Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts
In her first review for RealTime, in 2002, Gail alertly captures the dynamic intricacies, the sounds and sense of immediacy that is a Machine for Making Sense performance.
RealTime 48 April-May 2002
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Top image credit: Jim Denley, Stevie Wishart, Amanda Stewart, Rik Rue, Machine for Making Sense, 2002
This forum was held April 8 before the release of the Report on the Examination of the Small-to-Medium Performing Arts Sector. For an early response to the Report, see “Size Matters: the Small-to-Medium Sector issue”, RealTime#49. The meeting was informally chaired by Keith Gallasch.
Introduction: No pot of gold
Keith Gallasch
Welcome to the 8th of these forums for artists about issues of practice and survival. I’d like to welcome Suzanne Donnelly, General Manager, Arts Development NSW Ministry for the Arts who’s going to brief us as much as she can within the limits of confidentiality about the Report from the Examination of the Small to Medium Performing Arts Sector which is a report to the Cultural Ministers Council (from the 10 federal and arts ministries in Australia). It would seem to be fundamentally a report about the viability of the small to medium sector of the performing arts. The enquiry happened very suddenly last year as some of you will be aware when you had to drop everything and prepare responses. Rumour has it that there’ll be no pot of gold at the end of this particular report. One of the reasons for holding this meeting is that the expression “no pot of gold” was becoming oddly recurrent.
Rupert Myer, the head of the Australian Contemporary Visual Arts Enquiry announced not too long ago in an interview in the Financial Review that there would be no pot of gold at the end of that particular enquiry. I went to a meeting with him and about 20 visual artists and administrators and he spoke about improved networking, about tax breaks for artists, about something like the dole for artists (but hassle free) as solutions for the problems of the sector. But despite considerable pressing from the gathering, he would not admit that the artform, in this case the contemporary visual arts, was in need of additional funding or that the development of the artform had been frozen by inadequate funding. He wasn’t interested in that. Then late last year in the Australian we heard similar noises emanating from the direction of the Small to Medium Performing Arts Enquiry—that there were not going to be any financial outcomes from this and “why should we expect any”?” It’s only a report. It’s not Nugent!” So suddenly there was quite a lot of sector concern about the point of the exercise.
It was interesting at the meeting that it was Brian Kennedy of all people, Director of the National Gallery of Australia who said if things are rotten in the laboratory, how can you expect the artform to develop. And he kept pushing Myer to acknowledge something was wrong. But every time the word ‘crisis’ was mentioned of, Myer would say ‘no, no, not that word’. Nobody wants to hear that word. But perhaps that might be worth thinking about.
I know some of you here believe that we are facing a crisis or that the arts, especially the small to medium sector, has been in crisis for at least a decade, maybe more, as artform funding seems to be frozen at a basic level. On the other hand, new government initiatives appear to be opportunistic or pragmatic, and are to do with regionalism and emerging artists, youth, community and Indigenous art, and multiculturalism—all very important in themselves but with no account of what’s happening in the overall artform practices themselves, wherever thy are located.
Given there’s not much information around about the enquiry, we thought we’d ask Suzanne Donnelly to talk about it. Are you actually on the Working Party?
Background: Cultural Ministers Council
Suzanne Donnelly
No. I was and then I went away last year and Kim Spinks replaced me. I’ve now drifted back into it. One thing I just want to preface the talk with is that the report hasn’t gone to the Cultural Ministers Council yet and it doesn’t go till May 1 when they meet. And so when Fiona asked me to come and speak I said, could you possibly put off the date of the meeting because I’m not going to be able to tell you a whole lot about the recommendations because it’s not a public document yet. It probably will be but…But Fiona thought that it would be a good idea for the community to get together to talk about it anyway. So I’m not being evasive. That’s just the way it is.
I don’t know how many people are aware of the Cultural Ministers Council and if most of you aren’t you won’t fail in your next funding submission…It’s not something that’s well known. You’re probably aware that around Australia there’s an arts minister or cultural minister who usually stands alone or sometimes has charge of another portfolio or could be the Premier, as is the case in NSW. And it used to be that once a year all the cultural ministers, including the 2 Federal ministers, would come together and have a meeting. This has been going on since about 1985. It would tend to be rotated and each state would host it. And each state would contribute to the setting the agenda. The Australia Council also attends, as does DCITA (Department of communications, information Technology & the Arts) but it’s mainly for the Ministers. Then there’s the Standing Committee of Cultural Ministers Council and then associated with the Standing Committee are a number of working groups. So the Small to Medium Report came from a working group of the Standing Committee of Cultural Ministers Council. And the main work is usually done at the officer level, the Standing Committee level or indeed at the working group level. And what happens is that usually the ministers come together. They don’t agree on many things—if anything—and then they go away and everyone says, well that was a waste of time, wasn’t it.
What’s happened over the past few years is that there’s been more energy put into Cultural Ministers Council and there have been some big agenda things happening—not necessarily in the performing arts area. For example, at the last Standing Committee meeting, which I attended a few weeks ago and is where you discuss the agenda that will go to the ministers in a month’s time, the sorts of things they were talking about were heritage collections. They’d been talking about these for a number of years, funding a number of studies. They talked about Small to Medium. They looked at Public Broadcasting. There’s a big move about advancing Reconciliation that’s come out of the Council of Australian Government. They also talked briefly about the Myer Enquiry into Contemporary Visual Arts. Not that that’s part of their brief but they wanted to discuss it. They also have a statistics working group which does a lot of research and is actually quite valuable when you’re trying to progress a case in terms of getting extra money or putting something forward.
All the states contribute to Cultural Ministers Council and it has a funding formula. It’s a nominal amount of money. The Commonwealth puts in half, the States put in the other half and because NSW is the largest state it tends to put in 28% of the funds. So they don’t have a huge kitty. There’s probably about half a million dollars at any one time. It can fluctuate and different studies may require different amounts of money. So that gives you a bit of an overview of CMC.
A new status for the arts
It’s an unusual situation because the arts hasn’t been, till recent years, very high on the political profile. It’s only been in the last 5 years or so that you’ve had a number of Premiers taking an interest in the arts and been willing to push it. That can sometimes be good and sometimes difficult. Sometimes not having the Premier means that the minister is more able to push the arts because they don’t have to worry about when there are fires in the state or worry about the hospital system or whatever. The other side to it is that having the Premier there means that he can elevate the arts.
So in terms of the decision about setting up the Small to Medium Sector report, what it came out of was, as you’d all be aware, was the Nugent Report. Now the Nugent Report was slightly different from other reports that had gone to Council and the reason was that it had come through the initiative of the Major Organisations Fund at the Australia Council. And it also happened to have a banker at the head of the Fund at the time, Helen Nugent, who went on to lead the enquiry. So it was quite an unusual thing. Nugent lobbied very hard. When she set up this report she wanted to have some money at the end of it. And she knew the right people to talk to. There was a lot of political stuff going on. So there was a lot of discussion about the Nugent Report and then there was no Cultural Ministers Council for about 2 years. Interestingly, the Commonwealth kept delaying the Council Meeting. It was clearly a delaying tactic because the Commonwealth weren’t prepared to engage in it until they were sure they had money to commit to it because they were quite behind Helen Nugent. When all the ministers came together in Sydney in May last year to finally talk about the Nugent Report, everything had been pretty well signed off. All that work about recommendations and agreeing to things had been a year of negotiations at officer level. So it was really a matter of most of the ministers signing off although there was a bit of grandstanding.
Origins of the report
At that meeting, Mary Delahunty who was the Arts Minister in Victoria put forward a recommendation to say, okay, we’ve looked at the major performing arts sector, but we in Victoria are getting a lot of flack from our constituents about the rest of the arts—not just the small to medium performing arts sector but the whole of the rest of the arts. What about the visual arts, and so on? So they proposed that there should be further investigation into other areas of the arts. It was a fairly general position that was put forward. They didn’t have any terms of reference. They just wanted to float the idea. And there was a huge fight about who should be in it and how it should happen. In the end, they settled on looking at only the performing arts sector because there wasn’t much money to look at the whole arts sector and where do you start and ‘how do you do it and really, we’re not into doing it for years on end’. The Cultural Ministers really wanted to sign off on Nugent, thank you very much, and they didn’t want to do anything else. So it was agreed the focus would be on the Small to Medium Performing Arts Sector and there was some talk at that time that there may well be a Visual Arts Enquiry, so that kept the peace there. There was also a discussion at that meeting by the ministers that they really didn’t want to be seen to be committing to another huge amount of money as they had done with Nugent, that that was a very unusual situation, a one-off and they didn’t want to get caught up in it. So they spent a lot of time on the wording. They talked about an “examination” of the sector. NSW’s position, despite the cynicism of the meeting, was that we should do it because it’s really good to have some research on the sector, even if it comes up saying things that we may already know. There’s some hard data there and you need that in terms of arguing with Treasury. Even if the other states didn’t have a position or didn’t want to go along with it, we were quite happy to support it and the other states all agreed. Then it was a matter of getting DCITA to come on board and eventually they did.
Terms of reference
A working party was set up and officers were nominated to be on it and qw with any working party, it needed to be hosted by a state and, in this case, it was hosted by Western Australia. So the officers all met to define the terms of reference and they came up with the following: the role that the small to medium organisations play in the performing arts sector of Australia’s cultural life; the sector’s capacity for creative innovation, experimentation, research and development; the contribution of the sector to audiences, employment and training; the role of the sector in regional touring and access programs; the contribution of the sector to Australia’s international profile; the resourcing of the sector including models of working, management and governance issues and cost and revenue dynamics; and the relationship between levels of government and the sector including enhanced management of funding.
That last one is probably code for whether you should end up with a formula for funding like Nugent
So they were very broad terms of reference and there wasn’t a huge amount of money to spend on the study. There was a discussion on the best way to proceed and most of you here would have been at the other end of that. There were 2 studies done. One was done on quantitative research that was done by a group called Hydes Consulting where you would have been asked to fill in a whole lot of financial data. There was another one, a qualitative study done by Campion Decent whom a number of you may know. Those 2 report then fed into a bigger report and what’s happened now is that bigger report has gone to the working party who talked about it a lot. It went back, bits got re-written and it went back again. And now it’s going to Cultural Ministers Council and that’s where we’re up to now.
Valuable statistics
I attended the first meeting of the working party but then I went overseas last year and I wasn’t around. But what a number of us were trying to do was to get some research to underpin what we believed to be the case, to have the hard data. So it’s not going to be any surprise when the report comes out that certain statements about this being the R&D end of the sector, the creative end, the sector that contributes most to international profile, that does most of the regional touring—none of that is going to be a surprise. So you might think when you eventually get to read it, oh yeah, we all knew that. Tell us something else. Where’s the dollars? But that is in fact quite important because, if you’re dealing with hard headed Treasury officials, even if it doesn’t go any further than the CMC, from a NSW perspective, from my perspective when I have to sit and argue with Treasury officials all the time, it’s actually very good to have this information to hand.
What next?
It will go to CMC when they meet on 1 May in Melbourne and they’ll discuss it. Then there are recommendations that I can’t talk about. Then they’ll decide what they’re going to do with it. Again, with Nugent, it wasn’t Cultural Ministers’ Council that attached the dollars to it, that was all done at an officer level in terms of trying to negotiate it. That’s ultimately what needs to happen. The other problem is that each state needs to deal with its own jurisdiction. With Nugent, some of the states weren’t interested in coming on board and it was very last minute stuff. If there’s going to be a common approach to this, I think what will probably happen that there’ll be general things that the states and the commonwealth will look at in terms of what they can do together. The states will use the data themselves to try and progress the situation for their own companies.
Inter-government cooperation
I would hope that we can get a clearer discussion between the Australia Council and ourselves about how we do the funding so that you guys aren’t always putting applications in for projects and you get funding from us but not from the Australia Council or the other way around. Or that there’s an agreement that the states do the boring stuff and we fund all the buildings and stuff like that and the Australia Council can go off and fund all the glamorous international stuff. If there was an agreement like that it would certainly be useful but I’m not sure what will happen. Certainly I think there’s a will at this point to reach some negotiations about those things so that it’s clearer to groups and to funding agencies what will happen.
Nugent inroads
KG
So you think Nugent might have broken some ground?
SD
I think it did. And for all my personal scepticism at the time, I think it’s made a lot of inroads. It has entrenched that elite group up there, but I also see that there’s a way to use this. Whether or not the Nugent companies were just trying to be nice, they were very strong in advocating for the Small to Medium Sector, saying they need to have more resources. How that translates is another thing. Now, I do have pick up on one thing that Keith said about funding being static for a long time. In fact, in NSW funding has grown and we’re looking at more buildings.
KG
Certain kinds of funding has grown.
SD
Even if you look at Theatre or Dance budgets, they have grown. It probably hasn’t grown as much as people would like but compared to when I first came to the Ministry a few years ago, it was totally locked in. The Theatre budget was 99% locked in. You’d go to a meeting and think, what’s the point? Whereas now, they actually fund projects and certain companies have received increases in funding and other companies have come online. Some who only ever received project funding now receive operational funding. So I think that’s been a good spin-off and partly to do with the fact that we have an Arts Minister who’s also the Premier.
KG
I’m talking about an overall situation where the states across Australia are taking increased responsibility for projects and production whereas the Australia Council funds are very locked and people are still heavily dependant on the Australia Council so I wasn’t commenting so much on the states. But I’m sure we all look forward with excitement to the infrastructure developments in NSW that are happening at this very moment.
SD
So do I—especially in Western Sydney.
KG
How important is this report for the NSW Ministry?
SD
I think it’s really important. We got the NSW data pulled out and just to have that to argue the case for Everleigh (Carriage Works, now purchased by the NSW Government for performing arts use) and more work on Leichhardt (other buildings) has been really important. And we couldn’t have done that alone. We’re really small and we don’t have the resources to get that sort of research done. And I have to say, the NSW companies were very good in responding to the enquiry. So, well done. And we did have the most companies who were reviewed in it.
[Sue Donnelly left the meeting at this point.]
[Keith asked those present to speak about key concerns.]
Chris Hudson (ERTH, part-time administrator)
I think that size is not really the issue at hand and we’re really dealing with conservatism. The funding scenarios we see around the country are heavily biased towards the traditional and the classic. If we look at companies, and I’m not wanting to single any of them out as not deserving of support, but if we look at companies who work in more traditional genres such as the Australian Chamber Orchestra or The Song Company, we see that there appears to be plenty of government and corporate support. And one could say that their product is popular and that’s part of the reason for their success. But if you look at a popular cultural product such as dance parties, they don’t need the subsidies of $50 per seat that opera requires to exist and I think that indicates a bias against youth popular culture. We could ask what would happen if dance parties were funded to that extent, what type of event would we see.
The baby boomer solution for this situation is resources that encourage youth to consume antiquated cultural product such as discounts for seats and promotional programs encouraging people to consume cultural product that is not their first choice.
In Adelaide I only recently found out about the Major Festival Initiative which is a great way for companies to get reasonable amounts of money for the commissioning of new Australian work. I thought it was interesting that the way I found out about this was via a crumb that came our way to develop a show. It hasn’t been secured as yet but on consideration of the MFI I thought it was interesting as an initiative funding program. There’s no guidelines for the application. No public avenues that I know of to approach this funding program and it basically, from what I could tell, by how much one can supplicate to the festival directors of Australia. So I don’t think it’s really size we’re dealing with here. I think it’s a lack of support for art that perceived as risky or unusual.
More about Nugent
Rosalind Crisp (choreographer, dancer, Omeo Studio)
It’s interesting the way Sue Donnelly drew attention to the Nugent Report entrenching the elitism of the MOB people. It’s like it’s even undermined the small to medium companies more in a way, because that elevated them even further, entrenched their position.
KG
Nugent was very focussed on a small group of companies—the state theatre companies, the Opera, the Ballet and a bunch of orchestras. Together, those companies lobbied and they created a business plan. It was very specific. A banker working with a number of business people. There wasn’t an artist in sight and it was targeted. But the small to medium enquiry, 280 companies! As someone said when it started, why not take a smaller sample and work really hard on that instead of something so diffuse. There are other shockers. The Visual Arts Enquiry, for instance, has no brief to really analyse the financial situation. They didn’t ask the submitting bodies to give a financial breakdown of their situation. So it’s all much more anecdotal.
But as Suzanne said, and as Chris has said, in the area we all work in, there’s incredible diversity. We did a book last year for the Australia Council on Contemporary Performance in Australia with companies ranging from ERTH to Circus Oz. Of the 70 companies in that book, 34 had already toured internationally and often quite extensively. The big companies can’t tour as easily as the more mobile small to medium ones that carry our reputation with them overseas. And this is not very well acknowledged. And this is a problem for the small to medium companies. They’re increasingly being talked about. There is this enquiry that your general public and people who support the arts just don’t know about. I think that’s a major problem.
Small plays large
Michelle Vickers
I’m the General Manager of Legs on the Wall and what I’m going to talk about is much more specific to the challenges that we face because of our size and our limited resources. I think that one of the biggest challenges we face is that we’re a small company that’s often trying to, and expected to, operate as a large company. Some of our shows are quite large scale and we’re often dealing with major festivals, major venues and I find in those situations, you need to be able to react with the kind of quick responses that those sectors expect. They want to talk to your production department but you don’t have any full time production staff. That’s kind of you and I find that in that situation your analysis of any risk becomes a key factor in the way you operate. You have to make an assessment about what are the most important projects for the company, what’s the most important activity and where you’re going to take a risk in resourcing something further than just on a project by project basis.
Ensemble, unpaid labour rise
Legs also suffers from not having a permanent ensemble any more. For years we had four artists and were generally creating shows with casts of 4-5 which meant that they were able to keep up a certain level of physical skill and also of physical language. Over a number of years, we’ve moved to a project based company and we did this for a number of reasons but primarily for financial ones. We just weren’t able to sustain that. And for years when Legs did have a permanent ensemble if we didn’t earn the money to pay the ensemble, they just didn’t get paid. And I think that in this sector it would be interesting to understand what the value of unpaid labour is and favours that are called upon, based on people’s personal relationships, and a lot of that contributes to the sector. A lot of that keeps the sector alive and apart from a company level and an individual level, it’s largely unrecognised.
Scarce space
Another key issue for Legs is space and we’re in an extremely fortunate position in that we have a permanent space that we share with Stalker. However, it’s a completely inadequate space and almost unusable at times for the work that we do. As many of you would know if you’ve worked in there as circus or physical theatre artists, the rigging capabilities are extremely limited. The floor is uneven so you can’t even do a straight tumble run down it if you wanted to. It’s an unsealed space so we’re often unprotected from the weather which can make it an unsafe space as well. I think that’s a key problem for a lot of the S and M sector. They’re aren’t many affordable options around, as people would know. And it’s great that the Ministry in NSW is working towards developing a couple of spaces at the moment to address that. But I think space is still going to be a major problem for a while yet.
No room for error
Generally one of the problems related to size is that you’re constantly working with limited resources and with financial constraints and you’re taking a great deal of at least artistic risk and often financial risk and there’s very little room for error. The small to medium sector is more likely to suffer greatly from something going wrong than the larger companies who have a stronger capacity to spread their risks over a great range of projects. So if you’re working on a project basis or if you’re in a small company each risk that you take is so important and any fallout could potentially put an entire company at risk. Just look at the number of companies who are suffering at the moment from the hikes in Public Liability insurance. Legs is okay at the moment but I know some companies are going to the wall because they can’t ride out those problems over a number of years.
Picking up on what Chris said earlier, the larger sector certainly benefits greatly from the risks our sector takes but our sector is largely unprotected from the pitfalls of that risk
KG
That’s something I hadn’t thought about, the extent of risk. And I hate to return to the word “crisis” because I don’t like to toss it around too lightly but a lot of companies are living on the edge.
One size fits all
Rosalind Crisp
It does seem that the expectations have changed. It’s probably as much as it was [early in legs history] when artists were prepared to work for nothing and now there are artists in there who aren’t and why should they. But it’s like Legs has hit this ceiling where it can’t kind of move into being a MOB member [a client of the Major Performing Arts Organisations of the Australia Council]. So it’s straddled there at this mid-way point and I think that’s a problem for a lot of organisations who have developed and matured but the resources haven’t been there to take them further so they’re still reconstructing themselves.
KG
It’s primitive. It’s like you said earlier about small companies operating as if they were large ones. If you’re touring internationally, you have enormous responsibility. It’s a big responsibility.
Rachael Swain (Artistic Director, Stalker/Marregeku Company)
We often talk about having to have a structure where we can go from really big to really small and we do that constantly throughout the year. We have to be able to be this huge and tour shows with 25 people and then go back to having 2 people part time to keep the office open.
KG
There’s a high burn out factor. People do it for the love of it but they get punished for it. This is one of the hard things to convince governments and enquiries to think about. As well Australia has an appalling record at dealing with ensembles. I remember the various government fantasies of the 80s about funding ensembles. They didn’t last because there was never enough money. Most ensembles we knew have long gone. The unpaid labour thing is something as well which is not very well documented. The Australian Bureau of Statistics did some research on it in 1997. It was phenomenal the amount of unpaid labour in the arts in this country.
Nigel Kellaway (Artistic Director, The opera Project)
I’m sure there are many people here who have to fill out their little form every 3 months. It’s been going on for years. I’ve been doing it for about 5 years now. They keep collecting information.
KG
Peter Costello says that voluntarism is good for you.
Project-based funding & viability
Kate Dennis
I work as the Business and Accounts Manager at Stalker. I also work as part time administrator at One Extra Dance Company and I’m an active member of Theatre Kantanka Theatre’s Board, so I feel I’ve got a bit to say. I really feel strongly about what Ros just mentioned about companies growing out of something kind of “family”. There’s something that brings the people together originally and the companies develop on the blood and the unpaid labour of the artists and core members. And then slowly but surely the companies wind up continuing to be small companies who are trying to operate on an international level. I see that constantly—everyone’s stretched beyond the resources of their projects.
When I submitted a number of responses to the enquiry, I mentioned issues of governance and sponsorship and time and space, none of which I’m going to address today. I personally fluctuate on what the burning issues are so I’ll speak about the thing that’s burning in me at the moment. I’m really looking from my perspective at the financial administration and management of the companies and keeping companies viable. I feel very strongly about the approach to funding bodies of a project by project basis. What we’re asked to do is apply for funds and submit budgets that are break-even. I think something has to shift there. We’re going to state and to federal government and we’re saying we’re doing such important work on a national and international basis and we’re trying to develop our artform but every bit of money you give us we’ve got to spend on that particular project.
And because I’m interested in the running of the companies, I’m really concerned about how we can have surpluses on those project budgets—and I know it’s kind of a joke because we can never even fulfil the vision of the artists let alone have surpluses to run the company with or develop the people who work for the companies. Particularly the people who have come up through the companies and to have money left over for resources and infrastructure and getting off crap computers that are 10 years old. A lot of us have been working in the sector for 15, 20 years and we can’t give as much as we could when we were 20. There’s something about that whole business of applying for funding and not being able to ask for budgets where we’re allowed to put some money aside for cash reserves, and build up some security for our future.
Andrew Morrish
It’s the classic picture of the poverty trap. It’s the equivalent of the situation where every cent you get is committed…For me one of my fears is that this report will talk about how diverse, dynamic and successful this sector is which is lovely for us and acknowledgement is welcome. But what we’ve got is a diverse, creative, successful group of very poor people with no way to get out of that, no bridge being offered, no light at the end of the tunnel, just more and more of that.
KG
The whole concept of project has taken over. It doesn’t matter how far you are down the track, your work is still treated as a one-off project. Your track record doesn’t count, your body of work. We’ve heard so often recently about people being judged on their last project. What about the previous 10 years?
Michael Cohen (Artistic Director, Kantanka Theatre)
And the irony of this is that for some companies you can get more money by having that project existence than if you apply for a program. You’re actually safer being on that edge. It’s a savage irony actually.
Insecurely secure
Harley Stumm (Executive Producer, Urban Theatre Projects)
It’s complex. We just had our first commission from a major festival and our commission fee was almost as much as our triennial funding from the Australia Council we’ve had for the past few years. Okay, we get triennial funding from 2 funding bodies but being at the Performing Arts Market and hearing companies talking about developing work for international touring and contrasting it with UTP’s experience where we’re trying to make 3 or 4 shows a year, producing and presenting in Western Sydney, has made me think about the privileges and luxuries that we have compared to the ones who don’t have triennial funding, like Stalker and Strange Fruit and Kantanka. But also it makes you think about the advantages that those companies have. On the one hand we have the security of funding and permanent wages for 4 people, whereas we have responsibilities to our audiences and requirements to spread those resources not just into creating work but into producing and presenting it. When we do site-based community work, that means maintaining a database of audiences, keeping contact with communities, maintaining networks with our peers, with local government. Then I look at Strange Fruit and hear Roderick Poole say they’ve made 4 works in 8 years and I count up our 20 something in the same period. And I’m not slagging Strange Fruit but they’re in a position where they’ve got to keep making that work and keep touring it, or they don’t eat.
So in a way it’s a privilege for us to be able to create 3 works a year but then we put these under-developed works out there that are being judged against works that have been 2 years in development or works that have come from Belgium or France with huge resources put into them. I’m just thinking about how much we should be trying to produce. Should we be spending more time developing work? But then what happens if you want to make work in Western Sydney, which we’re committed to doing, where there is not a flexible black box theatre venue between Redfern and Kingswood. This means we make site-based work and we’re doing that because we’re interested in it, because urban geography is a key theme in our content but also out of necessity. So if you’re tying to make 3 or 4 shows a year, you’re putting stuff on in venues that have no history. Every dollar you spend in marketing has very few long term returns for the company. I understand Michelle’s problem with the Legs venue but at UTP we can’t develop any building capital or marketing capital or historical capital in a bigger sense. We’re always having to move around.
What, us viable?
Rachael Swain
One of the things that I get really concerned about from Nugent to this current enquiry and the kind of reality of our existence is that the recommendations and actions that came out of Nugent were very much based around financial viability, industry, better financial models and I think part of the nature of the beast in our part of the sector is that we’re not necessarily financially viable nor were we necessarily every intended t be that. And I know the last couple of big projects I’ve been involved with weren’t really viable. They had really long periods of research attached to them, long devising processes, they were about gaining new ground in terms of artform and cultural issues. I know some of our works are for community audiences, some are for particularly educated audiences, some are exploratory. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re about a cheap financial achievement and balance and roundness. It puts us in areas of risk and often that is dependent on individual’s choices and lifestyles. I know our company only exists because of the lifestyle choices of the freelancers that we work with and that we’re completely dependent on that.
People have chosen not to have children and mortgages and all kinds of things so that they can make this kind of work. I’m really concerned that there are going to be a whole lot of recommendations about how we can be more financially viable when that might not actually be in reality the nature of what we can be, the reality of what we can be if we choose to do what we do. That’s one of the concerns I have about the relationship between the report and our reality. I think for as long as we can possibly stand it, we shouldn’t become structurally funded. The management of our company might completely disagree with that but I think that staying project-based keeps us putting the money into the work. It keeps us desperate. It keeps us very unstable. It keeps us putting the money into the work and making the work the best it can be. I’ve had conversations about this with companies like NYID in Melbourne who see that for this scale, for this area of the sector that staying tight, staying flexible, staying project-based, staying responsive to the work that needs to be made is a kind of optimum position to be in. But it puts enormous stress on people—people leave.
Chris (ERTH)
But shouldn’t people be able to make the work they want to make and have children and earn a reasonable salary as well.
RS
They should. But at this time in this country …
Chris
It’s a 2-sided coin. In other sectors—even in industries like forestry or whatever, what is viability and what is sustainability? I think that people in the small companies like Stalker who are making new and exciting work, should be on a permanent wage and a reasonable wage.
RS
I don’t disagree with the “should” but I’m talking about what the reality is. It’s like it’s about society’s choice about paying for our level of enquiry and research. And in this country at this moment, it feels that the society doesn’t choose for us to be able to have a viable life and do that work.
Chris
Isn’t is worth talking about and to try and reach the goals we want to reach?
RS
Absolutely. But in terms of the focus of the work, that’s my feeling. For us it’s better to stay project-based which keeps it hard for us. And I think that the burning issues are always the fact that we never know if what we’ve got planned for the next month or 6 months is going to happen or not. So we’re all playing this waiting game of maybe we have to start waiting tables in the next moment…
KG
How long can you sustain that, though? You’re still young but it’s a pretty hard trot and it’s inequitable compared to lots of other arts cultures in other countries.
RS
It’s not sustainable.
Ros Crisp
It’s a Catch 22 because so many people give up, like Sue-Ellen Kohler, she gave up. It’s too hard. And that’s the fallout. People give up and that’s a huge loss.
Viability or sustainability?
Andrew Morrish
I think artmaking is always gut wrenching. By its very nature, it’s a hard thing to do. And if that’s confused with economic instability, you start to think that that’s part of the gig. Whereas in the past I’ve had conversations with people in The Australian Ballet (I don’t speak to people in the Australian Ballet these days) but all they talked about was how hard it was for The Australian Ballet with their limited budgets to do what they wanted to do.
There is an issue of ethics or morality which says, why can’t we be provided with in an adequate way so that we can get on with the struggle that’s artistic rather the struggle that’s just financial.
I don’t see it ever getting easy. Artmaking should be hard. It’s never going to be easy. And if it was, I for one wouldn’t be interested. But there’s an issue of sustainability. The real question is: how do you get enough support so that you can keep doing this thing which is hard to do? And I think there’s a distinction between viability which is kind of like a growth model and sustainability which is an ecological model which says I can keep doing this and I’m not having to destroy that much of the world in my attempt to do it.
Chris
That’s why I was interested in what you were saying, Kate, about not being able to show a surplus for projects and you just spend the money that you have because in any business models, there’s always a reserve. There’s always an amount that you put towards a reserve. It’s part of a sensible business plan.
Diminishing vision
Caitlin Newton-Broad
From my perspective, having spent 3 years in a small company (as former Artistic Director, PACT Youth Theatre), essentially 1 full-time staff member, 1 part-time staff member and about 350 volunteers and maybe 40-50 contracted artists paid at an abysmal rate sustained the life of the company. And I think a lot of companies here—and PACT is comparatively small on the scale of things—exist on a fairly similar model. That’s what surprises me all the time…The human resourcing is always so compressed and under stress. And I don’t think that necessarily is always a creative place to work from. I think it really produces a shrinking of our capacity to be intellectually engaged and to refresh ourselves creatively so that the work stays alive and so that you can think laterally to resolve things when they come up. I think when you work under that limited human resources conditions you’re in a reactive position—just like the poverty consciousness model. And it’s emotionally unsustainable. That reactive stuff is just so far away from what you dreamed that creative project or experience would be.
My interest is in how you write a report and answer, essentially, lots of the questions you can only respond to in anecdotal ways, or only use expressive terms to describe what you’re going through. And then you put dollar values to it. And it all seems quite reasonable. But I don’t know how the stuff that we’re feeding back can be digested and reported on adequately to reflect what’s happening. It would actually take a real strategist to put it into a framework that makes it saleable to the Treasury.
Anecdotal reporting
I just looked over the report that I wrote to the Small to Medium Sector Enquiry in the midst of a million projects, punching the stuff out and being hammered by various people in the youth arts sector saying, you have to make this the best report it can be. You have to make this the most convincing argument…And when you hear that the Nugent Report came out of people getting together in really in-depth meetings, coming up with a business plan together, as a collective of organisations—I think that would have been a really interesting way to maybe attack this report. As it is, we all did them on the fly. They’re anecdotal. It’s very hard to digest the information and make it readable in any way other than anecdotal. I think that’s a real problem for this area in terms of that relationship between economics and experience and the whole translation between the two.
It’s interesting to hear other companies speak about project funding and possibly one of those projects would eclipse the whole annual program of PACT, but people are still facing the same issues. And I can only respond emotionally and say it’s all a bit scary that we think we’re doing it hard at PACT and we know we have the tiny protection of a space, an identity, a miniature infrastructure. And you think, well that’s good but you’re just working so hard every moment of every day to keep it running. And you think, oh well, there might be a shift to another place. And you leave that organisation behind because you know that it’s never going to grow. So you might make a shift to another organisation that within its scale is suffering the same dilemmas. I think it’s about strategic reporting and the collection of hard data…I don’t know how you can put this anecdotal information into a powerful form, apart from having powerful friends and sit at powerful dinner parties.
KG
And those major organisation did form an association very quickly to fight their case.
Diversity versus strategy
Harley Stumm
And there are what 16 of them and they all do the same thing. There are flagship theatre companies, ballet, opera. They all run on basically the same model. They can actually all get together and do a strategic plan. There are 280 of us and look around the room, just the people here—Stalker, One Extra, Omeo, Urban Theatre Projects, Performance Space, RealTime, PACT, Kantanka, ERTH…. Okay, the work is probably most similar and that’s diverse enough but if you look at the structures—one company is touring internationally and doesn’t have triennial funding and this runs a venue and that one doesn’t…..There are so many differences. How would you do a business plan—
CNB
I have to say there has to be a way–
HS
–to work collectively.
CNB
—to digest the information. The questions we were asked were so vague. They were so broad, sweeping, I don’t know how you could make a sensible document based on the questions we were asked.
HS
Absolutely.
KG
And the process was so hurried. There wasn’t time for meetings like this. Regina Heilmann and Chris Murphy, you’ve just taken over as Artistic directors at PACT. It’s probably a little premature to ask for your thoughts…
Productivity versus poverty
Chris Murphy
A little, but I guess one thing that I would say is that just the amount of work that gets produced, that’s one thing that has astounded me looking at the history of PACT—the volume of work compared with the size of the resources. Also, I can comment from my experience with Kantanka over the years, on the unpaid labour and the energy and commitment and love that goes into the work that is so huge and that’s what sustains the companies. At PACT I see a similar scenario.
Regina Heilmann
What astounded me first coming into the job was, my God, how did Caitlin and Lucy Evans (Administrator) work under these conditions! But gee, the chairs don’t work, the computers don’t work. I thought, how on earth did they generate so much fantastic material over the years working in these conditions? I thought, I can’t…I had to go out, go for a walk. There’s no windows, no light in the room…But also it costs money to dream and take time. And I get the feeling that you’re constantly working on that kind of energy that goes ‘how much money can we ask for and will the other little foundations prop it up and…’
CNB
….being only as good as your last work and the terror of the whole thing collapsing.
Ros Crisp
I thought I might read some of the submission I sent. “The Omeo Dance Studio is committed to the development of an informed and critical culture of dance. It nurtures research and enquiry during ongoing practice and acknowledges risk and experimentation as essential for the development of new work. Omeo is the site of my practice and vision as a dance artist. In speaking about what it contributes it seems odd to give from this perspective when I set the studio up 5 years ago to serve in making my work as an artist. Now it does so much that one can look upon it and say this is an organisation and it contributes to Australia’s cultural life through supporting the making of new dance, experimentation, research, collaborations, emerging artist opportunities, mentorships, training, tours, international exchanges, a community of 50 peers and a database of 600. But hey, an organisation. This is an organisation by virtue of the fact that I have organised voluntarily the creation and production of my work, a space, a community, a venue, a phone line, a group of peers, relationships with funding bodies and critics. A small percentage of this has been funded activity. I live below the poverty line and have done so for all my life as an artist. I received a Fellowship from the Dance Board for 2000-2001 that has given me a taste of how the rest of the world lives. During this time I have used the financial security to facilitate more projects at the studio and to promote the work that has developed there with my company Stella b to venues overstate and overseas. The studio is no longer strictly “me” but it’s still inextricably linked to my work in major and minor ways. As a space for my ensemble to work in, through the young artists that art attracted there through the organic community that has evolved and now through the artistic community of peers that voluntarily manages Omeo Dance Incorporated.
“We have developed our skills as administrators, promoters and producers increasingly in conflict with our desires to simply do our work as artists. However, the net return from both endeavours is simply not enough to support a paid administrator and the prospect of queuing for one at the funding bodies is not encouraging. The growth of my work and the studio means that I’m now even more stressed than ever—artist, collaborator, choreographer, dancer/performer, publicist, producer, administrator, teacher, studio cleaner, mentor, caretaker, artistic adviser, board member, reporter to cultural ministers councils and last but not least, partner to another artist. All I can say is Help! The critical challenge is survival.” I’ll finish there. So, I don’t know how they dealt with that.
Harley
Put it in a basket labelled “another artist whinge”
Whose claim to fame?
Andrew Morrish
One of the things that interests me about Omeo is that it’s never been funded. Ros’s projects have been funded and she takes money out of the budget to pay for studio rent but as an organisation it’s never had any support. It’s been quoted as one of the 5 top dance producing organisations in the state. And I get a little bit annoyed when arts departments start promoting Omeo as an interesting and important asset for the state when it’s made no contribution to it. In a way that independence has been really important for Ros. The studio is paid for by people renting the space from us and the work that we put in for nothing doesn’t generate money to pay for anything but the rent and the costs that come with that space. So it’s interesting that all of a sudden it’s become an artifact, a contribution to a sector. It’s been appropriated by the bureaucracies in this way and held up as a shining example. The thing that strikes me about this sector is that we think everybody else is the success. We think we’re the only ones struggling and everybody else is doing so well compared to us. And this is a successful model but at what cost, and to what end? At what point did we volunteer to become part of a sector when in fact, the impulse was Ros responding to her own artistic needs. Organisations grow in these ways. You get some support but to get more you have to become more and more like that which is required to be like to get the support. There’s a shaping. We start trying to be strategic and fulfil perceived objectives of funding bodies. And there’s a whole heap of us rattling around in that world and being distracted from the artistic intention as a result. It’s a problematic thing.
Rachael Swain
Whenever they have these Celebrate Australia things—I don’t know if any of you have been involved in them, they’ve had them in Japan and Indonesia and we’ve been dragged into them a number of times—they’re basically always the small to medium companies that get put into those things because we’re interesting, we communicate in places where other languages are spoken because we use visual and physical languages to tell stories. They’re not the MOF [Major organisation fund] companies. When Australia wants to hold up the flag and say this is what we are, it’s our work that goes on display.
Michelle Vickers
And often you’re already on tour internationally so, it’s usually the companies that are in that region that find themselves in these showcases.
AM
The other part of that is that I find it completely distressing when paid consultants ring up Ros to get the data which she contributes for nothing. I’m not allowed to speak to them but if I was, I’d say if it’s that important, could you donate your salary to Ros while she does your work for you. This report is supposed to have cost $63,000 and a couple of people have done very well from it. It’s not us. This is just a personal little thing but it’s indicative of something bigger.
A small dance company tries to fit
Amanda Card (Executive Producer, One Extra Dance)
Since 1996 the model for One Extra has changed. It was a directive of the Board as a response really to people like Ros and all the independent artists working in Sydney. These artists, independents and small companies have always done everything. The artistic director, the person making the work has always been the accountant, the office manager and multiple things. There was a stage where One Extra had 5 people in the office—2 co-artistic directors, a publicist, a general manager and an office manager. That was in the days when “small” companies were actually quite large. There were 4 or 5 in Sydney, a few in Melbourne. Those companies have been decimated over the last 10 years and the independent sector is just people making work under their own steam.
So One Extra sounds a bit like PACT. It’s basically me full-time and Kate 2 days a week. We provide a producer model for independent dance theatre artists. The reason it’s dance theatre I guess is that’s my curatorial bent and also it’s the history of the company. Kai Tai Chan 1976 to 1992 and Julie-Anne Long and Graeme Watson for the interim between 1992-96. Janet Robertson had the company from 1996-2000 and she worked with a variety of artists. I tried to bring it back to the idea of working with a group of artists working in a dance theatre mode and as wide as I can push that model.
But I think what I find frustrating are 2 major things. The biggest thing for our company is the disparity between the NSW Ministry and the Australia Council. The Ministry understands why we exist in this mode. The Australia Council has a real problem with a producer model. What the Council seems to be doing in the dance area at least is that they have a finite amount of money and every 3 years they re-fashion it to make it respond to what they think the community is in need of. And it’s usually a bit like the law. It actually runs up behind what is actually happening. So as soon as something start to become familiar, they change their program to try and catch up with what’s really happening. So they’ve just recently done a change, a Special Programs grant which is a reintroduction of a yearly grant. So you could be triennial in dance or project funded. Or you could be a yearly triennial, which I find really interesting. So they brought it back in but they didn’t bring any more money to the coffers. They took money out of New Work and put it into Special Programs.
So then you apply differently and the model you apply for is one that we were unsuccessful with last year for various reasons. The question they asked was what do I do, what is my reason for being there? And so this year I’m doing exactly what you’re talking about—looking at how they structure what they do and trying to formulate what we do to fit so that they can understand what we’re trying to do. And I’ve just had a meeting, well it was a collective meeting, with Karilyn Brown from Audience Marketing and Development (Australia Council). What they’re doing is taking each sector and looking at it and at the moment, they’re looking at dance. So over the next 3 years they’re going to look at dance and try to work out what to do with dance to make the structures work. What they’ve come up with now is that perhaps a producer model might be quite a good one. But when I had the conversation with Karilyn it was all about the producer model to take things overseas and I felt a bit like the people in the Northern Territory—I went to an Ausdance thing in NT recently—and they were saying to us people in other states, look we can’t even get up to where you are. We don’t have any infrastructure at all. And what Karilyn Brown was talking about was taking companies like Bangarra and ADT and Ballet Lab overseas. But there’s a whole lot of people doing stuff here that don’t have any structural relationship and One Extra is struggling to keep those people working.
At One Extra we try and have a relationship with an artist. So an artist might come in and work with someone else, then they might produce a small solo work and then in a larger work and we try to have them flowing through. But we have drop them off all the time. People are dropping off. Kate Champion’s in this position at the moment, being employed for 6 weeks of this year.
Kate Champion (choreographer-dancer, Artistic Director Force Majeure)
And I’m very successful.
The innovation trap
Amanda
Everyone else thinks Kate’s doing real well and it’s great but she’s employed for 6 weeks of a whole year. So I’m trying to find ways to keep those people functioning and producing work. One of the other things I find really frustrating is that when we apply for funding from the Australia Council, we’re asked as a small sector organisation—we’re still project funded—to deal with the word “innovation” all the time. We have to be innovative. And yet triennially funded companies in the Dance sector are not asked to respond to that word. They’re asked to respond to the notion of development of audiences, long term strategy and so on. So the people with less money are expected to do the innovation while those with more resources—and in dance that’s the people with the solidly booked 6-8 dancers employed for 12 months of the year… It seems to me to be an odd relationship that we’re asked to be innovative but we make a project for $60,000 and we’ve got to employ 5 people and have 6 weeks rehearsal once the choreographer can start working with their people. And of course, with 6 weeks to develop and rehearse, we have under-developed work. But all the independents that we work with are expected to produce this innovative work, this new and exciting work, without any of the aerials and the videos and the…..They’re just people on stage most of the time and we beg, borrow and steal anything we can find to make the production values slightly better. But they’re always working in a situation where they can’t guarantee they’ll produce this incredible innovation.
Fiona Winning (Artistic director, Performance Space)
And then you have to do all the other stuff as well. You have to find an audience. You have to manage your company well.
AC
That’s the easy part. I think One Extra’s is a really good model. A model that works…It would be great to have a model where you could have someone who could work with someone like Ros Crisp and wouldn’t have any relationship to the creation of the work but would actually help you get to that point where you don’t have to do all that administrative stuff. Some kind of centralised place perhaps. This happens overseas all the time. Here we don’t be able to come to terms with the changing models that are out there.
With dance it’s really difficult. In the case of a show like Traffic (Stella B) it was incredibly innovative in terms of someone watching a lot of dance. But you get someone who comes in from outside of that, I can’t see that they’d necessarily see that. There’s not a lot of wheels and whistles there.
Producer-centred funding
Rosalind Crisp
I think there’s a suspicion about what One Extra does and that’s why it’s hard to make a shift. I know what you’re saying. In Europe there is that model. There are lots of theatres and lots of producers who will curate what they want and support it really well. But here, there’s a suspicion. I’m not quite sure why that is.
Kate Champion
Maybe it was the shift from when Kai Tai Chan set it up. It kept the same name but went from one thing to the other. There’s a sentimentality there.
RC
Maybe because we have that history of doing what Legs or Stalker or I’ve done where there’s been this tiny family or community thing that was free and so you kind of feel…
Andrew Morrish
I know when I was on the Victorian Dance Assessment Panel, which I was for 3 years while they still had one, we were very suspicious of that sort of (model) because we used to say, it’s a hidden tier of funding. As the funding body, we were worried that people would start and invent their own funding bodies. So Dancehouse would say give us this money and we’ll decide how to spend it. We’d get really nervous about that. We’d say, where is your accountability? Our accountability is clear—applications come in and we assess them all. That was one of the concerns that I noticed when things got tight. We’d say, oh they’ve got their own little funding tier and got really nervous about that. I think the time for a producer model is ripe. And there’s got to be a way to articulate that. But the curatorial focus would be what’s necessary.
RC
The problem is also that there isn’t the money. So it’s going from one area into something else. It’s not coming from elsewhere. So you’re in competition with me then for funding. That’s the situation.
AC
Also this new producer model, this idea of shift will not be given any more money.
An unsustainable situation: exploitation
Anna Messariti
My own position is very personal and I wouldn’t like to be considered just as representing the view of Playworks. For the last 9 years I’ve been working as an artistic director of small to medium sized organisations in 2 states and prior to that I worked at the Australia Council as the Creative Development project officer (Theatre Board) and the views that I hold are a reflection on all of those years of work and what I perceive has happened and I suppose my preoccupations at the moment are more to do with big picture things rather than the situation of the particular company that I work for.
I perceive the situation that we have at the moment in the sector as being totally unsustainable on every level. I suppose the level at which it affects me the most is that I find it ethically unsustainable because I feel that the only way we can survive and continue to exist within the sector is to be complacent about an ethos of exploitation of everybody that works in the area from the least experienced artist to the most experienced, from the volunteer to the highest paid amongst us. At all levels, the situation is really quite appalling, irrespective of the fact that sometimes it’s interesting and often rewarding and maybe good fun at times, it is at the same time totally immoral and the state and federal governments are complicit in this.
I recently went to a strategic planning meeting of a national organisation which was run by a consultant whose rate of pay was [considerable]. This person’s background was in marketing and he did a lot of consultancy work for state arts funding bodies, for DCITA; I don’t know what involvement he had with the Australia Council. He basically described arts funding at this point in time as being a 2-headed monster. At one head of the monster was the Australia Council and at the other head was the discretionary funds of the minister. And he said, though he didn’t produce the facts to back it up, that in the last financial year the discretionary funds of the ministers exceeded the amount of money that the Australia Council has to fund the whole of the arts, and that this would be the first time this had happened since the inception of the Australia Council. And I felt really alarmed by that because I thought if what he’s saying is true, we don’t know it, we don’t realise it and what we’re actually witnessing here is the complete disintegration of the arm’s length principle as we know it.
Funding for political gain
He then proceeded to tell us that there would be no more increases in funding in this sector. That the outcome of the Small-To-Medium Report would be nothing. We wouldn’t get any more money. It wasn’t an enquiry but a report. I mean, we’ve heard this everywhere. That the trend we are seeing at state and federal level at the moment is for all ministers to take the view that they’re no longer interested in arts funding for its own sake. They’re interested in arts funding that is directly tied to political gain. And so if they can see a voter outcome, political benefit in supporting the arts, this is basically where we may see increases. He referred to it as the Ra Ra money which was regional and rural money, ie where the political interest is at the moment and that’s what we should all be striving for.
In that situation where you’re actually trying to plan the future for another struggling small to medium sized organisation as a voluntary board member who already works for another under-resourced organisation that has to manage its own voluntary board and the vicious cycle of exploitation that goes on, I felt really quite desperate. I thought I’ve seen enough in the arts in the last 10 years I’ve been working in it that the minute we start to compromise the artistic integrity of what we believe in and what we do, and start to pander to all these sorts of political agendas, we’re lost, the work is lost. There’s no point in trying to work in it any more because it’s a completely cynical exercise.
Funding from ignorance
I don’t really know what the solution is. I feel that since 1997 when the restructuring of the Australia Council took place and we saw large committees and boards turned into smaller and smaller funds which have now been reinvented as Boards again, we saw a conflict of interest policy developed which basically means that nobody who’s involved in work at any level or who knows anyone or has any kind of relationship with anybody on any level can actually sit at a table and make a decision. And we have seen a situation where there used to be subjective but often passionate and interesting discussion about the way that the arts got made in this country. That’s what we used to have and it may have had its problems but I wonder if what has replaced it, this incredibly sterile numerical model which is very much applications- based. And anyone who’s ever worked for a funding body knows how easy it is to manipulate that system if you’re strategic about it. And “strategic” is a word we’ll probably hear a lot more of when the results of the Small-To-Medium Report are published. I suppose I just feel as though without even realising it, many of us are complicit in a culture of exploitation and dishonesty that we’re not even aware of—and we have no choice about it.
I came out of the meeting where there was talk about the Ra Ra money and the 2-headed monster feeling really angry about this, that it’s degenerated to this point and most of us don’t even realise it. But now I feel quite frightened by it and I think we need to come together more and express our discontent. But instead of directing it at the funding bodies whom I perceive to be completely powerless, I think we need to be directing it towards ministers, towards politicians. I think we need to bypass that whole level and go direct to the people who do have the power to do actually something about it.
The NSW: the international trap
The only other thing I’d like to say is to do with relates to NSW in particular. I’ve worked in other states and I work for a national organisation at the moment. The one thing I’m aware of in NSW that I think affects us all in a different way from any other state is that in NSW, every organisation and every artist who’s subsidised at any level is expected to be catering to a kind of national agenda. NSW has that reputation of being the international city. We’re expected to be international in the way that we operate. We’re expected to have that kind of leadership. But if you actually compare the infrastructure and the level of support that people get to work in NSW, if you compare it to what’s going on in every other state it’s just unbelievable. If I could be absolutely honest about this, when I read the report in The Australian a few weeks ago about the investment in buildings in NSW, I thought oh, that’s really great— but it’s 10 years too late. The roof of the Performance Space has been falling down for a decade. I remember Sarah Miller in 1991 talking about the buckets collecting water and the fact that the building could have been bought… I remember all of that, all the planning around it. I feel the crisis has existed for a decade and finally something is being done about it. We don’t know exactly what but something is being done. Whereas in Queensland they’ve invested in an infrastructure that’s much bigger than the arts sector that exists there but over a decade you might actually see that whole community and population grow into it. And I feel as though the whole country needs to be at that level at the moment because what we have is a situation where the thing that will disappear in this continual exploitation of artists and arts workers is experience and wisdom in the field and in that sense all that will happen is that we’ll all go backwards or we’ll just become incredibly mediocre.
What to do?
KG
I think a lot of us are feeling the same. It’s interesting with the craft organisations in NSW and with the NAVA (the National Association of Visual Artists) fighting to make that enquiry work, they’ve certainly gone straight to ministers. In fact, NAVA got so angry after the meeting with Rupert Myer that I attended that it immediately put a figure on how much they needed. They’d never done that. And the next day in The Australian they said we want an extra $15 million a year for the visual arts. I thought that was great. It gives people something to fight about. You actually put a value to it. This happens in all other fields like marine biologists working on projects say this is what the area needs for the next 10 years. In the arts we’re very loath to do these kinds of things. So, Anna, those words could be fightin’ words. And perhaps tonight we should decide what we want we think we should do, if anything.
Fiona Winning
That’s one of the reasons why we decided to proceed with the forum tonight even though it was going to be before the report came out. It’s because there’s got to be a way…In my folder, I had completely forgotten about this, in Victoria, about 40 small companies got together to respond to the enquiry and for all of the reasons that we know, we didn’t do that in NSW. So maybe this is the time to be mobilising to have some sort of response. And I agree, talking directly to ministers.
What happens to the art?
One of the things that I think I’ll talk about is the art. Let’s go back to the art and what is at stake at the moment. To me, in these 6 week projects where many independent artists are meant to self-produce, create an innovative work and then find an audience and blah blah blah, it seems that we are in an impossible situation and that we probably need to be talking about some really radical re-thinking about the way we make work in this country. Every international festival we go to, we all get depressed because we can’t make work like that because, you know, in Belgium….you know, they don’t show a work-in-progress until they’ve been working for 3 months!
I feel a little like Russell Dumas in saying that all we do is look to other places at the moment because we’re so fucked. So let’s try to think about what is going to make it better. And I’d suggest another set of discussions is needed. Because the conditions we’re working under are pathetic. I think people are achieving astounding results given those conditions. But I had a lot of trouble coming to terms with my job when I first started here because here we are with triennial funding from the New Media Arts Board and we have one broken down projector that has to be serviced every 6 weeks. I had a computer that operated at one sentence a fortnight. I mean some of that has changed and some of that has been upgraded but nevertheless in terms of making new media work, it’s a joke. We can’t afford to hire the stuff for a month to show it in the galleries because that means the artists get nothing. So you’re forever weighing up these variously stupid equations between paying for the work and paying for the infrastructure of the equipment.
So the lack of technology, the lack of time to make work, the dismantling of ensembles so we can’t experiment on any sort of ongoing basis and this absolute demand for people to be able to do everything, whether they’re the self-producing artist, or the director of the Performance Space who’s still learning how to do some aspects of her job. Going back to Chris’s opening comments, because of the conditions that we’ve been talking about, I know that I make decisions in my job that are extremely conservative. I find myself looking at something that is a good idea and looking at how we make that good idea work and unless there’s something like a 60% chance of being able to do it, we can’t invest staff resources to try it. So it means that on a producing level and on an artistic level, we’re actually diminishing our visions constantly. And I know that we have to be pragmatic as well.
Unnatural attrition
But I actually think we’ve got to the position where we’ve diminished our vision so seriously that we’re not going to be able to compete internationally any more. Looking at the work that comes out of this space, several years ago the Performance Space director could have said well there’s this many international tours of works from this space. There haven’t been any for a number of years. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a reflection of the work. There’s been good work but not as good as that fucking Belgian work! One of the contributing factors to that has been the gradual attrition of artists and producers and administrators and good people in this area of work is enormous. We need to be arguing that we have people with skills to make good art and with the conditions necessary to make good art, it will be done. It is being done. It’s just that the good art is only being made under awful conditions generally and we are being diminished by this not just personally but culturally on a much broader level.
I was heartened by the Roger Wilkins (Director General of Arts, NSW) interview in RealTime (#48) because it seemed like he might respond to those issues and I don’t know if we can argue strongly onto a national ministerial level, but it seems we do have to be talking about the diminution of ideas.
Despite my depressing rave, a lot of good art is still coming out of Australia and a lot of it is going overseas. It’s just getting harder and harder to make and the visions are being seriously diminished all the time. Actually at the Performing Arts Market—I don’t know if this is any guide—the international delegates were making noises about the work not being as impressive as in other years. Now whether that’s to do with the choice of work, I don’t know.
Rachael
I think they always say that.
Supply & demand
KG
The thing is everyone works their arses off. Artists put out terrific work. Governments can be complacent. The booklets we’ve done for the Australia Council, we’ve done 5 of them now, show an astonishing range of work and a lot of it has travelled. Now it might be touring on the sweat and love of the performers but that still looks really good on paper and as Rachael said, it’s the small to medium companies that are doing these international tours, not the state theatre companies.
Caitlin Newton-Broad
One thing I’d like to say as devil’s advocate is that the small to medium companies don’t necessarily get good audiences in Australia. So, in fact, you still need that groundswell of support from audiences in your own country. And really, I don’t feel like we as a field do so well on an audience level. But it really depends on what perhaps you mean by audience.
KG
The Australia Council’s Audience and Market Development promote this work very well overseas. There seems to be no equivalent work on the ground in this country. Although there’s a growing number of producers, touring networks are still not strong.
Clare Grant
There’s a system of distribution they can plug into overseas. There aren’t the systems here.
KG
Terry Cutler (former Chair, Australia Council) spoke about cluster studies. They’re all the go now. You work out the distribution of the arts and where it is and what’s resourcing it and how many funding directions are supporting it and how it can help itself. DCITA actually funded one for several million dollars in the new media area to see how digital arts and new media is working in Australia. As Suzanne Donnelly has said, in this area there are not enough statistics to know what ‘s happening. And yet, the whole Australia Council direction shifted towards the Saatchi & Saatchi demand side. It was almost like we’ve created all this product, supply if you like, but it’s not getting taken up, so now let’s look at demand, the audiences. They went about it in a funny way and I suppose the Saatchi Report will soon be forgotten, but perhaps not now that Cutler’s gone. But it’s like nobody wants to really invest additional funds in basic artform activity, the supply side.
What to do? Part II
Michael Cohen
Instead of trying to form a national coalition which sounds very grand but is probably unachievable, is there room for something like happened in Victoria which happened before the Small to Medium Performing Arts report was undertaken. I think they got together and made recommendations to the people who put together the report as to what the guidelines should be. Given that NSW is the most populous in terms of companies represented in the report, is there not space? Of course, it’s another voluntary job for someone to organise it, but is there room for an umbrella lobby group. Is it just an email noticeboard. Is there room for that among a disparate group of NSW performing arts companies?
KG
If we do something like that it’s important that the NSW sector talks to the Victorian sector and so on. It might not need to be huge. We don’t want to form an incorporated association.
FW
It might not need to represent everybody either. It’s a lot of work to make sure that all the performing arts companies are represented. Maybe it’s a sectoral thing within the Small to Medium companies.
MC
What about an organisation like SAMAG?
Jan Irvine
SAMAG (Sydney Arts Management advisory Group) doesn’t have the resources. I was actually just thinking about that and whether there could be some funding available through the Ministry or whatever. Being time-poor, how much time can you really devote to getting lobbying strategies together. I don’t want to use the word consultant because it has such terrible connotations…but I’m just thinking whether someone could be funded to drive a lobby group even for a period.
MC
Even the Carriageworks at Wilson Street is an example of a pretty disparate group of people who got together and in a kind of very ad hoc way wrote letters and sent emails. I’m sure that wasn’t what pushed it over the line but we can only hope it contributed some impact. I don’t agree that art is created out of desperation, or that we should accept that. I really disagree with that. Now, I’m not putting my hand up to run a lobby group, but I’m wondering if there’s not space for that.
Harley Stumm
That’s an example, and the buildings in Western Sydney and what’s been happening here at Performance Space. The most effective kind of lobbying is the companies who have some common interest working really hard on it. Rather than everyone feeling they have to sign up. Maybe some kind of strategic plan to assist in identifying goals and opportunities. What Wilkins said in RT was about good policy being a mix of opportunism and forward thinking. It’s political speak, okay, but it’s true. You know what you want and when you see an opening for one of the things you want, that’s when you push for it. Even though it might actually be your second highest priority, there might be that time when that’s the chance to get it. I think we need to be more strategic and I don’t have any objection to that word.
KG
A smaller group of companies working in Contemporary Performance challenging the outcomes of this report when it’s released could be quite strong. Especially if we can find some allies interstate.
HS
And there might be time when Railway Street and Griffin and Sidetrack and other companies who aren’t represented here where we should be working on the broad front with them. But there would be times when we have common interests and times when we’d be in competition.
FW
We can start with the people in this room as the network to be contacted about coming together.
Melbourne is home to a music scene which can genuinely be described as underground. Artists and camp-followers gather for erratic, sometimes will-o’-the-wisp events (Sean Baxter’s La Basta! being perhaps the most terroristic of these). The Make It Up Club has proven a durable feature of this scene—an all the more remarkable feat given its focus on improvisation. The fourth year of MIUC was celebrated with 2 nights of what artistic director Tim O’Dwyer calls “freeformance”, unified only by open-structures which defied standard notation. Artists employed materials ranging from prepared acoustic guitars (Ren Walters) to real-time electronic processing (Stevie Wishart). This confronting diversity cheerfully liberated the audience of any firm critical position. Who is to say for example that Tom Fryer’s aggressive, intermittently explosive, extended guitar technique was ‘better’ than Candlesnuffer’s otherworldly, yet somehow orchestral, guitar-activated sounds which seemed like they came from an experimental Theremin? As someone schooled in performance, I was most impressed by more overtly performative musicians. Indeed, the ghosts of Fluxus, Cage, Marinetti and Tzara were present throughout.
Concrete poet Amanda Stewart was a particularly striking performer. Though an established Sydney artist, Stewart is rarely seen in Melbourne. Her visit fortuitously coincided with the tour of Tess de Quincey’s awesome avant-garde movement work Nerve 9 (in the Bodyworks season at Dancehouse), partly scored by Stewart. Stewart regaled MIUC with several pieces, covering some of the same ground as Nerve 9 (see RT44 p35). When I spoke with de Quincey, she reflected that Melbourne audiences were particularly attentive to references in the piece to feminist psychoanalyst Kristeva. Seeing Nerve 9 alongside Stewart herself, this came as no surprise. Stewart acted as a living epitome of the corporeal feminine language championed by Kristeva. She highlighted the extremely physical quality of speech using stuttering rhythms and glottal stops, onomatopoeia and arhythmic, breathy consonants. Stewart’s work was moreover highly political, revealing the absurd babble underlying political and economic discourse, as well as the serious politics underlying our struggles at communication. Stewart herself proved a mesmeric, joyful presence, rising and falling on her toes in unison with the rush of air in and out of her chest and throat. Her gestures were not melodramatic, but every part of her body offered a symphony of sympathetic reactions to the squeezing of air through fleshy passages.
Although Vanessa Tomlinson employed an entirely different sonic palette (mixed percussion and found objects), she had a similar deportment to Stewart. Both exhibited an attentive curiosity, between openness and control. The improvisatory character of MIUC overall was in fact highly varied. While mad guitarist/performer Greg Kingston and saxophonist Tim O’Dwyer gave themselves almost entirely over to the free play of spontaneous noises and actions, Tomlinson and Stewart represented the more structured or definitively scored end of this spectrum. Each played works or fragments they had performed several times before. Although Tomlinson produced quite a din at times, she has a light touch. Her frame remained gently poised over her kit throughout, arcing through the air. When she dropped wind-up toys on her drum-skins it solicited sympathetic laughter. She performed with a sense of mirth and possibility, not belly laughs.
The almost slapstick insanity of Kingston and O’Dwyer was similarly memorable, offering a charging ride of guitar scribbles, fragments of 4/4 rock, literally breath-taking open-mouthed saxophone and sharp, brassily stoppered notes. It concluded in a wonderfully comic moment when, during a lull, the sweating Kingston dropped a towel and the assorted toys with which he had been abusing his guitar, and simply stated: “I’m a bit shagged out after that.” Baxter provided an even more complete break with seriousness in his somewhat limited but extremely funny demonstration of how to use a home stereo badly as DJ Arsecrack, leaping about in mock seriousness like a bogan Moby in between providing harsh, intermittent heavy metal explosions.
The work of electronica artists Anthony Pateras and Robyn Fox was particularly remarkable. They generated an extraordinarily dense range of noises, which could be likened to a hyped version of the Forbidden Planet soundtrack. Deep metalo-plastic crunches and violent screaming sheets buffeted in and out of more discrete noises which had the distinctive, rapid, rising attack and slow, dubby delay pattern found in so-called ‘spacey’ music. Miniature pillow-mikes were chewed, exhaled, slapped and simply enclosed within hands or mouths to help generate the score which Pateras and Fox then shredded with effects. It was a windy, hissy composition, rich in feedback and ‘bad audio’ noise. A mixture of new software and old equipment used at high gain levels meant there were times one could almost hear the springs rattling in the more elderly echo mechanisms. This provided a suitably rocking, hard punk conclusion to an extremely diverse festival.
Make It Up Club Festival, featuring Erik Mitsak, Rex Johnson (aka Tim Pledger), David Tolley & Ren Walters, Amanda Stewart, Greg Kingston & Tim O’Dwyer, Tom Fryer & Will Guthrie, Vanessa Tomlinson, DJ Arse Crack (aka Sean Baxter), Jim Denley & Stevie Wishart, Candlesnuffer (aka David Brown), Anthony Pateras & Robyn Fox, Planet Cafe, 386-388 Brunswick St Fitzroy, Melbourne, Feb 25-26. MIUC continues 8:30pm every Tuesday at Planet Café. makeitclub@yahoo.com.co.uk
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 38
© Jonathan Marshall; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Skin Club, Sophie, Linda Erceg
Arts festivals in Australia are going through a process of renewal. In recent years we’ve seen Barrie Kosky and Robyn Archer significantly increase the volume of Australian content in their respective Adelaide festivals in contrast to the standard model operating elsewhere. There’s been greater emphasis on innovation, aided by collaborations between festivals. And there’s been the regional reach of recent Adelaide festivals, Tasmania’s 10 days on the Island and the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music. Access has become a major issue, not only for new and broader audiences but also for artists—witness the Indigenous drive of Peter Sellars’ vision for the 2002 Adelaide Festival. There was an also an increase in the number of free events. Next Wave has long been about access, for young people to create and enjoy art, but this year it’s taken the concept to new heights.
Young people, new work, community engagement, contemporary issues and access are central to the 9th Next Wave Festival. From 17 to 26 May more than 70 digital, dance, online, performance and public art events by, for and with young people will invade venues in, around and above Melbourne. And for the first time it’s all free, a surprising and significant development in an era of enduring economic rationalism.
There are large scale events, exhibitions and other showings that won’t require booking. However audiences still have to book if they want to see performances and participate in forums and workshops. Money will not change hands. Simply register online and request what you want to see. Doubtless, sessions will fill quickly, so booking early is critical.
The 2002 festival sees itself as a collision of art, pop culture, new media, social action, environmental concerns, healthy dissent and, this is interesting, “extreme sport”, and a blurring of the boundaries between audience and participant. The program’s embargoed until the mid-April launch of the festival, but here’s a glimpse of some of the highlights from the 70 premieres created in partnership with young people.
One of the big events will take place on the last day of Next Wave—the planting of 11,000 trees in the suburb of Westmeadows followed by a party in the CBD. The site for the event is an important water catchment area and the planting, part of a 10 year plan, is being produced by Tranceplant, an independent, environmental dance party co-op, in collaboration with Melbourne Water.
As ever new technology plays a substantial role in the festival. Sydney-based sound artist Sophea Lerner will present The Glass Bell, a work 3 years in the making which has been described as a glass waterwall with projections where touch affects sound and image. There’s also interactive martial arts in the shape of Kick the Fractal and VR workshops in art spaces.
Interdisciplinary work will predominate. One of these is a hitchhiker-inspired installation, Human/Machine/Landscape, the result of a collaboration between a visual artist and a documentary filmmaker. The experience will be like a walk-in movie cum sculpture at 45 Downstairs, Melbourne’s newest performance venue (beneath Span Galleries). Another walk-in work will be an inflated chromosome!
Screenings at Cinema Nova include the Megabite Digital Film Project, with help from the ATOM Awards (Australian Teachers of Media). The response from young artists to the call for entries for Megabite has been enormous with more than 150 digital films submitted.
On the performance side of the program, the work is extremely physical, featuring some 25 productions. There’ll be Indigenous dance and The Difficult Company from New Zealand will explore notions of “anti dance.” Look out and look up as one of Melbourne most recognisable architectural and arts icons is invaded by Y Space Company for the 10 days of the festival in a radical outdoor aerial dance event.
In the realm of text there’ll be a focus on comic books and a serious look at independent publishing. Forums covering all aspects of the festival will feature overseas as well as interstate and local speakers.
Next Wave is about access and involvement for individuals and groups. It is also working on a larger scale—towards genuine community engagement. There will be a dozen large public art outcomes which will be unavoidable. These include young people at risk working with artists through long term exchanges in regional and metropolitan Victoria. The resulting installation works move, glow and inflate. Next Wave 2002 looks unique on all fronts.
RealTime/Next Wave
As part of the 2002 program, RealTime editors will work with a team of young writers to produce quick turnaround responses to the festival each day, online and at festival venues on computer printouts. See RT49
Next Wave Festival, Melbourne, May 17-27. For more information go to www.nextwave.org.au
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 27
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
This year’s Totally Huge New Music Festival begins over the Easter break with Drums in the Outback on Wogarno Station, a working sheep property 600 kilometres north-east of Perth. This is the second mini-festival at the station, following last year’s successful Violins in the Outback which featured Jon Rose performing and conducting his Violin Factory. This year sees a further commitment to regional performance with Hannah Clemen and Steve Richter conducting percussion workshops amongst the locals. The results will be incorporated into the main performance line-up on the Saturday evening.
The highlight of the weekend will be Clocked Out Duo (Vanessa Tomlinson and Erik Griswold) in collaboration with Chinese composer Zou Xianping and choreographer Zhang Ping, both from Chengdu in China’s south-western Sichuan province. Tomlinson and Griswold returned from Chengdu in February this year after working with Zou and Zhang for 3 months. This collaboration has yielded a cross-cultural, cross-genre perspective on contemporary performance—incorporating video, electronica, traditional and modified instruments, dance and mock ma jiang.
Over the past month the country media have been carrying “wanted” ads for distressed pianos. Ross Bolleter plans to revisit his improvised vocal and percussion piece based on the Ruined Piano of Cue. Bolleter’s performances, which range from avant-folk to hauntingly and reverberantly intimate, will contrast with the massed percussion of Freo Samba’s forty strong group of drummers, dancers and pyro-acrobats.
Other artists performing throughout the weekend are to be scattered across the countryside surrounding the homestead at locations like Lizard Rock, Blue Hill and The Wires. New installations by Alan Lamb, Rob Muir and Alex Hayes will occupy the outback landscape/ soundscape.
The Perth component of Totally Huge follows in April. While not themed there is a definite weight towards percussion in the programming which includes: Tetrafide; Nova Ensemble (in company with the pipe organ of St Peter’s Basilica); a significant part of the Clocked Out Duo, Zou and Zhang collaboration, and Ross Bolleter’s piano dissections. Balancing this program’s inclination are the contemporary chamber music ensembles Magnetic Pig and Elision. Previously in Perth Elision have performed Richard Barrett’s Opening of the Mouth at the Midland Railway Workshops amongst a Crow installation of decaying vegetables and moulding milk. This time they will be in concert mode performing works by Heyn, Desapin, Veltheim and others at the more anodyne space of the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
The composer-based ensemble Magnetic Pig will be celebrating their 10th anniversary with new works by members Cathie Travers, Lindsay Vickery and newcomer Jessica Ipkendanz. Travers will present 2 works from her Motion Algorythm series and Vickery will present Dialogues with Nobody and Improbable Games. Violinist Ipkendanz premiers her solo work Obsession. Travers will also be performing a solo show The Modulator where she abandons her usual electronic keyboard and effects in favour of piano accordion.
Moving from percussion and chamber music to electronica, John Gough, aka Pimmon, for the first time this year exposes Perth audiences to his dynamic electro-audio accretions. Also, Hannah Clemen has curated an immersive environment of sonic journeys. Seven hours of soundscapes, ambient and deep listening can be heard for free in the mathematically named ‘Function Room’ at the Paradiso cinema.
On the other side of town at the Claise Brook inlet off the Swan River there will be installations by Alan Lamb and Rob Muir. For Project 44 Muir is collaborating with visual artist Alex Hayes. A speaker is to be placed in the depths of each of an array of 44 gallon drums, playing its sonic history, real or imagined. The listener moves through the array physically mixing the many stories as they go.
At the river end of the inlet Alan Lamb will string 6 high-tensile wires across the Claise Brook; one end anchored to a huge eucalypt, the other terminating above the Holmes á Court gallery on the opposite bank. This work, Wires in the Sky, will use transducers to feed the constantly changing harmonies and transient impacts of the wires into the gallery below. In the gallery, visitors can listen, mix and record their own compositions.
Although this year’s Totally Huge is not as ambitious or as diverse as previous festivals, and many artists reappear throughout the program in different guises, Artistic Director Tos Mahoney is about to deliver another satisfying festival of new music to the audiences of Perth.
Totally Huge New Music Festival, Perth, April 12-21; Drums in the Outback, Wogarno Station WA, March 29-31 www.tura.com.au
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 38
© Andrew Beck; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Some books are educational. Others are an education. Richard Vella’s Musical Environments is one of the latter. So many of our experiences of music and especially sound events now fall outside the concert hall, and even there we can encounter miked chamber orchestras, electro-acoustic ensembles, djs and new hybrids. Conventional musical notation has been inadequate for at least half a century for describing or recording the new sound worlds we increasingly encounter on CD, in clubs, galleries, sculpture parks and in live dance and theatre. In performance, composition and sound design are no longer mere mood-setting accompaniment but an integral and often visual component of the live performance, the actors or dancers miked and often accompanied by a through-composed score. But what are we hearing and how do we describe it? Writing on music, as in most artforms, has long been a mix of the technically precise and the evocatively impressionistic. However, as new experiences, new instruments and new forms emerge, a fresh look at our vocabulary is called for so that we can share and understand our responses.
Vella’s book was published in 2000, but it’s never too late to alert those who might have missed it, and especially in the context of an ever-strengthening sound culture in Australia. Witness the articles and reviews in this edition on the Totally Huge music festival, Make It Up Club, impermanent.audio, Machine for Making Sense and Stevie Wishart, and keeping in mind the REV new music event in early April at Brisbane’s Powerhouse (RT 47 p31). Melbourne sound artist Garth Paine has been snapped up by De Montfort University (UK), sound writer Douglas Kahn by an American university, and sound sculptor Nigel Helyer recently won the $105,000 Helen Lempriere Sculpture Prize. In the next edition of RealTime, John Potts will review sound artist Ros Bandt’s impressive large format 2001 book (with CD) on Australian sound sculpture—along with the Vella it’s another must-have.
Musical Environments is subtitled “A Manual for Listening, Improvising and Composing.” For me it’s primarily a valuable book about listening, “tuning the ears” as Vella calls it, turning constantly to the companion CD with its dozens of brief, incisively selected examples. Occasionally though I found myself tapping my way through an improvisatory task until a point hit home, or rearranging the room. Not being formally educated in music or sound, I can’t offer an acutely serious critique of Musical Environments but I can say what it continues to offer me after several readings and many a dip into it: a great introduction to many aspects of sound production and reception I’d never thought about or hadn’t entered my experience, let alone my vocabulary. It is an educational book, consequently the layout is formal and possibly off-putting for the curious general reader. However, the same layout in fact makes it an easy book in which to find your way about. Alongside careful, concise non-technical explanations of topics (integrated by the author’s pervasive focus on time and space), Vella’s collaborator, Andy Arthurs, has provided many of the excellent Special Topics—brief introductions to music history, cultures, inventors, machines and the musicians who have expanded our sonic awareness. And there are extensive reading and listening lists appended to every chapter, that like the CD can take you off in new directions or, as I often found, jolted the memory and situated, for example, a popular song in a larger cultural map. The formality is more apparent, and convenient, than real. The tone is relaxed, the writing pithy (given the constant need to define) and often anecdotal.
If you write about music and sound, then Musical Environments is a handy manual for checking the accuracy of your vocabulary or even its foundations. The chapter on texture (and “blendings”) is a very good discussion of the role of metaphor as a way of describing what you’re hearing or making. Once you begin to get the terminology under your belt, there’s pleasure to be had in the author’s brisk elucidations: “Prominent characteristics of [traditional harpsichord] music are rapid note movements as exemplified in the ornamentation of melody, and the vertical collision of notes to form particular harmonic relationships.” As well as focussing on various minutiae, larger views are established and illustrated: “The history of instrumental practice is essentially the history of instruments extended beyond their normal practice.”
The unleashing of instrumental timbral qualities to explore and liberate sound is the predominant feature of music in the second half of the 20th century. Sound shapes and particular types of timbral articulations become motivic units; and development is achieved by the juxtaposition and variation of sonic shapes. Often the traditional concept of melody is gone completely. The instrument becomes the source of an outpouring of new sound. This is what made Jimi Hendrix a unique guitar player in the 60s.
This passage is accompanied on CD by an excerpt from Vella’s Tango (1990): “the clarinet plays glissandi, multiphonics (2 or more notes at the same time) and extreme register leaps.” The next example is from Jim Denley (“he explores different types of blowing sounds and accents, multiphonics, and the instrument’s harmonic series by whistling into it”) and there’s a great discussion of saxophonist Albert Ayler’s remarkable technique: “(he) incorporates pitch blends, pure timbral eruptions of colour, register leaps, squeaks and textural bursts. The instrument moans and wails like an animal.” Precise terminology and evocative metaphor merge.
You can find your way carefully through a rich vocabulary that includes the familar: timbre (“The timbre of a gong…is a rich soup harmonic and non-harmonic tones, noises and other elements”), register, dynamic, frequency, pitch, resonance, amplification, overtones, staccato, legato, tenuto, glissando, portmanento; and many less so: flanging, blending (“where individual components lose their identity in unified sound”—the unison playing in Thelonius Monk’s Criss-Cross, or the “vertical blending” in Elena Kats-Chernin’s Deviations and Scarlatti). Articulation “gives the musical surface a sense of physicality and shape”: the various symbols used to convey it on the score are detailed and Miles Davis is the exemplar. There’s a brief section on the microphone (“a controller”) and what kind of “transients” it produces and how it shapes space. Cut up, textural and rhythmic cells, montage, sound mass, stratification and simultaneity are all there reflecting the impact of sound and avant-garde cultures on music, performance and multimedia.
On the CD and the reference lists, Vella and Arthurs cast their cultural net wide catching folk, pop, avant-garde, electronica, liturgical and many other idioms. Australian composers and sound artists are particularly well represented: Kats-Chernin, Bandt, Rik Rue, Robert Iolini, Alan Dargin, Greg White, Alistair Riddell, Linsey Pollak, Liza Lim, David Chesworth, Amanda Stewart, Greg Schiemer (and his “improvising machine”—an interactive computer instrument that “entices performer response to a constantly changing musical situation”) and many others.
As the book progresses, the discussion of the impact of new technologies becomes central. Arthurs writes: “The expanding opportunities for interaction between real-time performance, improvisation and electronic music have allowed us to throw away the strict division between pre-programmed and pre-recorded, and spontaneous performance. Techno has broadened the appeal of acousmatic music, creating a new, widespread listening paradigm shift.” There’s also a valuable 8 page history of electroacoustic music from 1877 to rave, techno rap and multimedia: “(Rave) was in many ways a popular embodiment of the musical philosophies of the avant-garde movement, and John Cage in particular, where music ceased to be harmonically based, being more defined in terms of organised sounds….this music was preoccupied with sound and texture…”
As a young school teacher in the 60s desperate to find a way to poetry for my students I encountered R Murray Schafer’s When Words Sing, a simple introduction to sound poetry and related material. Around the same time there was the chance purchase of Stockhausen’s remarkable Gesang der Jünglinge, a bit later The Beatles A Day in the Life and Number 9 had their impact, and Stockhausen in Australia demonstrated his work to a grumpy, tweed-jacketed Adelaide male audience. Something had begun, and it’s good to find an accessible book that puts one’s own listening history into the perspective of a very large cultural map. And there’s something distinctively pleasurable about the way that Vella and Arthurs so economically, sometimes wittily, describe the world and the machines of sound: “The sound sampler is a hybrid gestural instrument which plays the ‘voice’ of another musical instrument with the gestural characteristics of the keyboard.”
Richard Vella, with additional topics by Andy Arthurs, Musical Environments, A Manual for Listening, Improvising and Composing, Currency Press, Sydney, 2000. ISBN 0 86819 544 8
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 37
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Kaffe Matthews, mr snow
Next door to Hibernian House, home of the Frequency Lab and monthly sound event impermanent.audio, is a pub called the Evening Star. In the 80s and early 90s it was called the Evil Star. I vividly recall as a terrified 18 year old in flowing Stevie Nicks robes being dragged into this den of all things loud, grungy and just right out there. The Evil Star is now the Evening Star again and features art deco table lamps and faux leather booths, and not a soul in sight. It gives me a sense of great nostalgia, and joyful anticipation as I climb the decrepit stairs of Hibernian House to discover that there is still a little hidden corner of Sydney real estate where the warehouse performance event can live and make a racket. There’s something gloriously lo-fi about the multitude of leads snaking across the floor and power boards piggybacked to the ceiling, the lighting setup that’s turned on and off by pulling out the fuse and the old car seat I’m sitting on. There is nothing lo-fi about the sounds we hear.
d.Haines and Vicky Browne take us on a tidal wave of tones. A constant swathe of sound is established, layers of tones added, some settled, some shifting around us. As the frequencies are tuned and retuned various objects in the space begin to rattle—a live percussive response. It’s a solid, clean block of sound with internal undulations and fringes of static. A sonic snow storm textured by tiny bleeps, like blinking lights, chasing each other around the speaker system. I hear a child’s voice, is that part of the mix? No it’s an unplanned addition, but intriguing—tiny, warm, barely emerging over the tops of the huge waves, adding a disturbingly earthy and innocent texture. I would have liked to hear the unconscious duet expanded on, but the set came to an end abruptly—rupturing the audience reverie.
Stevie Wishart’s performance is gratifyingly “live”—her sound production and sources embodied. Plucking on the strings of her violin, we hear the dry sound which is then sculpted—delayed, pitch- and shape-shifted into myriad new timbres. Vocal evocations, barely heard when first uttered, erupt in full glory curling around the space, mingling with the morphed violin. There is no longer one performer—there’s the live Wishart and all her other imagined selves. Her sibilances shimmer around the space, colliding, bouncing and finally merging into a harsh buzz. Coaxing that buzz into a pulsating drone, Wishart produces the hurdy-gurdy for a duet between her live presence and her processed emanations. Grinding, plucking, and scraping, the treated emissions form rhythmic loops—sounding like otherworldly circular breathing or the creaking of a ghost vessel. Wishart carves a space where the analogue and digital flow, meld and then break apart with an enlivening tension.
UK artist Kaffe Matthews’ set is a hypnotic journey through deftly crafted electronic atmospheres. Sending out a series of loops into the system, she then snatches them back from the live mike near a speaker and reprocesses them, creating a growing, evolving entity. It’s a curiously fleshless sound—pure electric and digital emissions. This entity has no imaginable form, just energy. Yet all the sounds are honed, specific. A click with a cavernous echo hooks us in, morphs into a burble, into an air-swatting chopper, into a morse code bleep that sweeps through the stereo channels, dynamic and surprising. I can’t help wondering what other audience members are visualising. Me, I see the electric transmission beaming out into the ether and Matthews catching the loops in a digital butterfly net. I get a real sense of the structure of her improvisation—sending the sound out there, and then plucking it back, remolding it, sending it out again. She has a light touch, mixing only a few chosen elements, teasing them out, dropping them. All her butterflies beautifully controlled and musically combined create an intense and rewarding sonic vision.
caleb k’s impermanent.audio is a vital addition to Sydney’s live music/sound scene. It is a serious and immersive listening environment, devoid of distractions—no talk, sometimes no light. Not only is it creating a regular space for live play but it’s also training up a whole new audience in active listening. I was suprised at the size of the audience and its reverence. Listening in such an environment becomes a creative act—honing in on elements and structures, remixing in your mind, imagining. It gives me hope for a thriving artistic underground burrowing away beneath the rip-it-down-and-renovate Sydney and its double glazed, reflective surfaces.
impermanent.audio, curated by caleb k, the frequency lab, March 10
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 36
© Gail Priest; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Andrew Morrish, Regina Heilmann, Nigel Kellaway, entertaining paradise
photo Heidrun Löhr
Andrew Morrish, Regina Heilmann, Nigel Kellaway, entertaining paradise
Nigel Kellaway is a survivor—one of the few mature artists still working in contemporary performance in Sydney, such is the unnatural attrition of the field. But for how much longer? After directing, administering, performing in and consulting on a string of demanding shows over the last year (Little George, The Song Company; Interview with The Virtual Goddess, Rakini Devi (Perth); El Inocente, The opera Project; The Berlioz—Our Vampires Ourselves tour, The opera Project (Hobart & Brisbane); The Audience And Other Psychopaths,The opera Project, Sydney; Fa’afafine, Urban Theatre Projects, Sydney; Kiss My Fist, Performance Space, Sydney) his latest work, entertaining paradise, could be the last for quite a while. He really needs a break but the astonishing failure of the Theatre Board of the Australia Council to support Kellaway’s work for the third time running means that he has no major support for his key venture, The opera Project, over the next year. Welcome funds from the NSW Ministry for the Arts have always been anticipated to supplement those from the Australia Council, but recently they have become the company’s only source of support—and there’s no more of that for the balance of 2002. So make sure you catch entertaining paradise before Kellaway becomes yet another premature archival Australian arts object. While this country’s investment in the young, the emerging, the multicultural and the regional has revealed a broadening arts sensibility and begun to meet some important needs, our attention to the ongoing development and survival of the mature artist has been shamefully negligent. The current shortage of Australia Council artform funds means that there is never enough to go around. Too often we hear of artists being told that they were judged on their most recent work. This is ridiculous when dealing with artists with a substantial lifetime of work. Of course not every work can be a success or of the same high calibre, but artists like Kellaway prove themselves over and over with surges of invention and brilliance. Such is the nature of creation.
Kellaway’s enthusiasm for entertaining paradise is undimmed by his straitened circumstances. Inspired by the material and especially the structure of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Pre-Paradise Sorry Now, he is collaborating with sometime opera Project cohort, performer Regina Heilmann and, for the first time, the improviser Andrew Morrish. The Fassbinder, described by Kellaway as “a classic piece of German anti-theatre” was taken up around the world in the 70s and realised in wildly differing versions. “There is a kind of narrative made up of mobile, fluid scenes including part of the story of Moors murderers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady—from how they met as young people and up to the first 2 murders. There are 9 pas de deux dialogues between them. There are 20 contra scenes each with 3 people. They’re all about 2 people ganging up on a third, for example 2 prostitutes versus a transsexual prostitute; 2 fag bashers versus a homosexual…The scenes can be performed in any order. There’s a sense of scenes being replayed or re-assessed as information recurs in different ways.”
Ever one for a challenge, Kellaway is fascinated with “how to make a show working from limited information and with how a small kernel of an idea can develop.” Having Morrish in the team is another kind of challenge. Although Kellaway always sees the process of making work as improvisation, the prospect of having a professional improviser on stage, in performance, is another matter. Kellaway has a meticulous sense of structure which firms as the work emerges. Fortunately he’s found in Morrish a like-minded collaborator—an improviser preoccupied with structure. “I’ve never met anyone who can jettison material as fast as he can…if it’s not working he jumps to the next moment…an extraordinary facility for self-censorship. He’s very intuitive. I’m more calculating—I think before I do. Regina does, thinks and then does again differently.” Kellaway and Heilmann have been working as Hindley and Brady “with Andrew intervening quite left field…then we respond and rewrite our material and eventully jettison the Fassbinder text.”
While the Fassbinder has provided a formal springboard for entertaining paradise, Kellaway feels that the German writer’s preoccupation with the roots of fascism in racism, homophobia and cultural paranoia still warrant exploration, and we’ve had plenty of evidence recently in this country why this should be the case. The Moors murderers “were the products of Glasgow and Manchester slums—their limitations were forced on them. Brady did reform schools, jails. But he did well—he was a bookkeeper in a soap factory and wore a tie. He and Hindley met there, products of the class system. But the work is not about the Moors murderers. It’s about a neo-Nazi mentality—they talk endlessly about superior forms of life and those with no right to be here. It’s about the massive insecurity that makes people go for the weakest, that’s fascism.”
This is an opera Project venture, so what role does music play in the scenario? “High art is very scary for Ian and Myra and therefore is everything they fear. Especially when the singer is a counter tenor and Indonesian. This is paranoia about the elite artist.” Eleven songs make up 35 minutes of the show. There are Purcell art songs, an aria from Handel’s Rodelinda—“a burst of extreme energy”—and the 1910 Alban Berg Early Songs—“lush, decadent, cabaret quality and pre-serial.” Of Purcell’s “Sweeter than Roses”, Kellaway enthuses: “it’s like a Restoration soundtrack for a hard core porn movie, the foreplay, the sudden cum shot (“and shot like fire all over”) and then, marvellously post-orgasmic. It’s onomatopoeic, it’s in-yer-face, it’s the rattling-in-the-dark world of Hindley and Brady—not that they’d recognise it!” They cling to an Elvis songbook.
Kellaway, Heilmann and Morrish are joined by the remarkable young counter tenor Peretta Anggerek and the accomplished pianist Michael Bell in what promises to be a grimly thrilling experience, where the pleasures and horrors of decadence tangle, exploring, as Kellaway puts it, “the obscene limits to which intimate relationships can degenerate.”
The opera Project & Performance Space, entertaining paradise, Performance Space, Sydney, April 19-27.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 36
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Red Cabbage 8, Half Full of Happiness
It began in the foyer, crept up on us crabwise—them filming, us filming them—and before we knew it (you could feel the audience holding its breath) we were following the faux princess willing us to join her in a journey out the front door and into the garden. The Red Cabbage 8 (RC8) ensemble was inspired by angels and we were brought face to face with lost dreams of white picket-fence suburbia and the toil of life—mowing, measuring, making babies. “You’ve got to get the horsey ride when you can and another ride after that.”
We wanted to love this one, really love it. And we did, just about. RC8’s principal creator and ensemble director is Louise Morris, partner of David Branson (who died tragically just before Christmas). And here we were so soon after at The Street Theatre, home to much of Branson’s work over many years, focus of the Canberra arts community’s outpouring of grief. The faces in the audience were the same ones that had bid him farewell. Half Full of Happiness—“a little token of remembrance”—was fat (full to the brim) with particular poignancy.
The 8 installations explored the concept of ‘invasion’ (according to the notes) in a dreamscape search for happiness through live music, multimedia and movement: outdoors, indoors. The installations that worked a treat engaged the audience, had us by the throat, laughing, expectant. Such as the swinging angels raining ice-cube tears. Such as the cackling trolls from the underworld throwing mud and spraying real water from real garden hoses to challenge any nascent arty-fartiness.
The in-between spaces were best. Navigating tight squeezy places. Crawling head to butt along sand tunnels (difficult for those in opening-night frou-frou). Reaching out to build our own sandcastles just about. Visually, Half Full of Happiness was full of impact. It was tactile, visceral. Our tongues licked ruby champagne. We were overcome by pesticide fumes. We immersed ourselves in something/anything half-full/half-empty with happiness.
It had echoes of ACME’s goldfish-pond sculptural installations at University House (National Festival of Australian Theatre, 1997). It was grunge extravagance, albeit on a smaller, domestic scale. It was a reflective, brave performance—of the moment. Even so (and I hesitate in saying this), there was something missing.
It ended all too abruptly, the ending arbitrary at that. For all our longing to get our teeth into it, feel grit, eat flesh, it was gone, quite finished (only just an hour) with the last of the performers brushing past nonchalant passersby and disappearing into the dark shadow of, as it happens, the Australian Family Court. Did we, at that moment of departure, step into the frame of the theatre, our action/inaction somehow becoming the muscle of the work?
It was as if Half Full of Happiness was a prelude to something not yet made, something grand and delicious but un-present, un-conceived, yet. But perhaps that’s the point…There is something ready now to be born.
Half Full of Happiness, Red Cabbage 8, conceived by the RC8 Collective: Tania Smith, Anna Grassham, Louise Morris, Kirsten Prins, Zita Whalley, Anna Hamilton, Katie-Jean Harding, Clint Dowdell, text by Anna Grassham; The Street Theatre, Canberra, Feb 26-March 2
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 35
© Francesca Rendle-Short; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Blak Inside, a series of Indigenous plays from Victoria, performed at Melbourne’s Playbox to sellout crowds. It’s a vote of confidence in the medium that these writers chose to craft their stories for theatre. I saw 3 of the 5 productions.
Belonging by Tracey Rigney is a story told simply and clearly. Cindy is 13, on the edge of womanhood and not sure where she belongs in her river town. She has friends and she has Pop, a solid, calm old man. Belonging stays with Cindy through a few days of upheaval at the brink of life-changing events. Cindy’s cousin Janice comes to town, looking to party. Tough, seemingly hard, but only 14, Janice does any kind of drug, looking for any kind of fun, hurt and reeling, throwing her body hard at a world that hurts her. She risks great pain to help her feel she can’t be hurt again and she drags Cindy along, needing to tell her how bad, how hard the world is, what a shitty future they have. Cindy’s internal battle is played out simply at the level of what happens to who, but the threads are long and knotted and the story compelling.
Jadah Milroy uses more complex poetic and surreal elements blended with humour to weave together stories of people lost in the city. Crow Fire is the story of Dayna. Raised white, and a public servant, she is frustrated with life and unable to make a difference. Dayna is drawn to Crow, a spiritual force, a big black survivor. Donning her crow costume, she tries to generate a fire in the people she encounters—a politician and her disillusioned banker husband; Yungi, who has come from the desert to the city seeking help; and Tony, her friend.
Casting Doubts explores the question of Aboriginality as it is recognised and performed for broader cultural consumption. A casting agent seeks Aboriginal actors for film roles. Writer Maryanne Sam develops a series of threads around the legitimacy of Aboriginal culture, whether it is denied or embraced. She explores the deep sense of betrayal sometimes felt when working in a cultural industry that insists on a narrow fantasy of the perfect Aborigine—trackers in loincloths, domestic servants who say ‘Sorry missus’ with downcast eyes. To get the job you play the part, but when the ‘trackers’ are in the waiting room, they’re on their mobiles—serious, contemporary dudes. The ‘domestic servant’ is gorgeous, worrying about wearing concealer and crocodile shoes. Are they Aboriginal enough to fit the crap parts written for them? “Him one big hebby pella…me go no furda, boss.” Then back on the mobile and into the suit to resume real life as an Aborigine. Oh well, there’s always Othello. This cleverly constructed play leads us, laughing, through layers of perception about race and image.
Conversations With the Dead is a giant of a play, performed at full stretch over 2 and a half hours by a powerful cast supporting Aaron Pederson in the performance of a lifetime. Richard Frankland’s script and direction drag us to the edges of suffering and pain through a series of conversations with those whose files and stories he worked on during years with the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Just when you can take no more, he eases back with music, some smart jokes and then takes you deeper into the unrelenting pain of Aboriginal deaths and the effects on families across Australia: the suicide attempts, the slashings, the chroming (solvent sniffing), the funerals every week, the disintegration of family life. From the inside, drinking and violence make sense at the end of a long line of breathtaking provocation and grief, the result of being pushed beyond what is tolerable. This is an extraordinary play with not only powerful material but also an understanding of the medium, the use of image, music and non-verbal waves of emotion flooding the audience.
These plays all speak the rich language of people not represented well in Australian culture. The language is tough, quick, hard, Australian, Aboriginal: lots of ‘deadly’ and ‘fullas’ and ‘cuz’. Not a lot of glamour, but lots of humour, some soft, but a lot of it hard, bleak, bitter. Still bloody funny though. These stories cannot be told by outsiders. Insiders in the audience just lit up, amazed to finally see it all up there, life reflected back in full colour.
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Belonging, writer Tracey Rigney, director Lauren Taylor; Casting Doubts, writer Maryanne Sam, director Kylie Belling; Crow Fire, writer Jadah Milroy, director Andrea James; Conversations with the Dead, writer-director Richard J Frankland. The season also included: Enuff by John Harding and I Don’t Wanna Play House by Tammy Anderson (see RT46 p38). Blak Inside, Playbox Theatre and Ilbijerri Arboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Theatre, designer Robyne Latham, lighting Rachel Burke & Michele Preshaw; composer Peter Rotumah, sound David Franzke; CUB Malthouse, Melbourne, Feb-March.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 34
© Mary-Ann Robinson; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Simon Wilton, Lucy Taylor, Mark Minchinton, Natasha Herbert, Margaret Mills, Felicity MacDonald, rehearsals for Still Angela
photo Liz Welch
Simon Wilton, Lucy Taylor, Mark Minchinton, Natasha Herbert, Margaret Mills, Felicity MacDonald, rehearsals for Still Angela
Still Angela premieres for Melbourne’s Playbox in April. Some of the collaborators, writer-director Jenny Kemp, composer Elizabeth Drake and performers Natasha Herbert, Margaret Mills, Lucy Taylor, Mark Minchinton, Ros Warby and Simon Wilton met Mary-Ann Robinson to discuss the evolution of the work.
Some of the team have worked together before on projects such as Call of the Wild (1989) and The Black Sequin Dress (1996). Is this piece is a continuation of earlier work?
Kemp From a writer’s point of view maybe it is…We’ve still got the sense of a woman who is passing through a period of transition and we’ve got once again 4 women playing one woman. Also that sense of an inner and an outer landscape or location, an inner and an outer world and a disjunction between those worlds. And the putting together of the 3 disciplines of sound, choreography and visual theatre.
Minchinton One of the things that’s changed since Call of the Wild’s that the Delvaux [Paul Delvaux the Belgian artist whose work figures in Kemp’s creations] stuff has sedimented. It’s not so overt. And the spatial relationships have changed.
Kemp A difference from then is [choreographer] Helen Herbertson.
Drake We could say that The Black Sequin Dress is like a transition between Call of the Wild and this work, because that was where Helen came in and worked with the actors in a generic way, to actually construct on the floor. It seems that in this one the movement is the driving force, possibly more than the text.
Warby I would say that the text is still the driving force. It feels like it went through a transition from the text to the initial development in which the focus was sort of, throw it on the floor and doing lots of impulse work. Now that the piece is being formulated, with the framing becoming much more refined, that balance has shifted again.
Kemp We are having to behave quite choreographically now in order to place text and movement alongside each other. Even though we are not doing expressive dance movements as such, we’re doing movement that revolves around spatial and temporal choices…because in many of the scenes there are about 5 grids operating. By grid I mean layers of reality or experience happening simultaneously and they are all actually slightly disjunctive in relation to each other. It’s quite complex making the spatial choices so that’s clear to the audience.
Warby Between the spatial and the textual, the layers are quite sophisticated and there are a lot of people on the floor.
Mills I feel that the action, or the movement, or the spatial plan that we are working to is given far more precedence in this one. I think that in Black Sequin there were more discrete events in the text.
Herbert With the ratio of those that speak and those that don’t, at some stages there are 3 characters that aren’t verbal. Helen has provided another language that’s happening non-verbally. At first, as an actor, it’s hard to be aware of all of that because you just want to hook into speaking, but we’re having to stretch that out and be aware of the other language that’s going on.
Kemp Your cue might be someone on the other side of the room doing something…
Herbert Which is nothing to do with the scene that you place yourself in. But it is of course, in another way. The challenge I found was when speaking and engaging in domestic scenes my character is on the move—there’s a certain pace to her and yet I’m having to move fast slowly because you have to react to whatever else is happening.
Kemp Because we’re working with scenes about emotional memory and actual memory, there are times when the actions of the figure Natasha’s playing are being examined by another character and that’s what’s interrupting her, or slowing it down. It doesn’t actually change the nature of her energy but we’re pulling it apart so it can be looked at because it’s being remembered. So that is a really particular task for the performer. Helen said the other day that the girl is not even there in a way, but it’s a slice of the girl, a fragment of a memory of something. And yet there is actually a person out there, a whole person, and they have to be that. But the way we perceive them, or the way they become a part of what’s happening, is as if at times it’s in the back of the brain. We’re trying to get the rhythm of a transition or a catharsis or some inner work that might be taking place.
Warby It’s like trying to get the rhythm of one character through 4 people and 2 languages—choreography and text.
Robinson Can you talk about the process of directing in this way?
Kemp Directing is very complex because one can only direct or be in dialogue with one layer at a time, so there’s been some discomfort in people not being attended to. That’s why when we’re all in the space Helen might be talking to one layer of it and Elizabeth can be talking to another layer of it. We’ve had blocks of time through our creative development when we were all in there and all able to speak.
Drake It’s like it evolves from the inside out.
Herbert We’ve had to discover what it is we’re doing and that has come through our relationship to one another.
Taylor My experience of finding my Angela is that I can’t find the text until I’ve found the physicality. But I can’t find the physicality without text. And then there’s the relationship to the space and everybody else within that. So it’s quite delicate. I’m trying to be patient with myself because it’s quite complex. I’ve got to be conscious of the fact that I’m a memory and someone’s remembering me. I’m in my kitchen—am I remembering me? In the end, I think I just have to be in the kitchen and the form and the content will support the idea.
Kemp Everyone else is this one person, Angela, and Simon is the other person, Jack. What’s that like for you, Simon?
Wilton It shifts according to the different Angelas. It’s not as complex, because I deal with them one at a time and they’re very clearly written scenes, very true situations, very easy to click into.
Taylor It’s wonderful sometimes because you think, am I addressing all aspects of my personality and character? But it doesn’t matter because I’ve got 3 other people to do that for me. I don’t have to do it all.
Kemp It is actually Angela at 3 ages, but we only need one Jack because the Angela’s 3 ages are mutable within her at one age. The younger self is still there as an older self is forming. We’re looking inside Angela and at the outside of Jack. In real terms there might only be one Angela sitting in a kitchen until she gets out and goes on a train journey. And the whole thing could be remembered. There are a number of narrative grids that are activated. They actually do coexist slightly, so people might decide that it means something different to the person sitting next to them, or not be quite sure whether she actually goes to the desert or actually gets off the train. A little bit like in Black Sequin Dress, there are those moments where you’re preparing for the future and you imagine the future. In imagining it, you’re preparing for it.
Robinson Elizabeth, can you tell us about the music, in particular the carousel and the carnival link.
Drake I’ve tried not to follow the text too much but I’m definitely influenced by a certain tone of the language. There’s something quite particular about this work, something kind of pure and raw. So I didn’t want to do something that sounded too sophisticated or too romantic. I wanted it to be just happening over there (in the corner). And the carousel I have worked through because of the connection with horses, and the fact that it exists in a carnival, a setting which is outside our ordinary lives, the place of dreams and dreaming. Mark was also interested in the carnival as a place where things turned upside down, where things aren’t quite what they seem.
Mills The whole thing about the world of nature—rain and earth, mother and memory—there is this layering of meaning in the script that is really strong.
Kemp It’s good that you mention the greater landscape, the sense of the place in nature, the feeling of being connected to the air and trees and sky, as well as being connected to a person. In some ways the play looks at what that is. Quite often when we’re very young, connectedness is attached to another person and there’s not necessarily a strong sense of autonomy. The play is looking at that shift towards autonomy and towards connection with place, or greater landscape. Not that that would cancel out connection with another person, but it’s opening up those possibilities. A kind of rite of passage.
Still Angela, director-writer Jenny Kemp, designer Jacqueline Everitt, composer Elizabeth Drake, choreographer Helen Herbertson, lighting designer David Murray, script consultant Mark Minchinton, film Ben Speth. Creative development and direction in collaboration with Natasha Herbert, Felicity MacDonald, Margaret Mills, Mark Minchinton, Lucy Taylor, Ros Warby, Simon Wilton, Playbox,. The Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse, Melbourne, April 10-27, 8pm; Mon-Tues at 6.30pm.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 32
© Mary-Ann Robinson; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Stephen Honegger and Anthony Hunt, Container (video still)
There’s an emerging niche of visual and sound artists in Melbourne who are actively influenced by computer games and what they represent in contemporary digital culture—which isn’t surprising when you consider the popularity of gaming and Hollywood’s relentless plundering of its imagery; or follow art-game trends in new media art internationally.
Stephen Honegger and Anthony Hunt have worked with the theme of game culture for several years, collaboratively and individually. Soon after graduating with Honours in Painting from RMIT, they installed a Sony PlayStation on a platform at Grey Area, just-out-of-reach, played by whoever was minding the gallery (Gameplay 1998). Hunt has presented facsimiles and ‘doubles’ in various media, while Honegger has sampled game landscapes in his videos, and in Final Fantasies (2002)—with Damiano Bertoli, Amber Cameron, Chad Chatterton and sound artist Julian Oliver—fitted out Gertrude Street contemporary art spaces with 3D sculptural forms lifted from the gaming world (such as concrete blocks and Mario Bros love hearts).
Container, a large-scale sculptural installation at Gertrude Street contemporary art spaces, offered a highly original and sophisticated use of the game logic. More experimental than the form of critique often associated with Australian new media art, Container was more interesting as a result. Entering the gallery, we encountered an object that seemingly didn’t belong: a full-scale rusted metal shipping container, complete with insignia. Container was originally conceived as a 3 screen video projection, but as Hunt confessed, “we were going to have to build lots of walls to make the space dark…and realised a container would be ideal.” Such an imposing art ‘clue’ and a mysterious droning sound from within compels us to look closer. Upon inspection, we discover the container is fabricated entirely from wood, meticulously constructed and painted to match our idea of what it should look like—and precisely matching the iconic image of containers which feature so ubiquitously in computer games.
The dark interior of the container reveals far more, as a video projection immerses us in a narrative generated from the game software Worldcraft. This follows a trend amongst gamers—popularised by mega-games such as Doom (1993) and Quake (1995)—to create and extend existing games using freely available source code (‘shells’) and software. It’s good for the software companies—whole communities develop around their games— fans do the research and development for free. Thankfully, the outcomes aren’t always predictable. The DVD loop in Container begins at night with a first-person perspective onto a detailed, 3D-rendered, pebbled alley at the rear of a warehouse. It’s an aesthetic immediately recognisable from any number of computer games. Clean, jerky camera moves create the sensation of moving through this simulated space. But as the character breaks into the building, we come to realise that what looks like scenery pulled from the latest computer game is, in fact, the gallery itself. What follows is an enticing virtual prowl through the empty upstairs corridor spaces of Gertrude Street artist studios—well known to most visitors.
It’s extraordinary how much mood and realism can be generated from game software. What almost looked like some extraction of hand-held video, as Hunt explained, was all painstakingly modelled in 3D over several months. “It started with the architectural floor plan, and measurements to the millimetre: the door heights, the corridors…everything we needed to know. And then we took photographs of all the surfaces…With modelling, you’re generally just building boxes, and then sticking on a digital image [for texture].” Gertrude Street was the ideal environment for such virtualisation, its corridors and stairs adhering perfectly to the syntax of game modelling. Honegger, who is open about his ambition to work in the game industry, admits that you wouldn’t be able to ‘play’ or interact with Container in its current polygon-inflated form. The point was, “to push it for our own purposes, to do something different with it.”
The narrative moves into surreal mode as we glide down the stairs into the gallery at ground level. The origin of the shipping container is disclosed when the ceiling magically opens and the virtual container slides gently down. The character stalks into the gallery office (complete with rendered versions of the computers, chairs, and catalogues) and collects a handgun foolishly left in one of the office trays. Entering the virtual container, another figure stands—just as we are—watching a screen (now blue and flashing ‘PLAY’). Thus armed, our identification with this character is put under duress. The game has become a ‘first-person shooter’ and it’s too late to intervene: shots are fired, shells pour onto the floor, the figure collapses and blood splashes on the wall. A ‘badly painted’ wall, now revealed as a trace of this gangland-style execution, was the overlooked clue.
Container preserves the basic narrative structure of commercial games—the survival objective and competitive aims—and in this sense is no critique. Yet, experienced alone, it evokes a chilling psychic and temporal displacement reminiscent of one of its inspirations—David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999). Simultaneously alienating and delicious, it adds a rich new dimension to the idea of site-specificity, the gallery, and indeed to the tradition of participatory art.
Container Stephen Honegger & Anthony Hunt, Gertrude Street contemporary art spaces Feb 1 – March 2.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 31
© Daniel Palmer; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Annette Bezor, Blush
The inclusion of Maryanne Lynch’s film Pyjama Girl in the latest offering at the IMA in Brisbane was an astute and successful curatorial decision. A particularly powerful film in its own right Pyjama Girl also provided a catalyst, that set in motion a dialogue between the 4 exhibitions on show.
I may have missed the pivotal role of Pyjama Girl if it had been showing when I first visited the IMA in early February. It is easy to miss such curatorial decisions, since in the most remarkable of exhibitions, the hand of the curator is invisible to the eye. We experience it as ‘just right’ and question no further. However, on my first visit to the IMA, everything was not ‘just right’. The exhibitions of Anne Zahalka (Fortresses and Frontiers), Anne Wallace (High Anxiety) and Annette Bezor (Blush) were up, but there was a strange and strained silence in the space. The projection room was locked and the only indication that Lynch’s work was supposed to be part of the show was a small sign on the door, Maryanne Lynch—Pyjama Girl.
In this context, the work of Zahalka, Wallace and Bezor appeared as a series of 3 independent exhibitions. At one level this impression was understandable. Each show was essentially a solo exhibition. Yet it didn’t quite add up. The combined catalogue and the advertising suggested that there was a greater connection within the show than all the exhibitors sharing “Anne” as part of their name.
Second time round, discordant mechanical sounds seeped from the screening room creating a sense of unease. Zahalka’s light box images of Sydney became more alienated and Wallace’s paintings attained a state of high anxiety. Lynch’s Pyjama Girl had escaped the confines of the projection room and implicated itself in the life of the other work. In this, Pyjama Girl set in motion a powerful dialogue, not just between the works within each artist’s exhibition, but also between the different exhibitions. Bezor’s work, alone, remained aloof to the pull of the Pyjama Girl.
Powerful filmmaking has the potential to collapse the viewer into the medium. In her nonlinear expressionistic narrative of the life and death of Linda Agostini, an Italian immigrant murdered by her husband in the 30s, Lynch’s film implicates the viewer in the drama through being shot from the point of view of the murder victim. In this tightly edited and taut short film, Lynch produces a dread and palpable anxiety that isn’t easy to shake off.
This sense is carried through to the work of Wallace. Borrowing from the tradition of film noir, her paintings are like film stills and in them we experience an unfolding drama. Stylistically, Wallace’s paintings have a strong resonance with Lynch’s film and, at their best, produce a similar psychological tension. In this context, I found myself creating a narrative linking the 2 shows. In the slightly smudged lipstick and vacant expression of the woman in The Indifferent (2000), death seems to lurk. I am transported back to the dramatic life and death of Linda Agostini. But then again, perhaps the character in The Indifferent is precisely that: indifferent. Here the work follows another trajectory—it aches with the loneliness and the isolation of contemporary life. Wallace’s work takes up a conversation with the photographs of Zahalka.
The dislocation and isolation felt in the characters of Wallace’s paintings pervades Zahalka’s work. In her photographs of Sydney, she provides us with iconic images of alienation—isolated human figures overwhelmed by the immensity of the urban landscape. In these light box images, the noise of Sydney is muted and the figures appear to move aimlessly in a strange hyper-real light. The sense of foreboding in the images becomes magnified as the eerie industrial sounds of Lynch’s film insinuate themselves into the space.
The mood of Bezor’s paintings contrasts with the tension created through the rest of the show. Her monumental self-possessed women swell beyond their frames filling the gallery space with a great calm. Given the serene and enigmatic quality emanating from her paintings, it may at first seem odd to program Bezor’s work alongside Lynch, Zahalka and Wallace. However, I found it took the petulant self-possession of Bezor’s paintings to break the psychic tension created in and between the work of the other three.
High Anxiety, Anne Wallace; Pyjama Girl, Maryanne Lynch; Fortresses and Frontiers, Anne Zahalka; Blush, Annette Bezor, IMA Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Jan 31-March 5
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 30
© Barbara Bolt; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Eme Suzuki, Fragment for Children
Not only do people move in very different ways, their choreographic construction methods and priorities are also quite diverse. Phillip Adams’ Ending #1—part of a major work-to-be, shown in its infancy—afforded a forensic perspective on constructing dance. Whilst some might build a piece through the development of movement, Adams appears to work with an almost fetishistic use of objects, a strong musical presence and an enduring commitment to design, that is, the look of the piece.
Ending #1 begins with a toy plane wiggling along fishing wire the depth of the stage, to the sound of Ligeti’s signature piece for Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey. Whilst the music suggested an event of great moment, the plane looked absurd in its precarious journey towards the back of the room. A similar tribute to the object occurred when a glow-in-the-dark toy was reverently studied by the performers, then wobbled towards the ceiling.
I had a sense that the movement in Ending #1 was not developed anew but drew upon a now-familiar kinaesthetic which Adams recalls and reworks to fill in the spaces. Adams and Toby Mills danced about in g-strings with fox furs draped around their necks, whilst Brooke Stamp seemed to hang about onstage most of the time—until Adams and Mills enjoined her in a trio which looked faintly pornographic, suggestively lit by a bare light bulb swinging back and forth. I found the piece pretty witty despite its state of choreographic undress. Supposedly about extinction (God knows how that entered this version apart from the dead foxes, and a luminous dinosaur), Ending #1 signals a beginning rather than an ending. I look forward to its evolution.
The second half of Bodyworks Program 3 included performances by 2 Japanese artists, Masami Yurabe and Eme Suzuki. A striking feature of both pieces was the way in which neither drew upon any familiar lexicon of movement. Developed and repeated in a series of poignant movements, Suzuki’s Fragment for Children was very clear, simple yet powerful, her kinaesthetic persona a young girl facing life, dealing with the world in emotional terms. Beginning tentatively, expressing fear and anxiety, the work finished with a series of bows that presented a self at peace. Suzuki’s sincerity and commitment to her theme gave the work its dignity.
Yurabe’s Witness was a very different kind of work, less personal, subject to greater change. Witness begins and ends with a chair. The start was almost clownish but, by the end, the chair became less of a prop and more an object of existential moment. Yurabe’s movement was also quite variable. From comic, anarchic interaction with the chair as a means to enter the performative space, the movement took on a more dancerly character. There was an incredible elegance about his body in motion, also a presence and aliveness which suggested a degree of improvisation. The program notes mention improvised Butoh performance. I felt by the end that I would like to see other works by Yurabe; he has a performative edge that could go many places.
Bodyworks, Program 3, Dancehouse, Melbourne, Feb 20-24
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 29
© Philipa Rothfield; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Rosalind Crisp
photo Richard Hughes
Rosalind Crisp
Rosalind Crisp is a Sydney dance practitioner whose Omeo Dance Studio has become an important and influential fixture in a city that lacks both physical space for contemporary dance practice as well as tangible networks and community support. She has recently returned from a trip to Belgium, France, Germany and America with her company stella b. where she made contacts that were both inspiring and beneficial. She returns there in May for at least 12 months, moving between Belgium, Paris and Berlin, and joined from time to time by her collaborators. Erin Brannigan talked to Crisp about travel and its challenges, her current practice and the future of the Omeo Dance Studio.
First let’s discuss your recent trip.
The idea for the trip started when I went to Glasgow for the new moves (new territories) dance festival in 2000. I went on to Belgium after that to visit some people I used to work with there in the early 90s. They were really interested in what I was doing and then a residency came through at the Monty Theatre in Antwerp. It’s quite a new studio above the theatre, curated as an international residency space. I received support for myself and my company, stella b. [currently Nalina Wait, Katy MacDonald and David Corbet] from Monty and from the Australia Council. So when I knew that arrangement was solid I built some other connections and what evolved was a 2 month tour with stella b. beginning with La Biennale du Val de Marne in Paris to showcase traffic, then back to the residency where we showed the results of the research we had done there. Then we returned to Paris and the Centre National de la Danse where we performed traffic and presented the Monty research in a forum. We went on to Berlin and did the same at Tanzfabrik and then I went on to London to do some teaching. Finally I went to the Improvisation Festival in New York then to LA to do a lecture/performance at the University of California, Riverside where dance theorist and practitioner Susan Leigh Foster is based. She invited Andrew Morrish and I to come over and she’s keen to have us back so maybe something else may develop there.
It was just incredible—I didn’t expect anything but was kind of hoping people would be interested in the work and they were. So it was very exciting and we received lots of invitations. Venue producers from Paris who came to see some showings are interested in commissioning me to do new work and I managed to find a manager in Paris who is helping me to get that together. And a lot of things came out of it artistically—especially the residency. It was a fantastic time to be really focused, away from Omeo, board meetings and that sort of thing…I felt really challenged and inspired by the questions they were asking. So it was about getting exposure and stimulus.
What kind of pre-conceptions do you think people had about you as an Australian contemporary dance practitioner?
In Belgium I felt there was a great interest in where I was going personally and the type of inquiry I’m interested in. They’re kind of unorthodox in a way…not so held by ballet and what’s technically correct. There’s a lot of experimentation there and I felt very inspired by that. And in Paris some people said “We’ve seen this…we don’t think it’s new but your personality in the work is really different.” And I thought, “is that Australian or is it me or what?” They were very intrigued and France is where most of the offers have come from for next year.
And then the response in Berlin was completely different again—I felt like they were overwhelmed by the work, as if they hadn’t seen any dance that wasn’t dance theatre. I didn’t feel the same critical engagement with the work. Perhaps the form I’m working with isn’t as familiar…Also, it seemed that there is a lot of interest in work that isn’t being promoted from the Australian end, and not a lot in the Australian work that is being promoted there. But I can’t profess to represent the European perspective. It’s really complex…I felt strongly that the critical dialogue is in Belgium and France and that’s what really attracted me—much more than in Berlin and America. In Brussels I met a couple of ex-students from P.A.R.T.S, the De Keersmaker school, and they’re very inquisitive—their feedback on the work-in-progress was just fantastic. They interrogated us in a genuinely interested and respectful way and were armed with so many tools.
There’s a limited audience here and you’ve been addressing it for some time. Does it feel like time to take your work to new audiences?
It seems quite hard for me to grow here anymore at the moment. I don’t feel that I can get the exposure and the dialogue that I need to challenge me…And the gigs—there’s just not the work here. And that does something else, having a lot of performances. Katy and Nalina grew in leaps and bounds while we were away. It takes a year over there to get the equivalent of 10 years here, so it speeds up the process. I don’t feel negative about Australia. It’s just what’s right at the right time. Being isolated has been fantastic—it’s really allowed me to develop my own voice.
However, there are differences between Australia and Europe that need to be addressed. The decentralisation of funding for dance in Europe means it’s possible to develop the connections that I have made and the networks of interest and support. This is unlike Australia where there is basically only one decision-making body, the Australia Council, deciding who gets to make dance each year. The European model is that funds are given to the venues to distribute. This encourages diversity and a sense that there will always be a place for your particular kind of work. The arbiters of taste who have the power to define what dance is in Australia are very few. And those few producers with money in Sydney, the Opera House Studio and the Sydney Festival define a very limited field through what they support. I do think this situation puts a stranglehold on the development of dance practices here.
What have you been working at—as a solo artist and with your ensemble?
What came up in Monty was that there was material that I needed to go further into—on my own body—before I could communicate those ideas to the other dancers. And that’s tended to be my process, working through physical ideas on my own, getting clearer in my own body and then communicating it to the others, then developing it further with them bouncing to and fro. I found at Monty that it felt premature to make work with them when I felt my body was shifting to another place from theirs, so I felt I needed to pull out for a while.
It’s not that I’ve moved away from the ensemble work, it’s just that I’m doing a solo at the moment. I’ve seen my company stella b. as what I was doing, and in a way it still is. I’m working with the same composer and this solo will be performed with another group work. But I needed to make the shift from the training aspect for a while. Maybe that never goes away—perhaps I’ll find that I’ll always be in a situation where I need to train people. I’ve also been encouraged by some of the French producers to work with some European dancers and see what that does to the way that I’m working, and I find that invitation exciting.
What is the history of the Omeo Dance Studio?
I took on a studio in Annandale in 1994. That was a huge risk—I thought ‘my god, how am I going to find this rent?’ I got through 18 months there and cut my teeth, so it wasn’t such a huge leap to then take on the Newtown space. Omeo Dance Studio is an interesting phenomenon. It’s just evolved without me even noticing it. And I suppose my funding status was reasonably good. I took Omeo on when I knew I had a funded project that had a budget for studio hire. But the first 2 or 3 years were pretty hard and I used to ‘pray’ for money. I lived on nothing really until the Australia Council bestowed a fellowship on me.
And then the studio became self-sufficient?
Well I work at least 12 hours a week in there for it to run, so that’s my labour in exchange for the space. I don’t really want to be the administrator of a venue so I keep it as streamlined as I can. I incorporated it 18 months ago with Andrew Morrish and Silver Gabriel Budd, but it also means we’ve taken on more work because we can. And it’s not just the work on the phone; it’s listening to people, welcoming them and responding to their needs. I did enjoy that in a way because there were a lot of conversations…It does feel that it’s a distraction for me now. I came back from Europe and I realised I’d been like an outrigger ship, dragging all these people along with me—so much effort. But of course I’ve got a lot out of it.
It is a business to the extent that it makes the money that it needs to run. It’s totally non-profit and nobody has been paid for the work that’s been done for the last 6 years. You could rent it out for high rates like other studios, but then it’s just a studio for hire and it doesn’t generate a community. I’ve made the decision to have a sliding scale so people with a ‘studio’ practice can use it for longer hours. So it’s all very tentacled around what I’ve done there. There is a vision—things I’ve decided to do and not to do, and having people contributing to the rent who are people I really want to support.
So what’s going to happen with you being away for the next 12 months?
I now feel I want to keep it going, partly because of the people who want to use it and partly because I actually want to come back and work there. It’s also a structure for me to continue working within, to be able to reconnect with a part of what nourishes me. And I do see things occurring between here and Europe. I don’t feel like I’m going and that that’s the end of it.
I’m still not sure how that will happen but the amazing thing is that Carol Dilley just turned up and I asked her whether she would be interested in managing Omeo and she said she was. She has run a company in Barcelona and she is organised and mature and smart and wants to get to know the dance scene in Sydney…And she wants to keep the studio going and she respects its history, which is great. And it’s also perfect because it’s not exactly a financial concern, but it seems there’s something for her to gain from it. It needs that reason to keep going…so that’s what has happened. So it will still be Omeo Dance Studio.
See Part 2 in RealTime 49
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RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 28
© Erin Brannigan; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Brian Fuata, Karl Velasco, Shelley O’Donnell, Kiss My Fist
photo Heidrun Löhr
Brian Fuata, Karl Velasco, Shelley O’Donnell, Kiss My Fist
The young and talented cast of Kiss My Fist were Brian Fuata, Hannah Furmage, Shelley O’Donnell and Karl Velasco—the Peripheral Vision Company. The context and theory were queer, as was made plain by the apologia in the program—“The title hints at the duality of the good/bad power to transform identity…” etc. Fortunately the work was also inflected with performative values. In the postmodern manner, Kiss My Fist was able to traverse its territory by invoking modernist dramatic traditions.
All the performers presented a character field: a lesbian who longed to be raised to the heights of serial monogamy by a straight woman (O’Donnell); a young Asian man dealing (à la Shirley Bassey) with the break up of his relationship (Velasco); and a Dorothy Porter-type serial killer/detective in a Working Hot world (Furmage). The locus of Fuata’s contribution is less easy to suggest, something he might care to consider; in any case he appeared as a rather anachronistic suburban dad with Elvis longings.
All were powerfully distressed. The audience was initiated into this by Mr Sixties Suburbs (Fuata) taking our tickets in an ecstasy of self-doubt and ushering us onto Ms Wannabe Serial Monogamist barbecuing her ex’s cat (I do hope it was actually a butcher-bought rabbit). We were not allowed to our seats until Mr I-Believe-in-Gay-Monogamy (Velasco) had finished dumping his rage on us.
And so Kiss My Fist continued—with perspicaciously placed ensemble work giving the production a unified dynamic.
It did however seem to enact existential aloneness—Sartre’s characters trapped in the nothingness of hell hurling their anxiety and rage at us like La Fura dels Baus offal. The business was bathed in a glow of Absurdist mania. The always already has been imminent, or some such, was excitingly in process.
The seating was flanked by a screen that threw up slides, comments and eventually a black Cadillac careering across plains and deserts, substantiating the sense announced in the program of the characters ‘hitting the road’. The audience was corralled and moved on, controlled. This lent Kiss my Fist an unnecessary comfort in which the too-easy satire participated. The sniping at gay targets was particularly facile.
By the time we had been advanced through the space to the red velvet proscenium, Kiss my Fist was really ready to confront us. In a theatrical coup, Velasco as a flailing Asian boy puppet related his tale of escape from the sweatshops and his cannibalistic journey as a refugee. The teetering balance of the comic and distressing was most acute at this point and I am not sure Velasco got it right. But then this was the principle on which this clever and accomplished production worked.
Kiss my Fist, consulting director Nigel Kellaway, performers Brian Fuata, Hannah Furmage, Shelley O’Donnell, Karl Velasco, sound designer Gail Priest, video Peter Oldham, lighting designer Clytie Smith, Mardi Gras 2002, Performance Space, Sydney, Feb 14-24
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 27
© Ian Haig; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Moira Finucane
Like the feast day after which it is named, the Midsumma festival is an unruly, hedonistic celebration, including events as different as The Festival Jack-off and the launch of Andy Quan’s Calendar Boy. Cabaret, monologue and deferred biography provided the 3 main trends that the arts events engaged with. Cabaret has a long association with queer aesthetics, the self-conscious performance of gender, identity and sexual allure offering a vision of society beyond the straight world. One must nevertheless question the inclusion within the festival of relatively ‘straight’ cabaret like Hell in a Handbag or the New Age lecture Imagining the Pleiades (unlike the pataphysical, stream-of-consciousness cabaret of the same month, Dilapidated Diva). Even Warhol’s dry, ironic persona was more dangerously camp than some Midsumma works.
Though ostensively a para-literary event, the Word is Out program had a cabaret ambience too. Writers recited texts in some cases written for performance in a relaxed manner, amongst the barely theatrical surrounds of a former Trades Hall meeting room. Love is the Cause for example included Richard Watts, schooled in the spoken-word scene which thrives amongst the back rooms of Melbourne’s pubs and clubs (Watts helped establish the nightclub Queer and Alternative). He has an endearingly rough-and-ready, almost improvised style, employing relatively simple language as he read from dog-eared pages. Kylie Brickhill echoed Watts in her rough comic approach, slamming on her guitar in an unaffected manner as she performed exerpts from her show Pick Me. She was delightfully naff, sending up her past as a young, newly-out lesbian who joined a band to “pull chicks.” Both seemed relatively weak however beside the 2 published authors on the program, a less than ideal juxtaposition of forms and styles.
Merrille Moss recited a tight—albeit slight—published monologue which at once mocked—while covertly celebrating—the indulgent self-pity of a recently dumped young lesbian. Andy Quan’s selections from Calendar Boy on the contrary were rich, expressive passages wrought from the simplest of elements. He employed a relatively unadorned, observational style which kept the emotional content at a certain remove. This proved intensely affective though in his study of the dangers of love, following a character who only barely avoided an abusive relationship. There but for the grace of God go I, seemed to be the message.
This perplexingly moving objectification of the personal was also exhibited in William Yang’s writing. For Yang however this occurs on a scopic level as well. The projected photographs that went with his words possessed an intimacy paradoxically accompanied by a sense of disinterested remove. As Yang himself explained when discussing images of his lovers, or how his camera enabled him to mingle with the lesbian community, the photographic lens offered him a way to get close to these figures while nevertheless remaining apart. Although Yang’s work has often been described as autobiographical, he provides too little information about himself for this to really be true. Friends of Dorothy is only autobiographical inasmuch as Yang’s persona can be described as that of the watcher—engaged yet detached, loving yet coolly documentary.
The most surprising aspect of Friends of Dorothy was how uncertain a speaker Yang is. Although he has been touring slides-and-text for years, he still tends to falter, before quickly picking himself up again. Here audiences once more found themselves in the intriguing, shifting sands of informal cabaret performance.
Melbourne is indeed home to a thriving cabaret scene, spreading from the queer clubs, to swish cafes where slick groups like Combo Fiasco perform, right through to La Mama. Theatre-maker John Bolton has provided a common departure point for the more theatrical manifestations of this form, drawing upon street performance, French clown and Jacques Le Coq. Hell in a Handbag (featuring Bolton-trained Merophie Carr) strongly exhibited the self-deprecating ‘theatre of naff’ style found amongst Bolton’s associates (Four on the Floor, Born in a Taxi, Kate Denborough). Handbag was not the best example of these approaches though. It compared poorly to coincident manifestations, like the more dreamy, melancholy, Calvino-esque ‘tales-of-a-city’ show Sailing on a Sea of Tears. It seems somewhat churlish however to criticise Handbag for its inconsistency given the free-form cabaret format widespread throughout Midsumma overall.
Although Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith produce highly charged, multifaceted works, their projects are characterised by a discipline elsewhere lacking in the festival. Finucane has been performing various characters she devised with director/dramaturg Jackie Smith for nearly 10 years in clubs. Nine were first brought together for The Saucy Cantina in 1999. More performance-art style figures like the Dairy Queen (spraying milk outwards and onto herself in an over-the-top, hyper-sexual game) have become infamous through guest appearances, yet Finucane’s rich, neo-Romantic, Gothic text work is less well known. Her dark, Edward Gorey/Mervyn Peake-style Expressionist melodrama Phantasmagoria (2000) failed to win the attention it deserved. Her Word is Out performances however demonstrated she and Smith have more stories and characters to offer. Their next project—Gothorama—is sure to be extraordinary.
The Smith/Finucane collaboration was the most threatening work within the festival. Sauce-Girl in Saucy Cantina was exemplary in this respect, a fiercely controlled yet minimally twitching woman staring into space as she squeezed a leaking sauce bottle. Her bizarre lust took the logic of gay and lesbian liberation to a frightening level. If all forms of sexual desire should be equally free, then Sauce-Girl represents desire for desire itself, a character who does not need another individual or even a particular fetishistic object. The work of Smith and Finucane is therefore more concerned with the exploration of emotion, desire and ritual behaviour, than with promoting particular sexual identities. Finucane’s characters are typically defined by a fragile beauty, a power and elegance bordering on fragmentation and death. Her Love is the Cause monologue painted a rich yet frigid picture of a deserted, frozen mansion where 2 siblings waited for “him”—presumably their father, but Finucane allowed no certainty here, only deeper mysteries—who bicker and protect each other in equal measure. Finucane delivered the tale with her characteristic tall, cracked, physical grace. It is indeed impossible to imagine Finucane’s works as purely written text, a trait that lifted her above her peers.
Her second Word is Out appearance featured her exuberant Latino-goddess: La Argentina. In Saucy Cantina, Finucane was ritually cleansed before transforming from Sauce-Girl into La Argentina, who described a food-market in which sexualised wares fell over themselves to proclaim her beauty. In Oceans Apart however La Argentina spouted a tale of ludicrous proportions, a rollicking, insane story of life with polar bears, kidnapping and gypsy-pirates. La Argentina is the only unambiguously life-affirming figure in the gallery of Smith and Finucane, a proud woman whose “firm arms” and “heaving bosom” metaphorically embrace the world.
The most suggestive aspect of the Word is Out program was the Auslan interpretation. Signers Lyn Gordon and Tanya Miller imparted a literally palpable sense of drama, offering their own distinctive inflections which undercut the writers’ authority, even as the latter read their texts. Gordon ‘spoke’ with a sense of shrugging melodrama; a rapid rim-shot approach of punctuated physical expression. Miller however had an easy nonchalance. Compared to Gordon, she almost slurred her physical speech. Her movements rolled out, tapering off into thoughtful poses.
These idiosyncratic physical dialects highlighted the tension at the heart of both the readings and authorship itself. One could actually see entire phrases collapsed into single, eloquent, nuanced gestures. Other relatively straightforward words engendered a flurry of physical activity, changing the emphasis of the text. Miller and Gordon dramatised how the meaning and expression of a text changes as it leaves the author. In Word is Out, the quicksands of physical cabaret sucked at the writers’ feet.
Midsumma: Hell in a Handbag, performers/devisors Shirley Billing, Merophie Carr, directors Vanessa Pigrum, Rebecca Hilton, Jan 22-Feb 2; The Saucy Cantina, director/co-creator Jackie Smith, performer/text/deviser Moira Finucane, performer Sandra Pascuzzi, Jan 22-27; 4Play, including Pick Me, performer/deviser Kylie Brickhill, Jan 15-19; Friends of Dorothy, performer/deviser/photography William Yang, Jan 31-Feb 2, Blackbox; Word is Out: curators Crusader Hillis, Rowland Thomson, Auslan interpreters Lyn Gordon, Tanya Miller, Trades Hall, Jan 26; Sailing on a Sea of Tears, performers/devisors Fiona Roake, Jesse Griffin, Terra Paradiso, Jan 29-Feb 15; The Dilapidated Diva + her Tight Three Piece Outfit, performer/deviser Emma Bathgate, director Barry Laing, Dante’s, Melbourne, Feb 7-23
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 26
© Jonathan Marshall; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Jim Denley, Stevie Wishart, Amanda Stewart, Rik Rue
Ting! (starts small)/minor vocal explosions/gurgling sax/digital grumbles. Who’s doing what? Everything makes a sound different from the one it should. Sax is percussion/breath is text/text is texture.
Gong! IIIEEEEAH! Something peaks, becomes part of the whole. Knowles, the mixer-in-the-middle, plays the pings and squeaks, the electro buzz/insecticidal hum.
Delay is everything.
Denley on woodwind, mike strapped to his larynx plays his own breath/breath like water/breath like buzz. The machine is breath.
Voice, text, breath, flesh—disparate elements merge, split again.
(A few walk out.)
Wishart & Stewart vocal play, tones and aspirances intertwine melding in cavernous effects. (Young art school couples kiss.)
Stewart all plosives and fricatives performs epic tracts. Receiving fragments and texture: words rise to the surface—”object”, “absurd”, “consciousness”, “98% junk”, “black hole”. Sense is sensing.
Wishart & Denley—duet for flute and frequency tweaking. Voicing and playing, he has a conversation with himself. He gutters/sputters, all spittle and bubble. She tunes him. He holds a note for an eternity.
They play the negative space.
Rue’s manipulations break free. Deft grabs of found sound sliced and woven. It’s loud, chaotic, subsonic, yet even the digital snatches are earthed, embodied. Stewart plays with scraps of Rue’s melodies sampling the samples. The machine is flesh.
Then silence, silence, silence…They are playing the silence…
Wishart winds up again. Plucks, struts the hurdy gurdy, all creaks and tuned static, reverberating scratches, and drones and buzzes/Denley bubbles/Stewart utters/Rue rumbles…then again, silence
The machine creates spaces, each moment unknown yet deliberate. The machine well aware of its parts senses itself shifting, morphing, evolving—balancing on the delicate edge of ego. The machine is greater than the sum of its parts. The machine is organism.
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Machine for Making Sense, The 20th Century Never Happened, Jim Denley, Julian Knowles, Rik Rue, Amanda Stewart, Stevie Wishart, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, March 15
RealTime issue #48, April-May 2002, pg. 38
© Gail Priest; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
The Sydney Festival offered Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin in the Opera House this year – the 1976 Soviet restoration of the iconic film accompanied by the SSO playing a Shostakovich score based largely on his Eleventh Symphony – The Year 1905, inspired by Eisenstein’s film. What was dispiriting about this otherwise splendid festival event was the tittering that accompanied the first 15 minutes of the film; an otherwise intelligent and appreciative audience revealing its ignorance of the film and its genre.
For Barrett Hodsdon-who wasn’t there because the Opera House context was “so wrong” for any possibility of understanding what Eisenstein was saying about the Russian Revolution-this sad ignorance was a direct consequence of Australia’s failure to nurture film culture anywhere near as enthusiastically as it nurtured a film industry. “I’ve seen a melodrama by Max Ophuls heckled at the Sydney Film Festival by young film-makers who thought they were superior to that sort of stuff. It shocked the overseas presenter. No wonder a Sydney Festival audience was unprepared for Eisenstein’s great art, his invention of montage in Potemkin.”
As someone who grew up in Britain, I saw Eisenstein at school, the French New Wave at uni, and could always dip into the British Film Institute’s cinemateque or publications when I worked in London. According to Hodsdon, I’d have had most of the same opportunities in Australia. His study of film culture in the 60s reveals the same student earnestness about film-”Queensland Uni had a Douglas Sirk retrospective in 1970, 2 years before Edinburgh discovered him.” But no BFI emerged. Sydney and Melbourne Filmmaker Co-ops made, showed and distributed consciously avant garde films in the 70s; declining to Super-8 capers in the 80’s-categorized by Hodsdon as “The age of cultural abundance-signs without meaning.”
He doesn’t even bother to consider the 90s, ‘The Time of Tropfest’, “when an independent film-maker-which used to refer to an outsider like Albie Thoms, the Cantrells or Paul Winkler relentlessly doing his own thing for 30 years-came to mean a beginner aiming for Hollywood via a gag film at Tropfest!”
The feisty Hodsdon was, of course, involved in all this. “He made a cineaste-referential film, Beyond Fuller in the early 70s”, according to his CV, before moving into specialist film culture research at AFTRS, the Film, Radio and TV Board of the Australia Council, the National Library and the Australian Screen Studies Association. He has (so far) vainly sought to establish a cinemateque at the MCA in Sydney. And he has a doctorate from UNSW-his thesis entitled, Retheorising Classic Hollywood Narrative.
Despite all of which, he can say with some bitterness, “I’ve devoted my life fairly futilely to serious criticism. But without a serious film culture, I’m lumbered with entertainment.”
It all started to go wrong in the 70s. In a somewhat belated paean of enthusiasm for the full gamut of film culture on page 129 of his book, Barrett Hodsdon barely draws breath: “The emerging base of film culture was more complex and nuanced than the high flown nationalist rhetoric (so essential to trigger the new Australian cinema in the political arena) and its conventional film industry assumptions permitted. The breadth was wide indeed-from low budget features to abstract avant-garde filmmaking, from critical debates about film culture entities to abstract controversies over screen theory, from the strident activism of new film organizations to groping attempts to formulate cultural policy, from radical agitprop filmmaking to documentary social exploration, from specialized historical screening gestures of the NFTA to the new hipsterism of repertory cinema.”
That’s what might have been. If only nationalism had not got in the way of bonding with the wider world of cinema (though it surely needed more than a derivative pursuit of Cahiers du Cinema auteurism). If only the Australian Film Institute hadn’t supplanted the braver and more coherent national screening systems of the National Film Theatre of Australia with a glossy awards priority (which itself now looks stuffed). If only academics didn’t have to spend all their time holding on to their jobs, replacing film cultural studies with “the rampaging of cultural studies.” If only the magazines that might have supported “serious” film criticism hadn’t folded – unsupported by institutions like the Australian Film Commission which has had an overview at least of the spending of $3 billion of public money in 30 years on a production industry that “tells our stories” to about 7% of Aussie film viewers in a good year.
All sadly true. But I think I beg to differ from Hodsdon on the fundamental value of film culture. While he sees it as an end in itself, involving “the wider film community”, I see film culture as, amongst other things, a means to the desirable end of making better Aussie films which reach and engage the other 93% of local film-goers. Reach them, reach the world.
Which makes Baz Luhrmann a key man for me – but not for Hodsdon. Dismissed by Barrett as a tool of Fox and “not cine-literate in any sense I know”, I see Luhrmann’s work as more ‘cultured’ than anyone else working at the moment. The range of references is huge – visual, aural and literary; though the speed at which they’re offered obviously terrified the older Oscar voter! Of course, Luhrmann has no film education; coming to cinema from the stage.
Which raises questions about the cultural education at institutions like AFTRS and the VCA Film School. It makes one wonder whether film culture would have suffered less under the Australia Council’s FRTV Board – which lost out to the “market-place orientated” AFC because of the supposed technical complexity of film. And I suppose it makes me wonder whether Hodsdon is merely harping nostalgically back to a cottage industry film clubland that would be utterly irrelevant in the multiplexes.
In his densely stylish way, Barrett Hodsdon has started a good debate. Whether it’s the one he intended, I’m not sure. His strongest material lies in the area of criticism; and that’s a disaster in just about all artforms in Australia. Neither the artforms themselves nor the public will support magazines offering what Hodsdon calls “second level reflection”; so we’re left with the dumbing down of the Murdoch and the comfortable nirvana of the Howard. Back in the 1930s a European politician told his country that “we should not be concerned with values, but should confine arts reporting to description so that the public can make up its own mind”. That was Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister!
Barrett Hodsdon, Straight Roads and Crossed Lines, The Quest for Film Culture in Australia Since the 1960s, Bernt Porridge Group, 2002; $45 plus $8 postage from 35 Doris Street, North Sydney, 2060.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. web
© Jeremy Eccles; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Sylvia Lawson’s new collection of essays and stories, How Simone de Beauvoir died in Australia, is a brilliant and timely book that examines the complex, tangled relations of politics and culture in our personal lives. It subtly moves across different settings—Australia, East Timor, Britain, Indonesia, France (especially Paris) and West Papua—and different art forms, genres and disciplines-cinema, journalism, literature, cultural theory, philosophy-listening and reclaiming the marginal cultural and personal voices and experiences that our postmodern metropoles ritualistically ignore.
This is an important hybrid book that refreshingly confounds our received wisdom concerning who we are inside and outside of Australia-over the last half century or so-in the context of global media culture. Lawson’s multifaceted ability to construct a work that is a dazzling combination of fiction, essay, history and memoir suggests someone who is acutely aware of the intricate connections between national and personal identity and how all forms of cultural production are anchored in place, time, gender and society. Furthermore, in an era where our cultural, film and media journals are rapidly disappearing and the dissenting voice in a post-September 11 world in Australia under John Howard’s Coalition Administration is becoming rarer by the day, Lawson’s courageous, self-questioning book resonates so tellingly.
Lawson demonstrates, time and again, that it is essential that we speak up for ourselves, for the local, in order to keep open our culture, history and identity. And also appreciating that continuity, rather than a boundary, exists between the personal and the political. Lawson’s welcoming ironic and perceptively heterogeneous voice attests to the pressing imperative that books, all kinds, may speak of many diverse things, but they can’t speak for themselves. Consequently, as Lawson’s vividly told autobiographical pieces suggest, books need to be frequently argued with and fought for otherwise “they die.”
It is this fierce and independent spirit of concern for writing and thinking that animates the author’s life as one of our most invaluable critical essayists and journalists working today in print and broadcast journalism. In the book’s fine extended title essay, Lawson’s discussion of Simone de Beauvoir’s often misunderstood oeuvre and relations with Jean-Paul Sartre, Nelson Algren and her lesbian lovers refers to the fearless and erudite pre-1968 critic, scholar and activist Dorothy Green and her exemplary role as a public intellectual. Green always contested canonical lists of artists and authors and often contributed to small magazines.
All the essays and stories in their respective ways are concerned with how one’s own understanding of what represents the national is a set of local issues that is elaborately enmeshed with another separate set of issues that are located outside one’s country. Given the “nation-building” rhetoric attending the Sydney 2000 Olympics and the Sydney Harbour Bridge Walk for Reconciliation (including other bridge walks throughout the country at the same time), Lawson mobilises a markedly persuasive case that Australia is a highly conflicted and complicated place whose people accurately read its symbols. In other words, Australia is in constant argument with itself-a veritable theatre of symbolic action-a country whose past, Lawson argues, belongs to us and is not another country. But it is also a country, whose once acclaimed social democracy, is on the retreat.
Debates about a post-Mabo Australia becoming a republic, globalisation, land management, censorship, immigration (in the wake of the children overboard and Tampa affairs), human rights, women’s work, media in a digital epoch etc, take place in mainstream press and national broadcasting and our run-down universities, the visual arts and small theatres. These debates have, over the years, been characterised by right-wing columnists as being “political correct” and driven by “the chattering classes”, “the Balmain basket weavers” and “the cappuccino set.” Such a cultural landscape of stifling ideological conformity either indicates our silent complicity or the necessity to argue back, to defend dialogue itself, and to construct our own local narratives in our own terms.
Earlier on in the book, Lawson re-evaluates in a majestic essay Raymond Williams’s legacy as a social theorist, novelist, and teacher in the English speaking world-especially in certain circles in Australian thinking. Williams, who died on the bicentennial Australia Day, explicitly advocated a view of culture that emphasised processes, rituals, objects, performances and lived experience in the social fabric of everyday life. Although Williams’ particular pioneering form of socialist humanism was not embraced in the postmodern academy, his constantly questioning, defining, oppositional voice in Anglo-American cultural theory spoke of hope, patience and his faith in the long revolution towards a better society. Lawson deftly illustrates how Williams’s legacy has still much to offer to us today in the new millennium.
In “Budgerigars, and Positions of Ignorance”, one of the book’s earlier stories, the author is in Alice Springs negotiating (from point zero) “the undulating red country of the Centre” and its original peoples with their many languages, customs, art and desert communities trying to figure out how all of us can share Australia without perpetuating Western stereotypes and values.
In Lawson’s 1988 fictional piece “Putting the books away with Jack” we encounter the cross-disciplinary enterprise of unpacking one’s library in the context of questions around nationality and our continuing relations with other countries in our region and beyond. Relatedly, these questions are further taken up around the imaginary of national boundaries and our ongoing understanding of who we are in the following two engaging essays “Sidelined” and “Against Oblivion.”
The former deals with the suppression of poet-editor Goenawan Mohamad’s magazine Tempo in the new Indonesia and, in the latter, we see how a 1990 Amnesty-produced series of video shorts (directed by Jean-Luc Godard/Anne-Marie Mieville, Alain Resnais, Henri Carter-Bresson, Costa-Garvas and others) delineates the complex links between human rights, imperialism and global media.In particular, Lawson focuses on how the Godard/Mieville self-reflexive video illustrates our own complicity in West Papua as exemplified by the case of the independence movement figure Thomas Wainggai-who was in December 1988 sentenced to 20 years of imprisonment.
This is an inspiring, optimistic and a far-reaching book that speaks of our life-long adventure of making sense of our world, here in this island-continent of ours. This means nothing less, as Lawson eloquently reminds us, than a perpetual open-ended questioning of our Eurocentric beliefs so we may find “out what it means to be here.” Above all, all of us who care for a republic of a self-enabling citizenry and letters, are ideally always clearing the ground for a better world so we may live in.
Sylvia Lawson, How Simone de Beauvoir died in Australia, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney 2002
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. web
© John Conomos; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Stevie Wishart
Stevie Wishart Solo is a phantasmogorical sonic experience, the primary source the transformations of the mediaeval hurdy-gurdy aurally and visually—and on strikingly different planes. The focus is not on the performer. She works quietly, head down, over her instrument or at her sound desk at the centre of The Studio floor, or moving slowly between the scattered rostra we’re seated on, or half-watching the large video screen while she plays. Although the concert commences with violin, the hurdy-gurdy becomes the instrument of choice, most powerfully and mesmerically in the long post-interval composition Drawn on Sound: HG Roll.
For fans of Wishart’s Azeruz CD with its clever pop leanings and short tracks, this concert was to be a very different experience, intimate, reflective, our eyes closed (ears open to the rich complexities of the score) or fixed on the big screen with Joan Grounds’ sublime slo-mo video on the form of the instrument, its strange mechanics and, even, its feel—Wishart’s hand (tattooed for the filming with Guido of Arezzo’s musical scale) hovering, plucking, strumming, dancing ethereally over the strings. Although live playing and screen action do not correspond literally, their relationship is never disjunctive—a curious harmony of sound and image envelopes the audience.
As an incidental and unconventional introduction to the hurdy-gurdy, the concert moved through the musical and sonic possibilities of the instrument on its own and in various mixes, evoking at various times, without being imitative, organ, sitar, string quartet, orchestra, sometimes seeming to amplify the workings of its own innards—like the creaking of an antique timber sailing ship. Wishart’s compositions entail mergings of jigs, dark marches, dirges, bursts of white noise, thunderous sonic wrap-arounds, long winding chords punctuated by emphatic bass notes in meditative passages as well as her own integrated vocalisings. Each hurdy-gurdy work unfolds with care and intensity, with moments of beauty and surprise.
Stevie Wishart solo, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, March 16, 8.15pm
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. web
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
soft silk…rough linen is the title of an emotionally charged, simply staged (a small orchestra including 2 singers playing traditional Vietnamese instruments, 2 speakers and slide projections) work from City Moon and The Seymour Group. It is expanded in the program notes to the aphoristic “never dream of soft silk…never despise rough linen.” The fusion of text (Vietnamese poetry from the 18th century to the present and current political statements about refugees) and music (traditional Vietnamese and contemporary Western) creates rather a nice dialectic (rather than simple opposition) between the smooth and the rough, between the simple and the sophisticated. The poetry is elegantly imagistic next to the rawness of the politics of refugee-bashing, while the traditional components of the music speak with immediacy and strangeness amidst the more familar language of modernism. The music is by Ngoc-Tuan Hoang. The process of compositions sounds intriguing:
I did not “write” the music as a conventional Western composer would do, but I was working with the ensemble to “make” the music…In our workshops I gave to the ensemble some musical materials (a Vietnamese folk tune, a poem sung in different ways due to different dialects, a note with different timbral changes due to linguistic inflections, for instance), and we together explored possibilities on the Western instruments and experimented with how to create a suitable soundscape for the Vietnamese poetry chanting.
The Seymour Group and Ngoac-Tuan Hoang (performing with Dang Lan) carry off this synthesis with verve, while the show’s director and librettist (and speaker with Phong Do) Bruce Keller marshalls the poetic and political texts with a mix of delicacy and didactic fervour. The litany of statements from politicians and observers of the growing international refugee crisis are given an additional charge by being chorally recited by the performers. Although fundamentally effective this is one component of the work where the linen is, for me, a bit too rough-the collective choral skill of the company simply doesn’t correspond with the instrumental and solo vocal abilities. Even so, the commitment of the company to these unaccompanied passages is never in doubt, and the construction of the first is striking in its spatial deployment of voices.
soft silk…rough linen is an engaging cross cultural experience, a fruitful cross-artform collaboration and another example (coming soon after Richard Vella’s Tales of Love in the same venue) of a concert work enriched by the layering of simple performative and visual elements. The participation of 3 Vietnamese refugees, including the composer, in the performance lent it poignancy.
The Seymour Group & City Moon (Vietnamese Australian Contemporary Theatre Company), soft silk…rough linen, Parammata Riverside Theatres, March 2, 8pm
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. web
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Rita Kalnejais, Sophie Lee in Mr Kolpert
The appeal of a nice night at home, one’s own, never seemed more attractive than when witnessing the brutality in someone else’s—the loungeroom bourgeois bloodbath of STC’s Mr Kolpert and the warehouse underclass savagery of UTPs’ The Longest Night. As nice nights in the theatre, they were, however, excellent. Something to take away and worry at in the comfort of…one’s own home.
Sydney Theatre Company: Mr Kolpert
A wide, shallow, low-ceilinged room, all pinewood veneer, drab carpet, one wall-phone, one framed photo of the Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge (that occasionally distracts the characters), a door to a bathroom, a door to the apartment building hallway, access to a kitchen, a clutch of toys in a corner, a large trunk at the centre of the room. We’re in Benedict Andrews’ land—cinemascopic, spare, distorting, abrasive, intensely physical, sonic (a dj at work to one side). Set and toys are reminders of the other German play he directed for STC,Fireface, but the wide dark slit and pit of that play with its multitude of huge dolls is here a starkly lit room utterly devoid of furniture.
In Fireface, emotionally repressed parents are finally murdered by their psychotic children. The parents are the target of a long tradition of anti-bourgeois German film and theatre. The children belong to a line of fictional and very real psychotics and terrorists. In Mr Kolpert, by David Gieselmann, we are faced (the actors largely play at us if not to us) with 2 couples, one invited by the other to dinner. But quite unlike their stage predecessors, these adults (late 20s, early 30s) are not repressed, certainly not in the usual sense. The veneer of good manners quickly cracks, the restraints of civilised behaviour are barely sighted as insults and physical abuse and confessions (usually the stuff of revelatory final acts in most plays) escalate into very bloody murder. In fact the hosts already have a previous victim somewhere in the house—in the trunk? Other than some insistent vomiting there is little sign of shock let alone remorse. The tears at the play’s abrupt end suggest release rather than remorse. The wife peeing on her husband’s body another kind of release. And all this without an interval or a moment of reflection, as pieces of pizza fly into the auditorium and the savaged delivery boy falls offstage before the front row of the audience to be stomped to death by one of the wives.
In this wickedly preposterous comedy of bad manners the playing, appropriately, has only 2 levels, a droll lack of affect and savage outburst. It makes for a suspenseful night out, and a messy one. Bourgeois behaviour at the very first seems as emptily formal as the room it inhabits, but it is dangerously eruptive. It soon looks unrepressed in its frankness and its volatility, these adults are not far removed from the psychotic children of Fireface. In that play, the parents’ refusal to deal with their offsprings’ problems is clearly a social failure, the evil of the children though is less clearly a social outcome, especially in the son. Mr Kolpert, on the other hand has no metaphysics. It’s a vicious social satire of a barren middle-class life with little style and no substance, an ideal recipe for fascistic behaviour (the murder of the boss, Mr Kolpert, for murder’s sake, and the subsequent ganging up on one of the husbands) replete with indifference to the suffering of others. What is frighteningly contemporary is the smugness and aggressiveness with which bad behaviour and mindless evil are enacted and indifferently justified (if at all). Sadly, this is a play of the moment.
Once again Andrews succeeds in creating a unique and consistently realised nightmarish world. His performers, Felix Williamson, Sophie Lee, Simon Burke and a striking newcomer Rita Kalnejais (with the best role in the play—the meekest and the most murderous), maintain a consistency of tone (a rarefied social voice), physical bravery (fight director Kyle Rowling), and a refusal to plump for conventional psychological nuancing. Fiona Crombie’s set design is chillingly stark in its unyielding totality (framed by a tube of show lighting accenting the sometime cabaret-ish dimension of the production) and Mark Pennington’s abrupt change of colour washes make for disorienting A-effects cum sudden mood swings. Peret Von Strumer aka Mako provides a sound score that often quietly, sometimes explosively, unnerves.
Andrews’ productions for the Wharf 2 Blueprints program and his The Three Sisters at the Opera House have offered Sydney theatre audiences a true rarity-an unfolding vision and an uncompromising, developing theatrical framework for it, dismissed as ‘style’ in some quarters. Better his explorations of the banality (and complex strangeness) of violence and social manipulation than the banality of the well-mannered perpetual motion machine of most straight theatre.
Sydney Theatre Company, Blueprints, Mr Kolpert, writer David Gieselmann, director Benedict Andrews; Wharf 2, Sydney, opened Feb 5
Urban Theatre Projects: The Longest Night
A disused warehouse in a dark, semi-industrial street in Granville, western Sydney, is home to the production of The Longest Night and home to the central character, Bernie (Bernadette Regan). No suspension of disbelief or virtuosic set design required here. Nothing in this neat but depleted house works—the TV, the CD player, the microwave, and the toilet’s in a state of repair. Nor does Bernie’s life work—she has limited access to her child, taken away on his birthday by a government official early in the night before our eyes. The pathos is intense, real time realism as mother and child reveal their casual intimacy. By living on her own, away from temptation, Bernie has the opportunity for redemption. However, in a familiar but very real scenario, she might lose her child to the law, and her integrity, when a group of friends take over her home and the long night, bringing with them unresolved tensions, drugs and cruelly learnt misanthropy. Bernie gets through this long night, but barely, and is once again alone, her former friends restlessly exiting, young adults locked into a perpetual adolescence of escape, thwarted energy and anger. They have flashes of humour, resolve, creativity—sustained bursts of mock filmmaking, role-playing, rapping and skilled hiphopping-and moments of generosity, painful sensitivity and apology. But in the trap of homelessness and unemployment these virtues are uncertain, possibly not good for survival in a culture of toughness (so sparely and graphically portrayed in the director Alicia Talbot’s The Cement Garage with some of the same characters).
If the narrative of The Longest Night is predictable (the relationships that won’t work, the job fantasies that can’t, the competition for loyalty, the disruptiveness of sex, the group breaking up), its modus operandi is not, story counting for less than the power of the moment. Partly improvised, the production often focuses on a particular action, a gesture or utterance and runs with it, sometimes with astonishing momentum. The outcome is a show that moves in waves, blocks of energy, passages of calm or twitchy restlessness, giving the work a nervy realism that it might not have achieved by plain scripting. The 2 big surges of energy, release and destructiveness that are central to the night (and Bernie’s fear of being condemned to the loss of her child) are like fantasies, such is their totality for the characters-lighting, sound and theatricality take us all onto another plane. Bernie eerily walks up a wall, the hip hop is virtuosic, the danger is palpable. The first time this happens, it’s messy and distressing, but often fun and inventive, despite Bernie’s resistance and subsequent hostility. The second time it’s a nightmare of anger, destructiveness and self laceration-one of the characters, Carlos (Charles Russell), taping his head and eyes tight with masking tape, pouring boiling water over himself, crawling towards us, an inadvertent performance artist. The Longest Night is at its strongest, as was The Cement Garage, in the suggestiveness of its imagery (reinforced here by composer Rose Turtle’s often quiet anxiety-inducing sound score and Sam James’ lighting). The dialogue is variable, though to give it it’s due there is some sharp humour and there are moments of power and quiet insight, for example between the 2 women as Bernie begins to believe in Lucia’s (Lucia Mastrantone) sisterly fantasies.
The performances are strong, especially when anchored in the momentum of the production or a particular image. Bernie’s quiet hostility towards her former friends and her swings between resistance and weakening find focus in her desperate need for support as her court appearance looms. She won’t get it. Carlos, the lover (or is he?) and the dealer, is a pragmatist with an aura of control and confidence belying something deeper-seen when he hurts himself—or innocent, when entranced by a model helicopter. Morgan (Morgan Lewis), the would-be filmmaker is all energy and camaraderie (expressed in the heightened synchronicity of rapping and dancing with his mate Shannon [Shannon Williams]) until a dodgy looking relationship gets in the way and he nervously edges out of a friendship. Lucia is a junkie in the making, ever on edge, kidding herself and friends with fantasies of work and committed friendship. Lucia Mastrantone’s edgy performance is chilling. Shannon Williams, already a noted rapper, proves himself a stage natural, creating a calm but threatening presence, but for all that one bewildered by the turn of events and the loss of a friend. Director Talbot choreographs the collective performances in the big scenes of wild release (and the subsequent burnout) dexterously, grabbing and splitting our attention, making the rampage all the more disturbing.
The Longest Night originated in sustained workshops in suburban Adelaide and western Sydney and in consultation with the very people it’s about. In its commitment to a semi-improvised format and in the absence of a writer (but not a dramaturg) it’s not surprising that even though well-shaped it’s a rough work, lending it a certain rawness, a valuable sense of unpredictability moment by moment. It means that given it’s a character-based play, with a plot and, for the most part, a solid fourth wall, that it’s not going satisfy the demands of motivation and outcome for every viewer. Me, I let that go, and went with those waves of energy, invention and image that suggested more than the words often could.
Urban Theatre Projects, The Longest Night, 2002 Adelaide Festival commission, director Alicia Talbot, space, video & lighting design Sam James, sound design Rose Turtle, dramaturg Caitlin Newton-Broad; Granville, Sydney, March 22-April 7
From Wollongong to Hollywood
Company Physical Theatre: Landed
A long shiny, skeletal, metal tube, a couple of metres in diameter, dominates the stage. In the course of the performance it will roll forward and back, reveal classroom blackboards, hoist performers high or deliver them to the stage. The actors manipulate it with ease, creating new spaces, dynamics and tensions. Above, a parallel screen angles out at 45 degrees over the tube, capturing colour, projections and sinister objects placed on an overhead projector. There are no trapezes or like devices for Company Physical Theatre to cavort about on-director-designer Carlos Gomez has built a tight framework for his performers and he exploits it thoroughly, using its simple possibilities elegantly and recurrently to return us to various narrative strands. Consequently physical skills are embedded in the set and the narrative with the performers deftly lifting and tossing each other about and generating some curious (and comical) shapes. It makes for a taut theatrical production with plenty of focus on the personalities of the various characters engendered by a strong cast playing multiple roles-Ed Boyle, Stephen Klinder, Kym Vercoe and Larissa Chen.
Another integrating aspect of the production is the live sound score played by composer Marianthe Loucataris on a reconstructed piano, an upright where she has direct access to the strings, to strike and bow them, amongst other things. Loucataris’ through-score is finely tuned, responsive to the rhythms of the performance and suggestive of cultural otherness and the odd experiences had by newcomers to Australia.
The shape of Landed entails a series of symmetrical shifts between English language lessons for new arrivals, dramas of trying to fit in, struggles to stay connected with where you’ve come from (you still might have a child there waiting to join you in Australia), and painful memory flashes. In the middle of a testing language lesson a student relives being tortured in his home country. Another endures the vivid memory-cum-nightmare of a Kafka-ish visa application interrogation by Australian officials in which projected images of hypodermics suggest real torture. A woman endures the company of her husband’s insensitive and untintelligible friend—what begins naturalistically soon turns surreal as the woman stands on her guests, mounts the table, pours drink over herself, such is her sense of bewilderment and abasement-they, of course, never notice. It’s a fine performance from Larissa Chen. Other moments are simple recollections: someone notes that a neighbour who tried to kill them in the home country also lives here now.
This is deftly performed and directed theatre. Occasionally it runs too close to old theatre-in-education formulae but it’s rich idiosyncrasies and pervasive physicality rise above those. The dialogue and brief monologues are often well-observed, although the drab language lessons are much less convincing. Doubtless there are still pretty bad experiences to be had in such classes, but there are many good teachers including, I hope, the staff of the Warrawong Intensive English Centre for whom the show was produced. With its powerful musical score, its clever integration of design and physical performance and its sensitive elaboration of the complexities of what it means to arrive in Australia and to learn to be here and to speak here, Landed is engaging theatre. Gomez’ direction is some of his best to date.
Landed, devised by Company Physical Theatre, director & designer Carlos Gomez, musical director Marianthe Loucataris, lighting Sydney Bouhaniche, researcher/co-writer Vanessa Badham; A PP Cranney Production for the Warrawong Intensive English Centre; Merringong Theatre Co, Illawara Arts Centre, March 20-23
Starlet Twins, Heidrun Löhr
PACT Youth Theatre: The Starlet Twins
Artistic Director Caitlin Newton-Broad’s final production for PACT is a reminder of the strong sense of design, stage craft, acting commitment and choreographic direction she brought to the company. The Starlet Twins is exemplary in all these respects with strong, sustained performances from a large cast of young actors not a few of whom at first glance seem unlikely contenders but quickly convince.
With a theatrical style that’s always bigger than life and quite rhetorical, it’s not surprising that Newton-Broad decided to venture into music with this production, not quite a musical but through-scored by Michelle Outram at the piano and with a handful of songs. However, in an odd way, its opera seria rather than the musical that The Starlet Twins reminded me of—a set of scenes with minimal narrative drive, in each of which a condition, an emotional state or moral dilemma is explored musically with elaborations and variations-here imbued with a great deal of physicality beautifully executed with the help of Chris Ryan and Regina Heilmann. Musicals before the 50s could be like this, before songs and dance numbers became part of the narrative machinery of a show. The reason for this is probably to be found in Lally Katz’ epic script and Newton-Broad’s commitment to it. Twenty-three year-old Katz’ biggest investment is in the elaborate evocation of a fabled pre-50s Hollywood-like city, replete with gangsters, Gothic horror and star ambition, anchored in the tale of twins separated at birth, doomed to meet again when one might unwittingly take the life of the other. Sadly, the focus on the moment at the expense of momentum means that while the realisation of scenes and performances could frequently be admired, the show stopped too often in its tracks, and not with showstoppers. A more economical version of the script, one which allowed the director and performers to do more of the work with less words might have helped. And as for the songs, however good they were the cast weren’t up to them. Occasionally Outram’s writing was just that touch too demanding, some with jazz nuancing; more often the singers simply couldn’t sing.
Packed with characters and curiosities (like the collection of the living heads of starlets in one twin’s basement), country hicks and crooked film producers, The Starlet Twins revels in kitsch, creating a fantastic, self-contained world, both satirising and adoring its fatal fantasy object, Hollywood, not the actual but the imaginary of its own dreaming re-written by a young playwright and doubtless many more to come. It’s a strange trap. That the playwright is originally from the USA explains some of it, but the fascination with kitsch, like the nightmare of economic rationalism, seems to endure, widespread and unabated. And last, possibly pointlessly, many a play starts its narrative too early and ends it too soon: I would have liked to have seen the twins together, the next chapter in their lives; the play, after all, makes so little of the nature of twindom.
All complaints aside (my problems not yours), The Starlet Twins was brave, frequently bracing, liberally dosed with high drama, expressionist touches and poetic fervour, confidently busy and sometimes richly comic. Having served youth so well, it’d be good to see Newton-Broad working with experienced performers. A fine writer herself, perhaps she’ll script something for herself to direct?
PACT Youth Theatre,The Starlet Twins , writer Lally Katz, director Caitlin Newton-Broad, designer Lisa Mimmocchi, sound artist Michelle Outram, lighting Simon Wise, dramaturg Francesca Smith; PACT Jan 24 – Feb 3
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. web
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Richard Grayson
Richard Grayson, the Artistic Director of the Sydney Biennale 2002, originally from the UK, has been based in Australia as a practising artist since the mid-1980s. He is perhaps best known here for his directorship of the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide from 1991-1998. This is his first foray into ‘Biennale world’ as a curator.
How did you come by the theme of this year’s exhibition
(The World may be Fantastic) with its evocations of fakery, fantasy and the supernatural?
The exhibition has been floating in my head for a long time. Partly it’s come out of my own practice, which is about alternative histories, partly out of the practice of such artists as Suzy Treister (my partner)-whose Rosalind Brodsky project posits alternative worlds and delusional realities-and Susan Hiller’s work, particularly Witness [Hiller was on the biennale’s advisory panel along with Janos Sugar and Ralph Rugoff]. There’s a common concern here for subjectivising the objective. These influences immediately informed the rationale. But also, there’s the fact that I read too much science fiction as a kid, and later too much Borges! And then on top of all that, there’s a slight boredom and annoyance with a whole lot of art at the moment that seems rather unambitious. A lot of the current rhetoric seems to fit very easily into established discourses on art. This is particularly so with Australian practice, even more so with East Coast practice. There’s a lack of juice and joy and risk, a kind of desiccation. The fun factor is missing. In fact, I think Australian art is not larrikin enough at the moment. At the same time, I see a lot of art that is buckling under expectations that it be radical, transgressive-I think there should be a ban on the words ‘transgressive’ and liminal’! Much critical rhetoric does a massive disservice to art. It becomes further and further unattached, to become a form of nostalgia.
So I came up with a rationale that I thought would be interesting, not really thinking that I’d get the gig, looking at artists who were working with modelling hypothesis, and not necessarily engaging with the discourses of art, even though their work may be art. I was drawn to stuff without performance indicators that didn’t fit onto established art historical boxes…art that in a sense was awkward. I am also interested in those things where you’re not quite sure whether they’re primary production or art production…things that are lumpy, awkward, undigested, that are on the edge of the law, outside, not recuperable.
Do you think there may be something particularly timely about the theme of subjective realities, fictions and alternative histories?
Yes I think so, although I can’t take any credit for that; it’s come about purely by chance. I’d never really been close to a zeitgeist before, but this time I think I may have tripped over one. One of the reasons I thought that the theme might be interesting right now was because of the tedium that’s set in with this hegemony of economic rationalism, where there seem to be no alternatives. That grey uniformity may force us back into the spaces of the imaginary. At the same time the collapse of communism has removed the anchor that used to make the political the real, so that in a sense politics has been reduced to the fantastic, the hallucinatory. Also, there’s the way technologies of the digital and virtual are challenging ideas of the real. Yet another factor is that theory has somewhat disenfranchised practice, be it writing or art. The grand narratives are no longer possible, even the statement is no longer possible, and everything sinks into this inferno of equivalence. However, some artists and writers, without rejecting all that, are saying, ‘Yes, I know we can’t do grand narratives any more, but let’s pretend we can’. So the aim becomes a pretence, a very self-knowing one, to provide a way out of that endgame. I think this return to narrative, be it knowing although not ironic, is in some ways inevitable, because I believe humans have a fundamental desire for pattern-making grand narrative, be that scientific, artistic or occult. It is hard-wired into us. Finally, in terms of the privileging of the subjective, there’s the fact that in the Western world now we are in thrall of the most subjective interpretation of phenomena by way of fundamentalist religious belief. All these might be reasons why the return of the fictional, the subjective, the idea of modelling hypotheses might be particularly timely.
How did you go about curating the show? Were you concerned to maintain a certain thematic coherence?
The process was very, very partial and subjective. There was no intention (or ability) of making a definitive statement, or of even being global. The exhibition is a proposition rather than a definition. I put together an advisory panel and we spent 3 days’ solid talking and brainstorming, and then I just wandered off and the rest was happenstance. The theme is not an envelope. If anything it is a table where you can stick a whole lot of different things and let them stand. But there are riffs and tropes, so abstractly, yes, it does have its coherences. But it probably will look like a dog’s dinner!
What do you think makes for a good curator?
No idea! I don’t think that for contemporary art-as opposed to historical art which is necessarily more academic-it’s that different from making a party tape. Some people are very good at making a party tape and they have something that is able to pull you onto the floor, as well as allowing you to engage with something you’ve never heard before. And other people are not good at making party tapes. People who make good party tapes tend to be fans, so something as unsophisticated as being a fan is useful for being a curator. I also think it useful to hang on to the idea that the curator is not the primary producer, that the artist remains the primary producer, no matter what the curator says. Then there is that thing of trusting your instincts. Sometimes you come across a piece of work and you say ‘I have no idea what that means, but I think it’s really good!’, and other times you say ‘I have no idea what that means, but I think it sucks!’ And you have no clear idea why. I think it’s partly about the conviction to follow that intuition, but to also be able to remain fleet of foot enough to change your mind. I think there must be a bit of unfashionable connoisseurship in there too. When I curate, I presume that I am the audience, so if works for me, it will work for the audience I want for the show.
Given that, what do you think is the role of the Biennale of Sydney?
Neither as an artist nor as a curator have I been a very frequent visitor to ‘Biennale world.’ But having been swimming in that goldfish bowl now for over a year I realised I was very glad to be working for the Biennale of Sydney, because unlike other Biennales it seemed to me to have a very clear role and function. The other 59 Biennales are getting into all sort of existential crises, ‘What are we here for?’ Here, it is very simply to get some good work in that may or may not be part of larger conversations, and it is to save each member of the visiting public about $3000 in airfares. If you’re doing a Biennale in Europe, on the other hand, it is a very different proposition. There, the exhibition is playing more the role of contemporary art spaces (like Artspace in Sydney) and driving for novelty.
So where do the Australian artists who are in the show fit in?
These artists are included to suggest links. This show is very partial and very subjective and it is not about the ordering of the great and good. It is about people who are doing interesting work in specific areas. You could do it without Australian participation if Perspecta was still running. It might be nice to have a show just of international artists in Australia. But Australia is a bit lacking in events that allow it to look at itself nationally at the moment. I think it’s extraordinary that outside the Adelaide Biennale, with its limited audience, and Primavera, with its handful of artists, that Australia does not have an exhibition where it can look at itself as Australia. Not that I think the Biennale should pick up that role. Rather it should use what little power it might have to encourage other initiatives. It is difficult enough doing one brief, to do two imperfectly would be an absolute disaster!
Why is nationality still so important to curating and promoting Biennales?
Part of it is history-the trade fair and all that. Part of it is ambition, inasmuch as the curators want to make a global statement. And I think part of it is habit. And possibly, it is actually pernicious. In many ways Biennales have turned into exactly what they didn’t want to be, the great levellers. There is a lot of rhetoric that claims Biennales are great Utopian spaces where we can set up resistance and critiques of globalisation. That’s actually absolute bollocks! This show is less global, partly because that didn’t start off as the position, partly because I am not in that circle of international curators whose everyday knowledge includes what is going on in Beijing at the moment. But also because of the theme: the fictional and fictive, with their strong literary and linguistic underpinnings, tended to favour artists within my language group, so that there are more Americans and Britons than there might otherwise have been. Then that became the position: if the project is openly partial, why should it be global? Fragility and subjectivity are what I wanted to foreground.
How do you think being a practising artist has inflected your curating of the Biennale?
I think perhaps what I bring to curating as a practising artist is a greater willingness to accept contingency (even though I do not accept that curators are artists). I am willing to be more fluid and more floppy, not wanting to make the authoritative statement. To me, curating is far more like making a piece of work…that is, ‘What happens if?’, rather than, ‘This is.’ Perhaps there’s a greater willingness to-’take risks’ is not quite the right phrase-rather, a sense of being on the outside of curating as an institution, and therefore not ruled by the need for authority, or overwhelmingly concerned with the immediate placing of the exhibition. Artists are just curators who don’t know as much as curators.
The Biennale of Sydney: The World may be Fantastic Sydney, various venues, 14 May 14-14 July
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. web
© Jacqueline Millner; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
At Nans, 2000 from Zoë by Donna Bailey
Donna Bailey
In the unfolding series of photographs of her daughter Zoë shown at Stills Gallery last month, Donna Bailey makes no claims to narrative. Something is happening here but no drama. In its place is the infinite variety of Zoë’s personae expressed in an intimate photographic diary-—Zoë as petulant Venus up to her knees in murky water, starkly serene in a bath with a baby, Zoë non-commital in a desultory backyard, deadpan in a doorway with siblings snaking round her legs. One minute she’s oblivious and the next, brazenly staring down her photographer mother. Zoë, her family and friends have the look of being looked at and of looking back. Donna Bailey has been photographing them, and especially Zoë, since 1998. Her photographs combine a compositional precision with an ease that make them look like casual documentation. The agenda in this study has to do with the delicate and evolving relationship between this mother and daughter as seen through the lens. Something is happening here but we don’t know exactly what it is—nothing more than a life unfolding and that in the hands of a photographer in a true collaboration with her subject is really something.
Currently showing at Stills, 2 remarkable photographers show us their very particular views of a city. Narelle Autio working in colour and Trent Parke in black and white push their chosen formats to extremes to give us not literal accounts of reality, but heightened, almost painterly images that bring out the fantasist in this viewer.
Narelle Autio
Walking tours of the Harbour Bridge have proved better than a little earner for the people who came up with the idea. Sydneysiders have grown used to the sight of the row of tiny figures in overalls hooked together and traipsing up the arch and standing triumphantly aloft. I expect Jeffrey Smart to paint them soon. Meanwhile Narelle Autio, stakes her claim for below, photographing—from directly above—people on the lawns relaxing for free in the shadow of the bridge. Not of this Earth is a series of 16 inkjets printed on canvas. The saturated colour, the texture of the surfaces are almost garish. There is some of the feel of candid snaps but with her customary keen eye Autio makes playful geometry of the things we do with nothing to do, mapping out the casual exhilaration of leisure, the shapes of indolence. The effect is vertiginous, exhilarating. Limbs tumble into focus, out of shot, arrange themselves in unselfconscious tableaux. A dog on a leash unwinds a careful line. A small girl rolls across the grass to the edge of the frame. Two pairs of legs, one female, one male erotically peep from beneath a tree. Three small figures and a dog move horizontally as their taller shadows upend them to vertical. Some appear flattened as if they’ve fallen to earth. A woman lies eyes closed, arms extended and dreams the bird above showing her how it’s done.
Trent Parke
There’s equal serenity and more than a touch of the gothic in Trent Parke’s shots of Sydney city streets (Dream/Life & Beyond). Partly it’s the scale (100 x 138 cms) but also the gravity of huge slabs of black with white slicing, shimmering and occasionally blazing through it. The photographer’s experience of this city is of its “underlying sadness” but as I walked through the exhibition Parke’s subjects turned the tables—someone made a mad dash from one side of the photograph to the other, to catch the thin strip of light right in the centre of the frame. A man waiting at a George Street pedestrian crossing watched with the photographer the silver white flecks of rain hitting the shiny street. And in the middle of a crowded public place, a ghost revealed himself for a second.
Donna Bailey, Zoë, Feb 13-March 16; Narelle Autio, Not of this Earth, & Trent Parke, Dream/Life & Beyond, March 20-April 20, Stills Gallery, Paddington, Sydney
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. web
© Virginia Baxter; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Ah Xian, Human, Human-Lotus, Cloisonne
As the gates to Victoria’s Werribee Park open for the Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award (won this year by Nigel Helyer), the portals to the NGA Canberra’s National Sculpture Prize close. A fundamental difference between the latter, the Lempriere and Sydney’s Sculpture by the Sea is that the NGA Prize is not for outdoor or site-specific works. Finalists, some newcomers, others well-established artists, each given $2000 to initiate and complete an idea or refine and extend an earlier work, often saw their works assembled for the first time at the exhibition opening. Each piece here effectively can relocate itself, and, because of this, the exhibition provides both stimulation and a kind of jarring in its eclectic array of discrete pieces made to be viewed in quiet white-walled rooms.
Whilst down the corridor Rodin’s 19th century works, Rodin: A Magnificent Obsession, clutch at their individuated despair with a solemn grace, it strikes me as provocative that the inaugural contemporary Sculpture Prize has gone to a figurative work. Ah Xian’s Human, Human-Lotus, Cloisonne. However, in contrast to Rodin’s muscled agonies and surging sexual vignettes, it is ethereal and meditative, like a form both smoothed by and surviving burial beneath water, its fine flowered and veined cloisonne-work embedded in life-size porcelain a technical marvel, its aloofness from “all kinds of political struggling, fighting, power gaining and the endless wars that exist in the world” initially taking some adjustment to sit with in the room. Like Keats’ Grecian urn, it is a “foster child of silence and slow time,” the figure emulating the quietude of a sacred vase, or pond.
By contrast, Geoffrey Drake-Brockman and Richie Kuhaupt’s Chromeskin, with its passive naked chromed male mannequin standing before a telephone-box sized prism, is a computer-interactive work where viewers’ gestures, body positions and approaches towards the box affect and reshape the gestures, turns and colours of the animated version of the mannequin within it, “an encounter between two aspects of human agency-the physical and the virtual-arranged en tableau”.
I am not sure which of these two works issues a deeper challenge. The recognition that all looking is an interactive encounter, and that many tableaux (of culture, of experience, across timezones) are activated in proximity to sculptural works, can be overshadowed by languages that almost strip the delicacy from this awareness. Human, Human is perhaps even more a political act than are the games pieces by Liu Xiao Xian (pitting indigenous against introduced animals on a chess board; the British Royal Family versus iconic indigenous Australians-and Christ, and B1 and B2-on a flattened Aboriginal flag/Australian map). These seem ideologically overworked and perhaps sculpturally underdeveloped, even and especially next to his own fine bone china castings of quirky Victorian cutlery, an elegant and excessive roll-call beside a single pair of fine white cast china chopsticks.
Other works hinge on the pulls of memory and grief (Pamela Kouwenhoven’s Shrine to Memory, discarded cemetery flowers almost quilted into complex spiritual icons; or Rosslynd Piggott’s Japanese-silk rolled pillow resting on a lean black plinth, a tear-bubble falling out one ear); on domestic familiarities (Lena Yarinkura’s metal-cast dogs, forlorn, on-heat; Donna Marcus’ walled snake-trail of aluminium teapots; Ruth Downes’ gorgeous, funny, sexy array of some 30 hand-made plinthed teacups playing with textures and ideas of odd meetings at mad hatters’, government house and community teas-a barbed-wire amnes-tea; gold-coined GS-tea; golf-teas, par-teas, various novel-teas). Others expose cultural decadence: Louise Paramor’s deep-and darkly-coloured, folded-paper Lustgarten sofa/chandelier, made during her Berlin residency, is as sharp and exposing of cultural undertows as were George Gross’s scratchy, dirty WWII drawings; whilst others still are lyrical contemplations of philosophy (Bronwyn Oliver’s winding, wall-mounted, woven copper calligraph, tackling Derrida’s idea of trace by tracing the movement of writing itself as pen is drawn across a page); of martyrdom (Linda Ivimey’s hessian-clad, hooded dolls both pregnant-like and child-like in shape, challenging the fetishising and making-saintly of deep embodied suffering); and of social inequalities-what street-tramp might be saved within the false-hope shelter/mobile aspirin of Richard Goodwin’s bicycle-stretcher?
Lionel Bawden makes sculptures out of coloured pencils look like they’re made of woven cane. Neil Roberts’ wall-mounted vaulting-horse clad with a leaded-glass rendition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim ceiling window is disturbing both in its relocated masculine force and its pulling of parameters from both floor and ceiling to wall. Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley’s Wall Unit (Origin of the World) is a series of peepholes into birds’ nests already destroyed by casting into bronze, a wall-mounted collection that yet survives fetishism (as body-memory, our remembered relationship to our origins does). Timothy Horn’s Glass Slipper (Ugly Blister) highlights the symbiotic relationship between Cinderella and stepsister, gewgaw and glassmanship in an interesting telescoping of the usually divided layers of craft-and myth-making. Sebastian di Mauro’s Clip, a floor-mounted, astroturf-clad pair of giant hedge-clippers, kindles and satisfies the garden-lust of would-be suburbanites too busy, too tired, or too often at the Art Gallery to tend or own their own hedge.
National Sculpture Prize, 2001, Inaugural Exhibition, Coordinating Curator Elena Taylor; curator Beatrice Gralton; judges Brian Kennedy, Julian Beaumont, Dr Deborah Hart, Professor Ian Howard, Neil Dawson. Finalists not covered in this review are: Geoffrey Bartlett, Kristian Burford, Matt Calvert, Peter Cole, Kevin Gossner, Fred Fisher, Matthieu Gallois, David Jenz, Gunther Kopietz, Ari Purhonen, Sarah Robson, Heather B Swann, Ken Unsworth. NGA Canberra Nov 30, 2001-March 10, 2002.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. web
© Zsuzsanna Soboslay; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
After three intense years working at PACT I am leaving, on adventure unknown, intending to loosen up, grow up and momentarily shirk the responsibilities of running a small arts company.
PACT is a resilient beast, surviving almost 40 years so far, with a constant influx of independent, inventive young people/artists who fuel its creative life and have this uncanny capacity to renew stuff, while testing out the precious spectrum of da cultural gatekeepers….At PACT, I have been supported by a whole cavalcade of generous professional artists, theatre workers, media writers, Board members and volunteers who are the lifeblood of the place…Particularly, my partnership with Company Manager, Lucy Evans was rewarding—as we egged each other on in a game of 'doggedness', sheer will and poor theatre invention.
The next team to work at this remarkable little cultural space is the accomplished performer/director duo Regina Heilmann and Chris Murphy. I would like to welcome them to PACT, as they hit the ground running. This move is a transition to full-time for Regina after years of contributing to PACT's various creative programs and a complete, absorbing new world for Chris after her work with Theatre Kantanka. It should be a blast!
Caitlin Newton-Broad
Former Artistic Director, PACT
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. web
© Caitlin Newton-Broad; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
The death of an artist
Just before we went to press we were shocked and deeply saddened to hear of the accidental death of Neil Roberts, a fine artist and a wonderful person. Roberts was based in Queanbeyan. His death coming so soon after that of David Branson in Canberra makes this an even darker time for the ACT arts community. As some of you will know, we were to publish in this edition of RealTime an interview with Neil’s partner, the performance artist Barbara Campbell as a prelude to a retrospective of her works at Sydney University for the Department of Performance Studies. The interview has been held over. An obituary for Neil will be published in the next edition of RealTime. All our thoughts are with Barbara.
RealTime & festivals
Our absence at the Adelaide Festival this year was noted. Thanks for the many wish-you-were-heres—it’s nice to be missed. A few wondered if we’d abandoned the festival. In previous Adelaide Festivals and at LIFT97 in London, the 1999 MAAP-Asia Pacific Triennial, the 2001 Queensland Biennial Festival of Music and other arts events, RealTime had been on the official festival programs. We weren’t invited to the 2002 Adelaide Festival and our limited budget couldn’t stretch to an on-the-ground team. It’s a very expensive and labour intensive business. Our commitment this year is to Next Wave, the festival for young artists and audiences in Melbourne (see page 27), where we’ll be working with 10 young writers turning out daily responses to the festival online and in print. Watch out for these on online, May 17-26.
Farewell Kirsten Krauth
Our invaluable Assistant Editor and OnScreen Editor, Kirsten Krauth, has left us after 4 years to work full-time at the Australian Film Commission. Her quiet thoroughness, her considerable writing and editing skills, and the warmth of her relationship with RealTime staff, editorial team members and writers will be greatly missed. To find someone with all her skills and interests is going to be quite a challenge. We wish Kirsten well in her new position.
NSW Arts—the future commences
As you’ll read in the last paragraph of the fascinating interview with Director-General of Arts, Roger Wilkins, there has been a major arts development in New South Wales. Following the considerable investment in arts infrastructure recently in western Sydney, it was announced that the State Government has purchased the Eveleigh Carriage Works in inner-city Redfern to house performance companies like Legs on the Wall and a new performance space. Although the issue of sustainability still dogs most small to medium performance companies and has to be seriously addressed, the needs in respect of working spaces and performance venues are being tackled by the government. The extent of the investment (what kind of facilities in the new centre and whether or not Performance Space will play a key role) is ever on our minds.
A birth
Our fondest congratulations to long-time RealTime contributor and editorial team member Zsuzsanna Sobsolay and partner Tim Moore on the birth of Ruby Saffron.
Young & emerging?
Perhaps Ruby Saffron will be interested in the Australia Council RUN_WAY and Start You Up! funding programs for new artists. Our most recent survey showed that 19% of our readers are aged 18-25 years: it’s interesting that they didn’t substantially figure in earlier surveys. RUN_WAY, a program of the New Media Arts Board, is aimed at under 30 year-olds, encouraging them with grants of up to $5000 to explore interdisciplinary/new media arts practice in any number of ways (Reed Everingham, 02 9215 9132, 1800 226 912 or r.everingham@ozco.gov.au). The Theatre Board is also offering grants of up to $5,000 but the age limit is 26 and the goal is for new artists to create small works for public showings (Gemma Pepper, 02 92159301, 1800 226 912, g.pepper@ozco.gov.au). A similar program, 2ExciteU, has been initiated for new artists under 26 from non-English speaking background (Michelle Kotevski, 02 9215 9030, 1800 226 912, m.kotevski@ozco.gov.au, see advertisement, p40). It’ll be interesting to see what effect these small seeding grants will have on the development of new artists and whether or not some of the cost is going to fall on established companies and organisations as the artists search for support, venues and credibility. RUN_WAY is in its second phase, so we should see some results. In an era of initiative-driven arts funding, suspicion of pragmatism and opportunism is inevitable. Let’s hope that these new programs deliver in the longer term.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 3
© RealTime ; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Charlie Victor Romeo, Irving Gregory of Collective: Unconscious
Charlie Victor Romeo is “riveting”, says promotional material from the Perth International Arts Festival. The work originated in New York, where it began off-off-off Broadway (just how off can you get?) before going on to scoop all sorts of awards.
I too was riveted, but in the original sense of the word-beaten over the head and fastened to my seat. The experience was not pleasant. As someone afraid of flying, I am the last person in the world who ought to have seen this depressing and pointless production. Depressing, because even though it was born in 1999, it cannot help but milk that moment in September. Pointless and depressing, because beyond the frame there is death. Hundreds of people died in the six ‘dramatised’ catastrophes that form the basis of CVR. The whole thing appeals to the worst in us, like slowing down to look at a bad accident on the freeway.
The set is minimal: only the cockpit is represented (so real is the production, we learn in the program, that it is used in training for pilots and disaster management courses). In this illuminated space sit captain and crew, their attention on the console before them. Each ‘case study’, drawn from ‘real black box transcripts’ is introduced by a slide. We learn the name of each flight, the number of crew and passengers aboard, and the nature of the problem that will be their downfall: engine explosion (Sioux City), multiple bird strikes (Alaska), incorrect altimeter settings-the whole bleak spectrum of things to fear, from the banal to the catastrophic. At the end of each ‘case’ we are offered another slide, and an enumeration of casualties. I quickly realised there was no point hoping for a happy ending.
From the outset we are subject to an aural assault. In our own little black box we throb, vibrate, gather in the static of radio communication, gloss over the buzz words, tumble into the groan and roar of the machine as it accelerates towards what becomes an inexorable narrative of unavoidable tragedy. The sound design by Jamie Mereness carries this performance, and rightly so, because as anyone afraid of flying will tell you, the ear is the organ of fear.
This theatre of ‘real life’ can only trade in death, and it is the most serendipitous, most spectacular, most horrific of airbound incidents that make it into this cauterised space. I wanted to leave, but I could not. I was, remember, riveted to my seat. But unlike those poor people strapped into their seats on the other side of the cockpit, my situation was never life-threatening. No one dies in a simulator. It is possible (cf September 11) that a being might enter the simulator and train themselves to die, and in doing so kill others. Is this why we are all here, at this performance? Learning how we might die? And having died, end up as a statistic on a projection screen at the Octagon Theatre, Perth. How depressing.
Charlie Victor Romeo, Created by Bob Berger, Patrick Daniels, Irving Gregory of Collective: Unconscious, Perth International Arts Festival, Octagon Theatre, March 25.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg.
© Josephine Wilson; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Dear Editors,
For 7 years I have worked for Urban Theatre Projects, the company which produced Fa’afafine, reviewed in your last issue (RT47 p38). As you know, I have never complained or taken issue with any review of any UTP show appearing in RealTime (nor any other publication). There have been negative or mixed reviews of our work in the past. Most of these I have agreed with. The rest I saw as valid assessments which I happened not to share. I would never dispute your right to publish them.
But what am I to make of the “Will Rollins” review of Fa’afafine?
Yes, I know you’ll respond that its not a review but a response to the work.
Well, yes. A response that reads as sneering, patronising and utterly unprofessional. No wonder its author didn’t have the guts to run it under their real name.
The clear implication is that Brian Fuata doesn’t need an audience, he needs a therapist. This is dressed up in a kind of why-should-I-listen-to-a-tired-self-indulgent-recitation of “his prose poems about his mummy” because-aren’t-we-all-over-personal-narrative world weariness.
Okay, so it’s trying to be funny and perhaps I’m missing the humour. To publish this opinion in an anarchist zine or an undergraduate paper would probably be mildly amusing. And perhaps a little levity, a little iconoclasm wouldn’t go astray in the oh-so-serious world of contemporary performance. I shall wait with interest to see if this is a sign of a new editorial policy for RealTime. Because at the moment every other article but this one takes itself and its subject seriously. So why is this show singled out for clumsily camp satire?
And why is it published under a false name? You write that “RealTime allows the use of pseudonyms where the writer might be placed in a difficult position in respect of their employment and/or the community they belong to. It is not treated lightly.”
Difficult position? Have I missed something? I know the political climate is grim right now, but are there secret police files on reviewers? Contemporary performance death squads, perhaps? An opening night blacklist?
Call me old-fashioned, but whatever happened to standing up for your opinions? Engaging in public discourse carries responsibilities, as the Heffernan outrage has just shown. Is that too difficult a position for you, “Will Rollins”? And RealTime editors, what were you thinking? No other worthwhile journal would allow such a piece to be published pseudonymously. (The last time it happened at the Sydney Morning Herald was a decade ago—and the writer was sacked.) Imagine the (justified) uproar if I, as the producer of this show, had written in praise of it, under a false name.
I welcome critical dialogue around our work and always have—I’d just like to know who I’m talking with. Brian Fuata, aged 23, had the guts to state his position(s). “Will Rollins”, who are you? From what position were you reading this work? Why don’t you let the readers in on the secret? And don’t tell me it’s not relevant—if that were the case, you’d have published under your own name. I know you well enough to know that.
Harley Stumm
Executive Producer, Urban Theatre Projects
Response
Harley Stumm’s letter includes reference to our response to his first message to us. The relevant points are reproduced here:
Dear Harley,
1. We think you have misinterpreted what is fundamentally a supportive if idiosyncratic review, hardly the “why-should-I-listen” response you portray. We see the writer as attentive to the words, in fact wanting to focus on them more clearly.
In our reading of Rollins review, we saw it as taking pleasure in Fuata’s performance, especially his new persona, praising the director for shaping that persona, astonished at the extremes of what the performer describes, and critical only of the disjunction between Fuata’s delivery and the staging of it.
2. RealTime allows the use of pseudonyms where the writer might be placed in a difficult position in respect of their employment and/or the community they belong to. It is not treated lightly.
3. We do not censor commissioned writers. Commissions are rarely rejected.
Regards,
Managing Editors
RealTime
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg.
© RealTime ; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Throughout the ‘Rainbow Region’ of the Far North Coast of NSW, cars are adorned with stickers that read like epigrams…Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Beauty, Free Tibet and Magic Happens. Magic recently did happen and it happened in the theatre. And it didn’t come from one of the big name theatre companies that visit us from Sydney or Melbourne, but from a local community theatre. The local Women’s Health Centre produced Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues for International Women’s Day. A week later the audience are still affected by it, and talking about it. We’ve heard and read about this show’s power as it trailblazes around the world…from Kenya to Hong Kong, Iceland to Venezuela, and Pakistan, where it’s currently on show. But what makes it so magical?
According to US feminist Gloria Steinem, who wrote the foreword for Ensler’s play (Villard, 1998) hundreds of years ago female genital symbols were worshipped in India as more powerful than their male counterpart, a belief that carried over into Tantrism. Tantric Buddhism still teaches that Buddahood resides in the vulva. However Indian yoni worship is a long way away from contemporary Western attitudes to women’s bodies? Words like ‘vagina’ feel clinical. ‘Cunt’ has been demonised and demeaned, and ‘pussy’ is, well…it’s all right.
This production achieved a rare feat in the region, selling out Lismore’s 390-seat capacity Star Court Theatre 10 days prior to performance. And still they clamoured outside to get in. Not even our local award-winning performing arts organization, NORPA, achieves that very often.
The monologues range from celebration to catharsis, and this version included two new pieces, Under the Burqa, an Afghanistani woman’s experience of drowning underneath the Taliban-enforced cloth, and My Short Skirt…”My short skirt and everything underneath it is Mine. Mine. Mine”. Got it? Women entrusted Ensler with their most intimate experiences, from the act of conception to birth, from the undeclared war against women to newfound freedoms. The narratives were gathered from more than 200 interviews and turned into poetry for the theatre.
In Australia there were 15,600 cases of reported sexual assault in 2000 (Australian Bureau of Statistics) and those working in the field say this represents only 10 percent of actual cases. In the US, figures are as high as 700,000 each year. In South Africa one in two women can expect to be raped in their lifetime. One elderly woman in the Lismore audience had been raped and severely bashed at 59 years of age in Johannesburg.
While claims continue that theatre is dying, that young people don’t ‘do’ theatre, this regional audience comprised young, old, straight, dyke women and men. Magic happened, which begs the question, what do contemporary audiences want to see at the theatre? If the power of these monologues was anything to go by, I’d suggest they want powerful, real, honest, present-tense stories that stir us to engage with ideas and issues that matter to us now.
The Vagina Monologues, writer Eve Ensler, director Cathy Henkel, performers Punita Boardman, Marika Cominos, Nikki Fuda, Many Nolan and MC Zenith Virago; March 8.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg.
In her catalogue essay, Ann Finegan examines Margaret Roberts’ work in terms of the deepest experiences of the body, of habit and forgetting, and of the nature of mind to seek in time-place-speed coordinates a method for grounding our consciousness in place. Roberts’ installation sets up an experience akin to what I would term “architectural theatre”.
The Mirror Room construction occupies, in the territorial, colonial sense of the word, the largest of Artspace’s three exhibition areas. The room is not, as one might first expect, full of mirrors, nor is it in any overtly apparent way a reflection or inversion of the containing room itself. It is a fantastically simple piece of work. An idea which can only be understood in the experiencing, and is therefore performative. Performative because it had to be built to be understood, performative because it forces the viewer into motion. Roberts’ statement that “the viewer…may see that it is their presence that completes the work” resonates with my own philosophy of practice: the work is also read in terms of the bodies present within it at any given time.
Walking the Mirror Room passageway is an experience that references the best in architecture and reminded me in some ways of architect Daniel Liebeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. In both cases one is kept moving and fascinated by the sensation that something is askew.
In her room notes Roberts references the inside of the white cube (the purpose-designed gallery space) and the parallel, concealed spaces beyond this indeterminate absence. On the one side, a section of gallery floor and heavy timber pillars, on the other, actually beyond the display walls to the external structural boundary walls of The Gunnery building itself, moves the outside world of traffic, business, pedestrians. Roberts also references the arbitrary placement of gallery space within historical walls; The Gunnery building had a former life in the Australian Navy and a subsequently purposeful existence as an artists’ squat.
Roberts has set up a space that demands participation and ambulatory pondering, a pacing out. This necessary circumambulation is reminiscent of the ritual practice of walking around a buddhist stupa, always in a clockwise direction, whereas here the layout inclines one to the anti-clockwise. In buddhist practice the movement sets in motion the mantras/prayers being recited. In the gallery space it sets the work into motion.
The work is simply 4 huge white walls, floor to ceiling, constructed by contractors to Roberts’ design. The placement of this shape is deceptively simple. To create the footprint Roberts has marked the midpoint of the four prominent wall sections which enclose the rectangular space, and brought those 4 single points out from the wall by a doorway width. She then joined the dots, arriving not at a diamond configuration (which would occur if you simply took the measurements from each corner of the room) but at an irregular slewed shape.
As you walk around to inspect what is there, you discover what is not. Space advances and recedes, expands and contracts, it slowly revolves as a room within a room. It is a piece about the movement of architectural space. Anne Finegan notes that “The mirror reflection, which folds the very walls of the gallery back into this structure, ensures that there is no ‘outside’.”
Walking around the hollow monolith, we naturally search for a doorway, a way in, but the interior is not forbidden to us, rather, we are already inside. The viewer, in this reflected gallery space, is in a wanderland, contained behind walls, on the other side of which other-dimensional viewers may be looking back. Contained within the void and waiting exhibition-space, our eyes move behind living portraits.
It is a satisfying experience, taking only a minute or 2 to negotiate, yet leaving one perplexed, confused, unnerved. Four-walled everyday reality has somehow been upset. One has entered a matrix, the coordinates of which are both the gallery itself and the most basic pattern of our everyday life.
This is a subliminal experience.
Margaret Roberts, Mirror Room, Artspace, Sydney, March 7 – 30
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. web
© Alan Schacher; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
How many South Australians does it take to change a light bulb, how many to change a government, how many to make a film industry? All good questions as we gathered for this year’s election night Zoom! awards, designed as the centrepiece of SA’s film development policy.
Despite continuing problems of defining what constitutes an SA film, the good news is that the awards brought together a solid collection of contenders. Most of the winners impressed with their intelligent understanding of the possibilities of the short film. Rather than Big Themes Hammered Home or Smartarsefest gags, we saw filmmakers discovering what they can do with stylistic tools—light, framing, staging, sound—in order to explore the power of creative imagery.
The main prize of the evening went to Jack Sheridan for Day Dreams. Sheridan’s previous film, Solipsis, also featured in last year’s Media Resource Centre craft awards. It was good to see the SAFC encouraging a filmmaker who is working consistently in an environment that gives little support to his kind. (When people describe SA as the driest state, they are not just talking about water.)
Sheridan’s film also won craft awards for screenplay and performance. The protagonist is ferociously bent on self-destruction to the exclusion of any distractions in the real or imagined world. Even when these coalesce to conjure up an attacker, none of it impinges on her heroic daze. Sheridan’s sureness of touch matches his dark humour.
If last year was marked by women’s successes in these awards, this year the boys were back in town. It was a coincidence that the second-place encouragement award went to another film in which women were targets of sexual assault. Having said that, Zane Roach’s Dark City combined a keen sense of the strange economies of guilt and redemption with an eye for the pleasures of low key lighting and noir mise-en-scene.
The most striking film of the evening was Matthew Bate’s Turbulence, which took out the award for sound design. (Sound people are on the money with films about the hearing impaired, just as actors can count on roles about the mentally ill to put awards on the mantelpiece.) The film deals with a boy’s realisation of the violence within him and of the forces that separate and then reconnect him to the world.
Christian Keefe’s The Worst Day of My Life won the Best Design prize. It treads familiar territory in dealing with the anomie of the salaryman, but it works this terrain with rich visual inventiveness, converting the protagonist’s spiritual isolation into a formal game of spatial manipulation. Underplayed performances combine with careful staging and inventive use of off-screen space to explore the texture of alienation rather than simply the narration of it.
As ever, the minor part of the awards happens in the present. The terror of the future looms over the evening. Let us enjoy the moment and commend the winners to the savage and indifferent gods who rule the lives of young Australian filmmakers.
Zoom! SAFC Filmmaker of the Future Awards + Media Resource Centre Craft Awards, Mercury Cinema, Adelaide, Feb 9
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 14
© Mike Walsh; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Ponde (Murray Cod), Kluvanek
The Intertwine program, which took place at many venues around Adelaide, has emerged as one of the real success stories of the Peter Sellars/Sue Nattrass Adelaide Festival. Comprising a series of loosely affiliated weaving workshops, public forums, and exhibitions of woven art works from Australia and beyond, Intertwine was a genuinely community-based, grassroots, cross-cultural and collaborative event. It perfectly exemplified the original Sellars vision for the festival and its themes of truth and reconciliation, cultural diversity and ecological sustainability.
Intertwine brought together Indigenous weavers from the Top End of Australia and from Ngarrindjeri country in and around the South Australian Riverland. Senior Maori weavers also participated, along with other community artists from all over Australia. Included in the latter group was the high profile Queensland based artist Pat Hoffie who regularly works on collaborative projects with weavers in the Philippines.
But the Intertwine program was most definitely not about promoting stars or lionising the achievements of individuals. The level playing field approach evident in this collective enterprise seems to have been a deliberate ideological decision on the part of the organisers. In a similar vein, Intertwine’s focus has not been exclusively on the end product, on the woven object as either artistic creation or object of desire, but equally on (re)establishing a sense of community among practitioners. Talking with the other participants about weaving practice and creating space to share stories or simply yarn have been integral to this communal—and process-oriented program.
Accompanying the workshops and dotted around Adelaide’s inner and outer suburbs were a number of exhibitions and installations of the weavers’ work. This attempt to cater for audiences outside of the CBD was also consonant with this festival’s more regional focus. For example, the Prospect Gallery in Adelaide’s suburban north, played host to a wonderfully engaging and beautifully realised exhibition entitled Weaving the Murray, featuring works created by non-indigenous and Indigenous weavers including prominent Ngarrindjeri weaver and language expert Rhonda Agius.
In recent years Ngarrindjeri weavers have revived the traditional Ngarrindjeri craft of coiling rushes and sedge grasses native to the Murray so that many young Ngarrindjeri have become confident and skilled practitioners. In addition, classes are now held on a regular basis for non-indigenous people who want to learn this ancient art. This revitalisation is a truly remarkable achievement on the part of the Ngarrindjeri. The pressures of colonisation in their region dealt such a severe blow to traditional processes of intergenerational knowledge transmission that the practice of weaving came perilously close to disappearing.
Woven in traditional Ngarrindjeri style and suspended from the ceiling, a large communally-woven Ponde or Murray Cod, itself a threatened species, is without a doubt the piéce de resistance of the Prospect Gallery exhibition. It is a visually appealing work with a cogent environmental subtext.
Concerns about the environment also figured prominently in the Intertwine workshops. Participants spoke later in almost rapturous terms about the sense of esprit-de-corps engendered by this unique program. The quality of the relationships forged while taking part will be one of its enduring legacies. Integrated events like this one have a real capacity to build social capital and sustain community as well as produce artistic outcomes. Maybe down the track, when the dust has settled, Adelaideans will remember this as a festival we had to have for precisely such reasons.
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Intertwine, Adelaide Festival 2002, various venues, March 2-3.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 4
© Christine Nicholls; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Think about Maralinga. What does the word conjure up? A mushroom cloud, probably, hanging malignly in the air; no land, no people. That was very much the line of thinking entertained by Lynette Wallworth, one of the Adelaide Festival’s Associate Directors 2 years ago. Shouldn’t we all—especially in Maralinga’s nearest capital, Adelaide—know more about the land and its people below the cloud?
And that radical way of thinking was/is intrinsic to the Peter Sellars’ Festival. If only he and/or the limp administration had been able to deliver on such original promise.
Mind you, that Maralinga idea has thrown up a pretty rich harvest. The proactive side of the notion involved sending the English video artists, Mongrel, out to work with the kids there on telling their stories with the latest technology and offering the Tjarutja elders, newly returned to Maralinga the idea of painting their experience. Victorian artist Lance Atkinson demonstrated techniques of acrylic painting at the elders’ request. This required the festival to conjure up its own visual version of what it did to take to Oak Valley, to appoint an arts adviser and set an arts centre in train. The paintings produced are a challenge—often combining a traditional dotted background with almost Pop art images of the Cloud and, in one case, an upside-down roo flying through the irradiated air. They hang outside the theatre where The Career Highlights of the Mamu is playing.
Mamu was a separate project in WA, eagerly seized on by Wallworth—because it involved the Wankatja people, who’d gone West rather than East when missionaries passed on the heartless government message that the land they had stories for, going back to the last Ice Age, was going to be irrevocably polluted by the British atom bomb test. They—at least the survivors amongst them—ended up around Kalgoorlie after a 300km walk through the Great Victorian Desert.
Twenty-seven-year-old Trevor Jamieson was born in Perth to Wankatja parents and describes himself as “hungry for the truth” about his origins. He envisaged a one-man show and began working with writer Scott Rankin, experienced in such story-telling through his work on Box the Pony with Leah Purcell. Somewhere along the line though, Jamieson’s family had a better idea and now all 17 of them are on stage round a campfire with 2 musicians and 3 screens at the back showing painted images, photos, documentary interviews and surtitles. Putting it baldly, the original show has not yet grown to encompass all these accretions, despite dramaturgy from Nick Enright, direction by Andrew Ross (the man who got Bran Nue Dae and the Jack Davis trilogy so right), a choreographer and 2 assistant directors.
But then, such documentary theatre encompassing a range from ancient dances to Super 8 interviews with elders out at Maralinga, is a pretty complex form. And one of the most affecting moments involved Trevor’s Auntie using language that was barely translated to tell of her parents and 2 siblings dying from radiation poisoning and/or the effort of walking through unknown desert country to Kalgoorlie, while a live camera revealed every emotion on screens behind her. Trevor had just told us how the men of the tribe had attacked the rolling radiation cloud with spears, identifying it as a Mamu Devil Spirit. At the other end of the theatrical spectrum, we’d also heard the tale of the first train sighted, scared off with spears: one hero had shat his pants, which he admitted to his mate in language. “You can’t say that”, his mate responded, “we’re supposed to be naked!” “Not to worry, they can’t understand what we’re saying”, the surtitles told us meta-theatrically!
Such a blend—that also ranged through powerful Hiroshima poetry and Country & Western sentiment—is always going to be dangerous. Where does a commissioning festival come in, trying to get it all right? The lesson of the Marrugeku Company’s chaotic Crying Baby is instructive. Revelations during the Performing Arts Market suggested that both Perth and Sydney Festival Directors had been fobbed off when querying its development with the line, “You don’t understand how Aboriginal work is made”, suggesting that as much rigour is needed in this important area as in any theatre-making.
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Desert Oaks, a painting project by the Oak Valley Community, Maralinga Lands. The Career Highlights of the Mamu, Trevor Jamieson & Scott Rankin, director Andrew Ross, Black Swan Theatre, The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre, March 2-5
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 4-5
© Jeremy Eccles; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
El Niño, Mark Rogers
El Niño, the ‘centrepiece’ of Peter Sellars’ 2002 Adelaide Festival, is the product of a collaboration between Sellars and legendary American composer John Adams. El Niño suits Sellars’ concept for the festival—an event of community and cultural interaction, reconciliation and storytelling, whose official opening was a night of Indigenous song and dance in Adelaide’s Victoria Square.
First staged in 2000, the oratorio El Niño recounts the Nativity, the moment from which we count our millennia. Sellars has transferred the Biblical story to a present day Latino setting. In the way Shakespeare productions are often updated, this transfer emphasises the power and timelessness of the story. Building a libretto from the texts of past and present writers, and including fragments from the Apocrypha, suggests all generations and all people own the story. Texts by Hispanic women, such as 17th century Mexican nun and early feminist Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, emphasise women’s perspective. The rich moral tales are cleverly drawn out—how the Infant is born into straitened circumstances, how dependent He is on the enduring faith of those around Him, how fear corrupts the morals of (great) men and provokes violence and oppression. These observations are directly relevant to our present world.
Adams had wanted to write his own Messiah, and this work seems a homage to Handel as much as his own celebration of the Nativity. Formally, El Niño is more than an oratorio, and includes a video, screened above the performers. The audience must follow the action on screen, the surtitles above it, and the complex polyphonies and competing rhythms of Adams’ mesmerising score. This version of El Niño omits the live dancers of the initial concept, but there are dance excerpts on screen.
Sellars’ video grounds the work in a way that no stage performance could. Looking as if shot with a hand-held camera, and set in an apartment, on a beach or in a car, it’s like a silent home movie, making the oratorio immediately accessible. We see a Hispanic Mary and Joseph driving around, cops as guardian angels, the Infant swaddled in a Mickey Mouse blanket, and “Jesus”, dancing, with a streetlight behind Him forming a halo. The movie is not overtly a depiction of the Nativity—these could be any people, and we make the association with the Nativity because of the symbolic content. Do we read more into Biblical tales than is really there? Rather, we should read more into life, which is itself a miracle. The themes, the mythology, are universally applicable.
This production involved Artistic Director Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices—a mixed chorus of 20 or so seated on stage behind the fabulous soloists: Shu-Cheen Yu (soprano), Kirsti Harms (mezzo) and Herbert Perry (baritone), and 3 countertenors. The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, occupying the pit, was nicely directed by Alasdair Neale.
El Niño , director Peter Sellars, composer John Adams, director Paul Hillier, Theatre of Voices, Festival Theatre, March 2-6
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 5
© Chris Reid; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
para//elo, Stories from the Market Place
photo Peter Heydrich
para//elo, Stories from the Market Place
Central Market is probably the most diverse site in Adelaide; a rich array of cultural practices operate here. Para//elo has exploited its ambience and pace to make connections between migration experience, trade, exchange and consumption. Stories From the Market Place engages with performance, installation, testimony and tourism to think the place of home. Homelessness at home. “We all leave and arrive from somewhere.”
Drinking coffee or tea is the thing one does while waiting, meeting or simply sitting. Lucia’s is legendary for its consistently good brew. We are offered an espresso cup painted with ships, sea and sky. A waiter fills it with a dark brew and gives us crisp sweet bread. Customers (audience) and performers mingle amongst the (as usual) closely packed tables. Over there someone is writing her shopping list, it’s Susie, we say hello across the tables. A stranger sits at our table near the small door. His coffee hasn’t arrived yet, the waiter assures him it’s on its way. Lucia’s always works at its own pace. The operatic score swells behind us and the customers/audience laugh as waiters signal the switch to performance with slow accentuated movements, out of place in the bustle of 7.30am pre-work chat. I’m glad this doesn’t last for long—this place is too small to be displaced in.
The man sitting at our table (Juha Vanhakartano) lays out 4 sugar cubes in a neat line, pours the recently arrived coffee into the saucer, puts one cube between his lips and proceeds to drink via the sugar filter. In between he tells us this is a Finnish practice. “Finnish coffee is bitter…one is always falling onto ice.” In this way the performers talk to those at their tables, across tables, tell stories; waiters bustle, wipe, collect, as waiters do. It’s a bit like the real thing but we are in it and the performers are performing. Susie (Fraser) is performing too. Her movements slow as the music/mood shifts to something approaching disquiet. It works. The talking stops.
We (we are a group, from beginning to end) are bustled out of the cafe door by a beckoning tour guide (Jason Sweeney). It’s all rather garrulous, as tours are reputed to be. We are shuffled along Laneway #5. Performers weave in and out, carrying luggage. Do those who flee always have time to pack? We arrive at a place adjacent to the Korean sushi stall. Headsets dangle around 3 long rectangular slabs. Like good audience members we climb up to sit on the stools, don the headsets and gaze, stunned and a bit awkward. These seats are high. The tables turn out to be vitrines lined with newspaper clippings, marriage certificates, photos and cartoons. Iconic things arranged down the centre represent the interweaving of 3 traditions, Islamic, Christian and perhaps Buddhist.
The visual aesthetic stops one thinking about this mix of otherness. More successful is the audio (Scanner aka Robin Rimbaud with Jason Sweeney), an ambient and disturbing mix of market sounds and story fragments. These images don’t settle quickly. A man from Iraq and another from Afghanistan offer small sweet things and fragrant tea in gold rimmed glass tumblers. To eat, to serve and be served are perhaps the things we first have in common.
Stories From The Market Place, Para//elo, creative director Teresa Crea, performers Irena Dangov, Susie Fraser, Antonio Gorgone, Jason Sweeney, Juha Vanhakartano, Adelaide Central Market, Gouger Street, March 2-9.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 5-6
© Teri Hoskin; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Red Dust Theatre’s first ever production wasn’t part of the original Sellars’ conception for the Adelaide Festival—but it well might have been. For it offers a no holds barred portrait of Black and White relations in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) with a rich vein of metaphor, poetry and song. Steve Berkoff goes up the Alice! But it has a discontinuous narrative that never quite stands up, and a cast that’s young in performance and don’t quite deliver on the promise of Watts’ text.
Throughout, the train is a vital image. It’s the dragon that the young Black Ulysses sets out to kill; it’s a comedic element (as in The Career Highlights of the Mamu) at which ineffectual spears are thrown; it’s the Rainbow Serpent of the White Man’s Dreaming; and, most important of all, it’s the driving, masculine force that gives train-driver Ed, the White villain of the piece, his power. So why symbolise the train with a wheelchair—the ultimate image of disablement?
The use of a name like Ulysses, of course, raises certain expectations. But his role in the play seems not to be the endless journeying as punishment by the gods of the Greek original, but the pursuit of Ed—corruptor and brutaliser of his daughter Violet, Ulysses’ only beloved. Ulysses might succeed in rescuing Violet from the River (the notorious, dry Todd riverbed—another strong image in the play), if only he has time. For it’s there that Mparntwe’s castoffs (including Ed’s wife Molly) go for the nirvana of booze and sweaty, indiscriminate sex that briefly allow them to forget the pain of living. But will he get there before the rains come to wash the town’s detritus away? Or will he be fatally distracted by the hunting of Ed?
And are we distracted from Watts’ metaphysics by Hodder’s lively rapping and Nampatjinpa Castle’s raw balladeering? There’s a rich brew here which is poised to explode. I wish it well in finding the balance that will light its fire.
Train Dancing, Red Dust Theatre of Alice Springs, writer Michael Watts, director Craig Matthewson, performers Steve Hodder, Jacinta Nampitjinpa Castle, Roger Menadue, Barbara Saunders, Space, Adelaide Festival Centre, March 3-9.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 6
© Jeremy Eccles; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Morgan Lewis, Bernadette Regan, Shannon Williams, Charles Russel, The Longest Night
photo Heidrun Löhr
Morgan Lewis, Bernadette Regan, Shannon Williams, Charles Russel, The Longest Night
“It’s about generated fiction that’s based in reality”, said director Alicia Talbot of The Longest Night when she was interviewed (RealTime 47, p 33) in February. My first taste of Urban Theatre Projects was initially clouded by that “generated fiction” idea of the expectation of a more rounded and complete theatrical experience that established the problems of dislocated kids/young adults, and then tried to craft some solutions. After all, UTP hadn’t only been working with Adelaide’s Angle Park community (and Sydney’s High Street Youth Centre in Parramatta), but had had the constant presence of youth and social workers as well.
But the word “protocols” was much in evidence at the Adelaide Festival. It produced a marvellous sense of ceremonial respect at the opening Kaurna Palti Meyunna; it was the excuse for Koori film activists to approve of Ivan Sen’s explicit Beneath Clouds and to mount a campaign against the much softer Australian Rules; and it perhaps accounts for UTP not taking their plays outside the input offered by the primary community they’re working with.
Bernie would love to find a way out of the trap she’s in. Her kid’s in care, and she’d love to be able to prove to the bitch who robs her of him half way through his birthday party that she’s freed herself of dependence on alcohol, drugs and the ‘friends’ who used to share an empty life based around them. But that gut-wrenching loss of her son would weaken the bravest soul. The comfort blanket comes out; Carlos comes in to mend the loo—and the scene is set for some heavy back-sliding.
Where UTP really hit their straps is in making this back-sliding look great fun (at least the first time round); Bernie’s black dog might genuinely have been let off the leash—within the limits of house rules about banging-on only in the unmended loo and no whacking up. But Carlos (Charles Russell) is dealing, Shannon (Shannon Williams) is rapping to oblivion, Lucia (Lucia Mastrantone) is simply twitching for a fix, and Morgan (Morgan Lewis) has the film-making delusions of Cecil B de Mille. As Bernie (Bernadette Regan) withdraws inexorably up the wall, they simply trash the place, and her good intentions.
It’s a really imaginative use of the space; and there’s a strong sense of a Legs on the Wall-style physical theatre to enhance the text. But the problem is that it all happens twice. Second time round it seems as though everybody’s banging a door as they fail to conclude yet another illogical argument. And the music gets louder. Only the front row of little Nunga girls lying on mattresses is still giggling.
It had been lovely to see these girls earlier working with the UTP company in the community centre square—girls tumbling, boys rapping, everybody line dancing. All wore Access All Areas/Artist tags; they were on the team. The audience wore coloured ribbons, denoting a group to be taken on tour by one of the community participants on the project. Ironically, single mum Karina seemed a whole lot better supported by the resources of the Parks Centre than Bernie. Maybe a way out is possible?
Urban Theatre Projects, The Longest Night, director Alicia Talbot, sound Rose Turtle, The Parks Community Centre, Angle Park, Adelaide Festival 2002, March 2-10.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 6
© Jeremy Eccles; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
The only real hope for a sustainable future involves a creative synthesis of the arts and the sciences to develop new ways of meeting our needs and our hopes.
Ian Lowe, “Bringing Art and Science Together”, conVerge, catalogue, Art Gallery of South Australia, 2002.
Lowe’s words are lettered on the wall of the conVerge exhibition highlighting the theme “Where art and science meet” and emphasising the role of artists as explorers, commentators and mediators of technology and its impacts. It declares an interest beyond the simple theme of art influenced by science, and focuses—in theory at least—on the benefits of cross-disciplinarity and the advantages of collaboration. The accompanying catalogue essays all advocate attempts to transcend the traditional boundaries between the 2 fields as they are usually perceived, that is, as opposing and mutually exclusive. This, it is ambitiously proposed, will aid in the development of a more complete understanding of the world we inhabit and the complex interrelationships at work within it.
This holistic approach is illustrated by the inclusion of the large Ngurrara canvas 1 and Marrawarra and Jila by artists of the Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency that introduce the viewer to the exhibition. They are neither visually nor conceptually what is expected in an exhibition about ‘science.’ Characterising “Indigenous Knowledge” as a “science engagement” initially seems a contortion. Their incorporation however makes more sense in light of this conception of science as a culturally specific knowledge system rather than a discrete field of knowledge, although the commitment to such an approach is belied (and the works possibly reduced to tokenism?) by the other works in the exhibition which do not take such a conceptually broad approach.
Many of these works utilise elements associated with popular conceptions of science: light and sound effects, computer-generated images and robotics. The scientific theme is therefore most apparent in execution and their overly technological ‘look’ tends to reduce them to illustrations rather than excavations of their respective issues. Adam Donovan’s Perimetry involves a tripod-mounted camera, sensitive to movement, that swivels to follow visitors as they move around the gallery. It might speak of surveillance and control, but its straightforward presentation, and the fact that it was produced as the result of Donovan’s residency at the Defence Science and Technology Organisation, renders the instrument gadget-like, more suited to the curiosities of a science centre. Pig Wings, by Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr and Guy Ben-Ary, is a recreated laboratory in which pig bone tissue is being grown in the shape of wings. Pertinent as the issues it raises are—the cloistered laboratory could easily be cultivating animal organs for use in humans—the work seems to be merely the simple transplantation of equipment from a scientific location to an art-specific one. Fascinating though the experiment is, the focus remains prosaic.
Patricia Piccinini engages with similar issues in her work Synthetic Organism 2 (SO2): The Siren Mole, though she bridges the art/science divide more skillfully. Her invented creature, the blind and lumpy Siren Mole, is presented in a museum/zoo-style display case, complete with droppings and an artificial backdrop. These specimens are accompanied by 3 large photographs that document the creature in a laboratory, which, as the catalogue notes, is its natural habitat. A (literally) constructed animal, the Siren Mole is presented as a consequence of genetic manipulation, not an abstract “what if?”, but its result. Piccinini has brought the technology to life, and in doing so withdraws the luxury we now have of being able to speculate on our reactions to invented life.
The majority of works are based on current controversial issues. Martin Walch explores the aftermath of mining in Over written/Under written, which profiles the landscape of the Mount Lyell mine in Tasmania. Whilst Walch is more interested in the apocalyptic scenery as the “new wilderness” than an explicit condemnation of the associated degradation, the photographs he exhibits are as strong as environmental campaign images. Their presentation, however, avoids such documentary sensationalism: peering through eyepieces at the illuminated stereo photographs, housed in wall-mounted packing cases, the viewer is transported by the vivid miniature detail of the enclosed world. The convergence of man and nature is undeniably illustrated in the ‘wilderness’ that is left after human intervention.
In a time when emotions have been reduced to chemicals and personality is determined by genetic sequence, Justine Cooper’s Transformers is a dynamic and mesmerising exploration of identity and individuality. Various constituents that distinguish a person—faces, fingerprints, DNA—are projected on the 2 sides of a long tent like structure. These are combined with poetry and statements that explore personality and the factors that act upon it: “I feel more Chinese because I am phenotypically Chinese”; “I believe that over 60% of our personality is determined by genes.”
The predominance of technology-based works mean that certain others do not fit. Jason Hampton’s small illustrative paintings such as Kidney Problems in Aboriginal Australia have now Reached Epidemic Proportions, combine intricate Aboriginal imagery with computer graphics. Although his illustrations of a biological analysis of Aboriginal health are engaging, the works are too small and too detailed to be carefully considered amongst the many large installation works. Fiona Hall’s Cell Culture is also in alien surroundings, with its quiet, expressive and decidedly un-technological exploration of DNA modification. Hall has created beaded and plastic animals whose various body parts have been replaced with Tupperware containers, highlighting the focus on ‘usefulness’ that directs much research.
The disparate nature of the works undermines the coherence of the exhibition, though this is possibly the result of its being organised by an 8-person ‘working group’ (rather than curators). While the stated focus is both pertinent and commendable, the works fail to accord with it. It is interesting, and enlightening, to compare the 2 disciplines, their associated structures of knowledge and methodologies, and to realise the potential that collaboration offers. In conVerge, however, the meeting of art and science remains conflicted.
Adelaide Biennial, conVerge: Where Art and Science Meet, Art Gallery of South Australia, March 1 – April 25
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 6-7
© Jena Woodburn; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
mik la vage
photo Paul Armour
mik la vage
OTIS looks like a piece of glorified junk. Soldered out of salvaged scrap metal, it is an instrument that epitomizes analogue in the raw, demands to be played and necessitates the gesture of performance. Yet as musician mik la vage begins to draw his electric drill towards the iron strings, it is the hidden mechanics that reconstitute the sound we hear, replayed and looped with delays and harmonies created out of sight. This is analogue-metal-machine-noise: stretched, tortured and affected by technology. It was one of the more graphic images of the Analogue 2 Digital (A2D) Electronic Music Conference in Adelaide Fringe 2002.
Machine sounds, whether music, noise or function, have infiltrated the sonic landscape in the way that Front 242 back-ends a Nutrigrain advert, the Rolling Stones have sold out to Microsoft and before you know it Dead or Alive have given a motorcar manufacturer the rights to their one-hit wonder, You spin me right round baby. Too many TV ads can spin anyone’s ideas around, but where the soundtrack to our lives ends up cannot be taken for granted.
A2D explored not so much the where or the why, but how electronic music got to be where it is. Running over 3 days at Adelaide University, it was divided into forums (Talk the Walk), artist presentations, (From Blips to Beeps) and workshops (Digging in the Digital Dirt).
If one were to create the soundtrack to A2D, held at a tumultuous time in Adelaide’s cultural calendar, it must include the shiver of the visiting Queen’s wave, the stomps of Indigenous dance performers on the Adelaide Festival opening night, the whoosh of the stunt trapeze and the beer-swilling rock rumblings of university Orientation week.
The presentation by participating artist Kaffe Matthews emphasised even more these all-encompassing elements of our acoustic space. During her improvised performance, the boisterous O-week enthusiasts could be heard loudly through the cinema walls. Whilst the audience were obviously distracted by this ‘interruption’, Matthews finished by explaining that she hoped her mikes had picked up the sounds and incorporated them. She creates her performances by taking minute recordings of her surroundings, whether they be Danish squats or London art galleries, effecting them live using a laptop and LISA (a program created at Dutch music institution STEIM) and creating lush sonic soundscapes permeated with crackles and techno-esque beats.
Matthews spoke about her journey through music, from her early MIDI violin performances to her collaboration with acoustic pioneer Alan Lamb and her current work. She has been ‘playing’ LISA since 1986, and despite only working with a laptop, has been ‘studying her instrument’ just as one would an acoustic instrument.
A recurring and, for many, redundant topic was: can electronic music be played live and debated in such forums as Attack of the DAT? Kate Crawford put it well when she said electronic music demanded to be appreciated as a new aesthetic. But for most of the already tech-savvy audience, machine-made music is not a lightbulb idea, and certainly not fleshy enough to be debated for an entire session.
A more interesting area of contention is the changing nature of the recording and mastering process in the digital age. Stephen Wittington, Eyespine and Jesse Reynolds discussed this in a Digital Sound Formats forum, pointing out that the process of digital recording has, on the one hand, eliminated the mistakes (or glitches), yet numerous musicians are still hell bent on recreating the hiss of a faulty speaker or the crackle of vinyl. Many fetishists out there are still obsessed with incorporating the ghost in the machine.
Wade Marynowsky gave a refreshing presentation of his audio-visual software created using MAX and NATO. Performing as Spanky, his sounds are accessible and beat-driven, triggering images of post-apocalyptic environmental destruction, colonial bravado and mutated textures. Here we can see the music.
Wax Sound Media and Andrew Kettle joined festival hopper Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, in the Soundscapes discussion about audio installations and sound ‘art.’ I was lucky to catch Scanner’s Stories form the Market Place commissioned for the Adelaide Festival. With performance group Para//elo, Scanner captured the energy and vitality of the Central Market, a wonderful piece of Adelaide’s cultural history.
The forum Collectives with Kate Crawford, The Bird and Kenny Sabir, discussed issues addressing the culture of music. In places such as Sydney, rivalry and politics can lead to the sad demise of many inspirational music initiatives, but the Adelaide participants felt their city was small enough to not necessitate any formalised electronic music collectives. The forum debated the rapid rate at which tools, especially computer-based programs, are created by large companies. Are the people who create these products actually using them? Do composers have time to become proficient on them before the next model is churned out for a quick buck?
Far from breaking any rules, the Electronic Concert Series, held in the stately Elder Hall, showcased the diversity of electronic musical instruments from an almost historical perspective. In a fantastic collaboration, Brisbane’s Topology and Loops combined an orchestral piece with recordings of radio transmissions, tracing the medium backwards from seminal voice recordings of Lindy Chamberlain, Nelson Mandela and Winston Churchill to Marconi’s 1901 broadcast: contact through the ether.
Another ‘historical’ performance, synapse, dating back to 1976, used a PDP-11 computer ‘interacting’ with a live performer. Composed by MIT founder Barry Vascoe, it was an interesting precursor to his current project audio spotlight which projects sound and image onto the viewer from a narrow spotlight. Other performances included wish, by Stevie Wishart and her hurdygurdy, as well as Tristam Carey, Jon Rose and synergy by Martin Ng and Jim Denley.
It was at the closing night party, 2002AD, at Adelaide’s Minke Bar that the current state of digital music was ultimately celebrated. Held in collaboration with the trickster VJ class, the night showcased over 20 acts including Scanner, The Bird, Ollie Olson, Spanky, Sub Bass Snarl and a host of Adelaide acts such as DJ trIP, froST and Kristan Thomas. During a dance performance a few days later, the speaker exploded three quarters of the way into the piece. To be honest, I didn’t really notice. I just thought that the composer had succeeded in replicating speaker hiss exceptionally well. Long live the new flesh.
Analogue 2 Digital, Electronic Music Conference, Adelaide Fringe, Feb 28-March 2.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 7
© Joni Taylor; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Gavin Malone, Driveway
photo Philip Hind
Gavin Malone, Driveway
Originally conceived of as an annex to the more ‘legitimate’ Adelaide Festival, the Fringe has this year seemingly surpassed it in both popularity and visibility. While the Adelaide Festival had attracted controversy since it announced that there would be no specific visual arts program, the Fringe’s visual arts content was, as usual, plentiful, dynamic and varied. Though its all-welcome policy can result in a notoriously hit-and-miss program, in which the works are as diverse in standard as in content, the anything-goes atmosphere aroused a sort of undiscriminating enjoyment in which critical analysis became almost redundant.
Fringe exhibitions were hosted in unorthodox locations: hotels, cafes and pubs, public spaces, shop windows, attached to the bars of carparks, the gardens and driveways of people’s homes. Oscar Ferreiro’s Skidmarks was based in various suburban service stations, where viewers directed by a list on the internet could examine patterns of tyre marks left by speeding cars. The Driveway project involved private driveways and backyards displaying works viewed on a walking tour. Held over 3 weekends, viewers visited houses around Adelaide, watching artists cutting the lawn with scissors or transforming garden sheds with lightboxes and webs of plastic.
In its own version of the lonely hearts database, Fringe organisers connected prospective exhibitors with venues—the ensuing assignations ranged from successful to dubious. Hindley Street and its surrounds were the focus in the city, which is demonstrative of the success of recent pressure to re-create the formerly seedy west end as the “Arts End.” Not for white cube devotees, exhibitions were held in hotels, shops and clubs, in the cinema and in shabby, disused buildings. Results were mixed: a venue such as the Novotel was eminently suitable for the classy Passion Pop, a collection of ceramics and glass, as well as the beautiful Anangu Pitjantjatjara silks that floated in its foyer. In contrast, the many cafe and club settings, as they often do, tended to undermine the artistic merit of displayed works, relegating them to decoration.
The Fringe’s ability—and willingness—to incorporate a variety of work saw it encompass such diverse showings as the Helpmann Academy exhibition of art school graduates, and From The Inside, a collection of works by Aboriginal people in jail. Exhibitions such as the rigorously theoretical, concept-driven photographs of Polyopia’s Mise au Point contrasted with the emphasis on technique and naturalistic aesthetic of the many craft-oriented shows. All the exhibitions reinforced this sense of diversity, as the viewer indulged in an almost gluttonous consumption.
Adelaide Fringe, Visual Arts Program, various locations, Feb 5 – March 17
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 8
© Jena Woodburn; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Sue Broadway, Jeff Turpin
Having already revealed her circus talents in the Lunar Tent at the Garden of Earthly Delights, Sue Broadway, one of the founding members of the internationally celebrated Circus Oz, now takes us back through the generations of her vaudeville family. The show is part tribute and part parody. As her great-great-aunt Elsie used to say: “A mistake is an opportunity.” There are lots of those, and lots of manifestations of the versatile ancestor appearing as the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and tripling as Miss Muffet, the spider and the tuffet.
Elsie, Australia’s own Lola Montez, shone during the Gold Rush days of Bendigo, and in a variety of tights, boots and unusual corsetry, Broadway makes her entrances and strikes an attitude. Here we have an elaborately laced Black Swan drowning in her crinoline to the strains of Tchaikovsky, only to emerge from a tent metamorphosed into a saucy little beach-belle. Jeff Turpin plays straight man, or in this case horse, to her increasingly outrageous antics. She balances peacock feathers on her nose, makes her belly do awful things and starts the juggling acts and ‘object manipulations’ which are the show’s core.
But it’s when she strides on as a horned Valkyrie with a few additions from Oxford Street that schoolchildren, sober matrons and scribbling critics howl with laughter, a collective fit only increased by the appearance of Jeff in similar gear styled for gents. Together they make wicked music on their steel naughty bits, Sue teasingly tickling a tin breast to make it chime, and Jeff innocently experimenting with the number of cones he can remove from his phallus until they fly though the air and get a good juggling. The combination of Mozart and Fellini produces lovely echoes of Papageno and Giulietta degli Spiriti. It also reminds us just how vital the tradition of music hall has been. The stage set, a lush little affair of red velvet curtains and peacock feathers, readily adapts into a screen on which other great vaudevilleans strut their stuff. George Wallace does his celebrated falling dance. Roy Rene crashes Society. Little Tich performs his marvellous leaning routines, and Broadway demonstrates how he did it with his special shoes. Slides of her own family on the road also blazon out the trademark name, besides alluding gently to personal pains and cute little mothers with bobbed hair.
The penultimate act is a tearjerker from another dimension, where primly costumed housewives pour themselves tea from pots, saucers and cups on the head, predictably ending up with brown liquid pouring in a fountain-effect over the face. The slightly miffed performer consoled herself by taking no chances with the sugar bowl. I’d say she got in at least 2 lumps before politely offering iced vovos to the audience. The WOW FINISH deserved its name, with both performers animating the whole stage with spinning plates, flying clubs, magic dishes and their pure Variety.
Sue Broadway & Jeff Turpin, Eccentric Acts, The Union, The Hub, Adelaide Fringe 2002, February 22 – March 16
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 8
© Noel Purdon; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Roger Wilkins, NSW Director-General of Arts
Director-General of the Arts. It’s a grand title. Its possessor, Roger Wilkins, doesn’t, however, sport epaulettes but rather, a bow tie and a quiet, urbane demeanour. He once studied and taught law and philosophy. His burning arts passions are music, mainly classical and jazz. He learned piano and the pipe organ. He has a particular interest in German literature, poetry and plays. He is Cabinet Secretary to the NSW Government and Director-General of Arts, heading the NSW Ministry for the Arts. My primary interest in meeting Wilkins is to gauge his awareness of the health (or not) of the arts in NSW and to see how policy shapes the government’s vision for the arts. It seems I’ve come to the right man.
Policy & action
“My pre-eminent background is in public policy,” says Wilkins. “I’ve been head of the Cabinet office for about 7 years and I’ve worked across a huge range of public policy issues for the last 10-15 years, from policy on greenhouse gases to health and education. In the Cabinet office I have special units on biotechnology, on drugs strategy, salinity and branches involved in social policy, legal policy, justice, competition.” What excites Wilkins about his role is “the capacity to influence major directions in terms of the future of Australia and New South Wales…If I didn’t I would have gone back and practiced private law or something like that.”
Wilkins still reads philosophy: “I’m excited by ideas and my interest in taking over the Ministry for the Arts was precisely that. I approached the Premier and said I wanted to do this job…I think it’s an index of civilization how the arts and culture fare in a society, and governments, particularly in this country, haven’t recognised the centrality of arts and culture. By that I mean not simply some of those arguments about increasing gross domestic product and economic activity, tourism potential, getting more people through the gate and so on. You’ve got to drill a bit deeper to understand…The arts really is the forum in which important values and ideas play themselves out and that’s a bit of an imponderable, difficult to explain to Treasury.”
Mapping the arts
Clearly Wilkins thinks he can do something for the arts: “it’s an issue which over the last 12 months I’ve been talking to a lot of people about, pre-eminently the Premier of course, as he’s Minister for the Arts. The first thing you need to have is some fairly clear sense of direction. That doesn’t mean you sit on your hands for 3 years while you plan, but it does mean that you need to rebuild your boat while you’re floating a little. You need to develop a framework for action. The arts is no different from a lot of areas of policy which I see from where I sit. There’s a degree of the ad hoc, a degree of isolation from other activities in society just because people build boundaries around bureaucratic territories…
“So, it’s important to build better frameworks for policy so that when you intervene…for example, do something about the MCA or Performance Space…it’s not simply because somebody came through the door with a problem. You need to understand how that fits into a much larger picture…what the issue was that they came through the door about. Ostensibly it might be a question of money but that’s the symptom. You need to understand where that’s coming from and how it fits into a total picture. So I think the challenge for arts agencies is to get that picture. What I’ve been doing for the last 12 months is trying to understand the topography of these issues a little better.”
Whole of government
Perhaps then, thinking of maps, Wilkins’ role as Cabinet Secretary gives the arts a better route than it’s had before between ministry and minister? “I don’t think that’s the point of it. Evan Williams [the former Arts Secretary] and the Premier were always closely co-operating. The value I think I can probably add as a Cabinet Secretary is the ‘whole of government’ approach, which means that for whatever reason I probably have better entree to other CEOs and I can readily talk to and get co-operation from people like State Development, Education, Planning and even the Justice Department. You can begin to examine areas of common interest and mutual benefit. You can begin to build joint programs and to think, for example, are we really making the best use of the money that we’re spending in the arts from an educational point of view and vice versa.”
Wilkins sees his position as presenting opportunities to explain that the arts is not simply for an elite and is not marginal to government policy. He points to the Premier’s crime prevention initiatives emerging from analysis of specific problems in different communities: “a lot of the solutions don’t just come from more police and better law enforcement, they come from a variety of programs designed to address a whole bunch of social issues…part of which is getting people more involved in cultural and artistic activities and using that as a lever of policy. Not that I’m advocating a purely utilitarian approach to the arts but there are areas where you can get a win win.”
Initiatives & policy
I ask Wilkins where arts initiatives emanate from and how they relate to policy. Western Sydney received $23.6 million earlier this year for the arts, primarily in capital development—refurbished theatres, arts centres and galleries, new multi-arts spaces—building on earlier funding and paid for this time from a stamp duty surplus.
For Wilkins, policy development has many sources. “Initiatives about arts and culture almost inevitably do come through the Ministry but that doesn’t mean that the Ministry necessarily thinks them all up. You might be responding to some problem, the Premier and the Premier’s office ring down and say that they want something to happen. They may come out of Cabinet. They may come out of the Parliamentary system and the Ministry system, from the private sector…or the arts and culture sector.”
Wilkins sees the Ministry as providing a framework in which these initiatives can operate, where the ideas behind them can make sense. The Western Sydney initiative he sees as “a nice mix…it’s policy opportunism in a way but it’s informed by the fact that you had done your homework and you did understand what infrastructure was required out there. And people in the Ministry had done that [work] over a period of time. Policy development—and I’ve seen a lot of it—is having a good appreciation of the topography, having a framework of policy within which you want to act, but then spotting windows of opportunity and when you see them, you go through. That’s very important. There’s a degree of entrepreneurship and opportunism in policy.”
In Sydney’s west it must also involve new levels of involvement of local councils in the arts, especially once the new facilities are up and running and require content. Wilkins sees the initiatives as providing leverage to encourage local government not only to make sure the venues are used, but to be involved in cultural planning more generally: “So it gives you entree into a whole extra level of policy development.”
At this point in the conversation I’m sensing an apparent gap between, on the one hand, the broad principle that the arts is good for a society and, on the other, the pragmatic responsiveness of arts initiatives. There are countries that have arts, even artform policies (as Denmark has for music), realised as acts of Parliament. Wilkins is disapproving: “there is a danger in hankering after what’s called ‘the arts policy’ as if it’s some tablet handed down from Mt Sinai. That’s not the way good policy develops. [I’ll give you] a couple of good examples from outside of the arts area, both with this current government. One is natural resources policy. The Premier has actually pushed a lot of initiatives on things like salinity, native vegetation clearing, water reform…In a sense, they start off as separate instances of initiatives that people want to embark on. You begin to see that they come together. There’s something that all these things have in common. There’s a story you can tell about how they coalesce into a coherent policy which then drives further work. So there’s a type of iterative process between doing sensible things in particular areas, then drawing them together and saying, hey there’s an overall direction we want to move in. This has been successful. We want to push it further. Very rarely do you see it…
“With the drug strategy, it was ready to happen, if you like. It was ready when people and politicians started talking about the demand side rather than the supply side of the drug problem, which is what the Drug Summit was all about. That’s how policy gets made. It’s sort of like a big jigsaw puzzle where you begin to discern what the puzzle is about and then you begin to discern what the gaps are about. The major difference from a jigsaw puzzle is that it’s not static, it’s dynamic. It keeps moving about.”
Giving direction
“Having said that, I think there is a need to give leadership and to articulate policy directions…It would be to say, for example, that we think we really want to spend the next 5 years concentrating on all aspects of the performing arts. We want to actually get that jigsaw of problems and issues and opportunities sorted. If you give that sort of signal, a lot of people will start coming out of the woodwork, talking to you about it. Opportunities will begin to make themselves. Particularly if someone like the Premier gets behind it. I just use that as a hypothetical example. So it’s a question of giving policy direction more than anything else. And you do it by example. You don’t just say things, you do things.”
A Ministry for the job?
The question then arises, is the Ministry for the Arts sufficiently well equipped for Wilkins’ vision of responsiveness and policy-making? He thinks so: “It’s an impressive organisation that I inherited. What I’ll say about it is not a criticism. It’s actually just saying where I think we could crank things up a notch. First of all, I think it should be basically about policy, and good public policy. It probably is a bit short of staff. It has been preoccupied with processing grants at the expense of people having time to spend on policy. I think it needs to be a little more active in terms of making an agenda…at a national level…and within State government, across portfolios.” Wilkins would like the Ministry “to get interested in curriculum and syllabus and what the education department is doing. I think we need to do a lot more work with local government in terms of looking at the opportunities there to broker regional cooperation. I think we need to talk to institutions and give them more strategic leadership in terms of the government saying what they expect…” He is concerned that without precise time frames and numbers “you end up with memoranda of understanding which are sort of motherhood things.” He would also like relationships between the Ministry and clients to be on a firmer footing: “I don’t see in a lot of cases why we don’t have longer term funding arrangements with people. Once again, that’s another example of where things are a bit ad hoc. People come in year after year and get a little bit of funding and they don’t know even one month before the end of the year whether they’re going to make it. That strikes me as an odd financial arrangement if nothing else.”
Artform survival
While federal and state government initiatives in areas of youth, touring and regional and suburban development have been significant, there has been no increase in funding for basic artform activity for many years. In effect there are insufficient funds for survival let alone growth, with greater and greater gaps between projects for many artists and infrastructure organisations becoming less and less capable of offering support. It’s something that the late Richard Wherrett, who sat on the Ministry’s Advisory Committee, felt very strongly about; that basic artform funding had come to a standstill for a decade. Although sympathetic to the various initiatives (and some participating in them), many artists feel that support for research and development, the work in the laboratory, is an area governments are not interested in; it’s simply not politically opportune. Is this true?
Wilkins is sympathetic. “In essence, I agree with you…On any analysis of the way in which artforms prosper and develop you have to say that if the R and D end of the spectrum, the laboratory, if you like, is having problems, then the artform has a problem. So I think when you ask does government understand that, I certainly understand that and I think the Premier appreciates that. We understand where the R and D end of the spectrum fits into the overall health of the artform and how it can contribute to a pluralism of ideas and of activity.
“What you do about the current problems is fairly clear cut. And in another sense, that would just feed into a conventional government funding program. What you need to do, for example with the performing arts, is to look at infrastructure—but it’s an expansive concept. It means basically making sure that everything from the space in which to perform to organisations to help produce, organisations to help create marketing opportunities and audience development, that all of that is in place for people to take advantage of.”
A case in point: Performance Space
“And you know we’ve been talking to [Artistic Director] Fiona Winning and Performance Space [about the future home of the organisation]. It’s about finding some key organisations of that sort [to work together] which you then say, well, we are comfortable that you know what you’re doing and we’re going to back you on this. And I think that that is really one thing that government should be doing, and one thing that we are trying to do.
“We’d like to do something about Eveleigh [the former railway Carriage Works in Redfern including Technology Park and an undeveloped site formerly managed by Company B Belvoir and now temporarily housing some small performance companies]. I think the boss will be keen to do something on that. It’s a question of money, of budget priorities. I can’t forecast…But we’re certainly keen to do something about it if possible.”
Recently, Rupert Myer, who is chairing the Visual Arts Inquiry, announced that there would be “no pot of gold” at the end of the inquiry. Similar noises have been coming from the Small to Medium companies and organisations inquiry. There have been more than hints that the solutions to arts problems will be found in improved networking, improvements to infrastructure (did any mergers come out of Nugent?) and tax deals for artists. While these could be valuable, I insist to Wilkins that they simply don’t address basic artform funding levels. While it might be good to have a new building for Performance Space and other organisations dealing with the contemporary arts (Wilkins interrupts: “Not only a building, Keith. I would like to see them playing a much more active role in the development of that sector”) the issue currently is what work can Performance Space program when so many projects go unfunded?
Falling between governments
For Wilkins this raises a key issue, the relationship between the Australia Council and the state arts ministries. Once upon a time the former looked after the product and the other the infrastructure, but those lines have long blurred as the states have taken on more and more arts responsibility. The pressure is on for the states to make up for what the limited budget of the Australia Council can’t do and there’s widespread feeling, especially in NSW, that Council and the states are quite out of sync. Wilkins thinks that “there needs to be an accommodation, an agreement at federal level. The Nugent Report was an example of the first time anyone’s thought, in a sense, about the roles and responsibilities of different levels of government in relation to arts practice. So it’s a move in the right direction. You need to get some sort of arrangement or agreement like that in relation to the small to medium companies and in terms of the visual arts as well…At the moment, you have inefficiency between different levels of government. And I’ve done a lot of work on federalism in a lot of policy areas and I’ve got to say that at its best it’s a whole bunch of people sitting around and saying they should cooperate more. At its worst, it’s a whole bunch of people sitting around saying they’re not going to cooperate…If [the states are to provide] infrastructure, there’s got to be some arrangement about the production and the projects that are going to be given life through that infrastructure.”
Although he won’t be drawn on what plan of action he’ll recommend if the various inquiries come to nought, Wilkins thinks “it’s probably true that the answer lies in doing things more efficiently between levels of government and some injection of extra funding…At a state level we’re looking at getting more money into the grants system. That’s going to be an issue worked out through the budget process. So I don’t know if there will be extra money, but really the critical thing I come back to is public policy, good frameworks and an understanding of what you want to do.”
On the plight of small to medium dance projects and companies in NSW (a distinctly sensitive pressure point in the federal-state relationship), Wilkins pinpoints the issues of sufficient studio space and “the capacity to allow the development of choreography in this country. So probably we need another 1 or 2 small dance companies where people can get more opportunities…That probably won’t break the bank…A propos of that, what you find in arts and cultural policy is how much you can actually achieve with a very small amount of money compared with a lot of the other policy areas I work in.”
Off the map
A little buoyed by some of the possibilities that Wilkins has hinted at I say, “So we can look forward to art that nourishes and challenges and is not only sustainable but grows?” Wilkins reply is interesting, if unexpected, taking us back into unmapped terrain—what can be done for the arts outside of direct funding. In his experience in other areas of public policy “the point of funding people is normally not so they just stay on the government teat. What you normally would try and do would be to find some way of setting them free. I would have thought especially in the arts more than anywhere else that people would be suspicious of government funding, given the track record of some regimes. So it’s a question, Keith, and I’m not talking about withdrawal of funds or making the pie smaller, of how should we interact in terms of grant funding? I’ve said to my people we’re sort of picking winners…One of the things I’d like to investigate without threatening anybody is to look at what other models there might be. I don’t feel comfortable choosing what people put on.”
This takes us back to the arts map and how to read it in order to make the most of it. It’s something that Terry Cutler, the Australia Council Chair, raised in our RealTime interview with him [RT45 page 6]. Cutler’s involved in the federal government cluster study of new media infrastructure and networking in Australia. Wilkins says that, “One of the people who’s impressed me in the last few months is Simon Roodhouse [Research Professor, Faculty of Arts Science & Education, Bolton Institute] from the UK. He came out here and talked about what seemed interesting to me at the time…Looking at the [arts] topography, audits of artistic or cultural activity…you begin to find that there’s a great deal more activity than you actually understood was going on. Then you can begin to see ways in which people can cooperate to their own mutual benefit. And we don’t do enough of that here. We don’t do enough lateral thinking.”
The good news
A few weeks after I’d interviewed Roger Wilkins, it was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald (Bryce Hallett, “Railyard becomes arts central as theatre companies roll in”, March 21) that, “The Eveleigh Carriage Works in Redfern is to become a new inner city performing arts hub with the State Government’s announcement that it would buy the site from State Rail for $15m. The Carriage Works and blacksmith’s shop will become a permanent home for companies such as Legs on the Wall, Theatre Kantanka and Stalker Theatre…In addition to offices and rehearsal studios, a contemporary performance space is also planned for the site.” This is exciting news for the performance community, now eagerly waiting to hear what kind of role Performance Space might play in this significant development.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 9-1
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Kristian Burford, Photo courtesy of the artist, 2001.
photo courtesy of the artist, 2001.
Kristian Burford, Photo courtesy of the artist, 2001.
Kathryn who is thirteen years old, is staying after school at her grandparent’s house. It is nine o’clock on a November evening. She has escaped the company of her grandparents to play with her grandmothers’ cat, which is a queen named Lucy, by moving into the sunroom of her grandparent’s house. After some minutes of happily petting the cat it has turned on Kathryn, penetrating the skin of her left index finger with its fangs and raising three lines of skin on her left wrist with the claws of its left paw. In response to Lucy’s attack, Kathryn has grabbed at the cat in an effort to disentangle herself from it. She has been fortunate enough to find the cat’s collar with three fingers of her right hand. This has allowed her sufficient purchase on Lucy’s slippery form to remove the cat to the carpeted floor of the sunroom. Kathryn has placed her injured finger in her mouth so as to contain her pain and her blood. She has then recognised that she has wet herself and has, simultaneously, taken the finger from her mouth. 2001. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Artist Profile: Kristian Burford
Burford makes life-size, hyperrealistic sculptures of figures, installing them in often painstakingly constructed ‘sets’, usually creations of domestic settings. These figures typically appear naked or only very partially clothed, and might all…be seen as having in various ways lost or given up, if only for a moment, their self-control. ….
So far as Burford wants us to look at his work as if it is life, rather than art, he places us in an awkward situation, witnessing, discovering typically private sexual acts in an intimate situation. Still, it’s hard to think of this as voyeuristic since the depicted figures do not answer, even unwittingly, the gaze of the voyeur with their own. They are self-possessed, their awareness is directed inwards. Michael Newall
Kristian Burford received an Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship in 1998 and is currently undertaking the graduate program at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. He was a finalist in both the inaugural Helen Lempriere National Sculpture award in 2001 and the inaugural National Sculpture Award at the National Gallery of Australia. He was recently included in Morbid Curiosity at ACME in Los Angeles and will be exhibiting at New York’s 1-20 Gallery in April.
Excerpt and biographical note from Michael Newall, “Kristian Burford: Wish Fulfilment”, Broadsheet. Vol 31. No 1, March-May, 2002. Reproduced with the permission of the author and the publisher, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 11
© Michael Newall; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Lyndall Jones, Aqua Profunda
The 2002 Perth International Arts Festival (PIAF) was the third in Director Sean Doran’s quartet of themed festivals based upon the elements (Water in 2000, Earth in 2001, Air in 2002 and Fire completing the cycle in 2003)—a somewhat banal thematic structure, but one broad enough to allow for lateral interpretation. This year’s theme of Air inspired the title Slipstream for Visual Arts Manager Sophie O’Brien’s second consecutive PIAF visual arts festival.
O’Brien faced a considerable challenge curating a program relevant to a city whose visual arts scene is currently suffering something of a lull, due in part to a severe lack of art criticism combined with a dearth of exhibition spaces after a year fraught with gallery closures. In keeping with the general state of all-pervading apathy, Slipstream was the least-hyped visual arts festival in several years, but perhaps the most ambitious in terms of content, with a focus on research-based projects and ephemera. O’Brien seemed to have interpreted the theme primarily in terms of space—the marginalised and changing social spaces we inhabit and the space between things.
Slipstream featured a marked focus on large-scale audio-visual installation, headlined by War and Peace, at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery. Comprising 2 installations by Lyndal Jones— Aqua Profunda, produced for the 2001 Venice Biennale, and 1996’s Spitfire 1,2,3—the exhibition was so good it’s difficult to believe the works were not created to be shown together. This was my first encounter with Jones’ work, and I was blown away by the sheer scale of the undertaking, combined with the relative novelty of an audio-visual installation requiring more of its audience than passively watching a screen. Spitfire 1,2,3 demands its viewer engage physically with the space in order to switch between 2 alternate soundtracks (one ambient music, the other spoken word) heard through headphones. Featuring dizzying aerial footage of the British countryside taken from the cabin of a Spitfire fighter jet, the work is remarkable in drawing the viewer’s attention to their own body in space. Aqua Profunda’s footage of constantly shifting reflections on water and the vertiginous bobbing of ferries, contrasted with intimate imagery of a woman speaking abstractedly of love and desire, effectively renders any single reading of the work impossible. Rather, Jones creates a space for shifting meanings, an abstract meditation on states of desire.
Research-based projects inevitably run the risk of falling short in a gallery context, as was the case with Multiplicity (Paris-Perth) at the Moores Building, part of European collective Multiplicity’s ongoing documentation of the changing use of urban environments. Despite only having 4 days in WA in which to work, the group successfully tapped into some of the specific racial tensions of Perth’s surrounding suburbs. In particular, a series of surveillance photographs following an anonymous Asian man from a non-descript suburban house, across town to his workplace in an industrial area, cleverly played upon the contradictions of racial otherness in a city that is closer to South East Asia than the rest of Australia. Ultimately, however, the cavernous Moores Building seems to have proven simply too vast a space for the group to fill in 4 days.
At PICA, Elvis Has Just Left the Building explored contemporary urban legends. I was disappointed by the show, given the subversive potential of the theme in a climate of post-September 11 global paranoia. Despite an intriguing mix of international exhibitors and highlights such as Ann-Sofi Siden’s mock horror-movie preview, The Clocktower (presenting her iconic protagonist, the Queen of Mud in an inner-city setting), the exhibition as a whole was not especially engaging.
Slipstream proved notable in showcasing emerging West Australian talent, with the majority of local contributors still in the early stages of their careers. Parallel Worlds, showing consecutively in an inner-city high-rise office space and International Art Space Kelleberrin in the WA wheatbelt, primarily featured recent graduates. Whilst the 2-venue curatorial premise was intriguing, I felt the show was unresolved in contextualising its venues—the capitalist associations of the metropolitan venue worked well, but there was something a little obvious in setting this up in opposition to a country town. Despite this, exhibitors produced some of the best works of their collective careers. In particular, Susan Flavell’s mattress landscapes and Pearl Rasmussen’s collaboration with illustrator Danny Armstrong were some of the most ambitious works yet produced by these artists.
The high point of my festival was unquestionably The Divine Comedy at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, which juxtaposed the work of 3 highly disparate artists: Francisco Goya, Buster Keaton and William Kentridge. Curated by AGWA’s Curator of Contemporary Art, Trevor Smith, the exhibition successfully linked 3 artists who really have very little in common, bar the project of social critique through surrealism. AGWA and Smith wowed the masses last year with their Robert McPherson Retrospective, but wisely chose to go low-key for 2002. The Divine Comedy was an intimate exhibition, reliant upon subtle juxtaposition (the raucous musical accompaniment to a Kentridge animation providing a weird soundtrack to Keaton’s silent films projected in another part of the gallery, for example). The exhibition was a major curatorial accomplishment.
As an integrated visual arts festival, Slipstream proved a somewhat flawed, yet remarkably ambitious undertaking in the context of a festival (and city) that has traditionally held a performing arts focus. A slipstream is “an air current”, O’Brien tells us in the festival guide, “one that moves in a forward direction behind and with a moving object, creating an airflow strong enough to pull you in its wake.” While a more cynical writer might suggest that being pulled along blindly in a cultural vacuum is an apt metaphor for the current state of the visual arts in Perth, there is much to be said for the sheer ambition of Slipstream, and with O’Brien moving on to new projects this year, I hope that the legacy of her vision will be evident in the Fire festival next year.
Slipstream: 14 exhibitions across 12 venues: War and Peace, Lyndal Jones, curator John Barrett-Lennard, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Feb 8-March 31; Multiplicity (Paris-Perth), The Moores Building, Feb 2-24; Elvis Has Just Left The Building, curator Boris Kremer, PICA, Jan 25-Feb 24; Parallel Worlds , curator Kate McMillan, Carillion City Arcade, Jan 20-Feb 24 & International Art Space Kellerberrin, Jan 20-Feb 17; The Divine Comedy, curator Trevor Smith, Art Gallery of WA, Feb 7-May 26; 2002 Perth International Arts Festival, Jan 26-Feb 26.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 12
© Andrew Nicholls; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Damian Pitt and Ivan Sen
photo Mark Rogers
Damian Pitt and Ivan Sen
One of the innovations of this year’s Adelaide Festival was the inclusion of a number of new Australian films. The major triumph in the season was undoubtedly Ivan Sen’s first feature Beneath Clouds, one of the strongest and most deeply affecting films produced in this country.
The success of the film at the Berlin Film Festival, where it won awards for best debut feature and best new actress (for Dannielle Hall), signals Sen’s rapid ascent to international prominence. This rise has not been unearned, given his body of short and medium length works that also screened in Adelaide and provided a rich background for the feature film.
Another viewing context was the festival’s emphasis on Indigenous films and films on Indigenous issues. Beneath Clouds is a road movie dealing with the unlikely travelling companions Lena, a young woman running away from her Aboriginal background in search of an idealised Irish father, and Vaughn, a young Aboriginal man who breaks out of detention to see his dying mother. Over the course of little more than a day, they hitchhike from Moree to Sydney.
Sen is clearly conscious of his status as an Indigenous filmmaker, though he is also anxious to position the film as broadly accessible. He refers to his Aboriginal background as “something to be proud of, but also just a tag, a hook.” While his films represent a strongly personal and coherent insight into the experiences of Aboriginal youth in country towns, Sen also wants to generalise beyond this. He claims to be “always interested in people searching for something that makes them believe they belong somewhere.”
In discussions after the screening, Sen emphasised his interest in a sympathetic emotional engagement with characters: “I find it easy to see other people’s point-of-view,” he said, adding that his starting point for the film was that he “felt very close to both characters.” His aim was to “intensify the emotional journey of the characters to such a level that the audience will have no choice but to join them.”
The explosive emotional response to the film bears out the power of his filmmaking in bringing home the ways in which racially-derived pain is internalised. Sen says that, “I knew I wanted to create an emotion at the end of the film, but I didn’t know what the emotion was.”
Sen spoke of Beneath Clouds in terms of personal history and catharsis. Lena’s denial of her racial background has an autobiographical element, Vaughn’s character draws on the experience of a cousin. Themes, narrative fragments, and stylistic elements return from the earlier short films in a tightly condensed fashion. The 1998 film, Tears, features 2 characters named Vaughn and Lena walking a country road while the camera tracks laterally beside them. Sen wrote the feature script 4 years ago, and the retrospective of his shorts showed us the ways he has been sketching around it and honing the power of his craft.
Everything about Beneath Clouds speaks of sparseness and strength of vision. The characterisations are simple but unyielding. Lena and Vaughn suffer no bullshit. They have the close-mouthed scepticism of those on the margins. Anger chokes other emotion, but the project of the narrative is to ripen that anger to include emotions that will help the protagonists to re-find the possibilities for life.
Given the state of the world, and the way it leads you to withdraw from it, there is no neat or hopeful ending here, but there is the ability to understand your pain. This film emphasises the relevance of this to an understanding of Aboriginal youth culture: it also wants to help a broad audience imaginatively inhabit these situations and emotions.
In this light, Sen is clearly achieving work that is much more important than the liberal guilt melodrama prominent in some other recent films on Indigenous themes.
Stylistically, the film is equally uncompromising. Sen’s filming of conversation demonstrates his sureness of touch. No wide 2-shots, no over-the-shoulder shot-reverse shot. He symmetrically juxtaposes big bold close-ups. You access this film through faces. In discussing his casting decisions, Sen keeps on returning to the look of the people, their non-verbal aspect. Like Pasolini, or better yet Bresson, it’s an effective way of dealing with non-actors, but it’s also a strategy that’s about direct honesty. There is nowhere to dissemble or conjure away the harshness of the truth.
Those who have seen Sen’s 1999 film Wind, will know that he has the strength (rare among Australian filmmakers) to substitute a single reaction shot for 10 lines of dialogue. He refers to the substitution of other elements such as looks or diegetic sounds as a wish to “start simple before you introduce dialogue,” so that dialogue emerges as “a focused substance.” The 1997 AFTRS short, Warm Strangers, is the clearest example of this, building to the point where a single word is uttered at the climactic moment.
There is perhaps something of Sen’s own behavioural style here. The quietly-spoken director likes to tell the story of his High School yearbook that summed him up thus: “Ivan saw all, heard all, said little.” The publicity materials for Beneath Clouds source his interest in film to “the ability to represent the complexity of life in a whole different realm to that of the word.”
When pressed to generalise about his formal methods, Sen spoke of avoiding contrivance to achieve a more direct realism, but then qualified this to say that he was interested in forms of contrivance which produce something uncontrived.
The productiveness of this paradox is evident in his handling of landscape. He plays with the angular abstraction of the wide-angle lens, and compositions with the horizon ostentatiously low in the frame. The opening titles sequence, shot by Sen himself (he was also composer and musician for the soundtrack, as well as writing and directing), lays out this interest in finding patterns in land and sky in order to see it afresh and emotionalise it. He has pared down his methods of achieving abstraction from those found in earlier films which included fast motion, dissolves to an unmoved camera position and the manipulations of colour balance which are so striking in Wind.
Ivan Sen’s success is doubly important if it provides evidence that institutional policies aimed at producing new filmmakers in this country are working. He comes out of the Australian Film Television and Radio School, where he has become the central figure for a group of collaborators. These include cinematographer Allen Collins, producer Teresa-Jayne Hanlon and editor Karen Johnson. Sen and Collins, in particular, have built up a strong rapport. This has resulted in a very quiet set, according to Sen, where “our language becomes as simple as a look.”
Australian filmmakers rarely get such a chance to work consistently, and while we hear a lot about development pathways for emerging filmmakers, it is encouraging to see such a resounding example of success in development policy. This validation was particularly important given the controversy surrounding Australian Rules, which also premiered at the festival. We all know the problems of a film industry administered by government institutions, but it’s important to remember that every now and then the system works.
Sen is not so much shy as self-possessed. He has detailed plans for the future, which include several films to be shot in the US, and which he promises will be “totally different” now that he has emptied his sketchpad with this film.
Beneath Clouds stands as a summation; a moment when a group of people working with a sureness in their art have come together to produce something fine and deeply moving.
–
Beneath Clouds, writer/director Ivan Sen, distributor Dendy Films, premiered Adelaide Festival, Her Majesty’s Theatre, March 3-4, released nationally May 23. Also screening as part of Message Sticks, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, May 14 – June 2.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 13
© Mike Walsh; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
This year’s Adelaide Festival premiered a number of films hotly contesting a range of issues including, implicitly, whether white Australians can make truly representative films about Indigenous subjects. Australian Rules has been particularly controversial but this subtext is also read in Rolf de Heer’s The Tracker and Phil Noyce’s Rabbit Proof Fence. In our Watchdog column, Jane Mills takes a critical look at the latter and its relationship with Hollywood filmmaking. Director Phil Noyce and Indigenous filmmaker Darlene Johnson (director of the insightful making-of documentary Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence, screened Channel 9, Sunday Feb 3, which should be seen alongside the film) offer their perspectives on the issue. In WriteStuff, Hunter Cordaiy interviews Christine Olsen, who adapted the original story to screenplay, about the film’s evolution and the commitment and obsessiveness that was part of the process.
Ivan Sen is Australia’s finest maker of short films with a series of outstanding and award-winning works including Tears, Dust and Wind behind him. Now he has won the award for best debut feature film at the 2002 Berlin Film Festival for Beneath Clouds, which continues Sen’s exploration into young Indigenous people living outside cities. In an incisive report Mike Walsh looks at the new film in the context of the earlier works and what Sen has to say about his work.
Keeping track
In Sydney and Melbourne it can be hard to gauge what’s happening in film in other states. OnScreen keeps up with reports on the WA Screen Awards, digi-docs (digital documentaries at the Adelaide Fringe) and the South Australia Zoom Awards. Plus there’s my take on the My Queer Career Awards which featured a strong field of shorts screened as part of Sydney’s Mardi Gras Festival. We also introduce a new mini-review section, critical bytes that encourage you to see new Australian and international independent films doing interesting things on celluloid. This time we include Walking on Water, The Tracker, The Circle, Mulholland Drive, Promises, No Man’s Land and Paul Cox’s eagerly awaited Nijinski, based on the dancer’s diaries and featuring Adelaide’s Leigh Warren Dance Company.
Digital profiling
RealTime+OnScreen is the only Australian publication that regularly profiles digital artists and keeps you up to date with events and conferences. This time we turn our attention to WA artist Michelle Glaser. Juvenate, on which she collaborated, was co-winner of the prestigious Mayne Multimedia Award at the Adelaide Writers Festival. We visit Tasmania’s Maria Island for the Solar Circuit gathering and continue to look at works that cross the film/digi boundary including the already mentioned Digi Docs conference. Emma-Kate Croghan (Love and Other Catastrophes) takes her Desire to the web and David Varga looks at opportunities for filmmakers using DVD distribution. We also introduce a new section where artists describe their digital works-in-progress, a snapshot of ideas in development in the digital arts arena.
Exit
And with that smorgasbord, I bid you adieu. This is my last OnScreen. I’m leaving RealTime for a position at the Australian Film Commission. It’s been a wonderful 4 years (with 2 as OnScreen editor) and I’d like to thank, in Academy Awards style, Managing Editors Keith and Virginia, for offering me the opportunity to commission some of the finest writers working in the arts in Australia, and for keeping the standards of RealTime so high. Thanks also to Gail Priest, Designer and Sales Manager, for always being positive, capable and willing to lend advice and a hand with anything. And thanks to all the OnScreen editors and writers who continue to make this section of the magazine an insight into what’s happening in film, screen culture and digital media nationally. Where else can you get this critical information, and where else can you get it free? I look forward to receiving it on my desk at the AFC.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 14
© Kirsten Krauth; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
There is no doubt that the arts can seem unimportant—even trivial—in the wake of traumatic events, including September 11, the refugee crisis, the war in Afghanistan and ongoing but pressing Indigenous issues in our own country. In truth the arts have suffered for years from the perception that they are unimportant. Our news and media outlets fill their entertainment and lifestyle sections with little but celebrity gossip and box-office grosses. And if we indulge in entertainment when the hard times take hold, it is because it offers the security of escape.
However, that ill-defined thing called Art is not so easily dismissed or perhaps as easily welcomed into our lives. Yet, confronted with the equally urgent, if less overtly spectacular (because hidden) abuses against humanity taking place in this country, I found myself extremely grateful for my experiences at the 2002 Adelaide Festival of Arts. While the outcomes were compromised and many of the processes flawed, it was nonetheless, an essential experiment establishing a radical interface between art and community in a previously inconceivable context. By including many previously disenfranchised artists and attempting to speak meaningfully about issues of fundamental relevance to all Australians, the festival achieved something unique, even if many chose not to take up the invitation.
Many complaints around the festival focussed, somewhat bizarrely it seems to me, on the apparent role reversal between the Adelaide Festival and the Adelaide Fringe. In the end, I’m not sure that distinction mattered (except maybe to the accountants). By taking advantage of both programs, it was possible to have your cake and eat it. I ran myself ragged but still missed far too much. That Katrina Sedgewick, Artistic Director of the Fringe, did an outstanding job is indisputable. That the Fringe provided not only entertainment but also productions and events of substance is also true. What interests me, however, is the fact that several big-ticket international acts were able to take place in the Fringe, without apparently receiving the subsidy typically guaranteed through a major festival. Maybe they didn’t need it?
As Karen Meehan, writing in Dramatic Online (March 13, 2002) noted, “by far the most important debate around the Sellars’ ‘myth’ or ‘legacy’ (depending on whether you agree with him or not), is actually about the structure of a major festival—a debate the Australian media [and many in the Australian arts community] seems to have bypassed” , except to be offended by the very notion of community or the positioning of Aboriginal peoples centre stage (sic). Meehan, is the only Australian journalist I know who has undertaken in-depth interviews with the much maligned Associate Directors, in particular the Indigenous Artistic Directors, Karl and Waiata Telfer (March 20, 2002). Did no-one feel that the views of Indigenous artists, participants in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital program or audiences at the Parkes Community Centre, were worth canvassing? Does anyone remember the Saatchi & Saatchi Report?
Equally bizarre is the suggestion that incoming Artistic Director Stephen Page will have nothing left to do as the Indigenous stuff has already been done. A similar notion was touted following Brenda L Croft’s groundbreaking Biennial exhibition, Beyond the Pale for the 2000 festival. The inclusion of Indigenous people is not a one-off event but a way of life. And as for spending relatively big money (in arts terms) on community based (low) art events instead of real (high) art, the screams of outrage could be heard across the country.
If those who say they love the arts really believe that art can define our times and probe our societies in ways that speak across continents and even millennia, then why were so many of them ungenerous and unwilling to take the risk? Surely it is the much touted ‘universality’ of art that has been so celebrated by those who prefer their art classical and their heritage European. Of course, it’s precisely this long reach of art—so incompatible with the immediate appetite of the news machine or the entertainment industry—that may have made the festival’s aspirations so unpalatable to so many.
When I experience a unique and profoundly moving opening ceremony like Kaurna Plati Meyunna, see a film like Ivan Sens’ extraordinarily beautiful and devastating, Beneath Clouds; an oratorio like John Adams/Peter Sellars El Ninño, or visit the Parkes Community Centre where Urban Theatre Projects worked with a bunch of kids from diverse and often disadvantaged backgrounds, I am privileged to enter into other worlds of experience created by artists, offering new ways of seeing and understanding. Their content and their approach to the particular and peculiar effects of time and place, of structure, form and media, suggest, against the odds, real change might be possible.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 4
© Sarah Miller; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Laura Monaghan, Tianna Sansbury, Everlyn Sampi, Rabbit-proof Fence
Even before I’d seen a single frame of Rabbit-proof Fence I was drowning in a sea of marketing spin-offs and moral blackmail.
First there was the book by Doris Pilkington Garimara, the daughter of Molly Craig—the oldest of the 3 Aboriginal girls to walk the 1500 miles back home from the River Moore Settlement to which they’d been sent in 1931 by AO Neville, Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia. Then came a film tie-in edition (interestingly called “a fictional account” by the publishers) with the cover showing the, by now, familiar sepia-tinted still of Molly (Everlyn Sampi) carrying her younger sister Daisy (Tianna Sansbury). The legend ‘A True Story’ appears just above the girls’ heads and under the author’s name, the inevitable ‘Now a major film…’
You’ve read the book, seen the film and yes, there is a T-shirt. There were also 2 trailers, a website, a ‘making of’ documentary by Indigenous filmmaker Darlene Johnson, a massive Channel 9 promotion that included free tickets for 1500 competition entrants to meet Noyce at a Fox Studios special screening, a study guide for schools from Australian Teachers Of Media (ATOM, supported by Qantas), free postcards, posters, the CD of Peter Gabriel’s score, and Christine Olsen’s screenplay from Currency Press (see interview p16).
I was reluctant to write about the film partly because I felt uncomfortably close to several people involved: I’d met Noyce socially, Olsen is a friend of a friend (we also share the same publishers), and Johnson is a former student and now friend. Mostly, however, I had grave misgivings about Noyce as a filmmaker.
I admire his early Australian films—Backroads, Newsfront and Heatwave—which skilfully critique aspects of Australian society by their formal marriage of innovative style with radical content. But I find his more recent Hollywood action-thriller movies—Clear and Present Danger, Patriot Games and The Bone Collector—uninspired, politically conservative examples of a genre I normally enjoy. The Bone Collector is a particularly nauseous combination of necrophilia and misogyny.
Everything about Rabbit-proof Fence sounded so worthy that my bullshit antenna was working overtime. Mambo was giving a percentage of the T-shirt sales to the Jigalong community where Molly and Daisy still live; a trailer stressed that OA Neville had the Aboriginals’ best interests at heart; first-time scriptwriter Olsen wrote how privileged she was to meet the girls and grannies of Jigalong; stories abounded about how both Noyce and international star Kenneth Branagh had accepted massive income drops and/or deferred payments because they were so moved by the story.
Was this another representation of Aboriginals as victims to assuage whitefella guilt? The quote from Noyce on the cover of the tie-in book summed it up: “This is a marvellous adventure story and thriller, celebrating courage and the resilience of the human heart.” This sounded straight out of The Player, Robert Altman’s parody of Hollywood manipulation.
I could not have been more wrong. I saw the film and was profoundly moved by the politically thoughtful approach taken by its white screenwriter and white male Hollywood director. I saw Johnson’s documentary and was profoundly moved all over again. I now believe the whole package that Rabbit-proof Fence has become offers a site to explore reconciliation from a place where emotion, truth, fiction and fact all merge.
Noyce thinks in an ideal world the film would be made by a black woman director who would have said something different to another audience. But he wanted to reach black and white audiences about a contemporary need for white Australians:
When I make a film [on a political subject] I wet my finger and put it up to the wind. Will it be blowing in my direction when the film comes out? In this case the wind was already blowing. The audience wanted a vehicle…to get beyond the rhetoric, the politics. I hope it is part of the reconciliation.
It’s no longer possible to…sweep it all under the carpet. It was genocide…it has to be genocide. It was deliberate and people were once in denial about it. But, since Bringing Them Home, there’s been a sufficient martialling of opinion opposing the view that the general population were simply confused. We almost destroyed Australia’s greatest resource. There is a need for white grieving.
To achieve this, Noyce admits to something seldom openly included as part of film art:
Hollywood knows how to reach audiences. I’ve learned the lessons in marketing and casting that Hollywood teaches. Now I have to use these skills to sell an Indigenous story into the mainstream. It’s not overtly political, but covertly. Hollywood can do this and can do it well…
I’m a sort of ‘migrant worker’ in Hollywood: you’re tolerated as long as you service the big machine…Rabbit-proof Fence is an antidote to what I’ve done in the USA. That was ‘escapist entertainment’ first and foremost. [Rabbit-proof Fence] has a story that could be the best of any Hollywood movie. Basically it’s an escape movie.
Noyce’s description of his film as a genre movie helps explain its potential for widespread appeal: here is a movie about a long denied subject using film language filmgoers are familiar with. But how to attract audiences reluctant to face up to historically repressed facts? This is where Johnson’s finely-wrought documentary enters the scene:
Phillip’s film is an emotional journey about a basic human right to be with your mother and live in your own home. My film is about getting a bigger audience for Rabbit-proof Fence.
Johnson focuses on the transformation of the 3 young actresses to mirror the transformation of the 3 girls who rejected the role of passive victim to white man’s well-meaning but racist designs for them. She made a bold structural decision to end her documentary not with the post-production process as many ‘making of’ films do, but with the filming of the scene where Molly, Daisy and Gracie are forcibly removed from their mothers. It makes this scene more emotionally distressing than it is in Noyce’s film where it takes place near the start, before we are attached to the characters. Johnson took this decision because she hoped it would deliver viewers to Noyce’s film.
Cinema plays a role in winning the hearts and minds of the Australian people to accept, understand and ultimately reverse the consequences of white assimilationist policy. In their own ways, Charles Chauvel’s Jedda and Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries, A Rural Tragedy also do this better than documentary, perhaps because they’re fiction and, unlike documentary, rely upon the mimetic for audiences to become absorbed and incorporated into the narrative. Johnson agrees:
Rabbit-proof Fence is better than a documentary which is always too actual, and can be too confronting. Fiction allows people to identify better. It makes for emotional attachment. Fiction uses storytelling devices…it allows us to get caught up in the story emotionally in a way that documentary doesn’t.
This slippage between fiction and actuality is too hard for some. Tabloid journalist Piers Akerman attacked Noyce for “playing fast and hard with the truth” (The Sunday Telegraph, March 3 2002). Responding, Noyce quoted Doris Pilkington: “Recognise what happened to us, so that we can all be healed.” Paradoxically, recognition requires the understanding that comes with the sort of emotional assimilation that Hollywood cinema can offer its audiences.
Paradoxical because, as Laleen Jayamanne points out in a thoughtful essay (“Love me tender, love me true, never let me go: A Sri Lankan reading of Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy” in Toward Cinema and its Double, Indiana University Press, 2001) the definition of ‘assimilation’ is: “to make like, to adapt, to absorb and incorporate, to convert into a substance of its own nature; to absorb into the system.” For audiences, the mimetic, involving assimilation in a way that makes it an essential element of fiction, can lead to awareness of truth, rather than a denial.
By exposing cinematic mimesis, Johnson’s reflexive documentary reveals how Noyce uses the cinematic experience of audience assimilation into the emotions of a fictionalised narrative to arrive at a recognition of what really happened. This way grieving is possible for white Australians, and greater understanding is possible for all.
Rabbit-proof Fence, writer Christine Olsen, director Phillip Noyce, distributor Becker Entertainment, currently screening nationally. See page 16 for Hunter Cordaiy’s interview with screenwriter Christine Olsen. Darlene Johnson’s Follow The Rabbit-proof Fence, a companion documentary to the making of the feature film, was screened on Channel 9, February 3.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 15
© Jane Mills; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Christine Olsen
Christine Olsen’s documentary production credits include Riding the Tiger and the award-winning Hepzibah. Her screenplay for Rabbit-proof Fence is an adaptation of Doris Pilkington Garimara’s book about her mother’s story, Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence. For Olsen this a double first—a feature film as co-producer and her first screenplay.
Rabbit-proof Fence is an adaptation from a book. To write the script you were confronted with one text and then had to turn it into another—can you describe how that process worked?
I knew that the book would provide the story for the film—it seemed to me to be a classic story; 3 little girls taken away from their homes decide to run away and walk back home. A very simple structure, and I think these stories make the best films.
So it was the journey which you saw as being classic?
It was like a classic fairy story actually, even down to the number 3, which you quite often find in fairy stories—3 sisters, 3 brothers, 3 witches—and it was about 3 little girls stolen from their home by the wicked witch and taken to her house where everyone is under a spell, and it’s a spell of forgetting. The longer you are in the house the stronger the spell becomes. It was imperative for the girls to get away as fast as they could before they fell under that spell.
This is the first screenplay I’ve ever written and now, looking back on it, the process of writing is the process of finding out what that story really is…and what you have to do is find out what that story is within you, why is it that you are completely obsessed…being completely taken over in your mind…constantly making notes, having thoughts about it at the kitchen sink, and why that strength of story carried you through 3 or 4 years of writing.
At various points I thought I knew what the story was—yes, this is what the story is, it’s a classic fairy story—you keep working on it and then you think…maybe this is an escaped prisoner story, a world war story; this is a script about a land taken over by invaders, they’re now reaching far into the hinterland and are stealing the children and taking them back into their own territory to train them as domestic slaves. The children escape as in any prisoner of war story and make their way home through enemy-occupied territory. Then this becomes a layer within the story. I think when I finished the script I knew this was film about home and what home means.
From there you developed the script and you weren’t necessarily being faithful to that original text?
Not at all…I felt completely free to do whatever I wanted with this story…there’s very little drama in the book and I didn’t know how to make a film about 3 little girls walking along a fence…But the moment I realised that the central idea is an argument between Molly and Mr Neville—who said ‘I know what is best for you’ and Molly says no, ‘I know what’s best for me’—I had my dramatic argument.
And it gave the script a voice that was different from the book?
Yes, I think it’s quite different.
How did you come to that conclusion?
The book was told very quietly, almost passively, and I knew instinctively that I actually had to work out why this film was important to me, why it obsessed me, and what drove me…
This suggests that writers must engage with a story on a very deep and personal level in order to sustain the vision.
Absolutely, otherwise…there won’t be any lasting interest. If a story is going to reverberate with people, that’s where it must come from…there’s something there that is universal, the extreme becomes the general.
So the process involves a couple of years of writing, and then you send the script off to Phil Noyce in LA and wait…How do you keep the writer’s obsession with the project over that length of time?
I did heaps of research…historical research. I went to Perth, I read everything I possibly could about the Stolen Generations. I knew that the key to this was actually going up to Jigalong and spending time there, and until I had nailed down Molly and Daisy I was going to be writing a white person’s film based on the whites in the film…I always thought I knew those people…they are our grandparents…they’re my family but I didn’t know the little girls.
I’m very proud of the way we handled the Indigenous issues in the film, consulted with the Jigalong people. We were very careful to take notice of their concerns, and their major concern was who would be playing Mardu people on screen. That process has enriched the film and it’s been such a positive thing to have done…it’s easy…it’s important to tell people it’s not hard to do this properly…you just have to listen.
Is there something about the production process that threatens or supports the holding of this writer’s vision?
One of the things I did was to be co-producer…and this meant that I was there the whole way through…
And normally writers aren’t, are they?
No, but because I had my experience as a documentary producer I was determined to have a creative input. And one of the things that happened that was vital to this whole process was that in June 2000, when Phillip had committed to the project, we spent 10 days working on the script.
When you worked with the director did you make substantial changes?
I think what happened was that we heightened the story…he was always saying ‘take it as far as it can go and if it’s too far we’ll pull it back’…that was his mantra. And also because he is such an experienced director he could say what we didn’t need and how things could be done…it was an immense learning curve.
In the last shot of the film we see 2 of the women whose story it is, and you suddenly come out of the fiction to living people…was that abrupt change always in the script?
Yes…in a sense that image says it all…we are still here and living in this land…what’s happening is that you’re confronted with a multitude of emotions at the end of the film and the lasting one is that these people have survived.
–
Rabbit-proof Fence, writer Christine Olsen, director Phillip Noyce, distributor Becker Entertainment, currently screening nationally. See p15 for Jane Mills’ commentary on the film and Darlene Johnson’s ‘making-of’ documentary.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 16
© Hunter Cordaiy; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
The WA Screen Awards (WASA) have moved from the wintry months of the last couple of years to a summer date. It is a time when balmy evenings beckon, international travellers succumb to summer’s lure and outdoor screenings are de rigeur in the West.
The move scheduled WASA hot on the heels of the national touring short film festival, Flickerfest, not to mention the newcomer on the WA short film circuit, the Grass Roots Short Film Festival. This gave the dedicated filmgoer the opportunity to soak up international, national and local short films, and come to an understanding of where WA filmmaking sits on the international stage.
Grass Roots ended up with a shortlist of mostly comedies while the exquisite cinematography and serious themes of the WASA entrants were more representative of the skills and depth of WA filmmaking. It appears that the judges of Grass Roots recognised this and the beautifully crafted and stylish film by Christopher Kenworthy, The Dreamer, took out first place.
Stump (which won 3 WA Screen Awards) is a comedy with a ‘gag’ ending but still a stylish piece of cinema. The film looks superb, the cinematography taking full advantage of the clear light of country WA. Structured in meticulous detail, each frame serves the final purpose, building to the payoff. Writer/director Robert Forsyth has an eye for detail and for what will work in a tightly written comic piece: the final product engagemed powerfully with the audience. It was no surprise that the film took out Best Short Film Under 30 Minutes, Best Writing for Forsyth and Best Acting for Talei Howell-Price (who also performed in The Dreamer).
Chris Frey, who has worked hard for years creating films that challenge the viewer, has done it again with Sol, a complex journey of spiritual investigation and confrontation. Rather than forcing a narrative on the viewer, he creates a montage of images. His strong focus on film as a medium outside conventional narrative made him a deserving winner of the best directing award. Sol also took out the best editing award for its seamless construction, but the strangely captivating Civilian Maimed must have created some great editing challenges for Ian Reiser which saw it deservedly shortlisted. However, it was the richly evocative work of Glen Knight which eventually won Civilian an award, Best Sound Design.
Pierce Davison was WA Young Filmmaker of 2000 and this year, with his brother, won the award for Best Animation and New Media with The Cows Side; unfortunately their equally bizarre My Mrs Tingwell didn’t make the shortlist.
Sue K’s Daz07/02/012038 was voted Best Experimental Production but was somehow overlooked as an entrant in the editing category, surprising given that the editing actually creates the film which is a series of stills cut together to create movement and the passing of time.
The John Butler Trio are a dynamic band who could make a video worth watching just by sitting around performing. That John McMullan took their song Pickapart and made a video for only $1500 speaks volumes about their dynamism. The shaping and the droll humour evident in this award-winning music video makes you appreciate what can be achieved with a great song, engaging performers and a man with a camera.
There was no chance that Sophie McNeill’s film, Awaiting Freedom, winner of the Triple J Independent Spirit if Award, was going to be allowed to pass unnoticed at WASA. A high school student, Sohphie knew a good story when she saw it, and created an Australian Story-style documentary about East Timor. She won Best Student Film and, with the strength of documentary filmmaking in WA, she will be in a position to pursue a career with some great mentors.
Bad Cred & Aliens is a detective story with a difference, and the production design by Shari Amber Finn (which took out the Open Craft section) sets the mood with precision. It seems strange that a film called Sightless should win Best Cinematography. The story of a blind man, April Ward has not shied away from the difficult shot, choosing darkness and reflection to create an uneasy feeling in the viewer with the warping of perspective.
This year, Andelko Jurin was named Young Filmmaker of the Year after receiving the Australian Writers Guild Award for writing in 1999 for Redman and the WASA for directing in 2000 for The Ballet’s Floor.
The diversity of subject matter and the uniformly high production values in the shortlisted films and the winners at this year’s WASA augurs well for the future of short filmmaking here.
WA Screen Awards, finalists’ screenings, Princess May Park, Fremantle, Feb 18-19; awards night, Novotel Langley, Feb 20, www.fti.asn.au
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 17
© Mary O'Donovan; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
My Queer Career
The Mardi Gras Film Festival has grown into a massive event examining existing trends in queer cinema. One of the highlights this year was My Queer Career, a short film competition open to gay and lesbian short films from Australia and New Zealand. What’s best about the screenings is the option of seeing either all 42 of the shorts submitted or the judge’s shortlist of 8 films. I go for the latter—and it’s one of the strongest lineups of shorts I’ve seen in recent years. Themes have moved beyond coming out stories or tales of teenage whimsy, to stories of generations (father/son relationships highlighted in particular) and drag queens after the lights have dimmed; no Priscilla triumphs here. Surprisingly there’s no stories about women—the lesbian component is entirely absent—and no finalists from New Zealand. This is a real shame and hopefully will be turned around next year.
Everyone’s born naked and, after that,
everything is drag
Tales From the Powder Room is the tragic tale of a drag queen who’s hit rock bottom. Directed by Darren Burgess and shot on 35mm, its animated hero/ine starts off high-camp bitch and spirals into a drug-induced self-delusional monologist, remembering glorious bygone days of stardom, juxtaposed with the POV of witnesses who were ‘really there’. Witty, nasty repartee flashes back into animated home movie footage of inauspicious beginnings—mother moans: “he’s just about sucked my tits off”—and a small boy’s smiling face as he dons a floral hat. And then his father gives him the boot. As Lola Lick stares, glazed, into her past, there’s a great musical segue from Twinkle Twinkle to Kylie’s Confide in Me, and you almost feel sorry for this tough bird with a heart of steel. But not quite. Darren Burgess’ animation is imaginative and his writing at perfect pitch.
VCA filmmaker Mark Robinson takes a similar theme but moulds it with a gentler touch. Sweet Thing starts in a caravan park: children abused by a drunken mother heading off to their school to talk about her non-existent career; bullies behind the sky-high fence taunt a young boy. We enter the caverns of a drag queen, Tom Candy (Iain Murton), living in this trailer city surrounded by masks and wigs, dresses, mannequins and feathers. The bullied Jacob (Brock Jays) finds family here, someone who can play the roles of both mum and dad, cooking him a well-balanced meal, then belting out Marcia Hines’ I Got the Music in Me. In a whimsical ending he masquerades as Trent’s mother, dressed in Dorothy-checked-pinafore, escorting him to school. The placement of this fantasy makes the film disappointingly anti-climactic, as if the funding suddenly ran out.
It’s good to see our tertiary students well represented in these screenings: Dale Burke’s (UNSW College of Fine Arts) Pillion was my favourite on the night. A strange, melancholy, at times erotic, meditation on male energy and aggression it reminded me most of Claire Denis’ Beau Travail: actors-as-soldiers camouflaged and choreographed, their lovemaking and fighting ritualistic and almost beautiful. Technically, it’s the most innovative of the films, with clever use of splitscreen, highly stylised performance and a great sound design by Debra Petrovich. A scene of men skulling huge stubbies of beer while shaving each other’s heads under glowing neon signs and graffiti is unnerving: sensual, moody, affecting, getting to the heart of men’s intimate spaces, what they share, but not with the world. This film puts you off balance, crossing that no-man’s land between pain and pleasure; a kick in the guts.
You don’t have to clean up after him any more…
Saturn’s Return and Tanaka explore similar themes of death and reconciliation. SBS’s Hybrid Life series has been significant in demanding that families be shown in all their illuminating complexities. These shorts don’t just tackle gay issues but inter-cultural and generational ones as well. There’s so much going on here. From the opening moment of Saturn’s Return—a hand floating on air currents out the window of a moving car—the late-twentie-something viewers know where they are. Isn’t this the archetypal image of a filmmaker on a road trip? If you’ve had a camera in your hand, on the open road, you’ve probably done it. The title too carefully targets a certain viewer. I once worked with an astrologer who talked endlessly of Saturn’s Return, a moment that occurs around the ages 28-29, which she blamed for life-changing yearnings and being unsettled in those few years approaching 30. As Barney (Joel Edgerton) and Dimitri (Damian Walshe-Howling) hit the road from Melbourne to Sydney, there’s clever dialogue about intercity rivalry, and the chance to drop in at Bonegilla (a migrant camp where Dim’s Greek parents met and where my own grandparents experienced harsh conditions). As we reach Sydney we meet the parents, ageing products of the hippie generation. It’s not all rosy: Barney’s father is dying of AIDS, both parents have been heroin addicts, and Barney was given LSD as a birthday present when he was 13. Like many of his generation, Barney grew up feeling responsible for the welfare of his parents rather than the other way round. But there’s no moral judgment here. Writer Christos Tsolkias’ usual fine touch adds a dash of sympathy to every character and highlights similarities as well as differences. In a pivotal scene, Sheila (Barney’s mother) says that she would like a grandchild and her expectations aren’t so different from Dim’s Greek parents. The combination of superb acting by Edgerton, Walshe-Howling, Harold Hopkins and Tina Bursill with excellent direction by Wenona Byrne shows just how much can be achieved in a short film.
Tanaka, directed by Clayton Jacobson, also has an interesting premise: a Japanese man, Hiroshi, dies in Australia after living with his male lover, Ron, for 30 years. Ron writes to the brother in Japan inviting him to the funeral and Hiroshi’s nephew Mori arrives in his place (the transition from back of a cab in Japan to back of a cab in Australia is particularly effective) armed with the firm belief that his uncle is heterosexual and married. Struggles are played out between traditions and cultures in subtle ways: Hiroshi wants his ashes to be scattered in Australia while his nephew is expected to take them home; Ron has a previous family including daughters and sons (making it even harder for Mori to understand the homosexual relationship). As in other festival films, the importance of home videos within the short is fundamental, contextualising Hiroshi’s love and life, changing him from phantom to family man. What I particularly like about this film are its compromises: little deceptions, things done for the sake of obligation, with evasive action often a necessity; and a winning ending as Mori smiles in the backseat of a cab on his way back home.
Other strong contenders among the finalists were: Into The Night, director Tony Krawitz, somewhat topical in its depiction of a rich older man cruising the streets for a rentboy, or maybe a son; and Turn Me On, director Catherine Chauchat, an exhilarating documentary on the history of the vibrator (did you know it was the 5th electrical appliance invented, well before the vacuum cleaner?). High Street Love Story, director Rob Leggo, about unrequited love on the streets of Penrith, seemed somewhat anachronous and needed a lot of work. Overall, the My Queer Career selection was excellent, revealing a maturation of short films as a genre of their own. Keep an eye out for them on the festival circuit, and hopefully at the Dendy Awards and Flickerfest this year.
My Queer Career, Australian and New Zealand Queer Shorts, Mardi Gras Film Festival, Palace Academy Twin, Sydney, Feb 19 & 22, www.queerscreen.com.au
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 18
© Kirsten Krauth; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
The recent re-release of Emma-Kate Croghan’s short film Desire didn’t raise an eyebrow compared to the hype generated in the promotion of her 1996 film Love and Other Catastrophes. Prior to the release of the latter, oversized posters were pasted across available city surfaces, ringing scaffolding on building sites and lurking in the half-light beneath bridges. The gigantic font announced the release as an event not to be missed. But it was not only our eyes that were targeted in the promotion of Croghan’s first feature. The film is mythologised as every independent filmmaker’s dream come true. Financed initially by credit card, it was rescued by a last minute investment. In contrast, Desire is a low budget film that slips into the viewer’s home unheralded. It travels via the magic of communication cables, making itself available on the computer screen with the click of the mouse. The exhibition of Desire on the internet potentially allows it to be viewed by a global audience.
Desire is one of the films screened on the Atom Films website. Parent company, Atomshockwave, is an independent entertainment provider with an archive in excess of 2000 films, animations and games. It lists Ford, Intel, Warner Brothers Online, HBO and Showtime as sponsors and syndication customers. A look at its homepage gives an idea of the eclectic collection of films on offer. Categories include animation, comedy, drama, documentary, extreme, thriller and world films. In the animation section you can click on flash or stop motion categories and watch short films like the intriguingly titled Osama Sissyfight. Desire can be found beneath the Australian film banner in the World Films category.
Conventionally, film viewing is characterised by a voyeuristic distance between the viewer and the big screen, offering a cathartic connection through identification and immersion in the fantasy. But how does this experience compare when watching films on computer screens? With films like Desire available online, viewing becomes more immediate and controllable. Whilst the dimensions of the screen are obviously smaller, the distance between the spectator and the screen is also diminished. Watching Desire on the small screen offers an uncanny sense of disjuncture. Disguising itself as early cinema, its exhibition on the computer screen produces a collision between the ultra-modern and the primitive. Originally shot as a silent film, Desire could be viewed on plasma.
Desire is cinematic, highly stylised and filmically literate. The flickering images are contrived to replicate the effect of silent cinema. Desire is without dialogue, primitive in its elliptical narration and Croghan uses rounded iris framing reminiscent of silent film. In the place of dialogue a soundtrack underscores the suspense. Croghan also infuses her films with an elegance and suspense characteristic of film noir. Her romantic, card-like title sequences remind us of the aesthetic decadence of the American studio system when even the fonts were art. The central unifying force is desire signified by the gaze. Furtive glances bind the anonymous characters, but are rarely returned. Whether it is in the carriage of a train, or in a laboratory, the atmosphere is charged with longing. Croghan highlights this with the inclusion of a scientist who analyses minuscule particles through the lens of a microscope, but who lacks perspective in his immediate environment.
Even though Desire appears to be a homage to the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, in the insistence of unrequited love and the link between children and danger Croghan’s film is clearly influenced by Fritz Lang, most particularly M (1931). This is acknowledged with the inclusion of a spiral-patterned ball, a motif that associates childhood play with danger in the adult world of both films. This clash of eras, styles, influences and technologies is utopia for a postmodern theorist.
Efforts have been made in recent years to elevate short film beyond its association with student experimentation. Tracey Moffatt enjoyed success as a short filmmaker before being financed to make a 90 minute feature film. She overcame this expectation by splitting beDevil (1993) into 3 discrete parts, effectively producing a trio of short films that combined to exceed the duration of a feature. Jane Campion attempted to change exhibition protocol in linking the first release of Sweetie (1989) with Alison McLean’s dark noir short film Kitchen Sink (1989), introducing her compatriot New Zealander to an Australian audience. But it is on the small screen that Australian shorts are finding an alternative home. The success of Desire at Atom Films is an encouraging sign extending the range of exhibition possibilities for short films to the computer screen.
Desire, writer/director Emma-Kate Croghan, performers Michael Lake, Nell Feeney
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 19
© Wendy Haslem; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Mulholland Drive
mez
Mulholland Drive
a smouldering david lynchian film-take on the starlet time|grind machine. the film presents the viewer with a dream|character-crossed plotline divided decisively according 2 a saccharine 50s vs a gritty late 90s version|comment on the hollywood circuit|circus, focusing on the twinned character incarnations of Australian actor Naomi Watts. Think: an amnesiac alice-in-wonderland plot constructed via de chirico detective-story-drenched cinematography.
Writer/director David Lynch, distributor Roadshow, screening nationally
The Circle
Kirsten Krauth
Circle
A tightening loop of restrictions and oppression as we trek along Tehran’s streets with women shackled but strong, evading brothers and fathers and policemen and lovers and doctors, men who must sign to guarantee these women’s dreams. Signs of rebellion link them: letting their traditional headwear drop to reveal lively intelligent faces, smoking cigarettes desperately in the night. A woman abandons her child on a busy city street, crouching behind a car, desperate. We flow slowly, evenly, from one character to another, with Panahi’s elegant linking narrative device beautifully revealed at the film’s end.
Writer/director Jafar Panahi, distributor New Vision, currently at Dendy Cinemas, Sydney, other states to follow.
The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky
Jane Mills
Based on one of the best accounts of the experience of entering psychosis ever written by a major artist, this often glorious synaesthetic mix of poetry, dance, music and movement tiptoes round the edge of the romantic nonsense of the ‘mad genius.’ Like Cox’s film about Vincent van Gogh, this is neither documentary nor drama but a genre of its own and at times reaches extraordinary levels of beauty and compassion.
Writer/director Paul Cox, distributor Sharmill Films, April release.
Australian Rules
Mike Walsh
The controversies surrounding the production of this film find their parallel in its thematics: the triumph of the Sensitive White Guy is central, while black people suffer nobly around the margins. The recessive Aussie protagonist gets another workout, as does the country town as vision of hell. Mix two parts Black Rock with one part Wake in Fright.
Director Paul Goldman, writers Phillip Gwynne, Paul Goldman; Shedding Light, Adelaide Festival 2002, March, national release mid-year.
No Man’s Land
Mark Mordue
Set in a trench in ‘no man’s land’ during the Bosnian War, the film focuses on 2 soldiers—Ciki, a Bosnian and Nino, a Serb—playing cat and mouse with each other in between uneasy recognitions of a common humanity. Tanovic worked as a documentary maker for the Bosnian Army and much of his work was used internationally as news footage, so he knows how to capture the clumsy needs and dark banality of the war experience: a fog where no one can see, a kicked metal bucket, a cigarette without a lighter, a soldier who wears glasses, the sweaty frustration of what should be a serene summer’s day in the countryside. As Ciki and Nino, Branko Djuric and Rene Bitorajac argue their way towards nowhere much at all, a circus of media sensations and international politics dances around them. Tanovic’s perspective is bitter but darkly humorous (“Rwanda, what a mess,” observes one soldier reading a paper) and the acting in this mostly stunning two-hander is extremely tight and convincing; a fierce display of prejudices and cynicism triumphing against all common sense. The hopelessness is mitigated by Tanovic’s taste for laughter, often absurd, finally sour, and a deeper, restrained sadness that lingers in the film’s last hovering image. No winners here.
Writer/director/composer Danis Tanovic.
Walking on Water
Brendan Swift
Drawing on personal experience, Roger Monk’s confronting script tackles the big questions—grief, infidelity, jealousy, and betrayal—without being pretentious enough to answer them. Interspersed with touches of black humour, the film captures the struggle of Charlie (Vince Colosimo) and Anna (Maria Theodorakis) after they help a terminally ill friend die; a journey ably complemented by the naturalistic direction of Tony Ayres.
Writer Roger Monk, director Tony Ayres, distributor Globe Film;Shedding Light, Adelaide Festival 2000, March; national release mid-year.
The Tracker
Mike Walsh
Rolf de Heer’s The Tracker addresses itself to the contradiction between land and history in Australia. Natural beauty c alls forth cultural ugliness, and epic landscape produces a banality of cultural response on the part of European settlement. The film is unfailingly beautiful, but the insertion of paintings at moments of violence suggests that the aesthetic is what we invoke when we can’t bear to watch.
Writer/director Rolf de Heer, distributor Globe Film, Shedding Light, Adelaide Festival 2002, March; national release mid-2002.
Promises
David Varga
Promises
Promises brings the opposing discursive histories of the warring sides of Palestine together, distilled through the experiences of children. While Hasidic Jewish boy Moishe quotes the Torah to legitimise Israeli occupation, Mahmoud the Hamas supporter offers title deeds. A documentary that subtly subverts humanistic optimism, revealing the intractable nature of the Palestinian conflict.
Directors Justine Shapiro, B. Z. Goldberg and Carlos Bolado, distributor Ronin Films.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 20
© mez ; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
The REAL: life on film festival has finalised its program for 2002, and has been given extra oomph from new director Hilary Blackman, who has worked previously with dancer Cazerine Barry and as digital media coordinator for the Melbourne International Film Festival last year. The festival now tours to Melbourne (May 2-8), Sydney (May 9-15), Perth (May 16-18) and Adelaide (May 23, 25, 27) and focuses on innovative documentaries, Australian and international—mostly premieres, and rare to see on the big screen.
This year’s meaty selection includes Dark Days, Marc Singer’s underground film about the underground, the lives of NYC’s displaced people living beneath Penn Station (winner Audience Awards at Sundance 2000); Melissa Kyu-Jung Lee’s A True Story About Love (see our feature interview with Melissa, RT47 p15); Darlene Johnson’s documentary about Ray Cott’s personal discovery tour, Everyday Brave—Stranger in My Skin; and Catriona McKenzie’s profile of leading Aboriginal activist Naomi Myers, Everyday Brave—Jetja Nai Medical Mob. Other highlights include Megan Spencer’s guided tour through transgressive documentaries such as The Annabel Chong Story; and doco legends Pennebaker, Hegedus and Doob’s celebration of the acclaimed soundtrack to the Coen Brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou in Down From the Mountain.
Qld TV series tackles new technology
Queensland producers, Tracey Robertson and Nathan Mayfield (Hoodlum Entertainment) are working on Fat Cow Motel, a 13-part multi-platform mystery series in the style of Twin Peaks. The show will be delivered to its audience thought Austar cable TV, radio, mobile phone, email, snail mail and dedicated websites, and is the first of its kind in Australia. Throughout the series, participants will be sent SMS messages giving clues to weekly mysteries.
Robertson commented on the writing process: “The challenge is finding writers who can do it. Firstly, they have to bear in mind all the platforms while writing the script. Then they have to not only write the material for each of those platforms but also co-ordinate the writing of all those platforms so they link together in the most effective way possible” (PFTC news). For more info visit www.hooligan.com.au/media/fatcow/.
Asian feast
Short Soup, a national short film competition offers filmmakers a cash prize and the chance to have their work shown on SBS’s Eat Carpet. Part of the Sydney Asia Pacific Film Festival, the competition is open to documentaries, animations and experimental works by, or about Asian Australians. The films can be up to 26 minutes
All the films entered in the competition will be shown throughout the festival, which runs from August 8-17. The finalists’ films will be screened on August 8.
Eat Carpet’s executive producer, Joy Toma says that by encouraging films from both Asian and non-Asian directors, the festival acknowledges that, “It’s not just Asian Australians who can tell stories about Asian experience. In multicultural Australia there are a wide variety of stories and telling them is part of our lives.”
At least one film will be purchased and screened on Eat Carpet. Last year 5 winning films were screened, including Linden Goh’s richly coloured drama My Old China depicting the joys and strains of cross-cultural schoolyard friendships.
Entry deadline May 30. Application forms and entry conditions available at www.sapff.com.au or by post: Short Soup Competition Co-ordinator, PO Box 339, Darlinghurst, NSW 1300.
Rachel Griffiths rules
For anyone who hasn’t caught it yet, don’t miss Six Feet Under. Written (and produced) by American Beauty’s Alan Ball, and featuring the same caustic humour, it is a breathtaking, surreal genre piece on all the good things: death, honour, love, sex, loyalty, family—in the funeral business.
Rachel Griffiths, in her winning speech at The 2002 Golden Globes, called her producers “you crazy bastards” for trying to get the show off the ground, and you can see why. This series breaks the mould, more like Dennis Potter than any US show I can recall. It is harrowing and funny; and Griffiths does a gorgeous contemporary turn as the woman who won’t commit, spouting psychobabble to ward off any advances: a sexually charged, strong and just damn cool female character. More please!
Six Feet Under screens on Channel 9, Monday nights, around 10.30pm (but usually about half an hour late). Hopefully it won’t be bumped around too much like The Sopranos. KK
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 20
© Kirsten Krauth; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Michelle Glaser
photo Robert Frith
Michelle Glaser
Juvenate (Michelle Glaser, Andrew Hutchinson) was 2002 co-winner of the Mayne Award, the Multimedia category of the SA Festival Awards for Literature, and was recently exhibited in the Perth International Arts Festival Celestial City Visual Arts Program. It has featured in several other showings internationally including the 2002 Ninth New York Digital Salon (touring internationally), and the European Media Art Festival 2001, Osnabruck, Germany. Felena Alach spoke with Michelle Glaser.
What was the genesis of Juvenate? How did your role as a writer sit within that process—especially given that it’s not a text-based work?
I was co-curating an exhibition called techne some years ago, and Juvenate was presented in an early form by Marie Louise Xavier and Andrew Hutchinson. It came out of an experience of serious illness, and provided a way of working through that experience. I became involved as a writer from there.
We were seeking to find a way to tell a story, without relying upon any spoken language and using minimal written text. The work is essentially about celebrating the ordinary, the extraordinary in the ordinary, so we wanted to keep it domestic, homey and familiar. As you move through the work you have that binary opposition of moving towards morning/summer/health/vitality or moving into evening/winter/sickness. We tried to recreate that fevered sense of reality that you have when you are ill, where memories and reality start intermingling, so you are not quite sure at what point in the experience you are. Also the images are very hyperreal, as if in response to certain drugs, or as a response to the feeling that life is finite and the most has to be extracted from each minute.
So in working with such polarities that guide the flow of the work, what are the bonuses and the difficult points? How do you find writing towards a less linear narrative within interactive screen-space?
Basically the writing is about the structuring of ideas and images and putting them into play, writing them into existence. You use language where it needs to be used, or images or sound or even an event (like the home delivery of art in Pizza Surprise)…I like working with interactivity, because the formula isn’t set the way it is within the existing forms of linear narrative, so you are really free to explore, and you feel like you are an adventurer in a new realm of storytelling. With each new project I feel like it’s a new game for all the collaborators to play. You have a project that everyone brings their ideas to and it becomes a much richer and better project for all those ideas. Whatever input you have is only ever a part of that final work.
What’s hard is that you actually don’t have a map yourself. So it’s trial and error. You are often a long way in before you can figure out whether it’s working or not. I found doing Juvenate that although it works in many ways, in terms of navigational paths it’s really hard to keep track of where the audience is, and whether you are delivering them a really satisfying experience in terms of continuity between scenes, or an experience that includes highs and lows…I like the sense of a structured experience with stages in the work that you pass through.
With interactive media, because you can’t tell the satisfying linear story that audiences are used to, you need the big narrative hooks that the user can fill in. You need a simple but strong story or premise where they can fill in the gaps themselves…learn to navigate the work, and relate the various elements to each other. And there’s the question of what your viewer might bring to the work, because the thing with interactive work is that it opens up many cracks…for as much story or information as it ever gives you, it opens up many more questions. If it’s an engaging work the user should be bringing a great deal to that work. The hard part of making interactive work is putting the lights along the landing path that create a strong sense of journey and outcome for the user, that they’re going to get something that’s not going to be a clickfest where they won’t know what they’re actually triggering, or like an IQ test that’s too hard to pass.
One of the hazards of much multimedia work is the loop, unintentionally getting stuck in the sense of ‘hang on…I’ve been here; hang on, I’m stuck; hang on, I’m sick of this…’ and you can lose your viewer.
Exactly. Unless you use really obvious menu systems to let them know where they are going and what they are doing, but you can’t weave that into a work usually, and it’s not a very satisfying answer. The idea of ‘intuitive navigation’ is not that satisfying as a solution either, because what you think is obvious is never obvious to someone else.
The new interactive project you’re involved with is Dr Pancoast’s Cabinet de Curiosites (developed with Nic Beames and produced with Mia Lalanne, Marie-Louise Xavier and Chris Wells). What are some of the interesting features of this 19th century phantasy?
The essence of Dr Pancoast is that it’s a work for the child in the adult, it appeals to that furtive sense of seeing-what-you-shouldn’t-see. It’s also picking up on the fun with images you had when you were a child, when things were just gorgeous and glorious for you to look at and play with and use to tell a story yourself. We’ve tried to make it really physical, so that everything you operate you drag and touch and do, rather than an abstracted intellectual process…it’s very tactile and highly textural rather than digital in feel. Something we’ve also had lots of fun with has been 19th century games like rebuses, labyrinths and all sorts of little gimmicks. It’s been good to revisit those technologies that started in the 19th century, like the early computer, photography etc. It features illustrations by Helen Smith, Gina Moore and Richard Giblett (see RT41). Also, the time machine featured in the work actually exists, and has been made by Philip Gamblen. So, for exhibition, the idea is that it’s not just a cold little work on a computer, but we can actually make much more of the space, where the time machine is a ‘working object’…
Another way of looking at the work is as an exploration of the colonising of sexuality: that process in the 19th century where sexuality became categorised. It’s also about the procreating couple, and where sexualities became defined in terms of acceptable and deviant sexualities. It’s quite text-heavy as a work, but while the text is intrinsic, it’s designed so that there are a lot of keywords, so that you don’t really have to read it all through. If you glance at it you’ll get a sense of what the text says. The expectation is that lots of people don’t like to read, but it’s a richer work if you do read the text.
Recently Perth saw the Pizza Surprise project, where you and fellow curator Katie Major (a delivery team known as Art To Go) were serving up pizza-box art-packages for a mere $19.95 (see RT46).
The idea of it was to do something that would take art out of the gallery and make it more accessible to a much wider audience than the usual arts public. Thanks to media coverage on Triple J and the like, it did reach a much wider audience who really hooked into the idea of art priced and sold like a pizza…We were in the front line delivering the work, so we saw how the work actually functioned as an object for people…What was funny was that a lot of people thought that $20 actually covered our costs. I couldn’t believe it…that it would cover the costs of paying an artist…Without grants to pay people we wouldn’t have been able to do it. But what’s great is that where there was nothing there’s suddenly all this work being made, and all these people, the audience, hooking into that idea…On the strength of the project we got an Asialink residency, so we’re going to be doing a joint project between Taiwan and Perth, which will develop the same ideas of commodification and taking art out of the gallery, direct to the audience.
How does the sense of work as a surprise sit in how you are delivering art to the people? How does this intersect with your interests in creative work?
That’s multimedia too isn’t it? You just can’t control what’s going to happen, you have to hand it over and let the chips fall where they may…I think essentially I’m interested in surface appearances, and the contrasting underside to those appearances, like with Pancoast where there is a polite surface and a filthy underbelly. Pizza Surprise is much the same thing: on the surface it’s a very simple gimmick about taking work to the public, and underneath it’s actually much more about how we view artists, the artists themselves being sold as a kind of brand, as well as the commodification of art, where structures in the art world decide how much a work is worth. The neat little surface and the seething mass underneath…I like projects that have an accessible face but have other levels to enjoy. Works that are accessible in a way that the general public can enjoy…but then maybe get hit in the face with another layer. I mean, that’s every storyteller’s dream isn’t it?…that they convey something that on the surface is very simple, but has levels of complexity that build toward something greater. That’s the hope.
The other joint winner of the Mayne Mutlimedia Award was Poems in a Flash on the Stalking Tongues website by Jayne Fenton-Keane, www.poetinresidence.com
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 21
© Felena Alach; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
The 2 day symposium conVerge—where art and science meet was developed to complement the 2002 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art of the same title, part of the Adelaide Festival 2002. In the words of the organisers, “the intention of the symposium [was] to broaden dialogue, generate ideas and raise awareness of the contributions both artists and scientists can make to the larger challenges of our times.” To facilitate this, a series of 6 significant topics were identified, with each headlining a 2 and a half hour session delivered by key speakers and followed by extended discussion. I must declare my vested interest, being both a speaker at the symposium and an artist represented in the 2002 Biennial.
The sessions ran under the banners of Partnerships, Bioeconomics, Genomics, Image and Meaning, Knowledge Systems, and Ecology. The depth and diversity of the material presented generated strong debate and the range of discussion included bio-ethics and representation of the human body; analysis of the relationship between art, language, empirical science and nature; transgenics and gene-environment interactions; social justice as individual responsibility; as well as the impact of GM technologies and the universality of DNA as code. Significantly, a strong grounding was maintained through insights into the ethical responsibilities inherent in indigenous knowledge systems and cultural values, and the importance of recognising and respecting the inseparability of a culture from the environment in which it is embodied.
Running as an under-current to the symposium was an interrogation of the structure, function and results of collaborations between artists and scientists and their industrial and institutional patrons, and an investigation into the ways artists and scientists may contribute to culture through “project-based organisation of multi-disciplinary contributions” (Dr Terry Cutler, Chair, Australia Council for the Arts, “The Art of Collaboration”, conVerge catalogue essay).
In an era when the arts are reforming themselves into an industry which must now “duke it out” with the rest of corporate Australia on a level canvas, much can be learned from the experiences of creative people already working as double-agents in the empirical world. From their insights it appears that in the techno-mad “noughties” there will be new and expanding opportunities for artists and the arts in general, particularly as science works to re-establish its aesthetic kinship with art in order to lift its flagging public profile—and expand its access to funding.
It also appears that in order to survive long term in the new research environment, funding availability will only be maintained if the arts can learn new ways to evaluate their outcomes and provide empirical proof of the value of their cultural research. Such a detailed approach to understanding the ecology of culture would also increase the value of the public perception of the artist and their training, qualifications and experience, and deliver a strong argument for providing realistic budgets for artists and their projects. Artists must now also learn to negotiate contracts which clearly define the role and responsibilities of the artist and co-contributors, and which also adequately protect them and their access to the intellectual property they create. Sadly some artists have lost access to equipment and expertise when a good idea evolved into a good earner.
From experiences recounted it seems that developing face-to-face working relationships with co-contributors is a key element in the long term success of any project, and that strong and open channels of communication are essential to successful art outcomes which avoid the artist functioning simply as a window-dresser for glamorous new science and technology. Australian society faces a number of significant ecological and environmental issues over the next few decades, and artists and scientists are uniquely placed to make major contributions to public awareness through non-linear approaches to the visualisation, analysis and eventual solutions to these issues. I am convinced that opportunities have never been better for real collaborations between artists and scientists that produce great art and great science, and also demonstrate that, just as artistic practice is a mode of research that evolves through experiment, so too science employs processes that may be driven by aesthetic considerations.
Information about the conference and speakers is available through www.adelaidebiennial.com, which will also host an ongoing forum aimed at extending, developing and maintaining the debate.
conVerge Symposium, March 3 -4, Masonic Hall, Adelaide Festival, March 2-3
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 22
© Martin Walch; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
New media artists recently gathered on Maria Island, off Tasmania, for Solar Circuit.
Maria Island: Frying the Solar Circuitry
Understandably most hairdressers are psychic. Hair is your cosmic antennae after all, only one head-click away from the information supergooey. Yet monks are bald, so one has to wonder about the benefits of separation, of cutting connections with the rest of the known universe.
The rest of the known universe
Tasmania’s Maria Island, as visiting new media artists find out quickly, is without easy net access. Options include park ranger seduction, or tapping into the global hive while dodging all those pesky Californian patent-pending pop-up banners. Tassie’s East coast more than makes up for this of course, with raw disk island power. Easily enough to feed the 30 or so Solar Circuit artists gathering to mesh their southern and northern hemisphered antennae in this data wilderness.
In this data wilderness
Used to connecting machines with fun(k), the deeper opportunities of a remote residency seemed to be the chance to synthesise new thoughts/approaches to the triangle of technology, culture and ecology. And maybe the lush location lured a little too. Great place to kick zen outta beta. As we drift towards the great global uncontrollables, wondering whether radical preservationism or sci-tech ecology management will save the day, perhaps remembering our own place within it all, can provide the clarity we need.
The clarity we need
As the days revealed the layers, an exquisite collection and calibre of people and projects emerged. Introducing the mountains of Europe to the mountains of Tasmania, spanking machines (Tulle Ruth), solar powered insects sound-blurring the natural artificial soundscapes, jobless robots (Ken Gregory), light painting in the midnight forests (Lalila), stretching the Tassie devil’s growl into sub-satanic terrain (Spanky), inventing languages derived from the local surrounds, convincing a village to do nothing for a week and making a film about it (Mex & August), retracing tales and journeys of Tassie Aboriginals, the redcoats and the Tassie tiger (Leroy Black & others), and so on. Eco-themes were well threaded through these projects, and the tailors were soon out sampling the island raw with camcorders, mini discs and all-weather microphones. Mood-capture on the island happened slow, but even with lazier heartbeats, most itchy kids were soon ready to remix.
Ready to remix
Verandah tea stories at some point revolved around plans to reintroduce the Tassie tiger with the preserved DNA of a foetus in the Tassie museum. A museum representative on hand relayed the plans, related camps of thought and its slim likelihood of success. Better perhaps than the 2 convicts chained to each other who tried to swim to freedom from Maria Island, one drowning halfway and the other taking a literal dead weight to the other side only to die himself from exhaustion. Better, but still slim.
Still slim
Did a lot of walking on the island. Stretches of beach, forest paths, mountain trails. Isolated places. Wild places. Is this wilderness? What is wilderness? At the remotest point of the island, chewing a fish caught by Spanky from Sydney, soaking up the fire and ambience, we were reminded of the human touch in all places as a satellite passed overhead in the dusky sky. Hours later a fishing trawler echoed its engine through the evening, undoubtedly a few short of their catch quota from legal fishing areas. Park rangers boasted the availability of electronic tracking methods that could trace a penguin to within a metre. Cost enough to buy a small car every week or so, but it added to a gradual sense of awareness that nothing is untouched despite its seeming isolation or rugged good looks.
Rugged good looks
Someone emailed me the other day: “Do you think a productive new media arts residency would involve a structured exchange of skills and technologies? Or do you feel that a more informal, friendship-based exchange of language, culture and ideas is sufficient to create a productive residency?” Solar Circuit was definitely the latter, though I felt it could have benefited from some on-site provocation with debates, forums or presentations to tickle each day’s exploration. To measure the productivity of an informal residency we should look at the long term conversations begun, the (re)combinations of cultures, skills, styles, experiences. But in the short term there was a snapshot available, Hobart exhibitionz, screeningz and island-glitchez.
Solar Circuit is an International New Media Arts Workshop and residency comprising workshops, WILD 2002 new media exhibition, forums, the OUT@NIGHT experimental film festival and a 10-day residency at a wilderness location with 35 artists from around the world. Project conceived and produced by Antoanetta Ivanova in partnership with the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, School of Arts and CAST Gallery, Hobart; Jan 29-Feb16
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 22
© Jean Poole; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Peter Wintonick
Interested in the future of Australian documentary? Curious about the worlds of hacktivists and viewsers? The 2-day Digi Docs event was the place to be. With sessions costing less than the price of a Tuesday Cineplex ticket, Digi Docs broke new ground in bringing together, for the first time, a range of new media practitioners, broadcasters and critics to explore the effects of the digital revolution upon the world of documentary. Co-funded by the SAFC, the AFC, the Canadian Consulate and DFAT and curated by documentary maker Heather Croall (with assistance from Chris Joyner), Digi Docs was underpinned by two assumptions. One is that there exists an underexplored yet fruitful relationship between documentary and digital media, whereby the social impulses of the former are served by the participatory capacities of the latter. As became increasingly clear throughout the weekend, many digital practitioners are already behaving in ways that documentary practitioners always have–for example, acting as watchdogs over processes of information dissemination. The second assumption was the power of the national funding bodies to drive changes in the current Australian mediascape.
Friday’s events, entitled “Through Australian Eyes”, especially looked at this theme, with presentations from SBS, ABC, AFC, FFC, Channels 7 and 9 representatives about developing opportunities for practitioners, like the scheme for soon-to-be-completed on-line docos from ABC and the AFC. Issues practical and philosophical were hashed out, such as the role of the public media re: the digital divide and the real meaning of “interactivity” (more, presenters insisted, than the mere clicking of a button)–all of which I took as a sign of the still flexible state of play in both digital media policy and function.
If “Through Australian Eyes” was long on national developments, Saturday’s sessions surfed an international wave of digital arts, information, and activism. Co-curated by Banff Executive Producer for Television and New Media Sara Diamond and documentary practitioner Peter Wintonick (director of Manufacturing Consent and the more recent Cinema Verite), “Windows on the Real” identified 4 prevalent new media themes: the participatory culture of new media, surveillance, activism, and the potentially disruptive agency of some digital practitioners. New media showcasing old agendas were foregrounded (for example, the Witness site, www.witness.org; the Universal Rights Network, www.universalrights.net), while DIY and tactical sites also attracted attention. Want to put together a new flag (call by netflag.guggenheim.org/netflag/)? Or perhaps psychoanalyse your harddrive (visit, at your peril, www.maryflanagan. com/virus.htm)? Sites were shown evidencing these and other activities, as well as one that apparently re-directs Disney visitors to a local porn site (check out www.RtMark.com, though that site’s as much about future interventions as it is about realised ones—so you may have trouble finding it). Indymedia’s yet-to-be-launched Woomera 2002 site, which will automatically turn ordinary citizens’ telephone reports into printed text and then record the reports on to the site, promises to take notions of interactivity into brave new democratic terrain. Semi-autobiographical work by YH Chang (www.yhchang.com/), Melinda Rackham (www.subtle.net), and Sara Diamond (www.codezebra.net—with John Tonkin) rounded out the day, all in all making for an excellent and informative bringing together of what is arguably Screen’s very oldest formation with its very newest one.
Adelaide Fringe festival, Digi Docs, curator Heather Croall, Union House, Adelaide University, March 15-16
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 23
© Julia Erhart; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
CD-ROM, once the medium of choice for ‘multimedia’, has lost much of its lustre in the past 5 years. In a catalogue essay for the MCA’s 1996 show Burning the Interface, curator Mike Leggett held out the CD as bronze sculpture for the 21st century; a new and replicable form for artistic expression. At the time, technological novelty, marketing hype and creative energy melded into a flurry of activity which quickly subsided. A new technological form caught hold: the net, and in particular the web—and the idea of the CD as the new coffee table book, drawing a paying audience of domestic digerati, proved too good to be true. The CD was revealed as just another storage technology, and not a great one at that: only moderately capacious, and slow, too slow for high-resolution video or really dense hypermedia.
Now the hot disc is DVD, and the CD is an everyday utility item, having survived because it’s still the cheapest and most convenient way to publish a large, static, self-contained chunk of data. Phone directories and reference books work well on CD. As an interesting consequence, a space opens for creative practice as the new Macquarie Dictionary and Thesaurus on CD shows. It includes Roget’s Circular, a work by Tasmanian artists Lisa Roberts and Melissa Smith. Not just filling spare space on the disc, the work is tightly knitted into the Thesaurus, such that Macquarie bills it as an “illumination.” An appealing thought, why shouldn’t all our databases—search engines, encyclopedias, phone books—be digitally illuminated? Digital art weaving itself into the grids of everyday, utilitarian computing, gold leaf and curling vines gone hyper.
Roget’s Circular takes the form of a collection of fragmentary images and texts, derived from the artists’ travels and correpondence over 2 years. The fragments are filtered through Roget’s own 12 categories of meaning, the architecture of his quest to order and organise the chaotic tangle of the language; the Circular is a personal network of memory, experience and association which is entwined with the officially constructed network of the Thesaurus. Another appealing idea, yet it just never takes off. The fragments are often beautiful, and sometimes interesting, but the networks of significance are mostly obscure and the urge to keep clicking wanes quickly. The work’s integration with the Thesaurus proper is mostly effective; portals to and from the Circular are linked to relevant entries. A shame, though, that the massive hyperstructure inherent in the thesaurus, the network of links from every word to countless others, goes unexploited by either the thesaurus itself or the Circular. (For a counter-example, see Plumb Design’s Visual Thesaurus, http://www.visualthesaurus.com/)
Roget’s Circular, Lisa Roberts and Melissa Smith, as part of Macquarie Dictionary and Thesaurus on CD-ROM (PC only).
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 23
© Mitchell Whitelaw; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
The Tissue Culture & Art Project
www.tca.uwa.edu.au
Following the Pig Wings Project, where we grew pig’s bone marrow stem cells in the shape of the 3 evolutionary solutions to flight in vertebrates (Bat, Bird and Pterosaurs), we would now like to animate them using muscle cells (from IGF-I transgenic mice as well as cardiac cells) as actuators. Besides the difficulties to do with aligning the cultured skeletal muscle cells and their use as actuators, we also have to modify the wing structures in order for the tissue to be able to animate the whole construct. The use of IGF-I mouse tissue, which is more efficient in its use of energy in comparison with its mass, will make this endeavour more achievable.
Animated Pig Wings will look ‘more alive’ and further challenge the audience perceptions of our Semi-Living Sculpture as evocative objects that blur the boundaries between what is alive/non-living, object/subject, and body/constructed environment.
The other research we are conducting is the development of a bioreactor for artistic purposes. Developing an interactive bioreactor (the ‘vessel’ which imitates body conditions for the cells to grow and be sustained alive) will enable us to present our Semi-Living Sculptures in non-specialised environments (such as art galleries) with no need for constructing a whole tissue culture lab. An interactive bioreactor will enable the audience to directly interfere with the environment in which the tissue grows and take an active part in caring for the Semi-Living Sculpture.
The research will be mostly conducted in SymbioticA—the Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia. Anyone interested in this research can contact Oron at oron@symbiotica.uwa.edu.au.
Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr
Machine Corporation
www.machinecorporation.com [link expired]
Machine Corporation is a satire about corporate websites and networked utopias. It uses Flash and action scripting to create an interactive user experience incorporating elements of character-driven narrative.
Machine Corporation offers a series of software products for free trial. In return users submit some very harmless information about themselves that Machine Corporation will respect and not on-sell to porn sites or marketing companies.
The authors hope to explore the possibilities of virtual space as the parameters for online narrative. The complexities of incorporating interactivity into this environment are handled by structuring and designing the narrative based on the familiar concept of interactive forms that are commonly encountered on the web.
In the tradition of culture jamming, part of the satire is corporate anonymity; therefore we refer to ourselves as faceless man 1 and faceless man 2 rather than identifying ourselves.
–
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 23
© RealTime; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
In his book Blue Fire, experimental psychologist James Hillman finds a spiritual meaning for graffiti in the modern metropolis. Random, indecipherable scatterings of information are inscriptions of soul: markers of resistance.
Marks in public places put a face on an impersonal wall or oversized statue…the human hand wants to leave its touch, even if by obscene smears and ugly scrawls, bringing culture to the walls and stone…
Hillman, A Blue Fire, Routledge, London, 1994
The cyberspace of the future, being hardwired now by marketing and PR professionals, is a landscape deserving of such effacement. Yesteryear’s digital revolution catchcry, “information wants to be free”, has been seemingly subsumed into corporate monoculture. The push is on to wash the internet clean of civic and social possibility. Copyright, 300 years old in 2009, is again the tool of monopoly control for the traditional owners of cultural intellectual property: the publishing, entertainment, and distribution industries.
The 1998 US Digital Millennium Copyright Act attempted to regress the public enjoyment of digital materials to pre-web levels. The entertainment industry, aware that video files can be pirated like MP3 music files over the internet, successfully lobbied the US government to provide the legal framework to allow complete control over the technology of digital audiovisual media. The DMCA forbids the distribution of any technology that can bypass copy protection schemes. This is akin to telling consumers if you own a CD player and cassette recorder, you’re guilty of music piracy.
Jon Lech Johansen, a 16-year-old Norwegian boy was charged for breaking intellectual property laws by publishing on his website DeCSS code for decrypting DVD technology. Johansen and his friends were not intending to infringe copyright, they claimed only to share the code to create a Linux platform DVD player. Emmanuel Goldstein, publisher of 2600 Hacker Quarterly, was charged under the DMCA for the same offence, and was accused by entertainment industry lawyers of “endangering the future of American movies.”
Regardless of the aggression of the new US laws, a quick scan of what’s available on the gnutella file sharing network makes it clear copyright (as we know it) isn’t going to live long beyond its 300th birthday. Hollywood blockbuster films like American Beauty are waiting to be downloaded in a cracked, DVD-compatible format.
As the saying goes: “every new law creates an underclass.” The DMCA has generated nadirs of flourishing subterranean hacker cults and legally evasive file sharing communities. These groups, like graffiti artists in the city, deface with their program codes the monuments of copyright control: with new hacks and cracks that are conscious, romantic, acts of resistance.
Free information advocates believe that copyright protects the economic interests of publishers and distributors, above the artists and communities who would benefit from a liberalised information marketplace. Nobody is saying artists should not be paid. What is argued is that peer-to-peer file sharing networks over the internet herald a step towards a new cultural economy, one that will greatly benefit artists and audiences in the long term.
Music file sharing, an example of what may happen with future film distribution, demonstrates new possibilities for musicians: a direct relationship between audiences, a form of ‘radio’ not mediated by the recording industry, global in reach, and communal in practice. No royalties are given to artists through free downloads, but the ability to distribute music outside the record company monopoly is itself revelatory. MP3 files can be sent around the world, at virtually no cost, with next-to-no effort, and without respect for jurisdictional boundaries.
Last year, on the Kazaa network, I found a bootleg of an obscure song that was not available for sale. Because of the rarity of the find, I investigated my host’s shared music library further (a feature most P2P programs share), and selected titles from the musicians @@@@. I’d luckily found a likeminded person randomly through the digital hook of an obscure piece of music: the file sharing community acted as the educational resource, leading to an exchange of ideas and music that did not require the music industry to play its usual role as controlling taste-maker. With little or no profile on local radio for @@@@, it was copyright infringement that led to my money reaching the artists. I purchased their album and paid another $50 to see them on their Sydney tour.
Clearly, the argument that free P2P file sharing does nothing but exploit artists is more complex than the entertainment industries would have us believe. The music industry itself was never able to conclusively prove that Napster or other MP3 file sharing networks did anything but increase record sales.
As bandwidth increases and compression programs improve, digital media will inevitably become a primary distribution mode for film. What online digital distribution represents for Australian short film, already starved of exhibition possibilities, is the opportunity of reaching online film community networks globally. The Australian and international festival circuit for short film is limited: only SBS’s Eat Carpet broadcasts short films on television nationally. The potential reach of the file sharing networks, and their ability to create a community of ideas about film, can only increase the profile of Australian short films locally and internationally.
Sites like Atom Films (http://www.atom.com/ [updated link]) have successfully exhibited short film for several years now, focussing on one-liner comedies and simple, net-friendly animations, boasting 16 million unique visitors each month (see “Small screen desire”, p19). While it’s a good example of a thriving commercial model of short film distribution, it lacks an awareness of film beyond broadly consumable entertainment.
Thankfully, it might be the hacking community that finds a way to make the distribution of film on the internet simpler, faster, and determined only by audience interest. While a post-DMCA environment will affect the availability of digital media sharing technology, the law can only ever be a minor variable in the future dissemination of audiovisual intellectual property.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 24
© David Varga; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
Perth International Arts Festival Director Sean Doran showed an alarming prescience when establishing elemental themes for his 4 festivals. The 2000 festival was themed ‘water’ and sure enough, it began with an unseasonable deluge that drowned out the Philip Glass opening night concert. The 2001 ‘earth’ Festival was-given the financial excesses of the previous year-much more down to earth! This year’s ‘air’ festival, despite a couple of nervous moments at Sticky—the opening performance spectacular in the far northern suburb of Joondalup—appeared to have escaped the literal elemental connection. Sticky relied on thousands of feet of sticky tape for its effects, so the mildest zephyr could be perilous. But this surprisingly beautiful spectacle moved without incident to its ambient and pyrotechnic conclusion.
360° in the shade
At the festival’s closing event, a freezing southerly buster made the experience of Amoros et Augustin’s 360° in the shade acutely unnerving. The show involved the installation of a huge projection screen, stage and rig on Cottesloe Beach (on possibly the windiest coast on the planet). The appalling weather made it hard to concentrate on anything but the risk to performers’ life and limb. This was a pity because there were fascinating moments in this performance which evoked a history through familiar and resonant images, from the cave paintings at Lascaux to the shower scene from Psycho; from sand paintings in the Navajo Desert to the photographic experiments of Thomas Muybridge and the paintings of Aboriginal desert people. To create these images the performers used a mix of live video feed, shadow theatre, action and sand paintings, mirror writing, live vocals and percussive beats: both astounding and ingenious.
While there were no instruments, the stage was constructed like a huge percussive instrument using a network of microphones, cells and sound sensors, distributed over the performers’ bodies, the screens, the floor and stage structure. The tightly scored composition was not to my taste and some of the images verged on the generic and overly romantic-often the case when European artists address Indigenous cultural traditions-but nevertheless it was a fascinating and committed performance by an extraordinary group of artists. My anxiety regarding the appalling weather was borne out on the second, equally windy night, when one of the performers slashed his hand and was dashed to hospital. The theme for the 2003 Festival is fire-I might just have to leave town!
Marnem Marnem Dililb Benuwarrenji, Fire, Fire, burning bright
Fire, Fire, burning bright
Some performances are highly polished, seamless theatrical events, constructed and informed by modern and postmodern tenets of capital ‘A’ art and the European and North American cultural tradition. Other work, while cognisant of those traditions, is recast in the vernacular of local influences and histories. Other performances are a gift-an opportunity to see, hear and witness the very different performance traditions-no matter how uncomfortable. This was certainly the case with the extraordinarily confronting Fire, Fire, burning bright (Marnem Marnem Dililb Benuwarrenji), written by Andrish St Clare and based on the traditional dances and songs of the Gija people and a true story told by Paddy Bedford and the late Timmy Tims.
Presented outdoors on a sandy stage at Belvoir Quarry, surrounded by trees, Fire, Fire tells the previously “hidden” story of the massacre of a group of Gija and Worla people murdered by white station workers and owners for killing and eating a bullock during a break from station work. The performance is a contemporary rendition of a traditional east Kimberley joonba (or corroboree) created for the stage. As such, this joonba, named and endorsed as a new style by the traditional owners, adheres closely to oral histories and incorporates the traditional songs and dance of the original sequence. St Clair explains, “the traditional performative culture of Australian Indigenous people is not primarily narrative. All the people in the community from Elders down to children usually already know the story, or at least the outside version which is open to all members of the community, so the need for narrative is absent, or coded very loosely…” (program notes). This means that the original joonba does not tell the story directly, but instead concentrates on what in western terms would seem to be peripheral details-in this case-the journey of the murdered men’s spirits.
From the shocking opening image of a corpse crackling on a fire, to the appearance of Gija people in ‘white face’ performing the roles of station owners, workers and police, this extended performance presents us with many extremely confronting images from our shared history. Despite considering myself reasonably informed about the atrocities committed in the name of colonisation, I was surprised at how disturbing it was to witness the Gija people telling this story. It was profoundly shocking to watch the whited up Gija men depicting the abusive language (“ya black cunt”, “bloody nigger” etc) and murderous actions of their white bosses.
The “hidden story” occurs earlier in the production. According to Peggy Patrick, (Company and Creative Director, singer, performer and Law) it was hidden because “people who were still working on stations were scared that if white people saw this joonba or realised what it was about they might all be shot themselves.” The latter part of the story presents the original joonba, the spirits’ journey, and contains audiovisual projections of country and traditional songs and dances with voiceover to explain the journey. Ironically, it was this part of the production, furthest from the concept of western theatre, that many of the non-Aboriginal audience were most uncomfortable with, finding it extraneous to the narrative drive.
The act of colonisation was ugly and brutal. Healing can only occur through a significant striving and an ability to bear witness to the violence enacted against Indigenous people in Australia. The listening can be painful and the truth uncomfortable. As Patrick says, “We want people to look at the show, to enjoy the song and dance and to learn what happened to our people in the past. Before, Aboriginal people were really frightened of white people. Now we hope we can all be friends together”.
One Day in ‘67
Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre’s production, One Day in ‘67, written by Mitch Torres, tells yet another story about Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal history, this time focussing on a tough but close knit relationship between a mother (Ningali Lawford) and her two daughters (Irma Woods and Ali Torres). One Day in ‘67 refers of course to the historic referendum in which white Australians voted overwhelmingly for Aborigines to be included in the national census, effectively giving them-somewhat belatedly-citizenship rights. The referendum forms a schematic backdrop for what is primarily a domestic drama-a heightened piece of kitchen sink naturalism. I thoroughly enjoyed this lucid and often funny production, which included outstanding performances by Lawford and Woods in particular, and Humphrey Bowers making the most of his role as the radio man playing the ABC’s signature tune on a ukulele.
The dramatic tension revolves around the relationship between the mother, Ruby, and her two daughters, one of whom is heavily pregnant. The first half ambles along in what feels like real time. The second half erupts into an enormous brawl between the two sisters. One sister has grown up with her mother in the mission, while the other was ‘stolen’ because of her lighter skin and given the ‘advantages’ of a white upbringing in the city. Torres adeptly negotiates the relationship between the 3 women to explore not only generational but cultural differences. Ivy (Woods) is determined to take up the cause for civil rights and shames her mission bred sister, Maudie (Ali Torres). Maudie sees her sisters’ adoption of a more confrontational mode as an implicit rejection and diminution of her own more traditional upbringing. There are some unbearably poignant moments in this play, offset by the sheer energy and cheeky humour of Lawford and Woods.
Shadows
PICA hosted three solo performances on behalf of the Festival, including William Yang’s memorable and moving, Shadows. I became quite accustomed to arriving at work and finding yet another PICA staff member in tears following the show. Whilst much of it was extremely poignant, there were also moments of hilarity, from the opening images of garden parties at Government House for the 1980 and ‘82 Adelaide Festival of the Arts, to an ostensibly artless statement on censorship, delivered deadpan, while a large flaccid penis is projected on screen. Yang’s work always appear artless, when of course, it’s highly constructed, drawing many apparently disparate threads into a tightly woven whole that comments acutely on our humanity, or lack thereof.
Plastic Woman
Plastic Woman
A particularly interesting performance Plastic Woman, presented by Thai Community Theatre Group, Maya, told in an endearing mix of Thai and English (and surtitles) the story of a “plastic woman” constructed by scientists to be the perfect sex machine. With the bare minimum of lights and props, the only set was a table to which was clamped a cheap and nasty plastic mannequin’s head wearing a truly dreadful wig. The script, originally written as a solo performance for a woman, is performed by a man, putting a very different spin on the performance. Thai TV star Asadawut Luangsuntorn’s compelling physical and occasionally sexually explicit performance conveyed the hypocrisy of a society that projects its own sexual fears and pornographic fantasies onto the figure of the desired woman. At the very end of the show, when the appalling statistics about the sex tourism industry (particularly with minors) start to scroll down the screen, we understand that this Brechtian style parable has an Australian audience well in its sights. The majority of the 5.4 million sex tourists who arrive in Thailand each year are Australian and German men. Something else to be proud of.
Failing Kansas
Not everything in this festival was to do with challenging content. At the high modernist end of the spectrum were two very different works—Mikel Rouse’s solo opera, Failing Kansas and the performance installation for fifteen voices, An Alphabet, by John Cage. The former was an hour long “tragic” opera very loosely based on Truman Capote’s renowned In Cold Blood, which explores the events surrounding the murder of the Clutter family in Holcombe, Kansas. The connection escaped me completely. I do not mind opacity, but having established the formal parameters of the work ten minutes would have sufficed. As it was a late night show, I took the opportunity to catch up on a bit of sleep.
An Alphabet
However, I loved An Alphabet, adapted from John Cage’s radio play of 1982. For me, Cage is a seminal 20th century figure and his ideas have informed much of my thinking about art and performance. Presented as an almost sculptural installation, the play assembles the luminaries of the avant-garde modernist tradition: James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Rose Sélavy, Henry David Thoreau and Erik Satie as well as Robert Rauschenberg, Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham and a 9 year old Mao Tse Tung. Their conversation comprised quotations from theories, lectures, manifestos, novels, freely adapted historical material and lines Cage simply made up. The dialogue is both live and pre-recorded and juxtaposed with fragments of musical and pedestrian sound. Cunningham gives a brilliantly understated and charming performance, playing not himself but Erik Satie. Mikel Rouse is James Joyce, and an utterly virtuosic John Kelly is the narrator. The performance also included local “celebrities” such as State Gallery Director, Alan Dodge as Rauschenberg, Alistair Bryant, Director General of the Department of the Culture and the Arts as Buckminster Fuller, and Channel 7 newsreader, Peter Holland. Though adapted for the stage after Cage’s death, this performance truly inhabited the world of Cagean aesthetics. Set on a stair-step structure, the cast, with the exception of the narrator, remains relatively static. The performers shift only at precisely choreographed moments, striking intermittent poses in a slowly evolving tableau.
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Sticky, Improbable Theatre, Joondalup, Feb 2, 3; 360° in the Shade, Amoros et Augustin, writer Marie Jones, director Ian McElhinney, Indiana Tea House, Cottesloe Beach, Feb 15-17; Fire, Fire Burning Bright, The Quarry Amphitheatre, Feb 6-10; One Day in 67, Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre, director David Milroy, Subiaco Theatre Centre, Jan 28-Feb 16; Plastic Woman, Maya-The Arts and Cultural Institute for Development, director Santi Chitrachinda, PICA, Feb 5-8; An Alphabet, director Laura Kuhn, Playhouse Theatre, Feb 14-16; Perth International Arts Festival.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 24
© Sarah Miller; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net
