Australian
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exploratory
performance and
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August 2002

You get your first job after drama school and you’re told, ‘Remember your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.’
Anonymous actor

The craft of the actor has been nurtured in Australia for the past 20 years by a number of tertiary institutions. The National Insitute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), West Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), Theatre Nepean at the University of Western Sydney (UWS), the Arts Academy at the University of Ballarat, and the Drama Centre at Flinders University are among many institutions that offer tertiary training in the craft. Since these schools are relatively young in terms of the history of Australian tertiary education, their overarching vision and curricula have been formed by their staff. It is difficult to imagine the holistic and passionate approach to actor training that one finds in these drama courses occurring with the quite same intensity in other arts disciplines. Peter Kingston, Head of Acting at WAAPA, expresses it in this way: “We talk amongst ourselves every week, every day, about what we’re doing.” But how does this “productive and generous self-indulgence” prepare graduates for an acting career?

In actor training there is a strong sense of a genealogy of method, a philosophy of theatre that is passed on to students. And something else—passion. When asked about their own training, all of the practitioner/teachers I spoke to were glad of the opportunity to speak about what had ignited them, to recount the story of finding their own sense of self within the art form. It is interesting to note that all the teachers of acting I spoke to had trained at a tertiary level in drama school—some as performers, others as directors.

In the courses I surveyed for this article, all have a curriculum built around movement, voice, acting, improvisation, devised work, singing, film and television skills, production projects and the creation of a show reel for graduates, often with a performance day for agents. Despite the overall commitment to a ‘total approach’ to training, there are some philosophical variances within the schools. At the VCA, WAAPA and NIDA there is a cohesive approach to actor training, guided by the Head of Acting at each school. In my conversations with 7 teacher/practitioners, I was struck by the depth of their commitment to the notion of the individual’s journey through the training, in preparation for the twisting path of a career as an actor/theatre maker. This personal connection, which Lindy Davies, Head of Acting at VCA, describes as “detached intimacy”, is exemplified in the question she put to herself when she was formulating the Acting Course: “How do I create an atmosphere where people feel safe?”

Peter Kingston says that he and his colleagues strive to deal with students “in a mutually respectful way, expanding their potential and our resources inside a laboratory, a rehearsal room.” Professor Julie Holledge, Director of the Drama Centre, Flinders University in Adelaide, also describes a holistic approach to the training of actors: “It is essential that an actor’s training balances the intellectual and the expressive, the intuitive and the analytical.” Kim Durban, Course Co-ordinator at the Performing Arts Course at Ballarat University, says: “The tool of the actor is the self, and the training is to sharpen and change and challenge those qualities of self as they are applied to the materials of theatre—time, space, body, silence, word, image.”

Lindy Davies has formulated a very specific method arising from her experience working at the Pram Factory in the late 60s, and training with Linklater, Brook and Grotowski in the 1970s. While working in Peter Brook’s company, she resolved for herself an apparent conflict between the contact-release work of Linklater and the discipline of Grotowski. “The form was the key to it all—it was the crucible that allowed the other elements to happen within it.” These experiences have been the foundation of her method in the last 7 years as Dean and Head of Acting at VCA. “We have a very radical approach to acting at our school. We don’t decide how we are going to say it or do it. The interpretation comes from the actor’s perspective—it happens kinaesthetically. We work to find the bridge between trance and language.”

Peter Kingston is in his 5th year as Head of Acting at WAAPA. Having trained at NIDA as an actor, he is inspired and challenged by the task of training actors. He muses that he and his colleagues in other acting courses are essentially doing the same thing, instilling in students “the importance of collaboration and that a truthful experience shared by the people making the work is the fundamental work.” Peter is eloquent about the state of ‘not-knowing’ at which point he encourages his students to begin. “What I bring to it is all that I don’t know. The group creates a fury of private investigation which spurs the work forward.”

Tony Knight, Head of Acting at NIDA was “thrown out” of NIDA as a student in the 70s and then went on to train at the Drama Centre in London. He says that the course at NIDA is “an intensely practical course—any theory happens on the floor.” As an acting teacher he draws heavily on the later Stanislavskian physical action method, where the action is played first, with the emotional/psychological territory taking care of itself. He believes that “acting always has to have an emotional and psychological approach”, but does not have time for any emotive indulgence from his students when they approach a character.

At Flinders, Ballarat and Theatre Nepean, the courses tend to be centred round a wide spectrum of skills, and the desire to expose students to all aspects of theatre. There is also an emphasis on theory and history to counterbalance the practical training. There is a heavy emphasis on ensemble work, so that students have the opportunity to write, direct, design, source props and costumes, raise funds, promote the work, in addition to performing. Julie Holledge was trained at the Bristol University Drama Department. “I was taught that actors require both a rigorous intellectual training and a highly disciplined physical training if they are to be expressive performing artists.”

After graduating from Bristol, Holledge worked as an actor and director in the alternative and experimental theatre in Britain for 10 years before moving to Australia. Unusually, the course at Flinders is a 4-year program resulting in an Honours degree. Holledge explains, “At Flinders there is no artificial separation between the body and mind, emotion and intellect. Our degree programs prepare our graduates to be creative, articulate and adaptable artists in whatever area they work.”

The question of how to prepare students for careers as actors is a common theme for teacher/practitioners, with acting courses often forced into review by university curriculum boards. Kim Durban says, “I am currently in a time of Course Review, so I often ask myself ‘what must a training artist know?’ I know many older actors are concerned that traditional theatre knowledge is disappearing. I sometimes wonder whether the old repertory system did a better job. However, where a university course can have value is in its connection to theory and research.”

Terence Crawford, Head of Acting at Theatre Nepean at UWS, trained as an actor at NIDA, and rejects the notion of a hegemonic method. “A method can be a bit of a lifeboat for actors to cling to, rather than just being happily ‘at sea’ on stage.” He teaches his students to think critically “before and after the act, but in the act, to lose their heads.” He believes there is terrible confusion about acting methods, with actors often not understanding that a method is for rehearsal, “not for going on stage. I teach methods toward acting, methods of rehearsing. I am very wary of anyone who says that this is a method and it will apply to all circumstances. As far as I’m concerned, such people have closed the book on creativity—have lost the humility which is the key to acting.”

After graduating, Crawford worked closely for 3 years with John Gaden at the State Theatre Company of SA in the 1980s. “John exemplified for me something I have continued to explore as a teacher: the connection between basic decency and acting.” This interest in the ‘ethical health’ of the actor has stayed with Crawford as he works with his students. “Good actor training is training for life—a kind of productive and generous self-indulgence. You’re there to look at yourself and learn about yourself in order to give, in order to be generous to others, to an audience.”

What does the world require of actors now, and how are they prepared for it by the academy? Tony Knight says “Most students who graduate from film and drama courses are going straight into film and television because that is the dominant market in Australia. The industry changes so quickly. What we have to do is get them ready for how the industry is now and for what they want to do in the future. We have to help them strike the balance between being an artist and becoming a commodity.” Kim Durban believes that the focus of today’s acting students is very different to those she trained with at the VCA in the early 1980s. “When I went to drama school we ridiculed the mainstream, looked down on TV and burned to be significant/alternative/ authentic. But now I have noticed a trend of leaning towards ‘the centre’—that many young and talented arts workers yearn to be discovered by the larger companies, to cross over. They are not committed to Howard Brenton’s “petrol bomb through the proscenium arch.” A visit to the theatre is often beyond their budget, on top of petrol for a 90-minute drive from Ballarat to Melbourne, in between working to make a living. They are far more likely to be writing a film-script and producing it on the weekends.”

Lindy Davies and Julie Holledge also speak about the need to balance the artist’s identity with the need to earn a living. “Actors today need to be trained in the skills necessary to earn a living,” says Holledge, “and for the most part these are connected to television and film. On the other hand, they need to be trained as performing artists who can push the boundaries of live theatre and attract new audiences even if this work, while sustaining them creatively, will never sustain them economically.”

Tony Knight has a big and hopeful vision for his graduates: “I want them to finish their training with the eye of a poet. I want them to show us new things. The baby boomers are going and something new will be in its place and I just hope they’re ready for it.”

Despite the focus now in acting courses on ‘survival skills’ to assist the graduate as they strive to enter the industry, all the teachers I spoke to agree that something more than skills and showreels are called for. The ingredient an actor needs to survive an unpredictable career is the ignition point, the passion that their own teachers began with. Yana Taylor, Head of Movement at UWS, wishes to inspire in students what Brett Whitely called “a true love for the difficult pleasures of the artistic life.” She believes that these ‘difficult pleasures’ “give you a view that enables you to move from job to job.” It seems that what everyone is assisting young actors to find is the indefinable thing that Terence Crawford calls “faith in the self”, and Peter Kingston “the spark of genius”, and Lindy Davies “something bigger than themselves” and Tony Knight “the eye of a poet.” In the end, perhaps it is the personal vision discovered, questioned and honed as a student that gets people through an acting career, and helps them to remember their lines, without bumping into the furniture.

RealTime issue #50 Aug-Sept 2002 pg. 43

Helen Omand, Rapt

photo Gus Kemp

Helen Omand, Rapt

Despite the odds (funding uncertainties, space shortages and touring impossibilities) an impressive line-up of dancers from across the country will front for this year’s Antistatic dance festival which offers a positively immersive experience for audiences.

The galleries will be jumping with installations. You can go a few rounds with virtual dancer Nicole Johnston in Chunky Move’s interactive dance installation CLOSER conceived by Gideon Obarzanek with new media artist Peter Hennessey. This will be a sneak preview of a work commissioned by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and premiering at its opening in Melbourne later this year. More meditative possibilities on time, space and the performance experience are on offer in Queensland artist John Utans’ installations on second thoughts and immersed, the latter created with dancer Wendy McPhee and sound/film artist George Poonkhin Khut. In NICHE Sue Healey choreographs for 2 dancers and film loop by Louise Curham, and in Bird Talk 1-7, Paul Gazzola (the world via WA) answers, among other questions, “Can a toy bird teach me choreography?” In and around the galleries, in mini-Me the anarchic Jeff Stein attempts to join opposing forces of minimalism and expressionism in the one body and The Fondue Set lead the audience on another kind of dance.

Important at this year’s Antistatic is the presence of emerging choreographers in a program entitled Mobile States which also tours to Perth’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Artists include Simon Ellis (Victoria) presenting FULL, a dance-theatre work based on the life of his grandmother; Felicity Morgan (WA) unpacking a dialogue on duality in Twosomely; Helen Omand who’s work has been raising eyebrows in Adelaide at events like Fresh Bait and Ignition, presenting her solo Rapt. And if you missed its short season at B-Sharp last year in Four on the Floor, there’s a chance to catch Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters in the sexy Sentimental Reason which offers some new connections between physical theatre and dance.

In the second week, Rakini weaves dance and vocals in Claustrophobia, a collaboration with composer Liberty Kerr; Eleanor Brickhill and Jane McKernan take a close look at self-image in Waiting to Breath Out and Michael Whaites presents Driving Me, his elegant duet with the work of video artist Carli Leimbach.

Works in progress will be presented by NSW artists Nikki Heywood (Body/explosive device) investigating “how to deliver gesture and text to within the skin of the listener: bullet-like”, and stella b dancers Nalina Wait and Katy McDonald collaborate with lighting designer Richard Manner. Brian Lucas (Queensland) works with “a dense format of dance, text and sound” in The book of revelation(s) and Ingrid Voorendt (SA) choreographs Fatigue, a solo for Stephen Noonan in which words push against movement.

On the talk front, in Dances with Screens you can join in a conversation between artists working with live/virtual bodies including Gideon Obarzanek, Wendy Houstoun (UK), Louise Curham, George Poonkhin Khut and Brigid Kitchin (filmmaker on Kate Champion’s groundbreaking Same, same, But Different). In Everyday Dance Erin Brannigan, Elizabeth Dempster and Ros Warby examine some theoretical and performative possibilities of the pedestrian body.

The workshop program throws up all sorts of interesting challenges to the brave dance artist. Special guest tutor Wendy Houstoun, investigating the nature of projection, asks “What rationale requires screened and live bodies to appear together? Voice expert Carolyn Connors wants to know, “What are you trying to say, and are you?” And in Impro Inferno Andrew Morrish asks his charges to jettison the concepts of choreographer, author, director, theme and content to concentrate on “the performer” and “the moment.”

Antistatic, Performance Space, Sydney, Sept 25-Oct 6, 2002

RealTime issue #50 Aug-Sept 2002 pg. 32

When I dance, I finally have a body to avoid.
Cristina Caprioli

Imagine a bridge, its centre collapsed, swallowed by the river below, and with it the steam train the structure couldn’t hold and the passengers the train failed to protect and deliver. What remains from disappearance, or rather from the appearance of the accident, the catastrophe?

paralla x presents a series of points: marks that make a map. As Deleuze & Guattari suggest, you can enter and exit the map at any place. I sat, and walked, in the space for perhaps 90 minutes and enjoyed the necessary ‘slow time’ of this series of points or intensities. Most of this time I listened to the audio (the ghostly appearance of software artifacts, or a short time made longer) that accompanied panorama a, whilst watching the iterations of birds, the water, the fragments of a bridge (over the River Tay in Scotland). There are tones of the small and the inconsequential, and also of the devastating effects of catastrophe that makes me wonder about the expectations and failures of technology. There is a strength to this ‘work’ of play that lightens the weight of absence and mourning. It seeks neither to solve anything nor to problematise technology, rather to open up the spacings or the intervals within which things take place.

Perhaps the thing architecture and dance have most in common is a necessary primary concern with gravity. Jude Walton worked with dancers and a biomechanist over a period of 4 months, using a range of equipment designed to measure the moving body. The use of augmented video goggles blurred the distinctions easily made between perceptions of inside and outside bodies: the points where the actual and the virtual meet, intersect, and affect bodies and orientations. On a small monitor set back in an angled recess, trace 3 displays lo-hi-tech stick-figure tracings made by sensors placed on points of the body in movement.

Mark Michinton’s catalogue essay, “Dance, chance, dream, scream”, notes the changes to the perceptions of the body in space effected by technological innovations in the 19th century—trains, planes and cars. The shock of speed. Across from the loose pile of fallen poles lit from underneath trace 2, is panorama b. Triggered by movements nearby, a model train engine circles a barren space. Enclosed in a wire cage this could be the interminable state of emergency.

panoptic sphere is a large video wall projection of a dancer (Ros Warby) in a room. The camera records her movements from below the floor and repeats its capture at feet, at thigh, at chest, at head, from above. “[The] size of the image (gargantuan) overwhelms as our imagination tries to construct the whole” (Jude Walton, email). It wasn’t so much that I was overwhelmed by the size of the image—perhaps the now familiar scale of megaplex cinemas has something to do with that. Rather I was made curious about where the body of the dance, or performance, meets the body(s) of the viewer, the gallery space and the image.

Quotation from Cristina Caprioli, Immanent Choreographies: Deleuze And Neo-Aesthetics, Conference, New Tate Modern, September 2001

Jude Walton, paralla x, video and light works installation; panoptic sphere: Ros Warby: choreography, dancer; Jude Walton: camera, editing; panorama: Jude Walton: camera, editing; Nick Von-der-Borche: train table design and construction; Tony Bishop: wire frame tunnel; Jason Keats: model; Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, May 2-June 8

RealTime issue #50 Aug-Sept 2002 pg. 33

Age of Unbeauty, ADT

photo Alex Makayev

Age of Unbeauty, ADT

The Age of Unbeauty has a sombre beauty. Musically, from its minimalist beginnings, through glides and subterranean bubblings, through its sad piano reversed against heaving organ chords, its insistently ominous rumblings, it breathes not dissonance or dissent but a fluent angst, resignation even, and is in the end usurped (presumably it had nowhere else to go) by some sentimental Bjork hymning, happiness-to-go. The design is vertiginous. At the back of a deep space a huge wall, like a parquet floor viewed from above, stands as if about to fall. Performers standing on their hands dance against it, the world upside down. Hidden doors open. One reveals a naked man and woman forced painfully against a perspex barrier, looking like a Renaissance painting of Adam and Eve banished from Eden, but with nowhere to go, only this purgatory. To be purged of what? Until near the end of the work, the beauties of the place are austere, danced duets and trios that speak not of union and sensuality but of bodies locked in furious combat or exercising en masse as if to exorcise…what? It’s a world where the mass divides and turns on itself with a finely articulated cruelty—those who are now the other are naked or masked and manipulated like puppets, beautifully, with apparent compassion but a dangerous grip. This is a world where the blind lead the blind, their suit trousers down around their ankles as they traipse again along the wall. One man (Dean Walsh), a kind of Everyman, or rather no man, because he doesn’t fit, totters awkwardly through this nightmare unable to break through to connect, occasionally complicit, only once eloquent and beautiful as he dances the wall, as if to scale it, and, at the end of the performance staggers to the forestage and collapses, presumably finished. Around him are couples whose entwinings no longer seem knotted, but supple and responsive, but…too late? The performance has ended but the wall, as it was at the beginning of the performance, becomes a huge screen filled with faces of diverse ages and cultures and Bjork bjorks on and on. Poor old Bjork to be put to such use. It might have seemed a radical gesture a decade ago, but here it irks with more sentimentality than irony, as if, like Luke Smile’s score for the performance, Stewart simply couldn’t conjure optimism, only in this addendum. Conceived partly after September 11, The Age of Unbeauty has some sense of topicality—a single strand of barbed wire hangs high across the stage, beneath it, as the performance begins, figures stand or sit in groups, or alone, watching, waiting, perhaps like refugees. They regroup. Time passes. They shift. It’s a potent image. Soon, however, the nightmare speedily engulfs them and is only ever distantly evocative of the specific unbeauties of our age. The Age of Unbeauty is a powerful work, even if it short circuits itself from time to time, and even if it feels less coherent than it should. Its dark vision might have seemed less loaded and the dynamics of its finale more complex had it foregone its cinematic ending. As ever, the dancers are superb, meeting Stewarts’ theatrical and choreographic demands with verve, bringing beauty to torment, one of art’s strange but necessary conditions.

–

Australian Dance Theatre, The Age of Unbeauty, devised & directed by Garry Stewart, choreographed with the company, dramaturgy David Bonney, design Stewart, Gaelle Mellis, Geoff Cobham, costume Gaelle Mellis, sound design Luke Smiles, lighting Damien Cooper, video artist David Evans. The Action Pack Season, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, June 26 – July 6.

RealTime issue #50 Aug-Sept 2002 pg. 34

Upholster is, as Phillip Adams states, a choreographic upholstery. From the intricate warp and weft of the movement to the larger patchwork of dance genres, across multiple references to fabrics, coverings, home-decorating and domestic environments, Adams takes a lateral, comprehensive and humorous approach to his theme.

With the proximity afforded by The Studio venue, the choreographic inventiveness, speed and sophistication is thrilling. Duets, trios and quartets fill the space with single figures appearing peripherally only to disappear again before pulling focus. Moving from podiums at the back of the space onto futon-like mattresses on the floor, sexual partnering and playful tussling inspire a choreographic frenzy of inter-weaving limbs and bold positions—thighs wrap around hips and dance partners kiss in a refreshingly frank representation of sexual intimacy.

On their feet, the dancers eat up the space in more clever groupings, or strut across the stage to take up new formations. The inventiveness continues with our attention drawn to both the large movements through space and the articulations of limbs, hands, fingers. The flow of this style of choreography is interrupted by 2 episodes. Knitwear provides Adams with a finicky and intimate choreographic device as the dancers button themselves into their own and each other’s cardigans. The tone of this sequence is in perfect keeping with the ‘cardy’ as an object associated with domestic cosiness. The second episode features Michelle Heaven in a deft characterisation of a shy upholsterer drawn into a fantasy world of floating lounges and sensual awakening. This section is well-crafted and entertaining, and clearly fits in with the themes of upholstery and the sexual liberation associated with the 70s though the shift in performance style requires a leap of faith from the audience.

The score provided by ‘turntabulist’ Lynton Carr drives the performance with psychedelic rock & roll, searing guitar riffs and funky rhythms. References to 70s music, fashion and ideals add other aesthetic/thematic layers to the texture of the choreographic fabric, and at times threaten the subtlety of the broader theme. The costuming is an example of this; a blend of singlets, lairy loose pants, chunky Y-fronts and pleated Dervish-like skirts for the boys, cardigans, frilly knickers and 50s frocks. The schizophrenia suggested by this is not necessarily a bad thing, and the plethora of styles, fabrics and patterns is appropriate to the theme. But the second half in particular accelerates and fills with so many references that the ending left me feeling unsatisfied—a promise that had been registered in the first half left unfulfilled.

The dancers are a group of individualised performers, rare at a time when youth and physical facility seem to dominate our dance stage—not that these dancers lack either. A variety of body shapes and personalities carries Adams’ work off in style, with stand-out performances from Stephanie Lake, Brooke Leeder, Gerard Van Dyck and Michelle Heaven. The Studio also felt like the perfect venue for this ambitious and style-savvy work.

Phillip Adams’ BalletLab, Upholster, choreography Phillip Adams; performers Michelle Heaven, Gerard Van Dyck, Stephanie Lake, Brooke Stamp, Ryan Lowe, Kyle Kremerskothen, Brooke Leeder; turntable composition Lynton Carr; décor/costumes Dorotka Sapinska; lighting Ben Cobham & Andrew Livingston. The Studio, Sydney Opera House, June 26-July 6.

Since the 1960s at least, the body as raw material for art, as a canvas or screen, as a site for artistic exploration, as a kind of (anti-)performance in real time, has generated insight and alarm, especially where it’s been the artist’s body and the means have been endurance or invasion, often by cutting. There are many forms of performance art, even if they are rarely encountered these days in Australia, but in Europe what has become a tradition, or perhaps unfinished business, is still well and truly alive and provocative. Some of it is coming to Australia.

Zane Trow, Artistic Director of Brisbane’s Powerhouse Centre for the Live Arts, met Nikki Milican at the 2000 Adelaide Festival of the Arts. Milican was there as part of the New Moves (new territories) venture with the festival and the Australia Council. The Choreolab workshop in Adelaide was the precursor to some 30 Australian choreographers and dancers participating in the New Moves (new territories) international dance event in Glasgow shortly after. In 2002 Millican invited 2 of those artists, Lisa O’Neill and Cazerine Barry, to participate in new territories, a celebration of new choreography and performance, incorporating New Moves, Scotland’s international festival of contemporary choreography, and The National Review of Live Art, a unique annual event which has been running since 1981—and since 1984 under Milican’s directorship. NLRA is focussed on performance art, contemporary performance and time-based art, all under the Live Art banner. Trow had attended the 2001 event and commissioned the works by O’Neill and Barry that Milican picked up. Now it’s his turn to bring several British artists, Milican, Lois Keidan of the Live Art Development Agency and a Glasgow arts journalist to Brisbane in October for the next stage of what he hopes will be a growing pattern of exchange and market development.

The NRLA is exemplary, says Trow, in providing infrastructure for performance: “It has done so for 20 years and you can feel that resonance…It brings together the young and the established and creates an energy.” The variety and richness of the performance forms Milican presents is evident in Edward Scheer’s report on the 2002 event in RealTime 49 (see also www.newmoves.co.uk). The festival featured over 200 professional artists from more than 12 countries across 4 continents. For his small but intensive 3 and a half day first-time program, Trow is focusing on performance art (as opposed to theatre-based contemporary performance): “I’m a lover of performance art because it is so anti-theatrical, so casual and off-handed, and it continues to investigate time, space and the body in significant ways.” He thinks the NRLA has been invaluable in nurturing performance, creating a safe house for the development of risky work, commissioning new work for many years and spawning offshoots like the London-based Live Art Development Agency (www.liveartlondon.demon.co.uk), an organisation which receives funding from the British Government and allocates it to the performance community (a model we should be giving serious thought to in Australia).

Australian performance artists have not been able to sustain careers focused entirely on their practice in the way that UK and European counterparts have done for over 20 years. Trow would like this issue debated, especially as he thinks that Australian performance artists are as good as any, more eclectic and often with a different sensibility with regard to the body, hence the acclaim for Lisa O’Neill’s idiosyncratic performances in Glasgow. It’s been a long time, he says, since the 1994 celebration, 25 Years of Performance Art (RT 5) and the appearance of Anne Marsh’s Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia, 1969-1992 (book and CD-ROM, OUP 1993). While names like Mike Parr, Jill Orr, Linda Sproul and Barbara Campbell have currency, and venues like Artspace are committed to occasional performance art events, the form is not prominent and careers are provisional. In Glasgow in 2001, Trow relished meeting artists “who are still ‘crazy’ and have careers as performance artists…appearing in Vienna, London, New York, and are recognised, and survive as artists and teachers in their field.” Trow also thinks that the NRLA “tells you a lot more about Britain than the RSC and Oasis.” The performers he’s bringing out, he says, offer a snapshot of British culture.

Given Milican’s enthusiam for Australian work, Trow sees the exchange with the NRLA as creating “a pathway into Europe in a different way from the Australia Council’s Performing Arts Market and the big arts festivals.” He’s also encouraged by the likes of Daryl Buckley, Artistic Director of the ELISION new music ensemble, who has successfully worked with a group of European producers to create an international audience for his company. For these producers, Millican and others, like Maria Magdelena Schwagermann (formerly of Berlin’s Hebbel Theatre and now Artistic Director of the Zurich Arts Festival), Australia is a hothouse of artistic creativity and distinctive inventiveness.

Trow describes the NRLA at the Powerhouse as a mix of installation, performance, workshop and dialogue. Performances will also be presented in Perth by Artrage (the longtime fringe festival is now under the new artistic directorship of Marcus Canning; see interview in RT#51). Trow is hoping that the visit will provide an opportunity for Australian practitioners to come and meet their British counterparts. It’s also an opportunity to hear from Milican and Keidan just how live art is nurtured, regarded and archived in the UK. The NRLA has a close association with Nottingham Trent University which has recently digitised 20 years of documentation of UK performance art. It could also be an opportunity to hear about the Contemporary Theatre Practice course at Glasgow’s Royal Academy of Music & Drama—Milican is Chief External Examiner. Lois Keidan (formerly Director of Live Art at London’s ICA) will speak about the NRLA, the Live Art Development Agency, curation and government arts policies and the support for performance across Europe. Mary Brennan, a mainstream journalist and passionate supporter of contemporary performance will address the media’s relationship with art.

Trow describes Michael Mayhew’s work as “extreme.” A preoccupation with death and decay is realised in a “durational work in a coffin in which he damages himself with glass and creates puppet icons of the body.” Mayhew has been creating works since the mid 80s, travelling “through the disciplines of dance, theatre, large scale and site-specific.” He is currently Artist in Residence at NRLA. In the notes provided on the performers, Mayhew writes that while in Australia he will search for a sister he has not seen for 38 years, and “I hope to travel to the desert to play with fire.”

Richard Layzell, says Trow, is “very anti-theatre”, “one of the first to stand in the street with a cardboard box on his head.” His “sustained anti-performance” has included a lecture on varieties of ducting tape “delivered in a bad 70s safari suit…funny, but real and with no theatrical pretense.” His work is “a mix of video, spoken word and meaningless gesture…so well-formed, a well-honed meaninglessness developed over many years.” Layzell is a member of Rescen, a research group of performers, composers and choreographers based at Middlesex University. For NRLA at the Powerhouse, Layzell will present Performing Everyday; it’s about “process, making, not performing, the art of cleaning, personal history, the Japanese aesthetic of wabi sabi and Layzell’s alter ego.” An intriguing aspect of Layzell’s career (which includes international performances, a widely seen interactive installation and several books) is his role as Visionaire for AIT Ltd, an arts-industry crossover company established in 1995, “recently voted in the top 5 companies to work for in the UK.”

Kira O’Reilly, whose work Trow sees as having kinship with that of Mike Parr and Stelarc, invades her own body in acts of self mutilation. He describes the work as demanding, as “monumentally beautiful and very considered”, “asking the most difficult question…how far can art go? Far beyond questions about voyeurism and ‘is the theatre dead’? It is a work of art, not self-abuse.” O’Reilly might perform (the demands of the work preclude an early decision); she’ll certainly talk and show videos of her work. She writes: “Making direct and explicit interventions in my body, I have bled, scored and marked and scarred by way of investigating the unruly and chaotic materiality of my substance and the disparate narratives at play within. This action begins where words fail me.” A 1998 graduate in Fine Arts from the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, she has been the recipient of a grant, a visual arts award and 6 commissions.

George Chakravarti’s video installation, Shakti, fuses images of the Mona Lisa and Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction and creation with that of the artist himself. Born in New Delhi, Chakravarti was raised as a Catholic but also came under the influence of Buddhism and Hinduism from within his family. He writes: “Shakti integrates painting and performance and delivers it as a time-based medium. An hour-long piece in real time, Shakti is viewed as a painting. I see the piece as a self-portrait, placing myself as the hybrid figure…I question my own identity and experiences of gender, race and sexuality, originating from the East and located in the West.” Based in London, Chakravarti is currently completing his Masters Degree at the Royal College of Art.

The 3 and half days of the NRLA in Australia at Brisbane’s Powerhouse promises to be intense and provocative, another (hopefully ongoing) significant addition to Brisbane’s burgeoning contemporary arts scene and a great opportunity to gain insight into the nurturing, funding and proselytising of performance in Europe. Most of all it’s about meeting and witnessing the work of leading British performance artists. To add to the frisson, you might think of enrolling in Richard Frayzell’s performance workshop, “which will explore communication, the irrational and the state of ‘not performing’. This is suitable for all ages and abilities, no previous experience is necessary.”

The National Review of Live Art, Brisbane Powerhouse, in partnership with New Moves International, Oct 15-18. www.brisbanepowerhouse.org

Innana’s Descent

There’s something eerily right about being taken beneath a Masonic Centre (appropriately a bunker of a building in Sydney’s CBD concealing sanitised ancient male rituals) to see a performance about a Sumerian goddess of about 5,000 years ago whose various manifestations (Ishtar, Astarte, Isis etc) place her somewhere in the long transition from matriarchal to patriarchal cultures. Her moon goddess journey into the underworld to confront the dark self of winter and death (her sister Ereshkigal) before emerging to regenerate the world requires her, as ruler of the solar year, to sacrifice a male, the shepherd king, the man-bull Dumuzi (from an earlier time when shepherds could become kings and kings were ritually slaughtered). There’s a curious pleasure in seeing this ritual enacted, especially when we are cast in the role of tourists visiting an archaelogical dig in an underground carpark. Here we are transformed from observers into witnesses as the performance slips from site tour (with lectures and projections) into ritual, sometimes hovering between as the workers in the dig appear as gods from the waist up, their grubby shorts and boots below, and battered car hubcaps and number plates are labelled and held aloft like sacred icons.

Our progress is brisk as we move into the harsh lights and dusty hubub of the wonderfully constructed site (designer Joey Ruigrok, sculptor/prop maker Shigeyuki Ueno, lighting Richard Montgomery, sound/music Felicity Fox, Gene Gill) with its wall charts, projections, table displays, industrial rumble and rattle, the manufacturing of objects (for the tourist trade?) and the droll chief archaeologist (Katia Molino) who will be our guide. She’s a likeable eccentric in love with the erotics of the dig (“excruciating as a slow striptease”) and divulging some of her own rituals—she collects the underpants of 147 men she’s slept with to date as well as purchasing round glass paperweights that recall their testicles). She also explains the fragmentary nature of her discoveries and of the goddess narratives, and muses, like any good postmodernist, ”Do you take fragments for what they are?” However, the tensions rife among the workers on the dig, without signal, become those between the gods they are symbolically (and later literally) exhuming. One of them (Chris Murphy) becomes Innana in a serio-comic boots’n’all expression of desire: “Who will plough my vulva, who will water my lettuce?”

From then on the sheer strangeness of this ritual world enmeshes us as we are marshalled about the site, watching Innana in a small wagon sharing wine with her increasingly drunk Father-King (Michael Cohen) and divesting him of his glittering royal apparel from top to bottom (including, of course, his worker’s underpants). After Innana ropes in the man-bull of her dreams (Dominique Sweeney), 2 thuggish and brutally competitive guardians (Cohen and Carlos Gomes) drive a path through the audience, divesting her of those same objects as she is drawn to a opening in the site wall, a projection that transforms into a spiralling journey into the vulva-underworld of her fearsome sister (Yumi Umiumare, magnicifently poised, cackling gutturally). Innana disappears. We are lead deeper into the underworld, the next floor down, and seated in a circle for a demonstration. The archaelogist makes a small cut in the mummified goddess, unaware that the demonic sister hangs below on the same gurney. A hand slips out of the cloth, Innana emerges. However, Ereshkigal will not release her without sacrfice. Innana seductively traps the horned Dumuzi (he’s enjoying a beer and a bit of country music) as the line between the fantastic and the real again emerges. Innana’s pudendum flowers with lettuce, a moment equally serious, comic and other. Life is restored. The archaeologist worships her alabaster statuette of Innana, a private ritual. The big, satisfied audience heads for the overworld, chatting, bemused, enthused. We’ve been somewhere deep in our white psycho-cultural history with its perplexing middle eastern origins, heading home to dig out our copies of Totem and Taboo, The White Goddess and those feminist histories of matriarchy.

It’s been a long time between shows, and earlier works were flawed despite some impressive moments. Theatre Kantanka prove themselves with Innana’s Descent. The structure of the work, the physically brave, focused performances, the totality of invention in design and audience management reveal a maturing vision. There are still challenges: the dialogue is simply not of the same calibre as the rest of the work and the realisation of the one conventional character, the archaelogist, seems incomplete. Katia Molino’s performance, as always, is a fine one, however her relationship with Innana as scripted seems more ironic than intimate, just as her private rituals seem trivial beside the cultural and psychological riches of the Innana stories. The audience is immersed in this other world, but the archaeologist seems largely immune to it and what it might mean for her. Having established her preoccupations so clearly it seems a pity that they have nowhere to go. I craved an encounter between the archaeogist and Innana, some more substantial act of identification. In another, imagined version of Innana’s Descent, the archaelogist, not one of the site workers, becomes Innana, at least somewhere in the unfolding ritual. Complaints aside, this was an enjoyable, sometimes disturbing experience, a work that demands to be kept in repertoire.

Four on the Floor

In Legs on the Wall’s latest and invaluable ongoing collection of new works by company associates and guests, it’s Alexandra Harrison as performer and director in Together and Diffusion who impresses with a challenging presence and some bold inventiveness. Like Sentimental Reason (Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters) from last year’s B Sharp program and Brendan Shelper and Tina McErvale’s Bumping Heads (Next Wave 2002), Together (director Rowan Machingo, creator-performers Harrison & Machingo) displays a scintillating choreographic sensibility fusing dance and physical theatre in a tense couple scenario of power shifts and in-and-out-of-sync emotional phases. In Diffusion, although rather slightly resolved, Harrison packs the performance with physical distress, erotic manoeuvres and a deft use of the vertical in the tiny theatre.

Pussy Boy

Christine Evans’ fable about a boy who wants to fly but whose only flights in the end will be those of fancy, even lunacy, is tautly constructed, ably directed (Chris Mead) with an eye to suspense and clarity, and finely performed. Ben Fountain as the boy is quietly curious. His tyrannical father (Chris Ryan) just as quietly imposes on the boy his misanthropy (built on mysogyny) via physical threat (from the same hammer and nails he wants his son to master) and example—casting out the old woman (Clare Grant) who lives with just too many dogs in the same building. A policeman and a policewoman, a kind of bitter-sweet chorus, watch the action like indifferent minor gods who might occasionally empathise but know they have no real power and who are more interested in each other in the end. Ryan and Grant, both from Sydney’s contemporary performance scene, bring distinctive presence to the work, a stillness and restraint that suits the poetry of Evans’ text and the intimacy of Belvoir St Downstairs. The live musical score for cello is fine in itself but too heavily underlines the misery of the tale. Evans (My Vicious Angel), now writing from the US, again proves herself a master of construction and spare, evocative dialogue in a quasi-fantastic setting.

Kicking & Screaming New Writing Theatre, B Sharp, Downstairs Belvoir St Theatre, June 20-July 7.

The Waiting Room

Works like this are important at a moment when Australia is evincing an insular meanness on the one hand and global gung-hoism on the other in an ugly allegiance with the USA. For the converted, who know these issues only too well, the work is a theatre experience that confirms convictions but, given the distance the government has calculatedly put between us and refugees, also puts emotional flesh on the bones of abstraction. The Waiting Room, from Sydney’s Platform 27 (director Richard Lagarto), but premiering in Melbourne in collaboration with the Melbourne Workers’ Theatre, is a gruelling experience on at least 2 counts. The first is its explicit enactment of life in one of Australia’s detention centres. A large projection screen, a clutter of video monitors (multimedia by Rolando Ramos) at floor level and a large, ominous mobile, transformable frame (set design Sam Hawker) collectively evoke a concentration camp in the Australian outback, aided by Liberty Kerr’s melancholy score, played live, and Stephen Hawker’s shadowy nightmare lighting. The screens also carry images evocative of harsh journeys paralleling the story-telling of the performers as refugees, as well as the ludicrous Australian Government video with its shots of dangerous fauna aimed at deterring asylum seekers. The construction of The Waiting Room epically alternates the Kafkaesque tale of a distressed traveller, personal stories of refugee flight and dramatisations of escalating detention centre cruelty with moments of pure agitprop satire of government and media. All of this is admirably performed, sensitively and often with physical and vocal verve by Wahibi Moussa, Steve Mouzakis and Valerie Berry multiplying themelves into a host of characters ranging from depressed children to John Howard. The second count on which this show is gruelling is overkill. The understandable anger that drives The Waiting Room constantly threatens to overwhelm it, to suck everything into an agitprop vortex—everything is known, worked out, pre-judged, performers become virtuosic machines, their personalities dissipated, some scenes are hectoringly simplistic, a number feel redundant. There is nothing here that cannot be addressed by judicious editing, some opening out of the best material and a fresh look at some of the scripting (by many hands) now that the play has had its first run.

The Waiting Room is a confident step forward for Platform 27. Trades Hall, Melbourne, May 15-June 1

Talking performance training is like finding yourself in an alternate universe, the familiar suddenly becomes a terrain of possibilities, bristling with unmapped spaces, virgin forests, alien influences, new performative species. Explanatory metaphors fill the air, time and space seem different here. The inhabitants speak of perceptual fields, of performance as thought and about having to learn to sit with ambiguity and uncertainty. Protocol demands you not mention the psychology of motive or the actor’s relation to story, certainly not until a lot of other things are addressed. In this world, the practitioners of contemporary performance and teachers in acting schools and performance-making courses are responsive to both the performer’s complex needs as a body, and to a new world where ways of being, holding space, the very desire to perform and the need to speak, if at all, are pivotal. Here performers are proud of their autonomy and the capacity to collaborate, occupy theatres, galleries, streets, sites, and interact with communities, across cultures and cyberspace. This world is a wilderness, new and uncharted, but like all such places it has its own proliferating laws, methodologies, possibilities and those poly-linguals who speak its languages. The university and the actor training school can be found here too, adapting to the artistic, intellectual and job market demands of the new performance species. They are also instigators, these artist-teachers and fellow travellers, opening out notions of acting and performance. While the very idea that universities should teach contemporary performance is alien to some, Mark Minchinton, actor, dramaturg, lecturer (Faculty of Human Development, Victoria University) proposes that the terrain he and his fellow teachers have opened up (and sometimes fight to preserve) within a university is a “wild space.”

Minchinton says that the 3 year Bachelor of Performance Studies is about performance-making but it is not strictly vocational: it’s for thinkers, makers, performers who are encouraged to “think the performance”, a performance not rooted in traditional forms. He says, however, that the course is excellent preparation for theatre and dance, or, alternatively, for established performers re-thinking their craft. Minchinton himself teaches performance skills, in particular what he calls “performance ethics” explored through team work and collaborative projects mixing first, second and third year students. Individual projects also emerge, especially in the final year when the focus is entirely on making works. By turns the work, he says, is exhilarating and nerve wracking because you’re always asking, What am I doing?” His answer? “Creating and preserving a wild space, re-describing it and protecting it…playing with the university structure…establishing an ethical relationship with it, striving to not be dictated by it.”

The nature of the collaborative projects is up to the artists who teach in the course. “We depend on diverse sessional staff as a guarantee against insularity.” Teachers include Elizabeth Dempster (see page 30), Jude Walton, Margaret Cameron, Margaret Trail, Chris Babinska, and Minchinton himself. Graduates go in many different directions—Pia Miranda into film (Looking for Alibrandi) and theatre (eg Benedict Andrew’s demanding production of Fireface for Sydney Theatre Company), Domenico de Clario into performance art and heading a visual arts department (Edith Cowan University, WA), others go on to further study and training at RMIT in fine arts and multimedia, and the VCA for theatre or dance.

For Bruce Keller, writer, performer and teacher, University of Western Sydney, the Theatre Making (formerly Theatre Theory & Practice) Bachelor of Arts degree is about all kinds of performance—site specific, community, cross-cultural—and alertness to new developments. The course combines study and practice. Keller says that students usually arrive with a rigid notion of theatre. He tells them however, “We’re here to mess with your minds,” opening them up to possibilities, to appreciate the diverse range of performance practice to be found in Sydney. In a university with adjoining music, dance and fine arts departments the cross-disciplinary potential is rich. Keller’s particular pleasure is watching for student epiphanies. He explains that most students when they enrol know that they like the arts, but are not sure what career they want, unlike, say, those students who are accepted into this university’s acting course. It might take a year or 2 of making work before a student hits on what they want to become—that could come from performance, lighting, sound, production management, a community project… Sometimes, he says, it comes out of a very demanding experience. Many students will go on to become teachers, taking with them an expansive and subtle view of performance. What the students gain, he says, is confidence, openness and ideas. Through off-campus projects as part of the course they work with communities and interculturally. These and other experiences provide professional links and industry contacts. Like Minchinton, Keller is emphatic about the value of sessional teachers drawn from Sydney’s performance community: “Students often don’t know it but they’re getting the cream of the Sydney performance milieu.”

Writer and director Richard Murphet runs the performance-making course at the Victorian College of the Arts within the Drama School. It is a 1 year Post-Graduate Diploma in Animateuring (or a 2 year Masters) in collaboration with the Dance School. Murphet sees no polarity between theatre and performance, believing it a continuum entailing “deep, interpretative acting skills.” What is central, he argues is “the figure in space and how text, image, structure, multimedia relate to the performer.” Rather than character it’s “the revelation of presence” as demanded not only by contemporary performance, he says, but the plays of Maria Irene Fornes, late Beckett, Caryl Churchill, Jenny Kemp. For the postgraduate animateur performance-making course, it’s all about “what’s going on in the space”, not the story: “Narrative is only [Hitchcock’s] McGuffin…it’s what’s between the actors that the audience gets off on.” What has to be asked is “what is the grain of the voice?”, “how do you whisper a movement?” The animateurs do 3 or 4 projects involving a solo performance, participation in a production directed by Murphet, facilitation of a work involving first year actors and an independent project of their choice. In these activities the students get to work with composers, choreographers and other artists. In their courses they are taught by Lisa Shelton, Tanya Gerstle, Robert Draffin and Murphet. They observe scene classes with Lindy Davies (page theatre article) and “pick what they want.” Graduates, he says, get work everywhere, with theatre companies, venues, in regional arts, directing, facilitating, performing.

I was curious about what a director expects of the trained performers she works with. Jenny Kemp has produced a unique body of work in Australian theatre that makes very particular demands on her performers who have backgrounds in acting, dance, voice and movement. She has worked recurrently with a number of performers and, significantly, regards them as her collaborators. Kemp articulates her expectations precisely. “Rhythm and timing are to do with intuition. Sometimes they are automatic in a performer, but not always. They have to be nurtured.” There is also the challenge of balance between the vocal, the physical, conceptual and spatial kinaesthetics of performance. “In a very general way”, she says, “tradition leans on the voice. Therefore the text is attended to and not the space” the performer finds herself in. In rehearsal, the performer “has to find a place, a world in which to stand, to inhabit…and must respond to the text spatially. The response should not always be that the performer speaks. Again this is to do with timing which is a kind of umbrella over all the elements of performance.” Kemp thinks that the worst scenario “is a homogeneity of rhythms in a group of actors…They each need their own sense of rhythm and character.” Another expectation is for performers “to sit with uncertainty and ambiguity, to be able to deal with contradictions within the rehearsal process, within their character, within the play. They must accept that a director will make mistakes and will change her mind.” Similarly, they must understand that contrary actions can be played in a character: “It’s obvious, but the actor must sit with complexity and contradiction, must embrace pluralism and difference.” Because the work is group-based, the performer also needs to be patient and tolerant, to keep working when not paid attention or when things are difficult, to have “a certain degree of autonomy.” A key expectation is to “hold form during performance. It’s a standard requirement but it’s not always understood. If the trajectories are strong it always helps.” I ask Kemp about younger performers she’s worked with recently: “I felt the training and the talent…There’s somehting palpable when someone arrives with training. It’s also about curiosity. It has to be there. Sometimes [it’s there] despite the training—which is sometimes developed for something else…It’s about how an actor relates to surfaces and depths, the inside and the social.”

Margaret Cameron is a writer and performer and has been a sessional teacher at the Victoria University for 7 years as well as at the VCA. At the former she teaches voice to first year students, “But not in terms of technique. It’s about the need to have a voice, of finding the need to have a voice, to go straight to the point about articulation. I ask the student, ‘Tell me something exactly.’ The more difficult it is to speak of something, the more interesting it is.” Like Kemp she sees the working group as made up of different qualities. “A performance is many perspectives in a space. The next premise is that space is created by perceptual practice…the intersections of those perceptions. A stage is a frame, a point a view, a window…” Cameron describes our usual state as like having a hand pressed against our face: “you have to push it away to create a space, a performance space in which to play. There is no play without space, no articulation of bits, no movement.” The process then is about “ways to practice perception” and in this she has been influenced by Deborah Hay, the American dancer and teacher she has worked with. After creating the desire to speak, Cameron procedes on to movement, to using the “invisible muscles…breaking every movement into a trillion pieces” by asking questions with no answers and afterwards asking the students to tell her what they felt, their own feedback. “They come back to language as if new. You put yourself in a place of observation minutely, otherwise there is no space. This is about thought and the body as thinker. Thought is the ability to endure ambiguity.”

For Cameron, the unversity “has been an amazing assistance. I use it to work. The university and my students are my collaborators.” At the end of the course? “The students are alone with it”, with what they have learned and become.

There’s a growing tendency for theatre and performance studies departments that are not primarily training oriented to include a practical component to offer students some sense of what it means to devise, produce and perform in a work for an audience and how that relates to what they’ve been studying. Clare Grant, former Sydney Front member, solo performer and actor teaches in the Theatre, Film & Dance Department, University of NSW.

She declares: “There’s nothing to study unless you’ve done it.” Her focus is on performance making, offering students alternatives to the character-based, cause and effect narratives of conventional theatre. Students opting for performance making include those in theatre, performance studies and film, or studying combinations of these for their degree. The Workshop Exercise course, for example, planned in conjunction with other courses, and, choosing from a range of performance types, culminates in a public production. Grant says that if she’s directing, the outcome is “not group-devised”, but “comes from individual imagery,” yielding a multi-layered performance. She amalgamates the individual performances into the finished work. One goal is to develop an awareness in students of “how to present the present moment” and she encourages students to “learn how to work without creating subtext.” Although Grant is not formally training students to be performers, her aim is for them “to be confident and hold the space”, “to look good in that space” and “to have a good experience.” Autonomy is important: “they create the material, they know what the task is.” Students go on to teach, to work with PACT Youth Theatre, a few go to NIDA or the VCA, some to directing, some to postgraduate work on performance.

Sydney performer and a founding member of Version 1.0, David Williams was a Theatre Theory & Practice student at the University of Western Sydney in the 1990s. He contributes his commitment to performance in part to the inspiration of a teacher, Yana Taylor, who insisted that students see contemporary performance, “work out what is” and brought artists from the performance scene to classes. In a course where students were introduced to an electic range of disciplines and “made work within loose parameters”, there was a sense, Williams says, of being able to make choices and to follow a form or an idea to see how you could go with it. As the course progressed “a set of principles for performance, not a style, emerged”, a sense of how to be, to occupy space, alternatives to being a plot-driven character. At it’s best, he says, the course encouraged openness and exploration and interdisciplinary relations with other university departments. There were moments, however, when performance making students felt like the poor cousins of those in the acting course. Some students sought extra-curricular training at a time when Open Season at Performance Space and Contemporary Performance Week at Sidetrack offered short term but critical opportunities for performance and development. Williams laments the passing of these events. The challenge on graduating, he says, was how to develop a practice, rather than a string of projects. PACT Youth Theatre, then directed by Chris Ryan provided the opportunity to perform in directed works and, in response, create one’s own. Williams spent 5 years training in Suzuki with Meme Thorne. Nowadays, as is happening across Australia, it’s improvisation at the Omeo Studio, says Williams, that’s providing a foundation for his practice.

This brief visit to a new otherworld of performance teaching and its nexus with changing attitudes to actor training is a small sample of the many more university departments who are opening up their own wild spaces.

On a chill Melbourne May morning over coffeee and tea in the Hairy Canary bar, the Snuff Puppets’ Pauline Cady and Andy Freer speak with a shared conviction that takes the edge off the chill and from time to time fires the arts conscience. After a decade of work (and well before that with Canberra’s legendary Splinters) their vision has lost none of its heat, however quietly, if insistently, it is spoken. A mix of artistic sophistication and political bluntness resonates in the work. A Snuff Puppets’ event is a curious combination of the raw and the cooked; there’s a rough-hewn immediacy (so vital to outdoor performance) and careful crafting—even the wildest of their giant, lumbering puppets has to be made for manipulability and a long performing life.

Pauline joined Splinters in 1985, Andy in 1988. After working on the company’s Cathedral of Flesh at the 1992 Adelaide Festival and driving back to Canberra, Pauline and Andy, with another Splinters cohort, artist Simon Terrill, decided to go direct to Melbourne instead. They’d been “doing puppets” since 1988 within the Splinters framework, but now they felt an urge to make it an entirety, to step right away from working with language. Pauline declares, “one look from a puppet can convey the whole of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’.” The Splinters years had been invaluable—the visual arts underpinning of the shows, the constant re-working of audience-performer relations and being part of something that was “so fringe, so underground.” However, inspired by the American Bread & Puppet Theatre and the British Welfare State company, the incipient Snuff Puppets wanted to reach larger audiences. The question was where, the answer was—on the streets, appearing without warning (“hit & runs”), sometimes as part of protests, sometimes as “fixed site shows with, say, the city as backdrop.”

The street shows could “disrupt traffic, scare children and drive parents away”, but they could also generate a classic pantomime relationship between puppets and audience. Pauline recalls in Adelaide people protecting the Cow from the Butcher (The Dancing Cow Show). There is a roughness to the puppets that their creators feel is “an antidote to Disney”, to a sanitised view of the world and the neat animations that purvey it. They love the open streets, but fixed site shows “offer more control over every element of the work.” The goal is to get the audiences they attract on the streets into a performance site that is still outdoors—“our ideal is the outdoors, it’s so beautiful to be out.”

Snuff Puppets have other audiences, ones that become collaborators. These are communities of many different kinds. It’s an area of work Andy and Pauline see “as having huge potential. We have so many offers we could do People’s Puppet Projects back to back.” These have taken them to Arnhemland (with a timetable spread over 2 years including a component this August), Singapore, China and Japan. On these ventures they “push the handmade aesthetic versus the slick” but also find that their own palette gets bigger. This can entail some amusing creative compromises—Japanese participants wanting to do kangaroos and Snuffies (as they are known to fans) attracted to Edo period art, doing “huge carp with other puppets inside and crazy geishas.”

“Fetishisitic” crops up several times as Snuff Puppets describe their relationship with their creations. It’s meant in its sacred rather than psycho-sexual sense. “The puppets are built from scratch with rough methods, but with a lot of attention to skin and look, very woven…A puppet is an object you love, it’s precious…You keep fixing them up. It’s a natural thing to do…There’s an element of such religiosity, of the god in the mask.” Snuff Puppets are fervent proselytisers. “We are spreading our attitude to puppets, their roughness, openness and accessibility….People recognise things in puppets.”

If these puppets have such power, why then the name Snuff Puppets? Originally it was an exhortation, as in “Kill the puppets!”, “Kill the standard concept of puppets”, show the workings, reveal them in daylight.

Performing locally, touring internationally and running community projects all compete with the creation of new work. It seems this gets harder and harder but a new work is “created or kickstarted every 12 months.” Careful scheduling is vital so that the puppet builders have ample time, performers can be given new challenges, and new shows can be run in properly. Balancing income generation and the demands of creativity is a challenge, but Snuff Puppets are undaunted. A trip to Bath (UK) in April for a puppet festival was inspiring, helping lift their profile, and they now have the support of a Belgium-based agent who will not program them into shopping centres. Wherever their work takes them, their commitment is still to intimate performance and to working the streets.

Snuff Puppets’ recent work includes The Water Show (2001), “an allegory of a pristine world, inspired by Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.” It’s a work that combines parade, spectacle and a workshop for 100 people. As beautiful as photographs from the show indicate that it is, almost a decade on the company can still have an almighty effect, attacked in The Sun Herald by Andrew Bolt over their pagan contribution to the Moomba Parade, the newspaper’s front page shrieking “Family Fury at Shock Parade.”

The company is the head tenant of an old army drill hall in West Footscray, part of an arts centre “in one of the poorest communities in Australia. The council and the Big West festival do a great job for the community. We’re staying.” When not at home they’re in Singapore followed by Arnhemland, Japan and China, sometimes working in 2 teams at the same time in different countries.Then it’s back to Melbourne for Wicked, a festival for children at the Gasworks Theatre (Sept 26-Oct 6), and some thinking about a brand new show next year, called Snuff Puppet Club, a night club run by puppets. Sounds like dangerous fun.

As Australia’s only full-time puppet company for adults (and the whole panoply of modern families) and as wickedly funny ideologues for puppetry that is political, communal and downright strange, the Snuff Puppets occupy a very special place in Australian culture.

Ryk Goddard worked with Melbourne’s the accidental company receiving critical recognition for works like Imagine a Life, superfluous man, Teapot and Fifteen Words or Less. He was appointed Artistic Director of Salamanca Theatre Company in 2000. This company, established in 1972, has a reputation for theatre excellence and innovation, most recently under the artistic direction of Deborah Pollard, producing over 100 contemporary theatre works for young people. Since Goddard’s appointment, Salamanca Theatre Company has changed its name to is theatre ltd. Promotional material for is theatre can be read as both a statement of intent and a question: is theatre: experimental, is theatre: site specific, is theatre: improvisation.

is theatre ltd reflects our new role in Australian Theatre. Thirty years of theatre in schools has not produced new generations of theatre-goers. Another reason for the name change was that people couldn’t distinguish us from the Salamanca Arts Centre. The new name positions our company as always questioning itself and the ways we develop, promote and present performance experiences.

Contemporary performance is happening now. It’s work that is made by people in a particular time with an intention that’s relevant to that time. Whether it’s text-based, experimental or devised, my sense of whether it’s contemporary or not is to do with the intention in making the work. All new work or experimental work is supposedly contemporary. I live in permanent fear of contemporary performance trying so hard not to be things, that it ends up not really being anything at all. The result is work that can be amazingly insipid and lacking in courage and vision.

We’re not performing shows in schools any more. Our research and engagement with young people indicates that participation is as important as watching. is theatre is shifting philosophy and practice away from theatre-in-education to a contemporary performance practice that moves away from serving schools to serving young people. We are working directly with students in schools through participation and putting on outside shows that young people can come to. What’s desperately needed in Tasmania is things for young people to do that are relevant to them, and in spaces where they have a sense of ownership.

We’re aiming to present work where the given is the environment. With Freezer we wanted to enhance and expand people’s expectations of the dance party environment. A dance party is an existing valid culture. There are powerful dynamics in the space that are really interesting. We wanted to align ourselves with that and open it out further. I like work where the artists have to work hard for the audience to have an interesting experience. That makes the world bigger, richer and experienced in a new way.

Blink, Eat Space, Fashion Tips for Misery, Boiler Room, Freezer, flip top heart and am.p are names you’ve devised for theatre training programs, improvisation laboratories and site-specific performances in 2001 and 2002. What future projects excite and push your boundaries as Artistic Director?

In the biggest sense I’m excited that I finally had the courage to place my performance practice at the centre of the company. Everything we do is connected in some way to improvisational practice. This main-streaming of improvisation seems to be happening everywhere and I feel in step with the times. White Trash Medium Rare is the first show I’ve done for years where I fully understand why I’m doing it. It’s a performance installation supported by Australia Council New Media Arts funding. We’re looking at issues of white identity and every artist involved has their own voice and their own practice.

At the end of July I’m participating in the Improvisation Festival of Melbourne, before MC-ing Sydney’s Big Sloth at Performance Space and then performing in Canberra’s celebration of improvisation performance. Between August 22 and 25 is theatre will host Boiler Room, a participatory multi-artform event. Artists from dance, theatre, music and the visual arts will facilitate workshops and show existing work. On the final night the artists will create a performance that combines and advances their skills. Boiler Room will happen at is@backspace.

For many Hobart theatre audiences The Backspace is a familiar environment that has sustained a lot of theatre practice. You’ve been instrumental in refurbishing and revitalising it as is@backspace.

is@backspace is Hobart’s dedicated contemporary performance space. It’s a new multi-use, flexible, 100 seat performance venue. The space is available for hire to develop and present contemporary performance. You can’t innovate in a town without an audience base and space for artists. We’re thrilled because is@backspace is booked out for the next 6 months. It’s a space to nurture yourself as an artist in a low-risk environment.

is theatre, Boiler Room, teaching & performing Ryk Goddard and Helen Omand; music creation Josh Green; dance improvisation Jo Pollit; multi-media Sean Bacon; musician Tania Bosak. is@backspace, Hobart, Aug 22-25.

The Studio got off to a good start with its first 6 month program, quickly establishing itself as a popular haunt for all sorts of live arts fans—sometimes it felt like each show attracted its very own tribe. It’s generally agreed that the contemporary arts scene has been enhanced by the presence of this comfortable and accommodating venue at Sydney’s premier location and its energetic support of Australian artists through programming, commissioning and co-producing.

If volume is what it’s about, The Studio has the goods. At the launch of Program 2, the management proudly stated that while there were 92 performances between July 2000 and June 2001, by June 2002 they’d counted 173. Given that most of these were short seasons, it’s amazing that Executive Producer Virginia Hyam and her team look as perky as they do. The new program suggests no rest is in sight, save for the 5 week season of The 7 Stages of Grieving. By the end of 2002, 104 independent artists, 5 small to medium companies and 17 music groups will have appeared at the venue.

A welcome new element is The Studio’s hosting of ReelDance Dance on Screen Festival in August (preview, page 32). And while the Dance Tracks programs might have had teething problems, it’s good to see a commitment to continuity in Dance Tracks 3, this time The Studio teaming with the Breaks of Asia Club as part of the Asian Music & Dance Festival, August 14-18. (Incidentally, don’t miss the visit by the acclaimed Akram Khan Company from London who’ll be performing their work Kaash at the Drama Theatre for the festival, August 20-24). Later in the year, in Dance Tracks 4, guest musicians are Endorphin and French DJ, BNX.

It’s great to see a classic of contemporary performance given a new outing. With Deborah Mailman’s current TV popularity, The 7 Stages of Grieving should be huge. Same goes for Donna Jackson who impressed with her Car Maintenance Explosives and Love at Mardi Gras a while back but hasn’t been seen in Sydney since. Her Body: Celebration of the Machine is part of the cultural program for the Gay Games. Hanging onto the Tail of a Goat created and performed by Tenzing Tsewang (RealTime 43) is a small but significant work originally previewed at Performance Space, premiered at Melbourne’s Gasworks and now given a welcome Sydney season. Premieres include Legs on the Wall’s foray into the primal world of sport, Runners Up, and Wide Open Road a collaboration between 2 youth theatres, Sydney-based PACT and Outback, based in Hay in south-western NSW.

The Australian Composers series features the work of 2 contemporary artists. Drew Crawford presents Lounge Music, an intimate evening of works chosen from his theatre and dance compositions, electronic works, opera, cabaret and concert music. And in Over Time Andrée Greenwell orchestrates her engaging collision of popular, experimental and operatic musics.

There’s jazz and fusion and some top notch stand-up in the form of Sue Anne Post (G Strings and Jockstraps) and Lawrence Leung (Sucker, winner Best Solo Show, Melbourne Fringe) and some quality acts in the exhibition space including Christopher Dean, Clinton Nain (responding to The 7 Stages of Grieving) and Mikala Dwyer.

As with Program #1 there’ll be hits and occasional misses in Program #2 at The Studio, a lot of creative risk-taking, and plenty to argue about afterwards at the ever inviting Opera Bar. Importantly, it’s all presented in a spirit of generosity and celebration of Australia’s contemporary culture. RT

If the first ReelDance international Dance on Screen festival in 2000 had an emphasis on experiment and the arty end of the spectrum, this year’s event is more expansive, taking in social dance, ritual and traditional dance as well as popular forms such as music video.

For curator Erin Brannigan, this choice reflects trends evident in the major dance film festivals worldwide of which there are now around 12. “We’ve got everything from military drills performed in a deathly quiet country field, through a dance ritual set against a bombed out cityscape in Chechnya to the very best dance-theatre by Holland’s Hans Hof Ensemble—in their work R.I.P performers give a physical rendering of adults coming to terms with the death of their parents. In Human Radio Miranda Pennell (UK) films ordinary people performing ‘private’ dances in their living rooms. David Hinton (UK) is best known for his work with DV8, Wendy Houstoun and Russell Maliphant. We’ll be screening Birds, the film that won him the prestigious IMZ Dance Screen Award in 2000—a choreographic study of birds in flight.”

This year Brannigan again teams with the One Extra Dance Company to present ReelDance and coming on board for the first time is The Studio at Sydney Opera House, the venue for the festival, as well as a number of state-based organisations (Dancehouse, ACMI, PICA and the Adelaide Festival Centre) as partners in a national tour

Other highlights of the program include Sean O’Brien’s Sunrise at Midnight made with Melbourne choreographer Yumi Umiumare and inspired by an historic photograph of a troupe of Japanese female performers who toured outback towns at the turn of the century. There’s a chance to see Canadian Laura Taler’s multi award-winning short A Very Dangerous Pastime purported to “dispel the myth that dance is beyond comprehension for the lay person.” And all in 14 minutes. There are also full length documentaries on ‘bad girl’ Sylvie Guillem and ‘bad boy’ Michael Clark who disappeared from the dance scene a few years ago to deal with his heroin addiction.

Dance aficionados of all stripes should get along to Saturday night’s Legends of Tap and Jazz, a full evening of short and longer films from the Cinematheque de la Danse in Paris featuring rare footage of Josephine Baker, the Nicholas Brothers, Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, Fred Astaire and all those others whose names are not so familiar (whatever became of Buck and Bubbles, Pops and Louie?). Nicolas Villodre from the Cinematheque is the special guest of the festival and will speak prior to the screenings at the free forum entitled Images and Dance: Struggle and Necessity. The forum’s at 7, followed by screenings from 8.15 on.

Recent music videos featuring some of the more radical experiments with dance will also be celebrated. Think Spike Jonze’ film of Fat Boy Slim’s Weapon of Choice with Christopher Walken dancing up a storm or the mockumentary dance troop in his Praise You or Lisa Ffrench’s choreography for Custard’s Girls Like That. These and others featuring Nick Cave, Moby, Madonna, Daft Punk and Blur will be screened, followed by a video forum with directors, choreographers and musicians.

The festival culminates with the finalists in the ReelDance Competition for Australian and, this year, New Zealand dance film and video, followed by the presentation of the Digital Pictures Award and other prizes. This year 60 films were submitted, double last year’s intake and according to the judges, showed an impressive degree of sophistication. The 11 selected for screening are: Arachne by Mathew Bergan and Narelle Benjamin and featuring the late Russell Page; in absentia by Margie Medlin and Sandra Parker (winners of the 2000 competition); No Surrender by Richard James Allen with performer/consultant Bernadette Walong; Sue Healey & Louise Curham’s Niche; Kate McIntosh’s The Gloaming; Tuula Roppola & Ian Moorhead’s Blowfish; Shona McCullagh’s Fly; Rosetta Cook’s Frocks Off; Julie-Anne Long & Samuel James’ Miss XL, Olase’s Dance by Louise Taube and court.(caught) a work by students from the University of Otago’s Dancelab.

ReelDance, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Aug 2-4 August; Adelaide Festival Centre, Aug 6-7; Cinema Paradiso in association with PICA, Perth, Aug 10-11; Federation Hall, VCA Melbourne in association with Dancehouse & ACMI, Aug 14-17; Star Court Theatre, Lismore in association with Dance Action Northern Rivers, Sept 27.

Front: Samantha Chalmers, Allyson Mills, Anthony Johnson, Steve Hodder, Michael Angus Back: Jodie Cockatoo, Shellie Morris, To the Inland Sea

Having only just returned from a road trip across the Barkly, driving for hundreds of kilometres through a sea of yellow grass stretching from horizon to horizon, flat as a tack for as far as the eye could see, the notion of an inland sea is both credible and evocatively appealing.

What is not so appealing is the notion of another piece of theatre based on the heroic exploits of some misguided white male out to pit his manhood against this country’s heart of darkness, searching for a personal holy grail. This focus was obviously not behind the Darwin Theatre Company’s most recent production, To the Inland Sea, based on Charles Sturt’s ill-fated 1884 expedition. The DTC team charted quite a different trajectory across this well-trodden territory.

Conceived and written in the NT, this ambitious project was billed as “a fiction based on Sturt’s epic journey, during which he carried a whale boat on a wagon through the desert”, searching for a mythical inland sea on which to launch it. With this compelling story of folly and disappointment as a starting point, writer-director Tania Lieman, co-writer Gail Evans and Indigenous composer Shellie Morris also intended to tell the story of the Indigenous guides and traditional owners of the country being ‘discovered.’ As well. This post-colonial approach is par for the course these days in Darwin, as is the exploration of multiple histories and ways of seeing.

In To the Inland Sea Sturt’s linear, historical narrative is interlaced with a contemporary story of another lost soul, a young Aboriginal boy dealing with issues of dislocation and alienation of another kind. These stories run in parallel throughout the production, interweaving past and present, reality and dream, and interior and exterior perspectives.

A giant video screen provides the backdrop for much of the action and dominates the stage. On a huge scale, vast landscapes, endless sand dunes and flocks of birds stream past as Sturt’s company becomes ever more mired in the desert. During the contemporary scenes the landscape imagery is replaced with the face of the Aboriginal boy, filling the space with anger and pain.

This psychic link between the 2 stories is alluded to in the opening words of the play, “everyone’s on a journey”, spoken by the Aboriginal boy’s mother, sitting down painting her country. Some journeys are physical and some are spiritual. Not all lead to the goal we seek or necessarily to redemption.

Another link between the narratives of past and present is made by the chorus: singers Shellie Morris, Jodie Cockatoo and dancer/vocalist Samantha Chalmers. Morris’ beautiful and haunting music was a highlight of the production.

The usual DTC style of physical theatre dominated the more conventional narrative. There was an abundance of energy and action amid all the drama as well as choreographed set pieces such as a fictitious ‘last supper’ featuring a cast of explorers pontificating about their exploits, including a ragged Wills, like Hamlet, holding a skull.

Unfortunately as the production continued I felt I was drowning, being overwhelmed by altogether too much going on. There was never enough breathing space amid all the colour and movement and technical whizz-bangery. There were beautiful, poignant moments but too rarely the possibility of savouring them. This was a pity because otherwise To the Inland Sea was an enjoyable production with all the right elements: great ideas and visuals, energy, points of cross cultural contact and risk-taking.

Darwin Theatre Company, To the Inland Sea, Darwin Entertainment Centre, June 11-22

Erica Price is a solitary dreamer and i industrious sex worker whose monologues reveal desperation for companionship. Her daily musings, including a mantra that ends, “…I ask myself: Who the fuck is Erica Price? And what is her price?”, allude to neighbourhood friendships that will never eventuate for her. A motif that begins, “When the Revolution comes…” refers to all manner of improvements and happiness that the increasingly delusional Erica needs to believe in.

Some of her clients are in love with her, some are self-absorbed, but they still want her reassurances, or her platitudes, for that is all she offers them. All 7 male clients are played by Lucien Simon, who is able to imbue each with a distinct persona. He conveys the hypocrisy and selfishness of several of these characters with particular skill. Subtly and empathically played by Marisa Mastrocola, Erica is vulnerable and determined, funny and sad as she descends into disillusionment bordering on the catatonic.

With Mastrocola’s pose and body language at the play’s conclusion exactly as they were at its beginning, director Tania Bosak implies that the action has come full circle. Erica is back at square one, having achieved nothing, and still longing for a life that will never eventuate. This confronting play could easily become too bleak but, finding moments of comedy, director and performers hit the right note.

Scape Inc., Who the Fuck is Erica Price, writer Sarah Brill, director Tania Bosak, Peacock Theatre, Salamanca Arts Centre, June 20-29; Carlton Courthouse, Melbourne, Aug 7-17.

The fallen-from-grandeur blend of architecture and streetscape of the historic Queen’s Theatre offered an apt historical and geographic metonym for the performance of Despoiled Shore MEDEAMATERIAL Landscape with Argonauts. Derived in part from a text by GDR playwright Heiner Müller, MEDEAMATERIAL is the latest production from a theatre ensemble of Flinders University Drama School graduates calling itself The Border Project. According to program notes, the ensemble aims to chart and map the future language of performance by exploring the interface between live performance and multimedia technologies, thus testing the boundaries between audience and performer.

While some familiar with the draughty venue and its hard platform seating came with cushions, woollen blankets, gloves and beanies, others caressed their glasses of Hardy’s in an effort to keep warm in the cavernous void of a minimalist performance space designed to represent “an urban wasteland where humankind has decimated and abused the natural landscape.”

More physical challenges were to come. The relentless amplitude of synthetic music beat incessantly, producing a searing soundscape like a techno time clock ticking towards death. It raked the skin and tore into the wrecked recesses of consciousness. The complex, cerebral text interfused references to the globalised technoculture of American popular culture (the banality of basketball and Big Macs) with a condensed version of Euripides’ Medea (the ominous effects of power, jealousy, betrayal and violation). These segments fused into a middle space of comic relief, referencing the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain and giving a luminous, stuffed dingo central positioning on stage in a darkly comic, John Clarke-inspired interview (with the dingo).

The final segment segued from the shadows of German expressionism and film noir to the decimated landscape of modern times. In the last scene, Jason, our damaged argo/astronaut, emerged from the void as television monitors flashed NASA film clips of the explosion of the Challenger space craft. All this, from Greek tragedy to 20th century eco-disaster, in 45 minutes.

The technically adept performance had its strengths. Particularly well realised were the enactments of actors’ identities and desires as the extensions of television images, as well as the evocation of a theatre-of-death psychic landscape rendered through the menacing music, the cacophony of accents, and the pastiche of images from German expressionism. The performance lost some of its impact to screeching sounds, halting, overwrought and sometimes frenetic speech and pronounced breathing of the actors, and the near hysterical pitch of sound and media landscapes in the final segment. The company holds more promise than it delivered in this instance.

The Border Project, Despoiled Shore MEDEAMATERIAL Landscape with Argonauts, writer Heiner Müller, director/designer Sam Haren, performers: Katherine Fyffe, Cameron Goodall, Ksenja Logos, David Heinrich, Amber McMahon, Paul Reichstein, Alirio Zavarce; Queens Theatre, Adelaide, June 20-29

Sydney University’s Sir Hermann Black Gallery is currently hosting an exhibition of works by notable photographers working the documentary format. A collaboration with Stills Gallery, the exhibition showcases a wide range of approaches to the form. One image is chosen to document the work of artists who more usually exhibit in series or essay form, among them, Ricky Maynard’s huge and confronting portraits of Wik elders; Stephen Lojewski’s suburban enigmas; Ella Dreyfus’ stark depiction of a body in transition from male to female. Trent Parke is a remarkable young photographer who’s recently be accepted into the Magnum Photo Agency for a one year trial period before final nomination, the first Australian photographer to get the nod. His Dream/Life series is represented here with a luminous image. Also featured is Narelle Autio’s photographic poem to leisure, Not of this Earth depicting richly coloured and textured aerial views of people relaxing beneath Sydney’s Harbour Bridge. In all there are 19 great photographers including William Yang, Lorrie Graham, Jon Lewis, Peter Milne, Donna Bailey, Jon Rhodes—every one of them worth a look.

RePRESENTING the REAL, Documentary Photography 2002, Sir Hermann Black Gallery & Sculpture Terrace, Sydney University till 17 August.

In response to considerable demand, our annual feature on the teaching of the arts in tertiary education has been expanded significantly this year to cover 8 artform areas—music, sound art, visual arts, film, new media, dance, theatre and contemporary performance. We’ve decided to focus on the training of the artist at a time when issues abound about proliferation of courses, competing methodologies, limited job markets and the commercial challenge to art’s integrity.

The essay on visual arts aside, where the issue of what art schools really do is tackled provocatively by Adam Geczy, our reports survey the practical training courses Australian universities have on offer. Our writers have interviewed lecturers, many of them also practising artists, about their teaching. Sometimes they speak on behalf of their schools, sometimes about their own practice.

It was clear from many of our respondents that limited funding, escalating class sizes and threatened course closures continue to be a serious challenge to staff morale and the effective training of artists. However, our focus is largely on what the various schools offer regardless of the conditions under which they operate.

There are a number of trends that emerge in these reports, some have been with us for a while, some are new, all are reaching new levels of intensity. Almost across the board there is a desire to generate in students the capacity to collaborate, for both the practical and ethical advantages of cooperation (even in feature filmmaking where the ideal of the auteur has persisted for so long). Autonomy rates highly, not as individualism but as the capacity to be self-sustaining, to create work alone or in teams rather than waiting to be employed. Not a few courses promote adventurousness, in terms of keeping up with new developments or in challenging convention. And in an era when artforms are transforming and electronic media converging there is a great emphasis on flexibility and multi-skilling.

Some departments pride themselves on having industry connections, on being part of network clusters, of providing in-course opportunities to students in the commercial world. It is here that some tension is felt over the apparent pragmatism of the “creative industries” approach as art gives way to the broader notion of creativity, and the demands of commerce, for example ‘to entertain’ or provide ‘content’, threaten to dominate. Conversely, commercial and subcultural developments in the wider world of music require an academic response, as Michael Hannan argues, that recognises there will be a variety of serious musician for whom traditional training will have little value. This adjustment is symptomatic of a wider phenomenon, the evolution of artforms and, particularly, their engagement in multimedia and new media. If some lecturers ask that their students learn to “sit with ambiguity” as part of their becoming artists, then the ambiguity that surrounds artform developments is something that teachers also have to sit with.

While most schools claim good employment results for their students, the jobs issue is nonetheless a vexed one, particularly in visual arts and dance. Our report notes the global approach to employment by at least one Australian university dance school given the almost total lack of work available in this country.

Whatever the challenges, many lecturers spoke with passion about their teaching and their concern for their students. There’s a desire to create a safe place in which students are emboldened to think, to create, to collaborate, to accept challenge and, in turn, to challenge.

The death of a dancer: Russell Page

In a year already too burdened with artist deaths, we were deeply saddened to hear of the passing of dancer and actor Russell Page on Sunday July 14. We saw him dance a few days earlier in Rush, the work his brother Stephen choreographed for Bangarra Dance Theatre’s new program, Walkabout. As ever, Page danced with conviction, elegance, power and a unique dancer’s language. He will be missed. KG VB

At last Melbourne has got a festival where local artists—there’s a lot of them in the program—receive deserved prominence side by side with some unique overseas and interstate productions. It’s the first of Robyn Archer’s 2 Melbourne Festivals. The second will be about the body—in dance and physical theatre. Perhaps she’ll get the guernsey for a third festival given that she’s already forecast it to be about voice, as in opera and music theatre.

This one is centred on text ie language in performance. If you’re expecting a season of nice plays, forget it. Archer’s choices and her vision of text in performance are as wide-ranging and provocative as you’d expect from her Adelaide Festival programs. She deals a blow to the myth that postmodernity has been the ruin of language. Here it comes embodied in dance, puppetry, music, physical theatre, installation, multimedia, contemporary performance and, yes, plays, but what plays! From Berlin’s Hebbel Theatre comes Total Masala Slammer, Heartbreak No 5, an erotic adaptation of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. There’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, adapted by Michael Gow from the novel (QTC/Playbox), and the Pinter version of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (VCA). The profoundly disturbing, not-to-be-missed Societas Raffaelo Sanzio make their first Melbourne appearance with Genesi, from the Museum of Sleep. Ivan Heng’s 140 minute solo performance about power and gender, Emily of Emerald Hill (writer Stella Khon), comes from Singapore. The 150 minute virtuosic adult marionette work, Tinka’s New Dress, has Ronnie Burkett creating and voicing 37 characters. Argentinian writer-director Frederico Leon presents one of his plays and a mini festival of recent Argentinian cinema. A handful of very intimate performances designed for small audiences include the Canadian STO Union & Candid Stammer Theatre’s Recent Experiences, 3 works by US actor-writer Wallace Shawn (My Dinner with Andre) performed by local actors, and IRAA Theatre’s Interior Sites Project, an all night stayover theatre experience. Gertrude Stein’s Dr Faustus Lights the Lights (St Martin Youth Arts Centre) gets a rare airing, and Daniel Schlusser, Evelyn Krape and sound artist Darrin Verhagen take a tough new look at Medea. And there’s more, from Five Angry Men, The Keene/Taylor Project, NYID, Chamber Made Opera, Back to Back Theatre, Company in Space, Arena Theatre Company, Joanna Murray-Smith & Paul Grabowksy, Helen Herbertson, Trevor Patrick and work-in-progress showings from others.

From Sydney comes Kate Champion’s impressive dance theatre work Same same But Different and Sandy Evan’s Testimony, a powerful and beautiful big band, multimedia tribute to Charlie Parker to a libretto by Yusef Komunyakaa. From Berlin there’s Uwe Mengel’s murder mystery installation, Lifeline, where you can become an active investigator. From the Kimberley region of Western Australia comes the passionately debated Fire, Fire Burning Bright; premiered at the 2002 Perth Festival it’s the story of a massacre presented by an all-Indigenous cast. There’s also a visual arts program (featuring Susan Norrie and Nan Goldin), a National Puppetry & Animatronics Summit and a timely national symposium on “The Art of Dissent.” In the past there have always been a few shows to draw interstate visitors to a Melbourne Festival, but this time you can feel the pull of the whole program, a unique opportunity to see an impressive display of Victorian performance talent in the context of distinctive and provocative international productions and a theme of the reinvigoration of language in and through performance.

Dancer Wendy McPhee and film/sound artist George Poonkhin Khut share an interest in sexuality and memory. They began their collaboration on their new work, Nightshift, by looking at peepshows, karaoke bars and feminine desire. McPhee says: “I wrote a lot of the text. George designed sound and the installation environment. The meeting point was the medium of video. The bulk of the work is in the editing and sound design. We did one video edit together but we had 7 hours of material which is a lot of looking at yourself! My main concern was that the emotional quality of the performance be kept and not dissolved. I think it’s a very intimate installation even though the images are projected floor to ceiling throughout a vast space. The intimacy is reinforced via the soundscape which evokes a closeness of whispers, pulses and floating sounds of bar room singing.”

Nightshift Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery July 13-28; Artspace, Sydney Aug 22-Sept 14

Michael Riley (Wiradjuri/Gamilaroi people) is one of the most idiosyncratic and inventive of contemporary artists. He explores Indigenous issues in non-literal ways, working through curious juxtapositions that make us look at the Australian psychic landscape in new ways. Riley’s distinctive body of photographic and film works will be celebrated at the fourth Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at Queensland Art Gallery opening in September.

Asia Pacific Triennial 2002 focuses on a number of artists who have made significant contributions to the contemporary arts internationally since the 1960s and each will be represented with a comprehensive group of works. Says gallery director Doug Hall, “The exhibition creates a context in which we see works by these senior artists, alongside artworks dealing with similar ideas and themes by other regionally significant, but lesser known artists.”

Artists to be represented are: Montien Boonma (Thailand), Eugene Carchesio (Australia), Heri Dono (Indonesia), Joan Grounds (USA/Australia), Ralph Hotere (Aotearoa New Zealand), Yayoi Kusama (Japan), Lee U-fan (South Korea/Japan), Jose Legaspi (Philippines), Michael Ming Hong Lin (Taiwan), Nalini Malani (India), Nam June Paik (South Korea/USA), ‘Pasifika Divas’ (Pacific Islands and Aotearoa New Zealand), Lisa Reihana (Aotearoa New Zealand) Michael Riley (Australia), Song Dong (China), Suh Do-Ho (South Korea/USA) and Howard Taylor (Australia).

Hall comments “The selection of artists reflects key themes, including the impact of the moving image on the visual culture in the 20th century, the persistence of performance as a key form of cultural expression in contemporary art, and the capacity of contemporary art to explore the complexities of globalisation.”

The survival of the term ‘new media’ confounds the 20 years the technology has been around in art and design departments of the tertiary sector—the term survives possibly as the ‘old media’ users resist a technology with which they are not comfortable thus prolonging the redesign of courses and the redefinition of tertiary education within the era of digital media. The AFC/ABC on-line documentary broadband initiative recently demonstrated that government cultural administrators still think it’s a matter of converting filmmakers to ‘content providers.’ Though the education industry is at last moving away from imposing such conversion upon the mature student, it is the younger students who are often best equipped to absorb the potential of digital technologies and utilise them outside such notions of educational progression.

In an attempt to harness the many, often conflicting possibilities of information technology, there has been an exponential growth in public and privately funded tertiary level courses and subjects, particularly in arts, design, information and communication departments over the past 10 years. Only some of the issues are discussed in this article. Marketing courses, until the dot com bubble burst, had not been difficult and the income from overseas fees formed the financial bedrock of many an enterprise.

For many reasons education has more recently become accepted as a lifelong process affecting all those who care about extending their knowledge of the world and even acquiring new skills, experiences and thoughts about it. The formal system of subjects, courses, assessments and qualifications have been augmented by centres, institutes and various research units to attract the validated research dollar as part of the dynamic development of a technology and arts practice still possessing the properties of the rhizome.

Innovation

Hybridity is increasingly encountered in the arts, and in the convergence of previously distinct communication industries. With such a flux, how do tertiary media arts course managers strike a balance between providing vocational skills and developing creative and aesthetic options within the contemporary discourses of commerce, design and the fine arts? Where providing competency training has been widespread, incorporating recent technologies into existing courses and curriculum has marked the secondary stage of realising digital medias’ specificities.

Martyn Jolly, Head of Photomedia at the ANU School of Art in Canberra says, “We have tried to integrate the teaching of new technology as quickly and as closely as possible into our existing curriculum. The distinction between the ‘traditional’ and the ‘new’ means much less to our students than it does to us. Specific vocational skills are redundant in 2 years. If you teach new technology ‘workshops’ isolated from the rest of the curriculum, you end up with really clichéd, superficial gee whizz results.”

Josephine Starrs at Sydney University’s College of the Arts aims “to familiarise students with the language of new media arts, some history of the area and the contextualisation of interactive media within screen culture.” A broad approach to the subject in the tertiary sector usually includes a general first-year introduction to the visual arts, then becomes more focussed as options and electives are taken, as course strengths are identified. Starrs says that “students are asked to give seminars on current trends in digital cultures incorporating virtual communities, tactical media, mailing lists, moos, computer games, and internet radio. We examine different conceptual approaches to making use of the ‘network’, including issues to do with browsers, search engines, databases, shareware, social software and experimental software.”

At the Faculty of Arts, Victoria University, Sue McCauley and Michael Buckley “do not tie course content to industry requirements as these are constantly changing. Rather we try to get students to critically engage with content issues for specific projects…industry placement for final year students is a part of the academic program.”

The new Faculty of Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology indicates the pedagogic direction now beginning to show using teaching technique and program innovation specific to the perceived potentials of digital media. Keith Armstrong, a freelance multimedia and multiple-media producer and artist, lectures in the Department of Communication Design where the broad curriculum, as opposed to the mouse-jockey paddocks of the computer labs, is likewise central to the program, but with performance added. “We draw widely upon multidisciplinary sources and get the students off their computers wherever possible, lead them through simulation games and exercises set in contemporary environments. For narrative-based works we model through role-play where possible and development through interpersonal dialogue.”

“We insist on lateral approaches, reward risk, develop marking schemes that take account of short term failures…a potent means for making students realise their deeply important role as designers/artists working within communities evolving within designed environments… [We] insist they can write text fluidly and cogently, persuade them that reflection is almost always a vital design tool, [teach them to] recognise, critique and steer well clear of multimedia’s endless seas of entrenched clichés…[and] force deceleration so that they can listen and reflect more effectively and work slowly towards ideas of substance.”

The School of Visual Arts, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts within Edith Cowan University is perhaps an appropriately named setting for a wider reappraisel of the approach required. Students are regarded rather more as researchers who bring with them a vision and, in collaboration with the department, develop it employing what the head of school, artist Domenico de Clario [see page 37], describes as a “perceptual matrix”, encouraged during the early part of the course. Design, installation, sound and video then form the mentored streams into which the cohorts move, having access to a shopfront gallery in downtown Perth which, in accommodation above, houses an artist-in-residence. As with several other institutions, cross-overs with Information Technology and Multimedia faculty courses are being carefully negotiated, as well as closer links with community groups and the facilitation of community services, de Clario having acquired a old cinema building 2 hours out of the city.

Resources

Is it a constant fight to retain a workable budget? “Yes, yes, yes!” was the reply from one of the teachers, as all areas and departments skate the peaks and ravines of the bean counters’ graphs. Alisdair Riddell of the Australian Centre for Art and Technology at ANU, while supporting cross-departmental sharing of subjects, has great difficulty meeting the demand that this creates. Most faculties have specialised marketing officers to promote what is on offer as well as seek out what prospective students are prepared to pay. “Relatively speaking, income from overseas students allows access to good equipment” is how another correspondent described it, though the interests of the students in this area, following some disgraceful scams, are now protected by the CRICOS Provider system and new Commonwealth legislation.

“One of the greatest challenges in integrating new technologies into current pedagogical practices is explaining to those in control of budgets that the technologies classroom is inevitably more time-consuming and expensive than the format of lecture/tutorial.” Lisa Gye, Lecturer in Media and Communications at Swinburne University of Technology goes on to point out: “For example, in a number of subjects I teach, students engage in a moderated discussion list about new technologies. Most academic workload models are not designed to account for the time that is spent reading and responding to such a list. Last year, the group discussion for Issues in Electronic Media averaged 30 posts a week with each post running to approximately 300 words. Until workload models do reflect these changes, academics are going to continue with pedagogical strategies that are less time-consuming, like essay production, regardless of the relevance of the strategy to the content of taught material.”

Research grants and graduate fee income help support on-going postgraduate programs and the creation of a cultural area within the Australian Reasearch Council (nonetheless tied to the long-standing traditions of ‘investigation’ in science circles) have begun to increase the options for the development of digital media methodologies.

Antagonisms

Ted Snell is the Chair of the Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) and in a recent advertising report he states that for some graduates “…their degree provides direct access to a range of professions such as design, fashion and the new (sic) digital technologies. Each year these new graduates leave art and design schools with the skills to contribute to the economy and to maintain their on-going redefinition of our community.” The arts, it seems though, still need champions. Following some recent comments made by the Prime Minister, Snell goes on to conclude that “We are fortunate that they now have the trenchant support of our senior political leaders…”

Though faculties or departments in institutions have been encouraged over the years to seek links or intern arrangements with commercial companies or not-for-profit cultural centres, it is within cross-media teaching centres rather than places of employment that the breakdown of barriers between vocational and non-vocational pursuits exist.

Martin Jolly argues that “art and commerce are no longer antagonistic—they closely inform each other. The distinction for our students is much less relevant than it is to us. But it is always hard to get commerce interested in what we are trying to do because they are working on really tight margins and struggling to keep up, just like us.” Keith Armstrong is wary: “Of course there shouldn’t be and aren’t antagonisms [but the] constant push for ‘entertainment’ as a key goal within outcomes and the sidelining of art as a viable vehicle for research [has] something to do with a lack of understanding of the histories and convergences of art and media practices.”

Mike Leggett is a curator and artist currently teaching Media Arts at UTS. UTS’s Megan Heyward was interviewed in RT#49.

Image note: Student director Leigh Scholten, worked with 27 fellow students under the guidance Helmut Stenzel, University of Ballarat, to make Promotional Use Only, an interactive CD which won the Gold Medal, Art Directors Club 81st Annual Awards, New York 2002.

The Brisbane and Melbourne International Film Festivals consistently feature strong lineups of new films coming out of Asia as well as retrospectives (see “The ferocious eye of Kim Ki-duk”). In Sydney, fortunately, we have the Sydney Asia Pacific Film Festival, now in its third year, a relatively small but tenacious and ambitious festival whose goal is not only to open up Australian audiences to Asian films but also, laudably, “to promote the professional development of Asian Australian filmmakers and actors and their presence in the local film and television industry.” Launching this year’s festival, Sharon Baker from the Film and Television Office of NSW (FTO) reminded us that the FTO had been involved in a visit to China by 20 filmmakers and, also, that the Australian feature film, Mullet, had won Best Direction at the recent Shanghai Film Festival. The time is ripe for joint ventures and growing cross-cultural awareness. This year’s SAPFF features 15 films from 9 countries and includes a new print of Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously. Festival-goers also get the first Australian sighting of Zhang Yimou’s Happy Times. As Festival Co-director, Juanita Kwok, advised us it’s a substantial change of direction from the filmmaker’s historical approach to Chinese life. This contemporary drama borders on whimsy in its fable-like construction but its sharp social observations about dreams and realities in a newly capitalist society bring it to a complex ending. Although the focus is on film from China, others range from full-on Bollywood (Heart’s Desire, partly shot in Sydney), to a Thai western, animation from China and Hong Kong, a Vietnamese reflection on war, Japanese avant garde director Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive 1 & 2, and the first new Australian film in this festival’s brief history, China Take Away, Mitzi Goldman’s account of writer and physical performer Anna Yen’s family life. The Short Soup film competition includes finalists from across Asia and Australia, and 2 seminars on Australia/Asia co-productions and the pressure to go mainstream and desert one’s origins promise timely debate. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle is the festival’s special guest—Gallery 4A will exhibit his photomontage works. This is a rare opportunity for Sydney audiences to participate in the growing Asian-Australian film dialogue.

Sydney Asia Pacific Film Festival 2002, Directors Juanita Kwok, Paul de Carvalho, Dendy Cinemas, Martin Place, Sydney, August 8-17.

Does Australian documentary programming reflect the turning away from our region that characterizes the last 5-6 years?
A glance at the exceedingly amero- and euro-centric line-up of the last 2 Australian International Documentary Conferences in Adelaide in 1999 and Perth in 2001, as well as the recent touring Real: life on film documentary festival and the REVelation Festival in Perth would suggest this disturbing trend. It is as if our documentary programmers unwittingly have fallen in line with the direction followed by the Howard governemt.

Even more disturbingly, at a recent brainstorming session in Melbourne, there did not seem to be much recognition of the problem or interest on the part of the organizer of the next documentary conference in Byron Bay in 2003 to shift this exclusive focus on films made by North-American and European filmmakers. To invite people from other parts of the world is put in the too hard basket because they are seen to require special attention (They might need interpreters! ) or because most documentary makers in Australia have no interest in knowing how their numerous counterparts in Asia, Africa or Latin-America view their own societies and present their stories. Audiences for their films at the Melbourne and Sydney documentary conferences in l995 and l993, which made laudable efforts to include them, were embarrasingly low.

We seem to prefer and perpetuate the trend among many Western filmmakers to go in search of the extreme, the exotic and unusual, the ‘underbelly of Asia’, to satisfy a Western audience’s obsession with sex and gender issues. Asia is meant to remain ‘the other’ and satisfy our desires. These are the films that rate well in our festivals.

And what of SBS (which laudably screens more documentaries than any other channel) and its programming of works by documentary filmmakers from the Asia-Pacific region? They are virtually non-existent. The World Movie afficionados are catered to with feature films (dominated by Hong Kong movies and Japanese animation), but hardly ever a documentary from the point of view of people who live in the region. Surprisingly, SBS differs little from the commercial channels in assuming that we need to have the real world interpreted to us by Australian, North-American and European filmmakers.

Is it perhaps SBS’ eagerness in recent years to be recognized as a European arthouse channel that drives this programming policy? Or is a multicultural Australian audience assumed to be incapable of understanding other perspectives? For all the variety of faces on screen as presenters, newsreaders etc, the decisions on what we get to see have over the years rested largely with born-and-bred Aussies and people of predominantly Anglo background. One can’t help wondering if that is why they are so incapable of accepting documentary formats and aesthetics that have been influenced by non-Western cultures.

We’ve come a long way in recent years when it comes to recognizing an Aboriginal perspective through film. But documentaries on our own Asia-Pacific region are constantly filtered through the eyes and storytelling practices of Western filmmakers. (Migrant stories, too, are seldom told by people who have arrived here as adults and may have a different aesthetic and way of telling stories.)

A few years ago a series of half-hour films from the Asian region that allowed local filmmakers to tell their stories was hailed as a daring breakthrough. It was, however, produced, selected and packaged by Australian and British producers who were credited with the series. I asked the UK commissioning editor who attended the Adelaide AIDC conference if he would have programmed them had they come directly from filmmakers in Asia. His answer was, “Probably not.”

At the IDFA documentary conference in Amsterdam in l997, a forum was held to discuss a new fund to support Asian filmmakers, and some of the guests from the region had been invited. After listening to the patronizing attitudes of several European broadcasters, a well-known Indian filmmaker responded with disgust that rather than dispense charity, the best thing they could do would be to actually purchase and broadcast films that are already being made by Asian filmmakers.

Film festivals are concerned with bums on seats to survive. But we should expect that specialist events catering to a reasonably informed audience, such as the documentary conferences and Real: life on film, would see it as their responsibility to educate audiences and move us forward into an awareness of the world around us instead of falling into line with the deplorable trend set by the present government.

Writer Richard Murphet notes in his introduction to Quick Death (1981, in Performing the unNameable, Currency Press with RealTime, 1999) that where most scripts are concerned with “What is it about?” and “Why?” his work focuses “on those thrilling questions—When? and How?”

Slow Love could be seen as an Australian avant-garde classic, enjoying the rare privilege of entering its fourth staging. The text consists of a series of instructions which make up over 100 short, cinematically-framed, enigmatic scenes—mostly without words—which explore various romantic, erotic and affective permutations between 2 men and 2 women. For example, woman 1 sits on a bed and looks right before man 2 rises, topless, from the bed behind her. After blackout, this scene is repeated, but with man 1 walking in on them.

Murphet’s approach opens a rich vein of interpretive possibilities for both audiences and directors. The scenes hang in a dissociated realm where it becomes apparent that both the characters and the audience craft their lives from a limited number of possible actions and outcomes. Virtually all of the worlds sketched by Murphet have been scripted before in film, television and romantic literature.

Murphet’s strongest cinematographic reference is film noir. Chamber Made Opera director Douglas Horton describes the 1983 Anthill version, directed by Jean-Pierre Mignon, as having a “Bette Davis/African Queen” feel, while the cast of the Australian-Flemish co-production (director Boris Kelly; Belgium, Holland & 2002 Adelaide Festival) were clothed in chic, black garb. Horton however has consistently refused to stick closely to extant staging conventions (The Chairs, Teorema). Far from having film noir’s dark, sharply defined contrasts, this production is closer to the grubby, smudged pathos of Ken Loach films. The cast are dressed in drab, loose-fitting, down-market clothes, while the set is reminiscent of a building under demolition. Undressed, mismatched window frames are laced together to produce 2 open work rooms, while a squat, ugly, black wall defines the stage wings. The lighting too exudes lower-class dejection, yellowing mists filtering through, or garish red and blue spots stabbing out like at a cheap nightclub.

The effect is to remove Murphet’s treatment not only from its stylised origins, but also its stylish ones, placing the performance in a world of petty jealousies and fragmented, unsatisfying relationships. Where earlier productions tended to deflate social expectations of romance by the unremitting portrayal of its classy, fictional origins, Horton’s version is a portrait of sad characters whose gestures only barely manage to evoke such models as Davis and Bogart, against which their own lives are unfavourably compared. Murphet notes that where younger casts have played Slow Love as if the characters were beginning their journey into romance, these figures now seem jaded—in Murphet’s words, they are “haunted” by love and its fictional images.

The general grubbiness of the production is also enhanced by the use of cinesonic samples, with grabs from television advertising and other fragments screened onto semi-occluded, on-stage sets, or mulched-out in Stevie Wishart’s live electronic score. The music is indeed the most perplexing element of this production, the sound abruptly leaping from extended string-produced drones (which Wishart creates by reinventing the hurdy-gurdy as an angular, Steve-Reich-style, avant-garde instrument) to beat-heavy drum’n’bass (which seems rather inimical to characters’ moods and actions). Wishart’s score is highly engaging in its diverse palette (almost Enya-like vocals, Laurie-Anderson-style violin doodling, semi-improvised processed samples) but it seems pegged to the cumulative effect of Murphet’s text as a whole, rather than anything in the scenes themselves. The music therefore exists almost entirely parallel to the staging, instead of providing much in the way of keys or entries into the work, or even an overt sonic dialogue with the performance.

What is one to make then of this production overall? I myself was rather disappointed. Not having seen Murphet’s works in performance, I was expecting the sharp chiaroscuro of film noir, “played (as the introduction to Quick Death states) cleanly, clearly and accurately.” Horton and Wishart by contrast have deliberately muddied the look, feel and sound of this aesthetic. Nevertheless, by doing so they produce a work which, despite its drawbacks, demands careful attention to the slight, enigmatic nuances separating ‘natural’ performance from the highly evocative tendrils which link it to romantic fictions as venerable as the Renaissance serenades Wishart briefly drops into. Earlier, slicker takes on Murphet’s script may, in the long run, prove preferable. None of those associated with this production however are content to allow either this script or performance practice in general to remain static. I therefore put Slow Love down as a fabulously brilliant, challenging failure, and fervently look forward to more such works—successful or otherwise.

Chamber Made Opera, Slow Love, writer Richard Murphet, director Douglas Horton, music composition & performance Stevie Wishart, design Trina Parker, lighting David Murray, performers Anne Browning, Beth Child, Mark Pegler, Ian Scott. Malthouse, June 21-29

Recent productions by Hobart companies, IHOS’s Touch Wood and Scape Inc’s Who the Fuck is Erica Price (see review) while stylistically distinctive, shared certain concerns, notably human isolation, if not tragedy, and a non-judgmental view of aspects of mental instability. These bleak topics were countered by spellbindingly good productions, with nuanced performances bringing out the best in script and libretti.

Increasingly, IHOS Opera mentors younger performers through its Music Theatre Laboratory, presenting works-in-progress. These performances are arguably more successful than some of IHOS’s full-scale productions, several of which have been excessive in their attempts to incorporate every trick in the book. The Laboratory, says IHOS, is “a place of experiment, discovery and learning” that gives young Tasmanian performers and composers the opportunity to work with directors and composers of national and international renown.

The program begins with 3 short works, varied in musicality, style and content, but well suited for showcasing the potential of the performers. Butterflies Lost is inspired by a work-in-progress by writer Joe Bugden and is an evocative soundscape set in the Terezin ghetto, the way station to Auschwitz for Jewish artists. Recorded voiceovers include excerpts of Nazi propaganda. Five ragged children play in an elaborate, forbidding set that incorporates broken glass. There’s a strong sense of menace. This is a very moving, very visual work.

Allan Badalassi’s Harmony explores the human potential of healing, incorporating Baha’i prayer text and referencing recent hostilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The voices of a 10-person choir soar, their glorious harmonies amongst the highlights of the evening. Rosemary Austen’s Eden’s Bequest sets to music the poetry of Judy Grahn. Solo soprano Sarah Jones performs as a sort of Everywoman, singing a repetitive leitmotif with exquisite clarity and exhibiting a dancer’s physical expressivity. Three female actors represent the ages of woman, engaging in esoteric and symbolic mime and ritual.

The main work, Touch Wood, is a thorough success. Concept and direction are by prominent Finnish choreographer and director Juha Vanhakartano and its music is by Adelaide-based composer Claudio Pompili. Touch Wood is accessible without losing intellectual rigour and largely succeeds in being humorous without trivialising its subject, obsessive-compulsive disorder. It looks, as the program note says, “at the rituals and obsessions we create to maintain our sense of security and draws parallels between them and the superstitions of mediaeval times.” It asks whether we enjoy greater freedom nowadays or if it’s an illusion. Five characters play out their private compulsions and rituals, occasionally interacting in amusing or poignant ways. There are some well realised solos incorporating spoken word and movement. I found the hypochondriac, the religious fanatic and the “compulsive apologiser” particularly entertaining.

The set, lighting and costumes, reminiscent of German Expressionist cinema, are integral to the success of Touch Wood. The performance reaches a musical and dramatic peak with a clever group-choreographed “silly walk” around the stage. The climax is loud, tuneful and exuberant and seems to imply that the human spirit can overcome even impossible odds.

IHOS Music Theatre Laboratory, Touch Wood, Peacock Theatre, Salamanca Arts Centre, May 23-26

In one of the essays from the Liquid Architecture 3 National Sound Art Festival catalogue, Luisa Rausa uses the myth of Echo as a starting point for sonic arts. Echo was banished to a cave to pine for her visually-obsessed lover Narcissus, cursed to return the words of others until she became nothing but an insubstantial echo. Sound has long been associated with such absent-yet-present ghosts, an ideal that reached its height with the extruded tape effects and smudged, crinkly soundscapes of musique concrete.

Although Jeremy Collings and Robin Fox supplemented these venerable tools with contemporary electronic devices, their work strongly evoked this tradition, creating a dense soundscape worthy of Xenakis. Natasha Anderson added inventive, breathy sounds, ranging from incomplete vocalisations, to wind glancing off a flute or gentle recorder notes. These were stripped, banished and contorted by Fox and Collings. The metaphor of Echo or Plato’s cave, of incomplete calls and responses drifting into abstraction, seems apt.

The gritty, spacious soundscapes that are a signature of later, digital processes—what Darrin Verhagen calls “delicate instability”—also featured in the festival. Black Farm for example was a strangely evocative, abstract AV work in which George Stasjic offered garish, cartoon images of the heads of Afro-American vampires and sheep, the camera moving slowly in or out. This was accompanied by Tim Catlin’s open, humming, acoustic world, which, in his words “privileges sonic density, texture and movement.”

The festival overall, however, was notable for its diversity. Bruce Mowson for example has a technologically-dirty-sounding take on minimalism, looping simple, hissy sounds so that his drones become the aural equivalent of op-art. Aural perceptions generate changes in modulation and emphasis where none objectively exist. Mowson’s short festival offering may not have been his best, but it had the elegant simplicity which informs all of his work.

Martin Ng on the other hand produced sharp spikes within an airy, static realm, employing what he described as “the molecular biology of DJing.” Using tiny sonic inversions, he crafted great waves of dense aural assault. Ng performed alongside guitar-pickup manipulator Oren Ambarchi. I confess that Ambarchi’s recent CD left me somewhat nonplussed. Ambarchi characteristically uses extremely quiet sounds and I lack the patience for such excessively hard listening. The live performance began in a similarly desultory fashion, audiences straining to hear anything, but Ambarchi and Ng developed it into the equivalent of an acoustic tenderising-mallet. Ambarchi has a second pick-up on his guitar-neck, and gently tapped it, generating layers of hums. Ng used a similarly cumulative approach. The final crescendo therefore constituted a massive, overdetermined wall of noises. The intensity of this conclusion was compelling—smoke even emanating from Ng’s amplifier!

Several notable AV pieces reworked sonic and visual historic traces. Cassandra Tytler’s My Happiness for example evoked a distressing yet affectionate portrait of Elvis—Elvis young, Elvis fat, Elvis beautiful, Elvis sweaty, as well as his fans—all passing over the viewer’s eye as if through a glass darkly. Light, shade, colour, everything seemed slightly off as Elvis’ voice leaped from one prison of echoing repetition (“Love me/Love me/Love me”) to another. Philip Brophy’s re-scoring of 1980s, easy-listening, rock-videos (Elton John, Billy Joel, Phil Collins) was far less kind to his subjects. Their voices were inverted into screams which Brophy described as possessing “a repulsive yet attractive granularity.” The most revealing aspect of Evaporated Music however was how easily punctured are such fat-cat musos’ conceits. The original film clips which Brophy replayed were crafted to sketch self-important narratives of romance or rebellion. With the voices no longer underscoring this however, these images immediately fragmented—without any further intervention upon Brophy’s part—into a series of meaningless, disconnected shards.

Sonia Leber noted in her paper a similar gap between sounds as historic elements (the recorded voice) and traces (emotion, breath etc) acting primarily through a-linguistic sonic qualities. Her public installations in collaboration with David Chesworth are concerned with gentle interventions in this field. The sounds of dog-owners calling to their pets featured in The Master’s Voice which uses charged or intimate vocalisations to manifest within new social spaces the babble of absent interactions.

Perhaps the most satisfying sonic ghosting of the festival was Hashima. This supremely beautiful study of an abandoned urban settlement on an island reminded me of the haunted visions and sounds of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. The camera switched from largely static shots of layered, dirty walls, to the detritus of people whose lives remained present yet inaccessible, while Jennifer Sochackyi provided an equally haunted score. Gentle echoes, shifts in proximity between the always slightly-removed sound of children, the hubbub of incomprehensible conversations—all became Echoes active within the caverns of history.

Liquid Architecture National Sound Art Festival 3, curators Nat Bates, Bruce Mowson & Camilla Hannan, July 2-20, including Liquid Crystal, North Melbourne Town Hall, July 11; Liquid Vision, Treasury Theatre, July 1; Liquid Papers, Treasury Theatre, July 13-14

Nigel Helyer (see interview), whose sound sculpture Meta-Diva won the 2002 Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award, questioned whether there were any courses in Australia which allowed for the study of sound in proper depth, responded by asking “Is there anywhere that teaches [among other sound subjects] psychoacoustics, soundscape concepts and electronics?” Given Australia’s predominantly deaf visual culture, it is typical that sound not be resourced at the level of other cultural practices.
Sound arts being what they are, a collection of disciplines ranging from post-digital music theory to film soundtracks, live performance to interface hacking, field recording to physical acoustics, it is difficult to find an institution which embodies these in a singular structure. The reality of the practical application of sound is that it is used in a variety of ways dependent upon the needs of individual projects. Yet the sheer variety of applications and their relative potency, especially compared with the ubiquity of visual media, suggests that Australian educational and cultural institutions are unaware of or unable to respond to the need for structures that support and develop the sonic arts in substantial ways. The establishment of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and the new building for the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, for instance, highlights this emphasis on visual culture. A proposal for a major soundscape studies facility in Melbourne was recently rejected, and funding for sound culture at the level of screen, visual and music institutions continues to be denied. For people wishing to study sound at a tertiary level beyond the superficial offerings of the black box focussed SAE style course, there are a number of institutions run by passionate and committed practitioners who can’t guarantee you a job, but can guarantee a thrilling sono-cranial re-wire.

While it is possible to study a sound subject here or there as part of a more general curriculum, some of the most comprehensive courses in sound in Australia are at Media Arts, RMIT in Melbourne and the School of Contemporary Arts, University of Western Sydney. Media Arts offers workshops in Video, Animation, Installation, Fine Art Imaging, Sound and Soundtrack and lectures in Audio/Visual theory. Students can study any combination of these and can complete sound projects exclusively, if desired, for the full 3 years of the degree. This interdisciplinary/poly-arts model has the advantage of creating a culture of collaboration—sound artists study alongside, and often develop projects with, photographers, film-makers and animators. The staff at Media Arts RMIT include contemporary practitioners Phillip Samartzis and Phillip Brophy, and the department is very much a driving force in the Melbourne scene, having spawned events such as the Immersion surround sound concerts, the Cinesonic Film Soundtrack and Sound Design Conference, the Variable Resistance international sound art events and the Liquid Architecture National Sound Art Festival (see review). Brophy offers some of Australia’s only specialist soundtrack subjects and Phillip Samartzis teaches a series of open ended, workshop and project driven subjects, which see students pursuing their own directions, be they Post-Digital Music, Surround Sound and Immersive Environments, Hip-Hop, Drum and Bass, Rock, Post-Rock or Soundscapes. The course curriculum is intensely student-driven, and syllabus changes for the workshops are a reflection of developing trends and themes in the ongoing collisions between sound, music and media. Anything a student produces publicly (performing and/or releasing material) is incorporated into their assessment and the sound culture of the course is deeply threaded: all the current lecturers in the time-based workshops were once students when Brophy ran the Sound area prior to taking over Theory and Soundtrack duties.

Sound at the University of Western Sydney, headed by the multi-talented and highly proactive Julian Knowles, offers a 3 year, 6 subject sequence in Music Technology which takes students from the ground level up to professional level in music and sound technologies through either a Music Technology major in the Bachelor of Music degree or a Sonic Arts major in the Bachelor of Electronic Arts degree. On top of this they offer Spatial Audio, a subject which is dedicated to the creative potentials of 5.1 audio and multi-channel composition; subjects titled Sonic Landscapes/ Electronic Cinema 1+2 which focus on experimental sound in the context of macro and micro cinema (screen, installation and web); and Pressure Waves and Electric Fields which focuses on experimental approaches to instrument design (soldering iron stuff). There are around 9 specifically focused semester-long sound subjects outside of what you might call more ‘traditional modes’ of acoustic music making. A number of core subjects allow students to work on self-proposed creative projects in an open and supportive environment. It is therefore possible to do a bachelor’s degree where up to three quarters of your subjects see you working with sound in some practical capacity. The remaining subjects are theory subjects which nevertheless allow for sound to be made a focus. Broadly speaking, all sound subjects are available to students in all degrees. There is no rule which locks a student out of a subject due to their discipline base or the degree in which have chosen to enrol. Students are quite heavily connected with festivals: What is Music? (Oren Ambarchi teaches a New Musics subject), Electrofringe, Freaky Loops and regular Sydney series like impermanent.audio and Frigid. Students have also received a grant from the NSW Ministry for the Arts to run gigs and exhibitions in an abandoned drive-in at one end of the campus and have had a partnership with AudioDaze on 2SER-FM.

Another opportunity to study sound within an academic context in Sydney is at the Department of Media Arts at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). The department offers theoretical subjects: ways of listening, culture and sound, music and popular culture which develop a critical approach to listening and historical and cultural contexts for sound; and practical sound subjects including audio production, creative audio techniques, audio workshop (producing experimental features for web/broadcast), soundtrack and installation and exhibition for sound and new media. The philosophy of the course is that sound should be an active and considered element of production—whether it be pure sound or music, or fused with other elements in a soundtrack or installation. The students at the course are active contributors to local film and video culture, various music scenes and some are involved with the more experimental DJ/VJ scene, and with sound art oriented installations and exhibitions. The department has links to 2SER, particularly through James Hurley, the sound facilities manager, and the staff include Norie Neumark who has been associated with Radio National and The Listening Room and creating new media work such as Shock in the Ear, and Shannon O’Neil, whose activities include running the Electrofringe festival, and working in broadcasting, composing and performing. The department previously offered a sound major which, regrettably, was discontinued due to funding pressures.

The Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University, offers a range of studies in sound. In the context of the well regarded Music Theatre and Acting courses, sound students enjoy a highly professional environment. Sound Design is treated as a discipline at the Academy and covers sound physics and speaker placement in all possible environments as well the use of audio to both create and enhance content in theatre, music theatre and film. Most of the lecturers and tutors work in the industry, and class sizes are small, currently averaging 8 students per year. The faculty has 4 studios, 3 digital and one analogue, which are networked and one of the digital studios is designed for surround sound. The Academy has rehearsal and production slots every 5 weeks, and each slot has 3 to 4 productions. The productions are most often theatrical although some include contemporary, modern and classical dance, and the Academy produces 2 films per year. Students put in on average a 60 hour week and are also expected to develop independent projects within the community, often appearing as DJ’s, engineers, and recordists on local productions. The students come from all parts of Australia and a third of these are women.

The usual place of sound, however, is as a module or elective within a larger curriculum of media studies, media art, fine art, new media and communication. At the School of Creative Communication at the University of Canberra, Mitchell Whitelaw lectures in new media, and offers several sound components in subjects in the degree course. Similarly, the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW, in Sydney offers some practical sound segments, and formerly offered a theoretical class The Art of Sound taught by Virginia Madsen, and the Department of Media and Communication at Macquarie University offers sound within its Time-based Arts subjects. The best scenario for these situations is that the lecturer or teacher of the subject has experience of sound practice. The interesting thing about sound’s position within media arts is that although it exists in a fragmentary form, an understanding of how it works will be of benefit in a range of situations, from paying keen attention to the voice while directing, to determining sound stream information to the audience in theatre, from making a video projection sonically effective in a gallery, to understanding temporality and composition for all media in terms of rhythm, layering or spatialisation.

While these and other institutions provide a lively atmosphere in which to study sound, and while sound culture, through live performances, releases, installations and other forms, continues to flourish, some practitioners have concerns about the future overall direction of education in Australia. Julian Knowles, for instance, comments that “we need a new government. People need to value education and intellectual life and start voting for a government which sees these areas as more important than detention centres, border protection and major sporting events.”

This was a special experience. Saariaho is a distinctive composer, often blending acoustic instruments with electronics, often with a dramatic intensity but also an unbroken line of development that separates her from her modernist peers and precursors and aligns her somewhat with eastern European and Russian composers but without their melancholic spirituality. I’d had the pleasure of immersing myself in her Prisma CD before attending the concert. It includes Dawn Upshaw singing Lonh, Anssi Karttunen playing the cello work Pres, and Camilla Hoitenga on flute for NoaNoa. In concert, soprano Alison Morgan managed admirably the sudden shifts from full voice to spoken word to whisper, sustaining the stream of sound that marks the work, faultlessly mixing it with the electronics and recorded voices. Pres is a more intense, argumentative work. I thought Geoffrey Gartner’s attack was bordering on the romantic, but listening again to Karttunen’s slightly more austere approach, I reckoned the difference was primarily a visual one. Witnessing the demands on the player in concert is a reminder of how much the CD experience can be an abstraction of a performance. Gartner’s performance was a fine one, fluent in the gearshifts in the second movement over its propulsive foundation and organic in his approach to the passionate, often moody third. Flautist Kathleen Gallagher’s account of NoaNoa was rivetting, ranging from the guttural to the spoken to the ethereal with ease, and providing some of the most interesting of the acoustic-electronic synthesis in the concert. Harpist Marshall Maguire deftly played Fall, a shorter work with a minimalist insistency that demanded an instant replay. The introduction to Saariaho’s work at the beginning of the concert by musicologist Anni Heino was very welcome. By the way, the Prisma CD (Montaigne naïve, MO 782087) is accompanied by an excellent CD-ROM that includes many hours of biographical and critical information, analyses of individual works as you listen to them, associated imagery, an entertaining opportunity to rearrange a Saariaho work and an eery photo-image of the composer morphing through all the 50 years of her life. Ensemble Offspring have done a fine job of introducing Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho to Sydney audiences with this superb concert.

Ensemble Offspring, A Portrait of Kaija Saariaho, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, July 7

There is a comment that hangs in my head from my time at art school. One of my lecturers, prising his rolled cigarette from his lips, confided to me in a deep voice, “being an artist is like being a cross between an intellectual and a rock star”. The mixture of earnestness and lèse majesté made the equation sound axiomatic. More than any other kind of tertiary education institutions, it seems to me that art school is where home truths and apocrypha blindly coexist. The role of a good art teacher these days is to dispel all the false myths that are woven around art and artists, and to instil in students the skills and the conceptual tools that are behind all good artistic intuitions. The lecturer in question is, alas, neither an intellectual nor a rock star. Academics like this abound in other disciplines, but a more visible concept of testable rigour chastens them. Art schools today suffer from the dreams of virility cherished by some of their staff, and the misconceptions that the outside has of art as a discipline. Art schools of today are both the beneficiaries and the casualties of the fact that art is a practice that cannot be verified. Never forget that economic and social rationalisation is a matter of proof, not truth.

One of the basic tenets of an art education is to make students distinguish between work that is illustrative and work that is critical, that is, ironic. Irony is the essential quality of art once art loses its continuousness with religion. Once out of God’s service, art becomes a mercurial form of play, and it is its sharp playfulness—or to use the philosopher Kant’s famous phrase, purposiveness without a purpose—that makes art so difficult to position. Like telling a joke to someone with no sense of humour, to speak of art as a rigorous practice is usually in vain. Art schools in Australia have been in a parlous state for some time. While experiencing their own hardships, it is not quite the same for schools in Europe whose riches are aligned to continuations with, or strategic departures from, pedagogical traditions and acknowledged mastery.

Signs of the low premium placed on art in Australia are already there in secondary school. Since 2001, art in NSW is only offered at the rudimentary two-unit level. This carries with it significant philosophical baggage, depriving students of the option to specialise and focus, effectively placing art on the same level as home science. It is one of those cases of cultural amnesia that undermines art’s classical parity with architecture, music and poetry. And we might as well bury the fact that the history of art developed in concert with other disciplines of social and political history, anthropology and economics.

Making the study of art still more unattractive is the logic behind the way the results are scaled. The UAI (university admissions indicator) operates according to a median scale which means that someone with a perfect score in art will be scaled down to about 92, whereas more people will be likely to get 95, or over, in something like four-unit mathematics. Yet, according to this very system, if as many people did four-unit mathematics as did art, mathematics would score worse. Art is a liberal subject which means it takes a wider range of students, but now better-scoring students are less willing to jeopardise their final score by studying art. The most intelligent students, however, are also the main performers in art. What puts such squalid policies in operation is the recent romantic myth that art is an expression of innate, essentially unlearnable urges, the province of eccentrics and visionaries tragically ruled by their passions. (We might start by considering that the common beliefs about van Gogh are mostly fictitious.) Unfortunately, a good deal of art is also taught along these lines.

Art schools were also founded on similar prejudices, namely that art is something studied by either the lazy or the emotionally overwrought. (Admittedly art schools are full of students and teachers like this, but they don’t make good art, if they make it at all.) Around 1990 a NSW statewide restructuring resulted in independent art schools amalgamating with universities. Students were enthusiastic, since their degree sounded better and they were also in a more favourable position to shift to other senior university degrees. The staff, (supposedly) practising artists, joined the ranks of academics. The modern art school begins with the Bauhaus (1919-1933), a free and subtle balance of spiritualism and technological logistics geared toward innovations of form that ranged from theatre to painting to design. This legacy, still dominant, can hardly cope with the sort of values that universities impose. In the normative sense, the university is built around the concept of Wissenschaft, which not only means science but also cultivated learning. Art is not science and its learning is not cultivated according to scholastic or rational models.

Throughout Australia, one of the main avenues for university funding is through the quantity of demonstrated research. An academic accrues points depending on books and articles. But the output is stringently vetted: books must have a recognised distributor, articles must be refereed and so on. Non-compliance, no points; the fewer points, the smaller a university’s share of the pie. Until this year, so-called creative labour such as exhibitions (including novels, musical works and the like) did not accrue points. Subsequently, since the staff could not be seen to contribute to the institution in a material way, art schools became an increasing liability, like a handicapped child whose parental love is perfunctory or indifferent. For to field art courses can be up to ten times as expensive as others. Making matters worse, the humanities at large are given proportionately less money per student than more professionally oriented areas.

Despite artists now being able to accrue points, it will be a long time before art schools will contribute materially to the institution as a whole. Oddly enough, a large proportion of tenured art lecturers have been protected by the lack of recognition that their discipline has had up until now. There is an alarmingly small proportion of tenured art staff who are, strictly speaking, regular, active practitioners. Art schools are also more protected than may first appear from the overbearing onus put on universities to make their courses answerable to vocational training criteria. Here is not the place to dwell on the absurdities of such expectations in the realm of the humanities, but in art, precisely because that knowledge is so difficult to quantify, it is easy to diddle the criteria. Being an artist is more an occupation than a profession. In comparison to countries with so-called old money, our art market is meagre and few artists can support themselves from their art. Subsequently, artists service their careers with neighbouring professions, web design, gallery assistance, teaching and the like. Thus to measure the “vocational” success of an art school is best done not in terms of jobs, but how many students go on to become artists; let’s be kind and make the standard 1 exhibition every 2 years. On this score art schools fail miserably.

This begs the question, which is being turned over and over these days, whether art schools should teach students skills or teach the problematics at stake in the whole art game. Either impart techniques without the strategies for manoeuvre, or strategies without techniques. Although most art schools try to do both, most of the staff are themselves divided as to what to teach—and there is now a decreasing knowledge of skills. I know of several students who attended the art school I went to who had to return to TAFE to do foundational courses. It is a perennial concern for prospective students, but not for ignorant teachers. In not teaching them much, they can avail themselves of the myth that they are not constraining the student, letting “creativity” have free sway.

The two most immediate pressures on art schools in Australia are attracting industry dollars and teaching new media. Financially straitened, art schools have to try to service courses which students enrol in for the principal reason that they cannot afford the equipment themselves. This is chiefly the case with new media and time-based art. The only problem here is that the boundaries for this area are far from historically set, and there are but a few people who could competently teach it. And the money for holding and upgrading costly equipment and software is supposed to come from elsewhere—industry—as if industry is a blind and bottomless resource. But art schools are supposedly different from industrial and graphic art colleges. Getting art schools to attract corporations is as ridiculous as trying to get a carthorse to gallop.

Carthorse—or dead horse? Curiously enough, the crises of faith in art schools have been been felt most deeply from within. No other tertiary discipline over the past 10 years has undergone as many face changes as the visual arts. The names of departments in this country’s major art institutions differ from conventional to goofily outlandish, either masking or reflecting what is taught. It is tempting just to say that art schools should be shut down and replaced with selective, localised TAFE-like courses. A writer must know how to write, a dancer dance, a musician play or mix, an actor act. But a good painter, for example, need no longer know how to paint in the conventional sense, not to mention that there is more than one sense of convention. Art schools are themselves a convention, but views are divided as to whether they’re a necessary one.

Julie Kovatseff, University of SA,
Nicotine Traces: the search for the other in the city

Originality is important, and one of the dangers of creative writing classes, for instance, or any critical approach to literature, is that it under emphasises originality. After all, a professor of literature is trying to find a tradition, and influences, which can be traced. People would rather talk about Poe as the typically American genius than as the total kind of lunar nut that he really is. There is nothing typical about Poe: he’s from the moon.
Edmund White

White is aware, of course, that absolute originality does not exist. Yet he knows that it’s the grain of the individual’s voice as it exceeds the strictures of a tradition that is at least one of the thrills of creative endeavour. What interests me, is that it’s possible to be a total lunar nut even while one is channeling an artistic exemplar. Apprenticeship and finding one’s own artistic path can go hand in hand. Hatched offers the proof. And this is also the yearly pleasure of the show, as we find the host bodies that the young artists have invaded gradually morphing into something (nearly) distinct. It is, to go down the familiar Freudian path, a deliciously uncanny experience that highlights the manifold possibilities inherent in every artist’s oeuvre.

Sean Cordeiro’s accomplished $hop & Save, for instance, takes its cue from the Brit duo Jake and Dinos Chapman. Like theirs, Cordeiro’s work is not exactly burdened by emotional warmth. In it, we find a pair of store dummies who’ve been magically turned into a satyr and a centaur. Replete with fake waterfalls cascading in cheesy electronic images behind them, it is distressingly banal. As shopping arcade props meets arcadian fancy, therefore, it draws fascinating parallels between all that Hobbit-ridden mythic fantasy crap and Gucci-style fantasy bullshit; Cordeiro hints that both are about a desire for transformation and that buying into them can leave one petrified like a lump of deformed plastic. $hop & Save is Ab Fab-meets-Tolkein by other means (a severely unsettling pairing) and is a terrifically resolved, if determinedly discomforting, piece.

German artist Thomas Demand makes an appearance in Hatched as host body for David Lawrey. As you might expect, then, Lawrey’s series of photos, Plastic and Cardboard, captures a kind of fake-realness that throws the viewer entirely. They look real but there’s something wrong—like Dorothy’s house after the tornado, shaken, stirred and wrenched from the bonds of the earth, the light is a little off, the seams in the wall and ceiling feel bizarrely stressed and bowed, the curtains suspiciously stiff. Given this, the difference between Lawrey and Demand should be clear: in Demand the violence exists as hidden narrative, in Lawrey we scope the visible scars. In his deliriously pessimistic work, therefore, Lawrey traces the faultlines, the almost gothic heaviness of space, and all the impending implosions that are just waiting to fuck us up and shake our lives into new, probably pretty hideous, dimensions. A nicely paranoid post September 11 riposte.

These are just 2 examples of art education doing its job—providing students with a rich body of works and artists to enter into, to channel through, cannibalise and then spit out. Most of the work in Hatched is in this vein, and it would be pointless to tick off work by work. But this said, the show did throw up a few true Poe-style lunar nuts. To my mind, Julie Kovatseff has to be the furthest satellite. Called Nicotine traces, her work suggests she probably got bored with trains and turned to something a little less salubrious—butt-spotting. Even so, she’s as anal as any clothed capped dweeb as she presents a 1960s style dress with cigarette butts adorning the cuffs and other places, photos of chalk circles where butts were collected and, finally, a map locating their broader positions. With the chalk outlines like crime scene markings she implies the obvious that—and despite her statement that she’s not concerned with the health aspects—smoking may be tobacco-company sponsored suicide. She transcends this banality on another level, however, as the piece becomes a pungent instance of urban archeology; a nicotine stained version of Benjamin’s asphalt botanist, Kovatseff maps the moments where we suck in relief from work or whatever, and hints at an underlying oral erotics that leaves its smoky haze over entire cities.

Also from the moon are Brendan van Hek and Anthony Kelly. Van Hek’s door in its own wooden coffin, Hinge:a joint that functions in only one place, is a wonderfully Wittgensteinean work. Devilishly nihilistic, it is, like all of Ludwig’s best stuff, a piece of packaged uselessness that is both an entry to nowhere and a sign of wasted human labour. Kelly, on the other hand, provides a quirky cold war flashback that has an oddly surreal overtone. Think the setting for a stage version of a Graham Greene novel directed by Robbe-Grillet and you’ll have an idea. Just as a dumb old art fan, I also really liked Midori Oki’s series of small ink drawings, Skin Diving (see page 10), depicting a fleshy nude figure wrestling with its own skin and a small black hole. On the same theme and equally interesting was Winnie Lim’s Felt, a scattering of clothing over the wall.

To use ad-speak, Hatched has something for everyone as it shows a recently birthed art world gleefully taking from their elders what they want and junking the rest. They’re moving on and moving up and many will find themselves in the disturbing position of being host bodies one day. And it might be sooner than they think.

Edmund White is quoted from The Burning Library: writings on art, politics and sexuality 1969-1993, Picador: London, 1994.

Hatched, Healthway National Graduate Show, PICA, Perth, June 7-July 21. Online catalogue and symposium papers at www.pica.org.au/hatched

Aboriginal art is really my expertise. I don’t normally write on subjects such as this but I happened to stumble on a small exhibition, VietPOP, in outer southwestern Sydney, that inspired and positively moved me. Aboriginal art is art made by Aborigines but what was this? Simple affirmations, autobiography of powerful human experiences and vitality, yet from one of the most denigrated youth communities in Australia. Think Vietnamese, think drugs and violent crime. The refugee story, the story of a group of people who have really struggled to become Australian is rarely talked about or given a voice. Maybe it’s the overbearing, fascist, political climate or my own tired state of mind from working in a decaying, surreal academic environment, but I felt I had to write about VietPOP.

The show, involving a curatorium of 7 young artists of Vietnamese heritage, was hung in the Liverpool Regional Museum, a small community cultural space that is a beehive of activity. The exhibition is alive with wit, colour, honesty and pathos. Though there are other Vietnamese artists exhibiting in Sydney (such as Dacchi Dang) this show is, I am told, one of the first (if not the first) to concentrate on young, emerging Vietnamese artists. It is this generation that articulates the changes in the way Australia constructs its ethnic and cultural identity at this moment. A special kind of tension hangs over the exhibition—the effervescent optimism of youth and yet the shyness of an uncertain ability to achieve their ambition. This is a responsibility felt by any serious new rising generation. We want to do the right thing, we want to succeed, we want to honour our parents and our past, we want to make our own statement, we want to determine our own future, we want to be ourselves. The artists are Cuong Phu Le, who is also a community arts officer working with the Vietnamese community, Thao Nguyen, Garry Trinh, Christina Ngo, Thuy Vy, Cat Tien Chuong, and Kevin Vo who collaborated with and provided a counterpoint to Sydney 2002 Biennale artist Jun Nguyen Hatsushiba. In fact Jun’s own students who now are exhibiting themselves are to collaborate in the future with this south-west Sydney group.

Futures and memories. The exhibition appears to be divided into 2 parts that ambiguously, like the lives of the artists, reinforce and yet diverge from each other. The refugee experience is of course central to their lives. It should be remembered that the culture of the West is littered with such stories. The cinema classic Casablanca is a refugee story. A Vietnamese-Australian version has yet to appear. Artists were asked to bring something from their journey, usually a common object belonging to their parents, that had attained an almost sacred, iconic status. Displayed under glass these mundane things resonate equally with sorrow, hope, gratitude and other memories. The parable of the sarong of Thao Nguyen is particularly poignant. It speaks of the escape of her parents and herself as a child from Vietnam. How a Cambodian man they encountered, after selflessly guiding and caring for them to see them to safety of sorts in Thailand, leaves them without asking for payment and is lost to them for ever.

The inclusion of the international Vietnamese-Japanese star artist Jun Nguyen Hatsushiba is interesting. Apparently an email had been posted widely from this group about the time of the Biennale asking, among other things, “What does it mean to be Vietnamese?” It reached a member of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art staff who invited the 2 parties to meet. Jun took to working with this group of ‘same but different’ kin (there’s an Aboriginal expression that says: we are the same essentially but definitely, in minor ways, different). Jun, it appears, has his own sense of responsibility and adventure.

Jun’s life and those of the young artists in fact have meeting points. He was born in Vietnam of a Vietnamese father and a Japanese mother. His work often deals with the experience of being a refugee and of statelessness, and of being Vietnamese in the world, whether you are in Ho Chi Minh City, in Paris, in California or in western Sydney. Yet, what Jun shows is that having 2 cultures and 2 languages enables people to gain insights that they wouldn’t normally. It’s what is added, not what is lost.

The Vietnamese population in Sydney is the largest of any city in Australia and supports flourishing community organisations, religious groups, restaurants, shops and other businesses. Its presence is very much felt. Today there are over 180,000 Vietnamese-born people living in Australia and over 50,000 living in south-west Sydney alone. In 1975 there were only around 900. Of these more than half were babies waiting for adoption. The first refugees arriving in Sydney in 1975 after the unification of Vietnam, were 283 orphaned children who were adopted by families throughout the country. This experience is revealed in newspaper clippings, photographs and other memorabilia in the artwork of Indigo Williams who as a baby was adopted into a very white Australian family. She had also made contact through the same internet survey that led Jun to the group.

The exhibition, despite its seeming lightness, deals with deep issues, the often terrible refugee flight experience, diasporic alienation, of personal identity and acceptance [even if only by your own parents]. Cuong talks of the ‘one and a half generation’—those born in Vietnam before their journey to Australia who have an experience, a memory of the country of their birth, but feel that they have to forge a new experience and a new sense of identity. There are also those who were too young to remember, and those born in Australia. A broad range of homeland experiences, memories and reconciliations exist. Kevin Vo’s almost nostalgic but seemingly detached account of his return visit is different from that of Thao Nguyen who appears to visit Vietnam often.

In a world of dichotomies nothing speaks louder than the senses. Science now tells us that taste is 90% derived from smell, so it is no accident that odours, pleasant and unpleasant, account for some of our strongest, longest lasting, most evocative bonds to people and places. Vietnamese refugees have frequently commented on the sanitised odourlessness of the Australian city environment compared with Vietnam’s rich mix of humidity, spice smells, cooking aromas, decaying vegetation and human life in action. Garry Trinh’s playful logo work I love pho reminds us of the sinister, predatory nature of the globalised fast food industry. In Vietnam the ubiquitous and delicious local and economical pho (a type of noodle soup), though really a breakfast food, can seemingly be found anywhere, 24 hours a day.

In Australia, Aboriginal people describe how animals are at their peak and look their best when they are full of fat. For Vietnamese people the concept of personal image is intriguing. Contrary to Western notions of slim well-being, in Vietnam it is positive to be fat. Some appear to struggle with this in Australia: “All this can be yours. Cars, houses, rich husbands…Life’s not fair, so make it fair”, reads a beauty shop billboard in Thao and Garry’s work. Notions of acceptable or desirable physical attributes and the ability to get ahead in the dominant culture have always had a life in minority cultures.

The exhibition gives these young artists a voice that isn’t necessarily their parents’. Though not denying their past or their roots they are different from the previous generation who often see them as “mat goc” (lost roots) or ‘the forgotten.’ Thao Nguyen’s video piece records conversations between her father and brother where they don’t appear to be listening to each other. Through their voices, these artists reclaim their history in a positive critical reinterpretation that prepares it for generations to come.

Red. Yellow. Colours are read differently on the margins. In the north of Australia, Aboriginal people of mixed descent are sometimes referred to by other Aboriginal people derogatorily as ‘yella-fellah’, or as ‘half a colour.’ In Arnhem Land, these people, who in another context might be described as sophisticated or cosmopolitan, are referred to in Djambarrpuyngu language as “narrani”, bush apple, red on the outside but white on the inside. Like the Asian banana, yellow on the outside but white on the inside. Most probably the appearance of Chinese migrants in the Northern Territory at the time of the gold rush is the source of this term. If an Englishman had Italian and French roots he would be seen as extremely cosmopolitan, intelligent, and be highly regarded. For the ‘other’ a mixture is always recorded by Western writers as a dilution, a loss and a person between 2 worlds, as never belonging to either—something white Australians and Europeans apparently never experience—they are never the ‘other’. They never have to explain or define themselves. This is Kevin Vo’s banana lamp. As Thao Nguyen explained at the opening of the exhibition:

When watching the cowboy movies and John Wayne films, in so many scenes they ask, ‘Are you yella?’. Do you guys know what this means? The Chinese—Asian yellow skinned— migrated to America and Australia during the period of the gold rush and have been here for a long time. They became known for their submissive nature. ‘Are you yella? Are you yellow? Are you submissive and lack courage and tenacity to rise up against me?’ This is what it means…I don’t want to be the next generation of submissiveness.

Ironically in Aboriginal Australia it was these ‘yella fellas’ who, though submissive for a time, came to be the most politically active in leading social change. This exhibition’s participants are also emblematic of change.

What would Australia be without the Vietnamese presence manifest in places like the thriving, amazing market place of Cabramatta? And yet few non-Asian Australians have much contact with the Asian community. Why has it taken nearly 200 years for a contemporary Asian-Australian Art Gallery to appear? Amazingly, in Sydney, the present Gallery 4A’s policy is to deal with inclusiveness which has a broader context. Although there is an emphasis on Asian-Australian artists, they are presented within a mainstream contemporary arts context. And yet this most important cultural centre struggles from a lack of core funding from key funding bodies.

This exhibition in the marginalised south-west of Sydney allows the work to speak to its own community. Largely invisible to the art establishment, the works give young Vietnamese people ideas for expression and being. Attended by over 300 people largely from the Vietnamese community on opening night the show was emotionally and warmly received. The centrepiece of the exhibition was a long banner by Kevin Vo in which each of the artists is portrayed, in political banner fashion, with their own affirmation. Aptly, Kevin Vo’s Superman (it’s hard to be) pop song digital projection, broadcast at full volume, made us aware of how the public act of producing such an exhibition transformed the artists into true Supermen.

Beverley Southcott

Beverley Southcott, Fuel and Gruel (foreground) and Contained Breath (mounted on wall)

Beverley Southcott’s art addresses the alienation of the individual from society and how the interdependence of the economy and the individual, through the cycle of consumption and production, constructs urban life. Her Garden City exhibition included a table at which one must stand to eat, and photos of windows that deny access.

Peter Burke & Robin Hely

Peter Burke and Robin Hely make an excellent duo. Both artists are drawn to witty performative interventions into everyday life that play with our expectations of truth. Burke is known for his alter-egos and fake street tabloid Pedestrian Times, while Hely has become infamous for a recent project at Westspace in which he secretly taped a painfully fraudulent blind date, only to leave us guessing if the angry female subject was in on the game (the whole event given added perversity when publicly broadcast on Channel 31’s weekly art show, Public Hangings).

In their recent show Delivery at Conical in Melbourne, Burke and Hely pose as Starlink Express, a fake courier company. For the exhibition, the 2 artists turned the gallery into a mailroom/depot, creating a major installation of floor-to-ceiling cardboard boxes leaving only a narrow entrance. They even arranged authentic props: a small radio, maps, old beer bottles and newspapers, all as an inventive way of showing video documentation of recent stunts based around the idea of involving the public in a staged art event.

A first video shows the artists dressed in distinctive orange courier uniforms lugging a package around the streets of Oporto, causing confusion among an unsuspecting Portuguese public by trying to deliver a huge, L-shaped brown paper parcel with an illegible address. Hidden inside the parcel, the camera shows the public’s interest in trying to find the owner of the parcel, made all the funnier with subtitles. Pedestrians become performers who freely give directions, help carry the parcel and question the couriers, curious to know what is inside.

Parcel-cam is an innovative trick. As the artists suggest, “the street becomes a lively and engaging performance space for improvised narratives and the mysterious parcel is a metaphor for indefinable content.” On the other screen, the artists are shown attempting to deliver the same parcel to befuddled but helpful recipients at various Melbourne addresses: Federation Square, Gabrielle Pizzi Gallery, Parliament House, the Crazy Horse sex club. On the street, the artists left the parcel with unsuspecting pedestrians—“Hey, could you mind this parcel for a minute while we get some lunch”—before disappearing. It seems we’re used to performances in public now, and some even speculate that they might be part of “some dodgy advertising campaign.” But more than an amusing reality-TV prank, the project becomes a surprisingly touching study in animating public trust. Daniel Palmer

Peter Burke & Robin Hely, What’s inside the box?, Conical Inc. Gallery, Melbourne

Anthony Johnson

Anthony Johnson, Utopia 2002
Sculptor and installation artist Anthony Johnson currently works in Hobart. He focuses on the “non-place”, typified by warehouses, cargo yards and construction sites, as a non-contextual site of transience. The non-place symbolises being nowhere yet everywhere —and the experience of feeling nothing yet everything.

These concerns inform the object-based sculptures and photographs shown at CAST, work meticulously based on equipment and detritus to be found in Johnson’s “non-places”, rendered ambiguous by their construction from incongruous materials such as polystyrene and clear perspex.

Johnson explains, “Despite their generic nature, these objects imply an illogical sense of ambiguity, mimicking the disorientated consciousness of our global village and the utopian quest for the “perfect world.”

Lily Hibberd

Virginia Baxter
For the past few years, the generous collective of artists who live and work at Imperial Slacks have hosted a regular program of performances and exhibitions from independent artists at their gallery in Surry Hills. Alas, Sydney rents have claimed another artist-run space and following the August shows (Look Mum, No Head—a performance/installation night on 2 August and Slacking Off, their final exhibition opening 21 August) Imperial Slacks will close its doors forever.

We dropped in to the gallery one afternoon in May to see Melbourne artist Lily Hibberd’s Burning Memory, a haunting little exhibition consisting of 15 paintings depicting various stages in the destruction of a burning house, each with an evocative title— Vicious Flicker, Collapse of dreams (skeleton). The room is infused with orange, yellow, and white light emanating from the canvases. A musical undertone bleeds from the corner where a video archive shows house fires from newsreels and films such as Hitchcock’s Rebecca. The effect is of something large contained in a small room. A slow and accumulating drama for the eyes and ears that, like fire, fixates. In her catalogue essay, “Wall of Fire”, Natasha Bullock refers to Hibberd as “referencing some of the devices of cinema—still, close-up, distance shot, cropped, blurry and sharp—(to) create a dynamic environment where interacting physical, perceptual and psychological spaces are built, re-built and collapse.” Burning Memory is a peculiarly immersive experience propelled by luminously impressionistic imagery.

Lily Hibberd, Burning Memory, Imperial Slacks Gallery, Sydney, May 29-June 25. www.imperialslacks.com

AFTRS student filmmakers

In April this year I attended the CILECT (Centre International de Liaison des Ecoles de Cinéma et de Télévision) congress at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. Founded in Cannes in 1955, CILECT is the association of the world’s major film and television schools, with 108 member institutions from 50 countries on 5 continents. The congress was an excellent opportunity to observe how screen teaching practices and philosophies in Australian schools fit into an international context. The 4 key congress themes were “School and Student—The conflict between Harmony and Invention”; “Curriculum Change and Technologies”; “Triangle—the creative collaboration between Writer, Director and Producer”; and “Documentary in the Teaching of Fiction.”

The first of these looked at the challenges of supporting students in their creative endeavours within specific cultural and economic contexts. The Australian film schools, like their international counterparts, deal with this through a variety of teaching models that range from independent and auteur to creative collaboration driven by producers, as well as courses that reflect the models of mainstream television and film production.

Globally, school curricula are responding to changes generated by new technologies. The range of opinion about use of film versus digital media in the training of emerging filmmakers—when, where, how soon, how much—was immense and reflected the way courses develop to match the resources and traditions of each school and the cultural role they play in their community. The Australian Film Television & Radio School (AFTRS) is an interesting example of a national school that has changed over the years to produce graduates who can create innovative work in various forms—television, documentary and new media—rather than just focusing on the traditional training needs of the feature film industry.

“Triangle” explored how curricula can foster creative collaboration. The question of how to create and manage it within a film school is pedagogically challenging and requires the commitment of teaching staff in every department to agree to support the concept and system.

With issues as potent as innovation, cultural specificity, the demands of new media and collaboration all circulating, the choice of where to go and how to get started in a competitive industry can be daunting for emerging filmmakers. AFTRS, the Victorian College of Arts (VCA), Royal Melbourne Institure of Technology (RMIT), Queensland College of the Arts (QCA), Charles Sturt University and Flinders University all offer practical courses with a range of curricula, entry levels and outcomes. I asked lecturers and heads of schools to describe what is unique and innovative about their courses and teaching practices. Here are their edited responses.

AUSTRALIAN FILM TELEVISION AND RADIO SCHOOL (AFTRS)

The full-time postgraduate program is an intensive, hands-on, production course. Students work on productions in their chosen specialist roles (DOP, editor, director, producer, etc) while at the school. Production work emphasises the nature of creative collaboration and assessment requires reflection on the process and collaboration. Teaching approaches include lectures, seminars, workshops and one to one mentoring. The short course program is linked to the full-time program and external students can take up units within it.

The diversity of the AFTRS program is a major strength. Students work on animations, TV magazine programs, documentaries, short dramas, feature scripts and drama series. With 12 different departments (from Cinematography to Design, from Directing to Sound, Visual FX and Producing) AFTRS offers a unique program with its in-depth specialist focus. It is one of the few schools in the world that offers a comprehensive program in Visual Effects Supervision.

Many graduates go on to develop their own production companies and often form teams through the networks they build at AFTRS (eg The Boys, The Bank). A 1995 study indicated 96% of graduates interviewed were employed in the film and television industry. Students range in age from 21 to 40 with 25 about the average. Entry is highly competitive. AFTRS receive several thousand requests for the application form each year which calls for a fairly solid portfolio of written and visual material. About 450 people apply for the 60 or so new places available each year.

VICTORIAN COLLEGE OF THE ARTS

The VCA School of Film and Television courses include a 3-year Bachelor of Film and Television degree, a one year Graduate Diploma in Film and Television, a Masters in Film and Television, a part-time non-award Foundation Program and a series of short courses.

The VCA aims to develop students who can make motion picture programs of high artistic and technical standard at a professional level. The strength of our style of training is that it develops students’ creativity and independence. The VCA School of Film and Television places ideas at the centre of all its teaching and development programmes. Innovation is at its heart.

Programs produced by VCA students have won numerous awards at festivals nationally and internationally. Alumni of the school include directors Gillian Armstrong, Geoffrey Wright (Romper Stomper), Andrew Dominik (Chopper), Aleksi Vellis (The Wog Boy), Robert Luketic (Legally Blonde); BAFTA and AFI award-winning producer Jonathon Shiff; Academy Award nominated editor Jill Billcock (Moulin Rouge); DOP Ian Baker (6 Degrees of Separation); and animators Peter Viska and Adam Elliot.

VCA students come from a variety of backgrounds and ages—some have substantial industry experience, others none. It is very competitive to get into the BFTV. In 2001 we had 203 people apply for 14 places. People sometimes apply several times before getting in to the course.

QUEENSLAND COLLEGE OF THE ARTS
GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY

Established in 1881, the QCA is one of Australia’s leading art and design colleges. Today it is strengthening a reputation in creative arts innovation, offering study across a range of disciplines—Animation, Screen Production, Australian Indigenous Art and, from 2002, a new Bachelor of Digital Design. An interesting feature of QCA has been the close link our film school has made with SBS Independent, producing 5 films in the last 7 years.

The college was annexed to Griffith University in the early 90s and offers an atelier style 16mm film course (the only one in Queensland) separate from the much larger video and media theory courses offered by Griffith University’s Humanities department.

The performance indicators by which to judge film schools are awards and jobs. We take less than 30 students per year, and their employment rate after graduation is high. Films produced at QCA win many awards in creative as well as technical categories. In 2000, honours student Peter Hegedus was invited to the prestigious Dokumart European Documentary Festival in Neubrandenberg, where his Grandfathers and Revolutions won a Highly Commended Award. Widely televised, the film has been seen around the world.

In 2001, 4 QCA graduate films were selected for New York University’s International Film School Festival; Natalie & Tanya Grant’s Ballet Shoe Laces shared the Audience Choice Award, competing with films from 70 countries. These are outstanding results equal to the best of many national film schools around the world from an emerging regional competitor.

FLINDERS UNIVERSITY

Recognising a need for further production training in South Australia, Flinders University introduced a Bachelor of Creative Arts Screen (BCA)in 2002— a 3-year course with an optional fourth Honours year. Prior experience in actual filmmaking is not a necessary requirement but evidence of creative work in visual or written form is, and a short-list of applicants is invited to interview on the basis of this submission. Last year we received 70 applications for a first intake of 14 places. The BCA is designed to be “industry ready”, producing students with sufficient skills to gain employment in a variety of screen/media industries at entry level, capable of gaining additional funding support for independent production, and qualified to pursue postgraduate study in this area.

The practical training emphasises collaboration and the role of the creative team, producing students who can get a foot in the door of industry, can think analytically, critically and creatively, and who understand screen media. Flinders University is an institution which endeavours to encourage innate creativity. Graduates are highly visible in the South Australian film and television industry. Two of the 3 South Australian Film Corporation’s $50,000 Filmmaker of the Future awards and all of the SBS/ SAFC documentary Accords for Australia By Numbers have been awarded to Flinders graduates. In the first few years after graduation many find attachments through the South Australian Film corporation (SAFC) on features and go on to a range of jobs, from project officers at SAFC, to production coordinators/managers, editors, sound recordists, DOPs, producers and directors in television, new media and feature films.

For students aiming for a career in the television industry the following courses may be more suited to their needs.

RMIT

RMIT Media Studies provides a 3 year Television Production major that introduces and develops a broad range of skills relevant to independent and commercial television and film production. Television Production is a Major within the BA Media Studies at RMIT.

The major strengths of our approach are the ways in which students are encouraged to work in independent and collaborative projects. We have redefined production to acknowledge the converging nature of the media industries. Students in their final year are able to develop and produce major collaborative projects that have multiple real world outcomes for converged media environments.

Broad television skills are emphasised, 16mm film production is available as an elective, and television studio experience is also available. Students are encouraged to concentrate on basic skills in the first 2 years of their program and in their third year to specialise in cinematography, direction, producing, sound design, editing, or digital postproduction. There is also the possibility of specialising in networked interactive video.

Our graduates are well represented throughout the film and television industry in Australia and enter the film and television industry as assistants to established industry practitioners, or start their own independent production companies.

The majority of our students are school leavers and there is a broad mix of local (Australian) and international students. Our first year enrolment is approximately 50 students.

CHARLES STURT UNIVERSITY

The 3-year degree course in Television is vocationally oriented. It provides high level craft skills training at broadcast operations level combined with an equal emphasis on storytelling and aesthetics. Students are exposed in first year to the range of craft skills used in television production, from tape ops to directing, single camera to 3 camera multi-camera studio and are expected to identify their craft interests early in the course. The major strengths of this practice lie in the graded approach to skills acquisition and consolidation in the first 2 years.

We only teach within the electronic television environment. However, anything they learn in this course is transferable laterally to filmmaking. The course is a BA (Television Production) with the possibility of Honours (an additional year) and a Masters degree.

We have had a take up rate that varies between 80% and 95% and at least three quarters of a class of 35–40 will be employed upon graduation. We work at this constantly by making our training both relevant to the industry environment, and challenging to future creative possibilities. We aren’t in the business of training ‘button-pushers.’ It’s why you push the button that matters.

Most of our students graduate around age 20-21. Backgrounds are varied, but most have had some exposure to video production at secondary school. We look for students who have a passion for television as an expressive storytelling medium and want people who will take a risk, not just conform to fashion. Television needs to be constantly challenged and I think the core of it all is that we want to train these young people to be employable and challenging in the coming decades.

The paradoxical question of how you teach creativity while training people for an industry that is about commerce and business is constant and ongoing. As are the issues of how many students we should be training, how many graduates will make their way into careers that are (and always have been) highly competitive to enter, difficult to survive in financially and often already oversubscribed.

The schools covered in this article are by no means the only way to get into the film and television. For young people starting out, the CREATE training package on offer in some TAFEs and schools can be a useful place to begin, as can the many undergraduate courses on offer within Screen, Media and Communication departments in universities throughout Australia.

A focus on the performance of “contemporary classical” or any other kind of current music is not something one generally associates with the major music schools in Australia, some of which still use the label “Conservatorium” to describe themselves. This term implies an agenda of conserving the repertoire of western classical music, principally of the 18th and 19th centuries. Noble as this aim is, the contemporary reality means new approaches to preparing music professionals are being sought across the sector. Professor Nicolette Fraillon, Director of the Canberra School of Music (and now the newly appointed Music Director and Chief Conductor of the Australian Ballet) notes that because “traditional performance jobs are still being reduced in terms of funding and the sizes of orchestras, (graduates) need to be really prepared and creative in a variety of ways in order to support themselves.”
The traditional preparation of a classical music performer is a long and rigorous process. It requires considerably more dedication if you add the skills associated with a variety of contemporary music practices such as the ability to play complex rhythms, to use non-traditional techniques and music technology, to improvise and even to engage with movement and acting. Musical genres are constantly blurring and mutating so it is difficult to know what approach can be adopted to provide the best kind of grounding for the modern musician.

The traditional music school has been forced to reconsider its offerings as the contemporary musical landscape has changed and the relevance of music degrees has come into question from the wider music industry. At the core of the problem is the traditional curriculum. According to Dr Tony Gould, Head of the School of Music at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), “the curriculum hasn’t changed much since I was a student more than 30 years ago.” In the same period, however, the repertoire and required skills have expanded greatly. Gould questions the deeply held notion in the Conservatorium culture that one has to have mastered Mozart and Beethoven before attempting the contemporary repertoire. Stephen Whittington, Senior Lecturer at the Elder School of Music in Adelaide, also believes the curriculum needs to be more flexible and that more interaction should formally occur between the various streams in a typical music school (eg composition, music technology, classical music performance and jazz performance), streams that have been traditionally segregated from one another. For Whittington the undergraduate curriculum is full of subjects that music academics steadfastly believe are core requirements for training a musician. Consequently there is no room to add new subjects such as multimedia as they come into the picture. Whittington asks: “Can you do multimedia if you can’t write a fugue?” The answer is obvious, but the reluctance to let go of archaic fields of study still represents a stumbling block in curriculum reform.

One modernisation strategy gaining momentum is the incorporation of compulsory improvisation training for all students at undergraduate level. Queensland Conservatorium and the University of Western Sydney (UWS) have done this already and, according to Professor Sharman Pretty, the Sydney Conservatorium of Music is poised to follow. Pretty explains that this will be one of the likely outcomes of a large development project at the Sydney Conservatorium in the field of “performance and communication”, a project that “aims to find ways for mainstream classical musicians to break out of the mould and to interface better with the broader community.”

Major music schools have always had to balance their focus of training elite musicians with providing a general training and performance service to the community, but in the current climate the need seems more pressing than ever. A greater responsiveness to the music industry and to other industries being served is also an urgent matter.

For example, Professor Robert Constable at Newcastle Conservatorium reports that there has been demand from the students doing the Church Music strand of the Bachelor of Music degree to incorporate contemporary gospel composition and performance training into the curriculum. Newcastle Conservatorium has also successfully introduced a suite of online postgraduate music technology courses that have mostly attracted school teachers seeking to upgrade their professional skills.

It has perhaps been easier for the small music schools to take a more radical approach to the problem of the contemporary relevance of their courses. At Southern Cross University in Lismore NSW we have completely broken with the classical music tradition in favour of training musicians and audio engineers for the contemporary popular music industry. In this specialist area there is arguably even more pressure to remain relevant to the industry, so we constantly struggle with the appearances of new musical genres and ever-advancing technologies. A few institutions, notably the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and UWS have chosen to embrace the contemporary in a more global sense, combining a range of contemporary styles including the popular. According to QUT’s Associate Professor Andy Arthurs, “there is no one way to play or compose music.” Thus at QUT experimentalism and a diversity of contemporary stylistic performance and creative practices are encouraged. At UWS, Dr Jim Franklin describes a more radical approach insisting that students broaden their stylistic palette. If they come in as rock musicians, for example, they will be expected to engage also with a contrasting tradition such as classical performance, and vice versa. All performance students, even classical specialists, are also required to incorporate sound and/or visual technology into their performance exam projects in a substantial way.

Even within the conservatorium, mandatory engagement with the contemporary is a strategic option. At the VCA, Tony Gould is deeply committed to “correcting the balance between the old and the new.” However, in programming recent Australian works for all student orchestra concerts he expects significant opposition from conservative elements within the school.

In many senses the rise of computer music technology has changed the ball game forever for music schools. Most of the sounds now heard on radio, television and interactive multimedia are predominantly electronic. In much pop music, the only thing that isn’t electronic is the voice. In the nightclub scene people dance almost exclusively to electronic beats. So while the majority of music students are performers it is arguable that the most vital work being done in music schools is in the recording studios and computer workstation labs. Activities range from the production of audio and multimedia artworks to the invention of new methods of digital arts creation and manipulation. Traditional music schools such as the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and the Canberra School of Music have led the way in the creation of software instruments in Australia, and have been joined in recent years by QUT, UWS and a few others. There is understandably more activity in this area going on at postgraduate level where the curriculum is much more flexible.

Despite these advances in the modernisation of curriculum and research there are continual challenges as the technological revolution grinds on. Stephen Whittington notes that at the Elder School of Music there is a new type of composition student who is not concerned with live performance outcomes and often not competent in, or even interested in, music notation. Working with sound entirely in the digital domain is fast becoming the norm in creative music. Whereas a decade or two ago there was a concern that the so-called “musically illiterate” rock guitarist or drummer was not being catered for in the tertiary music education system, we are now faced with a new set of creative practices that bypass the performer altogether. Another anomaly is that no tertiary music institution seems to have seriously engaged with DJing. The DJ is arguably a performer and an improviser but it is difficult to envisage a performance major being created to cover this ubiquitous performance practice.

Although it is impossible to imagine that the music performer will disappear from the musical industry landscape, it is clear that a different breed of musician is likely to emerge who combines a broader range of performance techniques with skills in composition, communication, multimedia and niche marketing.

With the increasingly cross-disciplinary nature of contemporary arts practice, music and other single-artform schools and their host institutions are also being forced to confront their artform ghettoisation tendencies. There have been a number of ways forward including the trend to establish digital arts degrees in institutions that have both visual arts and music programs. This is more viable when the contributing disciplines are in the same location and when strategic decisions to focus on multi-arts and technology collaboration have been made. In recent times the most spectacular example of this phenomenon has been the formation of QUT’s Faculty of Creative Industries.

How music as a discipline fares in these cross-disciplinary conglomerates remains to be seen. At the core of music is live performance, whether it is a string quartet, a jazz ensemble, or a contemporary pop band. Maintaining the performance tradition in the face of the digital arts revolution will be one of the great challenges of music and music education in the future.

In his second year as director of the Melbourne International Film Festival, James Hewison has extended his policy of foregrounding Asian cinema. His stated policy is that “this festival should be a representative or even advocate of the region to which we belong.” It certainly helps that Asia is producing the most interesting films in world cinema at the moment.

Hewison has a particular interest in South Korean cinema, aiming to locate it as “an almost irresistible part” of this year’s festival. He describes Korea as “an incredibly energetic film culture, one that takes risks in style and content, and is unafraid to confront its difficult past.”

This year’s retrospective focusses on Kim Ki-duk, a Korean director whose harsh, violent films will generate considerable controversy. Hewison sees Kim’s films as containing “a raw naivete—almost an innocence—but also anger and anguish expressed in his landscapes usually populated by marginalised characters. Like some of Kitano’s earlier films, there are exclamation marks of brutality that give his work striking, visceral impact alongside poetically constructed beauty.”

Like Japan’s Miike Takeshi, Kim works quickly (with 7 films over the past 6 years) and seeks to attain a transgressive edge by emphasising perverse sexuality combined with explicit violence. Like the Japanese new wave “eros and massacre” directors of the early 1960s, Kim’s films try to imagine what the world looks like when repression reaches an unbearable limit. When desire finally emerges, it does so through rape, murder and mutilation.

On his website (www.kimkiduk.com), Kim states his aesthetic credo that “film is created out of a point where reality and fantasy meet.” He claims that his films attempt to access “the borderline where the painfully real and the hopefully imaginative meet.”

The conjunction of pain and reality goes to the heart of Kim’s social critique. His is a world with a pecking order of beatings in which introverted artists and women occupy the bottom rung. Images recur of caged birds, of fish flopping around out of water, of dogs being beaten. The social world is divided utterly and communication is impossible and hardly attempted. In this world, artists are beaten when they show people truthful portraits of themselves.

At their most superficial, the films can often be read as political allegory. Wild Animals (1999) deals with a North Korean and South Korean forging an unlikely friendship; Address Unknown (2001) revolves around the American military presence in Korea; and Birdcage Inn (1998) and Bad Guy (2001) generate their conflicts out of class differences within Korean society.

Underlying these social conflicts, however, is a broader thematic. Kim works with a heavily psychoanalytical model of character. He has a rather hydraulic conception of sexual desire, where repression builds to a point of explosion. Sex is essentially linked to pain and rage in these films. Desire seeks to possess and incorporate its object, and the frustrations in attaining this end only serve to increase its sadistic ferocity.

No failing is so widespread or so dire in Kim’s films as the inability to identify with someone else. His narratives set up these self/other distinctions in order to find hope through collapsing them. The snotty middle-class girl of Birdcage Inn merges into the prostitute who works at her mother’s inn. The artist of Real Fiction takes on the personal history of the actor he encounters at the start of the film. The female protagonist of The Isle appears to dream, but we end up seeing that the dream belongs to the male protagonist. The woman forced into prostitution in Bad Guy stares into a mirror until her image overlaps with that of the pimp who has enslaved her.

As this final example might suggest, Kim aims to shock and offend. His champions invoke surrealism and Artaud in the emphasis on transgression as a means of cutting away bourgeois pretence, of being outside of boundaries. The imaginative leap to identify with others can only come after the embrace of one’s abjection.

After sitting through Bad Guy, however, and being asked to countenance the proposition that brutalisers of women become dependent upon their victims and that being raped and forced into prostitution can put women on a trajectory to emotional growth, you’ve got to wonder whether this is transgressive or just the retelling of a story we already know only too well.

Bad Guy and Real Fiction (2000) are films generated out of post-Laura Mulvey film theory. They both deal with relations of looking as a source of power. A character in Address Unknown asserts that the human eye is the scariest thing. The male protagonist of Bad Guy sets the narrative in motion by staring at a woman and then goes on to watch her sexual degradation from behind a one-way mirror. The male protagonist of Real Fiction can only return himself from the violent fulfilment of his fantasies by smashing in the head of the woman who has been following him with a digital camera.

This points to a reflexivity in Kim’s work that runs alongside his thematic concerns. The obvious analogy for Real Fiction, which was shot in 200 minutes, is Mike Figgis’s Time Code. The most impressive aspect of The Isle is revealed when it is viewed as a technical exercise in which psychologically complex characters are presented without the use of dialogue.

Indeed The Isle, which we saw at last year’s Melbourne festival, is Kim’s strongest film. In paring the drama down to the 2 protagonists, he introduces an economy and an intensity to the film, discarding the stock villains who circle around the few psychologised characters in his films. The Isle is about finding the still point at the centre of life where desire is taken to an end point where it exhausts itself.

Finally, in a year when all of the local festivals were scraping to find Australian films, it is worth posing Korean cinema as a point of comparison. Both countries had feature film industries brought into being and sustained by government intervention. At present, South Korea films have 49% of the domestic box office of their country. The films span a fascinating range from schlock genre pieces (Teenage Hooker Becomes Killing Machine) to national prestige films such as Chihwaeson, to the auteur margins inhabited by Kim. From where I sit, looking at Australia’s 4% of domestic box office, that looks like more and more of an achievement.

1. The debris of a smile

Fergus Daly
In the 1980s, when ‘the Sublime’ was the idea that defined Postmodernism for cultural analysts, Jean-Luc Godard realised it was by working through the idea of the beautiful that truly creative things would begin to happen. Not the Kantian beautiful wherein disinterest before the artwork relieves the spectator of his habits of thought, but a kind of bio-political ethico-aesthetic notion (when asked some time ago what it might mean to be ‘Godardian’, the filmmaker replied that it would be “to defend an ethics and an art”). In this notion, nature would have to be re-invented by cinema and bodies constituted by way of relinquishing their ‘habits of habitation’; both human subjects and the earth would be born in a single movement of life.

Éloge de l’amour, Godard’s first feature in 5 years, interrogates Memory, History, Resistance, Language, Ethical Adequation. Widely touted as his “most accessible film in years”, in reality it is barely penetrable yet deeply moving and stunningly intelligent, and its ‘method’ brings poet Paul Celan to mind: “Speak—but keep yes and no unsplit. And give your say this meaning: give it the shade.”

A one and a two and a three and a four—this count-in, a beginning, is also a count-down, 4, 3, 2, 1—a blast-off! 4 for the moments of love, 3 for the stages of life, 2 for black and white, 1 for monochrome and colour, cinema and video, TV and life, Hitler and Weil, Spielberg and Godard. But in recent years it is the 1 that most preoccupies Godard, ways of being one. Not so much the conventional problem of Singular versus Universal, but a form of the universal that would also be singular.

Godard’s fundamental problematic is unquestionably Ethics: ethical possibilities that don’t have the dead moral weight of established transcendent moralities. Godard’s characters are literally embodied ethical positions. If the human body remains the locus of new forms of resistance to ‘the Program’, then in Éloge the lightness that passes between bodies, in particular those of the vital trio Edgar (Bruno Putzulu), Berthe (Cécile Camp) and the old Resistance fighter (Francoise Verny), reaches a Bressonian intensity. Hence Godard’s invocation of quotations from Bresson’s Notes sur le cinématographe, as well as of Simone Weil (Edgar is composing a Cantata for Simone Weil).

This direct confrontation with the universe of Bresson whose characters are “figures with a movement in which weight plays no part”—to borrow Alain Bergala’s citation of Weil’s definition of grace—has been a long time coming in Godard’s cinema. Not only is there something of the Bressonian model in Putzulu’s performance; also in Edgar’s approach to the actor/bodies he seeks: he seems to want not models—vessels containing the spiritual—but beings carrying the ethical. Is Berthe not the embodiment of values somehow still out of Edgar’s reach? Godard wants not only his actors but his characters, even his documentary subjects, to suggest ethical possibilities. In his version of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens, Godard—rejecting a Grace/Fall duality—rummages through the signs and traces of the city for the meeting point of singular modes of ethical being which would also be universally beautiful.

Beauty is a matter of ethics for Godard. In Éloge it is tied to the theme of adulthood. “I’m not beautiful enough for the role”, Berthe tells Edgar. It is said of Edgar that he’s “trying to be an adult” but to be ‘at one’s prime’ as an artist tends to forego the capacity to capture birth and decay, childhood and old age. Compare Edgar’s inability to see Berthe’s singular beauty with Godard’s skill at creating a context to allow certain bodies or faces to appear on screen. In particular he succeeds in creating a unique sense of intimacy—the appearance of the old resistance fighter woman’s face (in all its History-lined beauty) appears to ‘find its moment’ in a way that is truly overwhelming. In allowing her to exist on screen, Edgar proves to be the film’s true ethical consciousness, or rather, the revealer of a new ethical possibility.

What has changed in Godard in the 35-40 years that now allows this face/body to appear on screen? Something which could never have occurred in the 60s, for example. Maybe it has to do with the eschewal of the ironic for the development of an approach that, in countering the manner in which the ironic announces itself, allows a revelation coming from a completely different place, and a new form of the beautiful.

Éloge de l’amour, as Yonnick Flot has noted, expresses “his way of seeing in adulthood the neutral gear of life, held in suspension by the energy of childhood and the forces of old age.” Here Godard returns to the ontological problem of lightness versus heaviness treated by Leos Carax in his first films, now staged in terms of History—more specifically, the French Resistance. In this context, Godard examines the way in which memory is transmitted from old to young people and the role of cinema in that transmission. Here we witness Godard continuing his search for a specifically cinematic ethics that would also say something philosophically about the present’s relation to the past. The film suggests that there is a certain lightness that passes straight from childhood to old age (from liberty to wisdom), thereby bypassing heavy adulthood.

2. Ode to Something

Adrian Martin
Today, Jean-Luc Godard likes to proclaim that “memory has rights and that it is a duty not to forget these rights.” How does he show this viewpoint on screen? Those in power who suppress historical memory (that means Hollywood, TV, government, capitalist corporations) are villains. And those ordinary people who possess no cultural memory—all those extras in Éloge de l’amour who have never heard of Bataille or Hugo or the inventor of some snazzy car—are simply fools, worthy only of being yelled at. But is it their fault? Godard sometimes makes his viewers feel the same way, like ashamed ignoramuses: didn’t you know that the train station sign “Drancy-Avenir” is also the title of a recent political film? Can’t you recognise all those Parisian sites where the key moments of the French Resistance played themselves out? Didn’t you appreciate the profundity of the citation from Bresson?

Let us return a harsh judgement back upon JLG: “The labyrinth of echoes, the anxiety of influence, the maze of connections without substance, the schizo-circuit diagrams, become unbearable” (Raymond Durgnat). Godard’s films are frustrating to study closely, because they rarely coalesce. As someone who has long been partial to the aura of Godardian cinema, I become fascinated with bits and pieces of Éloge. For instance, the strange scenes of conversation, more dislocated than ever, with lines of dialogue reconstituted on the soundtrack so that they overlap and cancel each other out. Or the sense that (in Peter Wollen’s words), since 1990, Godard has been “reworking his own origins as a classic reference text”: hence the return to Paris and black-and-white, the echoes of Bande à part and Pierrot le fou, the touchingly aged actors from his old films. Or suddenly beautiful, touching images, like Berthe whispering something into Edgar’s ear, something we will never know. Or, finally, that peculiarly Godardian form of fiction: some events that have already happened (but we can never exactly fathom what), combined with the film-to-be-made which cannot quite start, creating auditions, digressions and researches that lead only to business partnerships and personal relationships dribbling away, producing nothing, not movies or money or children…But all this is still not enough to redeem Éloge de l’amour.

My friend Fergus Daly sees and feels something in Éloge that I cannot—or only fleetingly, fitfully. I cannot grasp the film or its logic, and I suspect that it is, ultimately, incoherent. Godard’s artistic and philosophic thoughts proceed by a zany ‘free association’, leaping from one word-play to the next. Do these thoughts ever develop, grow, lead to a satisfying synthesis or resolution? For example, we hear often in this film about childhood and old age being real, genuine life-states, while adulthood is a void. It is a void because adults need social identities (banker, wife, thief), and identities lead to stories, and stories are, for Godard, ‘Hollywood’, thus they are bad. Then we leap up to the level of nations, and history: North Americans are void as people, because they have no real ‘name’, no origin, and they stalk the globe pillaging the stories of others…

And yet we will hear it said, with emotion, that the doleful Edgar is “the only person trying to become an adult.” Is this a joke, or a tribute? And hasn’t Godard spent several decades celebrating everything that is ‘unformed’ and ‘in between’ and uncertain—just like Edgar? As always, Godard vacillates cagily between a lyrical fullness of meaning and an adolescent desire to sabotage all meaning: hence, this ‘ode to love’, in the film’s obsessive inter-titles, often becomes just an ‘ode to something’, or maybe to nothing.

Denying himself most of the pleasures and possibilities of narrative, Godard depends purely on his formal structures to provide movement, mood and pathos to this crazy-quilt of quotes and notes. It all comes too easily to him: the perfectly placed repetition of a few bars of music by David Darling and Ketil Bjornstad; the welling up of an oceanic visual superimposition, combined with a halting, nervous camera-zoom or freeze-frame; the large-scale interplay of the film’s 2 halves, which is almost like Kieslowski; even that old poetic stand-by, the central character on a ‘journey’ (via foot, car, train), across mutually alienated spaces (city and country) and back through the shards of lost time, but mainly on the road to nowhere…

When asked what he looked for in the actors here, Godard replied: “Something, perhaps not much, that was real”. Fergus intuits the grace in these morsels of physical reality. I am frustrated, yet again, by the absence of genuine personality in Godard’s characters, and by his inability to invest their exchanges with anything resembling plausible, everyday emotion. I realise they are not meant to be ‘realistic’ characters, just supports in an ongoing essay/collage. But Godard’s 2-dimensional sketches either serve as an ‘open sesame’ for the viewer—prompting him or her to project all manner of emotions and meanings into the empty intervals on screen—or else they block any kind of engagement. Stéphane Goudet in Positif (no. 484, June 2001) wondered whether “the flagrant gap between the film and its title (‘love’?)” reflects, in the last analysis, “a fear of feeling and an anguish when confronted with the body.” There are still too many vestiges of the old Godardian dance, poetry and musicality in Éloge de l’amour for me to completely agree with that verdict. But I am sorely tempted.

Robert Humphreys is a cinematographer whose credits include David Caesar’s Mullet, a major award winner at the recent Shanghai Film Festival, and Tony Ayres’ Walking on Water which premiered as part of the 2002 Adelaide Festival and will be released by Dendy Films on September 23.

When did your interest in cinematography start? Was it film in general or photography in particular?

You often see quotes from people who work in film who made Super 8 films when they were 10 years old and were passionate filmmakers from the cradle…Well I can’t in all honesty say that’s me…my interest in film came from being a viewer, but it wasn’t until I went to the NSW Institute of Technology in the early 80s that I can say I thought ‘this is the life for me.’ My career path went parallel between stills photographer and cinematographer. I took lot of photos for rock bands, album covers, posters, and some theatrical stills and a little bit of fashion. And at the same time I was filming pop clips and eventually cinematography was much more of a challenge than stills photography.

I actually wanted to be a journalist and it wasn’t until I went to uni and saw the cruel hard world of journalism I realised I didn’t like it…but in the Communications degree there was a filmmaking course and that pretty much took over as the great fascination. I basically spent 3 years watching films.

We watched everything…Godard, Antonioni, Pasolini, Visconti, film noir, and my special favourite, Bertolucci…I think The Conformist is one of the truly great pieces of cinematography and for me that film is a text book.

Yes. The very first Australian film I saw I had to sneak out of school to see. It was The Devil’s Playground, which I still remember in incredible detail, then Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave.

If you were a photographer you would be able to have a consistent if developing style, but cinematographers work across forms, for very different audiences and directors. How does that affect the evolution of a style?

I think that the cinematographer is not so much an artist but more a craftperson whose job it is to visualise a director’s dream, to visualise words from a page…being an architect is an analogy. I also believe it’s a team of collaborators who make a film, so it’s directors and producers, or writer-directors who have a dream of a film.

I pride myself on not having a recognisable style; every film I do is dictated by the script, and I try to visualise a film. Flower Girl was a breakthrough for me, and also for the director Kate Shortland. It was one of those films that was a melding of styles. Where it came from is interesting. One of the all-time classics for me is Godard’s Breathless. It is still for me the most influential piece of cinema that I can think of, in that it was all hand-held, jump cut, it broke all the rules of editing, and it was pretty much shot with natural light, and it was filmed by Raoul Coutard. In Australia we like to think of cameramen like Chris Doyle as being breakthrough operators who use available light and are freeing the form,. but to me all of those films are Breathless shot in colour.

A lot of my style is based on not being intrusive: I don’t like to look at a picture and be able to see the technology behind it. I don’t like excessive backlight which is what you get in film noir, or camera moves which are designed to take you out of the story. If I have a choice my style is naturalistic. So if you’re in an interior in a house, say, it will be lit from the window, and in Flower Girl there’s only about 2 lights and we researched the locations very carefully to give us that effect.

Colour is everything in this film, and I strove for a really saturated image. If I have to admit to a house style it would be that use of colour! So on Mullet and Walking on Water there is a strong colour palette…it’s controlled by the designers, but what I do is saturate it so it becomes a strong part of the story.

How does that different response to each script connect to your choices of technology?

I’ll receive a script from a director. The cinematographer and the designer tend to be on the project from the very beginning, from first draft or very early. I’ll read it. We’ll talk about the specifics and have broad discussions about films [the director, the designer] like or don’t like, photos and paintings as well, almost anything they think is relevant to their script.

David Caesar talked about Mullet being a Western. It had a classic Western structure…the lone gunslinger/outlaw coming back to the hometown, and David always wanted it to be a big wide-screen experience. There’s little camera movement, the composition is classical, and to that end he made a tape of influences…films like Hud, which has a detached, wide-screen, observational style of filming. For interiors he looked at Drugstore Cowboy. He didn’t want Mullet to look exactly like those films but their influences added something to the discussions.

Then with Walking on Water, [director] Tony Ayres and I looked at a lot of things. We couldn’t settle on anything until it came to 2 references. The first was a film called Under the Skin, photographed by Barry Ackroyd (he works with Ken Loach a lot) and his strengths are to create very naturalistic looking films where the camera never draws attention to itself…everything is quite elegant. But Under the Skin is quite different. It uses long lenses, the camera is quite jerky and uses only natural light…We settled on that as the closest template and mixed it with the work of photographer, Nan Goldin, an American. Her work is incredibly honest, naturalistic, raw and powerful, documenting the death of her friends in the 80s from AIDS.

For Walking on Water we used an Ariflex and for Mullet we used a BL Evolution, one on the shoulder and the other never moved. Some cinematographers are highly technical and others like myself are more intuitive in their relation to the choice of camera. With Walking on Water we used long lenses, and the reason for that was that you can isolate actors in their environment, and so you tend to draw the audience’s attention to their performance rather than the environment. It’s also a good budgetary thing because it doesn’t need huge sets. Mullet was shot on Super 35mm which is standard 35mm blown up to anamorphic format, 2.35 to 1 ratio.

You also shoot for TV. You’re in the middle of Fat Cow Motel which is described as a multiplatform production.

It’s a TV series shot in Queensland, paid for by Austar, and going on air on Austar and Foxtel. It’s a 13 part series where each of the half hour episodes poses a problem which is solved at the beginning of the following episode…a lateral thinking problem, and is often tied up with a mystery in the town.

Yes, I could happily describe it as a cross between Twin Peaks and Northern Exposure. The cinematography avoids the classical Australian soap opera look, and as for the multiplatform side of it, each of the clues that are posed is elaborated on different platforms such as internet, text messages, and viewers register and receive the clues.

Is this the future…technologies altering the narrative, creating an open text?

It’s open in the sense that they’re trying to give people more value…the story on screen is 23 minutes each week, but if you go online there’s hours more.

A story is a story…classical cinema equals classical story. There are always people who will go to the movies to see those stories…even if the home screens get bigger. I still think the movies will be attractive as long as people are communal animals and enjoy that experience.

Molokai: The Story of Father Damian

Jane Mills
A worthy biopic of a real-life Belgian priest (David Wenham) who defied his superiors and risked his life caring for lepers in a neglected colony in Hawaii in the 1870s. A beautiful location and an amazing array of acting talent including Peter O’Toole, Kris Kristofferson, Derek Jacobi, Sam Neill and Leo McKern fail to save this movie from tedium. It becomes a painfully slow race between Wenham and the prosthetics department as bits of his body swell, distort and flake off. The prosthetics win but nowhere soon enough.

Director Paul Cox, writer John Briley. Distributor Sharmill Films. Screening nationally.

A Fun Night Out with Severed Heads

Keith Gallasch
What is striking about Severed Heads’ videos of the 1980s is their visual and aural integrity. That and being well ahead of their time. The manic, tautly rhythmic recurrence of images (within and across the works) and the richly overlaid minimal sonic and musical structures fuse into a singular go-with-it or lose-your-grip ride for the viewer. And it still feels new. This is no grab bag of the makers’ favourite bits and pieces (too often encountered these days). There’s lots of fun (tempered by leering Mexican Day of the Dead skulls), occasional political jabs (CIA, Disney), pop culture plunderings (Max Headroom), lunatic performance art and Tom Ellard and Stephen Jones in concert (some seminal VJing via a homemade video synthesizer). The 1988 Big Car Retread grabbed me like no other. A classic. The projections are big and DVD-crisp. Ellard keeps an ear on the mix by the side of the screen. Ian Andrews’ program essay on the group is a must-read that tells you just who did it and how. Thanks to dLux media arts for screening a significant piece of cultural history where avant-garde and popular impulses successfully met for a while.

d>ART02, Sydney Film Festival, Dendy Opera Quays, June 17 & 19. Other d>ART02 events will be reviewed in RealTime 51.

Minority Report

Keith Gallasch
Minority Report is action picture (Tom Cruise leaping impossibly from car to perfectly rounded car as they speed vertical roads; Tom welded in to a new car on a production line), Twilight Zone spooky what-iffery (seer cops float in tanks of amniotic fluid forecasting murders yet to happen; other cops, like orchestra conductors, wave at screens to conjure murder sites), Blade Runner urban nightmare (including a gruesome eye operation to short circuit iris identification), arthouse (Janusz Kaminski’s enveloping blue-grey cinematography, Max von Sydow’s father figure and Colin Farrell’s edgy Christian DA), murder mystery and political thriller (who controls the data?). Texture this with visual gags, deft sci-fi techno touches in the everyday that yoke the present to a not too distant future, add a great overlay of relishable paranoia and you’ve got a terrific cinema experience—if you like this kind of many-headed beast and you can put aside the weakness of the whodunnit (just another case of American Oedipal irresolution). Unusually, Spielberg keeps his narrative taut and to the point and does some justice, better than most, to the strange vision of Philip K Dick on whose short story of the same name the film is based. KG

Director Steven Spielberg, writers Scott Frank, Jon Cohen. Distributor Twentieth Century Fox. Screening nationally.

Italian for Beginners

David Varga
Reading the Dogme 95 manifesto (http://cinetext.philo.at/reports/dogme_ct.html) evokes a retro-avant-garde nostalgia for that variant of cinematic ‘truth’ that suspectly trades itself above the pleasures of cinematic artifice. Lone Scherfig’s Italian for Beginners, the fifth film in the series, applies the stripped-bare technique of Dogme to triumph the preternatural over the natural, in a subtle and satisfying mix of melancholic pleasure, character based absurdism, ordinariness and desire.

2002 Dendy Awards for Australian Short Films

The 2002 Yoram Gross Animation Award went to Dad’s Clock (director, writer Dik Jarman; producer Sarah Drofenik). Immaculately crafted figures (a man carved from wood, a bird made of precision metal parts) and set (a ribbed boat that unfolds into being) comprise a fantasy world that is juxtaposed metaphorically with the spare, naturalistic telling, by his son, of a father’s journey to death by cancer. The other animations were also excellent. Lee Whitmore’s superbly drawn Ada was my winner, a gentle evocation of old age observed by children as the sunlight through a window gradually colours a room, its inhabitants and our understanding of age. Anthony Lucas’ Holding Your Breath, although narratively awkward, creates an intense, dark, silhouetted industrial world from which a girl ventures out to an equally daunting stretch of nature and a relationship. KG

The tape was in the recorder, and it was a long tape. I knew Nigel Helyer would have a lot to say, because even before winning the Helene Lempriere National Sculpture Award earlier this year, he had been busy. And since taking out that prize he’d been overseas, interstate, here and there, on the move, working on projects, collaborations, schemes and dreams. So I came equipped with my trusty mini tape recorder.

Which didn’t work! Press Record or Play and all you got was a blast of nasty static. White noise is fine in its place, but this wasn’t it. No worry: surely Nigel himself, a technician/engineer/acoustician (these sound artists are such polyglots) could fix the recalcitrant thing. He jiggled, he coaxed, he gave it a whack, he held it to his ear, he looked into its soul—but the rascally machine just wouldn’t cooperate. So there we were, on the verge of discussing the fantastic worlds of sound sculpture, Virtual Audio Reality, Networked Environmental Audio Systems, Biotechnology, Intellectual Property, magnetic fields, cockroach hearing and miniaturisation—and the technology let us down.

Funnily enough, one of Nigel’s themes, once we get started, is the robustness of contemporary audio technology. So, dispensing with my dysfunctional recorder, we begin, using the even older-school technology of pen and paper.

First, what of his prize, the National Sculpture Award, which came with a sum of—dare we be so vulgar as to mention the figure?—$105,000? How did it feel to win? And (questions downloaded from E! Entertainment website) has the money changed him? Is he a big-shot sound artist now? Will we see him in the international jet-set, rubbing shoulders with Brian Eno and Moby?

Nigel was “pleased and surprised” to win with his environmental sound sculpture Meta-Diva, which is now installed in the grounds of Werribee Park, Victoria. Meta-Diva comprises 30 tall aluminium stems equipped with digital audio chips and timers. Standing in a pond, the work requires zero maintenance for at least 10 years. One pleasing aspect was the technology used to run Meta-Diva, so that the win in part “recognises that we should be using solar power more.” He adds that “for the first time we can use digital audio in solid state technology with memory. I’ve become very interested with the idea of being robust. Usually now I’m only let down by third parties [like the tape recorder]. Ten years ago you had to depend on technology with moving parts—tape or CD machines. Now you can expect these technologies to run, they’re much more robust.”

Meta-Diva is a successful, yet relatively simple, example of what Nigel calls a Solar Powered Environmental Networked Audio System. Its playback of sampled nature recordings provides an “almost infinite mix” which listeners can’t pick from nature. This technological rendering of natural sounds fits the 2 environments in which Meta-Diva has been installed: one an artificial lake in Korea, the other the English country garden landscape of Werribee Park.

As for the prize money, it will be invested in new versions of environmental audio work, networks that interact with both people and environment on the model of “emergent behaviour.” Some of this work draws on the Virtual Audio Reality System developed during Nigel’s 2 and a half years at Lake Technology, where he was employed as Senior Designer. Having left his academic position, does he now miss the financial security associated with a post in the Ivory Tower? Existing outside the academy is, he admits, “financially risky—but I’d die faster if I stayed there.” As compensation, he has an Australia Council Fellowship for 2 years, and a host of Visiting Fellow positions at various academic institutions in Australia and the US. One of these, at the University of NSW, will enable further development of Virtual Audio, based partly on Satellite Positioning technology.

So what are the artworks that result from this confluence of research and technology? One is an installation called Seed, which was first exhibited in Phoenix earlier this year, and is currently on show at the Biennale of Electronic Arts (BEAP) in Perth. Seed is a “sonic minefield”, a series of 16 facsimiles of Russian landmines as used in Afghanistan. Each one sits in the centre of an Islamic prayer mat which plays recordings of the 99 names of Allah as well as Arabic music. This work melds the Old Testament rhetoric of sowing seeds—like mines, they “lie in wait for the future”—with the “contemporary disasters of military and ideological conflict.” The visitor enters a “place of ambiguity” within the context of current military and political events.

From October, Nigel Helyer will be Visiting Fellow in the Department of Anatomy at the University of Western Australia. In a lab called Symbiotica—designed to facilitate cooperation between artists and scientists—he’ll be working on a project involving “compound hearing.” This results from research into the animal sensorium, especially that of insects. Spiders, for example, have 8 legs with tiny hairs as sound sensors: a phenomenon known as distributed hearing. But where is all this likely to lead?

“We hear in stereo, with our two ears,” he says. “But other life-forms, especially insects, hear with multiple organs, like legs covered with tiny antennas. In the lab we should be able to plug in things like a cockroach antenna into a listening or sound generating device. I’ll be showing this kind of project in Stanford [where he will be visiting Fellow early next year]. Stanford University is very big on biotechnology. Apparently, you can almost use cockroach antennas as microphones. They’re so well designed that cockroaches can hear us humans. Most insects have poor hearing, but cockroaches have a wide range of hearing.”

Being able to listen like a cockroach presents some interesting possibilities. One other aspect of biotechnology research—the small scale used in the study of, for example, insect antennae—corresponds to a direction of Nigel’s recent art: working in miniature. A project for the School of Sound in London next April involves miniature technology. Called One or Two Things I Know, it uses induction coils in a work of 10 tiny visual pieces drawn from Jean-Luc Godard films. The pieces are so small that you need to look at them with a magnifying glass; in the process, your physical presence affects the magnetic field, which triggers the audio content of the work.

This piece uses an ingenious interface, free of buttons, keyboards and screens. It’s designed, Nigel says, “so you engage the audio without realising it. It’s like a re-enchantment device, where the audio becomes magic. It gives an extra dimension that’s not automatically apparent. I also appreciate the tiny scale. I don’t want to be trapped working in large scale all the time; I like the intimate, hand held scale.”

And why Godard films? This relates to a childhood experience, when as a 13-year old Nigel stumbled across a Godard movie in London’s Victoria Station. It was a cartoon cinema that for some reason was screening Godard! It left a lasting impression, so that when later teaching sculpture to art school students he showed them Godard films to illustrate metaphor. Sadly, his students in the 1990s objected to the films: “They were deeply offended and told me I was sick.” Time to get out of the academy, then.

Nigel is convinced of the potential ensuing from the union of science and art. The omen was there in the town of his birth, which had earlier hosted both Halley (the famous astronomer) and William Blake, the famous mystical poet. Nigel has “grown into the idea that there’s no difference between art and science. Both are to do with creativity and inventiveness. Working with Lake, I found business people very open to creative ideas. They can be generous in the way they do things.”

This fusion of art, science and technology will be advanced in all these projects, as well as the various residencies and fellowships at universities and other institutions. There are other ventures, such as Nigel’s involvement with Polar Circuit, a series of workshops for media artists and theorists initiated by the University of Lapland. And the task of creating an international network of sound artists and theorists. Not to mention the difficult task of re-assembling the complicated installation work Silent Forest for its inclusion in the new Federation Square wing of the National Gallery of Victoria. And did I mention some of his online collaborations, such as Music for Mutants —keyboard standards re-designed (and re-copyrighted) for aliens with extra fingers?

There are other projects, collaborations and ventures, but they can wait for another day. For now, we separate, I with a broken recorder and writer’s cramp, Nigel with a head full of projects and schemes.

Performance Space is elegantly reconfigured into a diagonal wedge, angled screens to the left, wall to floor screen on the right; breaking the hard lines are diaphanous spirals, cylinders, cubes, bending and absorbing projections to their own image. The eye is drawn to the proscenium arch where there is a breathtaking orchestra of equipment—tiered rows of computer screen lit bodies, concentratedly clicking away, live mixing the sound, video images and realtime feeds into the sensory immersion that is Video Combustion—Alpha release. It is hard not to worship at this altar of technology.

An archetypal cybermistress greets us. Slicked-blonde and cold-scary—her whitened naked body projected upon and filmed live, overlaying her prerecorded face—she has been “digitally re-membered.” This apparition in the flesh and machine (Jaqilen Pascoe) is our guide, advising us to question the “nutritional value of our information diet”, a constant reminder of the “meeting between meat and machine.”

The tangible commodity is atmosphere. With 11 video projectors, every surface is textured. Images surround us at 3 million pixels per second, sound pulses the air in our lungs. Transitions are viscous, sections merging and evolving like an organism growing itself. We are kept abreast of the action by screens showing us the score—who’s on first, who did what, what’s over there. Another mode of watching is required, a kind of holistic ambient viewing. However the configuration and size of the space creates a static, seated environment, requiring the audience to concentrate for 2 hours on streams of video consciousness. With so many points of focus it is frustrating to be stuck with a limited viewing perspective. The second part of the evening opens the space up to wandering, but by then the performance focus has dissipated. A larger space would allow an audience to roam this world, to stumble upon the more performative moments.

I try to tease out specificities about sound and image, but they seem fused, like melted electrical cables. Video Combustion is a surge—energy that is absorbed rather than experienced as vision, as sound. Integrating performance into this fusion is the ultimate challenge. Pascoe strikes a balance between absorption and visibility, her spokenword-scapes (created with Wade Marynowksy) and live interaction are cool and slick, her prowling presence arresting, if a little familiar. Working beside and against projections, Momo Miyaguchi achieves the beginnings of a dialogue between image and live body. While the dance pieces of Talia Jacob, Annie Robin and Helen Bergan are thematically focused by video images of classical ballet and live overlays, the dance style is naive and conceptually unchallenging. I offer a thesis: the human body is not that interesting to project upon—the surface area too small, and the body too nullified by mandatory white lycra. The work is more engaging when the live body works actively with projection or is chewed up and reintegrated into image, as in the opening sequence of Pascoe’s face multiplied and affected by her own reprocessed presence. This is where the tensions and fusions of interdisciplinary work become electrifying.

The scale of the collaboration, the mastery and marshalling of technology and the degree of hybridity in Video Combustion are impressive. At the conclusion of the evening Justin Maynard (co-director along with Cindi Drennan) thanks all those who have helped “propagate chaos.” Interestingly, I have seen none—the event is calm, genteel even, bordering on reverent. Perhaps it was necessary to tame the multi-cabled beast for Alpha Release and in its next incarnation to loose the bonds. This beast feeds on hybridity and can only grow stronger through closer connections and knowledge of each artform. Therefore I send out the call to arms—video artists, see more performance—performance artists, experience more new media. Blast through Sydney’s discrete scenes and see everything!

Video Combustion—Alpha Release, produced by tesseract research laboratories and the vidi-yo network, Performance Space, June 22. www.videocombustion.org

Filmmakers routinely claim that movies are performative, that they actively generate and realise meanings and affects in space and time as the images flicker. Filmic projection is therefore eminently suited to accommodating live performance. Does the projection of images alongside a living performer however simply multiply the performers in the space, unnecessarily replicating material, rather than producing a new aesthetic? The Fusion program of multimedia performance seemed to demonstrate that video projection is most effective in live performance as a mobile form of painterly framing and overlay.

The collaboration between video-composer Dylan Volkhardt and dancer Tony Yap for example established that while both are extremely talented artists, little new was created by bringing them together. Yap danced, the projection showed evocative images of stars or a deserted urban construction, but what occurred between them was unclear. Ubique, on the other hand, resembled what Kraftwerk produced over 20 years ago (rotating wire-grid bodies, painted in with simple skins), the unremitting banality and lack of variation in the images actually detracting from a relatively interesting noise-sheet score.

Audiovisual artist Klaus Obermaier and dancer Chris Haring by contrast established a direct relationship between body and image by using the living body itself as the projection screen. Starting with a series of visual gags, D.A.V.E. explored the possibilities of the changeable, plastic body existing within an expanded, virtual realm. Hands were held to the side of the head to allow the illusion of massively distended, praying-mantis-like eyes, or thrust below the pelvis to make it appear the head was protruding from between the legs. The piece often relied on ‘gee-whiz’ black-theatrics and near-flawless illusionism. It was so profligately inventive that it was if anything too full of surprising, spectacular changes. Haring turned around to return wearing an elderly man’s projected skin, then that of an amused young woman; his anus talked (oral lips projected onto different labia); he ripped or pulled at his body, stretching it like India rubber, recalling Robbie Williams’ video Rock DJ.

This videophonic toying was however grounded in Haring’s equally impressive live physicality. In normal side-light he slipped about the floor in a delicately balanced yet vaguely brutal play of weight and gravity which rocketed about his pliable form, dropping into surprising shifts, rolls and articulations—all to the crinkly, swiping-sounds of Obermaier’s musique concrete or abstract breakbeat. Haring was so masterful at the near dislocation of limbs that he barely needed projection to establish a sense of radical fungibility.

Although D.A.V.E.was breathtaking in performance, it is Cazerine Barry’s House which lingers in my memory. House had a stronger sense of clockwork precision, of sharp, funky beats (mostly cheesy 1960s studio music) which set an exact rhythm for the morphs of space which Barry’s character negotiated, from the on-the-beat rotations of a projected house-plan, to lurid ‘primitivist’ fantasies of a rubber-tree-filled garden bearing vaguely sexual overtones. Barry’s work depicted a day-glo suburbia through an at once affectionate yet slightly disturbing reappropriation of 1960s kitsch—Howard Arkley in videochoreography. The video served as an ever changing projected frame or ‘front-drop,’ each tableau pierced by well-defined windows in which Barry posed, or through which she elegantly sashayed.

Though ostensively focussed on the theme of imagining one’s dream home and finding one’s place within it and the community which surrounds it, House also touched on the commodification of day-to-day experience, and the collapse of the separation between private and public space. The desires of Barry’s character were so saturated by the chic, manufactured designs she played with—or which occasionally squashed her into shape—that even her dreams of a lush, jungle garden were immured in representations from 1960s fashion. Any suggestion that “home” is a space where one shuts society out therefore seemed spurious.

In a particularly eloquent scene, Barry stood gesturing like a Monopoly traffic-cop, directing contemporary finance, pointing to lines in the projection which marked the passage of capital from BANK to ARMOURED CAR to PUBLIC. She reached into the screen-space to pull a box of relations to her chest, before shunting money somewhere else—a fabulous comment not only on commerce, but also the maddening complexities of home loans.

In both D.A.V.E. and House, the screen space was left resolutely flat and 2-dimensional, its 3-dimensional evocativeness generated primarily by the physical body it came into contact with, via gestural dialogue in House, or by the body serving as a lumpy screen in D.A.V.E. Ironically, this flattening of the filmic space successfully created a compelling sense of spatial depth in combination with live performance.

St Kilda Film Festival: Fusion: Performances in new media, presented by Experimenta. Works from the program reviewed here: Time Lapsed, direction/writing/producer/video Dylan Volkhardt, choreography/performance Tony Yap, music/sound Nick Kraft, James Cecil, Mik La Vage, Pip Branson; House, concept/performance/video Cazerine Barry, lighting Jen Hector, dramaturgical assistance Nancy Black, concept-development-associate-direction Rachel Spiers, production support Tom Howie; Ubique, sound/video Massimo Magrini (Italy); D.A.V.E. (Digital Amplified Video Engine), choreography/performance Chris Haring, video/music/initial-concept Klaus Obermaier. The Palace, St Kilda, Melbourne, May 29 – 31

halflives [a mystory]

The fixity of the photo album and the diary or chronicle, both print-based memory machines, have obscured just how fragile and momentary our family histories really are. When you start to explore a family’s history you find that there are moments of clarity brought about by recollection which are always temporary and are constantly displaced by new pieces of data. My grandfather was a somewhat vague but fairly fixed character in my mind until about 6 years ago when a woman rang my father and announced that she was his half sister. This new information profoundly reshaped my understanding of who he was. And then the more I looked into the past, the less certain it seemed. The name Gye, which I’d always believed was French, turned out to be Chinese—an anglicised version of Ah Gye. I started to see family as a kind of memory machine whose operations were similar to the computer—moments of coalescence alternating with dissolution as new data reshapes our understanding of our families. This opened up possibilities for thinking about how we might preserve our family history in electronic media in a way that more closely reflects its dynamic nature. Halflives attempts to reflect on the construction of our identities through family remembrance in an online environment. Part genealogy and part theoretical speculation, the site draws on Derrida’s theory of hauntology, Barthes’ reflections on photography and a range of family documents and photographs in order to explore new ways of understanding the past.

The last few years have seen a depletion of university resources resulting in fewer staff, an increase in student numbers, fewer places to put them while they’re on campus and no particular place for them to go after they’ve graduated, and all this within what seems like a constant review process necessitating radical restructuring of whole departments, and a rethinking of their function within and relationship to the communities they seek to be part of. Speaking to representatives of institutions teaching full-time dance courses, I detected a very determined positive stance about these changes with notes of distress filtering through.

Practice: new frameworks

Don Asker, Senior Lecturer and Post Graduate Coordinator at the Victorian College of the Arts is aware of the increasing rate of revision and evolution of courses generally. “A decade ago, there was a sense that a course was what it was, you could immerse yourself in it, and the field itself was quite tangible. But that was rather fanciful, and we are actually in a world that is dynamic and evolving at such a fast rate that there’s no real justification for perpetuating some programs…some institutes are better able to find a foundational core which enables the flexibility for dealing with rapid change and emerging needs. If you’re not in such a place, then you’re constantly involved in setting up new infrastructures and new resources.”

Kathy Driscoll, Senior Lecturer in Dance, University of Western Sydney, discussed the hilariously named “harmonisation process”, a university-wide restructure in which Dance, Acting and Theatre-making have been coerced into a new Bachelor of Performance, Theory and Practice. This was in addition to a simultaneous and thorough departmental review where people were invited to make submissions and students were surveyed extensively. She was concerned about the fragility of the wider tertiary system to support arts practice: “We’re facing this cut in dance, but the whole school—music, visual arts, all areas of contemporary arts at this university—is looking at cuts in staff, about a 30% reduction. That’s so significant.”

Ronne Arnold, Course Coordinator, National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association, comments: “Right now, I’m looking at an assessment report which suggests that a field trip is not an integral part of the course. But really, the field trip is the crucial element. Students get acquainted with the dances here first, and once they have an idea and know the elders who come to teach them, it’s easier for them to go into the community, because they have developed a relationship. Otherwise they’d never go.”

Development of specific cultural identity aside, the push is definitely global, and some institutions have been more successful in attracting a diverse range of students, from those interested in conservative approaches to dance and performance to those who desire more conceptually based collaboratively conceived, multidisciplinary work. Queensland University of Technology epitomises these strategies in its new Faculty of Creative Industries, and exhibits all the buzz words on its website: “QUT’s Creative Industries initiative is driven by changes in the international economic and social environment…The vision is to take the best of what we already offer in the performing and visual arts, computer and communication design, and media and journalism, and co-locate them in an interdisciplinary cluster dedicated to the creative aspects of the new economy…emphasising partnerships, networking, project-based innovation, and flexible working patterns.”

Cheryl Stock, Head of Dance, Queensland University of Technology, discusses the new configuration. “We have 6 different degrees, with 5 core units across all the degrees: Introduction to Creative Industries, Transforming Cultures, Creativity, Writing for Creative Industries and Introduction to Digital Multimedia, and no matter what discipline you’re in, you have to take 4 out of 5 of these components. We have 2 performance degrees (Bachelor of Fine Arts and the Associate Degree); the professional degree (Bachelor of Creative Industries, Dance) where students major in dance but take pathways through various subjects; and a double degree in Education Then there’s the new one, the Bachelor of Creative Industries (Interdisciplinary Degree) where people don’t belong to any particular discipline.

“Dance is fairly dominated by the digital environment. It’s definitely a valued component, but we have to keep reminding people not to forget about live work as well as mediated work. And that creates a problem for dance. With live dance forms, we have students working in the studio, so of course we still have huge contact hours.”

Elizabeth Dempster, School of Human Movement, Recreation and Performance, Victoria University, comments: “There’s a tension between the concern about experiential learning and its value, and the rather economic rationalist view that says wouldn’t it be good if everything was on-line, and funds could be diverted to other areas, away from studios and teachers. In fact some institutions would be under more pressure than we are because they’re even more practice-based. We haven’t chopped the experientially-based work but contact hours are less, due to funding restrictions.”

The VCA (University of Melbourne) and the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (Edith Cowan University) are 2 such practice-based institutions. VCA’s website states that the philosophical underpinnings still lie in studio practice, with classes in ballet and contemporary dance closely interrelated with composition and performance, and increased time in performance workshops. Performance and practice are also central to the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) philosophy, with daily technique classes, choreographic development and regular performance opportunities in a variety of venues. So is nurturing of strong links with professional organisations, companies and other artists, both locally and internationally. Both the Advanced Diploma stream and the BA program have a common year in first year and a core of ballet, contemporary, performance and choreography. While the Advanced Diploma is directed more towards mainstream dance with add-ons like pas de deux, pointe, repertoire, variations, the BA is more diverse and less defining, having been redesigned so that students can pursue individual goals as dance artists, choreographers, teachers or researchers. In the Honours course, students can choose either a research/performance project or audition for the Link Performance Dance Company. The MA in Creative Arts offers students the opportunity to refocus education in one particular art form and expose it to others.

Courses and communities

The social functioning within tertiary dance institutions and the relationship to the communities they are part of can sometimes be a complex weave of mainstream arts practices and non-dominant social values. VU, NAISDA and The Wesley Institute of Ministry & the Arts (WIMA) are 3 such institutions whose inceptions 20–30 years ago deviated considerably from what mainstream dance practice might have dictated. Still most important at NAISDA is the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture. “The component that the students come here for is the Indigenous—that’s primary, but we have a twofold program. Some of our students have never had the benefit of mainstream training so our institution fills that gap; a lot of students who come here also have no connection to their traditional culture, and they want to acquire that knowledge.” Similarly, WIMA offers courses which integrate dance training within a Christian framework. Evelyn Defina (Head of Dance, Wesley Insititute of Ministry & the Arts) comments: “Because of the nature of the college, there’s no competitiveness, no bitchiness. It’s more an atmosphere of encouragement and support, helping students to reach their potential. We offer a lot of one-to-one counselling, which we can do because we are small. That’s part of our brief.”

Elizabeth Dempster describes how the course at the Victorian University was initiated in response to a field of practice which didn’t have much institutional representation, being conceived of as “a platform for dance practices that were situated in cross-disciplinary or visual arts contexts and didn’t come out of conservative dance institutions. It was also giving ‘knowledge about’ and ‘experience of’, rather than expecting people to pop out of the course and be fully fledged artists. Now, it’s hard to decide what that community might be, it’s changed so radically over the last five years.”

Nanette Hassall says of WAAPA’s current environment: “We operate within a number of different communities. The most basic is the small group of independent artists who work in Perth. I spend two-thirds of my sessional budget, which is something like $40,000, on supporting that community. Artists are invited to make work with the students…When I came here, I found Perth very factionalised, and I think what we’ve done has helped to bring them more together, with more recognition of each other’s skills. We’re a kind of meeting place.”

Institutions also addressed questions about their skills base differently, but often discussed a similar convergent core of body-based work functioning alongside a diverse eclectic mix of other work which depended almost entirely on visiting and local artists. VU’s project-based work—8 hours a week—is determined by the visiting artists teaching it. Dempster says, “Strictly speaking it may not be a choreographic or dance approach. It may be a writing or visual arts project. The community of artists we draw on would rarely be from mainstream companies; they’re more the independent artists. And the sessional teachers are artists who have evolved and established their own practices in some way or other. These people are very diverse.

“The course is broad-based, and strong conceptually. Students get really excited by it, but they don’t get 2 technique classes a day. They have to find resources outside to build up the skills base if they want them…I still harbour the idea that you need a body practice in which to ground work, but for various reasons, the body-based work is about a third of the program. We do experiential anatomy, ideokinesis and improvisation, and these function as resources for students whose work may not evolve into a movement or dance-based form.”

At QUT there are rigorous classical or contemporary classes 4 days a week “because choreographers and directors still expect highly trained and virtuosic dancers…Mostly the contemporary styles are release-based because that’s what people teach, and are manifested quite differently with each teacher. All students are assessed similarly in alignment—which is fundamental in first year in both ballet and contemporary. We’re looking at generic attributes of styles, but we like the diversity that casual staff bring.”.

Getting work

Another concern has traditionally been about what students can achieve on leaving tertiary training. David Spurgeon, Faculty of Theatre, Film and Dance, University of New South Wales, has no qualms: “The immediate end is that students are going to be high school teachers of dance. Technique is fine, but we all know there aren’t jobs for dancers. What I’m promoting has a real goal in front of it. Everybody who graduates, who wants to teach and is prepared to travel, has a job. If you don’t want to teach full time, you can do casual teaching 2 days a week, which is better than waitressing, and you can make work.”

Nanette Hassall comments: “There’s no work in Perth, so it’s really important to get them out. But we can’t afford to turn their attention back to the eastern states because there’s no work there either…We encourage students to do overseas exchange programs which include places like Julliard in the US, the University of North Carolina, primarily for students who are very interested in teaching…There’s a lot of international benchmarking, taking the students to perform internationally. This year we’re performing in Dusseldorf at the Global Dance Festival. We’ve been to Korea twice, Malaysia 3 times…We’re also trying to invite at least one guest artist from Asia each year to make a work. Last year Shih Gee Tze came from Taiwan, and he also invited our students to perform with his company.”

Don Asker finds the contemporary VCA culture empowering: “We are getting a broader range of people and we can satisfy a broader range of desires. Within that, we’re making it possible for people to see that performance is changing. There are people working for companies like Chunky Move and Sydney Dance Company, but there are also a number of people seeking work in project environments that sometimes become extremely highly profiled. In the past we tended to have a more hierarchical perception of what was good achievement, but now we’re noticing that vocational pathways are much more complex. People move across them. Goals and aspirations are changing.”

Restless Dance’s in the blood continues this company’s interest in personal biography. The flow of memories weaves around the childhood body and the image of the birthday celebration, an event where the tension between welcome and unwelcome attention is heightened. The celebration of the person is poignantly lost amongst the preparations for the birthday and in group games.

A young man sits quietly on a chair. The other performers interact around him as if he is not there. Later he methodically moves along a row of cupcakes placed across the front of the playing area in a ritual of wishing—lighting the candle on the cake and blowing it out. Behind him daily tortures like the ‘hair brushing ritual’ or the ‘stand in the corner’ injunction are played out. Bodies struggle against each other in pleasure and discomfort. Times of physical achievement emerge—throwing, balancing on one’s hands. The piece moves effortlessly between group sequences, partnering and solos. The performers seem deeply engaged in the pleasure and process of moving.

Memory is constructed as decaying, both in the choice of the old Queens Theatre as venue and in the discoloured, frayed costuming—versions of Sunday best that also pass as retro-chic. The floor of the space is covered with fine sand and the replaying of memory leaves traces on this surface. In the distance, framed by a huge doorway, 4 musicians create swells that circle and resound in the space and then fade. At one stage one of the musicians plays Happy Birthday on water-filled glasses. The sound is slightly off-key yet crystal clear and melancholic.

The past is a strange country, so why and how do we revisit it? There is something in this work about reclaiming the desire to be playful and special. There is something also about pleasure and defiance in the struggle against interference and control by others.

Works in progress from Ausdance’s SA Choreo Lab were presented this year at the Space Theatre as part of the Adelaide Festival Centre’s programming initiative, in-space.

Helen Omand’s Up Front and Naked comprised a sequence of images of states of loss—loss of comfort, loss of perspective, loss of purpose, loss of belief, loss of restraint, loss of self, loss of mind. The unifying element in this associative flow between language, dance, light and video image was the sense that in each event the ‘performer’ was ‘out of place.’ The piece drew attention to the fact that the experience of ‘nakedness’ is perhaps the experience of a mismatch between behavior and context.

Katrina Lazaroff’s Finding the Funk was a solo about dancing. A series of sequences were structured around the contemplation of movement, moving into and out of a tap dance, contemporary, jazz or ‘club’ routine. It was intriguing to wonder what it was Lazeroff was wrestling with, in trying to ‘find the funk.’ Was it a quest for some sort of integration of disparate dance experiences or a more subjective discernment of when her dancing was ‘in the groove’?

Amanda Phillips’ When There’s Only (cinematographer Mark Lapwood) is a delicate and evocative film portrait of intergenerational and intra-generational relationship and dance. It shifts between a contemporary solo by a young woman and a group of older couples ballroom dancing in what appears to be a railway tunnel. The camera moves between couples and we notice nuances of touch and facial expression that suggest a far more subtle dance of desire and rejection as these bodies sweep across the floor. Is this the past travelling to meet the present or moving away from it?

Later we see the elderly men sitting on seats, waiting to be chosen to partner somebody. Their nonchalance and/or discomfort is captured in shifts of limbs and weight. One by one they are lead away until one man is left. He walks through the tunnel, then the young woman appears and they dance. Is he her father or grandfather? Is she his memory of lost love? The older dancers are interviewed on camera. We hear the stories of life partnerships formed or never found on the dance floor. The film poignantly captures the exquisite interplay between love, death, memory and dance and how the past and the present dance towards each other.

Waiting, choreographed and performed by Ingrid Steinborner and Felecia Hick, and filmed by them with Monte Engler, closed the gap between dance and video image through a seamless transference of action from live to video image. The performance built from the video image of a young woman waiting at a train station. This simple game between virtual and live body was so well played it felt like magic. The spatial shifts worked to bring the filmed and live bodies into such a direct relationship that it seemed as if the game was taking place in real time.

Sol Ulbrich’s tender fury began with an intricate sequence of gestures, a conversation between 2 women and a man that becomes barbed. Eventually the 3 break into a fight that travels through space and onto and off screen before transforming into a series of duets. This piece seemed influenced by the possibilities of film—the close-up and the location shot.

Sarah Neville’s Artifacts explored performance as archeology. The jangling of bone on bone accompanied Neville’s journey across the space. Bones unloaded with a thud, she danced. Drawn from Butoh and contemporary dance, her movement appeared deliberately fossilised, subject to a past logic.

Once Bitten, performed by Naida Chinner, devised with and directed by Ingrid Voorendt, was a study on love. It teetered between vaudeville slapstick, physical theatre—tragic comedy. Chinner enters in high heels, arms laden with tomatoes. She stumbles and the tomatoes spill across the floor creating a terrain of ‘bleeding hearts.’ She sings of love, performs a puppet show with the tomatoes and dances the spills of love, the falling down and picking yourself up again, with the occasional high kick. Some hearts get squashed. Chinner’s sweetness and bravado had us rooting for her in this sticky game.

The State Opera South Australia and Leigh Warren and Dancers collaborated to produce Philip Glass’ opera, Akhnaten. The Opera Studio was transformed by Mary Moore’s neoclassical design into a combination of exhibition, library and museum with slides, display cases and reading tables, chairs and a ‘temple.’ The opera begins with the principal singers as visitors to this museum/ library being shown around by the scribe, who is also the tour guide. The chorus enters as tourists dressed in clothes that could be day wear but also ancient costume. The dancers curl their bodies into the space. Their movement is repeatedly arrested. These contracted and splayed bodies become the preserved dead on display.

Various texts from ancient sources, some sung, some spoken, focus the music in each section. In this production each section is presented as a unique display. Warren’s staging is reminiscent of Glass’ music. The groups of performer are interwoven so as to present a unique image for each section.

The singers slide between representing historical figures and students of history or tourists. Their bodies have a held quality. They are careful, respectful tourists and historical characters suspended in time. The dancers create a shadowy play of past creeping around the present that reaches a thrilling climax when they compel the principal singers down to the floor again and again. It is in these moments of interaction that the ordered environment comes alive. Another exciting moment occurs when pages from the oversize books, used to structure the space, are torn out and scattered and the books slammed shut and thrown off their pedestals. This desecration of the pristine order of the space is visceral.

This production draws our attention to the act of preservation. The past is preserved and laid out for us and we, the audience to this past, are held in place, controlled in the present as we view this past. There is something relentless in Glass’ music, a similar obdurateness to that of the display case. I found myself revelling in the High Modernism of the production and longing for excess—the uncontrolled, damage, decay, the living body. It directed me though to muse on the place of the present in the contemplation of the past.

Restless Dance Company, in the blood, direction Ingrid Voorendt, The Queens Theatre, May 8-11; SA Choreo Lab, The Space, Ausdance & Adelaide Festival Centre, May 9-11; State Opera of South Australia & Leigh Warren & Dancers, Akhnaten: An Opera in Three Acts by Philip Glass, director/choreographer Leigh Warren, designer Mary Moore; The Opera Studio, Adelaide, May 16-25; Ausdance [SA], Australian Dance Week 2002, May 11-19

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