Australian
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August 2001

Neil Roberts, Things in the State of Belonging

collection, the artist, photo the artist

Neil Roberts, Things in the State of Belonging

If you soften your eyes, relax, let go of hard-edged purposes and intentions, you can look at objects differently—their textures, timbres, rhythms, how they have sat or walked in the world; not just their alliances and fights with each other; but also their gentler kinships, potentials, hopes to evolve.
There are forms of art which rely on the agon—a testing of object versus object, a gladiatorial match. And there are others which remember both the salt-taste of memory and the hopeful recombinant geometries underlying form. Although Neil Roberts’ work is largely sourced from objects-in-the-working-world (workgloves, cables, funnels, pizza trays), the weight of their uses becomes only a molecular part of their inherent qualities—and the cries for recombination that their edges yearn for.

Roberts in the studio: patient, peripherally scanning, hearing the cry of the object to mate differently, create a new creature, shift DNA.

So, when Roberts welds together a hoe and large caliper so that they lean into each other, strength resting in their paired fulcrum, teeth just touching the floor, they are both objects of labour (memory of sweat), and a black-bodied dance crossing air and time. Mantis and mantis coming to mate. Sweat and soil become proportional in a larger matrix which, like love, kisses into another space.

Take some umbrella frames—6 vacant hats, pincered pinnacles, girders for a seagull’s nest, perhaps; have them crouch atop 24 spidery long tubes of glass, messengers from the ground. Exquisite insects, aliens hovering; we stumble into a delicate world.

A long vein of old trowels hang along a wall, rusting diamonds embossed and flecked with fossils, millipede whorls, stones, glass fragments, a wallpaper rose, coiled wire like Rapunzel’s hair beginning to unfold. This series utters a quiet archaeology—echo of a building-site, childish trespass amongst grandfather’s toil, perhaps; but its thisness is stronger than sentimental memory: a tramline of tools, small meetings, shape within shape, what can a diamond hold. This is amplified by a roll-call of some 40 chalice-shaped petrol funnels along the parallel wall, their angular double-cupping echoing the negative space between those blades.

This sump-oiled Arthurian feast starts a reverb which connects to other objects in the room, most of which comment with soft inflection on men’s work/masculinity. The figures implicitly related to these objects are heroes, less so for their brawn or the violence of their strength, than the delicacy of the motion within their muscles, as the eye traces the necessary line of movement to a goal, and the arm and body fulfil their trajectories.

Roberts talks of “parallel universes…existing outside our perception, spending a blink of their existence in our known world.” This applies to actions both within and between people and objects, as well as to inherent qualities. At times, a nascent activity states itself (O2 drawn on a rusting tool). At others, the lines of energy between 2 boxers, or the swing of a punching-bag, becomes a drawing translated into leaded glass. Half Ether, Half Dew Mixed with Sweat wraps a carapace of Tiffany glass over a leather punching bag: fragile strength, harsh virility yoked in an embrace. “Go on, hit me,” they both seem to say. And how they might have moved, been moved, is also part of the piece: in its making, molten glass “flows slow”, as does the mind of the boxer punching sweet. Traditional church glass’s function was to “make visible the energy of God”; Half Ether’s leather, glass and lead literally hold each other’s lines of inspiration and flight. Their differences do not so much play out as dis/splay a new animal being formed.

Other works wrap wire, mesh or chain around cable, insulated wire, or bottles crushed by a goliath (a bikies’ night in). Baudelaire’s Rope (based on a short story about the rope used by a suicide which becomes an object of collectors’ desire) ponders how strangely a fetish-object is kept alive, the rope perhaps providing a link of relatedness that was missing in the suicide’s life; in this strange way, the suicide is held, perhaps for the first time. There is both astute social observation and a challenge to judgmentalism in this leaded posie whose cut lengths are only half-displayed. As with the head-banded cables of For Those Who Suffer Uncertainty there is a kind of sanctuary, a continuity of substance in the metallic embrace of something which has, or wants to, die, bequeathed to a livingness in the meeting of these wires.

Perhaps poignancy hits most in the blacksmithing aprons suspended from another wall: tired at day’s end, hung upside-down, the leather is patched with a splayed football opening like a flower. The aprons bare both gut and heart, hope and loss, an exquisite questing emanating from beneath the protective skins of work and toil.

The Collected Works of Neil Roberts, part of Metis 2001: Wasted, curated by Merryn Gates, Canberra School of Art Gallery, May 5-June 10

With thanks to Barbara Campbell for a transcript of Neil’s talk given for Artforum, Canberra School of Art, June 6.

RealTime issue #44 Aug-Sept 2001 pg. 39

Hung Le, Ningali Lawford, Black & Tran

photo Jon Green

Hung Le, Ningali Lawford, Black & Tran

Deckchair Theatre’s recent touring production Black & Tran transports us, theatrically speaking, to a pub in Carlton (Melbourne) while transforming the performance space into a cabaret venue with its own bar—an invitation to settle down, relax and get into the swing of things. It worked for me and I hate pubs, particularly the ones evoked in this production. It’s the old fashioned kind that comes with a telly for watching sport, a pool table and a dartboard—the true blue, Aussie bloke kind of pub. I don’t drink beer, hate watching sport on TV, can’t play pool or darts and loathe the aggro and punch-ups that I associate with the beer guzzling, poofter bashing, sexist and racist stupidities of the dinki-di Aussie. Well that’s the way it was when I was growing up.

In general, I don’t like stand-up comedy either and for many of the reasons cited above, so I should have hated this combination of pub culture and stand-up, but I didn’t. I can’t tell you whether or not pubs have changed but in Black & Tran, you get the impression that these old fashioned bars are now a positive haven—given the tidal wave of gentrification that has swept over most cities—for those who don’t want to participate in the white majority middle class culture of wine bars and brasseries. In this pub, instead of a big white bloke with a red-neck and a gut wearing a singlet and stubbies with his crack hanging out, there—glued to the cricket on telly—is a lanky, bespectacled Vietnamese man. When his nemesis arrives, far from a head-kicking skinhead, she’s a cheerful Aboriginal woman who swings into the bar with a friendly, “Hey Tokyo, ya wanna game a’ stick?”

While Ningali Lawford takes some convincing that Hung Le, whose Australian accent is so broad you could thwack it with a cricket bat, is in fact Vietnamese-Australian and not Japanese, Hung Le himself has a bit to do in coming to terms with an Aboriginal Australian. As they trade tall tales and true and tell lots of totally tragic jokes about eating dogs and snakes in sometimes hysterically visceral detail, the audience cacks itself in recognition of all those racial slurs and cliches. Perhaps surprisingly, this first generation migrant and original Australian have a lot in common. Neither of them spoke English until their late primary years. Neither of them is seen to be a ‘real’ Australian and, of course, they share a loathing of Pauline Hanson and those of her ilk. Hanson—referred to throughout as the “Oxley-moron”—is the target of merciless satire.

Despite the trading of racial stereotypes and cultural misconceptions, this is an amiable piss-take rather than a savage satire. And unlike a lot of stand-up, its message is inclusive rather than exclusive, its thrust mildly educational and its concerns humanitarian. In this infectious and light-hearted production there are serious issues raised but, in the end, this show suggests that one solution to the problems of injustice, prejudice and intolerance, at least at street level, is to be found in humour and a willingness to engage with the regulars at your local pub.

So maybe it’s time for me to throw off my ingrained prejudices and head on down to the local for a game of stick. My pool playing would surely test the limits of anyone’s tolerance!

–

Black & Tran, director Jean Pierre Mignon, created by & starring Ningali Lawford, Hung Le, Deckchair Theatre, Victoria Hall, Fremantle, May 15-23, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, May 24-26

RealTime issue #44 Aug-Sept 2001 pg. 30

Brian Fuata, Museum of Fetishized Identities

photo Heidrun Löhr

Brian Fuata, Museum of Fetishized Identities

I was raised on a steady diet of Chekhovs performed in the manner and dialect of langorous English tea parties. It was a relief then to encounter the Benedict Andrews-Beatrix Christian version towards the end of its Sydney Theatre Company season (Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, opened May 11), angular, impassioned, unpredictable—a good test of a production for a play we know only too well. It remains curiously faithful for all its lateral moves, disk-spinning, occasional (if sometimes just too out of whack) contemporary references and magically eccentric, full-bodied and frightening performances—not without the requisite moments of reflection and interiority the playwright demands. “Hyper-real” is how the collaborators describe the characters, and I think they’re right. It’s the astonishing range of emotion and its moments of sharp visible embodiment that fuelled me. This contemporary playing doesn’t feed everyone in the audience. The familiar made strange got a bit too much for some: Irina’s insistent “To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow…” at the end of Act II was quietly met with “To Mosman, to Mosman…” by one disgruntled patron. But the performance manner is now, it is the future. But whose? Why is Masha singing Joni Mitchell’s paean to Woodstock—she can’t get it out of her head. It’s awkward, it jars, but it says that the dreams of 1968 have failed utterly. Act III looks uncomfortably like Bosnia. I’d just read Michel Houellebecq’s manic-depressive novel Atomised, so I was edgy about any more baby-boomer bashing (we get enough of that in the Sydney Morning Herald) and the denunciation of 400 years of less than humane humanism. So I went home in a spin, fuelled by the playing, emptied by an Andrews-Christian vision grimmer than any Chekhov I’d supped with before.

Guillermo Gomez Pena’s The Museum of Fetisihised Identities (Performance Space, July 5-14) was one of the most remarkable experiences of recent years, pulling my disparate atoms into fractal coherence across the 3 hour performance. The San Francisco-based Mexican artist and his cohort Yuan Ybarra collaborated with Australian artists for 5 weeks to create a set of living, recycled, sometimes mutating tableaux that transform an increasing number of the audience across the season into performers. As RealTime’s Kirsten Krauth put it: “It’s hard to maintain a passion for theatre-with-boundaries after experiencing The Museum of Fetishised Identities. A venue done up like a rave with performances fluid and revolving and great thumping music, where you can rove with a drink in one hand and a machine gun in the other is pretty hard to beat”. This tightly choreographed production moves from museum (a collection of bizarre cultural types, partly constructed from the performers’ lives) to ritual, culminating in the crucifixion of Ybarra with ‘Chicano’ scrawled across his chest (how does, Gomez Pena repeatedly asks, a Mexican become a Chicano).

Despite the cross, the skeleton that hangs above, the density of colour and sound and the specificity of Gomez’s own images (punch drunk Third World boxer, beggar dwarf, sculptor of terror tableaux using the audience) the whole feels less Mexican than aberrantly and creatively global ie not corporate. The Australian collaborators produce images that evoke constellated local subcultures (feminist lesbian warrior dj), public transgressions (a naked woman climbs into a perspex display box and smears it with breast milk), cultural caricature (someone in a kangaroo mask in a flailing dance with a cricket bat), foreign experience (the ritual of an Indian street beggar turned into an appalling fashion parade using the audience). Valerie Berry, Barbara Clare, Brian Fuata, Victoria Spence, Caitlin Newton-Broad, Rolando Ramos, Claudia Chidiac and Agatha Gothe-Snape perform with commitment and precision, some revealing surprising, new dimensions when deprived of their usual means of expression. Digital artist Jorge Cantellano (satirical, animated images of branded synthetic humans) and video installation artist Vahid Vahed (dark imagery of political torment across the last century) complete the picture—an exhilarating expression of difference in the age of globalism that sometimes stops you in your tracks. A bit like partying your way through the Apocalypse.

Urban Theatre Project’s Asylum (director Claudia Chidiac; May 31-June 9), in a disused shop in a western Sydney suburb was not at all celebratory. Its more familiar assemblage of monologue tales of the refugee encased in a fragile narrative nonetheless had power and poignancy because of the great strength of some mature performers and the immediacy of the political situation in Australia’s atrocious handling of refugees. We entered the performance area as refugees, hassled by officials we couldn’t understand and we watched the performance through wire as projected images (Denis Beaubois) and unfamiliar sound worlds (Rik Rue) disoriented us, as we tried, pertinently, to read the writing on the walls that these inmates patiently worked at. In the end a refugee is forced to go home, presumably to death. As heavy as the hand is that hits you with this, the truth is as horribly light as Kundera’s: it’s hard to walk from the space, to drive home in one piece.

Critical Mass Theatre’s HAZCHEM (May 18-June 17) is bewildering and mysteriously affecting. A pre-show guided tour through the Wollongong City Gallery doesn’t prepare you for the council chamber balcony view through a mist of a yellow car atop a mound of sea-rounded rocks, a body flung across the car roof. It’s an image of beauty and of horror, the end of a story we’ll never know. What we witness seems to be some kind of aftermath in which perhaps a family is pulled apart, atomised. But HAZCHEM refuses such guessing and goes the way of reverie as headlines of crime and corruption and crashes and vast oceans wave across the chamber walls. A work siren sounds, grabbing everyone’s attention. So does rock’n’roll and the footy. There’s a brief sentimental evocation of a 60s holiday in the car, a trip to the Kiama blowhole. We’re sliding back. Trite memories and short-lived suspicions about pollution jostle, a comic but touching courtship is expressed in local terms (“you’re my smelter’), a slow death is mused over, and a running panic grabs thesel individuals (pulling them out of their cages, off their bikes, out of their preoccupations), until they unite atop the mayoral bench, yelling, punching the air, powerless. There’s been a car crash, a city has crashed, something has been lost. Deborah Leiser’s precise, visually intense direction yields focussed performances from a mostly experienced cast (Janys Hays, Bruce Keller, Jeff Stein, Bel Macedone, Ian McGregor) who know how to stretch time and contract space as well as how to act as the work switches between the imagistic demands of contemporary performance and fragmentary sketches of the everyday. I missed the significance of many of the local references and I wasn’t certain how HAZCHEM added up, so I wasn’t always at one with it and its sometimes cut and paste structure, but it’s a striking and worrying work. I hope Critical Mass Theatre (made up of artists with an association with the city) and its gallery partner persist in building contemporary performance in Wollongong.

Bel Brown, Marianne Hender, Claire Burrow, 100 Confessions

photo Heidrun Löhr

Bel Brown, Marianne Hender, Claire Burrow, 100 Confessions

David Williams’ 100 Confessions in PACT Youth Theatre’s Forked Tongues (PACT Theatre, May 16-27) featuring 3 emerging directors (Williams, Cindy Rodriguez, Briony Dunn), is a chaotic party cum game cum social experiment that requires improvisational skills and timing that are mostly beyond its players. Even so, recurrent gags, playing with labels, dodgy confessions, shifting allegiances, outrageous scenarios, some strong indiosyncratic performances and seriously escalating tension yield a surprising level of coherence. Rodriguez’ Picasso’s Blood is the most assured work on the bill. As with Melbourne writer-director Jenny Kemp’s play with gesture, group movement, iconic text and obsessive behaviour, Rodriguez creates a dream world where characters split and multiply and the relationship between a Bluebeard Picasso and Dora Maar goes to pieces. Knife play, a blood obsession, a pair of limping marionette legs, and sound waves of ocean, soprano and vocalise female chorus recur with nightmarish intensity, evoking a labyrinth of love.

Verity Laughton’s Burning (Griffin Theatre Company, June 15-July 14) unfolds like a staged novel, explaining its way forward, labouring its cluster of secrets and the predictable revelations of a well-worn theatrical model. For a ghost story it lacks the dynamic of stillness and alarm that yield eeriness and fright and a hoped for epiphany. Laughton is at her best when poetic. In Burning the dialogue is for the most part too earthed, the scenario uncomfortably middlebrow, the naturalistic to-ing and fro-ing too busy. Yet the writer is onto something that white Australians need to engage with, their relationship with the land (even if it is someone else’s) built up over 200 years. Cloudstreet awkwardly explores some of this terrain (though not with Burning’s explicit Celtic focus) and Miriam Dixson (The Imaginary Australian, UNSW Press,1999) and Jennifer Rutherford (The Gauche Intruder, Melbourne University Press, 2000), among others, provide rich insights. I wanted Burning to work some magic on me, to answer, however poetically, however intuitively, a big question, but I couldn’t see past its mechanics (some of which, like the ramped, enclosing wall of photocopies were in fact magical). I left as I had come, incomplete. Atomised.

Kate Champion’s About Face (The Studio, Sydney Opera House, June 5 -16, see Erin Brannigan’s review) may have suffered from an overly episodic structure and a bits’n’pieces soundtrack, but its account of a personality attempting to reintegrate itself was powerfully conveyed by the interplay of the performer live before us and on 2 screens. A horizontal screen above revealed a slow motion, suicidal fall; a large vertical screen behind a door yielded an encounter with multiplying selves. On the screen above a survelliance camera caught Champion at the door of her apartment—trying to gain access to herself. Brigid Kitchen’s film and Sydney Bouhaniche’s lighting gave About Face increasing cohesion. In scale and focus they struck the perfect balance between live and virtual bodies.

RealTime issue #44 Aug-Sept 2001 pg. 32

Audience detainees, Wild Knights

photo Heidrun Löhr

Audience detainees, Wild Knights

We’re driving out to the edges of Sydney. It’s cold and still. I’m going to see a performance in a remand prison for young men at Cobham Juvenile Justice Centre. The piece is called Wild Knights. The steady drive toward St Marys has me feeling like the event has started already, there’s that twist in the guts, a transaction is looming between me and…a Wild Knight, a young prisoner.

I know I will be a fleeting visitor to this veiled place, a nervous stranger who will leave, free. These young men have been consigned to the remand centre because they may have done something serious. They got caught and are awaiting sentencing. I am imagining these Wild Knights, compelled by the promise of a face to place alongside the cliches and stories of criminal youth, trouble, the violence in our lives and imaginations. I don’t yet know that my curiosity will not be indulged. It sure is cold. I dig deeper into my coat pockets.

Wild Knights is a performance event about ‘encounter’—with institutions, with myths, between human beings behind bars, those who are their jailers, family and strangers. It’s not a representation of prison life but plays with the palpable space between other and self, with real implications.

Wild Knights is a collaboration between Cobham Juvenile Justice Centre, High Street Youth Health Service and erth Visual Theatre, directed by Alicia Talbot. In a 2-hour show, devised by 10 young men (whose names are not revealed) with a host of professional artists and collaborators, the audience is sent on a privileged journey—to look at and momentarily experience a calculated initiation into this environment.

We are offered roles as “Detainees’, “Official Visitors” and “VIP Guests”, and taken on different paths through the complex and silent world of the juvenile justice system. While we encounter the mechanisms of discipline, evidenced clearly in the rituals of entry, we are privy to the defiance, incursions and exuberant gestures of the inmates and workers who populate the physical space of this prison.

Each audience member is asked to hand in their personal items at check in. Our phones, jackets and other items are sealed in a holding bag and we’re given an identity for the duration of the performance. I am a ‘detainee’ and loaded on a docking bus with tinted windows and plenty of locked chambers. All detainees are asked to don white suits for the initiation of a model prisoner.

A lot of the pleasure and dis-ease in this 2 and a half hour performance came from observing the reactions of audience to the protocols and impact of the place. At one point we were herded into individual cells, while a performance was conducted outside for “official guests and VIPs.” We gathered at one point to listen to a range of beautiful original songs, from rap to acoustic, in one of the many courtyards. A group of Wild Knights conducted a mysterious meeting; a mock court was held with corrupt officials and manic lawyers dancing around the defendant. Performers loomed overhead on harnesses, flying from the corridors through the space. A rhinoceros was admitted to a seedy nightclub while young men were savagely excluded. Others were presented with cups for bravery and imagination in a Hollywood-styled red carpet procession. Finally, in the glare and spectacle of fireworks, the Wild Knights ran across a dark field at a great distance from the audience.

Alicia Talbot, director and performer, talked to me about the making of Wild Knights, taking me through the minefield of making performance within a highly coded and patrolled institution. This short extract from her description of the project offers insight into a powerful collaboration between people in an extraordinary environment.

“When did art and the penal system come face to face? All the time. Constantly.

“Say, for instance, if anyone had said in January that in 6 months time I would have a group of young men, some of whom have been held 10 months without trial, wearing satin capes, in leotards and tuxedos and wearing latex masks of their own creation, walking on stilts, flying in harnesses and standing in front of fireworks, people would have said no…

“I believe that people are partially what you make them. From the very beginning I worked with the participants as a band of astounding young men, like the X-Men or Neo in Matrix. Society’s mutants are on the loose but if they go to this special school, and use their talents in a special way, they actually become the saviours of the world. Neo’s code and moral honour is something that he understands and fights for.

“I look for the opposite of what we expect. In a place like prison you may find a band of holy men. Does anyone who drives along the highway realise that a 14-year-old boy is in his underwear in a holding cell for 6 hours?

“That these men survive the system and are still alive makes them heroes and that does not make me blind to their faults. In fact, residing in all heroic figures there is hubris, leading to nemesis.

“When we were having a party after the show and a young man said to me “So, what is it like to be working with criminals?” I looked around at the workers, artists and young men and said, “Oh my lord, are there criminals here?” I don’t know how I would have worked from that starting point. I like to think of them as outlaws.

“My challenge to those young men is—how can you be an outlaw and still go home at night? How can you fight for what you believe in and still go home at night?”

Wild Knights, presented by High Street Youth Health Service and Cobham Juvenile Justice Centre; directed & co-devised by Alicia Talbot with 10 young men from the Cobham Juvenile Justice Centre and erth Visual Theatre (Scott Wright, Margie Breen, Cathrine Couper, Sebastian Dickins, Phil Downing, Sharon Kerr, Adam Kealy, Adam Kronenberg, Morgan Lewis, Johnathon Krane). Co-ordinator of Programs and Staff Development Carolyn Delaney; art teacher Keira Minter; music produced by Phil Downing; lighting Neil Simpson & Clytie Smith; video Finton Mahony & Clare Britton.

RealTime issue #44 Aug-Sept 2001 pg. 33

An image of the soles of Lisa O’Neill’s feet has stayed with me for some time after seeing Double Vision. Their wrinkled, abstruse folds seemed to convey an interaction between the interior secretive world and something made far more explicit, a dynamic that framed the more complex cross artform elements in this work. The manner in which those feet, seemingly possessed, drove the splayed torso of O’Neill across the stage confirmed the marionette-like status and powerlessness of that childlike figure. The feet moved in the direction of a little heart shaped red pincushion, a gift referred to in Maryanne Lynch’s text as given by one ill-fated mother to an ill-fated daughter. The child moves to re-embrace the mother. A memory revolving around the nostalgic symbols of pathos, love and loss surges hopefully towards some kind of reconciliation.

Double Vision, a performance-installation driven by writer-director Lynch, involved singer Christine Johnson, composer John Rodgers, percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson, dancer Lisa O’Neill, sound designer Brett Cheney, designer Selene Cochrane and lighting designer Matt Scott. The performance and creative development was funded and resourced principally through the Queensland Performing Arts Trust. Normally associated with mainstream productions such as the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, this kind of commitment from QPAT to contemporary Australian work merits high praise.

The stated intention of the work is “an exploration of motherhood—as viewed by daughters and lived by mothers.” Lynch is fascinated with iconic crime and, in this instance, Double Vision utilises 2 texts drawn from mothers whose lives are marked by the murder and misfortunes of their children and the subsequent judgements of society: Mary Murphy of the Gatton murders incident and Bilynda Murphy of Moe in Victoria.

I have often seen performance installations or cross artform projects which dissolve readily into a set of perceptions: ‘oh, the musician is moving an object again or playing at being a visual artist.’ Thankfully that was not the case here. The dense and complex structure, as the title suggests, allowed the audience to shift their focus between multiple events, in and out of the visual details of any one moment or the physical interiority of any one sound. I appreciated the ambition.

Two crinoline-like structures dominated the stage. One seemingly eviscerated and ribbed provided a birdcage littered with various percussion instruments and 3 gutted pianos, symbols of female domesticity, of soirees to entertain friends and family, the mark of bourgeois education and learning. They seemed and sounded rotten. Tomlinson acted upon their destroyed innards as a graveyard caretaker might to an old wooden coffin.

At the other end, Christine Johnson was immobilised upon a covered crinoline that thrust her upwards towards the lighting grid. The head of Johnson, like the feet of O’Neill, seemed divorced from the rest of her body. But her voice readily enveloped the audience and in one section the tearing agonised refrain of a mother seeking her lost child hammered out. The folds of the crinoline seemed as if the child could have hidden there and emerged at any moment. This was not to be. Mary Murphy is quoted in the text: “The pain is piercing me until I could die.” These were the moments that attempted to pierce the audience, to give some intimation of what that pain could be.

Recorded voices of women and children told their stories. A long necklace of jewelled lights snaked out behind one of the crinolines. A balloon was performed upon. A lot of small details, the symbolic minutiae of torn lives, emerged when I appreciated this work in hindsight. The strength of Double Vision lay in a cohesive integrity that refused to signal every moment to the audience or tell them what to think.

This is a group of artists that I would like to see together again in a future collaboration.

Double Vision, writer/director Maryanne Lynch and collaborators, Merivale St Studios, Brisbane, July 10-14

The Brisbane Powerhouse’s push to develop a live arts community locally, nationally and internationally is reflected in the breadth of programming on offer in 2001. The Queensland Sacred Music Festival, a public artworks program focusing on the still-growing venue and Transmission, a community and arts development program, have all boosted attendances by creating new audiences. All this work and more takes influence from both Australian and international contexts. It seems a healthy community is growing which is absorbing and reinvesting these experiences to alter the cultural ecology of Brisbane.

The millennium year saw an inaugural program of work from Queensland-based independent contemporary dance, performance and installation artists, bracketed in a season titled l’attitude 27.5&deg (the name refers to the geographical location of Brisbane, distinctive if somewhat French/exotique/nothing else). The 2000 programme hosted a triple bill evening of work by Brisbane choreographers and a site specific hybrid work, Bonemap, from Cairns-based artists. The success of this season encouraged the Powerhouse to build overseas links with Glasgow’s New Moves Festival which not surprisingly has picked up Lisa O’Neill’s FUGU SAN for their next season.

Now established as an annual event, l’attitude 27.5&deg in 2001 is marked by a variety of collaborations. As assistant directors for the Frank Austral Asian Performance Ensemble, Caroline Dunphy and O’Neill are teaming to create a new hybrid work, Rodin’s Kiss. Both are contemporary performers drawing their experience from Suzuki Actor Training alongside a more traditional western-based dance and drama training.

The collaborations are not just local. In 1992, Vanessa Mafé and artist Jondi Keane formed a group in Geneva with Markus Siegenthaler and have continued to make work across continents—both Mafé and Keane are now Brisbane based. Durchblick/(Entre)voir Land(e)scape began its life during a 3 week workshop between Mafé and Siegenthaler in Switzerland in early 2000 and together with Brisbane lighting designer Jason Organ, French dancer/choreographer Marc Berthon and French composer Dominique Barthassat, the group has collaborated to develop this work which will have performances in Geneva, Zurich and Neuchatel after its Brisbane premiere. The excitement for these artists as they meet across space and continents lies in sharing past experiences, the reconfirmation of self and the exploration of new territories. For Mafé, problems only occur when an artist remains static, locked in zero growth.

A similar cross-cultural collaboration drives L’autre et moi which explores the differing cultural socialisations as experienced by 2 choreographers, the Taiwanese-Chinese Lin Yuan Shang and the Swiss, Anna Huber. Closer to home, a foyer installation reveals the collaboration between Australia and England that was La Bouche, a mixed media group operating in Europe and the UK during the 80s. Many of the artists involved now live in Brisbane and this is a retrospective look at their ground-breaking work.

IGNEOUS, a Lismore-based multimedia movement theatre group, will be company-in-residence for 6 weeks at the Powerhouse leading classes and developing performances. Co-artistic directors Suzon Fuks and James Cunningham will be joined by South Indian Kalaripayatt master, Vinildas Gurukkal, who they started collaborating with during a recent Asialink residency.

At a national level, other attractions include SPRUNG with choreovideography by Cazerine Barry from Melbourne and the playfully clever Andrew Morrish, with his improvised Relentlessly On creating late night l’attitudes!

Post-show forums are becoming increasingly popular with Brisbane audiences as artists unpack their works for those new to contemporary practices. With the new media potential of the 21st century, new forms and disciplines need fresh eyes to appreciate the poetics of such works. Seasons such as lâattitude 27.5&deg provide rich and varied approaches to creative processes.

In a world of chronic consumption of the new, many of the works refuse the urge for instant gratification. Instead they offer complex collaborations, not only cross-cultural, cross-genre and cross-discipline, but also across time and space.

l’attitude 27.5&deg, curators Gail Hewton (project manager) & Zane Trow (artistic director), Brisbane Powerhouse Centre for the Live Arts, Brisbane, September 24-October 15

The 3 finalists in the General category at the Dendy Awards this year—Blowfish, Sunrise at Midnight and In Search of Mike—all involve dance practitioners. Neither fiction, nor non-fiction, these films sit somewhere else amongst the traditional categories of cinema, probably most closely affiliated with the historic avant-garde. Dancers or choreographers and filmmakers who have previously worked with dance are the only characteristics these 3 shorts have in common, and each needs to be considered for its very individual approaches to the short film format.

Sunrise at Midnight, featuring Melbourne dance-makers Yumi Umiumare and Tony Yap and directed by Sean O’Brien, is a cinematic study in the most poetic mode. Introduced by Umiumare in voiceover as she makes herself up in traditional Japanese style, the film is based on the story of a troupe of female Japanese performers who travelled around Australia early in the last century, and a woman who lost her way in the desert. Shot in black and white, it recalled the pace and certain attention to texture in the producer Sophie Jackson’s early short, Swing Your Partner, which featured a middle-aged couple in their wedding clothes dancing to a country love-song. While that film focused on the rhythm and progression of the dance, Sunrise at Midnight focuses on the stasis of the characters as much as, or perhaps even more than, their movements. Umiumare and Yap both have Butoh backgrounds, and this aesthetic is ingrained in—almost in the grain of—the film. The peculiar and terrifying darkness of the Australian outback collides with this Asian dance method to literally and effectively illustrate the story which is at its heart; a Japanese woman alone in a landscape that is intensely foreign and cruelly unforgiving.

But this simple reading of the film doesn’t really stick, and it’s the temporal dimension that squeezes more out of the situation depicted. Umiumare has spoken of Butoh as a dance of darkness but more than that, a journey through the darkness toward the light. The Japanese character doesn’t appear to be fighting or struggling with her situation, but absorbing it and experiencing the landscape she finds herself in, almost becoming a part of it through the framing of the camera. The appearance of another figure (Tony Yap) doesn’t break her isolation but oddly fills out the environment.

South Australian choreographer and dancer Tuula Roppola co-directed and stars in a film that can be more simply labelled a dancefilm due to its style and content. Blowfish features a solo performance by Roppola (if you don’t count the rubber blowfish) accompanied by a voiceover describing, in very banal terms, her actions. She works mainly against a wall and is framed quite tightly so that her physical articulations are very much at the centre of the film. The stop-motion creates an affect where the transitions from one position to another are elided and Roppola appears to be moved by an exterior yet invisible force. European filmmaker Pascal Baes had great success on the dancefilm circuit some years ago using this technique in his films Topic II and 46 Bis which featured dancers gliding down the streets and around courtyards in a bizarre and muted ‘dance.’ Baes went on to make ads for the Philip Starck hotels which featured a weary traveller gliding into a hotel foyer, up the stairs and into bed.

Roppola’s film, co-directed by Ian Moorhead, doesn’t really do anything new with this technique, but Roppola’s performance is compelling and her apparent lack of agency evokes a characterisation of sorts—a woman who is merely going through the motions, or, moved by another’s commands.

The winner of this category and the overall winner of the Dendy Awards, Andrew Lancaster’s In Search of Mike rides across a variety of forms or genres from music video to dancefilm, fictionalised documentary to queer screen. Writer/performer Brian Carbee (see interview, RT41 p27) plays himself and his mother—both young and old—in a bravura performance that is the real heart and soul of the film, even though objects, characters and domestic spaces (bedroom, kitchen, loungeroom) have almost equal resonance throughout. This film conjures the temporal shape of its story through its material details: a doll, a cowboy dress-up set, an oxygen tank, a set of false teeth. These objects stand out against an environment that is at once recognisable and then a surreal any-space where the young and older versions of the male lead overlap in a succinct coming-of-age scene. This particular scene features the only dancing per se, and even this is more like a cross between a tantrum and a frenzied nightclub scenario. The skills of Carbee the dancer and choreographer can be found more in his regular actions—dressing, sitting, gesturing while on the phone; there’s a kind of grace and ease there.

And then there’s the language. Lancaster has spoken about his interest in creating films to existing or specifically devised scores, for example his videoclips for Custard, Lino, You am I and Midnight Oil and his soundtrack driven shorts Palace Café and Universal Appliance Company, and has described the appeal of Carbee’s voice and script to his aurally-obsessed tendencies. Carbee’s grainy tone and American accent and his rhythmic writing style combine with a film score by Lancaster’s band Lino, to add another level to the film that is as rich and varied as the visuals. Carbee’s skill in evoking the intriguing character of his mother through her words may be inherited. In the film he says: “My mother doesn’t so much turn a phrase as flip it on its back and fuck the shit out of it.” Combine this kind of talent with Lancaster’s innovative and eclectic approach to short filmmaking and you’ve got yourself a winner.

Dendy Awards, opening day of the Sydney Film Festival, State Theatre, Sydney, June 8.

Nerve 9 is a work by 4 women—solo dancer/choreographer Tess De Quincey, audio visual artist Deborah Petrovich, poet/performer Amanda Stewart and writer Francesca da Rimini—whose contributions have been collected under the banner of De Quincey Co. Nerve 9 comprises 9 movements, each with a title—”Archaic domains”, “Tensile zones”, “Flesh of everyday speech”, “Porous matter”, “Tongue of sacrifice”, “Enigmatic hallucination”, “Black continent”, “Infinity emerging”, “Decentering”—mostly from the writing of Julia Kristeva, around which the artists’ materials have been arranged. The fifth title, “Tongue of sacrifice at the edge of the other”, was provided by Stewart. The work is a tight weave of dance, sound, text, sonic and visual imagery, and although De Quincey’s subtle movement often steals the visual focus, her work is really more of a thread which runs throughout the complex totality. Nerve 9 exists by virtue of all elements together; even the printed program which elucidates the work’s 9 sections is in the form of a visual score.

Nerve 9 is hybrid in essence and pushes the creation of visual, sonic and dance scores out from the far corners of the imagination, creating an intellectual arena within which all the ideas can grow and mingle. It synthesises some quite rarefied elements—Stewart’s shimmering sonic and visual poetry and De Quincey’s enduringly watchable portraits of attenuated human frailty. The different sounds (both text and soundscapes) and movement are entwined, as if De Quincey’s body can be shot through with those textures, human and electronic, structured and hanging on shafts or webs of sound, animated sometimes entirely by those vibrations.

The filmic and visual imagery provides a kind of harder-edged structure for the work, delimiting the 9 sections as they shift and change. It further expresses and clarifies a central theme, that of textual richness and diversity—of language, and the cultures from which it springs; of the flesh, which simultaneously grows into, out of and away from those cultures; and of the environment, seeping in, penetrating, escaping from, deflecting.

De Quincey’s performance has a depth and lucidity that is immensely readable and challenging. Her movement is neither naturalistic nor mimetic but often particularly expressive of human frailty and sensibility. Emotional qualities are strongly captured, but not with an overt sense of drama. Sensibility is expressed through highly and minutely wrought body language. She seems to work with ideas, particularly internalised and embodied, rather than with overt and consciously planned movement. It’s possible to see a physical narrative unfolding through the work—the flowering of a peculiarly acute register of human sensibility, the medium through which a person experiences the world.

As the work opens, a slim needle point of light pours downwards, as if from the darkness of a cave, light seeping out through a pinhole in a membrane, a tiny opening in the blackness, a stain imperceptibly widening, a deep drone. Then there is wind, whispering, bird sounds, the dancer’s body quivering, flinching, almost doll-like. A feeling of animation and coming to life. She opens her eyes with the sounds of water and whispering. Later there is singing, and the sight of a city—electric lights, signs, letters, neon. She is sensing, sentient, responsive, a grain of humanity, light and sound pierce her body. Blocks of light tilt behind her; she walks, looking back from where she’s come. There are people here. She has a wilted staggering gait, hands limp, “a body called flesh.” And then sometimes she seems not so much a person, more a passive idea, some other form of life. Then, on the screen, there are mouths speaking, foreign languages, texture in the sound, the lips sticky with lipstick, the skin, the eyes, all female. What are they speaking about? All those words, behind and in front of her, all those letters, that sound, becoming part of her. And could there be, among all this, a simple act of listening, an act of seeing, or of speaking?

Nerve 9, De Quincey Co, Tess De Quincey, Amanda Stewart, Deborah Petrovich, Francesca da Rimini, The Performance Space, Sydney, May 27

Sydney audiences have recently seen substantial new programs by 2 experienced practitioners who have returned to Australia after working with the 2 companies most associated with the dance theatre genre: Michael Whaites (Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal) and Kate Champion (Lloyd Newson’s DV8 Physical Theatre).

Dance theatre is an interdisciplinary approach combining movement and dance with theatrical elements such as narrative or drama, characterisation and spoken text. This type of dance is distinguishable from other contemporary approaches such as deconstructed or abstracted ‘pure’ dance (Merce Cunningham, William Forsythe) or more research-based, less theatrically-oriented work (Deborah Hay, Lisa Nelson).

What rises to the top with dance theatre, and is common across the 2 divergent schools represented by Bausch and Newson, is an investment in the potential of gesture to both produce and subvert meaning. Combining dancerly skill with the gestures of everyday to create ambiguity, provide commentary or deconstruct social and cultural norms, is the most common methodology.

In Oysterland, directed by Whaites and performed by Kay Armstrong, Julie-Anne Long and Jan Pinkerton, a dramatic, gestural kind of movement is used to fill out a rambling meditation on the female experience. We’re introduced to these women via the sort of frenzied and loose solo that reveals people’s truest moves and makes an immediate impression. From here on in things are much more carefully articulated, deliberate and pointed. Pinkerton in full ski gear parades the stage, shaking her hands, which rattles the clasps on her ski gloves, chattering like a rat; Long slides along a wall and across the floor in sensual delirium (or is it merely exhaustion). Talk about flabby upper arms, weight problems, menstrual mythology and face creams slips around uneasily and is gone, but the quality of a familiar movement that’s been forced off kilter, like the simple swing of Long’s bob as her head drops pathetically sideways, fills me in and opens things up.

Reading the gestures of Champion’s character in About Face, we find ourselves in a vacuous urban life, drained of any meaningful relations, memories, clues. A treadmill walks her to nowhere, tentative steps check out her apartment and locate the furniture, desperate and repetitious gestures of frustration erupt at the kitchen table, yogic balances, wobbling tip-toes, a choreographed inventory of her physical self…Everything points in one direction and it’s off the map. While these gestures manipulate and transform everyday activities and actions, their messages are clear, creating a definite thematic of lost identity.

Another key element of dance theatre is the workshop process which draws on the experiences of cast members to construct a piece from the ground up, building it around the particularities of the performers’ bodies and lives. Whaites’ Achtung Honey was created with another Australian, Allison Brown, while they were both working in Germany and circles around the theme of displacement. In one section, movements from other works in other places bubble up accompanied by the names of European cities. A game of hide and seek in lederhosen, a melodramatic solo with telephone, and an intimate—perhaps cheekily Romantic—pas de deux all bristled with homecoming joie de vivre.

While the connection between the performers and the theme in Achtung Honey is clear, Champion, as with her previous solo work Face Value, has us speculating about the boundaries between art and life. The physical inventory described above is obviously an account of her body, yet this character is caught in a surreal no-man’s-land. I wonder what kind of exploration led Champion to this work. The thematic choices she makes find their voice in her body, and the 2 things become thoroughly entwined.

The proximity of the performers to the theatrical material, and that material’s close connection with the gestures and postures of everyday life, brings us to a third driving characteristic of dance theatre—an emphasis on social and cultural relevance. Both Oysterland and Face Value trace out intensely feminine spaces, suggesting that these artists have something to say about the contemporary female condition, but the dimensions and nature of the worlds depicted are very different.

There is an odd sense of order in Champion’s world despite the apparent chaos. Isolated, disorientated and stressed as she is, the neat and effective design elements, slick projections and seamless performance frame the characterisation with a sort of comforting control. How is this isolated woman going to operate beyond the parameters of her home and the security of her competent, exploratory movements? How does her state of mind project beyond this surreal domestic enclave? The general thrust of the work is more inward and singular than a general commentary.

In contrast, Oysterland seems at times to be opening up to infinity. Kay Armstrong explores the particularly feminine ploy of dressing-to-please. Jan Pinkerton often retreats into intimate activities at the back of the stage such as eating, bathing or reading. Julie Anne Long sometimes trudges around the stage and leans against its supports as if she is at home. And then there are trolleys and historical texts that open up yet more spaces where the feminine lurks.

Champion and Whaites, Long and Armstrong, as well as other Sydney artists including Brian Carbee (see page 35), Jenny-Newman-Preston, Lisa Ffrench and Dean Walsh, all explore the terrain of dance theatre which has room within its general form for the various approaches they represent.

Kate Champion is currently working with Michael Whaites on Stir, a 5-week 1st Stage Development produced by One Extra involving 3 choreographers (Whaites, Julie-Anne Long & Rosetta Cook), 9 dancers (including Champion, Kay Armstrong, Narelle Benjamin and Linda Ridgeway) and 7 dance students from CPA, QUT and WAAPA.

Achtung Honey, choreographer Michael Whaites, collaborator Allison Brown, performers Michael Whaites, Celia Brown; Oysterland, director/ choreographer Michael Whaites, performers Kay Armstrong, Julie-Anne Long, Jan Pinkerton, One Extra, The Seymour Centre, May 23 – June 2; About Face, deviser/ performer Kate Champion, composer Max Lyandvert, filmmaker Brigid Kitchin, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, June 15-16.

People make work for different reasons. What unites these 3 pieces is a strong sense of artistic concern, especially in terms of content. Pervert, by Louise Taube, has been a long time in the making, reflecting Louise’s intent to explore and represent issues of spectatorship, desire and sexual difference. There are 2, perhaps 3 protagonists to this tale. One I shall call misogyny (the man), the other narcissism (the woman), and the third a Jungian anima, archetype of the female.

Through clever use of multiple video cameras, screens and curtains, a great deal of observation occurs on the part of both the characters and the audience. The setting is contemporary grunge, perfectly evoked in the HiFi Bar and Ballroom, which consists of several rooms, bars and a stage of sorts. Several young dancers do party-club impersonations, mirroring the narcissist’s kinaesthetic pleasures. A narrative develops between the man and the woman. Their interaction is always mediated, whether by video, telephone, time or space. In fact, they never really meet. The feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray would be pleased, for she thinks there is a vast difference between man and woman.

In the end, the man is killed off, the woman preferring the company of women to wolves. Although we cannot be too sad about this (he was revolting), there is something unsatisfactory here. For this was not just about a bad man. It was also about the woman’s subjectivity, especially her narcissism which was represented through the pleasures of movement. This bespeaks the need for more outside direction, not merely to direct the traffic of virtual and real images, but also to work through the nuances of the female character.

Simon Ellis’ Full is a delicate piece in comparison. Set in the tiny Glass Street Gallery, North Melbourne, it begins with the sounds of Simon’s grandmother. She speaks with simplicity of her life, nearly over. She tells us of her work, the loss of her husband, the cat she misses. Ellis lies in a glass box, suspended over the onlookers. Naked almost, he is born unto this piece. We hear more about the grandmother as Ellis descends amongst us to dance a life over time. Slides of her are projected onto his white shirt, words spoken by a young voice, displacing the logic of time just enough. The final image ensues from her remark that the dead are outside, wanting in. Ellis places himself against the roof’s skylight. The cold pink of the sky beckons his silhouette. The dead are there, amongst us. Whether we see them depends upon whether or not we look.

Chamber by Shaun Mcleod is a meditation on maleness. Not your standard ocker masculinity but the kind of men you might know and like. And yet, they cover each other’s mouths, cutting off speech. When they are nice, they nestle heads, they echo each other’s movements, creating a kind of harmony. When they are not, they move out of synch, forming an uneasy dance.

Chamber is substantially improvised. The focus of the performers is great. Mcleod sits at the back of the theatre watching these young men play out the echoes of his imaginary reflections. How much was this about masculinity? It is hard to say, in that this was not about stereotypes. So, in a sense, just because it was danced by men, it was about men. How then to move beyond that? Is this a reflection of how things are or a dance into the future of possibility? The ending, which juxtaposed poetry with Jacob Lehrer’s comedic meanderings, seemed to suggest a future. But it was hard to make out. The light was fading. The words were disappearing.

Pervert, xn, music Mik La Vage, performers included Shona Erskine, Taube & Gred Ulfan, Hi Fi Ballroom and Bar, June 6-13; Full, creator/performer Simon Ellis, music Jacqueline Grenfell, installation & design Elizabeth Boyce, Glass Street Gallery, June 20-30; Chamber, Shaun McLeod, performers Simon Ellis, Martin Kwasner & Jacob Lehrer, video Cormac Lilly & Christina Shepard, music David Corbet, Dancehouse, Melbourne, July 7-9

This is the fourth version of Garry Stewart’s Birdbrain and the second version I’ve seen. It begins with a portable, plastic record player sitting on the empty stage. Kristina Chan sits and plays snatches of the overture to Swan Lake. The record crackles. Stewart’s endeavour is established. This ballet classic will be sifted through contemporary technology and responded to by contemporary bodies.

Tchaikovsky’s music triggers memories of that celebrated ballet of love and deception but there is no time for nostalgia. The overture is intersected by a different music, designed by Jad McAdam and Luke Smiles. This music pumps. The company enters. The dancing in this section is tight, presentational and formal but there’s something electric about these dancers. They are wired for fast, exacting shifts of position, line and spatial orientation. I recognise moves from ballet, Cunningham technique, yoga, acrobatics and breakdancing. But each move is transformed through juxtaposition and the way in which these dancers’ bodies are organised for risk and range. (Stewart loves extreme stretch and moves that require phenomenal strength.) Fiona Malone and Tanja Liedtke appear at one stage in school uniforms. This image is disquieting—ballet as a schoolgirl fantasy, ballerinas as male sexual fantasies. Finally, terms associated with ballet flash at the back of the stage, the video screen framed by panels designed by Gaelle Mellis, each bearing a Renaissance image of a ballet dancer which is barely visible, silver on grey. Ballet history is present but fading. This opening treatise on ballet ends.

Then the real ballet begins. Ideas, images, references to Swan Lake flash past us in the movement, as words printed on T-shirts, as images behind the video screen and in Tim Gruchy’s video footage. The use of language to denote aspects of the original ballet makes the commentary hard-edged. For instance, at one stage a dancer labelled “royal disdain” duets briefly with a dancer labelled “peasant joy.” However, this hard-edged wit plays second fiddle to the dancing. A few of the highlights are: Larissa McGowan’s solo in which she turns herself inside out, shuddering and quivering as she transforms from a swan into a woman; Antony Hamilton’s ‘the story so far’ and ‘dying swan’ dance behind a pulsing, slow zoom in on a photo of one of the famous Odette/Odiles taking a bow (strangely moving); the linked-arm quintet of Queen, evil Rothbart, Prince Siegfried, Odette and Odile, making these characters an entwined entity; the ‘drowning of the lovers’ in which the dancers run in, perform spread-eagled leaps, face to the floor and then roll.

This company is hot. This piece might have started as a tongue-in-cheek critique, as suggested by the title, but the dancing no longer relies on quotation for effect. The virtuosic physical material has a thrilling kinaesthetic and expressive logic that I found riveting.

Birdbrain, ADT, conceived/directed by/choreography Garry Stewart, dancers from Thwack and ADT: Anton, Craig Bary, Kristina Chan, Roland Cox, Antony Hamilton, Tanja Liedtke, Lina Limosani, Larissa McGowan, Fiona Malone, Matthew Morris, Craig Procter, The Playhouse, Adelaide, June 29

Following on closely from 3 weeks of research and development—and new work for PICA’s Putting on an Act and a curated exhibition Tactical Intervention Strategies—I spoke with PVI (Performance, Video and Installation) Collective directors, Kelli McCluskey and Steve Bull, and performers Katherine Neylon, James McCluskey and Chris Williams, about humiliation, discretion, paranoia and behavioural
analysis software.

Your work a watching brief, for Tactical Intervention Strategies at PICA, challenges the gallery visitor not only to perform certain potentially embarrassing tasks in public, but to invite themselves to be watched closely by outdoor surveillance equipment. Did you expect anyone to take the bait?

KM We really didn’t think that people would take the costumes out on the opening night of TIS. We were almost daring the audience to follow through with the instructions, and they did. They have to choose a briefcase, a character, and call a number. They’re given coded instructions for the kinds of gestures they’re expected to perform in the cultural centre outside the gallery, like doing something at the traffic lights or covering their faces.

SB After they’ve received this message they have to look at the dictionary that’s posted near the phone to decipher it. The code steers the telephone conversation away from any potentially loaded ‘key words.’

KM What we try to do is to stretch the boundaries of a given space, then network it back into a performance. For our 3-week research and development at the Blue Room theatre we wanted to focus on surveillance technologies. Our work for TIS specifically came as a response to this report we had found. Do you know that Australia is the second largest distributor of CCTV systems in the world?

KM No it’s actually the UK. They’re incredibly paranoid. The technology that’s available is astounding, like behavioural analysis and facial recognition software.

This leads on from your performance deadspace that referred to telephone monitoring practices.

KM In deadspace we were investigating what constitutes a subversive word, and how language can be misinterpreted. Now we’re looking at gestures and the ways they can be misinterpreted by these cameras, equipped with behavioural analysis software. Something as simple as masking your face with your hands, smoking a fag or scratching yourself fits into surveillance criteria.

KM It came out of the UK and basically questioned the successes and failures of CCTV, finding that it hadn’t really been fully investigated. So an independent report came up with some really interesting facts about the people watching CCTV monitors, and how untrained they were. They brought their own prejudices to the interpretation of events, mostly linked to cultural stereotypes. So they would look at young people, or ethnic minorities, or just for the hell of it they’d pick-up on a good-looking woman and follow her around.

The extent of your research is broad; what performance outcomes did you expect to achieve through this R&D process?

KM We wanted the guys working on the project with us to perform surveillance tasks on the general public in public places. This is how trigger happy: private lives public spaces was developed. We set-up a workshop space with a scanner and a CB transceiver for walkie-talkies. We could hear them communicate with each other, and we gave them tasks each day to track somebody making certain gestures.

KN We also used our own prejudices, like the CCTV operators, to pick out the people that we would follow.

KM The guys have to try to ‘blend in’ and be discrete which is quite difficult, because the walkie-talkies don’t quite look like mobile phones, so we finally got them some hands-free devices.

SB They walked along speaking a very odd language, and anyone who clued into it gave them strange looks.

KN What we found was that everybody else noticed what we were doing, except for the person we were following.

JM It changes the way that you associate yourself with a space. As a watcher, as soon as you start reporting on people, you become really distanced.

SB It’s interesting how the coded language makes what you’re describing much more loaded. It’s pretty banal, but somebody walking to a bus stop becomes an incredibly over the top performance. So we’ve taken on the idea of Kate, Chris and James blending in in Northbridge, along with the notion that CCTV cameras ignore anyone in uniform. We’re having them dressed up as Santa Claus.

So how does the dynamic operate between Kelli and Steve as directors and you Kate, Chris and James as players? Do they give orders that you have to follow? How much personal choice or input do you have?

CW I find the work really satisfying because you’re constantly challenged to do things that you wouldn’t normally choose to do. The first time we started to workshop with Kelli and Steve they made us sing and dance, like “here’s some music, just dance in front of us.” It was humiliating, but you step over that.

JM Because Kelli and Steve work with so many different layers of research, it seemed like we were performing a lot of disassociated tasks which was exhausting, or else talking for hours to extract information from each other. Then, when everything came together with certain elements filtered-out, we would start to hear our own lines coming back at us. Since our first project, we’ve become a lot more involved in their processes, instead of sitting back and being meat-puppets.

CW Also, quite often we’re not aware of everything that’s going on in a performance. I can’t see everything, but Kelly and Steve have the eyes to see.

PVI collective: a watching brief, showing in Tactical Intervention Strategies, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, July 4; trigger happy: private lives public spaces + Putting on an Act, PICA, July 13. PVI are currently in residency at The Performance Space, Sydney, July 30 – August 20

John Meade’s Propulsion integrates the enigmatic moment of perception by revealing the body as a permeable surface. A video installation of the senses, the first thing to penetrate you is sound. To be precise, it is the sound of a distant piano motif which could be Satie or some other early 20th century romantic—but which is actually a looped series of Glen Gould variations, isolated and slowed down by emerging Melbourne artist, Jophes Flemming. The sound immediately installs us in a certain psychosomatic state—namely, melancholia—prior to the viewing of the video imagery.

Emerging from the darkened gallery space, 2 large perspex panels suspended from the ceiling emit bright, almost hallucinatory images. They face one another as floating apparitions that we can walk around and immerse ourselves in. Their ever-flowing images present 2 carefully staged, hyperreal scenes. One shows a man on a sparkling motorcycle, superimposed over a moving background of saturated green countryside and blue sky (as well as a mass of electricity and telephone wires). With no helmet or gloves, and with exposed hairy arms, he appears naked, or at least vulnerable. While he stares ahead for the duration of the video loop, our attention is drawn to his organ of sight, exaggerated by makeup or a certain camp tenderness. Occasionally we see a close up of his eyes, in profile. Eventually, a tear forms, and as it rolls off his cheek it unexpectedly transmutes into an ephemeral explosion—a subtle jouissance, rendered as an animated firework-like white spray.

The screen opposite depicts an equally dream-like configuration of time and space, with even less narrative drive. Another man flies through the air, his body outstretched horizontally, desperately struggling to maintain his position by clutching on to 2 handrails. His billowing T-shirt reveals a toned stomach and arms, but essentially these are ordinary, fragile bodies on display—actively passive. The imagery and music combine to produce a theatrical space, a potential bond of socialisation which dramatises the affective relation between the bodies and the viewer. A strange longing results, somehow nostalgic, overflowing the perpetual present of the video imagery.

Meade’s work—his sculptural objects and images—can be understood as meditations on the capacities of our gaze and of our bodies, conceived within the limits of human finitude. Inevitably, his art returns us to the idea and operation of the unconscious—desire, pleasure, repression and drives. Propulsion solicits our identifications in a subjective experience of duration. We are seduced towards a sense of meaning, figured as an excess. The work leaves us both melancholic and affirms a positive intensity, elegantly figuring the body as a source of desire and fear, sadness and joy, agent of the self to itself and to the outside world.

Propulsion, John Meade, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, June 8 – July 15. This exhibition originally appeared at the Art Gallery of NSW.

Chris Drummond’s directing credits include Play with Repeats by Martin Crimp, Slum Clearance by Vaclav Havel, and Wreckage by Hilary Bell. In his successful production of Yasmina Reza’s Art for the State Theatre Company of South Australia, and the continuing adaptation with playwright Susan Rogers of Robert Dessaix’s Night Letters, South Australian theatre director Chris Drummond is developing an expansive style that celebrates performance as an individual and collective act of conscience.

Theatre that seeks to be expansive both within itself and within its audience. As an audience member I want to laugh and cry and scream and be delighted and disturbed, whatever it takes to really feel alive. I want it acknowledged that I am present there, that I have a brain and life experience and a whole lot of other baggage as well.

In work, I am drawn to theatre artists who bring with them an understanding of their craft and an essential lack of ego, a genuine naiveté about how to move forward, unfailing rigorousness, fearlessness and above all, a sense of delight in their own and other’s playfulness.

If art is “the balance between order and chaos” where’s your personal fulcrum? How do you work at achieving that balance?

I try not to define the specific outcomes of my work. I have a sense of where we are going but try to have the courage to allow every possibility to have a genuine chance of taking seed. In any situation I try to find the most realistic boundaries within which we can encourage creative choice as a precursor to ordering the rhythms, images and tempo of a piece. I’m equating ‘order’ with the rational and ‘chaos’ with the intuitive. If we only ‘think up’ images and stories, then we will only be communicating that which we already know, which is very boring. If we leave everything open to intuition then we end up with a meaningless mess. So we need both.

At the moment I’m still interested in trying to work out how best to work with actors. I am in a very particular period of development, beginning to understand how not to control everything and yet still bring focus to the work. It’s a very long, very slow learning curve. I guess my desire is to create theatre that has true vitality. I love working with all the elements of the theatre but to begin and end with me creating fantastic images doesn’t feel enough. I am definitely not interested in being an auteur. I am sure I have certain ‘fingerprints’ in terms of my aesthetic but I try to respond afresh to each project in terms of the text, the cast or the social context.

It’s going very well! Susan Rogers (playwright) and I have been working on this since early 2000 and we hope to have a full draft by mid 2002, and looking towards a production in 2003 or thereabouts. It’s a huge undertaking. Thank God for Rosalba Clemente and STCSA’s Faulding On Site Theatre Lab. Their belief in this project has given Susan and me the resources and the time which is so necessary if we are to succeed in adapting this book with all the complexity required to realise its full potential.

In the first place you have to have a very clear reason about why you’re even doing it. What is the point of transforming a work of art from one medium into another? In the case of an adaptation, the new work has to have its own purpose, both in its own right and in relation to the original entity.

Night Letters talks about a very special quality of experience in which a dying man has burrowed down into the essence of his situation and found meaning for himself in an age where meaning has lost its, well, meaning! I believe it also communicates something very profound about humanity’s relationship to nature and something new about Australia’s identity to the rest of the world.

Adapting Night Letters came about because I wanted to access the meaning in the book experimentally. I wanted to understand it at a gut level. The internal journey towards one’s death is such an individual experience and yet the experience of grief is a collective one. It appeared to me that re-creating Dessaix’s internal journey within the community of the theatre might allow insight into both spheres of experience. Night Letters is also about existing within the moment. The theatrical medium could become a transcendent metaphor for that very theme rather than it simply being realised theatrically.

Practically, there are huge challenges in adapting this work. Night Letters does not have a traditional narrative structure and many of the characters have not been fleshed out in a dramatic sense. The fact that this work is semi-autobiographical presents its own set of unique issues. Robert has utterly floored Susan and me with his fearless generosity and his commitment to allowing us our essential creative freedom. He has made himself available in a vast array of senses and has asked for no control in return. The genuineness of his personal courage and honesty represents the very essence of what makes Night Letters such a unique work.

Personally I am conscious of my own political apathy. I would love to see more theatre artists working beyond their own creative concerns and finding inspiration in the fabric of our society. Within this I would love to see a fearless pursuit of excellence and a holistic approach to all that is unique about the theatrical medium.

Ultimately, I would love to see those artists who actually have ideas being realistically supported to bring their vision to the fullest fruition.

In September Chris Drummond is heading to Europe for further research on Night Letters before returning to direct graduating students from Adelaide’s Centre for Performing Arts.

A simply lit trunk sits in a corner. It’s reminiscent of something you might find washed up on a beach, or pushed aside by a lava flow. Faded, but still intact, it has a history. It may well have been the thing you grabbed, stuffing it full of clothes as you tore out the door, just before the volcano erupted. Maybe you dropped it, and by a twist of fate, as you were incinerated, it survived, the slow moving lava taking a different path from where it was hastily flung.

The shape of the island is strange, nearly circular—a mountain like a ring in the sea.

While the experience of Volcano has a similar, touching appeal to wandering the ruins of Pompeii in Italy, there’s also something gently humorous about Maria Miranda and Norie Neumark’s new installation piece, on the island of Stromboli, at Sydney’s Artspace.

The debris spilling from the trunk is not the legs of stockings and arms of sweaters, but the substance of the volcano itself, remembered by the trunk and now transformed as memories often are. Through technological aids we are given a trunk’s memory of the volcano…And because the trunk has seen many lives, so the memories are from many different times.

The trunk is lit by a spot of yellow. From it spews a mass of tangled cables, a lava flow of plastic and wiring, which lead to a collection of lava rocks—in the form of computer monitors, out of which spill and shake various images.

‘What!’ I shouted. ‘Are we being taken up in an eruption? Our fate has flung us here among burning lavas, molten rocks, boiling waters, and all kinds of volcanic matter; we are going to be pitched out…vomited, spit out high into the air…in the midst of a towering rush of smoke and flames; and it is the best thing that could happen to us. Shot out of a volcano at last!
Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth

Stones are falling around your ears—they sound like rain on a tin roof, in Neumark’s accompanying sound design. At strategic points around the monitors the roar of the flow has come down through time, down through the wires, as a static hiss, in and out of which fade voices—the gabble and chatter of people and bodies before, during, after. They’re speaking in the Stromboli dialect, something like a siren’s call, urging you closer, drawing you through the rubble, to tease out the meanings. It’s a trick—by now they have nothing particular to say, but to cry out their grief and love, inarticulate but still genuine, over time.

It seems that Hephaestus, being displeased one day, had taken the island of Thira in his hand and thrown it some distance, like a stone.

Maria Miranda has manipulated a series of static pictures, playing with the moment when you’re really not sure whether or not the earth has moved, if the trembling you’re feeling is lust or fear.

As you move in closer to the volcano, the images shift, and texts circle around, shifting between screens/stones. The radioactive heat has rendered them distorted, but the message is clear. We’re discovering the seductions of the notion of ‘volcano’, as did Krafft and Krafft, the vulcanologists who were famously consumed by Unzen in Japan, erupting in June 1991 just as they were taking photographs. The images could be, like the trunk, what remains, the camera thrown clear…

Eugène Ionesco also felt the pull of the volcano, and wrote the preface to Krafft and Krafft’s famous book of the same title as this installation—he tells us the myth of Stromboli’s birth in fits and grabs, while Jules Verne’s adventurers occasionally emerge through its centre, relieved, after their travels underground. And Stromboli’s also the island where Miranda’s grandfather Giuseppe Russo was born. Russo left for Australia as a young man and never returned, the tip of the volcano the last thing he saw. But in an ironic twist, as his eyesight disintegrated, he was left with an impression of the world somewhat in the shape of a volcano—a ring of clarity around a blurred centre.

It had fallen in the sea not far from Italy giving birth to the volcanic island of Stromboli. But in uprooting the center of the mountainous island, Hephaestus had left its edges, with the volcano in the middle. They say that if one were to put Stromboli back in its former place, it would take up precisely that part of the island that was pulled up.

Part showman, part shaman, bricoleur and self-confessed brigand, Barry Schwartz jolted the art world in America and Europe with his high-voltage hot-wired performances. He is now brought to Australia by the Arterial Group for a residency at the Brisbane Powerhouse to collaborate on Electrosonic Interference, a multimedia project for the Centenary of Federation. Belgian artist Bastiaan Maris, a longtime collaborator, has accompanied him as technical director and soundmeister. Here, Schwartz describes the project to Douglas Leonard, Brisbane writer and collaborator on the project.

Half a million volts

The audience is going to see an electrically charged wet environment for starters. The Powerhouse will mirror the process emanating from the sculptural elements with which I work: high voltage energy, liquids that represent motions of hydro electricity or turbines, certain kinds of mechanical impressions which tie in with aspects of the conceptual and visual ideas derived from archival material. What you see you may also think you feel. It won’t be a direct feel, but a manifestation of electricity like translating electricity into sound, the tactile impressions of energy, tangible energy.

Electricity is considered very dangerous. We make it visually user-friendly in a way that it becomes beautiful, so you get this real beautiful danger that people see. Sort of romanticise it in a way. We’re going to take the gantry crane in The Powerhouse and use it to represent a high voltage transmission tower which will move within the space and also within a liquid environment consisting of a basin or reservoir of non-conductive mineral oil. A hydro electric energy waterfall will provide a projection surface to feed in a lot of text and visual information. This high voltage tower will be turned into an electrical high voltage instrument, sort of a harp, which I am going to physically attack and play, respond to and be re-manipulated by as a physical conduit myself.

We’ll also use Tesla coils, high voltage frequency lightning generators, something like half a million volts. The average is something like 60 milli-amps, but it’s the resonant frequency which actually creates the voltage. It will actually charge the room, but I don’t want to get too technical about that because I’ll put my foot in my mouth. I’m more intuitive, you know, a scientist/researcher by trial and error. I don’t read a textbook to get it. I have to consult with somebody for the larger concept.

Sculpting sounds and energy

We channel the sound through our custom built sound monitoring system which will be 2, maybe 2 and a half metres in diameter, large satellite dishes. Because they’re parabolic in pitch they will act as directional speakers which will project the sound emanating from the sculptures. The system ties directly in and the sound will be fed back and projected towards any given person in the audience. The idea is not to import a sound system; it’s all part of the sculptural coherence.

Sources of sound include the vibration of other objects such as a large polished stainless steel disc that creates the impression of a record with a small ice stylus. I create the sound through reactive chemicals such as dry ice and liquid nitrogen and when it hits the plate it causes thermal stress. Minus 200 degrees. The sound actually is almost like a voice, it howls: on aluminium it’s screaming and shrilling; with stainless steel you get deeper undertones. It’s semi controlled and semi random. Like a lot of my sculptures, instead of building up a fully automated robotic environment—that’s not so much my ultimate interest—I like to come in there and intervene bodily. Come in there and disrupt, because then you find other ways to bring about a new process, sort of like experimenting and going through a process in real time.

It’s a body of sculptures that question and answer each other within an environment that I create. It’s like the relationship of matter and energy, how it relates to and influences the next sculpture. I’m also very interested in that intervention process because I have a difficult time with being just cyber-spatial and sitting on my bum. I think there’s a real tactile approach to your relationship with your sculptures and the process. And that’s where the collaboration to me becomes interesting—bringing in other ideas which give you other parameters to deal with the relationship between objects.

Digital divination

Technology has created a lot of objects that most people never get to see and they are actually incredibly beautiful, but they are only beautiful once you take them out of their function and maybe recombine them with other things in ways that they suddenly become very special.
Bastiaan Maris

It’s called the ‘digital divine’, a play on the ‘digital divide’ and not being able to provide computers for certain people, notions of access and lifestyle. Like being a pirate.

I’m very interested in the way things I create are viewed or not viewed, which brings me to other issues, of people who don’t have privileges to see it and, second, I’ve become more active in dealing with homeless people or people at risk in recent years. I don’t just like to be considered as doing a “white male boys’ thing” in terms of having “everything on my plate.” I’ve struggled really hard sometimes to make the work, and had to find my own employment by going out and scavenging materials in order to provide the means. And that became my job instead of having to, say, work in a restaurant like theatre people would.

Strangers on a train

A lot of my work in San Francisco has been in the art context, and that becomes incredibly stale after a while. At one time we hopped a train to Utah from California, completely bareback—a couple of sacks of clothes and shoes and video equipment—and it’s kind of absurd that, because of running out of time, we paid for the passenger train back. We met some young kid there who was really good at picking locks so we had a kind of little party with some candy and beer. And then I look over and I hit this one cabinet that had a VCR, and the VCR was hooked up to the lounge car upstairs so I said, “Hey, pop this tape in.” All of a sudden we had commandeered this train—there were 50 people up there—suddenly they were seeing this raw footage we’d made the previous day—stuff like wires, making sound out of it, tumbleweeds, and counter wires attached to the belly of the train—and I’m sitting there watching everybody and it really hit me, like WOW!, this is such a natural process of showing a different context, and why it’s really important how you present the work.

Electrosonic Interference, Arterial Group, Brisbane Powerhouse Centre for the Live Arts, September 6, 7 & 8 at 7pm, free.

In may this year IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory provided a mentorship program under the direction of visiting composer and performer Graeme Leak. Three emerging Tasmanian composers, Lisa Morriset, Joe Budgen and Rosemary Austen, were commissioned to develop scores for music theatre.

Morisset’s Sway, Bugden’s Death by Defenestration and Austen’s Eden’s Bequest respectively take a 50s song made famous by Julie London, the Freudian triad of loss, memory and desire, and a suite of poems by American writer Judy Grahn as their starting points for score and story.

This mentorship occurred in the context of a music theatre laboratory, which implies consideration of their projects from both musical and theatrical perspectives. These composers are at an early stage in their theatrical development. At what point in a mentorship program should new artists be challenged to move beyond the known and understood, to the place of heresy and theatrical inventiveness?

Sway, Death by Defenestration and Eden’s Bequest all have heretical potential. The shift from literal interpretation to a locale of invention, surprise and shock remains to be addressed by future mentors in association with these music theatre composers.

Graham Leak’s Happy New Ears provides a strong model of musical and theatrical joie de vivre. Taking rhythm and noise as the starting place, Leak contrasted elements of high and low, thick and thin, noise and silence to develop an innovative synthesis of sound, rhythm, and silence. Happy New Ears emerged from an intensive 10 day workshop program with the IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory.

Leak’s sense of space and theatre, coupled with his directorial skill, enabled the ensemble to explore sound and body as boundary and opportunity. The elements of subtlety and quirkiness invigorated the IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory which responded with a confident music and movement dynamic of lightness and finesse.

The ensemble performed a percussive body motif with tight synchronicity. Whoever missed the gradually increasing tempo of the pattern dropped out, generating a frisson of anticipation among the audience. The hilarious balloon orchestra was breathtaking in its conceptual simplicity. Leak’s direction provided members of the Music Laboratory with an insight into the less is more axiom of music theatre.

Leak’s strength as a composer is the aesthetic he generates from simplified sound sources including customised conductors’ batons, balls revolving on a plate and the ethereality of breath through copper piping. The Peacock Theatre resonated with the twirling of a delicate pseudo bull roarer. The audience suspended its breath, listening with new ears to spilling silence and music of the spheres.

Hector Berlioz’s song cycle Les Nuits D’été (The Summer Nights) Opus 7 (1834) provided the musical impetus for The opera Project’s production of The Berlioz—our vampires ourselves. Winter solstice wind roared around the timbers of the Long Gallery enabling an imaginative connection with Bram Stoker, Count Dracula and the shadow-seep of Transylvania.

The performance by Nigel Kellaway, Annette Tesoriero and Paul Cordeiro was preceded by weeks of warnings about operatic sensationalism, nudity, and adult themes. The other considered warning was: ‘beware, you will either love or hate this show.’

Kellaway’s production features his pale and trance-like appearance (a homage to Nosferatu?), the matching opulence of gown and jabot, the waft of perfume, and the performer’s intoxicatory responses to a Grecian urn brimming with scarlet rose petals.

The lure and fall of notes from Kellaway’s Bösendorfer is assured, and captures the lushness of Berlioz’s score. Les Nuits D’été is both fantasy and romantic song cycle. Sound mesmerises and tempts Cordeiro in his alternating role of victim and seducer. The performance is a pulsation of vulnerability and dominance. His languid looks, panting breath and sexual allure inevitably seek the double snarl of rose and wound. Tesoriero’s potent mezzo voice fills the performance space. She is an able partner in collusion.

Our vampires ourselves recreates and exploits the territory of fantasy and affirms familiar (homo)eroticisms. Opera is traditionally associated with the realms of desire, obsession, love and death. Melodrama invites parody and our vampires ourselves uses a panoply of theatrical clichés to enhance the ridiculous. The enactment of vampiric obsession through gorgeous music, stylised movement and over-statement hovers at the border of comfort-zone theatre.

There is room in this production to lull the audience, then introduce serial inversion to destabilise the familiar. If vampiric obsession is a parody then conversely it can be used as a theatre of relinquishment which involves letting go and settling accounts with both the parodic ease and the musical sumptuousness of a former century.

Happy New Ears, director/performer Graeme Leak & IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory, Sway, writer Lisa Morriset, performer Georgina Richmond, Death by Defenestration, writer Joe Budgen, singers Rachael Guy, Craig Wood, performers Alex Dick, Thomas Hogan, Eden’s Bequest, writer/composer Rosemary Austen, soprano Sarah Jones, performers IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory, Peacock Theatre, Hobart, May 31-June 2; The Berlioz—our vampires ourselves, The opera Project Inc., director Nigel Kellaway, scenarist Keith Gallasch, performers Paul Cordeiro, Kellaway, Annette Tesoriero, music Hector Berlioz, Long Gallery, Hobart, June 19-23

Melbourne is home to a healthy electro-acoustic movement drawing upon ‘glitch’ aesthetics in which various sonic ruptures mesh with dense nets of noise and stochastically rhythmical, airy hiss. Phil Brophy’s RMIT Media Arts course, the annual Cinesonic conference, the ((tRansMIT)) collective (hosting Liquid Architecture #2 this year) and the students’ recent Dorobo release Document 03: Diffuse (curated by Darrin Verhagen) have helped promote this sensibility.

During a discussion regarding the material featured on Diffuse, one artist suggested that when listening to such leftfield material it’s best advised to “go with the flow”; to let it just “wash over” you. Electro-acoustics asks auditors to question how to read these sounds; what are you listening for, what structures, and why? The May Australian Centre for Contemporary Art/Association Française d’Action Artistique showing Chases Through Non-Place provided a revealing cross-section of ways of dealing with this issue of sonic reference.

Proceedings opened with Michael Graeve’s experiment utilising aged stereos. Graeve scattered speakers from numerous op-shop turntables throughout the venue. The sounds of phonograph needles on naked turntables were amplified and distorted in a deliberately lo-fi fashion. Each unit was added and later subtracted from the mix separately, creating a dense crossroads of spatially distinct yet layered sounds within the venue. This produced a raw, semi-randomly distributed, dirty pulse—the sound of pure electricity or motors—engulfing the audience from multiple discreet sources. Graeve’s work harked back to earlier traditions of sonic terrorism, to Cage’s self-conscious games of chance or even more venerable ideas about electricity as pure, unadulterated spirit.

Graeve’s approach is refreshingly ‘old-skool’ compared to that of the Diffuse artists. The latter’s sparse, disconnected sounds make it difficult to distinguish their pieces from the noise of urban life and electronic mechanisms. At the Diffuse launch in RMIT’s Kaleide cinema, the audience was a model of respectful attention. Such a hushed, cinematic listening aesthetic implies that to confuse the external rumble of a passing tram with the controlled sonic environment inside would be an error. These noise-art recordings paradoxically operate best in the absence of actual noise.

Lazy however explicitly engage with noise, error and chance. Musicians Dave Brown and Sean Baxter extol improvisation as the key to dancing on the pin-head of self-indulgence, a complete lack of control, and masterfully uncontrolled music. Blending avant-jazz, anarcho-rock and sonic art, Lazy’s Alliance Française offering was an exercise in “microsonics.” Baxter and Brown come from too hardcore a heritage to perform quietly throughout. They nevertheless play on the rock temptation to indulge in continuous sonic explosions, setting this against breaking down ever smaller units of time, emotion, energy, structure, music and sound. Using electronica-activating guitar licks (Brown) and a very funny bag of naturally amplified percussive tricks (Baxter’s standard drum kit, metal fragments, sticks and a wonderfully squeaky chair), Lazy threaten to leave the audience either frustrated, over-stimulated, or satisfied by the impossibility of resolving such a resolutely chaotic/non-chaotic piece. In refusing both structure and anti-structure, Lazy render errors impossible.

Paris/Melbourne duo Battery Operated approach noise differently. The performers allude to architectural theories of the “non-place”: a standardised realm like the airport or 7-Eleven designed to facilitate maximum social and economic traffic. Battery Operated use the metaphor of the “chase” to dramatise the de-territorialisation of sound and space affected by such anonymous non-places. The central compositional structure is a stuttering, stumbling drum’n’bass beat, erratically shifting in tempo. The video projection moves from abstracted montages of bus stations, trains and footpaths to images of confusingly mobile architectural schemas which morph as the music shatters. Noise reasserts itself before one runs on again.

Chases Through Non-Place reaches equilibrium in a region beyond both social space and that of the disinterested travel facilitated by the non-place. You enter an environment of funnelling and extrusion, of multiple bleed-throughs between different sonic and architectural spaces. Anonymous muzak environments like the elevator are designed to normalise and contain human and economic traffic. Battery Operated however end with a profoundly disturbing sensorium of noise (disorganised sound and space) and spatio-sonic interpenetration (flow). The artists cinesonically depict the spatial violence the non-place effects, returning the local patois of noise and its disturbingly chaotic nature to our movement through social and sonic space.

Perhaps recordings, unlike performances, cannot fully engage with noise. Schooled in both punk anarchism and avant-garde reading strategies, I however do not wish to “go with the flow.” I revel in such structured noise which nevertheless exceeds our capacity to define or control it; not simply a flow, but an illimitable excess of ambivalent electro-acoustic significations.

Chases Through Non-Place, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art/Association Française d’Action Artistique, Alliance Fraçaise, Melbourne, May 11

This concert proved a fine example of a hidden jewel in Melbourne’s winter cultural world. Buoyed by an enthusiastic and substantial audience eager for that magic which breaks the bonds of musical convention, the second of the from the lip concerts (produced by Chamber Made Opera) tackled issues of authenticity, integrity and originality. In an historical sense it was not experimental but each work contained elements that seemed to reference the idea of the experimental, while being set within essentially conventional contexts.
The concert began with Narcissus and Echo, an opera by Robin Fox and Elizabeth Parsons. Here the myth found a sympathetic interpretation through a range of challenging sounds and performance practices. Rich in detail, the work utilized a bewildering array of sound sources including pre-recorded sound, traditional instruments, turntables, fans with records on them (yes, vinyl!), a tape loop, speakers and singers. The theatricality of the performance effectively suggested ‘too much’ and, of course, ‘obsessiveness.’ The visual feast and complex sound established a compelling momentum of excess with which the audience could readily empathize, perhaps to the detriment of those moments of subtlety.

In stark contrast, Ania Walwicz’s solo reading of her text, Diana (a reference to Princess Diana), was equally spellbinding. As a delirious, self obsessed, verbal barrage, punctuated by changes in tone and subject, Walwicz’s accomplished performance was clearly a part of the experimental performance tradition of the last 30 years. Solo readings by Chris Mann came quickly to mind because of the musical treatment of the text. In many ways, Walwicz’s performance was both refreshing and passionate and moreso through the raw and powerful experience of witnessing the composer as performer.

Finally, The Broccoli Maestro. This visual and aurally impressive chamber opera in 2 acts, for 6 voices, 6 players and tape by Slave Pianos, unfolded as a challenge to contemporary musical thinking. An aesthetically complex work and perhaps exemplary of how the reputation of Slave Pianos is spreading as their working methodology becomes more widely appreciated and understood. This methodology may be summarized as: the use of re-composition, in this case, composing with other people’s music; the use of other art forms and intellectual subjects including literature, painting, philosophy, religion and politics; explicit reference to other artists (in this case Tony Clark) and a complex performance context which forms a nexus and crucial point of originality. All of this adds up to a sophisticated means of substantiating and legitimating the immediate work.

The effect in performance was as a massed force which advanced on the audience from all directions, forming a convincing experience through the sheer weight of the artistic evidence. The musical component was reminiscent of digital sampling, which is often a crude and frequently short-lived experience in comparison to the juxtaposed instrumental material found in this performance. As a collaborative enterprise, The Broccoli Maestro was a formidable example of aesthetic recycling with its many levels of reference and representation. A product of an institution, or society in this case, it was also a fantastic work of synthesis, of the moment and worthy of further discussion.

ChamberMade 2001: from the lip, Concert No.2, The Experimental, North Melbourne Town Hall, Melbourne, June 22

Dear Editors

What does the astounding success of “reality show” Big Brother say about us? There’s a bunch of “ordinary people” pretending not to be self-conscious in a comfy fish bowl. Zero production values. Negligible editing. Give them silly things to do. No real challenges except throw everyone else out and tell the camera some lame reason why they nominated whoever, other than the truth that they want the $250,000 prize or short of that, to survive for sufficient TV coverage to ensure some subsequent product endorsement, magazine pin ups and advertising revenue. We’ll soon see Sara-Marie endorsing PJs, chocolate and lingerie.

What’s the motive? Evict people we don’t get along with? Who wins (apart from Channel 10)? Ben, the shy boy in the footy jumper, who didn’t bother anyone. Could he be the Australian taciturn archetype? Why doesn’t Channel 10 just plug us into the TV surveillance of our so-called refugee camps and interview deportees about how they feel about it?

I remember a cartoon about a hangman who comes to town and just starts lynching people. Nobody puts up any resistance because he executes them in the order of the least popular/most different (minorities, blacks, Jews) until finally there’s no one left but the hangman.

The Big Brother host, Gretel, was looking more like Morticia. How many times do you hear “There’s only one winner” in spectator sport? Pat Rafter’s defeat is the first time I can remember Australia give “the loser” a break.

Big Brother is the prototype of a commercially successful new Australian program—eviction by personality, living vicariously, illusory Truman Shows and the triumph of nothingness.

Miranda Devine (Sydney Morning Herald, July 19) gives an interesting international context. 27 countries have aired versions of Big Brother. According to the article, “In the end, the Australian public redeemed Big Brother. What had obviously been intended by its producers to be a smutty, slutty, trash-fest of reality TV was redesigned by the 3 million viewers who phoned the eviction line each week into a sweetly innocuous show about platonic love and friendship.” In contrast the overseas variants, which were rocked by protest, sex and controversy. What does that say? We’re a nation of unsophisticated bores.

Miranda says we selected the good guy Ben who epitomises Aussies as uniquely “sport-loving, hugging, blokes.” She glosses over the significance of the process, EVICTION—we evicted “the cads, the interlopers, the crass, vulgar, sleaze, smug, banal, pushy, bratty, drunk, loud-mouthed, leering.” Who are these people? Oh no…That can’t be right…what’s the story…it’s you and it’s me! Andy, the discipline mistress, boasted she was “gonna shag at least 5 people” before she left the house. I wish she had.

Dear Editors

I represent a group called ‘divergence’, which seeks to encourage werdwurk (electronic writing) in Australia.

In a recent conversation with an arts administrator attached to one of Australia’s major festivals, it was suggested to me that a number of other groups are ‘doing the same thing’ as we are trying to do. Further research revealed that these groups are for young adults or adolescents.

I am wondering whether there is a common perception in Australia that werdwurk is not a properly adult artform. This perception tars both sides of the age divide with the same insult, that is, that it’s not serious or worthy. This is not the perception of the genre overseas.

I suspect that if such a perception exists in Australia it is because the criteria used to ‘judge’ it are derived from analysis of traditional forms of literature.

In another context I was talking to Anna Hedigan, who edits the online journal Overland Express. Anna says she can’t get enough contributions. I think the reason why is that Australians werdwurkers are so accustomed to looking for support/opportunities overseas that they don’t even bother looking in Australia.

From the OzCo’s Literature Fund, it would appear that there is little comprehension of werdwurk. An indication of this is the requirements for examples of applicants’ relevant previous work. There needs to be an understanding that werdwurk is a different genre.

Relevant statements about werdwurk may include: it gets ‘published’ differently; it gets ‘distributed’ differently; therefore capitalism doesn’t work for it; it is engaged with constantly changing technology, which means there are some different concerns/ways we spend our time; it ultimately resides within a coded environment; it has a different ‘metaphysic’; the people doing it have some sort of relationship with the network; either the network is actually essential in their work, or they at least base communication with their peers on it; it often fuses a variety of traditionally distinct artforms; it can engage the user in a variety of potentially quite different ways; it encourages a collaborative approach, if only because the variety of skills necessary can be so daunting; it can include the user within an ongoing collaboration; that is, it can be performative.

All these things add up to a fundamental challenge of the concept of the author/writer/artist. Indeed, the distinction between these concepts is fading partly as a result of electronic wurk. However it would appear that Australian arts administrators sometimes rely on popular definitions, and this means they don’t actually engage with what’s really going on.

As a result, I do wonder how to create a recognized space for this artform in Australia.

At the recent Electronic Literature Organisation Awards in New York, one third of the finalists were Australian. Australians were easily the second most represented nation among the entrants (after Americans). Australian werdwurkers have won various international awards and their wurk is recognized throughout the world as best practice. It is regularly featured in international exhibitions and on international websites. Some of the writers/artists concerned are Komninos, Mez, Linda Carroli, Teri Hoskin and Adrian Miles.

In a small way, the writers and journal editors themselves are trying to address this marginalisation. If you want to learn more about divergence, email me.

Dear Editors

The Australia Council for the Arts has recently announced funding of $200,000 for a community outreach program to accompany a regional tour of Grease—the Mega Musical. The reaction from artists and organisations all over the country has been shock and disbelief. Shock that such a decision could emerge from the “Promoting the Value of the Arts Campaign” and the Saatchi & Saatchi survey. Disbelief that a good Australian work could not have been found. La Boite Theatre’s latest venture into the bush—the tent show Way Out West–is surely a good example of a such a work.

To suggest that the Grease “community outreach” is innovative disregards the fact that there are Australian artists and communities—Circus Oz, Flying Fruit Flies, Chunky Move, Bangarra Dance Theatre, to name a few—already working all across the country who are very good at it. Many of them do it for much less than $200k, sometimes they do it for free.

The Australia Council in one of the country’s most vital and vibrant public institutions. The policies and decisions of the Australia Council have historically grown from consultation with artists and communities and are always hotly debated and contested. Within the ongoing clients of the Australia Council lie some of the most creative, innovative and strategic thinkers and makers in the world.

Throughout the Major Organisations and amongst the triennial, ongoing and project-based clients of the Theatre, Dance, Music, Community Cultural Development, Visual Arts, New Media, Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islanders Arts Funds and Boards, to individual artists, youth arts projects, regional arts organisations and community art groups there is a commitment to creative partnerships with industry, community ownership and empowerment, new technologies and new audiences.

Most of all there is commitment to the development of a vibrant and exciting contemporary Australian culture that speaks about and shapes “how we live today.” For this vast and constantly struggling national resource to be effective and to realise the monumental potential that it holds, strategic initiatives of the Australia Council should, as much as possible I believe, enhance, develop, push and build on the strengths and successes of 20 odd years worth of public investment.

But very often these days, new initiatives (and their new money) are tied to a particular twist of a particular Federal Government wanting to see particular things “delivered.” This scenario is dangerous and inhibits the arm’s-length independence of the Australia Council Boards, who are in the main peer artists, involved directly in cultural industry development.

So, over time, a policy vacuum appears between Australian contemporary arts practice as it actually is, and the sometimes twisted assumptions of men in grey suits waving the results of a “focus group” survey like Chamberlain returning from Nazi Germany.

So in the same month that we are sending some of our best contemporary companies to New York for the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival Down Under, we are also funding “community outreach” for American popular culture—Grease, produced by one of the largest (multi-national) entertainment companies in the world, Really Useful, with the show’s copyright owned by the richest man in Great Britain, Sir Paul McCartney.

I simply can’t believe that between ‘em they couldn’t pay for it themselves. Or with a product so well known as Grease, find a corporate or philanthropic sponsor for the entire outreach project.

These things just do not compute. Australia Council, we love you. Please consider.

Dear Editors

I am concerned at the emotive misinterpretation in various articles of recent changes to ABC Classic FM scheduling, and your editorial of June/July is one such. It would be good to examine who set you up for it actually.

It is true to say that Soundstage is no longer heard on ABC Classic FM, but it is not true to conclude that drama production at the ABC is suffering as a result. It continues and can be heard on Radio National. I have never had any influence over the Soundstage budget, and I should add that I wonder what you mean by a “homebody” audience? Are ABC Classic FM listeners not homebodies? However, a fair question to ask is why I removed it from ABC Classic FM. The answer is that our listeners have sought better definition for what ABC Classic FM stands for. If it is a music network, then why is ninety minutes a week of drama on it, and they’ve asked the same question of why the Margaret Throsby repeat is there as well. This explains the change.

You then allude to The Listening Room, implying that “workshopping” it is to use a euphemism for axing it. That will not happen. But answer me this: how many creative artists in Australia are doing work that is suitable for the Acoustic Art brief for TLR, but not being heard? I’m interested to put that question? How many people listen to TLR, and could there be more? Are there fields of acoustic art that do not have their roots in musique concrete and the extended forms of poetry found in the last century? Do we ever hear music, say Mozart or Cipriano de Rore, in the way it is intended? Could we assert a different way of hearing by virtue of context, or contrast, or can we change things by examining the cultural moulding of our ears, actually create a different context? If you don’t know, then take my assurance that I am interested in putting the question. And through The Listening Room. I think you have misinterpreted my intentions completely and I would have been happy to answer your points if you had asked.

There is one more thing you might find hard to understand, and I include this passionate statement because a letter from Timothy Daly published by you in the same issue refers to “fine music boffins.” Sorry mate, it’s our turf. Our listeners like music. They’ll fight to the death for it, because it matters to them. It is a field people who do not love music cannot comprehend. It is about understanding the movement of sound, the organisation of sound. It is a language of its own. That applies no less to Mozart or Josquin than to Robert Iolini. But music is not words, it is not visual, it is not associative (mostly), and is not always psychological narrative (in this it is a far more radical and successful art form than writing). It is about sound. The organisation of abstracted sound for its own sake. Soundstage could only rarely be about sound, and TLR is nearly always about sound. That’s why it will stay on ABC Classic FM and why I want to ask what it could be that is not being at present.

Freud-bashing has become almost as big an industry as Freud himself. Perhaps that’s inevitable for a man who, like Darwin and Marx, began by shaping our minds and ended by dominating our small talk. His ideas are so much part of the furniture we feel we know all about them without, er, knowing all about them. Or rather we think we know one important thing. In psychoanalysis, Catherine Belsey points out, “everything means something else.” And that something else is, of course, sex. Find yourself fiddling with your pen? Dream about tunnels? Think your partner looks like your Mum? Once these things were coincidences. Next they were insights. Now they are grist for every gag-writer with a line in blue humour who can spell ‘abreaction.’

Emma’s Nose is either a brilliant addition to the anti-Freud industry or a blatant exploitation of it or both. The story doesn’t so much develop as hang like a poisonous vapour over a series of boot-to-crutch skits most of which involve the word ‘penis.’ Emma Eckstein was one of Freud’s patients, a young woman suffering from cramps, hysteria, compulsive masturbation and, according to nose and throat specialist Wilhelm Fliess, ‘nasal reflex neurosis.’ Jacek Koman’s Fliess is a mad-scientist-with-frazzled-hair figure, who’s got a glottal-stop and a theory that abnormal sexual preoccupations (undefined) are linked to noses. He and Freud (Tyler Coppin) shared a belief in the curative powers of cocaine and a 17-year correspondence, most of which involved stroking each other’s egos. In 1895 Freud invited Fliess to operate on Eckstein’s nose. It was his first attempt at major surgery and he left half a metre of gauze in her nasal cavity, to cause in the short-term near-fatal hemorrhage and in the long term, permanent disfigurement. The 2 men parted company but in a gesture bound to impress future researchers, never blamed themselves for Eckstein’s predicament. Amazingly neither did she, going on to become one of Freud’s first disciples and write a book on child rearing.

Paul Livingston (Flacco to you) has mined correspondence between the 2 men to revive a genre harking back to the days of The Legend of King O’Malley: biographical vaudeville. Freud with a German accent and Groucho Marx moustache fingers his cigar and wonders how to greet Fliess. Fliess appears in a puff of smoke, ejected from a side door of Stephen Curtis’ sloping-floor set, waving an antiseptic spray, to harangue spectators with his theories about noses. The humour is relentless, a comedy of bludgeon, the wielding of a single, heavy weapon (the sex reference) over a small area with maximum force: Freud and Fliess sniffing each other’s butts, exploring an olfactory dimension to proboscidal thinking; the doctors two-stepping with canes and top hats; Freud brandishing a talking cigar; and some plain old fashioned clowning (Willy belts Sigmund. “SF: What was that? WF: A Freudian slap!”).

During all this Emma (Meaghan Davies) doesn’t say much because she is swathed in mummy-like bandages. Apart from waddling and waving her arms about all she can do is watch–and bleed. After Fliess operates a considerable amount of the latter goes on. Blood pours, literally, from Emma’s mouth, staining her bandages a deep scarlet and making visible the bottom of her agonised face. She crawls up the sloping floor to escape, but slips on her own fluids and hemorrhages some more. Which rather takes the shine off Fliess’s reputation as a surgeon, although matters calm down after Freud offers him a brandy and the 2 men sniff more cocaine.

I am in some professional awe at the way Company B has managed the risk element of this show. The thin-ness of Livingston’s writing is evident; you can hear the ice cracking behind each line as the actors’ deliver it. Koman and Coppin’s work is a tour de force. If there was any let-up in forward momentum the production would flounder. That it never does is a tribute to the audacity of the whole creative team. To succeed with material like this needs nerve, skill and brains. The best example is the handling of Emma herself. Despite her ‘abject object’ status, she is an electric presence on stage, her eyes registering shades of feeling the slapstick seems to exclude but ends up highlighting. When the blood flows it says more than words ever could about the damage inflicted on an innocent by a couple of obsessed experimenters.

At that point the production goes further than the play. After all, Fliess is the focus of the story, such as it is. Freud gets in only on a guilt-by-association ticket. Knowing a loony isn’t the same as being a loony while the step from a fixation about noses to a theory of sexual drives is a big one, and this play doesn’t take it. Can shows about serious matters succeed if they are just fun? The answer is, of course. It is the worst kind of presumption to criticise a drama for not realising what it never sets out to do. But the production’s stunning handling of Emma’s predicament raises expectations that it might broach the big questions. If it doesn’t, for most spectators that isn’t a problem. The laughs are enough and one can sit back and applaud Company B for pulling it off (in a non-Freudian sense) once again.

Emma’s Nose: A Comedy of Eros, Company B Belvoir, writer Paul Livingstone, director Neil Armfield, performers Tyler Coppin, Meaghan Davies, Jacek Koman, Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, May 18-June 14

Belvoir St theatre seems to be the hippest performance arena in Sydney. Upstairs and downstairs attracts different crowds and the recent slot of shows–Imago, Hamlet and Four on the Floor–have showcased up-and-comers and established theatre folk.

It’s hard to maintain a passion for theatre-with-boundaries after experiencing The Museum of Fetishized Identities (see Keith Gallasch’s review). Hamlet and Imago seemed so far away, unreachable. The concept of a venue done up more like a rave (The Performance Space) with performances fluid and revolving and great thumping music–do it to me baby–where you can rove with a drink in one hand and a machine gun in the other is pretty hard to beat. I don’t like performances where as they speak their dialogue they look above your head into an imagined distance that we the audience can’t turn around to see. I like contact, especially downstairs at Belvoir, where the newly renovated space means you are so close you can smell the sweat of the performers. So back to Imago, the final stages of a beautiful butterfly-made, which featured some tough performances, in particular Sara Zwangobani as Cleo and Michael Gwynne as Jon. Its content–a woman who wants to be a man–is just too close to the film Boys Don’t Cry and it suffers in comparison. There is no ambiguity–perhaps this is the point–but as a first-time writer, Emma Vuletic’s first-time play-off-the-ground shows talent. More crossovers of characters’ dialogue, more silence, less posturing, would help it gel, and the good thing about the producers Kicking and Screaming (Chris Mead, Veronica Gleeson) is that they are dedicated to developing new writing and encouraging their writers to continue to work, so Emma’s next one will get some careful nurturing.

All the works in Four on the Floor (produced by Legs on the Wall) are strong physical theatre tableaux on relationships and desire, but Where is this?, a challenging piece about the difficulty of creating performance works, doesn’t quite fit in the programme. It’d be good to replace it with another double-hander as the other 3 are about erotic relationships between 2 people. The most audacious, Sentimental Reason, is a genuinely disturbing tale of foreplay and liaisons between a woman and a horse (and what a gorgeous horse he is as he pisses loudly and slowly into the front row of the audience) and lolls about, patiently watching us walk in. The use of straps hung from the ceiling, which Lee Wilson bridles, fights and reigns himself in, adds hellfireclub cred and Mirabelle Wouters, decked out in tartan tucked up into her knickers, and later naked astride her bareback plaything, is funny and kinky at the same time. Knots, which opens the night, is a great interplay of rough-and-guts between 2 girls, Ingrid Kleinig and Alexandra Harrison, asking those questions that are deadly serious, intensely physical, broaching power and sexual play. Like most conversations, and unlike most theatre dialogues, most of the time they fail to connect. One asks a question the other never answers. One answers a question the other never asks. And so it goes on. And there’s tension as a head is pushed into a bucket–there’s a hole in my–and water lashes the floors, to be maneuvered around and slid through, wishy-washy as girlie words.

The current trend is to promote your theatrical wares to groovy types by emphasising the soundtrack. Imago features Dirty Three while Hamlet has the very funky and talented Aya Larkin, lead singer of Skunkhour, in various guises including the player king, while cast members have a go at the turntable, DJing into the night. This music can take away from or give to the performance. In Imago it’s just plain irritating, like the musicians have never seen the production and the actors have never heard the music. Dirty Three has a cumulative often awesome power but here they just kind of plonk into the proceedings. Sacha Horler as Ophelia does an offkilter version of Lover Man in Hamlet, Billie Holiday’s lament curiously appropriate to her desperate desires: “I go to bed / with a prayer / that you’ll make love to me / strange as it seems.” In Desire Lines, amongst the angled-legged tango and tender dreamings, Ben Palumbo performs the most gorgeous falsetto, soaring into the rafters. The ending is particularly beautiful, his small red-back to the audience, singing as his partner and his own emaciated shadow slide imperceptibly, the sweat from Paul Cordeiro’s bald head staining and scraping the wall as he falls, feather-light. It’s a performance I wanted to see more of. Just a glimpse of shadow.

Four on the Floor, B Sharp 2001:Where Is It?, performance/ choreography Rowan Marchingo, director Simon Green; Desire Lines, devisers Ben Palumbo, Paul Cordeiro; Sentimental Reason, concept/choreography Mirabelle Wouters, Lee Wilson; Knots, writer/director Alexandra Harrison, performers Harrison, Ingrid Kleinig, July 19-Aug 5; Imago, writer Emma Vuletic, director Chris Mead, performers Michael Gwynne, Clogagh Crowe, Emma Jackson, Sara Zwangobani; Hamlet, Pork Chop Productions, director Jeremy Sims, performers include Sims, Sacha Horler, Deborah Kennedy, Company B Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, July 5-August 5

I like this title very much and–as the token critic on the panel–I sense a duty to acknowledge in my comments the hovering ghost of Roland Barthes. It was after all this eminent French cultural theorist who, in a 1968 essay, first coined the phrase: “The death of the author.”

It’s a phrase that, to this day, is largely misunderstood and often misrepresented. To come to grips with his extravagant claim, there are however 2 meanings of the word ‘dead’ we need to consider here.

There is dead as in ‘buried.' If you look up ‘death of the author’ on the net you end up downloading hundreds of novelists’ obituaries. That is not the kind of death Barthes was referring to. There is no question that writers are still needed to actually write, whether it’s novels or playscripts

What Barthes intended was a challenge to the habit among critics of his day (and still today) to look for the ‘meaning’ of a work of art in the writer’s so-called ‘intentions.' He claimed you could never know a writer’s intentions; even the writer cannot know what truly drives a book. The author’s history, education, sexuality, what he had for breakfast, is ultimately of little relevance.

All that exists, claims Barthes, at the end of the process of writing is the book, the text. At that point, the author and the work part company, a new union is formed between the text and the reader. Barthes rightly observed that in literary criticism from the Classical age up to the end of Modernism, the role of the reader had never been considered relevant in any discussion of the ‘meaning’ of a text.

“To give a text an author,” Barthes wrote, “is to impose a limit on the text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”

Barthes observation was that in seeking out ‘the intentions of the author’ we were not only attempting the impossible, we were also denying the text an infinite number of other equally valid meanings. As many meanings, in fact, as there were readers. As many meanings in fact as their were readings. This is true of the experience of theatre too. Anyone who goes back to see a production a second or third time knows what I mean.

We might be going the long way round here, but this does take us back to today’s topic: ‘Why be a playwright when the play is dead?’

Strictly speaking the play is not dead, it will never be dead so long as there is theatre. But we must, in the service of good work, accept that the play is no more or less than the architecture holding the work of art together. Playwrights are architects. Directors are, in this analogy, the design consultants. And actors are the inhabitants–owners not renters.

The play is not dead, in my view. But what about the playwright? As an author–whose intentions we attempt to seek out–the playwright is as dead as any novelist, in the sense that Barthes originally observed.

As a critic not currently employed (though ‘retired’ or ‘resting’ sounds better) I could be seen as ‘dead’ — as in buried.

As a dead critic I feel I am uniquely honoured to be asked to participate in this panel. It makes a kind of bizarre sense: critics are, when in work, theatre’s ‘undead’–wrapped in our capes, fangs barely concealed, we only emerge after nightfall to frighten baby NIDA graduates and leading festival directors of indisputable good taste.

Only after we have been stabbed several times through the heart with a crucifix by the likes of an emboldened Schofield or a vengeful Macintosh– today’s ‘holy cross’ looking uncannily like a dollar sign–can society safely allow us out for an appearance such as this one. As the legend has it, quite correctly, only a truly dead critic, as in buried, is safe in good society before sundown.

It was a casual conversation with Deborah Franco who works with Katharine Brisbane at Currency Press. We were, like far too many people with time on our hands, discussing the fallout of a Richard Wherrett's speech at the National Performance Conference in Sydney in January, which has lead to a cascade of commentary including responses from playwright Louis Nowra, dramaturg May-Brit Akerholt and emerging director Benedict Andrews.

Running through the responses has been an argument, by no means a new one, between playwrights and directors as to who is more important in the process of creating a work of art for the stage.

As a critic I have been confronted with this many times. It’s a version of the old chicken and egg conundrum. Directors these days are ‘up themselves’ because they take liberties with the text. They do not adhere to the playwright’s intentions. Directors, on the other hand, see playwrights as prima donnas who don’t know what’s good for them or their wayward scribbles.

These arguments get more complicated when the playwright is ‘dead’, in the ‘buried’ sense.

There was a panel discussion a year or so ago in response to Barrie Kosky’s radical production for Bell Shakespeare of King Lear. A host of senior academics–including Leonie Kramer–argued that Kosky had done Shakespeare a disservice in his ‘interpretation.' As Barthes would rightly ask, how are we to ever know what Shakespeare intended? All a director can do today with a classic text, or any text for that matter, is help his actors find meaning in it for themselves and their nightly audiences.

In my view, the recent kerfuffle cascading down from Wherrett’s first assault has been akin to the two ugly sisters of fairytale arguing vehemently over the glass shoe. Who’s more important–the writer or the director? When forlorn in the ashes in the corner sits Cinderella, otherwise known as the ‘actor’ or the ‘troupe of actors.'

In my view the true work of art we call theatre exists in the empty space between actors and audience. It is born as it dies, leaving (if the work has any cogency) an imprint on our souls. The Tuesday night performance is, strictly speaking, a different work of art from the one presented on Wednesday night.

If Tuesday night was the opening night then, we might ask, where are the writer and director on Wednesday night when the work of art is being recreated entirely afresh? They’re probably not even in the theatre building. Where are they? Most likely down the pub drowning their sorrows over the ‘hot-off-the-press’ scathing reviews.

It’s something a good critic should remember: whatever you have to say, don’t forget the performers have to get up and do it again in front of more people. If you’re hard, that can be a very big call. Meanwhile all else involved can write themselves off in a sea of valium and cask wine.

Of course writers and directors can be very helpful in the construction of the work’s preparatory architecture and design. But on the night, they actually have less a role to play in the making of the work than–dare I say it–that frightening bank of critics in the stalls, fangs flashing occasionally in the light, who do form part of the evening’s audience.

Actors/Audience/Time and Space are the fundamental components of the art form we call performance (theatre, opera, ballet, mime, stand-up comedy, all being no more than genres).

To propound that not only directors but actors too serve the vision of playwrights can result in a playwright’s death. Their professional or artistic death. They will never write a very good play if they ponce around in a delusional state of misplaced self-importance–if they believe they the true ‘authors’ of the work of art.

Good playwrights–and I cite Shakespeare and Pirandello here among the best examples–know they are mere handmaidens in the service of the actor-audience relationship. And they acknowledge, as household staff, they have usually well and truly knocked off for the day before the art form ever comes to life. Unless, like Shakespeare, they don a bonnet and take on the challenges of a minor role.

If playwrights are to maximise their contribution to the art form–and a good deal more could be said about this if we had the time–they should reconsider what a playscript is–or can be.

This too is a whole other topic, but let’s just say most bad playwrights think their job is to create dialogue. That’s it—dialogue–whether serious or witty or both. When really there is much more to creating an over-arching architecture of potential meanings which the actors and audiences can take up and explore.

Barthes is largely out of fashion these days when it comes to post-postmodern critical theory. Much of what he had to say in terms of ‘writing designed for reading’ has been worked through. But he made some superb observations about the nature of theatre which have largely gone unheeded by participants in the form. Brecht’s so-called ‘alienation’ theory was, in fact, one of his biggest influences.

Bathes also saw ‘texts’ everywhere–in the shining lights of Tokyo, in wrestling matches, in the silence of a rose in a vase. And when it came to the art form we call theatre he observed that the text was composed of much more then just words.

To finish, let me here just offer a glimpse of this in this quotation from an essay by Barthes titled “Baudelaire’s Theater”, written way back in 1954, a good 15 years before he killed off the author.

I think his comments best embrace, whether dead or alive, the still extraordinary potential of the playwright’s role. The subject: those resources available to the playwright as architect, which he groups together under the banner of ‘theatricality.'

“What is theatricality? It is theatre-minus-text, it is a density of signs and sensations built up on stage starting from the written argument; it is that ecumenical perception of sensuous artifice–gesture, tone, distance, substance, light–which submerges the text beneath the profusion of its external language. Of course theatricality must be present in the first written germ of the work, it is a datum of creation not of production. There is no great theatre without a devouring theatricality–in Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Brecht, the written text is from the first carried along by the externality of bodies, of objects, of situations; the utterance immediately explodes into substances.”

Does god see geese? And if SLEEP PEELS then do bells of loveliness ripple like rays of stars? It’s unfair to begin with questions; I take them back. Excuse them as mere rhetoric–a stupid way to write (stupid as…). The reverse of ‘stupid’ is diputs, almost ‘dispute’; a small matter of adding one letter and rearranging another. The matter of language itself; writing begins in the midst of a duel/dual, a dispute or doubling.

SLEEP PEELS is a palindrone. It clings, word to word, paused, like a quiet love affair. Still, Louise Haselton’s modest exhibition, Act Natural, at Greenaway Art Gallery had this pausing effect, a moment held still (breathless) before dueling with language. Can language be other than dual, double, two-fold–and more and multiple and ‘times’-this and 'times'-that, etcetera. So, when Haselton took the word LONE she asked for trouble, because ENOL is “any organic compound containing a hydroxyl group attached to a doubly linked carbon, usually in the form -C=C-OH” (Macquarie Dictionary). I have no idea what this means, but you can see the hidden message, the clue: ‘doubly linked’. A little toxic something, perhaps.

Every time I walk up the steps to the mezzanine space in the Greenaway Art Gallery I anticipate something. It’s a simple bare staircase which functions like a pause; you know the work up there will be of a different type and scale. It’s as if the staircase prepares you; it keeps you visually connected to 2 spaces simultaneously. Its bareness is a lone-ness, and yet it's intimate somehow, in the way the LONE ring was (bronze knuckleduster); a ring so intimate it “would lift the flesh from the face” (Lisa Young, catalogue essay). I’ve often thought of this staircase as an element of whatever work is up there, a path, passage, caught up, tangled, in the artist's intention (but never mentioned).

There were 6 works (3 bronze, one acrylic on board, one silkscreen, one paper and pen). They were singular, but played off one another, creating vector lines. The centre-piece, or anti-centre-piece, and almost ephemeral, drew everything to itself–a star–I mean ‘a star’ in shape and a-star in performance, like a character actor (Harvey Keitel) who simply takes the cake. The ‘star’ is paper, a length of paper folded into a star. It sits like a crown on a white plinth. And written around the star in pen was: dennis/sinned/do geese/see god/eva can I stab/bats in a cave/name no/one man/rats live on/no evil star/wont lover/revolt now. You can see language reverse itself, dispute/double itself. Whether language, me, you, means to is another matter. Usually we don’t. Yet we always manage to mis-mean. Lovely. Alarming.

It is difficult to say how quiet this exhibition was–as surely quiet as having 2 fingers cut off. What to say? It’s over. It hurts. Lone hurts. But, what to tell? Gone. Too late. There was a bronze tree of fingers, delicate fingers, not a child’s, fingers that had been around. Two were missing, broken off. Yet, there they were curled around each other on another plinth. It was, they were, sad, and comforting. Dead, in each other’s 'arms'. This was LONE; and while a-LONE, all around is a-LONE-ness. The works together witnessed LONE, as a community. They belonged somewhere, no particular place (and specific anyway), 6 things in view of each other.

In these days of ‘illegal entry’ Act Natural was a concise political work which in stillness evoked the overflow (the silent screams, the touches which generate ‘infinite’ possibilities), the excess sorrow that has no voice. And which points up the impossibility of acting natural; each occasion, event (here, artwork), requires separate attention, each has its own story, history, time. It is painful, as (L)ONE-liness is, it is hope, as setting out a-LONE is, it could be hopeful, if 'welcome' is offered.

The dual in Haselton’s work was (the pause) between language and object. It hovered, without desire for resolve, like an interval (a staircase), and in that interval imaginary refreshment came, food eaten, opinions exchanged (this is the land of language). The dual is rhetorical, within the beauty and despair of the word LONE (solitary, isolated, as a house: evoked in Lisa Young’s essay by the figure of Robert Indiana slouching in a door frame–architecture shows off at every chance): “Dragging on a cigar he gazes nonchalantly out…A lone renegade…” Later in Young's essay: “In counterpoint to the wistfulness of her text pieces, is the weightiness of her objects…; intended to be picked up and held, they have the authority of their traditional material…Curious human remains severed from the corpus delicti, they speak of an obsessive duality and the psychotic act.”

Haselton was generous, she made hard isolated works which reached for each other through small incisive moves, as if not wanting to disturb you (pausing before you). Their 'belonging somewhere', and their 'being in one place', their small party of melancholy, made one want to belong, be in solace (paused), with them, naturally, acting.

The gallery is nearly empty–a mixing desk, projector and a few pedestals turned sideways to form seats are in the rear room. A long, sky-blue screen is unrolled like a blind in the middle room, and there are tiny loudspeakers on the walls in every room. Lengths of speaker cable are taped to the wall in the shape of arches and angles, like an architectural drawing, or nerves mapping the body.

In this, the third in the Domus series of artists’ interventions into the CACSA building, a video is projected onto an entire wall. Meanwhile, Stevie Wishart slowly walks around wearing her hurdy-gurdy, whose transmitter signals its sound to the mixing desk and speakers. Wishart blends recorded, sampled and live sounds, exploring the resonances inherent in the gallery, a converted 120 year-old, inner-suburban, blue-stone villa.

Artist Joan Grounds has worked before with Wishart to create sound and performance installations. They make an environment, an arena. The video is a long, slow-motion close-up of Wishart’s hands playing the hurdy-gurdy, so slow it is nearly still, so large it overwhelms, transfixes. A primitive form of musical notation is painted in henna on the palm of one of Wishart’s hands–the ‘cheat sheet’ used by monks when singing, the hand as language, readable.

The sky-blue screen formed the backdrop for making the video. At times, Wishart rests the hurdy-gurdy on the screen so we can see, in one room, the props used for making the video and in another, the video itself. Throughout, the speakers emit taped sound. This sound becomes a drone, an arrhythmic, trance-inducing, electro-acoustic chant. In this environment, time seems slowed or stopped.

Wishart makes sound by poking and prodding the hurdy-gurdy rather than playing notes. It becomes an object of experimentation as well as a musical instrument, a site of multiple potentials (as is the building). The ancient script and the harmonies of bygone cultures that infuse the instrument are transported into the present. Wishart’s hands could be 1000 years old. The taped sounds, heard at the speed of the slow motion video, become guttural, demonic. It’s as if we’re inside the hurdy-gurdy, as if the gallery is a virtual instrument we’ve entered. Grounds and Wishart collapse the virtual, the medieval and the present into one moment.

Jonathan Dady’s Construction Drawings, the first Domus exhibition earlier this year, comprised scaffolding that replicated the CACSA gallery. Painted to look like a CAD drawing and wrapped around the building, it was a physical manifestation of an architect’s representation of the building, the real as virtual. In Domus 2, Ariane Epars’ Piece of Land 240, the gallery was again empty. Epars’ pulled up some floorboards in each room and placed lights underneath, illuminating the ground below and thus illuminating the origin of this colonised site. In the Domus series, the gallery is no longer neutral space.

Domus 3, Stevie Wishart & Joan Grounds, Contemporary Art Centre
of SA, May 11 – June 3

MEZ [Mary-Anne Breeze] has been described as one of “the original net.artists” who is “…without doubt one of the most consistent, prolific, innovative artists working in new media today. Mez’s work with language has had a considerable effect on the language of many…” Since 1995, she has exhibited extensively via the internet and in ‘realtime.’

Can you tell me a little bit about the history of this text/language you’ve developed?

my “mezangelle” style of writing/textual construction][ that has at its base email dialogues and network exchanges][ underpins all my net.artwork, even the more image intensive versions. the format evolved from a series of emailed collaborative pieces carried out with m@ ][Matt Hoessli from the CADRE Institute][ on the 7-11 mailing list from 96 onwards. At the time, I was into switching avatarian cloaks ][the most regular being ‘ms post modemism’][ which is another defining criteria of my net.artwurk][“net.wurks”][. my particular ‘angle’ was to take various information text tracts and ‘mangle’ them through free/multi-word associative techniques and repost them–hence the term, mezangelle. this technique has developed since, with computer code conventions and regular chat/email iconographs contributing to its formulation.

i sometimes wish i hadn’t termed the style mezangelling, as it directs the language m.phasis 2wards the authorial side, and i’m not sure if this fits in2 its gradual enveloping nature…”mezangelle” was used for the obvious reasons, splitting the term in2 angel][le][, mangle, gel, mez etc…but it also had as a trigger JG Ballard’s adoption of his own name in his novel Crash; it seemed such a deliciously jarring concept that i decided it would fit with the fragmenting of narrative and auteurship i had in mind, considering the avatar swapping i usually n.gage in…now, though, i’m not so sure][…

Did you program a generator to translate english into hybrid new language or how are the translations made?

the text is purely self][human][-generated within a framework of mezangelled conventions and the net.wurk overall, with the aim b.ing 2 partially indicate a mechanised or hybrid organic/computerised feel.

it’s always a numbing process, trying to concretely describe the gradual shifts n.herent in mezangelling ][numbing in that i have 2 actually stop and cogitate for a while:)][. currently, the use of the double/inverted square-pair-bracket is the main distinguishing feature, and this is ][in part][ reactionary; after c-ing several of the more distinguishable features b.ing adopted in2 widespread usage ][well, widespread enough to realize its n.fluence, such as in various x.hibition “titles” & other new media work using key elements similar to mezangelle, etc][, i consciously d.sided 2 shift the emphasis 2wards a more polysemous approach. the use of the double bracket ][i like to think of it as triptych bracket][ is part compromise on my part, in that for a brief while i toyed with using the reversed bracket *only* but after trying it in one piece decided–for the sake of readability–that it was a no-goer. ][c, i *do* consider my audience 1nce in a while:)][ the trip.tych bracket allows for a cushioning of the enhanced/added meanings i m.bed fairly heavily in2 my texts, but when used extensively becomes quite complexly layered.

it was a smooth evolutionary process, utilizing email and chatlines as traditional correspondence techniques, then decompressing this to include more performative aspects–the collaboration elements were crucial, in that they opened up a previously bland informatic space into producing new artistic forms and genres.

no, as the “net” ][in terms of net.art][ was largely formalizing into being around the time i first started my chat/textforays ][95][, so the process was more intuitive rather than prescriptive.

Did you have extensive previous experience with language/linguistics/syntax?

strangely enuff my professional arts career was kick-started as a hybrid writer/painter, though I was never satisfied with the medium][s][ and how my work was embraced within the umbrella-label ‘installation’. i had the urge to use the notion of scientific order to mask/covertly highlight another type of ‘random’ order and this led to the computer, 2 play & integration ][play is absolutely crucial to my work, if I don’t allow myself the time to absorb and digest and information-trawl, I’m lost][.

What was your method in choosing certain letters or symbols to replace words?

the method was based on absorption via my m.mersion in the basic components of networked communication via chats, the use of computer coding, emails, gaming etc, and so the incremental units of these exchanges became embedded in my net.wurks.

Was it based more on phonetics or on the similarities of the symbols to letters? Whenever I read your texts it seems almost easier to read aloud then just in my head.

neither; though initially it relied stylistically on grabbing from computer language/html whereas nowadays it seems more lyrically and structurally based ][which explains the ease of reading aloud][.

i’ve always been fascinated by the idea of the tandem process of language shaping reality and vice versa ][cf the whorfian, or sapir/whorf hypothesis][ and although i didn’t consciously have this theory in mind, i’m sure it’s influenced the way i want my texts 2 be consumed by the reader; also, barthes notion of re][thinking][writing of the author raises its ugly head in my overt intention to give the reader/audience various meaning/learning cues that must be actively pieced together.

Where do you think these “net.wurked” texts stand as far as the internet is concerned?

they don’t stand, they creep over netwurked tendrils, pop up spam-like ][but r very different to spam in content][ in many unusual places, and are archived for all 2 plunder in substantial email list/chat archives.

many and various; some people find my work too conceptual or plainly inaccessible whereas others equate it to the likes of Shakespeare, Greenaway and James Joyce. Some moderators can’t get a grip on the open source tone of my artistic practice and take actions to unsubscribe or ban me from their mailing lists, as happened on the Australian new media list recode recently. the fan mail is amusing and touching, though, and helps balance these negative actions.

Mez is the 2001 Resident Artist at the WCG, has been awarded the 2001 VIF Prize by the Humboldt-Universitat in Berlin, was shortlisted for the prestigious 2001 Electronic Literature Organisation’s Fiction Award, and is currently in the running for the JavaMuseums’ Artist Of The Year 2001 Award.

French filmmaker and theorist Agnes Varda is now in her 60s. In her lithe documentary, The Gleaners and I, she explores the often hidden worlds of people who salvage objects that others leave behind: a tonne of potatoes dumped because they’re misshapen, heart shaped, green vegetable leaves under crates at a Parisian market, grapes and apples left to rot, oysters left stranded after a storm. Varda gleans in her own way too, holding a camera rather than a sickle, sifting through digital images rather than metal by the roadside. Scrap crap. Shit bits. Fossicked through and spat out. She buys a clock with no hands and displays it proudly on the mantle. In France, gleaners have a certain nobility, are able to articulate their rights, protected by law. A chef in Burgundy roams the local hills looking for wild herbs. An artist makes “sentences from things.” People glean to survive, for art, by compulsion, or just for fun. Meanwhile, Agnes looks at her elderly hands, her thinning hair, trying to find the same empathy for her aging body that she shares with others she talks to: “I am an animal I don’t know.” Film festival goers become gleaners too, sifting through the rubble for those elusive odds and sods that can be shaped into lasting impressions. It’s harder than ever to get the full picture now that subscriptions only cover films at the State Theatre. It’s like watching the event with one eye covered. So here goes a “sheltered view.

Innocent bystanders

The Werckmeister Harmonies is the masterpiece of the festival, an overpowering look into the belly of the beast, or in this case the eye of a whale. What do you see? Good or evil? There’s the mysterious Prince who incites the members of a Hungarian village to rampage, riot and destroy. But does he exist or is he just a fiction created to justify others’ actions? A witness moves through this cold village. An innocent. He sees all, like the whale he loves to visit, stranded in a corrugated iron truck, tail piercing the village square, the night, like angel’s wings. In one of the most memorable beginnings in cinema, he pushes drunks at the bar into physical revolution, an embodied eclipse, where they play sparkling sun and moon and earth and twinkle twinkle little stars with their fingertips, spiralling and lurching around each other. He is a guardian angel unable to help, bleaker than Wenders’, watching and stepping with care. The monochrome and relentless cold and György Kovàcs’ exquisite music build a feeling of undefinable dread. It settles in your stomach, unnameable. It streams into the empty streets. Then the mob appears and starts to move, quiet except for footsteps. They ransack a hospital, destroying the equipment, beating the patients out of bed. No screams or cries of anguish, just a systematic, ruthless, unstoppable force, the fear heightened by the quiet.

Director Bela Tarr’s style is distinctive in contemporary cinema in that he rarely edits. The camera floats, smooth as a ghost, a dead man walking amongst hardened faces. Each scene is unforgettable: a policeman dances with his lover with a gun pointed triumphantly in the air. Loaded. His kids tear up and blow down the house, drumming with sticks, screaming “I’ll be hard on you, I’ll be hard on you”, each word a response to an inherited legacy of brutality, They control the world. Right now. While a dead whale lies in the village square, exposed, in streets that are burning.

How much profit is enough?

Bob Connolly, giving the Ian McPherson Memorial Lecture, says the best place to see documentary is in a “darkened hall surrounded by as many people as possible” and his methodology of narrative verité, being “prepared to film indefinitely”, results in high drama comic-tragedies/provocations like Rats in the Ranks and Facing the Music (which won most popular documentary at the festival). Anne Boyd is a good subject—frail, increasingly politicised, energetic, courageous, irritating, contradictory—and her love of music, along with the students’ exquisite soundtrack, infuses the film. It focuses on the gradual deterioration in teaching and resource standards of the Department of Music at the University of Sydney, due to the budget constraints meted out under university management and the federal government. The psychological damage on teachers aiming high within these environments is devastating. Staff start working unpaid. In the end, Boyd retires to concentrate on composing and second-in-charge Winsome Evans (“I can’t use the computer…I wouldn’t go to meetings”) has a heart attack. This is good drama but so much more. In a crucial scene, Boyd calls the Commonwealth Bank to try and muster some funding for a scholarship after spending hours composing on the computer—her ever-expanding duties as Head of Department now including sponsorship manager. It’s painful watching her negotiations, seeing her invest so much in her words, because you know that every charity is writing that same letter, every organisation coming up with its own buzz words, trying to entice the corporates to bite. This doco is a must see for every group on the fringes—artists, charities, academics, teachers, students—and anyone who believes, as Boyd quotes Beethoven, that “it is they who should give way to us.”

In August 1999, industrial giant BHP closed its doors in Newcastle. Steel City revisits the site, workers, management and community in the final stages. 2,500 workers are in a state of paralysis, having grown up expecting “a job for life” and feeling unskilled to tackle looking for work in a region as depressed as the Hunter. The documentary lovingly cares for these men and women, the men seen as vulnerable, described in feminine language—suckling on breasts—unable to defend themselves. Sometimes Kris McQuade’s voiceover verges on wartime-like propaganda, gearing into the sentimental—“this is where they lived”—as the camera traces the empty streets. Where the film is most successful is in the juxtaposition of management and workers. The marketing manager keen to get a media spin at all costs—he knows where his next pay cheque is coming from—staging a mock event of the last pouring of steel, inviting old timers to be involved: “it’s good business.” Front page news or bloated rhetoric? While Jack, who worked from age 14-51 at BHP, has no trade or qualifications but is learning to trust himself. And the others, who’ve never been for an interview, who don’t have “much literacy/numeracy skills”, get training from a service provider who says they need to “look outside the box.” The same workers who were told by BHP that “you’re not here to think, you’re here to do as you’re told.” The strangely moving image of a fiery process coming to an end.

Killing off the family

Made for the Hybrid Life series currently screening on SBS (see RT43 p14), The Last Pecheniuk is an unusual documentary in that it focuses on the negative aspects of being the child of immigrants in Australia. No soft-centred reminiscences packed up in a suitcase here. Instead, a tale of disaffection, a woman (the filmmaker Ness Alexandra), who changes her name to avoid the obligations of her Russian heritage, the pressures of being “the last Pecheniuk.” It’s a stylishly made film, Run Lola Run funky, complexly layered. Ness writes to an aunt who also ran away: “you were the big mystery…I imagined I was you.” The weight of expectation is heavy but there is love too. She sees her family as paranoid and isolated, her identity in Australia as trapped, bound and controlled as the Bonsai plants her grandmother so carefully tends.

Under the Sand is also about disappearance and reconstruction. Curiously resonant because of our cultural focus on the beach and the Harold Holt drowning saga, it’s about a middle-aged couple who visits a holiday house and head to the sand. While Marie (Charlotte Rampling in a memorable performance) is sleeping her husband enters the surf and when she wakes he is gone. That’s it. It’s disturbing because of its intangibility; there’s nothing for her or us to grab hold of. Is he just missing? Is he dead? Director Francois Ozon concentrates on Marie’s state of mind immediately after the disappearance and this is the film’s strange strength. It’s not quite grief. It’s not quite sanity either. She can’t miss him because he isn’t really gone. Yet. There are shifting surfaces, and sometimes it’s easier not to know the truth. When she finally relents and takes another lover, she laughs in the middle of making love and says, “you’re so light.” He’s not quite her husband. Rampling embodies in a very physical performance that sense of unreality when someone who touches you every day is no longer there.

Little boy dreams

David Stratton introduces The Apu Trilogy, Satyajit Ray’s classic black and white films tracing the life of a village boy, with a great story. When he was director of the Sydney Film Festival in 1968, he was approached by Ray to obtain a copy of Peter Sellers’ The Party for a private screening. Ray had just been offered a funding deal with Columbia, based on his script The Alien—an alien is befriended by a peasant—conditional on the agreement that Sellers played the part of the peasant. Stratton was forced to spend an excruciating few hours in Ray’s presence watching Sellers play an Indian After this, Ray withdrew from the deal.

The 3 films of the trilogy—Pather Panchali, Aparajito and The World of Apu—are quite different in tone and style. Pather is beautifully filmed and performed by a group of non-actors. Like Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (A One and A Two) the focus is on a small boy who sees everything but understands only pieces, oblivious to an adult world in which we become implicated. In Taiwan, a small boy takes photographs of the backs of people’s heads to help them see what they are missing. In India, Apu runs to his mother—he runs everywhere—with a letter from a long-gone father, evading his mother’s desperate hands. In Aparajito, it is the father who moves incessantly, in and out of the streets that wind down to the steps of the sacred Ganges, to be cleansed in water that is more diseased than he can know. Like Marie in Under the Sand, Apu becomes defined by absence, the deaths of sister, father, loved wife and an ambivalent relationship with his mother—which comes to haunt him in The World of Apu, when he takes on the role of absent father. Full circle.

There’s a woman who sits in the same seat every session at the State whom I dub ‘Voice of the People.’ After each film she announces loudly to the elderly women behind her a score out of 5. In Silent Partner, David Field and Syd Brisbane give headstrong, occasionally brutal, performances in a 2-hander that is about childish faith eternally unfulfilled. These men are close as family, prefer to buy cigarettes and alcohol than food, and completely naïve in their undertakings with the big boss. Based on a Daniel Keene play, the writing is understandably tough, unrelenting but sympathetic. Shot in 7 days on location at the greyhound races (where people just ignored the camera) and in various actors’ kitchens and bathrooms, it’s very low budget with a gorgeous sustained rhythm. The Voice of the People gives it 1 star out of 5. She says, “why would you bother making a film about 2 absolute losers” and then pauses, reflectively, “but Paul Byrnes seemed to like it.” I give the festival 2.5 stars—I have gleaned a bit but my bucket is half full.

Steel City, writer-director Catherine Marciniak; The Last Pecheniuk, writer-director Ness Alexandra, Dendy Awards, State Theatre, June 8; Facing the Music, writer/directors Bob Connolly, Robin Anderson, distributor Ronin Films, Australia; The Gleaners and I, writer-director Agnes Varda, France; A One and A Two, writer-director Edward Yang, Taiwan/Japan; Silent Partner, writer Daniel Keene, director Alkinos Tsilimidos, distributor Palace Films, Australia; Under the Sand, writer-director Francois Ozon, France; The Werckmeister Harmonies, director Bela Tarr, script based on book Melancholy of Resistance by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Hungary/France/Germany; The Apu Trilogy, writer-director Satyajit Ray, India, Sydney Film Festival, June 8-22

Thanks to Mike Parr’s recent 10 day performance at Artspace, performance art has been back in the news (“Watered down Avant-garde or history in the making?”, Bruce James & John McDonald, The Sydney Morning Herald, May 4). Once again the sad spectacle of paranoid and pompous John McDonald trotted out for the benefit of those who like their opinions raw and clueless. Poor Bruce James got to present the case for the affirmative, but he’s too decent and subtle a critic to go into the ring against someone whose comment on a piece of live art is based on a long distance log in and years of squealing discomfort at the very thought. It’s true that performance art hit a peak of intensity of expression in the 1970s but does this mean it is an obsolete form as he repeatedly suggests? If the fashionable were the only true value for art, why would anyone continue to paint or sculpt or draw or photograph or even contribute relentlessly mediocre art criticism in the pages of
the SMH?

For years Parr has been the subject of enormous controversy generated by one or 2 conservative art critics in the mainstream press often hysterically denouncing the work, failing to see it in terms of performance but always returning it to a base representational stratum, even in one case (guess who) “a sickly parody of the genuine ordeals endured by political prisoners and other victims of oppressive regimes.” Hello? The crisis for artists engaging in this type of extreme parodic ritual is always that the passage through the symbolic is seen by the conservative critical establishment through a veil of what Parr calls “the dead forms of the symbolic”—cliched ideas in fixed positions.

Think of the celebrated case of Karen Finley, the most visible of the NEA4 in the culture wars of 1990, whose grant was rescinded after conservative scaremongering in the press. She appealed and eventually lost her case in 1998, defending her first amendment rights to freedom of speech but gained an enormous amount of bad publicity. Two conservative critics in a widely syndicated column labelled her “the chocolate smeared woman”, provoking howls of Republican outrage from the likes of Bush (Poppa Bush that is, not so long ago is it?), Helms, Rush Limbaugh and even Ollie North, about taxpayer sponsored “filth.” Her ongoing response has included a number of books, a renewed commitment to performance art and, of course, the obligatory Playboy spread.

Finley was and is repeatedly associated in the press with extreme feminist outrages, nudity and bodily fluids. But anyone reading her new collected writings in A Different Kind of Intimacy (Thunders Mouth Press, New York, 2000) can’t fail to be provoked by the politics or the pathos of her AIDS awareness actions and installations, or her “absolute radical humour” (Artaud). Did you know she played the doctor treating Tom Hanks in the film Philadelphia?

As this surprisingly palatable survey of a 20 year career of textual transgression attests, Finley’s performances often feature violent language and aggressive gestures, strip tease, smearing the body with food (famously chocolate, more recently honey) and monologues, delivered as if in a trance, on topics such as incest and abuse or, in her most recent piece Shut up and Love me (P.S.122, New York, October 2000), on other forms of botched intimacy and frustrated desire. In scene after scene the more Finley speaks the more unspeakable it gets, culminating in a honey bath recital in an S&M version of Winnie the Pooh. She has a talent for tapping in to American anxieties and repressions and ecstatically dramatising them:

“Dad let’s fuck, and then I can get my life going. I’ve been in therapy for over 10 years and it’s all about you. You. The way you never had any time for me. You abandoned me emotionally. Physically. And the way you treat women.” “Oh so that’s what this is about, my relationships with women.” He half chuckled while going over to the liquor cabinet and pouring himself a VO. He brought her a drink, swirled the glass and casually said, “You’re not my type.” “What do you mean I’m not your type? I’m your own flesh and blood.”

Her art is usually abreactive, purging herself of a trauma which is neither actual nor fictive but present, ie not a genuinely or personally felt trauma, nor a purely characterised or represented one as in conventional drama, but one which is carried into the present moment with a genuine force by re-enacting it or re-inscribing it into a ritual gesture.

In his essay “Post Human? All too Human,” McKenzie Wark argues that this abreactive approach to performance is based on an outdated experience of the body and that “the limitations of an artist like Karen Finlay (sic) lie here: in a defiant and ultimately nostalgic assertion of a body’s right to itself.” This, for him, is kind of “retro humanism”, not a sufficiently funky post-humanism. Wark adds that, “a rage against the machine, an oedipal shriek against daddy is not the same thing as a figuring and a figuring out of the patriarchal structures of second nature. It is, once again, a self ghettoisation within art as a romantic refuge. The refuge late 19th century romantics sought in framing landscape on the wall, late 20th century romantics seek in performing the body in the gallery.” This argument made in a defence of Stelarc ignores the fact that performing the body in the gallery is precisely what Stelarc has been doing for the last quarter century.

Stelarc of course deploys an extended concept of the corporeal but always in relation to a very present physicality, which doesn’t repudiate the body as Wark seems to want. On the other hand, Finley performs the body in a way that underscores its linkages to psycho-social processes and systems, and is concerned with narratives of ecstatic emotion such as anger, lust and loathing which animate a different conception of the body as visceral and interiorised. This is not quite the kind of dead-end narcissism to which Wark alludes either.

Some people just seem to find overt displays of physicality and emotion distressing. Such people should refrain from discourse about performance art (whereof one cannot speak etc). Finley’s work also exhibits emotion not simply as a personal catharsis but as site of transduction, developing an energy in one symbolic system for use in another, from body to language, from artistic corpus to social body, to generate a shift in potential and a symbolic transformation. Put simply, Finley’s work is intended to allow more freedom for the body, however it is conceived. Her anger is hilarious, hysteric and performative, but also designed to shift the parameters of permissible behaviour by staging the unspeakable and the unthinkable. It operates on and in the world.

Performance art develops what Victor Turner calls “life crisis rituals” in response to drastically changing social and personal conditions. In Stelarc’s work it is the life crisis of an obsolete body finding itself without sympathetic environments in an age of technological innovation that is accelerating beyond the capacities of the organism to adapt. For him, it is a life crisis of the species. For Mike Parr it is the compulsory socialised performance of self, the pervasive and suffocating requirement on all individuals to perform the endless role of consumer, citizen and subject. For Finley, it seems to be the sense of a loss of capacity for affect, tantamount to a loss of humanity, that her work seeks to dramatise. These artists are driven to imagine and perform rituals which can also transcribe the crisis of the time, embody it and make it livable. This is the function of performance art for all of them.

While I was in Brisbane recently to cover the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music, several artists expressed alarm that QUT (Queensland University of Technology) had replaced the word Arts with Creative Industries. In RT40 (December 2000) Sophie Hansen commented about new funding priorities in the UK: “Cannily [The Arts Council] has hitched its wagon to the only buzzword likely to link the arts world to the concerns of the bright young reformers of the social and education sectors: creativity.” In “Music education: an industrial evolution”, part of our annual education and the arts feature, Richard Vella writes, “In an environment in which industry relevance has become the benchmark, it is now important that [university] staff actively engage with many industry stakeholders.” The Saatchi & Saatchi Australians & the Arts report found that more people were comfortable with the arts if the term was considerably expanded to include popular music and fashion. Outgoing Chair of the Australia Council, Margaret Seares, writes about the Grease Community Outreach Program (see Zane Trow’s letter), and more from Seares on the program), “It is about getting the disinclined group off the couch and out the door, heading in the direction of positive views about the activities we group loosely as ‘the arts’” (my italics). On the IT pages of the Sydney Morning Herald (July 17), Paul Quiddington wrote that the appointment of a telecommunications executive, Dr Terry Cutler, as Chair of the Australia Council “sent out a small shockwave, especially when he let it be known that high on his agenda would be to make the arts a business.” If this is the future, what will we call artists? There’ll be more about the creative industries push in forthcoming editions.

Artists are fast becoming the most interesting arts festival directors in the country. Robyn Archer, Barrie Kosky and Lyndon Terracini have created unique and challenging events responsive to Australian artists, local contexts and encouraging the growing demand for public dialogue about the arts.

David Young is a talented composer. Until recently he has been Artistic Director of the Melbourne-based music ensemble Aphids, a company dedicated to new music, including Young’s own, not as collections of concert pieces but as installation and performance works with sound design as an integral part of production. Aphids have toured the performance installation Ricefields in Australia and overseas, and the recent international collaboration, Maps, with leading artists from Denmark, director Louise Beck and composer Julia Hodkinson, premiered in Melbourne in 2000 and will tour to Denmark in 2002. Aphids’ commitment to engaging with communities has also been notable.

Young has resigned his position at Aphids to become Artistic Director of Next Wave, the long-standing and innovative Melbourne festival for and about young people. RealTime discusses with David why Next Wave appeals to him. We also explore his most recent work, Overheard at Inveresk, which he created for Robyn Archer’s 10 Days on the Island festival in Tasmania earlier this year.

Catching the next wave

Next Wave, being a multi-artform festival, is in many ways a natural progression from the work I’ve done with Aphids. Aphids is alive and well and going to Copenhagen with Maps next year but for me that might be the close parenthesis. Aphids is calling for expressions of interest from aspiring directors to take over as the new AD.

I have often been more interested in other people’s work than my own. That’s why I’ve always wanted to do collaborative work and involve other people not just in the production but in the whole process. Next Wave is not mutually exclusive and the beauty of it being a biennial festival is that there’s time to concentrate on my own work when it’s not festival time. Being able to explore those ideas, not just in music or even music theatre, but across text, visual and new media arts and dance, is something I’ve always wanted to do.

One of the problems for young artists is the lack of infrastructure—not just festivals but at all levels. The responsibility that Next Wave has is, as much as possible, to provide a nurturing environment, helping people to step into a context where some of the other things are taken care of, the administration, the marketing. The support is there so that people can concentrate on their work and have time to develop their ideas, get guidance, and have doors opened for them.

Shaping the wave

In our Kickstart program there are 2 music and 5 theatre projects which have money to develop to a work-in-progress showing stage. We’ve been encouraging people not to spend their money on production and do a big show but to develop ideas. I think a lot of them will find their way into the festival. As well, we have secondments and all of these have designated mentors. We have had 5 young choreographer/ directors working on Chunky Move’s Arcade. The feedback we’ve got from people about just being there, getting to meet and observe other artists, being incorporated into the process gradually, says that this is invaluable. The beauty of Arcade was that there were 5 quite different choreographers and we’ve been able to tailor-make the relationships.

We have a Kickstart community development secondee which is a new 6 month placement. Gillian Howell is a composer who’s worked mainly in music theatre and community development and she will be putting together a series of projects. Some will be part of the festival, others will perhaps be running in parallel or leading up to the festival to consolidate the community and cultural development aspect of the program.

There’s also a Kickstart public art program supported by the City of Melbourne and, again, there’ll be a number of mentors working with young visual artists and people who’ve done public art before—or maybe haven’t. There’ll be a showing of models or digitally rendered works. Some will go on to be realised as part of the program. There’s also Kickstart digital media as part of the Info Grammes Diegesis Media Arts Festival.

There’s a lot of development work. The important thing about Next Wave is that it’s not a shopping trolley festival. We don’t have the resources to buy things. We have to grow our own.

Wave-makers

Among the artists for the Kickstart theatre showings are Angus Cerini who’s doing a new street theatre work and presenting part of his new piece, Dumb. He’s a young playwright, a very physical, intense theatre performer who works a lot with soundscape with a monologue quality to it. I expect that he’ll take his ideas into ensemble work. Kate Sulan is a young director who works with people with disabilities in a theatre context and I guess that’s one of the most volatile projects because a lot of support is needed. It’s a new group who have worked a little together but this is one of their biggest opportunities and I really see them as having the chance to go down the Back to Back path. I think there’s enormous potential especially given support from the City of Port Phillip and Theatreworks in St Kilda.

From composer to curator

It’s a big change. Suddenly there’s infrastructure. It gives me a lot of energy because it’s opened up ways of looking ahead which I haven’t necessarily been able to think of myself. Certainly being a festival director is curatorial in the sense that it’s about being presented with ideas and not having to generate all of them yourself.

As a composer, the work I do is miniature. It’s always been pretty intimate, tiny. It hasn’t really leant itself to great commercial or audience success. And in many ways, that’s the way I like it. I don’t write operas or large scale orchestral or chorus works. I’m interested in small chamber works, individual experiences. So that fits very comfortably with a role like this because there’s space to do that work while I’m working on the festival. In fact, I’ve recently written a piece for The Song Company. It’s not a huge work. It’s a little David Young piece and there’s a way to do that that suits me. I don’t want to be creating work all the time every day. It’s not something that my work lends itself to.

Site specifics

(Robyn Archer selected the Inveresk Railway Yard, Launceston, as one of a number of locations across Tasmania for her first 10 Days on the Island festival and invited David Young to create a site work involving the local community.

In recent years, older models of community arts have been transformed by the likes of Big hART, Urban Theatre Projects, Alicia Talbot, successfully introducing multimedia, site work and contemporary performance to communities as rich and varied means of exploring their lives and the places they live.

Young’s description of his Overheard at Inveresk, which was both an installation and an opera, is a reminder of how significant non-musical sound and sound design are to the contemporary composer.)

At Inveresk there was basically everything you need to make a train—carpentry and paint workshop, blacksmith workshop, foundry. It operated for 125 years until 1993 when it was privatised and nationalised and then completely shut down. They sold some of the big machinery for scrap metal but eventually it was all donated to the museum. Now the whole site is being re-developed. There’s going to be the performing arts faculty of the university and 7500 square feet of new exhibition space for the gallery and museum. There’s a migration museum, railway exhibition, Indigenous exhibition and a new fine art gallery being developed. The centrepiece is the blacksmith shop which is completely intact.

I felt really honoured because we were the first people in there and it was the first time the public had really been allowed in. I went down last year and had a look. It was interesting coming back. The patina of rust and residue had been dustbusted and removed, all the heavy metals—it had quite a surreal quality.

The museum

Many people who used to work there came through the finished installation. There was one guy who hadn’t been there since 1977. He went to his old locker, opened it and there were his time sheets, his name scribbled on the side. This material is now part of the site as a museum. So he picked it up and thought, oh, this is not mine any more. It was really very moving because it had been quite a dramatic downsizing, a lot of people retrenched, a lot of resentment and many emotional scars that still exist. It’s a really important site in the recent social history of Launceston but also in terms of the industrial prowess of the city and its aesthetic.

It was late last year that I began the research—working very closely with the museum’s history department, interviews with people who used to work there and going through the archives, getting the different narratives, the different maps of the site—“That was the biggest drop hammer…that was the sort of court of the site and you had to take your hat off if you went in there…”

The installation

The site is actually quite big. It’s 3 big warehouses. We opened it from 10.30 till 4.00 over 10 days and organised a sound installation—a combination of CD loops and some randomised material incorporating oral histories. You’d walk past a locker and there’d be someone chatting in there or someone in a furnace. A lot of the machinery still works. It can’t be operated when the public’s there, but we were able to record it. There were aspects that were quite literal—this is what it would have sounded like. And we made the building shake. We had a fantastic diffusion system which Michael Hewes almost single-handedly loaded into his jeep and brought down on the boat from Melbourne.

We found fantastic chain links which hadn’t been welded together yet as part of the museum display. They became huge tuning forks and chimes. There were great saw blades which we suspended. All sorts of wonderful percussion material which I composed to.

Everything that we put into the sound installation was recorded in that space. So acoustically it married very naturally. We had one very long week to install everything and we set up a studio so we were able to keep the work alive and developing. Things changed. We interviewed people and fed that into the system as they experienced it.

Layered over the sound was musical material generated mainly through workshops with Tom O’Kelly, a percussionist who’s based down in Hobart and teaching at the Conservatorium. It was a very satisfying collaboration. We had workshops with the musicians in the building quite early on. Maria Lurighi, the soprano, was involved in those as well. It ended up being about exploring different acoustic spaces. There was a wonderful boiler tank that Maria stuck her head into and sang.

Outside of concerts, my work has always been collaborative. But unlike a lot of the other projects where I’ve been working with visual artists or a film-maker devising a work and then performers coming in to realise it, this was really drawing on the performers’ reaction to the space as well. And Michael was absolutely involved and was very much a composer for the installation as well. In fact, in many ways it’s the most uncompromising work that I’ve done. I feel that despite the contingent problems of dealing with a difficult space, the agendas that the museum and the local government had—quite a political football, as you can imagine, when there’s a lot of money going into it—we ended up being able to create a work which spoke to people emotionally about their memories. It really evoked their personal connections to the space if they worked there or if they knew someone who had—an uncle or a brother. But also people who had lived across the river and had never known what had gone on in there suddenly recognised sounds as they walked through.

The opera

We also created a miniature opera which happened on 3 days, scheduled for 4pm—I wanted to do something during the working day. The mini-opera was a compacted tragedy which was to do with the fall of Icarus. I guess it’s about me wanting to create not just an historical, museological work, but also something new.

The impetus came when I first walked into the site and there was a sense of all the workers having just left for lunch but that they would be coming back soon. There was an imminence, a resonance of something just overheard, something going on in time. I was reminded of the Breughel painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. A peasant in the foreground, everyday activity and the only indication of the dramatic event a little feather in the corner…and a splash.

And then it turns out that Icarus’ father Daedalus is credited with inventing the hammer. At the same time it seems many of the blacksmiths’ wives had never been into this space. This was their first chance to see where their husbands had worked for 20, 40 years. They had no connection. It was very much the place that he went.

A boy lit the forges at the beginning of the opera and then climbed an 18 foot ladder up onto a high rafter from which he observed the performance. At the end, he and the percussionist got on bicycles and rode off. Outside the building we had 20 cyclists ride along the boardwalk ringing their bells. When there were 2,000 people working at Inveresk, the road had to be closed to other traffic.

The community

When the drop hammer was going and Maria was launching into a Wagnerian moment, the local RSL brass band was walking along the boardwalk doing their standard repertoire. At a certain point it changed to a piece that I’d written for them and that resonated inside the building. Then they went back to their march. It had a wonderfully surreal quality.

I don’t know whether it was a hunger for something a little bit out of the ordinary or a connection to the space, but I was overwhelmed by the people’s enthusiasm and willingness to be involved. I also wrote music for the choir at the university, which we rehearsed and recorded as part of the installation and also as a chorus for moments in the opera. Launceston is relatively small and those community aspects had a significance beyond just being an effect in the performance.

Lance, the local pigeon fancier, helped us out too. We went round to his place one night and met his 200 pigeons. He told us he often fell asleep at the back of his house by the aviary listening to them. It’s a very beautiful sound with a slightly unnerving, fluttering quality. Each bird has its own call and the cooing sounded almost like water rippling. We recorded that. Of course, there are Icarian resonances—homing pigeons, feathers and so on. But the railways also made a lot of money from transporting and liberating pigeons. Homing pigeon races are a big thing in Launceston.

And at the end of the installation, we had our own homing pigeon liberation. We asked people throughout the season of the installation to write messages or reflections on their experiences. Lance borrowed pigeons from his friends all around Launceston and we had a cathartic and very beautiful moment, in the middle of the last day, after frantically attaching messages to pigeons and releasing them. They flew up in a wonderful spiral and disappeared over the horizon. It was the sort of project that required such an event because of the investment that so many people had made.

The museum was really interested in what happened because the space is being opened in November. There are enormous conservation issues about how they interpret it [the blacksmith’s shop], how they make it safe, make it accessible. And of course, sound is a wonderful thing because it doesn’t deteriorate or corrupt the materials, it doesn’t change anything and yet it can be very powerfully evocative and specific in the information it gives. So they’re planning a permanent sound installation as a result of our works.

Belgrade, June, 2001: along with 40 or so other artists from a dozen countries, I’m here to attend Dah Teatar’s 10th anniversary festival, Endurance and Transformation. To a visitor, reminders of the recent war abound. It’s a cash-only city (no functioning ATMs or credit thanks to the US embargo) and amidst the cosmopolitan buzz of a lively cafe society, bomb-wrecked buildings dot the city. And although next week Milosevic will be extradited to The Hague, the dead are still being exhumed from newly discovered mass graves, not 10 km from the heart of Belgrade.

In 1991 Dah Teatar was formed, the same year Serbia began its disastrous decade of war against its neighbours. With the Milosevic regime a very recent memory, the company now celebrates its 10th anniversary. Founded by Dijana Milosevic and Jadranka Andjelic, Dah’s theatre laboratory is part of the “third theatre” movement—a term coined by Eugenio Barba with whose company, Denmark-based Odin Teatret, Dah have a long and close association. Their work continues a tradition derived from Grotowski and involves intensive actor training and long development time for work, with the director creating montages from the results. In Australia the “third theatre’s” physical rigour and density, its emphasis on visual dramaturgy and its lack of script-as-source (though text is often used) would see it defined as nearer to performance than theatre.

Ironically for a company whose resistance to the Serbian wars has been both public and steadfast, Dah Teatar began with no desire to make political work. However, Serbia’s involvement in war—and the public ban on acknowledging it at a time when, as Dijana Milosevic says, “every second person on the street was in uniform”—provoked Dah to respond. Their first public work, This Babylonian Confusion, was based on the anti-war poems of Brecht and performed in the streets of Belgrade, a city with no tradition of street theatre. Dah writes that “great theatre masters have said that the first steps of a theatre company will define its destiny. This performance certainly defined the destiny of Dah Teatar. In general the performances of our theatre offered an artistic response to the social turbulence in Yugoslavia and represented a voice against destruction…”

In addition to hosting the festival (which included performances by Yoshi Oida of the Peter Brook ensemble, Om Theatre, Sun and Moon and others) and chairing the daily round table discussion on the themes of endurance and transformation, Dah Teatar performed 2 works: Documents of Times and their new collaboration—made this year with Seven Stages in Atlanta, Georgia—Maps of Forbidden Remembrance. Of the former, Dah writes: “Documents of Time was created in Belgrade May and June of 1999 while NATO was nightly bombing Yugoslavia. It is the testimony of reality dissolving in front of us.”

On a warm June evening, 2001, a group of us wander down a cobblestone street away from the centre of Belgrade to the Geozavod, an imposing old building with an ornate façade. We enter and face a wide stone staircase ascending in front of us, flanked with statues. A musician plays softly. An old woman enters, bent over with the weight of the books she carries. She places them on the floor and tries to climb the staircase. The steps are too wide apart. Painstakingly she creates a smaller step, using a book, between each stone stair and slowly makes her way up the staircase.

She is joined by a second old woman who appears at the top of the stairs. They meet near the middle and talk—memories, jokes, Hitler’s few good points. There are movement sequences, highly stylized and fascinating to watch: a strange old-lady dance up and down the stairs. The musician sings an ironic lament by the Klezmatics about the life of a refugee, “unwelcome everywhere.” At some point the women begin opening the books. From between the pages fall strange objects. Water. Salt. Money flutters from one (Yugoslav notes from the height of inflation: ridiculous but real banknotes for 10,000,000 dinar). A contraband stocking. The wrapping to a child’s present.

Eventually the women begin rolling, falling, in impossibly slow motion from the top of the stairs, the old-fashioned clothes revealing glimpses of voluptuous young thighs, different ages enfolded in the fall. It takes a very long time, this silent rolling fall. Female bodies become unrecognisable and familiar in turn, as if time were being gently dismembered. Their extraordinary, controlled fall slows my thinking and forces me to just watch, evoking a flood of associations: bodies falling machine-gunned down the steps of Parliament; the ecstatic abandon of children rolling down a hill; the way the old fall away from memory; the abandonment to sexual motion…Suddenly I recall a news article in the Sydney Morning Herald weeks before I left Australia, reporting the fate of 40,000 books donated by the university of Sydney to the University of Western Sydney (Nepean). There weren’t the funds to catalogue them so the new University, in its first flush of economic rationalism, decided to bury them. It dug them into landfill beneath the foundations of the new library. (Strange to connect Sydney and Belgrade by the fate of books: Bosnia joins in the memory chain—I recently heard that in Mostar, winter during the war left people with no firewood or fuel and so as a matter of survival, they burnt books instead.)

Finally the endless fall is over and the women stand and remove their outer garments. The lace gloves, the buckle-up shoes, are gently laid on the books. Sanja’s shimmering hair falls from her hat as she leaves behind the trappings of an old body and a dying century, walking away into a slow haze of light.

I loved this work for its apparent simplicity, its site-specificity and the density of images and associations created. While images of libraries in the ruins of war may seem cliched, the physical work of the actors and the intensely focused use of rhythm, speed and juxtaposition quickly dispel this impression. Work like this takes time to make; Dijana Milosevic estimates 6 months minimum for new work, in order to develop the complexity and layering that, like a crystal, forms from the inside out. By contrast with this usual slow incubation, the Dah/Seven Stages collaboration, Maps of Forbidden Remembrance, which premiered in Atlanta and at the festival, was developed at a slightly more American speed—a 3-month period. Both companies consider it still a work-in-progress and intend to refine it next year prior to a US tour.

Maps of Forbidden Remembrance deals with memory, loss and the violence of borders. The opening image of rocking chairs suspended from silver hooks, to be taken down, occupied for a time and hung again, remains vivid. My favourite image was created by an actor taking five-pointed red stars from the blue, star-spangled floor cloth and hanging them like bait on the lines just above the empty silver hooks where the rocking chairs hung. Through such images and the use of constant movement both behind and in front of a translucent scrim, the work creates a strong theatrical engagement with both the fixity of ideology and borders, and the sorrowful flux of the great tides of refugees the last century has seen. The singing (songs from the various histories explored by the actors) is well performed and carefully layered in solos, rounds and harmonies in a complex dialectic with the constant movement from absence to presence, death to life, which the actors perform.

Maps…took its inspiration from Carlos Fuentes’ novella, Constancia, the story of a Southern doctor in Savannah, Georgia who marries his Spanish love, Constancia. There is a mystery enfolded in this marriage, involving refugees and a bargain between the living and the dead. At the heart of Maps… is Fuentes’s Doctor’s question “How long a vigil… does historical violence impose on us? How far can or should my personal responsibility extend for injustices I did not commit?” This question resonates strongly in the Australian context of reconciliation and the heated debates surrounding it. In relating the question to our own context I’m following Dah’s footsteps: in making Maps… Fuentes’ question was refracted through the histories of its Serbian and American cast. And so it transpires that the recent dead of Srebenica are there too, amongst a throng of other victims of ‘historical violence.’

A performer, Maja, enters carrying armfuls of bread; she recites “Srebenica.” Then, laying a loaf of bread on the floor for each name, she recounts an alphabetical list of Muslim names—the names of those massacred at Srebenica by Serbian forces. Just as I’m taking in the sudden stillness in the room (Srebenica is not easily mentioned in Belgrade, not yet) Sanja enters. She begins goose-stepping, reciting the names of Russian artists exiled and killed during the Stalinist terror. Kathy, dressed in Spanish flamenco style, chants the names of the “disappeared” in Argentina. Faye, with a string of empty shoes tethered behind each heel and following her in a forlorn line, tells of her grandmother, an Irish immigrant who was bought in marriage for the price of her ticket to the US.

For me, this quick theatrical layering of one historical violence over another had the effect of TV news atrocity-montage: the impact and specificity were lost. In particular, the question—“how long a vigil does historical violence impose on us?”—seems prematurely posed in the case of Srebenica, where the bodies have barely had time to decompose and no kind of reflective vigil has effectively begun. However, the charged context of this performance—in Belgrade, by Serbs—is also a vital part of the meaning created. Mostar Youth Theatre commented to Dijana that the iteration of that single word “Srebenica” by a Serbian actor had more impact than if they, as Bosnians, had created a whole show on the subject. Like Dah, Mostar Youth Theatre have been deeply engaged in resisting the hatreds unleashed by war. They are committed to remaining a “multi-ethnic” company in Bosnia’s Mostar, the “city of bridges”—which had all its bridges destroyed, literally and metaphorically, as the town was violently bisected along “ethnic” lines redrawn in blood. (When the city’s oldest and much venerated bridge was bombed, its 400 year-old clay stained the river red as it fell. Mostar Youth Theatre again: “We don’t say it was destroyed, we say it was murdered.”)

Near the end of Maps…, Fuentes’ Doctor imagines the collective voice of the refugees saying to him “You owe us nothing, except that you are still alive, and you cannot abandon us to exile, death and oblivion. Give us a little more life, even if you call it memory, what does it matter to you?”

What is the quality of this memory? Surely it is specificity charged with affect: this voice, this strand of hair, this shade of red as Mostar’s oldest bridge bleeds away into water. Certain moments remain, isolated from oblivion by their luminosity. Another scene in Maps… which troubled me—speaking of rivers, bridges and oblivion—involved an “endless river” of refugees, created by performers rotating roles in a series of confrontations between refugees and border guards. Although the point of the unbearable repetition of tragedy is clearly made (the “one single catastrophe” which Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History perceives), here it is staged at the expense of that particularity to which memory lends “a little more life.” While it’s true that Dah Teatar (out of heroism and necessity) have deputized as “recording angels”, bearing witness during a decade when all the lights went out in Serbia, these 2 scenes err on the side of the angels’ static view and away from what we, in contrast to the Angel of History, cannot help but “perceive (as) a chain of events.” The static view is inherently depoliticising, because who can affect the inevitable?

There are other moments, however, that gesture evocatively towards the “little more life” which memory grants. On this note the show ends; behind the translucent scrim, laughing and drinking, are the gathered actors who suffered so many deaths in the performance. The Doctor joins them, clinks a glass. They wait. He proposes a toast: “May the joy of this moment last forever.” And it will, for as long as we care to remember it: it’s the task of this production, still to be realised, to make it unforgettable.

Documenti Vremena/Documents of Times. director Dijana Milosevic, performers Aleksandra Jelic & Sanja Krsmanovic Tasic; music Nebojsa Ignjatovic; Maps of Forbidden Remembrance, director Dijana Milosevic, performers Faye Allen, Del Hamilton, Sanja Krsmanovic Tasic, Maja Mitic, Kathy Randels; dramaturg Dubravka Knezevic; designer Nesa Paripovic; music Kathy Randels; lighting Jessica Coale, texts L. Anderson, W. Benjamin, C. Fuentes, D Ugresic.

De-Coder, 3rd year performance students, supervised by Meredith Rogers at La Trobe Univerisity

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.

Two composers and music educators describe the forces changing the nature of tertiary music education.

AA When I first arrived in Australia at the end of May 1991 it took only a week to realise that I was in a culture that had certainly not shaken off the shackles of its colonial past. It was the Queen’s birthday—a public holiday. In the UK no-one knew when the Queen’s birthday was, let alone celebrated it in any way.

I realised there was a similar situation in music education. Except for some innovative exceptions such as La Trobe University Music department (sadly, now closed) and Southern Cross University, the model was by and large the traditional English one. Unfortunately classical art music in the UK is a pretty poor example. No English-born composer from the 18th and 19th centuries was considered internationally significant.

In the 1960s, by a series of lucky accidents, England at last discovered its musical creativity with rock music and the Beatles. This music found fertile soil at home and was easily exportable to other English speaking nations (most notably the USA) in a way the English classical composers had never experienced.

Until then music had been highbrow or lowbrow, then middlebrow. The 60s was the start of what John Seabrook called nobrow, “a world where anything goes provided it sells” (Nobrow, Methuen, London, 2000). This gave England the swinging 60s and a newfound confidence.

Not so here. Australia was too far from the epicentre of the music business. In an area where an idea can be 2 weeks too late, the physical time and distance was too great. Of course there were some successes, but nothing like the tidal wave that swept the UK.

Unfortunately the academy largely ignored this change, concentrating more on maintaining so called ‘standards.’ These standards did not respect and therefore did not respond to a public change of preference. Understanding this was left to the cultural theorists. Important influences were technology’s increasing connectivity, the mass media determining and being determined by audience taste, cultural change and the relationship between technology and lifestyle. All of these bring us to the double edged sword of globalisation.

RV One can see these global influences on tertiary music here. Many changes were triggered by the Dawkins Report (Parliamentary Paper: 20/2/1988), which required smaller tertiary institutions with student numbers less than 2,000 to amalgamate with a parent university or combine with other small institutions to form a new university. For the smaller institutions, amalgamation directly affected budgetary control as this was either lost or restricted. Student numbers became the basis for income generation, forcing departments to rethink their course offerings. The university system transformed into a market economy. Departments became competitive and vulnerable to decisions beyond their direct control. External influences needed to be taken into consideration such as industry trends, the mass media and globalisation.

AA The potentially good news for Australian music in the global economy is that we move towards a world where the centre is wherever the centre is. And any part of the surface of a sphere is equidistant from its centre. Most important is connectivity, speed and ideas. This is not, however, a world where classical music is doomed, nor popular music blessed. As Manuel Castells has argued: “Globalisation is highly selective. It proceeds by linking all that, according to dominant interests, has value anywhere in the planet, and discarding anything which has no value or becomes devalued” (“Materials for an Exploratory Theory of the Network Society”, British Journal of Sociology, vol no 5, no 1, London School of Economics, Jan/Mar 2000). In a globalised environment, cults can flourish, provided one is networked to seek out similarly minded individuals from around the world. In a networked world, however, you cannot assume to be the spokesperson of a dominant culture.

RV With so much music being made today and a student population well connected to various networks, the pressure on music departments to be ‘relevant’ and at the same time developing musical skills and thinking is enormous. Something must give as there are not enough resources to teach everything, nor staff fluent in all the forms of music-making activity. Consequently, the 90s have seen new approaches to content and modes of delivery.

For some institutions content delivery has been reprioritised. Traditionally, most music courses were based on performance and notation skills and an assumption that western art music repertoire was fundamental. The student population in Australia now consists of people from rock, folk, jazz, techno, rap, classical etc backgrounds. Who is to say that the values of western European repertoire are more important than those of Middle Eastern music?

Larger classes have required changes to the modes of delivery. The rule is: if a department wants an increased budget allocation, then student numbers must increase. In this paradigm, small classes such as one to one teaching are financially unviable. Today, a performance student receives only 26 lessons per year. This affects continuity and qualitative learning issues, and staff become overworked. However, solutions can be found in collaborative, modular and flexible learning, technology-aided teaching, web site access, teaching software exploring interactivity and project based learning. It would not be too difficult to implement and include alternative teaching deliveries to free up staff time and not diminish standards.

AA The focus on skill development is a result of course content being more career relevant. However, does this mean a downskilling of musicians? If viewed through the traditional lens of melody, rhythm and harmony, then the answer is yes. If viewed as a series of specific skills for a particular job then opportunities abound. It takes a particular skill and aesthetic to write and perform for the living room or the concert hall or the church or for film or TV or interactive media.

So we need a broader definition of musicianship and music literacy. We have to acknowledge there are many ways to be a musician and there is no hierarchy of goodness in this. It is significant that the UK’s richest person in 2001 is Paul McCartney, a man whose inability to read music would bar him from most music institutions in this country. The jobbing musicians whose only skill is to faithfully play the notes may be admirable, but their status is diminishing.

Music institutions and departments need to remain indispensable if they want to survive in a quickly changing music industry. There are no safe havens. Every musician has to work towards connecting with performers and audiences in various modes and media by using ideas that have cultural relevance, be that with a home-grown product, or by value adding to a product from elsewhere. It is becoming a truly borderless world. Whether the music is Australian or not is of little practical consideration. All that matters is that we create, not just copy. Our education structure has not been very supportive of creativity. However, encouragingly, the Australian Research Council recently has included Creative Arts in its research funding. If we as teachers can shift our emphasis away from repertoire to creation, we are truly assisting the education of future musicians to be professionals in the field, instead of McDonald’s workers.

RV A slow shift is occurring from copying to creating: a shift from repertoire based teaching (ie studying and emulating the great canon of set works) to generic teaching using cross disciplinary works. The generic approach enables musical understanding via analogy: the student transfers patterns heard in one structure to another, such as identifying various pulse and melodic relationships in an excerpt from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, a samba from Latin America and an Aboriginal song. In both approaches creativity is used to facilitate an understanding of musical structure, style and form. However, in the former, creative thinking is confined to one of emulation, such as writing in the style of Palestrina or Charlie Parker, whereas through the converging of different traditions in the latter, creative thinking enables the creation of individual style, new repertoire, new contexts.

AA So, is creativity a free for all? I think not. It demands a set of skills, a knowledge of the buzz of the time, some nous and some luck. Be too similar to something else and you’re dead. Be too different and you are ignored. We are dealing in a market of symbols in what Justin O’Connor says is a “very volatile and fast moving symbolic circuit” (The Definition of Cultural Industries, Manchester Institute for Popular Culture, 1999). Not the classic environment of your average tertiary institution.

RV In order to survive this fast moving circuit, music departments must be adaptable, understand the benchmarks of creative thinking skills in music and identify the relationships existing between these skills, industry and personal vocation.

AA Just as enterprises in general have become information technology-intensive, they now are becoming more ‘creativity-intensive.’ Professor Stuart Cunningham, writing about Queensland University of Technology’s labelling as a Creative Industries university, says “the creative industries concept is a recognition that the future of the new economy lies in the move from IT to content‚ from infrastructure to creative applications” ( Higher Education Supplement, The Australian, June 27).

There is risk in this. Anything that relies on technology is constantly moving towards obsolescence. The recording industry is nothing like the industry of 10 years ago. And the next generation of musicians will need to be able to cope with these fast moving changes. They need to be creative within the market. They need to be connected and flexible. And therefore so do the staff of our music institutions.

RV Flexibility is the answer. In an environment in which industry relevance has become the benchmark, it is now important that staff actively engage with many industry stakeholders. This enables opportunities, peer interaction, the maintaining of relevant technical standards, potential increases in revenue from new sources, and provides dynamic role models for students. The tertiary music education sector engages with the music industry sector and vice versa. However, in conjunction there needs to be some development of a critical practice combining systematic enquiry and analysis into one’s own discipline area with creative thinking, as well as music literacy which embraces and positions new forms and contexts with the more traditional approaches to music making.

At the fifth in the RealTime-Performance Space series of open forums for artists working in contemporary performance, 50 performers, academics in performance studies, 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 Australia, and a number of choreographers and dancers, joined in the dialogue which was informally hosted by director and performer Nikki Heywood and RealTime editor Keith Gallasch.

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.

Meme Thorne (performer) My speciality 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. The Suzuki Company came to Australia in 1991 and performed The Trojan Women. What excited me most 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 principle 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.

I think the difficulty for a lot of performers is that you have an idea of how you want to be received and you have an idea of what you want to say but often the 2 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 to me 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.

Simon Woods?(performer, Zen Zen Zo, a Brisbane-based performance group) 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 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. 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. 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 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

Yana Taylor (performer, teacher) I’d like everyone to stand up who has found only 1 of their 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·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 dilletantes 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.

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, which 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 ourselves something different. And in the process I grabbed at anything that was passing by. 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.

NH Where does the 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 questions and then you’re back into training to address those issues and back into performance to test the answers.

Gavin Robins (performer, teacher) 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 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. 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. So part of my experience with Legs has been touring throughout the world and performing and really locking myself into a system, and after a while I thought that’s it, I need to go out and apply these skills in other areas.

And the Bell Shakespeare Company 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 Ashtanga 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? We see examples of it working in great companies like Theatre de Complicité who have a seamless merging of so many skills. And it is that search for holism that I’m excited by, and the dynamic eclectic training. And I think that’s what we should be striving for.

YT One of the things that afflicts this network is that training regimes are considered an uncreative area and are very hard to support and fund—unless it’s part of creative development or rehearsal—because it’s considered somehow unthought, 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 several 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.

Matthew Fargher (musician, 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. 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.

The tricky thing is 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 do 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. 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 others perform because they have a very physical way of singing and the singing and the gesture are one.

Silver Budd I’m a Body-Mind Centering© practitioner and I 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. 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.

Sue Broadway (performer) All of my training from when I was quite small right up to more recently is the exact opposite, 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 in answer to Yana’s question 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. I think I’m with Meme, I think they all become so ingrained in the body that when I set myself the task of going out to do the work I feel a subconscious level in the muscles and not in the brain at all. A lot of the things I do are about focussing on getting one throw right. When the object leaves your hand, you know as you take the beat, you know whether you’ve done it right or not. It’s a state of mind that you’ve managed to locate, a tempo in your body that repeats the action for you.

Alice Cummins (dancer, Body-Mind Centering© teacher) You do it in your mind but your mind is in your body. Your intelligence is all over your body.

Lowell Lewis (academic, anthropologist) I agree with what you say although I think it’s a duality. I call it the embodied mind and the intelligent body, and trying to get to a third place which 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. The best players can actually do Capoeira and sing at the same time. Although they’ll only do certain movements.

Alison Richards (academic, performance studies) 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.

Paul Selwyn Norton Choreographer, autodidact, never went to formal school. I was very fortunate to be taken off the disco floor and put on stage at the age of 23. I just 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.

PSN 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 my fundamental. So if I was working with, say, a gymnast, someone who had a strong sense of proprioception, I would teach them a sense of musicality, rhythm, timing. 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. What do you give to people who come to you in terms of training?

Russell Dumas (choreograper, dancer) Access to an embodied heritage. My own practice embraces the modern and postmodern and I worked with 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 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. 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 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.
Probably the most interesting bodies I’ve worked with have been the untrained ones like Keith March and Nick Sabel. The other ones very often have had ballet training. It’s something that’s barcoded into children’s bodies. I’m interested in the notion of a colonial ballet practice and how people talk about Republicanism in this world of dance.

YT The opportunities and support mechanisms for training have become thinner on the ground. At the same time, the appetite for them is on the increase. 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 they see training as part of the creative pursuit and intimately woven into it. At the other level, there’s the way the field’s run for a long time—making do, barter, exchange. But in Sydney there’s less and less infrastructure for that to happen, the space, time and access to it.

Body Regimes, RealTime-Performance Space forum, Performance Space, Sydney, June 4.

The next in the series of RealTime-Performance Space forums, The Place of the Space, on the relationship between the artists and the contemporary art space. Performance Space, September 3, 6pm.

Grease—The Mega Stoush/h5>
On our Post page, Zane Trow spits chips at the Australia Council’s controversial funding, as he sees it, to assist a commercial entrepreneur’s audience development. He and the Council’s Chief Executive Officer Jennifer Bott also thrashed it out on Radio National’s Arts Today last month. The argument has been taken up by others like Lyndon Terracini on ABC TV’s new arts program Coast to Coast. His Queensland Biennial Festival of Music focused strongly and successfully on creatively engaging communities. In the July issue of the Australia Council News, outgoing Chair Margaret Seares expands on the motivation for this project:

“This initiative is targeted at the major ‘disinclined’ group identified through our Promoting the Value of the Arts research, that is, regional males who have rarely, if ever, been to any form of theatre or arts event…. It’s is not about funding Grease, nor about taking money away from arts organisations that might otherwise have received it. It is about getting the disinclined group off the couch and out the door, heading in the direction of positive views about the activities we group loosely as ‘the arts.’ We are not funding the production or the tour itself. Our funding provides 4 modules making up a community outreach program in the 40 locations Grease will be visiting. They are workshops for local artists with the company’s key artistic and technical staff; an education kit for upper primary and secondary students and their teachers focussing on the student’s own creativity and the artistic process; linking with youth through local youth organisations; media relations skills development for local arts organisations. All modules are provided at no cost to participants. Our collaboration with the Really Useful Company has allowed us to in effect ‘piggyback’ on their investiment, risk and tour organisation work, allowing us to provide this program nationally through much of regional Australia at a very modest cost—about $5,000 per town. Most excitingly, it is providing access to over half a million Australians—many of whom would see themselves as disengaged or disinclined to support ‘the arts.’”

The curious thing about the Australia Council’s pursuit of the disinclined is its attitude to the ‘interested’ (the ‘inclined’ of the Saatchi & Saatchi survey)—is this lot already secured as an arts audience?

News on the training front

VCA Discovery Day on Sunday August 19 offers prospective students advice on courses plus the opportunity to see student work in all the schools including a performance by Company 2001, 12 final year VCA Drama students who have been working with Gregori Ditiyatkovski of the Maly Drama Theatre, St Petersburg on a production of Maxim Gorky’s Children of the Sun, running August 18-September 1.

August 6-12 marks the inauguration of a new partnership between The Seymour Group and the Tasmanian Conservatorium, a 3 year project which will allow students access to a high level performing ensemble, at the same time providing the Seymour Group with an opportunity to develop their national performance profile.

Melbourne Fringe and the Myer Foundation believe the arts desperately need a new generation of entrepreneurial creative producers to ensure their long term health and vibrancy. “Recently, a number of university based arts management courses have been introduced as fee-paying post-graduate diplomas. These courses offer structured accredited learning in a range of arts administration and management responsibilities. But what is desperately needed is hands-on mentor-based training to cultivate producing talent.” An Associate Producer Training Program will be piloted during the 2001 Melbourne Fringe Festival (September 23-October 14). Another significant development is Curatorial Lab, a collaboration between Melbourne’s 200 Gertrude St Gallery and Brisbane’s Metro Arts to encourage young curators.

New Music Week August 13-19, a week long festival organised by the University of Western Australia in Perth features the music of composer-in-residence Gerard Brophy along with performances by Trash, WASO New Music Ensemble, Magnetic Pig, Adam Pinto, we bOp, Guitarstrophe and Spiked. Also featued are works by Roger Smalley, Lindsay Vickery, Dominik Karsky, Richard Thorpe, Cathie Travers and more. Information 08 94841133 or 08 93802054

Collectors on a budget

First Floor is an artist-run gallery which relies predominantly on artists paying to exhibit, the voluntary work of the committee and events such as the forthcoming 1st Floor Fundraiser Exhibition. This is an opportunity to view and purchase artworks priced between $100 and $1000 by some of Australia’s leading contemporary artists including Stephen Bram, Pat Brassington, Martine Corompt, Adam Cullen, Aleks Danko, Kate Ellis, Julia Gorman, Brent Harris, David Jolly, David Noonan, Nat and Ali, Sean Meilak, Callum Morton, Alex Pittendrigh, David Rosetzky, Jacinta Schreuder, Ricky Swallow, Lyndal Walker, Vivienne Shark LeWitt and many more. August 8-25. 03 934734346, email

Fringe Acts

The Melbourne Fringe Festival (September 23-October 14) has nabbed Neil Thomas and The Urban Dream Capsule team who more usually inhabit the windows of the world’s department stores—most recently Sears in Chicago—who regroup as The Museum of Modern Oddities to occupy an old hardware shop in Johnston Street Collingwood for 3 months from August 30. The shop was run by the same proprietor until he retired in his 80s, leaving the contents intact. Also featured in the Fringe is Spencer Tunick, the photographic artist from New York who creates large scale public performances by getting people to drop their gear and lie down in the street. Recently in Montreal, Tunick got 2000 to strip for art. Watch for the stampede to “a very public place” in Melbourne.
Visit the Fringe website

International Successes

From 180 applications worldwide for the inaugural Llangollen International Instrumentalist competition in North Wales, Australian Claire Edwardes was the only percussionist selected. Her performance of Druckman’s marimba solo Reflections on the Nature of Water and Xenakis’ drum piece Rebounds was enough to land her the trophy and the 15,000 pounds.

Pity prizes for radio don’t attract quite the same booty. Nevertheless, given the treatment of artists at the ABC lately, producers Sherre DeLys and Russell Stapleton are probably happy enough with the accolades for winning the Grand Prix for Art and Sound Design in the 2001 Phonurgia Nova awards in France. These prestigious prizes are made for works exploring the creative potential of radio. Their work, Containers, for The Listening Room is composed entirely from recordings made at Sydney Harbour and Port Botany on a single day. You can hear it on ABC Classic FM 402 on September 3. Jim Denley, another regular contributor to The Listening Room shared equal second prize in the Fiction section with For You, Me and the Stars.

Sonorous Bodies, the video-installation/performance by Judith Wright and Liza Lim is going to the Hebbel Theatre in Berlin, September 22-23. Premiered by ELISION at the 3rd Asia Pacific Triennial in 1999 this sensual work features Satsuki Odamura on koto. After Berlin, the ELISION soloists tour to Bergen, Oslo and Trondheim in Norway.

Performance Space & MCA live on

In RealTime 42 Fiona Winning, Artistic Director of Performance Space, announced that because of impossibly high rent the organisation would have to leave its home. No alternative venue had been found. However, in a media release of June 13, PS announced that: “After lengthy discussions with NSW Ministry, Performance Space has received a letter from the Director General Roger Wilkins which in summary states: 1. The NSW Government recognises Performance Space as a ‘pivotal part of the performing arts sector’ and a ‘key industry support mechanism.’ They have prioritised the resolution of our venue crisis as being of critical importance. 2. The Premier and Minister for the Arts has approved a one–off grant to assist Performance Space to maintain its current program of activities. The NSW Government is also seeking further funds for next year, to ensure we continue to be able to run Cleveland Street as a venue in the short term while the long term ‘home’ is sought and secured.”

RealTime co-editor Keith Gallasch has just completed a 10 day stint reporting the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music from the Brisbane Powerhouse Centre for the Live Arts, a magnificent contemporary arts complex. Not surprisingly he wants one for
Sydney–for Performance Space.

After being submitted to architectural phantasmagoria and crazed talk of relocating the MCA, all lovers of contemporary art took heart from the Friday July 13 announcement that the NSW Government has at last made a substantial and long term commitment to Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Arts at its current Circular Quay-side location.

Looking round the Playhouse in Sydney’s Opera House complex, Kev Carmody rests his guitar and ironically mentions that when he’d last performed on Bennelong Point, he’d had to play outside in the forecourt. Next time, he promises, to loud cheers, he’ll be in the main theatre, where all the whitefellas get invited to perform.

With Paul Kelly and the entirely euphonious trio, Euphonia, Carmody was playing at Blak Screen/Blak Sounds, a 3-day festival celebrating the work of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander filmmakers and musicians. Celebration was in the air, but politics were not forgotten: the event coincided with Reconciliation (formerly ‘Sorry’) Week.

Just as with Indigenous painting, there are signs that Aboriginal filmmaking is poised to challenge dominant, whitefella filmmaking, and take the artistic lead. Rachel Perkins’ new film, One Night The Moon, which premiered at this event, is a good example. Based on the true story of Aboriginal Tracker Riley in Dubbo during the 1930s, this extraordinarily powerful and startlingly original short film challenges many preconceptions about Indigenous cinema.

Starring Paul Kelly as a white, racist farmer, it tells the story of a young, white girl (Memphis Kelly) who got lost in the outback and died due to her parents’ refusal to allow an Aboriginal tracker (Kelton Pell) on their land. With a boldness that catches the breath, Perkins has made a film whose originality lies in its operatic form, its refusal to obey the accepted rules of mainstream cinema concerning verisimilitude and realism, and its focus on the white family’s tragedy. Initially, the story was that of the black Tracker Riley but Perkins changed the focus to the white mother (Kaarin Fairfax). This disconcerts those in the audience who expect a black focus from an Arrente filmmaker. But, as Kelly says: “It is a story of knowledge offered and knowledge rejected, and the consequences that come from that, and that has great resonance for the history of both blacks and whites in this country.” And, as Perkins explains: “I wanted to make a film about the space between black and white Australians.”

Many of the films screened push boundaries in a variety of ways. None more so than those by Tracey Moffatt, whose landmark films—Nice Coloured Girls (1987), Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1990), Bedevil (1993)—challenge both societal and artistic conventions and, perhaps, helped create the pattern for the next generation of Aboriginal filmmakers. Not that Moffatt would necessarily agree that she has much in common with filmmakers who proclaim their Aboriginality. She sent a message from New York, where she now lives, saying she didn’t want to be known as an “Aboriginal artist.” While supporting her right to any label (or no label), it’s hard to see why she insists on the disclaimer. All her films screened—Lip (with Gary Hillberg, 1997), Heaven (1997) and Night Cries—display a strong political sensibility in which her Aboriginality, like her feminism, is impossible to ignore.

Night Cries, for example, weaves autobiographical material about the adoption of an Aboriginal child by a white family with a fantasy arising from the plot of Charles Chauvel’s film Jedda (1955). By proposing that Jedda didn’t die in the film’s last frames, but lived to become the middle-aged carer of her white adopting mother, Moffatt shows herself as preoccupied by issues of history, truth, survival and the need for radical change, as are many younger Aboriginal filmmakers.

There were several references to Jedda during the weekend. Darlene Johnson thinks “it’s an amazing film. In places the racism is so extreme that it’s almost laughable. But it also has a special place in our history. When it came out there was still apartheid in Australian cinemas: Aboriginals had to sit in different seats or couldn’t go to the cinema. But many Aborigines loved it. They saw Aboriginal people—stars—on the screen probably for the first time.” She also points to the huge amounts of documentary footage made by white colonialists in which Indigenous peoples had no involvement in their own representation; some of these images are used to powerful political effect in her film Stolen Generations (2000).

Johnson’s films cover a wide range of styles and subjects, from a mockumentary-style film about allergy (Dust Mite Be You, 2000), an award-winning short drama (Two Bob Mermaid 1996), to the heart-searing doco Stolen Generations (2000). But they all have one thing, at least, in common: “I guess they all have a ‘survival’ theme to them. Two Bob Mermaid, about a black girl who tries to “pass” as white, is very much about survival strategy. I wanted to explore that which is acknowledged and that which is disavowed: the conflicts and complexities of living in 2 worlds. Swimming is a metaphor for the need to negotiate these two worlds.” Criticised by some university students for representing Aborigines in a negative light—there’s a drunken female character—Johnson explains that she counters the stereotype by showing this character “as both a caring mother and someone who likes a good time and can get drunk—like anyone else.”

Erica Glynn is another whose films demonstrate a wide range of content and form. She describes My Bed, Your Bed (2000) as a comedy “that refused to idealise present day Aboriginal culture.” Her latest, Minymaku Way (2001), is a documentary about the work of the Ngangyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara, Yankuntjatjara Women’s Council in the remote desert communities of Central Australia. It shows the special malpa (working relationship) between some of the key anangu (Indigenous) women councillors and the white council co-ordinator. Once again, those who expect Indigenous filmmakers to focus on black culture to the exclusion of all white people, some of whom I spoke to during the weekend, criticise the film for its inclusion of a white voice and for its structure which reveals Indigenous community life to be complex. But the film gets its structure from the way in which the council itself works, not from the codes of conventional documentary filmmaking and as Erica reveals: “I don’t choose my films, they seem to choose me.”

The films of another potent filmic voice, Catriona McKenzie challenge preconceptions about Indigenous culture and filmmaking in very specific ways. Her 3 shorts—Box (1997), Road (2000), and Redfern Beach (2001)—have determinedly urban locations. They also attest to a wide knowledge and love of cinema from styles, genres and cinemas as diverse as Scorsese, Truffaut, social realism and magic realism.

Superficially, Ivan Sen’s films might appear to conform to the archetypal Aboriginal film. Journey (1998), Tears (1998) and Dust (2001) all represent Aboriginal teenagers living in outback or rural areas. But, ultimately, these impressive films by this assured, young filmmaker, whose love of the road movie resonates through almost every film he’s made, do not deliver the expected or the conventional. In her essay, “Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television…” (AFC, Sydney, 1993), Marcia Langton describes how myths of Aboriginality are created and perpetuated by filmmakers through the ways in which characters, typically, are de-conceptualised—socially, politically and historically. Sen’s characters all challenge colonialist representation by providing white Australia with a black history—one that shows how the 2 histories intersect or, importantly, fail to meet.

Glynn talks about contemporary life in terms of “juggling two worlds.” Johnson says something similar, discussing the need to negotiate identity and representation in 2 worlds: “I make films to educate my own people and white people about history—because both have been denied access to what really happened. We need to be exposed to our own history too. Many of our mob are just learning about it.” When making Stolen Generations, Johnson says she learned from meeting the 3 Aboriginal people stolen from their families as well as from a white nun who “did a 180 degree turn and now thinks what she did was wrong. I learned that her history is a part of white history too.”

To criticise Indigenous filmmakers for not making ‘typical blackfella’ movies, as some audiences both black and white do, is to ignore what interests many contemporary Indigenous filmmakers, what Rachel Perkins describes as “the space between black and white”, a space that some hope could be filled with a treaty.

On the second day of screenings, a white member of the audience asked, aggressively, why so few Aboriginals were present. Rhoda Roberts, the superb and tireless host, courteously pointed out that the films had already been seen by many, perhaps most, Aboriginals. She added that anyone who’d been at the opening night celebrations would realise how few revellers got to bed before 4am; attending a day of movies and music would be a hard call. As the films we saw attest, they have much to celebrate.

Blak Screen/Blak Sounds, part of Message Sticks program, The Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, June 1-3

For more Indigenous film see Alex Hutchinson’s review of shorts at FedFest & Teri Hoskin’s look at Kumarangk, a doco about Aboriginal women’s stories from Hindmarsh Island

Hidden away in the glorious RMIT Capitol Theatre and screening for one night only, FedFest combined a mish-mash of historical features with the 5 winners of the national Federation Film Festival: Kullifoot (directed by Brendan Fletcher) Warm Strangers (Ivan Sen), Jubulj (Wayne Blair), The Third Note (Catriona McKenzie) and Conflict (Michael Riley).

Curated by Scott Murray, the festival aimed to explore “the relationships between Indigenous and white Australians”, and in the main it succeeded. The inclusion of historical work gave viewers a brief insight into the different ways Aboriginal culture has been represented in film, although the selection seemed overly cautious, geared to only positive representations. Balanced against this, the 5 new films swung from the inspiring and heartfelt to the dull, a situation compounded by the order in which the films were presented.

The evening opened with the ponderous 1981 mini-feature My Country, Djarrakpi, then swung across to the least successful of the 5 new films in Jubulj, before dealing up the challenging and cryptic video installation Conflict. Perhaps My Country, Djarrakpi was meant to give the audience a sense of place, centring as it did on physical space and artistic interpretations of it, but it felt cold, distant. Jubulj had its heart in the right place. The idea of a fair skinned Aboriginal woman confronting both her heritage and the people around her was a good one, but the story was handled in a simplistic fashion and seemed to skate across the issues it was attempting to explore. Michael Riley’s Conflict was fantastic, a series of still images juxtaposing various interpretations of Aboriginal settlements and white occupation, binding them together with a voiceover. It succeeded as a mini-portrait of the festival’s most positive elements, allowing the audience to make its own judgements, never dwelling too long on any image and presenting a wide range of interpretations.

The brightest moments came after intermission with 2 great short films which were original, satisfying and complete (a difficult feat in 15 and 11 minutes respectively). The Third Note gave us a few minutes in the relationship between 2 neighbours, a blind Aboriginal woman and an elderly immigrant man, and their struggles with place and history. The performance of Deborah Mailman was particularly strong.

Kullifoot focused on football, place and family, and managed to run parallel stories inside its quarter hour. Trevor is leaving his community in Broome to play footy for the Sydney Swans, while his cousin Cragie watches on TV. The disparate stories are woven together, running Cragie’s development inside his community alongside Trevor’s success on the field.

Also worth mentioning is the mini-documentary Amy (1976) which followed a young Aboriginal girl in her quest to find work. Insightful, well handled and honest, it was a hypnotic social document which has effortlessly retained its relevance and importance.

Kumarangk (Hindmarsh Island) in South Australia is a site of cultural significance for Ngarrindjeri people. It is integral to their understanding of themselves and their dreaming. The 26 minute documentary Kumarangk 5214 had its world premiere at Hot Docs in Adelaide to a packed house. In traditional documentary style the story seems bigger than the film (and it is), as though the filmmaker (Jessica Wallace) is not there at all. Jessica and producer Rebecca Summerton worked closely with Ngarrindjeri women, in particular Sandra Saunders and Dr Doreen Katinyeri. This consultative, fluid mapping is the heart of the film, ensuring it remains sensitive to disparate voices. Kumarangk 5214 is very moving—the sadness so big, its truth so obvious. The film makes clear the tragic effects for Indigenous people of the vexed relationship between religion, politics, media and real estate development. Law and Lore.

Events before and since the building of the Hindmarsh Island Bridge constitute an ongoing cultural production that started about 170 years ago. It’s a complex (big) business that has hurt a lot of people and highlights the inadequacies of “impartial” law in cases of gender specific knowledge. Impartiality always serves something. Transparency here is a ruse. It also exposes the anomalies of current land rights legislation for urban Aboriginal communities: “It was the Urban Aboriginal who argued vociferously for land rights for all Aboriginals. And many of whom will never have that right and privilege to be a traditional owner or to be an Elder” (Harold Thomas, designer of the Aboriginal Flag, NAIDOC week speech commemorating 30 year anniversary of the flag, Adelaide, July 7).

The Hindmarsh Island Marina website greets the visitor with an image of still blue waters and a few boats. “From just $21,000 you can live the lifestyle of the rich and famous.” (accessed July 10). Here is the voice of ‘dispossessed’ middle Australia—One Nation territory. “Give us back our possessions, give us back control of our destiny and allow us to get on with the development” (Wendy Chapman, “Chapman and Others v Tickner and Others”, Federal Court Reports, 1995). In this belief structure, those who struggle for Indigenous land rights are elitist minority groups hell bent on getting in the way of ‘progress.’

Though the film is concerned with neither explanation nor expiation, there is a story of events made available, via a few spinning newspaper headlines and screen text. These familiar signs are places to linger—to listen to the women who fought so hard to protect the lands, skies and waters from further destruction.

One of the key elements in the life of the production was a weekend film-shoot. Some of the women gathered at Ngarrindjeri Pulge (house), Kumarangk. They came from their homes at Point Pearce, Croydon, Brompton, Largs Bay, Meningie, Goolwa, Murray Bridge, Victor Harbour. Jessica asked my daughter and myself to cook, keep the urn full and hot and the biscuit barrel topped up.

The women are welcoming and generous, but still, sometimes it’s uncomfortable—we are the outsiders at a place that is not ours among stories that, while not our business, we need to know exist. The women sit and weave, catch-up, yarn, drink cups of tea and Diet Pepsi and eat, argue, laugh, grieve. There are a lot of specific dietary requirements—some feel connections between the denuded body of the land and the bodies of its people—blood sugar levels are high.

Ngarrindjeri women’s weaving is different to the shuttle motion, the to and fro of warp and weft. The movement is more like a piercing, then making firm. Weaving is closely aligned with the telling of stories and the continuance of close family ties. Bundles of fresh water reeds are knotted by an action that loops over and under, through and with the preceding spiral. This method is manipulated to make a multitude of pliable folded forms that can, are, and have been used for holding, carrying, sheltering, and also for relaying stories (eg Ellen Trevorrow’s Seven Sister Dreaming weaving sculptures). The rushes have qualities peculiar to the place they grow in—on Kumarangk, sparsely now.

Some of the women have been given stories to look after, safeguard—an oral history passed from mother to daughter, aunty to niece—only women’s stories amongst women. One of these women is Dr Doreen Katinyeri, genealogist and author, who has made it her life’s work to gather and protect. She has so many names and family connections in her body, in her head. There is not a story here, there are many. Her task as custodian is to hold them safe.

Much has been made of the term ‘secret women’s business’ and alongside it, the charge of fabrication. “Wasn’t women’s business, secret business, it was more than that, it was our lifestyle, Kumarangk is concerned with birth.” (Maggie Jacobs, Ngarrindjeri Elder)

What constitutes ‘secret’ and for whom? Who holds the secrets and who has access? What remains unsayable? What happens to dispossessed oral cultures when knowledge as truth is based on a premise of archiving and recording? Some things shouldn’t be said, some secrets must be held, and the existence of others must be told. There is an intimate alliance between the colonial history of this place and South Australia now—the past is never only before.

Broken faith in ‘impartial’ Law and Justice is palpable at the point in Kumarangk where Sandra Saunders (director, Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement in SA, 1990-97) speaks: “I really believed that the law would protect the women’s interests…I just didn’t believe that society would do that to other people.”

The women are strong, or even “pretty deadly.” They have the strength that family connections and humour gives. At the court’s order, police recently searched Sandra’s house for a floppy disk: “…they did not find a floppy…found her remote control which was very funny as she’d been looking for it for months. All the whoopdido laughing caused the Channel 7 cameras to run in with excitement” (Wallace, email, July 11).

Jessica Wallace has also produced and directed other short films. She is currently a recipient under the 2001 SA Film Corporation Hothouse Scheme for rent-free office space and facilities plus a small living allowance. Here she plans to develop scripts, to “write. Investigate, joy, joy.”

With thanks to Jessica Wallace. The article title is a quote from Maggie Jacobs; all other quotes from Kumarangk 5124, writer/director Jessica Wallace, SAFC and SBS Independent, screening in the next series of Australia by Numbers, SBS, late 2001.

Today’s Sydney Morning Herald (August 2) has 2 articles by Garry Maddox. “Black male: the hottest thing in Hollywood” argues that Afro-American actors have never been in a better position, taking on an increasing number of lead roles. This interview with Chris Rock reveals that he sees himself (and is seen) as part of the mainstream now, that Hollywood credits star power as more important than racial background. This is an interesting cultural shift and no doubt has been greatly influenced by the dominance of Afro-Americans in contemporary music and global Top 40 charts. Contrast this with Maddox’s other article: “Audiences slow to appreciate Aboriginal content.” The title sounds pretty definite doesn’t it, casting a negative slant. But what the article is really about is upcoming films featuring Indigenous content, rather than the ‘relatively’ poor showing of recent releases Yolngu Boy and Serenades. It’s getting a bit tired to keep comparing Australian and Hollywood films in terms of weekend box office takings. Surely we can come up with other criteria for judging our own films. The 3rd Indigenous Film Festival in Parramatta this year attests to an eager audience—they cited the 2000 event as “an overwhelming success.”

If there is no audience, why are so many filmmakers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, mainstream and non-mainstream, looking to explore Indigenous themes in upcoming films? The AFC has a slate of productions in the pipeline. Phil Noyce’s Rabbit Proof Fence (with an impressive cast including Kenneth Branagh, David Gulpilil, Gary McDonald, Deborah Mailman) is about 3 part-Aboriginal girls who are taken from their families in the 1930s and their long return journey. Rachel Perkins’ One Night the Moon (see Jane Mills’ review/interview), also set in the 30s, concentrates on the disappearance of a child and a white family’s relationship with an Aboriginal tracker. Fred Schepisi’s Black Magic is a biopic on Len Waters, the only Aboriginal fighter pilot in WW2. Ivan Sen’s debut feature, Beneath Clouds, is a road movie about 2 Aboriginal teenagers. Craig Lahiff’s Black and White (writer Louis Nowra with actor Robert Carlyle) is about Rupert Max Stuart, an Aboriginal man imprisoned wrongly for the murder of an 8 year old girl. Lastly, Bill Bennett’s Bennelong (writer Nick Enright) concentrates on the first years after European settlement and the developing relationship between Governor Phillip and Bennelong. These films are to be released 2001-2003. There must be an audience—all those who walked over the bridges in support of reconciliation for starters.

The Indigenous Branch of the AFC, SBS Independent, CAAMA (Central Australia Aboriginal Media Association), The AFI Exhibition Program and the ABC have been instrumental in preserving Indigenous stories through fiction and documentary. The distributor Ronin Films has a significant back catalogue of hard-to-find shorts and docos like Bedevil, Coolbaroo Club and Land Bilong Islanders. The National Indigenous Documentary Fund is in its fifth year, the only regular production opportunity for Indigenous filmmakers. Visit the CAAMA website for their current projects including a doco on Bonita Mabo and second series of the ABC’s very successful Bush Mechanics. Documentaries released in the last few years have concentrated mainly on personal history, recovering the memories of the Stolen Generations. Recent films like Sissy (screened on ABC) and A Walk with Words (winner WOW Festival 2000) have been more about liberation, through coming out or the power of words. Romaine Moreton, gorgeous provocative wordsmith, talks of her dual love of academic theory texts and art: “film, music, poetry, the arts, are how you translate those theories and put them into the consciousness” of everyday people.

Now a new generation of filmmakers is moving beyond ‘black’ issues to explore, as Rachel Perkins puts it, the “space between Aboriginal and white Australians.” Beck Cole, recent participant in the AFC’s Visual Telling workshop (Sharon Verghis, SMH, April 23) where filmmakers had 5 days to develop a film script, had a new slant on this negotiated space. “The tales don’t simply have to be of the harsher realities of black Australia, endless tellings of deaths in custody or community breakdown…I don’t think it has to be one issue any longer—we’re more complex than that. We don’t want to be forever trapped in all that PC bullshit.” Blak Screen at the Sydney Opera House, one of the most exciting film programs this year, had selections of the best on offer: Ivan Sen, Catriona McKenzie, Tracey Moffatt, Darlene Johnson. Their shorts deserve to be seen like this, as a package, as they are some of the most beautiful and compelling films made here.

If audiences are not going to recent releases like Yolngu Boy and Serenades, perhaps it has more to do with the state of reviewing than content. Nothing sinks a film like the perception that it is ‘worthwhile.’ Rhoda Roberts (in Joyce Morgan, “It’s easy to mix the wrong cocktail in the global village”, SMH, June 13) argues that critical reviewing of Indigenous arts can be softer than on other work: “Often when we see our non-Indigenous critics, they’ll do an overview rather than a review…It might be they’re frightened of being labelled as racist.” There’s no doubt that it can be difficult for a white writer to critique Indigenous work—all kinds of concerns and complexities start to surface—but it’s important to keep negotiating. In this issue of OnScreen, 3 non-Indigenous writers do just that, tackling Blak Screen, FedFest and Kumarangk, a new documentary on Hindmarsh Island. Let us know what you think.

When faced with reviewing Tony Osborne and Andrew Morrish in their improvised solo works, I remembered the idea that life is like being in a play where you missed all the rehearsals. Because that’s what these impros are: performances with no pre-arranged content, no prepared topic, no rehearsed steps to take or ideas to develop, just ‘naked’ performers with nothing between us and them but their capacity to grasp, unravel and then reshape a moment into substantial and intriguing form. Sometimes they unfold like high tragedy. Or stand-up comedy. Or I’m reminded of a clown, vulnerable and potentially foolish, helpless in the face of ridicule except for the redeeming features of his own struggling humanity. All you have are the props—the chairs and tables, the coats and ties of life.

The wintry Performance Space is engagingly transformed into 2 intimate, child-sized theatres, complete with stage and raked seats, one for each performer, and the small audience fits the newly arranged seats like kids at a puppet show. Having set the stage, you make the rest up as you go along, ideas and action arising out of the context of the performers’ individually felt lives, the flesh that clings to those material bones.

Tony Osborne shows us various guises—stand-up comic, old Cockney lady, dirty old man. He lounges deeply in an armchair, waiting under shadowy underworld scaffolding. He has a frayed, grasping Dickensian look; he plays with stepping out from under, into the space; he shows us fleetingly a range of possibilities in his face and demeanour—fashion queen, theatre tragedian (the John Cleese school of dance) and other fantasies of his own making. There’s much talk—from his characters, about himself, slipping in and out of their skins—about fear, the audience, the material, whether it works. He is the butt of all his jokes, his own foolishness a source of inspiration. He asks the question himself, prancing around in front of us, we who’ve paid money and expect quite rightly to be entertained: who is he anyway? He risks becoming impaled by his own set-up, compelled to continue in the character of ‘entertainer’, slipping inevitably into the stand-up comic who has run out of jokes, and from there, sliding into the clown. Finally, on leaving the stage, he returns to himself, breathing and whole, releasing the audience.

Andrew Morrish’s performance shows us the possibilities of a clown at nobody’s mercy. He allows us to think, momentarily, that we are there to be amused or diverted or bestow approval, but quite soon other possibilities emerge.

It’s simply not possible to remain aloof and unaffected by the light-handed charm with which he leads us through his performance, with such certainty about his material, his stories, the shape of their telling, the beginnings, middles and endings of each phrase, the impromptu jokes he invites us to share, the subtly ironic buffoonery of his dance. He creates a cosy warmth, a pleasant intimacy in which we are trusted co-conspirators. He lets us in on one or 2 professional secrets, and demonstrates, by his gentle and compelling irony, the art of theatrical exposé—fake blood, fake danger, fake falling, fake choices. On this night, there was little tragedy in Andrew’s performance. He is not the clown open to ridicule; more like the host of a very select party, offering each guest entrée into his elite circle. The joke we secretly share is that, having been shown deliciously that this privileged status is a complete illusion, it nevertheless has the power, for a few moments at least, to be self-fulfilling.

Relentlessly On, Tony Osborne & Andrew Morrish, Performance Space, Sydney, May 17

Divided We Fall

Following on from last year’s festival favourite, Cosy Dens, Jan Hrebejik’s latest comedy is another play on everyday responses to a repressive totalitarian regime; the pressures of maintaining an appearance of ‘normality’ in the face of state-inspired terror, the thin line between resistance and compliance, often measured in tiny increments, and the constant need to watch oneself, and others, for any tell-tale signs of guilt or betrayal.

The catalyst in this instance is David, a member of a Jewish family dispatched to the camps, who returns to his home town in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in order to seek shelter. Taken in by friends and stashed away in the closet, his hidden presence soon begins to infect and inflect the behaviour and relationships of everybody around him. On the one hand, he must be protected and kept alive, like a forsaken reminder of an earlier age, but equally he is someone to be loathed and reviled, even by his protectors who are unable to let him go once they have taken him in for fear of detection. Indeed, roused from an uneasy inertia, this act of resistance ultimately forces them to act the part of collaborators in order to divert suspicion. And when the moment of liberation finally comes, the harbouring of a Jew assumes just as much importance for the same life or death reasons.

Not unexpectedly, ironies and a particular brand of blackish farcical humour flourish in these circumstances where the Nazis act as stand-ins for other traditional authority figures (the outraged father or bad-tempered boss) albeit with extra added evil. Hrebejik imbues the film with a late-summer lightness and warmth which belies the ever-present terror and compounds the comedy; an utterly contemporary film in look and sensibility.

Time for Drunken Horses

This was easily the most numbing cinematic experience of the festival, and not just for its scenes of freezing weather and constant trekking through thigh-high snow. Filmed in Iranian Kurdistan, the film shows the influence of recent Iranian cinema with a specific focus on the desperate, dangerous lives of Kurds sandwiched between Iran, Iraq and Turkey. Here, political struggle is expressed in the sinew-straining work involved in simply trying to stay alive. Whether it’s chopping down trees or hauling contraband over mountains, the hard labour required is a direct consequence of the Kurds’ stateless condition.

The final task, as it eventuates, verges on insanity; a young Kurdish boy, Ayoub, must leave his young sisters and take his crippled brother on a mule across the mountains from Iran into Iraq, risking minefields and ambushes (their father has already been killed attempting to smuggle goods across the border) in order to sell the mule (his only means to a livelihood) in order to pay for an operation for his brother in the knowledge that this will only prolong his life by a few months.

The unasked question is ‘is it worth it?’ and, in other hands, the film would have been about just such a dilemma, tracing Ayoub’s inner struggle to overcome his doubts and fears, followed by an epiphany in which he realises where his duty lies and heads off once more into the snow. There is none of this. No questioning, no wrestling with conscience. The children are not passive agents but they never acknowledge the types of choices being forced upon them and which seem so apparent to the audience. There’s never any doubt about what Ayoub will do.

This is a film about the correctness of ethical action, not so much deciding what is right or wrong, but in knowing what to do and following through regardless of the circumstances. It doesn’t make sense, it’s crazy, but in encapsulating the madness of the Kurds’ situation—they have no choice in being who they are—the logic is lacerating.

The Werckmeister Harmonies

It suggests celestial spheres and the music thereof, a feeling reinforced in the beginning by the spectacle of late-night drunks acting out heavenly movements, rotating and spinning like a stumble-bum universe about to collapse in a heap. Go home, says the barman, and they do, moving slowly off into the darkness.

Bela Tarr’s meticulous monochrome can be read as a dissertation on what is usually referred to as ‘the collapse of communism’ but the forces that he delineates in a single town could apply to any society beset by moral panics and an overwhelming sense of breakdown. The arrival in town of a circus hauling a dead whale, Nature reduced to a putrid hulk, heralds the start of a communal madness in which the thin veneer of civil order is quickly erased.

The fastidiousness of the set-pieces make you ache all over, particularly the scenes of walking men—alone, in pairs or en masse—in which the camera is allowed to run far longer than we expect, and then keeps on going, and going, and going until the thought occurs that it might not end at all and something quite meditative and resonant develops.

There are others as well—2 boys misbehaving, a middle-aged couple dancing, a whirling helicopter—which linger like an after-image on the retina, gently abraded onto the brain, but this unblinking stare extends to all everyday activity—getting ready for bed, cooking a meal—so that the different spheres of civil unrest, personal disarray and private moments gradually intersect and collide with the same slow force of planets falling out of orbit. There is an order in the disorder after all, an irresistible pathos that derives from the carefully observed actions of humans.

Silent Partner

A firm favourite, this one. Good starter, runs on strongly, sure to attract local interest.

A tight 2-hander (and 4-pawer, as every man and his dog will tell you) about a couple of ordinary joes, Bill and John, who get caught up in a dodgy dog racing scheme involving a ‘colourful Sydney identity’ and a greyhound, Silent Partner.

The dependence of the men on the invisible Alex Silver and the focus on just 2 main characters inevitably suggests comparisons with Waiting for Godot but the similarities are more apparent than real. Bill and John are not tramps, although they are just a whisker away from hitting rock bottom. The fact that they are barely holding it together is what makes the drama so acute; and the scenes in which hope does flicker briefly and, for an instant, they imagine a better life, are amongst the most poignant. At heart, it’s a film about people who lack any real power (ie money) but who nevertheless strive to stay in the game, keep on turning up, even though nobody else is playing by the same rules. Bill and John’s relationship with their silent, malevolent partner is symbolic of a wider breakdown in the social contract.

Filmed in just 7 days, it’s a remarkable achievement from director Alkinos Tsilimidos and crew. Two terrific performances from actors David Field and Syd Brisbane manage to make Bill and John instantly recognisable.

Zero points and a copy of Tony Abbott’s memoirs to the questioner from the mezzanine level who wanted to know how 2 such losers could afford to spend so much money on beer and cigarettes.

A One and a Two

It ain’t exactly Reality TV but there’s something about the manner in which this Taiwanese family is filmed—almost always in the middle distance, out of the room, in the street, the office, in corridors, in cars, in the open—which hints at such a voyeuristic impulse. It starts with a wedding, ends with a funeral and nothing quite so momentous seems to happen in between, although there is love and murder and a near-death experience or two.

It could be melodrama, except that it is so well grounded, set against the deliberate blandness of a trans-global decor and mass-produced modernity. The living spaces hum (when they’re not pinging or chiming or beeping) with a suffocating white noise and there is a constant rumble of traffic and buzz of human activity that renders all the emotional turmoil somehow muted, unable to find any satisfactory release.

There’s a sense in which mistakes are repeated across generations with the possibility of atonement, but this is set against the impossibility of anybody ever being truly present in their own lives. There is still ritual to cling to, somewhat debased, but in between the ceremonies life is a string of empty apartments and fractured relationships.

The studied neutrality of Edward Yang’s direction makes this a lot less depressing than it sounds.

Maelstrom

Like when you get sucked into a whirlpool of emotions and it goes round and round for no real reason other than that’s what it does. Like what happens when you take a Drink-Drive Bloody Idiot ad and keep extending it all directions—for no real reason other than you can—and because it looks slick, smart, sassy and sexy.

A young woman driving home drunk runs over a middle-aged man who works in a fish market—and drives on. Armed with this secret guilt (which seems to be associated, disturbingly, with a terminated pregnancy), the film chases down connections and parallels with a gleeful persistence bordering on paranoia. For instance, while having lunch, the woman’s friend complains about the quality of a seafood dish in a restaurant which, as it turns out, buys its fish from the market where…and so on.

It’s a form of hyper-extenuation in which the man’s death becomes the means to the woman’s rebirth, suggesting that on a certain level all the chaos of contemporary life is coherent and meaningful, not socially or politically but merely coincidentally.

Lost and Delirious

Tasteful and Prudish, maybe, Well-mannered and Predictable, but not enough losing it or delirium. The premise shows promise, following the familiar private-school-secret-love-thwarted-by-social-propriety trajectory and setting it down in a Canadian girls’ school, but that’s the only original stroke of the whole enterprise. Superficially the film’s about burgeoning adolescent sexuality and gender identity, as always, but pretty soon it bails out and opts for a heightened notion of romantic passion and a ‘why can’t two individuals just love each other’ approach which flops around rather ridiculously. It’s as if the film is embarrassed by its own lesbianism, but still persists with the notion that it’s everybody else who has a problem. So a lot of Shakespeare gets shouted and there’s a bird of prey that is used quite gratuitously to symbolise a free spirit. Are there any filmgoers left who don’t yet know how to rehabilitate an injured hawk?

Song of Tibet

Curious to observe in this film how Tibet figures in the contemporary Chinese psyche as a kind of aged relative, clinging to its charming folkloric traditions while Young China jets in and logs onto the internet. Old Tibet dies but not before rediscovering its history and culture which it then passes on to Young China.

This is seriously bucolic. Tibet looks ravishing—gotta getaway there—and the Chinese occupation is tastefully kept out of sight. In fact, you’d hardly know that it had ever happened. The local landowner leaves in the night as if going on an extended business trip and there’s a brief reference to how life improved after the serfs were set free. So that’s alright then—let’s all go to the Olympics.

Perhaps we expect Chinese films to be implicitly critical of the authorities, so such a blatant historical elision leave us feeling cheated—this is not the Tibet we want to see! In this case though, what we don’t see is probably more significant than what we do.

Divided We Fall, director Jan Hrebejk, writer Petr Jarcjovsky, Czech Republic; A Time for Drunken Horses, writer/director Bahman Ghobadi, Iran/France; Maelstrom, writer/director Denis Villeneuve, Canada; Lost and Delirious, director Lea Pool, writer Judith Thompson, Canada; Song of Tibet, writer/director Xie Fei, writer Xhaxidawa, China.

One of the comments most often made of film soundtracks is “I didn’t even notice it.” Sometimes this is considered a compliment. Sound is one of the cinema’s most powerful tools, whereby the audience is influenced from below the radar of their consciousness. This is the potent territory explored at the Cinesonic 4 conference, held at the Treasury Theatre in Melbourne.

The Potency of the Soundtrack

This potency is employed in subtle ways, as demonstrated by McKenzie Wark (Macquarie University, Sydney) in clips from E.R. where the beeps, sucks and hisses of life support equipment are orchestrated to create tension with the dialogue. On the other hand, the soundtrack can be turned on its head to reveal the voices it excludes. In Hollywood, the sound of the voice is regulated by the “Hollywood Accent”, from which directors rarely deviate (hear the regional accents in the Coen Brothers’ Fargo for an exception to the rule). Megan Spencer’s (documentary maker/film reviewer, Triple J) presentation “Shout It Out Loud: The Voice of the Documentary Subject” identifies distinctions between the heard and unheard. Megan gives voice to the invisibles: Benjamin Smoke’s croaking, tobacco stained timbres; the speech of ex-inmates struggling with the sound of their voices outside a prison’s reverberant confines; and most bizarrely and beautifully in A Pair of One, identical twins whose voices switch between a call-and-response of identical parts and a perfectly matched unison, as they begin, echo and end each other’s thoughts. Megan’s presentation gives rise to intriguing questions about the relationship between the subject and writer or director: who is speaking through whom?

Language, Nationalism/ Regionalism and Realism

As sound came to the screen, so did nationalism. While silent film spoke mainly with pictures, the voice in the talkies spoke in nationalised languages. It may be that Indian cinema relies so heavily on music because it speaks more universally to an audience divided into more than 300 languages. Kathryn Bird (multimedia producer, Melbourne) describes the effect of this in Hong Kong cinema, where actors, crew and audiences are divided into Cantonese or Mandarin speakers, necessitating complicated dubbing and translation. Extensions of this sonic nationalism, or regionalism, are apparent in further clips from Hong Kong films. Precedence is given to materialising the sound of bodies and objects moving in air, and music is pushed to the background, occupying the space cicadas would in a Hollywood film. An inversion of this sonic ordering came from Philip Brophy (lecturer, Mars) playing a scene from Flashdance where Irene Cara’s body flies through the air and the sound of the physical world is dissolved by the soaring hit single What a Feeling.

Any lingering ideas of the possibility of authentic cinematic realism are dispelled by Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s (film theorist, Bombay) tracing of differences between Indian and western cinema back to their roots in India’s 2 dimensional or flat pictorial representations and western vanishing point perspective. Ashish also explains how the conventionally flat, overdubbed voice in Indian cinema refers to a traditional relationship between the deity and devotee, in which the deity’s voice always issues from a frontal perspective. Interestingly, the phenomenon of the voiceover in western cinema is not given such mystic connotations, though the origin of this omnipotent voice can be explored. In contrast to these metaphysical allusions are Bruce Lee’s animalistic battle cries, discussed by Kathryn Bird, which collapse language, narrative and material into a cinematic inscription of a body’s energy.

Film production

Given that a film is an embodiment of the energies that produced it, the poetics of Derek Jarman’s films were also present in his life and in the methods by which he made his films. This poetry is also made manifest by Simon Fisher-Turner (England), score composer of many of Jarman’s films. Simon intuitively understands the difference between music and music-for-pictures and, handed complete creative freedom by Jarman, worked totally outside the Hollywood model of temp tracks, audience testing and producer’s final approvals. Simon’s unorthodox presentation is an antidote to the regimented and often neurotic world of filmmaking, and proves that it’s possible to have a successful creative career outside the accepted models of professional practice. A direct contrast to this comes from Skip Lievsay (New York-based sound designer for the Coen Brothers, Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee) who demonstrates that you can make great soundtracks by working completely within industry conventions.

For the attuned listener, the soundtrack is a rich and detailed terrain of sound and music. Film sound theory, however, is underdeveloped. Texts such as Michel Chion’s Audiovision, which investigates the unexplored reaches of the soundtrack and its relationship to images, develop new terminology, filling the critical void. So too does Cinesonic 4: Between Sound and Music.

Cinesonic: 4th International Conference on film scores and sound design, Cinemedia, Treasury Theatre, Melbourne, June 22-24. Cinesonic 3: Experiencing the Soundtrack is now available in paperback through AFTRS

Interactivity and improvisation were complementary and central to this year’s Fusion, a night of multimedia curated by Sue McCauley as part of the annual St Kilda Film Festival. Largely an evening of young artists’ work, Fusion showed the consolidation of existing electronic arts formats rather than breaking new ground. There were 2 separate programs of 6 CD-ROM works with creator-driven show and tell from computer console to wall screen, and one program of 3 works of video, dance, live music and improvisation. The CD-ROM demonstrations were accompanied by improvised chat about interfaces and the creative and technical processes. While this new media is very dependent on other arts–word texts, film, video, photography and drawing–it restages them in its construction, repetition, fragmentation and delivery of divergent pathways across the visual text.

The first set explored violence and sex. Uncle Bill by Debra Petrovitch uses black and white archival film footage of suburban Wollongong to frame images of childhood violence and sexual abuse. Petrovitch juxtaposes mountains of industrial debris with the human detritus of one household. She commented that there had been some resistance in the reception of her work–images of sex and violence without authorial directives might be read as voyeuristic rather than shock politics. Similarly, Tatiana Doroshenko’s Shot simulates a sex website under the banner “I want you”, with fake emails and video footage of a sex worker on the street, her customers in a car, looking into a mirror in a toilet. Doroshenko confirmed that this was not documentary but dramatised footage. The Exchange by David Barlas presents enticing digital snapshots; cartoons and words in poetic explorations of thwarted desires; virtual robots made of wood in a strangling duel to the death when one knocks the head off the other. Barlas’ confessed his passion for Radiohead’s music and alcohol to fuel his being-in-the-world.

The second program brought together landscapes and stories. Mike Leggett’s very impressive but unfinished Pathscape rolled through and panned around photographic footage of the beautiful southeastern NSW coastline and its salt lakes. Clicks on pristine vistas revealed cultural stories imprinted behind: Captain Cook’s journal about the coast, cinematic cultural anxieties from a ship’s crew in On the Beach, a young girl’s tantrum of environmental angst and a local Aboriginal recounting how his father crossed the lake on a log. Leggett talked of the 5-person team on Pathscape and the budget of nearly $100,000. Ruth Fleishman’s Oink presented drawing and cut-out silhouettes in a visual collage to accompany the spoken reading of Eric Dando’s science fiction novel, featuring Squiggley Fern and a half-pig-half-human who plays chess, living in a future Melbourne megametropolis renamed Circecity. The aural adaptation retained the imaginative writing from the novel, its narrative originality. City of Spare Parts by Sam Fermo, also set in Melbourne, uses the grid of a map to move from drawn images back into video footage of inner city terraces and traffic.

In Program 3, The First Law of Motion (Newton’s) by Opera Somatica had 2 dancers rolling, rising, falling, accompanied by a musician on a steel keg drum, and alluded to cultural crossings of east and west in sound and movement. Black and white film footage flickered to one side throughout the show, simulating a still image of the dancers standing together at the end of the show, with their body length costumes of 3 black and white strips. I really liked this false stillness that exposed the flicker of liveness to the eye and folded film back into photography. In one segment they danced joined around the waist. In another witty section they appeared on a large screen as “fluffy” feminine girls screaming “Oh my god” in conversation. In Edmund Chiu’s Lucid, straightjacketed dancers worked against cinematic images of childhood male violence, adult bondage, churches and cemeteries to techno driven hysterical gesturing. Peripheral Vision by Nadine Allen, Marty Damhuis and Dan Oreilly-Rowe, combined real time prop driven improvisation with live video filming.

The CD-ROM works allowed spectators to make narrative easily with their hints of familiar cultural plots: the prostitute on the street, domestic abuse. Only when Opera Somatic’s live bodies entered the frame did the ideas slip into less certain territory.

Fusion: Multimedia Program, The George Ballroom, St Kilda Film Festival, Melbourne, June 1

1999, Darwin. The rampage of the pro-Indonesian militia in East Timor shocked us all as we witnessed the building of a makeshift refugee camp which was to house thousands of refugees lucky to get out with their lives. The streets were peppered with United Nations troops dressed in full military gear. It was scary.
At the same time NxT, Northern Territory Xposure, the Territory’s first multimedia symposium, was set to take place. Another invasion—a welcome one, of new media artists who would gather in Darwin to share their skills with the artists living in the NT.

Regional events encouraged rich exchanges at the symposium and offered NT artists real opportunities to explore and experiment with new technologies. The hackers’ tent at the ski club became both an experimental lab and a sanctuary, a place where artists could explore some of the ideas presented by the speakers while Timorese refugees searched for information about their loved ones. At the close of NxT, many NT artists had begun to visualise how they could incorporate these new ideas into their own work.

To encourage such work, the Australia Council offered funds managed by a group of NT artists known as the MMREF Group and dispersed as 8 New Media Arts grants. Over the last year, the works, some live, some web-based, have been realised.

Camilla Lawson’s Cash Crop, in the artist’s words, “…aims to manipulate the audience’s behaviour in the context of public perception of environmental issues. In doing so, the work involves self-examination and critical debate about social complacency regarding a culture of ‘progress no matter what the social and environmental cost.’”

In Darwin’s Wood Street Gallery, 2 off-beat television scenarios are filled with images of red balloons. Red balloons dotting the landscape stand like soldiers at attention, then break away to flee across the barren earth. The vision then switches to a balloon growing. The sound is of the breath that fills it: air/gas/wind. The impression is lush, comical, majestic. Then it bursts—like popped dreams reflecting so many failures to ‘settle’ our environment at any cost.

In the centre of the gallery is Lawson’s skinned “crop” which she has used to cover a long seat for the audience. The skins belong to her balloons…a magnificent quilt that offers a place to rest and ponder the video works. Most cannot resist the opportunity to sit and feel. Are they just pawns chosen to represent the “frontier dominated idea of staking their claims to the land”?

Jichicha is a Shockwave movie produced by Stella Simmering and Wes Wagonwheel. Having spent years hanging out with the Aboriginal fisherpeople of the Darwin fish camp, Stella and Wes set about to create a “multimedia-language” toy. Their script comes from Aboriginal names for fish in the Darwin waters, their sound—Aboriginal voices and tricky noise compositions by Wes—and their images, sea creatures. The result is an original introduction to an Aboriginal language and culture.

The Massacre of the Gija people, a video produced by Jason Davidson and Rohan Fisher in collaboration with the Gija people, reveals a story of shame. Jason, who has close family ties with the Gija people from the Juwurliny Community, describes how “Elder Paddy Bedford tells a story of a poisoning massacre at Bedford Creek by white pastoralists around World War I. The story tells how some of Paddy’s relatives were incarcerated because they killed a bullock. When they were released, they were given ‘tickets’ to wear around their necks. Little known to the Aborigines that wore them, these tickets marked the people that were to be killed. The station manager took the Aborigines wearing the tickets out bush to cut wood. After cutting a lot of wood, the people were given poisoned food. The wood that they had cut was used as fuel to burn their dead bodies.”

The Ticket Necklace story is one of great sadness but one that the Gija people wanted to share. Jason Davidson feels that reconciliation can only be achieved when the history of these people is recognised, digested and the proper amends made.

Elka Kerkhofs’ fascination with the English language began when she migrated to Australia from Belgium. Many words, she discovered, had more than one meaning—virus, cut, paste and contamination. Armed with these words, Elka went to a number of people from different professions and explored their interpretations, which were then used as the script for a collaboration with Tracks Inc. Dance Company. The result is Blood vs Wine, a breathtaking production incorporating projections of intimate images, sounds and movement.

Beyond the Square was an event coordinated by Cath McKay and Georgia Glen and executed by a number of participating artists. This project explored “the relationship between art and life within the context of a shopping mall and its interaction with the culture of the community.” Using Casuarina Shopping Square, the only mall in Darwin, as their stage, these women set out to create an art exhibit for the general public. Shoppers were offered an array of artforms, including live mannequin displays, digital video projections, performances by a troop of well-rehearsed ‘shoppers’, junk sculptures created from shoppers’ trash, and a shopping trolley piece with a monitor ‘head’ that reveals what life is like from a trolley’s point of view.

Catriona Stanton’s Passage is about nostalgia. Collaborating with Sydney poet Tim Doon and Alice Springs filmmaker Declan O’Gallagher, Stanton seeks to explore the “disparity yet intrinsic connection of 2 Australian environments: the inter-tidal zone of the Pacific Ocean, Sydney, and the ancient bed of the Larapintine Sea, Alice Springs.” Images of granular Larapintine fossils are married to contemporary haikus and meditative sounds, then projected across a screen with the McDonnell Ranges as a backdrop. Set in the now abandoned Alice Springs drive-in, this work offers the viewer a true sense of the “remembrance of things past.”

Frances Bunji Elcoate had been working with youths at risk in Darwin through the Big hART project when she applied for a grant. Equipped with a strong multimedia background, Bunji provided these young people with the skills and the support to tell their stories using clay animations. These works were then presented as part of a huge multimedia production. Staged at the Darwin Performing Arts Centre, Wrong Way Go Back is a gritty, thought provoking piece that reveals, in snippets, the lifestyles that ultimately lead young people into criminal behaviour.

bryce anbis and tashidawa eyles’ box project explores the “analogical world of images and emotions—those places that we don’t really have words for.” anbis and eyles created a portable stage that was set in various locations to perform, record and recover the happenings around them.

There is no doubt that that the presenters at NxT helped to inspire NT artists, as have local artists like Trevor Van Weeren who was instrumental in bringing these works to fruition. Van Weeren was recently invited to be a part of Cyber Pow Wow 2K in Banff, Canada. True to their reputation as intrepid explorers, NT artists are undaunted by the challenges of new media technologies.

If d>art was a restaurant, it’d be all-you-can-eat. Very hip, sure, but with plates piled high with pixels; if I was a restaurant reviewer I’d be groaning. Around 50 works by as many artists; film/video/animation, CD-ROM, web and sound; a gallery installation and several nights of screenings. If d>art is dLux media|arts’ annual showcase event, a collection selected from hundreds of local and international submissions, without a curatorial masterplan, what comes out is a thick slice of contemporary media arts practice. While it’s a diverse collection, what’s most noticeable are the clear threads, trends and tendencies
running across it.

One is an interest in space, place and landscape, and particularly space layered with the virtual and informational. Often the focus is on urban space, with the interpenetration of experience, architectural space and data which forms our transnational “city of bits.” In Samantha Fermo’s CD-ROM City of Spare Parts (Australia) we wander through a layered and folded grid of Melbourne urban experience; subjective maps and buildable toytowns. First-person video runs under layers of line drawings to form a rich visual texture; the work hovers nicely between on-the-ground specificity—trying to remember that corner on Flinders St—and an abstracted, placeless urbanity. Jessica Irish pulls towards the latter in her website Inflatoscape (USA)—a network of coolly composed Flash screens exploring cities, crowds, e-commerce and IT through the trope of the bubble—as in bubble economy. One section advertises inflatable warehouses: impermanent industrial architecture, perfect for when your e-tailing business goes to the wall as the bubble bursts. Cute, but not stirring—if there’s a negative aesthetic tendency across this show, it might be the outbreak of Flash-induced vector graphic coolness. How much tastefully restrained monochrome interface design can we take? It’s passable when there’s some conceptual grit behind it, but in many cases—such as Tanja Kimme’s s_p_a_t_i_a_l CD-ROM (Australia) and Greg Lowe’s PLACE site (Australia)—swishy visuals only add to a sense that there’s not much going on.

One remarkable counter-example of that tendency is Stanza’s The Central City (UK)—another meditation on the informational urban. Here too, the aesthetic raw materials are cool shades of grey and neat vector boxes. The difference is in how they’re deployed: Stanza codes these elements into dense, layered atmospheric textures which are smoothly and unpredictably responsive; sprays of translucency, crawling flickering trails, and spinning arrays. Sound triggers are embedded in these surfaces, setting off grimy resonant noises; the artist calls these interactive audiovisual paintings, and unlike so much work in these media, the surfaces are visually rich and dynamic enough to withstand the analogy. The city’s in here, but in pieces, map fragments, place names; it’s flowing, shifting; there’s a sense that we’re dealing directly with its raw material—data. At the same time there are clues tying the work to a specific place, London, and to its particular brand of war-scoured urban redevelopment.

Still more urban stories: Michael Hornblow’s :plugins, drifting (Australia) splices Tokyo into a cyborg-salaryman. Kate Richards’ Darkness Loiters (Australia) takes us back to crime scenes in post-war Sydney; still, quiet shots which piece together into mysterious micronarratives. Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski tell a dark fairytale about surveillance and disguise in a.k.a (Australia). In Parken Verboten (Croatia), Martinis Dalibor parks dozens of shiny new VW Golfs in a marketplace in Rosenheim, lining them up into an obscure string of binary code. Once again the city is shot through with data.

While this urban/digital nexus continues to attract creative interest, and certainly remains relevant, as a theme it’s becoming quite familiar in digital media practice—almost a staple. By contrast the other strong thread in d>art feels like an idea which is bubbling up in several places at once, and still coalescing. Andrew Gadow’s INVERSION (Australia) starts out with some good old video feedback, that sizzling texture of cathode rays and glass, then rapidly turns digital and burrows inwards, stretching out pixels into flat, flickering masses. Gadow sequences retina-burning strobes, drifting block patterns and meshes, ornamented with the odd crunch of compression dropout. It feels like 80s scratch video, but digitally sharpened and purged of that semiotic overload: ‘pure’ digital video—mobile colour data. Not purely visual either; the sound is brutally powerful and fused tightly with the vision. In fact what’s going on here is elegantly simple: the soundtrack is a simple ‘porting’ of the video signal, so the video waveform is also an audio waveform. The 50 fields per second become an audible (and tactile) 50Hz buzz, which is inflected and modulated as the image flickers and shifts. Hearing and vision get wired directly together through a single signal-abstraction.

Myriam Bessette’s Nutation (Canada) approaches the same fusion, though less directly; a vertical band jumps and bends with the audio, twisting, braiding out into multiples and burning to white as noise bursts in the soundtrack. Here the sound/image relationship seems constructed rather than automatic, though the results look a lot like what Finnish minimal noise/techno outfit Pansonic did at the What is Music? festival earlier this year, running their chainsaw-tone generators through a video projector. Ian Andrews, the Sydney-based artist whose work featured in a retrospective this year, is on a related track. Some of his recent Microsound web works are also essentially synaesthetic data; flickers of ASCII and pixels oscillating in sync with jittering clicks and sound spasms (transmission, k-88, channel-11, channel-66). These are simple phase/permutation textures, layers of loops, but they accumulate into frantic, jumpy, surprising masses, with the loops’ internal rhythms full of holes and changes. These works also show, incidentally, that Flash doesn’t need to be dull and overdesigned—it’s a great platform for ultra-compressed online audiovisuals.

So this is audio/visual synaesthesia, one of the touchstones of the electronic arts, a creative aim as old as the hills. More particularly though, it’s a form of synaesthesia imagined or realised through the technical underside of electronic media: it routes signal and data from one sense-channel to another. Earlier versions of the synaesthetic ideal have imagined a kind of sublime sensory fusion or a perfect aesthetic whole—a gesamptkunstwerk. This is grittier, more concrete; a technical transcoding operation. In fact, this emergent digital synaesthesia isn’t so much about sensory fusion, or sound/image, as the common structure underneath both sensory channels—the signal/data itself. Hearing and vision are channels for apprehending that basic, raw material.

Back to data, which is all through d>art. Kawai Masayuki’s video a not = a or For Devatas who Keep on Dancing (Japan) is constantly breaking down into spastic—and artfully degraded—visual signal. Aphorisms damning the mass media are drolly intoned over scrolling, flickering noise: “only the moment when video completely denies itself…is the Art in the virtual image of the Revolution.” I’m not sure that this data.art is self-denial, though, more a symptom of a broader engagement with media substrata, a process where the floods of data underpinning our culture seep into sensory and aesthetic experience. Meanwhile [mez] writes Data[h!][bleeding T.ex][e]ts (Australia), densely encrypted realisations of language-becoming-information. Chris Henschke frames his sound interactive Corroded Grooves (Australia) citing Katherine Hayles, and calling for the breakdown of “culturally-imposed structuralist dichotomies such as information/materiality, pattern/randomness, information/noise.” Corroded Grooves goes about this in the same way as a lot of post-techno experimental audio; noisy, gritty beats and loops, tone and melody submerging under layers of detritus. Digital sound, but soaked in the sounds of material and media-decay. This is a solid addition to the growing genre of mix-and-loop audio interactives, with an intricate interface and a tastefully grubby sound; pity that, when I visited, the amplification was turned down too low for it to be really enjoyable.

Of course these 2 threads don’t account for the whole collection, by any means. Among the highlights on other tracks were Young-hae Chang’s DAKOTA (South Korea)—a stunning piece of online performance poetry; screen-high text (Flash again) stepping past to a fierce soundtrack of looped jazz-drum licks. Beautiful for its simplicity, and sheer impact, this is a wild ride—it’s so rare to feel ‘glued’ to a computer screen. Also notable for visual and interactive suppleness was the Glaser/Hutchison/Xavier project Juvenate (Australia), a textless web of mobile imagery and video on memory, illness and childhood. Still in memory-space, Richard Grant’s videoclip for Japanese dark ambient outfit Maju is superb. Pale Blood Coloured Recollections (Australia) feels like an audiovisual stream of remembrance—8mm film worked into dense, permeable, labile textures, flashes of free association and perceptual noise. It’s digital synaesthesia again, but intricately wrought rather than elemental; this was the most visually luscious work in the collection. Alongside pieces like Stanza’s Central City, it suggests a ratcheting-up of the aesthetic density, sophistication and fluidity of digital media practice.

While d>art was a rewarding collection, it could certainly stand to be smaller and more consistent in quality. There are also serious problems with the exhibition format; the Customs House space is too small to accommodate 30-odd CD-ROM, web and sound works. Packing them onto machines, screens and listening booths got them in, but the result is oppressively dense (the busted air conditioning didn’t help). I haven’t reviewed the sound works here because I didn’t hear them—2 CD players with headphones, in a room already full of people, machines and sound, is just not a conducive way to present audio work. Maybe dLux should consider pressing a CD compilation (cheap, these days) or better yet, put the audio online? It’s a very valuable undertaking, sifting and presenting this mass of work, but the results need to be more easily digestible.

d>art 01, Sydney Film Festival & dLux media arts, exhibition: sound/CD-ROM/internet, City Exhibition Space, June 10 – July 1; screenings: film/video/animation, Dendy Opera Quays, Sydney, June 15 & 19,

Lev Manovich suggests that if it had one, the subtitle of The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2001) would be: “everything you always wanted to know about new media (but were afraid to ask Dziga Vertov).” Indeed, cinema is especially privileged in his ambitious examination of the continuities of new media with ‘old media.’ Currently an Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego, Manovich was born in Moscow and holds advanced degrees in cognitive psychology and visual culture. Working with computer media for almost 20 years as an artist, designer, animator, computer programmer and teacher, his work has been published in more than 20 countries, and he frequently lectures on new media around the world. While working on a new book, Info-Aesthetics, his current artistic projects include Software for the 20th Century, a set of 3 ‘imaginary’ software applications, and Macro-Cinema, a set of digital films to be exhibited as an installation at Cinema Future at ZKM next year. Manovich will be in Australia at the end of November to speak at conferences in Sydney and Melbourne.

Why the language of ‘new media’–which would seem to be a historically variable term–and not, for instance, ‘digital culture’ (given that you suggest that your method might be called 'digital materialism')?

I decided to use ‘new media’ because this term is a standard one used both in the field and in popular media. At the same time, the term is open enough, a kind of a placeholder, and I like this open character. Historically, I think it appeared around 1990. Its emergence marked the shift from understanding the computer as a tool in the 1980s to a new understanding that the computer also came to function as a new medium (or, more precisely, a number of mediums: virtual space, network, screen-based multimedia, etc).

Your book starts with scenes from Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera, ends with a chapter called 'What is Cinema?’, and a spool of film appears on the cover. Why is cinema so central to your understanding of new media?

There are a few answers to this question. Cinema has been the most important cultural form of the 20th century, so it natural that new media both inherits many conventions from cinema (similar to how cinema itself inherited conventions from previous 19th century forms, in particular the novel) and also contains a promise of replacing cinema as the key form of the 21st century. Methodologically, I find the theory of cinema is more relevant to new media than, say, literary theory, because, cinema is a cultural form also heavily based on technology; and the evolution of film language is closely linked to the technological developments and changes in cinema's industrial mode of production. Finally, I was originally attracted to new media in the early 1980s (then called ‘computer graphics’ and ‘computer animation’) because I saw in it the promise of being able to create films without big budgets, lots of heavy equipment and big crews–something which tools like DV cameras and Final Cut Pro running on a Powerbook has finally made possible, although it took about 20 years!

Artists, designers, as well as museums and critics, need terms to talk about new media work. We can talk about a painting using such terms as ‘composition’, ‘flatness’, ‘colour scheme' and we can talk about a film using such terms as ‘plot’, 'cinematography’, and ‘editing.’ With new media, the existing discourse focuses on 2 extremes: either purely industrial terms such as ‘Flash animation’ or ‘JPEG image’ (which all describe software used and don't tell you much about the work's poetics and the user's experience of it), or rather abstract theoretical terms created during the previous historical period (between 1968 and 1989, ie between the student revolutions of 1968 and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Soviet Communism) such as ‘rhizome’ and ‘simulation.’ I would like to help develop a vocabulary that will fill in the gap between these 2 extremes. The focus of my work is on trying to come up with new terms, which can be used to talk about the works–both their formal construction and also the interaction between the work and the user. So, to be more precise, my analysis is not strictly formal as it is also concerned with what literary theory has called ‘reader response’, the user's experience of new media.

One of the distinctions you make in the book is between the database and narrative as competing symbolic forms. What is the significance of this contemporary shift to the database?

The shift to the database can be understood as part of the larger shift from a traditional ‘information-poor’ society to our own ‘information-rich’ society. Narrative made sense for cultures based on tradition and a small amount of information circulating in a culture–it was a way to make sense of this information and tie it together (for instance, Greek mythology). Databases can be thought of as a new cultural form in a society where a subject deals with huge amounts of information, which constantly keep changing. It may be impossible to tie it all together in a set of narratives, but you can put it in a database and use a search engine to find what you are looking for, to find information which you are not aware of but which matches your interests and finally to even discover new categories. In short, a narrative is replaced by a directory or index.

In your archaeology of the screen, a central opposition that you arrive at is that the contemporary (realtime) screen alternates between the dimensions of 'representation' and 'control.'

I think that the opposition 'representation-control' provides a practical challenge to artists and designers of new media. There are 2 dimensions, which can be distinguished here: spatial and temporal. Spatial: how do you combine controls with a fictional image flow? For instance, how do you integrate menus and hot spots in an interactive film screen? (This is often done by not having any menus on the screen but by allowing the user to control the program through the keyboard.) Temporal: how do you combine immersive segments and control segments? Typically the way this is done so far in computer games and other interactive narratives (for instance, in a very interesting Blade Runner game from a few years ago) is that an immersive section is followed by an interactive section, to be followed by another interactive section. More successful are the games where the 2 modes co-exist, such as first-person action games like Mario and Tomb Raider. You are the character and you continuously control it through a mouse or a joystick. There is another way to think about this opposition since we are talking about computer games. Traditional ‘non-interactive’ narratives (books, movies) are more concerned with representation and narrative immersion, what can be called ‘narrative flow.’ In contrast, all real-time games, from tennis to Unreal require the user to exercise continuous control. So the challenge and promise of combining a traditional narrative form such as a movie with a game is how to combine the 2 logics of narrative flow and realtime control into a new aesthetics.

At one point you suggest that the computer is the ultimate and omnipresent Other of our age, and you say that the space of new media becomes “a mirror of the user’s subjectivity”, but for the most part you do not theorise the subjectivities enabled by new media.

In The Language of New Media I am more concerned with formal analysis of new media works and their historical formation than with users' subjectivities. I am hoping to deal with the latter topic in more length in my next book, where I want to think through the common types of behaviour/subjectivity in our culture–information access (for instance, web surfing), information processing, realtime telecommunication (talking on a cell phone, chatting online) and so on.

Can you elaborate on the link you make between the post-industrial mode of production and 'variable media'?

Post-industrial modes of production use computer-based design, manufacturing and distribution to enable massive customisation. This involves constant updates of product lines; large sets of models/variation for a single line of products (think of hundreds of different sneaker design as can be seen in Niketown and similar stores), and the idea that a given product can be customised for an individual customer. Manufacturing involves materials, ie ‘hardware’; since new media is all ‘software’, in new media computers enable more radical and more thorough customisation than in manufacturing. For instance, the user of an interactive site can select her own trajectory through it, thus in effect automatically ‘customising’ a work for herself. Or, when you visit a commercial website, its engine can automatically pull the information about your previous visits and your location to put up a customizsed version of the site for you, including which language version you get, the ads displayed, etc.

Are there any current directions in art or popular culture of particular interest to you?

I am interested in all directions in popular culture and their interactions: dance culture, music, fashion, internet culture, computer games, graphic and industrial design. I am trying to educate myself about electronic music because I am convinced that the logic of digital media historically has always manifested itself in music before visual culture. In part this is because visual culture, in particular popular visual culture, is often representational, ie, photographs, illustrations, movies, all represent visual reality which puts limits on how images may look like. So it is in music that many key new ideas of digital media revealed themselves first: algorithmic composition, sampling and mixing as a new form of creativity, and online distribution of culture (MP3s on the internet).

As far as new media art is concerned, I am very impressed by Lisa Jevbratt’s software which currently forms the basis of the online exhibition Mapping the Web Infome. Lisa invited a number of people (including me) to use her software to create their own Net Crawlers and to visualised the data they collect. In her words, “Just as the Human Genome Project strives to map the mysteries of the body’s DNA, Mapping the Web Infome develops ways of representing the master plan behind the codes that created the Web. The newly commissioned net art project deploys software robots as cartographers of the continually changing internet and the resulting images chart the hidden relationships that lie beneath the screen’s surface.”

If we understand net art as an artistic and cultural practice which focused on a modernist analysis of an early period of the web (1994-1998), it is dead. As an institutional label for new media art as a whole, it is very much alive and gaining more and more recognition. What I don't like is that museums, art galleries, media and other cultural institution often use the term ‘net art’ as a stand in for ‘new media art’ (or ‘digital arts’) as a whole. As a result, the attention goes to net projects while many other distinct digital practices such as interactive computer installation, electronic music, interactive cinema, and hypermedia are ignored. In short, a particular practice is used as a stand in for the field as a whole. It happens in part not only because net art is the cheapest practice for museums to exhibit but also because we still do not have any real alternative to an aesthetic theory based around the idea of mediums. So now along with painting, sculpture, art on paper, film, and video we now have ‘net art’, ie art which uses the medium of a network.

Lev Manovich will be speaking at College of Fine Arts, UNSW, Sydney, November 23, contact Ivan Dougherty Gallery, tel 02 9385 0726; and (dis)LOCATIONs conference, Cinemedia's Treasury Theatre, Melbourne, November 30 & December 1. www.manovich.net

Australians in NY

25 feature films, along with new media works on the internet, will feature in the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) celebration of arts in October, which will focus on Australia. Paul Byrnes has selected some impressive Oz films from the 90s including The Boys, Dead Heart, Feeling Sexy, Floating Life, Looking for Alibrandi, Mabo: Life of an Island Man, Praise & Rats in the Ranks to screen in Killing the Koala. Hopefully the Big Apple will learn there’s more to Oz culture than Crocodile Dundee.

Facing the Music: another hit for Connolly/Anderson

Like the landmark Rats in the Ranks, the documentary Facing the Music (see Kirsten Krauth's review) is doing well locally, getting a cinema release at the Valhalla in Sydney, and winning the audience’s Best Documentary award at the Sydney Film Festival. The film follows Professor Anne Boyd’s fight to save her music department at Sydney University. Commissioned by Film Australia & distributed by Ronin Films, Facing the Music begins Melbourne & Brisbane seasons on August 2-3 & has been invited to a number of international film festivals.

Kaleidoscopic shoots

Metro Screen (Sydney) is calling for entries for its annual film & video festival, Kaleidoscope. It’s a good opportunity for emerging filmmakers to strut their stuff in front of industry judges & audience. Categories include best film, screenplay, cinematographer, director, sound design, female/male actor & editor. Open to any short film under 8 minutes. Entries close September 7, screening Chauvel, October 5. Michelle Hardy, 02 9361 5318, entry forms

Columbia Pictures hits Pentridge Pris

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Producers of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon are shooting their followup, Double Vision, in Melbourne. A Taiwanese thriller, in Chinese Mandarin and English, the film features Tony Leung Ka-Fai (see our interview), David Morse & 3 Australian teams on special effects: The Makeup Effects Group, Phenomena & Kevin Chismall. The film is expected to feature in the 2002 Silk Screen programme of Asian cinema.

Asian film spotlight returns to Sydney

The 2nd Sydney Asia Pacific Film Fest starts in August, screening features from Asia & shorts from local Asian-Australian filmmakers in SHORT SOUP (winning films will be screened on SBS’s Eat Carpet). In 2 seminars, crew from Philip Noyce’s The Quiet American will talk about filming in Vietnam and festival guests Garin Nugroho & Im Sang Soo will discuss the trend towards digital filmmaking in Asia. 15 new features will screen including 2000 Cannes Grand Jury Prize winner Devils on the Doorstep (China), The Land of Wandering Souls (doco about laying high speed internet cable through Cambodia) & Chicken Rice War (Romeo & Juliet, Singapore style). Readings Cinemas, August 9-18; Canberra, August 23-26.

CREATE’s film/TV/multimedia training package

CREATE Australia’s new training package means that, for the first time in Australia, skilled people working within the film, television & digital media industries can acquire nationally recognized qualifications on the job. Training ranges from basic entry level to tertiary level diplomas. For further info visit the CREATE website

Hothouse blooms in SA

The SA Film Corporation announced recently that Kanesan Nathan, Matthew Phipps & Jessica Wallace (see Teri Hoskin's review) have been selected for the Hothouse Scheme, which gives emerging filmmakers an opportunity to focus on their projects by providing rent free office space & facilities & a living allowance of $10,000. This year the scheme has expanded to include the possibilities of attending conferences/courses or employing script editors to help with scripts.

Tony Ayres, Walking on Water

The followup to Ayres’ exquisite & highly successful documentary on William Yang, Sadness, Walking on Water stars Vince Colosimo & Maria Theodorakis & explores the sometimes funny aspects of dealing with death & grief. The film has just completed shooting & will have its world premiere at the 2002 Adelaide Festival.

Calling Western Sydney filmsters

Penrith Valley Video Festival is seeking films to screen in one of the most popular events in Sydney’s west. Festival director Rachel Morley said: “The PVVF is about communities sharing and building upon the tradition of video-making. It aims to bring together schools, neighbourhood centres, student videomakers, community groups & established industry professionals to create a cultural festival that puts Penrith on the filmmaking map.” More than $4000 is up for grabs in cash prizes for 3 categories: Open Top 3 & U18s (videos under 10 mins) and one minute Short Shorts which must explore issues in the Penrith area. All entrants’ films are screened at EVAN Theatre, Panthers Club, October 10, with winners announced in the evening.

A Queensland first for Blurred

Hard to believe but Blurred is the first feature ever to be written, directed & produced by Queensland filmmakers, according to PFTC News (July/Aug). First time director Evan Clarry’s comedy about 9 youngsters at Schoolies Week on the Gold Coast is looking to secure funding from the FFC in the next few months. The screenplay was developed through the Low Budget Feature Initiative, where emerging Qld writers/directors get to work with professional producers & script editors.

WA’s first youth film festival

Imagine Your Australia. That’s the theme for the Centenary of Federation Youth Film Festival, which is open to all filmmakers between 12-25 years in WA. Supported by ScreenWest, the theme is open to interpretation & there are 3 categories: Years 8-10, 11-12 & tertiary/open. Films can be any genre & will all be screened September 23-29 in prominent venues around Perth. 08 9328 9343, email

Docklands complex for Melbourne

As reported by The Age (June 28), over the next 2 years the Victorian government will build a $40 million film & TV complex in the Docklands area. The site is aimed at revitalising the VIC film industry & bringing many industry professionals back from interstate. The government hopes to attract international productions while being affordable & accessible (unlike Fox Studios) to local, smaller budget projects.

Lack of access to cinema in rural communities

According to Karen Meehan (Dramatic Online, May 11), a recent report by Sharon Baker (NSW Film & Television Office) reveals that “in over 50% of rural communities in NSW people have little or no access to cinema.” The bottom line threshold for a commercial cinema operation is 15,000 people, cutting out many small towns. Flicks in the Sticks, organised by Bruce Tindale (Arts OutWest), is a workshop-already held in a number of small towns-that aims to give communities the tools they need to screen films locally. For further information contact Bruce Tindale, 02 6338 4657, email

Indigenous scholarships at AFTRS

The Australian Film Television & Radio School, in joint venture with the Department of Employment, Workplace Relations & Small Business (under a Career Development Strategy) is seeking applications for an Indigenous Scholarship. Awarded to the best overall applicant, the one-year scholarship in film (commencing January 2002) will offer one of the following specialisations: directing, editing, producing, sound, scriptwriting, design, documentary or cinematography. Recent recipients include director Rachel Perkins (Radiance, One Night the Moon): “It opened up a whole new world that I hadn’t known about in terms of looking at other people’s films, learning about adaptation, learning about scriptwriting, having contact with industry professionals in a way that you could directly talk to them & ask the stupid questions that you would never ask professionally on set. Being exposed to a whole range of experiences, being taken out of my context as an Indigenous filmmaker & just being a student within a non-Indigenous environment was quite good for me as well.” Applications close September 11, 02 9805 6444, email

One Night the Moon soon to be released

Rachel Perkin’s latest film, written by John Romeril, with music by Paul Kelly, Kev Carmody & Mairead Hannan, will be distributed by Dendy Films and released on November 8. Starring Paul Kelly, David Field, Chris Haywood & Ruby Hunter, the film is based on the true story of a young girl who went missing in the outback in 1932 (see Jane Mills' review). The film screened at the Brisbane and Melbourne International Film Festivals.

Film Australia wins award for Mabo Project

Mabo-The Native Title Revolution, an extensive multimedia resource produced under Film Australia’s National Interest Program, has been awarded Best Secondary Teacher Reference Category from The Australian Awards for Excellence in Educational Publishing and the 2001 ATOM Award for Best Multimedia in the General Category. Combining CD-ROMs with a website & online database, the project brings together documentary video with audio & text from a variety of primary/secondary sources. Developed & produced with assistance from the Multimedia 21 Fund-Cinemedia, the CD-ROM was directed by Trevor Graham whose award-winning film Mabo-Life of an Island Man inspired the project. The website was developed in collaboration with the Aboriginal Research Institute at the University of South Australia & established as part of the Indigenous Online Network.

Digital arts go troppo

The second annual Kick Arts Digital Media Awards are open for business so if you’re a digital artist living in Far North Qld, get cracking-open to anyone north of the Tropic of Capricorn. The awards will be presented at WETFEST 2001: Fed on Film, Courthouse Hotel, Cairns, September 15 & entries displayed at Kick Arts Digital Gallery, September 10-28. All submissions must be presented on CD-ROM and can include animation, interactives, sound, digital artworks & websites. Entries due August 24. 07 4051 2234, email

Electrofringe in Newcastle

Electrofringe is on again, an annual festival of digital, hybrid, electronic & new media arts which offers workshops for artists, critical forums on digital media & screen cultures, & a focus this year on copyright & intellectual property issues. Timed to coincide with This is Not Art & Young Writers Festivals and Electronic Independent Labels & Student Media Conferences, it’s a great time to visit Newcastle. September 27-October 1, email

Carnivale goes online

Carnivale: Multicultural Arts Festival, Sydney, will launch The Menorah of Fang Bang Lu (writer/producer Andrew Jakubowicz, multimedia director Tatiana Pentes) in early October, a multimedia web project where the user can explore the lives & stories of 7 Jewish families who lived in Shanghai, 1930-1960, the narratives emerging from interviews, artefacts & photographs. Watch this space for the web address.

Fat Cow Motel – Australia’s Twin Peaks?

Qld producers Nathan Mayfield & Tracey Robertson (Hoodlum Entertainment) have scored a deal to make a $2 million TV drama in SE Qld. What’s special about the series is that it’s a 13 part multiplatform mystery, the first large scale show to be delivered to an audience through cable TV, radio, mobile phones, email, direct mail & dedicated websites. The viewers will be able to contribute in various ways to the shape of the program & pre-production starts in October (PFTC News, July-Aug).

Digital scholarships – SAE College

SAE International Technology College recently announced new scholarships for their Digital Film Program. Proton Digital & SAE are offering 15 talented students scholarships to the value of $3000 towards course fees for the Digital Film Producer course at the Sydney campus. The 9 month course offers students the chance to fine tune their skills by producing, directing & editing a number of projects, including working with DVDs. The program commences September 17 & applications are currently being considered. 02 9211 3711

IMAP to archive independent media

Independent Media Arts Preservation has launched a new website to help digital media producers & arts organisations catalogue their media works. Concerned that the history of non-commercial electronic media is being lost, the website features a standardised template & preservation information.

Palestinian youth portal launched

Virtual Palestine, a youth project undertaken at Metro Screen, aims to bring together young Palestinians from around the globe to create artistic explorations of their culture & identity. The site features news & current affairs, a gallery, places for personal stories, a map locator & a place to create music. Participants have been trained in digital camera use along with software such as Flash & DASE (allowing people to connect their computers & play music together wherever they are situated).

Fibreculture encourages debate on digital issues

The fibreculture mailing list is a forum for Australian net culture & research, founded by David Teh & Geert Lovink in January 2001. The aim is to exchange articles, ideas & arguments, and be a preparatory forum for an conference in Melbourne, December 6-8. The convenors hope to build a strategic picture of how Australia might support innovation, R&D and the applications & culture of new technology. To join, send an email with ‘subscribe’ in the subject line.

In September 1995, I was in Cairo for the Seventh Festival for Experimental Theatre, a rather tawdry and incoherent affair with official entries capable of boring the pants off all but the most committed cultural tourist. But, on the fringe of the festival, in a tent under the open sky, I managed to catch Hassan El-Geretly’s Tides of Night, in which the El-Warsha theatre group used a mix of actors, shadow puppets, Sufi poetry and a traditional stick duel to tell an enthralling tale of love and violence. When I got back to London, I contacted the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) and told the organisers, Lucy Neal and Rose Fenton, breathlessly about my discovery.

A couple of years later, El-Warsha was invited to be part of the festival, which biennially breathes fresh life into the narrowly provincial London theatre scene. Set up in 1981, LIFT has always been at the cutting edge, championing the work of Robert Lepage, Cristoph Mathaler and De La Guarda when these artists were not even well known in their own countries. But not only has LIFT promoted experimentalists who have stretched the definition of theatre, it has also redefined theatrical space, putting on shows in parks, a deserted railway hotel, on board a bus, at the zoo and in shop windows.

This year, Reich and Szyber from Sweden converted a sightseeing launch and lit up the Thames, while Bobby Baker performed Box Story in St Luke’s church in Holloway. From Italy came Raffaello Sanzio and his evocative, moody Genesi, as well as his children-only show, Buchettino. Meanwhile, the Hittite Empire performed Skeletons of Fish, their startling “urban micro-opera”, just as the aural cascade of Heiner Goebbels’ Sound City woke up music theatre with his group-created sound. Hungary’s Mozgó Ház brought his Romantic state-of-the-nation show, Tragedy of Man, and the Dutch company Hollandia staged their collage of Pasolini’s writings, Voices. Politics featured heavily in Georges Ibrahim’s Al-Kasaba theatre, from Palestine, as well as in a selection of works in progress from new Ugandan writers. More traditionally, Pushkin’s Boris Godunov electrified audiences with its portrayal of sex and power. Discussions, talks and exhibitions turned the ship HMS President, moored on the Thames Embankment, into a daily club for all fest junkies.

Regulars have noticed that, for its 20th anniversary, the festival was a bit pared down. The reason is that LIFT is about to morph into a yearlong event, with Fenton and Neal bringing over new work on a regular basis. Why the big change? “Over the past few festivals,” says Neal, “we’ve felt ourselves pushing at the walls.” Because “much of the commissioning involves collaborations between British and overseas artists, and has a yearlong life, we coined the phrase: ‘LIFTing the skirts’ 4 years ago.” It means “the festival frame was beginning to feel a bit pinched”, says Neal, and that it was time to change. “We were asking audiences to stuff themselves every 2 years—and that brings an extraordinary excitement and energy—but when we looked at it hard, we found that we wanted LIFT to be a crossroads, where exceptional things come together, in other ways.”

For example, when RealTime came to the festival in 1997, “it helped come up with the evidence that a festival sets out to be more than the sum of its parts.” RealTime came up with a metaphor, describing the festival as “interconnecting chambers—which you could explore one after another.” In other words, says Neal, “we are looking for the contradictions, the paradoxes and the fact that theatre doesn’t settle easily in a box.” So “the box of a festival, where everything happens in 3 weeks, now feels very artificial—and it’s not something we need to hold onto.”

“When we started,” says Fenton, “foreign productions just didn’t happen here. Theatre promoters told us we were mad to put on anything in a foreign language. Now, of course, there’s masses of choice: BITE at the Barbican and Meltdown at the South Bank—summer is just bursting with foreign shows.”

Earlier this year, LIFT brought over the heartbreaking Young@Heart show, in which greyhairs play Elvis, from the United States, and Peter Brook’s Le Costume from Paris. But despite their success, there is evidence that London audiences are playing safe, and avoiding new or experimental work by companies they’ve never heard of. “There are various, different audiences,” says Neal. “We have programmed shows which act as a counterpoint to each other, but if the public doesn’t come, that is a very strong signal.” “It’s not a highbrow, elitist festival,” adds Fenton, “but you must always expect the unexpected.” After one performance of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, directed by Declan Donnellan, more than half the audience stayed for the after-show discussion, but then Donnellan is a big name already.

“We are trying to raise the possibilities,” says Neal, “to get people more involved in discourse, using theatre as a prism” for seeing the world. “When we say to people: ‘Come and see this show, it’s really amazing,’ they usually come.” This year, the pyrotechnic production, Christophe Berthonneau’s Garden of Light, was performed twice, creating “a temporary community which we held together for slightly longer, which enables new conversations to emerge.”

But LIFT is still always seeking “a better engagement with the public,” says Neal, who then moves on to bigger questions: “What resonates about theatre? What begins when a play is finished? We have set ourselves a 5-year project to ask such questions.” The artists that work with LIFT may increasingly be part of a season, with evocative names such as “Childhood Dreams.” “Romeo Castellucci is a good example,” says Neal. “Genesi, his show about the Bible, is quite different to Buchettino, his show for children. But, however different, to the company they are the same work. There’s a visceral quality to Buchettino—and for us it’s like planting a seed.” She wants to use such events as “gathering points for ideas.” In the case of Buchettino, LIFT is asking “in what ways can theatre be used to support children’s exploration of very profound issues, like death and abandonment, which the usual bland kid’s theatre doesn’t address.” Neal also wants to give credit to children’s intellect and “not infantalise them with kids’ theatre.” Various workshops and projects will build on the Buchettino show.

With international artists, who may come from Uganda or Palestine, says Neal, “we have fleetingly the opportunity to discuss the world and our sense of place within it in a different way.” With the Hittite Empire’s Skeletons of Fish came a series of events, curated by cultural activist Colin Prescod which, says Neal, “were a chance to oxygenate a much deeper, more personal—possibly not heard before in public—discourse that taps into the more private worlds of black artists in this country.” They addressed questions about “blackness”, and about the “aesthetics of black performing arts.”

Such events are organised with an ethos that Neal calls “conflictual collaboration.” Now that LIFT has shed the festival frame, “we can be lighter on our feet, more spontaneous and surprising,” says Fenton. Neal also points out that “the identity of London is changing; the idea of what is international is changing and the idea of a festival should reflect that.” “People have told us that LIFT has helped them rediscover their own city,” adds Fenton.

LIFT’s ambition to push the boundaries still remains. “We are still asking questions about whether theatre is a real public space,” says Neal. “How does it work? Which members of the public which have contact with it? Does it form public discourse?” She quotes Flaubert: “If you set out on a journey and you know your destination, then it’s not a journey.”

Once upon a time fringe festivals provided formal and political opposition to mainstream arts festivals. Influenced by the Edinburgh Fringe, a policy of open access was adopted (pending availability of venues). Somewhere along the way, the oppositional dimension seemed to get swallowed up in the sheer volume of work presented, a plethora of standup comics, countless solo theatre shows and a beer hall mentality. Mainstream festivals with the financial and artistic capacity to import radical productions and commission new work locally could look more progressive than their fringe neighbours. In recent years there have been occasional signs of incipient change in Australia’s fringe festivals, flirtation with new media, contemporary performance and Indigenous culture. Open access gravitates against thematic programming, but Katrina Sedgwick, the new Artistic director of the Adelaide Fringe manages to convey a clear sense of thematic purpose and curatorial drive while hanging onto traditional fringe values. The focus, as the Fringe theme—”Necessity is the mother of invention”—indicates, is on innovation and newer artforms that have been marginal, experimental and sometimes underground.

The fundamentals will still be the same as to why the Fringe exists in Adelaide and works as well as it does for artists across the board. Anybody can come in and do whatever they want in terms of the presentation of work from any artform and we support them to do that. The Fringe is fundamentally about creating a critical mass of energy and audience for artists to be able to present their creative ideas. For me, particularly coming from a background of the Adelaide Festival over the last few years, it’s great to clarify what the difference is. We are principally a service organisation to assist anybody who chooses to be part of the Fringe.

I do agree that increasingly fringe festivals—a lot of this has been economically driven—have tended to be more media friendly where you know you’re going to get coverage by focussing on the stars and increasingly they tend to be the easily tourable, comedy cabaret big ticket items.

What’s been great for me coming into the job now is that the Adelaide Fringe is in a position of security. It’s respected by government, by the corporate sector, by sponsors and, most importantly, by audiences for the scale of event that it’s become. I think that we can now trust that we are going to get the profile that we want. So we can start exploring new areas.

One thing that perhaps has been lost in trying to build the event is that we are there to support independent and emerging and fringe art. And I think the Fringe has to some extent been caught in an earlier notion of what fringe is—comedy and cabaret. They were the artforms that were marginalised at that time. Now they’re absolutely at the centre of the mainstream and there’s a whole lot of other artforms that haven’t seen themselves as potentially having a voice in this event.

So I’ve been very keen to look at what is fringe, what is underground, alternative culture now and how do we find ways to encourage, showcase and highlight these forms to our audiences.

Our principle focus is the engagement of experimental practice with technology and in particular looking at the relationship between analog and digital, now that we’ve got over the fact that digital exists and it’s not just enough to work with it. We want to start exploring the cross artform choices in using more traditional or analog technologies in engagement with the digital and the aesthetics that are evolving out of that.

2002AD Analog to Digital is an electronic sound and music conference that runs over 3-4 days with forums and workshops. We’re talking to people from What is Music? festival and the National Independent Electronics Labels Conference (Sound Summit). They’re part of the This is Not Art collective of festivals that happen in Newcastle every year. We’re linking into existing networks, using expertise and skill that’s out there and highlighting what they’re doing. There’s a very strong electronic scene here in Adelaide too, particularly in the area of techno. There are 3 of us working on the Analog to Digital program—myself, Martin Thompson and Paul Armor, 2 guys who are based here who’ve been involved in this practice for some time

The conference is actually a curated program. And it’s been funded by Arts SA and the Australia Council. So it’s not part of our core funding. In September we announce our Shooting from the Hip film and video program. Again, we’re working with different organisations who are curating particular programs for us. We’re developing a writing program at the moment. I’m not sure how extensive that’s going to be. All these are curated but they are completely forum and workshop focussed events. Support is not just about helping people to find a venue—it’s about watching other artists and seeing what they do creatively, highlighting areas of practice that we don’t usually get to see.

I think we need to look at the other side, at the audience. What’s important is not being a passive viewer but also having the chance to come to a central space, The Adelaide University Union precinct, where there will be a lot of people milling around who will have all seen work and want to talk about it. It’s been increasingly difficult for the Fringe to find a centralised home. The Lion Arts Centre was a wonderful space but we had to move out so that the University of SA could move in. It came down to the East End but there’s been quite rampant residential development going on there. There just aren’t the spaces there any more. Adelaide University Union precinct offers something unique. There’s an existing infrastructure that we can move into: the beautiful old cloisters where we can have a temporary box office, run bars and catering, and where people can hang out on the balmy Adelaide late summer nights. Adjacent are the union buildings which house the Uni Bar which is going to be our Fringe Club. There’s a cinema, another 8 venues that range from 60 seats up to around 250. Within the Hub we’ll have a very balanced program which, of course, will feature comedy and cabaret but also physical theatre, contemporary dance, music and cross-artform work.

The Mother of Invention competition is about inventors. You’d have to say they are amongst the most passionate, lateral, innovative, creative people working in ridiculous conditions and sometimes coming up with ideas that are hugely important for the development of the area they’re focusing on. I think that’s a creative journey that’s nice to highlight in the context of a Fringe because they operate absolutely on the fringe. It’s a way to engage with the SA Museum and they’re really excited having us there. And it’s a nice way to parallel creative thought in the artistic sense with other areas. I think there’ll be a huge diversity of stuff. We had a preview launch down here recently and a guy came up from Bordertown with this U-type harvester that he’d invented and we had a really excellent performance where he was sitting there on his harvester with all these chicks from Shimmyshock, a performance art group here, interacting with the harvester.

There’s a huge amount of thought and process given to every single element that ends up being presented in the Fringe and to have a theme that is a starting point for discussion is really useful.

Initial research concentrated on examining the physical sensibility of the performers, the primary aim being to develop a training process which, generally, assists in the articulation of the performer’s physical sensibility and, specifically, explores a perceived Australian spatial reality in performance…The company has drawn from a diverse set of forms and disciplines such as dance-theatre, bio-mechanics, martial arts, new media practice, Suzuki acting method and sport.
NYID publicity material

David Pledger is the Artistic Director of the Melbourne performance ensemble, not yet it’s difficult (nyid). Since 1995 the ensemble has presented 8 productions: Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy (1995), Nil, Cat and Buried (1995), William Shakespeare: hung, drawn and quartered (1996), Training Squad (1996), The Austral/asian Post-cartoon: Sports Edition (1997), Chicago Chicago System 98 (1998), Journey Into Confusion (2000) and Scenes of the Beginning from the End (2001)—merciless exposés of certain tendencies in contemporary civilisation. Each show is dynamically crafted physically, vocally, rhythmically. Each show has pushed to the edge the performers’ endurance and daring and challenged the audience to deal with the social implications of the issues raised. The works have been acclaimed critically, receiving 4 Green Room awards, mainly for innovative performance.

What are the lineaments of a culture? The company has asked this again and again. Where does its power lie? Where is its energy contained? What are its landscapes—natural and urban? How does it control its aberrant forces? With what forms of violence is that control applied? How is a culture—its content and its discontents—mediated and in what ways do the forms of that mediation shape the very culture it is relaying? The focus is on image, ensemble, performer presence and technology. The basic artistic team consists of Pledger, dramaturg Peter Eckersall, production manager Paul Jackson and the performers (including, consistently, Greg Ulfan, Paul Bongiovanni, Danielle Long and Kha Tran Viet).

In addition to the striking success of its live and technological communication, nyid produces and markets itself with flash and edge. It has a 21st century profile and its aspirations like its critique are global rather than purely local. It has instituted both a series of Independent Theatre Forums (the papers were reproduced in RealTime) and R & D Cubed, a program devoted to research into practice, which has given birth to 2 research projects, nyid tv and The Desert Project. It has also produced one film, The Unmaking of, and Pledger has recently finished a documentary for SBS based on his grandfather’s background in Italy (Cosenza Vecchia, broadcast July 20).

I first got to know David Pledger when he was a member of the 80s group, The Globos, with their slick, kitsch, satirical, witty, live ‘clips’ of pop songs. This interview took place almost 20 years later in his home in Elwood in July 2001.

Technology & perception

I was born in the 60s and I grew up with TV. I’ve never really known a life without TV. Technology is fundamental in the way that I see the world. I think that mediation through technology has absolutely created a shift in our perception of theatre. I never knew anything else.

Scenes of the Beginning from the End seemed to be playing with various degrees of audience involvement, shifting how we were to perceive the action in front of us. The first presentational movement piece shifted to a series of realistic vignettes voyeuristically witnessed by the audience through the windows of cars. This in turn shifted to a suburban family scenario played soap opera style in an open frame house. Finally we were in the theatre watching ourselves being watched.

When there’s a multiplicity of states of reception available for an audience, spectatorship becomes braindancing. The audience as a receiver of the performance is put in a situation where they are really watching how it’s communicated to them and then finally, and most importantly, working out what the meaning of that relationship is, as well as the content and the context. That variety of positions creates a dynamic relationship between spectator and action. The very last scene of Scenes, the surveillance section, gives you another point of view because it places the audience as the central agent.

Spectatorship & surveillance

In the final section of Scenes…, the audience is divided. One half watches, via hidden security cameras, the other half is seduced, engaged with, cajoled and browbeaten by the cast in the roles of members of the bureaucracy. The section culminates with certain members of that audience selected and taken off to be ‘beaten up’ in another sealed off space. The fascination of surveillance becomes a violent act in its own right.

The interplay between spectatorship and surveillance has been a major theme in my work since I started working on the media back in 97 (in Sports Edition). I’ve always been fascinated with movies like Rear Window: the phenomenon of watching someone who’s not aware of being watched, while being watched yourself.

As a mechanism for first world societies this phenomenon is poignant, sad and also titillating. The idea that this kind of social activity is commodified and sold and corporatised—literally institutionalised—has always intrigued me. Watching shows like Big Brother, for example, is sad because you think ‘god, don’t they have anything better to do?’ And yet there’s a kind of titillation about the fact that you’re watching someone doing something ‘real’ as opposed to doing something ‘not real.’

And this titillation, in turn, is connected to your own unexpressed desire to be watched. That is the emotional landscape of my interest in surveillance. Socially and politically there is something seriously dysfunctional in the whole surveillance relationship and its potential—the first world, which is America, is going to look at the farmers in the third world, just to make sure that they’re going about their business.

All of this technology is completely and utterly possible and in between that spectrum of looking at someone when they’re not watching you, and that kind of organisation of power and capital, are these multiplicities of mediation which determine the way that we organise ourselves in space, our emotional lives, our thinking.

We’re going to show the surveillance section of Scenes at the International Media Art Award, ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany), in October. It’s very exciting because the whole theme of the award is surveillance.

Technology: real & unreal

I’ve made 2 films now and both are documentary dramas. In a lot of my theatre shows I’m really interested in looking at the documentation of the real. But a documentary is an utter construction. Drama, on the other hand, is a form which says ‘No, we are representing life for you on the stage’ and yet sometimes drama attempts to be reality. And on one level that is simply what drama is and its pretence to be about something else is a lie.

Technology is just another medium for exploring the relationship between the real and the unreal. The gestural choreography in our work is another kind of technology, one in which the abstraction of real action is put together as a way of developing another form of language as text, and also a substitute for text. So if you look at verbal language as ‘the real thing’, and the movement that arises out of it and is abstracted from it as ‘the unreal thing’, then the distance that’s created between text and movement in my work is really looking at issues of reality and unreality.

Placing the audience

I’m so not interested in the actor’s transformation. Transformation is a very old fashioned way of thinking about acting. I think it’s not performative. When you look at performers and actors transformed on stage, the agency of fear is with them and not with the audience and that is counterproductive and unpolitical. The audience may at best be active empathetically and kinaesthetically but they’re not active socially. At all times the audience should be conscious they are in a theatre. You can be engaged and you can be taken away and your imaginative landscapes can be scoured by the presentation of the ideas of the theatrical piece but it is essentially a piece of theatre. The deceptions of illusionist theatre are no longer appropriate and younger audiences just don’t buy them.

The ensemble needs to have an understanding of what the performance means for us. Then what we try to do is give the audience, through the style of presentation, the problem of the thing that they are watching. The audience is not observing our journey as characters through the narrative. We are instead presenting a set of ideas and concepts and ways of thinking which the audience are being asked to piece together every single night, with us and for us.

Going too far

Humour is the point at which the audience’s possibilities are opened up. Octavio Paz once said that humour renders everything it touches ambiguous. This is a very politically active space to be in. Humour is vital in all our theatre.

At the opposite extreme is violence. It closes off options and causes decisions. In The Sports Edition there is a section when we act violence on Kha. This was made in response to One Nation and their targeting of Asians and Indigenous Australians. And the audience is identifying with the fact that here is a guy who’s feeling that every single value in his world is diminishing as a result of the political agendas that are being acted out on the street and that diminishment becomes a problem for us as citizens of Australia. It also becomes a problem for us as members of the company because the working through of that whole process of beating him up and constructing a choreography and language for it can be quite traumatic. You make a decision whether you go on, and obviously the decision has to rest with the person who is at the centre of the violence. We all have to ask ourselves, ‘Are we going too far?’

The paralysis one feels at the moment of witnessing violence is a really dynamic situation in which we find ourselves more and more as the world becomes more overtly violent. But this moment at which the audience decides whether or not to engage or step in to halt the violence is the point at which action, social action, is made decisive.

Whose vision?

When I hear questions like that I feel like the work is diminished because the work is not essentially mine. It is the audience’s. Also, the representation of my work is not just about me in my space because I work collaboratively with other people. And because I work as an artist, I work from the danger zone of the unknown where too much analysis from a personal point of view can close up so many possibilities.

The moment at which you remain within your work is the moment at which you continually leave it. There is no sense in identifying what any single piece means in my personal life, because it is part of a continuum of a series of landscapes in which I live and work simultaneously.

The story within a performance is not about me, but essentially it has parts of me in it. I take the prime authorial role, but the pleasure of collaboration allows my 2-dimensional vision to be expanded into the 3-dimensional world of working with a group of people whose intelligences and imaginations constantly contribute to every facet of every show.

nyid’s annual workshop & research program in August will initiate the company’s social capital fund, which will contribute part-proceeds to an independent social welfare agency. Next year nyid will use the fund as a challenge program to lever an equal donation from targeted private sector and philanthropic organisations. David Pledger has been awarded a Churchill fellowship to travel to Germany, Senegal, New York and Denmark.