Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

October 2001

The tango is a powerful, popular form of dance and music from Argentina that has long crossed the high-low art divide, achieving an entirely new level of cultural intensity and global reach in the 90s. Progressive jazz producer Kip Hanrahan played a key role, recording Astor Piazolla and ensemble on the Nonesuch label in the 80s with a rare vivdness and depth of sound, capturing the composer’s rich theatricality. The likes of Daniel Barenboim and Gidon Kremer contributed CDs from the classical end of the spectrum in recent years and Piazolla’s orchestral works and opera have enjoyed a quieter if still significant posthumous profile. Sally Potter’s soggy, mid-life crisis movie about the tango added further to the form’s popularity.

To take on the tango is a brave move and in the hands of Rock’n’Roll Circus and director Yaron Lifschitz, the tango, outside the Piazolla soundtrack, is disappeared–a curious piece of magic. The tango becomes mood, the tango as imaginary rather than real. Look, no dancing.

The globalisation of the tango means that like many a World Music, the form has been uprooted and de-cultured. We’re used to this phenomenon and we’re more often than not forgiving. But Tango, by using the very name, sets up expectations that for some us cannot be met. For others, like the rapturous audience I was part of, it was not an issue.

Put all that aside, which is not easy, and Tango is a pretty good show. Though there are a few other things that I’d like to get out of the way first. After more than 20 years of physical theatre in Australia, here is a company that can’t decide whether it is performing a coherent drama or stringing together routines that require show-bizzy bows. Some of the routines have such a theatrical intensity that it seems a sin to applaud, but the performers are asking for it, so… Others are so mundanely a show of skill that they read like fill. Some are too ambitious–the pre-climax chair-tower scaling is so un-confident that real fear creeps into the audience. The lessons are always the same: know where you’re going, don’t do repertoire for its own sake, do what you can do best and integrate it.

Still, I more than like Tango. The performers look good, they can act, they exude a mix of innocence and brooding intensity that is engaging and when Liftschitz fuses these with sudden spectacular flight and intense physical contact, Tango is gripping.

Tango works, but only moment by moment and not as a coherent vision. The Edward Hopper bar-room narrative it promises peters out leaving the female member of the erstwhile triangle right out of the picture–in fact at the top of a very high pile of chairs. The ending, with Dylan’s “I Shall be Released” is only forgiveable because it is sublimely sung (no tango inflections)–but its fit in the scheme of things seems unmotivated. The set similarly mixes muted Hopper with brightly coloured mats, cancelling out the requisite atmosphere. With so much going for it, Tango could have been helped by taking on a writer, and dancing the tango–it seems the right place for it, its potential for physical display enormous.

Rock’n’Roll Circus, Tango, director Yaron Liftschitz, designer Ralph Myers, lighting Jason Organ, performers Ben Palumbo, Lauri Kilfoyle, Andrew Bright, Davey Sampford; Brisbane Powerhouse, Aug 29-Sept 9

RealTime issue #45 Oct-Nov 2001 pg. web

Barry Schwartz & The Arterial Group, ELEKTROSONIC INTERFERENCE

courtesy the artists

Barry Schwartz & The Arterial Group, ELEKTROSONIC INTERFERENCE

The huge, wide walls of the Brisbane Powerhouse Turbine Hall wrap around us, flooded with images moving slowly, vertically, the effect is vertiginous. In the centre of the hall digital images play on a large screen above a collection of bright metal sculptures standing just above water. A projection on another wall picks up artists and technicians as they move purposefully about the space. A choir appears on various levels delivering text in song, chatter, chirp and mutter. The recorded voice of an elderly one-time Powerhouse worker, Max Ham, intones the fun of working life (including his workers’ skiffle group, The 5 Kilowatts) and the horrors of a building then awash with asbestos and machines that chopped off fingers and limbs. A long row of artists and technicians sit at a bank of computers, lighting and sound desks. Centre stage is the American Barry Schwartz (electro-mechanical structures, RT#44) and, constellating about him, the Belgian Bastiaan Maris (chemo-acoustic installations), the Brisbane artists Andrew Kettle (sound) and Keith Armstrong (visual production) and others in their coveralls.

As the installation-performance slowly unfolds over the hour, sparks begin to fly, shooting out of the top of a condensor accompanied by shards of sound. Schwartz activates the sculptures. The stroking of a large metal disk yields eerily primal metallic groans. The artist lowers what looks like a huge, smoking turntable arm onto the same disk unleashing pure, massive cymbal-like tones. The pace of the work accelerates, the tone growing more ominous, the choir heralding something apocalyptic, Ham telling of death by electric shocks, death by asbestosis. Schwartz dons long, protective, insulated yellow sleeves and big gloves, dips them into water and turns to the big screen, now streaming with water. He strikes, igniting the water with balls of electricity that travel up and fade, as others climb higher and higher, each stroke ringing out like chorded bells heralding the end of time. Unlike the workers in the Powerhouse who were electrocuted and resuscitated or died, Schwartz is safe, transforming danger into awesome, if grim beauty.

In a key moment, a wiry tree sculpture (realised exquisitely as well in a digital version onscreen) is picked up, electrified and inverted by Schwartz—“The possibilities for radical enchantment are signified by an inverted wattle tree—resembling the Jewish inverted tree of life—which was part of the ceremonial initiation of young [Indigenous] men and was called kakka, meaning ‘something wonderful’” (program note).

To see a living installation on such a scale and of such ambition as Elektrosonic Interference in Australia is a very rare experience. Limited funds, short development periods, inadequate venues and scarce technical resources usually gravitate against the realisation of artistic visions of this kind. However, Brisbane’s Arterial Group have managed to find the collaborators, the financial support, goodwill and the venue with which to realise a major multimedia creation.

It’s hard to do justice to the scale of the work. There are other resonating layers. The site-specific response to the Powerhouse (built in the 20s to power Brisbane’s tram fleet) also includes the site’s environmental and Indigenous past, primarily found in writer Douglas Leonard’s text, scored by composer Stephen Leek and performed by The Australian Voices, and visually echoed in the projections on the Powerhouse walls, spelling out ‘Terra Nullius’. In antithesis to this oppressive notion, Leonard uses another local Indigenous word, Kore, denoting wonder. The text and composition, Kore, includes a litany of environmental riches:

eastern water dragon/saw-shelled tortoise/swamp snake/broad-palmed rocket frog/clicking froglet/echidna/chocolate bat/fawn-footed melomys/ferny azolla/spikerush grogbit/golden-lined whiting/bull rout/pacific-eyed rainbow fish/freshwater catfish/azure kingfisher/rainbow lorikeet/red-legged pademelon/rufous bettong sugar glider

These are spoken against sung lines: “They are coming back, the weeping bottle-brush, the broad-leafed apple, giant ironwood, white bean, black ti-tree, native holly, axe-handle wood…Kore, Kore, Kore, they are coming back,” and an invocation of Nguril, the Creator of the river, plains and creeks of the region.

Barry Schwartz & The Arterial Group, ELEKTROSONIC INTERFERENCE

courtesy the artists

Barry Schwartz & The Arterial Group, ELEKTROSONIC INTERFERENCE

Leonard has also constructed the sound text drawing on the oral histories of the multicultural Powerhouse workers, revealed in their terse natural poetry, their detached accounts of workplace accidents and management negligence, recollections of the Powerhouse cat, a river overflowing with fish, and pride in The 5 Kilowatts.

The cinematic dimension to the work is enveloping, entailing whole walls and screens, recorded and live projections. It provides a rich theatre of simultaneity, of choosing where to direct one’s gaze as the work unfolds.

For a creation of such ambition and textural complexity it’s not surprising that it didn’t always work or please everyone. Opening night appeared to be seriously under-rehearsed. For 20 minutes it looked like it wasn’t working at all, although there was a lot of flurried techy movement about the stage. The choir, even when miked, were often hard to hear above the soundtrack and the talkative audience—but when they were heard in their scored whispering, muttering, coughing and singing, they excelled. Lighting ranged from spectacular to inadequate—Schwartz was seriously underlit at crucial moments. A show that sets up such huge theatrical expectations has to go some way towards meeting them, even if it is an installation with its roots in the anti-theatrics of performance art.

For many who found the first 40 minutes sluggish and unfocused, all was forgiven in the last 20. For others the work was always unwieldy—too many layers, too many collaborators. Some had seen Schwartz perform overseas, describing his work as more complete, more coherent when more or less on his own. One viewer described him as a showman out of context in the preoccupations of his collaborators. Of course, the line between showman and artist is often a thin one in contemporary performance, and certainly Schwartz’s offering in Elektrosonic Interference was not as spectacular as some had hoped. Its beauty was rare and idiosyncratic and the meshing of water, electrical flow and spark and sound was often remarkable. But for the audience the work did require a special patience and attention under sometimes difficult circumstances—awkward production values, tiny program notes, an hour or more of standing, often crowded viewing. Apparently, subsequent performances were more focused and more satisfying.

Elektrosonic Interference needs to be rewarded for more than ambition. Australia can be a punishing place to work, off-the-cuff dismissal is de rigeur, failure to recognise achievement and potential is common, though a little less brutal than it has been. Works on the scale of Arterial’s vision (involving more than 70 artists, technicians, singers, volunteers) remain rare and are usually the province of overseas artists in shows we hear about, but rarely if ever see. The collaboration with Schwartz and Maris offered an opportunity to embark on such a venture. It is to be hoped that the Australian collaborators will carry this unique experience forward into new, equally ambitious projects.

It has been wearying in recent decades to see theatre company casts whittled down, performance ensembles disappear, feature films strangled by small budgets. No wonder Theft of Sita and Cloudstreet have been greeted so passionately—scale is integral to their power. Brisbane’s ELISION ensemble is another company working with installation as performance and across artforms. transmisi was performed in the Tennyson Powerhouse in 1999 for the Asia Pacific Triennial, Opening of the Mouth in the Midland Railway Workshop for the 1997 Perth Festival. IHOS Opera too operate on a rarely seen scale. Big is not always best, but unless Australian artists seek to experiment with scale, and are empowered to do so, we’ll continue to feel that something is missing.

Arterial Group-Barry Schwartz Collaboration, Elektrosonic Interference, director/performance artist Barry Schwartz; sculpture workshop/technical director Bastiaan Maris; concept development Douglas Leonard, Barry Schwartz, Therese Nolan-Brown; Turbine Hall, Brisbane Powerhouse, Sept 6-8

RealTime issue #45 Oct-Nov 2001 pg. 29

Rockhampton Gardens Symphony

Mitchell Gallery & Studio

Rockhampton Gardens Symphony

In Brisbane

For 10 music-filled days I saw concerts and wrote and edited in the Brisbane Powerhouse, site for much of Lyndon Terracini’s 2001 Queensland Biennial Festival of Music (see interview, RT#43). It was an intense, always enjoyable and often revelatory experience—not only of unique music expertly played, but also of an artistic community celebrating what it loves to do and finding time to spend together. With Assistant Editor Jenny Speed and a team of Brisbane writers, most of them artists, RealTime produced reviews online and distributed print copies in the Powerhouse. Also now on our website are articles on the Biennial’s International Critics’ Symposium. A small selection from our QBFM articles, and excerpts from others, appear on these pages along with a list of all the reviews online.

Beyond the Powerhouse, the festival made Brisbane appearances at Southbank (a stunning, standing ovation-Turangalila-symphonie), City Hall (Anumadutchi, the Dutch percussion group with African guests ), Customs House (ELISION ensemble’s Spirit Weapons), St Mary’s (a packed out Critical Mass for the homeless and a rivetting Song Company recital) and, again at Southbank, the Stuart Series, an excellent set of twilight concerts working out the new Stuart grand piano (Lisa Moore, Paul Grabowsky and Michael Kieran Harvey brilliantly showcasing the instrument).

Across Queensland

Concerts were staged in Mackay, Townsville and Cooroy, and in Barcaldine, Rockhampton and Logan City workshops and events brought artists and communities together. In Logan City, in Queensland’s Bible belt, Terracini successfully introduced Sydney’s Cafe at the Gate of Salvation (in performance and workshop) and the Indigenous singer Rochelle Watson to an audience of thousands in a 7 hour celebration of song including some wildly received Christian rock’n’roll.

Terracini wanted to hold a festival that people in regional Queensland could feel connected to. He’s particularly proud the way participation worked so well in the remote western town of Barcaldine (home to the Tree of Knowledge, site of the famous 1891 shearer’s strike meetings and birthplace of the Australian Labor Party) where 200 townspeople made and played marimbas. Terracini said, “It’s one of those events where people will say ‘I was there.’ One of the reasons it worked well was because everyone wanted to work together. They came from everywhere in the Barcaldine community. They had a great relationship with Jacinta Foale and Mik Moore. Mik took all the workshops for making the marimbas and Jacinta taught them how to play and wrote a piece called Barcaldee. Now it’s their piece.

“We rehearsed in this huge space, the Workers’ Heritage Centre. I had to mould a huge cast into an ensemble and that happened very quickly in 2 rehearsals. Venáncio Mbande was there from Mozambique and the participants saw the marimbas he’d made and was playing…there was a fantastic bond.

“We closed off the street at 2am, built the stage—the whole thing was a huge logistical exercise. We asked David Thompson, a custodian of the country up there to speak first to welcome us all to country. He’s a descendant of the Aboriginal people who had lived there who were massacred. He’s gone back to live there. He came off stage and burst into tears, an extraordinary moment. Then the Mornington Island song men—freezing, painted up, in their head dresses, doing a terrific job—were singing festival to Queensland. And the sun came up and shone through the branches of the Tree of Knowledge. We’d timed it.

Anumadutchi came on and did the Barcaldine Suite written especially for the festival. The 200 players of the Barcaldine Big Marimba band were seated either side of the stage joining in and 1,500 people in the street were screaming and whistling—a wonderful atmosphere at 7.20 in the morning. And then the Barcaldine Big Marimba played Jacinta’s piece and one by Linsey Pollak, and then they played with Anumadutchi—a fantastic finale. Then we had a barbeque.

“Then we went on to Rockhampton. The gardens are beautiful. We had a number of stages, again with trees as a theme—a bamboo stage, a banyan stage and a hoop pine stage. Various Rockhampton ensembles played on the smaller stages so people could move through the gardens and hear concerts during the day. Thousands turned out. The Song Company performed on the massive hoop pine stage (we had to be able to get 400 people on it) in a kind of natural amphitheatre. At 4.45 Roland Peelman came on to conduct the premiere of Elena Kats-Chernin’s Rockhampton Gardens Symphony, a half hour choral symphony with the Rockhampton Concert Orchestra, marimba band, the City Brass Band, drum kit, 2 choirs and a tenor soloist from Rockhampton, Christopher Saunders—and a text by Queensland poet Mark Svendsen.

“At the end 5,000 people were on their feet. You don’t expect this in a garden. There was so much applause they had to play the last movement again and then the applause still went on. The players who were originally bemused by the music were now enamoured of it and they said would like to do more as a change from The Sound of Music. Normally you’d never get a standing ovation for this kind of work, but because it was theirs they were responding to new music, a new work, a world premiere. The town councillors took a risk on it and it paid off. The premiere got on to the front page of the Rockhampton Bulletin which called called it ‘a thriller of a symphony.’

“The contrast with the Federal government’s $200,000 Really Useful Company tour of Grease is disgraceful. If (Minister for the Arts) Richard Alston had seen these concerts…The lack of knowledge about what is happening to art and culture in regional Australia is appalling. If the Really Useful Company had to apply to the Australia Council for funding, they would never have qualified under the Council’s usual conditions.”

Terracini’s Biennial looked a success, even at its half way point when we met to talk. He was excited not only by the positive community response across Queensland, the standing ovations (“a new phenomenon here”), but also because, even though he wasn’t getting to sing, directing the festival “was like doing a show.” Despite the rather grim prospects for new music delineated in the accompanying International Critic’s Symposium, the festival’s audiences suggested a brighter picture. Though, as we all know, a festival can succeed where the year-round programming of new music can fail to engender anything other than small audiences comprising the usual appreciative suspects. Even so, Terracini’s adroit programming managed to satisfy diverse audiences without compromising the quality of the work, and suggests possible ways forward. My greatest pleasure came from being able to experience Messiaen’s Turangalîla-symphonie and new or rarely heard works performed by Lisa Moore, Michael Kieran Harvey, the Australian Art Orchestra, Topology, ELISION ensemble and Orkest de Volharding. Let’s hope that in 2003, the Biennial will return with Terracini again at the helm.

RealTime issue #45 Oct-Nov 2001 pg. 31

Anumadutchi

photo courtesy QBFM

Anumadutchi

Loops & Topology: Airwaves

Brisbane Powerhouse, July 24

Seventy-five minutes of radio archive history. FM clarity, AM telephone bandwidth. Old timers scraped out of mouldy shellac grooves. Naïve racists on rusty tapes. Databases of dickheads, geniuses, opportunists, and self-promoters. Arranged in reverse chronology. From now to then, from us to them, a salad of history where before White Australia was Belsen, before Clinton was Ghandi, where men had to walk on the Moon before Cathy could run that great 400. But the vocal text isn’t about cheap moralisms. It’s stochastic history not storyboard history.

And over and under the ‘Voice Portraits’ plays the music. A series of episodes and program pieces to reinforce or foil the text. George Bush whingeing about Saddam and damn that’s some funky bass. The Goons bubble up and Max Geldray lives again. Dad and Dave ride on the back of Click Go the Shears. Sometimes the musical quotes were right there on the staves; cut and paste, a straight up arrangement. But most times the references were oblique, witty, laugh out loud nostalgia. Not that the music was all quotes and ironic degree by a long shot.

…At the beginning I think of a happy John Zorn, then associations disappear pretty quickly as I get caught up in the individual personality of the piece. The sound is excellent, right volume, right balance on the instruments. The performers play to a click track, they’ve each got headphones on. I’m not surprised, the music’s often complex, the timing always precise. Strange, abstract rhythms suddenly synch perfectly to all time favourites. ‘Now is the time.’ ‘I have a dream.’ ‘Turn on, tune in and drop out.’

In Airwaves, music effortlessly holds the mirror to the musicality of language. And it is not just that either. Airwaves is a big piece, chockerblock, a must-have for the collection when the CD comes out. Play it entire or dip in and out. Don’t play it in the car while driving. Too distracting.

Greg Hooper

Karaikudi R Mani, Sruthi Laya Ensemble

photo Kate Gollings

Karaikudi R Mani, Sruthi Laya Ensemble

Australian Art Orchestra: Into the Fire

Brisbane Powerhouse, July 24

The AAO musicians were seated in a semi circle, cradling the Sruthi Laya ensemble, who sat at the very front of the stage. A big band in the round with the karnatic musicians in the solo spot. Adrian Sheriff and Sri Mani’s title track from the Into the Fire CD grew out of their 1996 collaboration in India and later in Adelaide. One of the real difficulties in cross-cultural composition is the need to find ways of overlapping the styles, and also of working at a level of depth and respect within the 2 cultures. The composers have taken the basic material of the raag, the karnatik scale, and developed an exhilarating, enthralling performance. With the brilliance and accuracy of some of the best classical and jazz players in Australia flying through the melodic phrases, sparse but warm harmonic material, and the total focus and control of the Indian master musicians, the audience was captivated. At an emotional level I found the performance of this composition deeply satisfying. If there is a definitive list of “classic” cross-cultural compositions and performances, then Into the Fire is definitely on it for me. …Just as we reached the crescendo, the AAO put down their instruments and sat back to listen to the Sruthi Laya. For 20 minutes we were mesmerised by the brilliance and accuracy of their playing. Then, as if this wasn’t enough, the AAO members moved back into position and with the mighty clap of Paul Grabowsky’s guiding hands the orchestra joined in again, thundering through to the coda. Beautiful stuff.

Jim Chapman

The Queensland Orchestra: Turangalîla-symphonie

The Concert Hall, QPAC, July 21

…The end result was both richly textured and wonderfully playful, completely enveloping the audience in the composer’s unique and often unpredictable sound-world. Michael Kieran Harvey particularly seemed to revel in the demanding piano lines. At times he pushed the brassy Stuart & Sons instrument to compete with the full orchestra while at others he interjected with Messiaen’s trademark snatches of birdsong (most prominent in the languorous sixth movement). If anything, perhaps the performance erred more on the raw dynamic side, losing some of the carefully layered harmonies and elements in the overall wash of sound. Some of the blame for this, however, could be levelled at the acoustics of the Concert Hall which at times lacked the clarity required for such a work.

Valérie Hartmann-Claverie’s Ondes Martenot had no such problems with the hall or competition from the orchestra—its pure sound managed to cut through everything. Messiaen gives the main love theme to this instrument and uses its soaring glissando effects to evoke an otherworldly and transcendent space…Hartmann-Claverie’s delicate use of vibrato layered with slow violins in the restrained sixth movement helped produce a haunting crystalline sound that beckoned the audience to gaze into the starry face of eternity while Kieran Harvey’s piano called us back with the earthbound song of birds. It is with this type of beautiful and essentially melancholic moment that Messiaen strives to express the inexpressible and to give us a space to experience a time outside of time. For a moment during the movement I closed my eyes and dreamed of the stained-glass light of Sainte Chappelle which so inspired Messiaen’s musical language.

…In the final acts of the work [conductor] de Leeuw pulled out all stops and let loose the rawness of Messiaen’s orchestration with the tuned percussion and brass sections particularly working frantically to deliver. This had such an overwhelming effect that by the end of the symphony’s epic 75 minutes most of the audience rose enthusiastically for a standing ovation. The overall effect was inspiring and revealed a viscerality and feeling that I had not encountered in recorded versions of Messiaen’s oeuvre. Though this performance may not stand as what some may call a definitive interpretation of the Turangalîla-symphonie it was certainly one to be experienced–tutti con brio!

Richard Wilding

Anumadutchi & The Queensland Orchestra

Brisbane City Hall, July 26

…The performers brought the venerable Venáncio on stage and set up the 8 pieces of the timbila. This was a rare treat for a Brisbane audience. This xylophone-like ensemble is something quite special. Venáncio is a Mozambican man who has led a hard life, like many from this region, but who has managed to maintain the tradition of this music nonetheless. The instruments range from the 19 key sanje to the 12 key dibhinda and the amazing 3 key chikulu. Each instrument is played with a 2-handed, complex polyrhythmic pattern. Imagine hearing them played at breakneck speed, and with each of the different instruments playing different parts, once again interlocking. It is a richly textured kaleidophone. The only way you can hear it is to let it sink into your mind and to focus on any of the hundreds of possible patterns that can be heard. Visually, the playing is exciting, especially watching the chikulu players hurling themselves at the 3 log sized keys of their instruments. Venáncio is an unbelievable player. The counter melodies that he was playing were so deep in the cracks of the other patterns that it’s hard to imagine that anyone else could play them. He is probably the best timbila player in the world. He is regarded as such in Southern Africa, and his performance confirms this.

Jim Chapman

ELISION: Spirit Weapons

Customs House, Brisbane, July 22

…Since its inception, ELISION has excelled in the production of a brilliant palette of sound colours. It is this range which leads me to think in gastronomic terms—the sounds are so physical one can almost taste them. Michael Smetanin’s Vault has this quality, with its gorgeously crystalline sounds made by spiky high notes on the harp combined with viola harmonics, metallic percussion and rushing piccolo runs, along with bottom-register bass clarinet rumblings. The music’s physicality is also expressed in body-based rhythms, played with James Brown tightness by the ensemble.

…Anthony Burr’s robust performance style (on contrabass clarinet) was used to great advantage in an extraordinary new work by Liza Lim. A new piece by Lim is always an event, and she continues to surprise. Spirit Weapons consists of 2 short pieces drawn from Machine for Contacting the Dead. Lim composed this large work for Paris’ Ensemble Intercontemporain on the occasion of an exhibition of newly unearthed 2,400-year-old Chinese musical instruments. She resisted the obvious choice of composing for replicas of these instruments and instead invented ritualistic music referring to another object found in the tomb—a triple-daggered halberd (cutting/stabbing weapon). Three percussionists, perhaps reflecting the 3 daggers, form a “meta-instrument” with the contrabass clarinetist. This is very serious music, a “radiation of ancient wood and metal”, but I can’t help imagining a sense of fun, perhaps even mischief, in Lim’s use of instruments.

Like Gavin Bryars’ Sinking of the Titanic, this is music imagined as happening under water, and the Leviathan sound of the contrabass clarinet is a perfect fit. The piece is a “slowed down, submarine version” of the other component of Spirit Weapons, a cello solo, played with miraculous fluency by Rosanne Hunt, in which harmonic overtones continually emerge from sliding notes and the dark sounds of loosened strings.

Robert Davidson

Orkest de Volharding: Andriessen Music Video Program

Brisbane Powerhouse, July 27-29

…Smetanin’s Eternity was musically the most interesting thing on the program, drawing a completely different sound world from the ensemble. Two clarinets were added (Paul Dean and Diana Tolmie, both familiar to Brisbane audiences) which helped even the balance between wind and brass, such that Smetanin was able to play with delicate antiphonal choruses of continually shifting homophonic blocks of sound. Paul Dean’s precise microtonal playing in the upper register was particularly impressive. This strange, symmetrical, microtonal minimalism perfectly distilled a sense of the eternal, the otherworldliness with which Smetanin characterizes his feelings when observing the night sky.

Andriessen and Greenaway have had a fruitful artistic partnership since their first successful collaboration on M is for Man, Music and Mozart (1991). I was in some subtle way disturbed by the live performance of Andriessen’s music alongside a screening of the film. The music, and its performance aspect, was ‘foregrounded’ to an extent inconsistent with how I experience music in Greenaway films. For me it upsets the balance, normally so precise and deftly handled, between the swarming fecundity of Greenaway’s foregrounds and the cool, sparse intellectual rigidity of his background structures. Certainly an interesting idea, and worth trying as a festival event, but ultimately a viewing of the original film gives a more complete and balanced representation of Greenaway’s intentions.

Simon Hewett

Lisa Moore – The Stuart Series

Auditorium, Queensland Cultural Centre, July 27

American composer Martin Bresnick’s For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise (2001) is a musical take on the William Blake poem and 21 illuminated line engravings of the same name (1818). Directed by Robert Bresnick (the composer’s brother), video artist Leslie Weinberg’s DVD projections consist of simple animations and manipulations of Blake’s black & white and illuminated emblems, enlarged onto an on-stage screen above the piano. Moore’s was both pianist and speaker, this time delivering the entire text of Blake’s poem.

As Moore starts to play the pulsing, determined Prologue, we meet the Lost Traveller, our Everyman companion for this 30 minute piece. He zooms on-screen, cane in hand, and hurriedly moves through time and space while trees pan right, sky pans left. Musically this world is built from colouristic expressive recitative, intersticed with pulsing sections of relatively static harmonies which rock unevenly, restlessly. Moore commands a counterpoint of voice and fingers, sometimes speaking the text to a rhythm; sometimes freer; and sometimes sung, as in the Epilogue’s slow and gentle jig addressed to Satan. …In an era of the supremacy of visual literacy, Bresnick’s collaboration with Weinberg is an example of evolution in action, as is the creation of the Stuart piano. A coherent multi-sensorial work, it invites sustained attention from a far wider audience than ‘pure’ concert music can hope to do.

Lynette Lancini

Michael Kieran Harvey – The Stuart Series

Auditorium, Queensland Cultural Centre July 23

Kieran Harvey explains that Australian composer Laurie Whiffen’s Sonata Mechanical Mirrors is “very loosely based on the Liszt B Sonata” and because it is built on “mirror images of musical cells…is awkward to play.” Well, this might not be Godowsky-does-Chopin, where the melodies at least remain recognisable, but Sonata Mechanical Mirrors is Lisztian in spirit, passionate, even demonic, and an olympian test for player and piano. Great waves of crystalline upper notes cascade against a thundering bass, the Stuart declaring ever greater capacity for volume, its middle range again revealing a bell-like radiance, the whole quaking but without surrender as Kieran Harvey sweeps relentlessly up and down the keyboard, pianist and piano at one. This is an exhausting, cosmos-conjuring 15 minutes. And once again, eruptions are succeeded by calm and afterglow…surrender or grace?

The work that lights up an already enthusiastic audience is Tim Dargaville’s Negra. Kieran Harvey notes its African references, gospel influences, Indian rhythms and distinctive recurrent note row. To my ears this is a great pulsing ragtime fantasia, always hinting at but refusing Joplinesque melody, driven by a pounding, rhythmically familiar left hand style pitted against constellations of upper end trills played at astonishing speed. At times it sounds like a virtuosic cross between Dr John and Jerry Lee Lewis. Is either in the market for a Stuart grand? Kieran Harvey makes a great salesman. In the sublime coda to Negra, as in Andriessen’s Trepidus, as the bottom notes die, the top ones quietly bristle with restless energy…until they too evaporate.

Keith Gallasch

Paul Grabowsky – The Stuart Series

The Auditorium, Queensland Cultural Centre, July 26

…Pivotal to the whole performance was Coal for Cook, dedicated to Ornette Coleman. An audacious nod given the Texan’s key ensemble innovation was the double horn front line quartet with no piano (ie no chordal accompaniment). This in its day freed Coleman’s alto sax into a domain of wild harmonic invention. The alteration of intention and conception was equally profound in the context of Grabowsky’s performance. The tone of the prior pieces, which saw the right hand trying to break free of the constraints imposed by the somewhat repetitive and pendulous walking bass figures, was fractured. This gave way to a much freer section with the pulse merely implied rather than insistently stated and restated and, more than that, feeding on the sheer aggressiveness of the work’s dedicatee. The nicest passage in the piece was perhaps the rapid 2 handed upper register section which mimicked the squally trumpet/alto sax blowing contests of Colemans’ own Prime Time quartet. Rendered on the chimingly bright-toned Stuart piano, these were as coruscations of light on a teeming sea.

Mitch Cunningham

Editor’s Note: RealTime published online reviews during the 2001 QBFM. The full online feature will be re-published in the archive in the future.

RealTime issue #45 Oct-Nov 2001 pg. 31-

Welcome to the third of RealTime's annual surveys of developments in Australian new media art. Working the Screen 2001 celebrates the Australian new media artists and works selected for the Brooklyn Academy of Music's (BAM) Next Wave Festival. Now in its 19th year, Next Wave has long had a reputation for innovative programming. This year the festival includes Next Wave Down Under, a month-long celebration of contemporary Australian arts. The BAM website features the work of nine Australian net.artists, provide links to the sites of fourteen new media artists, two net.sound sites, an online documentary on Chunky Move dance company and audio-on-demand broadcasts of works from ABC radio's The Listening Room. This online exhibition has been titled Under_score: Net Art, Sound, and Essays from Australia (www.bam.org/underscore [link no longer active]).

When the federal arts ministers Richard Alston and Peter McGauran announced the film industry assistance package last week, the highly managed launch was similar to the opening of a factory or the naming of a dam the only things missing were the hard hats.

In RT#40 (Dec 2000), we published “UK Arts: the creativity panacea” and in the editorial to RT#44 I raised the issue of the widespread retitling of ‘the arts’ as ‘creative industries’, a move heavily influenced by new arts policies from the UK. These days ideas and policy models spread with the efficiency of viruses. Bolton writes that “it’s understood a cultural policy statement is now cautiously being put together by the Department of Communications, with the intention of launching it during the coming election campaign. This will unite the separate sectors of the arts, formally label them as the “cultural industry” and announce them as a cornerstone of the information economy.” The first signs of the Federal Government taking an unusally strong interest in the arts are evident in the initiation of the Visual Arts Enquiry (successfully prompted by expert strategic moves from Tamara Winikoff and NAVA) and the injection of a much-needed $92.7m into the film and television industry. Bolton quotes Peter McGauran, the junior Federal Arts Minister, in an interview with The Australian Financial Review, as saying “‘We’re not going to peddle the myth that the creative sector is going to become the new grounding of economic innovation,’…But McGauran and Richard Alston, the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, have not been immune to current thinking on culture and its impact on the economy.”

The widely promulgated thoughts of Chairman Cutler (friend and advisor to Alston) of the Australia Council have doubtless played a role in these developments. He most certainly has argued that artist innovators can do much for industry and the economy. For this reason RealTime requested an interview with Terry Cutler to ask how the artists benefit from the arts-industry equation. The ensuing discussion with Alessio Cavallaro, Sarah Miller, Linda Wallace and myself makes for fascinating reading.

The promise of improved arts funding looks more than likely. In WA a state budget increase of $7.6 million for the arts and future commitment of $26.5 million has been announced. Its theme, “Rebuilding the Arts”, acknowledged that there is still much more to be done. Arts advocacy group Arts Voice agreed. “The erosion of fiscal resourcing over the past decade has resulted in many organisations being so over-stretched that the energy needed to undertake substantial creative and productive work for the benefit of Western Australians has been sadly diminished.” The budget includes increased support for smaller organisations including the Blue Room Theatre, PICA, Multicultural Arts through Kulcha and the Community Arts Network and Indigenous arts through Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre. Arts Voice also welcomes increases in available funds for regional touring for performing, visual and literary arts and a focus on regional access. Sarah Miller, Artistic Director of PICA, cautioned that “these increases will only return organisations to early 1990’s
funding levels.”

Elsewhere, recent Australia Council grant results in New Media Arts, theatre and especially dance left many artists distraught. If new money comes into the Australia Council, and it is vital that it does for this country’s creativity, it should be directed through the Boards to artists and not to special initiatives and one-off programs. If the Federal Government and the Australia Council are putting such store by innovation then they must give it the support it warrants. The In Repertoire guides to exportable Australian performance that RealTime has produced for the Australia Council are proof that innovation here is alive and widespread, often touring internationally, often struggling to survive. They are also evidence that innovation needs to be understood within and without the emerging paradigms of the arts as digital content and cultural industry. While a functional approach to the arts and how they can profit Australia can help justify government expenditure, it could inhibit vision and should be handled with care.

The recent RealTime-Performance Space forum, The Place of the Space, addressing the role of contemporary art spaces and the future of PS, proved a significant event. One hundred participants joined in this 2 hour, open-ended discussion, more in the courtyard afterwards. Eloquent contributions from Nicholas Tsoutas, Sarah Miller, Zane Trow, established and emerging artists, and representatives of other arts venues, provided inspiration and material with which to move forward. The presence of Jennifer Lindsay, the new Deputy Director General of the Arts in NSW, and her participation in the sometimes confronting dialogue made the event even more worthwhile. The transcript of the forum will appear here in early October.

In this edition, we celebrate Australian innovation in new media arts with the publication of our third annual Working the Screen liftout. The artists represented in its pages have been selected by BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) for an online exhibition, Under_score, in its Next Wave Down Under program, part of Next Wave 2001, New York. We hope you enjoy Working the Screen and find it a valuable, ongoing resource. As well, in response to endless requests for the names and websites of new media artists, in October we’re opening our New Media Index (NMI) page on our newly addressed, more easily accessed website: www.realtimearts.net. As NMI grows we’ll be including images, reviews and news.

Sad to say, Philip Brophy, our OnScreen Cinesonic genius, has decided, with regret, to leave RealTime. After 5 years of contributing his bi-monthly column despite a heavy teaching load, organising the unique Cinesonic annual sound and cinema conferences (and getting them published), Philip has decided to commit himself to his art, a reminder that he has been the creator of some key Australian films and responsible for the brilliant sound design for the 2000 feature film, Mallboy. Thanks Philip for the use of your finely tuned cinema-going ears for the last 5 years, we’ll seriously miss them. RealTime readers
will seriously miss them.

In a short burst we witnessed unfathomable horror. And yet we have been denied witnessing others’ horror for years. There is compassion for some and not for others. In a brief instant all the gains of dynamic multiculturalism have been decimated. We are witnessing the lie of justice for all and the surge of globally manufactured racism with the invocation of crusader vengeance and the politicisation of difference.

Synergy no longer surprises me although populist ignorance, and talkback’s propensity for connecting the asylum seekers and terrorists, is astounding. Recent actions have made it acceptable to demonise difference. There has been deplorable lack of leadership in the face of cowardly racist attacks. Perverse government policies are sanctioning these actions while contradicting the basic principles of mainstream multicultural society and the ethics of hospitality. Communities are increasingly fragmenting and segregating and the possibilities for reconciliation seem further away than ever. Critical multiculturalism has become a burning issue—the pervading spectre of our time. As John Rajchman asked, “how can we be ‘at home’ in a world where our identity is not given, our being-together in question, our destiny contingent or uncertain?” Responding to this challenge of dealing with cultural and racial difference in the face of the escalating politics of prejudice will be our greatest test of maintaining a just, hospitable and creative society.

At a time that now seems so much lighter, the July Globalisation + Art + Cultural Difference Conference addressed the renegotiation of multicultural discourses for the arts. Providing a multidisciplinary platform of theory, activism, policy, art and ethics, this was a vital colloquium that investigated the current debates in an international context seeking to come up with global solutions. It combined industrial-strength talk with a serious commitment to providing new models of cross-cultural collaboration in workshopping solutions for future action and understanding. This was the first conference I had been to where there was a healthy, non-hierarchical mix of artists, theorists, activists and policy makers.

Convened by Nikos Papastergiadis, Nicholas Tsoutas and sponsored by the Arts in a Multicultural Australia Policy of the Australia Council, the conference attracted a full-house from around Australia to hear 16 excellent papers and celebrate the launch of Jennifer Rutherford’s terrific book, The Gauche Intruder (Melbourne University Press, 2001), that traces the pressures on Australian morality. There was a large contingent of international guests and inspirational Australian speakers: a wonderfully productive cacophony of accents, positions, backgrounds and colours that denied the need to pin down identity.

Papastergiadis set the tone for the weekend by declaring his boredom with cultural identity and theory. In privileging slapstick theory and a dis-ease with identities he called for a proactive engagement with multiculturalism in private relationships and outside official discourses. A number of speakers reminisced about their search for a way to feel at home when confronted by the ambivalence of the hyphenated-experience that inspired both shame and later empowerment in the possibility of escape from the dominant culture. Ien Ang called this routine, so integral to everyday life, “living in translation.” This is a constant process of negotiation between cultures and communication that denies a notion of ethnic homogeneity since the transformations are never uniform, but are oppositional and always localised. Although I used to think that the evolution into hybridity was a positive thing, Ang among others offered a critique of its redemptive powers, noting that hybridity is based on the destruction of optimistic reclamations of difference since they are always bound by power relations.

This floating existence with its de-centred whiteness and identity-in-process shaped for many a general comfort with being outside obvious belonging. Chinese-Australian artist Lindy Lee explained that despite being told from an early age who she was by how she was viewed, she found it liberating not feeling or being all that Chinese but coming to discover it later. By reinventing things through the ‘bad copy’ her work is a continuing assessment of issues of authenticity. She explained that she was looking at that which is not reproducible while questioning the self as an interweaving of myriad experiences. This is a search for living through a constant dismantling and recreation of new configurations. For artists and theorists, becoming-other of themselves and of the social milieu that they inhabit is essential for sketching alternative modes of belonging and possibilities for multiple translations.

Rasheed Arena, a theorist and artist, spoke about the parallels between modernism and multiculturalism and repercussions on art and social agency. He argued for the positive advancement of society through artists thinking collectively not individually, emphasising the critical role of cultural difference in community-based regeneration projects. Gerardo Mosquera, a curator from Cuba working through Caribbean poetry, spoke of the globetrotting installation artist as an allegory of globalisation—more global for some than for others. Jean Fisher, a writer on contemporary art from England, presented an engaging paper and slide show on the metaphysics of shit and the ethics and agency of the trickster. She argued that globalisation is empowering and that artists should make use of its effects—its excesses and waste in deploying an ethical responsibility. Ghassan Hage discussed transcultural migration and the Lebanese diaspora with a special focus on Venezuela. He identified hope as the greatest inspiration for immigration—the bargaining on increased possibilities of difference, greater security and opportunity away from home.

Marcia Langton and Hetti Perkins spoke in very different ways about Aboriginal art, ownership, innovation, authenticity and discursive marketing restrictions. They challenged a variety of preconceptions about Aboriginal art and its institutionalisation in the Western context that all too often just doesn’t get it, missing the playful and the sexy, living, social processes. Langton addressed the issue of authenticity and the suspicion of innovation in Aboriginal art and culture that, in the service of Western value and values, exploits the marketable yet unreconstructed trope of Stone Age primitivism. She argued that this construction of culture as a highly nostalgic post-imperial souvenired commodity denies Aboriginal responses to innovation, globalisation and most importantly secret-humour business. This reproduces the accusations of nostalgic traditionalism often levelled at multicultural art that denies the possibility of innovation through amalgamation. She argued for the dynamism and multiplicity of Aboriginal art that has an importance outside of the postcolonial white world that only gets the spiritual bongo-bongo and commercial value. Telling a story about the Rover Thomas paintings at the police station at Argyle Diamond mine and their community functions, she emphasised that the real audiences of Aboriginal art see the jokes and the dirty bits in an open-ended engagement. The ‘dirty bits’ are often edited out, but reappear in invented translations or place names. It was heartening to learn that the Australian sacred is covered in faeces, urine and sperm.

Similarly, new technologies have unleashed possibilities for new forms of communities and connections for cultural activism. Ricardo Dominguez, concealed in a black balaclava, presented a stunning autobiographical performance of his coming to digital consciousness through his involvement in the Zapatista networked activism. It was exciting to observe the history of hacktervism and its re-emerging connections with the new activists who have reclaimed the streets as sites of resistance. His comments on the ethics of international digital zapatismo tied in with the questioning of the limits of performance art in Coco Fusco’s reading of her as yet unperformed play, The Incredible Disappearing Woman, about the ‘disappearance’ of assembly line workers on the US-Mexican border. The play was not so much about the excesses of a performance artist recording having sex with the corpse of an unknown woman in a Mexican bordertown (and then attending a retrospective of his ‘censored’ work many years later) but, as Fusco explained, an imaginative investigation into the inequitable modes of cultural exchange and their institutionalisation. The decision to use the body of a Mexican woman to carry out a necrophilic sex act as performance, the actual transactions that enabled the artist to acquire the corpse in Mexico, and the ability to ‘make her disappear’ when she was no longer needed, demonstrated the economic and cultural intricacies of US-Mexican relations. The excellent reading was a potent allegory of the spectacle of inequality and the skewed ethical discourses that emerge in art practice. It emphasised the micro struggles by the gallery attendants to intervene in these processes, challenging us to consider how we as artists intervene with language, relations, practice and policy to achieve greater social and cultural equity.

Multiculturalism was seen as contentious with continuously shifting definitions and without a major all-encompassing theory. Although identified as no longer a minority issue, it appears to be meeting increasing resistance from populist voices claiming that it is an assault on Anglo-Australian culture. Fazal Rizvi argued for working pragmatically within prevailing state ideology and language while keeping the notion of multiculturalism unstable to provide active and radical possibilities.

Strategies for destabilising multiculturalism created 2 opinions for defining the way forward. Some argued for mainstreaming multiculturalism and taking it out of the ghetto while others saw benefits in maintaining its ghettoisation as a pragmatic form for artists working with cultural difference to obtain institutional support. Fusco stressed that theory can and should move beyond segregation of multicultural arts whilst funding arrangements continue to foster and support this area. The realities of Australian society and arts practice were identified as no longer fitting the prevailing policy and funding models. The policy of managerial multiculturalism with its benevolent ‘access and equity’ logic that tolerates but manages difference was dismissed. There was a lack of accord on how to ensure that multicultural and Indigenous cultures—the source of Australia’s greatest vibrancy and creativity, far more so than the nostalgic, antiquated ‘white high arts’—receive appropriate support. Yet this inspired a productive range of strategies for engaging with cultural difference and resisting dominance that included a focus on individual artists and issues, greater community engagement, reforming education and the unrealistic financial support of the western canon, battling cultural ignorance and de-categorising cultural difference to make it our central concern. The practical outcomes of this conference will define and influence the conceptualisation of future policy since artists working with cultural difference will continue to struggle with issues ranging between social equality and outlandish creative projects in the hope of negotiating new forms of an ethical, dynamic, multicultural Australia.

The conference was the best talkfest I have been to in terms of the quality and range of the papers, the high level of engagement from the audience and the inspiration for future engagements.

Globalisation + Art + Cultural Difference: on the edge of change Conference, Artspace, Sydney, July 27-29.

Melissa Madden Gray is a striking performer, whether in ELISION ensemble’s Liza Lim-Beth Yahp opera, Moon Spirit Feasting (formerly Yue Ling Jie, Adelaide Festival 2000, Melbourne Festival October 2001) or in Richard Foreman’s My Head Was a Sledgehammer for the Kitchen Sink company (Belvoir Downstairs, B Sharp, Sydney). Both are demanding works revealing the acting, singing, dancing and choreographic range of Madden Gray’s talents. She arrives for the interview with a touch of the flu, anxious about her voice—she’s performing nightly in the Foreman and rehearsing the opera during the day. But she is driven—no sooner has she been offered a seat and tea, than she’s whipped out the score of Moon Spirit Feasting and is demonstrating its vocal riches, how Lim has scored these and remonstrating with herself for singing when she shouldn’t.

When ELISION contacted me I had to do a demo tape. They’d heard about the work I’d done with Opera Factory in London which was a fairly extreme mixture of physical and vocal delirium. They had in mind a mezzo soprano with acrobatic skills. The framework for the demo was “chesty, nasal, guttural, Chinesey.” I stood in front of the microphone and I couldn’t find a way in to make those noises. This was during the horrors of Kosovo…you know that mass media imagery of all those women in trucks being carted off and that incredible keening, wailing. I couldn’t get it out of my head and the deadline was coming up to send the tape in and, ruthlessly, I used it. But it was honest in that I couldn’t stop thinking, what are we seeing in the world and what we are doing as performers and artists. Liza incorporated the essence of that demo into a chunk of the score—the Ghost Feeding scene. I had to re-process her processing of my ‘noise’ and then find a way into that but with her structure around it, still giving me quite a bit of room to improvise. That’s what’s exciting about working with a living composer.

She’s making my voice sound like a Chinese gong, using microtonal inflections, throat distortions, gasps, ululations, exhalations, harsh whisperings, extreme crazy vibrati. Sometimes she talks about Chinese Opera parody. There’s Mandarin in there which is very heightened. There’s street Cantonese which is really rough as I discovered when I had some coaching in somebody’s office and caused heads to turn! They’re all the things that come out when you play with the voice and start looking at extreme forms of expression that don’t come out with the general social and theatrical preoccupation with beauty or with careful grotesqueness. Understandably, most opera singers don’t want to push their voices to those limits.

You find ways of placing less stress on the voice. The hardest thing for me with this music is actually being sensible because it is so fantastic. Once you’ve deconstructed it and put it back together again, and put it in your body, it’s hard to do it half-heartedly. I can’t really make those noises unless I really hurl myself into it. Half way through the opera, where I’m pretty “possessed”—and I have simultaneous images of empowerment and disempowerment—I am a vessel for various hungry ghosts and I’ve got all sorts of geisha rape images and Bangkok prostitutes going through my head—it’s hard to put a lid on it. But I had to because for the other half of the opera I’m singing very high and very purely and I simply can’t get those notes if I’ve shredded my voice.

I did a lot of research before we started, particularly a trip to Singapore and Penang with the director, Michael Kantor, and the designer, Dorotka Sapinska, and looking at the Hungry Ghost Festival that the opera is based on. In Penang, there are shrines on every corner and street theatres where these performances are in constant play to the hungry ghosts who are let out once a year for a month—basically, ghosts who have no descendants to worship them and therefore need assuaging and distracting with constant performance and offerings. Moon Spirit Feasting is based on those street theatre operas which are now in very tawdry form. You can see very old people mouthing the words but a lot of young people don’t know what’s going on. It’s much more fashionable to have a karaoke night or these incredible performances where starlets leap out of black limos and jump on stage and do a couple of numbers in clear plastic raincoats, yodelling…

ELISION’s opera has the feeling of a bridge between something esoteric and something very contemporary. It’s sexy, it’s plastic, the design is almost Foremanesque with its little box stage..

Liza’s very interested in the necessity of ritual and you see it in Penang because people are burning effigies while they’re on their mobile phones. It’s part superstitious and part really entrenched in the psyche. But this work never feels like it’s just a pastiche.

It’s like the women performing in the street theatres in Penang during the festival and then she is also an ancient demon goddess who, in various forms of the myth, is either evil or good, fertile or infertile. I was also influenced, in researching this, by the sex clubs we went to in Bangkok. There’s a whole chunk of the opera, The Bridal Bed, where the entire sex manual—

Fantastic, I say! What’s art for? I tried to incorporate some of that as well. I had written a lot about the body in performance and pornography as part of my degree at Melbourne University. I did Arts Law and Honours in Fine Arts and German and was doing the final bits of my Law degree while I was still at drama school at WAAPA (West Australian Academy of Performing Arts).

As much as I could I made it performance-related and I did the final exams when I was rehearsing with Opera Factory in London. By day I was this shrieking primal force and by night I was sitting saying, hmm, trust accounts.

I’d had dance training. I had an extraordinary teacher—Merilyn Byrne. She was very strict but her major concern really was the joy of children dancing. I know now how unusual that is. She died last year but I realise now, I knew all the time, she was sort of my creative mother. I miss her terribly. Merilyn was so into the drama of it. She always had a monologue running over the top of everything—(SINGS) “The-ere is the hat for me, run, run, run….” It all had a sing-song thing which I think inadvertently led to my wanting to speak while I was moving.

So you always knew you’d go on to become a performer even with the arts law degree?

I was a stupidly over-imaginative child. I thought I was Elizabeth I for a period of time when I saw Glenda Jackson at age 3 or something. I was always performing. I had the full dance training in ballet and contemporary and jazz. I had a fabulous drama teacher at school and I was singing all the way through and also my mother used to take me to the Pram Factory when I was a wee thing and I would insist on going again and again to the same show, seeing people like Evelyn Krape and Tony Taylor and Sue Ingleton and, later, Robyn Archer. They are my strongest childhood memories. My grandfather was always taking me to the opera and Gilbert & Sullivan. So it was a very theatrical childhood. They’re all lawyers, so there was the simultaneous thing of, well, that’s lovely but of course, you’ll get a sensible career.

It was really quite a hotbed of experimentation—Kosky, Kantor, Lucien Savron. It was a really exciting time and it set me up with an idea of the possibilities of theatre. And then I had a scholarship to go to Berlin. It was this strange world of cultural clashes and essential truths. There was an International Theatre Institute World Congress and I was the Australian rep to the actors’ workshops and I happened to be placed with the Butoh director, Tadashi Endo, who’s based in Germany. That was mind blowing—my first experience of Butoh—especially having come from a movement based background and then to be opened up in a totally different way. As I’d shifted more into ‘acting’, I’d almost had to negate myselfas a dancer, to get weightier or more grounded. This was a different way back into the body. As much as my dance training was incredibly theatrical, you’re still working with that upwards and outwards energy and that I-won’t-breathe-till-I-get-offstage sort of thing. So to suddenly to be thrown into such a primal movement world, which made so much sense, it was really quite extraordinary. At the same time I saw Pina Bausch do Cafe Müller. I had seen her work on video before but to be working in such a supposedly ‘foreign’ theatre form but feel that it absolutely related to tanz theater made sense to me about, I guess, where I am now, using everything I have.

Yes, to say this is all you and these are all modes of expression and when it works it’s about the most pure, terrifying, visceral parts of us. I found that exciting because it’s natural for me to combine sound and body and not to divide them.

Hybrid is a great term in some ways but it sounds watered down to me rather than a built-up, holistic thing. Maybe we should refer to everything else as ‘divided’. The work that I’m attracted to, the people that I really love working with, are the ones who force you to confront why you censor.

First I went back to Melbourne University and wrote up my thesis on Annie Sprinkle and the body in performance. That was huge to work on because it felt like I couldn’t disengage from it in an academic or cerebral way. I started from a really anti-porn position, I guess, and the more I read, the more I started to think the more porn the better, the more in control of it people are the better, the fewer chances for exploitation, the more we realise the difference between fantasy and reality, the more we unlock the spirit, the less dangerous it is in repression. Having said that, then seeing those Bangkok sex clubs, I felt that I should re-write my thesis. You know, I’m an educated, white, middle class woman and, of course, speaking in relation to performance art and strip and exotica and pornography in a specific sphere. When I was faced with poverty en masse and desperation, obvious exploitation…so blatantly to do with power and money and the Western dollar, it was horrific. So I did re-enact a scene of that in the opera because I felt so broken by what I’d seen. And if you can’t respond in your artform then I don’t think you can justify being an artist. There are times I think I should be working in a women’s refuge where I can maybe tangibly measure—today I gave this person this phone number or took them and put them into a safe place. So I want to do that in my art and not make it a separate performance for people in the know.

This has been the great appeal of contemporary performance from the 70s onwards, where you can comment directly on your own experience, make your own life the material of your work.

It’s interesting now to know where to take that. I was in New York recently and I saw quite a lot of performance art and there’s such an expectation now for it to be transgressive. Where do you go from there? I saw John Fleck who was one of the NEA 4 and there was this great moment where he put newspaper on the floor and was about to shit and then didn’t. The only way he could now be subversive was not to be.

I think I needed to feel that I had the training. I did Music Theatre but they sold me the course very much in terms of contemporary music theatre more than musicals. And they let me do plays with the theatre school and classes with the dance faculty and work professionally in third year. It was a fantastic place to be, particularly because of the people they brought through. David Freeman from the Opera Factory did a workshop for the STC and he used some of us. To meet and work with him just re-connected me with all of my instincts about what theatre should be. It was totally timely. His way of working is so extreme but I like that.

He says, why would you do an improvisation half-heartedly? That’s 2 hours of your life gone! He’s gathered all sorts of exercises and techniques from all over the world. He draws on trance and primal forces and he puts you very quickly into a place where you can’t con yourself. It’s the same with Butoh where you go straight to ‘the thing.’ So his method is to hurl you into a whole lot of situations where something might happen, those blissful moments of no-mind, when you’re not censoring yourself….It’s not indulgent, huggy theatre. It’s about life being short and getting rid of the rubbish and going straight to the essence of things.

I did a workshop in Japan on Chikamatsu’s The Love Suicide at Amijima. Chikamatsu is Japan’s Shakespeare. And that was fascinating because there was a fabulous Welsh actor who’d worked a lot with the Royal Shalespeare Company, a Butoh performer now based in Paris, a Japanese soapie actress, a punk rock singer, a straight theatre actor and me. It was absolutely wild. We were doing the David Freeman version of this ancient play and because we didn’t have a common language we had to work in the most primal way. We all came from different performance traditions. In Britain David has this radical opera reputation. He’s got that preoccupation with the body and nudity on stage.

He’s says, “I just can’t help it. They’re just so easy to shock!” So in London I did the final Opera Factory show called And the Snake Sheds Its Skin by Habib Faye, a West African composer, who writes most of Yousso N’ Dour’s music, and a British theatre composer, Adrian Lee on the epic of Gilgamesh. So you had David playing Monteverdi, Phillip Glass, rock’n’roll, all of these different musical genres. For Habib it had no chronological significance and none of the weight of a western canon. It was just music. And David was playing him that and he’s got this fantastic West African pop sensibility and he’s putting this ancient text to music and then it was being morphed into theatre again by a British theatre composer. That’s the kind of collaboration that I love.

That production toured around the UK, then I worked with the composer John White. I came back and, since then, I’ve done the opera with ELISION and more recently lots of commercials and mainstream theatre.

The commercials are but I just love performing. I am energised by that variety. Recently I played Hedy La Rue in the musical How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying for The Production Company. The following week I did a webcast to the Amsterdam Festival for their closing night, John Cage Song Books. I’d made 3 short films for them and we did this insane live webcast at 5.30 in the morning. The program included people like Joan La Barbara and Sonic Youth—quite a fantastic line-up. The piece that I did was a video duet with my mouth pre-filmed on a Satie phrase, “Et tout cela m’est advenu par la faute de la musique”—“all of that is the fault of music.” And I’d just got back from New York where I’d seen so much well-meaning self-conscious art and some pockets of inspiration but a lot of things that really made me think I’m not gonna find the answer in any city; it’s got to be about collaborating with interesting people globally. The John Cage Song Books sort of encapsulated the joy and exhaustion of the compulsion to create.

It would be very hard to find someone else to do Moon Spirit Feasting the way you do it. But on the other hand, it’s not your work, though you’ve contributed substantially to it. Do you want to build your own repertoire?

I’m doing a crazy 60s deconstructed French cabaret character, Miaow Meow, who is becoming quite a force. She’s emerging but she’s performed for the Totally Huge music gang in Perth at Club Zho with Lindsay Vickery. She’ll do some gigs at the Melbourne Festival. I realise how much of my work is about the shift between sexuality and fetishisation. With Lindsay, I’m working on all those pieces, feeding them into a program that will reconstruct them into totally new songs which I’ll perform as a kind of cyber 60s cabaret girl who’s broken down and come back together again in a new musical framework.

You don’t feel any contradiction? You talked about how Butoh and working with Freeman gave you a holistic sense of total focus and energy where you could suspend that sense of consciousness and yet still be true to the work. Nonetheless, here you are doing a range of work that might make some think, well, yes, she can do Moon Spirit Feasting and the Foreman, but How To Succeed In Business…?

It’s a fantastic part! It’s hilarious. And you’ve got 2000 people at the State Theatre in Melbourne every night who really love it. Always this perceived dichotomy! Rodney Fisher directed me in Design for Living at the MTC and will direct me in Masterclass later this year and was co-producer of My Head Was a Sledgehammer. He’s an extraordinary man who’s obsessed with language and text and he’s got the same kind of intense brain as David Freeman—same but different. They’re just people who are passionate about theatre and getting the essence of you. That’s exciting. I don’t see a difference.

Yes, but I think it’s creatively deadly defining yourself by or limiting yourself to any particular place or scene. I love travelling and the global collaboration that technology facilitates. I’m very excited to do the tour (of Moon Spirit Feasting) to Berlin and Paris next year. Hopefully I’m also doing Dennis Cleveland at the Lincoln Centre with Mikel Rouse. His music is the opposite to Liza Lim’s in many ways but it’s the same in that he’s absolutely specific. He draws on his culture which in this case is TV talk shows, New York. It’s totally different but it makes sense to me to work with those people. They are honest. That’s what makes them interesting. I don’t think there’s pretension in that work, which is what I’m terrified of as a performer. I want to keep finding the ‘real’…even though it’s always shifting.

Dr Terry Cutler is 53 years of age, a former chief strategist with Telecom until the early 90s, Deputy Chair of the advisory board to the National Office of Information Economy, 1997-98, Chair of the Australian Government Industry Research and Development Board, 1996-98 and Managing Director Cutler & Co Pty Ld as well as a Council Member, Victorian College of the Arts. Cutler was co-author with venture capitalist Roger Buckeridge of the Commerce in Content report which is said to have fuelled the Keating Labor government’s Creative Nation program.

Cutler’s appointment to the Australia Council is unique: he’s not just a businessman, but one working in new media with projects in Tonga, Malaysia and in Australia and has close connections with government. When appointed Australia Council Chair, Cutler briskly adopted a high profile and made unusually early pronouncements in the press, on IT pages, in an article he wrote for Business Review Weekly and in an edited version of a speech reproduced in the Sydney Morning Herald. In the SMH he was reported as saying that, “Creativity will be the crucial driver of the new economy…and that as the first new chairman of the Australia Council in the 21st century he will be pushing the value of arts in innovation” (“White knight on a mission…”, SMH, June 19).

It was “the value of arts in innovation” that caught my eye. In BRW he declared: “Creative artists will be at the centre of [the] next revolutions, creating technology-enabled solutions that, like all good tools, extend our human capabilities and horizons” (Cutler, “The Art of Innovation”, BRW, June 29). As with Creative Nation, the Blair government’s focus on creativity, the Queensland government investment in “creative industries, and the federal government’s Creative Industries Cluster Study (see below), the connection between the arts and industry is pivotal. Or is it what artists can do for industry? What’s in the relationship for artists?

With this in mind I thought it would be opportune to have a discussion with Cutler early in his Australia Council career, especially on this subject of innovation. Alessio Cavallaro (new media curator and project manager at Cinemedia, former director, dLux media arts), Linda Wallace (artist, writer & curator, most recently of hybridforms, Amsterdam for the Australia Council) and Sarah Miller (writer, Artistic Director, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts) joined in the discussion, which also included the Council’s New Media Arts Board Manager, Lisa Colley.

Just before the meeting date, Richard Alston, the Federal Minister for Communications, IT & the Arts, announced that the Australian Film Commission would manage a “$2.1m fund to seed the further development of innovative broadband content.” A second initiative was the undertaking of “a study of clusters in the creative digital industries to analyse cross-fertilisation that exists between various capabilities in the Australian economy, creative and otherwise, that are producing, distributing and marketing digital content and applications, and what are the key capabilities we need for the future” (www.dcita.gov.au, Aug 31). The panel monitoring the study is Colin Griffith (President, Australian Interactive Multimedia Industry Association), Professor Robin Williams (Dean, Faculty of Art, Design & Communication, RMIT), Kim Dalton (CEO, Australian Film Commission) and Dr Terry Cutler.

KG What’s in the Creative Industries Cluster Study (CICS) for artists, do you think?

TC Well, hopefully the fact that I’m on that small advisory panel to the study in my OzCo role rather than wearing some of my other hats. It’s been assigned to me to think about it in terms of the role of digital arts within the whole digital industry, digital content arena…[I’ve been] grappling with the issue of how you distinguish between some of the imaginings that we use in this area. We talk a lot about how digital content and digital arts are all digital content, but not all digital content is digital art…The value of the study I think is in trying to have a systematic overview of the whole value chain, if you like, of digital content production.

KG So it’s not just a matter of seeing people as networking or how they might help each other out by sharing costs and so on?

TC Correct, but to have a systematic application of standard industry analysis in a way that I think a lot of the arts could benefit. Trying to get my head around the portfolio here, what I’ve noticed a lack of is any intelligent, comprehensive mapping of the territory in a way that highlights the interconnectedness of practice activities but also, if you like, the interconnectedeness of various elements of the supporting infrastructure.

For example, do we have a good grasp on the changing nature and role of distribution channels and how that affects both the scope for individual artists and their practice and the various pressures that either create channels to audiences or in fact make them more difficult—which I think is always a particular issue in Australia. If you look at content generally, distribution has always been the neglected bottleneck. Film and television is a great example. To me, the initial value of this cluster study is in trying to get that overall mapping and then hopefully, to be able to identify particular points where there has been a lack of attention and focus more government attention on some of those areas. I’d like to see more of that happen across more of the territory.

LW Do you think a study like that could begin to put pressure on the government to free up the media control ownership laws, things like that. That’s one of the sticking points for digital distribution, there’s no channels for it or very few.

TC If you start looking at issues of distribution channels in a digital, networked environment you can begin to understand some of those bottlenecks…and, therefore, the connection with other policy agendas. That will give you a new angle on some of those agendas.

AC More broadly, how might that affect other aspects of the arts, not just digital media arts but arts that are performance-based for example?

TC Well…what I can’t put my hands on at the moment is a good descriptive mapping of the [arts] landscape in a systematic way. What this exercise could do, if we do it properly, is perhaps provide a model that could be replicated more broadly. That’s something that I’m very keen to see here. In the current visual arts review or the review of second tier performing arts companies, how do we understand the landscape and the interdependencies between major companies, smaller companies and so forth? At the moment, it’s very hard to get a picture of that landscape. Certainly I find it hard to find a picture.

SM It’s great to hear that you’re interested in that kind of overall mapping because things have tended to happen because of historical precedent, of course, so there’s not necessarily any reason behind it. It’s just evolved, “growed.”

TC In conjunction with next year’s [Australia Council] Annual Report I’d like to think about producing an annual state of the arts type report, as a way of actually asking what does the landscape look like now, or if your like, how has the cultural biodiversity developed that gives us a reference point for moving forward, because I haven’t seen that. …The challenge there is to find a really good landscape painter.

SM All of us are here because we’ve worked in hybrid new media, interdisciplinary areas and I had the debatable privilege of spending 5 years on the Board of a CMC [the Community Media Centres set up in the wake of Creative Nation]… From my own experience, the desire for convergence and the ability to actualise it are radically different things. It’s a term that comes up in a lot in a number of your papers.

TC To me, confronting the concept of convergence is progressively unpacking something that gets more and more like an octopus. The only way I can make sense of it now is to talk about different waves of convergence. The first wave was really very much technology driven in terms of the integration of the tool side and particularly between computing and telecommunications. The second wave was very much around the whole services sector. This is where it begins to get exceedingly messy, and becomes much more demand-side driven in terms of the applications. The technology then becomes embedded in the re-design of process and practice. The third wave is where you’re getting a convergence between IT and biotechnology, which I think is really interesting in the way that then raises fundamental questions about the nature of meaning, of mind and so forth. That raises a whole lot of new ethical questions about our self-definition as humanity which then, I think, creates challenges for how the arts re-envision how we see ourselves.

Some work we’ve been doing in biotechnology and bio-informatics lately and the arts thinking about how you visualise information and meaning is actually a really interesting new area of convergence, where new skills need to be brought back into what might traditionally be seen as fairly sterile technical areas. That’s an area where some new stimulus in digital arts might come from.

SM Are you aware of SymbioticA— [a collaborative research laboratory in the Department of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia; see The Tissue Culture and Art Project in Working the Screen]?

TC Absolutely. And I think that’s a beautiful example. I find it really exciting. The challenge is how you replicate that experience and learning and particularly in Australia’s uncreative industrial landscape. To get more people to see the value of those forms of interdisciplinary work.

AC A couple of your papers online refer to the book by Kristensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: Why Technology Causes Great Firms to Fail, and a couple of the key words or phrases that you quote in relation to that book are “disruptive innovations” and “precipitate major disjunctions.” I’m wondering in relation to these sorts of issues how the Australia Council might itself be seen to be productively disruptive to enable these sorts of connections to be made across disciplines. How to introduce artists to industry to try to stimulate a sense of a broader, more lateral, more creative approach to art-making. Not just in digital arts, but to get performers, musicians and so on to think about some of these lateral issues you’ve raised. How might the Australia Council be seen to be a more productive catalyst for such relationships?

TC …Kristensen distinguishes between conventional models of continual improvement—clearly there’s a whole tradition of that in the arts, succeeding generations taking an established disciplinary approach and continually improving, refining, refreshing that—and a second form of innovation around disruptive technologies, which probably does happen in the arts from time to time. To me, the interest is in the way in which the creative arts can be a catalyst for disruptive innovation in other territories. I see it increasingly as a driver of innovation in industry and science, education, health and so forth…and in new areas of collaboration. You can look back to points of radical change in the arts, like the Renaissance and the revolution around the scientific basis of perspective, for example, and how that totally changed an aesthetic. It’s interesting to speculate how our use of digital tools frees us from some of the traditional constraints around time and space and might provide equally radical new ways of conceptualising practice. Some of the most interesting areas for me are combinations of visual art and sound or virtual reality where, again, you’ve got the potential to radically play with those dimensions.

LW What usually gets lost in these kind of collaborations [between art and industry] is the artist and their work. They usually have to compromise. They usually are the poor cousins of science and technology development. They always have been. And the impulse to art is what gets pushed under the table and that’s really key in this.

SM And budgets, which you would know, Terry, from your experience on the [Australia Council’s] New Media Arts Fund.

LW And it takes a really strong lobbyist to really push for an artist and the art project itself.

TC That’s why we’re all in the job, isn’t it? But to me, there are a number of issues about those collaborations which I think are really important. Only through changing those points of connection you’re going to change people’s perceptions about the value of the artist in the contribution. To me it’s also about a bigger challenge, one of how we re-position perceptions of the importance of the arts in our society, a consequence of which is then you can look at funding and support for artists in a different way. When I think about the challenge of do we provide enough funding and support for artists at the moment, the answer is demonstrably no. How do we increase that and increase the effectiveness of support in all its forms? A key prerequisite for being successful in that is to change people’s perceptions of the value of what we’re offering. And a key part of our job here is actually to work with the sector in trying to change those perceptions.

AC If you were able to achieve that, you’d actually re-position the Australia Council’s role in the cultural community of this country. Are we at such a point now with arts practice and the infrastructure that supports it that we need a radical re-positioning of the Australia Council? If we put it at the centre can it enact more challenging connections, relationships and partnerships with industry and science and other areas, commerce and so forth—and indeed even position Australian art and artworkers internationally to achieve different kinds of work?

TC You’ve got to think about the whole process and mechanics of social change as a generic issue because what we’re talking about is part of that. Is it time for a radical point of reassessment? Thinking about charting the course for the Australia Council and government involvement for the arts at the beginning of the 21st century provides a natural break point that says, ‘where are we headed?’, and that’s a bit irresistible.

AC According to the discussion paper for the [Australia Council] Strategic Plan that’s online at the moment, one of the goals is to develop increased support for innovation, research and development of the arts in a rapidly changing world. But the same could have been written in a list of goals 10 years ago and it would still hold true.

SM It was and then it was withdrawn from the strategic plan…and then it went back in again.

TC But isn’t that interesting and important. To me it’s a really challenging concept, encouraging risk-taking for what it means in practice. I love a line…which I rediscovered the other day in Wired about innovation in the information economy being like the need for new metaphors…new metaphors will probably come from ecology or systems, Chaos theory and talking about “skating to the brink of Chaos”…Now, how we domesticate and become comfortable with those notions within something like the Oz Council is a really interesting challenge.

SM It’s interesting that in a decade that’s been very much about the rhetoric of change, my experience has been that all of that has been about about diminishing of possibilities. We all know that Australia has a small economy and a small population and so on so, [ that] advanced technological research has not seemed to be possible in this country. I think [there’s something in] Alessio’s point about how we engage internationally. Somehow we’ve positioned ourselves outside all those different economic blocks and we’re not accessing effectively it in the way that many other equally small countries in the region are…It’s often been noted, and it seems to me to be true, that Australia has not had a successful research culture or a commitment to it. But the rhetoric keeps emerging. It’s almost as if we want to know in advance which bits of research will be successful before we commit to it.

TC We’re slowly changing. I’ve seen a huge amount of change say in the R and D environment in the last 10 years, in which I’ve been actively involved, in terms of what you can now talk about and what is happening versus what was possible a decade ago. I think we should be quietly optimistic. You’ve put your finger on an interesting area though in terms of that whole issue of international collaboration because part of the solution in the R and D territory is how you make sure Australians can think themselves into being part of global networks and putting to work all our rhetoric about virtual communities and actually actively networking in global collaborations with peer groups. The potential for that is huge including reconnecting with a lot of Australians who have gone offshore, assumed key positions all around the world but who we’ve lost in terms of our own creative base. In a whole lot of industry areas, I’ve been involved in initiatives to actually reconnect those people. I think the scope to do the same in the arts could have huge potential. The flip side of that is that if we really started to think through in more detail what we might mean by multicultural arts practice and so forth, how does that then affect the way we think of cross cultural collaboration more globally. Personally, I’d like to see far more people trying to find more ways of bringing far more people from offshore here and creating a real hotbed of activity.

SM We had the experience this year with a major Taiwanese show which was spectacular with one of the largest financial, integrated services companies in Taiwan. China TV came across to Perth to make a documentary about it. A 20 minute documentary about a Taiwanese exhibition in Perth, you can’t buy that. And before that, these extraordinarily well-connected people didn’t even know that Perth existed except for the curator whose father bought gold from Perth. It’s been very interesting and they paid for all of it. And it would have been worth at least a million US. And the state of Western Australia put $2,750 towards the show.

TC Pivotal seed funding! If we’re serious about the challenge of how we most effectively act at the start of the 21st century, then I think the real role for OzCo is to be much more effective in promoting critical discourse and discussion. To me, coming into this gig, one of the things that’s disappointed me most is the lack of that. And I think the opportunity is there and I think the OzCo can play a natural role in promoting that critical discourse and discussion that then starts to permeate.

LW I’ve had quite a lot to do with [technological institutions] and I think they don’t really want to give an inch to art practice. They’re not really interested That’s my perception. If you can assist me to break down, I look forward to it.

TC What you’ve said just reinforces to me the sense that we’re dealing with incredibly clunky outmoded institutional structures that don’t work as models for collaboration. The challenge is how we invent more effective models for collaboration.

SM I should say with Imago [the Perth-based CMC], the one part which was effective was the arts program. It was the only thing that stayed within budget, the only thing that developed the organisation any profile and it was the first thing they tried to junk in the push to become self-supporting even though they failed miserably on every commercial operation.

TC We’ve also got to be fair because when we go back to that climate in the early 90s that all of that came out of, I think those were important interventions and to say that the world has moved on is not to say very much.

KG It’s been good to talk and if you’re available it would be good to do this again. I think it’s important, especially for the small to medium companies and individual artists, who often feel, given the Nugent years and the Saatchi report, they’ve been left out of the picture, as Rodney Hall says. Discussions like this can be a conduit between Council and artists.

TC It’s crucial. One of the hardest decision I had when this gig landed on my desk was what I gave up. After much debate, one of the things I didn’t give up was being on the Council of the VCA precisely because of that fabulous linkage to the coalface, and to those kids. I get so much out of that. You have different challenges at different points in time. How you stay always connected to the real game and your core business, something that is always going to be a priority for me. And that means the practicing artist because that to me is the touchstone. I’m trying to find ways to stay connected so that I don’t lose the plot. That also means that channels like yours can play a key role in managing the dialogue.

AC …From my perspective I would like to see would be a little bit of extra proactivity taking place…I think some of the issues that have been raised today and your response to them would demonstrate in an exciting way that that might be the case.

This is an edited version of a discussion held at the Australia Council offices in Sydney on Monday, September 3

I don’t know any other way apart from convincing people to work with you and getting some work under way, even unpaid, and presenting it to any public—in a cellar, in the back room of a pub, in a hospital ward, in a prison. The energy produced by working is more important than anything else. So don’t let anything stop you from being active, even in the most primitive conditions, rather than wasting time looking for something in better conditions that might not come off. In the end, work attracts work.

So said Peter Brook, trying to answer an enquiry from a hopeful young theatre director.

The problem has always been the same. How to get started, how to continue, how to establish yourself in order to earn a living as an artist whilst not compromising the vision that got you going in the first place. These days, however, the competition is stiff from other media, money is scarce and it is much harder to live on the breadline.

Theatre itself is seriously under threat. The mainstream struggles along with an aging audience and does what it can to attract a younger one, while the non-mainstream has shattered into a thousand directions—all productive, many of them opening up kinds of performance work which would not have been seen in previous generations, but at the same time shattering the audience base and presenting young theatre artists with serious questions of identity in relation to the work they are doing.

Two new theatre companies in Melbourne provide fascinating alternatives to ‘getting some work under way.’ In their names, Theatre @ Risk and Theatre in Decay both directly face the dilemma of the artform. Robert Reid, the founder, writer and director of Theatre In Decay remembered, “When we started in 2000 all I could hear anywhere is that ‘theatre is in decay’ and I felt that I couldn’t work in this industry without acknowledging upfront that is how we are being seen—so what to do about it?” Chris Bendall of Theatre @ Risk admitted that “naming it was tongue in cheek in that we knew we were going into risk in doing it” but asserted, too, that for him and Victor Bizzotto, directors of the company, the only way to save theatre was by taking risks and by challenging their audience to take them—”to go to a deeper level.”

Theatre @ Risk began this year with an ambitious season of works at the recently opened Blackbox Theatre at the Victorian Arts Centre. The first production was a double bill of the thriller, Polygraph, by the French Canadian writer Robert Lepage and the celebration of cultural miscegenation, The B File, by British writer Deborah Levy. Their second production was Louis Nowra’s urban nightmare The Jungle. They were to mount Austrian writer Thomas Bernard’s Histrionics in December until financial considerations caused them to postpone until next year, when they also plan to present a new play by Chilean, Ariel Dorfman, and to develop a show of multi-languages and voices based on the concept of the Tower of Babel. A key focus for the company is what Bendall describes as “trying to find some meeting point between difference, a collision of languages and cultures.”

On an immediate level, this is to do with an interest in performing shows from around the world that would otherwise not be seen in Melbourne, but it was evident too in the collisions between class, gender, race and occupation in The Jungle—the urban chaos of subcultures. The form the company prefers is one that moves fast between various locations and times, a mixture of strong text with bold physical images, judicious use of music and “a pumped up fast and driving techno energy—abrasiveness and rawness.” It is a theatre for a new breed of educated young theatregoer.

The aim nevertheless is to provide an alternative to mainstream theatre from within the body of the beast. The choice of Blackbox as a venue provides a home right in the heart of the Arts Centre. The texts are ones overlooked by other theatre companies but they are recognisable as theatre texts. The shows get reviewed by mainstream as well as alternative press (Helen Thomson of The Age is particularly supportive). Their aim is to develop the company to the point where it can attract government funding. They are in for the long haul. Their productions are minimal and stripped back but they are stylish and as such demand more cost than the still-growing audience numbers can cover. That is their dilemma. All the work so far has been donated free of charge by artists and crew involved. And the directors have outstanding debts to pay. They set themselves this year to get a following and a name. This they have achieved but it has been at enormous cost, physically and financially. For Bizzotto, in his early 40s, the challenge is a critical one:

There is a part of me which wants to continue to be the independent artist out there being invigorated by the challenge and this other part where I get home and it smacks me in the face—it actually frightens me—I have to support my family and I don’t know how I am going to do that.

Robert Reid’s Theatre in Decay is on another path altogether. Since he founded the company in 2000 they have produced 10 plays, nearly all written by Reid and all directed by him. The plays are of various lengths, some monologues, some dialogue, and some grouped together into longer combinations. They play at various venues around the city: fringe theatres, pubs, on the street. The aim is to get stuff out, as much of it as possible and as often as is humanly feasible. It’s like a guerilla theatre—short plays, coming from unexpected angles, happening in different places, in different contexts, about different issues, in different genres—no sense of building up continuity, more a sense of trying to break continuity. When I asked Reid whether the name of the company suggested that they were trying to rescue theatre or to destroy what we have known as theatre, he nodded in amused understanding and quoted Geoffrey Milne’s comment on the company on the ABC: “one wonders whether they are the solution or the problem.” He admitted, “I’m less and less interested in theatre as an idea.” His focus is fully on the relationship of the audience to the performance.

What isn’t being addressed in most theatre that I go to is audience inclusion; everything feels in the same setup—audience/ stalls/darkness/stage/actors/light—audience sit face front, rank-and-file and are expected to not talk not cough not laugh too loudly, in essence pretend we don’t exist, we exist in our own imaginal worlds and any intrusion from outside interrupts it and breaks it—‘the magic of theatre’. It feels to me like that is a brittle, fragile type of theatre, alienating audiences, because people would much rather be a part of an art event than just witness to one. Very often the work of ours that gets the best response is that where the people can move around, talk to their friends, drink, eat, sing along.

In TID actors pretend to be nothing other than actors and to be nowhere other than where they are: ‘‘What you see is what you see; if the actors aren’t pretending to be someone else and somewhere else the audience doesn’t have to pretend to be no-one and nowhere.” The genre that the company prefers to work in feeds that sense of audience stimulation and inclusion—horror, schlock-horror—because “I enjoy it and actors enjoy it and audiences enjoy it and I don’t see it done on stage often coz it’s very difficult to do horror properly.” He cites an example: “All the Damned Zombies culminated in a scene where 14 actors in a pub each grabbed an audience member and ground their crotches into the audience member’s head with confetti flying everywhere and the sound guy picked up a live chainsaw and ran through. Every single night at the end of the scene people burst into applause; it released something deep in them.” This sense of deeper release is another motive for the choice of genre: “what makes it scary is the constant reminder that humans are fragile—a reminder of our own mortality.”

The focus is also on the politics of human interaction: “the stuff I do as a writer is either horror or politics; more often these days both at the same time. New Scum dealt with sweatshop labour and the attitude of the public towards drug use and addicts. The Girl Who Lived in the Coke Sign Above St Kilda Road was a monologue about homelessness and escaping from homelessness but ending up in advertising.”

Unlike Bendall and Bizzotto’s thoroughgoing vision for the future of their company, Reid is far more circumspect: “I don’t know if TID is the kind of company that gets funding—it’s less important for me to have the funding, partially because I believe that if we can buy our way out of a situation we don’t have to think our way out. I think that TID has a relatively short shelf-life and once it has run its length it will evolve into something else.” In his case, the ‘something else’ is 2 plays to be performed by Australian Theatre for Young People, the possibility of a commission from Playbox and works commissioned for The Storeroom.

While Theatre @ Risk are on the lookout around the world for new images, fresh voices, and working tenaciously to keep their vision alive, Robert Reid sits at his job at Telstra with pen and paper at the ready and listens to the wild voices in his head.

Theatre @ Risk: Chris Bendall & Victor Bizzotto (artistic directors), Kirrilly Brentnall (company manager), Amanda Silk, Rob Irwin & Nick Merrylees (design team) and a loose ensemble of actors.

Theatre In Decay: Robert Reid (writer/director), Anniene Stockton (manager) and a loose company of performers including Telia Nevile, Elliot Summers & Robert Reid. Their current play is All Dressed Up and No-one to Blow, 27-31 Munster Tce, Nth Melbourne, September 25-October 13

This is the story of an unravelling of progress and evolution. It shows that forward is only one direction we might go: is a forward motion better than a backward motion, or sideways? Better to crawl from the water, get up on your legs and do something sensible on dry land? The fishman went the other way. So his story is told from the end, through the middle, the accident and, finally, the beginning.

The end is death. In the dryness of the Wimmera desert, 50 year old Neil Wilson asphyxiated in his home-made waterproof fish suit—no gills, you see—having completed the journey of his life, travelling upstream while the majority rush the other way. Many people saw Neil Wilson, but never knew who he was until he died. He hung naked at the end of a rope under Toolondo Bridge, with Coke cans slung around his waist and seaweed in his hair. He was a fish on a line. He collected vinyl and plastic from the tip and sewed himself his own scaly skin, head plunged in a bucket for periods of time. His parents asked: “What are you doing with your life?” Fishman: “Something special.”

Back to Back are the right people to explore Fishman. This Geelong-based ensemble, formed in 1987, has a core of performers with an intellectual disability. Director Marcia Ferguson worked with the young cast on this contemporary story, making links with older tales of the Indigenous Bunyip and other monsters. The script and performance style allow and embrace quirky, individual characters who emerge from a strong and focused ensemble and slip back again into their collective base. There are 14 people on stage, then 17. Unusual nowadays to see casts of this size. Unusual to see such a diverse group, all intently focused on their fishwork.

Grainy film of dry land and water is projected onto a corrugated fibreglass curve that defines the performance space—almost the inside of a water tank. Another film shows people in plastic/vinyl fishsuits running in circles, flapping around in forlorn black and white paddocks, stranded on the dry land of normality. Fish out of water. This is also the surface for watery lighting that switches to hard, expressionist angles and shadows.

A live video feed at the side of the stage produces images of little gold fish in a tank, a face distorted through the water and glass, a little puppet motorbike—the bike that Neil should not have ridden the day he crashed, acquiring brain injuries 10 years before his death.

Sounds percolate throughout—murky splashing, thick water sounds, bubbles and breath, popping and flapping. Grabs from radio and TV intrude a hard ‘real life’ sound, so thin and banal against the richness of the abnormal, the interior world in which fishman floats.

All this technology, all these people—it comes together seamlessly and backwards. Good stage management helps, but Back to Back have the ability to create a space in their performances where everything is alright, even a gutted fish left on the stage floor at the end.

Fishman Back to Back Theatre, director Marcia Ferguson, choreographer Phillip Adams, designer Anna Tregloan, film Rhian Hinkley, performers Tara Allitt, Adam Berry, Mark Deans, Rita Halabarec, Nicki Holland, Voula Hristeas, Simon Laherty, Sandy Landers, Shannon Lewellin, Meridin Miller, Joel Pollard, Eric Rebernik, Darren Riches, Jamie Senior, Kylie Trevarthen & Bonnie Trotter; Blakiston Theatre, Geelong Performing Arts Centre, Aug 30-Sept 1

Foreman has to be seen to be believed. Limited to reading about his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre for decades, finally in London in 1997 I saw and believed. Foreman and company were in town with the trademark set–a work of art, black and white perspective lines, props displayed as if from an eccentric collection–along with the admired narrative discontinuities and undoing of ‘character’ which Richard Foreman shared with other New York performance notables of the 70s. It was thrilling to see it all in 3-D. But belief had to sustain a few jolts. This was an even more intensely visual experience than expected–by the end of the performance the set had been re-worked, every prop exploited, perspective re-aligned. Whatever else they were doing, the performers were executing an artwork. A more electric and discomfiting jolt was provided by Foreman’s excessive theatricality. In the early 80s I’d seen works by Mabou Mines, Meredith Monk and Robert Wilson where the revolution against the conventional in theatre, dance and opera had been realised as a startling spareness, time distended, the body foregrounded, language undone, an intensely visual experience. Here I was witnessing something furious, fast, bigger than life that seemed on the one hand kind of old-fashioned, on the other radical, since the over-the-top theatricality was not sustaining the verities of plot or character, but something else altogether, a curious admix of the visual and a disjunctive psychology of displacement, condensation, slippage. It was funny, bewildering, disturbing.

It’s one thing to read that Foreman is funny, it’s another to experience it. It’s funny funny. It’s funny in bits, in the Woody Allen manner–waves of one-liners, inverted aphorisms, one-off nonsenses. As with Allen, on their own these sound like something out of Pop Philosophy I, but they accumulate into something more serious, and ontological, and because they’re not bound by narrative flow, hysterically Freudian. But you do have to grab at the language to get a footing. And bells ring as scenes end abruptly and you feel like Pavlov’s dog, stimulated though in this case not sure of your response.

As has been often commented, Foreman puts his audience in a new phenomenonological relationship with theatre. Once this was radically deconstructive (before the term had even gained currency), and it still can be, though 30 years of contemporary performance have made such gestures familiar. What is important is that Foreman’s is a body of work, 30 creations over as many years, unfolding as would a visual artist’s, a tightly conceived cosmos in which combinations of objects, language and sundry personae enter into new permutations. This is not simply deconstruction, you can’t only define a work of art by what it opposes or explains. It’s a unique way of regarding the world…and theatre. It stands on its own. It’s one man’s vision.

Strange then to see a local company, Kitchen Sink, announce that it was going to do a Foreman–My Head Was a Sledgehammer (1994). In contemporary performance the creator of the work is the one who performs it, embodies it. Not only that, but quite unlike the playscript, which can be realised in many ways, performance comprises multi-planed texts of which language might be just one component. A new interpretation of a playtext is always a possibility. But what do you do with the texts of performance–mimic the total effect? However, some American performance has a strong literary streak: Lee Bruer, Richard Foreman and others offer substantial texts that can be intrepreted in different ways from their Mabou Mines and Ontological-Hysterical Theatre originals, not that it’s likely, but…

Kitchen Sink hit a happy balance–the production is Foreman-like, but no carbon copy. The set evokes a mad collector but has neither the space (Downstairs Belvoir St in its new format) nor the inclination to reproduce Foreman’s pictorial vision. Nor can the one-off ensemble reproduce the heightened physical and verbal poetry of the Foreman team. But they do more than a good job as the driven trio of Professor and Students, head-miked and sound-tracked, more animated than perhaps warranted in a small space, but physically dextrous and incredibly responsive to the (il)logic of the language, and to the abrupt gear changes of scene shifts. Helmut Bakaitas as the Professor is a melancholic seeker of truth, his rich resonating vocal timbre perfect for the god-like delivery of platitudes and his worrying at quandaries: “I make up rhymes, but they don’t rhyme,” “The unintended becomes true…I speak it…it becomes true.” Cartesian neatness and cause and effect count for little in this universe, especially when love enters the picture–the Professor’s collapse is a rivetting moment, a sudden psychological faultine opening up along the surface of abstractions. Melissa Madden Gray teetering on a single ballet shoe
excels physically and vocally, and Benjamin Winspear, swathed in phylacteries and stomping in workers boots exudes frightening power. They are the self-possesed Students, all raw energy and possibilities, the youth the Professor has lost, projections of desire and religious yearnings. Mind you, the riot of imagery and utterance means that it’s hard to put your finger on what you’ve just barely understood before Foreman’s world moves on.

Director and sound designer Max Lyandvert (who worked with Foreman, 1996-97), designer Gabriela Tylesova and the performers (including the 3 “gnomes”–Kiruna Stamell, Diana Cottrell, Amanda Shipley–the mysterious managers of the action), do a fine, engrossing Foreman. If only they’d do more but I’m sure that’s unlikely, their biographies suggest work as interpreters on many theatrical fronts, not the single, dedicated line of performance. As for the master, I recall Richard Murphet commenting in London, after we’d seen our first Foreman, words to the effect: “Isn’t it funny. We’ve finally seen the work of someone who’s influenced our work all these years and it’s great but it’s…too late. Like being in a museum.” Richard remembers then “thinking if not saying ‘The artefact is just as I imagined, perfectly preserved…but somehow not to be touched. The display case may have to be cracked open.'”

Kitchen Sink, My Head Was a Sledgehammer, by Richard Foreman, B Sharp season, Belvoir Downstairs Theatre, Sydney, Aug 9-Sept 2

Australia’s national women’s theatre company has taken a leaf out of Chekhov’s dramaturgy. Like one of his monologues it delivers its satire with puns, outbursts of mania and direct address. There is also a simple but effective suspense. Instead of a gun being introduced in the first act and begging to be fired by the third, it tempts the audience with a set constructed of hundreds of gleaming, neatly piled, fragile pieces of china. Jennifer may work in a shopping mall and be in Security, as her phallic uniform proclaims. But she is the bull in that china shop as well as the toreador. By the time she has manifested a body of personalities ranging from members of her nagging family to Indian shopkeepers and advisors on the political situation in Dubai, she is ready to swing her baton and let fly. The audience at the performance I attended was so delighted that they asked her to do it again.

Director Catherine Fitzgerald has brought the company a long way towards intimacy with spectators and their environment. Noëlle Janaczewska’s inventive text, for example, was originally written with a Sydney backdrop. At the company’s base in the Port and now in the old Odeon cinema at Norwood, it resonates with Adelaide references. Fifty metres down the street are shopping malls overflowing with crockery, alive with the teenagers and pensioners who might be from Jennifer’s own neighbourhood. There’s even a tortoise in the petshop. Her ingenious movement into the play provoked giggles of wonder.

There were many special dimensions to this performance. Kate Roberts slides into the script as if it were written for her (it was). Like a medium, her skill lies in giving each new character an immediately identifiable indicator to demonstrate his or her presence, the swing of a key-chain, the tug of a coat. Because a large section of the auditorium was filled with Auslan users, a signer gracefully stood behind Roberts and shadowed her entire text. The set took its cue from the kitchenware, a serviceable white square whose corners and intersections marked Jennifer’s pursuits and excursions beyond the mall.

The forum afterwards was a relaxed epilogue that allowed the audience’s curiosity to be satisfied and the company to cement their presence in this precinct of temporarily gathered shoppers. Insecurity may be allowed to peep through the imaginary characters. As theatre the company has its feet surely planted on the ground.

Holy Day comes after, and obliterates, any notion of a happy Silent Night. Rosalba Clemente’s production forcefully justifies her program of lengthy Theatre Lab workshopping. With a cast of 8, and growing confidence in pace and blocking, she plays Andrew Bovell’s ambitious text from silence to crescendo. It is always a pleasure to hear an authentic new voice in the theatre, and Bovell’s is already responsible for several fine scripts, including the film Lantana. Here he writes with a genuine sense of mystery and tragedy. Rather than reciting the plot, therefore, I can best serve this work by attempting to give some idea of its atmosphere.

In a mid-19th century travellers’ refuge on the edge of the desert, 2 white and 2 Aboriginal Australians tell their conflicting and equally atrocious stories. Isn’t this, after all, what constitutes history and the attempt to represent it? Even the best playwrights use metaphors, cadences and journeyman entrance/exit speeches that refuse to come alive until pushed to their limits. Not all the actors are strong enough to bear the weight of their lines, though Kerry Walker‘s Nora and Rachel Maza’s Linda succeed with the economy and timing of a chronometer. Polemic and metaphysical, the play is rarely a sermon. Its questions are too painful. Rather than setting up a hierarchy of good and evil, Bovell should have left them that way. This production has brought out elements that make some words and actions unnecessary. The author might wisely consider cutting or rearranging them.

Cath Cantlon’s set is stark and classic. The single raked floor curls just slightly where it meets the horizon line. With the cyclorama descending but never quite touching, it suggests a vast chart. Downstage action is confined to the thrust, where Cantlon’s typical frugality creates the pub’s interior with chests, and benches that look as if they have supported outback Europeans for a century of storms and desert dusks.

Though the space seems empty, boundaries have subliminally been traced. TERRA NULLIUS appears in copperplate letters, and the ground is marked like the ghost of an ordinance survey with a deluded name: FinePlains. Clemente seizes this map to establish the shifting boundaries of the stories. Blackfella’s land becomes fenced. The only waterhole is cut off. Christianity threatens animism, replacing the Southern Cross with a blazing crucifix. In hoc signo…what? Shall you conquer or be like a child lost in the wilderness? The perennial national doubt is shot through with Bernie Lynch’s eerie soundscape, fading a human scream into the cawing of a crow. The enforced communality of different people trapped in a single environment has always been the stuff of great tragedy. The House of Bernarda Alba and Riders to the Sea show how electrifying this condensation can be. It is greatly to Bovell’s and the State Theatre Company’s credit that they have entered this area instead of remaining safely with comedy, irony or melodrama. There are moments when you might indeed be in the Abbey with Synge or with La Barracca and Lorca. Australia has fought shy of depicting tragedy except in painting, poetry and the novella. Differences overwhelm us, differences between men and women, black and white, straight and queer, convict and free. If Bovell hasn’t yet managed to open these states into a continent, this excellent production remains a vision of it.

Jennifer in Security, Vitalstatistix, writer Noëlle Janaceszewska, director Catherine Fitzgerald, Norwood Odeon, Aug 21 – Sept 8; Holy Day, State Theatre Company of SA, writer Andrew Bovell, director Rosalbe Clemente, Adelaide Festival Centre, Adelaide, Aug 21- Sept 5

Rudi shows us a domestic exhibit of soap remains scraped from different household sinks—some perfumed, others cracked and worn thin and still others dirty, a paradox of the object ‘dirty soap’. Constance tells us of the convicts and early Australian settlers who used to hold possum races. The greatest champion of them all, Little Jock, has been preserved for posterity, a venerable and desiccated skeleton on display in a specially made case.

In the traditional museum, objects are classified, stored in order to revive and activate official memories, and then they become monumental. In a hardware shop in Johnston Street, Collingwood, we have walked into an archive of the useful and the useless—the Museum of Modern Oddities. Hardware, with a different meaning from the computer term, is the circuitry of the everyday which consists of screws, kitchen utensils, plumbing parts, paint, sink basins, plastic flowers, rope and lengths of timber. Its temporary proprietors are performance artists Neil Thomas and Katy Bowman whose own collection of oddities comes from previous projects, passers-by and visitors. One photo collection of naked feet is classified with the owner’s own data—what they know about feet, do with their feet, and what they think of them. On one page I find the wrinkled, thin feet of my mother; she likes to rub them in oil.

MoMO ostensibly collects ephemera—a young girl keen to contribute went out on the street and picked up bits from the road, broken glass, a stone, black plastic, a rubber band—but in today’s world, ephemera often slips away. Time is faster and faster, we throw away most of what touches our hands, we rarely stop to notice the ordinary, and we don’t often repair things. Things do not emanate ‘quality’ unless they are designer products. But here, the contents of an old shop are in a museum, which a strange twist of time and space makes precious. In the catalogue, I see a collection of Chinese pottery urns. On a shelf, in a neatly partitioned cardboard box, about 20 small, black urns are lined up, with a single white one isolated like a jewel in the middle. Treasures, these are small Bakelite switches, that will never be switched on. So does that redefine ephemera: not objects used in the everyday but things that might have another existence, if we invest them with one? Alan Read writes of “the accumulative power” that derives from the accretions of the everyday and its rich depository of connections with neighbourhood (Theatre and Everyday Life, Routledge, 1993). MoMO collects with care, not just things but memories.

As we leave, Rudi and Constance show us a photo of the man who owned the shop, proudly standing at the door displaying his useful goods which made him special to many. He visited that day, old and a bit unsteady. He is a Polish Jew who lost the top of his finger when it was shorn off in a grinder by the Nazis; perhaps no wonder his life became a collection of tools and bits for others to make sense of. A sensibility that MoMO digs into by remembering and fabricating a story for things
to live by.

Museum of Modern Oddities, Neil Thomas & Katy Bowman, 137-139 Johnston St Collingwood, Melbourne, August 31-November 11, Wed-Sun 12-5pm, free

Canberra's CIA theatre company lobbed briefly at PACT Youth Theatre, Sydney with Punch, young Melbourne playwright Geire Kami's take on the puppet classic, Punch & Judy. As Claude Levi-Strauss has it, every variation on a myth simply reaffirms the 'original', so it is in Punch and many other re-workings of a puppet show (in UK composer Harrison Birtwhistle's version Punch traps his victims with wordplay) that has terrified and intrigued generations of children with its primal violence. Punch & Judy has a mythic power rooted in its ritual inevitability. What you look for in new versions is some connection with the present in play with the story's primordial passions. Kami's Punch is an unemployed, failed suicide on the edge of externalising his anger (Judy recommends “getting a job in wrecking”), afraid to look at himself in the mirrors he then must smash. Fantasies of killing the baby left in his care besiege him until, inevitably, he strangles it, the fear of psychosis realised. Bodies pile up in a cupboard and, finally, it's trial by puppets for Punch, as if the complexities of psychology and morality have been reduced to the mechanics of ritual. Even his longed for death is not going to come easy. Sketched like this you can sense some of the play's promise. Had it and the production been more thorough in their contemporary working of the story, Punch might have been a bracing experience. Instead it alternated uneasily between quaint and grotesque, beset by a mixed bag of acting styles and uneven pacing, best when at full throttle and much bigger than life.

CIA, Punch, writer Geire Kami, director David Branson, designer Emily O'Brien, cast David Branson, Susannah Frith, Scott Gooding, Kai Hodgkin, Fabian Prideaux, Phil Roberts, Anna Voronoff, Barb Kraaz, PACT Youth Theatre, July 31 – Aug 4

Solar Circuit in Tassie

Tasmania will host Solar Circuit in January/February 2002, involving workshops, wilderness residencies for artists, conference, artists’ presentations and exhibitions. It is the Australian gathering of Polar Circuit, hosted in Finland since 1997. Solar Circuit aims to: “create a truly translocal media and arts environment by extending the international input of the Polar Circuit community, establishing a link between the far north and the far south” and offers “an opportunity for artists to work together over a given period of time to develop new artistic content exploring the relation between new media and the artists’ response to a geographically remote place, the Tasmanian wilderness.”

Flickerfest goes onlin

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Flickerfest continues its exciting showcase of international and Australian shorts in 2002 by announcing its first online festival, along with a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock. The festival will also increase the number of Australian short film sessions and showcase 2 Canadian programmes curated by Shane Smith, director of the Canadian Worldwide short film fest in Toronto. Director Bronwyn Kidd commented, “we are very keen to be able to move beyond traditional short film exhibition this year by incorporating elements of new media into the festival.” Flickerfest tours to Melbourne, Perth, Darwin, Adelaide and Brisbane after beginning at the Bondi Pavilion, January 4-12.

Gearing up for noise

Following on from the success of loud in 1998, the noise festival, which profiles the creative work of artists under 25, will be taking over Australia’s media in October. As well as in print, on TV and radio, noise will be online with E-Works, Postcards from Heaven, Online Gallery, Fake Ads: An Online Collection and MCA Curation (noise.net.au from October 1), An Artist a Day (www.visualarts.net.au) and audio art (www.sbs.com.au/noise)

Morphologies

For some time now Australian artists have been working in a range of collaborative ventures and residences with ZKM, Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany’s leading new media research centre and museum. Now, there’s an opportunity to glimpse some of the work that’s emerging in Morphologies, a joint project of Artspace and Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney College of Fine Arts (Nov 22-Dec 15). The exhibition occupies the 2 venues and features recent digital video work produced at ZKM by both ZKM artists and generations of Australian artists working at the forefront of experimentation in areas such as interactive cinema including Dennis Del Favero, Agnes Hegedus, Ian Howard, Susan Norrie, Jeffrey Shaw, Skan (Skye Daley and Daniel Wright) and Peter Weibel. Speakers at the symposium on Friday 23 November at COFA include Michele Barker, Ross Gibson, Lev Manovich, Anna Munster, Kate Richards and Jeffrey Shaw.

Antonia Baldo is a young Australian who went to London 5 years ago as a student filmmaker. Doctor Akar’s Women is her first play, derived from a film script that never made it to the screen and expanded for its stage life with the expert encouragement of Griffin Theatre Company’s Artistic Director, Ros Horin, for their 2001 Carnivale contribution.

Doctor Akar’s Women is a great read, a deftly constructed, acerbic account of the lives of second generation, middle class Turkish-Australians. The central figure is the general practitioner Doctor Harry Akar, adrift in a cultural limbo, obsessed with the suicide of his father when Akar was 12. Nominally patriarchs, both men are lost in the female world that encompasses them and in which love is a mystery. If the father suffered its withdrawal by his wife, then Akar has refused it to his wife and daughter. In his despair the father turned to a yearning for Turkey, wearing the curled-up-toe shoes—“picked up at the boutique outside Adelaide”—ballooning trousers, praying—“he’d wander round with a compass trying to decide which direction Mecca was in this week”. Less ostensibly, Akar repeats the ritual but only in private and only in a brief, repeated dance, his arms outstretched, says Baldo, “like the wings of an eagle.” When Akar’s medical student daughter baulks at surgical practice on corpses, her career is threatened, and when he encounters an intriguing female patient who has lost her love for life, the doctor’s world is destined for change.

Asked if she knows a man like Doctor Akar, Antonia Baldo says, “I don’t really want to say. He seems to me very real, and he still is a really charismatic guy. He was a political activist in the 60s. I know myself that when I really believe in something I want to act, rather than sit in a pub and talk about it. I’m not like that but I’d love to be, and he would as well, and to care enough. The actor playing him is so right, I can’t bear it sometimes.”

Akar is cruel, he’s blunt and people are blunt back, but he usually has the upper hand. And the playwright, equally, treats her protagonist cruelly. “I don’t think about it. He really has to have his heart broken in the hardest way. She’s the kind of woman [his patient] he’d fall in love with—to make it hard on himself.”

Baldo is not Turkish. Her grandmother on her father’s side was conceived in Italy, born in Broken Hill, and given the middle name “Australia”; Baldo’s mother is English. Although she won’t go into detail, she says the play is autobiographical: “It is a family thing. I’ve cunningly disguised some of my Italian relatives.”

Why a Turkish family, not Italian? Baldo travelled in Turkey, became fascinated with it—“the landscape felt a lot like Australia, it’s huge and got such a mythic feel to it”—and now lives in a London suburb with a large Turkish population. “We did a short film and had to talk to a lot of people in the Turkish community. When I wanted to check on anything in the play I’d run down to the corner shop and ask the guy to verify facts and names and where people came from.” Because of its 2 generational remove from Turkey, the play doesn’t depend on elaborating cultural detail, but what’s there is evocative. Recollections are most likely to be of stories handed down from first generation migrant parents about their younger years in Australia, tales that have acquired the status and mystique of myth. Of her own family Baldo says, “Nothing tangible or enormous has been passed down. I would love it if there had been, to cling to for a sense of place and history. Though the risk is you can end up romanticising like Harry.” One of the joys of Doctor Akar’s Women is the telling and subsequent testing of a particular family myth.

Antonia Baldo has been working on a feature film which, all being well, starts shooting next May. And she’s writing another play, having enjoyed this experience so far. As for her relationship to Australia, “I’ve spent a lot of time wishing I was back, but there’s something about the distance that has made it easier. I find it hard to write anything set in England…everything I imagine is in the form of Australia and set in the middle of nowhere. There’s no middle of nowhere in England.”

Doctor Akar’s Women should be a rich experience. It’s a tough, naturalistic, often cruelly funny play about love over which death ever hovers. And it’s one of the few plays of recent years that goes beyond-the-suitcase to deal with the dilemmas lived out by the children of migrants.

Griffin Theatre Company, Doctor Akar’s Women, by Antonia Baldo, director Ros Horin, designer Catherine Raven; cast: Ana Maria Belo, Sandro Colarelli, Laura Lattuada, Angela Punch McGregor, Slava Orel, Inga Romantsova, Sarah Smuts-Kennedy, George Sais; Carnivale 2001, The Stables, Sydney, October 5-10

We have entered the era of Innovation. In this era, the language of hybridity is increasingly lassoed into creative couplings that are expected to yield unforeseen benefits in the areas of technology and the arts. ‘Art and science’ are the buzzwords of the moment. ‘Risk’ sits on the positive side of this equation, and anyone who dares stand still risks falling right over. Yet in the forgotten trenches where small companies and creative individuals fight it out, risk is an increasingly impossible word. Who can afford to take risks in this climate?

John Burtt takes risks with Nervous, his recent 1 hour solo performance at PICA. John is well known for his collaborations with Skadada, but this time he steps on stage without the accoutrements that have become de rigeur in contemporary performance. No pulsing sound, no montage of groovy Troy Innocent images, no elaborate set—just a performer, a microphone and something to say. This is certainly not dance as we know it. Nervous is, however, the most physical of performances. Conflicting impulses converge and erupt as the body becomes an occupied site. The premise is quite simple, perhaps not wholly original. The performer has ingested a Hypermart, a kind of giant shopping/entertainment/conference centre, a hybrid human-machine complete with a security control centre and rogue elevator. The tone is satirical, the pace breakneck, and the performer’s task Herculean. It is not easy to simulate a car chase with one body and a fast-moving tongue.

Nervous is aptly titled. The experience of watching Burtt perform is like seeing a newcomer to the tightrope-walking business attempt to cross Niagara Falls. Can the performer pull it off, keep on track, hold the audience? When he reached safety I applauded heartily, along with the rest of the enthusiastic audience.

There are weaknesses. The script is not always funny. The writing is uneven, and the performance occasionally falters, particularly where Burtt resorts to a Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em campiness. Nervous would benefit greatly from a script-editor and a dramaturg. Despite all this, Nervous remains funny, brave and worthy of attention. Which is why the reception in both the local WA paper and The Australian is cause for comment. I can only conclude that both reviewers fail in that most unquantifiable of graces—generosity. For them the risk implicit in Nervous meant nothing. They didn’t care if John Burtt fell.

“Tedious”, “juvenile”, “silly”, “irrelevant”, wrote Naomi Millet in The West Australian. And, “…his skill is largely wasted in Nervous, because movement has been pared to a minimum.” “Worst of all”, writes Rita Clarke in an equally dismissive review in the Oz, “he doesn’t dance, staying permanently rooted on the spot.” Burtt has committed the fatal mistake of opening his mouth and refusing to move (I am taken with the image of the reviewer as organ-grinder, the performer as monkey. That damned monkey just won’t dance!). But Skadada has always sought to extend itself beyond dance. Text, voiceovers and narration have been integral to its process.

It is the idea of the dancer as actor/comedian that most offends the reviewers. “The problem is,” writes Clarke, “John Burtt has reinvented himself as a comedian. Bad move.” But Burtt has always been in his metier with comedy. Nervous is a shift in the artist’s focus, but it is not without precedent or preparation. There are specific skills that must be learnt by the actor who speaks, and the performer undertook training in these areas in preparation for Nervous. As a dancer, Burtt has long drawn on the potential of the body as a site of comedic catastrophe and local angst. The subtext of Clarke’s review is that dance is somehow unmediated, silent, that it does not dissemble.

Reviews matter greatly, particularly if you live in the far distant West. A bad review can kill a local audience and influence the future national reception of an your work. Speaking for West Australian work, it is apparent that local reviewing remains a mystifying and opaque business.

Artists are faced with a contradiction. On the one hand, the rhetoric of risk suggests that innovation will be its own reward. On the other hand, extending our areas of established practice places an unavoidable question mark over the final outcome of a work. Do we sacrifice certitude for experimentation and open-ended play?

Nervous, director Katie Lavers, performer John Burrt, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, July 26-August 4

Ever on the lookout for new permutations of real and virtual bodies interacting in performance–as dancers explore and exploit new media–I was struck by a moment in Jonathon Sinatra's Burning In. Writhing at an angle, head to the wall, Sinatra is joined by a larger than life image of himself on an adjoining wall. The first appearance is rather ghost-like and becomes even more so as another shadowy Sinatra separates off from the virtual one. The original anchored dancertwists sharply and quickly, his duplicates duet gracefully, splitting, merging, splitting.

This performance of doubles is in fact 2 performances, one on the pavement alongside parked cars followed by another inside the Omeo Studio. The first evokes nothing less than someone found in the street, struggling to sit up, crawl, stand, grip at unyielding car bodies for support. The essence of the movement is a kind of off-centredness which is repeated in the studio performance, but no longer always from the ground up. Long moments of near stillness are followed by formal and informal patternings of movement and light that open out the studio space. Even where the body seems to move with most certainty (ghosting another double in an often Rosalind Crisp-like choreographic vocabulary) there always seems to be the inclination to fall, to slip out of frame, to settle uncomfortably, to barely rescue the self, making for an uneasy subtext amplified by Mark Mitchell's dream-like lighting, David Corbet's elemental sound score and Peter Oldham's assured video work.

Anna Tregloan’s remarkable Skinflick contains the gem of a design idea. On cue, the audience has to crawl underneath and into a set that consists of a floor 4 feet above ground level. We the audience sit underneath that floor with just our heads poking out, a series of runways enabling movement before our very eyes. Meantime fairy lights and music promise a magical experience. Working with light and darkness, and a range of costumes and props, a series of meditations occurs. The genre is physical theatre, along with some instances of the spoken word. Moving alongside a large carried mirror, a mutation of corporeal symmetry occurs. An old woman clones herself, hoping to escape the limits of mortality. Swings, furred feet, extreme poses and disguised bodies are moved into unusual shapings for unusual times. The sky opens and ping-pong balls poetically fall and fall like bouncy snowflakes.

There is a somewhat disjointed character to Skinflick, as if the sections were created independently of each other. There is also a sense that the chosen movements could be further developed with a view to the (kin)aesthetics of the piece. Overall, the design of the set and props has a consistency of wondrous creation that is not always reflected in the action. While the performers are skilful and interesting to watch, I'd like to see more of the initial magical promise come true.

Skinflick, direction & design Anna Tregloan, performers Cazerine Barry, Jody Farrugia & Vanessa Rowell, North Melbourne Town Hall, Melbourne, July 26-Aug 11

In my lecture at this year’s Leica/CCP Documentary Photography Exhibition+Awards, rather than lingering on the troublesome divide between documentary photographers and other contemporary artists, I took the position that all sorts of photography should find room under documentary’s umbrella. This year’s Leica exhibition offered plenty of positive evidence.

Rather than a single defining image, entrants were asked to submit a series of up to 7 recent photographs “demonstrating or developing an original and considered appreciation of the chosen subject.” The exhibition contained examples of documentary forms which the genre has always handled well, such as the capacity for strong political statement evident in Simon O’Dwyer’s S11—striking colour images of the protest outside the World Economic Forum at Melbourne’s Crown Casino. There’s Sam McQuillan’s shots of grieving relatives of independence supporters in East Timor. Political intent was also close to the surface in Sandra Walker’s Institution and Stephen Rooke’s Kensington Housing Estate (a pity they didn’t draw on Australian subject matter) and in Matthew Sleeth’s Tour of Duty and Ashley Gilbertson’s Melbourne: Whispers and Shadows—in other words, half the finalists.

The medium is also great at charting unique phenomena as in Dean Sewell’s shots of the fascinating “Cave Clan”, a network of more than 100 members of Australia’s unofficial association of urban explorers of stormwater drains, reservoirs, train tunnels, abandoned buildings, bridge structures and bunkers, who communicate via the internet. Documentary also comes into its own in recording changing events. Steven Siewert’s series The Sulphur Miners of Kawahijen follows the daily journeys of 20 men in East Java as they work on an acid lake inside the crater of the Ijen Volcano. Agnes T Earl’s series Untitled (63 Signs) was the most methodical record. Displayed grid-like, it focused on people lining the route to the War Memorial in Canberra on Anzac Day, 2000. Similarly, Alex Cyreszko’s Abandoned Car Series 2000 is all shot from the same viewpoint. Interesting to compare these with others and wonder what gives the latter works their “conceptual” feel.

Tamara Voninski’s Hen’s Nights series featured some of the most physical and confronting images of women I’ve seen for a while. The photographer says “On my first evening in Sydney as a new immigrant I saw a young woman at Town Hall train station wearing a veil and a sign saying “It’s my hens night. KISS ME PLEASE…Thus began my fascination with this Australian ritual.”

Rejecting the yoke of objectivity with which documentary (and all photography) has been associated, others like Steven Lojewski, Narelle Autio, Trent Parke, Marzena Wazikowska, make more personal statements. In Not from this Earth, Autio observes from above, the intimate patterns of the everyday in a great series of inkjet prints on canvas of picnickers under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Wasikowska’s Fragrant Sweat features the photographer’s 16 year old daughter and her friends. Marzena talks about the impossibility of distancing herself from her subject and the dilemma is there in her pictures which give you the feeling that the photographer is almost on top of these kids, almost in their bodies.

The judges Isobel Crombie (Curator of Photography, National Gallery of Victoria), artist Rosemary Laing and photographer Emmanuel Santos chose Steven Lojewski’s Urban Dreams as this year’s winner of the Leica camera with Sam McQuillan, Tamara Voninski and Dean Sewell highly commended. Lojewski creates stylishly subtle Antonioni-like images in which the human is occasionally present but never crucial. His laconic still-lifes remind us how barren Australian cities can appear.

The Leica/CCP Documentary Photography Exhibition + Award, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, Aug 9-Sept 8; Stills Gallery, Sydney, Dec 12-22, Jan 16-Feb 9. The exhibition tours nationally into 2003, and is accompanied by a substantial education program and an online component.

We are both implicated, both involved, in Tactical Intervention Strategies and Loop as writer and artist respectively. We are reporting as insiders standing in a moment of synergy between the working practice of local practitioners, 2 arts spaces and the wider cultural community. Young artists curated both exhibitions: Marcus Canning for TIS and Michelle Siciliano for Loop in 2 distinct cultural centres, Perth and Fremantle.

FA Both shows have an ideas-based premise and thus initiate a processual kind of working method, one with lots of flexibility towards project development that allows for a certain margin of risk.

BD TIS presented the artists involved with a dual challenge necessitating a level of commitment to a work of art beyond mere installation. It’s the challenge of engaging the current local and political hegemony at fundamental levels, and furthermore to activate a response from an audience to potentially subversive and experimental works of art.

FA Loop presents a circuit of reference that is tighter, more contained at a structural level, yet still drawing the viewer into its frame. In the context of a tricky exhibition space that (through heritage listing, and high venue costs) is primarily geared towards art that turns a healthy trade, Loop provides a series of engaged works that really inhabit the space of the Moores building and enliven it, revealing its potential for installation and contemporary work that develops a spatial paradigm.

BD While TIS had the central focus of the exhibition space, it traversed layers of the city and extended to remote, site-specific locations. All works implied a dynamism that was participatory, process or time-based, and referred directly or indirectly to the history of pranksters, interventionist and street-level performance practices. Petro Vouris’ Blood Drum, an audio/video work amplifying the sound of dripping blood, boomed for kilometers (initially) from the PICA tower while Martin Heine’s Culture Gut comprised a small caravan chained inside a skip bin (which was later subject to an arson attack and destroyed) parked in the courtyard directly outside the PICA main entrance. The PVI Collective’s A Watching Brief utilised the surveillance codes followed by security and CCTV operators to devise a set of performance instructions and props to be enacted by the viewer (see RT44 p38).

FA In contrast, I found many works in Loop to firmly place the viewer in a rarified, bounded sense of space. Kate McMillan’s In The Beginning is The End uses the ready-made economy of pre-fab (expanded grain bag) packaging to literally ‘take up’ space. Vanessa Mazza (small and large lightbulb studded backstage mirrors, arranged via dimensionally correct white floccati rug, to the tune of Black Box’s sultry pop hit Fantasy) teases the private gaze through a loop of narcissism, creating that tension between private expressions of reverie situated within public view that both solicits and denies its realisation. With Three Six-T Spin (large circular corral of scaffolding, crash mats, soundscape, inflatable screens and video projection showing suspended figure in shuttered 360 degree, variable speeds) Ivan Bannon manages to balance an intriguing text of figure and motion with the creation of an enjoyable space for the viewer to linger within.

BD A billboard erected on the side of PICA by Arthur Russell and Derek Krekkler, Follow Through, initiated discussion between us about the problematics or challenges that artists can face with the integrity of a project that requires continual or accrued maintenance. Simon Perecich and Thea Constantino’s Der Ring Des Nibelurgen placed reworked fragments of Wagner’s Ring Cycle as advertisements in the personal columns of local newspapers, slipping cleverly into a pre-existing media structure for the accumulation of phone-message responses. Lucas Ihlein’s Event For Touristic Sites required volunteers to wear shirts printed with racially stereotypical slogans in tourist centres (such as “All Australians are slobs”, “All Italians are horny”), implicating and positioning them at a personal and accountable level with other members of the general public. Christian de Vietri’s (in)security organised a group of 50 security guards to follow randomly picked individual viewers around the gallery, initiating a complex game of watching/stalking that continued throughout the course of the exhibition’s opening.

FA The use of the internet in Katrien Jacob’s piece provides a counterpoint to this, engaging viewers to surf a network of packaged porn websites, downloading to feed a printer spooling accretions of paper waste, to then convert these into torn assemblage flowers. This, along with wall-text proposing a series of sexual scenarios as transactions, offers a familiar rendering of somewhat tired sexual commentary. Beyond this key idea of transformation/recuperation, I found the translation of ideas to material form here problematic, unresolved.

BD I thought that Seddon Pepper and Drew Wooton’s Everybody Needs was the finest re-working of pre-existing material. Using taped episodes of Jason Donovan era Neighbours, they meticulously re-edited a rhythmic video loop that amplified the various idiosyncrasies of each overblown character, insinuating psychosis and perverse behaviours. Mickie Quik’s 'appropriation' of an existing billboard for a Masters of Business conference, with guest speakers Norman Schwartzkopf and Mikail Gorbachev, was converted to a large scale 'before' and 'after' with the images of 2 representatives of right and left-wing politics becoming interchangeable.

FA The final 2 works were screen-based including Caroline Mazza’s untitled dual video projections. I enjoyed the slow mapping of geometries of abandoned and obsolete vaults of industry, the phantom grandeur of mass productivity economies of scale worked into a grainy image that moved between the suggestion of space and the flat image itself. Your work Lengths of Forgetting (black and white still images projected onto triptych of standing screens) weaves narrative implications between landscape and figure, a lone female walking a forest path as the trees morph between textures and certain images tweaked into spooky fractalising symmetries. Along with the other symmetry of synchronising the outer screens, this subtle play reveals a vaguely menacing deep order within the chaos and randomness of the natural forms.

BD At a material and physical level, the Swiss collective Airline’s installation Airstream had an ordering effect on the TIS exhibition. As a suspended network of thick, finely woven rope and inflated, circular seats or capsules, it created an elevated viewing platform for the exhibition space, and a contemplative space for the individual viewer.

Loop, curator Michelle Siciliano, The Moores Building, Fremantle, July 6-22; Tactical Intervention Strategies, curator Marcus Canning, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, July 4-Aug 14

“The weather forecast is for ‘possible late showers’ Wednesday, rain periods Thurs and Fri, so if it doesn’t rain Wed, Barbara will perform again then. But if it does, there will be no performance except for tonight. Our advice: please come tonight and tell others if you can. Otherwise, come on Wed if it’s not raining.”

In the bar on campus at Sydney University, students are watching Fight Club. Up the road, a small crowd is assembling in the courtyard outside the Art History Block. Inside, Barbara Campbell is rubbing down with baby oil to protect her from the chill. Over in D Block, the barman drops ice into a glass. Librarians leave for the night. At 6 o’clock the artist emerges naked from behind a screen. As she slides onto a small table, her back to us, the representative from the Ministry for the Arts settles onto a garden seat. An inverted sewing machine fixed to the underside of the table whirrs into action. Laura from Performance Studies looks at the sky. On its way to the screen a cryptic film loop (shoe shine?) caresses the body in its path. Over there, Brad Pitt checks, “First rule of Fight Club?” Here, below the table, a tiny heater braves the elements. A Brancusi takes sensually slow shape in stills on an adjacent screen. A man from Security picks up his keys from the Canteen. The artist’s softly glowing skin incongruously conveys warmth. Though Barbara Campbell does not move, her body dances in the flickering film light. Brancusi turns to Elsworth Kelly. Line, curve, light, image all move back and forth from screen to body. Blood slows. The machine sews stitchless, then stills. Of the hundreds of actions we have initiated, ignored or been implicated in today, this deceptively simple set, observed through the eyes and felt synaesthetically in the night air between bodies, has some chance to hold in memory.

Scooping up leads, post-performance, Barbara Campbell, now rugged up in a jumper, says “It feels so good to do it.” She’s more than irritated that one of last week’s performances at the College of Fine Arts had to be cancelled because of rain. Then time, having dropped a stitch, picks it up again. As we make our way to the bus, the Ministry representative is thinking about her children at home. A cyclist loses his scarf. As temperature adjusts, I fight back forgetfulness that threatens to kick in.

Days later, defying first rule of Performance Art (Don’t talk about Performance Art), I email Barbara Campbell for some background on her performance. She graciously replies:

“I’ll just say what was in my head when I was making it….I was thinking about the dark, suppressed desire side of modernism, specifically Marcel Duchamp and his sexualised vision in things like Etant Donne, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (aka The Large Glass) and the Precision Optics. As against the white box formalists and some of the abstract expressionists. I’ve had Rosalind Krauss’s thinking on this (The Optical Unconscious) in my head for some time.

“So, on a really simple level, I set up a kind of live version of Duchamp’s Large Glass with me as the stripped bride above and the sewing machine as the Bachelors desiring machine below. This side, as you’ll recall was set against a black screen with a subdued projection washing over the top (a kind of cinematic frottage). The image was of a slow-mo shoe shine in close-up–an obscure reference to another Duchamp work called Fresh Widow (Duchamp insisted this work, which was made of black leather, be shone every day like shoes). Then over the other side was the pristine white square of formalism with mute and static objects projected onto it–mostly Brancusi heads from the Guggenheim, also some Elsworth Kellys, Carl Andres, David Smiths etc. Despite the formalism, they are not without their own brand of sensuality as the slow dissolves and shiny close-ups revealed. The whole thing was played out under the stairs of the university’s Art History department which provided a handy conceptual as well as physical frame, I thought.”

The Machine, oiled again, Centre for Performance Studies, Sydney University, June 5. In collaboration with the College of Fine Arts, CPS is planning a survey of Barbara Campbell’s performance works as part of the Sydney Biennale 2002.

From percussive exploration, to music evocative of Oriental landscapes, to Structuralist excursions into possible ‘feminist’ forms, the National Festival of Women’s Music was a feast of textures, sonorities, explorations of instrumental combinations, and journeys into archives to resurrect startling older works absent from our consciousness and hence from the reputations of some of our most important senior women composers. The archaeological re-interpretations afforded by a festival such as this are of no less pleasure or importance than meeting new works. While a parallel conference looked at issues such as whether or not there is a recognisably feminine aesthetic in the work of women composers (a consensus: there is, but it’s very hard to define), concerts commissioned new works for new instrumental partnerships and coupled a 19th century hymn by our first documented woman composer with a wry contemporary song cycle about political and personal greed. The ‘cover-girl’ image of Elena Kats-Chernin on the posters, brochures and advertising belies the depth, variety and nuggetty purpose of compositions evident across the festival—almost as unhappy a choice as sponsor Qantas’ congratulations for “this happy event” as if it were supplying booties or nappies for a newborn child.
Sound-text performer Amanda Stewart was a happy inclusion: though her instruments are her body and voice (arms swaying, gesturing, self-enveloping, her live stereo-miked voice interacting with pre-programmed loops), the experiential parallels (what defines music? what constructs the listening experience?) provided an important counterpoint and stimulation in their own right. Her concerns lie with layers of word-production (Artaudian collapses under skin; questions about knowledge and meaning), yet there are also sure-footed compositional considerations at work, measures following powerful cohesive rules above the splintering.

Not just ‘futurist’, Stewart’s sound-bites link to old languages, primal Babels, ‘the speech of tongues.’ I think of the linguist de Saussure’s phrase, that it’s not language per se, but our capacity to make it that is innate. So too about our perception and making of music. Something about Stweart’s work is just right for this festival: perhaps because of its exploration of our capacities to make and hold even the most tempestuous of emotions, explorations, and experience within patterns to which our organisms somehow respond.

Her video, coupling a vocal soundtrack reminiscent of Kubrick’s 2001 with slowly emerging images of foetal bodies spiralling, exhibits a subliminal architecture echoing Amanda Handel’s piece for flute and guitar, Goarounds and Grounds. Structured on a mandala or aid to ritual contemplation, Handel’s ‘musical translation’ of the visual gesture of a circle within a square (soul within the Cosmos) also elicits another geometry: is the square inside the circle as well? Is it indeed geometry that holds form in place? Both Handel’s and Stewart’s works are contemplative; but the latter’s gasps, expectorations and flaying of flesh from vocal bones also unnerve: a little girl in the audience tries to shelter behind, within, the ribs of her mother.

Percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson explores lip- and mouth-sucking while playing, sliding, clambering over, spilling rice and paperclips onto a bass drum: claustrophobic, an elevator panic, slow snow falling. In a second improvisation she played 2 rubber balloons. These are confident, if not new, explorations. It’s interesting that in this kind of work, questions of ‘carrying it off’ are different from other repertoire, the conviction requiring perhaps an even fuller embodiment, a greater theatricality closer, perhaps, to the commitment, polish, and impersonation of acting while remaining ordered and logical in structure. Jazz saxophonist Sandy Evans elsewhere demonstrated a teasing, stretching, sometimes agonising (agon-ising, contesting) within and against a necessary form. Tomlinson shows verve, but can remain coy.

The festival surprises were not all about exploring non-instruments and extended techniques. Within more conventional technical frames, explosion of myths surrounding a whole generation of composers—works of Dulcie Holland (whose piano Sonata [1953] debunked the sweetness of children’s pieces for which she is largely known), the elegiac and exacting Miriam Hyde, the gutsy, bony and muscular 50s internationalist work of Peggy Glanville-Hicks—paid real homage to their genius and reminded us how narrowly their works have been generally known and categorised.

Other concerts ranged from Medieval and Baroque (exemplary musicology from the bloodhound Carolyn Kidd, Artistic Director of the festival, digging up archives), to nice examples of contemporary work carrying earlier modalities in structural or tonal echo (Andree Greenwell’s exquisite Viewing, a hyper-enriched aural Medieval window; Gillian Whitehead’s The Swan, a classically-sourced allegory of the soul) to new festival commissions and the little-played works of several contemporary composers from Canberra.

Standouts included the concert Guitar Four Girls and the Song Company. The guitar group was exceptional in its textural explorations between instruments and satisfyingly expansive of structure and techniques—highlights: Maria Grenfell’s sparkling Tuscan journey, a lush mosaic and complex, juicy dialogue between marimba and guitar, grape and sun; Caroline Szeto’s tripartite Dawn, Day, Dusk—rising arpeggios, rasping grit-eyed koto combined with dewy-juice fluids of guitar; a strutting stretted business for the central section; darkening, descending sequences of compact arpeggios folding into night. The Song Company’s varied yet cohesive program ranged from the colonial Emmeline Woolley to the biting wit, rich textural sonorities and theatrical playfulness of Jennifer Fowler’s cycle Eat and Be Eaten, and 16-year-old Lisa Crane’s Der Mondfleck, a shrieking, expressionist sprechengesang based on Pierrot verses by Albert Giraud—another ‘splitting’ piece, exploring “man’s doubt about…power over himself” with remarkable maturity and textural bravery.

In this concert, Kats-Chernin’s meat knife waltz for chamber choir (complete with carving knives and sharpening blades) raised a good tittle from the audience. Not quite satirical, her work often exhibits a tendency to humorous deflection with a certain resistance to a grounding-note. “In the late 1970s,” writes Richard Toop, “she emerged with a certain suspicion of ‘heavy works’; in recent years, a sort of ‘light music’ (often sourced from recognisably lighter musical genres—German cabaret and theatre, rags, pop, via appropriation and pastiche) has come to play a prominent role” (notes for Kats-Chernin’s Purple Black and Blues CD, 2000). That said, this festival did showcase a range of textural exploration in this important composer’s work (even an oddly-Phillip Glass-like choral piece); her opening night Sand Waltz for the Canberra Wind Soloists proved the most satisfying, as her jaunty touch proved well-matched to the jittery, disjunct staccato textures of the wind quartet.

Concerts which elided works into single movements, almost ‘demos’ of larger pieces, or blended pot pourris from widely divergent cultures and forms, were less satisfying, odd degustations without enough coherence to tantalise. Although one of the challenges of embracing diversity is resisting homogenising coherence, the relationship of this to structuring and cognition is one of the questions this festival rightly stirs up and challenges. As exemplified in this conference and festival, the differences between prejudice and the cognition of subtly different architectures will and should be teased at for decades to come.

National Festival of Women’s Music, artistic director Carolyn Kidd, Loose Canons Conference, director Ruth Lee Martin, various venues, Canberra, August 29-September 2

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film of his own revolutionary, epic poem Teorema threatened to cast a deadening shadow across composer Giorgio Battistelli’s recent wordless opera. Rather than reinterpreting Pasolini or Battistelli, Chamber Made director Douglas Horton’s staging critiques them both. If Pasolini’s cinematic mise en scene is fractured, Horton’s is dispersive and mutually antagonistic.
There are parallels between the energies of the score, Pasolini’s critique of capitalist, bourgeois domesticity, the mute, hysterical witness of the Italian characters, and the return of primal practices and emotions. But Horton’s overall tendency is not so much to knit these themes together as to leave them free to act against each other; to juxtapose design elements (light, staging) with the dancing body (Michelle Heaven as the daughter), the acting body (Ian Scott as the father) and other intermediate techniques (dance-maker Shelley Lasica as the mother, theatre-maker Tom Wright as the son). If opera is the term for a work lacking singing, mime, or even formal dance, then this is anti-Wagnerian opera. It is not so much total theatre in the sense of a gigantic, musical-theatrical deus ex machina, as totally dysfunctional theatre.

This quality builds throughout the production, making the second half more sensational and melodramatic than the first. We move from a series of unnecessarily telegraphic, discrete seduction scenes, to a series of chaotic, overlapping aesthetic vignettes owing more to the infamous exhibition of British postmodernist installation and ‘shock-art’ Sensations, than theatre per se.

Behind opaque plastic curtains lives a well-to-do, classically European family (in whiteface even). The Stranger enters—black, male and muscled, an embodiment of exoticism within their home—and the curtains disappear. This is the first major slippage between Horton and Pasolini. Horton’s casting of Afro-American Australian Juan Jackson dramatises the racial themes that Euro-American aesthetics plays out. The Stranger of the film was white, but race changes everything—especially where sexuality and a ‘return to the primal’ are concerned. Pasolini tended to locate the revitalising salvation of the bourgeoisie in the dark, mixed blood of the Mediterranean peasantry—but it is only a short voyage from Italy to Africa.

Peter Corrigan’s elegant use of bent wicker at the rear of the stage comes therefore to recall tepees or postmodernist ‘tribal art’. The form of the production thus echoes the content. Both show how Westerners are endlessly seduced by images they project onto Africa and the Orient. Jackson’s own musical signature is the Persian drum, reminding us that Western discourse tends to blur cultural distinctions (though a few responses suggested that this was actually reinforced for some). Jackson’s performance superbly accommodates these readings without being confined by them. The Stranger is content to offer whatever his hosts desire, to have sex with each in turn. We never know however what he himself wants, or is. He preserves his mystery because he refuses to be what the others see him as. He simply leaves.

The hysterical collapse of character, psychology and the very structure of the production that this encounter with ‘the Other’ engenders is the strongest aspect of Teorema—not least in terms of the music. The first half feels hurried, full of the angular clashes, short sections, ascensions and false-starts often described as ‘brutal’ or ‘primitive’ when musical Modernity arose. The second act however has more room to breath and pause. The inevitability and relentlessness of the first half is replaced by a more open sense of musical time in which anything could happen, as the characters tunnel in upon their own psycho-aesthetic obsessions.

The son’s highly physical, performative drawing-style leads him to smear himself with paint and rub himself along the floor, echoing Yves Klein or Pollock. This offers no release however. The mother unrolls the Stranger’s mat, complete with his underwear. Her tormented encounters with these fetishes offer an abject “consummation”, but hardly one “devoutly to be wished.” The daughter is rendered as a pained, human camera obscura, mapping out lines between photographic subjects, including herself. Ian Scott however all but steals the show through his concentrated minimalism, replete with nameless emotion, slowly stripping as he throws off his possessions, dignity and identity, before collapsing.

Only the maid’s journey lacks this sense of self-immolation. In the film she selflessly returns to the peasantry to perform miracles. Horton’s disruption of Pasolini’s ethnological ideas however closes off this site of potential redemption. Horton’s staging does not resolve this issue, but in shattering the production’s own theatrical unity, he creates ample room for such contradictions to coexist within this richly complicated work.

Teorema, by Giorgio Battistelli, ChamberMade Opera Co., director Douglas Horton, conductor Ronald Peelman, performers Shelley Lasica, Ian Scott, Michele Heaven, Tom Wright, Barbara Sambell, Juan Jackson, CUB Malthouse, Melbourne, August 9-12

While physical performers like Company In Space, Louise Taube and Stelarc explore the idea of a live body interacting with its virtual Other or avatar, such exercises are relatively uncommon in the context of music itself. Saxophonist Tim O’Dwyer and electronic-manipulator Newton Armstrong’s latest work Geology evokes some of these concerns. The performance begins with an absolute minimisation of acoustics, with O’Dwyer producing sounds simply by fingering the stops. Gradually this is added to with the first transition of bodily essence into music by breath. Wind and glottal stops gently reverberate through the brassy coils. Single notes then poke out, peak, and explode into a fireworks of elements running up and down the scale.

It is at this point that the composition suddenly reifies outwards. A great torrent of electronic noises is unleashed through the 6-way sound system. Although Armstrong’s tones are largely composed through a single integrated system, his palette seems to trace a mini-history of electro-acoustics. We begin predominantly with relatively unprocessed pre-recorded saxophone sounds, multiplying the ensemble through virtual sonic space. As we progress however, more overtly electronic elements increase and begin to subvert the virtual, simulated saxophone. Tones reminiscent of early Stockhausen and Schaffer sit alongside both saxophones at an ever higher level. More recognisable processing also begins to intrude, the virtual saxophone becoming a Hendrix-esque device, moving into sounds akin to even more introspective guitar processing approaches like Tangerine Dream. The warmth of the old valve-transformer devices (fuzz boxes, wah-wah pedals) comes more and more to replace the spiky, stretched, unimaginable sounds of earlier electro-acoustic traditions. Finally the digital sounds of contemporary glitch–crystal matter clouds of diffuse sound–appear.

This introduces the full sonic palette in under 10 minutes. From here relationships become more complicated and difficult to describe. It is far from pure impulse-driven indulgence, but it nevertheless defies conventional musicological descriptions of how the sounds modulate, rip up and then seem to evaporate into gritty near-silence. Beyond even be-bop, the largely improvised progression charts an ever greater increase in subliminal energies. Sheer noise, volume or tempo, however, does not follow this pattern–rather, being radically fractured, leaping from one position to another. My rather musicologically hardcore companion saw insufficient change here and it is certainly true that O’Dwyer and Armstrong push a negative envelope in terms of finding infinite variation within relatively self-contained musical motifs and ideas. Nevertheless simply by realising the score in 3-dimensional space, gently revolving about the room or aggressively coalescing or dislocating throughout it, Geology offers if anything too much to listen to and think about.

The only unsatisfying aspect was that the doubling of the instruments (saxophone and live-manipulated electronics) with their virtual, electronically simulated sonic doppelgangers occurred predominantly in virtual not real time. It would be interesting to hear what would happen if the live saxophone sounds were electronically processed and multiplied in real time, rather than this occurring largely at a spatial level. Perhaps this is currently unfeasible though–an idea worthy of further research.

Geology, saxophone Timothy O'Dwyer, electronics Newton Armstrong, mixer Steve Adam, Trades Hall, Melbourne, August 15-17

Before Night Falls & Adelaide shorts

Before Night Falls
writer/director Julian Schnabel
co-writers Cunningham O’Keefe, Lázaro Gómez Carriles
Distributor Dendy Films
Release date September 6

A thorn in Fidel Castro’s side, Latin American novelist/poet Reinaldo Arenas was imprisoned in Cuba in the 1970s for his “anti-revolutionary” writing and homosexuality. Julian Schnabel’s elegiac film Before Night Falls paints a vivid and moving portrait of Arenas’ life, hallucinations, wanderings, flight of imagination, and ultimate exile to the United States until the time of his tragic death from AIDS. From out of the sea, the story of Arenas’ emerging literary talent, sexual impulses and political persecution are woven seamlessly in the cinematography of Xavier Perez Grobet and Guillermo Rosasfrom, from archival newsreel footage of Castro’s Cuba, simulated reportage, re-constructed memories, and passages from his poetic texts. We experience Arenas’ fragmented reality, sensations, a sensuous homoerotic floating world, that slowly disconnects from reality, a life dissolving, as he is pushed to the periphery of society, an Outsider.

Inspired by his autobiography Before Night Falls, and other writings The Hallucinations, The Parade Ends, The Colour of Summer, Schnabel brings Arenas’ silenced/censored voice to film. Ironically, from the impulse of Latin American Cinema Novo’s anti-Hollywood rejection of imitation and populism, Schnabel casts Hollywood stars Johnny Depp (Lieutenant Victor & transvestite Bon Bon) and Sean Penn (Cuco Sanchez) alongside Spanish actor Javier Bardem (Reinaldo Arenas). However, Reinaldo ultimately finds no paradise lost in liberation/exile to capitalist New York, only suffering and the deterioration of mind, physical and spiritual death. The film recalls cinema as a gun, the violent depiction of Reinaldo’s historic/political reality, moving between documentary and narrative modes, the themes of repression and social injustice.

Raw Meat and Radio; Ex Post Facto; Girls on Loos; Derph

A city is a skatescape, a row of toilets, or a village of the lonely, depending on your perspective.

Raw Meat and Radio, by Renée Gifford, sympathetically examines the loneliness of the middle-aged single. A talkback radio voiceover discusses their plight while a man shops at the supermarket for meat and a woman packages it for display. A meaty metaphor, and no happy ending.

Rebecca Summerton’s Ex Post Facto depicts a woman with a fresh scar on her face telling a succession of unresponsive people that someone is smashing windows nearby. A doctor sutures her face—“the scar will give you character”, he consoles. It transpires that she is the smasher.

Sophie Hyde calls her Girls on Loos a “theatrical documentary.” Interviews with women are interspersed with vaudevillian performances in a public toilet block. The doco covers poo songs, graffiti, toilet sex and intimacy, whether you are a toilet paper ‘folder’ or ‘scruncher’, and drugs in loos. Beneath the hilarious anecdotes are deep insights into what happens between women in public toilets.

Derph, by Bryan Mason, is an absorbing look at skateboarding culture, profiling committed (addicted?) skateboarders—their adventures, run-ins with the law, successes and crashes. Backed by a hypnotic blend of jazz and rap, this brilliant footage must have been shot by a pursuing roller-blader with a mini-camcorder. Derph is breathtaking, a must-see.

Symbiosis is a visual and aural chimeratic experience; quite beyond the militaristic and action/violence experiences of virtual reality that we might be accustomed to. It is an exploratory journey of emotion, time and space in an immersive virtual environment.

The sellout event was included in the Sideshow digital media program at the Melbourne Film Festival in September and is one of the first of its kind in Australia. The Melbourne-based practice responsible for the event, Metraform, worked with VR technology only available in the VR Centre at RMIT University where the event took place.

Symbiosis combines stereoscopic visuals on a 180-degree wrap-around screen with an 8 channel sound design, creating an intense immersive experience. The focus of Symbiosis is neither on the visual or the aural, but requires both to experience it. Metraform has created 6 virtual worlds which evidences an intense, theoretically rich and provocative collaboration.

Metraform is a multi-disciplinary collaborative team researching VR technology as a medium to deliver experimental art content. The founding members are Jonathan Duckworth (architect), Lawrence Harvey (sound designer) and Mark Guglielmetti (digital media artist). Symbiosis is the result of their combined practices in an immersive virtual environment.”

The artists have diverged from normal practice in their respective fields to create a new experience for the spectator. Although placed in a film program, Symbiosis is not a screen-based unfolding of narrative, but is concerned with the relationship between the spectator and the work itself. It is about diverse modes of interaction and engagement.

Duckworth and Guglielmetti designed 3 virtual worlds each and Harvey provided the soundscape. Duckworth explores the non-realisable architecture of spaces, and Symbiosis has given him “the opportunity to explore space in non-conventional, digitally constructed spaces that can't be perceived in any other way.” It opens with Nebsphere, resembling a forest-scape as it explores the spatial depths of abstractly architectured forest canopies and undergrowth. It is visually provocative with colours and movement indicative of growth and decay.

Guglielmetti describes his approach as drawing on conventional 'ways of seeing' and disrupting these conventions through a conceptual exploration of space. His juxtaposition of recognisable and non-recognizsable objects forces the spectator to challenge their habitual methods of perception and simultaneously espouses a complexly rich environment of association. In ModelKitJesus we are navigated around and along a gigantic model-kit in an otherwise empty space. The emptiness is echoed by a startlingly eerie soundscape, reminiscent of sounds heard while scuba diving. The model is almost Lego-like in structure, with its removable pieces slotted in to the model itself. There are familiar pieces such as a hand, bits of machinery and tools–all removable and to be assembled (in the mind's eye) as a model kit whole. A model kit of Jesus?

Like Guglielmetti's work, Harvey's soundscape combines familiar and non-familiar sounds and effects in an aurally rich environment, both complementary to the visual experience and distinct from it. Harvey's work is concerned with the electroacoustic possibilities of the medium and exploring the aural experience of the audience.

Symbiosis is designed to engage and empower the spectator and is therefore broadly appealing. In the initial stages of development, Metraform “decided Symbiosis would be experiential; that is for an audience member's active subjectivity to inform their experience rather than an experience driven by any particular narrative or narrative structure.” It is, in Guglielmetti's words, both “delicious and difficult” and part of the spectators' challenge is to choose their own narratives of interpretation.

What I found most intriguing was that it evoked diverse responses and a powerful subliminal effect. Furthermore, the audience responses recorded by Metraform are similar to those experienced in the virtually immersive environments created by artist Char Davies. To quote from her findings, my personal experience was one of immediate “verbal indescribability” and a “deep sense of mind/body relaxation.” The responses “ranged from elation, depression, relaxation, excitement, wonderment and awe.” They also found a mix between people, those who wanted to discuss their creative interpretation and those with a delayed feedback-response time.

The implications of these subliminal effects of immersion in a virtual environment suggest that Metraform's decision to create an active subjective experience was successful. Due to the intensity of the work, people had to adjust immediately afterwards and the manipulation of time/speed seems to contribute to responses. Symbiosis is navigated at a slow pace, and at a conscious level the perception of time and speed appears consistent. However, as Metraform suggests, “by slowing the perception of (an abstract and unfamiliar) space you're inadvertently accelerating time.” There is a bizarre feeling, 'losing track of time', as your perception of time is challenged. Real time can be described as the “speed at which nothing happens” and ironically the Symbiosis experience is multiplicity, not nothing.

When asked about new artistic opportunities for VR technologies, Guglielmetti referred to Margaret Wertheim's reaction. Wertheim is recognised for her theorising on the parallels between physical, non-physical and spiritual spaces and has suggested that arts in real time practice are facing a premature death. She spoke with Metraform after experiencing the work and expressed her excitement about the existence of this new project in Australia. For someone devoted to writing about the medium to express doubt and then withdraw it is evidence enough of the fertility of both the work itself and of VR as an arts practice.

For those wishing to experience this exciting emerging art practice, you'll have to wait for the next iteration in May 2002. This will be a totally immersive and interactive experience with all 6 chambers linked. Equally impressive is that the sound materials will be linked to the 3D geometry of the spaces and made responsive to user presence and navigation in various ways.

Symbiosis, Metraform, Jonathan Duckworth, Lawrence Harvey & Mark Guglielmetti, Sideshow digital media program, Melbourne International Film Festival, Virtual Reality Centre, Interactive Information Institute (I-cubed), RMIT University City Campus, July 21-23, 28-30

This year, the Emirates AFI Awards will be celebrated by a film and television industry buoyed by a recent Federal Government funding injection of $92.7m, the return of the production cost tax rebate scheme and a prominent role for the AFC in the management of broadband content development ($2.1m). Yes, the dollars will be invaluable at the development and production end, but what about effective distribution? The big issue remains, how can the industry attract bigger and loyal Australian film audiences. Is it now time to get screen culture (and screen education) right back on the agenda? When funding was tight over recent years and the industry was clamouring for more development funds, screen culture was downgraded and under-funded, despite being championed by the likes of George Miller and Scott Hicks. To assess the likely value of the increase in funds (or, as some have put it, a return to previous levels), Tina Kaufman interviews prominent industry figures, and both Kaufman and Jane Mills consider the role of screen education, an area Mills has had some distinctive recent experience in, as you’ll see.

Last year RealTime published its first Prizes and Projections supplement, reviewing all the features, shorts, documentaries and animations nominated for the 2000 AFI Awards. The response was great, largely because RealTime was the only publication to give significant space to the non-feature film categories, as well as providing a history and commentary on the Awards’ often controversial history. This year we’re doing it again and its been made somewhat easier by changes to the judging system. Feature films can only be judged if they’ve achieved distribution and been screened, keeping the nominees to 13 this year. The number of shorts and documentaries in the final nominations for each category has been limited to 4 or 5–the number of actual entries was almost double that of last year (90 short films and 68 documentaries).

This year the awards will be screened on prime time Channel 7 on November 16 from the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne.
No doubt the AFI is banking on the attendance of some of stars who’ve made it big in Hollywood—Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Anthony LaPaglia, Toni Colette, Hugh Jackman, Heath Ledger, Naomi Watts, our Nicole etc etc—to attract a wider audience than usual. Eddie Lim, Emirates Area Manager, puts us in the picture: “A major objective of our sponsorship was to globalise the Australian film industry and we believe this is a significant step in realising that goal.” But the AFI now has competition. Now in their second year, the if magazine awards will be telecast live on SBS on November 7.

It seems amazing that in a small industry such as ours that there’s room for 2 awards nights in the same month, so it’ll be interesting to see how they play out and whether or not the judging is that different. Hopefully we can move beyond the “a sound designer is responsible for…” boredom of past telecasts with some innovative programming backed up with some good writers and decent compering—Denton & Keller, Clarke & Dawe, Roy & HG, or hand the whole production over to Working Dog.
The Editors

The Cloak Room exhibition is curiously un-cloakroomlike: large, open, filled with fantastic structures—and not a coat in sight. An exhibition verging on the opaque, one gets a sense of meaning restless beneath the impenetrably smooth surfaces of metal and cardboard.

Even the extensive EAF space, for which the work was designed, seems almost too small for, or is made too small by, the fabrications wedged within. Clean and beautifully constructed corrugated-cardboard structures speak of architecture or design as they span the space like cityscapes in miniature. Dividing these stacked arrangements are strips of industrial rubber flooring, a normally prosaic material made oddly inviting as it forms pathways that trail off the raised platforms of cardboard and onto the floor. These pathways tempt, constructed as they are from a material designed to be walked on: a sign outside says “Please do not walk on the artwork” but the footprints of earlier visitors are clear.

Expanses of cardboard are used both in conjunction with this flooring material and with the metal and wood sections of the installation. Light-weight, disposable and malleable it seems to reference models, maquettes and mock-ups, the stuff of design, while the timber and metal are the raw building materials themselves. Together they suggest the transition from plan to product, from a concept to its manifestation.

Around the edges of the exhibition space other intrusions crop and swell. At a-little-above-head-height, 6 three-dimensional L-shaped cardboard fabrications, shot through with skewers, protrude from the walls. These speared, spiky forms cast sharp shadows, yet are surprisingly without menace. Stolid in the corner is a further indeterminate object, like a huge overtoppled table with its legs sheared off and lunging in haphazard directions. Monolithic, these legs at first evoke the columns of classical architecture, though this impression is rapidly counteracted: made of zinc-coated steel and supported with metal pinned-joints the effect is more functional, mechanical. It is an exhibition of such multiple realisations: later visits prove the topography of the cardboard structures to be in more subdued relief than initially judged, less a dominating cityscape than platform or stage.

Expectations are confounded again by the animated sequence that shows a computer-generated, generic multi-story building falling down in a cloud of dust and rubble: a mundane enough image, but here disorientingly projected on its side. Immediately this building collapses into the ground it begins to reform, a mesmerising process re-enacted continuously. Each time, the structure is not so much re-built, but rather the dismantling process is reversed, in a constant and continuous process of action and reaction. So the message becomes less about the relentless ravages of time—civilisations, like buildings, will fall—or of inexorable progress—man struggling from the ruins to create again—but instead the process implies pre-determination and a surprisingly satisfying inevitability.

This first collaboration of George Popperwell and Anton Hart has produced a dense exhibition where following conventional chains of inference and connotation will perhaps never yield distinct conclusions. The accompanying essay by University of NSW architecture teacher Michael Tawa recognises this with its pertinent etymological exploration of various concepts associated with the idea of ‘the cloakroom’: as prelude, threshold, vestibule of play that “conceals, decoys, baits and lures.” It is in reading this essay, in following its complex relationship of words, that the viewer is prepared for what will be essential processes of exploration and excavation.

While the essay provides a non-literal explanation, a suggested approach to viewing, there are concrete connections included amongst what seems to be a thoroughly abstract piece of writing. When Tawa states that the “metaphors wander” and names his analogies—jungle snare, factory floor—one is tempted to tick off the elements (the spiked traps, the box-stacked Pirelli-covered industrial floor) that one recognises. But while it is important to realise that this installation can be appreciated purely for its aesthetic merits, being skilfully designed and faultlessly constructed, much of its value seems to lie in the chains of meanings it creates. The inclusion of the various fantastic objects inspires all kinds of literal and metaphorical analogies and the resulting sense of Derridean destabilisation is possibly what gives the work, initially frustratingly static, its sub-surface sense of restlessness.

The Cloak Room, Anton Hart & George Popperwell, Experimental Art Foundation, August 10-September 8

The Emirates AFI Awards need to be all things to all people. They have to be industry awards, and antipodean Oscars, as well as reflecting the high-toned claims for capital C Cultural relevance in which the film industry indulges to justify keeping its snout in publicly-funded troughs.

The cost of the awards system finally caught up with them last year. Previously any feature could be entered and all films were toured around the country for the voting membership. This produced an impenetrable thicket of films that only the hardiest of cineastes could struggle through to reach the ballot box on the other side.

This year, films must have a distributor in order to be eligible. This has taken out the undergrowth, leaving 13 of the taller trees. It also constitutes a realistic intervention in recognising that, as much as we all lionise production, distribution is the most important component of the industry. Australian cinema loads all of its energies into development, but a film with no distributor is a tree falling with no one to hear it. This year Moulin Rouge (Fox) opened on over 250 screens and grossed $27 million domestically. The Dish (Roadshow) peaked on 284 screens, grossing $17 million. The rest of the Australian cinema spent the year in the arthouse outhouse. Daylight came third before Mullet which did heroically to gross south of a million dollars after opening on 9 screens and expanding to 15.

Moulin Rouge is the central film in this year’s field. It is the quintessential product of the If We Build It They Will Come philosophy. Well, they came, they brought money and shiny trinkets like Nicole with them, and now the question remains: is this a good thing? The fate of the film at the awards will be a judgement on its status as one possible future for the industry. When Arthur Philip turned up he found that the locals took the trinkets but maintained a suspicious distance. Two hundred and thirteen years later and the jury is still out on this as a strategy. Moulin Rouge may possibly win Best Picture, though if they ran the awards like Big Brother, I suspect it would also be the first eviction.

Meanwhile, in the golden fields of theory, we might nod wisely in Baz’s general direction. Ah, the pastiche! Ah, the dazzling play of the empty signifier (and signifiers don’t get any emptier than Nicole in this film)! Surely all films must be like this in the brave new world of the postmodern, where we know there is nothing but the reworking of cliche! Though, of course, if all films were like this, Baz would be no big deal. Instead, he is a distinctive innovator who is trying to import these notions from the avant-garde into the mainstream.

In the other corner, we have Mullet, the skinny kid fighting above his weight and being careful not to throw too many punches. If things go wrong for the Tall Poppy, he might be the one left standing at the end of the night. Perhaps this would be fitting given that David Caesar’s film is exemplary of several trends within Australian cinema. It is firmly in the mainstream of a formally conservative ‘cinema of quality’ accentuating themes of personal growth.

Dramatically, it is a good instance of the dialogue-driven actorly cinema, which results from the dominance of theatrical values in Australia. The increasing emphasis on script development means that more has to go onto the page, encouraging the primacy of dialogue. This is ironic given that one of the major thematic strands to emerge this year is the inarticulacy of the Australian male. Characters in Mullet spend an enormous amount of time talking around their problems, such as the inability of blokes to express love.

What do you get if you cross Ewan McGregor with Ben Mendelsohn? Noah Taylor in He Died With A Felafel in His Hand, another bloke whose problem is that he is unable to express love. He smokes Gauloises, covers his wall with photos of Anna Karina and Sartre, plays at being the writer as loser, Henry Lawson updated to pomo wanker. This is ironic bohemian fantasy for those who can’t afford Fox Studios. It is all excellent fun, until the film decides that it’s time to settle down and get serious—the thematic equivalent of getting a job. I guess we all have to grow up sometime but Richard Lowenstein’s strength is his comic version of Australian urban subculture.

Anthony LaPaglia in Lantana is a cop unable to express love. This sets up common ground between him and Geoffrey Rush, who is also unable to…well, you get the picture. Ray Lawrence takes this material and runs it through the stylistic system of a director like Atom Egoyan. Characters circle each other with motifs leaping from one to the other in a tightening spiral of transference and condensation. The camera prowls slowly and the music oozes unease. While the film walks the line between brooding and ponderous, its use of a detective plot also raises the question of genre filmmaking in Australia.

“You’re a great fuck, but you’re a very ordinary detective,” observes Kelly McGillis of the Susie Porter private eye in The Monkey’s Mask. This is a neat observation of the split in priorities of Australian films. They tend to shy away from action-based genre narratives with goal-oriented protagonists, as this is too much like fighting the Americans on their own turf. Instead they try to be the great fuck, to explore the interpersonal nuance rather than the narrative pleasures that are typically at the heart of genre.

Risk is atypical in taking its genre narrative more seriously. In the context of the Australian cinema, this is indeed a risky undertaking. The conventions of film noir are easier to identify than to replicate. Claudia Karvan, for example, gets left holding the bag both in the story and the performance area, where she makes an unlikely femme fatale. But she seems like such a nice girl.

The Bank, Robert Connolly’s populist thriller, tries to compromise with genre on several fronts. Its thrills are worked into dramatic confrontations rather than externalised into action. Once again, dialogue has to drive the film, resulting in periodic lapses into didacticism. Its other way around action-based spectacle is the quotation of lush nostalgic style, with Bernard Herrmann music and Saul Bass title sequence and graphics thickening the action.

I’ve stressed the closeness of Australian cinema to theatre. The most obvious example is Silent Partner which leaves Daniel Keene’s play essentially intact. I don’t have a problem with this—Andre Bazin once noted that one of cinema’s strengths was its ability to enhance theatrical drama—though too often the influence stops at an overwrought theatrical performance style. This film adopts a very unromanticised view of what it is to inhabit the lower economic depths, which makes the publicity for it as an ultra-low budget film particularly apt. Let’s launch into interpretive space and see the film as metaphorising its own impoverished circumstances. To make Australian films is to be poor, and to be poor is to be crushed but, improbably, to survive.

Perhaps this is why Clara Law seems a perverse presence in the Australian cinema—an established director who migrated to Australia. After her diaspora film, Floating Life, we have her landscape film, The Goddess of 1967. The perversity extends to her treatment of landscape, all bleach bypass, and accentuated blues. It is interesting to see her revisiting the terrain of Nicholas Roeg and Walkabout, when so much local filmmaking is trying to ground itself in the specificity of urban cultures.

Yolngu Boy and Serenades mark a welcome return to Indigenous themes in Australian film after last year’s silence. Yolngu Boy, made by the Australian Children’s Television Foundation, strives to be cool in order to win the respect of its primary youth audience. There’s rock’n’roll, petrol sniffing, and the hyperactive camera style of a generation that has absorbed rock videos straight into its central nervous system. It resists the impulse to preach for as long as possible.

Mojgan Khadem’s film Serenades deserves credit for delving into a social history rarely seen in our cinema. The heroine moves between Aboriginal culture, Christianity and Islam, all of which are seen as variant forms of patriarchy. The coalition of interests between Afghanis and Aborigines is a potentially interesting one, as is the observation that women are doubly marginalised within these formations. At the point when our heroine has no alternative but to reclaim some sense of Aboriginal identity, however, the jig is up. Aboriginality functions as a vague form of nature worship and a position of victimhood.

La Spagnola, like Yolngu Boy, is very conscious of the value of stylistic flourish. Set against the postwar migration experience in the skippy badlands, this film tries to reappropriate the stereotypes of southern European migrants. OK, so the women scream, the men are dumb and horny, and they all wave their arms around a lot. But at least they have decent music and they know how to cook! Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown on the verge of Sydney, although there is no formal experimentation to shock or act as an alternative focus of interest as there is with Almodovar at his best.

Let’s end by returning to the question of popularity. The Castle opened up fresh vistas for Australian film a few years back. Here was a film that was able to break out of the government subsidy, niche-market bracket and connect with a broad Australian public. The standard criticism was that it wasn’t much to look at. I found this to be a refreshing change as Australian films are often Beautiful, especially when they are nothing else. The Dish arrives as an attempted corrective. If I had to describe it in a word, that word would be burnished. Surprisingly little happens in the film, but much of it happens at the magic hour. In an industry which generally cares more about getting films made rather than watched, the quiet efficiency of this film’s success stands out as a beacon of unfashionable success.

If I was a betting man, I’d be looking at the each way odds for Mullet. (It seems wussy to back Moulin Rouge for anything but a win.) The romantic in me (sorry Baz, I know that’s a cliche) might also be prepared to lose a few dollars on He Died With A Felafel In His Hand.

This year baby-boomers battle it out with baby-documenters for Best Documentary and Best Documentary Director in the Emirates AFI Awards. 5 documentaries are nominated across several categories. I recommend that you go see them all. In this review I will nitpick and critique rather than praise the tireless and often largely underpaid work of the docomakers. The praise should be assumed by default.

When Professor Anne Boyd, the central character of Robin Anderson and Bob Connolly’s Facing the Music, walks off in the distance and says, “The university is dead”, it is a poignant moment. I took an academic friend to see the film and she cried, realising that she, like many of her colleagues, had to grieve the passing of tertiary education in Australia. Connolly/Anderson’s film is timely. The story of defunding universities and of academics suffering stress and heart attacks is increasingly common. Boyd’s university is more absorbed with budgets than with research and she can only find 10 days in a whole year to write music which, considering her importance to Australian music, is a great loss.

Anderson and Connolly, along with their editor Ray Thomas, are masters of the craft. The documentary sounds and looks gorgeous. My quibbles with the film are twofold. Firstly, it ends very suddenly. The final cadence of the film is almost non-existent and the final scene is played out in text superimposed over images of the characters. ‘Life goes on’ endings still need to leave me with a sense of finish before I find them successful. If only because, for me, life does not go on. It ends with the credits. My second quibble is just how well crafted it is. Anderson and Connolly have been making these observational films about chiefs for some time, whether professors of music or heads of Pacific tribes. I want them to break out and do something new. I want them to move onto their next series and see what interesting experimentations they come up with.

Vanessa Gorman’s Losing Layla is the story of that one percent we have nightmares about becoming. Gorman, a producer on Australian Story, documents her own feelings and those of her partner throughout her pregnancy, the birth and the death of their baby daughter. To be honest I purposely missed the TV screening because I just didn’t want to have to confront this kind of story. But I bite the bullet and see it in the screening room of the AFI, a small glassed-in and sealed-off podium. I feel strangely like a fish in a bowl (or a documentary subject) as people walk by embarrassed at seeing tears roll down my cheeks.

I find the interviews with Layla’s father beautiful and sensitive. The build up to the birth is done well but we spend too much time with the couple and Layla after her death and before her burial. Also, I would have liked to see Gorman make the final statement about her relationship to Layla’s father direct to camera. As in Facing the Music, closure occurs off camera.

Peter Du Cane and Matthew Kelly’s Playing the Game episode is a straight up and down documentary about the secret bombing of Cambodia. The woman next to me in the theatre keeps exclaiming loudly “oh!” as we find out more about the US involvement and bombing. I have no doubt she would have voted it best doco. I find the film’s portrayal of Prince Sihanouk as a political mastermind surprising.

Du Cane and Kelly’s documentary leaps effectively across time and national borders and I am never lost in the narrative or left dangling with questions unanswered. I gain some insight into Cambodian affairs but as a filmmaker I find the work too straight and authoritative in its manner. This is in contrast to another film nominated for a craft award, David Max Brown’s and Tom Zubrycki’s Secret Safari which uses all the traditional tricks, but with a playfulness and glint in the eye that pokes just a little bit of fun at the form.

When Dennis O’Rourke read a critique that a colleague once wrote about his work he told me that this person should sit down and watch and rewatch his films until he understood them. So I did that. I rewatched Cunnamulla, hoping that I would find it amazing and that I had just missed the point in my first viewing. The film follows a year in the life of various Cunnamulla locals. But O’Rourke’s subjects are not going through any particularly riveting crises—compared with Professor Anne Boyd or Layla’s mother or even Cambodia—and we only scrape the surface of who they are.

I think O’Rourke is one of the greats and his Good Woman of Bangkok is one of the most poetic and complex documentaries I have seen. His work is a mixed bag, but to his credit he keeps reinventing his style and challenging the form. And so it is inevitable that some works will be brilliant and some less so. I’m in a minority in being bored by this film; most everyone else thinks it’s fab.

In Wonderboy Andrew Wiseman revisits the subjects of a previous documentary, Driving with Richard. Footage from the first film shows the young and brain-damaged Richard in conflict with his parents, and is used as flashback material. The subjects reflect upon the previous portrayal and fill us in on the current situation.

The documentary is cut by the legendary Uri Mizrahi. The films he edits are leisurely in pace and he is not afraid of using images of people in everyday life. Sometimes the unique nature of everydayness is fascinating but at times I feel these images are disguising a story told in interviews or voiceover. Despite the on-camera breakdown of the mother, the film is too passive and gentle. But a third episode about the crisis when the father is too old and must hand Richard over to public care should be interesting viewing.

Out of all of this concentrated viewing I noticed that endings are an issue for Australian documentaries. The films with stronger endings seem overplayed and the ones with weaker endings leave me thinking ‘oh, it’s finished.’ Wiseman’s ending errs towards the overly dramatic. It holds on an image of Richard as his father’s voice says that the community (read audience) will have to look after Richard once his dad gets old. On the other hand Facing the Music and Losing Layla, my favourite films of the bunch, both finish frustratingly off camera.

What is animation? In the case of this year’s AFI nominees the more relevant question may be what isn’t animation? If we limit the scope of our analysis to include only 2-dimensional moving images, it could be argued that nothing falls outside the category of animation. ‘Live action’ could in theory be defined as pixelation (a term coined almost 50 years ago by legendary Canadian animation pioneer Norman McLaren, to describe the technique of stopmotion animation that used real actors in life-size sets, as seen in his movie Neighbours [1952]). Interestingly enough, this was the same technique used to great effect by Louis and Auguste Lumière in some of the first motion pictures ever made, where the interval between frames taken perfectly matches that between frames projected. This is taking things to an extreme but perhaps ‘animation’ as a single category for a film award might simply be too broad. I found this problematic when attempting to review last year’s nominees, and it was no easier this time around. If anything it was more difficult, with this year’s selection presenting an even more diverse cross section of ‘animated’ films.
With The Exploding Woman, Nancy Allen has delivered a second wave feminist fable in which a woman finds her existence reduced to an isolated postnatal life of washing and ironing. Paranoid and delusional, the woman finds her domestic environs increasingly menacing. Even that good old Aussie icon, the Hills hoist, turns nasty, making a cameo appearance as the harbinger of all evil. Although its dark vision may still ring true for many new mothers, the narrative has a distinctly 70s flavour, also present in the film’s somewhat dated visual style—most notably the psychedelic sea of tears and the hand drawn images that appear momentarily near the end. A grab bag of various filter effects, animation techniques and editing styles are used to enliven what is essentially simplistic live action. The resultant disjointed feel is perhaps meant to mirror the protagonist’s unstable mental state but it came off as unresolved and clunky. On a more positive note I thought the ultrasound images were used very well in the final credits.

Bad Baby Amy by Anthony Lucas is a children’s film set on a drought-ravaged outback cattle station. While dad is in town trying to save the station from the bank—not too hopeful without rain in the very near future—Baby Amy accidentally on purpose swallows one of her Italian Nona’s magic glass beads. Local wise blackfella Bill is roused from his ‘thinking place’ to drive Amy and her 11 year old sister Rose to the doctor. Bill brakes suddenly to avoid a dead cow (“stupid mob them bullocks”) and Amy coughs up the magic bead near a termite mound. Lo and behold, next morning the rain begins to fall, a happy ending for rural multiculturalism.

Rendered using 3D sets and plasticine armatures this film beautifully captures a dusty red Australian outback. Several scenes also feature digital postproduction (both animation and compositing), with some clever handling of water—one of the greatest challenges facing the stop-motion animator. The excellent lip syncing lends the characters a credible screen presence (though I’ve never seen a baby crawl quite like that), while good lighting (especially the sun behind the windmill) and several well-executed camera moves top off some fine cinematography. Personally I found this film—though not without charm—to be kinda humourless though. Basically it took itself a little too seriously for my taste.

Norah Mulroney’s Collective is a slick and polished film, though more an exercise in compositing than an animated short. In a variation on the tried and true ‘nature gets her own back’ theme, a butterfly collector is imprisoned when his collection decides to turn the tables. Breaking free in a flurry of CG wings, they dance a while with their prey before enveloping him in a human chrysalis.

Now there is one thing I find especially painful when compositing live actors with computer generated elements and that is an actor trying to ‘see’ something that has yet to come into existence and having obviously no solid idea where to look. Humans are so adept at tracking the eye movements of other humans that it’s almost impossible to get this right (no matter how big your computer is—show me a single character in Phantom Menace who once looked Jah Jah Binks square in the eye). To her credit though, Mulroney pulled off the landing of a CG butterfly on a ‘real’ hand extremely well. And the film’s sumptuous production design and cinematography are completed by some very tasty credit sequence images.

AFI nominee regular Sarah Watt collaborated with animator Emma Kelly to produce the last film in this year’s selection, Living with Happiness. Like Allen’s The Exploding Woman, this film evokes the darker side of new motherhood but does so much more successfully. Here we see how a mother’s precarious happiness with her new baby is threatened as domestic vignettes are humorously intercut with her worst case scenario fantasies. The cutaways to visions of impending doom escalate from simple household accidents—baby drowning in the bath or being showered with boiling water—to the more extreme—kids whacking up skag in the playground—and absurd (if strangely pertinent)—airliner crashing into the house. Deciding to clear her head with a walk on the beach, she is swept out to sea by a freak wave, uttering expletives (convincingly delivered by Sigrid Thornton). She is eventually rescued by a 9 year old on a surfboard who delivers the moral of the story, sensibly informing her that “the thing is, not to panic.”

Living with Happiness is something of a stylistic departure from Watt’s recent work. Several of the disaster scenarios use clear pencil lines and extreme shifts of view and perspective, giving them a distinctly Plymptonesque feel (Bill Plympton, American animator best known for his quirky [and often hyper-violent] hand drawn films such as the hilarious 25 Ways to Quit Smoking). And Watt’s typically painterly style is used to great effect in the ocean scenes with excellent beach crashing waves and some really nice underwater moments.

As I watched the 4 nominations for Best Short Film it occurred to me that there was something similar about them that I couldn’t immediately pinpoint. After watching for a second time the source of this commonality became apparent—it was me, or rather my response to each of the films. Against all my expectations as a jaded viewer of too many ‘clever, clever’ shorts, I was rather bewilderingly affected by these films. (Not that they aren’t clever.) Those immediate qualities such as a deftness of direction and narrative assuredness that we’re used to in lauded shorts are here matched by gentle, nuanced performances and most significantly a desire to explore what it is that moves people. Each of these films concerns itself with the minutiae of human interaction; the volumes that small moments speak about the emotional lives of characters and, at the same time, the broader social, cultural and political factors that frame them.

In Jane Manning’s Delivery Day Trang, a young Vietnamese girl, gets dressed for school on parent-teacher interview day, only to be told by her mother that she must stay at home to help in the family outworker factory as it is delivery day. She tries to negotiate with her mother to make the interview, but the day slips away. A variety of small incidents and exchanges punctuate the day and the rhythms of family and community life are beautifully and believably rendered through the eyes of a wise and preternaturally responsible child. Deborah Lee’s performance as Trang is particularly noteworthy. While Trang’s urging of the younger adults not to waste time is played to amuse, it also reveals an understanding and hence anxiety about the consequences of not making the deadline. Similarly, her fear that a Foxtel salesman is an inspector points to the everyday pressures on the family.

What is particularly striking about this film is the way in which it depicts the Vietnamese-Australian family entirely in their own element and not self-consciously in relation to Australia—the only Anglo-Australian character is the teacher who, while extremely significant to Trang, remains nevertheless marginal. Screenwriter Khoa Do focuses instead on the extended family, the conversations they have as they work about the hazy past and their aspirations for the future. They speak in the half-English so familiar to migrants yet so rarely captured. Care is also taken to visually detail the actual work that is done by the outworkers—those mysterious stamped numbers found on clothing tags are thus transformed into a story about how people survive.

Saturn’s Return (Wenona Byrne) begins in a fairly pedestrian way—2 young men, Dimi and Dan, videotape themselves embarking on a road trip from Melbourne to Sydney. They stop en route at Bonegilla, the migrant camp where Dimi’s parents first met. They are on their way to see Dan’s father. Layers are slowly added to this apparently unremarkable premise and their cumulative effect has a strong emotional impact.

The 2 men, who are lovers, try to negotiate their very different relationships with their parents and their parents’ histories. While Dimi’s parents are Greek migrants and Dan’s are drug casualties from the 60s, they each face similar issues of identity, ties to family and to the past, which they deal with in their own ways. This is conveyed with humour and restraint, and the performances are again accomplished, particularly Joel Edgerton as Dan. He skillfully and believably conveys the pain and weight of responsibility on a son yet again having to play a parental role. I wasn’t surprised to discover that the film was based on a short story by Christos Tsiolkas (who also wrote the screenplay), a writer who always manages to dig out the truth and heart of the seemingly obvious.

In The Big House, writer-director Rachel Ward explores the emotional side of prison life. Tony Martin plays a long-term crim who has gotten used to and understands the system. He waits near the entrance of the prison for new young inmates he can take under his wing to both initiate into and protect from the harsh realities of prison life. A combination of Martin’s performance and clever dialogue make this a blackly comic scenario. There are echoes here of Martin’s Neddy Smith in Blue Murder and this memorable performance rivals the earlier one. It is also quite a fascinating exploration of social performance and masculinity at its most isolated, pressured and extreme.

While gritty and detailed enough to seem believable, the film is also at times quite formal, even stylised in a broad sense. It takes a confident hand to make all this work and Ward displays real skill in creating a pared down, yet not overly contrived, structure. She gives an emotional insight into this uninspiring world without being condescending or heavy handed, and the final result is funny, humane and depressing, all at the same time.

The most outstanding of this impressive group of films is Steven Pavlovsky’s Inja. Set in South Africa (‘Inja’ is the Xhosa word for dog), this parable-like film tells the story of a dog brutally trained by its white owner to hate the Xhosa boy who has lovingly reared it, an act which years later backfires on the owner. The film uses the sort of twist typical in short films to great moral effect. What could be something akin to Alfred Hitchcock’s Tales of the Unexpected (that is, clever and forgettable) is given a sense of immediate relevance by being solidly placed against the political backdrop of a changing South Africa—the film marks the shift with the small boy raising the old South African flag at the beginning, and the new flag as an adolescent.

The careful and precise pace along with the beautiful cinematography serves the story well. The time taken to establish the subtleties of the relationships within the film—between the boy, the dog, the farmer, his wife, the women who work on the farm and, importantly, the landscape—provides the film with its substance. While parables tend toward the unambiguous, Pavlovsky explores the complexities inherent in relationships where proximity and otherness are interwoven and competing at every turn. It is a rare feat to capture so much within 17 minutes.

It is also interesting that a student film (Australian Film Television & Radio School) should be set entirely in South Africa. Like Delivery Day and Saturn’s Return, both part of SBS Television’s 13 part Hybrid Life series, Inja reflects the extremely varied preoccupations of filmmakers in Australia today. In engaging with such a range of experiences, concerns and histories, all the short films nominated represent the breadth of cultural and social diversity that is so often experienced on an everyday level, yet so infrequently treated in such thoughtful ways on Australian screens. After viewing these films I have the feeling that the Australian film landscape might finally be growing towards a much anticipated maturity, even if it has taken a sapling to show it the way.

Needeya Islam has just been appointed Coordinator, Young Filmmakers’ Fund, FTO

Until recently, the Australian film community was in a state of nervous discontent following some years of static or declining government funding. Despite several reports on industry concerns over low development and falling production levels, and high profile deputations to Canberra, the Federal Government had hardly responded to the growing sense of crisis. When the Australian Tax Office ruled against tax concessions for investors in Red Planet and Moulin Rouge, it seemed as if even the expanding offshore production sector was under threat. Despite this, however, overall production in Australia has continued to grow and spread in style, content and diversity. Overseas films and television productions are being made at the Fox Studios in Sydney and the Gold Coast Studios in Queensland, employing local casts and crews, using local post-production facilities and putting money into the local economy. We’re seeing a seemingly ever-increasing number of low budget/no-budget productions, short films made for short film competitions and festivals that proliferate across the country and the calendar, and guerilla features made on digicam and bankcard.

At the beginning of September, everything changed. The Federal Government announced a comprehensive package of assistance for the local film industry, comprising increased funding of $92.7 million over 4 years for the Australian film bodies, including the Film Finance Corporation, the Australian Film Commission, Film Australia and SBS Independent (in recognition of that organisation’s success in beefing up a limited funding allocation to an impressive production slate. Head of SBSI, Glenys Rowe, is now talking about the possibility of a miniseries). The package was bolstered with a new refundable tax offset for qualifying large film productions, to act as an incentive for foreign productions made in Australia. Euphoria reigned, and spokespeople for the film bodies and industry groups rushed to welcome the injection of urgently needed funds into the industry, as well as the reassurance provided to foreign investors who could have decided against Australia after the adverse Red Planet decision.

(To attract local investors, offshore productions shooting in Australia had been using an Australian tax concession, Division 10B of the Tax Act, which allowed 100 percent deduction on investment over a 2 year period, and had much less stringent local content requirements than the better known Division 10BA, more commonly used for Australian films. However the ATO recently decided that these concessions should not be allowed, as the investment was not ‘at risk’, the condition that allowed the concession in the first place. A recent report has estimated that offshore production had brought over $600 million into the country over the past 4 years, with that cash inflow promising to increase substantially.)

Kim Dalton, chief executive of the AFC, welcomes the government’s announcement. “It’s a package, as far as the local production industry is concerned, that works across the key agencies involved in the areas of development and production.” Although there have been complaints that the increases in funding only restore what had previously been cut, Dalton believes that to a certain extent the level of funding that’s been provided is the level which the government clearly feels is appropriate to the size of industry that they’re prepared to support. “And the fact that the government has decided to intervene in the area of foreign production as part of the package is a recognition that foreign production is an important component of the Australian industry, an understanding that the local production sector and the foreign production sector are interdependent and should be addressed so.”

Director (and past Australian Screen Directors Association president) Stephen Wallace is less enthusiastic. “Of course we should be grateful for what we’ve been given, and we are…But really the FFC needed much more, because basically what they’ve been given is just for high end TV production. There are apparently $200 million worth of projects they could invest in, and they’ve got $48 million. We know it’s not enough, because three-quarters of the people in the industry aren’t working.”

But Dalton believes that higher budget television production has been an area of concern in the local industry. “The number of miniseries now being produced is very low, one to two a year, and for a form that’s very popular with Australian audiences, that’s unfortunate. It is an issue to be addressed in the context of the current review into Australian content standards by the Australian Broadcasting Authority. The ABA has already set levels of first-run children’s drama but there clearly remains a problem about how that level of quality drama is going to be funded. Part of the government’s new package, $7.5 million next year and $10 million the year after, to the FFC, is specifically directed at adult drama and children’s drama, and will go some way towards dealing with this. But it is still a concern.”

The new tax incentives look set to benefit only foreign film productions, as few Australian films have the at least $A15m budget required to qualify for the tax benefits. Wallace wishes that the government had looked at improving the tax benefits available to those who invest in the Film Licensed Investment Company Scheme (government-sponsored schemes to raise concessional money for investment in film), which are having a hard time attracting investors at the moment. “We need some other doors to investment in local production; currently the FFC is the only door, and it controls everything.” He also believes that the requirement that a local film project have an Australian distributor has narrowed things down dramatically, given that Palace is the only distributor really offering support, but there’s a 6 month wait to even have a script read at Palace. “I just wish the government would look at some of the issues that actually mean that there’s only one door for investment and that’s the FFC. We need more doors, more diversity in funding.”

After releasing an important review into the state of development in the local industry, which concluded that we spend far less, and take far longer, on this vital component than most other national industries, the AFC last year reallocated its internal priorities to highlight and support its primary developmental role. The increased funding it has now been promised will allow it to further sustain the vital areas of script and professional development for not only features but short films, documentary, animation and interactive media. “We’re now funding what we believe to be some really interesting and strong projects, and those projects have been put to us by teams, often writer/producer, and sometimes writer/producer/director, teams of people who are the more established players within the industry. That’s something we wanted to do, to say to the industry that by development, the AFC didn’t only mean the development of new and emerging talent (although we continue to do that), but the provision of a proper level of development funding to established practitioners. Those people are coming back to the AFC, and are appreciative of the fact that we are attempting, within our limited resources, to provide high levels of support.”

“I thought I was making the first of what would be a series of Asian Australian co-productions—that there haven’t been many since is very disappointing,” said director Brian Trenchard Smith at the screening of the restored version of his first feature, The Man From Hong Kong (1975), on the closing night of the second Sydney Asia Pacific Film Festival (see p20). “Australia’s closest relationship is with Asia, we should be choosing subjects that appeal to both markets. If we’re short of finance in this country, look to Asia. What’s important is that you put time and effort into your script, make your characters real within the genre you’re using—it’s not easy, but it’s worth trying. Co-productions are a very good way of hedging your bets, and they also double your prospects of making money, as long as the film appeals to both markets. Golden Harvest was able to milk (Man From Hong Kong) in the Asian markets, and the rest of the world was gravy.”

“It’s not up to the AFC to socially engineer the industry,” says Dalton. “If writers and producers come to us with ideas along these lines, we’d look at them. There’s certainly no resistance to such a development. But the reality is that the majority of the films that get made in Australia are going to focus on very specifically Australian stories, and the ones that do move off our shores—given the realities of finance and casting—tend to look towards Europe or America.”

But if people are still managing to develop projects and to get into production, why is it so hard to get audiences to watch Australian films? In a recent television interview, producer Jan Chapman talked about the Australian features that had done well in Australia but had been unable to translate this to overseas results, either not selling in other territories, or underperforming on overseas release, often despite good reviews and promotion. Films like Looking for Alibrandi, The Dish and Chopper are probably among those she had in mind. In an increasingly crowded world market, Australian films have a problem; for a small industry that can really only afford to make relatively small films, the way to go, financially as well as creatively, is to make films for the domestic market even though that market is dominated by US product, and local success is still hard won (apart from Moulin Rouge, which is counted as an Australian film, only Mullet and The Bank either have or look as if they might make a little dent in the local box office this year). “We have the immense disadvantage overseas in that we were once so fashionable, and we’re not even slightly fashionable anymore,” says producer Richard Brennan. “And even locally we’re competing for distributors and release dates. And when we do get a release, we have very little to spend compared with US films with lots more money for promotion and advertising.”

Dalton argues that it’s the market conditions that have altered dramatically. “It’s much harder, not just for Australian films, but for British films, or any other specialist cinema. The market has contracted, and it’s tougher out there to sell films internationally.”

“What we need,” says AFI Director Deb Verhoeven, “is a genuinely national cinema, in which films are not only produced, but are watched by an appreciative audience. We need a recognition of a viewing nation—we don’t really seem to have that concept. The funding cuts that the AFI has experienced are simply a demonstration of the lack of importance given to exhibition and the audience in the overall film community. What we have in Australia is a viewing population, not a viewing nation. We’re a great audience, but not really for our own films.”

By any standards, this year’s Melbourne Film Festival was a major success. Attendances were at record levels, and for good reason, as the festival has capitalised on past innovations such as the wide distribution of a free catalogue, the use of major media partners and government promotional support, as well as 4 good theatres close together in the CBD. Overall, the festival gave solid expression to the importance of screen culture to the city.
There were some fine European films such as Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I and François Ozon’s Under the Sand (both reviewed here after their Sydney screenings). However the big news was the increased programming emphasis on Asian cinema under new director, James Hewison. There is obviously a hole in the market that the festival filled. Mainstream cinema has decamped to the shopping malls and the arthouses are clogged with crossover films and the rancid stench of Sundance. Anyone with eyes for new vitality can see that it is coming from east Asia.

We have come to associate the Brisbane International and Sydney Asia Pacific Festivals (see p20) with strengths in this area, but Melbourne gained a lot of ground this year with 2 programming coups: a sustained focus on new Korean film and a retrospective on Japanese director, Ishii Sogo.

South Korea has emerged as a major regional cinema, capturing over 40% of its domestic box office with locally made film (compare this to Australia’s highly touted 8% last year). The output of the Korean industry combines popular genres and specialised art cinema, and Melbourne contained a good range of it with 10 features. The quality varied, but it was valuable to see a range of films and get a sense of the cultural, industrial and aesthetic outlines of this as an emergent national cinema.

Of the 10 films, 3 were outstanding. Bong Joon-ho’s debut film Barking Dogs Never Bite is a brilliantly constructed fable of disillusionment and the endurance of hope. It takes the familiar theme of emotional emptiness at the heart of urban life, but finds fresh hope by looking to new (or under-represented) social groups. It contains one of the great female heroes of our times. Forget Lara Croft, this girl walks out of the office to save lost puppy dogs!

Hong Sang-soo’s The Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors is an experiment in modernist narration. It tells a narrative then seizes up and retells the same story in altered form. You can play the Rashomon interpretive game about the subjective nature of interpersonal relations, but more importantly, this is a puzzle about the role of memory in narrative comprehension.

The Isle divided a lot of viewers with its minimalist dramatic style combined with brutal imagery. Baz Luhrmann might believe that love stories are constructed out of banal mush, but here is a love story in which a lot of fish hooks get inserted into bodily orifices. Boy meets girl and a lot of blood gets spilt in the process. The disturbing aspect is that there is quite a compelling logic to everything that happens.

We’ve seen political thrillers in the past from Korea such as last year’s Shiri. This year’s version was Joint Security Area, an immensely enjoyable thriller-comedy about the irresistible impulses toward political reunification and the attendant fears involved in the process. A political cinema which can successfully frame urgent contemporary issues in popular genre terms is no small achievement.

The Korean cinema looks to have its fair share of dark horror films and thrillers. The whodunnit Tell Me Something by Chang Youn-hyun contained so many red herrings I think I ended up being the killer. It’s replete with dismembered body parts and wild car crashes without much pretext other than a commitment to the richness of genre experience.

Schoolgirl horror is an ascendant cycle within the supernatural genre, following Whispering Corridors. This year’s entry was Memento Mori, which takes us once more into the heady atmosphere of schoolroom crushes, suicide, guilt and the return of unquiet spirits. This is carried off in a compelling way here as the narrative shuttles back and forth through memories until finding a redemptive image of happiness to bring its horror to a close.

The director of Whispering Corridors, Park Ki-hyung, had a new film, Secret Tears, once again centring on a schoolgirl with that bad, bad mixture of teenage angst and supernatural power. The impulse behind this cycle seems to be the realisation that women have stuff inside them, which once released, threatens to change the world. Let’s hope they find out quickly.

The other major event in the Asian component of the festival was a retrospective of 7 films by Ishii Sogo dating from 1970s Crazy Thunder Road to the irresistibly named Electric Dragon 80,000 Volts. This most recent film led off the retrospective and resulted in enormous queues for all of Ishii’s work. As a child its protagonist had absorbed an enormous charge of electricity that could only be dissipated through an electric guitar. You can’t go wrong with a quickly cut film based around noise and music played at a volume to make the seats shake.

The key to Sogo’s work is his commitment to excess, either in the frenetic performance style of his early films such as Crazy Family (1984), the overwrought montage and audio-sweetening of his most recent films, such as last year’s samurai film, Gojoe, or the excessive restraint of his middle period films, best represented by Labyrinth of Dreams (1997).

The most significant film from China was Jia Zhang Ke’s Platform, which was unfortunately only available in a truncated version. This did some violence to a film about the texture of social change in the transition to market socialism. This immensely important change is chronicled through a troupe of cultural workers who begin the film performing Maoist propaganda and end as a breakdancing group. The film continues the thread of Chinese filmmaking, which includes Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, in which long takes and distant framing are combined with innovative staging to discover new ways of manipulating space.

The news wasn’t all good for those who follow Asian filmmakers. New films by Takeshi Kitano (Brother) and Abbas Kiarostami (ABC Africa) were major disappointments, and I’m still looking for someone with a good word for the aptly-titled horror prequel Ring O. However you don’t judge a festival simply by the good films it serves up. Good festivals bring new things to your attention in a concerted fashion. I’m thinking maybe Thailand next year for a regional focus?

50th Melbourne International Film Festival, various venues, Melbourne, July 18-August 5

At the Sydney Asia Pacific Film Festival (SAPFF), at a seminar on digital filmmaking in Asia, an older man was getting increasingly agitated in front of me. As filmmakers Garin Nugroho (Indonesia), Im Sang Soo (Korea) and Richard Harris (Australian Screen Directors Association) debated the technical merits of digicam, he suddenly charged out into the aisle and yelled “Asia’s killing off people all over the place. You don’t give a damn!” as he left. Harris quickly quipped “he’s our resident performance artist” but it did remind us of the racism and sense of anger directed at certain groups in our community that has overflowed in the last month. Why was he there? What answers did he want? He certainly missed the point of the forum; many of the participating filmmakers at the festival do give a damn—about the lingering effects of wars and violence—in Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, China.
The wonderful thing about SAPFF is its insistence on showing films from as many countries in the Asia-Pacific region as possible. Not content with just Hong Kong action genre, the screenings this year exploded the notion of ‘Asian cinema.’ It just doesn’t exist. There was as much variety amongst these films as any other cinema around the world: comedy, chaos and martial arts in Shaolin Soccer (Hong Kong), newly restored The Man From Hong Kong (Australia) and Chicken Rice War (Singapore); black comedies Devils on the Doorstep (China) and Space Travellers (Japan); reflections on passions and violence in Mirror Image (Taiwan), Tears (Korea), A Poet (Indonesia), This Is My Moon (Sri Lanka), Wharf of Widows (Vietnam) and Woman on a Tin Roof (Philippines); and a documentary on laying high speed internet cable in the Cambodian Land of Wandering Souls. A new entrée on the menu was Short Soup, a competition open to short films made by or about Asian-Australians; the winning films screened on
SBS’s Eat Carpet.

The difficulties and joys of translation permeated the festival’s films and seminars. At the seminar, both Nugroho and Soo had translators (who incidentally weren’t acknowledged—should they always be invisible?). It was a long, often tedious, sometimes unexpected, sometimes funny Q & A; you can translate words but not necessarily meaning in our technology driven world. The translators often didn’t seem to understand the technical terms associated with digital filmmaking and cinema theory. It was a subtle game of give and take with more questions than answers. It was great to hear those who understood Korean exclaim in joy at Im Sang Soo’s answers while the rest of us sat waiting (this happened throughout the screenings too when the subtitles were dodgy). Soo is a cool dude, laid-back, sunglasses, in rebel pose. He says that his film Tears was aimed as revenge at all the producers who’d knocked him back for financing—he put more graphic sex and violence in. His translator at this point is hesitant about talking dirty: “it’s his word, not my
word” she emphasises.

Tears uses 3 digicams to capture the spontaneity of life on the streets for homeless teenagers in Seoul. The cameras were often hidden from the performers, waiting, ready to pounce. This sense of the unexpected gives life to a gutsy film reminiscent of Larry Clarke’s Kids. Use of non-actors (kids picked up at a local nightclub) adds to the grit. Soo argues that the digital camera is so small that “no-one thinks ‘this is a camera…I have to be an actor.’ On the street no-one realises you’re making a film, you get free extras.” General audience reaction to Tears was poor in Korea; its target market, teenagers, were restricted from seeing it, but the ones who snuck in, not surprisingly, loved it.

Nugroho sees the digital format as more democratic, economical and flexible, but believes there needs to be greater discipline because of the ease of getting footage. He explained that Indonesian cinemas screen digital/local films because Hollywood films have become too expensive to import. Cinemas are closing everywhere due to lack of choice. It’s hard to imagine his film A Poet having a screening there. Based on the writings of Ibrahim Kadir, a didong poet from Gayo, Central Aceh, the film was shot in 6 days in long takes, recreating events of 1965 when the Indonesian military imprisoned suspected members of the Communist Party. Non-actors—Kadir and villagers who actually experienced the terror—appear in the film which is set in one location, the interior of a prison. An estimated half a million (probably more) people were murdered. The film is shot in eloquent black and white, gliding from closeup to closeup of prisoners’ faces as they wait for their names to be called. There’s remarkable use of language and chanting as the camera captures rituals from above—encircled clapping and singing about meeting first loves, a wedding song and dance repeated—stories told and heard many times, enriched by the re-telling. The men and women are separated but can make each other out through a tiny peephole. Women prepare meals for the men in front of the prison bars. We never see the torture or death but it’s made real in the calling of names, the cries at night, the gradually emptying prison cell and Kadir’s daily duty of tying the ropes to close the sacks over people’s heads, as they are led out into darkness to be “hacked up like banana logs.” Kadir wrote the film’s poem-songs in prison. He was later told he had been mistakenly incarcerated, one of the few surviving witnesses.

Prisoners in sacks are also a feature of another stunner, Devils on the Doorstep (Jiang Wen), which won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in 2000. It is an unforgettable blend of farce, sly humour, ethical dilemmas and jaw-clenching violence packed into 139 minutes in crisp black and white. It’s 1945 and children in a northern Chinese village line up for sweets from a man on horseback leading an army band playing a jaunty tune of Japanese invasion. This tune will come back to haunt us later. The opening 5 minutes—shots of feet twisting during love-making, a gun in the mouth, knives thrust through paper thin bedroom walls—reveal Devils to be not the usual ‘Red Sorghum-Chinese Lantern’ softcore Chinese film we’re used to seeing. An anonymous messenger delivers 2 sacks with the instructions that they will be collected in a few days. The sacks contain 2 men, a Japanese army officer and his translator (who is Chinese). If anything happens to them, the entire village will be killed. So, we are introduced to an eccentric mix of beautifully moulded characters. Again, the notion of translation is at the heart of the film’s success with exquisite, finely tuned dialogue. The Japanese officer wants to die and screams abuse at his gentle captors, saying that he will rape and murder their women. His companion wisely translates everything he says as a plea for mercy. The officer wants to learn swear words that he can hurl. The translator teaches him “you are my grandfather I am your son happy new year” which the officer then screams repeatedly to the bemused villagers who appreciate the words but can’t quite understand the delivery. The translator explains that Japanese sound the same whether they are angry or happy. The film is full of such delicate balancing acts in a world that gradually disintegrates into madness. The final half hour is one of the most shocking 30 minutes I’ve experienced in cinema, a surreal, gruesome parallel to films like Apocalypse Now, revealing just how far the minds of men can bend to unimaginable actions during war.

SAPFF is one of the rare festivals that manages to successfully balance popular hits like Shaolin Soccer with the real treasures touched upon above. Overall the quality of films was outstanding and it was a shame that some, like A Poet, didn’t manage to get the audiences they deserved. Its portrayal of a peaceful Islamic community caught up in the violence of an extremist military is particularly relevant right now as a message to those in our community who are braying for blood and targeting Muslims with their hatred. Festivals like SAPFF contribute to an awareness that it’s useless to use blanket terms to define people who live in other countries, let alone simply characterising them as ‘Asian’ or ‘Middle Eastern’. I wish the agitated man in the opening paragraph had stuck around to see A Poet. He might have learned something.

Sydney Asia Pacific Film Festival, directors Juanita Kwok & Paul de Carvalho, Reading Cinemas, Sydney, August 9-18; Center Cinema, Canberra, August 23-26

The published script of Chopper has 2 introductions that afford a way ‘in’ to one of the most controversial and successful Australian films of recent times. The first is by the subject of the film, Mark ‘Chopper’ Read, and the second is by the writer/director Andrew Dominik. Both are angry responses to the film production process, resentful of the arduous, emotionally sapping task of bringing a story to the screen.
Read suggests that by understanding him, or wanting to, we might be on the path to ‘unlocking’ our own demons. It is a fanciful notion that many of us are like him, just more suppressed. What is not so fanciful is our fascination with him as a screen presence, elevated to the level of popular hero by a feature film, appearances on television, and extensive press coverage in the cultural rather than crime columns.

The audience’s repulsion and/or attraction to ‘Choppers’ of all descriptions seems to confirm that the cinema touches some primal place where we only have the courage to go vicariously. And one of the reasons the film did so well at the box office was that local audiences, after so many years confronting (mainly) American psychopaths in the dark, were relieved to have a homegrown one to admire.

But Chopper is no Oscar Schindler, around whom there grew a vigorous moral debate concerning his motives in rescuing, then using, so many people as workers in his factory. In Chopper our task is to understand a repulsive personality, and perhaps see him as an Australian man socialised into violent, often deadly, personal conflicts.

The Chopper screenplay is a good example of how the reality of a film image is not necessarily visible on the page. Dominik complains of the treatment he received from funding assessors who didn’t ‘see’ his film from the script and, in particular, what moral position the audience were meant to take in relation to this one-man-killing-machine. This is because the film’s strength lies in a plain directorial style and a mesmerising performance from Eric Bana as Chopper. The power or quality of an actor’s performance, plus the look of the image, can often be hidden within the words on the page.

This gap between word and image is the universal dilemma of scriptwriters whose work must enthuse both the production team and the bankers long before the first frame is turned. For example, in Scene 77, a carpark outside Bo Jangles nightclub is the setting for the murder of Sammy by Chopper. The script records the following description:

Sammy tries to move past Chopper. Chopper fires, blowing a hole through Sammy’s left eye. Sammy stands there for a couple of hysterical seconds, right eye blinking and then slowly crumples.

What appears on the screen is less ‘hysterical’ than matter of fact, almost banal, action in the half-light. It is shocking in its ordinariness. And then the ordinary is turned on itself by the tone of Bana’s apology—Sorry mate. It is at this moment, through the totality of the performance, that we realise Chopper is a personality completely out of control.

Several times in the film, at the moment just before his victim’s death, Chopper seems mesmerised by the result of his actions, fascinated by the spurting blood yet dismayed that he might have hurt someone. The script does not fully convey the interest this split personality response can generate at these moments.

Chopper is a study in badness much like Mailer’s book on Gary Gilmore (The Executioner’s Song), along with the obligatory media fascination with the criminal ‘character.’ The end result is the elevation of the psychopath to hero—Chopper is portrayed in film publicity with folded arms and guns crossed, in Ned Kelly pose.

The historical/contemporary criminal hero nexus is misleading because it distorts the true nature of heroism, and heroic deeds. In Chopper’s case it suggests something more than he really was, even though his victims (thought to number 19) were mainly drug dealers. His attraction, so cleverly worked in Dominik’s film, is based on the vigilante persona that has a long tradition in the movies. Admiration for revenge, it seems, eschews the need for complex moral debate everytime.

Chopper, film: writer-director Andrew Dominik, writer Mark Brandon Read; screenplay: publisher Currency Press, Sydney, 2000

You are averse to entering large dark corridors—inhibition dictates it. You slowly move forward, before your eyes adjust, into what premonition has told you to distrust. It is an annoying sensation, this fear, since common sense tells you that the experience is not harmful. You are gripped by the suddenness of this disorientation in a space that is not the world: a heavy cloak of warm darkness, a mouth whose teeth are slivers of light. As you approach them, they approach you, these figures whose shape and luminosity appear as you have always imagined ghosts to be. You move closer to a man who gazes out with an emotionless but inquisitive stare, and he retreats; at the end of the corridor a girl surges from the darkness, made more from air and light than from flesh and bone. They are communicating with you in an impossible mixture of intimacy and callousness. You do not know whether it is out of some unspoken need that these remote worlds have come to visit you, or whether you, for a moment more vulnerable, have called on them for help.

And leaving Gary Hill’s Tall Ships (1992) is very much like being woken from a hypnotic spell, recurring in residues and flashes. It is technological art at its very finest, for it does not call attention to itself as technology, does not play a game of cleverness with the viewer, does not make the viewer feel like a Luddite or in need of updating, does not try to initiate the viewer into some new maxi-digi-cyber-techno-syntax. If it takes up something new in our eyes, it is more in its forms; its concerns are perennial. Hill’s pale blue figures, the “ships”, though mute, speak to us before we realise that they have, because they speak to us about the condition of the purgatorial span between birth and death, and the feeling that most of us have that there is something more to material life, though we are at a loss to say what it is. These ships are mirrors and they are gods, making us feel both more secure, and more lost.

It is this depth rather than the puerile lust for hyper-technology that makes Space Odysseys: Sensation and Immersion profound, absorbing—and touching. If we are looking for poignancy without sentimentality, technology is not habitually the first place we will turn. Speaking generally, too many bad experiences have warned the average art-goer off art associated with technology, and rightly so, as the abuses of video art, as well as other so-called new media, are now more associated with sensory solecisms than stimulation. Yet this is one of the most inviting and, whoops, enjoyable exhibitions of contemporary art that I can remember.

It is curious to see the word “immersion” in the title for it immediately evokes its antonyms in the 20th century canon, associated with Duchamp and Minimalism: alienation and theatricality. It is curious because technological art, with its dark rooms and dramatic build-ups, is among the most stagy; not to mention everything we have been told about the alienating effects of technology. In the case of one of the 2 non-technological works, Bruce Nauman’s Triangle Room (1978-80), made in the name of unease, you are left wondering—immersed—as to the very source of alienation. It plays negative shrine to James Turrell’s positive one, an exercise in visual stealth. The first moments of being in the chamber for Turrell’s Between the Seen, with its 2 dull spots flanking a green oblong, can be spent waiting for something to happen. Nothing changes, and stepping closer to the green reveals it as a void; you stand at its raised edge with a calm feeling of having touched nothingness.

The larger claims, if any, of the exhibition were not clear to me, although Victoria Lynn in her introduction to the catalogue cites Cocteau’s film Orpheus, characterising the viewer’s role in the exhibition as an Orphic passage into rich and different spaces. The suggestion is that we, the viewers, are encouraged to become poetic beings who, out of duty to our wish to seek more than mundanities, descend into absorptive unknowns (although Orpheus went to hell to retrieve Eurydice and was subsequently torn to pieces, we thankfully remain intact).

In addition to its concerns for new spaces and dimensions caused by light, it was perhaps an effort to avoid (or dodge) recent dogmas about alienation and technological over-determination that led to the inclusion of László Moholy-Nagy’s Light Space Modulator. For it reminds us that new media is not necessarily all that new. His highly abstract black-and-white film is of a piece with the multi-disciplinary experiments of artists and designers at the Bauhaus, where he also taught.

There is a very new and active encouragement of collaboration in the Bauhaus, extending beyond architecture, and distinct from previous epochs, because the collaboration is between equals. David Hanes and Joyce Hinterding, artists with long and separate careers, have produced The Blinds and the Shutters, a 4-channel video and sound piece, taking up the entire room. On facing walls are alternately large topographic projections in black-and-white, and colour landscapes. The most frontal projection, surface opposite the entry, depicts a classic Modernist style house in the midst of a typical Australian landscape encircled by objects belonging to its interior: a blanket, cushions, a billowing white shirt. It carries a similar semantic obliqueness to the work by Moholy-Nagy but, again, not a negative sense, as you do not straight away feel that you have missed the point. Calm and expansive, the work is a conundrum whose sensuous qualities suffice.

In Lynette Wallworth’s Hold Vessel #1 and Hold Vessel #2, the viewer is asked to take one of the frosted glass bowls from the entry to be used as a visual receptacle for the 3 constantly changing visual mutations and gyrations projected from the ceiling. Most unusually, the viewer is given a device for viewing, a bowl, making him or her an essential component in receiving the luscious colours and designs, apparently inspired from sea-life. To soft, non-descript sounds, the images swell and mutate on the concave or convex surface in your hands. Here the viewer is not put into the role of passively experiencing, but of capturing.

Space Odysseys: Sensation and Immersion, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, August 18 – October 21; ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image), Melbourne, 2002. Luc Courchesne’s artist’s talk will appear in RT#46

There are no classrooms in the electrosphere.
There are no Teachers and there are no Students.
(Capital T, capital S). Likewise, there are no rules. Or they are fleeting. Born and broken in a moment of recognition, our rules have become martyrs, in this, the economy of digitisation.
Enter trAce’s Online Writing Programme.

For those of you familiar with trAce, it will come as no surprise that they are among the first to embrace the dawn of electracy, a kind of electric literacy where emphasis is placed on the former component of the word when used in conjunction with the latter, and vice versa. Or to walk a path already trodden—e-literacy, netwurk, wryting, digerati, hypertext.

The fundamental characteristic of electracy, and something trAce has taken to heart, is the instantaneous connectivity explicit in the act of electronic transmission. Or put simply, the physical manifestation of creative energy.

Flirtatious dialogue between 2 strangers who have met (disembodied—in name only) through their love of abstract poetry. Rhizomatic threads of a bustling bulletin board, composed of inroads and exits only. The shape of an idea, its future glimpsed through the tail-tale signs of metamorphosis. These are the new classrooms we inhabit—the imagined space of transient connections.

It was with this in mind that I enrolled in trAce’s inaugural series of Writing Workshops. Here the premise was simple. trAce supplied the space, tools, e-lit celebrities and starting points for conversation. The rest would be decided by the Event of the moment.

This Event, always elsewhere on the textual horizon, drove each of us forward, but in disparate directions. For 8 weeks (and a further 6 days) we were unified by a common desire—to reach our end and then paint the illusion. What began as a relatively small space grew in infinite proportions as each co-conspirator travelled forever outward, taking the centre with them.

This was to be a learning experience I could not have imagined. Once logged onto the school, the catalogue of possibilities began to course through the blood like a drug of addiction. In this space, ideas were encouraged to reach fruition. I was simultaneously a writer, a teacher, a voyeur and a pupil—a fly on the wall of imagination. These roles, which shifted along an axis of rhetorical experimentation, founded the idea of a neoteric community. Our bodies slipped in and out of disguise as we opened our minds to a hypertextual consciousness.

I would like to thank trAce for securing a parcel of empty space on the electronic frontier, to be filled with the effects of the imagination. For nurturing this fragile block in its embryonic stages and for testing its boundaries in infancy and beyond.

Through trAce’s noble duty to creativity and connectivity, I feel that I have glimpsed the first stages of a burgeoning entity. A school with no rules, or rules that belong only to the individual. A school that nurtures independent thought through the very nature of its infinite flexibility. And a school that resides only in the imagination, made real through the desire to speak and made better through our ability to listen.

Go to the trAce website for more information, or to enrol in their online writing courses

In her solo exhibition Open Inspection at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia (CACSA), Sam Small subverted the contemporary art gallery. She took away its name, re-established its context and altered audience preconceptions, almost to a point of deception. The first indication was the signage. CACSA is an old villa, complete with return verandah and shrubby front garden. The large suave, brushed steel sign placed asymmetrically on the fence is the only outside element differentiating it from other houses on its street. Small replaced the CACSA sign with a large bold one, akin to that of the real estate industry, that reads:
OPEN INSPECTION

Superbly located and retaining all its period charm, this unique exhibition home comprises 4 main rooms…(etc)

A similar advertisement was placed in the weekend real estate pages of the local paper. The effect was remarkable. People came in droves to have a peek into someone else’s home. Suddenly the contemporary art gallery had currency—as real estate. Small was playing with fire. Politically she was confronting the ongoing and still unanswered problem of Australia’s limited contemporary art audience. Socially she was pushing at the edges of acceptable public and private information. Personally she was confronting an unsuspecting audience with their preconceptions. Artistically she was establishing her own work in direct competition with the architecture and real estate value of the gallery building.

So people came, driving up in their shiny cars, some with children in tow. Most, I am told, stayed to look. I wonder what they were looking at—the “ornate lofty ceilings” or the “original timber floors”? However, getting people along was only the first step in a marketing campaign; the next was having an appealing product. Inside, Small’s installation was not bright and shiny. It stood in great contrast to the bold sign out the front, and the slick advertisement in the paper. Hers was not a contemporary art marketing campaign, rather a playful and insightful exploration into notions surrounding public and private spheres.

In the first 2 galleries were 2 miniature partly built houses on stilts, far too high for anyone to see through the windows, although a warm yellow light emanating from inside the buildings was enticing. In the third gallery a pile of carpets blocked the entire entrance. This was an intriguing piece, not only because it made me wonder how Small managed to do it, but also because it took a little while to work out what it was. Suddenly I realised I was looking at cross-sections—of houses, of carpets. Everyday things that I don’t see because I don’t ever look at them from Small’s point of view. The carpets, now vertical, had lost their role as protectors of the bare foot from the hard horizontal.

Tucked away in the back gallery, was the most perverse work. Small had gone through the Adelaide white pages and systematically documented every residence listed under the name of Jones, and displayed a photo of each house and marking its street address on a poster-like street directory of Adelaide. This was more than just a play on the adage ‘keeping up with the Joneses.’ It was a thorough, organised and premeditated travesty of public information. At last we got our peek into the private domain, but by a very public means. Hopefully the irony of displaying very personal information from a public book in a public gallery was not lost on the visitors hoping to get a look into somebody else’s home.

The most impressive part of Small’s exhibition was the constant traffic. Her work became a performance without the artist being present. Watching people confidently approach the gallery as though entering someone’s home was fascinating, even without the knowledge that at some point it was going to become obvious to them this was not an open inspection. And then there was the awkwardness, the shared awareness of having been tricked, and the resulting discomfort. Sam Small’s installation was not easy, but very clever.

Open Inspection, Sam Small, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide, July 7-29

Two attempts to represent the relation between self and world, similar in theory, utterly diverse in practice. Normally known for her abstract dance tapestries, in Fraught Sandra Parker (Dance Works) collaborates with dramaturg Yoni Prior to create an existential condition all too familiar—angst. A mood for our times, the work is a relentless presentation of intersubjective tension, irritation, frustration and rejection. The performers look like they have accessed their own interiority to give substance to the emotional flavours of the piece. A series of appeals, negations and irritated refusals occurs between the dancers. No-one is being nice to anyone. Not that they are cruel. Just caught within their own little world views, unable to walk in the footsteps of the other. And yet, there is no solipsism here. Hands press flesh, need fuels touch. Unfortunately, the touch of the other is not experienced as pleasure, rather, it is an imposition, unwanted and irritating. The pink residue of repeated tactile appeals looks raw, an injurious slight to autonomy.

Fraught sustains its emotional tenor throughout. Although there does seem to be some variation in the interactions between the performers, I can’t discern a qualitative difference at a meaning level. In the end I start to get irritable, probably proving Parker’s argument. There is no rupture between my own tensions and those on the stage. Without subscribing to the ‘art should be entertaining’ banality, I want to be shown a way out, a means whereby I can move on. Later I’m not so sure. Perhaps Fraught is like Derek Jarman’s film, Blue, a monochrome meditation. If so, it would be good to see the work in train as the audience enters, and still happening as they leave.

Fraught stands out as a courageous departure for Parker, away from the finely modulated abstract towards kinaesthetic feeling in the realm of the Real. Yoni Prior’s dramaturgy works well in terms of the visible integrity of the performers. Deanne Butterworth’s emotional embodiment is particularly convincing. Fraught is an attempt to represent a certain zeitgeist in movement terms. As such it is redolent and evocative, but it never aspires beyond reflecting the way the world is. It would be nice to see the hand of Parker within the work, saying something further about this, not a solution but perhaps another side, a neglected facet of an existential state of affairs.

Could Fiona Cameron’s Looking for a Life Cure offer an answer to the woes of Fraught? Get real. Nothing is too serious about this playful work. Performers Cameron, Brett Daffy and Kirstie McCracken engage in a number of scenarios, fantasies of acclaim, fame and gratification. None too promising, each does little more than depict the scene of satisfaction, certainly not its attainment. The joy of this work is in the dancing and in its quirky character. Cameron is a charismatic performer. Somehow she manages to combine skill with abandon. In one section she plays a French diva performing a deconstructed cancan as part of a Godzilla film. Take #1, take #2, take #3 requires the repetition of an enormously demanding routine. And yet, each time Cameron launches herself into huge leg extensions, jumps and floor work with the same self-possessed eccentric movement style. Brett Daffy is also a superb dancer, fluid and precise. There’s a sense that Cameron has collaborated with Daffy and McCracken to develop material, but each person’s movement has its own kinaesthetic flavour.

Performed upstairs in a wide but shallow room at the Malthouse, with one big window, I saw Looking for a Life Cure in the late afternoon. Set against a darkening sky, over time, architectural silhouettes transformed into twinkling lights. This added a poetic dimension to Cameron’s final, heaving figure against the window, offering no more than a moist and tired being. I left smiling.

Fraught, Dance Works, choreographer Sandra Parker, dramaturg Yoni Prior, dancers Deanne Butterworth, Jo Lloyd, Brooke Stamp, Michael O’Donoghue, Tamara Steel & Mia Hollingworth, Athenaeum Theatre 2, Melbourne, August 10-18; Looking for a Life Cure, choreographer Fiona Cameron, performers Fiona Cameron, Brett Daffy & Kirstie McCracken, The Tower, C.U.B. Malthouse, Melbourne, August 8-11

Is it true that Australian dance is currently undergoing a major resurgence of interest in improvisation as performance—or is it simply my personal bias towards the endlessly exhilarating environment in which I find myself? Whether true or not, the question has been pounced on by people from other major cities, not just on the east coast. Some say yes, some say no. While there are many people in little pockets around Australia who use improvisation in various ways, sometimes as a choreographic tool, or with scores around which a performance is based, these processes seem different from performance that is totally improvised—no scores, no structures, just-get-out-there-and-see-what-happens.

In Sydney there’s been a shift of focus, a critical mass of interest constellated by one or 2 events, notably Andrew Morrish’s performance project, Rushing for the Sloth, at Omeo Studios (Newtown) which had its inaugural performance early in 2000, and the Relentlessly On… performance season at Performance Space earlier this year, by Tony Osborne and Andrew Morrish (see RT#44 p37). Rushing for the Sloth is an ongoing forum curated monthly (the last Sunday of each month) which Morrish says “remains dedicated to the development of audiences interested in the potentiality of improvisational performance to create new form, endorse presence and embody openness.” He adds, “I’m not interested in having this conversation about what I’m responsible for, frankly. I’m just doing what I want to do, and that’s all there is to it. People improvise for a whole lot of reasons. Some people don’t need to get any better for it to work for them, and I’m very happy for that to be the case, but my own interest is in making increasingly interesting theatre.” With this aim in view, the intervening Sundays function as more intimate forums (Taming of the Sloth) for a core group of 5 to 10 practitioners and invited guests to develop skills, pushing themselves to expand their range of material.

Melbourne practitioner Martin Hughes (State of Flux) asks how I might be assessing this so-called resurgence. “Who is it showing all this sudden interest? Clearly we are talking about a very specific population. The popularity of Morrish and Peter Trotman, who for more than 15 years have been able to find audiences, attests to a long-standing interest in improvisation as performance. Theatre Of The Ordinary, Al Wunder’s performance group, has operated for more than 20 years. And witness the huge interest in Deborah Hay’s classes recently. I believe this could only be possible with a history of practice for many years prior to her classes. Ros Warby is another name that comes to mind [see interview RT#46, Dec, 2001], someone who has a long history of exploring improvisation as performance.”

Most certainly improvisation has a history, though for a long time government grants were reserved for purely choreographic endeavour. Perhaps, wisely, the word ‘improvisation’ has simply been absent from the discussion even if it was present in many people’s practice. In the early 1980s, Dancelink invited a number of American improvisers to Australia to teach and perform, notably Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson and Dana Reitz. The development of ongoing mentoring relationships with international artists has continued, more recently with further visits from Deborah Hay, Lisa Nelson, Jennifer Monson, Eva Karczag, Julyen Hamilton and Ishmael Houston-Jones, to name a few, and many Australian artists discuss their relationship to these people as primarily important in their artistic development.

Adelaide artist Helen Omand suggests that improvisation holds an interesting mirror to current political changes, in that the autocratic creator is now going by the wayside. In Steve Paxton’s view (“The History and Future of Dance Improvisation”, Contact Quarterly, Vol 26, No 2, 2001) governmental regimes have changed from controlling forces which expect their populations to do as they’re told, to ones which expect their populations to take responsibility for making their own work. Further, Paxton writes, “Since the recent popularity of chaos theory, chaos has been rationalised, seen to have structure, and proves to be metaphoric of sensitivity rather than insanity. It has been upgraded. It is invited to the dinner table, and shows up at dance performances.”

Ryk Goddard, artistic director of Hobart’s Salamanca Theatre Company, discusses what’s afoot: “The scene is very young here, but there are already crossovers occurring between dance and theatre performers, underlying the strength of the scenes in Melbourne and Sydney. The new improvisation is not pure, but hybrid, collaborative and fuelled by curiosity. It’s built around practitioners like Wunder, Morrish and Helen Clarke Lapin, who have stayed with the form since the 1970s. Contemporary practitioners are no longer trying to shock or smash the system but are engaging in a genuine exploration, and this moves it from a training or developmental tool into a performance form in its own right.

“The forms reflect social structure. The 4-act play, for example, reflects a classic, 1950s-style school-marriage-career-retirement social order. In the 1970s when these structures were being torn down, improvisation became a tool to do this with. In the 1980s, Theatre Sports became the ‘accessible’ art, and suited the prevailing culture that said that even art could make money. Unfortunately the make-or-break quality meant that performances were sometimes based on cleverness rather than genuine exploration. Now, people move relatively quickly in and out of different countries, institutions, employment. We are better at multi-tracking, allowing creativity to sit beside business, including imagination in intelligence.”

Goddard established Eat Space in Hobart, teaching performance improvisation focusing on ensemble, solo or duet. He teaches movement, voice and text skills, examining different ways to create scores or lines of enquiry which shape performance. Two students have set up Blink, a monthly performance improvisation laboratory, like Sydney’s Sloth, on the last Sunday of every month. People have very different interests and performing styles, and because the scene is new, performance times are short (5 or 10 minutes). As people become more skilled, times will become more flexible.

Morrish drew a schematic diagram of names, with circles and arrows going from one to another, trying to explain all the relationships that, in his view, create the complexity of Australian improvisation culture. A central name in his scheme is Al Wunder, Melbourne teacher and practitioner, often mentioned as the most influential artist in Australian dance improvisation, if not directly then via his students, some of whom now teach and perform internationally.

In 1962, the only performed improvisation Wunder knew about was jazz music. Later, his growing pleasure in watching improvised class exercises fuelled the idea of totally improvised dance performance. At Judson Church in New York this was already happening, and contact improvisation was born out of this. Contact has traditionally been based on the development of physical skills—particularly partnering skills where 2 people move around an ever-changing point of contact—and as a response to the high dance culture of 1950s and 60s USA. Meanwhile those skills continue to be refined in a variety of performance contexts, in choreographic endeavour (eg DV8in the UK) and improvisation of all sorts.

For Wunder, there is little similarity between his work and traditional contact improvisation. He encourages people to use any and all of the performing arts—music, all kinds of dance, theatre—as a means to communicate to the audience. Most people believe it is the non-competitive nature of his style of teaching that has proved so popular. His teaching methodology deals primarily with physical awareness and articulation, but essential to this is the idea of positive feedback. “Whenever we talk about exercises or performances, we state what we enjoyed doing or seeing and try to say why we enjoyed it. This gets rid of the negative judge and fosters confidence in both performing improvisation and developing one’s own aesthetics.” Martin Hughes thinks this is fundamental to what happens in Melbourne, engendering a very positive environment for exploration that goes well beyond the classes and is evident at many performances, strongly supporting Melbourne improvisational performance practice.

Melbourne in particular has hosted a number of the now very popular ongoing improvisational performance forums, beginning with The Flummery Room, set up by Morrish and Peter Trotman, which flourished for several years. According to Hughes, this kind of ongoing forum has been very much led by the example of Trotman, Morrish and the group Born In A Taxi, providing performance opportunities for themselves whenever they had the need to test out their latest exploration. In similar style, the monthly improvisational performance forum, Conundrum, was initiated by 2 groups, Five Square Metres and State of Flux. Running for 6 years, these nights now have a minimum audience of 80 enthusiasts.

Five Square Metres base their work on ‘school of fish’ ensemble movement, storytelling and character creating a collage of imaginative, abstract performance, a theatrical world that closely resembles a way of life. Pieces range from 25-35 minutes. State of Flux play with scores and structures, but also use no scores to find new territory. Classes focus on contact skills, but their overt aim is to explore the ‘performability’ of contact, enhanced by the diversity of skills in the group.

Born in a Taxi have found audiences and income in the corporate market, bringing theatre practice to movement improvisation disciplines, creating forms of improvisation that balance entertainment with genuine exploration and imaginative licence. Theatre of the Ordinary, Wunder’s performance group, is based at Cecil Street, Fitzroy. Hughes and his partner are responsible for running the Cecil Street studios, and maintain a diverse range of improvisation classes.

Jo Pollitt, Perth artist, found inspiration in her experience of the huge New York improvisation scene in 1999. Her performance/research group, Response, began in March 2000 with 14 dancers, retaining a more workable number of 5. With a visit from Jennifer Monson from the US last year, they have also developed a working relationship with an improvisational orchestra, Ensembleu. Pollitt teaches improvisation at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), and from time to time holds increasingly popular ‘quick response’ lunchtime improvisation sessions. “In terms of dance, I definitely feel like I am pretty much on my own here in Perth, although I am very supported at WAAPA and have no trouble finding interested dancers to work with.” Recently, Perth performers Tony Osborne, Alice Cummins and Jonathan Sinatra have moved to Sydney, and along with Morrish’s move from Melbourne, have enriched the Sydney scene immeasurably.

Pollitt’s interest is in “the potential energy and the value of the body and the person, in light of the glut of new technology, today’s cyber-infused world, and dance-theatre inspired work. Is the body still interesting to watch in itself? I think dance improvisation in performance can offer a precise and non-linear insight into the performer. Humans are complex and it is this I hope to reveal through dance, in the performers’ choices and responses.”

Helen Omand in Adelaide has found that although there are improvisation practitioners there (rumour has it that there’s yet another group called Eat Space), it is still mostly an unknown, little understood form in the dance community. She began teaching classes on returning from Europe late last year although student numbers were low. “Kat Worth and I have been inviting different people to jam with us, but this has also proven slow; professional dancers are so busy, juggling paid jobs and grants. We are still looking for the right form for things to take off.”

Omand says, “Everything in nature forms patterns. In fact, the biggest fallacy about improvisation is the idea of freedom. You cannot be free if you are not placed and present. To be able to make choices, you first have to ‘know’ where you are. Then comes the ability to be open to the realm of possibilities, choosing whilst maintaining presence. The best improvisations are when it seems like the score has already been written in space/time, and the body makes it manifest.”

Similarly for Goddard, contemporary improvisation is all about form. It’s about learning how to recognise the dynamic you are in to bring out its richness. If you expand the moment enough, ideas and themes emerge and become recognisable. “At its best—and there are many great practitioners—it is satisfying, demanding performance that is honest, reflects in its energy the way people live their lives, and allows the coming together of imagination, the body, the intellect, humour and grace.”

Thanks to Al Wunder, Helen Omond, Ryk Goddard, Andrew Morrish, Martin Hughes & Jo Pollitt for their generosity in contributing ideas to this article, and to the many improvisers whose ongoing practices have made the vibrancy of the scene worth talking about.

At a recent Sydney forum on artist-run spaces, an observer suggested that rather than offering a radical alternative, such spaces merely mimic dominant commercial models, maintaining the status quo by reiterating the hierarchical prestige of those venues. If this is the case, then the frequently cited adage that artist-run spaces are merely the training grounds for tomorrow’s (commercially) successful contemporary artists would necessarily be true. So if artist-run spaces no longer fulfil any experimental or broad cultural purpose, where does that purpose lie today? If the artist’s self-directed conviction in do-it-yourself practices is still alive then where is it found?

A series of events and propositions exist that confound and complicate simplistic notions of artist coordinated events as well as the roles of ‘traditional’ artist-run spaces. Some of these have taken contemporary work outdoors for brief periods. Others have hijacked the physical and conceptual boundaries of the gallery while at the same time questioning existing spatial models of contemporary practice. Still others have utilised the 4 walls of the gallery but for widely divergent ambitions, more aligned to the utopian politics of direct action. Of course none of these are ‘new’ or unique historically. What they demonstrate, however, is the return and continued vitality of thinking resistant to readily available precursors. Such efforts promise to render the exchange between artist, gallery, public venue and community more fluid and, at the same time, less definable.

In 1998 a one-off project titled Glovebox was launched. It was overseen by Simon Barney and Chris Fortesque, directors of the now defunct South gallery in Surry Hills. Glovebox occurred on the top storey of a carpark close to Sydney’s Central Station. The premise of the exhibition was explorative and vaguely irreverent. Artists were asked to install work in the gloveboxes of friends’ or other artists’ cars. On a nominated date, which became the standard opening, cars containing completed works congregated at the aforementioned venue. As cars were parked, visitors and drivers were able to roam among them investigating the art on show. Such work varied dramatically from the ironic to the deadly earnest. It spanned everything from more conventional media like painting and photography to free-form audio compositions designed to be played on car stereos for extended periods. The work in Glovebox ranged from highly intricate installations to wry minimalist gestures.

What distinguished the show was its expanded thinking on what constitutes an exhibition. Aligned with this thinking were the obvious suggestions of mobility and direct interchange between artists and general car-owners. Glovebox exploited the symbolic reverberation of cars in Australian culture that remains highly charged. Although in certain respects simply an exhibition in an alternative venue, the show was equally a parody and skewed celebration of the car-meet or car-boot sale. While free of artist run space nominalism, Glovebox was generated from the activities of such a space and at least partially from the inherent frustrations of its daily coordination. Also challenging was the implied durational aspect of the event. Participants were asked to caretake the work in their cars for a period of at least 2 months. In this time such work might travel considerable distances and to places not normally associated with contemporary art. Glovebox set a precedent for the alternative reception of contemporary art in Sydney.

Partly influenced by the social and artistic success of Glovebox was KWL (Keep Within the Lines). Once again this was an event staged in a public carpark. The Seymour Centre carpark adjacent to Sydney University is a central and spacious venue that provides additional panoramic views of the surrounding area. KWL was organised by Josie Cavallaro, Sarah Goffman and Lisa Kelly, 3 Sydney-based artists who approached the university to use the site. Artists were invited to produce work in direct response to the physical confines of the standard parking space. Such work might specifically address the nature of the carpark environment and its attendant conceptual underpinnings. On the other hand it might appropriately engage the basic dimension of the parking space. In the former category was the Duchampian display of an immaculate lime green Torana propped in mid air. Related works included: an installed car-stereo and speakers that emitted the phantasmic repetitive splutters of a car failing to start; a rooftop display of pyrotechnics courtesy of a rocket-propelled trolley; a self-regulating fountain-come-shower and clusters of small grotesque heads grimacing as though in imminent threat of annihilation by an arriving vehicle.

Once again the possibilities for social interaction were emphasised, particularly in lieu of the carpark’s general accessibility. In this instance the focus of the event was orientated more towards concepts of modular containability than duration. KWL questioned the compartmentalisation of contemporary practices by humorously overlaying them with standardised concepts of urban separation. Once again the spectre of the car, that modern civilian container par-excellence, was conjured in its absence. Through recourse to the parking space, KWL cast a wry and questioning eye over the premises of both artist-run and commercial spaces. Most of the participants were regular exhibitors in either or both.

Returning to the 4 walls of the gallery—though in an activist guise—were the activities of now defunct Squatspace. As the name suggests, Squatspace was an adjunct of those buildings (with squatters) on the busy thoroughfare of Sydney’s Broadway. The location has undergone one of the most dramatic transformations in recent local history, converted from a strip of disused or under-subscribed businesses to an area marked by a constant stream of pedestrian and road traffic. Most of this is primarily the result of the multi-million dollar redevelopment of the Grace Brothers buildings nearby.

Squatspace grew out of intense conviction in self-reliance and disillusionment in the escalating commercial structures re-shaping Sydney. As a gallery, Squatspace superficially resembled many other artist-run spaces, coordinated principally by the artists Lucas Ihlein and Mickie Quick, and supported by a team of indispensable helpers including lawyers, musicians and performers. What marked Squatspace was not only its mode of operation but its public association with squatters’ rights and ongoing tussles with local council. The highly visible location meant that it was a target for oppositional attacks by members of the public and others. Significant to its practices was its embrace of generally unfashionable forms of overtly politicised art: poster making, pamphleteering, performance and other activities flippantly considered ‘marginal’ to dominant modes of contemporary cultural production.

Squatspace generated a climate of public engagement by inviting people for free dinners, discussions and films. Within this climate the art displayed was varied and often far from flawless. Its importance, like that of the projects previously mentioned, lay in its open critique of the broader function of art in society. Rather than accepting art’s contemporary role as a self-contained given, the projects discussed here assist in exploding its possibilities in multiple directions. They require serious consideration no matter how humorous or novel they seem at first. At the same time, the metamorphic quality of such projects questions the place and reception of art as a living, interactive entity. No matter what their ultimate results, such practices promise something more vital than the simple justification of career demands.

The annual Emirates AFI Awards play a crucial role in protecting the health of our screen culture. They give us the chance to ask what Australian cinema is and what we’d like it to be. This isn’t such a solipsistic or negative activity as it sounds.
It lets us see more clearly that Australian cinema is, as Tom O’Regan clearly demonstrates in Australian National Cinema (Routledge, 1996), “a messy affair…not only in our ways of knowing, reading, consuming and producing films and the larger film-making milieu of which they are a part, but also a messiness among the films themselves with features far apart” in terms of style, content and purpose. It’s also in constant conversation with the mainstream and other national and local cinemas. If it weren’t, our whole culture would be in trouble since our cinema plays a large part in how we imagine ourselves in relation to the rest of the world.

Our cinema shows how our filmmakers are negotiating and participating in an ever-moving dialogue; what critics, reviewers and audiences watch, write and think about is also in constant motion. What we want our cinema to be is never static: if we don’t speak out about what we want and don’t want Australian cinema to be, then the dynamic relationship between film producer and consumer becomes arid and nothing, or very little, can come to fruition.

For some years, a number of film critics have expressed concern about the way our production and critical practices have come to a halt due to a lack in awareness and understanding of screen culture. That audiences lack this is understandable: despite the valiant efforts of SBS and the AFI, the burgeoning number of film festivals, and the tiny number of brave independent cinemas and distributors, there simply isn’t the opportunity for audiences to see a wide range of movies from local and national cinemas all over the world. That filmmakers also lack much knowledge of the many different ways cinema can tell a story is reprehensible, although the responsibility may not lie entirely with them: they too have to be taught and our film schools and university film courses may not be adequate to the task.

In the late 1980s, Elizabeth Jacka wrote of “a loss of vision, a failure of nerve” in Australian cinema and regretted “that the complex set of discourses and institutions that constitute the space in which cinema exists is deeply inimical to ideas, controversy or aesthetic adventurousness” (“Australian cinema: an anachronism in the 1980s?” in S Dermody and E Jacka eds, The Imaginary Industry, Sydney, Currency Press, 1988). In the mid-90s O’Regan expressed similar concern about a cinema that has a limited range of “film-making repertoires” and much still to embrace and understand. Presciently, Adrian Martin had diagnosed the causes in the 80s:

“Nurturing the Next Wave: What is cinema?” in Scott Murray (ed) Back of Beyond: Discovering Australian Film and Television, Sydney, AFC, 1988

The analyses of last year’s AFI nominations suggested that few of our filmmakers had a strong grasp of film language. Tina Kaufman, warning of the dangers of neglecting screen culture, concluded: “If the films produced in a year are the outward manifestation of the health of the local industry, the Australian film industry is indeed ailing. (Metro, 121/122, 2000). Given this persistent critical framing of the question ‘What is Australian cinema?’ and the apparent refusal of filmmakers to ask the same question, how do this year’s movies measure up?

There’s certainly been diversity. I feasted my eyes on the spectacular Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann), but felt visually starved during the stage-bound Silent Partner (Alkinos Tsilimidos), which looks more like a lump of yesterday’s porridge than a movie. I was forced to play anthropologist to Australian culture, as O’Regan puts it, in films such as The Dish (Rob Sitch) and La Spagnola (Steve Jacobs) and also, more reluctantly, to nerdy, forever-adolescent, male culture in He Died with a Felafel in His Hand (Richard Lowenstein) and Mullet (David Caesar). But, if these irritated me witless, I was deeply moved watching the men in Ray Lawrence’s thoughtful Lantana learning either to grow up or that they never will. And, at the time, I didn’t even notice how the female roles were mostly reduced to mere cipher in the gripping thriller The Bank (Robert Connolly).

Watching Serenades (Mojgan Khadem) and Yolngu Boy (Stephen Johnson) I sadly agreed with Adrian Martin’s 1988 dictum: that a cinema of good intentions, which prides itself on its progressivist record, is essentially a conservative cinema. But an antidote to androcentricity and the mainstream, at least, was to be found in the otherwise disappointing The Monkey’s Mask (Samantha Lang) and in Clara Law’s wild and unwieldy The Goddess of 1967.

While critical of many of these films, I also enjoyed several and—as I increasingly demand of a movie—I got to see and/or hear something entirely new or to detect a cineliteracy behind the filmmakers’ repertoire of screen language. This year, 4 films filled this need—that’s a lot in one year. First-time director Connolly (The Bank) drew upon an extensive knowledge and a keenly intelligent understanding of film language and history that makes me impatient for his next film. The more experienced Lawrence clearly has a similar relationship to film culture and he uses it to pleasurably unsettling effect in Lantana.

Law’s The Goddess of 1967 delivered a more dilute pleasure. There have been few Australian arthouse features in recent years—I can’t think of one since Tracey Moffat’s beDevil (1993)—so it was especially important that this film was funded and distributed. At times, just when the plot or dialogue made it irredeemably banal, Law and her cinematographer, Dion Beebe, gave me a visually exciting and a startlingly different cinematic experience that engulfed me in wonder.

Finally, Moulin Rouge. I may not be ready to give a considered criticism of this film, as my love for it is still pretty much unconditional. Like the cancan dance itself, it flirted and seduced by frustrating my desire for a full look at what I know to be there, but which can’t be revealed if I am to be kept wanting more. I saw this film in Dubbo in rural New South Wales at a late night screening. Whatever the cultural differences in the audience, well after midnight we all gave the film a standing ovation. Now that was something entirely new.

In order to draw upon the full palettte of options that a knowledge of screen language offers, a filmmaker needs to be aware of the cinephiliac and how to deliver it. Too often, Australian filmmakers appear to be unaware of this.

Acutely aware of the need for screen culture if Australian cinema is to flourish, the AFI discovered a way of delivering it. This explains why, last June, I found myself bathed in sweat in the large, galvanised iron barn-cum-studio of Broome’s Indigenous radio and television station under a 20 foot papier maché rainbow serpent, giving a critical analysis of the title sequence of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969).

Exploring the meaning of the intensely cinephiliac moment when Captain America, aka Wyatt, aka Peter Bogdanovich, takes off his wrist watch, kisses it goodbye, and chucks it into the dust where it lies like the tin star in High Noon, a symbol of law and order that no longer works, is tough when you’re crying out for a long, cold drink and a swim, and Western Australia in 2001 seems a long way from late 60s Californian hippiedom.

But there was no stopping the group of cinephiles and would-be filmmakers attending my seminar; they were unfazed by the temperature in the high 30s, the almost deafening sound of the enormous 8 foot fan as, like a projector, it went wyrrrrum, wyrrrrum (or was it dziga, dziga?), and the impossibly fuzzy picture on a sand-blown monitor.

Moving on from Hopper’s dope-filled frames and a range of other classic road movies, from Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night to Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise, I analysed Australian cinema’s love of the genre, including The Back of Beyond (John Heyer), The FJ Holden (Michael Thornhill), Wrong Side of the Road (Ned Lander), Backroads, (Phil Noyce), Mad Max (George Miller), Priscilla Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliott), Bill Bennett’s Spider and Rose and Kiss or Kill and, finally, The Goddess of 1967. What did rural Australians make of this intensely intellectual, multicultural, postmodern road movie?

That they saw it at all was thanks to the AFI’s Burning Rubber initiative, which took a handful of Australian road movies—followed up by my 2-hour seminars—on the road to rural towns all round Australia to launch a road movie video-making competition. In Leongatha, Townsville, Bundaberg, Dubbo, Tamworth, Broome, Bunbury, Darwin, Port Lincoln and Launceston, while some said they were baffled by Clara Law’s film—they’d never seen anything like it—many told how deeply impressed they were, precisely because they had been unaware of cinema’s ability to speak in so many different tongues.

I’ve yet to see whether their own short road movies reflect an increased awareness of film history and culture. But I’m optimistic that they’ll prove a more thoughtful audience for Australian movies. In the long term, this might mean that there will be greater competition for an AFI award from filmmakers who ask the question ‘What is cinema to me?’ Those who do are more likely to make uninhibited films, displaying a greater range of “film-making repertoires” and more “ideas, controversy or aesthetic adventurousness” than many do currently.

You enter a darkened gallery strategically dotted with unidentified objects. Besides the darkness, the most pervasive element is the pulsating soundscape that incorporates traditional Arabic song and contemporary Western dance/club music. As your eyes adjust, the video projections at either end of the gallery seem to change from amorphous, whirling colours to images of festive folkloric Arabic dance: on one wall, belly dancers writhing to a Syrian song; on the other, a group of dancers in bright, Arabic costumes have been paired with an upbeat, disco soundtrack, strikingly recontextualised by this unusual juxtaposition.

Welcome to Fassih Keiso’s installation at Hobart’s CAST Gallery: Not Only Skins and Fabric.

Keiso is a Syrian-born artist who completed a BFA in interior design and a postgraduate diploma in theatre design at the University of Lebanon before coming to Australia. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Sydney College of the Arts. His areas of study are echoed in the spectacle—the theatricality—of this installation, the attention to detail evident in the work and his calculated use and manipulation of interior space.

Keiso has a comprehensive history of solo exhibitions, installations and performance works in far-flung venues from New York to Poland, Tunisia to Melbourne and Syria to Sydney. He is also a film and videomaker and has taken part in dozens of group shows in Australia and internationally. He has recently capped off an impressive record of prizes, grants and residencies by being selected as one of this year’s winners of the prestigious Samstag International Visual Arts Travelling Scholarships.

Over recent years, Keiso’s work has “examined the tensions between current Middle-Eastern and western perceptions of the body and sexuality.” He connects traditional Arabic elements relating to the body with technologies and media such as video, slide projection, photography and computer-imaging to present them in a contemporary context. This permits an absorbing, personalised view of the body in Arabic culture, opening up a compelling dialogue for viewers.

Besides the technology, other elements dot the gallery. Large animal-skin drums become the ‘screens’ for the slide projections: in one instance the word “skin” is superimposed on what seems to be a vastly enlarged, confronting close-up of a surgically stitched wound on golden flesh—tiny wrinkles, blemishes and downy body hair are all exaggerated in size to create something perversely fascinating. To add to the bizarre ambience, each of several drums is accompanied by drumsticks, inviting the gallery visitor to contibute to the gallery’s soundscape.

To this increasingly eclectic mix, Keiso has added a mirror ball—symbol and cliché par excellence of western disco culture—and flashing party lights: a sort of “discothèque in a tribal, desert tent” effect and a strange amalgam of 2 very different and very strong cultures. The overall work is dazzling, even dizzying—it truly impacts on the gallery visitor who physically experiences and becomes part of the installation.

The work succeeds in Keiso’s aim of “examining the cultural politics of sexuality and morality” through the body’s absence in Arabic representation contrasted with its presence, even ubiquity, in western culture and representation. The work effectively challenges western definitions and views of Middle Eastern cultures and the perceptions and even clichés these ideas perpetuate. Not Only Skins and Fabric takes 2 cultures and questions the dichotomy between the perception of western society as open and contemporary versus the idea of Arab culture as Other, traditional and exotic.

Not Only Skins and Fabric is a celebratory, uplifting, thought-provoking work. Keiso clearly values his Syrian Arabic heritage and is able to impart this to his audience. In an Australia currently struggling to maintain its multicultural image, works such as this are particularly relevant.

Not Only Skins and Fabric, installation by Fassih Keiso, Contemporary Art Services Tasmania Gallery, North Hobart, June 8-July 1

“Bored boys checking their email”— Robin Rimbeau aka Scanner’s description of a predominant performance mode in electronic sound art (artist talk, Artspace, August 11). I was glad to hear it wan’t just me who had observed these tendencies. (Share the secret. What is it in fact that you are doing up there?). Refreshing too to see the phenomenon challenged by the majority of artists in Static Museum.two, curated by Garry Bradbury at Artspace.

Over 2 nights Bradbury brought together a collection artists to “struggle against utopian technocratic digital hegemony”, fighting the fast trade in new technologies rendering the old favourites obsolete. This was particularly evident in A Kind of Bloop by the Loop Orchestra, consisting of tape loops of Miles Davis and porn thrown on to struggling reel to reel decks. There is such comfort in a loop—rhythmic irregularities create their own logic, become safe and predictable, only to sweep out of sync into a whole new groove. The Loop Orchestra create a climactic aural orgy of groans, hoots and howls both human and instrumental that run around the 4-speakered corners of the room. Particularly beautiful is the poetic denouement—2 loops of the same riff, one slightly longer than the other, dizzyingly lurching and cycling round us, like the ghost of Davis himself, just not quite able to stop playing yet.

Scot Horscroft and friends’ Chug R Chug created an intriguing dichotomy between physical presence and sound emission. In an act of RSI-inducing endurance, 4 very visible musicians play repetitive chords on unamplified electric guitars, which are picked up and processed though an invisible but very audible laptop. The ‘chugs’ of the almost inaudible power chords are tweaked and effected to create a subtle lake of overlays and sonic swellings. What we are seeing seems so very different from what we are hearing, one excessive and visceral one minimalist and ephemeral.

Zero Charisma, A Construction—a collaboration between Mutante Frequante and Milk from Triclops—also aurally manipulates the physical space. Forty gallon drums variously fitted with speakers are installed around the space—one with an oscillating speaker emitting dopplering sirens, others working as metallic echo chambers and “vibraphonic” implements.

Garry Bradbury’s work as Sanity Clause with Ian Andrews is raucously engaging as the fragile and physical nature of vinyl records is explored, amplifying the defects and histories—a shame that technical hitches prevented us hearing its ‘bilabial plosives.” Bradbury’s work on the second evening was outstanding, varying from an amazing piece created from a Dark Side of the Moon album cut in half and stuck back together the wrong way round, to deft manipulation of clean and dirty sounds to create a satisfying and polished aesthetic. Also of note was Rik Rue’s Things Change, things Remain the Same (ver 3), an epic performance and radiophonic work of cracking landscapes, sonic tectonic shifts and monumental mountainous groans.

It occurred to me, as I pondered the notable absence of female artists (save Jasmine Guffond, half of Minit), that there is a particular approach to sound as experiments in science—the fascination with frequencies, waveforms, electric spasms and gadgets—that, as a sound artist myself, I cannot access. I simply don’t think of creating sound in this way. I’m sure there are female sound artists with the technical aptitude I don’t have—so where are they? Do they, like me, simply lack the inclination? (I invite responses to this oversimplified provocation.)

Static Museum was an epic 2 night experience with more artists than I have space to mention. It was an excellent forum for a variety of sonic explorations, celebrating a vibrant, if male-centred sound culture in Sydney.

The first Waveform conference attempted to open up what has become a stagnant forum for the discussion of academic based computer music. This discipline has reached the end of its usefulness, partially due to the development of personal computers and the release of high-end applications for digital audio processing and realtime performance. These applications have been placed firmly in the hands of a large (often non-academic) community including those making experimental music.

The conference included talks on contemporary trends in digital music, while retaining a number of speakers who were either not up to the task or stuck in the ‘old ways.’ There are not many people speaking about digital music and theories around new music practices. Future conferences could open up the range of topics to include other disciplines that cross into the area of digital music, such as popular music studies and musicology.

Conference director, Julian Knowles is a lecturer in electronic arts and music at UWS, a sought after sound engineer and audio producer. His recent performances have revealed a highly developed ear and a forward thinking use of computer sound applications.

Kim Cascone (USA) was the keynote guest and is a post-digital audio producer at the centre of the current trend in contemporary experimental audio, known as glitch and microsound. He also writes about this trend in a number of periodicals including the Computer Music Journal. His performance at the conference was, however, lost in the huge space, demonstrating just how live computer music can be.

Australia has developed a strong foothold in this experimental subculture with a number of exponents achieving international exposure. Sydney based producer Pimmon (Paul Gough) has had a slew of releases on labels from Britain, Japan, Ireland and the USA. The first night’s performance saw tables messily spread over the performance space with laptops on most. Pimmon’s set displayed a new playfulness, with melody creeping into his output, as well as the usual series of perplexing sounds and tones. Another local producing hugely interesting audio is Peter Blamey who uses only a mixing desk and oscillator to create feedback which takes the form of pulsing tones, often very bassy. He manipulates these sounds by fading them in and out. This makes for a dynamic set bordering on the rhythmic while retaining an element of disorder, as Blamey is never certain of what will form.

Two Melbourne based exponents were also up to scratch, displaying the new interest in using gaming technologies for sound performance. Seo’s performative piece (a rare thing in the world of laptop virtuosity) made use of a gaming console joystick to push and pull audio out of his laptop. Delire uses the gaming engine itself to house his audio, taking advantage of the system’s 3D sound. This is a new area in experimental digital audio and opens up a huge range of possibilities.

Scot Horscroft’s work featured 5 guitarists who repeatedly played a single note for the duration of Chug r Chug. The electric guitars were plugged into Horscroft’s computer, the sounds then heavily effected and incorporated into his larger audio framework. The guitars emerge as a glimmer of what we might imagine from such a number of instruments. The glistening sounds rise and fall in the mix, never quite reaching what might be expectations.

Although the contemporary scene is often criticised for its use of the space bar (a reference to starting an audio file and letting it run), it is simply not the case that all live performance offers is a sound producer sitting in front of a laptop twiddling with invisible patches. These live performances displayed just how out of touch the tape music is. Being forced to sit through under-developed work simply played through the sound system was proof enough of the need for the live element. Digital audio exponents need also to show some understanding of contemporary thought.

Other standout performances were heard from Donna Hewitt, Julian Knowles, Shannon O’Neill, Sun Valley and Phil Niblock (USA).

Waveform 2001: Digital Musics, School of Contemporary Arts, University of Western Sydney, July 12-14

Listening to electroacoustic music can be tough. Despite hours of practicing seated spectatorship, the prospect of remaining focused through 2 hours of electronic music is daunting. Immersed in mediated sound, we are a silenced society of listeners, and have been since the speaker displaced the piano over 100 years ago. Babies are LOUD, and have no understanding of socially encoded silence. When we get drunk, our gag is loosened, and we can become noisy. Mostly though, westerners are lumpen flesh antennas, receiving spectacle from a posterior position and any urges toward communal sound production and participation are lost in a sea of star-envy and self-consciousness.

Electroacoustic music usually has no performer, no entertaining beat and no memorable melody. There are no iconic human forms to focus on, no dancers or dancing, and no bar. Daniel Turrugi, head of the French electronic music institute GRM who came from France to present parts of Immersion 2, readily admitted that it can be hard to concentrate in this type of sonic environment. The French have thought long and hard about issues of presentation in electronic music. Also, they have not flinched from bringing the sound engineer to the foreground and exploring their role as artists. In the 70s, they decided to challenge the orchestral establishment on its own turf (any challengers to the Melbourne Symphony at the Concert Hall?). They invented the Acousmonium, an orchestra of 24-60 speakers arranged around and within the audience, and through regular concerts trained people in moving music in space.

Immersion 2 featured 3 evening concerts: French Historical, Contemporary European and Contemporary Australian, and a 3-hour workshop. The French programs and workshop were presented and curated by Turrugi. Performing live spatialisations for 8 of the 11 French pieces, he demonstrated the richness and spontaneity possible using the speaker orchestra. His skill is the outcome of France’s commitment to research and facilitation of this form; conversely some spatialisation by Australians, such as at Sonic Residues 02, demonstrated the corresponding lack of support here.

The performative aspect of spatialisation became apparent across the 3 concerts. During the first evening, the dynamic movement increased with each of the 6 pieces, as if Turrugi was warming to the system. Any hesitation disappeared when performing his own composition, Mano a Mano, as the piece began by being mixed entirely behind the audience. The second work, La roue Ferris, a masterpiece by Bernard Parmegiani, was a favourite of many in the audience. Following this was François Bayle’s Troupe dans le ciel (1979), a 22-minute epic which used 2 two-note molecules for its construction; it evoked geometric architectural structures such as the geodesic dome. Though the novelty of glitches has well and truly worn off, their appearance in the final piece for the night, Christian Zanesi’s Archeion: Les Mots de Pierre Schaeffer, showed that at least one French Electroacoust ician listens beyond the repertoire.

The second evening program, Contemporary European, contained 5 works by 4 composers, of which 3 were premixed onto 8-track tape. While allowing composition for 8 speakers, these tape works lacked the dynamics of those in which the spatialisation was conceived and performed live by Turrugi in the space. This program tended toward the current trend in French Electroacoustic music, and was characterised by bombastic sprays of dry sound objects. One piece was described as “minimal and noisy” as if it were a daring derivation, yet fans of minimal noise would have had a hard time getting satisfaction from it.

The final program of Contemporary Australian work began strongly with Carpark and Incidentals by Carl Priestly, the spatialisation of which showed off the site-specific re-designing Priestly had done in the rehearsal period. The piece realised the evocative potential of spatial movement as an element of composition, and at only 8 minutes duration, left me wanting more. Darrin Verhagen presented 3 short pieces, the second of which licking the rope burns of the muse stood out for its musical effects—at Immersion 2 the convention of music with sound effects was reversed. Philip Samartzis’ sound for Storey, a collaboration with video artist Dominic Redfern, included layers of texture which, when mixed in space, sounded as if the hall’s vertical surfaces were hung with sound-sheets. Samartzis’ sound came from a stereo source, and was mixed live around the speaker system, demonstrating the advantages of designing the spatialisation at the site. Some of the other works on the night lacked this dimension and a few suffered from being drenched in reverb, which served to wash out their spatial dynamics. In fact, the repeated use of abstracted pianos with reverb detracted from the program as did the bombastic theme of the European program.

Hearing the Acousmonium in the flesh was irreplaceable for experiencing the material possibilities of spatialisation. So too was Turrugi’s workshop, which addressed issues of presentation of electronic music thoroughly researched by the French, such as expanding audiences by doing as much as possible to make this often difficult form accessible. While it would be a mistake to consider the GRM the last word in electroacoustic music, it seems a waste that their research is not more widely known or experienced.

Immersion 2, coordinated & presented by sound artist/academic Philip Samartzis, RMIT Storey Hall, Melbourne, September 7-9

Somewhere between Perth and Kalgoorlie lies the small wheatbelt town of Kellerberrin, home to the International Art Space Kellerberrin Australia (IASKA). On a glorious spring day in 1999, I drove to Kellerberrin with Japanese artist Shigeaki Iwai to check out both the art space and the town. The day was full of colour: red roadside dirt, vast blue sky, pink and white paper daisies and the blinding gold of canola fields in flower.

At times, the canola fields stretch past the horizon, bending your eyeballs and doing very weird things to your sense of space.

IASKA is housed in the main street of Kellerberrin. Arriving at midday, we could see precisely 2 cars, one sleeping dog (of course) and no people. Now, city girl that I am, I am at least familiar with the concept of space and country. I can’t imagine what it might mean for an artist from megatropolis Tokyo, a city of 37 million people, to encounter that landscape, let alone spend 3 months in a tiny community with a population of 1000 (including the surrounding district). Nevertheless, in 2001, Iwai, his wife and 3-year-old son, did just that. His exhibition Could you guide me around, ‘cos I’m just tourist from Japan was the outcome of that residency.

Iwai’s project for IASKA , sometimes funny, often poignant and always moving, gently and perceptively opened up a space of engagement between the local and the global, an interface between community and conceptual practice. The exhibition might be described as a town portrait in 3 parts—a conceptual triptych.

The first part consists of a series of 8 postcards, each identified only by edition number as “a shot of Kellerberrin” and carrying the words, Imagine…now you are in a tiny wheatbelt town in Australia. A single postcard was sent to about 100 people in Japan, Europe and the US. No other information about the place or the people was provided. Fifty postcards commenting on the images were returned for installation in the gallery.

Before Iwai’s arrival, the town only had one postcard—a picture of the post office. Conversely, Iwai’s images, like those of most tourists, document his rather more personal ‘monuments’, images that provide a key to his growing sense of place. They include: a view of the town from its only ‘lookout’—the country is unbelievably flat; sunrise over a shearing shed; a moody night-time image of the old deco-style cinema (now closed); primary school children in yellow t-shirts and blue trackie pants; derelict cars rusting in a paddock; an Aboriginal grave-site with plastic flowers, incense and small statuettes of the Virgin Mary; a portrait of Noongar elder Cath Yarran with her sister; and a smiling Australian woman holding a photocopied sheet containing salient facts about Kellerberrin.

The responses to those images suggest that many people view Australia through the filter of a 1950s B-grade American western. Some respondents seek out similarities to their own place while others struggle with the unknown. Some are friendly. A couple are antagonistic. Whilst one Japanese recipient was amazed by a place with so much space you could leave cars to rot in a field, a Dutch correspondent was appalled by this clear ‘evidence’ of violent Australian men who drink too much, concluding, “I NEVER want to go there.” Ironically, I find myself feeling a little defensive.

Iwai’s research also consisted of 20 interviews with local people. Rather than transcribing, he wrote a subjective response to the experience of those intensive interviews undertaken with (for instance) a local doctor, a farmer, a Noongar Elder and a retired Italian construction worker. For the third component of the exhibition, Iwai borrowed a representative chair from each subject. Each chair—centrally positioned in a circle in the space—was draped in red fabric onto which Iwai had screen printed unidentified verbatim quotes from the interviews.

Returning to Kellerberrin for Iwai’s opening, I discover that not only the gallery but 2 other shopfronts have been taken over (at least temporarily) by Perth-based artists Philip Gamblen, Brigitta Hupfel and Andrew Smith, who participated in a week long workshop with Iwai. The next day I hear about the performance area planned for a salt flat on a property just west of Kellerberrin, while others are mulling over the possibility of re-opening the old cinema. In the front window of the IASKA space, slide projectors are flicking through images of Kellerberrin and Tokyo, while in the gallery the audience of mostly local residents are doing the opening thing—drinking, chatting, looking, reading and having a whole lot to say about the exhibition and their roles within it. As dusk falls, I experience a kind of epiphany: imponderables like ‘arts led recovery’, elitism, community, space, conceptual art, cultural exchange, centres and peripheries, and Japanese tour guides with little coloured flags flicker through my consciousness. I seem to have landed in ‘Art Town Kellerberrin: a great place to live’.

Shigeaki Iwai was IASKA artist in residence, June-August 2001; exhibition: Kellerberrin Gallery, August 4-September 2. A publication from his residency is forthcoming.

Richard (the rash) Lewer vs Luke Sinclair, Adrift: Nomadic New Zealand Art, opening night of Conical (performance documentation)

Everyone knows that artist-run spaces are essential to the networks that make up the Australian visual arts infrastructure. Yet, for a variety of familiar reasons, they’re usually short-lived enterprises. Even the funding category—artist-run initiative—reflects this sense of a beginning. Artists disperse, rents go up, ARIs come and go. Yet a commitment to collaboration sustains pockets of Melbourne’s art community, and around the more established spaces such as Platform and 1st Floor, once impatient young artists have become prominent figures. While this has forced some reflection over the viability of the model as a subsidising ‘feeder’ for the commercial sector, new generations of artists seem continually eager to make their own opportunities, along a classic self-service ethos. With 3 new artist run spaces opening in only a month, it feels like a new wave has just hit Melbourne’s contemporary scene. Together with the new gallery at the VCA, Conical, Bus and the TCB/Uplands assemblage represent significant new additions to the artscape.

Anything can happen at an art opening today. So the fact that Conical opened its doors with a boxing match staged between 2 artists—Richard (the Rash) Lewer and Luke Sinclair—shouldn’t surprise. Billed as “an arts/sporting event never before seen”, in the context of the group exhibition Adrift: Nomadic New Zealand Art, curated by Emily Cormack and Lewer, it suggested the difficulties faced by landless New Zealanders moving into Melbourne’s art scene (one-eighth of NZ’s population apparently live in Australia). Fight Club it wasn’t, but with the help of trainers and a professional MC it made a pretty good simulation—a kind of performance art for our times, neither about self-expression nor the politics of the body but simply about mimicking the spectacle on its own terms (with live feed piped to a TV with street-frontage below, and making it onto ABC TV’s Sunday morning Coast to Coast).

Just off Brunswick Street in Fitzroy, Conical is the brainchild of Adrien Allen, an emerging artist and Masters student at VCA. The space came about fortuitously and—although it has been dubbed a grand sounding ‘Contemporary Art Space’—he sees it functioning as a project space. Allen’s interest in the ideology of the white cube has also extended to the gallery fit-out: one half is moderno white, the other consists of peeling green painted brick walls. Allen speaks of it in terms of the white cube’s entropic process, complemented at the launch with these bricks dotted with live moss landscapes (a work by Anoushka Akel). Conical’s future is a matter for negotiation and probable collaboration; in the meantime, Louise Hubbard and Chris Köller show in October.

Bus, another artist-run space, opened in late August on the wettest of Melbourne’s winter nights—which didn’t stop a crowd filling the place. Located opposite Troika Bar in the CBD, Bus occupies the first floor level of a 1940s industrial building. Comprising 3 spaces defined by white walls and high gable trusses, it offers a dedicated ‘sound space’ “for the emerging sound artist…to push the discipline.” They’ve already staged a weekend event of sound performances, adding to the growing literacy of sound art in Melbourne (radiating from the hub of Samartzis-Brophy at RMIT). The opening show of emerging artists, Departure, included an installation by Renee So, sculpture by Nick Mangan, photographs by Selina Ou, as well as a digital installation by Chad Chatterton and Julian Oliver. Bus aims to promote cross disciplinary collaborative art practice, a philosophy which may have something to do with its board members stemming from fields as diverse as architecture, graphic design, animation and sound. Bus is the offspring of a design firm of the same name, located in the front of the building.

Down the road in Chinatown, up an alley and next to a sex shop, TCB Inc. Art (Taking Care Of Business) reopened at the start of September in a joint project with a new commercial space called Uplands. TCB began in the former Grey Area window-gallery space in Port Philip Arcade for 18 months before it was squeezed out last September. TCB is composed of a committee of 9 artists, with an average age of 26—mostly graduates of the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA). Uplands runs independently. Gallerists Blair Trethowan (an emerging artist included in Primavera this year) and Jarrod Rawlins (a fellow member of DAMP) decided to start up a business, and earlier this year found a space to house the 2 separate organisations. The gallery then held a substantial fundraiser to completely renovate the compact spaces. In their minds, Uplands and TCB are independent and yet inseparable; one could not exist without the other. Here, the relationship between the artist-run space and the commercial sector is transparent—TCB subleases from Uplands—but the dealer’s eagle-like position is somewhat short-circuited. Accordingly, the artists represented by Uplands are a mix of emerging and established (many with international links)—A Constructed World (Jacqueline Riva and Geoff Lowe), Jon Campbell, Nadine Christensen, DAMP, Sharon Goodwin, James Lynch, David Noonan and Blair Trethowan. Exhibitions change fortnightly at TCB and monthly at Uplands, and the 2001 TCB program includes shows by Brendan Lee (the first part of which has just shown at Westspace, another artist-run space in the city, tucked away near the Queen Victoria Markets), Amanda Marburg and Selina Ou. An interesting experiment in a new model; everyone in the visual arts will be watching closely.

Rent prices have raised Melbourne’s artist-run spaces to the first floor. The ground floor Victorian College of the Arts Gallery also opened in August, under the supervision of Head of the School of Art, Su Baker. Essentially 2 white cubes, well situated between the St Kilda Road National Gallery of Victoria site and the soon-to-be new Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, its first show was the Besen Foundation’s Roger Kemp Memorial Prize—with David Rozetsky’s Custom Made reconstructed for the occasion (RT38 p35). It’s not a student gallery. Exhibitions will include local, national and international artists curated in-house and by guest curators, including a forthcoming collaboration with Centre for Contemporary Photography and a show curated
by Elizabeth Gower.

Conical: Contemporary Art Space, 182 Johnston St, Fitzroy, 03 9528 1567, Wed-Sat 11-5; Bus, 117 Little Lonsdale St, Melbourne, 03 9662 2442, Tues-Fri 11-6, Sat 11-4; TCB Inc. Art/Uplands, Level 1, 12 Waratah Place, Melbourne, 03 9747 8203, Tues-Thu 12-6, Fri 12-8, Sat 12-6, , ; Victorian College of the Arts Gallery, corner Grant & Dodd Sts, South Bank, 03 9685 9468, Wed-Sat 12-5

Just as Australian-Norwegian relations were souring over Australia’s handling of the Tampa affair, Daryl Buckley was working on the final stages of an international collaboration some 4 years in the making. A rumoured ban on Australian wine was making Buckley nervous about getting Norwegian artists and freight into Australia for the November premiere of Dark Matter at the Brisbane Powerhouse.
Buckley is Artistic Director of ELISION, the enterprising and widely travelled, Brisbane-based, new music ensemble. ELISION and Buckley are now at their busiest. Sonorous Bodies (composer Liza Lim, koto Satsuki Odamura, video Judith Wright) has just opened in Berlin. Moon Spirit Feasting (premiered as Yuè Ling Jié at the 2000 Adelaide Festival) is on the Melbourne Festival program this October and is being recorded for CD release. And Buckley and Lim are going to be parents.

Dark Matter began as a conversation between Buckley and Christian Eggen of Norway’s CIKADA Ensemble in 1997 when the conductor was working with ELISION. Eggen had been inspired, says Buckley, by the way ELISION was opening up ensemble practice. The companies “liked each other and decided to something that was not a concert. ELISION has had a long relationship with English composer Richard Barrett in investigating form and it was decided to get him aboard.”

A search for “an installation artist with an architectural sensibility” was also initiated. ELISION has made its mark in a commitment to contemporary composition, but more especially in investigating the dynamic between music and visual imagery especially in the use of space evident in Opening of the Mouth (Midland Railway Workshop, Perth Festival, 1977, Brussels, 1998) with British artist Crow, and Bar-do’I-thos-grol (The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Lismore) with composer Liza Lim, artist Domenico de Clario. Moon Spirit Feasting (composer Liza Lim, director Michael Kantor, designer Dorotka Sopinska) was performed on a barge on Adelaide’s River Torrens.

The leading Norwegian artist, Per Inge Bjørlo with his long history of creating installations and working with industrial waste, was the artist selected for Dark Matter. In 1985 he had been commissioned to carry out decorative work for Follum Factories. A studio was put at his disposal free of charge and, ever since, Bjørlo has been associated with this paper-producing factory where expertise, machines and a working milieu are at hand. his internationally exhibited works have incorporated mirror splinters, hair, stainless steel, blindingly strong light bulbs and rubber floors.

Buckley describes his encounter with Barrett and Bjørlo in Amsterdam in 1999 as “a meeting of intense minds” with “a lived commitment to art.” Progress since the project’s inception has been extraordinary, he says, given the risks of cultural and geographic gaps. With British Council support Barrett was able to work with Per Inge Bjørlo at his home in Norway. Buckley describes it as an ideal collaboration. The proximity to the paper mill sponsor was another advantage.

Buckley is a guitarist and will play a key role in Dark Matter. He’s been working on the Transmissions sections of the work with Barrett for 2 years. As well, with the composer he’s discussed the selection of players, “those with the capability and who can be pushed.” Also on the agenda has been, he says, “how to work with CIKADA in an intelligent way…they haven’t had ELISION’s experience with Barrett. It’s not ELISION plus CIKADA, but all the musicians working as a whole.” CIKADA, in turn, have played pieces from Dark Matter at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in the UK. Carl Rossman has been playing some of the work as a solo for contrabass clarinet.

The impulse to deal with dark matter (particles that go through matter as in a particle physics laboratory in Cern, Switzerland, visited by the composer and designer) came from composer Barrett, the phrase suggesting what is not known, evocative of a cosmological theme beyond physics. “It’s also about the spirit of a quest into existence.” He describes Barrett as a materialist, “an older kind of Marxist’, “however, the final movement is influenced by Buddhist precepts.” Buckley says that “Richard Barrett will be at the sound desk with sound designer Michael Hewes manipulating taped sound in real time.” The text comprises English, Chinese and an invented language and is sung by Deborah Kayser.

Dark Matter explores the interconnectedness and transmission of human knowledge. It incorporates understandings of human consciousness and perception drawn from Hindu metaphysics, Renaissance `hermetic’ thought to more recent developments within the realm of physics. Its imaginary `narrative’ is formed within the listener/viewer as they move through multiple spaces and acoustic environments creating their own pathway through a labyrinth of real (acoustic and/or electronic) sound-sources. The location of a moving ‘body’ (performer, audience) within ‘space’ is central to the manipulation of sound and physical elements. (ELISION website)

As for the spatial dimensions of the work, the main theatre at the Powerhouse will be cleared of its seating and the audience will be placed among the performers and the sculptural elements of the work. Some of the audience of 150 will find themselves viewing the work from chambers. not that Buckley’s seen the very final design—”They’re being a little secretive.”

The Powerhouse will be transformed into multiple spaces: one relatively large area in the centre, in front of the main stages, where all activities are audible and more or less visible, and other spaces delimited by installation-elements, which will have spatial and acoustic qualities of their own, based on their shape and the materials from which they are made. For instance, a small `claustrophobic’ area containing a speaker, whose sound is deadened by the area being surrounded by felt: also rows of large cubical frameworks made of steel pipes lined with various materials; and other pieces and objects already made by Per Inge Bjørlo. The audience enter through a small aperture. A choreography of relocations for the performers constantly recomposes and reforms the performing ensemble, extending the multiplicity of available perspectives.

Support for the work has amazed Buckley with pre-production funding coming from the Norwegian Cultural Council, sponsorship from the Norska paper mill assisting with manufacturing and freight, and a steel company providing raw material. A power factory in Norway assisted with travel. The British Council and DAAD, Berlin have assisted Barrett and the production has been supported by the New Media Arts Fund of the Australia Council.

Buckley is proud of the model he and ELISION have pioneered for international collaboration. “Australian artists think a lot about touring but they should be thinking collaboration. The trouble with touring is that you don’t enter into local history. You leave little behind. You don’t influence people’s thinking. You merely briefly fill a space left by someone else. How do do you become part of a city somewhere else in the world and make a serious contribution to it?” Dark Matter might, says Buckley, “really open the door to central Europe… John Howard willing.”

ELISION ensemble, CIKADA ensemble, Dark Matter, composer Richard Barrett, soprano Deborah Kayser, designer Per Inge Bjørlo, sound designer Michael Hewes; Brisbane Powerhouse, November 16-18

The experience of this year’s Festival of Darwin was inextricably linked to events that unfolded on election night, Saturday August 18. There couldn’t have been a better time to launch a festival, one that could ride the unprecedented wave of excitement and the possibility of change. It happened like this…Only 2 days after the festival’s official launch, we all went off to vote. A friend and I had booked to see a local multimedia production that night. The election had been seen as a foregone conclusion, a bit depressing actually. Even this time, the pundits had us believe there was only going to be marginal change. However, on the way to the show, the story was breaking on the car radio. Seats that had been held for 26 years were falling like cards in the northern suburbs, the CLP heartland. Things were happening, excitement was building, a sense of momentous occasion starting to dawn. We didn’t want to go inside and leave the radio. Doing our duty, we entered the womb, and immersed ourselves in an extraordinary environment. The clamour of the outside world diminished for a moment.

The Tube, a multimedia installation and performance created by 2 Darwin women, Elka Kerkhofs and Elle Parsonson, was described as “an intriguing journey through the mind, body and emotions of women.” The distinguishing feature of this project was its setting in the amazing WWII Tunnels under the Esplanade in the city. This site, once a fuel storage area, is a 250m long subterranean tunnel with a post-apocalyptic industrial ambience, dripping with water and disused heavy machinery. For this production the tunnel became the metaphor for the internal bodily landscape. We entered through the mouth, were shepherded through the vagina and ended up in the womb, where there just happened to be a DJ, a stage and a whole lot of TVs.

The first marshalling area near the mouth contained a multi-layered, diaphanous installation on which images were projected, with references to peeling back layers of clothes and consciousness. The tunnel contains a dogleg just past this point and, led further by a woman on stilts, we were presented with an extraordinary sight. The tunnel at this point stretches 170m in a straight line, with curved rock walls and a shallow drain running along the floor. At regular intervals, 9 naked women, wearing only swimming goggles, were stationed, each holding a flickering monitor to her crotch. The scene stretched seemingly to infinity. The screens, glowing blue, illuminated the dimly lit scene as the audience craned to get a look. The tunnel is not wide and we passed single file by the women. The frisson of proximity and possible recognition combined with the sexualised imagery on the screens added to the sense of drama. It was an intriguing and mysterious experience as we made our way down the tunnel of love. The saga of conception and reproduction was enacted by dancers in front of a large bank of monitors flanking the DJ. Unfortunately the performance, where the metaphor was spelled out rather too literally, did not quite live up to the introduction. There was a tendency, as with a lot of performances that blend hybrid art forms, to try to do too much. The Tube—a major logistical feat by emerging artists—was successful when they stuck to their strengths.

I couldn’t wait to get back to the car radio and find out what had happened. The rest as they say is history and we were re-born into a new reality where the political landscape had changed forever. We went along to the Waratahs where the party faithful, and really anyone who wanted to go, were drawn like moths to the flame of change. It was quite a night. Party politics aside, the euphoria was palpable. It really was time!

The Festival of Darwin is a community event. It falls on the cusp of the Dry just as the weather is about to change. The setting sun glows like a huge orange, reddened by the dry season haze. It’s all about to turn nasty…but not yet. The festival is in some ways the peak of the crescendo of activity that builds up during the Dry. There is so much going on that it’s impossible to get to it all. The place is packed. Events like the Grand Parade, the Teddy Bears’ Picnic, the Festival Club on the Wharf, the Fig Jam Indigenous music gig, the Barrdy’wanga Gunga String Festival, innumerable art openings and performances draw huge crowds. Amazing cross-cultural interactions are often noted by visitors, but if you live here it’s like that all the time. It just escalates during the festival as the ranks swell.

Tracks Dance usually stages one of its trademark multimedia, cross-cultural performances, often a highlight of the festival. Tracks have worked for many years with groups including Indigenous communities, cultural groups, young people, trauma survivors, elderly women and even football teams. Their’s is a theatre of inclusion.

Their latest production Fierce is based on the life of Olive Pink—anthropologist, botanist, Aboriginal rights activist and cranky soul—who lived in Central Australia. She was variously labelled a communist, a mad woman and the “fiercest white woman in captivity.” This production focuses on historical and fictitious elements relating to an encounter between Miss Pink and the Warlpiri people of the Central Desert. In director Tim Newth’s notes, the performance is said to be about connections between a white world and a Warlpiri world. He’s talking about the Grey Panthers and the Warlpiri Ceremonial Dancers of Lajamanu, 2 groups of female elders with whom Tracks has worked extensively. Between these 2 groups and at their intersection hovers the awkward figure of Olive, who in this production is played by Melbourne-based performer Trevor Patrick. The old women dominate the production.

The Grey Panthers are first seen as a Greek chorus decked out in plain calico dresses, their faces also masked with calico, features exaggerated as grotesques. This is the white world where they sing “Nothing else to do” as they wave Olive off into the distant ‘other’ world she will inhabit as an alien for the rest of her life. Patrick’s portrayal of Olive, which ranges from affected geisha to high camp drag, is strongly counterpointed with the earthy femaleness of the Lajamanu women, natural and charismatic performers. In contrast, at times everyone else seems stilted and not totally together. Olive’s botanical work, her strident and relentless writings appear in various ways in the design and narrative. Some members of the cast had first hand contact with Olive and cross-cultural misunderstandings about her story add to the narrative, the notion of her ‘pinkness’ being one.

In development for 3 years, the production is a rich and layered experience. It also involves the melding of various artforms with original music from the Arafura Ensemble, visuals by Gay Hawkes and Mat Mainsbridge, and choreography by the creative team, highlighting the collaborative way in which Tracks works. The subtext is the exploration of encounters with ‘difference’ on all levels, which this company has made their signature in recent years.

The visual arts were well represented in this year’s festival. One of the most interesting was Ending Offending, Our Message. This collection, created by inmates of the NT Correctional centre as part of the Ending Offending initiative, presented a strong show of mostly Indigenous, first time, artists. Staged at the disused Fanny Bay Gaol in a wire-caged shed, the opening crowd was a strange mix of the usual art set, art advisors, prison guards and prisoners. The food was definitely non veg. The show was opened by Margie West, Aboriginal Art Curator from Museum and Art Gallery Northern Territory (MAGNT), who pointed out that the gaol has been the scene of art production for over 100 years, as prisoners contributed to one of the first shows of Indigenous art, The Dawn of Art, in 1888. Some delicate reproductions from that show hang in the cellblocks in another part of the gaol. The predominance of Aboriginal artists is a sad reflection on the disproportionate number of Indigenous prisoners in NT gaols and this exhibition, the fourth of its kind, focused on the concerns of the prisoners in a very direct way. Much of the work is narrative and contains heartfelt messages of reconciliation or pleas such as “I like to see my family to make me happy.” The project and these paintings are important for cultural maintenance and the telling of collective narratives, documenting harsh social realities from domestic violence to commentary on the justice system, with a raw honesty and stylistic freedom often only found in first time painters. The artworks employ hybrid styles with naïve painted storyboards, outlined with dot work or other traditional styles. My favourite, Horses around Oenpelli by Lennie Naborlhborth, is a poignant reminder of country and experience far from the confines of his present situation. Now there is a government in power committed to the scrapping of Mandatory Sentencing legislation, there may be some cause for celebration by prison inmates as well.

These events, totally different and realised with varying degrees of success, represent a snippet of the diversity of the Festival of Darwin. For many people it was the best of times and it just keeps getting better.

Ending Offending Our Message, Fannie Bay Gaol, August 30-September 31; Fierce, Tracks Dance, Browns Mart, September 22-26; The Tube, WW11 Tunnels, the Esplanade, Darwin, September 17-19

Semena Santa: Castillian Holy Week/ semen-seamen
Crux: Latin term for the Southern Cross
Cruxtations: crux + stations/marine class of invertebrates including crabs

Semena Santa Cruxtations is a multiplicitous, mimetic, contradictory, carnivalesque, neo-Baroque, semi-collaborative installation/event by Perth-based Manila-born artist Alwin Raemillo. The work is at present journeying from Manila to Hong Kong to Darwin to Melbourne to Fremantle. It involves large quantities of local crabs and beach sand, a collection of small horns made from film strips and various other exotic items of Filipino kitsch, and Mickey Mouse printed bed sheets with photocopy transfers of images of The Last Supper and Ronald McDonald. Coming from the densely hybrid society of the Philippines, Raemillo displays a mischievous contempt for the hypocrisies of the Catholic church and the greed of globalised business interests. International fast food chains are a favourite target. Ronald McDonald, with crown of thorns and spattered with blood, is portrayed as a modern day Christ, Mickey Mouse stands guard over a herd of sheep and cattle ready for slaughter, and The Last Supper is stabbed with fondue forks.

On the opening night, a relaxed and gently anarchic event which encouraged impromptu audience intervention in the site, Raemillo read from and burned copies of the Bible translated into Bahasa Indonesian and a creole for Indigenous Australians. The crabs, caught or bought locally, cooked and eaten in a Filipino style feast, were cleaned and printed with photocopy emulsion transfers of maps, money, food packaging logos and various icons of Australiana, wired to the gallery walls and embedded in the sand that covered the floor in diminutive hills. They became a multilayered metaphor: for the cancerous spread of globalised business, the liminal realm between 2 environments/cultures and the nonlinear, nonprogressive movement of social change. In the modern world radical differences are clustered together, constructing irresolvable contradictions. An ethics embracing cultural diversity becomes a necessity.

Tropical Darwin, on the edge, where the complex and brutal consequences of colonisation are daily confronted and a migrant sensibility seems the norm (everyone here is in some sense displaced) was a perfect site for Raemillo’s project. It was offered and received warmly and generously and we hope to see him back.

In a sense, his postmodern strategies of appropriation and conflation served as a supportive framework for the rituals of shared labour, dialogue and festivity that were the real life of the project. Sure the artist brought his agenda and props with him and the rules of participation were his. He also created an inclusive, nonprecious and pleasurable environment for creative practice that was consistent with his notions of local revolution and acceptance of the realities of cultural difference. His communication skills are an intrinsic component of his work; he is a keen advocate of collaborative practice (he has done several projects with his partner, Juliet Lee) and a thoughtful pedagogue. Semena Santa Cruxtations was not only an installation: it was fishing, feasting, discussing, performing and socialising. The crabs got caught, the weather was perfect for the dinner, a positive sense of artistic
camaraderie evolved.

We have just held our first post-Semena Santa Cruxtations dinner on the art school lawn. We intend to make them a regular event.

Semena Santa Cruxtations, Alwin Reamillo, 24HR Art, Darwin, August 17-September 1

Reckoning: to settle accounts with, to rely or depend on,
of considerable importance or influence…

In the winter of 2001 there are a lot of reckonings going on. The poisonous assumptions of White Australia pervade public and private life; not since before the 60s—the era of civil rights—has ‘Australia’ so blatantly been made to mean ‘Anglo’, asylum seekers imprisoned, crimes racialised. During this winter, and the spring months before, a group of 4 installation artists and 2 curators, commissioned by Performance Space, have been collectively reckoning with the meanings and contexts of reconciliation (or, as Wesley Enoch calls it,“Wreck – Con – Silly – Nation”).

The brief was to explore and problematise popular and political notions of reconciliation, undertaking a rewriting and remapping of Redfern through the exchange of memories and histories, and to develop a collective art process and collaborative means of production. Redfern, the site of the Performance Space, is a long-term meeting place for decades of Aboriginal people arriving from the country and interstate, as well as the site of some of Sydney’s oldest non-Anglo migrant communities.

The 2 curators, Rea and Ihab Shalbak, and the 4 installation artists, Jonathan Bottrell Jones, Ruark Lewis, Romaine Moreton and Nuha Saad, each have complex histories and memories of Redfern; ‘funereal’ is how Ruark describes it—many of their combined memories of Redfern relate to a past of deceased people and cultures passed away.

In Shalbak’s words, “the experimental collectivity initiated by Reckonings” released poetic responses to ideas of place and home. As you entered the gallery, you heard people discussing Redfern as both place and idea, a set of histories and present stories, recorded on the move through Redfern’s streets. This is the first of many layers of remapping, compounded by further works: video images of faces exiting Redfern station; Drive-by Shooting—flashing impressions of Redfern’s streets from the safety of the car, playing on the outsider’s fear of the area’s Mean Streets; and a tiny screen around a dark corner intimately revealing interspersed shots of a private and public Redfern. More immediately, you are arrested by Moreton’s use of footage of the largest gathering of Aboriginal people ever, the protests against celebrating 200 years of white invasion in ‘88, the celebration of survival, the March Against Forgetting. Running around this installation are 2 contrasting soliloquies to the idea of place: Kafka’s late 19th century yearning for the security of home (in German) and ‘Bindamayi’s song about Country:

Murtanga-ulla-la tharkiart kumarnha-la putarri
Kulawina yarku kujurri kuralanha
(When I come back to my country
Someone has built a stockyard on the flat land,
And a whitefella, Bluey, is sleeping in my birthplace.)

Despite the quotations representing the unequal power relationships of colonialism, an urgent poignancy erupts in the meaning produced between them. They share a sense of yearning, not just for a home but, on Bindamayi’s part—as Joseph Pugliese writes in the Reckonings catalogue—of the right to offer hospitality, “a right so brutally arrogated from Aboriginal peoples”, in that first moment of invasion, and throughout white/Aboriginal contact.

Moving through the rooms the sense of collaboration between the artists is expressed through Jonathon Bottrell Jones’ forty ambivalent words, running stencilled along the walls in 2 parallel lines, cohering the diverse work on exhibit. The viewer is left with plenty of space to insert their own meanings into the often abstract and oblique formalist work: Ruark Lewis’ tall ruler-like measuring sticks, totemic in size and colour, calibrating differing systems of measuring land title, evoking those flood-level, river-crossing poles; Nuha Saad’s pieces of architrave, painted green, arranged and lit on the floor, surrounded by dissected banister poles. Only after several viewings did I start to comprehend the poetics of these pieces; in counterpoint with the name of the architrave work, Green Lake, you could hear the whispering of 19th century houses, and the name’s relationship to ‘The Red Fern’. The child-size house-frames offered beguiling pillows to be hauntingly smoothed, Daisy Bates-way, ‘for a dying race.’

We are saturated with imagery from a popular, global culture in denial of history and memory; incorporating words in conjunction with images works to create a new dynamic. Within this dialectical space, new meanings erupt. One of the themes produced through the process of inter-cultural and inter-racial collaboration, through talking and listening, is the idea of living and working within difference, and listening to the layers of the past as they exist in the present. The Reckonings exhibition featured white powder as a central motif—the lime produced from the first days of white invasion by grinding down the massive shell middens (or “monuments” as Peter Myers calls them) which lined Sydney harbour. Oyster shells spilling over bricks and mortar tell how a second Sydney was built from the Eora place—the shells of the Eora contained to this day within the lime mortar of Sydney’s buildings. But the white powder also brings into the present the white flour, white sugar—mission food, arsenic-laced ‘White Man’s Poison’, and the ubiquitous heroin currently poisoning the community.

The urgency of the questions surrounding reconciliation creates the context for the formalist artists producing the Reckonings exhibition, highlighting the difference between meaningless abstraction and the creation of poetically charged objects whose material value resonates. This was not an exhibition to be quickly consumed. Ruark Lewis commented that, like all allegorical work, disguising and masking initiates you slowly into a process, much like the reconciliation process itself. Unlike the directness and speed of agit prop, allegorical formalist work requires time to ponder the signs, and make your own connections. Or you could miss the strategies of reclaiming, incorporated in the simple way the re-writing of ‘Red Fern’ magically unleashes the imagination to hear the sounds of a pre-colonial past, a fern-lined creek, dripping water and calling voices, breaking apart the conquering myths of place.

Reckonings, curated by Rea & Ihab Shalbak,
Performance Space, Sydney, July 27-Aug 26

In a recently released discussion paper, the Office of Film and Literature Classification has highlighted several areas that are under consideration for substantial changes in the guidelines to the classification of films, videos, and computer games in Australia. The adoption of a single set of classification standards that would cover films, videos, computer games, DVDs, internet content and CD-ROM films is one of the main proposals, while the possibility of an R rating for computer games and a special children only C rating has also been raised.

The OFLC has called for public submissions in its review of the current guidelines, giving a deadline of October 31, and citing the need to ensure that the guidelines “reflect current community standards” as the main rationale behind the review. Film guidelines were last reviewed in 1996, and the guidelines for computer games were established in 1994. An analysis of submissions received by the OFLC will be followed by further consultation with industry and interest groups, and consideration of the proposed revised guidelines by “independent experts, including a language expert.” The final decision on the changes, if any, will be made by the Commonwealth, State and Territory ministers with classification responsibilities.

Despite the stated aim of Australia’s Classification process being that “adults should be able to read, hear and see what they want,” the draft guidelines included in the OFLC discussion paper seem to offer further restrictions on nudity, violence and drugs, while a new clause argues that the “inappropriate use of substances that might damage health or are legally restricted to adults must not be promoted or encouraged.” The draft guidelines also allow the classification board to consider the likelihood of certain actions or events within a film or video game being imitated inappropriately, especially by young children, in real life. Such actions or events may include the detailed portrayal of criminal or violent techniques, or actions that may promote illegal or dangerous behaviour. The degree of interactivity may also be used to affect the impact of a film or game, and therefore its classification.

The discussion paper points out that both industry and community groups have noted that the current guidelines do not address convergence in various entertainment media. With DVDs and CDfilms now widely available for sale or rental, and online material much more available, interactive features, computer games and links to internet sites are becoming regular features. The discussion paper asks whether there should be a single set of classification standards for all media, with interactive products classified in the same way as films and videos, or should an age-based approach be introduced, similar to the G8 category for computer games.

Anti-censorship group Electronic Frontiers Australia has welcomed the possibility of the introduction of an R rating for computer games, which would see a relaxing of bans on some adult games. However EFA believes the proposal to use the same guidelines for films and computer games could result in increased restrictions on films.

Parent group Young Media Australia is concerned that the introduction of an R rating could put children at risk of exposure to violent or sexually explicit material. At present, computer games that do not comply with MA15+ classification are banned in Australia. Computer games are banned if they have realistic violence, extreme horror, simulated or explicit sex acts, sexual violence and detailed instruction or encouragement of crime, violence or proscribed drugs.

In this context, a very interesting appendix to the discussion paper is the report of the research project Computer Games and Australians Today, a nationwide investigation completed in 3 stages during 1995-99. The primary focus was on the role of aggressive content and, interestingly, the project concluded that although many of the games had aggressive content, it did not appear to be the central attraction, nor was it taken seriously. The report also noted that none of the independent research published to date has demonstrated serious effects of aggressive gameplay on the behaviour of young people. A notable development is that as the first generation of computer gameplayers reach adulthood, they have sustained their interest in this activity, with the adult market for games large and growing. It therefore appears anomalous and without scientific basis to continue to refuse to allow an adults only, or R category, in this one medium.

“The road of excess leads to the place of wisdom”, wrote William Blake some 200 years ago. Kim Machan, director and curator of MAAP01 (Multimedia Art Asia-Pacific) seems to have taken this line the Proverbs of Heaven and Hell to heart, titling her 4th annual new media arts festival Excess and packing 3 days at the Brisbane Powerhouse with a plentitude of digital media experiences ranging through viewing, interactive participation, dark-room listening and rave.
Machan’s focus is “on the extreme positions adopted by artists in their engagement with new media.” She sees this as substantially different from the conventional excesses of mainstream media which are desensitising and make the whole idea of excess meaningless: “when artists take an idea and push it continually, we are refreshed with ways to re-engage with electronic media [encountering] deeply personal positions speaking from richly different cultural positions.”

MAAP is in its 4th year, heroically directed, curated and managed by the mercurial Machan, an intrepid seeker of sponsorships, in-kind deals and hard-to-get funding. She has a good eye for innovative new media art in Australia and across Asia, and has steadily built ongoing connections in the region. This year’s partners include the Digital Media Festival (Manila), Arts Centre Nabi (Seoul), The Loft New Media ArtSpace (Beijing), Videotage (Hong Kong) and Experimenta 2001 Festival (Melbourne). Like the Asia Pacific Triennial (its partner in 1999), MAAP reaches out, drawing a disparate region together, linking artists, organisations and audiences.

This year, the Brisbane Powerhouse will be home to MAAP01 while a wider audience will join the event online. The huge Turbine Hall will show CD-ROM works and online events on a big screen and a host of large screen Mac G4s and iMacs. Artist Di Ball will play host with a guided tour of a CD-ROM sampler. Machan says that these and online works like Melinda Rackham’s empyrean will be “given the zoom treatment”, transported onto a big screen, no longer “a tangled tight bunch of information stuck on a computer…but sumptuous.”

This program includes Excessive up close and personal featuring Lucy Francis (with the artist providing a live cello track) and Keith Armstrong (of the transmute collective). Ball will also introduce young artists who will talk about their work. The net cost forum on digital media issues will be broadcast in collaboration with the ABC’s online Headspace and Experimenta Media Arts.

Also in the Turbine Hall, Dion Sanderson’s installation, Work for the Office, will comprise 10 computers. Users activate programs to create what Machan calls “an orchestra of computers.” In the adjoining Sparks Bar, small monitors on the tables will feature video works including contributions from Singaporean-Australian artist Emil Goh, and New Zealand’s Raewyn Turner.

A selection of installations will be found in various parts of the Powerhouse. In a stairwell, Korean artist Oh San Gil’s video looks “like blood dripping,” says Machan, “an excessive red projected onto the floor…Then, finally, you realise what you are looking at.” (Machan’s not saying.) Elsewhere, an empyrean installation and an untitled Ruark Lewis video work will sneak up on audiences wandering the building. Also featured are dLux media arts’ d>art01 program (RT44, p24) and Andrew Kettle’s selection of sound works from across Australia. The latter will be played in the darkened AO-Audio Room (for Audio Only) with the additional luxury of eye masks for the sense deprivation that makes the most of sound.

Music and performance are to play a vital role. At the launch Melbourne’s Toy Satellite Collective (video artists 2Loops [Kim Bounds, John Power], producer/sound designer Andrew Garton) will collaborate with composer/DJ Jimi Chen and video artists Vince Chung and Austin Wang from the Eyedrink Collective, Taiwan. The collaboration debuted at the 2001 Taipei International Arts Festival as Undercurrents. Also appearing will be Japan’s Candy Factory who work internationally on web projects and new media installations (www.trans.artnet.or.jp/~transart/). Each night an Art Rave will be created with massive sound and vision mixes.

A significant contribution to MAAP01 will be a video installation by Chinese artists Gong Xin Wang at the new Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Art (soon to be the home for IMA, Arterial, ELISION ensemble and Rock’n’Roll Circus). MAAP has invited Wang to show his latest video installation My Sun, a 3 screen panorama that poetically investigates questions of society and the individual through presenting a Chinese peasant woman’s relationship to the sun. The woman works in a large open field, repeatedly reaching up to grasp the light as the sun rises, enters the landscape and leaves its traditional orbit. Her image multiplies, creating an army of replicas. The individual becomes the mass, or does she?

The internationally exhibited Wang (born 1960) lives in Beijing. He spent nearly 8 years in the late 80s, early 90s living and exhibiting in New York before returning to China to continue his practice. His work is seen as integral to the history of video art epitomised by Bill Viola and Gary Hill (whose Tall Ships is an eery highlight in the AGNSW Space Odysseys, see p25). In recent years Wang has focused on video portraiture. Machan writes in her essay on Gong Xin Wang that in The Fly (2000) a person struggles to fight off a fly. The fly’s path is traced across the screen and is heard on the audio track. The camera slowly zooms in to reveal that the face is constructed from pixels…each revealed to be that of a single fly—an individual face made of a mosaic of flies.

MAAP’s vision of close new media and cultural relations with Asia has been carefully sustained. Machan speaks of “incredible Korean interest in MAAP…The Koreans look on Australians as new media experts.” She fantasizes about the possibility of running a version of MAAP from Seoul at some stage and describes The Loft New Media ArtSpace (China’s first new media space) as “damn sexy, scary.” As an extension of a giant night club, it features digital art works embedded in the floor and on monitors running down the walls. Live performance includes German and Dutch experimental musicians, guest international curators and regular experimental screenings”. Machan’s MAAP presentation at The Loft was reviewed and broadcast on CCTV. Australia needs friends like the festivals and venues MAAP is connecting with.

How has MAAP survived financially, running ambitious programs on small budgets? Machan’s answer is succinct: “So much of what we do comes from in-kind support.” The Powerhouse gives MAAP the space and support for the event. Equipment, like data projectors, is borrowed from QUT, Arterial, QAG and elsewhere. Macromedia have shown unswerving support and collaborations with the ABC and Experimenta are vital. “MAAP pays for most of the program and artists’ fees. Our sponsorship is really in the delivery and things like invitations, catering, nuts and bolts. We have no office rent or overheads—or paid staff! We leverage off others’ infrastructure.”

As for box office, Machan likes to keep the event free. “It’s early days for new media arts. People don’t know what they’re going to see.” She thinks that rather than a small paying audience it’s better to have a good-sized audience open to new experience.

Gong Xin Wang, My Sun, MAAP01 in partnership with the IMA, Performance Space, Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Art, Brisbane, October 6-16; Artspace, Sydney, October 4-27

John Safran let loose

John Safran, the smart and entertaining punster from Race Around the World, has been signed by SBSi for a new series screening 2002 on contemporary music. The 10 part series will focus mainly on dance, rap, rock and pop and “stories that perhaps Stuart Littlemore would cover if he hosted Video Hits”. Safran commented: “I’ll be talking to the artists I’ve grown up with, and the ones I’m shaking my butt to now. And it’s going to be very multicultural as well; I’m told one of the guys in Metallica is half-Dutch.” Richard Lowenstein is Executive Producer of the series.

Good news for Oz docos

For the first time ever, SBSi will commission and fully finance a proposal for their provocative Cutting Edge series, which screens Thursdays, 8.30pm. General Manager Glenys Rowe commented: “This initiative will enable production of docos which in the past could not have been made”, providing complete finance of $275,000 for one film to be commissioned before June 2002. It is designed to provide a fast track for subjects which need immediate shooting, without the delay of the usual financing timeframe. SBSi welcomes proposals from creative teams that include writers and directors skilled in drama, as well as documentary filmmakers. Amy Frasca, SBSI Documentary Co-ordinator,
02 9430 3915,

Cannes Palme D’or winner at Italian Film Festival

Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room will close the second Italian Film Festival. A big success last year, the festival will screen this year at Palace Norton St and Palace Academy Twin in Sydney, October 10-24, before travelling to Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane in October/November. Other films screened will include Malena (Cinema Paradiso director Giuseppe Tornatore), The Last Kiss, Honolulu Baby (The Icicle Thief director Maurizio Nichetti) and Placido Rizzotto, based on a true story about the murder of a trade union leader by the mafia in Sicily.

Screentour – planning resource for exhibition touring

In May 2001, Media Resource Centre (MRC) in Adelaide gained funding from AFC to further develop Screentour, an online planning database for those involved in screen-based exhibition touring throughout Australia. The database has 3 functions: to provide a ‘one stop shop’ for programmers wishing to research and secure screen-based touring programs; to provide partnership opportunities for programs in development; and to provide date and location information about upcoming tours to prevent scheduling clashes and encourage longer-term planning.

Cinema Sprints on again

The Glen Eira Film Festival, November 9-11, is once again holding its Cinema Sprints program, which features shorts from 30 seconds to 3 minutes. If you want to watch or participate, contact Rosanna Verde, Festival Coordinator,

Daisy Bates at the Adelaide Festival

Pre-production has begun on 26 Hooks and Eyes, a South Australian Film Corporation-funded short film based on the life of Daisy Bates. A series of vignettes will link the past to the present, “a dramatic map of obsession and the colonial imagination.” A collaboration between the Adelaide Festival Corporation and SBSi, the film will premiere at the Adelaide Festival 2002.

Local NSW film events

Project Contemporary Art Space is staging a film retrospective and exhibition, A Century of Cinema, in Wollongong, showing archival footage including tourist promotion films, industrial films, short films, amateur productions and old newsreel footage. Movie-house memorabilia, photographs and lectures will accompany the screenings. The films will be screened October 13-20 in Wollongong and most sessions are free. A full program is available in October. 02 4226 6546, . Meanwhile on the other side of Sydney, Screen Me! The Blue Mountains Short Film Festival, Katoomba Scenic Railway, March 14, is looking for interesting works of all genres under 15 minutes. They are particularly keen on animation and documentary. Deadline December 14.
02 4782 9976

And the AWGIE goes to…

John Romeril celebrated a double win at the AWGIES this year. As screenwriter for One Night the Moon, he took home awards in the Telemovie Original Category and was presented with the 2001 Major Award (along with Rachel Perkins). The hosts of the night HG Nelson and Rampaging Roy Slaven also won the Fred Parsons Award for a Special Contribution to Australian Comedy. Other scripts honoured included Lantana (Andrew Bovell), Mullet (David Caesar), Australians at War (Geoff Burton), Wee Jimmy (Stephen Mitchell) and The Secret Life of Us (Christopher Lee).

Find

October 2001

In Brisbane

Across Queensland

Loops & Topology: Airwaves

Australian Art Orchestra: Into the Fire

The Queensland Orchestra: Turangalîla-symphonie

Anumadutchi & The Queensland Orchestra

ELISION: Spirit Weapons

Orkest de Volharding: Andriessen Music Video Program

Lisa Moore – The Stuart Series

Michael Kieran Harvey – The Stuart Series

Paul Grabowsky – The Stuart Series

Solar Circuit in Tassie

Flickerfest goes onlin

Gearing up for noise

Morphologies

Before Night Falls & Adelaide shorts

Raw Meat and Radio; Ex Post Facto; Girls on Loos; Derph

John Safran let loose

Good news for Oz docos

Cannes Palme D’or winner at Italian Film Festival

Screentour – planning resource for exhibition touring

Cinema Sprints on again

Daisy Bates at the Adelaide Festival

Local NSW film events

And the AWGIE goes to…

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