Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

December 2001

Flickerfest 2002 is in its 11th year, offering the most comprehensive roundup of Australian and international short films, and now touring its various programs nationally (see www.flickerfest.com.au for dates and locations). It is also one of few festivals to seriously recognise shorts filmmakers’ talents with a number of awards on offer and a chance to be picked up by SBS’s Eat Carpet for broadcast.

This year’s program features 4 main sections. International Shorts is where the best worldwide and Australian films are in competition. There’s Australian Shorts if you just want to catch local action. The Short Documentary Competition offers the rare chance to see this highly specific format. And there’s the category I’m pretty excited about, the first ever Online Festival, 60 minutes of digital shorts in competition on the Flickerfest website throughout January, where you can vote for your favourite film. It’s great that Flickerfest has acknowledged the many filmmakers creating shorts for the web. There’s also a spotlight on 3 years of Canadian shorts, and a 12 year retrospective of the Australian White Gloves Festival.

Special sessions include a Tribute to Alfred Hitchcock program with shorts that reference Hitchcock films, experimental films that recycle his footage and Bon voyage, one of only 2 shorts he made for the big screen. One of the films featured is Das Ei (The Egg, Hans George Andes, Germany, 1993). Now, a lot of people have a thing about softboiled eggs. They can’t stand the sight of runny egg yolk or the wobbly, mucousy, white albumen. Das Ei plays on these deep fears in a day in the life/death of an egg set in realtime to Bernard Hermann’s score from the shower scene in Psycho. Hitchcock shots are transformed: the spray of the kitchen tap; the knife in the membrane; the yolk gurgling down the drain. Great stuff.

Other film highlights include Hop, Skip and Jump (Srdan Vuletic, Slovenia, 1999) and Copy Shop (Virgil Widrich, Austria, 2000). The former I’ve seen before and it’s hard to forget. Jumping from the 1984 Olympics to the streets of Sarajevo in 1993, a relationship wrestles amidst the battles of war. Boys play games, teasing snipers. Through a target we see a boy killed; his body too small, feet too slow. And what happens if your former lover turns out to be the sniper, wreaking vengeance, firing into your apartment? It’s a disturbing and clever film.

Even better is Copy Shop, a mini-masterpiece, where the film itself appears like paper coming out of a photocopier. The film, like the central character, looks set to disintegrate. It’s flimsy, it tears. Brilliantly self-referential, our main man works in a copy shop where he starts to photocopy his own body. As he does, the machine starts to take over, spitting out copies of film stills we’ve seen earlier, eventually making copies of the man himself. The obsessive narrative can’t help but turn in on itself and, as in Being John Malkovich, he eventually has to confront a world populated by endless editions of himself. In a moving ending, he looks down from the heights to see a wriggling mass of his own heads, seething like disease under a microscope. A witty, stylised and just plain weird take on the exciting possibilities of cloning.

Flickerfest is helped by its atmospheric setting; the verandah looks out onto the well-oiled bodies and cool horizons of Bondi Beach. In the heat of summer, it’s a good place to chill out. See the next issue for a comprehensive roundup of the best of the fest.

Flickerfest 2002, 11th International Short Film Festival, Bondi Pavilion, Bondi Beach, Sydney, January 4-12, touring nationally

RealTime issue #46 Dec-Jan 2001 pg. 16

Willem Dafoe, The Hairy Ape

Music theatre was a common element in 2 of the most striking shows of the 2001 Melbourne Festival, The Hairy Ape and 2Pack. The New York-based Wooster Group’s The Hairy Ape sold out months in advance, due largely to Willem Dafoe playing the lead. Many spectators were therefore surprised to find themselves at something resembling a physicalised radio play, or a percussive, almost rap-style performance of early 20th century American working class patois. Those who walked out did not however follow Eidos: Telos discontents in phoning talkback radio.

The Hairy Ape had considerable acoustic power. Dafoe’s guttural tones modulated between sharp assaults and almost liquid intermingling words. The industrial set comprising a 2-storey metal grid emphasised the violence of Elizabeth LeCompte’s direction. The design also established a New York studio feel in the otherwise cavernous Merlyn Theatre. This was classic postmodern Brecht. The deliberately intrusive microphones and constant amplification of the text ensured that one was never simply lost in the drama. Rather one reflected on how things came about on stage, both aesthetically and narratively.

Eugene O’Neill’s play seems at first ideal for such an approach. It is vitally concerned with working class identity, the role of the unions, and class distinctions. O’Neill’s tale of a disenfranchised ship’s furnace stoker is however problematic. It brilliantly captures workers’ fears regarding technology. Yank’s peers have become slaves to the iron machines of capital. Yank/Dafoe is literally enmeshed in the production’s technologies, a microphone permanently strapped into his paw. To become free, one must regain control of one’s physical labour and body. O’Neill alternates between eulogising Yank’s brute physical prowess and showing how his faith in these muscular, self-punishing values turns him into the hairy ape he has been likened to.

Class solidarity is only possible for O’Neill if the muscular working class expels femininity. The world of the play is divided between hyper-masculine working class men possessed of an easy male camaraderie, and a divided upper class of effeminate men and women. It is the intrusion of a tremulously voiced upper class woman which shatters Yank’s fraternal below-deck paradise.

LeCompte’s staging presents O’Neill’s text as an acoustic object to be critically worked upon in the space. This leaves one free to reject the author’s dubious gender politics. The absence of even the possibility of female workers in this representation of a period characterised by a massive female workforce and women’s increasing political and social visibility (the so-called New Woman, suffragettes, socialists like Rosa Luxembourg etc) is troubling though. LeCompte offers no commentary beyond casting the same performer (Kate Valk) as both the naive female upper class intruder and the ape to whose deadly embrace Yank finally surrenders himself. This might suggest that the association between physical strength, masculinity and working class identity is not as strong as one might otherwise imagine. Despite such flaws, The Hairy Ape is a compelling, complex production. Given the long history of post-WWII reinterpretations of Brechtian theatre (Heiner Muller, Elin Diamond, Peter Brook et al) though it is hardly the radical work it continues to be hailed as. This is the sort of production Playbox and MTC should be doing.

O’Neill’s implicit gender politics are reversed in the latest piece from Melbourne circus-theatre company Dislocate. Where O’Neill’s same-sex community evokes a working class paradise violated by a new Eve, playwright Michael Gow’s script for Dislocate’s festival show, Risk Reduction, suggests that homosocial relations are the problem, more a male angel menaced by a comic Lucifer here. In Risk Reduction we meet performer Geoffrey Dunstan as a fearful office worker whose body is cleaned and dressed by his personal servant, Rudi Mineur as Mr Muscle. Their relationship is illustrated by a beautiful acrobatic sequence, Dunstan affectionately and intimately manipulated by his companion. It is again the intrusion of femininity—this time in the form of Kate Fryer as a photocopy assistant—which disturbs this male idyll. Dunstan’s homosocial introversion however is here represented as pathological. His salvation occurs when he rejects Mr Muscle in favour of a return to heterosexual society, gathering the courage to act on his (normal) desire for the woman.

Mine is definitely a more subtle reading than Risk Reduction is designed to elicit. The work is primarily a caricature, boldly painted using episodic acrobatic sequences and simple dramatic scenarios. We meet Dunstan’s paranoid-neurotic stumbling through a park at night, helpless outside of his hermetic work and domestic environments. Fryer swoops down upon him from the rigging. Her black cockroach suit and panto-villain laugh are a joy. Risk Reduction is great fun for adults and children, but Gow’s simplistic narrative lacked the wonderful, mad complexity of the John Romeril text for Dislocate’s Acronetic (2000). Risk Reduction is a comparatively slight work, more of a crowd pleaser.

Belgian company Hush Hush Hush’s 2Pack provided a needed correlative to these festival productions. Belgian-Algerian director Abdelaziz Sarrokh has worked with Alain Platel’s Les Ballets C. de la B. Platel’s influence was visible in 2Pack’s structure as a chaotic series of impressions taken from an evening in the life of an ethnic working class community manifest on stage. The set comprised 9 cubicles stacked on top of each other as in the ghettoised high-density housing one finds from Ghent to LA (or Melbourne). A bar in a ground-floor corner, action spilling out of it onto the main stage. The area in front of the flats came to represent both the streets on which the inhabitants socialised on as well as a space in which their troubled dreams were enacted.

2Pack mixed Expressionist ideas and choreographic fragments with hip-hop culture; Pina Bausch’s dance theatre meets freestylin. A well-selected score of phat classics acted as the characters’ projected mental jukebox. B-boy styles and dance-offs sat alongside suggestions of personal histories of sexual abuse, the physical manifestation of racial pressures and other themes. The production was eminently accessible with these devices and pop-culture references, while still being challengingly abstract and dense. At one point a woman’s inchoate psychic pain led her to wrap herself in knots and stuff white balls into her mouth as she executed an angrily ecstatic, arching, operatic, melodramatic solo. Multiple social constraints were alluded to, energising the production. Hip-hop was revealed as a cultural amalgam which produces art from conflict. An old skool track of Ice T cautioning listeners not to be fooled into believing the Gulf War is about freedom, but about imperialism at home and abroad, took on chilling relevance in light of the destruction of Afghanistan.

2Pack was moreover the only Melbourne Festival production to effectively dramatise women’s lives. The sexual freedom of one woman, objectified by a man who gazed at her and provoked her with his tongue, became a source of both her liberation and oppression. She found ecstasy in her sexual provocations, yet it was she who later retired to her flat to muse on her scarred sexual consciousness. The women were indeed amongst the strongest performers, moving beyond the classic B-boy stylings which the men excelled at, gesturing towards flamenco and athletic modern dance. One tall, taut woman revelled in going head to head with the others, employing a distinctive, low, acrodance style. The combination of tightly choreographed sections with improvised play-offs eventually exploding the entire dramatic structure, made 2Pack the best of these 3 shows, yet even it could not compete with the Greenaway-meets-Cunningham, postmodern ballet-opera of Ballett Frankfurt’s Eidos: Telos.

The Hairy Ape, by Eugene O’ Neill, Wooster Group, director Elizabeth LeCompte, Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse, Oct 19 – Nov 3; Risk Reduction, direction/text Michael Gow, performers/devisers Kate Fryer, Geoffrey Dunstan, performer Rudi Mineur, North Melbourne Town Hall, Oct 24 – Nov 3; 2Pack, by Hush Hush Hush, director/performer Abdelaziz Sarrokh, State Theatre, Oct 24-27.

RealTime issue #46 Dec-Jan 2001 pg. 8

Hellen Sky, Company in Space

photo Jeff Busby

Hellen Sky, Company in Space

Where do cultural fantasies about physically transplanting a human body instantly to another part of the world (read galaxy) come from if not from artistic license? State of the art instant electronic transfers that substitute digital images of the body only serve to taunt us with the inadequacies of current technology in relation to our grander imaginings. As John McCormick and Hellen Sky of Company in Space experimented with transposing the movement of Sky’s body from Melbourne to Florida, they imaginatively stretched towards the ‘what if’ of transporting her whole body. But on opening night, we were not able to witness how her body’s movement was received in Florida because the reciprocal transfer of a moving male body from there to Melbourne was not fully realised for the audience.

Company in Space’s performance work may well stir the spatial imagination of viewers. While it is at the mercy of the law of technology—we desire what it has yet to deliver—CO3 as an event was composed of multiple performances by bodies on the sidelines. Sky, in a motion capture suit, moved in slow motion along a balcony at the Capitol Theatre, across to its aisles and down to the stage. She moved under the weight of the leather suit with its metal rod structure outlining her limbs like a second skeleton, one worn outside the muscular frame. She carried the added weight of familiar images of space suits moving on the moon or divers on the ocean floor. I enjoyed the metaphoric resonance of a healthy body at large, hooked up to monitors capturing its every twitch, its every breath, and watched intensely by attendants—another visible performance.

Sky’s body in motion radiated with the aesthetic beauty of exposed machinery; from the delicate brass of an old clock mechanism at Greenwich to a new look Apple iMac. Competing for attention with her live body, however, was her live movement doubled into animated screen imagery.

On the screen were animated figures moving in unfamiliar trajectories. Sky was controlling them from her motion capture suit without any visible delay. As she moved her arms, personified figures moved theirs in animated landscapes; firstly, an old woman outside a house as it began to snow; secondly, a young woman in an earth-bound landscape with artificial trees. A bodiless coat joined this screen woman followed by 2 upside-down legs. The background began to erode into darkness and the virtual world turned into an arcade with a robotic figure and then into shadows. Once the simulation of humanness vanished and figures became geometric in constant motion, patterns swirled like digital diagrams of a body’s movement. The most sublime was a paper-like image in an electronic wind.

There was sound, but on reflection it may have been supplementary if not incidental, sometimes like flowing water, mostly an electronic hum. McCormick and the production team worked in reaction to Sky’s bodily movements as she drove the visual effects. Why was I drawn to watch Sky more than the screen most of the time? Even a completely covered live body in slow motion was more appealing to this perceptual body-self. Paradoxically, the dancer’s physical body was hidden to make its muscular movement visible on the screen.

Company in Space, CO3, concept John McCormick developed in collaboration with Miriam English, Hellen Sky, Keith Robertson. RMIT Capitol Theatre, Melbourne, Sept 6

RealTime issue #46 Dec-Jan 2001 pg. 27

Quick Brown Fox, Leigh Warren & William Forsythe

William Forsythe presented 2 works at this year’s Melbourne Festival. One, Quick Brown Fox, was made in collaboration with Adelaide’s Leigh Warren and Dancers, the other, Eidos: Telos, was performed by his own company, Ballett Frankfurt. Quick Brown Fox was inspired by the typist’s motto, which uses each letter in the alphabet at least once. Philosophers have long recognised that, on the one hand, language consists of a finite number of words and, on the other, that these words can be combined in an infinite number of ways. Thus, the open ended nature of language. Similarly Forsythe’s work is built upon classical ballet with its finite lexicon of movement. Yet he too manages to combine finitude in order to create.

Vacillating between movement and stillness, Quick Brown Fox replicates the syntactic challenge of its namesake. All dancers are assigned their own phrase material. Upon a spoken command—one of 26—the dancers adapt their movements, mainly in relation to the presence of other bodies, to form a composite body. Frozen for a moment, they then resume their individual dance. Kinaesthetically, the movement is ballet based; clearly shaped, with its characteristic pelvis, head held high. Yet, many deformations of ballet also occur. While it’s clear that everyone has their own moves—moves that seem to suit each body—they also combine in complex ways with the others, sharing weight, weaving in and out, making room.

Quick Brown Fox is a relentless series of formations, deformations, solos and duets. The score is a deconstructed collage of simple musics, in and out of tempo. Some people complain that one hour straight is hard going. I find it totally absorbing and thoroughly stimulating. The dancers are so clear to watch. It’s not that the movement as such is so interesting but the flow, the combinations, the complexity, the abstract permutations make the work compelling. The cool jazz of Quick Brown Fox brings forth something I haven’t noticed in previous works by Warren.

Eidos: Telos is a much more difficult piece to write about. Harder to grasp, harder to recount. In 3 parts, Part I presents a piece (Self Meant to Govern) made the year before Eidos: Telos. Clocks tick backwards, time is scrambled, muscular bodies move, forming permutations and combinations. A violinist plays amidst the action. It is fast. There are moments when whatever order has been achieved drops a notch. Not that the execution is any less controlled, more that a certain disorder is represented. The edges of the tarquet floor are peeled back, creating an inexplicable sense of horror that a boundary is now permeable, vulnerable. Part II pokes a finger into that hole, plumbing its depths, emerging to examine the contents. One performer (Dana Casperson), bare breasted in an orange skirt, screeches as a spider, speaking of her time below and above the earth, evoking the mythical personae of Persephone, Kore and Demeter. Her voice sounds like fingernails on a blackboard. After Casperson’s solo, the company enters, bare breasted men and women, in flowing skirts: Velasquez‚ Las Meninas. Waltzing, curving through space, occasionally one performer speaks, challenging the audience with aggressive remarks. A mixture of beauty and mortal despair.

Part III suggests a return to Part I, refracted through the memory and sensibilities of the performers. There is a palpable sense of the dancers recreating in movement something from dances past—Proust lives. At one point giant strings stretch across the stage, their twanged reverberations effecting gross changes of mood and texture.

There are many occasions when a great deal is happening, decentering any sense that there is one line of action to follow, one line of thought. Difficult, dark, beautiful, suggestive, puzzling. I’m not very good with myth but I can tell you that death has something to do with it. And life.

For the record, some of you may have heard about nudity and obscenity. Casperson had no undies on under her floor length skirt. It was comparable to Sharon Stone’s apocryphal flash in Basic Instinct. My mother missed it altogether. And the obscenities? Some words spoken in anger. Unfortunately, I’ve heard them before from fellow drivers.

Quick Brown Fox, choreography Leigh Warren & William Forsythe with the ensemble (Peter Furness, Kim Hales-McCarthur, Deon Hastie, Rachel Jenson, Glen McCurley, Aidan Kane Munn, Jo Roads), Leigh Warren and Dancers, The Merlyn, C.U.B. Malthouse, Oct 11-13; Eidos:Telos, choreography William Forsythe, text Dana Casperson, Ballett Frankfurt, State Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne International Festival of Arts, Oct 17-21

RealTime issue #46 Dec-Jan 2001 pg. 8

In family lore there’s the insult that goes beyond the pale, the revelation that brings shame on the name and then there’s making a film. There may be a market hungry for reality but what about the wash up in the lives of filmmakers who risk being excised from the will or at least struck off the Christmas list?

At this year’s WOW International Film Festival organised by Women in Film and TV (WIFT), an event jam packed with shorts, features, forums and celebrations impressively curated by Jacqui North and her team, a special day of documentaries featured 4 films that negotiated some of the perils and pleasures of personal filmmaking.

Jessica Douglas-Henry’s Our Brother James is really a portrait of the filmmaker’s sister Alix and her learning to live with their brother James’ suicide at age 20. In exposing the holes in the family fabric that allowed a vulnerable boy to slip through, the filmmaker opens herself to some judgemental responses from the audience—”where were you?”, they niggle, and “why didn’t we hear from your mother?” When you enter this terrain, it’s too easy to forget it’s film you’re watching. To prove it Douglas-Henry describes the strands that disappeared in the cut, replaced by the power of Alix’s considerable screen presence and the power of her “story.” Jessica invites Alix into her “split focus” scenario. Together the sisters take the journey back to Geraldton, back to the house where Alix found her dead brother, back along the path of personal grief that led her to public action—she is now involved with a voluntary suicide prevention organisation.

The film begins at the remote family homestead and moves through a crossroads and onto the dusty road to Geraldton. Jessica drives the car and asks the questions. Somewhat uncomfortable on camera, she defers to her sister who’s easy with it. “I don’t want to sound crass,” said someone in the audience after, “but she’s great talent.” As with all family stories, truths conflict but here the filmmaker listens intently to her younger sister’s side of the story. At one point, in response to Alix’s memory, she directs the camera to follow the nape of a neck, a young boy in the street who looks alarmingly like James. But no matter how careful she is to be objective, as Alix watches her own child playing, Jessica’s eye drifts to the sand dunes around Geraldton. Much of the film’s strength lies in the evocative way Douglas-Henry locates the family drama in a very particular landscape.

Melissa Lee set out with a project to research Korean-American documentary filmmakers and wound up with something altogether more interesting. A True Story About Love exposes her problematic romance with her first Korean lover (Melissa is Korean-Australian) and simultaneously his friend, a Japanese actor (the star of Peter Wang’s Chan is Missing). Lee takes a while to shake off her ‘researcher’ role. When the actor asks her out she interrogates her own image, “How could I go out with him after what Japan did to Korea?” Like other good films in this genre (Dennis O’Rourke’s The Good Woman of Bangkok, Sophie Calle’s No Sex Last Night) this little film reveals some big truths about relationships. It mixes narration, confession into the mirror, with intimate conversations with the 2 men in and out of bed. Given the sheets are still warm, Lee’s subjects are understandably less than comfortable with her surveillance, sometimes confronting it. And the filmmaker is upfront when the Japanese actor unleashes some scary thoughts on race and sexual power which, in the end, she doesn’t really want to hear. As often happens in these films, there’s no happy ending. Lee follows her filmmaker’s heart and is left with only the hand-held.

Safina Uberoi is nervous before the screening of her film. No wonder! Half the Indian community of Sydney has turned up for My Mother India and here she is with an opening shot of underwear hanging on a line. “One of the recurring horrors of my childhood was that my mother hung her panties on the washing line. I don’t know what Indian women wore under their saris but they never ever hung them where other people could see them.”

So begins a story more fascinating than any fiction I’ve encountered lately (outside my own family) and with an unforgettable cast of characters: Patricia Uberoi, the filmmaker’s mother who recounts her story so eloquently; JPS Uberoi the philosopher father; the Sikh guru grandfather who in the madness of his dying days “awesomely” relived Partition as the 1984 anti-Sikh riots raged in the streets; and his wife, the strong-willed grandmother who never forgave “the atrocity” of his treatment of her in 1947. The film weaves all this with the personal story of Patricia whose Canberra family could never bring themselves to visit her in Delhi, whose composure breaks only when she talks about giving up her Australian citizenship as an act of violence. You feel the intensity in the eyes of each family member as they meet those of the filmmaker and her husband (Himma Dhamija) behind the camera. The face of Patricia Uberoi, a study in itself, is interspersed with footage shot in India. At the heart of this film is a daughter’s homage to her complicated heritage. As we watch the fair-skinned faced Patricia kneading chapatis, Safina says, “My father is Indian and so is my mother, the identity of each a lifetime’s quest that is always being played out in complex ways.” Introducing the film to the huge crowd Safina speaks confidently about her reasons for “sacrificing” her family’s story to public scrutiny: “What happened to India happened to us”

Rob, the subject of Charlotte Roseby’s film Still Breathing, suffers from cystic fibrosis. Between drugs, hospital stays, a severely restricted lifestyle, he makes the most of what he knows is limited time. His calm insights into mortality conflict with the medical profession: “Death is seen by doctors as a looming giant ready to pounce if they do something wrong.” As he narrates the film his descriptions of the physical sensations of the disease, of lungs filling with fluid, are translated into images of rocks and water. At one point, his hospital bed is transposed to the beach. “Independence shrinks to body size,” he says, and it’s this restriction to his freedom that hastens the decision to list himself for a lung transplant, which may or may not work. My one quibble with this film was that it succumbed to the documentary cliché, adding text to tell us what happened when the cameras stopped.

As Safina Uberoi said in the afternoon forum, while personal documentary is not for everyone, the challenges involved in it—including the ones to do with confronting the subjects of your work, ie your family and friends—is great discipline for any filmmaker.

Our Brother James (52 mins), director Jessica Douglas-Henry, producer Mary-Ellen Mullane; A True Story About Love (27 mins), director/producer Melissa Lee; My Mother India (52 mins), director Safina Uberoi, producer Penny McDonald; Still Breathing, director/producer Charlotte Roseby, producer Nell White. WOW International Film Festival, Chauvel Cinema, Sydney, Oct 20.

A legend has been deliberately circulated that a revolution has begun to take place. As yet there has been little fighting in the streets, a great deal of whispering behind closed doors, with odd, isolated, blustering outbreaks; but the machinery of government goes on much the same as ever…You still want to be a revolutionary? You’ve plenty of time. The party has scarcely started.

New Brutalism. The Brit-Pack. The Blood and Sperm Generation. Cool Britannia. In-Yer-Face Theatre.

Whatever the moniker, do these names signify the triumph of marketing over substance? Are these nasty newish British plays just full of puerile shock tactics or do they mark a genuine shift in the form and content of theatre?

Aleks Sierz, a London-based writer and reviewer (and RealTime correspondent), suggests the latter and has produced a timely volume, In-Yer-Face Theatre, on the nature and depth of this shift. He details quite exactly the forms and chances taken in this gut-wrenching, heart-stopping and mind-numbing theatre work. His inelegant neologistic title hints at the oblique angles some new British drama has taken. In-Yer-Face theatre, Sierz explains, is anything new on stage that swears, vomits or fucks up; anything that is scatological, funny, violent, shocking, provocative; something that breaks taboos, explodes prejudice or betrays your trust. More than this, he explains, “this kind of theatre is so powerful, so visceral, that it forces audiences to react; either they feel like fleeing the building or they are suddenly convinced that it is the best thing they have ever seen and want all their friends to see it too.”

And this is what gives this particular volume a fascinating currency—that this new writing did attract a significant audience. Indeed it was, and is, often commercial (many of the plays examined here started in small or medium sized theatres and ended up on the West End, and even Broadway). Commerce and art rarely mix well but these plays often sold out, without their authors ever ‘selling out’. And in this respect the Royal Court led the way. As it did back in 1956 with John Osbourne’s Look Back in Anger.

Such an artistic policy did attract much criticism (though it was also good for business). Some commentators have suggested that many of these plays were opportunistically conceived, modish and written to formula—add genital mutilation, heroin, dance music and amusingly lewd and drunken slacker angst, a nifty title and stir. Others argued that this fuss was simply much ado about the young; the transfiguration of the new, the naughty and the young purely because it was, and they were, new, naughty and young—an inversely sentimental charmed circle of youth. Another form of flak was one I encountered here in Australia. On expressing public support for this work I was attacked by the dramaturg of an established theatre company on the grounds that if I liked that new British stuff I must be shallowly obsessed with sex and violence. I retorted that most good theatre is usually about sex, violence, death or game-playing, at least to some degree—thus inadvertently suggesting a new strain of critique, that everything old is new again. Finally, and unsurprisingly, conservative critics damned as amoral this seeming concentration on sexy violence and violent sex. Who could forget the Daily Telegraph’s Jack Tinker on Sarah Kane’s Blasted: “this disgusting feast of filth.” Whatever the motivation, ethics or quality of the new British drama that Sierz studies, however—and I will get to this soon—these works genuinely pulled a new audience into theatres.

Whether you like them or not, the works of Patrick Marber, Sarah Kane, Conor Macpherson, Jez Butterworth, Judy Upton, Martin Crimp, Antony Neilson, Martin McDonagh, Rebecca Prichard, Joe Penhall, Mark Ravenhill, Rebecca Gilman, Che Walker, Nic Grosso—and many others examined by Sierz, most of whom came up through the Court—have reinvigorated an industry that was asking itself less than 10 years ago: ‘Why is our audience so fucking middle aged?’ This was Stephen Daldry’s mission statement when he took over the Royal Court in 1993. It was against all orthodoxies that the Royal Court put on a season of first plays by new writers on their mainstage; indeed Graham Whybrow, its Literary Manager, mentioned to me in an interview in 1998 that all his colleagues “stroked their beards” and said such a venture would certainly fail. This brave and astute programming worked, however, and continues to do so. By this I mean, and Sierz’s book supports this, that writers kept writing and people kept coming. It did shock. It did hit the tabloids. It did mean there were renewed calls for censorship. It also had people talking about theatre again, and a larger audience than there had been. Sure that’s a woolly unqualified statement, but this book is testament to the interest and excitement this new work generated. Nor were these new plays simply cool or hip (though they were that too), but hard-nosed social comment and thorough, visceral explorations of humanity and the inhumane. This new kind of theatre, what Sierz refers to as “experiential”, has also been enormously influential. The breakthrough, and salutary lesson, then for other more staid theatre companies was (and remains) that new theatre writing was commercially possible, even desirable. In the past 10 years new work has indeed been where the money is. This lends legitimacy to the notion that something important was going on, a new blend of innovation and moneymaking.

Gone were the pompous state of the nation plays, the Brechtian bulldozer, the arch Ibsenite punch and concentration on established writers. In swept a king tide of female and male playwrights of mixed races, complex political affiliations and even more confusing sexual obsessions. Specificity of class, race and gendered experience was the key to these howls of pain or laughter. On close study they remain powerful, genuine and finely crafted. The work of Kane, for instance, here studied in some detail, is fascinating for its continual experimentation, explosive humour and horrifying honesty. Similarly the work of Prichard or Penhall is undeniable in its fierce intelligence and sinuous, extreme naturalism.

This is work that marks an important change in culture, politics and theatre—reminding us also that these are inseparable. Theatre can and must tell stories for us to reflect on who we are and where we live so we can reinvent the world, laugh at its possibilities, our foibles, mutability, idealism or alienation. And in this case the more contemporary the story’s resonance, the better. On stage anything is possible and in that respect Sierz’ book makes great reading. It is thrilling to read about a society and an industry/profession that supports unknown writers because of their clarity of vision and determination to think through and beyond literal limitations, cultural reservations and societal constructs.

In his analysis of this work Sierz makes much of the passepartout “experiential” (this theatre was new and dangerous because it was not simply naturalistic, emotionally extreme or terrifying; it is totally involving like it is happening to you too, thus experiential) but he can afford to be more specific and more academic than that. It tends to collapse idea and form into a hagiographic mess, and though I know what he means, it feels both too upbeat and too generalised. What needs to be understood about this new writing is that not only is it exciting, but that it has been painstakingly, professionally and expensively developed, programmed and produced. The Royal Court produces 19 new plays in full production a year. Not all that work is going to be earth-shattering, but some of it will probably be quite good. And along with the Royal Court, the theatres that survive solely by producing only new work are many and varied (and these are only the ones I can remember off the top of my head): The Traverse, Paines Plough, Out of Joint, Soho Theatre Company, Royal National Studio, The Gate, the Bush, Hampstead Theatre, the Glasgow Cits and the studio theatre at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.

It should also be noted that the rather grand claim of the title (“British Drama Today”) is not borne out in the book. It is not about all British drama today. It focuses exclusively on a small number of young playwrights. Their innovations in form and content are important but are totally text based. Also, by concentrating mainly on the shock value attached to these plays’ depictions of sex and violence, it misrepresents the breadth and scope of the new writing that was produced at this time, and the reasons for its sudden accessibility. In addition to this, Sierz enlivens and emboldens the concept of the playwright. This might irritate some—like a performer and writer I spoke to recently who dismissed the notion of the playwright as bourgeois, 19th century and moribund. This book is primarily descriptive too, referring often to fashion, and to things that are cool and hip. As a result its analysis feels a little slippery but the book is essentially a marvellous resource and an important signpost. As is Sierz’s great website. If you don’t like this particular flavour of new British writing, this book probably won’t change your mind about it; but it will certainly open up your eyes to the seriousness of the work, its pretensions, enthusiasm, irony and vaulting ambition.

In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today by Aleks Sierz was published by Faber and Faber in March 2001. www.inyerface-theatre.com

Nigel Helyer, Caliban's Children (above), Densil Cabrera, Serenade, in Crosstalk (on plinths)

The cross talk of the title no doubt refers to the way sounds from the different pieces ‘bleed’ (ouch!) into one another when placed in close proximity. Often, in exhibitions involving sound, ‘cross’ could apply to the antagonism of competing sounds, but here there is no anger, no claims staked, nobody out of control, no rude interruptions. The installation strategy of Cross Talk is to only include works that are so gentle and unobtrusive that, even as they share the same space, they don’t get in each other’s way. Faced with the alternatives—come up with the money for separate, insulated spaces; alternate the operation of pieces; put them on headphones; or let them battle it out, the most boisterous wins—this is perfectly valid. It is a bit odd, however, given the institutional connection, since architecture at some point conjures up monumentality, the discarded shells of history lashed by weather and baked mercilessly for generations by the sun, the gaudiness of too many expensive magazines and self-congratulatory award ceremonies, you name it, not just quiet little corners more reminiscent of cupboards. Whether all 6 pieces in the show flourish in such toned-down surrounds is a separate question.

Konrad Skirlis’s BuzZAir was the loudest of the bunch, but then again its delicate gritty squeals, windy pulses and the like—what he calls dirty sounds—have been exiled to the outside. Problem was that the buses, cars and aeroplanes were there first and if electricity is to compete with the sounds of the petroleum economy, it needs some juice. A block down the street there was a transformer in ill repair that put up more of a fight. Densil Cabrera’s Serenade was a belated entry into the contest held by the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg in 1779 to determine the character of vowel sounds and make a device to sound them, so to speak. With the assistance of the glass artist Peter Wright, Cabrera modelled vocal tracts down the centre of rugged glass plugs, upon which listeners rested their ears. It was difficult to determine which vowels were being fluted from the separate pieces, probably because they were reduced to a whisper. The pieces were elegant and the idea a good one, but Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein already won the contest in the early 1780s. Kratzenstein had an inexplicable aversion to diphthongs; perhaps there is something to explore here.

Floriferous was a beautiful multimedia work by Kirsty Beilharz, who also composed and performed the accompanying piano piece. The piece was a good vehicle for harmonizing obvious talents flowing in several directions, but the material substratum of all the carved frames, garden shots, orientalism, sat awkwardly on the flat little screen, and the music of a high modernist register seemed out of place for a show ostensibly addressing the problematic and possibilities of sound. Likewise, Michaela James’ Overbalancing seemed more concerned with reconciling sound with the artist’s skills as a painter rather than proposing an integrated work in its own right.

The 2 most successful works were by Mark Jones and Nigel Helyer. Jones’ Eine Kleine Licht Musik was certainly the most architectural. Light, projected through 2 rotating multicoloured and mineralised filters, continually traversed across the mouth of a large white ceramic bowl flanked by 2 white vases. Tucked away at the back were sensors that converted the light to raspy little sounds emanating from a speaker placed below the crockery. It was difficult to determine how the light might correlate to the sounds, as the filters overlapped and went in and out of phase with one another, but the overall effect was to give light movement and volume, common attributes of sound, while the sound assumed more of the steady-state feel of light. The piece could have been more architectural still if Vitruvius had been consulted on “sounding vessels in the theatre,” Chapter 5, Book 5, of his Ten Books of Architecture.

Finally, Helyer’s Caliban’s Children comprised a series of what looked like large plexiglas squid suspended from the ceiling, or ornate trumpets, squid trumpets, driven by some circuit-board and speaker action where the mouthpiece should be. The title refers to the sound sensitive Caliban and his “isle full of noises” from Shakespeare’s Tempest. The isle, in this case, is Australia and the children are its inhabitants, who not only tread upon the indigenous and colonial politics on the “un-inhabited island” of the play, but also tread upon sounds from a more geological time frame. The squid resemble radiolaria, the microscopic sea creatures that gave up their crusts a long long time ago to help form Australia’s foundations. The sound of these stiff, hypertrophied creatures turns out to be an intense little sine wave, which bends as you approach closer or try another angle. This change in pitch might be influenced by the array of baffles that are the creature’s tentacles, but comes most certainly from the Theremin circuit, which renders the pitch sensitive to movement. Here the radiolaria meld into the radio technology upon which the Theremin was based. The Theremin was originally designed to mimic the movements of a conductor’s hands. Like conductors themselves, an autocratic design. In this case, instead of hands it is your head; instead of conducting an orchestra you are trying to listen to the past; and instead of autocratic directives it is an ever-changing relationship. Helyer will have to go into mass production, however, if the installation is to approach the “thousand twangling instruments” of which Caliban spoke.

Cross Talk: Works Involving Sound, Tin Sheds Gallery, University of Sydney’s Faculty of Architecture, Sydney, Oct 20 – Nov 10

Just a few keywords to give you the flavour: swirly amorphously romantic music, the absurd keenness of youth, and a terrible urge to smile—all strong features in Lisa Ffrench’s new solo work, Part-Time. Meet Lisa, a girl with a part-time sales job and a full-time desire for stardom: the almost epic squabble between tedious reality and an insatiable fantasy life, making her in the end a sadder but wiser part-time choreographer.

One teeters between disbelief and amazement at the possibility that her story is autobiographical. Does the Lisa Ffrench we know actually (but secretly) worship at a pink heart-shaped altar to George Clooney? Does she really devour Vanity Fair with rabid desperation to feel closer to the stars? Or is this some other fictitious Lisa—like Muriel—perhaps, with stardom rather than a wedding as her supreme goal? Maybe the answer doesn’t matter. Ffrench’s aims are, to a certain extent at least, ironical and self-mocking. However, unlike Muriel’s Wedding, the purpose is unclear in the straightforward narrative delivery. While she leaves minimal room for interpretation, most people who watched her performance didn’t seem to mind. They also enjoyed the dance which was simple, accomplished and unambiguous, containing literal gesture and well-formed steps. Finally, Ffrench delivers a short, touching song that manages to reach places the rest of the performance might have missed.

The Fondue Set, originally billed as an “also featuring” act, delivered a show which, despite its obvious limitations (Emma Saunders had a broken foot complete with cast), managed to create something quite new in Sydney dance culture, bringing their own particular flamboyant party girl context with them from night club to theatre. Soft Cheese is in roughly 8 sections, illuminating the social behaviour of girls with their guard drooping, at a party or just looking for a good time. The scaffolding for this behaviour is most likely the familiar 60s cocktail scene, where politeness gradually disintegrates with the quantity of drugs ingested. There’s also the particularly bitchy, tragic, nihilistic flavour of today’s public party crowds—women dressing up and getting blotto in their efforts to have a good time.

The movement itself seems to seep naturally out of the nightlives of the 3 women, becoming heightened when they’re frocked up in red tulle and ankle boots or chilled out in an excess of cool. Whether falling face first into a bar top and a plate of Jatz, staggering boozed through cigarette smoke patterns, exhibiting nonchalance as if it were a lifestyle or slowly swaying to the beat as they pour drinks over themselves in perfect unison, the dancers recapture fragments of the fantasies of some other fast-disappearing generation.

Jane McKernan slowly rolls across the floor to face the audience, legs awkwardly kicking, doll-like and unstrung, arms gesturing, beckoning. It’s quiet but for Louise Davis who sings a plangent unaccompanied version of The Doors’ Hello, I Love You. McKernan scrawls her phone number in lipstick on the inside of her arm, sprawled out for the taking.

In the last section, Gabby Adamik and McKernan don what look to be netball colours for the quaintly charming elite team event of marathon dancing. But what starts out to be a very slight joke becomes a dance which breaks over the audience with increasing abandon, a gruelling, driving, repetitive cycle of unison phrases, and with each repetition the dancers become more breathless and out of control. This dance caused me to rush out and buy The White Stripes’ CD just for those 50 seconds of Little Room. The Fondue Set make it last for at least 10 minutes.

One Extra Dance Company, Part-Time, solo work by Lisa Ffrench; Soft Cheese, The Fondue Set (Emma Saunders, Jane McKernan & Gabrielle Adamik), Downstairs Theatre, Seymour Centre, Sydney, Oct 25

Great excitement at the door and an insistent clamouring to get in from some young people who had not booked, still giving it a go although they don’t carry the magic ticket. A security guard and box office at the gate manage to create a sense of energy contained. A bit of a scramble for seats inside and the image of a small sea of excited moving figures. The shoreline of performer-audience geography shifts back and forth as the players burn with animation, leaning forward from their front row seats—emptied and filled again as they jump up to perform then slither back to ogle and shout support, to call to a performing friend, shy-looking and focused on her task. They must have told her something good. Her composure dissolves only for a moment.

The noise is big (from performers, parents, friends, teachers) and the entrances grand, with the exception of the quiet still presence of Billy MacPherson who welcomes us to the land with a raw and powerful sung poem—a rare still point amidst moving lights, projected images, furious dancing. Our focus on this place at this time is heightened by the filmed story of a city boy’s return home after a stay in the bush. Life in the streets of the innercity is a comfort after sleeping out with the terror of the spirits of someone else’s country.

Images of the street, voices in the dark telling it how it is and 3 white-shirted, rock-solid, soft-voiced young male singers leaning into their hand-held ‘voice box’ mikes. Anchors in a raucous hyped-up crowd of spectators and performers urged on by master rapper and hip-hop artist Morgan Lewis playing MC, throwing in the odd bit of drumming and break-dancing.

Huge shouts of recognition and acknowledgment for each group, which swells as the Miamis are bumped into the space from the street in the back of a big white people-mover van. The shout that goes up for “Waterloo 2017” makes sure we will never forget the singers’ postcode.

The noise and action contrast with the angular diffidence, squishy T-shirt adjustments, totally self-contained rippling movements of dancing bodies with many kinds of grace. They check the next series of steps over their shoulders as they work the chewing gum and grin momentarily, then drop us into a new reality as we see them hanging out at the gym, dancing in the streets, running from the police or involved in a street dispute captured in multiples on video screens.

Stand Your Ground, the creation of 70 young people, many of them Indigenous, from Redfern, Waterloo, Alexandria and Erskineville, generates a tremendous sense of place and identity. The performers celebrate the slice of innercity Sydney where they live, its group loyalties are passionate, its dangers tinged with excitement. It’s in the media again this week—public transport re-routed after hurled objects repeatedly damage buses. It’s a site of maximum development—vast stretches of expensive new apartment blocks, revitalised industrial sites, car showrooms, trendy pubs and cafes—and chronic underdevelopment: unemployment, poor housing, poverty and the social tensions they breed.

A one-off like Stand Your Ground, where everyone seems to know everyone, and where pride can be displayed without antagonism, talent given a go or the community have fun, is more necessary than just worth doing. It might not be up to PACT’s usual stringent aesthetic standards, but it’s not that kind of show: its volatility, the calls that pass between stage and audience, the raucous shocks and pleasures of recognition and sharing constitute something more palpable than a fiction on stage. Stand Your Ground is one deadly multimedia concert.

Stand Your Ground, Hip Hop, Morganics (aka Morgan Lewis); dance, Leah Howard; performance, Caitlin Newton-Broad & Billy MacPherson; video. Rebecca Ingram; design, Jonathan Jones; consultant Alicia Talbot; lighting, Shane Stevens; production manager, Richard Montgomery; PACT Youth Theatre in collaboration with Cleveland Street High School, JJ Cahill Memorial High School, Waterloo Girls Centre, Fact Tree, South Sydney Youth Service, Joseph Sargeant Centre, The Settlement & Cell block Youth Health Services; Australia Council (Community Cultural Development Board), South Sydney Council, Myer Family Foundation. PACT Youth Theatre, September 21-22

Survival of the Species—now there’s a topical title—is a comment not only on the parlous living and working conditions of most dance artists in this country but also on the means by which a species reproduces itself, in this case mating rituals and relationships.

Context of course is everything. Like many people, I find myself struggling, in the wake of terrorism, war, the refugee crisis, elections and so on, to find meaning and relevance in the art that I view. So, is my disappointment with these works a matter of bad timing or something else? Confronted by so much trauma and loss of life across the globe, doesn’t the term survival take on a much more compelling edge? And conversely, shouldn’t it be possible to enjoy the sheer escapism of work that plays with flirtation, sexuality and the moody ambience of a smoky New York jazz club where the women are sinful and the men are dangerous?

That should be the case but in Something’s Got to Give, by Paul O’Sullivan, it’s hard to see these dancers as the epitome of a get down and dirty sexuality. While the men strut for the wrong women, and the women only have eyes for the posturings of the wrong man, the choreography is polite and the dancing tentative. The cut and thrust of an urgent sexuality suggested by the design and soundtrack gives way to careful phrases that stop just before the end of each bar. The dancing is so cautious in some instances that I start to worry about injuries.

Visually, Something’s Got to Give strongly references film noir. The design is darkly atmospheric, utilising blackness, slivers of white light and projected (uninteresting) reversed black and white images. The moodiness is complemented by the soundtrack, particularly Ennio Morricone’s Peur sur la Ville, so evocative of the aforementioned jazz dive that when the choreography shifts from sexual strut to adolescent push and shove—slap and tickle—either I completely miss the point or the work completely loses the plot.

O’Sullivan’s previous works have been beautifully controlled, self-devised solos that utilise his quirky sense of humour, idiosyncratic take on life and beautifully relaxed and loose limbed dancing. It was precisely these qualities that were missing in this project. I’m very familiar with the dancing of all these performers so it was disappointing that their performances were cartoonish rather than modulated, never moving beyond their respective comfort zones. O’Sullivan has yet to find a way of imparting his aesthetic and direction onto other bodies.

Sue Peacock’s Tempting Fate is a development from an earlier work, Near Enemies, and, as might be expected from this more experienced choreographer, is confident, taking choreographic risks that result in engaged performances. The design relied heavily on projected images of old 50s movie posters with Bette Davis, Doris Day and Robert Vaughan in hysterical technicolour. Equally filmic in its references, and with a strong musical through line from the soundtrack of David Lynch’s Lost Highway this project begins with a seemingly fatal shooting and explores various alternate scenarios from the dancepoint of the individual performers.

Throughout this piece a couple, Peacock and Bill Handley, come and go, occasionally discovered in a passionate embrace, sometimes just moving through the work, but at all times oblivious to the world of the other dancers. The highlight is a performative duet between the 2 with Peacock playing straight woman to Handley’s absurdity. I have no idea what it means. It is very silly but very satisfying. Handley, wearing his suit jacket like an apron, a hanky on his head topped by a small black hat, shuffles a reference to soft-shoe and party magicians, occasionally exposing his bare white buttocks to the audience. Of all the filmic references, Handley’s absurd physicality is by far the most effective, being less literal, more lateral, and highly evocative of those physical comedy greats Groucho Marx and Buster Keaton.

In the end, however, for this particular species to survive, there has to be a lot more risk and I suspect a lot more understanding of capital A art and how it might engage with the world. The relationship of film to live performance is particularly fraught. For most people, even a bad film is more compelling than a live performance. Consequently, dance artists need to be asking more questions and taking less for granted when it comes to putting steps with narrative and exploring form, structure and design. To do so, however, takes sustained development time. Given the vagaries of funding and the current political climate, nothing seems less likely.

Survival of the Species: Something’s Got to Give, choreographer Paul O’Sullivan, dancers Stefan Karlsson, Olivia Millard, Sue Peacock, & Sete Tele; Tempting Fate, choreographer Sue Peacock, dancers Claudia Alessi, Bill Handley, Olivia Millard, Sete Tele & Sue Peacock, lighting Andrew Lake, photography Ashley de Prazer & Graeme Macleod, Playhouse Theatre, Perth, Nov 1-3

“Ballistic is a community dance development project that sets out to extend the creative potential developed by the dancers over the past 24 months of DADAA (Disability in the Arts, Disadvantage in the Arts) dance workshops. Essentially Ballistic celebrates cultural exchange between young people with and without disabilities.”
PICA (Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts) Bimonthly

According to choreographer Sete Tele, Ballistic is a response to the desire of DADAA members to “dance fast.”

The performance space is sparse. The only props are 9 screens on wheels with clear plastic centres positioned as a barrier between the audience and the space. There are 3 large projection screens, one on the back wall and one on either side; the side screens are columns of fabric. The performers enter, dressed in surgical costumes—clear aprons, some with headscarves and gloves. Initially I am unsure of the significance of the outfits—are they a comment on the human body, or on the ways in which bodies are commodified or classified within the medical paradigm? What is the relationship between the images of cells, scientific diagrams and body parts projected on to the back screen, and the infinitely more interesting groupwork and exchanges occurring on the floor? Is this design meant to symbolise something clinical?

I consult the program—the designer’s statement is bizarre—although I do eventually surmise that his quest is to interrogate the idea of “surgical examination” and to comment on the issues of agency, or lack of, surrounding these processes for those with “mental and physical disability.” Yet for me this piece is precisely about ability, not disability. It is a celebration of difference, of exchange and of humour. I am happily distracted from my musings by the movement sequences. A number of the dancers perform solos and each is different and profound. Some like Julia Hales and Yolanda Berg choose slower music to demonstrate complicated sequences while others prefer faster more dynamic dance styles.

The dancers seem to be enjoying the process. There is teamwork here, and many of the sequences seem to involve partnerships with one dancer leading or guiding the other. There is lots of laughter and sharing; the pace of the soundscape quickens and the performers speed up in response. At this stage the screens have been moved and used as partners in the dance—twisted, woven and swirled around the space then pulled away to the back projection screen.

The music changes to a techno beat and Joshua Bott takes up a central position—he cheers, chants, performs a series of breakdance- style moves and invites performers into the centre to perform solos. Joshua gyrates, clasps his crotch, and asks the other dancers for high fives—he has great presence and knows how to mobilise it. He demands our attention and tells us to clap in time with his movement—he boogies along, laughing and cheering his co-dancers. Virginia Calabrese joins him and performs a number of fast moves, calling to her co-dancers to join her, shouting ‘go girl’ as they step into the limelight.

There is a sense of freedom now. The partnerships which dominated the first part of the performance have been fractured, the performers, particularly Bott and Calabrese, take control of the process and flout convention in their excitement. A sense of mischief abounds in these seemingly improvised sequences. The audience cheers in response to this more dynamic pace and everyone is having a great time. There is a sense that we are near the point of metamorphosis, an overwhelming sense of joy in the air. Joshua makes eyes at the girls in the front row and revels in the attention.

I can’t remember the last time I attended a performance that created so much energy and excitement for both audience and performers. After a few minutes of this high-energy action the performers gather together and begin to glide back and forth across the space and to twirl in pairs. The mood changes. Things become stiller. The screens are placed at the front of the space; there is a voiceover in German. Maria Lisa Hill takes centre stage and performs a slow and meditative solo piece. I feel deflated. It’s not that I don’t enjoy Maria Lisa’s work, it’s just that the power and excitement harnessed in the previous, more freely improvised, piece seems to have been capped and bottled rather than built upon to achieve the promised metamorphosis. The piece ends on a sombre note and the performers exit. I hope that in their next work the performers pursue that “fast dancing” to see where it leads.

Ballistic, DADAA WA, choreographer Sete Tele, performers Rachel Ogle, Susan Smith, Fanci Hitanaya, Lui Sit, Yolanda Berg, Virginia Calabrese, Julia Hales, Maria Lisa Hill, Lisa Collins, Joshua Bott, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Nov 8 – 10

It’s been a momentous couple of months and this OnScreen reflects the political concerns of filmmakers and writers. Many are starting to recount their experiences of September 11…I sat in a Sydney café watching television, surrounded by people pressed against the glass—like photos I’ve seen of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics—tears streaming. The streets were quiet. It made me see the city differently, the towering buildings suddenly threatening around our office, the planes flying too low over my house in Leichhardt. It’s affected our writers too, along with the recent election, which has galvanised people into action, the need to debate. Mike Walsh tackles the highly topical issue of asylum seekers and detention centres, and the incongruity of government agencies (like the AFC) funding documentaries that question and explore the government’s own policies and problematic attitudes towards refugees. He speaks to a number of filmmakers, including David Goldie, about their involvement with upcoming projects. Meanwhile, Felena Alach and Joni Taylor link youth festivals with activism (Electrofringe and TILT Symposium), arenas where the digital and political collide—who can forget the Boat People image projected boldly onto the sails of the Opera House.

What these events haven’t affected is cinema going (unlike other areas such as performance). The recent IF and AFI awards highlighted the strength of the Aussie film field this year. I particularly enjoyed IF’s play with the awards format: one hour, no ads (SBS), a witty and politicised host (Liz Gorr) who had fun with the guests, the replacement of bimbos stiffly holding awards with a girl in crazy short tutu and a parrot on her shoulder, and genuine recognition of young and established filmmakers working in the areas of shorts and documentary. What the IF Awards recognised, finally, is that there’s no point trying to recreate the Academy Awards. Our industry is small, people know each other. The IFs had a family atmosphere. The AFIs were quite a contrast. Beautifully situated in Melbourne’s Exhibition Buildings, the stage looked to be about 100 metres from the audience and this feeling of distance persisted. A truly awful start (David Reyne and Marcia Hines singing Forever Young—cringe) led to an uncharacteristically careful performance from Roy and HG. Where was ‘the Dump’ on film culture? Some presenters were so nervous they could hardly speak, while others were so drunk they could hardly stand, like the Logies days of old. At nearly 3 hours it was low on entertainment and often failed to seriously acknowledge film talent—some Awards I was waiting for (in categories of documentary, short films and sound) were simply listed before the ad breaks.

As expected, Lantana was the winner on both nights, taking best director for Ray Lawrence and most acting gongs, including IF’s unusual stance of giving Best Actress to all 5 women in Lantana (Rachael Blake saw this as true recognition of collaborative effort).

In this edition Jane Mills starts our new column on issues in Australian film culture, Watchdog, with an interview with sound designer Andrew Plain (IF Award winner for La Spagnola, who also worked on Lantana and Facing the Music). Also featured are Monique Schwartz, Melbourne-based director of a film about Jewish mothers in cinema, ANAT Executive Director Julianne Pierce looking after the best interests of new media artists, the perils and pleasures of the personal documentary at the WOW festival, a virtual youth festival in noise, experimenta’s provocative Waste exhibition (see RTpost) and digital artist Troy Innocent goes seriously material.

An exhibition, a film, a CD and a CD-ROM make for an immersive, disturbingly evocative experience of cultural history in Crossroads: Shanghai and the Jews of China at Sydney’s Jewish Museum. The experience is heightened during my visit by a woman keenly identifying relatives in photographs exhibited on the walls and asking me to find her family on the computer screen—like me she had taken a while to work out that clicking on some but not all of the candles of the Menorah was the way into family histories. For many of us the history of the Jews in China is new, as with the Jews of Calcutta, whose story (partly that of her husband’s family) is to be told by the 2001 NSW Writers Fellowship winner, Bem la Hunte, in her next novel.

Crossroads is seductively intimate, occupying a small space at the top of the museum building. Through the design and selection of materials (much of it on loan from Australian families) the exhibition interweaves Western and Eastern imagery within the rich red and gold that frames a fascinating history. Shanghai was home to Sephardi (Oriental) Jews, mostly from Baghdad, from the mid 19th century. This small community, 800 by the mid 1930s, some of its families very wealthy, played an influential economic and cultural role. They were joined in the early decades of the 20th century by Russian Jews fleeing first Tsarist and then Bolshevik rule. A participant in the documentary Crossroads: Jewish Stories from Shanghai (director, Jonathon Robinson, Paradox Films) says, “Life in China was a utopia. We had the operetta, the symphony…it was a cultural life.” Others comment that they experienced no anti-semitism, “We were just foreigners.” Theirs was a culture of one belief but many languages—Russian, French, English, Chinese and Arabic—and, remarks one woman, cuisines: “you could get cooks that could cook anything—Iraqi, British, Russian…”

By 1941, a wave of refugees from Europe that began in the mid 30s had swollen the community from 4,000 to some 25,000 inhabitants. No visa was required to enter China. Exit visas from Europe had been the great barrier to escape—homage is paid to Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Lithuania who issued visas to thousands who would otherwise have been murdered. Highly organised community groups in Shanghai helped refugees with welfare, jobs and education. Despite inistent Nazi pressure, the Japanese did not eliminate Shanghai’s Jews, but did force many into the over-crowded Hongkew district. At the end of the war, most migrated to other countries, including Australia, Canada, USA, Israel and Brazil. The exhibition displays photographs, everyday belongings, religious objects and documents, including ample evidence of oppression: “Stateless refugees are prohibited to pass here without permission”, says one sign.

The CD-ROM, The Menorah of Fang Bang Lu, a work-in-progress by Andrew Jackubowicz (Writer/Producer) and the new media artist Tatiana Pentes (Creative Director) is engrossing. There are texts by the authors telling the stories of their own family connections with Shanghai. Jackubowicz recounts a trip to China, the search for what was once his family’s home and buying an old Menorah (a candelabra for use in religious ceremonies) but this one with a music box in its base! He finds it buried in a pile of objects in a shop. Pentes’ grandfather is Shanghai band leader Sergei Ermolaeff (Serge Ermoll). The central experience of the CD-ROM for the user is a pictorial one that wisely sidesteps elaborate textual detail. The impact is impressionistic, but it works in the way that family albums and old photographs invariably do—they require us to query, to imagine, to project, to search the image for points of recognition. Pentes has used a simple but effective layering of images. A click on a Menorah candle opens a family page which in turn opens to a circle of 7 images, a graphic index of topics that cover a family history and its place in Shanghai culture. Click on one of these and you enter another layer with a row of images across the top of the page. Below these is a delicate, ghostly, halftone black and white collage of a large clockface, a child, and a wintry, mountainous rural scene—the Europe lost to these refugees?

As the cursor hovers over an image at the top of the page, the same picture appears enlarged below for closer perusal, sometimes accompanied by a brief text, the font subtly evoking both Hebrew and Chinese writing. As you move from image to image (documents, tickets, precious objects, curios, wedding and school photos, casual snaps) and then onto another aspect of a family’s life (leaving Europe, relations with Chinese, life under the Japanese, leaving Shanghai…), a sense of personal history emerges. And they’re very different histories, although they all share great pleasure in Shanghai life before the Japanese take over the city. The Gunsbergers meet on the Tran-Siberian Railway on their way to China and soon marry—there’s a wedding gift of a glowing Russian Art Deco coffee service, looking like it was made yesterday. There are snaps of the family left behind, killed by the Nazis, Fred Gunsberger as scoutmaster in Shanghai, the margarine factory he worked in and which brought financial ruin, Fred after the motorcycle accident in Australia that left him blind. The Moalem family were Sephardic (Babylonian/Spanish), their prosperous Shanghai history reaching back into the 19th century, their stay in China after the war longer than most. Canada rejects them, Australia accepts them in 1950.

There are other aspects to the CD-ROM (eventually destined for online transmission) including paintings and postcards stamped with Nazi icons (a chilling sight) and a sketchbook of Shanghai street figures that scrolls at length right to left across the screen.

The CD commissioned to accompany the exhibition features the kind of music heard in Shanghai in the 30s and 40s—Yiddish song, Schumann, Gershwin, Ellington and Russian and Baghdadian traditional tunes—along with compositions by Kim Cunio (the son of a retired opera singer from Shanghai) that evoke the intercultural feel of Shanghai (Crossroads, Kim Cunio & Heather Lee, Lotus Foot CD, LFP 104.2).

Crossroads is an effective, informative and multilayered exhibition, well worth experiencing, and especially intriguing to engage with in the company of older Jewish Australians passing through. Hopefully, the online version will be available soon.

Crossroads: Shanghai and the Jews of China; Project Manager Alan Jacobs; Curator Jane Wesley; Sydney Jewish Museum, 148 Darlinghurst Rd, Darlinghurst: currently showing until March; The Menorah of Fang Bang Lu, an Installation as a Work in Progress, Carnival, Performance Space, Oct 5-14

The title Eat My Shorts puts even a hardened Performance Space audience on notice and, for the most part, comes up with performative provocations that are defiant more in terms of form and cultural specifity than direct political content. The show begins with a deceptive air of the spiritual: Cicily Ponnor, neat, well-mannered, sari-clad, with a lotus made of coloured powders on the floor. She may well be dressed in tradition but it soon becomes clear that she is not altogether of it as Bollywood obsessions (the star, the singing, the dancing, the “wet sari scene”), Bankstown teen dreams and realities and escalating rough language climax in the vacuum-cleaner obliteration of lotus harmony. Ponnor is funny and sharp; Teenage Masala left me wanting more of Indian-Australian life in the suburbs and the imagination.

Richard Lagarto and Angela Grima in Cultural Frankenstein & Other Gourmet Delights enter with the requisite suitcases and appear to mock community theatre cliches and demands for cultural specificity with a bizarre pan-Mediterraneanism where nothing much is what it seems—are those biscotti Scotch Fingers? What’s Zorba the Greek got to do with being Portuguese or Maltese? And why has that dance turned hip-hop? In Australia the ingestion of other cultures has become a promiscuous gourmet activity. With scenes strung together like revue skits and looking decidely under-rehearsed, Lagarto and Grima got away with their thesis by turning on chatty charm addressed directly to their audience.

Brian Fuata, a 23-year old New Zealander of Samoan extraction, on the other hand, offered rare precision in language and movement along with emotional intensity in his ongoing exploration of his mother, sexuality and cultures. Each time you see Fuata you experience another episode in a life unfolding as he muses over key incidents, some you’ve heard before (that’s part of the adventure), and intones a litany of observations that are droll (“There is Mother in my madness”) and mind-bendingly dialectical (where mother and son roles symbolically reverse to make perverse sense). Fuata locks into 3 demanding, animated poses standing in each of 3 trays of grass (installation artist, Haydn Fowler) tighly lit by Neil Simpson, throwing his young body into disturbing relief, making something of a monster of this obsessive ruminator.

The cultural and gender fantasia of De Quincey & Co’s Seep was hilariously delinquent and rudely non-specific, a sublimely unintelligible dance of self-obsession and flirtation that evoked bad heavily-bewigged opera (“3 counter tenors act as signifiers of Byzantine, Arabic and Chinese vocal traditions” says the program) and, with consummate control, bad dance. Seep it did, as cultural and gender identity bled in every direction in a gloriously promiscuous collaboration between Xu Feng Shan, Michael Demetris-Dale, Victoria Hunt, Kristina Harrison, Koon Fei Wang, Roger Hany, Francesca da Rimini, Virginia Barratt, John Gillies, Russell Emerson, Richard Manner (lighting) and Tess de Quincey (direction).

Like Fuata, Angel Boudjiba is an interesting writer and has the makings of an engaging performer as witnessed in Urban Theatre Projects’ Asylum. In Thudarth—Survivor, Boudjiba, an Algerian Berber, does a verbal Magritte, an act that includes transforming the onstage table into something other than that beheld. As he measures the furniture, this surreal act becomes political: “This desk is a home of crime, it looks like a desk, but it is a congress that hides truth…The desk made the white man superior in history, but what makes Jesus a white man?” A suit is similarly deployed—equipped with cyber-terrorist devices “it can destroy me, if I try to think.” Against the reductive powers of table and suit, Boudjiba invokes specificity, asking audience members to speak in their foreign languages as he sings a Berber song. Curated by Performance Space’s Fiona Winning and Michaela Coventry as part of the 2001 Carnivale program, Eat My Shorts was evidence yet again that contemporary performance is a rich site of cross-cultural collaboration.

Ros Warby is one of a handful of truly distinctive Australian solo dancer-choreographers creating a body of unique works and steadily gaining international attention. Warby’s work has also included significant periods since 1990 with Danceworks, Russell Dumas’ Dance Exchange and currently with Lucy Guerin Inc, performing memorably with Guerin in Robbery Waitress on Bail around the world. Over the last 6 years, Warby has been committed to presenting her own work created in collaboration with sound and design artists. Her program Solos, which premiered in Melbourne early this year, will tour to the 2002 Adelaide Festival and the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (USA). Erin Brannigan spoke to Warby fresh from working in the US with choreographer Deborah Hay.

The US experience

Yes, I travelled to Whidbey Island outside of Seattle last August where Deborah conducts the Solo Commissioning Project each year. It was there that I learnt and performed Music. This is the second solo I have learnt of Deborah’s. I performed my adaptation of Fire, which Deborah choreographed in 1999, in my own program Solos earlier this year and again in NYC with Deborah in her trilogy program at St Mark’s Church. It was a tremendous experience for me. We performed the solos back to back. I was in white leotard and headband, she in an odd shaped black pantsuit. She is 60. I am 34.

I have worked with Deborah over the past 5 or 6 years in Melbourne, New York, and on Whidbey. I first met her at one of her Melbourne workshops in 1996. Her work resonated deeply and immediately with my own. I recognised an extraordinary teacher and artist, and understood how her experience and practice could expand my own…Her attention in performance is extraordinary…her clarity and efficiency in getting to the core of what makes concise and refined dance performance.

Working through the ranks

I went through the ranks I guess. I trained in Europe at a variety of international ballet schools and on returning home immediately made a beeline for Dance Works (this was around the time Nanette Hassall, who had founded the company, was leaving). I needed frameworks for my development as a dancer and an improviser/choreographer (as I then imagined myself) and a company like Dance Works seemed to offer those opportunities. I did not presume for a second I could figure all this out on my own.

After 3 years at Dance Works I went to work with Russell Dumas in Sydney for the next 3. His influence was profound…Russell and other Dance Exchange founding members had created and were nurturing links with American dancers, improvisers and choreographers–such as Dana Reitz, Eva Karczag and Lisa Nelson–who became important teachers for me. All the while I was plodding along with my solo work and from my early Melbourne days knew Shelley [Lasica], Trevor [Patrick], and Sandy [Parker]. Shelley was making a lot of solo work at the time and had Extensions studio where work was being shown. However unconsciously, these people represented a context or framework for my solo work. But the influence of the American practitioners has had the most profound impact on my practice in the long-term.

I had met Lucy Guerin in NY when I was on a travel study tour in 1993. I began working with her after my time with Russell and I have worked with her for the past 6 years, the same time as with Deborah. Over this period I have arrived at a point where I feel I have the appropriate history and stimulation to concentrate on my own choreographic and performance practice.

Given your interest in and connection with high profile American dance practitioner, why haven’t you chosen to relocate overseas?

When I was on my travel study tour and finished working with those artists in America, I considered staying and working in the States. But because I was interested in developing my own practice and had an opportunity to work with Russell Dumas, I decided that I would have more time, space and opportunities to do that in Australia. And the fact that I have been travelling backwards and forwards to maintain those connections has been imperative to my development.

The importance of solo

So you have always combined working as a soloist and working with companies. I have a preference for solo work–the focus it allows me and the chance to become familiar with a singular way of moving. But perhaps this is a symptom of what’s on offer in Australia outside the large companies. What are your feelings about solo work?

I love solo dance–the opportunity to see a performer’s attention moving through them. It is difficult to see, and sometimes to practice, such specificity in group choreography when the focus is often directed elsewhere. As a solo performer, I love the opportunity to direct people’s attention to the most intimate and invisible moments. I am actually directing my own attention there, and hope others may recognise something. I love the simplicity of the form.

The recent performances of your solo work Eve seemed to me like a departure for you into what almost verged on role-playing. The ‘muttered’ gestures and whispered words were often directed to the audience in a way I haven’t seen in your work before. Did this solo work mark a shift in your relation with the audience?

My very early solo work, prior to the influence of the American practitioners, contained the essence of this recent solo. The early work was very emotionally driven, but I didn’t have the facility to utilise that expression well and I’d wind it up in a little ball. I recognised that I wouldn’t get much mileage out of that kind of intensity. The work with Deborah, Eva and Russell over the last decade has allowed me to filter that intensity through my whole body. Deborah uses the term “loyalty and disinterestedness at the same time.” My work with Deborah is very relevant here, particularly her performance practice. She always leaves the house lights on in the theatre when she performs. It’s so that the performer’s perceptual awareness is fully engaged–on a visual, oral and cellular level.

Eve is about the multi-faceted nature of the female character, the various layers of child, adult, sister and lover. The invitation to be seen and a generosity of spirit runs throughout the entire piece. In the first section where I am quite child-like, there is a simple, storytelling, look-at-me quality, along with reference to dance class and following the teacher’s steps. And then in the last section it arrives at a more integrated place, a place where the character is generous and inviting. I was referencing the Dying Swan a bit…but rather than death, a kind of lightness or flight. Eve is more character-based than anything else I’ve done in the last 6 years. Mary, an early solo work from 1990, was also character-based so I feel as though I’ve come full circle.

Putting it into words feels like I’m undoing the complexity of that process. The only way I can work with those kind of simplistic images in performance is if there is a sophisticated layering occurring… to be with the image or instruction and out of it and combining it with other images at the same time. I have to say, I’m not focusing on characterisation, it’s just something that grows out of my practice. Perhaps it’s the nature of solo performance. When I’m performing Eve, it’s like I’m following a path or a ‘yellow brick road’, but I’m being constantly available at every moment to impacts upon my perception–whether they’re from the audience, the space, the instructions or my imagination.

Working with choreographers

How does the process of working with others fit in with your own choreographic work?

I presented 3 solos in February this year in a season called Solos. One was by Lucy Guerin, one by Deborah Hay and one by myself (Eve). There are 2 aspects here–the choreography and the dancing. I am primarily interested in the dancer and dancing. I have always practiced dancing and this usually happens in solo moments, hence the attraction and empathy I have with the solo form. By ‘practicing dancing’ I mean the dancer dancing alone as a pianist would practice alone. This is not something encouraged in dance training in general, yet it seems essential. So whether I’m dancing my own choreography or someone else’s, I engage in the same performance practice. The choreographic instructions vary, the limitations and liberties I place on myself differ slightly in each work, but the attention is equal.

Framing, crafting and aestheticising dance is the choreography–an opportunity to detach from your individual idiosyncrasies and go beyond the surface of that purely kinaesthetic sensation. Choreography makes room for the performer to manage and organise themselves in mind and body, imagination and timing, within the framework of a singular vision. I am interested in how best I can occupy those frameworks. In relation to other people’s choreography, that’s my job. Although, in my own work, the process towards finding a clear framework for myself to occupy is often more challenging than when it is delivered to me. In my work I can choose when and where to go. I feel I can inject more of myself into the work, not indulging the emotional self, but investing in it and detaching from it simultaneously.

Both Lucy’s and Deborah’s choreographic practice provide me with similar room. The choreographic instructions are clear as a bell and this is the work that rings true to me, that interests me. It’s the clarity of their work that allows me to fill the choreography with a cellular intelligence. Feed the imagination with impossible tasks. Trust the body as mind. It requires a lot of thinking and re-thinking, moment after moment to arrive in this place.

Dancing and Choreography

Can you explain a little more what you mean by ‘dancing’ here and why it occurs in solos as a more ‘purely kinaesthetic’ experience? And how it is different to ‘choreography’?

Dancing, for me, is how the dancer organises themselves inside their own perceptual, physical, emotional and intellectual realm, and inside the choreographic structure. It is a state in which the dancer engages this ‘cellular intelligence’ to translate choreography into dance. The choreography is the framework or score for the dancer to occupy, whether in solo or ensemble form. Choreography is a designed structure that can provide strong reference points for the dancer to dance from, or inside of, and not get lost in their own preoccupations. Choreography cannot be seen unless danced, as a song is not heard unless sung. The dancing performer has the task of integrating all cellular and perceptual intelligence–many layers of experience–body, mind and heart, in order to articulate choreographic ideas. A dancer needs to practice ‘dancing’, not simply an execution of choreography.

I find indulging in the kinaesthetic sensation alone, a limiting approach to dance performance. The kinaesthetic sensation I am referring to is responding immediately to a physical, emotional or intellectual impulse and allowing the body to follow that momentum uninterrupted. It is more interesting as a solo dancer to challenge that moment of impulse, to pause and give space to the whole system organising itself within the instruction, idea, choreography or whatever, so the expression of this moment is not overloaded with meaning but at the same time enriched with the dancers entire experience. This does not limit the dancer to just the kinaesthetic experience, but broadens the experience by including all perception, imagined or true. Dancing solo offers opportunity to listen to this process closely and embody the choreography appropriately, so it is full, not empty, or overflowing. It is a delicate balance.

I have spent many years training and re-training my body and mind to be in dialogue with one another. This has involved physical training, ballet, modern dance, tai chi, meditation, Alexander Technique etc. When I talk about the body as mind I am assuming for myself that a lot of understanding already exists in the body without the need for me to interfere, reinvent, relearn or think through this system. I am trusting my body as my teacher. It is from this point I can begin to practice performance, to detach from self and to utilise all past work and training to it’s optimum, inviting and trusting my perception to steer the dance within the choreography. This practice is to attend to what is there, in each moment, within the choreography, within the task, to attend to the task with complete commitment and loyalty, to invite the layers present to be appropriate to the moment I’m experiencing.

Can you talk a little about your own choreographic process… methodologies, collaborations, the relation between improvisation and performance?

I have always improvised, which is really what I mean by ‘dancing’ When I begin dancing in the studio I start these sessions with a very particular attention. It’s a listening…a patience and diligence in waiting for the body-as-mind to deliver. I then identify particular things from that that interest me and slowly build the choreography or the score with this material. I identify the intent and can begin imagining, and then experience a storyboard unfolding. By storyboard I mean that as the sections of the piece develop, I take that material and create a storyboard on paper so that I can begin to play with the structure. With Eve, the film images were very specific to exposing aspects the character that I, as the dancer, couldn’t imagine expressing. The film’s processes provided a way of separating the layers at specific moments.

Earlier in my work I collaborated with musicians and composers, Helen Mountford in particular. I worked with the choreography between movement and sound, letting that lead the development of the score. I still work with sound but trust the song of the dance more these days, for instance, letting Helen see the dance before she begins the sound score.

I also let space and circumstance influence the shape a new work takes. I imagine the actual framework that may house a particular dance. Imagining the house you may like to inhabit or occupy for instance. This means including design much earlier on in my work than before. I have collaborated with Margie Medlin on my last 2 projects (Original Home and Eve). I trust her work with mine and, like trusting a choreographer, know that she will work toward framing the dance, whether with structures, in light, or on film. Margie also worked with me on my first solo, Mary, in 1990 which I mentioned earlier, so we really have come full circle.

Dancing with film

What do you see as the relationship between the film image and the image of the live dancer?

I am interested in film having the ability to reframe the dancing body, to show details of the dance from inside the dancer’s experience, to show moments that are sometimes missed by the audience because of distance or attention. In the context of Eve, I originally designed the dance to fluctuate between the live and filmed dancer as a means of clearly drawing the viewer’s attention to details–face, hand, torso–that were relevant to the character’s experience. I imagined some of the projected film images to be quite small. Margie [Medlin] made them large, often 4 times life-size. The result impacted on the dance substantially. As I storyboarded the dance and the film, I wasn’t taking into account an environment within which the character could exist, so Margie’s contribution was not only the projection design, but also the creation of that total environment. Margie became interested in the character having other playmates and an overwhelming playground, hence the oversized projected figures.

I am also interested in the choreography between the film and live image to create a dialogue or phrasing in the work, literally the rhythm of the piece as a whole, similar to how I’ve worked with the choreography between sound and movement. Trusting Margie’s aesthetic and artistic choices has been important and has often bought into focus for me a particular intent or moment. We have a compatible aesthetic and process and are attuned to improvising together, building frameworks to house a dance.

Ros Warby’s Eve was seen as part of the antistatic dance program Scope at Performance Space. Also featured in Scope were Lisa O’Neill’s Fugu san and Cazerine Barry’s Sprung. Scope will be reviewed in RealTime 47, Feb-March, 2002.

We’re such bums that we don’t want a proper 9 to 5 job and we’ll do anything else, whether play in a band, write a sitcom or, ahhhhh,
sell T-shirts…
Luke Sparke & band mates, noise [tv]

Listen to that. The wind through the grass. That’s a hit around here, man.
Damien, NoKTuRNL, noise [tv]

The week before the federal election I heard a talkback session on Life Matters (Radio National, weekdays, 9am) where young voters, aged 18-25, were asked to call in and discuss who they were voting for and why. In nearly all cases, callers stressed that they were not going to vote for major parties (preferring Democrats or Greens but understanding fully where their preferences would end up) and practically all were against both Labor and Liberal’s stance on asylum seeker issues. The other striking thing about this program was the hogging of the airwaves by older listeners who, even though Geraldine Doogue repeatedly stated that the floor was only open this time to younger people, had to get their 2 cents worth in with inane chatter. Time and time again, Doogue had to ask, “excuse me but are you really under 25?” It highlighted how rare it is for young people to get their voices heard in the mainstream media, which is a shame for the rest of us who miss out on the thoughts of a generation that is articulate, creative and politically astute.

Of course, there are other outlets for young voices (see TILT and This is Not Art) and noise is a major player, a national and media-based festival, which followed on from LOUD in 1998. In the 4 years since LOUD I’ve moved from the right demographic (under 25) to no longer eligible and it’s a curious shift; I can no longer speak with authority from the tender perspective of youth. LOUD was important to me: my short fiction was published online, it was peer-assessed with critical feedback (and yes, young people are good critics) and it gave me the confidence to apply for a ‘real job’ in publishing (RealTime), where, happily, my first review was of LOUD itself (see RT23 p3). noise has broadened to keep up with technological advances: over 25 projects and 10,000 artistic entries, appearing in magazines like Voiceworks, HQ and Black and White, on SBS and ABC in noise [tv] and short fuse, online with a cacophony of Flash, sound and visual arts, and in Pluto Press’s beautifully produced Anthology, which matches a witty and sensitive introduction by Richard Fidler with angry cartoons and some wild fiction.

With so much on offer, there’s really no option but to sample. And this is what the noise site is designed for. But I quickly lose patience as I spring around in circles unable to find what I’m looking for and it dawns on me that I’m heading towards 30 and I don’t know what I’m looking for and that’s why I can’t find it. These creative projects don’t look like my idea of youth art, whatever that is. I’m looking at websites that look like corporate designs. And that’s when I realise what it is that seems new about these creators; there are no boundaries between life, work and art. This is just stuff that they do. For noise, a website (whether personal or for a corporation) is artistic practice, it’s about technique, compiling elements to be gorgeous and sleek or grungy and impenetrable, intricate constructions of a state of mind, full of design flair and whimsy. And it is as much about profile—who these people are, what they like, their obsessions. I find a girl who’s obsessed with buttons and it leads me on to people around the world obsessed with buttons and then I’m scrolling down this list of fantastic hand-designed buttons with grrrl bands like Bikini Kill for sale and I’m so tempted but they’re in American dollars and my credit card is over the limit.

I lob into E-Works and find Konrad McCarthy’s Humanesque Web and—damn I need to get a better computer. Sleeping babies lie in the nursery and welcome us. Heads lift and turn into phones and envelopes, the surreal icons of contact web-style, and I’m loading, a rocketship about to take off, into a series of interactive comics, and I like the mix of anti-authoritarianism and multimedia know-how. A wretched mother spits out “a smile is just an upside down frown” and tries to force her kid into submission after he gives her the finger. This same woman punches her baby in a mockery of Funniest Home Videos, while a power gauge that we click effects her level of violence: “if it doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t lead.” The design is incredible but, as is often the case, the writing’s a bit slack. It always amazes me that people who spend hours playing with software and computer code can’t be bothered doing a spellcheck, especially when certain jokes depend on rhymes that fall kinda flat when the spelling’s wrong. Best of all are Konrad’s variations of nursery rhymes with choose-your-own endings: Black Sheep, persecuted by his White classmates, goes ‘postal’; Cat and the Fiddle offers Gratuitous Drug, Violence, Sexual Reference or Toilet Humour options. Who could resist?

Estelle Ihasz is everywhere. She has over 30 creative entries in various sections of the program and I’m again in a loop when I link to links to linking things that loop to, finally, Visual Frequencies, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s noise project. The Flash fest where everything bumps and grinds quickly fades to the stillness of this exhibition, with 30 works by 10 artists, in a range of styles. I find the ‘educational’ aspect a little tedious here—great pains are taken to describe the work and explain how it’s done, which either seems pretty bloody obvious or leaves little scope for the imagination—but the site itself is beautifully set up and easy to navigate. And I’m back to Estelle’s imagery, luminous photographs of bedroom walls touched by morning/afternoon light, the sun tracked by subtle changes of colour: a corner of a room from pearl to beach sand to Antarctic ice. It’s a great curatorial idea (and something that noise in general should do more) presenting a range of examples of each artist’s work.

“Do I look in the camera…or ignore it, or what” asks DJ Kat Kid, one of the many artists profiled on noise [tv] (screened Saturday nights in October on ABC, before Rage). Hiphop culture and all its elements (graffiti, turntabling, rap, skateboarding and sampling) permeate the lives of many featured here. It’s easy to forget that these subcultures have been around for almost 20 years yet they still have the appeal of the new. DJ Kat has a gorgeous honeyed voice and dreds, and performs in Brisbane’s Powerhouse, sampling Julie Andrews, Michael Jackson and promoting Mother Tongue, an Australian label that features female hip-hop artists. Dean Wells, a filmmaker from Newcastle, explores the skateboard culture and takes us into his living room, introducing his personal chef (dad) and pretty impressive digital camera and computer editing suite setup. Arlene TextaQueen is a Sydney star, unforgettable with her space cadet outfit of coloured textas, who does portraits of kids, friends and people at dance parties. But my favourite of all is the completely eccentric Adelaide-based Felicity Electricity (soon to add the middle name Publicity) whose art comprises a Hillman Minx completely plastered with magazine clippings of Princess Di, including pics with John Travolta and Michael Jackson. Taking decoupage to new heights, she is currently working on a 1950s caravan to be covered with pics of the Royals (so Princess Di can tow the royal family) and her next project will be a London bus. This girl is going to be big.

As with other aspects of the festival, the segments in noise [tv] are just too short. All of the artists mentioned could have done with more than a snippet. We never really get to know what makes them tick. I guess it’s mainly a budget thing but they all needed an Australian Story of their own. Unfortunately, ‘youth’ tends to be equated with ‘quick.’ And if you hear often enough that you have no concentration span, you’ll end up believing it. As the festival tends to concentrate on individual profiles, young artists appear like islands dotting the cultural landscape, little worlds to themselves, isolated, rather than part of a community. It’d be interesting to see how many of these artists join together, are connected, by being part of noise. Surely one of the aims of this festival should be to build bridges for the future, or for the next festival at least.

Julianne Pierce has been an artist (one of VNS Matrix, an influential team of cyberfeminist artists), a program manager (Performance Space), a producer (of the award winning Debra Petrovich CD-ROM Uncle Bill), co-curator (Biomachines, Telstra Adelaide Festival 2000 and Spectrascope, Sydney Biennale 2000 satellite exhibition), curator (Encryption Corruption, Physics Room NZ, 1998 and Code Red, Performance Space, 1997). She is now Director of ANAT (Australian Network for Art & Technology), the peak national art, science and technology body based in Adelaide. According to Julianne, her first 12 months as Director have gone very quickly. As well as running a number of projects she’s used this as establishment time to find her niche in the organisation and to work with staff and Board on the way forward.

One of the directions from our Board was to embark on a period of consolidation because ANAT had been through such growth, and there were 3 new staff—myself, the Manager Caroline Farmer and Web and Technical officer, Claudia Raddatz. The only staff member who was not new was Charity Bramwell, the Information Officer. So the first task was to look at the infrastructure and settle in the new staff and reassess where we were and rebuild some of our systems. And look at things like marketing and ANAT’s profile and how we’re positioned and how to actually give the organisation greater visibility.

ANAT’s seen as valuable to its membership, especially for the training opportunities it offers a lot of artists.

The training has been integral to the organisation: the National Summer Schools still play a really important role. But we’re noticing that a lot more training opportunities are being offered by people like Metro Screen in Sydney and Ngapartji in Adelaide. We’re interested in focusing more on specialised training. We’re running an Indigenous Summer School in late 2002. The first one we did in Darwin at NT University in 1999 was very successful. So we want to do another next year and also focus on masterclasses. We’re keeping on the professional development arm and we’re looking at our Conference and Workshop fund as part of professional development.

It’s a small fund that ANAT offers on a monthly basis. It works on quick response. It’s open for ANAT members to apply for up to $2,000 to attend a conference or event within Australia or overseas.

It’s true that there are lots of courses being offered around the country, but in any artform there’s often not much for mid-career artists.

The Summer Schools are also a meeting place. It’s not just about training, it’s about networking and some really interesting projects have come out of them such as nervous objects, an informal collective of artists working with sound and other media. We want to keep that momentum going but using different models and perhaps not providing so much grass roots training.

More and more. And increasingly we’re seeing ANAT as having a brokering role. Under the umbrella of professional development is our residency program. We’ve brokered 3 Indigenous residencies in the last 12 months: Jason Davidson at 24HR Art in Darwin, Christian Bumbarra Thompson at CCP in Melbourne and Jenny Fraser with Hermannsburg potters in the Northern Territory.

This year we’ve also developed 2 science residencies as part of the Scientific Serendipity Program with the support of the Science and Technology Awareness Program run by the Federal Government’s Department of Industry Science and Resources. There have been 4 residencies in all, and in 2001 we negotiated for Brisbane-based sound artist Adam Donovan to work at the Defence, Science and Technology Organisation in Salisbury, South Australia. Sydney artist Justine Cooper has been supported by ANAT in her residency at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Both of these artists are included in the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (2002 Adelaide Festival), which is a great outcome for our residency program.

We’re also supporting collaborations between artists. For example, out of Alchemy (the Summer School in New Media Art and Curation held at the Brisbane Powerhouse last year: RT38 Working the Screen 2000, p10-11) has come a collaborative performance/hybrid work between Monica Narula from Sarai (RT43, p21) in New Delhi, Sarah Neville from Adelaide and Sydney-based digital artist Mari Velonaki. We help with planning and we provided some seed funding for Sarah and Mari to go to India for a couple of weeks. We don’t see ourselves as a producer but as a supportive partner.

Basically the organisation supports the membership. We have quite a substantial national membership. We produce a quarterly newsletter and send out an email digest with updates, conference and workshop reports and some critical writing. More and more our members use us as a resource. This year we have a full-time staff member servicing the membership so that we can respond to requests within 24 hours.

We also play an advocacy role and represent our members to government and lobby groups, and I sit on quite a few committees. ANAT is being called on more and more to represent the cultural sector to government. This is where we need to be focusing in terms of bringing more revenue into the organisation but also having an effective voice to add to government policy. But how do you maintain the status as a peak body within a continually shifting landscape? The number of reports that come through! There are so many opportunities and ANAT has to be able to respond to those.

Do you mean by the “shifting landscape”, the developments in new media that are constantly happening or changes in the political landscape?

Across the spectrum. For instance, with Senator Alston’s recent release of the funding for broadband and the whole issue of digital content and digital industry clustering, how does ANAT get involved with these processes and represent “the cultural sector”? I read lots of reports and I think the funding scenario is now shifting. Obviously, the New Media Arts Board of the Australia Council plays a vital role but increasingly state government bodies are supporting projects and artists and, of course, there’s the AFC. I’m thinking also of initiatives like the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne’s Federation Square that will provide a permanent exhibition venue for Australian screen based work.

Do you think in the future it will still be viable for the New Media Arts Board of the Australia Council to be funding distinctly digital media works on the one hand and, on the other, hybrid performance works, some with new media components, some not?

Obviously the fund developed in response to a change in practice. I don’t think it’s the other way around. There was a recognition that some forms were shifting to a more interdisciplinary mode. Those directions were very strong and still are. But there probably needs to be a clearer distinction within the Board of what sort of work they support, because I think it’s unclear to some people. I still think the fund can accommodate both of those strands. It’s difficult for interdisciplinary artists to go to the Theatre or Dance Boards because their guidelines are quite rigid whereas the New Media Arts Board is flexible and fluid and responsive to that work.

I think new media practice is still seen as marginalised within the visual arts and crafts sector. And I think that exhibitions like Space Odysseys (AGNSW, see review) are creating an acceptance of the practice. It’s a new genre but artists are creating fascinating and important work. There’s been a great leap beyond the technical barriers, creating work that goes beyond pure technicalities. This sort of work has to be accepted within a more mainstream visual arts culture. I think it is an issue of resources for a lot of galleries but it also challenges the idea of what contemporary practice is, in the same way that installation once did.

Yes. Charity Bramwell is working a day each week as the archivist for the Adelaide Biennial so she’s collecting material and documentation which will end up as a web-based database of artists, resources, notes. For the Adelaide Fringe we’re co-ordinating the Trickster masterclass on VJ-ing and video-mixing. The masterclass is being conducted by VJ Iko from Portugal, who has worked with Jean Michel Jarre, the Beastie Boys and Daft Punk. We often partner with other organisations around Australia to develop projects, such as the recent TILT event in Sydney, which was developed in partnership with dLux media arts. This is a great strength of ANAT, enabling us to work with different organisations and reach diverse audiences.

We’re aiming at 3 publications over the next 12 months. Arcadia (Theology and Technology) has resulted from a research project conducted by Samara Mitchell. It involved a research phase which developed into a listserv discussion on a broad range of topics. The listserv was moderated by Samara and involved invited participants discussing spirituality, the arcane, the idea of soul etc in relation to current developments in technology. The publication includes edited excerpts from the listserv and we’ve commissioned Hakim Bey and Eric Davis to contribute essays. We’re launching it in print in December and it will be free. The other 2 publications will also result from projects and residencies, and will be launched during 2002.

At the moment every time that “infrastructure organisation” is mentioned, everybody immediately thinks “service”. It’s not that simple.

We did a members’ survey this year, getting some feedback about our direction. We’re also working on putting up a new website. Doing that has really made us reassess how we talk concisely about an organisation which is quite amorphous and broad. Basically the organisation has a professional development arm, an information and resources arm, and a project development and support arm. We can talk about the organisation as having specific roles. When people say, so what does ANAT do, it’s always been a bit like, well what doesn’t it do! Reaching a younger audience and engaging with a diversity of dialogues and attitudes is also important to us, hence the TILT and the VJ-ing projects.

Yeh, we’re clustering! ANAT has a high profile internationally. We get so many queries from overseas, wanting to connect to Australian artists, wanting to know what’s on. In terms of the service we provide as a membership-based organisation, that sort of thing is really beyond our charter in a way. But it’s a vital aspect of what we do. And servicing an international community who are wanting to find out about Australian artists is ultimately supporting our membership.

As a peak organisation, presumably you’ll have a position on the whole broadband issue?

I think we’ve got to be there. We have to represent artists, look at their role as “content providers” for broadband. Look at the role of artists and creative thinkers and cultural workers in creating this new landscape of digital content. New media artists are already working in games companies, working in the media. I think one of the beauties of new media art is that these artists are really working with language and narrative and non-linearity. And they’re experts at it, specialists in it. They can really contribute to ideas like what interactive television could be.

I’m looking at how new media artists are remunerated for their work. What do you charge for a link to a website from a gallery? What do you charge if someone wants to cache your work in an exhibition? We have to look at setting some protocols. The whole method of distribution changes the nature of the work and I think some artists are feeling exploited and a bit unsure about how to deal with institutions and the distribution of their work. New media artists are also incredibly in demand which is both a positive and a negative, as it can put strain on an artists’ output and practice.

At the same time, it’s very exciting for artists working in this field, who continue to work both nationally and internationally. ANAT has really been at the forefront of this push over the last 12 years. It reflects the growth and maturity of the sector. It’s a great time to be involved in ANAT.

In an unused section of office space at the MCA, the seats were hard and the lighting fluorescent. Yet the symposium, Technologies of Magic: Ghosts & Their Machines, in itself proved an example of the technology of magic. It is in us, the beholden of those to whom we cede authority, that the magic is produced, whether in film or media, the theatre or the book, and with whatever tools they have at the time. The relationship “between technology and mysticism” and the production and representation of the immaterial was the theme of this one-day conference. Technology is our magic, it extends us with its reach, mediates our intimacy, vanishes from sight becoming ubiquity and environment. The invisible electrical fluids that we once understood as the spirit, inaccessible and beyond worldly thinking, are now the means by which we open our lives to others in the world, far beyond the local. The invisible is now the immaterial; a phantasm embedded in the Cartesian framework, animating the technological and the biological object.

Yet our emotions are quintessentially of the body: our visceral acknowledgement of the impact of the other. Rachel Moore, in her analysis of the role of archival film and old technologies in modern cinema, suggested that technology is often the mediator of the magical—ancient spirits and modern emotions (re)animated in the movie. The quickening of love between protagonists is triggered not by Cupid’s arrow but by incidental technological intervention. Magic and technology “alike accede to the notion that romantic love requires a magical trigger that comes from outside the lovers’ bodies, and is powerful enough to effect the bodies’ every sense.” Technology replaces nature and “in modern times, magic inhabits technology to produce the necessary elation of the body’s senses.” But technology also offers communication, bringing the remote into a single frame, a medium for emotions to weld and join, the medium through which that most magical event, falling in love, might be achieved.

Simon During introduced the magical effects of the 19th century stage. These, too, were the means whereby technology brought about the wondrous, and led to special effects in the cinema. Stage effects and optical illusions such as Pepper’s Ghost allowed the presentation in the theatre of all sorts of extraordinary occurrences. Nineteenth century popular concerns were imbued with the remainders of the spirit as religious object following the ravages of the Enlightenment. Spiritualism and a fascination with death presented a prime opportunity for entertainments based in phantasmagorical effects. Yet, as During pointed out, there was a curious interweaving of spiritualist séance and magical entertainment. Theatrical entertainment became the vehicle for ghost stories and mind-reading exercises with many practitioners moving from one stream to another.

John Potts provided a typology of ghosts: from poltergeist to personal ghosts, to harbingers of the future, to “non-interactive recording” ghosts obsessively repeating some event known only to themselves. Suggesting that they are often a moral warning or a signifier of the ancestors, he distinguished ghosts’ earlier cultural roles from their modern ones in the inexplicable. Now we have other terms for them: orbs, energy anomalies, yet they are still placeholders for things as yet unexplained. But hauntings are a re-presentation of the past, a kind of memory. As Potts pointed out, while the contemporary dialect we use to speak of magic borrows from science, “the ghost is the past speaking to the present and we will continue to hear it no matter what dialect it uses.” The “non-interactive recording ghost” is like a tape-recording and he wondered whether the magnetism of certain rocks might support such remembering. Human remembering is inadequately understood, and Potts offered a brief look at possible mechanisms, pointing to the role of emotion in the “recording strength” of memory.

Annette Hamilton, in her paper on the Uncanny, reminded us that Descartes dissociated the mind from the body—making it an object while rendering it immaterial. The mind, the ghost in the machine, becomes a thing in itself that houses within it all other things. We create technological objects through desire; they remain just a thing yet they belong to their maker. Hegel claimed that we carry a right to put our will into things and own them, producing a confusion of the subjective and the object. Hamilton explored this production of the object beginning with the mother’s breast and its fetishisation and following through to the function of the pet as a transitional object, a substitute, and finally the substitute for the substitute that we see in the Sony AIBO robotic dog. AIBO becomes an emotional prosthetic in its capacity to respond to its owner’s behaviour and voice. Finally Hamilton suggested that the fundamental break between the eye and the thing may well be coming to an end as the object begins again to have a meaning and subjectivity inherent in it, perhaps independent of our own desires.

Edward Scheer spoke about Stelarc and his relationship to the technology that increasingly adheres to him in his performances. Stelarc’s “visual excess of technology” ties him into the network of cyberspace, collapsing distance and representing a crisis in the identity of self and the body that emerges as we enter the new conceptual spaces that the net affords. For Stelarc the body in its narrow form is obsolete. It now extends across the net as the avatar, though animated as an emotionless extension of ourselves. But what will happen to these avatars? Do they become ghosts enabled to move bodies as Stelarc is moved within his exoskeletal Movatar? But Stelarc takes it further, folding his movement back onto the avatar in an endless precession—the exoskeleton becomes a servo-mechanism, staging feedback loops between the avatar and its rider. The avatar becomes a ghost riding our human machine, as it is yet a machine ridden by remote, networked users who are its ghosts. Stelarc’s cybernetic corporeality embraces the entities of its operation, extended across the net as they are, while in this curiously emotionless surrender he becomes the vehicle for animating the emotions of the networked personae of his riders.

Nigel Helyer’s concern is with the sound, the ear and the voice. For him the ear is a bringer of warnings, an indicator of danger signals; receiver of sounds regarded as phantastical, magical discarnate. The voice in the classical world of the oracle or the spirit guide is discarnate, separated from its origins. In drawing attention to the relationship between the dead, the spirit world and technological development, he mentioned Edison’s interest in recording the voices of people as memento-mori for their survivors and in his attempts to develop a “spirit-phone” to communicate with the dead. The 19th century idea that electricity animated the body leads to Edison’s interest and many other associations of technology with magic. Helyer spoke about his project for placing sounds, readings and music on the gravestones in the cemetery at St Stephen’s Church in Newtown. Engaging in the process of re-enchanting the world, he is developing means for enlivening objects, giving them their own voice using virtual reality technologies.

Ross Harley introduced 2 installation works that invoke the ghostly presence of people who had such an impact as to render them well remembered after their deaths. Woman in Room 32 remembers an eccentric woman who lived in the Regent’s Court Hotel in Kings Cross. She refused to move from her room when the hotel was renovated, embarking on “a campaign of terror” by playing her organ late into the night and giving hotel staff a difficult time. The installation in Room 32 of the hotel was built from a ‘live’ broadcast that could be viewed on the hotel’s TV system. Static and interference in the TV program marked the ghostly presence, in a room in which the TVs and their electronics were exposed and dangerous. The work seems to have had the effect of an exorcism in that the staff felt they could enter the room once the show was finished and the renovation of that room could be completed shortly thereafter.

I found it hard to see any real connection between the talks. The theme may well have been to do with the re-enchantment of the world, but this reading is contingent upon my own fascinations. We must invert this view so that we understand not that the world is some disjunctive realm of mind having priority over the material but that matter self-organises into the structures that bring it to life. This removes the need to invoke some outside agency—the ghost. Life and mind emerge as the results of this process, a necessary function of matter in its organised complexity. Technology is the prosthesis not the producer; it is perception which constructs and intentionality that produces, and these are themselves both functions of the conscious being.

Technologies of Magic: Ghosts and their Machines, a symposium organised by John Potts, Macquarie University & Edward Scheer, University of New South Wales, in conjunction with Performance Space; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, July 18

According to my dictionary, an ‘audient’ is a listener, and this particular aspect of my experience at l’attitude 27.5? probably began with my walk between the rose beds at New Farm Park past noisy crowds of hefty looking crows. Is it just me or is Brisbane teeming with those big black birds? The auditory offensive hit a peak with the 2 live shows I managed to catch and the La Bouche installation. (The sprawling program which covers nearly 4 weeks means that interstate visitors have to be content with a slice of the festival.) Lisa O’Neill and Caroline Dunphy’s Rodin’s Kiss and Cazerine Barry’s Sprung are both challenging auditory experiences with scores by Brett Collery and Barry & Adrian Hauser respectively. And the La Bouche installation, a computer program including tracks and videoclips from the group, has their particular brand of early 80s electronic pop spilling into the cavernous interior of the Powerhouse. Of the 2 workshops I had a peek at, Brian Lucas was toying with spoken text combined with gestural movement, while Vinildas Gurukkal’s masterclass (part of the Igneous company residency) was the exception, being an exercise in silent mimicry.

As for ‘bodies’ and ‘technology’, they were both present in abundance. The emphasis is on ‘live arts’ as well as ‘contemporary dance’ in the program copy from curator Zane Trow (who shared this job with Powerhouse Program Manager Gail Hewton). The part of the festival I saw works through, but also around, the idea of independent contemporary dance practice. The bodies here do much more than the requisite mind-body exploration that often defines ‘cutting edge’ dance. Collaborations with actors, pop musicians, martial arts experts and untrained dancers, and technologies such as projection, lighting, web-casting, music video and storytelling place the dancer/choreographer within a broader context of cultural innovation. The larger vision of the organisers in producing such a program can perhaps be traced to the refreshing ease with which they use the much tortured term ‘independent.’ Clearly defining this as “individual dancers and choreographers who work outside of the established ‘dance company’ structure”, l’attitudes 27.5? can get on with the more important job of servicing the wide variety of practitioners who fall within the independent field. With Hewton sharing the curator’s role with Brian Lucas next year, and a strong shift of emphasis towards workshops, the annual l’attitudes 27.5? could make interstate travel very worthwhile for independents looking to share ideas and make connections.

Creating from the Body 1

First stop was Brisbane-based dance-choreographer Brian Lucas’ 2 single-day workshops, “Creating from the Body” 1 & 2. Open to untrained dancers, it attracted an interesting cross-section of participants, some from circus and non-dance backgrounds. Entering the Stores Studio, I thought for a moment that I had stumbled on a John Cleese Funny Walks workshop, with the participants strutting, waddling, scurrying and loping across the room while muttering to themselves. It was soon revealed that fairytales had provided the starting point for this exercise, familiar stories which were then combined with random actions. The participants’ odd trajectories across the space then made perfect sense; physically moving from one scenario to another or to mark the passage of time, and the activity of storytelling, are natural partners.

Lucas later told me he was attempting to disrupt the relation between the performer and their personal stories, in the creation of solo work through the various means I had witnessed; beginning with traditional stories, adding incongruent gestures or new instructions regarding speed and order, interrupting the spoken text with other words or giving so many instructions that interesting things come out of the resulting ‘mistakes.’ He finds that these processes provide a “non-threatening” way into telling one’s story. At one point Lucas defined what was ‘interesting’ as “the bits that you want to follow, or see again.” So the individual story emerges from the editing of the material, and the movements that survive the process are perhaps those that resist immediate perception. Providing a means for distancing the performer from the performance is a central aim, and Lucas stressed that it was the effort or attempt to achieve this which was central to the workshop process.

Lucas, like so many independents, works alone, but has found—or rather has had a role in creating—supportive communities such as the Cherry Herring which preceded the Powerhouse development in Brisbane. Now an artist in residence as part of the Incubator creative development program at the Powerhouse, Lucas is in an ideal position to develop his own practice and share something of his experience with the larger community through projects such as these workshops. And these 2 activities feed each other, as Lucas points out. The residency also offers a certain credibility given what he describes as the “nebulous nature of the freelancer”, and places him in contact with the array of artists who pass through the venue. The custom-made facilities at the Powerhouse have had another less quantifiable effect on artists such as Lucas; as he puts it, “if you know the space values you then you value the space.”

Rodin’s Kiss

Later that night Robyn Backen’s installation The Building That Speaks, built into the walls of the venue, guided me back to the Powerhouse with its flashing morse code messages for Rodin’s Kiss. In this work by 2 solo artists, actress/director Caroline Dunphy and dancer/choreographer Lisa O’Neill, the bold staging places the 2 figures against the powerful vertical thrust of what looks like a huge sheet of ice. Dramatic lighting strikes from the sides, sometimes fractured to throw cracks of light across the stage. The extreme changes in lighting and music (designed by Matt Scott and Brett Collery respectively) cut across the action just as often as they accentuate it, so that between these interjections, and the way the drastic set and lighting effects transect the physical space, the theme of unnatural interference or an improper interruption to an established order emerges.

This is in keeping with the narrative on which the work is based; a woman seduced by an ice sculpture of Rodin’s The Kiss. The protagonist’s desire transgresses the parameters of romantic love. This character, played by O’Neill, spends most of the work in a kind of stupor, swooning at the sculpture with her back to us, knees turned in, wandering from side to side with her arms raised, or showing us the face of stealthy desperation as she crouches low to the ground. Her embodiment of the character is complete and consistent; she repeats this swooning walk often and the moments of desolate inaction have the same deflated posture. But it was the more agile choreographic sequences that I began to anticipate. Having never seen O’Neill perform before, her eclectic phrases, grounded physicality and theatrical delivery brought on one of those revelatory moments when movement as a way of articulating does seem endless in its possibilities. She begins the show with a series of falls to the floor (falling for him?) that happen so instantaneously, the actual movement can hardly be seen, just the before and after. This quality continues through a phrase against the ice wall, O’Neill’s jagged shapes succeeding each other with almost indiscernible transitions. Flashdance literally flashes through my mind, but the resonance in O’Neill’s movement with a popular, punchy style of dance, lingers. There’s definitely something sexy and radically hip about these more rigorous choreographic sequences. This impression may be enhanced by her costume (by Sandra Andersen) of a short dress, bustier-style top and knee pads.

Dunphy played 1 female and 2 male characters who all work around the central female protagonist. She, in turn, seems in some ways to conjure them into being. The idea of characterisation is never straightforward in this work, but costume, actions and voice are utilised to distinguish 4 separate ‘players.’ Dunphy also spoke but it wasn’t simply a case of spoken text and various characterisations filling in the information suggested by the mute, but physically articulate, O’Neill. The dialogue was obtuse and delivered with a forced theatricality that deflected any straightforward reading, and little of the text stayed with me perhaps for that reason. One character walked casually into the action, hands in pockets, speaking in a relaxed drawl. The other male character entered with a glittering and dramatic flourish, dressed in a dark suit and hat in Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal mode, throwing off a couple of Jackson’s moves and poses. The second female character appeared only briefly, perhaps as the displaced woman in the sculpture, asking for her lover’s return.

The gaze plays an important role throughout with the performers looking directly out at the audience or at the ice wall, at one point singling out spectators and consequently drawing them into the drama. This redirection of the gaze, away from each other on stage and through what is beyond their physical presence, is so essential to the work that the final moment when 2 of the characters lock eyes is shattering. The themes of seduction, desire, romance and ‘first love’ emerged for me mainly through this refraction of the gaze, loosening these overworked ideas from any specific identity and bouncing them between the stage and audience, but also through the figure of O’Neill, physically drenched in a sort of love-sick and desperate inertia.

Vinildas Gurrukal Masterclass

Vinildas Gurrukal’s masterclasses in Kalaripayatt, the traditional martial art of Kerala in southern India, are part of the 6-week Igneous residency at Brisbane Powerhouse. Igneous’ co-artistic directors, James Cunningham and Suzon Fuks, say their work with Gurrukal grew out of time spent in India where they were impressed by the quantity and variety of physical skills. The nature of Gurrukal’s body practices and his willingness to share resources provided them with not only an artistic collaborator, but a training methodology. Kalaripayatt involves exercising the mind as well as body and has an intensely spiritual dimension. The class begins and ends with salutations directed at a Hindu icon, placed in the corner of the room, and proceeds with a meditative focus and mood.

As in Lucas’ workshop, the members of the class come from varied backgrounds, some with dance training, some circus and martial arts disciplines. The choreographic quality of Kalaripayatt, with its emphasis on agility rather than strength and on defensive moves rather than offensive, is demonstrated when Gurrukal partner’s each participant one-on-one. The student repeats Gurrukal’s movements so there’s a mirroring of his actions, a to and fro rhythm that has a swinging follow-through as opposed to an aggressive attack. Gurrukal can obviously do these movements in his sleep, watching each group of activity in the room and giving instructions while sparring. The eye choreography exercises are particularly intriguing, obviously designed to fix challengers in their sights, but looking very flirtatious.

Igneous Playshops

Gurrukal’s work with Igneous has also inspired the Lismore-based company to incorporate an Indian approach into their performance context. This new direction involves drawing from the geography and culture of the environment in which they are working, as well as being informed by the contingent status of the performative moment in Indian culture; the slippery shifts between warm-up and spectacle, audience attention and absence, performer and character. Hence the sight of Playshops’ participants climbing all over the interior of the Powerhouse in the Visy Foyer prior to Cazerine Barry’s Sprung.

Igneous are also continuing their investigation of video as a performance component. They utilise video in 5 ways: shooting to plan, projecting ‘live’ during the work so that the on and off screen performances correspond, utilising archival material in performance, using projection as ‘set’ and projecting onto bodies in the performance space. These approaches can overlap in any specific case and Cunningham describes it as a doubling of the performance space or “involution”.

Installations

What’s the difference between a computer program and an installation, or a video and an installation? I’m not sure, but I did enjoy the slice of 80s electronic music offered by the La Bouche program and the quick update on the transmute collective offered by the 2 videos on a loop, both in the Visy Foyer in the belly of the Powerhouse.

La Bouche was created by musician Andy Arthurs, one of the original members of the UK-based La Bouche collective, along with musician Philip Chambon and choreographer Lloyd Newson. Arthurs is now Head of Music at QUT and 2 of the dancers who worked with the group, Fiona Cullen and Shaaron Boughen, also work at QUT, hence the Brisbane interest. Newson, currently director of DV8 Dance Theatre, is of course Australian and another choreographer who worked on La Bouche’s first show, Graeme Watson, was artistic director of One Extra in Sydney for some time.

The most interesting aspects of the installation are the video clips for Reaching for Blue and La Bouche, as they give an idea of the cross-disciplinary collaborations that the group was involved in. The addition of filmmaker Peter Lydon and composer/performer Alan Belk rounded out the group’s performative range, with Belk’s “extended vocal technique” providing the signature element. The driving concept of the group was “the de-physicalisation of electronic music and its dislocation from the body”, and the use of the human voice as the basis for sampling created a distinctive sound that ranged from Manhattan Transfer on drugs to sublime choral sounds and many things in-between. Live appearances at major UK festivals and on television, video clips and recordings make up their body of work, but unfortunately there is no footage of the festival appearances.

The La Bouche video was choreographed by Newson and shares aesthetics with Phillipe Decoufle videos being made in simultaneously in France and the US, utilising rhythmic, almost graphic choreography, radical costumes and in-your-face special effects. The difference between this work and other music videos of the time (many of which were aesthetically progressive, such as the videos that accompanied the New Romantic wave in the UK) is the focus on dancers rather than singers and the originality of the choreography and some of the visual concepts. Squarish black sunglasses are de rigeur, smeared lipstick, spiky short hair and boxy red clothing, and the choreography for the 3 dancers sitting on chairs is all cool posturing with some nifty rhythmic footwork. The Reaching for Blue clip is more contemporary dance and less music video, shot in B&W with the same dancers caught in several locations. Shots of TVs and Barbie Dolls, and a jazz sensibility in the choreography, keeps things connected to the pop-culture world. La Bouche represents an enduring example of that ‘something else’ that was going on at the interface between the arts and popular music at that time.

The transmute installation has a more direct relevance to the l’attitude 27.5? program and speeds us ahead 2 decades to another interdisciplinary, multimedia collaboration. It consists of 2 looped videos; one on the making of a 1999 installation, transit_lounge (The Fantastic Adventures of Ling Change), and the other on a performance from earlier this year, Liquid Gold (The All New Adventures of Ling Change). The latter was the first outcome of the transmute collective’s residency at the Brisbane Powerhouse which will continue into 2002.

The artistic director of the collective is new media artist Keith Armstrong and Lisa O’Neill is the performer/choreographer who plays several roles in each of the works. They are joined by Gavin Sade, a multimedia interface designer, and sound designer Guy Webster. The samplers and video special effects of the 80s are replaced with digital technology, computer animation, web casting and custom built chat servers. What remains the same is a desire to find the humanity through the technology, and to that end the transmute collective are assisted by Dr Liz Baker, who brings the element of ‘philosophical ecology’ to the process, which manifests in both the form and content of the work. It informs the design of these interactive creations and produces visual elements such as the animated flowers that grow or die in response to the spectator’s interaction with the installation environment (transit_lounge).

There is obviously a strength in this collaboration that exceeds its parts, a point that is reiterated in the videos. The future for transmute is a new work, Transact, which will “produce a new ‘Net-work’ of interdependent installations connected by the Internet.” The collective’s overall aim is “putting some of the ‘liveness’ back into the work that is lost through the lo-fi images and sounds that the web currently allows.” It is hard to glean what kind of experience these real and virtual environments present to an audience. But descriptions and images of writers responding instantaneously to online performances, audience members feeling out their impact on a sensor driven installation and the cartoon-like characters dreamt up and costumed by O’Neill, all point to a warmer, fuzzier technological experience. While the overall style of the work is thoroughly contemporary, there was also a kind of comfort in the Alice in Wonderland feel of the Ling Change character and the images of O’Neill marking out her movements against a blue screen…just like Gene Kelly filming his scene with Jerry the mouse in Anchors Away.

Sprung

Cazerine Barry’s double-bill, Sprung and Lampscape, was the perfect end to my Brisbane experience. As a solo performer Barry, like O’Neill, has embraced technology, specifically digital video design, which she projects onto a scrim in front of her live solo performance. Unlike O’Neill, Barry is almost a one-woman show, liberated by the ability to pre-program. For Sprung she is credited as choreographer, devisor, digital designer and sound mixer. She is assisted in this work by associate director Rachael Spiers.

Barry appears as a 60s girl/woman both on screen and behind, dressed in a demure house frock, knee-high black socks and flat black shoes. The plan of a house is super-imposed over the action and has a Patrick Caulfield-esque look, especially later depictions of room set-ups consisting of 2D black outlines. In one such room the real Barry blows through an air vent, fluttering the virtual Barry’s skirt, then the action is reversed. Humour runs through the piece and the kitschy 60s music operates through the same wild and abandoned editing process as the visuals. Constant transformation is the outstanding element of the work and I was surprised at the end to find myself back where I started with the house floor plan and the 2 Barrys. The visual, aural and cultural sidetrips on this journey take full advantage of the mutability of virtual environments, while directly reflecting the central theme of the work; “a dislocated sense of home and place” and the Australian dream of home ownership.

In a frenzy of capitalistic excess, Barry drives a coin like a steering wheel and poses in one of her many neat ‘frames’ beside prime-ministers’ portraits, subtly mocking their posturing. A male character appears who shrinks and grows all over the place. A monkey head and a skeleton frame Barry on either side as she sings and dances to a cute 30s tune, Busy Line. Then the image of a foetus appears with a corresponding voiceover and Barry is cocking her leg in a disturbing manner, crotch to the audience like a dog. The misty effect of the scrim clouds our vision of her at times and the roughness of some of the video images colludes with this effect to point to the presence of the technology. Barry has fun with these new tools and utilises them in a personable and relevant way.

With the choreography, I again have a sense of limitless possibilities. Barry appears to do whatever is right for this character in the various situations she finds herself in. Tap dancing, Charleston, go-go, stylised everyday gestures…She keeps pulling things out of her choreographic box of tricks as rapidly as the virtual world she has created leads us through its trippy labyrinth. Popular and social dance somehow makes perfect sense in this environment.

In Lampscape Barry is joined by sound designer Adrian Hauser and costume designer Anna Tregloan. This piece has a similar format to Sprung but a much darker tone, beginning with Barry rolling across the base of the scrim. The shadowing effect is more eerie than amusing now, the colonial figure changing size and multiplying like a ghost dredged up from the past and appearing on the screen by mistake. Rocking chairs, outback landscapes, stuffed kangaroos and a heavy ornamental proscenium frame (sometimes featuring old-fashioned doilies) conjure a colonial culture across generations. This piece features more extended dance sequences, both in terms of their length and the breadth of movement, with the ghosting effect forcing the audience to draw the figure out of the darkness.

l’attitde 27.5º: Creating from the Body 1, physical performance workshop with Brian Lucas, Stores Studio, Sept 23; Rodin’s Kiss, Lisa O’Neill & Caroline Dunphy, Sept 19-23; Masterclass with Vinildas Gurrukal, Stores Studio, Sept 8-Oct 13; La Bouche: A Retrospective, Visy Foyer, Sept 19-Oct 14; Transmute, Visy Foyer, Sept 19-Oct 14; Igneous Playshops, Turbine Rehearsal Room, Sept 5-Oct 13; Sprung, Cazerine Barry, Visy Theatre, Sept 26-30; Brisbane Powerhouse.

Butoh’s founder Tatsumi Hijikata once reflected that a body that rests upon straight legs is a body equipped with reason, while that on bent legs lies at the edge of reasonable understanding (Jean Viala, Nourit Masson-Sekine, eds, Butoh: Shades of darkness, Tokyo, Shufunotomo, 1991). Mixed Metaphor 2001 abounded with dancers whose forms rose above the ground with an uneasy step. Opera Somatica for example offered a study of empty, externalised identity which concluded with a near naked performer tottering before a projection of cracked soil, while Lynne Santos bent low to the floor to transform her body, sensorium and movement into a sympathetic environmental system.

The highlight was the latest collaboration from Butoh-trained Yumi Umiumare and Grotowski-trained Tony Yap. Umiumare and Yap have often come together for others (Kagome, Meat Party) as well as their own productions, of which How Could You Even Begin to Understand? comprised the 9th to 12th versions. Over the past 6 years they have developed a sensitivity finely tuned not only to each other’s movements, but also each other’s states and microscopic energy fluxes. They venture far beyond their original training into a fluid, loving, meditative discipline which is as close as many of us will come to shamanistic techniques—though their work is no more fully described by such terms than it is by postmodernist performance art. The communion and slight return that they enacted simply by moving past each other was redolent of soft restraint, generously deferred violence, uninhibited, chaotic improvisation, and structured, minimal abstraction.

The distinctiveness of this compassionate vision of sympathetic, physical, ‘chaos without limit’ is especially apparent in light of the visit to Melbourne of Butoh luminary Min Tanaka earlier this year. Ironically, Yap and Umiumare have produced their most individual aesthetic yet by returning to a style strongly akin to that of Tanaka’s nearly prop-less, terrifying yet joyful, physical amorphousness. This artistic progression in Umiumare and Yap is echoed by that of their sometime collaborator Santos.

Though Santos is a superb, multi-disciplinary performer, she has tended to be slightly overshadowed in her work with Yap and Umiumare. Her latest self-devised solo however has definitively established her as an independent artist with her own take on these traditions. Santos has a taut yet soft presence all her own, with that slightly deferred sense of gender one finds in Laurie Anderson’s performances: not quite ‘feminine’, yet not ‘masculine’—a cool, relaxed elegance.

In Desert Country—A body record Santos epitomised the performative ideal of existing in and through space. Her body was like a bead on a string or a sieve in water, a porous site through which air and space flows. Santos spinning while holding a basic flag, literally generating a sympathetic response in the windy ether, was a particular highlight. Using a mixture of stripped-back anthropomorphisms, open-armed salutes to the skies, and pseudo-pleasurable tremors, she reproduced not only the physical memory of what it is to be in the desert, but what it is to be desert. This was beautifully enhanced by Nik Pajanti’s lighting. For How Could You Even Begin? Pajanti provided amber streams tightly confined to Yap, Umiumare and the path that connected them. In Desert Country however the whole space darkened or glowed with colour in response to Santos’ emotional states.

Martin Kwasner’s ‘body-map’ from Legless Lizard was rather different. The closest comparison to his solo is Trevor Patrick’s Continental Drift (1997). Both comprise a psychokinetic auto-portrait. The body is described by light (here large illuminated slits, and projected close-ups of body parts), choreography and text to produce an abstract biography. Whereas Continental Drift had a striking sense of cyclic cohesion, Kwasner produced a pleasing sense of disparity and montage. His fluid yet various movement phrases functioned similarly to the filmic mise en scene of Robert Altman and Quentin Tarantino. To quote The Simpsons: “There is no moral—it’s just a bunch of stuff that happens!” Kwasner’s solo operated on a prosaic, humorous level while also hinting at deeper relationships and experiences (an unnamed soul-mate, an unexplained affinity for the feeling of rain).

The irregular surges of momentum and angularity which have tended to define the work of Lucy Guerin and some other Melbourne choreographers played only a small part in Kwasner’s solo. Nevertheless the extremely expressive abstraction he produced recalled Guerin’s more dramatically accessible yet conceptually dense combinations of late (notably The Ends of Things). Kwasner’s more rounded, ‘user-friendly’, choreography represents the new face of this trend, which sits well alongside the post-Butoh movement to which Melbourne also home.

Mixed Metaphor, season curator Helen Herbertson: How Could You Even Begin to Understand? Version #9-#12, performers/devisers Tony Yap, Yumi Umiumare; Wall Pieces, performers/devisers Wendy Morrow, Leigh Hobba; FashionMotionExhibit, BODY, choreographers Natalie Cursio & dancers, performers Shona Erskine, Danika Barnett, Anna Burgess, Kimberly Lawrence, Elsie Nelson, Felicity Pearson, Ellise Peart, Leana Rack; Mask, Opera Somatica, performer/deviser Elizabeth Keen, operator/performer Circle K; Desert Country—A body record, performer/deviser Lynne Santos; Legless Lizard, choreographer/performer/writer Martin Kwasner; Dancehouse, Melbourne, Sept 13 – 22

A large red curtain diagonals the stage. Between it and the audience, a triangle of earth, a music hallish forestage. A performer opens the curtain, more soil, tall tufts of dead grass, the wall of a house built from old cupboards, trunks and wardrobes, adorned with stuffed native animals and a piano—later to be played by a wombat. Along the adjoining, long black wall, a row of gas jets—a very old house, a theatre from another century? For Beatrix Christian’s Old Masters, a neo-Shakespearean comedy with a droll Chekhovian discursiveness, director Benedict Andrews and designer Justin Kurzel have created a magical double world where relationships between individuals can be scrutinised with an acid, poetic realism and the thin line between life and art can be writ large like a fable, one in which all will end…well enough. Disbeliefs are rapidly suspended, characters break into affecting song (mock pop, Sondheim, Schubert, Waits), the hired help (an opera chorine, name of Henry [Frank Whitten]) lurks with a skull mask, doubling as Death, witness to the torments of lovers in a magic circle of trees. A shocking death will only be a dream…but life will never be the same. As well, our hostess is unwilling: “I’m a muse, not a narrator”, objects Fleur Wattle (Jacki Weaver) the ageing, life-long nude model to Lillian Fromm, the great artist (Robyn Nevin) who is suffering the painter’s block on which hinges a large part of the play’s outcome.

The Fromm family have gathered, each with their own burden, each in search of some resolution or preservation. Lillian’s former husband, womaniser (including an affair with Fleur) and heart-attack candidate Gordon (Max Cullen), is on hand with his second wife, Dorotéa (Julie Forysth), at first appearance a tough petit bourgeois out to get half of Lillian’s property. She is, but we grow to understand her charitable motive for refugee women. There’s Lillian and Gordon’s son, Ford (Aaron Blabey), a postal contractor, an escapee from his mother’s greatness, and from an affair with Fleur which will threaten the bond with his father. However, Ford’s determination to achieve ordinariness is usurped by his love for Vivika, a junkie poet, whom Lillian seizes on as her new muse. Will Lillian be inspired anew? Will Vivika stay with Lillian and be freed of her drug dependency? Will Ford lose the love of Vivika and his father? Can Dorotéa get Gordon to will her his share of Lillian’s land? Will Gordon die unloved? What kind of life does Fleur face, ageing, stripped of lovers, fully clothed and nobody’s muse?

The establishing of this interlocking set of emotional dilemmas is dazzlingly realised. Christian’s dialogue is alive with sharp one liners, rhyme and half rhyme and a compelling aphoristic drive as well as that Australian rarity, a distinctive voice for each character. Andrews provides a theatrical sleight of hand that allows complex emotional moments to be dealt with briskly, comically and with a fitting, choreographed physical intensity. He sustains this to the very end, but on the way something has gone wrong, or missing, been thinned out. The words stop hitting home, we’re witnessing economy resolutions, simple homilies, mere narration. It’s unnerving. After all we’ve been through, is this it?

The pivotal moment in Act II, before the play seems to fade, is the sneak preview of Lillian’s painting of Vivika, a marvellous physical and verbal dance of a scene in which Vivika, Fleur and Dorotéa interpret the artwork. Whose feet are they? Vivika’s? She is so proud. But what do they represent? Christ’s feet? Yes. But they’re old feet. Fleur’s feet! Fleur is ecstatic, the muse once more. Lillian, emerging from the dark, says yes, they are Fleur’s, but announces that she has no more need of her. Fleur collapses. Nor, we soon see, will Lillian need Vivika. Just herself…she ponders self-portraits. It gets a laugh. It fosters a thought. Of all the characters—and despite Robyn Nevin’s fine, restrained portrait of a self-possessed, sometimes inadvertantly cruel person, never wifely, rarely motherly, always the artist—this is the one character who is most symbolic and the least actual. Her few moments of interiority are conveyed largely in song; she has few protracted exchanges with the others; little they do impinges on her. Of course, Fleur is at the centre of a play, finally enjoying playing narrator, coming to grips with her loss…but all this is pretty perfunctory in the end, as if there is nothing that can be said between her and Lillian, not even the struggle to speak. Expectations are high, outcomes low. Perhaps the adherence to a comic vision curtailed pushing the emotional limits, kept Lillian in the artist box. But the history of comedy is full of sublime darkness.

These worries don’t extend to the performances which are formidable, suggesting the outer reaches to which the play doesn’t always extend. Leeana Walsman excels in an off-the-edge performance, the tottering, ankle-collapsing, shooting-up junkie poet in love with Ford but glimpsing salvation as a muse, knowing that a return to ordinary life means death—and to it she goes.

There is so much to relish and treasure in Old Masters that it seems niggardly to criticise it for what it doesn’t perhaps aspire to. However, there were many who thought that Beatrix Christian’s The Governor’s Family was a great play. The playwright got a critical thrashing for it. With Fred and Old Masters under her belt and the critics’ warm approval, it’s to be hoped that her adaptations of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters (STC, 2001) and Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (STC 2002) will encourage Christian to explore the outer limits of her vision in her own next play.

Beatrix Christian, Old Masters, director Benedict Andrews, designer Justin Kurzel, composer Max Lambert, lighting Nigel Levings, costumes Fiona Crombie; Wharf 1, Sydney Theatre Company, opened October 17

Our cover image says it all on 2001. Ian Haig’s scary and suggestive Excelsior 3000—Bowel Technology Project mocks the banal functionalism of the application of new technologies with an image of constipated privacy hooked into a world rendered entirely virtual. These days media veils, governmental obfuscations and censorships combine with the dreamside of new media to closet us in cosy fantasias. No wonder cyberactivism is on the rise (see TILT).

Meanwhile RealTime keeps the lines open with an edition packed with reports and responses from across Australia (welcome Warrnambool) and beyond to the Yokohama Triennale and Britain’s In-Yer-Face theatre.

RealTime staff wish you well in these harsh times. However powerless we might feel in yet another New World Order, we need to be active on behalf of Afghani and other refugees in a time when an insular Australia’s primary forays into the world seem to be military.

On the edge of Fortitude Valley, as Brunswick Street heads into New Farm, just minutes away by car from the remarkable Brisbane Powerhouse is another astonishing addition to the Queensland arts scene—The Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts (JWCCA). At the very moment that post-election rumour sweeps Australia suggesting to the small to medium performing arts companies that the federal inquiry into their well-being will come to nothing, here is a new, magnificently equipped home for 7 Brisbane-based contemporary arts companies and organisations: IMA (Institute of Modern Art), Expressions Dance Company, Rock’n’Roll Circus, Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Performing Arts, ELISION new music ensemble, AFTRS (Australian Film Television & Radio School, Queensland branch) and The Arterial Group.

JWCCA is big, 2 buildings fused into one by Michael Rayner of Cox Rayner Architects: the old Empire office furniture store (facing the main road) and, behind it, the Bushells tea and coffee factory (the artwork faded but still visible from the street). Near the corner of Brunswick and the adjoining side street, a glass tower gives the building its unity and contemporary character. A few steps down the side street and onto a gently sloping terraced courtyard (bounded by a low stone wall inscribed with some of Judith Wright’s verse) and you’re at the glass-walled entrance to the IMA. Back on the busy main road, the building is lined with shopfronts waiting to be leased and the main entrance. The latter gives immediate access to the theatre at the centre of the building, those organisations on the ground floor, and, wisely, alternative access to the IMA. The foyer includes an installation (not functioning on my visit), a dedication to Judith Wright, the poet and activist after whom the building is named, lift access to the other levels of the building, a bar and an adjoining outdoor balcony.

For IMA Director Michael Snelling and Expressions General Manager Abel Valls the journey to the opening of the centre has been a long hard haul over many years. A mid-90s Green Paper on the needs of small to medium arts organisations prompted the Coalition state government to purchase the site. A change of government to Labor meant re-charging the project, seeking the support of Arts Minister Matt Foley, who persuaded cabinet colleagues to run with it, and investing an enormous amount of time in negotiating with organisations and architects. Valls says that he and Snelling once estimated that they were each spending at least a day per week on planning and negotiating for years. Issues included getting the theatre right, providing quality studio spaces for the performing arts companies, sane acoustics (with performing arts companies working in such close juxtaposition), security, live-in artist studios, workshops, a loading dock, freight lift and good storage space. The cost was $15.25m and the building and everything in it looks worth every cent.

The companies pay rent for their spaces and the theatre is available for hire to outside users. It has a large, flexible performing area, excellent height and a catwalk, freight lift access to all levels, excellent lighting equipment and seating for 200. The seating is retractable (push-button, 15 minute operation) making the space ideal for all kinds of performance. For a company like Expressions, the number of seats means that while the theatre will be ideal for developing new works, for small seasons and hosting guest companies (like Singapore’s Odyssey Dance Theatre in 2002) its not going to achieve the kind of box office that their Queensland Performing Arts Centre seasons do in a couple of weeks. But, says Valls, the JWCCA provides them with the very flexibility they need.

Under the artistic direction of Maggi Sietsma, Expressions tours internationally, throughout Queensland and beyond to schools and art centres, and runs choreographic workshops and community dance classes. Their major operations are now very much under one roof and the JWCCA is custom built to match the company’s needs. Valls says that within a few weeks the company felt totally at home in the building, a significant test after spending 15 years in their previous one above a Hare Krishna restaurant and miles from their 2 storage spaces out near the airport. A stairway leads up from the company offices (reception, direction, management, production, promotion, design etc) to a large dance studio with lighting bars (for workshop performances for audiences of up to 60), a perfect dance floor (the best of some 6 prototypes), natural light, and the choice of fresh or conditioned air. Expressions christened the new theatre with Sketches III revealing its capaciousness and versatility.

Rock’n’Roll Circus, one of Australia’s leading physical theatre companies, has a more modestly sized office but a very impressive studio with plenty of height for performers to swing and to toss each other about. Artistic Director Yaron Lifschitz is clearly very pleased with the space and the facilities. The theatre though is of less immediate significance because of the hire cost and the company’s successful partnership with the Brisbane Powerhouse. However, the JWCCA is ideal for the company for rehearsal, management and the projected creation of their Circus Training Centre and for community workshops including with young blind people in a project with the Royal Blind Foundation. Like Expressions, the JWCCA is a base for national and international touring, with New Zealand and Europe in the company’s sights.

ELISION new music ensemble has an impressive record of extensive national and international touring and collaborations (see Dark Matter, p36). ELISION’s brand of contemporary music can at times be aggressively if sublimely loud. Abel Valls claimed he could sit in his office and not hear Daryl Buckley, ELISION’s Artistic Director, practising the Transmission electric guitar series for Dark Matter in the studio below.

Also resident in the Judith Wright Centre are Kooemba Jdarra who nurture Indigenous artists in all aspects of theatre and have a fine track record of premieres and touring works. The community new media Arterial Group were featured in RealTime 45 (p29) with their monumental, international collaboration with San Francisco sound installation artist Barry Schwartz.

IMA has 3 gallery spaces, 2 workshops and 3 fully furnished artist studios. The substantial gallery spaces, 2 of them large and one intimate, all currently feature works by Queenslander Robert Macpherson. These are fine, cool, spaces to wind through taking in Macpherson’s droll vision. IMA can present 15 to 20 exhibitions involving around 100 artists a year, as well as publish 10 titles ranging from small catalogues to substantial volumes containing the work of some 50 writers and artists. The JWCCA should give the IMA the increased visibility it warrants.

There are some challenges for JWCCA. The name of the centre is hardly a good hook for attracting audiences. As well, while it’s nice to honour Judith Wright, it’s a little odd to do so in a centre that has no literary organisations. Certainly the name of the theatre (as yet unannounced) will need careful consideration. The kind of stores that front the building will also shape public attitudes. A couple of the centre’s residents thought that a bookshop (in a large suburban area devoid of one) would be ideal…but unlikely. One thing however seems certain, Fortitude Valley and the densely populated New Farm with its growing number of restaurants, cinemas and cafes and a 25-40 age demographic, could provide an immediate audience for the JWCCA theatre and gallery.

The most significant thing about the JWCCA is that it is that Australian rarity, a civilised, well-appointed home for arts companies where they can develop new work, sustain extant work, teach, workshop, have artists truly in residence and be accessible to the other artists and the public. Like the very different Brisbane Powerhouse (a performance venue, but crucially also a producer), the Judith Wright Centre for the Contemporary Arts is a complex production house, a model for other Australian states to take a long serious look at.

While most of the major arts companies of Australia provide expensive entertainment to those who can afford it, it is the smaller creators who are the innovators, uniquely representative of Australian culture and much more likely to be welcomed and applauded overseas. In most other states of Australia, companies of this scale desperately await the justice that will give them decent working conditions and homes in which work can be consistently developed.

The Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, 420 Brunswick St Fortitude Valley, Qld.

I can’t vouch for the Turkish-Australian content of Doctor Akar’s Women, a first play from Antonia Baldo a young Australian resident in London where she’s having her first feature film screenplay produced in 2002. She’s visited Turkey but freely admits (though refusing to go into any detail) that her play is about her own family but filtered through another culture. Whatever its provenance and regardless of its first play failings, Doctor Akar’s Women is a fine work about masculinity—a study of the male child of a father who suicided, his situation complicated by unresolved cultural and sexual tensions.

Akar is a doctor, a general practitioner, born in Australia of a Turkish immigrant father and an Australian mother. On the one hand he appears benign, a storyteller, passing on family lore—to the women who langorously surround him as the play opens—and casually interested in his cultural origins, signalled by the small moments of male Turkish dance he slips into, usually when he’s on his own. He is indifferent to his wife, distant from his surgeon-trainee daughter who is desperate for his advice and emotional support as she learns to cut up corpses in class. On the grounds that his sister’s estranged lover behaves a little like he’s gay, Akar mocks her desire to return to the relationship. Harry is also totally removed from his formidable mother. Harry Akar is not a nice man. That is one of the Baldo’s great strengths, the ability to create a man who is superficially amiable, who expects to be heard but does not listen, and the will to keep him unlikeable.

Without having yet to spend any sympathy on Harry, we gradually accumulate material for a murky case study. He loves and hates the father who suicided when he was 12. Harry was abandoned; Harry in turn abandons all about him. But he treasures the memory and the storytelling of the father, he becomes him in a way, entangled in the unresolved love between his mother and father, wanting to blame his mother for his betrayal. Harry Akar is afraid of love, of commitment. His wife Connie reminds him that his political activism at university attracted her—he can’t remember it, he says, abusing her for her Double Bay lifestyle and financial dependence. Harry is a case, and while we can’t sympathise, we can understand, and we can foresee the hell into which he is about to cast himself.

Harry has an affair with a patient with advanced tuberculosis who seeks him out because he has a reputation for handing out drugs, no questions asked. Despite, or because of, her death wish Harry is drawn to her, wants to help her, leaves his family, tries to move in with her in one of the play’s most discomfiting scenes. Here is a woman who is used to being alone with herself and an imminent death. But the world moves on regardless of Harry; the woman dies, his daughter masters the challenge of surgery, his sister reunites with her lover, his wife forms a relationship with Harry’s accountant, and Harry has to learn the complexity of his mother’s feelings about her husband’s suicide. Harry has lost a lot, gained some, been uprooted from the saturnine ease of cynicism. Unfortunately the play’s final scenes manage these resolutions too briskly, too comfortably. However, Dr Akar's Women stays with you: at a deeper level than the functional ending there's something extremely disturbing in the constellation of a fracturing family, the mystery of suicide, an initiation into surgery, and an affair between a man on the verge of emotional death and a woman whose body has betrayed her.

Sandro Colarelli plays the challenging role of Harry with a dextrous physical ease and a Kevin Kline charm that constantly and bitterly undercuts itself. Angela Punch McGregor is surprisingly tough as Harry's mother, in her own way not unlike Harry—the forceful surface belies unresolved grief. Overall, the cast is strong, the multicultural mix a reminder how predominantly Anglo our mainstages still are.

Antonio Baldo, Dr Akar's Women, director Ros Horin, designer Catherine Raven, costumes Karin Thorn, lighting Chris Yates, musical director Max Lyandvert; Griffin Theatre Company, Oct 5 – Nov 10

Gerard Van Dyck’s Collapsible Man was an immediate hit at this year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival. Van Dyck plays a whimsical, vaudevillian character, living out of a portable, intricately constructed box. Chair and table slot in and out, a bed of sorts springs out, doors form and reform. Van Dyck purports to lecture his audience—an interminable, anatomical collage is wound out of an overhead projector like an old musical box. God knows what kind of body snakes out, bones connected to implausible bones. He flips, slips and somersaults within the context of presenting his ‘ideas’ to the audience.

There is a gentle grace to this character, as if he might have been a renowned academic if he could only stop the impossibility of his own eccentricities. Instead though, it seems he is an itinerant of ideas. Some of his suggestions are simply lewd, however; an orifice is used to engulf his body to hilarious effect. Straddling the roof of his dilapidated abode, Van Dyck is finally confronted with a blinking neon sign: a giant arrow points stage left. At last, the penny drops, and Van Dyck sits down at the piano to sketch a musical conclusion.

Van Dyck uses all his dancerly skills in a very understated fashion. The result is an endearing presentation, oddly reminiscent of Brian Lipson’s A Large Attendance in the Antechamber (RT 41 p25), in the sense that both pieces involve strong performances of weird people from another time and place.

Little Asia Dance 2001 showed 5 dance works in Melbourne, before touring the lot to Hong Kong, Taipei, Korea and Japan. The first half of the show consists of 3 solos by women. Although coincidental, the dancing in these works is not dissimilar. Li Mei-Kuang’s The Last 15 Minutes (Taipei) is an emotional but dancerly presentation of a sense of yearning. Done with commitment, I have a sense however that there is a certain holding back from looking the audience in the eye. Hyan-Hea Bang’s Flashback (Korea) is more in-your-face, about self and identity, face and representation, involving 2 rows of pictures, which she uses dramatically. Wai-mei Yeung’s Tango of Water Sleeves (Hong Kong) is the most stimulating. Beginning with a stiletto walk along the back wall, in front of video projections of text, Wai-mei uses the space of the theatre more than her predecessors. The last segment is very effective, with canny use of video projections of a Beijing Opera character on her own body, effecting a virtual duet with herself.

The second half features the boys—Australian Brett Daffy and Japan’s Tsuyoshi Ozawa. Daffy shows Ward: Human Meat Processing Works about subjection and manipulation. He performs his suffering through dancing a distorted body that is artificially modified. His movement is both stunning and hermaphroditic. Ozawa’s piece is the more dramatic, about death, performed to Purcell’s famous lament from Dido & Aeneas. Ozawa has an incredibly flexible back that he uses to the max to convey feeling.

The Collapsible Man, choreographer/ performer Gerard Van Dyck, Melbourne Fringe Festival, Dancehouse, Oct 12-20; Little Asia Dance 2001: Hirano, solos by Li Mei Kuang, Hyan-Hea Bang, Wai-mei Yeung, Brett Daffy & Tsuyoshi Ozawa, C.U.B. Malthouse, Melbourne, Sept 27-29

Along with the usual insights into the ideas of new Australian photo artists this year’s Photo Technica Award Exhibition, The Whole Picture offers exercise for the eyes.

The lush coloured lambda print on the wall just inside the door could be anything anywhere. In one of a series entitled Conjecture, Samuel Phelps’ eagle-eyed aerial view of “the banal spaces we inhabit” (ie domestic interiors), colour and form offer an intriguing optical puzzle.This is the sort of picture that has people doing little head bobbing dances in front of it.

Heightening the theatricality of the celebrity chef portrait, one of Paul County’s black and white series on Tasmanian restaurateurs is posed in a museum set with a giant kangaroo. All is revealed when the photographer, who used to work in the hospitality industry, tells me that the chef in the picture came from South Africa and found no demand in Hobart for his skills in cooking wild animals.

“The world looks beautiful through a Hasselblad,” says David van Royen. Something of this young photographer’s broader vision is captured in these 2 examples from his series (him self) featuring men who are “no longer boys, (but) individuals moving beyond their prolonged adolescence… struggling with what it is to be male in today’s changing community.” The photographer takes only 3 or 4 shots, his subjects posed or “paused” in doorways. Not so taken with life caught candidly, Van Royen negotiates gestures or moves in intuitive interactions with his subjects and together they subtly re-constitute thema for the camera.

For a moment Paul Knight’s panoramic type C print of one of those peekaboo sex salons makes a desultory scene look glamorous. But before your eyes the pink light and mirrored surfaces give way to the worn exercise mat, the vase of dead flowers and the line of private portals which remind you how much the truth of this vision depends on your perspective. I look forward to other sightings in this photographer’s ongoing project of “questioning escapist vistas”. Nice one.

Catherine Brease haunts more familiarly ambiguous spaces (abandoned industrial sites) imbued with that enigmatic quality—presence, in her Pendulous Series. Rebecca Ewer stages spooky little tableaux with plastic models in Thalassa Park. Eleni Daviskas restages dream places by dramatically lighting and colouring urban landscapes at night.

There’s more to Shannon Sutherland’s project than meets the eye. She’s interested in “the physical and metaphysical nature of ownership.” Her subjects are the objects that she lives with but “the sense of possession is suggested without revealing their physical form.” Certainly in these 3 prints Shannon gives little away but I was intrigued by the idea and returned to them for another look. And though I thought I had outgrown dolly photographs, Keira Cooper managed to evoke sharp childhood memory (smell and touch combining with the visual) from closeups of scratched plastic cheeks, sand inside a sealed ear and a scalp threaded with nylon hair.

Kirsten Podlich set out to explore the people and the domestic interiors of the Fassifern Lutheran Parish of South East Queensland but came back with only evidence. Along with the photographer, we stare blankly at elderly people caught in the glare inside their own homes, framed by their idiosyncrasies.

Twelve finalists were selected for this show from 180 entries by emerging photographic artists from across the country.

My pick for the prize was Rebecca Ann Hobbs for her idiosyncratic Suck Roar series—3 self-portraits with possums, squid and very large dog. Hobbs is taken with “femininity and ferocity, wetness and hunger, fear and affinity” She took me with her. Hobbs was the runner up. The judges (Judy Annear photography curator Art Gallery of NSW, photo-media artist Rosemary Laing and ACP Director, Alasdair Foster) chose Daniel Shipp for his meticulously crafted series The Jettisoned State. Here performances are created for the camera to elicit “unspecified feelings” from the viewer. Mostly these reminded me of Hal Hartley movies I haven’t seen yet. The judges describe Daniel’s work as “enigmatic but knowing without ever falling into cliche…” and having “a sophisticated understanding of the visual language employed that engages the viewer and makes them an equal participant.”

Daniel Shipp graduated this year with BRA Honours from the School of Fine Arts, University of Sydney. Rebecca Ann Hobbs is in her final year of a BFA degree at the Victorian College of the Arts.

The Nikon Award for ACP Student of the Year went to Holly Schumacher and the runner-up was Kirstie Rickwood.

Australian Centre for Photography Photo Technica Award for New Australian Photo-Artist of the Year 2001, November 16-December 23, Australian Centre for Photography, Oxford Street, Paddington.

Whenever you attend a show at Performance Space, you walk along a corridor either side of which are small gallery spaces. Sometimes the rooms are crammed with people attending the opening of an exhibition. At other times a solo artist like Jonathon Sinatra can be observed making work in progress. Sometimes you stop and watch for a while on your way to the box office. Sometimes you simply walk past.

On the way to Eat My Shorts, I happened into George Khut’s installation and almost missed the show I’d come to see. To describe the elements gives little sense of their combined effect. In the dark, on 2 lightweight screens are projected black and white images of the dancer Wendy McPhee. Layered over her fragmented movement is a flickering text. Words and limbs fly as in some wild rewind to a score that sounds like film spooling or slides shuddering and with a hint of distant voices.

Sitting at either end of the installation my eyes choreograph a subliminal dance from a language of barely detected forms and lightning fast words, sometimes projected backwards. George Khut has plans to extend this work and show it more extensively. It certainly deserves a longer look and a wider audience. Like so much impressive work being created these days, this one surprises us as it comes into view, briefly flares and leaves only a light trace.

Welcome to postmodernism, where without regular excursions into the outdoors, artists have fallen prone to a pestilent force other than nature. Stylistically the artists in ::contagion:, an exhibition of Australian work, are a generation raised on globalised visual culture imported via the television; their work representing what they have ‘seen.’ Curator Linda Wallace describes these artists as using media forms as ‘the machine’ for reprocessing images into art—a form of time machine.

Kate Murphy’s Britney Love, uses television style as performance. Displayed on 6 floor monitors, in pop-girl/boy group formation, an 11-year-old from Glasgow makes public a private performance derived from watching similarly styled performances on television. Britney Love has provoked strong responses from viewers, some taking issue with the artist’s apparent abuse of power over a minor. While Murphy, with her access to a camera might have been in a position of power, the child is (despite the probability of retrospective embarrassment) manufacturing a dream legitimised by watching television. That this idea comes from a mainstream form is a good adjunct to the notion of pedophiles lurking in the dark recesses of the net waiting to snap up innocent children. Artistic vision was once considered to be representative of society in general. A work like Murphy’s throws the modernist concept of the uniquely individual artist back in the face of the viewer.

New media exhibitions pose some prickly questions; like how ‘new’ does media need to be and is copying onto new technologies muddying the waters? Without advocating any tardy purity of materials, just how ‘new’ is PhotoShop? Perspectives on technology are momentarily focused on the newest, raising the issue of how an art of new media might fare. In some senses, ‘new media’ shows how much art appreciation involves backtracking away from literal meaning. Audiences to new media exhibitions might arrive with the expectation of finding ‘self-absorbed’ video or cinematic SFX displays but are dumbfounded when confronted with the likes of Vivienne Dadour’s, Realm, a paper-based text and photographic work. After all, Realm, in reproducing colonial government texts on controlling non-British immigrants, and utilising such passé media as paint, is the stuff of most, plain flavored, contemporary art shows. Meanwhile Matthew Riley’s Memo, presented on CD-ROM, has the look and feel of a picture book. In this way, ::contagion:: takes the approach that ‘nothing’ is ever really ‘new’; that ‘new’ is firmly grounded in the processes of the ‘old.’

In Artist, Tracey Moffatt & Gary Hillberg edit together an exposé of ‘the artist’ sampled from films and reassembled in a sequence that mimics traditional cinematic narrative structure; beginning (creation), middle (reception) and end (destruction). The artist in popular culture is a pathetic figure; their desire to represent does not have a contagious effect on the general populace. In the examples re-used by Moffat & Hillberg, artist and audience ultimately react violently towards aspirations for the ‘new’–whether stylistic and/or technological. Wallace’s own work, eurovision, re-uses imagery from film and television to re-use ideas within a contemporary context; it may be ‘new’ media but the how and what of representation still plagues artists. These works are poignant examples of how visual sampling can work. The hunger to represent despite technological change remains (whether paint brush, digital video or source code).

With the physical space showing paper-based work and using video, monitors and projection, as a screening format, the online content is where ::contagion:: ‘feels’ digital. Sites gathered here as ‘webworks’, such as subtle.net and laudible.net, show how current new mediums broaden the scope of art into wider issues of communication and broadcast. On laudible.net, the work of sound artists forms an archive of mock webcasts. These sites raise art appreciation to a new level, visually advocating technological formalism and inviting critiques of programming styles. This contrasts with the work of Gary Foley’s; here accessibility is both a visual and political strategy. The use of technology and the design of the site aim at a wide audience. In ::contagion::, these sites are a survey of Australian web activity over the past five years.

Just one quibble to finish, if Koori artists are not hooking into current urban and net-based new media communities curators could be meeting these artists on their own ground. If reconciliation is to be addressed, is this not be part of making it happen?

::contagion:: Australian Media Art @ the Centenary of Federation, curated by Linda Wallace, The Film Centre Wellington, Oct-Nov.

I adore arts festivals. Having performed in, produced for, or just hung around many of them over the years, I look forward hungrily to these opportunities to see new work, and to network and socialise with other artists.

Unfortunately I find myself living in a city where the cultural planners seem determined not to have a decent arts festival. Canberra has completely stuffed up over the last few years. We let the National Festival of Australian Theatre (and its sibling, the Australian Performing Arts Market) slip through our fingers to Adelaide. The ACT Government insisted that the old Canberra Festival was a ‘cultural’ and not an ‘arts’ festival and so it became not much more than a limp parade, a food fair for drunken yobs, and a (very expensive) Neil Cameron fire spectacle by the lake. Then it was forced into a shotgun marriage with the Multicultural Festival, which nearly killed both. Instead, the ACT Government ladles millions of dollars into a V8 SuperCar race that has no cultural relevance to our city, in the name of tourism.

But those of us who like our art fast, new and daring always had Festival of Contemporary Arts (FOCA). Fostered by Gorman House Arts Centre, FOCA always seemed subversive and held promise that there would be something to surprise. It was programmed by a curatorium. It brought many of the Canberra ex-pats back to town. Odd Productions would set up camp in the service courtyard of Gorman House with a bar and DJs and there would be a fortnight-long party. It was, simply, the most exciting time for artists in Canberra.

Tragically, the czars of the ACT Cultural Council decided that this little mutant festival had no value and took away its funding. The ensuing outcry saw a small fraction of that funding restored, but the big plans had to be abandoned. Talk about funding something to fail…but we True Believers kept our fingers crossed.

The centrepiece of the first weekend was the program of outdoor performance in Civic Square. This plaza, bounded by the ACT Legislative Assembly Building, the Canberra Theatre and the Canberra Museum and Gallery, has become the obsession of cultural planners determined to make the square into a vibrant locus of street life. It’s a futile exercise. Garema Place is the true heart of Canberra and all attempts to transplant it, as in the last Multicultural Festival, have died on the operating table.

In previous years the passing trade of Garema Place and City Walk, including an avenue of street performance and food and market stalls, created a carnival atmosphere. The opening of FOCA5 in Civic Square, by contrast, had the performers outnumbering the audience, especially in Abreaktion’s Temenos. Billed as an “alternative” tour of Canberra, Temenos was a gaggle of poets, actors, musicians and performance artists roving through installations (a great Canberra tradition) and lacking the production finesse to get its message across. Most of the time the audience simply couldn’t hear what was being spoken.

Next up was the cyber-feralism of Odd Productions. Odd’s massive set pieces have been a feature of previous editions of FOCA, and Dream Home was advertised as including the installation of a whole demountable house with transparent walls. Alas, budgetary and logistical constraints seem to have prevented this. Instead we were given some pretty, but unchallenging, physical theatre. Great visuals, great performances, great music, but lacking development in the text. Odd would benefit immensely from a dedicated and experienced writer on the team if they want to evolve beyond satire.

So, indoors for some of yer proper theatre. Gorman House’s Currong Theatre had a full program of plays and performances that proved popular. The prodigious Iain Sinclair of Elbow Theatre performed Wallace Shawn’s solo piece The Fever. It’s a thoughtful work, not much more than a monologue, examining an upper-middle-class fop developing a social conscience. It was written to be performed in lounge rooms and I’d love to see it that way. The night I went, it was followed by a self-devised solo work from Melbourne performer Scott Gooding, Pure Escapism. Gooding’s another extremely talented performer and this piece could be powerful, given time to develop some dynamics other than teeth-grittingly manic.

The party aspect was limited to 2 events, the major being artbeat at the Canberra Theatre Centre’s Link space. The daggy title presaged the slight sinking feeling I get at the notion of seeing ‘performance’ in a dance club, but this had some nice surprises (remember, the Sydney Front used to do club shows once upon a time…). The program was put together by Canberra club pioneer Sylvie Stern, who has been unstinting in promoting young artists and in trying to foster crossover between the club and the arty scenes. The mix worked exceptionally well on this occasion, with engaging performances from Beren Moloney and newcomers Flipside, and some intriguing installations by Madeleine Challender (see RT42 p36), Aimee Frodsham, Calen Robinson and John Ashauer. Of course we were really there to dance, with the bill headlined by Nicole Skeltys of B(if)tek. My booty was most shaken by the breaks of local Bec Paton.

Of the real highlights of FOCA, one was a complete surprise and the other a huge relief. Clockwork Divide was a small jewel of physical theatre devised by Blaide Lallemand, unknown to me before the festival. It featured clever and beautiful use of soap bubbles and membranes, the work of Conan the Bubbleman, that literally brought gasps of astonishment from the audience. I went back a second time with my kids, and it was standing room only.

It was a huge collective sigh of relief and gratitude that greeted CIA’s, and Director David Branson’s, stunning return to form with Demons, devised by Wayne Macaulay and loosely based on Dostoyevsky’s The Devils. Demons is a gutsy work, breathing new life into the multimedia/performance/ installation/theatre tradition that was once a Canberra trademark. It features some standout acting as well, most notably Pip Branson, who could easily make a career on the stage if he wasn’t already such a consummate musician (formerly of much-loved indie band Sidewinder and now with Something for Kate). Phil Roberts and Rebecca Rutter were also first-rate. Demons is the first work I have seen deal effectively with ramifications of the Melbourne S11 protests—the meeting scene, where the audience becomes for a moment part of a direct-action planning group, was as real as theatre gets.

In the end, the artists were able to make this festival their own once again, and the people came despite a tiny publicity budget and the absence of any work from the Australian Choreographic Centre that dominates Gorman House. Plaudits especially must go to Festival Manager Anne-Marie Peard, whose iron will and passion made FOCA work.

Ironically, between FOCA and my finishing this review, the ACT Government initiated a “Festivals Review”. Maybe Canberra will eventually have a major mainstream arts festival—but FOCA is now owned by the community of artists and if anyone tries to defund it again or make it a ‘fringe’ to something, there will be blood in the streets.

Gavin Findlay plays trombone in lounge-funk sensations CooCoo Fondoo, who put on the last night artists’ party at Gorman House.
It rocked.

After Ballett Frankfurt’s production Eidos:Telos, the radio and popular press ran hysterical with moral outrage. They claimed it was ‘not classical ballet, too difficult, too noisy, its disturbing images not suitable for children, a cultural decline, too intellectual, wilful obscurantism’ etc. The Governor’s wife registered a protest of obscenity and many audience members walked out either because of the sound or use of ‘foul language’. In Paris in 1913, a similar reception was given to the first performance by The Ballets Russes of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Nearly 100 years later in Melbourne, even the mainstream critics have failed to communicate the extraordinary achievement of Ballett Frankfurt and choreographer William Forsythe. Eidos:Telos reconstructs ballet as a serious contemporary artform, registering the pulse of the present through the technologies of its craft.

To begin with, Eidos:Telos alerted our tired senses to feeling. My hair stood on end for the sheer tension of watching line upon line of dancers walk towards a taut wire stretched the width of the open stage, only to fall away, be repelled or finally pluck the chord into deep vibration. And I held my breath to see a woman, actress Dana Casperson, whose whispered concourse with the underworld of the spider leads her to unwind a length of golden cellophane—that was glorious gown, violent crackling sound, ball of sun wrapped against the light. From the back of the throat she growls “I’m lucky, I’m lucky, I’m lucky”, only to abandon the paper and herself to a chaotic unravelling. In fury, she enacts the feminine myths of rape, madness and recovery.

What kind of vision are we present at here? In Frankfurt for a day in March, I found myself in the studio of the Frankfurt Opera watching Forsythe in rehearsal with his dancers. He was realigning sections of a larger work that I discovered later was Eidos:Telos, with different pairs, trios or larger groups. Each group worked on the vocabulary of the phrase before shaping it on the floor. There was a mood of dispersed concentration, with him watching, shifting, making contact, touching, repeating, adding, refining the details of their movement. Even those not dancing were calm and focused, exchanging notes, joining in with quiet laughter. Like all dancers there was a functional aspect to their preparation. Certain choreographic principles emerged—asymmetry, independent articulation of body parts, incomplete rotations, fall and catch—and always the twists through the torso, folds guided by a hand gesture leading to a hip rotation and back out through an awkward bend in the leg. This quality of torque, what Hillel Schwartz calls the “new kinaesthetic of the twentieth century” (J Cracy and S Kwinter eds, Zone 6: Incorporations) operates as both an ideal for new kinaesthetic experiences and a critique of those ideals. Extended torque, in a Forsythe ballet, can flow on any plane and in 2 or more directions simultaneously like the double helix. I see his dancers in Melbourne as exceptional performers of the dynamic shape of DNA. In rehearsal, he asks them to find a way that is not ‘overprepared’—hands like wings, fingers curling and stretching like a baby’s grasping at air—the primary extensions of the body emerge into the icosahedron of the kinesphere. The floor patterns are off-centre, diagonal, forward movement always being drawn back, one dancer always out of step, off to one side. I write in my diary that the quality of his dancers and the rehearsal is patient attention, in the dance I see an eccentricity kept in check by precision.

Eidos:Telos is a work in 3 parts; the first section, Self Meant to Govern, is dominated by time—clocks all over the stage and the formality of well-tempered gesture. The rigours of ballet training exemplify the impossible will of the human being to master the self against the forces of destruction, the future. A violinist, Maxim Franke, goads the dancers with intense vibrato and lots of scratching. In one trio, the male dancer tries to keep up with the spinning of the 2 women, his arms flicker above his head like an arrow aquiver. The strings are nearly breaking, the woman stops him from playing. The relief is painful. Part II with the actress and a chorus of long skirts is concerto form: multi-focal, deeply layered, climactic and never-ending. Part III reprises Part I but enters with 3 trombones. Throughout, the sound score of Tom Willems has been relentless, its saturation of space suspends the apprehension of sensibility. Christian Metz writes of the autonomous realm of “aural objects” (Yale French Studies, 1980) and I have this experience with this music; it is not before or after or illustration of the dancing, it is, at first listening, a phenomenology. So, as the trombones repeat their muted blasts, I hear guns exploding, planes crashing from the sky, bodies thundering to the ground, the wind crying. It is the end of time and it is now. The dancers fold around each other, seemingly smaller here than before but still more of them.

Why is it that reviewers tried to contain this event within the defensive parameters of known territory? Is territory what we struggle over? Forsythe is not making art from within the confines of 19th century ballet, nor of modern dance, nor dance theatre nor postmodern dance. As a contemporary artist he can appropriate all these traditions if he so wishes—deconstruct and reconstruct them in new and different combinations. He is allowed to do this, this is what composition involves. I knew Ballett Frankfurt, first and second-hand, having seen in Paris in 1998 his comic tribute to musical theatre, and observed the Leigh Warren and Australian Ballet translations of his choreography. These earlier works gave me only a partial sense of his oeuvre, emphasising either the radical displacement of stage focus or the realignment of the technical body. But his art goes further—Forsythe’s choreography is not directly or literally about the human as subject of dance. We do not have to reproduce archetypes on the stage any more, we do not have to make pretty pictures, we do not have to tell individual stories. Theatre and film gave that up mid last century and so did dance, although Australia may be slow to realise. When pressed in interview, Forsythe talks of starting points for Eidos:Telos arising from Beckett, the death of his wife, the films of Russian director Tarkovsky, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and the myth of Persephone. But these intertextual narratives do not and have not made this ballet. Choreographers, since Merce Cunningham, have often composed with structures that use unpredictable elements of movement, series, reversal and iteration. Indeed, a contemporary ballet can examine abstract principles, such as how quantum physics is organised or the ways in which clouds travel through the sky.

Postmodern formations of bodies, even where ballet is the disciplinary structure, can hover between stillness and the micro-visibility of flow. And so we see in Eidos:Telos a 6/8 swinging of 50 bodies in coloured silk skirts, swooshing, lilting backwards and forwards. They are dresses sweeping the floor, they are arms swinging in unison, they are turning, turning like flowers towards the sun. In Australian dance we almost never see that number of dancers filling a stage with polyrhythms. We are not prepared for this moment of sheer beauty, however it does not last and cannot. We must relinquish the possibility of transcendence and domination, especially since September 11. There is already something wrong with the pattern, a dancer breaks away, there is someone speaking a foreign language. One dancer turns against another and then another turns against another and then there are more and more who break step. There is a man swearing, he is in Hell. He tells us his nightmares, we hear them vividly, they are repugnant but so then is death, is dying, in the face of the rhythm of life.

Eidos:Telos was a work of great passion, intensely vocal—dancing bodies in defiance against a taut string. Without choreography that challenges old precepts and moves across boundaries, ballet will ossify and collapse. Wake up, Australia!

Eidos:Telos, choreography William Forsythe, text Dana Casperson, Ballett Frankfurt, State Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne,
Oct 17-21

Death as a vocation. The constant hunger for seduction. Entertainment as commodity fetish. Dancing with the shadow self. Four works comprise the short, sharp and shameless motif of Terrapin Theatre’s latest production Insatiable: Meat Eaters (Angela Warren), Succulent (Catherine Fargher), The Dog Within (Terrapin artists) and Lian Tanner’s Corpus Nullius.

A soldier’s desolation is interrupted by an aircraft overhead. A body drops from the sky. This event instantly alters what was before and what is to come. The soldier and a praying mantis meet over the corpse. Both are starving.

Meat Eaters offers a droll yet confronting humour. In a subversion of instinct the female mantis has failed to devour her mate’s head: “Bite me honey, I’m through.” Her failure to cannibalise denies the mantis “the sacredness of death.”

Soldier and insect anticipate death. One through vocation and the other through instinctual patterning. Performers Kirsty Grierson, Michael O’Donoghue, Melissa King and Jacob Williams manipulate the mantis with impressive dexterity. A highlight of Ben Sibson’s sound score is the percussive clack of its segmented body. Humour and pathos are compounded as the mantis and soldier confront survival in a hostile terrain.

“You know nothing about survival” taunts the mantis. In a reversal of anthropomorphism, the man/tis tutors the soldier in cannibalism as a potential strategy for survival by pouncing and devouring an emerging cicada. Although denied self-fulfilment through death, the insect encourages the soldier to hone an instinctual capacity for life. The lighting shifts. Human omnipotence and moral conscience are reduced to a fade out and the sound of chomping.

The Demeter/Persephone myth is the starting place for Succulent. Mark Cornelius’ and Hanna Pärssinen’s projected images establish the territory of seduction: a filigree of leaves overlaid by shifting gradients of green. In the midst of this viriditas appears a red-headed figure in a red dress, and a single flower. The 2 figures are separated by a swathe of red lines, bending and attracting in a Möbius of inversion and desire: “I’m kissing your stamens/pistils all over my cheek.”

Flowers spill, enhancing allure and its aftermath. The Persephone-figure insatiably seeks the sensuousness of petal against skin. Her naiveté excludes any insight into how rapidly idyll can involute into threat. A strangler vine envelops her neck. Desire and awareness are mediated by darkness. The soul’s dark domain remains an adjunct to the girl’s metamorphosis from innocence to experience.

There is little innocence evident in The Dog Within. A human-sized boxer and a poodle serve as a device to bridge the interval. The audience’s delighted response to a panoply of canine sniffing and pissing affirms the intention of the piece—the corporate market’s insatiable need for entertaining and accessible images. The Dog Within is predictable and non-challenging but will remain successful with audiences. That is its point.

Lighting designer Don Hopkins’ subtle separation between light and shadow is integral to the performance of Corpus Nullius. The Terrapin artists operate bunraku puppets to portray 2 ballet dancers; one performing in light, the other in shade. The piece potently explores the concept of compliance with an imagined ideal. The containment of Corpus Nullius on a stage within a stage enhances the fragility, nuance, and sheer bloody-mindedness of the dancers engaged in discord between 2 aspects of the one personae.

Corpus Nullius presents the familiar Jungian construct of the shadow. The shadow self struggles with the conformist self’s desire to maintain socialised predicates of acceptability. Dance is used to measure the success of attainment through the perfect tutu, the perfectly held arabesque, and the perfect music. Conformism gradually collapses. The shadow rebels, breaks out into Scottish dance patterns and refuses to sustain the arabesque while uttering stifled screams of frustration. The shadow dancer responds to different rhythms and the potential of an alternate self. Neither the disapproving tap of a point shoe, nor a deathly shaking can control the shadow’s defiance.

Finally, against the pull and counterpull of discordance, the damaged wreck of the shadow takes revenge. A tunicate-shaped bag evolves. Chasing, waiting and snatching, the bag devours the classical dancer’s insatiable desire for perfection piece by corporeal piece.

Director Jessica Wilson has assembled 4 thematically linked yet diverse pieces. Insatiable continues Terrapin’s role of amusing and bemusing audiences through visual theatre for adults, which reflects the collaborative finesse of its performance and production team.

Insatiable: Meat Eaters, writer Angela Warren; Succulent, writer Catherine Fargher; The Dog Within, devised by Terrapin artists, Corpus Nullius, writer Lian Tanner, director Jessica Wilson, designers Greg Methé & Hanna Pärssinen, performers Kirsty Grierson, Michael O’Donoghue, Melissa King, Jacob Williams, Peacock Theatre, Hobart, Nov 14-18

The Adelaide-based Memory Museum is one of the more ambitious, if sadly ephemeral, events to be celebrated for the Centenary of Federation. Appropriately staged in the old Drill Hall of the Torrens Parade Ground, the installation works the theme of war through the metaphor of memory excavation. The Memory Museum stages a dramatic, visually and aurally challenging, emotionally provocative experience; a polyglot of the different voices of South Australia. Visitors begin their labyrinthine journey in near-darkness on an archaeological site where excavators call out names of war dead retrieved from the ruins of Western civilisation for a Roll of Honour. From there we journey through 13 chambers in 9 rooms, each connected to different historical moments recalling Australia’s engagements with war.

In 9 sites, students from the Flinders University Drama Centre enact short performances or monologues to conjure up memories of people and events associated with the war. Under the tutelage of drama professor Julie Holledge, students devised segments of the performance and sometimes scripted the monologues in the year leading up to the exhibition. Research included the conduct of personal interviews with members of veteran associations as well as Indigenous, women’s and refugee groups, in addition to working with archival material from national, state and private collections. As in good postcolonial practice, students do not occupy the spaces of those remembered; rather they become the retrievers and curators of memory, piecing together fragments from interviews, letters, postcards and photographs to construct versions of stories that are then exchanged and passed on. Droll stories like the one that ‘takes the piss’ out of British General Birdwood standing semi-naked in the Aussie heat, or resourceful stories like those of WRAN prisoners of war fashioning outfits from worn-out sailor’s pants, colourfully designed with lipstick features.

There are 2 exceptions to the student-as-curator-of-memory rule. One is the poignant performance of Peter Michell, who effectively embodies the memory of his grandfather, a man he never met (he died in the war) but whose censored letters home provide the springboard to memory. Through recovering gaps in the letters Michell relives 5 wartime events, from incidences of hookworm to a horrendous bombing which resulted in shrapnel wounds to his grandfather’s ankle, rump, and arm, and the loss of his right eye. Standing on an excavation site that doubles as a bunker, set against a backdrop of walls papered with hundreds of letters home, Michell renders the horrors of war through the loving voice of the laconic Anzac soldier: “Don’t worry love, I’m really fine…You can hardly notice.”

The other notable exception is the performance of Vietnamese-born, Australian-raised war orphan, Dominic Golding. Dominic was rescued from Saigon through the auspices of the World Vision Orphanage, initiated in the 1970s by a now-prominent South Australian psychotherapist, Rosemary Taylor. Sitting cross-legged on the ground in army fatigues, Dominic relates his reminiscences to a camcorder in a halting, speech impaired voice. Two massive screens behind him pick up his face, superimposed upon images that fill in the gaps of his stories. Ironies abound, like how he constructed his “Vietnamese” identity through American post-war movies; or suffered discrimination while growing up in Mount Gambier, not so much as a result of his ethnicity but because of his deafness; and how he realised his nostalgia for the “old” Saigon through doctored videos taken in 1999 during his first trip “home.”

Mary Moore conceived the complex, interactive staging for the exhibition around effective and economic geographies of colour, light, sound and space. A womb-like space occupies the core of the labyrinth, where colours of the student curators’ uniforms change from stark black and white to pink, and where the lighting lifts from the grey shades of outdoor battlefield ruins to the warm, flesh-toned interiors of kitchen, lounge, laundry and sewing room. At the centre, 2 female curators ‘pick’ at the fragments of garments obtained from women’s prison camps. An overstuffed armchair, a cast iron stove and a sewing machine punctuate the walls of the detention camp, suggesting an interpenetration of public and private spheres, a co-mingling of the war at home and abroad. Nora Heysen’s lively portraits and official photographs of WRAN nurses line the walls of the outer circle. Voices of survivors and crackling newsreel tapes echo round the space, telling of the fall of Singapore and the capture, detention and death of hundreds of nurses at the hands of the Japanese. Outside the circle, the war at home is remembered through a wall plastered with features from Women’s Weekly and life-sized blowups of the Anzac Arch and “Cheer Up” clubs that once occupied the banks of the Torrens where the Festival Centre now stands.

As groups mingle in the spaces, boundaries between official military history and personal reminiscence, archive and memory, past and present, performance and recollection, performer and visitor break down. Carrying a postcard with them on which they are invited to record their own memory of war, visitors exit from the white glare of the final “treaty” room to a desk, a computer display and an Australia Post mail bag. Off to the side, a student curator sorts the postcards, registering through her silent gestures the gamut of emotions they provoke. The journey loops back to our beginnings and spirals beyond, loosening history from its moorings to live on/in us.

Memory Museum, commisioned by Centenary of Federation SA, producers Adelaide Festival Trust, Flinder University, Creative Director Mary Moore, Installation Director Tim Maddock, Drill Hall, Torrens Parade Ground, Adelaide, Oct 21- Nov 4

If, regrettably, domestic violence is now known to be widespread and not confined to any particular socio-economic group, it is still unlikely to be considered the stuff of successful comic theatre. Tammy Anderson’s remarkable two-hander, I Don’t Wanna Play House, takes this very difficult topic and, thanks to engrossing storytelling, deft characterisation and highly professional production values, creates an engaging and often wryly amusing work.

I Don’t Wanna Play House is essentially Anderson’s dramatised memory of a childhood and adolescence marked and marred by male violence, most notably at the hands of her “battling” mother’s various boyfriends.

Much of these memories were, formerly, suppressed and Anderson reveals “I was watching my children playing in the backyard one day, jumping on the trampoline, laughing and running around, and my daughter asked me to give her a ‘whizzy.’ It all came back to me. Secrets. Secrets. Secrets. I put pen to paper and started writing about these secrets and I wrote pages and pages and pages.”

As Director John Bolton explains, “During a class in grotesque theatre Tammy beckoned the whole group with her finger and whispered ‘Come here.’ It was a short simple moment but what lay behind it was apparent to everyone. There was a communal exhalation, a deep silence and a desire to know ‘what next?.’ A year later I read Tammy’s first writings and knew I would like to direct her piece; here was the what next? in its most raw and honest state. Tammy’s courage and ability to play with events that would ‘do most people in’ has been incredible to witness. Her joy, humour and lightness have continued to shine through a piece which explores some of the most difficult aspects of our existence…”

Having premiered at the CUB Malthouse in Melbourne earlier this year, the work had its Tasmanian premiere at the Peacock Theatre in the Salamanca Arts Centre in late September. Anderson is a Launceston-born Palawa (Aboriginal) woman who has lived in Melbourne for the past 14 years. She is a graduate of the Swinburne University Indigenous Performing Arts Course and has participated in numerous creative development workshops for Ilbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cooperative, Playbox and Melbourne Workers’ Theatre. Thus, she brings a wealth of creative experience and artistic integrity to I Don’t Wanna Play House.

The work sees Anderson describing and frequently incarnating the characters of her often disordered childhood; the travels to and from “the mainland”—so typical for Tasmanians looking for a new start; her family’s constant search for stability; the struggle to get an education and an apprenticeship—and all with the steadfast figure of her grandmother (with her well kept household and well loved pet dog) as the one constant to return to. Anderson recounts her life’s events in a combination of the matter-of-fact and sardonic; nothing is glossed over or glamorised. She strings together a series of anecdotes, tales of triumph and near-defeat, deftly switching character from this character. She has an extraordinary knack for portraying, with a new vocal inflection or a distinctive gesture, a range of very different characters and emotions. In this outstanding performance, she lays bare her own story, telling it without self-pity, but with plenty of vitality and vigour. As in the best theatre, she makes a very particular story seem utterly universal.

The stark Peacock Theatre, famously hewn from a natural rock-face, is expertly lit by Michelle Preshaw, but is otherwise unadorned by sets or props. Anderson’s co-performer, Don Hopkins, plays something of a second fiddle to her tour-de-force—his role is to provide the occasional country song that punctuates or steers the narrative. And while this music is just right in the context of a young Palawa woman’s journey to selfhood, it is something of an aural backdrop.

It is not so often that a performance receives a standing ovation; for its Hobart opening night I Don’t Wanna Play House received this spontaneous tribute, recognition of a moving tale told honestly, bravely and with much good humour—and of an almost faultless, brilliantly versatile lead performance from the very same woman who had lived and survived the indignities portrayed. There is some talk of a return season of this most exciting, gutsy play. Not to be missed.

I Don’t Wanna Play House, writer/performer Tammy Anderson, director John Bolton, Salamanca Arts Centre, Playbox & Women Tasmania, Peacock Theatre, Hobart, Sept 18-22

What are we to make of the decisive role that the policy to turn away refugee boats appears to have played in the return of the Howard government? The strength of passion occasioned by this issue, and the astonishing effect that it has had on our electoral process, gives it a great urgency. How do we understand what this means about Australia?

The swift capitulation of Labor to Howard’s policy saw a consensus among both major political parties that to champion the cause of the refugees was electoral death. On election night, Kim Beazley, speaking from the depths of his own compromise, employed the metaphor of bleak angels and good angels as some sort of grandiloquent codewords for racism.

In the centenary of Federation, it is apt to invoke historical precedent. The manipulation of fear of the ‘Asian hordes’ seems a constant in our political process. For all the rhetoric of multiculturalism and reconciliation, when push comes to shove, we know who’s going to get the shove.

What’s particularly interesting is the way public opinion on this issue has been managed through handling the visual media. The government has been at pains to keep television cameras and microphones away from the refugees, so that they remain as abstracted representatives of preconceived ideas. Visual media have the power to give them a voice, to transform them into real people acting out of despair and courage.

It is significant, therefore, that the debate over asylum seekers has been taken up so swiftly by the major government-funded media institutions. SBSi has commissioned a new series of Tales from a Suitcase featuring Afghani Muslims. The Australian Film Commission’s one fully funded documentary for the year deals with refugees. The AFC, in collaboration with ABC Online, has also funded a refugee project as one of 4 web-streamed projects on the ABC site.

Project 1: Tales from a Suitcase

The third series of Tales, to be broadcast on SBS next year, is to be directed by Andrea Dal Bosco and produced by Will Davies of Look Films. While the first 2 series dealt with migrant experiences in the periods from 1946 to 1959, this one will centre on oral histories of Afghani Muslims talking about their Australian migration experience.

Davies sees the material as being vitally important to current political debates over refugees: “People are dying and being kept out when we should be opening the doors. Australians generally do not understand the Afghan people, their history, suffering or present predicament. A series like Tales can tell individual stories that paint a broad picture of the Afghan migrant experience and through personal, often very private stories, we get to hear and hence understand their situation.”

The background of the series has been a style that Davies calls “pure Oral history.” In order to foreground the immediacy of the experiences of their subjects, the filmmakers have, in the past, refused archival material to establish context. They have used only edited interviews illustrated sparingly with visual material such as photographs, supplied by their subjects. In this series, however, Davies claims to be searching for more evocative visual material to augment the oral history.

“This is the strongest and most confronting way to tell history”, says Davies. “Though we obviously edit their interviews, we do so to tell their core story and to help in the broad matrix of experience we are looking to expose across the series. What we produce (and this comes out in every episode we have made) are very human, very revealing stories that general approaches to history pass by as insignificant and unimportant. To us, the individual is the most important and this is who we want to celebrate and empower through the window on the media we can offer.”

Davies sees the importance of this approach as its ability to make people see the issue in a new frame of reference: “All we hear about are queue jumpers and economic migrants. These poor Afghan people are desperate, they have nothing, are powerless, stateless and destitute, and we turn them away. The media must come to their aid, tell their story, correct the imbalance in the media now.

“What we hope to achieve is that the audience will get a far clearer picture of the Afghan people, their experience and their wish to live in peace in Australia. We want to have their situation understood and have Australia feel the shame they should for how they deal with these people.”

Project 2: Escape to Freedom

Four documentaries were recently selected for the new web-streaming project to be hosted on ABC Online. The project is part of an ABC/Australian Film Commission initiative that aims to challenge conventional documentary forms through exploiting the possibilities of the internet.

One of these projects, Escape to Freedom, will be produced by Goldie Dahdal New Media, and will deal with Australia’s response to the plight of refugees. David Goldie, who along with Sohail Dahdal is overseeing the project, stresses its importance: “As a country, our attitude to immigration, and to refugees in particular, strikes to the heart of what modern Australia is all about. We are the second most multicultural country in the world, so immigration has played a fundamental part in the past 200 years in who we are and what we are.”

Goldie says that the aim of the project is “to examine the experience of being an asylum seeker and the process that they must go through to be accepted to settle in this country.”

It will endeavour to do this by employing the possibilities opened up by new technologies. “The traditional approach to documentary filmmaking will be tipped on its head,” claims Goldie. “Online documentaries add 2 important things to conventional doco; one, is making it accessible to a wider international audience, especially a younger audience; two, it’s interactive, which allows the viewer to view it their own way, and interact with the documentary in ways traditional documentaries cannot.”

The genesis of the project was with designer Dahdal, who has a great deal of interactive and general new media experience, but lacked a traditional filmmaking background. Goldie aims to combine the multiple possibilities of interactive pathways with a strong sense of narrative. He believes that interactivity must work hand in hand with “a bloody good story to hold the viewer.”

Project 3: Anthem

While the Australian government has been spending large amounts keeping refugees away from journalists and redistributing them throughout the South Pacific, its peak film industry body, the Australian Film Commission, has committed $250,000 to fully fund a feature-length documentary on the issue. Anthem will be directed by Helen Newman and by Tahir Cambis, whose film Exile in Sarajevo won several international awards including an Emmy.

Newman and Cambis’s work has grown out of a concern with the hardening of attitudes towards refugees in this country over the past 2 years. They began taping with Kosovo refugees at the time refugee havens were becoming detention centres.

As a former refugee himself, Cambis is particularly interested in the construction of “empathy between audience and refugees” as well as civil rights issues that extend beyond the refugee question.

The filmmakers are planning to travel to Pakistan soon to begin tracing the paths taken by refugees from Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan as they make their way through Indonesia to the variety of detention centres that await them in Australia, and now the South Pacific. Anthem will foreground both the institutional and individual aspects of this crisis. It will look at the role of Australian government, of the judiciary and of the media, but also attempt to give a human face to the refugees, who have been demonised or abstracted by government and media.

In the lead up to the election, the visual media were marked by the absent and unclear role they played. We have seen refugees only as indistinct figures through a telephoto lens, as sites for all the darkness that Australia has within it. Let’s hope that these projects redress some of that balance. While Australia has one of the most conservative fictional film industries in the world, this issue should bring to the fore the strength and courage of documentary film production in this land of asylum.

Monique Schwartz’s Mamadrama is a rare Australian documentary in that it takes ‘thinking about cinema’ as its subject. It also openly reveals the filmmaker’s own process of testing and questioning the limits of film and its modes of representation.

Mamadrama traces the difficulties Schwartz experienced attempting to reconcile the Jewish mothers of the silver screen with her images and ideas of her own mother. This very personal narrative drives a rigorous investigation into the representation of Jewish mothers in American, Yiddish and Israeli cinema. Schwartz treats her subject with great respect, both critiquing and taking pleasure in the rhythms and idiosyncrasies of the Jewish mother characters and their creators.

Mamadrama is such a big research project. How did you prepare for it and what was the genesis of the idea?

It came out of my academic work, at Melbourne University. I have always been interested in women and Jews. In this instance, I was particularly interested in the idea of the mother and especially the Jewish mother. If you look at the ‘mother’ in film, you see there is a very big difference between the way the Jewish mother and the non-Jewish mother is represented. There are many problems with the representation of the mother anyway, but there is more of a problem with the Jewish mother.

I’m interested to know what your selection criteria was in both the films you decided to profile and the people you chose to interview.

The films had to be feature length; the mother had to have a reasonable amount of screen presence; the woman’s role as a mother had to be substantive; and the films had to be talked about in the literature in some way. A lot of people said ‘Oh you’ve gotta look at Crossing Delancey’, which is a fabulous film, but the character is a grandmother. Then there is a Yiddish film called Two Little Mothers, but it’s a daughter playing a mother, so I couldn’t use that. I wanted to keep very strictly to the feature criterion too, so “Oedipus Rex” in New York Stories is really a 40 minute segment, and maybe I’m being pedantic, but I didn’t feel 100% comfortable about using it.

I interviewed people who directed or acted in these films…I didn’t interview the writers because you can write a character’s lines, like ‘I love my son’ and, in the end, it’s the direction that determines how it will come out on screen.

It’s always very ambitious, and often very difficult, to work a personalised narrative around an intellectual premise; can you talk about your process of weaving those strands of the film together?

Well that process started in the script. All the work that I have done has a personal dimension and a public dimension, showing the context of the personal and the structured reality. I can’t actually see any other way of doing things. I was a little scared in the first instance, and I had to be cajoled into keeping myself in there. I’ve never done something quite so personal, you know. I’ve always had a distance in there, different points of view. I had a lot of help from the script editor Annette Blonski, commissioning editors Sabine Bubeck-Paaz (ZDF) in Germany and John Hughes (SBS) here and the editor, Uri Mizrahi, to make sure I got the balance right and that the personal narrative always reconnected to the main theme.

There is a very interesting moment in the interview with Paul Mazursky where he says, “I should do a Jewish mother heroine” with this sense of surprise as if the idea that a Jewish mother could be a heroine has never occurred to him before. I wondered how you felt in those moments where the premise of the film was almost subconsciously proved correct by the commentary of some of your subjects.

I knew the sort of material I was going to end up getting because I’d interviewed them all before. You do the research interview and then people will often repeat themselves the second time, verbatim. I was very grateful for whatever people gave me because they were very open and talked about their mothers and their mother experiences which are very close to them…it’s an incredible act of trust…I end up respecting and caring for the people I interview which is why I don’t make aggressive films! I thought he was very funny, Paul Mazursky; he was desperate to do this film because he believes in Jewish cinema and he was so happy that I’d got this film together.

I was really fascinated with a lot of the archival material and certainly the Yiddish films were new to me. How did you get introduced to that work?

I am very interested in Yiddish culture and Yiddish film in particular. The interest followed on from Bitter Herbs and Honey and working at 3ZZZ community radio [Melbourne], when I was very involved with the Yiddish-speaking community. I began to investigate the sort of cultural product they made and I was fascinated by the whole culture which is very dedicated to the world of ideas. Not only that, when I looked at the films themselves, I noticed that they were incredibly radical. Some of that Yiddish cinema employed the techniques and methodologies that feminist filmmaking employs like breaking the narrative, bursting into song, positioning the women at the centre of the narrative drive and the stories not revolving around the rejoining of the couple…In addition to the gender point of view, they were also politically radical in that they would make very strong commentary about migrant life and about the class system that Jewish migrants were dealing with when they arrived in places like New York. Of course I found them totally transporting emotionally and the musical items in them, well, I always found those to be just fabulous.

I love the title. I liked that it had its own phonetic quality at the same time as ‘Mama’ replacing ‘music’ in ‘Melodrama’.
Mamadrama has a lot of play on words…it’s very musical, and it actually is a word that comes directly out of discussion about Yiddish films with film critic Jim Hoberman. He came up with the term when I first interviewed him 6 years ago.

I noticed that there was a temporal cut-off point in relation to the American cinema, more so than the Israeli cinema and the historical end-point of Yiddish cinema. Do you see any change going on with contemporary American representations of Jewish Mothers?

Not that I’ve seen. You know there are hardly any Jewish mothers now in feature films. But they have moved over to television and they’re all the same, and if anything they’ve got worse…it’s vile, a stereotype.

Although the situation of those mother characters can be funny when you watch them, there’s something very sad about them…because you see in front of your nose the history of the Jewish people, and it makes you very aware of what a turbulent and difficult history that has been. That’s how I felt during the middle of editing. Yes these excerpts are really funny—hee hee haw haw—but there is an underlying tone of real sadness.

And that’s where the personal narrative works really well because you can draw that out in a melancholic way, instead of a sentimental way. You’ve referred to Yiddish culture’s interest in upholding the world of ideas, and obviously this film on a supertextual level is really doing that as well…

Well you know I hope its very entertaining too. I don’t like ideas by themselves, they have to be entertaining, they’ve gotta make you laugh, they’ve gotta make you cry. That’s what I tried to do, and I think I achieved it to a certain extent with Mamadrama.

Mamadrama, writer/director Monique Schwartz, distributor Sharmill Films, is screening in Melbourne and Sydney with other states to follow.

Debate over the condition of Australian cinema hasn’t been so heated for many years. In this new column, Watchdog, we’ve invited a writer to pursue key Australian cinema issues over 3 consecutive editions of OnScreen. Because she’s riding a wave of debate over her new book The Money Shot (Pluto Press) in the press and on radio, we thought it’d be a good moment to catch Jane Mills’ thoughts as new Australian films find their way to the screen. Eds.

I was at the drive-in cinema in Sydney’s western suburbs with everything I desired: a Vietnamese takeaway from nearby Parramatta nicely steaming up the windows, a Hot Date sufficiently agile to negotiate the gearstick, and a double bill to snuggle down to. Having seen Moulin Rouge, I was confident that my passion for it would be returned with a truth, beauty and love, that would rub off on the Hot Date and provide me with some insight into spectatorship theory. As for Robert Lutekic’s Legally Blonde, I was interested to learn what this young Australian director had done with his Hollywood debut.

My admiration for Moulin Rouge (in particular for editor Jill Bilcock) remains unalloyed, and we both thought Legally Blonde fun, funky and feminist. A problem, however, lay in their soundscapes. They had a disconcerting effect on my libido since I found it necessary to look at the screen the whole time: I felt like Jeff (James Stewart) in Rear Window who preferred to follow the narratives being acted out through the windows of his apartment than concentrate on the lips of his girlfriend (Grace Kelly).

Yes, I know that films aren’t made to be heard on an FM radio channel. But while both films, in their own ways, are bold and inventive, visually and musically (Moulin) or narratively and comedically (Blonde), neither manifest any courage in their sound design. Film sound theorist Michel Chion noted that “we never see the same thing when we also hear; we don’t hear the same thing when we see as well.” But, in most films today what we hear is precisely what we see. This point is well made by sound designer Randy Thom (Forrest Gump, Castaway):

Many directors who like to think they appreciate sound still have a pretty narrow idea of the potential for sound in storytelling. The generally accepted view is that it’s useful to have ‘good’ sound in order to enhance the visuals and root the images in a kind of temporal reality. But that isn’t collaboration, it’s slavery. And the product it yields is bound to be less complex and interesting than it would be if sound could somehow be set free to be an active player in the process. Only when each craft influences every other craft does the movie begin to take on a life of its own.

When sound designer Andrew Plain went up on stage at the IF Awards recently, he had to ask which of his 2 films, La Spagnola or Lantana, had won. I was disappointed that his award was for La Spagnola, which has the sort of safe soundscape that many contemporary filmmakers rate highly because no-one notices it. The sound for Lantana, however, while less exciting than it could be, contributes something filmic in addition to the picture and not merely in support of it.

Plain says that like many directors, Ray Lawrence couldn’t articulate exactly what sound he wanted, but unlike other directors this was only because he lacked the vocabulary, not the concepts:

Ray had this idea of La Paglia’s character being crushed in the city. So we gave everything in the city a sound. We see him experience fear that his heart may be weak, but the sum total of the layer upon layer of the different sounds we recorded crushes him from within and reduces him to emotional inactivity.

And when he’s driving through a tunnel out of the city, we see the double white lines reflected in the windscreen. We laid heaps of sound tones for the white lines. We wanted the audience to feel rather than hear these lines. I don’t think anyone will hear it. But it gets there and delivers the feel that Ray wanted.

Plain is particularly pleased with the opening sequence that he says “initially delivers loud, over the top, cicada sounds that change into moody sounds of the other world as the camera tracks into the bushes.” It’s the sound, not the picture, that first reveals that lantana, the film’s central trope, is a noxious weed that has escaped cultivation and doesn’t belong in the bush—like the betrayal and misplaced trust that doesn’t belong in a relationship if it is to survive.

Lawrence didn’t want Plain merely to reproduce reality, but to create a scape that delivered sounds and tones relating to responses he wanted in audiences. Which is what the documentary Facing the Music, about Sydney University Music Professor Anne Boyd, does better than any other Australian film in a long time. This, too, was sound designed by Plain who says the filmmakers Robert Connolly, Robyn Anderson and Ray Thomas (editor) were persuaded to treat the soundscape as it would be on a feature film. The resulting Dolby digital 6-track format produces extraordinarily powerful feelings and moods by daring to treat actuality more creatively than most documentaries dare:

There’s a scene where she’s actually listening to music in her room on her CD player. But we treat it as if it’s off screen, then treat it so it sounds like it’s filling her room…so we hear it as she does from her CD, which doesn’t satisfy the reality of her CD player, but is designed to create in the audience the passion that it creates in her. When we cut back to her at her desk, conducting the music on her CD player, the music soars as if it’s her heart soaring. Her passion is made palpable by how we treated the music. One of the good things about non-linear editing is that there’s literally no reason why docos like Facing the Music can’t end up with a soundtrack every bit as good as for a feature film. But it’s much more costly than most doco filmmakers are prepared to pay.

Plain points out that a few years ago feature filmmakers began to think creatively of the relationship between the screen, architectural cinema space and audiences. With films like Jurassic Park and Last Action Hero, he says:

Finally you could say filmmakers realised the power of the sound environment. But it was used so boringly and conventionally. Audiences were so getting off on sound coming from everywhere; they were streets ahead of most filmmakers. Around this time, however, documentaries like Sunless (Chris Marker) and Camera Natura (Ross Gibson) used sound creatively while feature films were plodding along with mundane tracks. Then it all stopped. They weren’t prepared to spend the money. Or make the mind shift required to think of sound separate from the picture.

Few filmmakers today are prepared to remove the glue that conventionally sticks image and sound together. Plain is especially concerned for the documentary form which has been ‘gazumped’ by Reality TV:

If they’re to rise to the challenge of the popularity of these television reality programs, they’re going to have to be inventive. They’re going to have to go back and experiment with sound, just as they did in the early 1930s when sound was new.

When Plain first started in the film industry with a film studies degree, he used to pin up quotes in his office from legendary filmmaker Robert Bresson such as: “If the eye is entirely won, give nothing or almost nothing to the ear. One can not be at the same time all eye and all ear. And vice versa, if the ear is entirely won, give nothing to the eye.” But he now believes he was too pedantic:

It’s more about what’s appropriate. In Cut, for example, we broke the rules because the film breaks rules. There’s this scene where the actual murderer and another character playing the role of the murderer have a Wes Craven style face-off and we gave it an outrageous sound. The point was that we shouldn’t have got away with it—but we took the risk and we did get away with it.

Clearly more Australian filmmakers need to take more risks (and spend more money) if they are to come even close to achieving what Plain cites as the soundscape that best exemplifies the change in mindset that he’s looking for:

The sound in La Haine (1996), the French film by Matthieu Kassowitz’s, is incredible, extraordinary. There’s no way that film was shot without the director knowing while he was shooting exactly what the sound would be like. It’s an exciting example of a film that demonstrates how incredibly important it is to plan sound and music before you shoot.

Under the direction of Lisa Logan, Experimenta’s major annual event for 2001 was more like a festival, with the Media Lounge at the centre of a series of screenings, events and web effluence on the theme of ‘waste.’ Black Box theatre was decked out for the occasion in an excessive pile of techno-garbage: old circuit-boards, mutated monitors, broken TVs, defunct phones and alarm clocks as well as the odd deformed bicycle and rusty compost tumbler. If the post-industrial wasteland aesthetic seemed a little uninspired, the theatrical décor provided a moody venue for a diverse collection of new media art. Twenty-one artists from Australia, India, Korea, China and the USA were billed as presenting works. Unfortunately, this was reduced to 20 when Katrien Jacobs’ Libidot 2001: Sexy Flowers (USA) installation was unceremoniously removed an hour before the opening due to its pornographic content (see RTpost).

Easily the most memorable piece was Ian Haig’s Excelsior 3000—Bowel Technology Project (2001), featuring 2 ‘super toilets’ located in the centre of the space. “I was greatly relieved to see the ‘Dunny Installation’”, one visitor scrawled in the comments book. Indeed, this treatise in anal fixation provided a welcome escape from some of the more tired themes of Australian new media art (genetics, AI, etc). Literalising Paul Virilio’s observation that high-technology has paradoxically disabling effects, Haig’s twin sculptural assemblages are awash with lights, plumbing, hydraulic systems and other gizmos. It’s a fantasy toilet, allowing the user to select, using a retro push button interface, various bowel motivation material to watch on small screens (including gushing mudflows which the artist calls “pornography for your bowel”). A dysfunctional excess of technology, like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Haig’s parody extends his work in the convergence of the utilitarian into the fantastic. With toxic sound by Philip Samartzis—including deep frequencies from under the toilet bowl—the work takes an old theme, the relationship of the body and technology, and makes it at once ordinary and perverse. Of the important precedents for exhibiting excrement culture in art contexts—Duchamp’s urinal, Manzoni’s cans of shit and Oldenburg’s pop toilets—none is more participatory. As Dominique Laporte argues in his book History of Shit, the toilet contributed heavily to the creation of the bourgeois Western individual, so it was pleasing to see people enthusiastically embark on a public trip to the throne.

In Iain Mott’s Close (2001) you sit on a barber’s chair surrounded by 4 large video screens and, through the abnormal proximity of a soundscape offered by headphones, experience a haircut from start to end. The video shows a man shaved to his eyebrows against a sound chamber (which could almost be a virtual landscape or hair follicles), while binaural recording offers the unnerving feel of having your scalp scraped by a razor. John Tonkin’s video These are the Days (1994), is more subtle, with its sheets of paper gently falling to the floor and a soundtrack counting them as they fall (courtesy of Philip Glass)—a shame it was presented in what was really a passageway.

Of the numerous interactives, Natasha Dwyer’s Appeal R-Tip (2000) broke down the contrast between the rubble and all the desirable hardware by adding bits of rubbish to the keyboard and plastic wrap to the mouse. Presented on upturned rubbish bins, you place an order for trash, but the work really needs to be online. Same goes for Shilpa Gupta’s Sentiment Express (India 2001), where we request love-letters from India behind a pink curtained booth. Other engaging Australian works were included, such as Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starrs’ Dream Kitchen (see RT 37 p22). However, the poetics of Korea’s premier net artist Young-Hae Chang’s flashy text work Samsung Project and Lotus Blossom, wonderful to break the monotony of routine computer use, was lost in this messy offline context. Similarly, a video projection of Quake excerpts by Chinese artist Feng Mengbo (Q3 1999) looked barely distinguishable from promotion for the game. Liu Wei’s video of people scavenging to recycle bits of garbage in a Beijing rubbish tip (Underneath, China 2000), presented on a massive widescreen TV, seemed more likely to positively confuse our media imaginaries.

Waste was a befitting theme for Experimenta, since there’s hardly another product in the world that contains as many hazardous materials and has such a toxic effect on the environment as the eternally obsolete outputs of the high tech industry. And, given that the the Media Lounge was evidently popular with a range of audiences, especially younger ones, perhaps it was appropriate that some of the work looked like the residue of a school display (such as a glib presentation of ‘new media’ at various historical moments – paper, CD, etc.). With the rhetoric of ‘art for everyone’ in the air, we have to accept the good with the bad; and hope there’s room for the as yet unclassified.

Waste Interactive Media Lounge, Experimenta Media Arts, Black Box, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, Oct 19-Nov 3. Unless indicated, works referred to are Australian.

Newcastle: This Is Not Art festival…a 4-way conjunction of the new media-tech festival electrofringe, the National Young Writers Festival, the National Student Media Conference and Sound Summit 2001. This diverse cross-section of interests descended amidst grand-final-fever in Newcastle to explore an extensive program of workshops, panel discussions, project expositions and forums by day, with evenings offering all kinds of entertainment in the form of sound experiments and visual collaborations.

Navigating a dense schedule was relieved somewhat by my brief to focus on new media arts, implying mostly electrofringe content. This Is Not Art (acronym alert…) presented a broad overview of the state of the creative ‘fringe’, providing crossing-points between a flourishing underground of youthful enterprise and more established structures. Organised largely as non-formal presentation forums, the relaxed and amicable style of delivery provided mostly interesting and enlivening discussion with a high level of audience engagement. There were a few hit-and-miss hazards, certain forums suffering a frustrating lack of direction/focus, or thwarted by tech-glitches/panellist no-shows (such as the mystery of the elusive Mark Dery). Overall, content was generous and most sessions highly rewarding.

With pragmatics, playfulness and politics intersecting in the realm of creative appropriation, one key theme of TINA discussion centred on copyright, exploring the ethics of ‘cultural recycling’ in the use of ‘sampled’ sound/images/text within creative practice. This topic reveals the marginal status of those applying non-sponsored creativity towards technology, within the grey-zone politics of ownership vs authorship in the age of digital reproduction. Citing “the glamour of theft” and “the pleasure of the intertext”, San Franciscan Steev Hise discussed the censorship dilemma for artists working in sample-based appropriation which led to the development of his site as a secure, non-censored server for such artists. In an entertaining flipside to creative appropriation, Mark Gunderson (Evolution Control Committee) exposed leaks in the now defunct Napster file-sharing phenomenon, where people unwittingly allow computer soundfiles of their own (excruciatingly) personal recordings to be shared by lax default settings. These dodgy karaoke moments and pillow talk, as unconsenting gems of kooky source material, present hilarious examples of the fruits of creative trespass, with such anonymous authorship throwing questions of privacy into discussions of the creative ethics of ‘fair use.’

The balance between politics and play within appropriation-as-subversion emerged through topical discussion of ‘culture jamming…art or activism?’. (‘Culture jamming’ implies symbolic/concrete interventions into the public space of communications, introducing noise into the signal of ‘the proper’ economy of status quo commercial/official interests.) In the shadow of the recent shock of spectacle terrorism and its military responses, the forum on resistance politics, subversion and art was thrown into stark relief. In arguing the question of effectiveness—either as art or activism—within the elusive hit-and-run tactics of cultural jamming, the frustrations of such symbolic resistance revealed itself a necessary altruism for those who choose peaceful, non-militant modes of cultural critique (to whatever degree such subversions manifest as material interventions). An example of such creative interference was presented by Andy Cox (Together We Can Defeat Capitalism) with the (re)launch of the pseudo-corporate para-sites www.citibank-global-domination.com and www.citigroup-global-domination.com. This web intervention masquerading as bank home page (cunningly tweaked to pop up high on key-word searches) creates links to legitimate wilderness group sites, revealing factual information about the global/environmental impacts of this and other banks’ activities.

electrofringe presented highly informative workshops offering practical insights into digital tools, complemented by interesting panel discussions on online environments, multi-user virtual ‘worlds’, and developments within the gaming industry. With unanimous emphasis on the importance of freely accessible and ‘open-source’ software for lateral applications of digital ingenuity, one important topic was that of customising software through ‘patching.’ This is the process where software is altered through manipulating its source code in order to offer new tools for digital manipulation, project development and creative novelty. Presentations included Anne Marie Schleiner’s curated examples of gaming culture art and experimental game patches such as alternative character ‘skins’ for established games (see www.opensorcery.net); the use of existing game engines as a base from which to develop a 3D environment as with the interesting game project Spookyville; Celine Bernadeau’s discussion of current game industry developments; and other engaging discussions on the future of the ‘global village.’

Other tech presentations focused on current technologies for processing audio/video signals in realtime, with excellent tutorial workshops in software tools such as MAX/JMAX. This also opened up a view into the arcanely fresh phenomenon of vision mixing or VJ-ing using realtime manipulation of video to generate either images in response to external audio sources, or combining a complete AV signal with ‘scratch’ techniques of cut-up collaging to create an integrated sound+vision ‘musicvideo.’ UK feature guest Vicki Bennett (aka People Like Us) offered both consummate performance in vision mixing as well as engaging workshop discussion on the technical processes. Other VJs offered excellent examples of this recent media artistry throughout the festival, a greatly appreciated visual content in the program. Also worth mentioning were the excellent Archimedia screenings and other random site showings that manifested in the streets and venues of Newcastle.

electrofringe, directors Joni Taylor & Shannon O’Neil, part of
This Is Not Art festival, Newcastle, Sept 26-Oct

not copyright, boat-people.org, emerging from a workshop led by Deborah Kelly at the Tactical Autonomous Zone [TAZ]

Following on from what is now merely referred to as ‘September 11’, the world climate was an unplanned and underlying issue at this year’s futureScreen festival, which included the TILT symposium and seminar. The positioning of TILT (“Trading Independent Lateral Tactics”) had to become far less dramatic and serious than the electro-militant attempts to overturn the status quo as seen at other similar-themed events in the late 1990s. The serious political issues merely reinforced the importance of humour and theatrics so vital in successful subversion.

The line-up was exceptional. Organisers Leah Grycewicz and Josephine Starrs put together a group of established art practitioners and independent media makers of the calibre of ®TMark, Steve Kurtz (Critical Art Ensemble), Ricardo Dominguez, Francesca da Rimini, as well as artists from the experimental music and squat subcultures such as Mark Gunderson (Evolution Control Committee), Agnese Trochii (Discordia), Spanky and Stealth Video Ninja.

Although the international representation was phenomenally strong, it was the local and Indigenous participants who brought the important issues into focus: Australia’s geographical and ethical positioning in these times, who is doing what, and the impact this has in collaborating with other activists around the world.

The symposium (“Talking Tactics”) acted as a take-off point. In what was a memorable introduction, immigrant community worker Paula Abood opened the conference with her film Of Middle Eastern Appearance. Has the world really changed for “the invisible” people after September 11? Melbourne artist Deborah Kelly presented an entertaining look at her invasion of public spaces as an art practitioner. Famous for her Hey Hetero series, many may have noticed her “ESCAPED REFUGEES WELCOME HERE” poster in windows across town.

On the other end of the spectrum to Kelly’s comparatively “low tech” operations, Steve Kurtz gave an eye-opening talk on the possibilities of bio-engineering. Tactical response for Kurtz involves resisting the capitalisation of the food chain by developing genetic alternatives.

To many, the avant-entrepreneur ®TMark was the conference superstar. His exposé of the infiltration of the Yes Men into various World Trade Organisation seminars was hilarious. (The ongoing dialogue is highly recommended.) Coming to a town near you.

Noteworthy were the comments and observations about the manipulation of media and structured narratives around such events as the G8 summit in Genoa. Marco Deseriis (Italy) presented an at times harrowing account of the lead up to the death of Carlo Giuliani. It emphasised the necessity for independent media such as www.indymedia.org and www.freespeech.org in exposing such “truths” as the creation of popular reaction to violent protesters such as the Black Blok. Other independent media organisations represented included Australia’s The Paper as well as www.shnewz.org, edited by John Hodges. Rix-c was represented by Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits, and is based in Riga. It is the uniting point for many Eastern European media centres and lists such as XCHANGE and www.borderland.org [expired].

The importance of watching the watching was again highlighted by Ricardo Dominguez of the Electronic Disturbance Theater who talked about his Anchors project, which he described as “little sister watching big brother.” This method of implementing panopticon-like ideas in areas of indigenous oppression is a continuation of actions in the Chiapas region in alliance with the Zapatistas.

Kevin Buzzcott (Keepers of Lake Eyre) and Rebecca Bear Wingfield, from Irati Wanti, are Arabunna people and anti-nuclear activists. On the same panel as Dominguez (“Poisoned Planet: Waste Not, Want Not?”) they reiterated the dangers of uranium extraction, and how the responsibility of Australians is now more urgent than ever. Methods of spreading Indigenous ideas and rights don’t have to be high-tech either. It can be done, explained community worker Nina Brown, on the one and only radio station in Coober Pedy.

The technological capabilities of the net are still a tactical method under review, but the more empowering DIY approach to the www structure is replacing sheer techno utopianism. Irene Graham and Scott Mcphee addressed censorship, privacy and the law, while Mark Gunderson showed how programs such as Napster could be used to address copyright laws and intellectual property.

Other elements of the festival included the TAZ space at Imperial Slacks Gallery. This dark cross-cabled techno environment grew during the course of the festival with ongoing collaborations, both technical and intellectual, and daily workshops.

Outcomes of a festival like this are important. Following the event, most of the participants continue to communicate with each other on a net list. Dominguez has created a web toy for Irati Wanti in its fight against Western Mining, and other spontaneous collaborations occurred at events like cinema concrete and Stealth Video Ninja.

And who were the raiders and tactical players that literally exploded out of the festival borders? There were vigilante boat projections on the Opera House, unannounced Chilean songs of mourning and exploding gnomes that were strangely ignored by officials.

Breaking away from the screen-based technologies altogether, TILT was a gathering, at times spontaneous and informal, sharing, discussing and presenting alternatives to science, arts and politics.

TILT, part of dLux media arts’ futureScreen 01, in association with ANAT, Imperial Slacks, House of Laudanum & Metro Screen. Seminar: “Tactical Media”, Paddington RSL, Oct 8; Symposium, College of Fine Arts, Sydney, Oct 12-14

(OK, so it’s risking an inelegant pun but) Troy Innocent’s work is in fact comprehensively complicit. It’s always been performative and reflexive but this time the dynamics are those of video/computer games and the competing modes of modelling realities with which they’ve memetically infected perception…so you expect, and gloriously get, DIY puzzlers about interactivity, interface, languages, translation and immersion.

Artefact is split—entirely in keeping with its matrix of critical themes—into 2 sections, alternate dimensions with disconcerting shifts of scale. The first, Mixed Reality, is gorgeously uber-kitsch: grouped assemblages of sculptural elements, stylised dioramas made from screen-dumps of an overpopulated video game…the one someone’s playing next door, actually. Built from exuberant glossy-plastic blocks of bright colour, the iconography of Artefact’s second dimension (the game Semiomorph) here emerges lifesize, so you feel you’re in the game. And interactive, with icon-cutout pressure-activated pads on the floor for the viewer to stand on, triggering complexly-patterned light-n-sound-shows around and in the pieces. Each assemblage seems to have its own interface and interactivity protocols, eliciting the classic audience lo-fi paranoia (press here? harder? faster? is it tracking me? are the lights in synch? can I play DJ? why is there a sign warning me not to look at the laser?) and the epistemological dance that accompanies it (no no let ME! See, if you walk through here, then step just…here…and move like this). Hokay, yes, it’s fun, and a bit like a dodgem soundscape, and a bit like an over-ambitious multimedia rave performance, and occasionally a bit like the hypnosis scenes in Exorcist II, but it’s also got Doppler allegorical resonances—about modelling, simulating environments, hyperrealisms, modalities of interaction and the fantastical desire to attribute life/agency/meaning to artificial set-ups—that you take with you when you move into the game itself.

Semiomorph is set up next door in a darkened room with widescreen projection and surround sound, joystick mounted on lectern. The gameplay is as pared back as the virtual environment is densely cluttered: first-person, simplified avatar, routinised navigation, joystick for viewpoint shifts, buttons for movement and firing, collect energy points, elude opposing entities and avoid the randomised blast icons. When you reach a critical mass, or via the intervention of ‘muticons’ or ‘power-ups’, the mode of representation can shift abruptly, transforming the rules of play and relationships between icons and your avatar. At the level of ‘text’ you get viral mutation, when you’re in ‘simulation’ there’s rolling realistic hills, in ‘iconic’ you get chequerboard wire-frame-y constructions and in the ‘diagrammatic’ level you’re faced with a maze. Each level of representation has its own familiar, an icon, tamagotchi-fied and uncannily-cute (eg icon is ‘Specular’, a saucer-eyed anthropomorphised M&M). The environment has no loop-back to a default state, so how the last visitor left it is how you engage with it, disorienting and volatile, algorithmic, promising systematic morphing, logical programming and familiar simulation, but experienced as a series of synthetic disjunctions. As a participatory investigative method for analysing reality modelling—from toys and gaming, through stylised mapping and interactive 3D simulations, among artificial life and virtual realisms, in levels of abstraction and spatialisation, playing with narrative and usability—it’d be difficult to top.

But Innocent does, of course. It comes complete with trading cards (featuring the major avatars of each dimension, listing traits, abilities, “special attacks” and what beats what how), slinky-metallic stickers, impossibly-funky catalogue and essay (pedigree by Darren Tofts out of Andrew Trevillian) and official gameplay instructions with an exoskeleton of compact context. There’s the reminder, for instance, that “Artefact” is a graphics term for errors, those pixellated scruffy bits left over when compressing or translating one file format to another, the unpredictable and ineradicable granular excess that disturbs the smooth artifice of naturalness.

Moreover, Artefact works intermedially within what is perhaps the most consistent, centripetal and rigorously reflexive oeuvre yet produced in Australia that takes as its critical object and creative praxis the phenomenology of digital/new media art, but—yay! yum!—it dramatises what it analyses and critiques. It’s as intriguingly playful as it is heuristic, like a Piccinini installation that’s accidentally incubated an idea.

Perhaps the most fitting comment on the impossibility of perfectible machine translations—between modes of representation, across disparate realities’ media, between the video, computer and other games we play with semiosis, across incommensurate languages—comes from the endearingly ye-olde-world feedback mechanism in one corner of Artefact: the guestbook: “Someone’s eaten too much acid in their lifetime…nice work though.”

Artefact, Troy Innocent, Faculty Gallery, Monash University,
Melbourne, Sept 23 – Nov 3

“MAAP is a concept and a vision, not a place or a time,” according to Kim Machan, speaking indefatigably as director/curator of Excess, Multimedia Art Asia Pacific Festival 2001. This vision over 4 festivals has seen major partnerships developed between regional new media organisations in China, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Australia. Making her stand on behalf of the immediate cultural exchange of artistic voices, Machan warns that the developing economic rationalist rhetoric in Australia seeks to divide the arts and cultural community into those who make money and those who don’t, stigmatising the latter as ‘elite’ and out of touch. The media here is the internet. Lack of infrastructure becomes a strength that allows MAAP to be whatever it wants—international, cross-cultural, transportable.

MAAP 2001 installations were as varied in form as in their conceptual concerns, sometimes savagely sardonic or wittily confronting. Ruark Lewis’ video installation, Untitled 1, deconstructed the written word (Helen Demidenko’s The Hand that Signed the Paper, a notoriously fake historical reconstruction) by physically ripping up the book. Golden Time, by Japanese artists’ collective Candy Factory, projected repeats of a televised aerobics class from Australia to an empty wheelchair located directly beneath a glitzy, suspended noose made from display cable lighting (“we move domestic boredom into different media, to show exactly the same program people are bored with…”). Korean artist Oh Sang Gil’s comment on excess and waste seemingly dripped blood into a toilet bowl until the flushing revealed it as the formalised “minimal aesthetic of an everyday motion.”

My point of entry began at the Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Art where, meditating upon (being meditated upon by) Gong Xin Wang’s triple-screened My Sun (see RT45 p22) coloured and toned subsequent encounters: the fallen jacaranda blossoms while walking to the Powerhouse, experienced as psychedelic tessellations; the pure Zen task of ‘sitting’ in the AO: Audio Only sound art gallery curated by Andrew Kettle. Yan Zhenzong’s I Will Die 2001 completed this trio of contemplative exercises.

Zhenzong’s work relentlessly and fascinatingly presented ordinary people, young and old facing the camera, speaking the words of the title in their own languages. Sometimes with embarrassment or evident disbelief, sometimes with authentic solemnity—inducing a cumulative effect of stilling the mind from asking Western style, cooler aesthetic questions.

Viewing the Excess Chinese video program curated by Wu Meichun and Machan, I particularly liked Yang Fudong’s Backyard: Hey the Sun is Rising! which decontextualised traditional Eastern martial arts into an absurd choreography with, at times, a Buster Keaton-like wistfulness for a more innocent version of masculinity. It was also a privilege to see an earlier work of Wang’s Myth Power (1990), which, in a ‘worked’ anthropological documentary style, demonstrated his ongoing investigation into belief systems and post-Communist tensions between individualism and the masses. With an underlying sense of loss of community, the sun here is sometimes shown in negative (the black sun alchemists took to symbolise the unconscious in its base, ‘unworked’, state prior to individuation). Wang’s new work for MAAP, Prayer, continues this line: visuals pan from a pair of hands praying before an altar, continue up through the temple architecture to the sky and descend again into a ‘cityscape’ of uniformly replicated stone plinths. Antennae of wires open and close in systolic fashion to an invisible sun, duplicating the praying hands. The suggestion is that even the endeavours of modernity are supplications.

By introducing the notion of ‘sublimity’ in her essay on Wang, and with the Blakean intimations of Excess, Machan reveals an extant neo-Romanticism. Certainly there are more than echoes of 70s ‘happenings’ in Post Sensibility: SPREE 2001—documentation of a wild underground event held in Beijing. Machan considers that Chinese artists have been digesting the whole of Western art history in the past 3 or 4 years (installation art was still banned in China 4 years ago), and are pushing limits, searching for individual expression. This new wave of Protestantism in the arts invites comparison with our own, relatively staid, practices.

But it was Sydney-based Melinda Rackham’s interactive, computer-generated cosmos, empyrean, that chimed on a different front, particularly with Wang’s preoccupation with the human desire for transcendence and ambivalences about traversing a non-referential universe. At once ‘charming’ (like the quark), and terrifying.

MAAP01, director Kim Machan, Brisbane Powerhouse
Centre for the Live Arts, Oct 12-14

Australian poetry culture is experiencing major shifts which, given time, will see new challenges for publishing houses, literary journals, poets and readers alike. Readers and artists are still there, eager to give voice to their meditations, but the financial support is not. Massive funding cuts to publishers of this work is seeing poets turn away from the traditional champion of their articulations, the print industry, to embrace the liberating possibilities of a new medium.

This transference not only means that poets may sidestep the economically driven publishing industry, but that their work now becomes available to a new, more dynamic and diverse audience. Working in CD-ROM, poets can experiment with the neoteric forms such a medium invites and invokes. The tangible qualities of print are hybridised with a multimedia aesthetic, and a marriage between textuality and movement is born.

Papertiger: New World Poetry is one such creation. Its eclectic style is generated by a heterogeneous mix of poets from around the globe, who form a polyvocal international revolution in poetry. Papertiger incorporates the work of artists such as Melissa Ashley, S M Chianti, Michele Leggott and Lisa Jacobson, catapulting Australian artists onto the international stage. Papertiger is a theatrical experience for the senses and it is refreshing to see a strong cast of local talent taking the lead.

Once installed, the reader/user/viewer is invited to begin a journey into the rich matrix of possibilities on the screen. A seductive, linguistic striptease announces Papertiger’s arrival as ‘the true art of our time’—not far off the money. As words slide in and out of the screen, an oral backdrop shapes what is to be a dramatic reading experience. Subject matter ranges from chaos theory to the subjectivity of corpses, with much contemplation in between. In chasing the maps of such poetics, one is simultaneously grounded in the acute intimacy of observation and the awareness of a ‘bigger picture.’

The poems (some 100 plus) are divided into 4 sections: yama, agni, varuna and ishana. While most are presented in a more traditional manner—a linear, stabilised textuality—there are some that experiment with the liquid flexibility of digitised space. Michele Leggott, for example, showcases her four-part poem a woman, a rose, and what has it to do with her or they with one another by overlaying the text with spoken word. A soft, feminine voice guides the reader through a rich lamentation of loss and longing, and it is the poet’s acoustic presence that secures its siren-like quality.

This new-found projection into acoustic space is taken to another level with Patricia Smith’s Chinese cucumbers. Here there is no text as such—at least, not in the way we have come to think of it. This poem is more like an avant-garde music video. Once again, the poet’s voice takes us through interweaving images, some out of focus, or in slow motion, some intimate and others confronting. This intertextuality mirrors the reader’s movement as she glides over the top or dives deep into the poem’s delicately woven fabric.

Each meditation exists as an autonomous entity, a moment of pause or a grating fragment, but it is the reader, and her desire to drift or to dip, to create fissures of her own making, that makes Papertiger a truly innovative reading experience.

Papertiger: New World Poetry captures the moment of a revolution in form, stylistics and energy, and I encourage readers to embrace this dynamic experience. The book of the new millennium may be dead, but its poets have only just begun speaking.

In Post, RealTime 45, Tina Kaufman wrote alerting us to the implications of the Office of Film and Literature Classification discussion paper aimed at producing a single classificatory system covering computer games and film and television. The paper introduces some odd criteria for censorship including: sexual acts where one or other of the participants look like they’re under 18 years of age (whatever happened to the age of consent?); imitability (no more heist movies, thank god); and restrictions on the depiction of the use of legal drugs in these media (as Arts Today’s Julie Rigg argued, art is not a health education tool, Radio National, Nov 28). Australia’s censorship laws have tightened up considerably in recent years with new media arts being most palpably impacted by legislation pertaining to web transmission (see Linda Carroli, “[R] is for Regulation: cleaning up the net universe”, RT35, p20). But there is nervousness everywhere: the producers of a new performance work in Sydney in recent weeks self-censored projections with sexual material when the extremity of a possible prosecution was brought to their attention. As censorship laws thicken fast and furiously, and as punishments grow more draconion and the laws more inflexible, which artists or companies or arts organisations will be the test cases? It’s a tough choice. Eds.

Dear Editors

On Thursday 18 October the Experimenta 2001: Waste exhibition opened in Melbourne as part of the Melbourne Festival. According to the catalogue, visitors could expect to encounter Sexy Flowers, an installation by Boston-based artist and academic Katrien Jacobs that invites viewers to recycle internet porn images by printing them out and folding them into flowers.

Just before the exhibition opened, Experimenta’s Board of Management intervened and decided that Sexy Flowers had to immediately be taken out of the show. Jacobs was advised of this in a most unfortunate and very unprofessional manner: she was sent an internal memo from Experimenta in which Artistic Director Lisa Logan asks Robyn Lucas (President) and Geoffrey Shiff (Chair and lawyer) if they might contact the artist to let her know why the piece has been censored. Geoffrey Shiff later explained that Sexy Flowers was removed from the exhibition for the following reason: “The work was not ‘censored’ at all. It was removed because it breached the law to publicly exhibit explicit pornography of this nature.”

Do censorship laws differentiate between the media in which content is encountered? Pornographic imagery sourced from the Net is different in terms of what might be encountered and how it is encountered from pornographic content regulated by the architecture of a CD-ROM enframed by the curatorial logic of an exhibition. That is, one pornographic image is not the same as the next. Any sensible law needs to register this mediation of difference.

Experimenta’s Board of Directors has assumed that it is endowed with the capacity to determine what constitutes ‘legitimate’ artwork for the public. Once artworks have been approved through a curatorial selection process, surely it is up to the public to decide what constitutes ‘offensive’ material, and not the cultural disposition of the Board?

To say that the artwork breached laws on the public exhibition of explicit pornography is not at all equivalent to saying that Sexy Flowers was not censored. The formulation of categories operates precisely to determine that which belongs in a category and that which does not. This, in itself, is a form of censorship.

The issue of whether or not the content of the work fell into the category of explicit pornography is open to debate, or at least it should be. Instead, Experimenta’s Board of Directors has closed down the possibility for debate that might arise out of encounters with Sexy Flowers.

Perhaps more than anything, this instance of censorship—for that is what has occurred—is representative, in my view, of the inability, the horror even, of cultural institutions of the establishment to negotiate what is, after all, a popular cultural form. Pornography is mainstream, and has been at least since it was made mechanically reproducible with the invention of the printing press, followed by photography.

Sexually explicit content can be viewed pretty much any night of the week on free to air commercial and public TV. Programs are preceded by a warning to viewers about content. Similarly, ‘pornographic’ content has featured fairly regularly in State art galleries across Australia. State galleries also advise viewers of what they are about to witness, should they choose to inquire further into a particular exhibit. Prior to its removal, the Sexy Flowers installation displayed a warning about content. Experimenta, in this instance of censorship, has deviated from what until now has been a mainstream, institutional norm.

If there’s one thing you might safely assume is part of Experimenta’s cultural mission statement, it would be to provide the public with artworks that experiment with the possibilities of various media and to provide the public with contexts to experiment with the work of artists. Indeed, Experimenta’s mission statement reads as follows:

“Experimenta reflects, celebrates and stimulates the dynamic convergence of multiple media across technologies and in various spaces of engagement, challenging and extending the aesthetic, formal and conceptual potential of art.”
www.experimenta.org/about.htm

By having a Board of Directors intervene in an exhibition just before it opened, censoring an artwork that had already been approved and legitimated though a process of curatorial selection, Waste and Experimenta have failed in that mission.

Finally, on a more speculative note, I would suggest that this instance of censorship articulates with the new control society that is in the process of consolidation following 11 September. This is a society in which conservative actors assume to be beyond challenge, critique and questioning. It is a society that assumes its own legitimacy in universal terms. It is a society of terrorism enacted by conservatives.

Ned Rossiter, Melbourne
See also: “Enculturating Net-Porn: Interview with Libidot”

Dear Editors

Thank you for the opportunity to respond to Ned Rossiter’s letter regarding Experimenta’s decision not to proceed with the exhibition of Sexy Flowers.

Importantly, the work received from the artist Katrien Jacobs prior to exhibition as part of the Waste program was not the work originally submitted and selected during Experimenta’s earlier Call for Entries.

The work received for exhibition comprised CD-ROM generated images of sexual activity generally regarded in the wider community as of ‘hard-core’ pornographic nature. This was not apparent until the work was installed immediately before the exhibition opened.

The Board of Experimenta sought advice that indicated it would be an offence for the organisation and the venue, the Victorian Arts Centre, to proceed with the exhibition of these images under State and Commonwealth laws. On this advice it was decided to withdraw the work from the exhibition. The capacity of a general audience in a free venue without age restriction to print and remove these images further compounded potential legal ramifications.

This decision was not made lightly, and no disrespect was intended toward the artist or her work. I appreciate the artist’s intention was to transform pornographic images by creating paper flowers, but Experimenta’s Board and staff must operate within the law. I trust there is room for artists to consider these issues for exhibiting organisations when situations like this arise.

Dear Editors

In early September the ABC TV Arts Show asked me if they could make a segment for their Closeup section of the program. This was scheduled to be aired at 9.30 pm September 13.

The segment discussed several of my works and featured the work Execution Bed. I recreated Timothy McVeigh’s execution bed (life-size) and then encased the structure in tiny hand painted balls that resemble hundreds and thousands.

After the bombings in New York on September 11, a decision was made by ABC management not to air my segment as people were feeling pretty shell-shocked. I agreed with the initial decision but expected that the segment would be aired at some point in the following weeks.

My work raises several issues regarding the American cultural hegemony operating in the media here and the sanitisation of real violence and political issues on television. It also confronts issues of ‘good taste’ and the predominance of ‘tasteful’ art over art that has any difficult content that permeates the Australian art scene. I am talking now about the commercial gallery system and mainstream newspaper and television arts coverage that is so conservative here.

At other levels, the work functions as a memorial; it arises from grief. It’s anti-violence, anti-death penalty, it questions our desire to watch these images on television. At a psychological level we’re horrified by them, but the fascination with them seems to be about being glad it’s not us in that position.

I was told recently by the producer of the program that they would not run the segment at all as people might see my work to be ‘tasteless’ and feel ‘indignant’, given current world events. She felt that some ‘weird’ sort of zeitgeist was operating.

I’m concerned about the censorship of this program discussing my work. Not only because of the impact on my artistic practice but more importantly the precedent it sets for other artists and anyone currently attempting to express alternative opinions.

Artists have appeared on the Arts Show recently talking about the current war. The problem is that the artist’s work is always legitimised by the rhetoric of the ‘genius’—of the brushstroke or drawing mark. This is a centuries old aesthetic tradition. It’s easy and it’s safe. I’m talking now about realistic charcoal drawings or painterly paintings of war scenes. My work seeks to take this rhetoric away and present something more objective and subversive. Contemporary art is supposed to be difficult and subversive.

When a journalist from the Age made an enquiry to the ABC about the non-airing of the segment, she was told the reason the segment was not screened was because the ‘production values’ were too low.

The producer told the journalist she would write to me to explain. I was told all this by the journalist, not a word from the producer. A letter never arrived.

The production values for the segment are not low. I have shown the tape to several colleagues (all celebrated contemporary artists) and we think that the standard is the same as anything else appearing on that program and feel unanimously that this is plain censorship.

Mary Lou Pavlovic, Melbourne
Execution Bed will be on display in Fall Out at the VCA Gallery in Melbourne in December & at Conny Dietzschold Gallery,
Sydney, in January. Eds.

Everyone knows where they were on September 11. I was in Darwin watching CNN as it happened, in a house in Philip St, Fannie Bay (subsequently the subject of an ABC program, Our Street). Meanwhile a group of senior artists from Balgo on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert, near the WA border, were en route by road to Darwin for the NATSIAA Aboriginal Art Award. They arrived that evening and I sat down with them to watch it all over again on the ABC news, and tried to imagine what the demise of New York looked like to them—like a video they said, scenes from a disaster movie. It looked the same to all of us…Eric Michaels, an anthropologist who famously studied the effects of the introduction of television in the Warlpiri desert community of Yuendumu, would have been perversely pleased by the egalitarianism of mediated disaster.

Michaels would also have enjoyed Djon Mundine’s rant at the forum at Northern Territory University, organised by 24 HR Art, on “Criticism and Indigenous art or Sacred Cows and Bulls at the Gate”, because Michaels wrote brilliantly about the whole vexed issue himself before his untimely death in 1988. Mundine, in black beret, racy red braces and the usual dreds, insisted that until Western art critics learnt Warlpiri as routinely as they might learn French, there could be no real progress in their understanding of Indigenous art. Other panellists—Benjamin Genocchio (art writer from The Australian and academics Ian McLean (White Aborigines; a study of Gordon Bennett) and Pat Hoffie—were more moderate. Mundine raised the difficulties of situating the subject amidst the territorial imperatives of the 2 great houses of academe, Anthropology and Fine Arts, and argued that most Indigenous art doesn’t fit the canons of Western art, and to talk in a colloquial style smacks of colonialism and simplification, and to be a Modernist or Post-Colonialist tends to lead to mere comparison viz Aboriginal Cubism and other nonsenses.

Djon’s own practice was predicated on his defining experience as an art advisor in NE Arnhemland where he took up the go-between role, translating and explaining the inside to the outside; cultural boundary riding. He cited his writing in The Native Born as an exemplar of his approach, where he creates a dialogue between himself and the artists, and quotes extensively from interviews he has done with them. He also acknowledged that he takes an ideological position of not attacking Aboriginal people publicly (in case he’s quoted by Keith Windshuttle in Quadrant)

Which brings us neatly back to Bad Aboriginal Art vide Michaels 1988—is there any? And if so, who says so? Michaels (like Mundine) says Indigenous art is the product of too many contradictory discourses that resist resolution. Genocchio acknowledged a pressing need for an engaged form of criticism but wasn’t volunteering to hang himself on the wall in pyjamas to be a target. Hoffie and McLean were more forthcoming and accepted the responsibility of having an opinion—”not falling silent”—and finding a way to engage with the mythologies and reflect self-critically on the possibilities of cross cultural exchange by acting as an interpreter of a culture of which you are not part.

Meanwhile, at the Art Award, it was the usual big night out for all of us—artists, advisers, dealers, collectors, critics, and what seems every year to be more of the whole of Darwin—who gave a standing ovation on the lawn under the stars to the new Chief Minister and erstwhile Member for Fannie Bay, Clare Martin, the first woman, first Labor CM, since self-government. Spirits were high and there was a general feeling that the judges Bernice Murphy and Michael Riley had done good in awarding first prize to Dorothy Napangardi. There was also intense local pride in the win by Larrakia elder, Prince of Wales, in the Open painting section.

Art Award week is always a big one and, in recognition of this, an effort was made to coordinate the numerous exhibition openings which immediately follow the announcement. It was even advertised in the NT News as an “Art Crawl” and listed 5 openings on one day featuring Indigenous artists. This hectic day included a reception at Parliament House for the representatives of the Indigenous arts industry hosted by the new Member for Arafura, Marion Scrymgour, the first Indigenous woman MP (deputising for Clare Martin who was in Canberra for urgent talks on the Ansett collapse and its devastating impact on the NT). This was the first such reception and it would be neat to assume it was because of the change of government, but I was assured it was well in train beforehand.

The Crawl began at 24 HR Art with Judy Watson’s Cumulus series, continued to Cullen Bay, where Red Rock Art showed new work in ochre from established Kimberley artists, then back to town to the foyer of the Supreme Court, where a feast of paintings, prints and weavings from Milingimbi, Crocodile Islands, in Central Arnhemland were on view, and for sale at such reasonable prices they were snapped up on the day. Milingimbi was one of the earliest art centres established in the 70s but has been dormant for the last 15 years, so its resurgence was greeted with great enthusiasm by a large contingent of artists and town council members.

Flushed by their justified success at the Art Awards (in the Works on Paper category, for the suite of 30 etchings based on the historic Yeundumu Doors by Paddy Japaljarri Sims and Paddy Japaljarri Stewart), the Northern Editions opening at NTU Gallery was a highlight with a new batch of screenprints from Yirrkala, produced and editioned in the community. There were many bold works but Marrnyula Mununggurr’s linocut showing how Centrelink works outside the big towns combined her usual acute observation of Balanda ways—rows of people sitting at computer terminals—with her distinctive graphic style grounded in bark painting. The newest and smartest gallery for Indigenous art, Raft Artspace on Frances Bay, opened the first solo show of Balgo painter Elizabeth Nyumi. Again these luscious paintings of the fruitfulness of desert country in bloom were like confections in creamy pinks, reds and golden yellows, so thick and generous you wanted to eat them straight from the canvas.

In a week dominated by Indigenous art, was there any room for what becomes in the context the ‘other’ art? Yes, some. Local sculptor Judith Durnford opened her first solo show Moves, Moves Not at Woods St Galllery—132 pairs of shoes made of paperbark. Later Durnford packed up the fragile footwear and flew off to Japan where she exhibited them again, managing to link the Top End and Japan in a unique exchange of culture.

At Browns Mart, Knock-Em-Down Theatre and Darwin Theatre Company produced ROAD HOUSE, a season of 4 new one act plays. Knock-Em-Down is the brainchild of Stephen Carleton and Gail Evans, and rightly describes itself as “a strident new voice” that “probes life at the northern edge.” ROAD HOUSE is a companion piece to their 1999 season, BLOCK, which was based in a block of flats in urban Darwin. There are no wimpy half measures here, no ersatz Southern sophistication; they rework the Frontier Myth into a new genre, Territory Gothic. In ROAD HOUSE the drover’s wife wakes in fright at the Bates Motel—the road’s flooded, she can’t leave—and outside a serial killer lies in wait to snatch her baby!

Four plays, 4 writers—Carleton and Evans plus Marian Devitt and Andrew McMillan—directed by Carleton, Evans and Ken Conway, and performed by an ensemble of 10 actors including Carleton, Evans and Conway. The brief: it happens in a roadhouse and no-one can leave. Gail Evans’ Burden, which she described as an “ugly play” with a simmering background of serial killing, was powerfully disturbing. It also had the stand out performance by Merrilee Mills as Bet, the catatonic, droll religious fanatic who had us mesmerised with her opening: “Hot enough for ya?” We are appalled but on side. “You oughta get yourself looked at”, her man Jack (played with sensitivity by Conway) mutters out of the side of his mouth and we agree. As the investigation into the bodies that keep turning up goes on, Bet ponders in a very spooky way, “maybe I served the killer petrol.” Maybe she did. Carleton’s Forbidden Tongues Whispered in a Night of Desert Rapture was lighter (anything would have been), a mix of satire and magic realism bringing together 2 Sydney gay boy types and a local harpy. Conway’s direction was the best in show, and Gail Evans’ performance as Lurleen (the chatelaine of the roadhouse) was a high camp treat. Devitt’s Deadline was strong on immersion in the local—the flooded cabins and the blocked writer en route to Timor—but it foundered in the diffuseness of its universal insights. While McMillan’s Dingo Calling was a collection of separate bizarre character schticks, never able to get a dynamic going, although Bob Scheer’s portrayal of the superbly organised and well informed teutonic tourist was a delight with some amusing overtones of Bruce Chatwin, just as Amelia Hunter’s hippy mother, Sunbeam, wickedly recalled the Lindy story.

A significant feature of all these plays was the tendency to go paranormal—spiritual, New Age or cosmic phenomena—when the writer wanted to up the ante in the narrative tension or character conflict; unfortunately this often results in flaccid and predictable denouements. Invariably I find, whether it’s one act plays or short stories, I want the ones I like to be longer, yet that belies the exercise and probably would strain the material. Each play, like each Territory roadhouse (as McMillan said) has a distinct character because of the person who runs it.

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Memorial Project Nha Trang Vietnam–towards the complex–for the Courageous, the Curious and the Cowards, 2001

The moving image is inescapable. Imagery can be retouched, manipulated or fabricated, it can be projected onto cloth, walls, moulded surfaces, the floor, and through TV and computer screens. It can be cued by the viewer. It can be blunt or surreptitious, naïve or cryptic, romantic or coldly passionless, intellectual or infantile, political or vacuous, archival or hallucinatory. We’re moths in moth heaven—a zone of infinite bright lights, all beckoning. We’re always alert to a potential story.

Much new work is designed for the art museum/gallery, staged in large cubicles and sometimes allied with static elements. Much is televisable or internet/computer transmissible. The form is endlessly variable—quasi-documentary, pictorial imagery, narrative, computer graphic.

Maybe half of the 100 or so artists in the inaugural and meticulously mounted Yokohama Triennale in Japan use screen-based imagery of some kind.

Political concerns are foremost in many works. Mats Hjelm’s Man to Man (Sweden), involving a split screen, made its point by juxtaposing adroitly edited imagery constructed from material left behind by Hjelm’s late father, a documentary maker. It includes scenes from prisons, American POWs fresh from Vietnam condemning the war, a French clown singing a patriotic song, young South American girls playing musical chairs, third world construction workers, cattle starving in an African drought. Hjelm collapses key issues in world politics into a powerful 45-minute montage and shows how they’re still relevant.

In Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Tijuana Projection (Poland/US), female Mexican labourers describe the abuse they have suffered, wearing the camera just under the chin to narrow the image of their faces. The video is of a performance before an audience who watch the women’s faces projected onto a large screen, the women just visible sitting at a table below the screen as they speak.

There is much beauty, even pathos. Fiona Tan’s enchanting St Sebastian (Indonesia/ Netherlands) shows girls from Kyoto practising archery. Across Japan, girls of 20 (the age of adulthood) go through various ceremonies, wearing their ‘coming out’ kimono. The video shows close-ups of faces, hair, skin, the drawing back of the bow and the practising of the movements, as they contemplate the meaning of the ritual.

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s delightful video, Memorial Project Nha Trang Vietnam—towards the complex—for the Courageous, the Curious and the Cowards (Vietnam), shows several young men pulling and riding old Vietnamese tri-shaws underwater. They pause regularly to surface for breath before continuing their work. There follows a scene of the underwater topography, and white tents of mosquito netting, suggesting an empty, submerged village—a moving portrayal of post-colonial Vietnam.

Pipilotti Rist’s fun Related Legs (Yokohama Dandelions) (Switzerland) is in a space hung with white lace curtain materials, onto which are projected images of people, eg a face pressed against a pane of glass. One projector rotates to shift the image from curtain to curtain, the work suggesting something ephemeral, inconsequential. Oladélé Ajiboyé Bamgboyé’s video (Nigeria/UK) is a few minutes of unfocused shots, like an abstract painting that moves, backgrounded by a gentle keyboard soundtrack. Marijke Van Warmerdam’s scratchy, 8mm B&W movie (Netherlands) continuously shows falling blossoms transmuting into leaves and then scattering in the wind, the camera then returning to the tree shedding the blossoms.

There are great animations. Tabaimo’s Japanese Commuter Train (Japan) is a cartoon rear-projected on all sides of a narrow arena—viewers are inside the train with the commuters. Akimoto Kitune’s stunning computer-generated cartoon UFO (Japan) is a surreal trip through space, with a groovy dance track, rear-projected onto an opaque white paper window in a child’s room. Monster heads adorn the room’s walls. While computer animation is the means rather than the end, UFO shows how far the medium has come, and reminds us how central cartoons are.

Sowon Kwon’s oblique work (Korea/US) uses pieces of archival footage of Olympic gymnasts or people walking about, and traces the figures with a coloured line to emphasise the movement. Though recalling Muybridge, the work says more about perception and figure drawing than kinaesthesia or biomechanics. And it defeats association with the subject, eg Nadia Comaneci.

Xing Danwen (China/US) projects New York and Beijing Street scenes into an open cubicle that has a glass-box-like a treasure chest at its entrance. The box houses objects and more projected images counterposing those on the wall. It’s as if we’re inside the artist’s head, watching memories. More literally cranial is Bigert and Bergström’s 3-metre wide hemispherical dome (Sweden) with projections on its inside surface. Equally introspective is Uri Tzaig’s streetlight that projects a metre-wide circular image onto the floor, adjacent to park benches from which people can watch.

There is concern with the architectural and topographical. Florian Claar’s work (Germany/Japan) comprises light projections on sculpted surfaces to suggest landscape. Tacita Dean’s (UK) video, shot inside a revolving restaurant, induces a meditative state as you absorb the banality of the diners, waiters and the slowly shifting background, the outside world as mere scenery. Bahc Yiso (Korea) has roughly cut one wall out of his cubicle, placed it on its side and projects onto it a direct image of the sky above the exhibition hall. Florian Pumhosl’s work (Austria) comprises 3 large projector screens, hanging in space to define a zone, showing videos of buildings in Europe and Madagascar (and fireflies).

Many works combined screen imagery with other elements. Jason Rhoades’ cryptic installation (US) of found and other objects on an artificial lawn included TVs both as object and information source. Oki Keitsuke’s Bodyfuture—have you ever seen your brain? (Japan) has hundreds of white plastic brains on the floor, with CAD 3D illustrations of brains. In La Charme, Emiko Kasahara (Japan/US) covers a floor with circular wigs a metre and a half wide and shows a video of women with matching hair colours sitting on these mats. Candy Factory’s Re:move (Japan) comprises a timber gallows painted a garish yellow, around which are placed wheelchairs and exercise equipment. An adjacent laptop computer displays a video of people learning to use a wheelchair. Candy Factory’s computer-based work is generated collaboratively using the internet.

Yang FuDong’s disturbing work (China) has 3 elements: 4 large screens showing a traditional Chinese garden with superimposed, miniaturised images of naked girls as nymphs/ fairies, while normal-sized people move about obliviously; a cluster of 16 small TVs showing scenes of lovers in a park or men exercising; and 3 other TVs showing scenes suggesting women waiting in a brothel. What separates surveillance, documentary, voyeurism and fantasy?

Rirkrit Tiravanija (Argentina/Thailand/ US/Germany) brought his small van stacked with video players connected to TVs outside it, each with a chair for viewing the videos he shot from the van while driving around Japan. This itinerant artist is more often associated with performance or installation—he once made a replica of his New York apartment and placed it in a Köln museum. Watching his videos is like entering his history, taking part in his interaction with the world.

The Triennale extended outside its exhibition halls and into the adjacent shopping mall. Aernout Mik (Netherlands) depicted a stock market floor with stricken traders amid the carnage of a crash. This surreal work repeated seamlessly, suggesting to bemused shoppers an endless cycle.

The screen is even mocked. Alexandra Ranner’s glass-enclosed room (Germany), containing seating arranged to view a lamp post visible through a window, evokes the absent, impotent television. Adel Abessemed’s Adel has resigned (Algeria/US) is an endlessly repeating 5 second image of a woman’s face as she states “Adel has resigned”, shown on a TV monitor that sits in the corner of an empty room. The artist indeed appears to have taken his leave. With time, this mantra might be hypnotic or meditative, but I didn’t wait.

William Kentridge’s haunting work (South Africa) is a glass bathroom-cabinet, with a rear projection inside it, showing animations he makes by photographing sequences of his drawings—news headlines interspersed with depictions of the troubled citizen.

The video is a panopticon. It can condense the photographic, the narrative, the performative and the representationally abstract. The aesthetic is flexible, indeterminate. If there is any story, it’s typically remote, conjectural. If not, you look for symbol and metaphor, or respond reflexively. The screen image’s power lies in its ability to shift our thinking and emotions, and it is becoming a dominant artform. Amidst more conventional artworks, screen works stand out in Yokohama.

Yokohama 2001 International Triennale of Contemporary Art, Mega Wave—Towards a New Synthesis, Yokohama, Japan, Sept 2 – Nov 11

It’s often said that innovation and dynamism occur not at the centre of systems, but at the periphery. Try applying this notion to metropolitan and regional art scenes and you’ll often find an uneasy silence. At least that’s been my experience since arriving in Warrnambool, 3 hours south west of Melbourne.

Logic in these parts deems the distance from Melbourne to Warrnambool at least twice that of the reverse journey so that much of what occurs in terms of the visual arts in this region remains unremarked or, at worst, invisible to those elsewhere.

So, what is happening on this strip of English landscape transposed to the shores of the Southern Ocean? The town of Warrnambool boasts a Deakin University campus nestled between river and paddock. Graduates from the Visual Arts school here are regularly represented in the National Art exhibition, Hatched, hosted by the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Warrnambool Gallery’s permanent collection contains turn of the century European salon paintings, colonial landscapes including works of Eugene von Geurhard and Louis Buvelot, and other historic images of the Shipwreck Coast region. What may surprise is the collection’s strong representation of works of avant-garde Modernism including artists Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan, Charles Blackman and Joy Hester as well as those of contemporary artists Juan Davila, Barbara Hanrahan and Ray Arnold. In addition, 2 temporary spaces host works from leading artists as well as touring exhibitions. Monash University’s Telling Tales: The Child in Contemporary Photography (see RT39 p9) is a recent example of the latter, featuring Anne Ferran’s series Carnal Knowledge, Ronnie Van Hout ‘s Mephitis and Bill Henson’s Untitled 1983/1984.

The gallery deviates from the conventional white cube in its encouragement of community and emerging artists through the availability (at a small fee) of a temporary exhibition space, the Alan Lane Community Gallery. Though risky in many ways, this generative move unearths some interesting contemporary practices and talent.

Evidence of this was seen in October, with Tate Plozza Radford’s exhibition Junk Food, a raw but coherent body of works. Using spray paint, Radford uses a process of marking and layering to produce a palimpsest effect or visual overlays evoking ancient cave paintings and alleyway graffiti. Temporal and spatial boundaries are blurred formally and thematically, through a superimposition of pristine dinosaur terrains, urban bleakscapes and the clutter of contemporary existence. This body of work may be viewed as an allegory of the planet’s progressive/regressive occupation by human and other forms of life.

Showing at the same time in the larger gallery was the Deakin University annual exhibition (by design or chance) entitled Regula Fries. The show displays an interesting intersection between fine art, photography and graphic design forged through Deakin University’s Visual Arts program that allows students to work across these areas throughout their undergraduate studies.

Another recent exhibition/event Slessar’s/4 Works (which deserves more space than can be given here) suggests the attribute of dogged tenacity is not lacking amongst local artists Adam Harding, Amanda Fewell, Chelsey Reis and Carolyn Rundell. The initiative culminated in a body of site-specific works interrogating the role of the gallery system as arbiter, and allowing the makers and audience to explore emergent relationships between art practice, space/place and community.

Slessar’s Motor Electric Shop, built in Koroit Street at the turn of the century—dark, begrimed and somewhat decrepit—was up for lease with no takers. With persistence the artists were able to secure the building free of charge for 6 weeks.

Works produced by Fewell and Reis emerge as a direct response to the nature of the building as a place of male labour, and demonstrate how craft can operate simultaneously as aesthetic conceptual and critical practice. Fewell’s intricately woven rolls of cash register dockets allude to the commercial history of the site. The alchemical visual transformation of waste paper into rich and delicate fabric is a validation of women’s labour where once only men toiled.

Reis took inspiration from discarded oil-stained T-shirts and fragments of texts—graffiti and notes—left by workmen, converting them into finely embroidered garments. Producing the work from and in the space, Reis questions the logic of Western attitudes to work and applies what she terms a “low-tech, hand-made approach, linking the aesthetics of craft to meaningful work practice.”

Rundell, known for her monolithic sculptural works woven from barbed wire, continues the dialogue with Shadow Lands Virtual Skies, a massive quilt woven from barbed wire and suspended from the ceiling over a bed within a darkened space. She views domestic space and landscape as strong influences on our psyche and comments, “The work attempts to illustrate the paradox of love and control in both domestic space and the wider Australian landscape.”

Harding (remembered for prior interventions through his Black Cats and other projects in Geelong) is new to the town and, without a car, is bemused by the proliferation of roundabouts and traffic barriers thwarting walkers and drivers. Assuming ownership of the roundabout as a front yard, the first phase of his work involved knitting a pastel-coloured mohair cover for steel barriers at the nearby corner—a performance which amused passers-by. Other responses included some suspicion from the local constabulary, discomforted by interference with civic infrastructure and a strong belief that knitting is not a blokey thing to do. The mohair tubing was later filled with white wadding and installed in the building as a precarious railing, producing comic contrast to an unyielding mechanical darkness.

The Slessar’s project afforded a new connection with the building’s history and its departed community. For some, it seemed to satisfy a yearning for something rough, gritty and perhaps bohemian. The makeshift bar and kitchen offered a place for artists and curious visitors to linger for a yarn and ponder anew the notion of change, transformation and this business called art.

Interest and activity around the site has led a local restaurateur to take up a lease to convert Slessar’s Electric Motor Shop into a bistro restaurant—art slipping, almost seamlessly, into life?

In correct syntax brings together the work of 3 artists, Melbourne writer Mammad Aidani, Singapore based installation artist Matthew Ngui, who sometimes lives in Perth, and Tasmanian textile artist Greg Leong, currently Launceston based. The curators, Niki Vouis and Mehmet Adil, presented the artists with a series of artistic challenges.

First, the artists were asked to engage thoughtfully and deeply with the work of the others. In the next stage they worked collaboratively to make new installation work in which they incorporated visual and other textual references to each other’s artistic oeuvre. Spatiality, space sharing and attendant questions of power were related issues with which the artists had to contend, since the new work commissioned had to be site specific. The resulting installation work was custom-made for Adelaide’s tiny and rather idiosyncratic Nexus Gallery space.

In response to this curatorial brief, Hong Kong-born Greg Leong chose to incorporate an ancient Persian motif, the boteh symbol, into his work. The boteh apparently originated in Persia then traversed India, Central Asia, the Caucasus and Asia Minor before winding up in Scotland where eventually it morphed into the well known and relatively contemporary paisley design. Leong’s mixed media quilts, suspended from the ceiling of this small gallery, speak eloquently to the possibilities of a borderless world based on globalised kinship systems where identities are neither singular nor monolithic but are routinely and complexly intersecting and hyphenated. In rich red Chinese silk and brocade, inscribed with texts of different verses by poet Mammad Aidani, the works look for all the world like gorgeous inverted seahorses floating and bobbing underwater.

The entire exhibition gave me the feeling of finding myself below sea level, encountering treasures rich and rare in a dark and quiet space. The aquarium-like feel of the space and the exhibition itself was reinforced by the continuous flickering presence of the live video installation by Matthew Ngui projecting Mammad Aidani’s elegantly hand-written ink-on-paper poems in Farsi script. I loved the work that Ngui and Iranian-born Aidani jointly created. Aidani’s Poem in Persian (2001, ink on paper), reconfigured by Ngui and projected on to the wall of the gallery, was ethereal, memorable and moving. The fleeting, sensual qualities of their installation contrasted interestingly with the other more literally material works.

All of the works here show that migration, late capitalism and personal markers including gender, ethnicity, ‘race’ and sexuality combine to produce complex identities at the nexus of a set of sometimes contradictory elements. If art is about transcending the spaces into which one is born, both physical and metaphorical, and embarking upon aesthetic adventures of identity, this exhibition succeeds par excellence.

This is a thinking person’s exhibition. The curators have consciously drawn an analogy between visual images and other kinds of texts, especially linguistic ones. Specifically, the exhibition conveys the idea that all artistic traditions (for example, ‘Chinese’, ‘Persian’, ‘European’) have an underlying grammar or ‘syntax’. Just as there are rules governing spoken and written expression, the structure and visual patterns or possible arrangements in any given ‘visual language’ are subject to certain cultural parameters.

While this is a challengeable assertion, as there are limitations with respect to how far such a linguistic analogy can be extended to visual media, the idea raises a plethora of fascinating, supplementary questions. For instance, are these new, hybrid artistic works akin to linguistic pidgins and creoles? If the latter, each of these works could be understood as greater than the sum of its component parts, regarded as unique transcultural creations. Or are they simply arbitrary agglutinations of various visual and cultural signs and symbols, the artistic equivalent of, say, broken English? There is a suggestion in the accompanying brochure that this may be the case, and that lying in the interstices and cracks of seemingly inadequate spoken language are unappreciated riches. Or are the works on display here merely tricksy, along the lines of Pig Latin, for example?

Thanks to Adil and Vouis throwing down the curatorial gauntlet, these culturally diverse artists have created installations that give us a good deal to look at and think through with no instant gratification to be had, visually or in other ways! Of course, there’s nothing new about artists ‘pinching’ or appropriating visual patterns, ideas and styles from other cultures and traditions in the course of cultural contact. What is different about In correct syntax is that the artists were actually directed to do so for the purposes of this exhibition. Now that’s a different ball game.

In correct syntax, curated by Mehmet Adil & Niki Vouis, artists Matthew Ngui, Mammad Aidani, Greg Leong, Nexus Gallery, Lions Arts Centre, Adelaide, Sept 6 – Oct 7

I was lookin back to see if you were lookin back at me
To see me lookin back at you
Massive Attack

‘Observation’, it seems safe to say, has made it to zeitgeist status. Whether it’s the bizarre phenomenon of watching the making of Man Down (the ‘film’ shot by Big Brother inmates) or the maddeningly abstract formulations of Niklas Luhmann (German sociologist and ur-reflexivity theorist) observation is the critical stance of choice across a range of artistic practices and cultural sites. The video art program Wet and Dry explored this cultural trope—the “lingua franca of hyper referentiality” (curators)—with edgy wit and a disquieting aesthetic. Curated by Ian Haig and Dominic Redfern, the event brought together recent work from a diverse set of Australian and international screen-based video artists.

Wet and Dry was organised conceptually according to a number of technological, formal, and thematic criteria and the trope of observation played itself out in different ways over the 2-night screening. For many of the pieces within the Wet program this meant self-consciousness about the pop-cultural heritage of video art. Ferrum 5000 (directed by Steve Doughton), for example, clashes Busby Berkleyesque references with images that recall The Residents together with 50s sci-fi ‘green goo’ iconography. And I Cried by Cassandra Tytler makes observation an explicit concern in its exploration of ‘celebrity’ and the longing for stardom. Drawing from televisual culture, with an obvious fondness for 50s crime narratives and 60s set design, Tytler’s piece is both homage to and critique of the ‘cult’ of the image. Video diarist supremo George Kuchar is, of course, rather a cult figure himself. The 2 works screened, Culinary Linkage and Art Asylum, are poignantly kitsch studies of trash culture and TV land: “beautiful people emoting” as Kuchar puts it. Emoting is something Kuchar does extremely well. But it’s not quite the emotion of Sunset Beach. His sensibility is pitched somewhere between Samuel Beckett and Eddie the Egg Lady—the excruciating passage of time and the pathos of bodily function. Sadie Benning’s Aerobicide, a music video for the band Julie Ruin is, ostensibly, a critique of sales pitches, focus groups, motivation seminars, target audiences and the rest of the corporate grammar of consumerism: the “Girls Rule (kind of) strategy” to use their ironic phrase. But the video looks so goddamn good—gaudy colours, modernist architecture and fluorescent office lighting—that it’s hard to resist the urge to join in the whiteboard fun. And pleasure, as all good visual culture theorists know, is intimately connected with the business of ‘watching.’

The Dry program brought fresh, albeit vexing, interpretation to the ‘scopic’ desire of screen-based art practice. Hood by Klaus vom Bruch explores the spectral and uncanny forces behind visual iteration and feedback. A woman’s face is caught mid-glance as she turns her head. The shot is played again and again, till you get the sneaking suspicion she is actually looking back at that which plays her back. Mesmerising and intractable, this image, her slightly anxious face, her gaze, forms a self-referential loop from which it is difficult to disengage. If Hood is slightly vexatious in its attention to the materialities of screen culture, its quiet insistence to look at rather than through the interface, then Joseph Hyde’s Zoetrope is relentless. Here, we find Laura Mulvey’s theories on the pleasure of visual phenomenology pushed to ear splitting and pupil constricting extremes. Zoetrope seems almost pornographic. Yet there are no undressed bodies, no unexpected flashes of flesh to excite our carnal appetites and hence shame the viewer/voyeur. No, what is pornographic about Hyde’s work is the way it focuses on observation sans object. Twenty-one long minutes of raging, screaming feedback and migraine-inducing white noise creates claustrophobic soundscapes and optical distress. Zoetrope transforms the romantic experience of watching something (narrative development, character formation, scenic construction) to the somatic reality of neurological response. Watching becomes an intransitive verb. Theoretically very pleasing; corporeally—not so much.

One of the last works screened was pleasing on both counts. Conceptually adroit and visually stimulating, Involuntary Reception by Kristin Lucas is about a woman afflicted with an “enormous electromagnetic field.” The formal arrangement of the video is double imaged, reflecting her ambivalence about technological mediation. Because of her extreme sensitivity to electromagnetic signals this character, played by Lucas, can crash computers, read people’s minds or make cats fry as she explains in a beautifully sparse, monotone voice: “Yeah, I’ve had a pet before. You just have to be careful not to…pet them. Because that just builds the static energy and…I guess the static charge was just too much for her…I’d start petting her and the static would build up. And then one day…it was just too much. Love kills. Love kills.” Indeed, a fried cat is iconic of this video art program itself: half wet, half dry, disquieting but compelling to watch.

Wet & Dry: International video art, curated by Ian Haig and Dominic Redfern, presented by City of Melbourne & Centre for Contemporary Photography, Cinemedia @ Treasury Theatre, Melbourne, Sept 21 & 22

Reviewing Pizza Surprise! is an exercise in restraint. An abundance of culinary and other lame clichés spring to mind, willing me to make them manifest. The reality of the Pizza Surprise! project and its outcomes, however, is that though the work and its literal delivery are based on a packaged concept of convenience, it is far too cunning to be so easily dispatched.

Pizza Surprise! is unabashedly what it is, a commercial, marketed-to-the-eyeballs, good-value visual arts project, and much more. It is a national and international event, a travelling show, and a low-price, egalitarian and accessible exhibition for your lounge-room table. Conceived by local Perth curators and recently pizza delivery chicks, Michelle Glaser and Katie Major (Art to Go), Pizza Surprise! is, above all its superfluous and incidental concerns, a collection of damn fine art. Seven artists including Bruce Slatter (my personal choice), Martine Corompt, Bevan Honey, Mari Velonaki, Scanner, Horst Kiechle and Sam Collins tackled the compressed white, flip-top cube with work that spanned the supernatural to the structural.

A strange kind of value judgement starts to operate when art is offered, home-delivered in a family-sized pizza box, for $19.95 (+GST). The generic nature of presentation, the online order form and automated responses solicit hasty decision. I knew I had to have one but further scrutiny of the work would have prompted me to order the lot! Therein lies the paradox; as a show of 25×7 packaged multiples, it has proved unattractive to artistic, commercial and cultural entities (who should be kicking themselves), but immensely popular within the gp.

The work by no means suffers for this, as all artists engage with the pizza box’s spatial and commercial paradigms with incisive, deconstructive and, yes, entertaining work. Sam Collins’ Appliance for the Decoration of a Common Void is a neat composition of circuitry and wires with a discrete switch that, when plugged into a TV, begins to scroll a number of test-pattern orientated compositions, creating a changing abstract-art feature for any living-room.

Another technologically-orientated work, Pizza Aphonia by Mari Velonaki, uses text formed by a number of LEDs that light up when the box is opened. This work, deconstructing an intimate letter within 25 pizza boxes, has resonances with the film noir secret briefcase. Martine Corompt’s gruesomely cute Household Names includes a cannibalistic cartoon adventure of 4 physically distorted, wannabe pop-starlets and a pink, rubbery doll of the same extended proportions.

Bevan Honey takes the framing and placing concerns of The Hot Sell into a zone of questioning the consumer experience. His work includes a piece of timber thickly layered with varnish that covers a random, linear pattern in black paint. The reverse of the pizza box includes detailed instructions for hanging that suggest a considered approach to placement in the home.

Cardboard constructivist Horst Kiechle’s Partially Iconoclastic Zero-Zen Art (PIZZA) uses the pizza box as a starting point for the folding of a series of boxes, from cube to non-cube. These works are carefully cut in the same material as the pizza box, and rely on the customer following specific instructions for their creation. UK sound artist Scanner’s Spread recreates a soundtrack of someone-else’s everyday, transplanted into the home of another.

A condition of buying a Pizza Surprise is that the owner must send Art to Go a document of its installation. My Bruce Slatter Painter’s Palette Ouija Board deserves a home-movie séance replete with candles and much foaming of the mouth to conjure one of the “…really great dead painters.”

Pizza Surprise! curated by Art to Go (Katie Major & Michelle Glaser), various homes in regional areas & metropolitan cities of Australia, Oct 23-Nov 7

Lindsay Vickery has been based in Perth for the last 10 of his 15 years composing and performing New Music including works for acoustic and electronic instruments in interactive electronic, improvised or fully notated settings, ranging from solo pieces to opera. He has been commissioned by numerous groups and has performed in Holland, Norway, Germany England, the USA and across Australia. In December he will be resident again at STEIM (Amsterdam) working on an interactive video project and in January he will undertake a 9 states tour of the US culminating in a residency at the Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia (CEMI) at the University of Northern Texas. Vickery also lectures in music at the Western Australian Conservatorium of Music where he founded the laboratory Study for Research in Performance Technology.

…one can observe that numerous important elements coincide with real facts with a strange recurrence that is therefore disconcerting. And, while other elements of the narrative stray deliberately away from those facts, they always do so in so suspicious a manner that one is forced to see there is a systematic intent, as though some secret motive had dictated those changes and those inventions.

The genesis of Lindsay Vickery’s creation, Rendez-vous—an Opera Noir, is reflected in these opening lines. Adapted from Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel Djinn, Rendez-vous has strayed with systematic intent through the decade of its making. Over coffee, between teaching and rehearsals, Vickery spoke about his latest work.

“At the end of ‘93 Warwick Stengards, who was the Artistic Director of Pocket Opera, came to see me. He was interested in commissioning a work. I actually suggested a number of things before Rendez-vous because Djinn was quite a difficult work to adapt…”—Vickery gives a short laugh “…Stengards wasn’t interested in any of those but he thought Rendez-vous sounded like a great idea.

“So that conversation resulted in me writing a libretto. We applied for money to write a score. I wrote a score…Rendez-vous was completed back in 1995 so that gives a measure of how difficult it is to put on new opera…particularly in Perth. There is no infrastructure to put on work of this nature. So, there was a workshop period back then in ‘95. Then Pocket Opera went bust and Magnetic Pig picked it up and did a concert version, just the music (in ‘97) which was so we could get recordings to push the work forward. Since then it’s been a period of collecting bits and pieces of grants to develop this part, grants to develop that part, collaborations with various people. Finally, this last 18 months or so has seen Black Swan (Theatre Company) coming on board, Tura (Events Company) coming on board.

“We had a meeting the other day where all of the various partners who are involved in this work were in the same room. And, you know, it really is indicative of the difficulty of doing this that it has taken 6 or 7 major collaborators to come together to be able to put this thing on.”

Vickery, along with Cathy Travers and Taryn Fiebig, has been performing excerpts from the opera for the past 5 years.

“That’s been quite an important element in keeping the work alive. One of the songs has been recorded for Musica Viva and has been touring schools and that kind of thing.” He laughs. “It is so innocuous that it has been to primary schools.”

“Just in frustration really. A couple of years ago I took some ideas from it and made a separate piece called Noir which used the Miburi jump suit as a midi controller, controlling lights. Noir didn’t use any text appropriated from Rendez-vous, Robbe-Grillet’s text; it was an original text. But there is a little tiny bit of the music from Noir which I pinched for the car chase scene. But essentially Noir was a work, a separate work, a quite closely related second-cousin.”

When asked if, at that stage, he just wanted to see something completed, even if it was a second cousin, Vickery replied, “Yes. It felt really great to be in this room with people who were all pointing in the same direction, and keen to see a work finally up and running.”

Now Rendez-vous is up and running. At the time of the interview it was only days away from rehearsals and all of the video footage, for the virtual set, had been shot and was being edited.

“We have a really great team of people working on it. Obviously, like so many contemporary artists, they are not being paid a heap of money. Well, particularly Vikki Wilson of Retarded Eye. We came up with the idea of having virtual sets, projected sets, maybe 3 years ago, and she and I have expended an enormous amount of energy discussing how we were going to create this work and what it was going to look like. She’s got a great visual sense and a really encyclopaedic knowledge of the postmodern literature scene, the postmodern theory scene, which comes through in her work in a way that’s not overbearing. She creates really incredibly beautiful images.

“Talya [Masel, the director] was in on the process right from the beginning. She ran the first workshop back in ‘95. She has been in on the various stages and transformations, incarnations, of the work. She’s been ideal; she’s definitely got a sense of French literature and postmodernist literature.

“Andrew Broadbent, who plays Simon, has a music-theatre background. Taryn Fiebig, she crosses over between the classical music and contemporary music streams, and also music theatre. Then there is Kathryn McCusker who is firmly planted in the Australian Opera, in the classical tradition. So there is a kind of hierarchy there which is reflected in the characters they play.”

Vickery’s “kind of hierarchy” also contributes to the development of the opera’s narrative and its structure.

“In film noir where everybody is talking at the bottom of their range, and everybody is being as cool as possible, is as far away as you can get from opera where everyone is talking at the top of their voices, as loud as they possibly can. We needed a transition through that. So, we picked up on the increasing complexity that you get in the novel by having the characters begin at the bottom of their range in a style that is much closer to natural speaking, and they gradually go into more and more heightened speaking and eventually full singing. I hope that this will be a seamless thing. That’s part of why we cast the way we did.”

Vickery concludes, “Tos Mahoney (see RT 41 p32) at Tura (Events Company) has been really important. I think this is the most complicated single work that has been put on by Tura”—looking across the table Vickery laughs—”this is definitely the most complicated work that I have put on.” Then, suddenly serious, “I hope the momentum from putting something like this together can remain for other projects out there. After this, hopefully, they’ll know it can be done successfully.”

At the end of the year Vickery will be taking QuickTime footage of Rendez-vous to a number of venues and producers in the US. The University of Northern Texas has already made enquiries about staging it.

Lindsay Vickery, Rendez-vous—an Opera Noir, Rechabites Hall,
Perth, Nov 21 – 25

Visitors to Canberra, or new arrivals, are often anxious to find out where ‘town’ is, where they are in relation to the middle of things, the action, the hub, the urban focus. There’s a common conversation that goes along the lines of, “So where’s the city?” “Well…” (apologetically) “there’s Civic…” Civic is the diffuse middle of this diffuse city—a loose mix of malls, cafes and bus terminals; visitors greet it with some suspicion, as if there’s actually a real urban centre somewhere else which is being kept from them.

The retail and restaurant cluster is around Garema Place, the wide pedestrian plaza that is truly, in social, street-life terms, the middle of town. Its image has been dominated by petty crime and drugs, until recently; the Place has been ‘cleaned up,’ and local government seems intent on encouraging a more lively and non-threatening public space. There’s certainly a pulse now: lots of fire-twirling, the odd band, packs of skateboarders and freestyle bike riders, hopping around the steps and benches like biomechanical goats. As well, public sculptures have been multiplying in the Place precinct, part of a public art program being run by local government. The latest of these is The Master’s Voice, a sound installation by Melbourne-based collaborators David Chesworth and Sonia Leber.

The work is physically almost surreptitious: 11 straps of stainless steel grille, inset into the pavement and up an adjacent wall. It borders a pedestrian thoroughfare through low-key retail and cafes, a transitional space. Crouching below waist level, it trips up passers-by, induces double-takes, private puzzled glances. It calls out: “Come ‘ere…gedaround ya lazy dog / Chook-chook-chook-chook! / Back…back…back…good boy, Whoa!” It addresses us directly, in a language and a sonic shape that is completely familiar. It’s just that we’re not usually the addressee, here. A throng of animal-voices: calls, exhortations, orders, signals, admonishments, affectionate jibes. In fact they’re real-world recordings of people talking to their animals, with the sonic presence of the animals themselves edited out. There’s a kind of hole in the air where an animal should be, but it’s only occasionally clear what kind of animal, and anyway it keeps changing. A phantom menagerie, chooks, dogs, elephants, horses, who-knows-what. That’s what passing humans walk into, what alerts and draws them in, a virtual form made from silly, anthropomorphised animal-talk, but a form which points to the real presence of one of those inscrutable ‘others.’

Leber and Chesworth have edited the calls together into short compositions, layered sequences which follow a passerby the length of the work. There are arrangements of sense and subject but especially sound: pitch, contour, cadence, rhythm. The ‘sensible’ inflections of speech get stretched into wild glisses and warbling melisma; syllables shorten into abstract sonic punctuation. There’s a bit of outright mimesis, growls and clucks and budgie whistles, but more often the calls work 2 strata at once, language and sound, human and animal. The words are there as a scaffolding for the sonic forms—the elements which do the behavioural work—but also for the speaker’s own benefit, a warmly ironic monologue. “You’re not going to be able to walk, your stomach’s that big…You aren’t…Eh?” At the same time these calls are full of questions, invitations to conversation, spaces for exchange; there’s this urge for an interchange, which in the absence of an articulate partner, puts words in its mouth, or maw.

So these candid, charged interspecies moments emerge from inconspicuous slots in a mallscape; their sonic shapes stand out against the ‘public’ murmur of social verbosity. As Tony MacGregor (Executive Producer, Radio Eye, ABC Radio National) pointed out at the work’s opening, Canberra is nominally a location for public, social, civilised speech; yet the House of Reps is dubbed the “bear pit.” Meanwhile these real interchanges have an immediacy that the scripted drivel of most political discourse lacks. Most striking, though, is the presence which the work projects, the way it subtly deforms this coolly anthropocentric public plaza, turning civilised language into silly noises, and turning people, momentarily, into animals.

The Master’s Voice, sound installation by Sonia Leber & David Chesworth in association with H2o architects, Pocket Park, Corner Garema Place & Akuna Street, Civic, Canberra.

At the beginning of Toru Takemitsu’s work, Stanza II for amplified harp and tape, Marshall McGuire stopped to retune his harp. The simple gesture of standing, quietly checking, plucking, and moving on to the next strings held a quiet kind of physicality and inherent theatre, that had the potential to serve as a source of inspiration for the mixed media content of the 3 concerts I attended in September, as part of the Sydney Spring Festival.

That work was a festival highlight. The tape track of the Takemitsu, written/recorded in 1971, was exciting and rich. Something in it grabbed the imagination and flung it up into the air. The harp (both treated in realtime and appearing on tape) sounded as if it had been left alone in a dusty corner of a city warehouse where the daily movements of the sun across its strings and frame, and the shifting humidity of a decade’s seasons, had caused it to disintegrate…popping to itself, the wood creaks, the strings sound brittle, a bat flying past brushes the strings and they shimmer and flick apart. This was organic and dark music, almost vocal, as the harp cried out its fracturing. We heard the city outside the windows, and voices, briefly, as they peered into the room—though they didn’t seem to see the pieces of the harp in the corner.

This work came at the end of the Twentieth Century Harp concert, featuring a selection of favourites from renowned contemporary harpist Marshall McGuire. Also a delight during that concert was Berio’s Sequenza II—always a pleasure to hear the recognisable gestures of a Berio Sequenza, of which he wrote several, for various solo instruments. Kaija Saariaho’s Fall also had electronic elements, echoing from the corners of the room, flirting briefly with the lower registers of the instrument—I never knew a harp could growl. And McGuire playing Franco Donatoni’s Marches at times created a physical effect—a swoon of harp swirls made the back of my head tingle as with the first draw on a cigarette and, there again, a pleasurable exploration of the colours of the instrument’s lower registers.

The video projections throughout the concert, by Nicole Lee, worked reasonably well with the Takemitsu—images of a dark-eyed and serious young man moving through a cityscape. We’d seen him earlier throughout the concert, turning in slow motion to face us.

At the Colin Bright evening, The Wild Boys, I enjoyed the playful and ironic Stalin, with the recorded voice of Jas H Duke working itself into hysteria, crying out the name of the Russian dictator like a child for his mother, or a lover for his partner. And given that it was just a week after the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York, and consequent Australian government posturing, the re-presentation of Amanda Stewart’s 1988 Bicentenial work work, N.aim, was horrifyingly prescient. Stewart’s presence in the audience, reminded us how welcome a live performance would have been.

The recordings introduced the artist to the listener before Bright manipulated them. They also added a much needed change of texture through the concert, as I found The Wild Boys, Ratsinkafka and There Ain’t No Harps in Hell, Angel too long, too loud, and too didactic. Musically they were all bombardment, with little tonal variety. And call me old-fashioned, but there’s something odd and frustrating about hearing great musicians (Sandy Evans, Marjery Smith, Synergy Percussion et al) on tape in a concert. The one live appearance from Marshall McGuire for There Ain’t No Harps in Hell, Angel was a disappointment—outdated and predictable in its references. AC/DC with Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus? Give me a break.

Towards the end of the festival, Delia Silvan’s program, Night Vision, was musically enjoyable, with exquisite performances. Roger Woodward’s 2 Chopin Nocturnes were like a caress, McGuire pensive and perfect in Ludovico Einaudi’s Stanza and From Where?, and cellist David Pereira played Carl Vine’s work with tape, Inner World, with precision and appropriately withheld emotion.

But the dance didn’t work for me. Delia Silvan is a fine dancer and her first attempt at choreography was sometimes pretty, but overall somewhat clichéd in its subject matter—women and darkness—and its choreography. Meanwhile the music inevitably becomes secondary—an emotional support team for the main game. An odd thing in a music festival.

For this concert, as with the other 2, I found the imposition of other elements upon the music exactly that—an imposition. Looking for points of integration of purpose in each I could find very few—what did manifest for a moment in Lee’s video work, and that of Dean Edwards during the Colin Bright concert, was soon evaporated by monotonous repetition.

Watching digitally rendered red dots split and multiply I wondered at their function. Similarly I ended up averting my eyes from the repeated replays of Lee walking up a beach. Can someone tell me the point of using digitally made landscapes through which the viewer is rushed ever onwards, as if in a video game (Edwards). A comment on the sterility of the way we interpret the world around us, or the mindlessness of video games…or are the images themselves sterile, with no connection to the psyche of the audience, nor the artist? Abstract images appeared throughout the Bright concert, combined with more immediately graspable, repeated images—newspaper clippings, drawings of Stalin, dollar signs, Aboriginal children, the Greenpeace web address. So does the repetition indicate that the music is all the same? Or that the issues are? Either way, if you can say it once why say it again, and again?

These 3 concerts demonstrated the fundamental problem of contemporary music’s continuing disconnection from contemporary performance practice. Musicians are prone to repeating, in their ignorance, the practices of awkward, early days of collaboration. If Sydney Spring is to stake a claim in this worthwhile territory, then the organisers should think about adding a specialist curator to its artistic team to help realise its admirable intentions. Otherwise, keep it simple and stick to the music.

12th Sydney Spring International Festival of New Music: The Wild Boys, Colin Bright, Sept 18; Twentieth Century Harp, Sept 20; Night Vision, Sept 22, The Studio, Sydney Opera House

The Sydney Spring International Festival of New Music is an intimate garden where new works sprout side by side with modernist rarities—old seeds newly planted and nurtured. A small audience of admirers and the curious gather in the Sydney Opera House’s The Studio. For a significant part of the festival we are joined by a larger audience of ABC radio listeners. We clap like buggery to make them feel there’s a big turnout. Once again it’s a surprise that Sydney Spring can survive on the small audiences and a modest budget while yielding a richly coloured crop of quality performances planted by Artistic Director Roger Woodward and Executive Producer Barry Plews. But it does, attracting grant and sponsorships and some concerts pulling sizeable and appreciative audiences.

The pick of the bunch were the concerts by Clocked Out Duo, Erik Griswold, Ensemble Sirius, Marshall McGuire, and the Homage to the Iannis Xenakis, who died in February this year. A feature of this year’s Sydney Spring was the interplay between music and other media—video, visual art works, dance and combinations of these. Compared with the 2000 festival’s Exile, these were less developed and sometimes less than ideal combinations (see Gretchen Miller’s response above). Nonetheless they were indicative not only of healthy explorations in hybridity but also of a widespread concern to reach new audiences intrigued by multimedia possibilities.

Russian Futurism, Sept 14, 8.00pm

This proved an unusual opening concert, providing in part a prelude to Russian musical Futurism (or Constructivism as it is sometimes called as in the Sitsky Adelaide Festival concerts) with works from Skryabin, his son Julian (who drowned aged 11) and Pasternak (who gave up music to write). Skryabin's Feuillet d'album (1910) is his first venture into atonality. Roger Woodward plays an earlier work of intriguing beauty of the same title (1905). The son's Two Preludes (1918) seem even more prescient of the music to come, yet sustain the beauty of his father's dark romanticism. Then we were plunged into the middle of Russian Futurism with the 4 piano Symphonie: Ainsi parlait Zarathoustre (Thus spake Zarathustra; 1929-30) by Ivan Vishnegradzky. A musical mystic following Skryabin, the composer employed quartertones and microtones (a preoccupation too of our contemporary, the Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina) to evoke cosmic consciousness, in this case 2 pianos tuned to normal pitch, 2 in quarter and 3-quarter semitones. The effect is extraordinary, initially like a bevy of slightly out of tune pianolas exercising scales on the edge of chaos. The second part is rhythmically rich but even more harmonically disturbing, the tonal shifts sounding like massive re-tunings of a master instrument. The brave pianists were Robert Curry, Daniel Herscovitch, Erzsbet Marosszky and Stephanie McCallum. The second part of the concert was a great debut for the Grand Masonic Russian Chamber Choir of Sydney, conduced by Artistic Director Piotr Raspopov. How the post-World War II works they performed fitted under the Futurism mantle wasn't clear. Shostakovitch was a contemporary of the Futurists and a fellow member of the doomed Association of Contemporary Music—some early works, like Symphonies 2 and 4, share the robust sense of machine and chaotic speed associated with Futurism. However, the Poems 5, 6 & 7 from Ten Poems on Texts by Revolutionary Poets are elegaic, seamless constructions that allow the choir to demonstrate its range from classically rich Russian basses to lucid sopranos. The short work by Georgi Sviridov, Sacred Love, was remarkable only for its long, layered closing chord. by now I was beginning to think that Futurism had indeed been thoroughly purged by Stalin. However, the next 2 works, Da-di-da and Sunset Music, both by Valeri Gavrilan, suggested a tradition kept alive with their mix of the sung and the spoken, whoops and laughter and an insistent if heavily punctuated rhythmic drive. A dogged cuteness indicated that a radical inheritance was not be found here. What we got was a choir with a lot of promise and at its best in the Shostakovitch.

ACME Jazz Unit, Sept 14, 10.30pm

In the first of the late night jazz offerings from Sydney Spring, Adelaide's ACME Jazz Unit performed with polish and exuberance and was rewarded with rapturous applause. That's a good outcome, considering that the band's natural home would appear to a be a quality jazz club and that we'd of our drinks on entering The Studio. Vocalist Libby O'Donovan reckoned it would have been nice to have cigarette smoke too, but only for the atmosphere. The sense of musicians speaking the same language was evident from the beginning. In tightly scored, short works, improvisation was not a priority, but the many nuances that adorned the works yielded an engaging conversational ease. O'Donovan's range rose from raunchy belter to music theatre mezzo to a soft, all-sweetness-and-light soprano (thankfully without American vowels). While looking spectacular in her high heel sneakers, ultra-punk-spike hair and slick black plastic 3-quarter coat, she moved little, energy focused and embodied in the voice and on sharing the stage with the instrumentalists. Aside from one all too brief avant garde-ish contribution, Space: Tone Poem, the works, all composed by band members, were pretty safe for a new music festival, the pleasure mostly coming from the sheer dexterity of the delivery. There were exceptions, the gentle, opening number Harvest Time erupted into wild vocal riffs against the minimalist pulse of piano and drum. In Man of Sorrow, Julian Ferraretto's violin sang sinuously in the tradition of Stephan Grapelli. In his own La Zia Zangara (The Gypsy Aunt) the same voice spoke with a dynamic flamenco accent, shades of Chick Corea's Spanish phase. Throughout, bassist Shireen Khemlani proved an audience favorite with her right-on-the note melodic inventiveness and fluency while drummer Mario Marino provided clear lines of support with plenty of dextrous treble and no signs of heavy footedness. Group leader and key composer, Deanna Djuri, is an eloquent, melodic pianist, deftly creating a big city, bluesy Sweet Lullaby with a soaring vocal line for O'Donovan. Djuric's prize-winning, gospel-inflected Don't Let Go allowed the vocalist even further off the leash in the final number. The concert's centre-piece was Soap, a set of songs (Suspicion, Love, Jealous, Revenge) commissioned from Adelaide composer Angelina Zucco. Moments of musical inventiveness and committed performances didn't quite prevent it feeling like a sketch for a music theatre work and one in search of some real substance. ACME Jazz Unit made an impression that only frequent visits will sustain, bridging pop, jazz and music theatre with a coherent vision.

Ensemble Sirius, Sept 15, 8.15pm

The American duo (Michael Fowler, piano, keyboards; Stuart Gerber, percussion) play Stockhausen with a simple, elegant theatricality and a bracing, lucid sonic intensity. They first gesture their way to their instruments to perform 6 of the star signs from Tierkreis (Zodiac, 1975). Nasenflügeltanz (1983/88), the engrossing duo version for percussion and synthesizer of part of the huge 7-opera cycle, Licht, had percussionist Gerber singing Lucifer’s lines, punctuated with orchestrated hand signalling. The best known work on the program, Kontakte (Contacts, 1959-60) sounded less familiar as a piano, tape and percussion work than as an electronic score, but was nonetheless rivetting.

Colin Bright, Wild Boys, Sept 18, 8.15pm

A sampling of Bright's works played vividly over the sound system was accompanied by video images projected on a central screen and slide collages on screens to either side. The curious mix of videogame-like digital imagery and agitprop collage (Dean Edwards) was too busy and sometimes too literally illustrative to ever enter into a dynamic relationship with scores that were already full on, replete with their own texts (the late, great Chas H Duke, William Burroughs, Amanda Stewart) and powerful aural imagery. Bright is a unique and provocative voice, but going visual needs care—ears wide, eyes shut.

Erik Griswold, Sept 19th, 8.15pm

Erik Griswold is not Jo Dudley. Dudley was still in Germany. Griswold filled in, replacing Dudley’s sensual and whimsical theatricality with one of the most rewarding and intense performances of the festival. The tall, lean pianist-composer hovered over narrow stretches of his keyboard and picked and pounded out Other Planes: trance music for prepared piano. Rubber wedges, bolts, weights and business cards variously contributed to the alchemical transformation of furious, minimal clusters into eerie harmonics and distant half-heard melodies, sudden evocations of gamelan and marimba. American writer Craig Foltz provided text and voice via phone line for the title work, the apocalyptic intoning of the banalities of the everyday focused on air travel made for unsettling September 11 associations. Visual artists Sarah Pirie framed Griswold with treated fabrics pierced by light, echoing the detail of the compositions and the preparation of the piano.

Marshall McGuire, 20th Century Harp, Sept 20, 8.15pm

Rough Magic (ABC Classics 456 696-2) is rarely away from my CD player. This concert proved a great companion program providing more 20th century music for the harp, extending McGuire’s project into powerful works with amplification and tapes. Gentle works—the twinkling harmonies of Tounier’s Vers la source dans le bois (1922), the seductively song-like Hindemith Sonata (1939), Peggy Glanville-Hicks’ pastoral Sonata for Harp (1952)—preceded Berio’s lyrical and theatrical Sequenza II (1962), shot through with harmonics and abrupt punctuations (slaps, taps, sudden dampings), Kaija Saariaho’s Fall (1991), metallic, big and pulsing, with great rumblings and sweeps of the strings, Donatoni’s Marches (1979 and on the Rough Magic CD), an obsessive, hesitant dance with its passages of intense quiet pitted against grand guignol hyperbole, and Takemitsu’s Stanza II (1971), unexpectedly alternating aggression and reflection (with gagaku resonances), strings burring, chords bell-like, declamatory, fusing with blocks of haunting pre-recorded sound. The home video banality of the accompanying screen material (Nicole Lee) provided neither companionship nor counterpoint for the delicacy of the more introspective works or the grand gestures of the larger ones.

Clocked Out Duo, Sept 21, 8.15pm

This proved to be the most idiosyncratic concert of the festival, a striking and original fusion of minimalist and jazz (and other) impulses realised in piano (Erik Griswold) and percussion (Vanessa Tomlinson). The concert reproduced track by track their CD Clocked Out Duo: Every Night the Same Dream (COP-CD001) including the sublime title work (Griswold) with its engaging recurrent neo-boogie drive and percussive chatter, Graeme Leak’s lilting dialogue between a Vietnamese newsreader and solo percussion, Tomlinson’s intense musical monologue, Practice, Griswold’s Bonedance (with seed pod rattles tied to the pianist’s wrists, first driven and then ruminatory), his beautiful and, here and there, unusually romantic Hypnotic Strains (“Varese/Xenakis inspired percussion” with piano improvisation) and Warren Burt’s Beat Generation in the California Coastal Ranges. If Griswold’s highly focussed rapid fire pianism often magically conjures a clear, transcendent musical line, Burt starts out with and sustains a gently pulsing note (“the beating of one note against another as moving sine waves undulate against delicate vibraphone chords” says the program note). It carries you along, sound and texture everything, the vibraphone a Buddhist bell beneath Big Sur pines.

Delia Silvan, Night Vision, Sept 22, 8.30pm

There are still those choreographers who employ a selection of musical compositions, often excerpts from substantial works, as a framework for their own creation. It's a rather tired tradition, especially in an era where composers, sound designers and dj-composers are creating challenging scores that may well entail any number of appropiated works but which add up to challenging totalities. In Night Vision Delia Silvan dances to a collection of compositions played live that make for an occasionally interesting but unlikely concert program and Silvan's choreography is not strong enough to provide the requisite coherence. The intention is that the work comprise a “series of interconnected 'duets'” (with Marshall McGuire, the Clocked Out Duo, Roger Woodward and David Pereria playing works by Einadu, Griswold, Chopin and Vine respectively). The relationships seemed all too circumstantial. The design (Silvan and Craig Clifford) with its 2 columns of moveable light (suspended perspex poles through-lit from the top) however suggests potential, framing and enabling the choreography's obsessive dance with the self.

Homage to Iannis Xenakis, Sept 23, 6.00pm

Two things were striking in this extraordinary event performed by Roger Woodward, Stephanie McCallum, Vanessa Tomlinson, Nathan Waks and Edward Neeman. One was the demands made by Xenakis on the performers, whether on piano, cello or percussion, as if possessing them from beyond, enforcing the tortuous stretch of arms and hands in the rapid traversal of keyboards, Vanessa Tomlinson’s furious playing-as-dance, Woodward’s manipulation of an original score comprising massive pages. The other defining element was an enduring sense of the compositions as aural architecture, the conjuring of vast imaginary spaces sounding ever more accessible and inhabitable, ever more beautiful with age. A fitting conclusion to the 12th Sydney Spring.

12th Sydney Spring International Festival of New Music, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, September 14

As a guest of Brisbane’s ELISION at the world premiere of Dark Matter I offer the following not as a review, but as personal and descriptive account of the work and the feelings and thoughts it provoked. The work is the joint creation of the ELISION ensemble and the Norwegian CIKADA ensemble, their conductor Christian Eggen, and the primary collaborators, British composer Richard Barrett and Norwegian visual artist Per Inge Bjørlo working with Daryl Buckley, the artistic Director of ELISION.
Dark Matter is a massive and mysterious work. It embraces its audience and eludes it, unites and divides it, hectors and seduces it. It solves nothing, it opens up everything. This is the dialectic you ride for 75 minutes if you have the patience and the stamina, or the will to surrender. I wrestled and played with Dark Matter over 2 performances, worried at and relished it. Treasured its intelligence and its stark beauty.

Installations come in all sizes. This was a huge one, a performative installation in the Brisbane Powerhouse’s large theatre, the seating removed, the space a concert hall, an unfamiliar church, a panopticon, at the very least all of these. On entering you don’t know where to place yourself. This is something like a concert hall: there are musical instruments at one end, seats of a kind at the other, but each is a sculpted space. The musical terrain is of platforms, a brightly lit box and a tank behind a glass wall, all at various elevations: the audience plane is flat but on it are metal cages, benches and tubular stools, short and sharp-edged. Glaring lights on tall stands assail us as we seek out seats. Some of the seats in the cages (evoking miners’ lifts) face away from the musicians. Between a row of stools on one side and benches on another, a metal sheet is lined with truncated cones topped with glass disks. It looks dangerous, an object for contemplation, as is the whole space for the duration of the performance.

Not a note has been played, but the performance has already begun as the audience enter and transform and become the installation. They move about, selecting seats on which they place the industrial cloth handed them as they enter. The light is too bright, they change seats. Or they stay and, choosing only to listen, tie on the masks they find on their seats. Or they sit to find themselves facing a small metal-cased monitor on a stand on which they or their fellow audience members appear. They are watched as they watch. Visual artist Per Inge Bjørlo has divided the audience from itself.

Bjørlo has transformed concert hall into gallery, given a listening audience objects, screens and other people to contemplate. The objects might be made from industrial detritus but they appear honed and burnished. Harsh quartz halogen light scatters through wire mesh and heavy grilles, fusing the whole into one architecture. But its wholeness is racked with interference, a scientific phenomenon that Per Inge Bjørlo sees his own art sharing with composer Richard Barrett’s. This is an installation that interrupts the view, compels the audience to mask, or seek out new spaces, to sit amidst the musicians, or stand or lie anywhere, to hear the play of electronics from very different vantage points. The audience can choose to visually and aurally compose its response to Dark Matter, to the push and pull of invisible material.

In the very centre of the floor, dominating the space, is a tall, circular platform, its base a metre and half tower of metal grille through which scatters white light. Above a stool, a score, small loudspeakers facing in: the conductor’s pulpit, the centre of this panopticon. Already in the austerity of the materials, the dazzling purity of the light, an audience atomised into contemplative individuals, there’s a sense of church, an unfamiliar one, not holy, not home to dogma (as Barrett ever stresses), but mysterious, enquiring, as art should be. Barrett in a program note refers to Dark Matter as a “cosmological oratorio”, and given the range of his sources and inspirations from various creation myths through arcane Renaissance thinkers and doers to Samuel Beckett’s painfully optimistic but entropic vision, it’s apt.

Even before we hear a note of music (which confirms and changes everything), another association constellates round the design. The metallic austerity, the light, suggest laboratory, or reactor. And when the music commences, as Barrett says, Christian Eggen becomes a conductor in more senses than one. Composer and visual artist visited a particle accelerator in Switzerland as part of their preparation. Bjørlo imbues the space with the stark beauty of a Protestant church and an industrial ugliness suggesting danger—an aesthetic we have embraced since at least the early 20th century and in which Nature has no easy place.

Behind the conductor and in a large cage of their own (ironies abound) sit composer Barrett and sound engineer Michael Hewes, outputting the electronic and amplified sounds that dialogue and aurally dance with and challenge the acoustic instruments before them. In the major electronic passages it is fascinating to watch Barrett leaning over his small cluster of pads and keyboards, fingers flying, hands hovering, striking. The sounds generated and meeting with those of the acoustic instruments build another space in and about the installation often beyond description, often beyond the sometimes too familiar cosmic sci-fi sounds of electronics. Like the installation and its evocations, individual and collective sounds, phrases and passages and whole movements have a rare sonic purity, found also in Deborah Kayser’s soprano meditations or her adroitly spare reading of Beckett, and even in the rapidly articulated (mock shamanistic was it?) wordless litany from contrabass clarinettist Carl Rossman.

It is however the questing voice of the electric guitar that tests the prevailing tone of chaos constantly if barely ordered. It is here that the composer—the artist as analogous to the scientist, as Barrett would like to see him/her—takes us somewhere very different. Curiously, in the entropic finale to the work, after all else has faded in a sustained, sublime reverie, and the last words of Beckett’s Sounds have left us, the electric guitar alone sings on, but it is fading, being faded, until the plug is pulled, leaving only the faint plucking of a near soundless instrument. Barrett, in a dialogue with Buckley in the printed program puts it more precisely:

…6 superimposed guitar parts…create a chaotic and meaningless tangle of notes against which the live guitar struggles aggressively but is ultimately defeated, first in its attempt to make sense of things and finally in its attempt to make any sound at all, as its amplification is withdrawn, turning it from the loudest instrument in the ensemble to the quietest.
For a complex musical work, in which like jazz you can lose yourself, lose track, find your way again, Barrett’s Dark Matter is lucidly constructed, canonical, interpolated with these astonishing electric guitar passages (transmissions) from Daryl Buckley, which progress from delicate harmonics to huge chordal shifts and dense buzzings and burrings (that seem to evoke but avoid the idiom of jazz and rock greats) and apocalyptic hymnings that nothing else in the work approaches, and nor should it. Fittingly the guitarist sits at the highest point of the ensemble atop a metal platform mounted on what appears to be a huge abstract concrete foot pointing into the space; behind the guitarist a screen fills the vast theatre wall, a single light radiating nova-like across it.

Barrett describes Dark Matter as modular, as unfinished. This first version will be augmented with new passages and re-shaped in future versions. I’ll be keen to hear how they work, whether this art as investigation will continue to take the same shape it does now: creation and its instabilities; erudite investigations, beautiful orderings, cosmic imaginings; the word and its end; musical entropy. The passage from the Big Bang or Lucretian Chaos or Creation to Entropy or the Day of Judgement or various brands of static Eternity is an all too familiar macro-narrative. Umberto Eco has mused, “..what if the story of the big bang were a tale as fantastic as the gnostic account that insisted the universe was generated by the lapsus of a clumsy demiurge?” Of course, Dark Matter’s rich complexities and artistic illogic defy such broad patterning moment by dramatic moment.

Whatever thoughts (and anxieties) Dark Matter gives rise to, the work is already a deeply memorable one for me. It was a pleasure to see a work on such a scale, of such beauty, with such a range of invention and skilful realisation emanating from a long and sustained international collaboration.

This report on Dark Matter is part of a RealTime-ELISION ensemble joint venture. At the invitation of ELISION, Keith Gallasch travelled to Brisbane to see 2 performances of the work and participated in a public forum in which he and musicologist Richard Toop interviewed composer Richard Barrett. The performance of Dark Matter was recorded for radio by the ABC. We hope to soon reproduce the printed program’s Richard Barrett-Daryl Buckley dialogue on our website.

Dark Matter, ELISION and CIKADA ensembles in association with the Brisbane Powerhouse, composer Richard Barrett, visual artist Per Inge Bjørlo, conductor Christian Eggen, sound engineer Michael Hewes; Brisbane Powerhouse, Nov 16-18

A major shift in the phenomenology of modern listening is marked by the distinction between Swann’s infatuation with the “little phrase” from the Vinteuil sonata in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, and Hans Castorp’s absorption in gramophone recordings in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. For Swann the evanescent “little phrase” remains always different from itself, not only because of variations in performance, but because the successive occasions on which he hears it are separated by the years of his own existence. For Castorp, on the other hand, the obsessive replaying of his favourite records marks an attempt to escape time, to attain within the temporal flow of music an arrested state in which every note is always played “just so.” In both cases this musical infatuation gradually decays to an intellectual and emotional nullity, not because familiarity breeds contempt, but because the interiorisation of music absolves the listener from the difficult labour of listening.

We might characterise modernity as producing a simultaneous disappearance and proliferation of music in our lives, for if there has been a steady decline in participatory musicianship, at the same time we are more than ever surrounded by music in its recorded forms. The concert form, exemplified by the chamber recital, might be seen as an intermediate stage in this division of musical labour, between the involved listening of musical participation and the distracted listening of a saturated musical environment.

Since 1995 the 4 Adelaide-based composers Raymond Chapman-Smith, Quentin Grant, David Kotlowy and John Polglase, known collectively as The Firm, have been refining a kind of pure and uncompromising musical event. They see themselves as working in the chamber tradition, of a serious intellectual music granted leave from music’s traditional subordination to social functions, where the audience is brought together not to pray or celebrate or even necessarily be entertained, but simply to listen.

In a musical equivalent of the artist-run gallery, The Firm organise their concerts themselves, from the programming of the music to the more mundane details like mailing lists and tickets. Always on a tight budget, they dedicate their resources to hiring the best performers available. They have built up a strong local audience and have featured regularly at the Adelaide Festival and Barossa Music Festival. Through recordings and broadcasts they have gained increasing recognition nationally and overseas, with Chapman-Smith, Grant and Polglase having recently been commissioned to write pieces for the Schoenberg sesquicentenary celebrations at the Vienna Festival.

Chapman-Smith’s work is probably the most austerely intellectual of the four. Although minimalism influenced his earlier work, his primary musical filiation is with the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. Other inspirations also derive from the German romantic tradition, such as the quasi-mystical abstraction of Klee and Mondrian, or the metaphysical lyricism of Paul Celan’s poetry. Chapman-Smith’s approach is to rework the classical forms of an older tradition, such as Bach’s tautly symmetrical Baroque dance-forms, within the rigorous language of a reinvented serialism. Far from a dry academic exercise, however, the highly restrictive parameters Chapman-Smith sets himself work to temper the extreme expressiveness of his ‘raw material’, giving his music a restrained but powerful eloquence.

Grant’s work is the most diverse. He identifies 3 distinct styles in his music, which he tends to use in alternation rather than trying to draw them together into some reconciled mode of expression. The first is an aggressive expressionism, in which a percussive element derived from minimalism drives a kind of grunge exploration of the dark side of the human psyche. As a psychological antidote to this material, Grant’s second style is more serene, a mystical attempt to achieve what he calls “whiteness”—a spare, open, aesthetic deriving from Eastern Orthodox religious music. Grant’s third style, which has emerged more fully in recent years, is a yearning or nostalgic Romanticism which owes much to central European composers such as Leos Janacek or Pavel Haas, in which the simplicity and openness of the melodic and harmonic elements lends the music simultaneously a great vulnerability and resilience.

Kotlowy’s work is intensely focused on the act of listening. Inspired in part by Eastern meditative traditions, as well as Cage and Feldman, the basic structure of his music is extremely simple, single distinct notes sounded separately between periods of silence. There is no ‘line’, no stepping from one note to another, nor is there ‘development’, in the sense that the middle or the end of the piece is qualitatively different from the beginning. Instead, Kotlowy concentrates a microscopic focus on the character of each note in isolation, making audible its distant delicate harmonic resonances, but also drawing attention to the incidental variations in the act of playing. It resembles Chinese calligraphy, in that the artist’s gestures leave large areas of the canvas untouched. A recent string quartet is a typical example, with each player given a series of sustained notes to be played pianissimo. The notes overlap to create delicate shifts of harmonic texture, but developmental flow is quietly resisted, creating a sense of being in time rather than moving through it.

Polglase describes his primary concerns as “tonal, thematic, developmental.” Fundamentally expressionist, his is a densely textured music, driven by melodic invention and characterised by dramatic contrasts in mood. Although he has recently concentrated on commissions for orchestral works, he sees the chamber form as the quintessential site for exploration and experiment in music, offering more flexibility and potential for expression than larger ensembles.

Grant comments that over the years The Firm have tended to reduce the instrumental colour of the ensembles they work with, preferring the classic chamber groupings of string quartet, piano trio, or solo piano, rather than the larger mixed ensembles that include wind, brass and percussion. This reduction in colour, Grant comments, forces the composer to abandon “rhetorical” effects, relying on a more “conversational” relationship with the audience, in which structures, forms and ideas are at the heart of the musical experience.

Russell Smith is an Adelaide-based writer and teaches in literary and cultural studies at Adelaide University.

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December 2001

The US experience

Working through the ranks

The importance of solo

Working with choreographers

Dancing and Choreography

Dancing with film

Creating from the Body 1

Rodin’s Kiss

Vinildas Gurrukal Masterclass

Igneous Playshops

Installations

Sprung

Project 1: Tales from a Suitcase

Project 2: Escape to Freedom

Project 3: Anthem

Dear Editors

Ned Rossiter, Melbourne See also: “Enculturating Net-Porn: Interview with Libidot”

Dear Editors

Dear Editors

Russian Futurism, Sept 14, 8.00pm

ACME Jazz Unit, Sept 14, 10.30pm

Ensemble Sirius, Sept 15, 8.15pm

Colin Bright, Wild Boys, Sept 18, 8.15pm

Erik Griswold, Sept 19th, 8.15pm

Marshall McGuire, 20th Century Harp, Sept 20, 8.15pm

Clocked Out Duo, Sept 21, 8.15pm

Delia Silvan, Night Vision, Sept 22, 8.30pm

Homage to Iannis Xenakis, Sept 23, 6.00pm

realtime

Ned Rossiter, Melbourne
See also: “Enculturating Net-Porn: Interview with Libidot”