand template for all modernist audiovisual destructo-narrative), Coppola’s use of The Ride of The Valkyries from Wagner’s Ring Cycle is specifically about the bombardment of death with beauty. The music is blasted at the Viet Cong from the choppers, freaking them with European bombast to disorient their aural landscape. But in Crazy, it is revealed that Nessun Dorma is less a musical projectile and more an aural impression which maps the face that listens to it. As we watch the ex-soldier listen to one of the 80s’ most kitsch grotesqueries of High Art super-group bellowing, it is as if the pores of his skin exude with all the space between the laser-burnt pits of the CD recording. Eyes open, occasionally blinking, audibly breathing, he—like most of Crazy’s subjects—does not fit the desired romanticized semi-religious icon of the ecstatic listener, enthralled by harmonic rapture with eyes wide shut. His face is removed, ungiving, transported. The effect is undeniable: we bear witness to the phonological materiality of the song as inscription; as that which is listened to rather than encoded, recorded, produced or performed. The transparent psycho-sonic skin which wavers between objectivity (the song as music) and subjectivity (the song as experience) shimmers and fluctuates.

How can I say this? Because all the songs played hold no particular significance or pleasure for me, yet I am moved by their presence in the film. I am not pathetically responding to an overtly emotionally loaded situation. (Dumb humanist identification is predicated on the puerile Pavlovian response to only the grossest displays of emotion.) I can actually hear the architecsonic impact of the song as it guides its listener (simultaneously the film’s on-screen subject and me) in a way that transports me beyond my taste in music. The songs, then, are possessed by an ownership far greater and more powerful than my relation to the music. Even if the music did reflect my taste, my relation to the song would most likely feel trivial compared to the clinging lifeline it provided to the film’s subjects.

Is this axial shift in identifying music possible with anyone? And with any music? Is it an event of experiential revelation or a linkage in a developed sensibility? For as long as I can remember, 60s recordings of slow-paced cabaret crooning with reverberant voices cooing in a manner reminiscent of 50s doo-wop have struck me as achingly empty in their echoic rendering and stylistic somnambulism. To many (especially film people) such songs are camp, tacky, kitsch and great to use in send-up situations. As I hear those swooping violins, that muted ‘lounge’ rhythm and the self-mockingly maudlin voice, I associate the songs with Korean vets and their metal implants, withered penises, dysfunctional marriages and psychosexual cracks, alone at a bar and gripped in a sodden existential stasis. Powerful songs can be those within which you can sense the navigational path for someone’s potential empathy with the song, irrespective of your preferences or reading of the song’s importance.

Cinema is a wonderful machine for generating this effect. The laying of music ‘on top of’ someone’s face on a screen can not only project an emotional reading of the character’s state of mind, but also externalize the interiority of the imagined person. Crazy outrightly documents this. Each song states: I am what is inside this head, behind this face, within this listener. Crazy also proves that any narrative can embrace any song for any purpose. It is in this rare documentary that song and music raises this issue while virtually all fictional film dramas engineer the film score as if music and song has to control, shape and dictate the emotional energy maps of its characters. This notion of film music is typical of the authorial delusion which governs the act of writing in general and cinema in particular—that all elements in the fictional scenario are there to reinforce the power of authorial voice which places them there. Film scoring—the act of laying a particular piece of music ‘on top of’ a face—is a desperate claim for the selective power of music and how it can be used as a controlling force within narrative. Crazy evidences music—in the receptacle of songs—as an uncontrollable force, both from the song-writer/singer’s intention and in the film subjects’ reception of the song. The ex-soldiers all fix their songs to precise incidents and moments, which did not call for the songs. Such music—as one guy puts it in the film—is “weird stuff.” In the end, all the songs perform as talismans against the craziness in which they found themselves gradually sinking. Crazy is a testament not merely to the human spirit, but to the power of song.

When Tom Logan (played by Jack Nicholson) slits the throat of Lee Clayton (Marlon Brando) in Arthur Penn’s Missouri Breaks (1976), Logan invokes and externalizes Clayton’s own crazy (psychotic) disposition. Leaning over him and breathing into his nostrils, he says “You know what woke you up? Lee, you just had your throat cut.” Face to face, they mirror each other not with symmetrical precision, but through a resonant balance. Logan lives out the impulse to bear witness to the death of his nemesis less as a classical gesture of narrative closure, and more as a will to discern whether the aural bears any witness to its visual encoding on the face. It doesn’t. Sound exists in the much deeper recesses of the mind. The face is but an iced-over veneer of still pools whose traumas operate at frequencies beyond registering of troubled waters. The blank face of the traumatized is not an impassive countenance; it is an impassable terrain, saying “If you could only hear how I hear…”

Crazy, directed by Heddy Honigmann, screened at the 2000 Sydney Film Festival and is currently touring as part of the AFI’s European Film Festival.

To take something at face value is to take it as it comes or as it appears, without prejudice and expectation. How possible is it to take something ‘as it comes’, especially our faces, when they are so coded, inscribed and readable? Of the abstract machinery of faciality and facialisation, Deleuze and Guattari write, “the face is a surface: facial traits, lines, wrinkles; long face, square face, triangular face; the face is a map, even when it is applied to and wraps around a volume, even when it surrounds and borders cavities that are now no more than holes” (A Thousand Plateaus, University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

So, our faces are subjectified, signs and signifiers: currency in various exchanges, caught between the value and virtue of beauty, residual eugenics and the sexual selection of Mr Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Artist John Tonkin explained that eugenics is a close relative of evolution, having been developed by none other than Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, in the late 19th century. Tonkin, speaking at an Artist’s Talk at the Queensland Art Gallery about his life as an artist, described eugenics as an enlightenment project that developed a “real obsession with working out the interior of things from the exterior.”

For Tonkin, there are sinister comparisons between the ‘sciences’ of eugenics and physiognomy and the Human Genome Project. “It seemed to me that there were parallels with what was happening a couple of hundred years ago and what was happening now…Today’s science is tomorrow’s bad science.” Since 1992, Tonkin has appropriated these sciences for a body of work comprising elective physiognomies, elective masculinities and personal eugenics. As he speaks, he quotes from various texts: about “traits of industry, integrity and genuine piety” and how “physiognomy takes cognisance of races and nations as well as of individuals.”

When Tonkin appropriates the tropes of eugenics and the Human Genome Project in his programmed and installation-based interactives, he makes it all about YOU—your imperfections, your survival, your readings, your prejudices. Entering into a game of portraiture with the user, there’s a give and take of data which the artist collects for ongoing analysis. The data is averaged to create a “public consensus” of sorts. Tonkin’s practice tests the assumptions (and practices) of science, subjectivity and technoculture. In this era of an emergent ‘posthuman’, eugenics is something we do to ourselves, caught up in the rush of ‘self-help’ and ‘self-improvement’, to become something else or to invest ourselves with other qualities.

In personal eugenics, exhibited at the QAG as part of A Centenary of Faces, users manipulate images of their faces to become someone else. It’s as easy and as fast as changing an online nickname. Each user has their photo taken and decides how they want to “evolve” (eg become more considerate). Then the work produces several variations and the user decides which of those s/he wants to evolve. “When you choose one of those you choose which one survives to the next generation…You can actually do as many generations as you like—there’s nothing stopping you going to a total extreme.” As in eugenics, behavioural qualities are translated into physical traits. The user receives 2 hard copies of the result: one goes onto the wall of the ‘kiosk’ and the other is for the user, a souvenir of their foray into ‘identity tourism.’

Similarly, with elastic masculinities users can construct a body, manipulating a digital image to develop a picture of a ‘sensual’ or ‘vulnerable’ body. “With this piece I was also interested in how fluid our sense of our own body is…How day to day your sense of shape changes with your state of mind.” In a survey, you put your perceptions to the test for elective physiognomies. In accordance with a list of qualities such as ‘trustworthiness’, the user categorises 5 manipulations of the artist’s face.

During his 2 year Australia Council New Media Arts Fellowship, Tonkin commenced work on a grand unified theory of self, focused on the correlation and collection of ‘data.’ Again driven by user interaction, this work will let users correlate their own behaviours (eg how much coffee they drink) with global activities such as share performance on the stock market. Engaging chaos theory to a degree, individuals can monitor how their actions and habits are impacting on the world. Tonkin’s works occupy the juncture of the subjective and the scientific, poking fun at some persistent ideas about determinism, reductivism, empiricism and perceptual systems.

John Tonkin: Artist’s Talk, Queensland Art Gallery, March 23; personal eugenics, part of A Centenary of Faces: Celebrating the Centenary of Federation, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, March 29-June 3

Convention dictates that the central characters in a feature film reveal themselves to the audience in such a way that we may share their ideals and problems. This process of identification applies even to unlikable characters. The need to understand evil in a personality is almost a sub-genre in cinema.

While these journeys to the dark side might not be historically new—there is a tradition that goes back to Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949) where we had to be aware of gangster James Cagney’s mother complex in order to understand his predilection for shooting people locked in the boot of his car—it does suggest that cinema is now more interested in the shady rather than the wholesome.

But what happens when the central character is both a lost personality and so interesting that we come to genuinely care for him?

Ana Kokkinos’s film Head On turns this into a compelling advantage. Her hero Ari, played by Alex Dimitriades, hardly responds to experience in a way that progresses his personal story—in fact, the final sequence of Head On deliberately denies the idea of redemption in the life of the central character.

There are several strategies employed. The first and most important is that Ari is always on screen. It is a technique borrowed from classic detective stories—we know only what the private eye learns and experiences—and we must deduce and digest the same information as the character. There is no allowance for a wider interpretation. This confines us and the character into a tight relationship of mutual knowledge.

Having established this, Kokkinos then allows Ari to progress from incident to incident in his 24-hour journey, while we can only guess at the ‘map’ he might be using. Each event does not, on the surface, advance him towards any specific destination. Later we realise this might be an acceptance of his destiny.

In dramatic terms each scene is, in some sense, a structured failure. All relationships that might stabilise Ari result in argument and escape. In succession he is asked to accompany his parents to a Greek club, has several failed attempts at seduction, and is arrested by the police and subsequently beaten. To confirm the dramatic intent of the film, the only thing that is in any sense successful in this day-in-a-life is anonymous tough sex with strangers in alleyways. These encounters are presented as a risky addiction, whereas everything else in Ari’s world is an obligation to be rejected or avoided.

In Ari we are shown only the need for oblivion, and the frustration we sense in him has the potential for violence. Kokkinos cleverly contrasts this with black and white images from his parents’ early days in Australia as they took up the political cause of opposing the Junta back in Greece. They at least had ideals and a cause, a channel for their beliefs and anger at their personal and collective condition.

Head On clearly says that one generation later, the children of those idealists are adrift in an Australia that does not politically engage them. There is only a dwindling tradition of weddings and afternoon card games where English is not spoken and the old songs are sung. These are not major scenes, but their cumulative effect is a major narrative strategy of the film. Small incidents, repeated with slight variation, building to a statement about the absorption of immigrant values within the wider Australia.

Ari’s brother does have political discussions in cafes but the language used is deliberately presented as hollow rhetoric. These discussions are also shown to be the province of the articulate and the employed. Both are conditions that Ari fervently eschews.

By showing the tensions within Ari’s family, particularly between father and son, Head On also depicts the fracturing of that traditionally important structure which in turn confirms the ‘drifting’ of Ari as a personality, cut loose from the values that would have reinforced his identity within a specific community.

Head On does not conform to a classical feature script structure and, as such, should be seen as a courageous piece of writing. By using incidents rather than major set events, and by forcing the audience to interpret Ari’s thoughts about his condition from what they see rather than what they’re told through dialogue, the script proposes a less literary form of Australian film writing and instead espouses the value of the visual as primary content.

Head On, director Ana Kokkinos, writers Kokkinos, Andrew Bovell, Mira Robertson (adapted from the book, Loaded, by Christos Tsiolkas), distributor Palace Films, currently available on video from Roadshow Home Entertainment.

The project started off with my interest in some wooden towers and concrete structures in the wasteland area near the West Gate Bridge and my background with Loophole Cinema (UK). When I was with Loophole we used to do a lot of filming with Bolex cameras for site specific installations and performances which we did around Europe and where we met a lot of people with kinetic machines and expanded cinema.
Paul Rodgers

There is a scene in the great Brian De Palma film Blow Out where the main character, sound artist Jack Terry (played by John Travolta), tries to reconstruct an earlier crime scene of a fatal car accident which he heard and partially witnessed. He cuts out from a magazine the still images of this accident, which were apparently captured by a photographer working on location when the car spun out of control. Jack edits these still images together, turning them into a montage of movement as he adds his own sound recording. He then projects his film, bringing this earlier scene back to life, reanimating this moment and the magic of cinematic projection.

The installation Projection Machines also plays with the magic and meaning of film projection. Paul Rodgers’ work crosses the mediums of experimental film, video, site specific performance and installation, digital media and construction-based projects. Projection Machines presents 2 kinetic machines—The Dome and The Beacon—which (in their own ways) project captured images of Melbourne’s industrial wastelands. The experience they offer is of an expanded cinema that encourages contemplation of how we read and understand images and their referents in all of their fleeting, magical, incandescent materiality.

The Dome dominates the space, as if it were the centre of a darkened cube, a multi-projection machine allowing many points of view. Its hemispherical, translucent structure functions as both container and contents: projector and reflector. Rodgers describes it as a “biosphere: a container of select Melbourne landscapes” whose surface also plays host to a scattered montage of fragmented wastelands and refracted industrial scenes. The images are projected from within, sweeping across the dome’s skin, like interrogating search lights. Yet the interior workings, its logic, remains opaque. What is left of these emanations are confounding, swirling and fleeting images, partially recognisable as a pylon or a neglected, overgrown patch of earth. They defy our efforts to read them into complete images, or to recognise them as narrative or formal patterns.

This relationship between the machine and its projected images reveals a number of interesting contradictions, the most obvious being that between the container and its contents. While the biosphere represents a life-affirming force, what it projects are places that have been left behind, remnants; a vision that has run its course or remains incomplete and unresolved. What is preserved and archived is the evidence of decay or dissolution. The second contradiction has to do with the beauty of light projections that render fragmented images of emptiness somehow magical and whole. And so, quite surprisingly, the refracted looping projection of endlessly repeating and abstracted images creates mesmeric, though fleeting, beauty out of ephemeral records of waste and desolation.

The Beacon represents a sentinel at the entrance to the cube (gallery) and offers an alternative way of entering this space. In appearance it is like a projection booth, pieced together from found material. It is a private site, unlike the communal circumnavigation of The Dome, and it works on the principle of exclusion—a projection machine for one. Inside The Beacon a small 4 to 5 second loop of grainy 16mm footage of industrial wastelands can be viewed by hand cranking the machine’s projection forwards or backwards.

As we enter, a heat seeking surveillance detector toggles on the machine’s power, illuminating its projection. And then, just as we settle into viewing the loop of film, our stillness, our physical inaction, suddenly turns the projection off and disrupts the process of reading.

With its hazy, indistinct and intermittent projection, The Beacon returns us to the age of the kinetiscope, as if it were a time machine. But its primitive mechanism simultaneously renders us outside of, and lost to, the process of projection itself. The result is that this sentinel, this portal to the past, remains essentially mysterious. Is this a time machine from the future where the past (today) is so wasted that we would not want to travel back to our time, or is the future so opaque and uncharted that we hesitate to go there? In the end it is only our action (activity) that keeps the promise (of projection and vision) alive.

These kinetic machines remain landmarks on a map—locations meant to help us find our way, or to discover where we are. Yet they equally dislocate, separating us from the images they project. Despite circumnavigating The Dome with its visions of a post-industrial future, and stepping inside The Beacon to journey into an industrial past, we are no closer to reasoning the bits and fragments that are seen and heard, remembered and projected, into a history beyond our own; we are left stranded amongst these magnificent machines.

In Blow Out, Jack Terry believes the film that he has so dexterously pieced together provides an answer, a revelation about the accident that took place. But the film disappears. It is erased by mysterious conspirators leaving behind only the static of the screen. The message in De Palma’s film is that the more we try to employ images and sounds as evidence, solutions and answers, the more that resolution will escape us. What we are left with is the dissolution of those images and sounds; hazy memories of something that has now passed us by. It is in this dissolution of images and sounds of a world of waste that Paul Rodgers’ Projection Machines so precisely places us.

Projection Machines, Paul Rodgers, producer Keely Macarow, Mass Gallery, Melbourne, April 4-21

Following the complete course of 10 Days on the Island, I became increasingly aware of both the divisions that beset Tasmania and the various ways in which Robyn Archer’s festival sought to heal them. It had opened at Risdon Cove, an Aboriginal massacre site, welcomed by the Cape Barren Island music of the Palawa exile. At Port Arthur, the aerial gyrations of Strange Fruit offered a weird challenge to associations with convict brutality and the Bryant massacre. In the convict city of Launceston, a grimy, deserted railway workshop echoed with the sounds and memories of a heyday blotted out by its harsh 1970s closure.

And right at the festival’s end, hippies and loggers met across that other great Tassie divide in an east coast sheep paddock. Sea Chant wasn’t always an easy encounter, its knife-edge balance sharpest as bass Gary Rowley sang the almost militaristic Jobs, Jobs, Jobs by local Imogen Lidgett, while we looked on clear-fellers doing their worst. Somehow lines like “Now we can all feed our families” sounded less than thankful, more an excuse, by a community, both on and off stage, which depends on the chipping port of Triabunna and its atomised eucalypt mountain of chips looming over the ships being loaded. Not surprising when the East Coast Regional Development Organisation, sponsored by Forestry Tasmania and North Ltd/Gunns, had commissioned Con Koukias (IHOS Opera) from Hobart to make the show in the first place!

Sea Chant was not an opera, by the way. It was a carefully inclusive community pageant in the manner of those created by Gilbert Spottiswood as Queensland’s State Pageant’s Officer in the 80s. Does such an indispensable position exist today, I wonder? Local schools, choirs, shearers, companies and historians had all contributed the bricks which the IHOS team cemented loosely together. Koukias contributed a catchy mock-Medieval chant celebrating the botanical names for eucalypts, recorded by local artist Louisa Ann Meredith. Other music included a Victorian lullaby, ‘we’ll all be rooned’ ballads by land and sea, a marvellously choreographed tribute to fish-packing, and a moment to be treasured as maestro Michael Kieran Harvey belted out Bach on a harmonium fit to madden any merinos within hearing.

Meanwhile, back at Launceston’s derelict Inveresk Railyards, life is springing anew thanks to the Queen Victoria Museum. Eventually a National Heritage Museum will make use of the whole site where (locals recall) 2000 workers knocked off promptly at 5 every afternoon until the 70s, flooding local streets with their bicycles. Overheard at Inveresk was the first twitter of Spring, a sound installation by Melbourne composer David Young incorporating both industrial noise and the words of workers from the Blacksmiths Shop, recalling the labour they were proud of in conditions that were rugged before being rationalised out onto the street.

Four performances of a miniature opera by Young also took place on sunny afternoons that created positive blocks of light in this smoke-blackened negative world. Soprano Maria Lurighi and percussionist Tom O’Kelly reflected both worlds, O’Kelly conjuring crystalline sounds from the rusted rollers of a 3 metre ex-industrial gamelan; Lurighi somehow combining a libretto using (amongst other sources) the Tasmanian Government Railways’ Book of Rules and Regulations from 1950 with the role of Naucrate, mother of the flighty Icarus. That story never really emerged from my necessarily partial viewing of events around the big shed; the safety limit of 200 was reached at each of the scheduled performances, requiring a bonus fourth to be added.

It was mainly the setting, therefore, that transported me thousands of miles to Midland in Perth—to another railway shed where 7000 had been tossed out by the same benevolent National Rail Authority. There, at the 1997 Perth Festival, I’d endured and been profoundly affected by the premiere of Richard Barrett’s Opening of the Mouth. ELISION’s recorded performance brings it all back chillingly—one of the Brisbane group’s finest (ABC Classics CD 465 268-2).

But back in Tasmania, it was exciting to travel the surprising length and breadth of that isle to find people in garages, internet cafes and wineries talking about their first international arts festival. Could it have been because the effort conjured by magician Robyn Archer was—as all good art should be—a necessary one? Had she somehow collected island art from around the world that really meant something on this island? And what will she come up with in 2003—having been instantly confirmed in her position by Premier Jim Bacon—now that she knows the territory that much better?

10 Days on the Island Festival, Artistic Director Robyn Archer, Tasmania, March 30-April 8: Sea Chant, Tasmania’s East Coast Regional Development Organisation & IHOS Opera, Grindstone Bay Merino Stud, Triabunna, April 6-8; Overheard at Inveresk, David Young, Michael Hewes, Inveresk Railyards, Launceston, April 5-7, installation March 30-April 8

Tiago Carneiro da Cunha, Low attention span/high curiosity rate (portrait of Peter Elliot)

Entering Gallery4A in Sydney you see 30 VHS tapes displayed on the wall. You select one, Low attention span/high curiosity rate (portrait of Peter Elliot) by Taigo Carneiro da Cunha, and step back and place it in the VHS player behind you. You seat yourself on a couch. On a large screen is projected the image of a corner in a white room. In that room are 3 boxes and a man. A very chunky man. This man has short crutches attached to his arms which he uses to walk and run on all fours. Occasionally he screeches and, jumping up, runs at the camera, arms and crutches flailing about in the air. You watch—is this a recording of some kind of behaviorist experiment? Some bizarre private fantasy? Then you realise. This man is not a pantomime act—he IS a gorilla. Every pause, gesture and vocalisation perfectly mimics the animal’s behaviour. Peter Elliot is a professional ape appearing in many films including Greystoke—The Legend of Tarzan Lord of the Apes and Gorillas in the Mist.

This work (amongts others in the programme) is indicative of a kind of radical anti-aesthetic in much contemporary video art. Actions and events are presented and left unexplained. What we have are tapes with the quality of documents—documents of actions and everyday events which problematise the act of viewing and the perception of the world from which they were taken. There is no obvious attempt to be ‘creative’ within the medium. But this video raises all kinds of uncertainty about mimesis. For a split second we have no idea what we are looking at. We don’t have a framework for what we are seeing.

Rotator (by Volker Eichelman and Ruth Maclennan) presents a series of shots of an ideal European romantic garden accompanied by a soundtrack of kitsch filler music. Like so much contemporary photography which seems to objectively render people, landscapes and buildings, it seemingly documents without comment. Different shots are part of a hyper-real catalogue in which everything is rendered in absolute detail. The romantic being emptied of romance, leaving behind the banal shell of hyper image. However the low resolution video image has trouble competing with the high resolution of the large photographic prints of much contemporary photography (see Bernd and Hiller Becher, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth et al).

Time is indeterminate. Most of the works are loops or of an indefinite duration. You may watch them for as long or as little as you want. Exhibition space is also indeterminate. These works could be individually installed in a gallery, appear as a segment screened on TV, or projected in public spaces. Like a pop song or an ad they can exist in any situation. Charles Saatchi says simplicity is one of the qualities of great advertising. This kind of video art shares this simplicity. The concepts are so simple that they transcend context.

New Releases: An International Survey of Recent Works on Video,curator Emil Goh, presented by dLux media arts, Gallery4A & the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, March 15-April 14

Botched attempts at family ritual, the absurd or impossible ‘noughties’ relationship, conceptual flights and schoolyard racism—I struggled to find neat thematic links between films at the FTO Young Filmmakers’ Fund (YFF) Festival. The films shared only their difference—in approach, form, style, genre and content—and their popularity; the (over) capacity crowd was lounging in the aisles on the plush Chauvel Cinema carpet the Sunday I attended.

The Beach Story, written and directed by Kathleen Drayton, is a spare and quietly amusing drama. Artfully shot, it peels raw the idiosyncrasies of family dynamics which a trip to the beach can intensify. Mum puts the SLAP in slip slop slap when partner Frank (Russell Dykstra) gets fresh during sunblock application, his hands like blowflies busy over her flesh. Bored and embarrassed, daughter Holly wanders off to practise a Popstars-style dance routine on a rock pitted with dark pools until she’s interrupted by a (literal) wanker reclining, naked, behind her, one hand moving in sleazy applause.

Holly flees one erection to find Frank busy with another. She watches him mould his blokey sandcastle—a replica of a car (his Triumph)—then kicks dents in the chassis. We almost feel her shudder when he reveals his serial-sculpting history: “I reckon it’s the best one I’ve ever done.” Frank meticulously photographs his sandcastle, getting greater pleasure, we suspect, from souveniring the moment, than from his ardent sculpting. Meanwhile Mum, who has dozed, sunbaked and flirted with a nearby beach-ball enthusiast, announces with delicious, ambiguous gravity, “It’s over.” She trudges wearily back to the car, her limbs draped and tangled in beach paraphernalia, like something weedy dragged up from the sea. The playful script, adept performances and lulling cinematography made this trip a memorably visceral one; I could clearly imagine their journey home: the sting of seat vinyl on sun-crisped thighs, sand in previously unexplored crevices of flesh, the old car sizzling with too much heat…

From the ocean to the concrete, spray-painted ‘burbs of Newcastle, Intersectionz is a grungy, skater drama in fish-eye focus set to the sound of local bands. The action-versus-adolescent-torpor narrative takes an awkward turn in the final moments, but the intriguing (and puzzling) inclusion of a dad who’s half-mad professor, half Big Kev, means the work escapes the neat formula of My Old China. Written and directed by Linden Goh, My Old China explores the theme of racist schoolyard bullying and is stylishly shot with a fight scene in which saliva is threateningly dangled and drooled. Yet for me, Goh’s film lacked the complexity which might have intensified and enriched the depiction of the Chinese boy’s experience.

A video documentary about the life and decline of a young, HIV-positive woman, Chrissy, won the Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival (and screened on SBS last year). Chrissy’s friend Jacqui North directed, produced and wrote this record of a life punctuated with fistfuls of medication and an acute awareness of approaching death. North doesn’t shield us from discomfort as she dwells overlong on Chrissy, battling nausea at the family dinner with a wrenching, empty smile, one sister quietly departing to return with a plastic bucket; or sister Adele, recalling Chrissy’s proud boast that her cardiac arrest was the biggest ever: “when she does anything, she does the full thing…” Despite predictable home-footage of an unsteady toddling Chrissy on a stretch of Queensland lawn, the small and intensely particular moments of Chrissy’s adult life and her family’s acceptance of her grim future are compelling and moving.

Contemporary Case Studies, directed and written by Janet Merewether, is an assured and overtly stylised exploration of a 30-something, hetero, single woman’s lament. The series of neatly designed, crisply scripted segments are intensified through the adroit use of small details. A woman mines for a splinter in the soft flesh of her foot with tweezers; another twitches with shame while coming out to her analyst as a…heterosexual!, venting her feelings with an inflatable, phallic punching bag; 2 friends commiserate on the state of contemporary men—one makes pastry, the other recites verses from poet Gig Ryan’s early 80s tirade, If I Had a Gun, while a dog whinges and gnaws at thrown scraps of dough.

If I Had a Gun…I’d shoot the man…/who comments on my clothes. I’m not a fucking painting/that needs to be told what it looks like./who tells me where to put my hands, who wrenches me into position/like a meccano-set, who drags you round like a war…

In another scenario, 2 friends exercise while discussing their romantic failures; the fervency of these musings, not their physical gyrations, seems to propel their workout, generating heat and sweat. Pithy psychological theories and depthless new age myths are mobilised; early woundings, father difficulties, soul deficits are worked over, but not worked-out. Merewether’s adept use of the split-screen exaggerates the tension and humour by forming unusual and ironic connections between disparate sources.

Ink Runs Out describes a couple’s break-up through a series of claustrophobic interior close-ups, shot with video which suits its shaky realism. The punch-line to the couple’s argument is literally inscribed on flesh and worth the wait, despite an at times wordy script. Similarly concept-driven, but with an Alice in Wonderland feel, Desire Lines details a woman’s flight/fall from a building during which she glimpses the inhabitants’ lives. Unfortunately the film’s impact suffered from being scheduled after the 52-minute Chrissy. The only appropriate follow up to Chrissy (which culminated in a funeral) seemed the reflective space of an interval. Directed by Annie Beauchamp, Desire Lines was slick, seamless and whimsical even if its imagery seemed derivative of Massive Attack’s video Protection and Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire.

The NSW Film and Television Office grants up to $25,000 toward the production cost of films shot within NSW by artists aged between 18 and 35 years. Since the YFF’s inception, 58 films have been produced; 15 of these were featured in the 3-day festival. Next year, I’ll be arriving extra early to grab a seat.

Gig Ryan, If I Had a Gun, Contemporary Australian Poetry, edited by John Leonard, Houghton Miffin, 1990

Lyndal Jones is a leading multi-disciplinary Australian artist who has produced performance works, installations, site-specific and video works and impressive permutations of all of these. Jones was selected to be Australia’s sole representative at the Venice Biennale in 2001. For this event, the Australia Council commissioned a new site-specific, video installation, Deep Water/Aqua Profunda. The exhibit’s curator is John Barrett-Lennard and the commissioner is Leon Paroissien. The handsome catalogue includes essays by Barrett-Lennard, Margaret Plant and Lesley Stern (“Let ‘Lyndal Jones’ be the name that we give to a body of work, a body that mutates as it traverses”). At the Australia Council’s Sydney launch, after which we interviewed Jones, we noted the number of times the speakers stressed the weight of responsibility which attaches to participation in such a prestigious event.

The power of buzz

If it’s a failure, then I’m on my own really. Who’s responsible but me? If it’s a success, then it could have a lot of ramifications for artists. But we’re all used to that, aren’t we? If you start to think bigger than that, then you fry. The Venice Biennale is a big event, but lots of little countries show work there, and big countries. Everyone makes sure they see the American pavilion and then it really does depend on how the work is picked up. Some works are of-the-moment and no-one can predict what they will be.

There’s a sort of a buzz that goes around the Biennale that a work should be seen. It’s the same as the Biennale here. That’s how (American video artist) Doug Aitken became really well-known. His work, From one side of an Island to another was shown at the last Biennale—it’s kind of about alienation really, very hip, dark, wonderful piece. It was the work in a sense. And what was fantastic was that, unlike a lot of video work, it wasn’t just a single ‘action.’ As artists we watch other artists and identify or not with a single, potent action—that’s kind of the rule for making video. People don’t necessarily have the confidence to just see that some of us work in a different way until someone like Doug gets the stamp of approval for making a much more narrative work. And suddenly it all opens up.

I work with video from a subjective, experiential position for the viewer. Consequently, a certain type of critic has difficulty with it because they can’t stand outside and analyse it. But for a lot of people just watching it, it’s quite straightforward. They’re just in it.

Make me wait

There’s a particular state in making work that is really exciting, whatever it is. And for me it has to respond to things that are important at the time. And they’ve usually been political things. From the Darwin Translations (1994-98) is really about an erotic voice. What really drove that was that whole feminist debate about pornography. There was the anti-pornography group. Then there was the group who basically, like myself, thought well, what are you trying to say, we can’t have thoughts and fantasies? And so it was about trying to find a woman’s very vocal fantasies. So this work is a kind of shift from that, I’m not sure where to…

Desire’s there at an emotional level. And the erotic, putting off the pleasure. At one point in Aqua Profunda the woman on the screen says, “Make me wait.” It’s based on the refrain of her counting to 10, sometimes in English, sometimes in Italian. And it’s about the way we count. As a kid I used to sit in the bath and Mum would tell me to get out and I’d count to 10 and when I got to 7, I’d go 7 and a half, 7 and three quarters…I’ve since discovered just how prevalent it is. Another line in it is, “It’s about restraint.” So she’s saying “Make me wait” and the narrator/gallery guide is saying to the audience, on the soundtrack, “She’s waiting, wouldn’t you say?” “She’s practising restraint.” It’s my voice. The gallery guide is just a voice. It’s a discussion about the image. The woman’s face is increasingly close-up, sometimes she’s looking at her audience, sometimes just waiting, in a sense, and counting.

All my work implicates the audience. And that’s to refuse being an object. So people can’t just simply, safely watch her. So in a sense it starts with us safely watching her and, in fact, discussing and analysing her and she turns around and says, “No, I’m not doing that. I’m waiting.”

Immersive

The images are floor to ceiling. And basically the size of the space is pretty much the size of Wharf 4 (Sydney). It’s a little bit narrower. So where the cameras were placed is in fact where the images will be placed in the room in Venice, 3 along one side and 1 at the end. And that looks across water to those 50s Sydney buildings. And you can see similar ones in Venice. There’s a line of flats. Then on either side, there are close-ups of the sides of ferries and sometimes bits of people depending on how close the ferries are. They’re like screens really or curtains, so you can see the other wharf and it’s almost continuous, because it’s the farthest away that we focused on. Then the Manly ferry will come in, a great big green curtain with a stripe. And you see it from the end one. It’s beautiful. Then there are little ferries that come in front, backwards and forward, faster. There you see bits of people. It’s simple.

I love the ferries. There are ferries in Melbourne too but they’re not everyday working ferries. They’re not ordinary, they’re not about transporting people to work. So in both cities, Sydney and Venice, it’s the ordinariness of the ferries that’s important.

Site specifics

I knew the site. I made the work for what I knew. I had footage—shot on an earlier visit by hanging over the water from the back of a gondola. I also had footage of Howard Arkley’s show. Then John Barrett-Lennard and I went back to Venice a couple of months ago to measure everything so that all the walls could be built before we got back—saving a lot of money. And I was really pleased that I was right about the space, that it wasn’t just a fantasy. I had to do a complete breakdown and a floor plan for the application and I submitted a video showing some of the footage and I talked. Because there’s talk in the piece, it seemed appropriate. And I showed bits of other works. If you really want it, you treat it seriously.

We’re building some extra walls, mostly to make the spaces discrete. They’re only sections of walls—there’s one space up high and there are steps down to the lower space. I’m building a wall around the upstairs space to cut that off, so that it’s like a square room. I don’t want the viewer to have any analytic possibilities. Yes, the associations become aural rather than visual.

Water and sound

I grew up on the Murrumbidgee and my perspective was always water on the edge of a desert. It makes sense. Otherwise I don’t understand why I work on such a big scale. And I’ve always worked with the idea of a field of events so that you can have a choice about where you look.

And sound has always played a part. In From the Darwin Translations, on one side is Freud and on the other side is Darwin, and of course, the intellectual debate surrounding those 2 men is so completely fierce. And I was intrigued that in art you could be watching the finches (live and caged at one end of the installation), being a naturalist in a sense, but you had to hear the confessions to an analyst. And on the other side (in an adjoining room), you could be listening and watching and being a voyeur, as an analyst is, but you had to hear the finches. So art creates a synthesis that you can’t possibly do intellectually.

Aqua Profonda in Fitzroy

There’s a sign in the Fitzroy Swimming Pool: “Danger. Deep Water. Aqua Profonda.” It’s so big at the end of the pool on a blue ground. It’s fabulous. It just dominates the pool, the atmosphere. It’s right near Carlton (Melbourne) which is the area where all the Italian immigrants were housed when they arrived. It would have been written in the 40s or 50s and has been kept I suppose because it’s so iconic. In the pool you sense that you could really be in Italy. You look up and see the writing and you hear people speaking Italian and you’re in Australia. It’s ordinary. That’s what’s intensely pleasurable.

The other thing is that they wrote the sign as “Aqua” which is Latin, not the Italian “Acqua.” And “Profonda” is Italian and not the Latin “Profunda.” And I thought, to be truthful, I really should keep this but I can’t do it. I’ll just look like a drip. I went with the Latin because I wanted the association across languages a bit and because of the way contemporary Italian writers are using Latin as a language.

Shooting

You mostly see the water in Venice when you’re on the vaporetto. It’s a single viewpoint looking down. And that starts on one screen and moves to the next. Whereas the Sydney wharf material is on 5 screens, so it’s a complete experience of being there at the time. But, as I said, not all that representational, it’s like closeups. It’s just extraordinary. Sometimes it looks like paper…it’s really abstract. There are moments in the first two thirds of it where you see a boat go past and you think, oh, water. It suddenly becomes three dimensional. After that it becomes much more abstract. It becomes like marble paper and like this flat, grey surface. Absolutely not manipulated.

The Venice stuff I shot myself. The Sydney stuff was a 5 camera shoot Garry Warner organised. Basically we just turned the cameras on and I ran around and lined them all up and people minded a camera and we let them run for the half hour. And we did that twice.

The upstairs footage I had a cinematographer do, Patrick Byrne, with a sound recordist. It was Patrick’s idea to use a mixture of blue gels just behind the performer (Tanja Bulatovic). It’s so closeup and the first two thirds of it just with a locked off camera and she does the work. She can find the lens. It’s fantastic. Then there’s a whole section in which I used real closeups, like a mouth or an ear and you see some of the wildness of the colour, all out of focus, just this bright background, kind of like a painting. We spent a whole day shooting and there’s this one continuous take which I repeated I liked it so much. It has a voiceover as well as her speaking and counting. Then there’s an intercut section that I’ve dissolved of the really closeup stuff. Then I’ve re-used this piece but with a different story. So there are chance relations between the language and the images.

Writing

It took a long time. I found it very hard. It’s taken me months and it’s only 4 pages. I don’t know how I wrote it. It went through a stage of being highly embarrassing. I read it to a friend and he looked at me and you know how when you read something aloud you think, oh my God, this is really…You have to be able to do that, of course. So I went back and pulled it in and I was very happy with it in the end. I think it could sit quite nicely almost as a sort of poetic piece with some images.

Cycles

It’s basically me talking to the viewers about the image, the narrator, not me. The narrator becomes more and more implicated in a sense. And the counting is the basis of it. And each piece is cyclic rather than narrative. It’s a scene rather than a narrative. It’s a moment or 2 moments.

The downstairs piece is 30 minutes and upstairs is 20. So they’ll cycle differently against each other. So I’ll never be able to control it fully. But again what we do is work within a field of constraints that allow it to have meaning, otherwise it would be arbitrary.

The counting is important. Tanja counts in a teasing way or with a sense of desolation. In the end she’s just sobbing, snot running from her nose. It’s very simple, not acted.

It’s cyclic—people have to be able to come in at any point. And you have to be able to enter a meditative state.

How it all happened

Before the Keating Fellowship I was doing a mixture of performance and video work. And when I got the fellowship, I thought, here I had an amount of money to work full time but, in fact, it was an amount that a writer or a painter or a person working by themselves could use but certainly not someone working with performance. You couldn’t live and make performances on it. I made one performance, Spitfire 1 2 3 (1996), but that’s when I really started to focus on video. My work now, for all that everyone says about it, is actually much smaller in scale than some of those performance things I did.

At the same time I made Spitfire 1 2 3 as a film. Lynn Cook wanted the installation version for the 1996 Sydney Biennale. But that was all cut back because of equipment. So she ended up showing the film, which was also shown at the Ian Potter Gallery (Melbourne) at the end of that year. Then it was picked up for Video Positive 9 in Liverpool, UK. And it was a huge hit there. As a result of that, within 6 months it was invited to show at the 15th World Wide Video Festival in Amsterdam in 1997. It was in Fotofeis, an international photography festival in Scotland where quite a lot of Australian art was shown. I was invited to work as artist in residence for 6 months in Ayr, just outside Glasgow. I was invited to show other work in Coil, a film/text magazine in London. I was also invited to a Belgian festival but in the end I just couldn’t do it. And the work was already going to Berlin in an Australian show, selected by a German curator. That was the only Australian show I was in. All the rest came out of showing the film.

Liz Anne Macgregor had wanted me to show Spitfire at the Ikon Gallery when she was there, but, again, I couldn’t because it was already being shown somewhere else. So we talked about showing other work and I said I’d like to show the new work Demonstrations and Details (2000). So it was shown there and in a regional tour—just a few weeks ago it was shown at the Newland Gallery in Cornwall. You see how it works. They just kind of come off one another once you start.

Life

I haven’t had one. It’s been quite hard. I was running the sculpture course at RMIT for the last couple of years while Robert Owen was away. He was away again this year but I couldn’t even contemplate doing it. So I’ve got no idea what happens to my life at the end of June. None whatsoever. And that’s looming very fast. I just have to have faith and know I can pick up my Feldenkrais work, but it takes a while to get a clientele going again, a couple of years usually. So, we’ll see.

It’s very hard. With a partner, that’s fine. But for me to be away for 5 months from friends and family and by myself…You live very sparely. It’s too hard. On the Ayr residency I had a cottage way out in the Scottish countryside. I bought an old Zephyr that had been used in a Ken Loach film. I’d drive for 35 minutes to get into the school at Ayr, then another 1 and a half hours to Glasgow. And once a month to London. It was winter and bitterly cold. I’ve been invited by this place up outside Dundee. By the sounds of it they do fantastic projects. They want to show the Spitfire piece too, because there’s an airforce base there. It’s so apposite to show that work all through Britain and Holland and Germany. It makes sense there. Whereas in America, I don’t think I’d bother showing it. There’s no point. And there’d be the censorship. It’s just a romantic piece.

Wish

A lot of my work was enabled by the Keating Fellowship. There are 2 things that I’d really like. One is for the reinstitution of something like that for artists. And the second thing is to have an equipment (DVD, video, computer) source for artists and galleries in Australia. They’re 2 things that I think would be significant contributions, that I’ve had the benefit of, or difficulties with in the latter case.

It feels wonderful doing the Venice Biennale. It’s a big moment for anybody. It was the same when I got the Keating Fellowship. I’ve been very privileged.

Television viewers feeling jaded by the interminable parades, day-long political re-enactments, and formal gatherings with worthy speeches (that seem to have comprised much of the TV component of this Year of Federation) should look forward to Hybrid Life, the contribution from SBS television which goes to air in June. Instead of stodgy and longwinded celebrations of the past, they’ll see something that in its very energy, diversity and multiple viewpoints, delivers a much more representative idea of what it means to live in Australia today. Back in 1999, when SBS was deliberating on their contribution to the national celebration, they decided not to look back as everyone else seemed to be doing, but instead to compile a portrait of a contemporary Australia, where 40 percent of its inhabitants were either born elsewhere or came from families where one or both parents were born overseas.

Hybrid Life is a series of 13 short films, personal stories from filmmakers from distinct ethnic communities that, in an exhilarating accumulation of style, story, and personality, present rapid fire snapshots of a generation of Australians who live in and try to make sense of 2 different cultures—maintaining the language and mores of the country where they or their parents were born, while adapting and settling in to their new home, new school, new ways of living.

From a mother coping with the demands of a new baby and reliving the obsession with Bert Newton that began when she was growing up (learning English from the television) to a woman of Russian descent whose connections to her family are re-activated by a sudden call from an aunt missing for 22 years; from a teacher in an Islamic school at last learning how to talk to his father to a wedding photographer who helps young couples create their fantasies in images that will keep forever; from a Vietnamese orphan airlifted to Australia at the end of the war who returns to Saigon as a young woman inquiring into her past to a young Vietnamese schoolgirl whose mother wants her to skip school to help get the sewing finished in the backyard clothing factory; from the young people who congregate in the shopping mall in multicultural Parramatta to the son who has to pick up a relative from Croatia for his father on the night when he already has big plans with his mates; the characters in these stories have complex relationships with their families, their communities, and both the past and the future.

But it’s perhaps the cumulative effect that’s most powerful as you watch the series. Each half hour program is personal and intimate, with the filmmaker working through complex feelings about families and the conjunctions of different cultures, and yet they combine to weave together a portrait of an immensely rich cultural tapestry that spreads out from the crowded inner-city to the sprawling outer suburbs and into the regions. And, in several of the films, when the filmmakers go back to the country they came from as young children, or from which their parents came, what is learned contributes to their lives in Australia.

Given its audience and remit, it was natural for SBS to want to ensure that a range of ethnicities and backgrounds be reflected in what it chose to produce as its component of the year of Federation, and Brigid Ikin, then head of SBS Independent, decided that that hybridity should be inherent in the styles of the programs as well. Since its establishment in 1994, SBS has commissioned more than 400 hours of quality Australian production, ranging from low budget features to drama series, animation, and single documentaries and documentary series from independent filmmakers, but Hybrid Life has been one of the most challenging projects undertaken.

Series producer Megan McMurchy was appointed and a national mailout was sent to the database SBS had compiled of all those filmmakers with a migrant background it had had dealings with or knew of, while the project was also advertised in the industry press. Two page proposals for a documentary or drama concept were asked for, and from the 200 applications received a short list of 17 was given development funding, and finally 13 were chosen to go into production through 2000. Final selections were made by McMurchy in consultation with Documentary Commissioning Editor John Hughes for the 9 documentary programs, and with Debbie Lee for the 4 short dramas. Financial support for 8 of the documentaries came from the National Council for the Centenary of Federation. For McMurchy, this was a special and unusual working experience and she’s pleased that what looked to be an exciting series has more than lived up to its promise. A number of the programs from Hybrid Life have already become finalists in both the Dendy and the Atom (Australian Teachers on Media) Awards.

Hybrid Life screens Fridays, 8pm, on SBS from June 8: Dear Bert, Sparky D Comes to Town, Wee Jimmy; June 15: Parra, Delivery Day, Saturn’s Return; June 22: The Last Pecheniuk; June 29: Always a Visitor; July 6: Missing Vietnam; July 13: The Brides of Khan; July 20: Cosenza Vecchia; July 27: Islands; August 3: From Here to Ithaca

Delivery Day, Islands & Sparky D Comes to Town have been nominated for ATOM Awards; The Last Pecheniuk & Sparky D Comes to Town are nominees in the Dendy Awards, Sydney Film Festival, June 8-22; Wee Jimmy was a Certificate of Merit Winner in the Shorts for Kids Category, Golden Gate Awards, San Francisco International Film Festival, April 19-May 3

Until this year Tasmania had never held a major international arts festival. After much planning, 10 Days on the Island became a reality in March and April. The festival was strongly supported by locals and a significant number of interstate visitors. The theme of the festival, “the island”, provided open-ended inspiration for a range of artists, groups, works and events, including international imports.

There were many highlights amongst the performance-based works. A Tasmanian physical theatre event CENSORED, devised and performed by Hobart dancer and choreographer Wendy McPhee, played to sell-out houses. The pseudo-autobiographical tale of a classical ballet dancer who never quite made it, CENSORED is a risk-taking combination of drama and stand-up comedy plus recontextualised ballet and modern dance.

Confessional in tone, the work seamlessly crosses the boundaries between artforms, showcasing the comic talents and acting abilities of McPhee who already has a solid reputation as one of Tasmania’s best classical and contemporary dance performers. Set in suburbia, CENSORED explores the dancer’s love-hate relationship with her art and the sacrifices and traumas—notably body-image issues—it involves. To this end, McPhee spends a third of the performance virtually nude, heightening the already well established vulnerability of her character.

The work expands McPhee’s extensive repertoire as actor, dancer, raconteur and comedian. Her willingness to push the boundaries and her fearless ability to confront the kinds of demons and insecurities we all recognise gives this young woman’s story a genuine universality.

The show is noteworthy for its tight direction by Deborah Pollard and high production values, particularly the sound design by George Khut, one of Tasmania’s most innovative sound and installation artists, recently relocated to Sydney (see interview RT#42 p37). It is possible that CENSORED will tour interstate; don’t miss it.

Within the visual arts, the festival offered an engaging range of choices. The City of Hobart Art Prize has established a reputation for presenting the best in cutting edge contemporary artforms, Australia-wide. It concentrates on 2 media/techniques annually; this year the categories were fashion and photo/digital media.

The fashion section was by no means conventional. From 14 finalists the award went to Melbourne designers Denise Sprynskyj and Peter Boyd, aka SIX, showing a recycled man’s shirt inserted with laser-cut polyester, a hand-painted organza square tailer dress and a handbag made from a man’s jacket.

Hobart-based Sarah Ryan, formerly of Brisbane, won the photomedia section with her trademark, a digital lenticular photograph, using a technique she has developed as part of her current PhD research. Her large, shimmering image, The Real Escape, is of an eerily neutral, almost empty, modernist space—it could be either interior or exterior—dominated by a similarly unreadable metal screen. The illusionistic qualities of her lenticular technique give unremarkable subject matter a disquieting resonance.

Held on beaches and private property on the Tasman Peninsula, an hour from Hobart, Sculpture by the Sea featured 60 works pre-selected from over 120 applicants. Part of the pleasure of visiting is engaging with the rugged coastal scenery of the region and following sculpture trails in the 3 venues. A full-on, full-day experience. Some works responded to the natural environment in which they were placed; others, particularly those in hi-tech/man-made materials, intervened in—and provided a strong and often thought-provoking contrast to—their surroundings.

Anna Phillip’s monumental Doily II, fashioned from crocheted recycled plastic bags, explores the medium’s mutability and continues the artist’s exploration and deconstruction of symbols that form and inform the female condition. Helene Czerny’s Victory Roll captures real human hair in perspex tubing—a juxtaposition both abject and aesthetic, exploring “hair and its journey…”

Poets and Painters is another established event incorporated into the 10 Days program. The concept involves the pairing of 15 visual artists with writers of poetry and creative prose, each duo producing a collaborative work. Participants are free to work together in any ways that seem appropriate: sometimes an existing work or idea is the catalyst, other pairs work together from scratch, and so on. The exhibition’s opening, hosted by Robyn Archer, was performance in its own right, with spoken word renditions from most of the writers—and Archer moved to burst into impromptu song.

Two other noteworthy exhibitions were Response to the Island, a craft- and design-oriented blockbuster curated by Grace Cochrane, and Island Postcards, over 130 pieces wittily and irreverently referencing and re-inventing the form, or concept, of the postcard.

For a first festival, remarkably few glitches were evident, no doubt due to Archer’s professionalism and the enthusiasm she inspires. There were so many events and attractions that it was not possible to view them all in the 10 days available. Happily, many of the art exhibitions were extended beyond the festival.

The festival generated a palpable buzz, exciting for a place that so often misses out on touring shows from interstate and overseas. There was a stimulating menu of music, dance, puppetry, drama, physical theatre, visual arts and more. It has been confirmed that the festival will continue as a biennial event; we look forward, then, to what 2003 will bring.

Censored, Wendy McPhee, director Deborah Pollard, Theatre Royal, March 29-April 7; City of Hobart Art Prize, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, April 1-May 20; Sculpture by the Sea, curated by Dick Bett, Tasman Peninsula, March 23-April 8; Poets and Painters, curated by Dick Bett, Bett Gallery, March 23-April-18; Response to the Island, curated by Grace Cochrane, Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre, March 28-April 29; Island Postcards, co-ordinated by Penny Carey Wells, State Library of Tasmania, Hobart, March 28-April 29.

Clara Law was born in Macau and graduated from Hong Kong University. She studied filmmaking at The National Film and Television School in London. Her feature films include The Other Half and The Other Half (1988), The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus (1989), Farewell, China (1990), Autumn Moon (1991) and The Temptation of a Monk (1993). Floating Life (1996) was her first film after re-locating to Australia and was co-written with her partner, Eddie Fong. The Goddess of 1967, also co-written by Fong, has garnered a number of international awards including Best Actress for Rose Byrne at the Venice Film Festival and Best Director at the Chicago Film Festival.

I heard that the inspiration for The Goddess of 1967 came from a road trip you and Eddie did in 1997.

It was our first trip to the outback. We came to Australia in 1995 and when we finished Floating Life we realised we didn’t know very much about Australia. So we bought a 4-wheel drive and went into the outback for 18 days. Out of that trip I got stuck in my head 2 places: Lightning Ridge and White Cliffs. So Lightning Ridge is Goddess and White Cliffs will be The Mechanical Bird (Clara’s next film).

Did the story for Goddess come while you were in the outback or did you have the idea before you set out?

At that time we wanted to do something on the dark side…because what Eddie and I had been doing was more to do with the positive side, nothing to do with what is irrational and hurtful to people. I think that is part of human nature and we wanted to look into that. So that was the idea, the first stage. Then we went to the outback. We thought somehow Lightning Ridge, and people who have the kind of existence where they work underground, seemed quite probable to fit into this idea of the dark side.

It’s an interesting metaphor that reflects the theme of the film—people burying their past and their secrets. Did the characters emerge after you had discovered the location?

We slowly developed the characters. The Japanese man came first and then the blind girl. We felt she had to be blind, we didn’t know why, but we just felt she had to be physically handicapped. If she’s blind and living independently, then she is connected in a way to something higher than what you can normally feel or materialise. We thought it would be interesting to put that type of character against a guy that comes from a society that is totally materialistic, a guy who has nothing to do with the spiritual side, who is very disconnected, very departmentalised. We thought if we put them against each other something interesting would happen.

His attraction to the car (The Goddess) is because it’s a physically beautiful thing whereas her attraction is its history, its emotional, intangible presence. The 2 characters have a very different relationship with the one car. How did the car come about?

We were looking for something for him to collect because he comes from an affluent society. Material stuff is easily accessible and it defines you as a person if you have collections. In a way that is what to us is the Japanese image. When we saw a friend’s Citroen DS we knew it had to be this. What we found out later fitted into the story. The fact that it’s an icon, that it’s such a futuristic car, its legends with (French President Charles) De Gaulle and French movies. Totally not part of Japan. It fits into this whole thing of modern technology and how man can behave like God, and he can actually be God when he creates something so perfect, and yet it’s still only a car. It just fit so perfectly with this guy who’s looking for a goddess in a car and finds a goddess in a girl. It was a coincidence but also a stroke of fate.

You have a very organic approach to scripting. You start slowly and then build the story.

We are never story driven. I think we are more character and theme driven. Sometimes we will just start with an image or something that’s been nagging me…if you start from a story it can become very superficial, very external, and that’s not something we’re interested in.

In a lot of ways you remind me of a painter. You’re so interested in composition and images, very much the art of cinema.

This is what I believe. I think cinema is telling a story through the images, images are very very important. I would rather rely on images than dialogue. I think they complement each other but I like to use dialogue in a poetic way rather than just disclosing information. I hate trying to describe through dialogue. If you want to describe something you do it through visuals.

Both Floating Life and The Goddess of 1967 are films where characters are taken out of their natural environment and placed in alien landscapes. Is this theme of displacement something that has particular resonance for you?

Probably, because that’s what I’ve felt. Even before I was living in Australia…when I was living in Hong Kong and in Macau, where I was born, I felt the same…always there are 2 people in me, one that goes through the emotional trauma and pain that everybody goes through, but there’s also another side that is very strong in me, that sits outside and looks at myself. I’m never very attached to things so most of the time I like to observe. I don’t like to possess. I don’t need to possess anything so I like to observe and react.

I think I’m attached to things in bigger terms, things that are beautiful…but I’m not especially attached to any place. You’re attached to your memories but then you’re also aware that memories are in the past and you have to keep going forward. At the same time, there’s this strong awareness that life is very transient, there’s a beginning point but also an ending point…Probably that’s because I have a very traumatic memory of my brother. My eldest brother died when I was very young. So, mortality and the feeling that nothing is forever was very strong in me as a kid. Instead of going away it grew in me, this feeling that nothing is forever.

It’s interesting that you became a filmmaker because by making films you create a permanence. Your films will last beyond you.

Exactly. This is something very revealing about my character. When I was a kid I loved doing theatre, I loved directing plays. When I was in my last year in high school I directed a play that was an adaptation of Joan of Arc. It was entered into an open school competition and I won all the awards. We were delirious with happiness and I went backstage when it was all finished and we were packing and talking about where we would go to celebrate and then I felt really down, very depressed, and I didn’t go anywhere that night. I went home and I wanted to have a great cry. I suddenly felt very empty that it was finished. All this energy that you put in, all finished. From then on I didn’t do any more theatre. I stopped altogether. I started writing poetry and prose again, trying to find a means to express myself. But I knew I would never do theatre again because it was so sad for me.

You moved to Australia 6 years ago. Was this because you felt you could grow more freely here as an artist? Did you feel confined by the expectations placed on Hong Kong filmmakers—the martial arts movie genre?

That was a very big part of it. We felt a pressure in Hong Kong where you had to make a certain kind of film. A genre film and there was no alternate, independent cinema. Then my fourth film Autumn Moon, that won the Golden Leopard in Locarno, was ignored. In Hong Kong they just want movies to make money and entertain. When you try and walk the other path you are not looked upon with respect or support, and all that time Eddie and I felt trapped. No one around you is thinking like you or working like you or thinking you should be working like that. You’re trying to grow and move forward as an artist but you have to always pretend that you are part of this mainstream. We were not part of the mainstream and we knew we would never be. In 1993 we came to Australia to do post-production on Temptation Of A Monk and the more we stayed here, the more we felt that this is the place we could spend half of the year writing and recharging, while we spent the other half working in Hong Kong. At that time Autumn Moon was being released in Australia and received very good reviews. While we were working here we wrote the first draft of Floating Life which we showed to producers and they were interested in developing it. So slowly and gradually we stayed.

You said Hong Kong doesn’t support artists beyond commercial interest. Do you think Australia is any different? Do you think this country supports filmmakers throughout their careers?

Everything is relative. I won’t say that it is heaven here but I think to a certain degree you have a lot more channels to turn to and to do things that are different. This is what I felt when I first came here. I know now it is getting a bit more conservative but probably that’s not just Australia, it’s a worldwide thing. It is very unfortunate and depressing. The big money is now getting into arthouse films. A lot of arthouse films are not arthouse any more. It’s degenerating into something else.

You have to challenge yourself to keep getting closer and closer to what you hope is a work of art and you just have to try to keep doing that because there is no other choice.

With Mechanical Bird we are exploring a different space and time. What Eddie and I share is a concern with the meaning of our existence…the spiritual side…if you look up there and then look down and see all these people —and us. Why us here on this planet? So it’s what’s out here on the planet and what we are, actually, inside. The macro and the micro is what intrigues both of us and why we move from one story to another in different ways.

The Goddess of 1967, distributor Palace Films, is currently screening nationally

A Sarai is an enclosed space in a city or beside a highway, where travellers and caravans can find shelter, sustenance and companionship; a tavern, a public house, a meeting place; a destination and a point of departure; a place to rest in the middle of a journey.

Sarai: the New Media Initiative, Delhi, works with these readings of the word Sarai to create a space where old and new forms of media, their practitioners and those who reflect on or critically examine these practices, can find a convivial atmosphere, and enter into shared pursuits that will create a renewal of public cultures within and across city spaces.

In Delhi, there appears to be amazing access to “new media space”, signs point to small cable operators, hundreds of public call offices, low cost media such as music and videotapes, reasonably inexpensive “grey market” computers and internet cafes evident all over the city. However the vast majority of the urban population is unable to gain access to these resources.

In establishing a small Sarai, a space for debate, dialogue, refuge, production of work and generation of ideas, the team of artists, activists, filmmakers, theorists and thinkers behind Sarai have taken on a huge task. The friendly and ebullient team may not be able to provide new media access to all the people in Delhi, but they will certainly influence public debates, raise awareness of work being done in this area and provide access to a significant number of communities who may not otherwise have had this opportunity.

The Sarai New Media Initiative emerged out of a collaborative vision between the Centre for Studies in Developing Societies (CSDS), a non-profit institution (funded in part by Indian Council of Social Science) and Raqs Media Collective who have since been joined by a group of independent artists, programmers, historians, web designers and documentary filmmakers. Their intention is to foster collaborative work and partnerships as well as to provide a space in Delhi where people can develop ideas. Its establishment has been supported by the CSDS, the Daniel Langlois Foundation and the Netherlands government, assisted by the energetic partnership they have established with the Society for Old and New Media in Amsterdam.

We translate the term ‘connectivity’ to mean much more than internet access. For us it connotes the means and desire to forge links, build affinity groups, crystallize networks and enter conversations around/through our intellectual activity and creative work.

The research agenda of Sarai is organized around 2 core areas: “understanding the place of the media in urban public practice and consciousness, and reflections on the city as constituted through representations and technologies.” Their current core program centres around explorations of the city and the lives of people in Delhi in terms of ecology and technology; the concept of a media city and how that reflects, and also writes, the lives of those who inhabit it; an engagement with the Hindi language and its representation in the physical and virtual worlds. Sarai is also committed to an exploration of the free software community in order to design applications and hardware configurations so that they are truly accessible and allow for low connectivity and authoring tools.

In line with this agenda, the 3 day opening event, “Enter: the Public Domain”, addressed topics as broad as cinema and the city, access and censorship, social justice and the city, free software, and global new media, art and the city in contemporary literature and cinema. Artforms presented ranged from film to installation, internet to sound, photography to writing.

In reflecting on the notion of a Public Domain various speakers including Rajiv Bhargava, Geert Lovink, DL Sheth, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta discussed possibilities for tracing and imagining decentralized versions of the formation of public opinion through contemporary technologies. Discussion centred on issues of providing spaces for disparate voices and concerns.

Monica Narula presented Global Village Health Manual, a recent interactive screen-based work developed by Raqs Media Collective. The work is an extensive digital archive of research undertaken on popular print materials from 19th century India juxtaposed with contemporary medical research from the internet. The combination of sources posed a range of questions about the body in a digital age. Meena Nanji, a filmmaker from Los Angeles who is currently working in Pakistan, Afghanistan and North India, focused her presentation on strategies she is employing to develop work about the experiences of young Muslim women in these countries. Samara Mitchell, representing the Australian Network for Art and Technology and Ngapartji Multimedia Centre in Adelaide, showed Australian work and focused on interdisciplinary discussions and collaborative practices between artists, practitioners and philosophers in Arcadia, an ANAT research project exploring philosophy, theology and approaches to human/machine interactions.

Issues of access, freedom and censorship across various media forms were also central to a number of panels which sought to open up debate. Rehan Ansari, a freelance media critic and writer from Pakistan also undertaking research through CSDS, spoke about the physical space of Karachi and how the city geographically exists in mutually exclusive zones. Juxtaposing the physical with the virtual, Ansari also spoke of the website Chowk, an online space of discussion, dialogue, reviews, journalese and general chat for people living in Pakistan and India as well as people who have connections with Pakistan, providing a space of exchange for residents currently living in, and diasporas living without, South Asia. On the same panel Siddhartha Varadrajan, a journalist with the Times of India, discussed ways the news is produced in mainstream media and Arun Mehta, president of the Society for Telecommunications Empowerment, suggested that the sheer size of the internet ensures that there are adequate spaces to “bypass” censorship in traditional media forms.

The task of the Sarai team will be to remain relevant to the many communities in Delhi, ensuring that they can attract the young and disadvantaged audiences that they intend to serve, and remain networked into a supportive international community. If the opening event “Enter: the Public Domain” was anything to go by, I have no doubt that they will live up to the task they have set themselves.

In Moghul India caravansarais (inns for merchants and travellers) were found at regular intervals along major highways and in cities. …Constructed by the great for reasons of charity, religious duty, and fame, they were open to merchants, scholars, religious specialists, and other travellers, but not to soldiers. The average sarai had room for 800 to a thousand travellers, and housed barbers, tailors, washermen, blacksmiths, sellers of grass and straw, physicians, dancing girls, and musicians…

The caravan sarai erected by Jahanara Begum near the entrance to the garden on Chandni Chowk was the outstanding example of its type…Jahanara wrote, “I will build a sarai, large and fine like no other in Hindustan. The wanderer who enters its court will be restored in body and soul and my name will never be forgotten.”

In Delhi, the reason Jahanara Begum’s name is remembered is the infectious energy of the Sarai Institute for New Media in their drive to establish a contemporary version of an Indian Sarai. I will remember them all for their generosity, their intellectual rigour, and their amazing dedication to the philosophy of establishing a site for the exchange of ideas and the development of new work. While this Sarai does not currently have room for a thousand ‘travellers’, the extraordinary commitment of the Sarai team to making tools and knowledge available to many Delhi artists, young people and communities who do not currently have access, and their integrated approach to cross disciplinary dialogue and debate, will undoubtedly have an effect on thousands of artists and communities in Delhi and beyond.

Sarai New Media Initiative, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi, India, February 23-25, “Enter”, Sarai: the New Media Initiative/Society for Old and New Media, Delhi/Amsterdam 2001,

It starts in a bar. I’m standing alone at the back of the crowd clutching my glass of vin ordinaire. Yes, I have been here before. Suddenly in focus, a woman perched on the bar top—her voice is husky and flirtatious. She asks: “What’s your poison? What do you want?”

And before I have time to think of an answer, to define my role in this most familiar of settings, it’s Sex and the City, it’s you and me babe, out on the prowl. It’s Brigid Jones’ Diary. It’s most of us at some time, looking for something and ‘love is a four-letter word.’

Do you want me?
my body? my heart? my soul?
Just sex!
How do you want it?
Do you want it hard, fast, slow, soft, kinky, tender?
How long will we go for?
Will your libido match mine?
Will you fall in love?
What do you want?
A hard on, a slippery nipple, quick fuck, orgasm, pink pussy, 69er, flaming orgy, ecstasy?
How much do you want?
Will it be great?
It better be!

Shannon Bott’s The Morning After, the Night Before was first presented at the Blue Room Theatre in 2000. In an attempt to attract private support to tour the work interstate, she has reprised the show in PICA’s black box space. She’s a compelling and engaging performer, physically and vocally articulate, and unafraid to engage directly with her audience. This, her first solo work, is very much in the tradition of Wendy Houstoun or Kate Champion with its emphasis on the play of languages—spoken, theatrical and choreographic. What differs is the content which has yet to extend beyond the personal but then, she is a much younger artist.

The Morning After, the Night Before is accessible, polished and fun. It takes a familiar experience and translates it into a kind of cut-up, where fairytales, dirty jokes and a sense of personal experience happily co-exist. The design is simple and effective. On the one hand, a flock of cute handbags suspended in space, holding anything and everything a girl might need for a night on the town. On the other, a pristine column of white pillows that end up tossed across the floor in orgiastic abandon.

As a performer, Shannon Bott is charming, engaging and vital. She is also talented, tenacious and ambitious. And if this work doesn’t really stretch the parameters of either form or content—well, there was a lot to enjoy and the audience loved it.

The Morning After, the Night Before, created & performed by Shannon Bott, collaborators Sally Richardson & Sue Peacock, lighting Andrew Lake, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, April 24-26

Over the last 2 years, emerging Adelaide musical collective The Sty have been harboring a discreet warehouse in the Adelaide Hills, proliferating a collection of works ranging from free-form psychedelia to cinematic audioscapes, punk, funk, rock, desktop-techno and lab jazz. Wading into the voluminous archive of Sty remixes is to trawl the marvels of an untapped universal audio sub-consciousness. Thankfully, a portion of this amassed range of phenomenal musical exploration has been chosen by the collective for public release, soon to bathe the inner ear of the sleeping.

The 4 core members are Jolon Van Santen, Andrew Herpich, Ryan Davidson and James Bagley. The band is gathering popularity on stage through its charismatic performances of laconic rock tunes I fell in Love with Yello and Girl on Horse. Bursts of frenetic laughing-gas vocals in Criminals, putting away Criminals (delivered by Van Santen) are not unlike the bizarre voice-box gymnastics executed by US band, Ween. Although differing somewhat in style, both Ween and The Sty place a level of importance upon revealing the experimental process during recording. A studio bungle or conversation places emotional randomness against the threat of over refinement in the home-studio digital editing process.

In contemporary composition there are notable advantages for digital technologies which permit a quality of production previously unattainable to most independent musicians. Creator and key sound designer for a short film titled Buggin, James Bagley, with creative assistance from other members of the collective, devised a complex cacophony of orchestral strings to provide the on-screen avatar of an omnipresent fly. Using a keyboard as a primary means of composition, Bagley recorded individual violin notes and worked them into convincing baroque phrases in a digital edit. The result was uncanny: an immense weave of hovering strings, like a colony of musically manic flies honing in on one traumatized human actor. Buggin won Best Sound Design and Composition at the 2001 Media Resource Centre awards in South Australia.

As satellite member of The Sty, Iain Dalrymple’s first 2 unreleased albums, There’s a Planet on my Tongue and Acrylic Car, lodge an irresistible appeal to the delta waves of the brain. In particular, the tracks on There’s a Planet on My Tongue are dense with physically affecting atmosphere, like that hanging over a live orchestra. Both albums are afloat with sound bites of aural sci-fi phenomena and the periodic siren song of one homesick beacon. Dalrymple searches the vast data-pool of the internet’s audio archives to borrow power from collective social responses invoked by warbling operatic divas, nostalgic films and national anthems. Under the guidance of an animist’s ear, Dalrymple’s masterful works capture the simple aura of domestic environments—birds, alarm clocks, brewing coffee (I could almost hear the laminate on the kitchen benchtop), wind in trees—arranging them with an increasing intimacy of consciousness from natural to organised chaos.

The emotional range in Dalyrmples’s gorgeous concertos and in the enigmatic work of The Sty are but a few examples of the many triumphs of high quality, low budget productions emerging from dedicated and intelligent musicians. Refreshingly, the breadth of musical influences, skill, and diverse styles apparent in much of emerging independent music in Australia is able to resist any automatic clumping within the limitations of genre.

10 Days on the Island, Tasmania’s first international festival of islands, offered a feast of physical theatre, visual arts, dance, music, literature, film, cuisine and sculpture installations. These elements combined to generate a frisson of excitement across 32 towns and
80 venues.

Robyn Archer’s program design enabled her to negotiate Tasmania’s fraught politics of localism while modelling the shape and energy of a festival decentralised away from Hobart. Her strategy introduced Tasmanian audiences to the excitement and diversity of the arts experience through performances by assured companies with immediate and accessible programs.

From this plethora of performances, CoisCëim Dance Theatre’s Ballads, Compania Segundo’s No 2 and Theatre Talipot’s The Water Carriers stimulated our desire for lost voices through reclamation of the orality and alterity of Irish, Pacific and La Reunion Islander cultures.

Books scattered, bundled and piled in dishevelled heaps provide the central and recurring motif of Ballads. Cellist/dancer Diane O’Keeffe lies covered by her cello, emblematic of a coffin lid. Rising from the grave on an angled board she scrapes and bows the sound of her diminished and famished self. Choreographer and director David Bolger unequivocally situates the audience in the grey unfolding of the Great Irish Famine and the Irish diaspora. CoisCëim dance the space of hunger, death and dispersal. Bolger’s choreographic style is that of narrative abstraction, fully utilising the devices of physical and dance theatre.

This production encouraged speculation on the globalisation of the book as a theatrical device. The Irish tenants of English and neo-English landholders were illiterate. Their narrative mode was the voice of story. Books codified morals and registered land holdings, weight and tonnage, profit, births, deaths and marriages. In Ballads the frenzy and fluttering of leaves of paper provides a record of both the dead and departing; the inter/leaving of stories.

Dancers Muirne Bloomer, James Hosty, Lisa McLoughlin, Jonathan Mitchell and Katherine O’Malley are finely honed in their physical responses to score and story. The finesse of their ensemble work, the staccato and stutter of their isolations and contractions invoked power and subtlety. Theirs is a dynamic of gravitas. The emphasis on each dancer’s audible breath provided an extra sound pulse as a reminder of the physical demands of dance and accent to the horror of death by starvation.

Ballads resonates with the wreckage of lives; of the broken blatherers and botherers of Ireland dispersed across aisles of ocean in a diaspora of phytophthora, the blight that caused the potato’s withering. Islands continue to disperse and receive peoples for whom old alliances are severed. The story lies mute in the mouth, furled for resurgence into another frenzy of word, a continuing record of the misplaced, unclaimed and differently named.

Writer Toa Fraser’s compassionate and humorous script is brilliantly enhanced by Madeleine Sami’s solo performance about family life in No 2. A single red spot on a solitary red chair establishes the domain of Nana Maria, the elderly matriarch of a rambunctious Fijian family. She moans and mourns her age, her departed husband and living in a house without singing, dancing, feasting and fighting. She decides that today she will name her successor. Her grandchildren will prepare a great feast day like they do in Sicily. Through a succession of deft movements Sami adroitly establishes the mannerisms of 9 characters as they prepare for the feast, cook the pig, discuss, dismiss and establish their claims to be named as Nana Maria’s successor.

Fraser and Sami reveal their lives through a performance which imbues each character with the fullness, foible and failure of family story. References to former and present colonising influences and icons are scattered: the royal family, the Catholic church, rugby, hip hop, race and class distinctions. No 2 is engaging theatre. The joi de vivre of Sami’s characters capture the weaving of English, Fijian and Maori cultures, inflecting each character’s aspirations; from Tyson’s dream of rugby fame and educational achievement to Hibiscus’ posturing as a wannabee model, to Sol’s seductive hip hop routine. Madeleine Sami is a young performer retelling the space of old story and familial connections through contemporary idiom and gesture.

A recurring motif of 10 Days is the turn and return of voices, as fragments of sound and utterance are shaped into theatre that wounds our logic and shifts imagination. Theatre Talipot’s The Water Carriers claims and renames Indian Ocean myth, memory and magic through physical theatre of intense immanence.

The Water Carriers is potent and prescient theatre for an increasingly water-starved world. The stark stage design establishes the vertigo of deep thirst. A river once provided the connecting thread between people occupying the mountains, the valley and the sea. The river as bearer and supporter of life has dried into a gorge. “Sing again water”, the dancers intone, “are you sleeping?” A shifting repertoire of voice and body is established through the precision and energy of the performers. Four dancers hallucinate across deserts, summon water from dried springs, and convincingly cross gender at the well of women.

The absence of water projects the performers into an obeisance of ritual and practical strategies. These include dance, percussion, and the weave of harmonic voices to entice the sky to deliver water through invocations of memory, fragments of song, sayings and dances. Their success will enable the roots of the talipot tree to glisten, moistened throats to resume the story, and a river to flow renewing peoples and their worlds again.

Water surrounds, connects with and separates all island cultures. The journey across water is an informing motif for all island inhabitants. 10 Days on the Island showcased international companies alongside high calibre Tasmanian visual artists and performers. Robyn Archer’s strategy of dispersing representatives of island cultures around the island state will hopefully ensure a strong and enthusiastic audience base for the 2003 celebration of islands and arts diversity.

Ballads, CoisCëim Dance Theatre, director/choreographer David Bolger, Theatre Royal, Hobart, March 30 – April 2; No 2, Compania Segundo, writer Toa Fraser, performer Madeleine Sami, director Catherine Boniface, Peacock Theatre, Hobart, April 4-8; The Water Carriers , Theatre Talipot, writer/artistic director Phillipe Pelen Baldini, composer/ interpreter Ricky Randimbiarison, choreographer Savitry Nair, Princess Theatre, Launceston, April 5-6

A Warning

I am not impartial. I am a practitioner in the theatre scene about which I write. Because I practice I don’t get to as much theatre as I would like. But when I do go I feel that I have a stake in it; and, in the face of the omnivorous imperialism of mass communication, I care about how it reveals the world to me. I go, as Tim Etchells of the British performance ensemble Forced Entertainment puts it, as a witness not as a spectator, “because to witness an event is to be present at it in some fundamentally ethical way, to feel the weight of things and one’s own place in them, even if that place is simply, for the moment, as an onlooker.” I don’t sit there waiting to be transformed or uplifted or provoked into action. I know that all of those will result from the contract between me and the performance. We both have to work at it. The late American actor Ron Vawter described the feeling of riding the wave of energy from the audience like a surfer. Well, when it works, the wave is shared, we’re all on it; and we know how fickle waves can be. They soar and they dump, but even when they dump you are surrounded by energy, whereas in the theatre, when it’s not working, there is a cold energy-less atmosphere. Oh for the return of impassioned disagreement.

The view overall

There are 2 broad aspects to the Melbourne theatre scene: one, the theatre that goes on in Melbourne, the product, the productions, the one-off, or intermittent shows that are mainly, though not exclusively, gathered around the various arts festivals that have developed over the past 10-15 years; two, the theatre of Melbourne, the ongoing, year-round theatre culture connected either to companies or performance spaces. These are not mutually exclusive, the line is being crossed all the time, but the distinction is worth making, partly because for so long the emerging festival market and its supermarket way of presenting art has been seen as a threat to the fragile local theatre ecology; partly because, in the face of festival influence, it may be time to recognise the shift in local theatre that they have helped bring about.

The Independents

The festivals are healthy. I don’t have the space to deal with them here. The non-festival one-off scene—what the funding bodies call Individual Projects (a lot of which also happen in the festivals)—is also healthy if not wealthy and certainly numerous. I get about 2 invitations a week to new shows opening in the various independent venues around town: Theatreworks, The Storehouse, The Carlton Courthouse, Gasworks, the Trades Hall, North Melbourne Town Hall, or various warehouses or lofts around the inner suburbs. In these shows, limited as they are by funding, interesting creative trends can be discerned. This is the work of performance artists, young and old, seeking to delight, engage and, in Peggy Phelan’s words, “ignite the conscience of an ethical observer.” The artists have something to say about the world around them or inside them and the genres and traditions of the various performance disciplines stretch and strain to accommodate the complexities of their responses to a complex world. There is a constant output by artists and small groups which attempts to rewrite the visual grammar of theatre.

There are many emerging independent groups and artists that I’ve seen or not yet seen. Chris Bendall and Victor Bizotto’s Theatre @ Risk opened in May, a season of works at the Blackbox Theatre in the Arts Centre. Robert Reid’s Theatre in Decay is prolific, mounting at a variety of venues the punchy contemporary pieces that flow from his pen. I hope to cover these 2 groups and others in more detail in later issues.

The New Agenda

The agenda is now being set by the independent work, unlike the case in days of yore when ensembles and medium-sized companies and spaces were the avant-garde. The reason is economic of course. Who can afford an ensemble these days? A few months ago, in the North Melbourne Town Hall, a packed room of small company directors, administrators and actors, and a sprinkling of independent artists gathered to form a network of theatre professionals, Theatre Network Victoria. The purpose was to gain strength in numbers, to accumulate a supportive database, to set up a lobby group that could argue for the return of the middle ground of Melbourne theatre—that area that operates between the independent projects and the larger companies like MTC and Playbox. There was general agreement that the loss of that middle ground was causing a real lack of depth and breadth in the city’s theatrical culture. There was a range of opinion as to how to address this but an agreement that a congregation of effort was better than trying to go it alone.

But there is no denying it: the theatre culture has changed. My friend, the director Kim Durban, coined the term “the necklace theory” to describe a way of working in these times. I hope she won’t mind if I share it here. It arose in response to her attempt (successful finally) to mount a Masters production at the VCA—a radical reworking of the 16th century domestic tragedy Arden of Faversham. With no money to pay the group of professional actors she wished to work with, she worked out a schedule in which she would always be present at rehearsals but she would work with whichever of the actors was able to turn up. She got different combinations every week. No actor was able to turn up to all rehearsals. Some dropped out half way through. Some joined late. The show kept developing. She had a source text but the text they were building for performance was original. There was a loose ensemble of intent but no continuity. Except for her. She was the jeweller, threading together the pearls that were formed at each meeting. What was significant, I think, apart from the fact that the work went on to success, was that instead of bowing under the pressure of circumstances, Kim reasoned for herself another way of working. “The age of the ensemble working all hours in the old church hall has gone,” she said, “this is the age of the necklace.”

The Melbourne theatre scene is now like a necklace. To keep up with the trends, to be there at the breakthroughs, you can no longer pop down to the Pram Factory or Anthill or even Handspan. You’ve got to move around, picking up the pearls where you find them, threading them for yourself, trying to make sense of the whole pattern. Attendance at La Mama has always been like that—potluck; that, in addition to the space itself, is its charm.

THREE COMPANIES

Keene-Taylor Project

There are a few companies that are bucking this trend. Ariette Taylor and Daniel Keene (Keene-Taylor Project) have gathered around them a group of actors who, whilst continuing to work in the wider profession, keep returning to perform. This is a loose ensemble of sorts. It enables Keene-Taylor to draw off a wide variety of generations, styles and experience. Their youngest performer is still in her teens. The oldest are in their 70s. What draws them is that Keene’s closely wrought, dark and sympathetic studies of those at the margins of our society are wonderful actors’ pieces. The company is run by a director and a writer but in many ways it is an actors’ theatre. The genre may look to be social realist, but the recognition in the writing of an unpredictable transcendent dimension and Taylor’s idiosyncratic direction create instead an aura of magic-realism. The focus is deliberately narrow. It is the consistency of the target and the pursuit that is its power. Here are poverty, prejudice and loneliness, three of the huge social monsters that still need slaying; here too is the humanity that may yet do it. Keene-Taylor draws a devoted audience because there is the strong sense that to be there is to be a witness to a vital social event. These may be character studies but when they work (and they risk skirting close to a reductive sentimentality when they don’t) the real event lies in the depth of understanding reached between actors and audience as the world unfolds. Keene-Taylor has performed at a Brotherhood furniture depot, at the Trades Hall and at the Malthouse.

Ranters

The Cortese Bros, Adriano and Raimondo, formed Ranters Theatre several years ago and have had success here and overseas with Adriano’s direction of Raimondo’s plays. Interestingly, both they and Keene-Taylor work with one director and one writer. “Boutique theatre”, a friend called it; the model is European and has the advantage of intense focus in contrast to the extensive charter that a writers’ theatre like Playbox accepts. The Corteses have attempted to organise the company along lines more recognisable as an experimental ensemble: a group of young or youngish people devoting most of their professional time to relatively long rehearsals and a consequent shared performance language. The performance style is intentionally rough, the mise en scene loosely organised, so that the line between world and theatre is blurred. This is obviously well suited to, in fact is built out of, the style of Cortese’s most recent work: gritty, contemporary urban fables. These are stylistically recognisable works—they are low-tech, not cross-disciplinary, the form is open and seeks to question the ways an audience may perceive the reality they are presenting. They throw focus onto the human and therefore onto the actor. Like some of the contemporary British playwrights, Cortese is looking anew at human relations in the lights of a fin-de-siecle city. Ranters has performed at La Mama, Napier St, the old Economiser and Playbox. A review of their latest show, St. Kilda Tales, follows.

not yet it’s difficult

David Pledger’s group, not yet it’s difficult, is not an ensemble but over the half dozen or so shows they have created in the past few years, several of the same performers have appeared. The group works with a highly articulated physicality, influenced by Pledger’s exposure to Eastern training methods. The work is non-narrative, non-character based. The early shows worked almost purely off a choric physical language—on one occasion applying Eastern modes and rhythms to familiar Australian sport behaviour—and that element is still present. Recent work, however, has included some more traditional dramatic encounters and dialogue and the introduction of fairly sophisticated video and sound tracks. nyid theatre is conceptual as well as experiential in intent and there has been a growing complexity of concept over the arc of their shows. nyid has performed at Theatreworks, in the plaza outside the Arts Centre, at the Athenaeum Theatre and in an old indoor parking area in West Melbourne.

In RealTime 44, I’ll continue this survey with an interview with Pledger, before moving onto look at some of the newer companies.

Seen fleetingly in a suite of photographs last year, SO2 is Patricia Piccinini’s latest synthetic creature. A highlight of the visual arts component of the Melbourne Federation Festival (“The Australia Projects”, May 9-27, curated by Juliana Engberg) Piccinini’s Superevolution featured SO2 both as a set of zoological images at RMIT and as an animatronic ‘live’ version at the Royal Melbourne Zoo which could be visited in its habitat. Uncannily platypus-like, the work was intended to represent “all that was primordial about the ancient continent of Terra Incognita.”

Meanwhile, LumpCD, co-authored by partner Peter Hennessey in their Melbourne Drome studio, represents the culmination of many years’ labour, incorporating a series of Piccinini’s ideas and images and translating them into an interactive form. LumpCD was included in the Posthuman Bodies component of the CyberCultures tour, and was recently exhibited at Centre for Contemporary Photography’s e-Media Gallery (March 16-April 12), and during May in the CCP’s regional Victorian CD-ROM program, Click.

Patricia Piccinini has been enjoying considerable international success lately. As well as group shows such as the Australian media art show Hybrid Life in Amsterdam in March, she was one of 4 Australian artists selected for the Kwangju Biennale in Korea last year, one of 2 for the Berlin Biennale in April, will hold a solo show in Lima in June and will be returning to Tokyo in July. Among other projects, Piccinini is currently working on Blast, an interactive environmental work for the new Australian Centre for the Moving Image at Melbourne’s
Federation Square.

How do you see Superevolution and LumpCD in the context of your overall art practice?

PP They both deal with the issues that have always inspired me—how we look at the definition of ‘life’, and how it’s affected by new medicine and technology. SO2 (synthetic organism 2) represents the dream of creating something really new, the ultimate creation—life itself. For the Federation Festival, Juliana Engberg suggested I work with a public institution and I chose the Zoo. It’s been challenging because zoos have a specific goal, which is not only to look after the animals but also to create encounters between humans and animals so that people will go away with a sense of connection. Zoos are totally self-conscious about the way they need to enclose their animals. So when I said to them that I wanted to put an artificial animal in the wombat enclosure, there were clear implications of a critique. Nevertheless, they agreed for me to go in there and create an animal that questions the nature of life—that draws attention to the idea that the zoo is totally artificial. What does the idea that we are now able to create a new life form say about the zoo’s main purpose, which is to preserve life? What does it say when the artificial and real animals of the zoo hold the same fascination for people?

I looked at lots of animals for SO2 and came up with drawings of a creature that kind of looks like a platypus, has the mouth of a stingray, but ultimately I feel is a relative of the naked mole rat. It’s now called the Siren Mole, or that’s its common name. Peter Stroud, curator of mammals, got me in touch with Paul Andrew, a taxonomist from Taronga, who gave SO2 a proper Latin name, Exallocephala parthenopa, a wonderfully romantic name from Parthenope, a siren said to have been cast up and drowned on the shores of Naples. Philip Miller from Puppetvision took my computer drawings and gave them a 3-dimensional form. The illusion of life is crucial for the work, otherwise the ideas wouldn’t be able to jump across, people wouldn’t engage with it. Now hopefully they’ll think: what’s this thing doing here, in fact, what’s this whole place doing here?

As well as indulging in the pleasure of pure creation, SO2 is about asking questions. Why would you create new life? Where would it belong? Could it affect other life forms that are indigenous to our environment? This whole project was inspired by a real life event—the creation of SO1 the world’s first synthetic life form, a micro-organism. This project is a fiction that, in this world of cloning and transgenic babies, is totally conceivable. It’s about cute, loving and adorable creatures that ask to be looked after and inspire feelings of nurturing. Ultimately this project could be a spark that might trigger off ideas in the public realm, amongst those who don’t see art very often.

And what about LumpCD? Can you tell me about your experiences producing and distributing it?

PH Patricia started making Lump works in 1994 for an exhibition at the Basement. Around 1997 we received a grant from the AFC to develop a CD-ROM version. We collaborated on the script and structure, and then I worked on the production with Patricia involved at more of a distance. We wanted to produce a work that people could take home, which makes it perhaps too huge and complex for an exhibition context. To see and hear everything in LumpCD would take 6-7 solid hours, but your average exhibition encounter is maybe 10-15 minutes. As for selling CD-ROMs, we’ve sold a few, but it’s tough. There’s no culture for it and it’s difficult to place; it works within a gaming mode, but it’s art and doesn’t have ‘game-play.’ We describe it as a virtual narrative environment.

LumpCD is also quite funny. Can you tell me about your strategic use of humour?

PP When I make these life forms, I believe they’re endearing and quite attractive. I don’t set out to make something repulsive that would shock people. I know some people don’t find them cute, but that’s hard for me to understand. I certainly don’t see the humour in my work as something that detracts from its seriousness. It’s just a way of making difficult ideas more palatable. I struggle in life to find a sense of joy in things. If there are moments in my work when people find joy and humour, that’s a real bonus for me. And I don’t connect accessibility with lowest common denominator.

PH There’s a lot of faux seriousness in contemporary art that’s there to signal its value, depth and profundity. So part of Patricia’s humour is about refusing to work with that particular mode. The work avoids simple moral judgements, and the humour sets something up and then cuts it down a little bit, so that it doesn’t stand on that edifice of seriousness.

PP It’s easier to do something that’s seen as being serious because people accept it right away, they don’t question what you do, they just accept, because they think you must be right. Equally, I feel there’s hardly any irony in my work; there’s sincerity, which people sometimes find hard to deal with, but I would say my work is anti-ironic.

PP I keep up and am absolutely vitally interested in it, but really just as a lay person. The Protein Lattice work was inspired by a TV segment; seeing the mouse with the human ear…was so phenomenal it made me think I had to do something.

PH What’s frightening is how little we keep up; we’re not looking anywhere obscure, just New Scientist and The Herald Sun. I feel that it is like catching that little flash that happens and holding it up for a little while, so that it doesn’t disappear into the background noise of the world so quickly. Patricia’s work demonstrates that these bizarre things are not in the future, they’re already happening. In this sense it’s social realism if anything…the current political condition of people living in our world today.

PH The filmmaking model is the one that is closest to the way Patricia works. My role is one of many collaborators working towards a conceptual goal that is usually developed by Patricia. It is a collaborative process, but not necessarily democratic!

PP The production of my work requires a team of people. And luckily I’ve a strong association with Peter and Dennis Daniel and everyone else at Drome, who are always credited for the modelling, rendering, editing, video and production work that they do. I tell people straight out that I conceive the work and then bring together the pieces. How do people perceive that? I don’t know, and it doesn’t interest me. If I didn’t have great people working on the projects, it wouldn’t work. I don’t want the ideas to be limited by what I can physically do. The ideas come first.

Do you think your recent international success is related to the ideas being quite universally accessible?

PP Some of my work is very Australian—such as the SO2 series in the carpark with the Holden—which is intriguing for people, but on the whole I’m dealing with international issues that are not specific to the Australian art world. I guess different countries are interested in works for particular reasons; it was interesting that Lima specifically requested The Breathing Room which is a work that looks at the idea of panic, because they thought it related well to their political situation. Plasticology was exhibited in Tokyo even though my work was not known there because Japanese people have a deep interest in the idea of nature.

PP My father is a photographer, so it was always around. I was trained in painting so I learnt a lot of skills about composition, light, colour, the formal attributes of images. I started thinking of digital imaging, not photography, in 1994 as it seemed the most appropriate way to deal with ideas of biotechnology and advertising. My practice is conceptual—I use whatever media I think will best express my ideas and therefore I don’t have a lot invested in the idea of photography specifically. I am more interested in art.

Patricia Piccinini is currently exhibiting in Lightness of Being—Contemporary Photographic Art from Australia, Monash University Gallery, Melbourne, May 22-July 7; Superevolution, 2001 Federation Festival, wombat enclosure, Royal Melbourne Zoo, May 11-27

There are so many rooms in this work; rooms of earth, water, milk and salt. From the moment we enter from backstage we are stepping into rooms, witnessing an evocation of emotion through these elements.

There is the image of despair, with a woman siting naked on the floor, arms around knees, long hair pasted to shoulders, a shower streaming water over her. We look by stepping up to a strategically placed hole in the wall, take it in momentarily, and step away for the next in line.

We walk through the stage to the seats of the theatre; taking in other rooms that are more implied than constructed. A woman is on her hands and knees, writing furiously the words “I am listening” around the edges of a square trough filled with milk. We are voyeurs to her distress.

Blocks of ice hang suspended from a metal structure, dripping away throughout the work, their original form diminishing as they become ever-expanding puddles of water on the floor.

A mound of earth lies in a corner of the stage. The performer looks at it, warily, touching it with a toe. Then resentment and irritation seem to set in as she kicks at it destructively, scattering it across the space.

A rectangular shaft of light is projected on the back wall of the stage and a solitary figure walks from left to right, painting black circular forms, first in the light, gradually drifting out of the light’s reach; less and less contained. She leaves the stage and the door to that room closes.

Salt pours onto the stage in a steady stream from above. A woman is standing in front of it, oh so slowly moving forwards and backwards within a square of light. The movement becomes less gentle and more twisted. The salt begins to take its own form on the floor. Later, another woman stands in the salt, head bowed, arms outstretched, imploring.

The 2 women stand in a trough of milk, whispering, tenderly embracing and supporting each other. This scene of comforting grows quite forced, with one pushing against the other and the milk splashing outside its pristine boundary. The scene closes with one performer, left to scrub out the words that have framed their struggle; “I am listening.”

These fragments of the work echo the themes of grief, anger and loneliness; all emotions that accompany the death of a loved one. The objects Clare Dyson uses help us to reflect on our own experiences—the mound of earth a grave; the milk a symbol of the nurturing and care that we put into relationships; the dripping water perhaps our own transformation on the other side of grief.

With an original score by Damian Barbeler and the reverential music of Zbigniew Preisner and Meredith Monk filling the space, intimate drowning moves from solemnity to anguish, with an almost celebratory ending. And the objects are left to stand alone, forever altered by the performance—pools of water, splashes of milk, scattered earth and salt.

intimate drowning carries us through a journey of grief and loss with beautiful, lingering images and riveting moments of movement and stillness that pierce the soul. It’s another compelling, affecting work by Dyson, and will stay with me for some time.

intimate drowning, creator/choreographer Clare Dyson in collaboration with performers Meg Millband, Julia Gray & Carrie Fowlie, ANU Arts Centre, Australian National University, April 6-13

Emerging artists and new venues are making an impact in Adelaide. Shop_70 is a new gallery, run by James Dodd and Josh 2K in a converted shop in Marlborough Street, Henley Beach. Specialising in new and experimental work, Shop_70 provides an alternative outlet for emerging artists. Its first exhibition Hot Dog with the Lot, opening in June, includes work by Katrina Simmons, Peter Franov, Alan Houghton, James Lillecrapp, James Crabb, Andrew Best and Store.

Dodd, Josh 2K and Store held an exhibition of painting, Shoes, in the Shed at the Contemporary Art Centre South Australia (CACSA) in February. They painted the Shed’s spacious interior walls with Manga-influenced cartoons, where fashion jogging shoes are fetishised objects of teenage sexual play, highlighting the consumerism in pop culture.

Dodd participated in Gleam, a show of emerging artists at the Experimental Art Foundation last October. Gleam tours to The Physics Room in Christchurch, New Zealand, in June. Dodd was also in the group show Endzone at Brisbane’s IMA last December-January. His wall-paintings for Gleam and Endzone are abstract forms painted gigantically, suggesting a mural, graffiti or a disco backdrop, emblems for the 21st century.

Graduating Victorian Michael Kutschbach won a residency at Adelaide Central School of Art in 1997 and is now a lecturer in painting there. His recent work comprises spray paint or photographs on boards of various sizes. On these surfaces, he draws a single line, a misshapen circle, either with paint or by removing the still wet under-paint with a fingertip.

In his December exhibition Roundhouse at 220 Hindley Street, Kutschbach painted the wall purple and then covered it with small, repeated forms. These forms, recalling fruit or coloured bubbles, become wallpaper, mocking that disdainful description of bad painting. They are traced from an original ‘blob’ painting he made by squashing paint with the palm of his hand against a ceramic tile, the ultimate gestural stroke. By tracing the blob over the top of other paint or photographs, the motif becomes a symbol for painting. The unbroken wiggly line also symbolises endless, circular rumination. By using the forms on a wall, on small and large boards and to permeate the boundaries of these boards, this musing appears portable, infecting all surfaces and display forums, unconfined by painting’s conventions. Kutschbach has also made ceramic blobs, painted white, or chromed to cast strange reflections. He is exhibiting at the Riddoch Gallery, Mt Gambier, from May 25 and at the Greenaway Gallery, Kent Town, from late June.

Realism, unpopular in recent years, is James Cochran’s language and he is making an impression with it. His exhibition at BMG Gallery North Adelaide in May dwells on the themes of the lonely, alienated individual, temptation, revelation, and the religious parable. In Francis in Ecstasy, a young man lies supine on a disco floor, eyes closed, surrounded by dancers oblivious to his condition. A friend cradles his head. Is he overcome by substances or experiencing a vision? Cochran nicely establishes the ambiguity, posing crucial questions about religion and contemporary (youth) culture. In Revelations, 7 young people in everyday clothes sit at a table. Before them are a hamburger bun and some beers. The central figure has a Christ-like demeanour, but are they (and we) listening? Hindley St and the Temptation of Anthony is a self-portrait in which the artist navigates a seedy world of sex, drugs and hopelessness. Cochran’s work is strong, committed and developing in interesting directions.

Renate Nisi and Roy Ananda, 4th year students at Adelaide Central School of Art, exhibited at Flightpath in March. Nisi’s most striking works are those in which she has taken wire or a branch and bound it tightly in cloth to create a form resembling a tortured, mummified human. These ambiguous figures seem like moths trapped in their chrysalises. In another work, pieces of black rubber tubing sprout from a tall frame, suggesting a tree of industrial materials. Though simple, these forms are carefully made and highly resolved, creating a dark poetic.

Ananda’s work often employs the outline of the momentary splash of an inkblot. His Template, in the Helpmann Academy’s 2001 Graduate Exhibition, is a 2.4m x 2.4m bright yellow room divider, hinged down the middle, with a metre-wide splash-shaped hole in the centre. Ananda is also interested in the record groove which contains much (musical) information. He cuts a groove through a series of objects, such as bricks, and threads through a string steeped in a coloured oxide, to make “master disks.” At clubs such as the Minke Bar, he draws abstract shapes on a large sheet of paper while the DJ performs, producing gestural works that reflect the mood of the music.

The Minke Bar is a new venue crowded with artists, filmmakers and musicians. Movies are shown while DJs perform. There are art exhibitions and the attraction of artists drawing live. Joe Novosel draws here. He and Ananda use a 2.5 x 2.5m piece of heavy paper taped to the wall (with a small rectangle cut in it to leave exposed the goldfish tank embedded in the wall). The energy and the intelligent discussion here promise artistic revitalisation.

At CACSA’s Shed in May-June is a group show of installations by 2 recent graduates and a student. Kate Benda’s Still comprises 3 mesh-covered frames, on stands, with objects suspended inside the mesh. Naomi Williamson’s What makes you think you can start with a clean slate is a stack of cardboard file-boxes forming a mountain, with tiny ladders cut from the sides to enable the ascent of a minuscule figure. Emma Northey’s sensuous She felt he felt comprises 2 tall, tubular forms covered in pink felt, like figures interacting.

An exhibition entitled The Land of Milk and Honey: Emerging Victorian Artists at Adelaide Central Gallery is a survey of work by 11 Victorians, all recent graduates. The exhibition provided the setting for a debate on the proposition That the Artistic Grass is Greener on the Eastern Seaboard. Though pitched as an entertaining panel game, the debate had a serious theme—that artists fare better there than here. While the Debating Society awarded the affirmative team the prize, audience sentiment was with the negative. The audience may be right. New venues for emerging artists, like the Shed, Shop_70 and the Minke Bar, are encouraging artistic development, and we’re seeing significant new work.

Upholster, Ballet Lab’s latest work, has those qualities I have come to identify as typically ‘Phillip Adams.’ First, there is the complex partnering. This form of action is both impersonal in manner and interdependent in terms of body mass, obviously requiring input from the performers in the development of the choreography. I rarely tire of watching these activities because they are often surprising and intricate. Then there are the weird dances: waltzes, mazurkas and polkas that twirl and weave through space. These compositions exhibit the traces of ballet, as remembered perhaps in an acid flashback: time is collapsed, heterosexuality decentred, no smiles, just an ironic twist. Both these styles lend themselves to large group work.

Upholster has 7 performers. The piece is divided into 2 Acts—Renovate and Upholster. Renovate is more episodic than connected, purporting a “dystopic Kama Sutra performed on futons.” Naturally Adam’s partnering work was well suited to the convolutions of coital knot-tying. Most of the positions were sexually suggestive, except no-one seemed to have any feeling for anyone else. I guess that’s the dystopic element. I felt a slight sense of the mechanical about these interactions, in that the timing only allowed for a perfunctory shift from one position to the next. Perhaps this is the logic of the orgy—no time for tea and a biscuit, just a quick change of the rubber sheet and onto the next. Nonetheless, the entrance of Erskine, Heaven and Van Dyke (experienced performers) introduced a satirical edge which seemed to subsequently infect all the others. Simple enough, their menage à trois consisted of a “Twister” game involving buttoning each other’s knitwear into a tripartite body.

My favourite section in Act One involved a series of foldings of people and futons, rolling, covering, turning, exposing, conjoining. This worked exceedingly well, for the viewer’s eye was woven into the fabric of the dance, watching the futon fold over a body, and unfold to reveal another. The experience of surface becoming depth, becoming surface again, spoke well to the theme in that upholstery is the process by which the surfaces of furniture are constructed and shaped. On the one hand, it is an interior materiality (stuffing, foam, springs); on the other, it creates surfaces (the final façade).

Act Two was more straightforward and literal. Here, there was a set, a protagonist and a narrative of sorts. Michelle Heaven played a daggy, whimsical character who, like Pinocchio’s dad, made things with her hands. This time, it was the couch that came alive, animated by 2 performers. The ensuing dance with Heaven’s character was really interesting, calling forth imaginative physical solutions to an unusual duet. Like the folding futon section, the interaction with an inanimate but mobile object created stimulating morphologies. Heaven was turned, carried, twisted and transported. Whirling Dervish dances and post-alienation pile ups on the couch in front of the TV followed, leading to the final tableau—love-in between hippie boy and girl— flower power scene of redemption.

Lynton Carr’s vinyl mixes were great, including modern and classical moments. There were also some good atmospherics leading up to the last scene. Overall, Upholster was very rich in movement terms, obviously the result of a great deal of creative work. It was also fun. Thematically, I’d question the role of upholstery. If it was as inspiration for the design elements of the piece, the objects to be played with and the costumes, it played its part. What it didn’t do enough is investigate the nature of upholstery which, like flesh, covers bones, shapes bodies, yields to the touch. Can we think of human bodies as upholstered objects? There was an inkling of these issues in the folding futons section. There are also connections to be made between the wrapping of bodies and the wrapping of furniture. I also felt, perhaps mistakenly, that the Kama Sutra theme, and its decorative Hindu arm gestures, was a bit of an add-on, to give an exotic flavour to the whole. Because I saw it as more superficial than integral, I felt there was an element of “Orientalism” here, use of the exotic other to reflect western ethnocentric concerns, rather than as an engagement with that other.

Upholster covers a lot of ground. It is intricate and detailed, manifesting Phillip Adam’s deep-seated interest in design (see RT#37). While hinting at the conceptual grounds of upholstery, it weaves an aesthetic web. On the surface, beneath the surface, questions are covered over, but they are there to be discerned as the work unfolds.

Upholster, Ballet Lab, choreographer Phillip Adams, dancers Michelle Heaven, Gerard Van Dyke, Stephanie Lake, Shona Erskine, Brooke Stamp, Ryan Lowe, Kyle Kremerskothen, Athenaeum Theatre II, Melbourne, March 15-25

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