Australian
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June 2003

Dead Man Walking

Alongside its successful venture into Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and Parsifal, State Opera of South Australia continues its commitment to contemporary opera and music theatre creations (John Adams’ El Nino, Philip Glass’ Akhenaten) with the forthcoming staging of another American work, Dead Man Walking. Inspired by the film and book it was based on, the opera takes on the issue of capital punishment, a potent one in the USA with an increasing number of states rescinding the death penalty (partly a humane decision, partly a legal one driven by DNA testing revelations of innocence and threats of considerable litigation) despite their President’s commitment to it. The widely produced Dead Man Walking is accessible, emotionally intense, naturalistic opera (music by Jake Heggie and libretto by Terrence McNally) and as was so common in the 19th century, its audience will know the story from its appearance in other media. And this story is a true one. The opera makes a great companion piece to the Handel oratorio Theodora, as staged by Peter Sellars for the Glyndebourne Festival in 1996, which convincingly frames this tale of Roman persecution of Christians as an allegory for the ills of capital punishment, replete with the modern tools of execution (Channel 4/Warner Music Vision/NVC Arts VHS 0630-15481-3). As with the Wagner and the contemporary works in the company’s program, doubtless interstate opera fans will be crossing borders to see Dead Man Walking.

Dead Man Walking, State Opera South Australia, Sung in English with English surtitles, Aug 7, 9, 12, 16, 7.30pm Festival Theatre, Bookings through BASS 131 246

RealTime issue #55 June-July 2003 pg. 38

Seeing something isn’t the same as listening to it. Seeing is about location—the eyes track the moving object and fix it upon the retina. But hearing is about objects in action. Our ears listen to a world in motion and the resulting sounds tell us about substance: crystalline or liquid, cracked or whole, being one or many. So through listening we hear the physical substance of a dynamic world and learn something that vision does not reveal.

The systematic exploration of the phenomenology of listening became prominent with the work of R Murray Schafer and the beginnings of the Acoustic Ecology movement in the 60s. Schafer challenged the dominance of ‘eye culture.’ He claimed that the acoustic environment has pragmatic and aesthetic value and that there is a moral imperative to improve the quality of life through the preservation and enhancement of our acoustic environs.

By the 90s the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology was formed with members across Asia, Europe and North America. Their latest symposium, including talks, presentations, group chats, soundscapes, soundwalks, an audiotheque, exhibition and a concert was held recently in Melbourne. Topics for discussion included linguistics, field recordings, methodology, performance, composition and noise pollution. At first the varying methods and topics among presenters made for an annoying lack of focus. But by the end I wished I’d been able to get to everything (cursed work hours). Nowadays, inclusion, multi-discipline and cross-practice get the prime logo spot on the academic corporate guernsey but Acoustic Ecology (AE) actually practices the exploration implied in working across boundaries.

Hildegarde Westerkamp, a hero of AE, took us on a soundwalk, or guided listening tour, through a nearby park. The walk had a lovely symmetry, beginning with the crunch of leaves underfoot and ending with the rustle of leaves overhead. In between, the acoustic space took on architectural qualities, indicating varying degrees of enclosure as we moved through open lawns, next to walls, alongside a lake.

The soundscapes concert was held at the new BMW Edge Auditorium in Federation Square: Scandinavian floor timber meets crazy-pave Meccano and glass beehive. Composers worked the mixing desk at the front, while the speakers of the sound diffusion system from RMIT’s Spatial Information Architecture Lab were distributed all around. The resulting acoustics were maybe a bit harsh and reflective in the upper mids.

First up was Doug Quinn’s perfect underwater recording of Weddell Seals. Evidently the furry brutes had been building some sort of cruel and gigantic cheese grater 50 feet below the Antarctic ice cap and a fight had broken out. One for the marine mammal noise cognoscenti. Certainly changed my attitude to the clubbing of baby seals. Gabriele Proy then presented 3 beautifully recorded pieces. Lagom used sounds of children dive-bombing in water, playing tennis and football. Transitions from tram rides to water to ballgames hinted at the easy sociability of games. Natural sounds were treated as both document and material for synthesis in Barry Truax’s Island. The sound of wind across a lake, waves on the beach, frogs croaking, water dripping in a cistern and a final windy shoreline produced an intense mood and drama, volume and space. Next was Angel by Jo Thomas, with program notes about the passage of time, the body and the voice. I didn’t hear that within the piece but the audience liked it.

Lawrence Harvey played his Canopies: chimerical acoustic environments, originally produced for the 200 metre long Soundscape System in central Melbourne. This work showed off the spatialisation capabilities of the diffusion system, particularly the use of the front/back axis, as well as Harvey’s expertise on the mixer. Transformed wood-chimes, shells, beads and small bells made up the sonic material in a piece that moved to a beautifully quiet finish. Westerkamp used ‘rainsounds’ to evoke the west coast of British Columbia. Cars on a wet road. Wet gravel walks. Subtle modulations across short and long time scales and another clear and dripping ending.

Westerkamp (with photographer Florence Debeugny) also had an installation in Hearing Place: Exhibitions and Audiotheque, organised by Ros Bandt and Iain Mott of the Australian Sound Design Project (www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au). At the Edge of the Wilderness explored the ghost towns of British Columbia through recorded soundwalks and photographs. The poetry of the images, the rhythm of their presentation on the wall, the soundwalk as a narration, all evoked the damp decay of abandoned timber towns. I’m familiar with Ros Bandt’s work through CDs, books and her symposium talk. An acute sense of space comes through in her recorded works, and I regret only glimpsing her piece and missing those shown at the Yarra Sculpture Gallery.

I did however get a chance to hear Iain Mott’s piece in the Audiotheque—a binaural recording of Mott having a haircut. In a binaural recording, microphones are placed as though they are in the ears of a real head: this technique achieves a spatial representation of sound that is close to actual listening. The technique is particularly good for headphone use—the speakers-in-the-ear headphones mirroring the stuck-in-the-ears microphones. Mott’s decision to record a haircut binaurally (mics in his ears) is inspired. The proximity and pressure of the headphones replaces the hands and the scissors to give a haircut without the cutting. The haircutting sounds are heard as intrinsic to the haircut experience. Mott’s piece, like the strongest work in the symposium, used sound to recreate the sense of being within an experience while drawing conscious attention to the importance of the acoustic environment for the emotional and informational content of that experience. Which is where Acoustic Ecology began.

International Symposium of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, hosted by The Australian Forum for Acoustic Ecology & The Victorian College of the Arts in co-operation with Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes; various locations in Melbourne, March 19-23

RealTime issue #55 June-July 2003 pg. 30

Hydrogen Jukebox is an opera from 2 of the 20th century’s most controversial artists, composer Philip Glass, transgressor of classical music boundaries, and Beat poet/hero the late Allen Ginsberg, whose work is still about as contemporary as any can be. Using 18 Ginsberg poems as libretto, the opera paints a musical mosaic of America from the 50s to the 1988 Presidential election—and into the present. Synchronicity and the 60s still conspire: while this Australasian premiere was in rehearsal, the war in Iraq was brewing. In Hobart the show’s dramatic posters, on which Ginsberg’s words form Stars and Stripes dripping like paint slowly attracted a layer of anti-war graffiti. The war was at its height during the performance at Hobart College and we were all “…listening to the crack of doom on the Hydrogen Jukebox” as Ginsberg wrote in HOWL.

Rarely performed, Hydrogen Jukebox has a reputation for being difficult, but this production moved seamlessly from poem/trance to musical lightning strike across a canvas of controversial, confronting territory—political propaganda and anti-war feeling, personal anguish and sexual politics, religious and cultural dissonance, so content-rich and energetic it left me gasping.

Director Robert Jarman deserves high praise for making this important work accessible to a new generation eager for the hard-won truth: that sometimes art can explain life better than we think. Jarman’s innovation was the side-screen projection of scrolling computer text, taken from the net, listing US government and CIA interventions. Meanwhile, centre stage, Ginsberg’s lyrics rode effortlessly astride Philip Glass’ mesmeric musical lines. Glass uses the human voice as instrument and instrument as voice—just as Ginsberg played around with bizarre adjective-noun combinations. Medleys of incantations—“Who is the enemy, year after year…battle after battle…” (Iron Horse) form hypnotic, lilting word/sound waves that travel from performer to audience like electric musical current. This is a powerful and confronting production.

Behind the singers, actors made a living fresco—in Grecian white robes, or statuesque in plush towelling, slowly rubbing the stars and stripes off bronzed flesh, or forlorn in trench coats, travelling, crying. There’s humour too—Aunt Rose in lopsided 5/8 rhythm, and The Green Automobile, camp, upbeat.

Many in this production’s cast perform regularly with Hobart-based IHOS Opera. Of particular note were Sarah Jones’ crystal soprano, Matt Dewey’s wonderfully resonant bass-baritone, Chris Waterhouse’s and Craig Wood’s smooth tenor and Robert Jarman’s reading of Ginsberg’s Wichita Vortex Sutra. Thematically, as we crossed beyond America into the buddafields, into now-ness, I felt I’d watched a new media form being invented. This beatnik opera’s mix of imagery and soundscape is explosive, but gentle beyond words.

Hydrogen Jukebox, University of Tasmania Conservatorium of Music, composer Philip Glass, libretto Allen Ginsberg, director Robert Jarman, conductor Douglas Knehans, choreographer John Rees-Osborne, lighting Tony Soszynski, sound Malcolm Bathersby, Hobart College, April 15, 21, 24-26

RealTime issue #55 June-July 2003 pg. 30

This year’s Totally Huge New Music Festival featured established artists from opposite ends of the new music spectrum. Putting experimental electronicist KK Null on the same bill as renowned contemporary classical composer Roger Smalley says a great deal about Tura Events Company’s eclectic and inclusive approach to programming. By amalgamating practitioners from various musical practices (who share only instrumental virtuosity and an infatuation with possibilities), the organisers demonstrate a commitment to continually blurring the boundaries that define new music.

Those unfamiliar with Smalley’s contribution to Australian new chamber and piano works might have found scheduling a 60th birthday concert in a ‘new’ and cutting edge festival somewhat contradictory. However when Smalley and the West Australian Symphony New Music Ensemble premiered Kaleidoscope, such preconceptions were quickly erased. The work is defined by short contrasting movements, circulating a divided ensemble (strings, woodwind and a horn, trumpet, percussion and harp group). The music was built up in thirds, creating great variation within a relatively limited space; swarming dynamism against stasis.

Smalley also paid tribute to the influence of 20th century composers, performing Suite No 1 by Stravinsky and a transcription of Scriabin’s 10 Poems, a reclamation that highlighted the continuing significance of work from new music pioneers. Principal oboist Joel Marangella had the perfect vehicle to display his technical talent in Smalley’s Oboe Concerto, his riveting presentation followed by the first performance of Piano Study No 1 (Gamelan). Composed for left hand alone, this was the first in a trilogy of projected pieces that focus on producing sound from the piano’s lower register, exploring the percussive, gong-like qualities of the black keys. The impressive works performed that evening confirmed Smalley’s reputation as a principal innovator among the local and international new musical field.

Belgium’s Rubio Quartet attracted a similar, but not quite as diverse audience to the Perth Concert Hall. Patrons packed into the foyer, an intimate, but perhaps not ideal venue for the Australian debut of Dirk Van de Velde and Dirk Van den Hauwe (violins), Marc Sonnaert (viola) and Peter Devos (cello). The quartet’s inventive programming enthralled the audience with instrumental virtuosity in an intense and refined performance from their modern repertoire. The players clearly revelled in the String Quartet No 4 by Shostakovich, whose music they describe as a “second language.” The audience was then lulled by the gentle ambience of Luc Van Hove’s lengthy Opus 3, before the unexpected outbursts of Wolfgang Rihm’s String Quartet No. 4. Undaunted by the structurally unusual piece, the players tackled each challenge with emotional energy, revealing their passion for works that manoeuvre at the edge.

However, it was the work of the young composers of Breaking Out that truly reflected the freedom and independence characteristic of new musical approaches and convinced audiences that chamber music is far from an insular form. Among the groundbreaking artists were David Howell with a bold statement in Chipped Chrome, a striking viola and trumpet combination; Nela Trifkovic with the 2nd song-cycle of Give Me Back My Rags and Year 12 Christchurch Grammar student Kit Buckley (the youngest composer in the program) whose String Quartet No 1 explored the sound worlds of an emotional response to architecture.

Chamber music experimentation continued as ethnomusicologist and artist in residence from Hanoi, Vu Nat Tan introduced listeners to the unique timbrel qualities of the Vietnamese bamboo flute. The ethereal music inspired many Perth improvisers to join in with Tan. Ross Bolleter’s improvisation on his famous ruined piano (part-prepared to retain some of its melodic function but mostly fractured by squeaks, groans and the rhythmic tapping of soundless notes) was later joined by Lindsay Vickery on clarinet, infusing the textural palette of sound with a lyrical quality. Then came an unexpected performance by Tos Mahoney on flute and finally Jonathan Mustard, playing a unique variety of wind and percussion instruments, setting the pace for the intense musical ferment to follow.

Relationships between traditional Western, Vietnamese and found instruments were explored in collaborations between Daryl Pratt from Match Percussion, Peter Keelan and members of Tetraphide Percussion. One of the few electro-acoustic collaborations involved Hannah Clemen, using her own invention to manipulate the sound of the bamboo flute. The first of a series of installations, the instrument in Clemen’s Intraspectral, was designed to separate and highlight the sounds that comprise the harmonic spectrum of voice. Back in the gallery, listeners were invited to vocalise into a microphone while a computer analysed the various qualities of their voices and responded unpredictably. This unique discovery challenged audiences to explore the extent of their vocal expressions and discover new ways of listening and responding to sound in daily life.

While the festival had an undeniably acoustic flavour, electronic noise fanatics were not forgotten. Perth’s reputable Lux Mammoth gave audiences one final aural nightmare to remember them by, leaving the senses truly alert for the devastating onslaught of Japan’s KK Null. In a predominantly improvised performance, Null’s pounding techno beats, intricate, dense and fascinating layers of noise and abrasive rhythms interwoven with some heavily distorted vocals, produced moments of juddering physical intensity. Null’s performance completed this year’s diverse conglomeration of local and international artists, in a festival that bristled with an undisciplined intermingling of sounds, instruments, media and music methods, giving greater complexity, new meaning and expanded purpose to the musical arts.

Totally Huge New Music Festival, presented by Tura Events Company, April 4-13

RealTime issue #55 June-July 2003 pg. 31

This title suggests the common view we have of Medea, who slaughters her children supposedly out of jealousy when her husband leaves her. It’s a powerful and enduring myth—she’s the ultimate Bad Mother. (And our own continuing horror/fascination with Lindy Chamberlain testifies to this phenomenon.)

In another night: medea Nigel Kellaway pairs this classic with one from the modern repertoire, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Albee’s play answers Medea, with George killing off the (imaginary) child the couple has raised, after a night of cold fury, slugging it out in the living room in front of transfixed guests (a role designated for the audience).

This work is less concerned with the children’s deaths, though, than their parents’ lives: it is the Jason/George/Nigel and Medea/Martha/Reggie show. (Indeed, later on “Nigel” has little patience with “Reggie’s” [Regina Heilmann] pillow-baby smothering.)

Welcome to the Games that Lovers Play—or at least the rather less innocent and more manipulative ones long-term couples play. You have to know someone very well indeed to unerringly home in on and bring out their worst every time—or, in the case of long-time collaborators Kellaway and Heilmann, their best, as in this production.

another night isn’t just about middle-aged dysfunction, nor does it merely display the rubble of plundered texts. It also has more profound comments to make on the material itself and there is a clear logic at work which rebuilds these stories into a commentary on those same old, same old stories we fall back on, and the dead-end, self/mutually destructive grooves we lapse into. It’s an invitation to think anew.

This we particularly see through an especially gorgeous feature of this production, the 18th century Clérambault Medée cantata, sung by counter tenor Peretta Anggerek. The cantata itself stops short of the dastardly deed of infanticide and thus cuts short the natural conclusion of the Medea story. The pierced, tattooed, half-naked body-builder is not our usual image of an opera singer, and Anggerek embodying Medea the foreigner, Medea the enchantress is thus a double reminder that things aren’t always what they seem and assumptions can be dangerous. This Medea might well tell a different tale from the one that has repeatedly been told of her.

The set also echoes this invitation to shake out our preconceptions. Beginning mostly in darkness, all we can see are the grand piano downstage right and, prominently centre stage, a golden sofa (with Heilmann resplendent upon it).

Uh oh. In the last month both a playwright and a designer have commented separately to me on how much they hate “sofa” theatre, the writer claiming that it was almost worth checking in advance to see if there was a sofa on the set before buying a ticket: it’s become shorthand for unadventurous, naturalistic TV theatre-family drama at its most banal. Of course that doesn’t turn out to be the case here (though no one takes the credit for the set design), and a black gauze screen swings up to reveal 3 more musicians, behind them a cascade of scarlet drapes descend from ceiling height creating performance spaces on several levels.

What I also find particularly fascinating in this work is its lively conversation with opera in its high art form, rather than in its original (and opera Project) understanding of a “work” in its broadest sense.

Kellaway sways towards opera with live music (4 very talented musicians, including a truly delightful trio of harpsichord, baroque violin and viola da gamba), surtitles and the outstanding talents of Anggerek. At the same time, the sumptuous artificiality that is opera is neatly paraphrased/parodied by the ballerina-in-the-jewellery-box that is Anggerek in his opening scene; framed by red curtains, dressed in golden silk, revolving jerkily to the sounds of appealing music. An ironic answer to the all too familiar “park and bark” school of opera performance?

While static display is not part of Kellaway’s aesthetic, display certainly is, and Annemaree Dalziel again contributes costumes. Most gorgeous are Kellaway and Heilmann’s robes with full swishy skirts—great for flouncing about the stage—a sumptuous pink and gold for Heilmann, regal purple with frills for Kellaway. And Anggerek’s 18th century inspired half gown (all the better to see your pierced nipples and tatts with) is truly fab.

This show is also, I feel, The opera Project at its most accessible yet. Surtitles! A play (well, movie) we all know! Of course, there’s Heiner Müller mixed in there too with his Medea Material, but even he is digestible, given enough context, as we are here—and he certainly provides the text for some of the most theatrical and striking moments of the piece, especially in ‘solos’ by Kellaway and Heilmann.

Heilmann in her toxic frock sequence is wonderful: as she plans doom for Jason’s bride-to-be, she brings it (literally) on herself—and, unwittingly, thousands of years of condemnation with it. Twitching and grimacing on the floor, this lethal charmer is mesmerising.

That Kellaway revels in the language and music and their interplay in this production is clear. The sung and spoken texts are better integrated here than ever before, and they work powerfully off one another. An extract of Müller’s Landscape with Argonauts transforms into a visually and aurally arresting duet between Anggerek singing the cantata on the top level of the stage with Kellaway standing immediately below him, spitting out the text in the music’s pauses.

At the end, the screen descends once more, again cutting off the musicians from the performers, returning us to the beginning, and “Nigel” sends the “children” (the musicians) off to bed, before wandering off himself.

Everyone has gone except Medea who remains sprawled on her couch, her fiery, golden chariot; there before it begins, there after it ends. After 2500 years, she’s not going to stand for being pushed around/pushed off stage anymore—she concludes the evening with a defiant “Fuck you, Nigel!” But was anyone listening? Well, yes, the “guests” were still there and paying close attention.

The opera Project Inc, another night: medea, director Nigel Kellaway, performers Nigel Kellaway, Regina Heilmann, countertenor/narrator Peretta Anggerek, piano Michael Bell, baroque violin Margaret Howard, viola da gamba Catherine Tabrett, harpsichord Nigel Ubrihien, lighting/production Simon Wise, costumes Annemaree Dalziel, music Clérambault, Poulenc, Schubert, Melissa Seeto, Performance Space, Sydney April 30-May 10

As Harriet Cunningham reported in New Music in Sydney: a lively corpse? (RT 52), contemporary music doesn’t fare too well in Australia’s biggest city and not for want of trying. However, Ensemble Offspring, a project-based collective of musicians with a commitment to new music, is one of a handful of groups that keeps the scene turning over, this one with idiosyncratic programming and keen audiences. Later this year they’re off to take up invitations to perform in the Warsaw Autumn festival, and in Krakow, London and the Netherlands. Then in November, as part of the New Music Network’s New Music Now series they’ll present the ‘imaginary opera’ of Matthew Shlomowitz, The Cattle Raid of Cooley or The Show, which is described as “a double narrative singerless opera exploring the (im)possibility of program music.” The same concert will also feature a multimedia work by composer Barton Staggs and digital artist Justine Cooper (see article). In their most recent concert they explored the work and legacy of idiosyncratic American composer Harry Partch (1901-74) with a day long exhibition of musical sculptures and new instruments and a night-time concert. Partch has no obvious musical heir, but his legacy has been widely distributed and appears in part in the work of many, hence the concert title Partch’s Bastards.

Partch’s percussion-oriented, instrumental inventions were influenced by ancient Grecian and Eastern models and were integral to his music theatre works like the magnificent Delusion of the Fury. Believing that Western music was out of tune, Partch proposed tonal alternatives, creating a rich musical vocabulary of his own, often working with voice, spoken, intoned and sung. In his Illegal Harmonies, Music in the 20th Century, Andrew Ford describes Harry Partch as a key precursor to Meredith Monk and Laurie Anderson. It was appropriate then for Ensemble Offspring’s concert to open with the composer’s Barstow (1941), a droll musical ‘road movie’ of hitchhiker inscriptions (Partch spent years as a hobo and itinerant worker) for voice and adapted guitar. Performer Christiaan van der Vyver ably rose to the demands of the work’s moments of gospel beauty and personal lament, and folk-tune iterations. The work required the guitar frets to be shifted to realise Partchs’ microtonal tuning. Other ‘instruments’ included 60 ceramic tiles (with a surprising range and sometimes bell-like depth) scratched and tapped in Teguala (2002) by Juan Felipe Waller (Mexico/Netherlands) and wine glasses in Amanda Cole’s Cirrus (2003), rung with fingers, tapped and bowed until they vibrated and whistled, evoking fragile violins and theremins.

The second Partch work, Two Studies in Ancient Greek Scales (1950), deftly executed by Jackie Luke (dulcimer) and Julia Ryder (cello), was a more demanding experience, worth a re-hearing to allow the brain to adjust to its strange tonalities. Christiaan van der Vyver’s ensemble piece, Light Flows Down Day River (2003), was a gently marching, bluesy concoction with an Eastern tang and featured the composer’s home-made xenophone with its bright, rounded notes. With characteristic flair, flautist Kathleen Gallagher brought the requisite theatricality to a Partch evening with her performance of William Brooks’ (US) Whitegold Blue, a relatively abstract piece requiring notes to be bent or plucked from the flute, and the voice to speak, hum and whistle. Lou Harrison’s engaging Canticle No 3 for the largest ensemble of the night (5 percussionists) had its welcome gamelan-ish moments and some notable passages for guitar and ocarina (Gallagher again) and ranged through intimate and huge sounds, pauses and delicate hesitancies. The concert lived up to its subtitle, An alternative world of sounds, and although the tonalities of Partch and his bastards sound for the most part more familiar than they did half a century ago—so broad has our collective musical experience become-there was still much to challenge the well-tuned ear. The excellent program notes were by Rachel Campbell.

Ensemble Offspring, Partch’s Bastards, concert coordinator Damien Rickertson, Paddington Uniting Church, Sydney, May 3

Simon Cavanough is a path-maker artist, his work is about forging myriad in-roads towards ascension, as in Head on a Stick, the impossible blueprint for the clever boyish self-image (no body, but a spindly tower of etched lines and geometries), holding aloft its cute decapitation. Happy as Charlie in the Chocolate Factory, who ends up flying high above the city in a glass lift. Cavanough’s show, Pathway to Wellness at the Scott Donovan Gallery, contains the dream of becoming an anarchic Biggles, except the planes are all plastic or in pieces, co-opted for the war machine or wedged between bits of rock in a precision flying fantasyland. What else goes up? There are balloons inflating, little bridges, factories, houses, Puffer Dude! All Knockin Back the Sky.

Though what you’ve really got is a beer bottle flying machine, propped on top of a delicate, almost collapsing, undercarriage. That’s where the strain comes in. What must come down. After all Cavanough isn’t singing naively along to the radio in an impossibly green field-sky rockets in flight, afternoon delight—his work reminds us that we are grounded horizontally in a world of detritus, not vertically in the ether. And his inventions are all awry, are unnecessary, like Structures for Holding Up Clouds—a piece of scaffolded yellow styrene. Also toying with precarious suspension is his collapsing bridge, The Road to Wetness and Dribble, a reinforced gloopy drip about to break. Nothing inspires confidence, All the Good Things Sometimes Fall Over. (And indeed, at the opening, people are accidentally bumping into and knocking fragile pieces off the podiums!)

Model making seems to have become very popular in contemporary art—artists are making models of things popular consumer culture already produces en masse, and exhibiting them in galleries. Cavanough’s antipathy to recognisable form—he uses everyday materials similar to arte povera—comes with the criteria that things must be dissembled and unrecognisable as such. He might use the pared back frame of a plastic lotus flower, as in I’ve Been Looking at the Ways of Higher Beings, though by the time it’s incorporated it’s been completely pulled apart. You get the sense that it’s important that the work doesn’t reek of popular culture, that the impulse behind it is a frustration with form and meaning, the dumb materiality of what’s finished and proper and produced. His reconstructions are forever attaining, never achieving, recyclable and fragile in their coherence—just one possible iteration. This isn’t the model-making associated with late 20th century nerd boys making sci-fi, anime, mecha—it’s deliberately not that pop.

The assemblages are the products of a ‘poiesis’—“or all representation whether visual or verbal is a making, a constructive activity, a poiesis” (The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics). Though model-making is technical, formulaic, you must follow set procedures, there are diagrams, it’s in every way rule governed. It’s a craft, if anything. Perhaps Cavanough is attracted to the anti-art nature of craft—is tempted to abandon art practice. Just as Duchamp gave it up “in favour of playing chess” in 1923 (though he didn't really). “In fact he continued working on his long-term project The Large Glass…What is important here is the gesture rather than the fact. (Kay Campbell, “Out of Humour” in Wit's End, MCA, 1993). And Cavanough seems also to deviate, because the instructions don’t allow for an intuitive or perceptual path. So he ends up making art after all. Once you leave the manual behind, what emerges is bricolage. And there’s the sense that the artist has had to invent his own narratives driving the will-to-form from these askew assemblages—there’s a wizardry, a role-playing or warped war game feel. Why are the plastic figures of Airmen suspended on stalagmites of fibreglass, tumbling like circus performers, euphoric and gleeful, or, more likely, are they free-falling from the sky? The organising principle of these often small 3-D works is that they are whatever the artist has scavenged, perhaps from a studio floor strewn with beer cans, model aeroplane parts, Redhead matches, and the refuse of styrene and foam, as it fell in the bin. All the accidental flotsam and jetsam of one person’s idiosyncratic practice and aesthetic eye. The process reminds me of Hany Armanious’ fantastic folky and arcane installations, involving the chance juxtapositions of found objects.

Cavanough is also technical, literally inventive—like his contraption for failing to fully inflate a pink balloon—which again puts in way too much effort for outcome. Its electric bellows, piston, plastic tubing and dirty old saw blade, all try to breathe life into the balloon—while straining and trembling with effort, shaking under the pressure. Is there a pathway to wellness for the patient on such a shonky respirator? Or does playfulness undercut the masculinity, the whimsy of pink balloons that will cure? It seems the artist is as wistful as his titles. You feel he might be wryly writing off some punk excesses of his youth—Silly Aggressive Lust signals his awareness of the eternal air of adolescence underpinning the avant garde: Graffiti: I once thought it would be cool to nail some meat to a wall of a bank but now I’ve mellowed.

Failure is a leitmotif. Cavanough once tried his hand at rocket-science in the suburbs—I’m Going Higher Than I’ve Ever Been Before II—though the event, the aspiration, the experimentation was what cathected. It was an attempt not just to test a hypothesis with almost guaranteed results, but to witness the danger, and abjection of failure, harking back to when flying machines crashed at air shows, rather than today’s high tech ‘friendly fire’ accidents. The rocket did get a metre or more off the ground, climbing the structure built to launch it, getting as far as the path went—while failing to reach the sky’s aporia (perhaps luckily for the residents of Tempe). I get the feeling the artist would also like his practice to launch and re-launch itself in unpredictable directions, while necessarily factoring in failure—I can see him as artist-in-residence at a regional RAAF base—as a dishonorary wing nut. Poetic licence, pilot’s licence—wanting both.

This show is toned down for the gallery setting, less elemental spectacle. It’s Cavanough in ‘hobbyist’ mode, building A Little House for Me & You in a city bedevilled by property development. It’s a modest, generative show, making some runways out of the ‘endism’ that characterised the embers of the late 20th century. The minutiae of this work is fitting, giving a perspective on the ground that suggests the aerial view—it’s metaphysical (both poetic and material) but doesn’t require transcendentalism out of the cosmos. And the show adds subtle continuity to the artist’s body of work that exceeds the gallery paradigm—his work has always been endlessly deconstructive/reconstructive, concerned with both disinvention/invention. Simon Cavanough continues to make fragile, failed objects—resisting art—in that they are kind of hard to classify, fetishise and buy. He’s also exhibiting here in a gallery facing imminent closure (perhaps to re-open somewhere else)—though this isn’t about being trapped in any victimhood cycle, Oh Wizard, rescue me with your canoe. It’s more a bit of nostalgia for old magic—for the sky which remains plentitudinal.

Prime Two was like an SMS conversation—fast and focussed. The Queensland Art Gallery was given over to people, movement and multiple performance spaces, with a dynamically different (and younger) crowd than at the openings I’ve attended. Inside, the noise was louder than at the largest opening, with the boom of the outside stage audible and overlaid with other music, acoustics and percussion. Instead of the usual focus on one event, this more disparate arrangement saw crowds gather around performances. Others flowed past, on their way to other dance, music, sound or performance points.

Prime Two was an ambitious program developed by the Gallery to engage a youth audience (13-25 years) they believe are “up for the challenge of contemporary art.” Its focus was hybrid art forms. Short performances from musicians, artists and performers working around and over each other ran from 2 until 8pm. Planning was required if you had an agenda and a wish-list of things to see, although simply following the noise and crowd had its charms.

The central water mall hosted Rock’n’Roll Circus 5 times over the 6 hours, teetering tantalisingly close to the edge of the bridged walkways. But despite acrobatics on precariously stacked chairs, nobody fell in. There were sudden and spectacular fashion and design parades. In an adjacent space, Phat! Streetdancers were synchronicity in motion, building on hip-hop, pop and rap influences, playing to riveted crowds and enthusiastic applause.

There were 5 strands—prime movement, prime art, prime fashion+design, prime interactives, and prime sound—none of which was privileged over the others. Performances and changes were not announced—each just began and ended or morphed seamlessly into the next.

While some strands of Prime were static displays—exhibitions and paintings up to the QAG’s usual exacting standards—those with performative and interactive possibilities moved outside the gallery ‘square.’ Chalk it out by Archie Moore provided a blackboard for graffiti from “the whole class”, and the audience shared their views on schools with little inhibition. This was located in the sculpture courtyard within earshot of the Prime stage where DJ Indelible alternated with performers Menno, MC Battle, and the first Australian show by Samoan rap and hip-hop duo Feliti+JP.

A Prime performance that literally intruded into the crowd was Jemima Wyman and her “Body Double”. Jemima and sister Aja variously rode, beat, pushed, and kicked an oversized carrot-shaped orange bolster around the space in moves influenced by kickboxing, Kung Fu, mime and slapstick. Any conceptual depth was hard to identify, but the 2 performers clearly enjoyed the catharsis of letting go on a large phallic signifier.

Refuge was available in the Prime rumpus room, designed to celebrate the fads of the 1980s. If you hadn’t played Twister since childhood, here was your opportunity. There were also video clips and retro music designed to bathe you in comforting childhood memories and orange light—nostalgia for the young.

As night fell it was standing room only in the sculpture courtyard as Resin Dogs took the stage for the first performance of their national tour. As they exited, a white screen rolled down from the marquee, transforming the space for a mesmerising performance from Lawrence English and Tara Pattenden mixing sound and visuals. It was a fitting finale to 6 hours of stimulation attended by 4,000 young people, it brought the crowd to a brief silence.

Three distinct categories of work exist within Scott Redford’s exhibition I’ve got my spine/I’ve got my orange crush. Yet though the shockingly pink Surf Paintings, the almost abstract photographs of the Urinal series, and the Dead Board video works are segregated, they are thematically interrelated by their references to homosexuality and in the use of the surfboard motif. These also mark them as a continuation of Redford’s previous distinctive explorations.

The large Surf Paintings are made, like surfboards, of resin-coated Styrofoam. Painted onto this foam base are sketches of Gold Coast scenery: high-rise buildings and palm trees, all in evocative silhouette. The smooth, highly reflective works initially seem all impenetrable surface, and, struck by their size and intense colour, the tendency is to regard them as a group and at a distance. But beneath their shiny seals the painted foam is grainy, like layers of multicoloured sand, and a closer look at the fine washes of pigment reveals their painterly qualities.

Redford has boldly—brashly?—interspersed these works with pieces that are similarly highly-coloured but otherwise blank, except for attached surfie-logo-like stickers, or text: “Our goal must be nothing less than the establishment of Surfers Paradise on earth.” Secret Surf Painting gradates horizon-like from pink to purple, accompanied by a plaque that proclaims: “The content of this painting is invisible; the character and dimension of the content are to be kept permanently secret, known only to the people of Surfers Paradise.”

The surfboard is, for Redford, linked to homosexual sex: his catalogue interview with Chris Chapman recounts a story about a well-known surfer who strapped boys to his favourite board before having sex with them. While this link may be personal, Redford also works with a more commonly recognised gay sex location in his Urinal series. The dark and gleaming close-up photographs present this quotidian hardware as surprisingly beautiful, the scratched surfaces burnished by the flashlight and coated in streams of water trickling in skittery rivulets down the dented, rusted facades.

The contrast of the brightly-coloured Surf Paintings with the dark and impervious metal of the urinals seems to pit the glitter of the tourist strip against the secret confines of the public toilet. The Surf Paintings are almost iconographic, potential mottoes of Gold Coast publicity. Possessing an entirely different glamour—not to mention comfort and hygiene—the appeal of the urinals is far more private. Each Urinal work’s title is followed by a location—(Surfers Paradise) or (Fortitude Valley)—and, so noted, they seem to function as mementos, fixing an encounter firmly in history like a scribbled phone number or snatched Polaroid.

The surfboard motif is continued in the video works Dead Board I, Dead Board II and Dead Board III (a “dead” board being one that no longer floats). In the first a surfboard leans against a parked ute; written on it in large red letters is the word “DEAD.” A young man takes a handsaw from the Ute and cuts the board in half. As it collapses, he stands back and regards it for a moment, before glancing toward the camera as the shot fades. Dead Board II shows 2 men cutting up surfboards and spraypainting “DEAD” on the boards. The excruciating Dead Board III features bikini-clad models—all perfect skin and limbs and hair—performing the same task in the more upmarket setting of a Gold Coast hotel room. In the catalogue Redford explains the girls were chosen to replace the boys in order to please his (straight) video collaborator. This last video is painful to watch: the girls are uncomfortable and horribly inexperienced at wielding the saw, coming fascinatingly close to severing fingers or scraping expanses of smooth tanned flesh. After they finish their chopping and hacking they stand and leave, admirably concealing their relief. The floor of the empty room is left littered with sorry and broken boards, not unlike, in the setting of the expensive hotel, prone lovers exhausted by their exertions.

Unlike the finely executed Surf Paintings and Urinal photographs, the Dead Board videos are an inelegant case of point-and-shoot. Redford was assisted by different artists on all 3 bodies of work, but the disappointment of the Dead Boards cannot be blamed solely on the shortcomings of the video. Rather, they have the off-putting sense of being made on a whim, and as such demonstrate the considerable distance that often exists between concept and manifestation, a distance that must be negotiated with care. Unfortunately, in this context the accompanying catalogue validation becomes almost humorous, if not objectionable. The repetitive screeching of the handsaw possibly does illustrate the “concept of modernism as an endlessly recycled paradigm.” But there’s a difference between “a play on the idea of boredom” and just boring.

I’ve got my spine/I’ve got my orange crush, Scott Redford, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, March 28-May 4

An hour from Melbourne—a small cream fibro cement cottage, paint peeling, curtains fading. Inside it’s dark, cool, ants are making their way around. It is 2001, and the owner has only just left for the nursing home, but all over the house is evidence of the last 70 years. A calendar from 1956 hanging in the kitchen, letters from the turn of the century in the cupboards; old tins of laxative pills, matchboxes from the 50s with Aboriginal men standing on one leg and the sunset behind. There are recipes for Sao biscuits from the Depression, there is hand stitched linen; the laundry pegs are the big wooden ones Victorian children used to fashion into dolls. There is a collection of old mops hanging up, a wringer, and many old tin buckets and basins for handwashing. So much it is overwhelming. It’s a museum. And a few months later everything is collected by a younger relative who torches it in an all-night bonfire after downing a bottle of Jim Beam. Such is the ephemeral nature of most of our archives. Like memory, they can disappear overnight.

But the job of the archivist is to fix, to preserve. We are all collectors, accidental and considered. We hoard, we classify, we fetishise; magical objects arise from the everyday. The House of Exquisite Memory, at the Sydney State Records Centre, tips its hat to the “natural born archivists” (the hoarders, the children, the obsessives), although most exhibitors here are art professionals, a fact which is initially disappointing. However, the exhibition is necessarily reflexive given this: while some pieces work precisely as archives—Megan Hick’s Flat Chat, a photo documentation of footpath graffiti, is a fixing and celebration of what is fleeting in the everyday—others explore the nature of archive and memory.

In The Housing of Memory: off her rocker Fiona Kemp returns to the family home where her father, certainly a natural born archivist, has allowed the family archive to accumulate. From this, she has selected objects from her childhood and arranged them in a series of Perspex picture boxes—an autobiographical narrative of fragments, junctures and collisions. In one a type of suburban mise-en-abyme emerges: a hanky with images of washing hangs on a mini washing line, Astroturf below, in front of a photo of a backyard washing line. In another, the text “she always rocked herself to sleep at night” underscores a box in which a small blue dress hangs beside an empty hanger, with old receipts for clothes arranged underneath. There’s a haunting quality to it, and while there’s certainly an element of play here, there’s also loss and longing; gaps between objects and part-stories.

This is also the case in Barry Divola’s Critterholic, which traces a recuperation, not only of the objects but the practice of archiving. There is something here—in the recreated suburban kitchen setting, in the empty kitchen chairs at the Laminex table, and the Perspex cereal boxes, containing small toys—that resonates with a nostalgic recovery; not least because Divola’s present collection attempts to recover his lost one of 60s and 70s plastic cereal toys. (Divola resumed his cereal toy collecting 5 years ago—his mother had long since thrown out his childhood collection.)

Sally Gray’s My Garden as a Family Archive features dried flowers, images, and text suspended from the ceiling by string tied to rocks on the ground. Each picture twists with the breeze and movement in the room, giving us glimpses, a moving ephemeral montage of memory and attachment, where the familial and familiar are implicated in the complex of the garden. Memory, we are often reminded in this exhibition, is a collection, an archive. And in these works memory seems to disrupt more linear archival practices. Zoë Dunn’s first sounds and words, as recorded by her parents, again alert us to our often unnoticed practices (parents are always doing this kind of archiving), and the trajectory they trace along all our anxieties and desires.

James Cockington’s Memory Triggers is an assemblage of knicknacks and miniatures dating from 1966 (small because they had to fit into a shoebox in his bedhead) and features such objects as a mini Fanta bottle, and a Whitlam era it’s time badge. The miniatures are time capsules, synecdoches for an era. The collection is assembled as an enclosed checkerboard, part of a loungeroom setting facing a TV which plays Maree Delofski’s film The Trouble with Merle, an exploration of the conflicting stories about Merle Oberon’s background. I caught the end, with Merle’s “return” to Tassie where the convergence of studio bio and truths, gossip and secret (all archives in themselves), marks “a disaster” for the film star and the beginning of her so called decline.

That the exhibition is anchored in references to the everyday—loungeroom settings, checkerboards, kitchen settings, gardens—affirms that the everyday and familiar are sites of desire, longing, loss and recovery, asking us to consider what makes us collect; what are the practices and rituals that trace memory and recuperation about?

In David Waters’ Bus Farm, at the Yarra Sculpture Gallery, miniature wooden buses, perhaps a hundred or more, made from redgum sleepers with burnt relief, are arranged about the room; children visiting the exhibition wanted to move them around (and did). Playful, nostalgic, indelible, the repetition does recall childhood, toys—but they are rendered with a precise aesthetic that marks the work as artisan. Waters gestures to mass production, hence Bus Farm, and there’s some irony intended in the mass production of something so obviously hand crafted, raising broader issues about the question of replication. But this replication evokes a feeling of comfort, both in the reception and, I imagine, in the production; there’s a delight in this, an intimacy.

Considering this, I sit on the refashioned bus seats, and, looking down on the buses I see a street scene, a herd, and recover a feeling of the power of childhood; our domain over our magical objects.

The House of Exquisite Memory, curator Susan Charlton, designer Kylie Legge, State Records Centre, Sydney, Mar 28-Aug16; Bus Farm, Yarra Sculpture Gallery, Melbourne, Feb 19-March 12

Brendan Lee’s video work is founded on a dissection of the technical devices used in mainstream cinema to produce emotional effects in the viewer, and his reinterpretation of those effects to subvert their original context and experiment with their use in isolation for other purposes.

Death is a matter of time is a short work building on the use of the eye in cinema. We all know that the eye is the most compelling of human features, window to the soul and all that. To me the eye means little without the face around it, so let’s see how Lee broadens the meaning of the image of an isolated eye with his digital wizardry and intellect.

Death is a matter of time is a companion piece to the installation “…a matter of time”, showing in May at Melbourne’s Gertrude Contemporary Arts Space. I haven’t been able to see the larger work, so must examine this smaller work in isolation. The video comprises 3 images: an LED countdown clock on 0:00:00:00; images of a flame and an explosion superimposed on the pupil of a man’s eye, from which tears drip. Then an ambiguous image I’m told is a sniper, is superimposed on a woman’s eye, it whites out then reappears as the eye widens before whiting out again. These superimposed images stutter in time with a faint heartbeat sound.

The implication is that the eyes express their owners’ realisation of their imminent death; that which kills them is reflected in their pupils. Removing this cinematic device from its context allows the possibility that these eyes are also those of the cinema audience. The “eye of the soul” cliché takes on new meaning as I consider the eye as portal to the language of symbols, accessing the subconscious, where the layers of correspondence a symbol brings become the building blocks of further meaning.

One image of the eye from modern cinema that leaps to mind is the recurring dilating pupil in Darren Aronofsky’s drug-filled Requiem for a Dream. I don’t think of that particular image as a device: it’s a coded message with one layer of meaning for the general public and a deeper, exhilarating but scarier one for those who’ve explored life’s darker pathways. Experiencing Death is a matter of time is instead more poignant in light of recent world events. We all think of ourselves as possibly immortal, until we aren’t.

My copy of the CCAS press release with its still of a man’s eye has been sitting beside my computer for a couple of days, spooking me. It’s too quiet. They say you never hear the one that gets you.

Death is a matter of time, Brendan Lee, Canberra Contemporary Arts Space, March 29-May 3

Love Tester, a site-specific, installation-based project opened at the Virus Lounge, a gaming centre on Francis Street in Northbridge Perth, one hot, late-summer night. Regular clientele were locked away behind glass in a grid of computer consoles, air-conditioned, seemingly oblivious to the swelling art crowd and intent on blowing their opponents’ virtual brains out.

Here they creep through dark labyrinthine environments, avoiding ghouls and zombies in search of the prize. In our case, we are informed, the prize is art, and the labyrinth is a somewhat brighter (if no less seedy) Northbridge. The zombies are self-explanatory, especially on a Friday night.

The arcade game, Timezone, pac-man, pinball, Playstation and Pot-Black are all plundered in Love Tester’s hot-pink, heat-sealed promotional material. We get it already! Love Tester is the product of Nintendo-generation boredom, short attention spans and engagement with a local arts scene that continuously battles the seemingly effortless high production values of popular culture. Pilar Mata Dupont’s opening-night performance, Estrella the Pony, engaged the audience with the generational theme of the Love Tester. A 20-something woman with a My Little Pony fetish grooms a life-sized plastic horse in the Virus Lounge car park.

Love Tester is the latest attempt by 2 curators and 13 young artists to shift the local visual arts paradigm from the confines of gallery-based exhibitions and thrust it in the face (or at least the peripheral vision) of the general public. It follows similar successful event-based and site-specific projects including Hotel 6151 (2002), Peep-in-Death (2002) and the video-based Drive-by (1999) to which it is more closely aligned.

Scattered between various Northbridge businesses, the locations of Love Tester’s individual works are disclosed on a map: large hot-pink symbols at each venue guide audiences from place to place. These measures largely avoid the risk of each intervention being subsumed within its environment, although investigations in the weeks following the jubilant opening night revealed some fragile points of connection between project aspirations and the actual work.

I searched in vain for Nathan Nisbet’s Bentley the Bear, an audio-visual collaboration between Mark McPherson and Philip Julian, putting its absence down to the kind of natural attrition that often occurs when site-specific works are displayed over long periods. Things break down. Julian and Nisbet’s Flow Form at Merizzi Travel did however successfully project its morphology of symbolic and design forms for the duration of the show.

Pearl Rasmussen and Danny Armstrong’s Empty Man Comic Strip stencil series was barely distinguishable from the greasy, black patina of chewing gum on the pavement of William Street, but this may have been its point. The artists’ subtle monochromatic animation is activated by the viewer only while walking, and staring down at the pavement.

Poolside Manifesto’s Forgetting Tuesday at Virus Lounge was easily the most resolved and engaging installation in the program. Consisting of a disturbing ice-cool, pastel wall painting and cut-outs illuminated by fluorescent lighting, the work takes its cues from retro fairy-story illustration and early learning texts such as the Janet and John series. Spanning at least 15 metres, this immersive work describes disembodied scenes, including a robin redbreast caught on a hook, and a boy flying his heart like a kite.

In Bennett Miller’s 2-part installation, Where’s The Love, at Pot Black and the WA Skydiving Academy, the artist repeats motifs from previous installations involving stuffed animals (this time, a leopard caught in a net) and a TV set showing the still, pixilated image of a cat, or boy. Enigmatic and indecipherable, Miller anticipates audience confusion with a quote from the late William Burroughs, “What is this asshole Bennett, who smokes two packs of cancer a day, really saying?”

Love Tester, AFWA’s Emerging Curator Project, curators Jess Clarke & Jennifer Lowe, various venues around Northbridge, Perth, March 28-April 20

The most engrossing works in this fine exhibition by Adelaide artist James Cochran are self-portraits in which the face is either not realised in detail or just not seen. In the most striking, The Artist’s Tears, we see neither eyes nor expression, only the copious tears of paint he weeps (the work has been purchased by the Art Gallery of South Australia). In the smaller portraits the visage is a soft blur of blocks of colour, their arrangement curiously evoking a forceful personality in meditative moments. An accompanying video shows the artist stretched out, staring into a puddle of water on a busy city footpath, studiously ignored by passersby. Other works reflect the artist’s interest in down-and-out street life with a vivid coloration that draws on his years as an aerosol artist and brings an odd warmth to scenarios of despair.

Dead Man Walking

Dead Man Walking, State Opera South Australia, Sung in English with English surtitles, Aug 7, 9, 12, 16, 7.30pm Festival Theatre, Bookings through BASS 131 246

The Melbourne sound scene is a factional, sprawling, many-headed beast. If this sounds like a gripe, it isn’t. Take it as fact posing as opinion. The audience required to sustain such a monster exists, though it consists largely of sound practitioners, and we are prepared to venture far and wide, geographically and aesthetically, to look each head in the mouth and hear the echoes of our own voices shouting down the chasm.

As pleasant as it is, Footscray Community Arts Centre, a bluestone basement on the banks of the Maribyrnong River, is not the most accessible venue. It takes a brave aural adventurer to take on the quest. The 5th series of Articulating Space, held every Monday night in March, ran the gamut of sweltering heat to biting cold, and veered sonically from grating tedium to compelling aural assault.

This, of course, is one of the series’ main strengths. A diverse and challenging program is essential to the health of any event, and it’s a feature of the many other heads of the Melbourne sound art beast, but Articulating Space distinguishes itself by the context within which work is presented. It’s show-and-tell. Artists present their latest works in a matter of fact way that largely sidesteps or informalises the ‘performance before an audience’ aspect.

This trend really became apparent when the out-of-towners performed, becoming exceptions that prove the rule. Jim Denley (Sydney/Brussels), KK Null (Japan) and even the pairing of Philip Samartzis and Casey Rice (Melbourne/US) for the first (and last?) time, were compelling more for performance reasons than necessarily sonic ones.

Meanwhile, among the locals, there was an almost total removal of the entertainment factor; the performances were more akin to demonstrations, or workshops. That’s not to say that the issue of performance was not addressed at all—c’mon, this is still the performing arts, folks! In particular, performances by followers of the extended techniques religion (Jim Denley, Anthony Pateras, Tim O’Dwyer etc) obviously had to address performance. Denley was most interesting, perhaps because he chose to perform from the centre of the seated audience in what seemed an attempt to direct attention away from himself as performer. However, watching Denley’s bodily gestural theatre is as crucial as the sound.

In contrast, Thembi Soddell also performed within the audience, but as transparent sampler anti-performer. She presented a compelling combination of shy quietcore and abrupt volume/intensity cuts that hinted at a perverse grunge aesthetic.

There was the usual predominance of laptop/mixing desk performances, which seem to naturally raise the question of performance. The laptop performance argument is getting somewhat boring, and increasingly irrelevant, but I have to say the ‘3 amigos of laptop’—Steve Adam, Ross Bencina and Tim Kreger were exceptional because they gave a real sense of 3 musicians/artists playing as an ensemble. This was also largely evident in the sound they produced, as the usual range of smirks and grimaces in the glow of the monitor screens gave little away. Showing even fewer facial tics, Tim Pledger and Dave Nelson, ostensibly twiddling knobs on a mixing desk, presented a focussed piece of restrained discord and harmony interplay, and tonal tension.

But back to the show-and-tell where Klunk (Rod Cooper) stood out. Prefacing his performance with an explanation of how he came to design and build his continuous bowing instruments he methodically moved through the instruments’ koto/hurdy-gurdy-like plucking and dronal effects, offering a mesmerising sonic insight into his work.

The show-and-tell format also becomes interesting when familiar performers present, allowing analysis of the micro developments in an artist’s oeuvre. Tim Catlin continued his explorations of the sonic range of the electric guitar, presenting the instrument in perhaps the most fragile and delicate fashion he has to date. Natasha Anderson has extended her wind instrument fetish so far that the only remnant of an instrument was a hand operated air pump! Robin Fox and Will Guthrie stretched the ‘Fox Paradox.’ Fox, an extremely knowledgeable analog synthesis historian, performs using software processing that requires audio input to process, in this case Guthrie’s percussive tinkering. Fundamentally this is the opposite of synthesis, which generates output from a purely electronic starting point.

Ultimately, deliberately dismissing any pretence toward entertainment means audiences need to consider not whether they enjoyed the event, but rather whether they learnt or discovered anything. Articulating Space consistently provided fertile opportunities for sonic discovery.

While Anthony Pateras takes a well-deserved break from organising the series, and its return to Footscray remains in doubt, it would be a shame if this type of sound art event disappears from the scene.

Articulating Space: Live Electronic Performances and Extreme Acoustic Practices, A Music Hive Presentation, Footscray Community Arts Centre, Melbourne, Mondays in March

Dancehouse curator Helen Herbertson’s Bodyworks 02 was a showcase of well-developed, inspired works from Rosalind Crisp of stella b, Tess de Quincy, and Phillip Adams of balletlab. By contrast the 2003 program largely consisted of modest pieces at earlier, tentative phases of their development. Martin Kwasner, Tim Davey, Rakini Devi, Eleanor Brickhill and Phoebe Robinson presented fine studio studies containing compelling elements or moments, but none was cohesive or satisfying in overall form. Sue Healey’s Fine Line Terrain also had a searching inconsistency for the opposite reason, it was adapted from several longer studies with more dancers and a complete design. Although Bodyworks 03 reinforced Dancehouse’s position as an institution promoting catholic, innovative choreographies, it remains unclear if Bodyworks is an annual ‘showcase’, or a more experimental season.

The uncertain, sketchy quality of Bodyworks 03 meant that those pieces developed from a strong, cohesive idea, or which self-consciously grasped and worked with their own play and ebb-and-flow were all the more impressive. Born in a Taxi for example presented a superb structured improvisation, using general yet stringent narrative and characterisations on which to hang exuberant yet often vaguely melancholy clowning and movement. Although The Potato Piece was new, performers Penny Baron, Nik Papas and Carolyn Hanna have worked together for years and so the project represented a more evolved showing of their established physical, dramatic style.

Michael Nyman’s lightly pulsating, neo-Baroque music helped emphasise the Peter-Greenaway-esque, tangibly sensorial nature of the production. Simple set elements such as heavy, wooden boxes and planks, a pile of rough tan-bark, water, textured hessian and garden produce-potatoes, apples and oranges-solidified the show. It also made it as much about the audience’s empathetic identification with the performers-smelling fruit, discovering new tastes and textures, or settling to work seated upon cool, upturned tin pails-as about any overt narrative or character development. Three figures, each associated with a particular fruit or vegetable, moved from isolated introspection and self-devised physical rituals, to meet, exchange produce and gestures, and sort through their collective materials. The performance was like a quizzical coming-to-life of a still-life, complete with the glistening, painterly patina of ripe, cut fruits and warm lighting by Nik Pajanti in the style of the Dutch masters; a sort of opera buffo in Buster Keaton style physical game-play and dance.

The show concluded with the characters’ discovery of books amongst their surrounds-another element from the tradition of late Renaissance still life. This final device led to a delightful sequence in which each performer stood on a heavy, oaken cube, gesticulating and physically relating the tale that they had just read intently to themselves. However this sequence was less well integrated into what preceded it, the characters failing to return to their central, identifying props (potatoes, apples, oranges), closing with an explosion of business largely unrelated to the motif of the 3 growers. The Potato Piece was nevertheless a thoughtful, joyful performance.

Dianne Reid’s Scenes From Another Life also sustained a sense of comic play. For Reid however, this was tied to an interest in her own self as a form of remembered, public performance. Reid’s physical intonation exhibited a quality common to several of Melbourne’s mature independent dance-makers (Sally Smith, Felicity MacDonald, Shaun McLeod, Peter Trotman). Although her apron-like costume and clearly-defined musculature evoked Chunky Move’s young dancers, Reid and her peers have abandoned the exploration of physical extremity as a device for developing choreography. Reid performed with more of a sense of the everyday and with a wonderful softness and lightness, which made the sudden lilts of strength and precision that come with a dancer’s body all the more charming.

Using text, music and projection, Reid explored the uncertain body of the public performer. Unlike the more conceptual, linguistic model developed by choreographer Simon Ellis in Indelible (see RT 54), here memory was inherently psychokinetic, melding pleasure, discomfort, hallucination and the physically remembered past in the act of recalling events. While Ellis clinically yet evocatively rendered the idea of memory, its structures and its conceits, Reid amusingly depicted the psychophysical experience of finding one’s body suffused with the quirks of recollection.

Tiny, projected versions of the performer clambered and tumbled over her torso as she looked on, disconcerted by this bodily revolt, yet also lovingly empathising with her diminutive other selves, helping them over her shoulder with a gentle push or lift from under their feet. Reid explained that she wasn’t even sure if these and other remembered gestures and songs were her experiences or moments from films she’d seen, or stories she’d told. As the show’s title indicates, the body and our sensory memory constitutes another life, including dreams, awkwardness, yet also our pleasures and our most comforting personal sensations. Reid concluded that the bemused confusion she felt about the source of these impulses and sensations mattered less than the idea that one can recall with absolute certainty such mundane feelings as “stretching out on your stomach, in the sun, like a cat.”

The highlight of Bodyworks 03 was director Phillip Gleeson’s The Follies of Emptiness. Ben Rogan’s most notable performance trick is a roiling of his abdominal organs and musculature to represent psychophysical disorder and alienation. Under Gleeson’s guidance though, Rogan’s form became a microclimate of electric ripples and erratic tremors. Gleeson’s lighting created an environment in which Rogan and Trudy Radburn’s bodies melded with wavering tangibility sustained by Expressionist aesthetics (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Pandora’s Box etc). By using barely perceptible, misty illumination, juxtaposed with brightly-focused points of light hovering in darkness, Pajanti helped render the performers as semi-decomposed, textured phantoms, unfixed within the audience’s perception of space and depth.

Emptiness was not, however, a neo-Expressionist homage, despite its superficial visual similarity to that dark scion of illusionistic, vaudevillian cabaret. The show was characterised by a more viral sense of mutation and interaction. Jen Anderson’s exquisite, scintillating sheets of noise drew on some relatively ‘popular’ music such as Aphex Twin and Einstürzende Neubaten, but overall the score sounded similar to contemporary French electro-accoustics like those on the label Les Emprintes Digitales. The turbulent, musique-concrète-crazzle echoed and reinforced the sense of an explosion of sensations outwards and inwards-of bodies and personalities absorbing and projecting everything from cheap, electrical lights to hissy 1960s tango-pop; from the lurid, luminescent orange wallpaper Radburn absent-mindedly sashayed before, to the vinyl and chrome kitchen chair Rogan fused with, spider-like. Just as the score sometimes resonated with a sudden backward sweep of magnetic tape sound, one had the occasional impression, watching Rogan and Radburn, of viewing videotape in rewind.

There was a bleed-through of signals, influences and emotions, a mutual contamination of sparse, thematic elements that made the few moments of robotic, automatic movement seem more akin to a wildly visceral form of wet-ware, virtual reality (which of course it is), than the now venerable idea of Cartesian, mechanised life. As in David Lynch’s Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, or even Jean Luc Goddard’s more raggedly inter-cut work, the very DNA of character and emotional ambience here became subject to spontaneous change, producing an uncontrolled, hypnotic sense of instability at every level. This jumble of references created a deliberately abstruse portrait of weird, (sub)urban, formlessness, or domestic cyberneticism. Emptiness was particularly impressive in this respect, given that Gleeson eschewed almost all of the touted, glossy tools of contemporary new media normally employed to achieve such effects within his own rich yet minimal dramaturgy.

Bodyworks 03, curator Helen Herbertson, lighting Nik Pajanti, John Ford, Dancehouse, Melbourne, Mar 12-30; The Potato Piece, Born in a Taxi, devisers/performers Penny Baron, Nik Papas, Carolyn Hanna, direction Tamara Saulwick; The Follies of Emptiness, director/choreographer/lighting/set Phillip Gleeson, performers Ben Rogan, Trudy Radburn, Max Beattie, music & sound Jen Anderson, Kimmo Vennonen; Rust, performer/choreographer Martin Kwasner, dramaturg Tim Davey, text Allan Gould; The Dusk Versus Me, performers/choreographers/projection Tim Davey, Katy MacDonald; Q U, performer/choreographer Rakini Devi, percussion Darren Moore; Scenes From Another Life, performer/choreographer/video Dianne Reid, costume Damien Hinds, dramaturgy Yoni Prior, Luke Hockley; Waiting to Breathe Out, performer/choreographer Eleanor Brickhill, performer Jane McKernan, music/text-performance Rosie Dennis, lighting Mark Mitchell; The Futurist, choreographer/performer Phoebe Robinson, music Tamille Rogeon, sculptures Alex Davern; Fine Line Terrain, choreographer Sue Healey, performers Shona Erskine, Victor Bramich, music Darrin Verhagen.

In the world of film noir the femme fatale is mysterious, duplicitous, heartless and usually gorgeous. In classic thrillers we know them as helpless damsels in distress. Think of the forlorn Isabella Rosselini in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, the terrified Janet Leigh in Hitchcock’s Psycho and the cunning Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon. A long tradition of violence has been perpetrated on and by women in stories like these. They’ve been paraded through popular culture to become mythic icons in themselves.

As in their previous works, which have lightheartedly explored aspects of the female psyche, in Blue Moves The Fondue Set (Jane McKernan, Elizabeth Ryan and Emma Saunders) examine the leading lady in their own terms. Through an ensemble of dance, movement and monologue the work steps beyond the archetypes offered by film to present a more contemporary brand of mademoiselle.

They enter wearing uniform red-patent boots and clingy dresses. They sashay, hips swaying, looking nervously behind them, legs giving way with every second step. The moves suggest archetypal victims, but these women are strong, graceful, coy, sexy, noisy, angry and violent.

The more successful moments of Blue Moves take just a small element of the archetype and play with it. One piece sees Ryan sprawled on the floor, crawling after a microphone that is pulled away from her. Panicked, breathless and silenced, it’s an arresting analogy for the victimised woman.

The work is less effective when the group tries to modernise the plight of their women. In one piece Saunders pounds out a vengeful version of Kylie’s You’ve Got to Be Certain, hurling punches, sideswipes and knee jerks at an invisible ‘ex.’ An amusing take on modern revenge for the broken hearted, the premise is too thin to entertain for the length of the song. Elsewhere, in an awkward chorus of laughter, wavering between the cackle of the femme fatale and the howl of the wounded, the idea seemed lost on both performers and audience. Rather than unpacking any filmic codes, it felt like we’d missed out on a private joke.

The most exquisite moments captured an element of womanhood using what is clearly the Fondue Set’s most expressive talent: movement. In a brilliantly choreographed trio, they twist around the room, continuously swapping partners while leaving the third dancer to fall away. Fluidly losing and joining each other mid-stride, the dances create a graceful and hilarious analogy for the swiftness of the modern relationship—being hurled into a succession of short flings.

The final piece in the show used dance to embody one of the most sacred elements of female friendships. In this routine they stood talking together and as one girl fell, the others picked her up, then another fell and the others picked her up and so it went on in a swift succession of ‘pick-me-ups.’ Beyond a reply to the woman as ‘helpless victim’ archetype the scene was a perfect metaphor for the cycle of support that often characterises female friendships.

Created as a dance translation of contemporary live music, The Fondue Set usually performs in pubs and clubs—venues frequented by people their age. In the atmosphere of a noisy pub and set to the music of a live band, their usual audiences are prone to more distraction than the formal setting of the Seymour Centre allows. Perhaps this is why Blue Moves feels like it lacks a bit of flesh. The attentive theatre audience brings more expectation to the performance. That the shorter, more flamboyant scenes are more successful is a reflection of the dancers’ natural inclination to perform for a more rowdy crowd.

It might have been the absence of their live band, The Screamers, who usually perform with the troupe, that made the space seem empty but this can’t account for the weaknesses in some of the dramatic scenes. Simple ideas expressed physically ultimately carried the most strength. While Blue Moves struggled to articulate a resounding idea about the cinematic myths of the female ‘victim’, it offered some beautiful moments about what it is to be a woman and a taste of what could be a new breed of femme fatale.

Blue Moves, The Fondue Set, created and performed by Emma Saunders, Jane McKernan, Elizabeth Ryan, dramaturg Keith Gallasch, set design Imogen Ross, lighting Simon Wise, Downstairs Theatre, Seymour Theatre Centre, Sydney, March 6-8, 12-15

Before 5000 dimly discernible faces in Adelaide’s Botanic Park, the Australian Dance Theatre presented their new work, Nothing. Part of the 10th anniversary of WOMAdelaide. The work by Garry Stewart and dancers continues the company’s commitment to diverse presentations. The electronic soundscape of sound designer Luke Smiles pulsates over the crowd, turning the chilly night air electric with anticipation. Four dancers enter, dropping into a twisted hyperactivity with gargoyle faces while an intricate, powering duet of sweeping angular movement between Roland Cox and Larissa McGowan intersects the space. For 40 minutes the ADT troupe will be adrenalised terpsichorean rock stars.

Paul White crosses the stage with a series of liquid contortions that embody a positively pagan animal magnetism. The sound of breaking glass heralds a quintet whose synchronised movements exude a sense of fragility, of something ‘other.’ Wearing sheer, torso-revealing, underwear, designed by Gaelle Mellis, these creatures look out with trepidation, extending and quickly withdrawing limbs into a personal, protective space. The work continues in a seamless collage of physical arrangements: solo, duet, layered with solemn clan ritualism. Limbs are tossed while idiosyncratic gestures are momentarily suspended by protracted, finitely balanced extensions and gravity defying flight. A vocabulary motivated from internal spaces is a departure from the signature Stewart style. This work unfolds from the inside out as the composition slides in and out of formation, creating space for startling, short dynamo solos by Lena Limosani, Anton and, on a bare stage, sinuous Amazonian flexions from Sarah-Jayne Howard.

Inspired by Sogyal Rinpoche’s Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and Elisabeth Kubler Ross’ On Death and Dying, the work has a reflexive quality, the states-of-being it suggests are ‘not of this world’, but gesture to something past. It’s as if time has reverted to the reptilian dawning of mankind, stretching the tenuous thread between life, death and the hereafter. Nothing is loaded with abstract signs, both in the dance language and in the dancers’ ethnic tattoos. The movement vocabulary is a primal soup of dance history, with borrowings from Ashtanga yoga and gymnastics, reconstituted to create something hybrid and new.

Less esoteric, Artifice by Peter Sheedy was planted firmly in the realms of human behavior and the influence of technology. It was performed at Adelaide’s tertiary dance training institution, the Adelaide Institute of TAFE. Sheedy has danced with many of Australia’s leading companies and has made work for Chrissie Parrott, Leigh Warren and Dancers and Csaba Buday. Artifice is the culmination of 3 years’ development, a fragmented journey of spoken text, contemporary dance and video imagery.

On stage the dancers stand, casually conversing, dropping in and out of pedestrian movement, peering and commenting on audience members as they enter. An industrial atmosphere with dim blue lighting, search lights, slowly rotating gobos and a red light grid create a cold geometric world in which the 4 dancers try to relate. Melissa Jaunay’s lighting dissects the space, delineating areas for actions. Boundaries are tested through physical and verbal play. A series of couplings, solos and trio unison phrases unfold, clearly marked by entrances and exits that highlight the superficiality of attempts to win each other over.

Solon Ulbrich and John Leathart perform a seamless duet of intertwining bodies, manipulating each other to get what they want, suggesting the games people play. Kim Hales McCarthur delights in a hot pink latex dress, improvising a self-flagellating text that merges into popular songs with deconstructing movement phrases. The strain of this stream-of-consciousness solo ultimately results in a shutdown of all communication. Lisa Heaven’s repetitive text on the theme, “Mummy thinks you’re really pretty”, delivered via a microphone, becomes a sinister torment, subliminally leading to the narcissistic breakdown of McCarthur’s character.

The projected visual narrative, blurred spinning tops and the rear view from a driving car—cross-dissolved with a body to the eerie scene inside—interrupts the traditional contemporary dance and verbal vignettes. We discover the car has crashed, perhaps suggesting self destructive tendencies—technology driving us too fast, humans thinking too much, wanting too much, wound up and spinning into a subjective oblivion; ultimately outsmarted by the artifice of their own design?

“If you don’t stand for something you can fall for anything,” says one of the characters in Artifice, expressing my impression of a work that nonetheless tested many artful devices.

Nothing, Australian Dance Theatre, choreography Garry Stewart, ADT dancersMcCormack, Larissa McGowan, Paul White, guest dancers Sarah-Jayne Howard, Caitlin McLeod, Paul Zivkovich, designer Gaelle Mellis, sound Luke Smiles, lighting Damien Cooper, WOMADelaide, March 7-8; Artifice, choreographer Peter Sheedy, performers Lisa Heaven, Solon Ulbrich, Kim Hales McCarthur, John Leathart, Adelaide Institute of TAFE, Feb 25-27

Questions about what defines puppetry or ‘figure theatre’ arose repeatedly in this year’s Ten Days on the Island Festival. When should puppets assume more naturalistic styles, and where does that leave the performers who work alongside them? When is puppetry just a bit of fun and when do our expectations become more complex?

The Heart of the Andes by New York’s Red Wing Performing Group told 2 parallel stories: one about a young boy retreating from a school bully into his picture books; and the other the story of 19th century American painting. This is the 7th in a series of works on sight subtitled “Everyday uses for Sight” and described as a “love letter” to seeing. The homage has a number of frames—miniature worlds, the biological structure of the eye and theories of composition, such as the Dutch grid used by 19th century painters.

Frederic Edwin Church and Winslow Homer are paid particular attention, with one of Church’s paintings providing the title for the show. We are told that opera glasses were worn to fully appreciate his painting. Where Church’s work dealt with frontier themes, Homer’s subjects included rural life, children and play.

Red Wing employ shadow and Bunraku puppetry and manipulate objects in the spirit of a magic show. Heart of the Andes is a series of intricate reveals—using frames, tape measures and beams of light pulled like threads through paintings. These guide the eye and play with the idea of optic distances—blending science lesson and art.

At one point, Hurlin and his puppet interact—the puppeteer’s thoughts echoing around the theatre—suggesting a postmodern take on the form. Objects representing the science of painting are revealed and fetishised. A stylised soil cross-section becomes a chest of treasures containing the artifacts upon which the show hangs: opera glasses, a miniature piano accordion, a tape measure.

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs by Tasmania-based Terrapin Theatre, has been reworked from its original 2000 version. Written by Noëlle Janaczewska, it’s a non-linear narrative inspired by the myth of the lost child which has “haunted the Australian imagination since colonisation” (program note).

Most of the changes, in performance style, scripting, projections and music, were intended to make the new version less literal. In 2000, the journey was more character-based—this time the performance was more centred on the emotional world of Carla, the protagonist. The present became ambiguous. Avoiding traditional narrative highs and lows, designer Julia Christie and director Jessica Wilson took on the challenges an actor existing in a puppet world and a character existing in a world of memories to which she can’t directly respond. Carla was directed to be more puppet-like, the goal being to distance her, and resist letting the actor carry all the emotion—thus realising the form’s potential.

The gypsy puppet that makes love to Carla is operated by 3 puppeteers. A tawny exotic, with stumps for legs and dangling genitals, he floats before settling on her. The scene moves from the sensual to the unnerving. Like the cicada puppet and the Indian doll, Carla discovers that bejewelled exteriors often conceal less savoury, if not grotesque, cores as they become confused in her memory.

Michael O’Donohue plays the lepidopterist who cautions Carla about the hazards of traveling through India. He wafts around her unseen, as chilling as her memories and as Carla’s sinister and neglectful parents—Czech style marionettes with gashes for mouths and vacant eyes.

The drama in The Dark was most intense when disconnected. This was a powerful reminder of puppetry’s ability to go where primarily text-based theatre would struggle to escape gratuity. My breath caught when violent kicks were delivered backstage and a tiny puppet convulsed in the foreground. Carla, now adult and helpless still, stood between them. The Dark was an intense and suspenseful journey that challenged its audience by substituting potent sensual layers for conventional narrative principles.

Where Heart of the Andes displayed conventionally masculine preoccupations in its delight in the technical, the structural, and the ‘reveal’, The Dark was feminine in its immersion in the internal terrain of emotion and memory. A haunting emotional landscape was brought to life by Glen Dickson’s projections of deserted rural roads, headlines of lost children, and Ben Sibson’s menacing soundscapes of cicadas.

Urban Safari, a New Zealand company, introduced audiences to the inhabitants of Gondwanaland in the streets of Salamanca and on the sprawling cricket green of Port Arthur’s original settlement. Endangered Kennel Pigs and Cantaloopas were presented in nature documentary format, lead by the breathy commentary of a Steve Irwin/David Attenborough hybrid and full of awestruck kiwi “crikeys.” The puppets were The Lion King-like and galumphed unperturbed on architecturally unsound limbs. It was intriguing to ponder these mutations of familiar forms and speculate on what was going on inside them. How many people were under there? Do hand or foot stilts create those dimensions?

Ferocity built up as the 1 metre Kennel Pigs went about their mating rituals with all the conflict that their name implies. Saggy 3 metre Cantaloopas gangled, apparently benign, until provoked to deliver one of their “lethal kicks.” The show was well chosen free family theatre through which you could drift.

Stories of Faces began with a dust-coated pianist playing an old standup piano in an RSL hall. She is so unobtrusive that no-one suspects she’s anything more than a local fill-in. Then the flourishes begin—growing steadily until she turns to greet the audience in a playful accent. It dawns on the audience that this is not the filler, but the act. Belgian visual artist Horta Van Hoye allows herself to be lead by a tall roll of paper. She elaborately twists, crumples and teases it to produce gentle, ancient faces. The first, a bearded man becomes smitten with his creator. Later, other ‘faces’ are collected from the wings to form a benign ensemble.

The transformations and reveals are pure silliness—a human bouquet, a face hat, a horse becoming a palm tree—as is the final mask installation, at which point I realized my craving for more narrative would not be sated. Perhaps the extended show provided this. For me the title of the work was representative—the performance offered stories of faces, but not characters, and was delightful mainly for Horta’s own facial animation.

Arrivals was a non-verbal work by Mixed Media Productions that employed puppetry, dance, video projection and an original music score. Again, paper featured strongly. The set was created from sheer textured drops of it, moveable cage walls, and a projection screen. Paper is slashed and burst through. A tense flashlight search follows. Houses are meticulously cut out and envy motivates one character to destroy another’s claim. Paper becomes a symbol of reinvention, of fragility of place and home.

A running or climbing puppet—with percussion creating the tension of fleeing—was an intermittent refrain and an aspect of the show I found most moving. Projections were used not so much as embellishment but to say something in their own right. A captive child creates a miniature world, populated lovingly with flecks of paper—the camera allowed us into her imagination. When a cage moves over the camera, there is the sense that her imagination had been trespassed.

While the work began as a show about arrivals in the broadest sense, it gravitated specifically towards the subject of detention centres and refugees during the devising/rehearsal process. The traumas of uprooting, of trying to escape to freedom, the randomness of rules for granting freedom, and the objectification of people, were recurring themes.

The representation of puppetry in this year’s Ten Days festival demonstrated both the present global renaissance, and the many manifestations, of the form.

Ten Days on the Island: Heart of the Andes, Peacock Theatre, March 28-31;The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Terrapin Theatre, Earl Arts Theatre, Launceston, April 4-5, Peacock Theatre, Hobart April 9-12; Stories of Faces, performer/creater Horta Van Hoye, various locations; Arrivals, Mixed Media Productions, Princes Wharf No.1 Shed, Castray Esplanade April 4-5

Every decade or so, since the 1960s in Australia, the craft of dramaturgy seems to come into focus as a part of theatre practice, and calls for our attention. One set of investigations currently underway has arisen from conversations among Melbourne dramaturgs over the last couple of years. The Dramaturgy and Cultural Intervention Project devised by Melanie Beddie, Paul Monaghan and Peter Eckersall is a continuing investigation designed to generate a diverse range of discussions and workshop activities that focus on issues in professional dramaturgy.

There might be good reasons why dramaturgy is due for special attention. For one, the field has expanded to include applications moving beyond literary models into performance, dance, technical and production dramaturgy. This trend has been on the rise since the 1980s and the evolution of hybrid spaces for theatre has extended and expanded the importance of dramaturgical activities in the production process. Technical innovations and increasingly diverse means of production and dissemination have likewise made the theatre environment even more structurally complex, polycultural and information-rich. This has created the need for creative specialists who keep track of the complicated flow of ideas, technologies, and forms. The rise of performance studies and the interest in investigating aspects of cultural theory in and through performance has further created a need for a new kind of dramaturgy which responds to the postmodern influences currently engaging theatre artists. As a practice that is often called upon to act as a contextual presence in the rehearsal and development process and keep alive the memory of alternatives in the pressure cooker environment of production, dramaturgy lies at the cutting edge of creative praxis.

Secondly, as Australian artists continue to participate in debates about theatre culture and seek to make productive interventions into dominant social and cultural spheres, the need to develop our political understanding of dramaturgical practice also grows. Like other forms of cultural production, theatre is now produced in a globalised cultural landscape and faces ongoing aesthetic, representational, and ideological challenges both in the facilitation of theatrical production and in its various modes of reception. Thus we might ask what can theatre do, be, and become when we live an age of “ambient anxiety”, a worldview proposed by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and experienced through the dramatic manipulation of events. When the hegemony has become theatrical and power has become a mediascape of representations, violent performative acts, and staged lessons in discipline and fear, where is the alternative space, what can the artistic response offer?

In the first of the dramaturgy forums during the 2002 Melbourne Festival, John Romeril said, “I live today in an age in which words represent an incredibly corrupt medium. The feeling I have is that we’re living in an age of liars, where what is spoken is almost inherently untrustworthy. In those circumstances, I suggest that the theatrical response [is] to go into dream state, to go into physicality, to go into visuality, is to maybe ask an audience to make sense in areas of their own sensibility that have not been invaded by the general corruption to which language in our time is being subject.”

The Dramaturgy Project has thus far produced 2 contrasting symposia, the first public and the second more in the line of professional development. Dramaturgies: the artist as agent provocateur and cultural interventionist was a half day public event held in partnership with the Melbourne Festival. It featured a panel of artists whose work was presented in the Festival: Federico Leon (writer and director, Argentina), David Pledger (writer and director, NYID), Scott Rankin (writer, director Big hArt), Renato Cuocolo and Roberta Bossetti, (IRAA) and, on video, writer, director, Romeo Castellucci (Societas Raffaello Sanzio).

Co-convenor Melanie Beddie set the tone of this forum in her introduction, “Dramaturgy could be considered to be the midwife between theory and practice. It provides a process of bringing performance ideas into a concrete form, and it can also allow for the essential luxury of contemplation and evaluation of both process and product.”

The symposium gave rise to a profound sense of discourse rather than the more commonplace artists’-talk-as-marketing-formula common at festivals these days. Participants all remarked that speaking with other artists was a rare and rewarding the opportunity.

Among the many provocations raised by participants was the idea of the artist as somebody who is acted upon, with the everydayness of the artist as an essential way of imagining one’s work. Castellucci termed this an “accidental community” that aimed to generate a sense of vitality and danger in our lives. Cuocolo and Bossetti also stressed how dangerous theatre should be—not in any abstract sense but in the confrontation of staging theatre in their home. “Theatre shouldn’t repeat politics but make politics,” was how Cuocolo expressed his aim, as a “ripple effect” and an artistic expression that might become a wave of critique and change.

Pledger and Rankin likewise spoke of theatre’s “ripple effects” and “concentric circles of consequence” as a cultural agency that extends from a singular activity and enlivens and creates opportunities for social-cultural interactions. Rankin’s nKnot @ HOME, presented in the festival, was described as a framework for political acts—art as way of accessing power. Pledger spoke of the politics of process as praxis that underlies his creative approach. The elements of making theatre—his collaborators, his understanding of the world, and his use of literature and popular culture—come to shape the production as a whole. Leon expressed the importance of crossing borders and how theatre is made as a contract of negotiated effect between the stage and audience. Eckersall said that in a world of borders and constraints interventions through the community of theatre might cross the boundaries imposed on the world: an idea of interaction as intervention.

In February 2003 the project moved into a second stage with a 2-day symposium designed to focus on dramaturgy and professional practice. Eckersall’s keynote paper: “What is dramaturgy? What is a dramaturg?” reviewed the history of dramaturgical praxis and outlined models for its politically interventionist character. Panels chaired by co-convenors focused on particular aspects of dramaturgy and were organised around the themes of performance, dramaturgy, text, design, dramaturgy and curatorship. Each panel featured 3 speakers who discussed their personal case studies, which were presented with discussions of future directions for theatre and performance praxis in general.

For the final panel, artistic directors and senior staff from major organisations and independent companies were invited to respond to the project themes as a whole. The panel largely accepted the need for dramaturgy to be valued in the wider creative process; the question was: how to pay for it. An audience largely drawn from the theatre community reinforced the convenors’ intentions that the forum act as professional development. Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter gave a rousing performative wrap-up to the proceedings.

We are now considering ways to extend the project, specifically into workshop based activities and possible studio-performance based outcomes.

An edited transcript of Dramaturgies: the artist as agent provocateur and cultural interventionist from the Melbourne Festival forum is published on the RealTime website. [currently offline] A report on the second Dramaturgies conference will appear in RT56.

The dramaturgy and cultural intervention project was devised by Melanie Beddie, Paul Monaghan and Peter Eckersall. We gratefully note the support of Arts Victoria and thank the Melbourne Festival, The School of Creative Arts, University of Melbourne and all the artists who generously participated in the project.

The Sydney Theatre Company’s busy and highly productive Blueprints Literary program is run by Nick Marchand, Artistic Development Manager, and, until recently, Artistic Associate Stephen Armstrong who has left Sydney for Melbourne.

Overall, the Blueprints program adroitly combines development and production, offering playwrights very practical assistance and staging some of the most interesting and challenging work from the STC in recent years, as directed by Wesley Enoch and Benedict Andrews. Benjamin Winspear (a fine performer: Kate Champion’s Same, same But Different; Max Lyandvert’s production of Richard Foreman’s My Head is a Sledgehammer) has taken over the resident directorship, staging 2 plays in 2003 that are emerging from the writers’ program: Ben Ellis’ These People and Brendan Cowell’s Morph.

The literary program of Blueprints comprises professional development for an invited “assembly” of 5 playwrights, bi-monthly rehearsed playreadings (including in 2002 a rare opportunity to experience recent German playwriting) and public forums (The Advance Party). Other writers in the assembly are Vanessa Bate, Emma Vuletic and Marchand himself, all working on the development of full-length plays with dramaturgs Beatrix Christian, Louise Fox and Jane Fitzgerald and mentors David Berthold (the newly appointed AD at Griffin), Verity Laughton, Marion Potts, John Romeril and, until recently, Nick Enright (whose recent death is sadly lamented). The program also includes short-term ‘responsive projects’ allowing writers to work experimentally with actors, directors and dramaturgs on smaller projects. That’s where this discussion with playwright Ben Ellis (whose Falling Petals opens shortly at Melbourne’s Playbox) and dramaturg Louise Fox (a film and television writer remembered as a striking performer in Barrie Kosky’s Gilgul Theatre).

Ben Ellis The Responser project I did as part of the Writers’ Assembly in 2002, where each of the writers took on an 8 week time-frame, picked an article and used it as source for a half hour presentation. Mine was based on the transcripts of the Senate Enquiry into ‘the children overboard affair.’ It involved a workshop with actors, a really rewarding process, both for verbatim and imagined responses to the text but also in having to work outside the box. The “fog of war” was really interesting. Admiral Shackleton more or less accidentally said that there hadn’t been anyone thrown overboard and in an attempt by the Navy to get themselves out of a problem he read out an amazing statement that read like a postmodern poem about how things come together and create a fact and then they disperse…a kind of mist of Naval language.

These People is another project, originally inspired by peoples’ experience of detention centres in Australia—they’re actually called “Immigration, Reception and Processing” centres. ACM have advertised positions for detention centres even though legally they’re not to call them that. I gathered interviews with people who’d worked in the centres but we didn’t want the focus to be on them and Ben [Winspear] and I had talked about how it couldn’t be just a verbatim piece as told by refugees…there were certain problems of reception of voice, of attitude, which you can solve with say a play like Aftershocks [about the Newcastle earthquake]—not that that’s an easy piece…

BE …[So] we realised we’d have to investigate those variables in the process. After a while I decided it had to be about the Australian response to the refugee story, which is a story older than the Bible…We have to see what’s changed, what’s the rupture—it’s a change in the Australian mindset to asylum seekers by boat…something has shifted and we had to investigate that.

KG It was something bigger, not just a matter of falling for government rhetoric?

BEYes, something bigger and how that was interfacing with that government rhetoric. At the same time there was a Human Rights enquiry into the effect of detention on children which brings up a lot of horrific details.

Louise Fox I’d read a lot of the material Ben had sent us and I was there for the 2 weeks and then, when we came back together, the play formed. When we started off we were just throwing all kinds of exercises at the material. The concept of the play genuinely grew out of the workshop.

BE And we did a lot of exercises dealing with attitude, taking bits of language and speaking in different ways, working with archetypes.

BE I think that’s what it’s about when, as a body politic, we’re encountering a refugee, it’s someone we’re imagining. The first project, Select Committee For Imagining a Certain Maritime Incident: A Progress Report, looked at a recurring nightmare of the threat of cultural and geographic invasion. The words that kept coming up were completely related to the imagination, the subconscious if you like—not just the fact, but the dreaming of the fact and how those 2 interrelate. If you look at Philip Ruddock’s language it’s devoid of specific details, and he’s a master of that, [creating space] for people to imagine that refugees are hitting and cutting themselves for a good outcome…

LF Not as concretely as it became. What we noticed was that we had a ‘family’ in the room, with 2 older and 2 younger actors, a family in an odd space confronted with this odd information. Once we’d said they look like a family, Ben went away and then came back with characters, in many ways Australian archetypes but with very specific details about them. Ben’s plugging into a history of anxiety—half of the material is [documentary], half is generated from these characters who pretty much speak in third person, so there’s a level of dissonance in the way they deal with themselves.

It’s about making you listen because we’re so assaulted with mediaspeak and it’s very easy not to actually hear. The moment you shift an attitude you begin to hear…There’s not a single moment in the play where you hear a piece of information from the person you’d expect to hear it from…so it’s constantly trying to shift your ear.

KG Australian political writing is not good at language analysis, though Guy Rundle’s Quarterly Essay on John Howard is an exception.

LF I think that’s where Ben is gifted. The play feels as politically sophisticated as it is theatrically.

BE I think the area itself [the ‘refugee play’] is a place where normal storytelling or story as function has all of sudden failed, because every person who wants to tell their story thinks it will deliver the final word and the release—from having it listened to and accepted.

BE The audience have to listen. They have to make a story themselves, in terms of their own lives in response to the show.

LF There wasn’t a script initially, so I’m here to help Ben and everyone make the best piece of theatre they can. It was about provoking Ben and finding links for him all the time…

KG …moving towards a script? Worked on by a group but not group-devised, still writer-centred?

BE You need as a playwright, at some stage, to get in contact with the idea that it’s actually a craft, with bodies in time and space and that’s what it’s about. You can, if you’re a developing playwright, be left in a room with no idea what an actor does, or what you need or what kinds of things might spark you off.

KG This oscillation between the aloneness of writing and the togetherness with the creative team, do you enjoy it?

BE I like it when it’s very compressed—it’s a conversation between those 2 states…

Late summer in Brisbane. It’s a shock to be asked to leave the cool cavern of the Powerhouse foyer to face the mid-afternoon sun. The expanse of river blunts the blow, but as I venture out with other ticket-holders to Altered States, I’m anxious we might be in for a dose of al fresco youth theatre.

Thankfully we re-enter via a fire exit. Another sensory adjustment—this time far more promising. The gritty backstage of the Visy Theatre is awash with movement. A map of terra nullius flashes unevenly on the bare brick wall. A phone operator welcomes a Brisbane Transport enquiry. A sail billows as we float among the words and images of first settlement folly and contemporary city life.

Altered States was a collaboration between Brisbane’s Backbone Youth Arts and Sydney’s PACT Youth Theatre that aimed to investigate notions of identity emerging from a sense of place, in this case Brisbane and Sydney. Originally conceptualised by former company directors, Caitlin Newton-Broad (PACT) and Lana Gishkariany (Backbone), it was brought to fruition by a team of over 20 writers, performers, and new media artists directed by PACT’s Regina Heilmann and Backbone’s Brendan Ross. It was an ambitious task that must have had its fair share of long distance difficulties. One can only wonder at the kind of intensity wrought in the final 2 weeks of the process when the teams met in Brisbane; a period described in the program as “a perilous negotiation between each team’s ideas, processes and material, with the intent of gradually rubbing up, intruding and merging with each other.” Whatever they did, it worked. Altered States was an exhilarating exploration of 2 cities and the restlessness that they and their histories invoke.

Having moved through the initial sense-scape, we took our seats for the rest of the performance, played out in mostly alternating scenes: Sydney/Brisbane, Brisbane/Sydney. The predictability of the format was avoided by intelligently integrated video (Sam James) and sound (Gail Priest and Lawrence English), key collaborative segments, and the energy of partly improvised scenes. The jovial banter among the cast gave an open and confident feel to the performance, which featured some great writing, particularly from the Sydney mob.

The take on Sydney was sexy, sinful, and grimy. It opened with the bawdy Polly Lee who “came to tea, had some whisky up her sleeve.” This established the tone of the Sydney trajectory and demonstrated the impressive ensemble capabilities of PACT. They persuasively gave form to the city as “a woman wearing too many petticoats”, moving effortlessly between its star-spangled marketing, pre-dawn underbelly and congenial absurdities (where did that human fly come from?). These vignettes segued into ruminations on national character and identity, while the group scenes about metropolitan life delivered some treasured lines: “Exhausted exhausts create sunsets immaculate/shall I speed up your thighs into the nitty gritty of you, dirty city?”

Quite a contrast, then, to languid Brisbane stories marked by the paradox of hot coffee and humidity. Apart from the pre-show trek outdoors, Brisbane was introduced by its “planned hipness”: all blue sky, palms and phallic office buildings. Puncturing the touristic fantasy were the fabulous jests of sliding off chairs, slipping out of focus, melting into stupor…until the inevitable Munchian “FUUUUUUCK.” So Brisbane. Then came the thunderstorm and, for the lucky audience, the watermelon. Slurping in our seats, all was again good with the world. While the Northerners’ writing was not quite as developed, the evocation of urban tropicality was cleverly nuanced and self-reflexive. Bodies were infused with the city’s summertime rhythms and the physicality of the work was strong.

An integral link was the shared desire for altered states and constant movement. An inevitable consequence of being young? Or standard issue for contemporary urban living on Australia’s eastern seaboard? On many levels, the Backbone/PACT performance was insightful, sophisticated and fun. Here’s to more “perilous negotiations” of this type.

Altered States devised, written and performed by members of Backbone Youth Arts and PACT Youth Theatre, directors Brendan Ross, Regina Heilmann, video Sam James, sound Gail Priest, Lawrence English, original concept Caitlin Newton-Broad & Lana Gishkariany, Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, Mar 7-11

The Works is an 8-day community arts festival that celebrates the art, heart and soul of the City of Glenorchy. A community-driven, grass-roots arts event, it is unlike anything else seen in Tasmania. More than 40 commissioned Tasmanian artists worked with school kids, youth groups, pensioners and people from Aboriginal and other communities to build collaborative relationships and create 36 diverse projects including film, sculpture, theatre, writing, music and visual art.

An initiative of Glenorchy City Council and Kickstart Arts, The Works succeeds because it is a themed festival that energetically explores the ideas of working life that are central to the Glenorchy community’s view of itself.

Pasminco’s Zinc Smelter was the venue for the Dusk Drive short film night coordinated by Roland Gabatel. Assisted by creative mentors, 24 filmmakers produced short video, animation and grooves. While often focused on young male enthusiasm for skateboarding, motor-X, horror and music, the art and animation clips interspersing each video short included the talent of Trent Robert Fisher’s Witness da Quickness, Squid and Jester and Tara Ford’s smart and imagistically street-wise SK8 Girl. Sixteen of the filmmakers contributed to the shoot-to-show Pocket Maxi program of 3 minute super 8 films, with the Benjafield Collective providing an enthusiastic and often amusing live backing track.

The Community Spirits exhibition at historic St Matthews Church, coordinated by visual artists Chantelle Delrue and Gwen Egg and audio designer Geoff Allan, explored the meaning of individual and community spirit. The exhibition featured hundreds of individually painted prayer flags, each with a Peace motif and a temple sculpture developed by the Burmese Buddhist Society beside Jo McCann’s delicate painted-glass mandala tiles.

Palawa Aboriginal Corporation was the setting for an open day celebration of contemporary Aboriginal culture and the screening of Muttonbirding, a continuous journey by video artist Fiona Richardson. This work featured a group of Tasmanian Aboriginals on their annual mutton birding trip and includes a moving sequence that revisits and reinforces the potency of traditional ways.

At the hard rock, hip hop sound stage, Lab A revved it out as part of the multi-arts street party. Professor Psycho’s arresting vocals were backed by the impressive drummer Evil, bassist Komodo and lead guitarist Gede.

A pack of reporters accosted a surprised spectator. Microphones, cameras and sound booms were thrust into the victim’s face. The quirky Jamie Thompson group of local grade 8 drama students interviewed in unison, extracting intimate confessions in a barrage of mindless copycat reporting.

With a section of Main Road covered in piles of junk, enthusiastic teams competed in the loud and live Collex/Recovery Sculpture Slam. Urged on by MC Ian Pidd, the wannabee Robert Klippels managed to create the humorous and bizarre with the winners decided by spectator applause.

Norman Circle, Glenorchy was the hilarious setting for Sight Seeing, one of 4 plays included in Blockbusters Theatre. Metro bus passengers observed residents and supporting actors during 4 circuits of the street. The plot unfolded with the aid of a shepherd searching for his sheep, an inebriated father en route to his daughter’s wedding, a Santa being chased after nicking a video recorder, and the recurring rear view of a streaker. Directed by Jessica Wilson, the delight of Sight Seeing was the involvement of local families in a realistic drama that will be the talk of Glenorchy.

Situated on Tasmania’s West Coast, Queenstown has a reputation as a tough town with a savage pride. On March 22, 70 Queenstown residents crowded into the Mt Lyell Mining & Railway Company General Office. They witnessed their story at the launch of Mining the Imagination, a multi-media CD-Rom depicting Queenstown’s social history and contemporary life, landscape industry and culture. Mining the Imagination is a complex community cultural development project that included an artistic team of 12 and 70 community members involved in making art and photography. The project’s thematic elements were developed in consultation with over 245 community members during the last 2 years. Another initiative of Kickstart Arts, this time with the West Coast Heritage Authority, Mining the Imagination included mine worker portraits by local photographer Dayle Sturgess and video interviews and stills by Matt Newton. The project also featured Martin Walch’s unique animation of the landscape around Mt Lyell. Taken from mining survey photographs, Walch’s images are a testament to the spirit of an extraordinary place. Mining the Imagination aims to deepen understanding of the Queenstown community and to enable connection with a magnificent story.

The Works: Art, Heart and Soul, artistic director Ian Pidd, producers Richard Bladel, Fiona Richardson, City of Glenorchy, May 3-11; Mining the Imagination, producer Richard Bladel, creative director Steve Thomas, animation & imaging Martin Walch, video Matt Newton, editing Raef Sawford, photography Dayle Sturgess, sound design Boo Chapple, design Dean de Vries, programming Chris Reeves, community outreach worker Karen Sturgess, writer/researcher Melinda Standish, Mt Lyell Mining & Railway Company General Office, Queenstown, March 22

Crouching BBoy, Hidden Dreadlocks is an engaging mix, a guided tour of the grassroots of hip hop that comes disguised as a workshop for violent offenders. The structure seems a little creaky at first, functioning less as a frame and more as a dodgy alibi that allows Morganics to yoke together the various elements of the performance. But at the same time, there is a logic to it, since much of the material is loosely anecdotal and draws on his several years experience running hip hop workshops.

We’d been promised an evening of hip hop theatre, and I wasn’t the only one who found that a somewhat uncertain prospect. “Aw, what?” some hulking homeboy asked uneasily at the bar beforehand, “Is it gonna be like a play?” Well, actually, no, not really. Morganics appeared on cue, checking our security passes and ushering us upstairs. Suddenly we’re in Long Bay Gaol, participants in the violence prevention program (and if the numbers tonight are any indication, overcrowding is rife in the NSW penal system). People jam onto windowsills and floor, and there’s a short pause as everyone squeezes together to make room for the performance.

So what is hip hop theatre? A little bit of everything, really. We get a brief lesson in beatboxing that culminates in a simply jawdropping virtuoso demonstration of the possibilities of the art. We’re shown some basic bodyrocking moves (not enough space for us to try it ourselves) mixed up with some documentary video clips on a tiny television that’s really too small to see from the back of the room, but which perfectly fits the hip hop poetic of making do with whatever you’ve been dealt.

Morganics is full of energy, and he and the show move with a nice sense of pace and timing and impressive verbal and physical dexterity. There’s a prepared rap, some freestyling and breaking (the under-subscribed audience participation segments are saved when the littlest bboy grabs the mike and busts a move), and some amazing monologues performed as a range of characters that pack a deep emotional punch. If anything seems slightly downplayed, perhaps it’s the music, but that might be part of the point. The basic premise of the show (maybe of Morganics himself?) is that hip hop isn’t simply a musical genre but something between a culture and a cultural toolkit.

Seen like this, the frame starts to make more sense—for Morganics, hip hop is about empowerment at the community, not the record or clothing company level, and in one sense the show is a personal history of hip hop activism. There’s a layered poignancy here, a sense of frustration, anger and sadness (a kid from one of his workshops yelling “Morganics!” from the back seat of a police car in Redfern) laced with positive action, humour and hope (“never seen so much rayon in the bush”) and if the evening sometimes veers from hip hop theatre to hip hop evangelism, it’s also infectious and deeply real.

Crouching BBoy, Hidden Dreadlocks, Morganics, The Performance Space, Redfern, April 16-26

The scene in the dimly lit Bankstown Old Town Plaza is post-apocalyptic. We wander along a sideshow alley of grim, heavy, metal cages inhabited by a man watching a tired television in one and 2 girls in another playing at mutual assault. A tall mechanical sculpture towers over us, ominously still. A group of young people with a ladder scurry to a nearby store and pinch a fluoro tube from the awning. And so, with the stealing of light, begins Mechanix, a latter-day constructivist paean to collective invention and unalienated labour. It’s a drama of transformation: the sculpture whirs into life, links with the cages (creating opportunities for aerial performance) and, astonishingly, hoists them (with associated mass human effort) to form a giant tower that the performers triumphantly ascend, waving aloft a bright electric light. It’s a transcendent moment, not exactly spiritual, but with the large, singing and dancing and pretty much uniformly attired cast, it is quite un-ironically imbued with Bolshevik good faith. That’s not surprising for a generation that can only hope for work, let alone work that is meaningful and genuinely collaborative.

On the way to liberation there are entertainments both raw and virtuosic, tense moments between individuals and between groups, the display of bizarre machines, the creation of light sculptures, and collective dance and drumming (bringing a new meaning to the term ‘drum machine’). The whole is framed by the intense musical compositions (with some fine guitar and sax) of Liberty Kerr and Reza Achman, Simon Wise’s dramatic interplay of ambient and performer-manipulated light and co-director Joey Ruigrok van der Wervens’ magical mastery of the machinery around which Mechanix is built (and which he constructed with his collaborators). With van der Werven, UTP Artistic Director Alicia Talbot and movement director Lee Wilson have transformed a cast of some 30 young performers into a pretty much coherent and confident team. Anything seems possible in Mechanix, found materials become sculptures, machines and musical instruments, artforms intersect and, thanks to some very lateral resourcefulness and a great sense of communality, a depressed horizontal world rises up with its makers into a tower of light.

The National Institute for Circus Arts (NICA) was formally established in Melbourne in 2000, building on the strength and vitality of Australian circus and physical theatre work. So now kids, you can run away and join the circus, but Mum and Dad will be happy because you’re getting a formal education. Never mind the fact that you spend all day hanging on ropes or balancing tables on your feet. This year, NICA’s first graduating students come leaping and swinging into the public eye with On Edge—like at a graduation, they even have funny hats.

The BMW Edge at Federation Square bears up well. The 3 dimensional exploded geometry of the building has an uncanny resemblance to a circus rig. Its metal angles echo the larger architectural statement of the building itself, and have some of the same functions—these are structures for people to swing from, crawl over and occupy in multiple ways.

Eighteen young performers saunter into the space, an ensemble of clowns—low key, dressed in identical long, red coats. Performers emerge from this red collective to showcase their skills as individuals and groups—with hoops, tissue, balances, trapeze, cloud swing, Chinese poles, juggling—and then return to the ensemble. There is a feeling of support, of people who’ve worked together for years, who know each other’s sweaty armpits intimately.

Much individual virtuosity is evident on stage, with a respectable amount of nerve wracking anxiety and exuberant energy. Many performers demonstrate the fit and focused presence of hardened circus professionals. This toughness and confidence is frequently evident in the performers’ backgrounds in gymnastics and martial arts. Yet skills without art are simply the Olympic Games—the trick with this form is to do something more.

On Edge is more interesting than a showcase for a series of neat tricks. Gail Kelly (who has directed youth companies as well as Circus Oz and The Party Line) and Celia White (a performer with Legs on the Wall, The Party Line, and now directing) bring to the work a hint of their experience of Club Swing, allowing a natural overlap between youth, physicality, sexuality, thrills and loud music. It all reflects the crossover of circus in Australia into club scenes—and club scenes back into circus.

Further links emerge in Lynton Carr’s phenomenal turntable work. If inner city club/circus could talk, this is how it would sound. Carr’s high energy musical shifts and scratching work feed into the live performance. It’s sometimes hard to know who to watch in this dialogue between bodies and sound. Carr throws in everything—from the flashy brilliance of Carmen, through 1950s schmaltz and into the mindless doof doof bass rhythms of house—scratched together in a live interaction with the energy of what is happening on stage.

On Edge, director Gail Kelly, assistant director Celia White, lighting George Kulikovskis, costumes Jill Johanson, turntable composition Lynton Carr, riggers Derek Ives, Finton Mahony, producer Andrew Bleby, National Institute of Circus Arts; BMW Edge, Federation Square, Melbourne, April 10-27

The day before we put this edition of RealTime to bed, Senator Richard Alston commenced an astonishing assault on the ABC, charging it with anti-American bias in its reporting of the Iraq War, and threatening funding cuts. This is one of the most alarming government incursions on journalistic responsibility in recent memory in this country. But Alston was not alone in this attack on liberal democracy and its cultural manifestations.

The next day, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph (May 29) used composer Jon Rose as its prime target in an attack on art funding, citing Arts Minister Rod Kemp’s caution to the Australia Council about “exposing itself to ridicule by handing out grants for questionable projects.” The Telegraph chose the wrong target. Rose is an established artist with an international reputation. He has had a popular success with the Adlib project (a marvellous archiving of everyday Australian music making) with the ABC and with his Great Fences of Australia performances in the Victorian Arts Centre for the 2002 Melbourne Festival. There are many grant projects that are likely to be beyond the comprehension of Minister Kemp and the Telegraph, either because they are difficult to interpret (and all too easy to mock when taken out of context) or they are simply beyond Kemp and some journalists’ arts experience. This does not make those projects or the artists undertaking them fools or opportunists.

Earlier the Australia Council’s New Media Arts Board funding of the Escape from Woomera computer game hit the front page of the The Sydney Morning Herald. The report was an opportunistic waving of a red rag at the Ruddock bully. Melanie Swalwell puts the event and computer gaming in context.

In the security-building wake of September 11, authoritarian governments—whose only notion of freedom is the free market—can make the most of opportunities to censor the media, the arts and, with workplace agreements, tighten the reins on universities.

‘Arm’s length’ used to be the operating principle for government relations with the Australia Council. Along with freedom of the press, it needs to be restated and confirmed.

The women’s pages

Without any effort on our part, women writers have always made up 50% of the writers for RealTime and the work of women artists is always strongly represented in our pages. In this informal feature survey of recent and forthcoming works, our articles, reviews and interviews reveal female artists still grappling with, if often overcoming, some of the restraints on careers, craft and vision that have long dogged them, or which, like motherhood and working with men, are part of the dialectic. However, whether in the intricate re-shaping of the vision of support organisations, the extended inclusiveness of festival gatherings or the expanded breadth of material and means (the engagement with new media, with the technology of science, with zoology, anthropology and cultural history), there’s a strong sense of expansive views and new vistas.

Dramaturgy and screenplay writing now

The fortunes of dramaturgy in Australian theatre have been mixed since the early 1980s, doubtless fueled by an imagined tension between British pragmatism and European folly. That opinion was still in evidence at the second of the Dramaturgies conferences held at the University of Melbourne in April, but was outweighed by growing interest in what dramaturgy can offer as it becomes an increasingly integral part of Australian theatre, dance and opera. In this edition we have a report on the first of the 2 Dramaturgies events, an online transcript of the first event, and an interview with playwright Ben Ellis and dramaturg Louise Fox as they work on Ellis’ play about Australians and refugees as part of the STC’s Blueprints program. As well, screenplay writer Blake Ayshford reports on his and fellow writers’ experience of the NSW Film & Television Office’s script development program, Aurora.. There’ll be more in our Dramaturgy Now series in RT 56.

New editors

It’s a great pleasure to welcome to our editorial team new Contributing Editors, Mick Broderick (WA), Mike Walsh (SA), Danni Zuvela (QLD), Mary Ann Hunter (QLD) and OnScreen Commissioning Editor, Daniel Edwards (NSW, see OnScreen Editorial). RT

In early May an intimate but vital industry conference on the state of Australian TV was held in Perth. Size does matter, but in this case less was more. Where else but the annual Small Screen Big Picture TV pow-wow can you schmooze with leading local and international producers, broadcasters and agents while buttonholing the new heads of the Film Finance Corporation (Brian Rosen) and SBS Television (Shaun Brown).

It seems that the challenges and opportunities of digital technologies are not being met by either industry/producers or consumers/audiences. On a panel devoted to “crossing the boundaries” of film to digital, producer Vincent Sheehan, AAV digital lab head John Fleming and the FFC Investment Manager Ross Mathews grappled with the implications (creative, technical and financial) of choosing digital over film. While Mathews suggested the FFC would be increasingly flexible with lower budgets for digi-features, Fleming’s presentation of post-production costs was sobering: there was still little to be saved using a digital pathway.

The PAY-TV panel signaled trends in both programming and industry economics. With nearly 12 times the amount of content shown on Pay TV as on all the free-to-air broadcasters combined, subscription content providers say regulation is damaging their industry with onerous local content provisions and erratic anti-siphoning laws. Although resistant to the 10% requirement for local drama, Pay operators suggest that as more subscribers take up Pay TV, additional programming will be devoted to domestic productions.

One of the most forthright panels covered trends in factual programming, ostensibly recognising the “revolution” in programming and the “plethora of new styles of storytelling.” Daryl Karp, head of Factual Programs at ABC Television, began the session with a showreel of the past 18 months’ top rating ABC programs followed by the top rating Australian programs. Surprisingly, most were non-fiction with an aesthetic bias towards dramatic reconstruction, the monarchy (past and present) and CGI special effects. All attracted an audience of about a million and there was not much difference in audience size for locally made, versus imported, top raters. For Karp, successful stories need recognisable names and accessible content entertainingly told, but more critically, they have to fit within the ABC’s program schedule.

Reading the trends in such recently commissioned work, Alex Graham, Chief Executive of UK production house Wall to Wall, quipped, “Yeah, I’m waiting to see the Dinosaur Queen of the Nazis next.” Graham is responsible for ‘reality history’ programs such as The 1900 House, Edwardian Country House and Frontier House and the ‘speculative future’ documentaries Smallpox 2002 and The Day Britain Stopped. His creative model for factual programming is drama, whether it’s fish-out-of-water shows that immerse 21st century families in recreated historical environments, or creating a not-too-distant future and invoking catastrophe to ‘retrospectively’ comment on the folly of contemporary social policy. While acknowledging the “fakery” of these oxymoronic “reconstructed” futures, Graham beguiled the audience with his pitch, “Everything in this show is true, it just hasn’t happened yet….” Despite the impressive imagery and pomo rationale it all seemed deeply derivative—Peter Watkins pioneered the same thing at the BBC 4 decades ago with Culloden and The War Game.

Mark Hamlyn, Executive Producer at Film Australia, rhetorically asked what the ‘revolution’ in factual programming meant for Film Oz with its unique national

interest program and “cultural remit as a specialist documentary house.” His answer invoked the economic mantra of Bill Clinton, reminding the audience that “it’s about the entertainment, stupid.” In TV, it’s not the facts surrounding any event or life story that are important but the creative treatment of these and their entertainment value. Increasingly, Film Australia is looking to “the classic 3-act structure” of narrative, where recreations are embraced, but these dramatisations are ultimately measured against the “cheesiness factor” (too much or not enough).

Marie Thomas, Commissioning Editor at SBS, met session chair Celia Tate’s challenge to be “provocative”, saying few projects she’d been pitched in Australia had “excited” her. Thomas confessed to being a little jaded from reading countless treatments that referenced Fred Wiseman or Nanook of the North. Bureaucratic limitations frustrate her ability to entrepreneurially solicit projects, she said, and she does not share Hamlyn’s lament for the demise of the Commercial Television Production Fund, which takes millions of dollars from the sector. After years at the UK’s impoverished Channel 5, Thomas knows compelling programs can be made consistently on minuscule budgets.

Other stand out conference sessions included Scott Buck, Supervising Producer of Six Feet Under, who charmingly deconstructed the series and showed an episode yet to be aired here. The vicissitudes and pathologies of Six Feet’s dysfunctional ensemble characters are drawn not from fiction, Buck said, but from the scriptwriters’ personal experiences of death and its taboos.

Mother and Son and Grass Roots writer Geoffrey Atherden’s poignant yet hilarious lunchtime delivery stole the show. Atherden’s shtick included a whimsical meta-analysis of the act of presenting with a Powerpoint display that added new meaning to digital performance. As guests tucked into the buffet, Atherden drolly delivered his belief that a bilateral free trade agreement with the disproportionately powerful US will have dire consequences for domestic creative industries.

Comparing the situation in Australia with the US, New Zealand, Mexico and Canada, Atherden assured us that “the argument is not about free trade, it’s about fair trade.” After encouraging his audience to support intervention in Canberra, he received a loud, sustained ovation. Whether the warm response to this inspirational rhetoric translates into effective industry action and subsequent federal policy remains to be seen.

2003 Small Screen Big Picture TV Conference, Hotel Rendezvous, Observation City, Perth, May 7-9

As I dragged myself from Susan Norrie’s eddy, my gait was little more than a palsied geek boy shuffle. The art world equivalent of sitting through Das Boot, the experience of eddy was posture-damaging heavy, it mooched around my body like some endless, sticky largo. Later, as it started to sink in, the experience changed in tone. With time to mull over how this 3-part show spoke to itself and out to broader cultural shenanigans, a surprising lightness glimmered through. What was cool about eddy was its sneaky, perverse mix of rhetorical and emotional density with a maxi-skip load of light-as-a-feather interpretative aftershocks. Maybe all this reveals is the difference between literary and somatic responses—the somatic is a direct punch to the breadbasket, the literary (or the exhibition-dream-work, take your pick) a deferred detonation.

Though I felt the effect of the readerly last, it was signalled up front in the juxtaposition of text works on 2 facing walls of Perth’s Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery. On the left were 2 large paintings, one grey, one a blacky maroon with under painting showing through. The texts are partially covered, partially readable; we scan these braille surfaces, our bodies set at a distance (thanks to museum conventions) and aching to reach out and confirm how the letters feel. This teasingly off-limits word play was mirrored by a slice of text from Ang Lee’s flick The Ice Storm. The segment we read is at the beginning of the film, when Toby Maguire sits on the train flipping through his Fantastic Four comic. He’s just had a kinda kooky weekend culminating in not having sex with Katie Holmes (of Dawsons Creek). (Always a plus in my opinion and, oddly, he had the same experience in The Wonder Boys). Anyway, the text is about the ways families hold us down like sludge and it’s impossible not to hear Maguire’s voice as we read, triggering all the resonances of this marvellous film (the interplay between the frozen ice and Christina Ricci’s intensely free bicycling figure, for example). The significance of this only becomes apparent, however, when we hit Norrie’s majestic Undertow. At the start it’s a pop cultural curve ball that gets you thinking about reading the surfaces of gallery walls, your own family dynamics, and whether Ang Lee’s Hulk will be as good as the hype.

The show’s other important segment is the thin rectangular room of black paintings from Norrie’s Inquisition series. The painterly equivalent of a floor-full of scurrying cockroaches, some are like scenes from one of Kossoff’s oily nightmares. Some are behind glass, Cornell boxes posted from an endless night. One is not really a painting but a concertina-ed fan of paper-geisha girl noir. Regal, elegiac, these also constitute a macabre theatre of the 2-D that gnaws at the gristle of formalism and the more dainty elements of the monochrome tradition. Their viciousness is amplified in the majestic Poisonous Fly Paper, good enough to mix even more metaphors about. A freaky, groovy Venus Fly Trap of a picture, it threatens to kiss you deadly, leering at you, aesthetically seducing you like a praying mantis out to bed some cute mantis tail. Okay, I wasn’t really that spooked, but in this beautiful, small room there is the feeling that Norrie is upping the ante in terms of the emotional and intellectual force that painting can offer at the interface of abstraction and representation.

It’s the sumptuous cinema of Undertow, however, that is the show’s lynchpin. Like walking into a Holmesian fog, the room is dull, lit only by the screens. Standing amidst them, we finally realise the Screen dudes were right: we’re part of the apparatus too. On one screen a young girl bobs along on the shoulders of a man. She’s watching the early bloom of the cherry blossom, thanks to global warming. On another, 2 guys fill a balloon and let it go. They treat the balloons the way Paul Celan treated stones—with reverence, awe and a movingly opaque symbolism. Other screens show aspects of environmental degradation, burning oil, cormorants stuck in oil, etc.

The final (or first, depending on when you find it) screen in Undertow features a scene from Orson Wells’ The Trial. The shot shows Anthony Perkins watching Naydra Shore carrying a large suitcase over the nondescript badlands. Perkins carries his own lighter box, and is relatively unfettered. From seeing the film and reading the book we all know that Perkins’ K is guilty, intrinsically so, bafflingly so. He is confused, though, because he thinks he’s a clean skin. Presented within Undertow, he is unburdened, the oil doesn’t touch him and we see him as a jerk, unaware of anything around him. Norrie is using K (as Kafka did) to stand in for all of us—we are all on trial for our slow-mo, first world terrorism against the planet. And we are jerks too when we fail to realise this.

However, what Norrie’s mobilisation of The Trial shows, is that our guilt is attached not only to environmental issues, but to our structural make-up—it’s part of the super ego. Here psycho-dynamics and enviro-dynamics are intimately entwined. Here’s where the importance of The Ice Storm kicks in. The undertow is intrinsic to us. We are glued in place by so many layers—family, spectacle, aesthetics, desire, gravity. There is no escape, and Norrie lets us know this while encouraging us to question this and question the hopelessness of this questioning. Which is to say that this is a Freudian show that turns on the logic of the death drive, the irreversible plunge back into the sludge and crap we came from when the dopey game of evolution began. When Norrie makes a plea for us to swim against the oily tide, she also makes it damned clear that to do so is impossible. It is this that saves it from being a one-dimensional “woe is the state of the world” exhibition. This makes it, strangely, even more thrillingly pessimistic.

I’m only skimming here. There’s a book-length commentary possible on eddy, in the same manner that Barthes did a job on Balzac’s short story Sarrasine in S/Z. Issues to consider for extra credit might be: whether it’s a coincidence that The Fantastic Four was the first comic to introduce a black character as a staple—the Black Panther. How does the work relate to Gary Hill’s Tall Ships— are we ghost ships in Norrie’s sea of screens? What are the precise connections between The Trial and Ian McEwen’s The Innocent? And how is film used as a substitute for theory?

How was evolutionary theory articulated in performance practices of the 19th century? That these apparently disparate spheres had a symbiotic relationship is the provocative thesis of Jane Goodall’s latest book, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order. She argues that performance traditions as diverse as theatre, circus, ballet and even the rage for black and white minstrels not only reflected the developing scientific culture but engaged it in an active, if sometimes facetious, dialogue.

Consider the career of P T Barnum, that “master of humbug” and proprietor of The Greatest Show on Earth who was born in 1810, the year after Darwin, and established himself as the definitive showman-capitalist of the 19th century. In his multifarious ventures, Barnum famously exploited traditions of the fairground and freak-show, assimilating all sorts of heterogenous acts and exhibits into increasingly corporatised spectacles.

In some respects Barnum resembles the great entrepreneurs like Ford and Edison, his mastery of American hype and know-how guided by an almost intuitive understanding of his epoch. Barnum’s fame and influence extended with the railroad and the printing press. As a manipulator of what we now call ‘the media’, he demonstrated prototypical canniness.

The entertainment empire Barnum unleashed was uniquely adapted to the geo-political empires of Europe and the trade routes of the United States. Goodall relates how, in his later years, nothing less than the panorama of diverse humanity became his spectacle. In 1884 he first exhibited the “Ethnological Congress of Savage and Barbarous Tribes” in which Zulu warriors, Afghans, snake charmers, “high- and low-caste Hindoos”, Aztecs and “Nautsch dancing girls” battled for attention in the show ring. Later, whirling Dervishes, Cossack riders and Aboriginal boomerang throwers (kidnapped from Queensland’s Palm Island) were added to the mix, jousting and competing in athletic displays of Olympian grandiosity that Barnum, in an awful pun, proudly promoted as the “races of the races.”

The spectacle of interracial competition and even the reference to ethnology (a synonym of sorts for ‘anthropology’) is indicative of Barnum’s attentiveness to the emerging “science of man” which, in the Victorian era, was irrevocably influenced by evolutionist assumptions. But Barnum’s engagement with science pre-dated the Ethnological Congress by decades. A defining moment occurred in 1841 when he completed negotiations to manage the ailing American Museum in New York and rapidly filled its galleries with dwarfs, flea circuses and anything else that was “monstrous, scaley [sic], strange or queer.”

To “startle the naturalists and wake up the whole scientific world” was one of Barnum’s professed ambitions. With a dry restraint that allows her wonderfully rich material to convey its generous endowment of humour, Goodall describes Barnum’s purchase of the “Feejee Mermaid”, a zoological assemblage, that in 1825 had been profitably exhibited at London’s Bartholomew Fair and even then dismissed by scientists as a hoax.

Barnum’s introduction of this rather shopsoiled fraud to the American market indicates his genius for publicity. The event was pre-empted by a cunning press release that hinted at the mermaid’s scientific credentials, verified by a “London naturalist”, one Dr Griffin, who had conveniently arrived for an American tour. Dr Griffin was Barnum’s stooge Levi Lyman, who had cultivated the role of expert scientist in various ruses. When the mermaid toured the US in 1843, a South Carolina naturalist called the bluff in a newspaper article, describing how the mermaid was constructed. Characteristically, Barnum managed to turn even this setback to advantage, recalling the exhibit to New York, playing up the “scientific controversy”, and inviting the public to come and judge it for themselves.

Goodall shows how Barnum monitored and exploited developments in evolutionary theory. The American publication of The Origin of Species in 1860 precipitated the revival of an exhibit titled “Barnum’s Incredible What is It?”, a creature purportedly captured in Gambia and promoted as Darwin’s missing link. This might be seen as straightforward repackaging of older traditions of the freak show and carnival, but Goodall points out that the primal fascination of such human or quasi-human ‘monstrosities’ was never the exclusive domain of the showground. Naturalists had long been interested in ‘curiosities’ and peculiar ‘productions of nature.’ Theories of evolution put the spotlight on freakishness and grotesquery, bringing new attention to phenomena that had long been the bread and butter of carnival and showmanship.

Not only Darwin but also his predecessors like Saint-Hilaire and Lamarck (both evolutionary theorists) had brought special attention to natural variety, arguing for a vision of nature in which forms were not fixed but subject to constant mutation and transformation over time. Royal Academicians certainly sneered at vulgar spectacles like freak shows, and would have applauded the 1840 legislation that outlawed theatrical entertainment at Bartholomew Fair—a pivotal event in the modernisation of London which suppressed ribald and supposedly subversive performances: traditions that dated from medieval times.

But science was imbued with its own codes of display and showmanship. Surgeons practise in theatres because an audience of students or colleagues was once de rigeur for an operation. Some appeal to theatricality was essential if the budding scientific institutions were to attract the masses, let alone be pedagogically effective. Museums provided talks and entertainment to spice up otherwise lifeless exhibits, while zoological gardens never entirely shook off their relationship with the circus—nor could they afford to if they were to maintain the flow of paying customers.

While much in this book is side-splittingly funny, Goodall’s ambition is serious. She contests a monocular view of the 19th century that developed in the 20th, a position in which, “…evolutionary theory came to mean Darwinian theory. It no longer encompassed a range of competing analyses and interpretations, and was accorded monolithic status as one of the great paradigm shifts of modern intellectual history.”

Goodall’s astonishingly agile tour through music halls, opera houses, theatres and circuses is an admirable demonstration of the remarkably heterogenous ways in which performers and audiences dealt with the new ideas about themselves that evolution threw up: the connection with apes, the loss of certainty about the human form, the terrifying prospect that primeval forces might lie secreted in the ‘modern man.’

Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are literary works that explore and exploit these anxieties. Dracula’s creator, Bram Stoker, was the manager of the acclaimed “beast actor” Henry Irving whose arresting movement from the “diabolical to the divine” (Auerbach) inspired the blood-sucking aristocrat—“a stalking category crisis” as Goodall calls him.

All this substantiates her contention that a history of performance provides a paradigmatic understanding to the culture of evolution. No other form is so intricately concerned with the fullness of corporeal possibility. Curtailed by bodily limits, yet seeking constantly to extend and redefine them, the floating qualities of the ballet dancer or the versatility of the ‘protean’ mimic who could embody a member of any class, race or creed and then dissolve like magic into someone else, encapsulate not only the hopes but the culture of anxiety that accompanied all this conjecture about what people are and what they might yet become.

This is a book that covers considerable ground in little more than 200 pages: a history of performance which, in the tradition of Richard Sennett and Greg Dening, pans the stage, the audience, and the forces that combine to give them a dazzling frisson. Although I enjoyed the gallop, there were times when I wished for more. Perhaps it will come in future books.

Jane R. Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order, Routledge, London & New York, 2002, ISBN 0 415 24378 5

Jane Goodall is Research Director at the College of Arts, Education and Social Sciences at the University of Western Sydney.

According to founder, Jill Greenhalgh, the international Magdalena Project emerged from anger at the suppression of women’s voices and frustration with the consequent lukewarm quality of their theatre. This fuelled a desire to create not ‘a women’s theatre’, but a forum in which women could cultivate greater discipline and rigour in their work and develop performance that would “compel the listening.”

That was almost 20 years ago and at the recent Magdalena Australia Festival at the Brisbane Powerhouse this aim was clearly still alive although anger seemed to be a less central motivating force. The annual Magdalena festivals have been likened to trade union meetings, lacking a secure funding base and geographic home, they’re hosted by artists with a passion and heightened sense of responsibility. In this case, actor Dawn Albinger conceived the colossal Brisbane event with her tireless Sacred COW performance collaborators Scotia Monkivitch and Julie Robson. With a steering committee and Indigenous working group, they aimed to ensure that Australia’s first Magdalena Festival was artistically engaging, culturally diverse, and grounded in the values and traditions of Indigenous peoples. For 10 days, delegates shared their work—at varied stages of development—and proffered performances, workshops, yarnin’ circles and debates. And while the Magdalena mantle may have changed considerably given the feminist impact on contemporary performance over the past 2 decades, the organisation continues to be driven by the work that women create, rather than by the ideologies that fuel it.

Coordinated by Kooemba Jdarra, the Indigenous program included workshops in contemporary movement and gospel choir, a screening of Black Chicks Talking with Leah Purcell, a dedicated Indigenous women’s meeting place, and a series of afternoon yarnin’ circles covering topics such as Indigenous protocols and intergenerational work. During the opening ceremony, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women shared stories and dances; a highlight was Aunty Delmay Barton’s extraordinary operatic voice singing us forward onto the festival proper. Similarly, the final yarnin’ circle in New Farm Park with Murri elders Aunty Vi McDermott and Aunty Ruth Heggarty enabled a spiritual and symbolic closure for delegates, providing sacred space to reflect on the past and give voice to the future.

The festival’s public performance program featured over 40 shows and offered all the pleasurable intertextualities and associated frissons that more generously funded and slickly-curated theatre festivals try so hard to provide. For the most part, the theme “Theatre-Women-Travelling” was interpreted metaphorically, with personal and spiritual journeying featuring in a number of pieces. Various approaches to stage-managing multiple truths in solo work created interesting generic points of reference, and debates about the ontology of theatre and corporeal presence filtered into a variety of performances and discussions.

Dah Teatar

An undisputed highlight of the festival was the poetically provocative Cirque Macabre by Belgrade’s Dah Teatar. Literally a circus dance of death, it was at once playful and violent, comedic and sinister. The misplaced hopes of the 20th century are embodied in 5 travelling players who create their arena—a wall-less circus tent—and deliver the cheerless refrains of a passionate and bloody era. Clad in evening wear, variously accessorised with army jackets and business suits, dance performers Aleksandra Jeli and Maja Miti march, writhe, distend and fall to the ongoing strains of piano accordion, double bass and violin. They perform dark tangos and “obscure circus acts” of lost balance, human powerplay and “double direction”, while the sombre and beautiful musicians are the ever-present observers, often suffering collateral damage as they counterpoint the dance or mark historical moments. The performance refuses stasis—each episode draws us inexorably into another of equal surprise and allure. With army boots balanced on shoulders, Jeli and Miti engage in a vigorous dance-off that reaches knife-edge agitation. The violinist lies down to play, without losing a beat. A routine facial shave is meticulously executed during a roll call of international commissions for conflict resolution and peace. Listed one after the other, the meetings “all account for nothing” while voice-overs of Bertolt Brecht and Martin Luther King ground the paradox of it all. Truths shimmer and dissolve in Dah’s work as we are instructed “it is only in the dark, that the stars are best seen.”

Cristina Castrillo and Margaret Cameron

“I didn’t want to do a show. What shall I call it? A performance, a thing…a…?” Umbral means threshold and is the title of Cristina Castrillo’s solo work which enthralled with its self-reflexivity and quiet parody on the process of conceiving theatre. Part narrative, part demonstration, Castrillo (of Teatro delle Radici, Argentina/ Switzerland) seamlessly merges the 2 modes with remarkable stage presence and wit. She embodies her dictum that “realness cannot just be found in verisimilitude”, demonstrating for herself and her audience-guests “how to be real and true without [producing] a single truth.” It was a life and art-affirming work that made me yearn for repeat viewing. As did Margaret Cameron’s Knowledge and Melancholy, a revelatory performance in its manipulation of the time/space/body of memory-truth. Shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Louis Esson Prize for Drama in 1998, the piece is a testament to the value of ongoing creative development and repeated outings. Further complexities have been mined as a result of Cameron’s collaboration with American dance teacher Deborah Hay on the choreography of her solo character’s lyrical and evocative journey through landscapes of absence and grief. Another so-called “lecture/demonstration”, the autobiographical work is rich with striking textual play and underscored with a sense of curiosity that balances its potentially disarming darkness. Cameron’s character is at once stoic and vulnerable, personifying the vexed state of melancholy.

Stace Callaghan

Personifications of a different kind were found in Stace Callaghan’s Between Heaven and Earth drawn from the experiences of St Teresa of Avila, Hildegard von Bingen, Freda du Faur and Muriel Cadogan. Callaghan skilfully tensions the physical with the metaphysical by centring these pioneering women’s narratives in the disjunctions of their obsessions and quests—for spiritual enlightenment, a sense of achievement, love. The accompanying video text, which features Callaghan scaling the grafittied cliffs of the Powerhouse with measured calm, provides a resonant contrast to her onstage shamanistic convulsions and punishing callisthenics. The shocking revelation of the fate of lovers Cadogan and du Faur at the hands of medical and religious establishments brings a highly charged sense of the political to a piece centred in experiences of the heart and soul.

Julia Varley

The much anticipated Dona Musica’s Butterflies by Julia Varley was another solo narration, but one that failed to ‘compel the listening.’ Directed by Eugenio Barba (Odin Teatret, Denmark), Varley plays Dona Musica, a character whose originating text (and reason to exist) is soon to be no more. Three personas—Dona Musica, ‘the actress’ and ‘Julia’—deliberate on the causes and consequences of this situation, with treatises on subatomic particles, illusion and transformation flitting through the text like Varley’s ever-changing prop of the butterfly. By all accounts Varley has been performing this piece for a very long time and, to many, it simply felt tired.

New media performance

More high-tech in its interface with notions of multiplicity was Swim—An Exercise in Remote Intimacy, a “raw work” showing by Avatar Body Collision. Performed live by “globally distributed performers” Helen Varley Jamieson, Vicki Smith (NZ), Karla Ptacek (UK) and Leena Saarinen (Finland), Swim was an investigation of intimacy and its discontents when devoid of physical proximity. As Varley Jamieson, the lone corporeal presence on stage, opens her laptop and logs on, she seeks intimacy with distant friends. She initially experiments with remote voyeurism by undressing for the webcam while some of her mates—whom we see simultaneously on screen—return the favour, an act witnessed in mechanistic time-delayed fragments. Together, they then enter ‘The Palace’, an online environment, adopting avatars and playing out mythical lovers’ fantasies. Admittedly disengaged once the avatars took over, I nevertheless caught myself empathising with Varley Jamieson’s lone figure left at performance end once the screen darkened and the laptop was folded. Less focused but more ambitious was S/W/ITCHES’ The Physics Project (Leah Mercer and Amantha May), which used simultaneous remote performance to trial the application of physics to the soft science of relationships. Like Swim, this work-in-progress was fettered by generally awkward webcam technology that is yet to successfully translate simultaneity. Yet it was this very limitation that created unexpected delights such as ironic slippages of action and response-time in the remote feed. It is difficult to know how history will treat these early experiments but, as Performance Space Director Fiona Winning commented in a festival forum on the topic, many new media artists internationally are grappling with similar difficulties. And while many at the forum failed to be convinced of the viewing pleasures of this kind of work, it provoked interesting debate on what is meant by ‘presence’ in live performance.

And more…

There was, of course, much more to the festival: Vulcana Women’s Circus’ seriously sexy new community show, the spectacle of Taiwan’s Uhan Shii Theatre and Teatro Nomad’s poignant Landless—7 Attempts Crossing the Strait. There was a range of engaging works-in-progress such as Geddy Ankisdal’s politically sassy theatrical concert No Doctor for the Dead, Sacred COW’s The Quivering, Angela Betzein’s Wicked Bodies for Zen Zen Zo, and an insightful improvised demonstration by Sarah Cathcart and Amanda Owen of their collaborative work processes. “Aotearoa Day”, inspired by traditional Maori rituals of encounter and hosted by members of Magdalena Aotearoa with Tii Kouka, was a celebratory feast of traditions, new work and cabaret, while off-site Christine Johnstone and Lisa O’Neill presented their gloriously gothic cabaret concert, Pianissimo at QPAC and Sheila’s Shorts showcased 4 darkly humorous new works by young Brisbane artists at Metro Arts.

Last mention, though, to an unlikely feature with an enduring effect. Waiting Not Drowning formed a treasured double-bill with Cirque Macabre early in the festival. Originally written by Sue Broadway in January 2002 as part of the Australian Women’s Clown Project, this version was devised with director Therese Collie and Fleur Evans. Collie’s pre-show ushering/security lazzi made way for the classic clowning of Broadway and Evans whose characters contrasted delightfully in appearance, temperament and acoutrements. Two people waiting, 2 people fronting nameless authority, 2 people eventually stripped of all possessions (including big shoes, fake nose and polyester Tom Jones collar). For a brief moment, the clowns morph into faceless travellers (or are they refugees?) alone yet not…waiting, waiting. For me this downtime was just long enough to recall images of the Tampa alongside all journeys of indefinite destination. As the characters reluctantly parted, Waiting Not Drowning encapsulated the multidimensionality of the festival theme but, perhaps more central to Magdalena’s creed, it compelled a special kind of listening—the kind that’s enabled best through laughter.

Magdalena Australia Festival, Theatre-Women-Travelling, International Festival of Women in Contemporary Theatre, artistic director Dawn Albinger, executive director Scotia Monkivitch, forum co-oridnator Julie Robson, Brisbane Powerhouse, April 6-16

Performing Lines and Performance Space will be bringing Margaret Cameron’s Knowledge and Melancholy to Sydney in August.

Anthea Davis, Eugenia Fragos, Daniella Farinacci, Miria Kostiuk, The Telephone Exchange

The word ‘asylum’ once meant a place to withdraw from the pressures of the world to ponder, as in a religious retreat. Later it became associated with psychiatric institutions. Although the Women’s Circus’ Ghosts grew from outrage at Australia’s rejection of asylum to boat people, the production retains this dual sense of the word.

About 60 women with various degrees of training occupied a set that evoked institutions ranging from those established by the Japanese in Singapore and Malaysia, to Nazi concentration camps, Australia’s current detention centres, boarding schools and orphanage dormitories. A row of bunks ran down each side of the set—beyond this, cyclone fencing and towering, Tampa-esque shipping containers enclosed the rear. The space was as ambivalent as those described by survivors of the above: highly gendered (here feminine), oppressive and clearly demarcated, but also a site of mutual cooperation and support against the forces pressing through the wire.

Ghosts is the first Women’s Circus show from Artistic Director Andrea Lemon after last year’s Secrets (by outgoing director Sarah Cathcart, scripted by Lemon). This work has had a mixed reception, largely because of Lemon’s greater use of abstraction and massed choreography. Although the performers were occasionally overstretched, the use of canons (half of the cast beginning a sequence once the others were 2 steps in) masked imprecision in all but the opening and the finale.

Criticism of the piece seemed a result of audience expectations of prescriptive snappy skills and tricks within a dynamic narrative. Personally, I’m tired of high-energy tricks, even if they’re linked to theatrical plot. Though ostensibly a ‘circus’ director, Lemon is largely uninterested in a traditional approach. Abstract, dreamy physical theatre is a better description of her aesthetic, and it’s more distinctive and challenging as a result.

Much of my pleasure came from observing the women on the beds silently watching their peers when not performing themselves. Through this simple, Brechtian device Lemon drew the audience in to share moments of happiness and pain, liberation and entrapment, which were often densely intertwined. A sequence of the women doling out food from rough tin pots beautifully encapsulated this, creating a sense of hardship, of struggle for resources limited by unresponsive, absent authorities, yet also of generosity and affection between the women as they looked from plate to plate to compare their servings. The show occupied a space outside of time, a purgatory, but also a true asylum. Rather than producing a sharply focused, didactic work, Lemon created an abstract space within which issues of survival, feminine strength and communion were played out, leaving temporal or thematic resolution for outside the theatre. Ghosts represented a moment apart, yet was no less political for that.

The design of Ghosts helped achieve a temporal stillness. By contrast, playwright Samantha Bews’ The Telephone Exchange struggled against a clumsy design of irregular grey forms which the actors wrestled to rearrange between scenes, while unremitting, direct light-sources hindered the dark hallucinations, memories and desires expressed by the characters between more naturalistic scenes. Despite such shortcomings, Bews’ play had a subterranean density. Four women work 9 to 5 at a 1950s Melbourne telephone exchange, their brittle patter giving way to disturbing intrusions of sexual, ethnic and social fantasies and occurrences, which gushed in a series of intercut monologues, moving the characters into a surreal state close to delirium.

I later learned that all 4 dream figures were intended to represent aspects of the character played by Daniela Farinacci, but the relationship between various events and individuals was confused in performance. One character (Eugenia Fragos) rhapsodised about the avenging sword of the Archangel Michael piercing her with divine lust while recalling stolen moments with her deceased fiance. Another (Miria Kostiuk) endlessly rehearsed her dream kitchen, appliances and husband. A third (Anthea Davis) related her fantasies of enriching her drab Anglo experience through befriending her exotic Eastern European neighbour (a Russian princess fleeing the Reds, perhaps?) while the fourth (Farinacci) had a Mediterranean lover whose dark presence was both displaced and enhanced by the image of her mother hanging by the neck in an air-raid shelter. Untangling the precise details intended by these allusions was beside the point, as their indeterminacy evoked a dense, psychosocial world broiling beneath the veneer of 1950s Anglo-Australia.

Meredith Rogers’ direction of Peta Tait and Matra Robinson’s Breath By Breath produced a more successful interplay of racial and ethnic tensions through a meditation on the works of Anton Chekhov. Robert Jordan played Chekhov’s gently homoerotic muse, resembling a sympathetic Mephistopheles or Iago, while also playing a young Jew living at the edge of the Russian Pale of Settlement just before the 1880s pogroms. In this context Jordan’s blackness was surprising. Though one could suppose he was a displaced Ethiopian Jew, the effect when combined with his lightly mannered performance, was to render him a classic representation of otherness for European intellectuals such as Chekhov (and the mostly white audience). The mise en scène did not however exoticise this foreign racial presence. Rather, Jordan appeared as a perplexingly intangible, yet destabilising, unfixed influence—like a wisp of time or forgotten event, hovering delicately on the margins of this otherwise typically Chekhovian world with its focus on love and loss.

The staging of Breath By Breath was based on a Brechtian version of the play-within-a-play, tempered with a spartan realisation of Stanislavski’s original writings on performance. The overall effect was to sketch a parallel between Chekhov’s gesturing towards the beauty of moments of love lost in time, and a similar melancholy on the loss of history, on how events such as pogroms are only indirectly evoked, never fully grasped, like snow falling on one’s hand. The comparison is problematic; history surely has a solidity, specificity and urgency that Chekhovian emotions don’t need. Irrespective of one’s position on such debates, Rogers’ production was a sublime exegesis of these issues, all the more remarkable for its gentle, melancholy ambience. Like Ghosts, the political was addressed by withdrawing into an asylum offered by self-conscious performativity.

Ghosts, Women’s Circus, writer-director Andrea Lemon, choreographer Teresa Blake, musical director-composer Andrea Rieniets, sound Dawn Holland, lighting Gina Gascoigne, set Trina Parker, rigging Franca Stadler, costume Amanda Silk, Shed 14, Docklands, Mar 14-Apr 5; The Telephone Exchange, writer Samantha Bews, director Lawrence Strangio, dramaturg Maryanne Lynch, lighting Gina Gascoigne, set Meg White, sound Ben Grant, musical director Geoff Wallis, 45 Downstairs, Mar 5-16; Breath by Breath, writers Peta Tait, Matra Robertson, director-set designer Meredith Rogers, music Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey, lighting Bronwyn Pringle, performers Neil Pigot, Anastasia Malinoff, Robert Jordan, T’Mara Buckmeister, Bob Pavlich, Bruce Kerr, Adrian Mullraney, Carlton Courthouse, April 24-May 10

Three weeks before she begins rehearsal of her new work, The Inhabited Woman, Leisa Shelton and I are talking about timing. When she announced it, some colleagues wondered why she would be leaving her teaching at the VCA now, after 4 and half successful years. Surely, this is where it all pays off? Then there was her decision some years back to have a baby at which time friends said, “Why would you do that now, when your career is taking off?” And again, in 1989, after training in Europe for 6 years, she decided to return to Australia, she asked herself: Is this the right time? As worlds were opening—Bausch, Kantor, Mnouchkine? Then again, this was a good time for Australian performance—Lyndal Jones’ Prediction Pieces, Jenny Kemp’s Call of the Wild. Having chosen to stay, she looked around to see talented dancers working up solos in scout halls with no opportunities to perform.

But for Leisa Shelton each decision has turned out to be in some way timely. She feels a sense of achievement having been at the VCA in an era of shared vision with a team that included Richard Murphet and Robert Draffin, under the directorship of Lindy Davies. Her response to the Sydney artists’ dilemma in the 80s was to start Steps a curated program of physical performance at Performance Space which showcased the work of an extraordinary generation of performers including Roz Hervey, Kate Champion, Matthew Bergan, Sue-Ellen Kohler, Nikki Heywood and Anna Sabiel. And the baby? Well little Audrey is the envy of her playgroup. How many other kids have kept time with de Keersmaeker from their mother’s lap?

LS My background has always been physical theatre more than pure dance which is really what Steps was about and working with Meryl Tankard in Canberra (1990-93). If I was going to be called a “dancer”, I wanted to push open a bit what I knew dance as being from my training and work in Europe…And in Robert Draffin and Richard Murphet’s work the language is derived from the physical state or the physical manifestations of the being inside the world.

I see the training of an actor as being, from its base, physical but the approach is very wide and it’s internal far more than external …the internal is affected kinesthetically and physiologically. Ultimately the one thing that all good theatre training eventually comes back to is the breath and the breath is a physical act. It’s still a contentious issue—what is physical and what is vocal. Breath belongs in different areas in different ways. It’s a bit like water in the world.

Which is extremely contentious—apparently we’re in for a bout of water wars. In 2000 you collaborated with Richard Murphet on Dolores in the Department Store (see RT43). Does your new work together spring from that?

In the form, yes. The Inhabited Woman is a concept that I’d started work on when I was awarded the Rex Cramphorn Scholarship. (1993) The originating question remains: What are the voices and worlds that inhabit a woman as she wakes?

At that stage I was in my early 30s and it was an almost preoccupying focus for me to have a child. The whole process was very fulfilling. But as I came out of the early baby time, the reality of having a certain career trajectory or momentum and being the mother came into real conflict….The ability of the 2 to function together I found was a myth. I started to read about other women….I became caught in what this was about, this expectation of “having it all” and the reality of, in some ways, being left with nothing.

While someone like Simone de Beauvoir set up a context in which contemporary women could see their lives, and could claim self again, in order to do that and to uphold her place in the mythic relationship with Sartre, she paid a very high price. And I guess between 35-40 [for me] a lot of things changed very quickly. That became a time to question what you can and can’t do any more and how you find the point of balance, the moment when you can say it’s enough. I am this good a mother. I’ve done this much work that I’m proud of….I can personally sit with that. Then I have these moments when I’m caught in or overwhelmed by a certain perception which says, Ah but…what you could have done!

We started with a series of provocations and from that Richard has written the language…The metaphor has come from some reading I’ve been doing about the death of Virginia Woolf, her drowning, which I always found fascinating—that a woman could walk into a river, lie down and stay there.

A few. But not enough to hold her down. The water was very shallow, thigh high. She put herself under the water and lay down and drowned. The will and the need for that release was so intensely present in her that she could do that.

So the piece begins with a dream of walking into a river and submerging and staying under. The river returns throughout the piece and remains the metaphor for the woman’s desire to be something other, to go somewhere other, to inhabit a watery underworld. And the desire which the river continues to force forward and out of her, the sound of the river, the memory of the river, the return of images from the dream [all] force this desire inside her, out and into her home.

I wanted very much for this to be about the internal world of a woman which can be calmed and nurtured, or its difficulty be enhanced, by certain circumstances. But I wanted the woman’s world to be good. She is with a good man. She has a small boy of 3 who loves her. She has a beautiful home. She has all she should need and want. She should be happy. It’s enough. And for her it’s not. And it’s not about being in an abusive relationship, or difficult financial circumstances. It’s about a world inside her which is being denied. And the river forces it out of her. And she has to leave that world and find herself. She checks in to a hotel where she could be anyone and there she meets herself.

You have a team of young artists on the production working with film (Elspeth Tremblay) and sound (Katie Symes) and architect Ryan Russell. How do those elements work within the piece?

The river is entirely sound and image. At the moment, the film occupies the woman’s internal world or the perceptive world from outside. The dream is shown in film. Her imaginal world is projected in the space on a variety of surfaces at the same time as her inhabited state is present in the room. One of the ideas we’re working on is that when she finally does enter the domestic space—in which there is no man and child, just the voices of, sounds of—the film will show how the man sees her move through the room. The other side will show how the child sees her. In the middle is the woman who is neither one nor the other.

It’s like in Asian theatre when men play women because they understand them. They’ve witnessed them, watched them. Obviously the women that Richard Murphet has been in continuous contact with have affected what he’s witnessed…The writing for the women in Dolores… was glorious. His ability to write the minute detail, the complexity of the internal world is one of the layers of [his] Slow Love [1983, 2000] that I love. I always found it surprising that a man had written that. And The Inhabited Woman is very provocative, contemporary feminist writing, written by a man. And some people may have a huge issue with that. But I actually love it that a lot of that language hasn’t come directly from me. I’ll interpret it in a world in which we’ve chosen the elements together.

It’s inside a lot of men too. I don’t think it’s a mid-life crisis point but I think it affects a generation of women who are having children later, who have tasted a certain level of autonomy and self-driven life choices who find it very difficult. It’s a big thing for a woman to walk out of a family. So the struggle is to find a point of equilibrium. And I don’t think the examples are there. It’s ‘give in entirely and be this’ or ‘let go entirely and be this.’ But if you’re trying to tread the 2, then you’re just disappointing everyone.

Personally I feel like it’s an area that we’re not managing to cater for together at all as women because it’s layered with a certain level of guilt and desire to prove we can do it. And it’s all getting bottled inside us as we all try to make it work. Everyone’s watching to see who’s managing to make it work or failing to do so. And for others it’s the not-having-had the child that’s the constant….so that having had the child seems like you did the good thing without realising what it means to have had the child. So there’s no easy ground…And this is not an autobiographical piece—much as it terrifies me to realise how close, particularly over the last 3 years, the material of this work is—some of it is absolutely not my experience…I wanted to investigate the other, not go to the autobiographical place…and I have no answers. This piece unfortunately doesn’t answer things for anybody (WE LAUGH).

When the young P T Barnum bid for the Scudder family’s natural history museum in New York, he referred to it as a collection of “stuffed monkey and gander skins.” No doubt his intention was to discourage rival bidders, but it would have been a fair description of most private natural history collections of the time, which was 1841. The remnants of dead animals: how do you make a show of them likely to appeal to anyone other than a fellow collection freak? “Wonderful variety”, as Darwin called it, is a wonderful concept, but when it comes to hundreds of rows of bottles containing assorted coils of beige slime, or thousands of dusty fur corpses with glass-eyed stares, or millions of spiky insect corpses pinned on boards, who really wants to get lost in the wonder of it all?

Barnum’s genius was to organise a co-habitation of the stuffed monkey and gander skins with a noisy and vigorous assortment of live creatures and to have the entire ensemble choreographed into a provocative wonder show that set out to confuse the difference between real and fake biological forms. Maria Fernanda Cardoso’s work, with its performative interweaving of live and dead forms, maintains a knowing but detached relation to this tradition. The first works you meet on entry to her new exhibition Zoomorphia at the Museum of Contemporary Art are the Mating Ball (petrified) and the Cardoso Flea Circus (alive and hopping in this video version of the internationally toured show).

The first of these is a basketball sized tangle of red-sided garter snakes in plastic replica, accompanied by a curious narrative. In the mating season, the males of this species converge en masse on the females, so that each female becomes surrounded by a writhing ball of would-be mates. Seeking to steal an advantage over their rivals, some of the males secrete female pheromones and so masquerade as females in order to get a place on the inside. But “on close inspection” researchers at the University of Texas have discovered that some of the mating balls contain a counterfeit female and that in 29 out of 42 tests, the impostor was indeed first to reach the genuine females. With its particular scientific credentialling and its improbable imagery, this is just the kind of story Barnum loved to make up. He called it the art of humbug. The narrative could be as fake as the plastic snake bodies, but Cardoso says she never makes up stories. Her genius is to identify natural phenomena that behave like sideshow acts.

The fleas in the circus are real. Cardoso feeds them herself, from the blood in her hands and arms. Throughout the action, they are shown in magnified simultaneous projection so that every detail of their minute forms is visible, and at the end of the show, children are invited to watch up close. What the fleas perform, though, is pure human fantasy: high wire acts, high dives, flights across the arena suspended from personal kites. There’s a cross-species joke going on here that belongs quintessentially to circus humour. Of course, height is no problem for fleas. The difficulty is in getting them to imitate human high-wire performances, and so evoke the classic fiction of a world of miniature beings surrounded by miniature artefacts and replicating all the sophistications of the human social world.

More sharply disconcerting is a large ring of frogs posed like black-face minstrels, with heads thrown back, hands splayed in front of them and knees bent in wide plié. But they are held together by a wire skewer that passes through their bellies, and they are as dead as the proverbial doornail. If they remind you of a chorus line, they also remind you of all the lovingly tortured small creatures that make up the natural history collections of the world.

Cut flowers, impaled grasshoppers, tiny lizards twisted into a crown of thorns, preserved snakes knotted together around a pole they will never climb all contribute to this impression of violated rather than suspended animation. There is violence in the traditions of animal show business as well as those of natural history, but in acknowledging this, Cardoso’s work also maintains an ironic distance from it, displaying above all an affinity with the natural poseurs and tricksters of the animal world. The chickens whose extravagant crests look like the off-track competition on Melbourne Cup day; the red-sided garter transvestites; butterflies that perform sudden disappearing acts through their “uncannily perfect” camouflage techniques. “The vanishing butterflies pose more questions than answers,” says the caption. How come to look dead might be a good thing? Suddenly, one of the common facts of natural behaviour turns into a vortex of speculation.

Zoomorphia, Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, April 9-July 6

Jane Goodall’s new book, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin review by Martin Thomas

Speaking to women at the wheel of 2 national women’s arts organisations, I sense they’re comfortable in the driver’s seat and that the road ahead is as important as the roadworthiness of their vehicles.

Vitalstatistix: Maude Davey

Embarking on her first year with Vitalstatistix, Australia’s only full-time women’s theatre company, Artistic Director Maude Davey wonders whether seasons of plays are the only or indeed the best way to debate and circulate ideas within Waterside Hall, the heritage building the company occupies in Port Adelaide. “In some ways theatre companies are dinosaurs.” While mindful of the expectations that Vitalstatistix will produce a number of plays each year, Davey who has worked for over a decade in the “independent” sector is also in favour of more flexible approaches to performance as reflected in Vitalstatistix program for 2003 and beyond.

Work that deals with “technology, politics and biology” interests her and especially “how these fields are impacting on the status of the corporeal human creature.” In her own work, she has been concerned with the mediated body—“the impression that the body you wear makes, in spite of you,” she says. Being a twin (her sister is physical performer Annie Davey) might have something to do with it. While heavily pregnant recently, Maude performed The Pickle or the Pickle Jar in which she appeared as herself but was also played by other people who materialised on TV monitors. “It’s weird being inside that body. Suddenly you are regarded by others as something other. You are what you represent. You are a mother-to-be.”

She’s fascinated by debates around reproductive technology. “It’s easy to say it’s about wresting power from women to enhance male domination, but I prefer to look at how interesting, how difficult, how horrifying and how amazing the technology is—all at once.”

Vitalstatistix 2003 season opened this month with Davey’s production of Parallax Island co-written with partner David Pidd. A 2-hander performed by Pidd and Astrid Pill, it’s described in the press release as “Not so much a play, more a performance about the performance of gender.”

In July the company embarks on Playgirl, a 4-week intensive play development project with open readings of works scheduled for production in 2004. With some notable playwrights on board, Davey is eager to play with possibilities. Catherine Zimdahl’s Wharf at Woolloomooloo is about a visual artist. “Visual art excites me more than theatre,” says Davey. “What is it about our attention to a work of visual art and what can it say about our attention to performance?…Melissa Reeves has written a musical about crime celebrity matriarch Kath Pettingell and we’d like to bring the musical into some new territory.” Davey is interested in the culture developing around computer-generated sound/music making. The night before we spoke she’d just seen New Pollutants at the Exeter Hotel. “They’re great….I’m looking for the female equivalents.” Valentina Levkowicz has written about a group of actors from the 70s whose guru returns to create a new work with them in the 21st century. Here Davey sees the potential to examine what’s changed in performance practices in that period.

The program also includes Part 1 of Davey’s Future of the Species series. Directed by Anne Thompson, it takes on society’s ambivalent attitude to the maternal body and is set inside a uterus. Part 2 will focus on the smallest social unit (which could be a family but not necessarily) and will take the form of a physical theatre piece. Part 3 will be created as a site-specific, community collaboration.

Also commencing in July is the 21 Days Journal Project initiated by writer Rosan Chakir and composer Lucy Jones in which women living on the Le Fevre Peninsula will be invited to help create a work by keeping daily journals for 21 days. The diaries will

provide the basis for a play and also manifest in part as a radio program in which each of the contributors will read a minute of her day.

In September a co-production with the Adelaide Festival Centre Trust’s InSpace program will see the next incarnation of Cazerine Barry’s multimedia performance work, Sprung. “The thing about technology that interests me,” says Davey, “is how to make it truly performative…The ideas it throws up are interesting to think about, not necessarily to watch…Cazerine Barry has made the mix dynamic, the live body still central.”

“We’re reinventing the world around us, how we live, how we die…” says Davey, “we have to reinvent our theatre as well, how it looks and how we look at it.”

Playworks: Francesca Smith

After a pause in proceedings following the departure of former director Anna Messariti for the top job at ABC Radio Drama, Francesca Smith has been guiding Playworks since February and looks set to take on the role permanently. She too sees the importance of opening up organisational structures in order to elicit work of vitality and relevance.

In 2003, says Smith, “the focus is less on assessment of early scripts and more on catching the ball that is already in the air; less on workshops and more on strategically designed development. We’re using resources in more flexible ways. This involves everything from managing the dramaturgical development of promising works so they reach their best possible form in production to taking on a fabulous idea which has no play yet, just a new writer whom Playworks believes can pull off the project.”

Smith is particularly keen to expand Playworks’ Indigenous Dramaturgs Traineeship Project this year by offering the possibility of actively mentoring gifted Indigenous theatre artists through the process of writing their own work. Playworks has been working in 2002 with Nadine MacDonald (Kooemba Jdarra), Irma Woods (Yirra Yaakin) and writer Jadah Milroy. They decided that the best way to discover how dramaturgy works was for each of the would-be dramaturgs to write a play.

Playworks is commissioning short works on particular themes in collaboration with organisations such as Playlab, Brisbane Writers Festival and the Australian Script Centre. They’re also involved in a partnership with ABC Radio conducting radio scriptwriting regional workshops with writers such as Noelle Janaczewska in Tasmania and Janis Balodis in Lismore assisting local writers over 2 months with production as one possible outcome.

Still taking shape is an idea of Smith’s for a collaborative writing project with Islamic communities. “When the war was at its height, I had an urge to organise a responsive writing project to stimulate creative ideas,” she says. An overarching desire is “to encourage works that situate performance writing as important.” She wants to nurture strong voices, “to fan flames that are already glowing…[to see that] something actually happens in response to what we do…I don’t want to denigrate the private but these days I’m more interested in work that engages with the world.”

As a practicing dramaturg, director and teacher, Francesca Smith had reservations that taking on an administrative job like this might take her too far out of the creative plane. But 3 months in she’s discovering that “an organisation can be a creative entity. And flexibility is the key. Opening up. Not locking into things. Playworks is no longer bound by the page. Words are part of a spectrum. Music theatre is a special interest. We even have an opera in the pipeline. We receive videos, DVDs. What matters is that there’s clarity on the part of the writer about what she’s doing and what she wants in the way of assistance.”

Kerrie Schaefer and Laura Ginters are gradually updating the valuable research done by Colleen Chesterman on the working patterns of women writers in Australian theatre in Playing with Time (1995). “It’s hard to be a playwright,” says Smith. “It involves invisible ways of being. Networks are crucial. This has been important for the success of all those hot young things who are still more often male than female. You need relationships and access to getting things on. As always an important role for Playworks is fanning the flame, strengthening the commitment, enthusiasm, the love to keep going.”

There is an obvious aesthetic comparison to be made between the cultures of contemporary S&M fetishism found in glossy magazines such as Skin Two and global fetish clubs, and cyberpunk fantasies of the last 2 decades, spawning their own sartorial techflesh codes. In fact spaces such as Sydney’s infamous Hellfire Club and those within popular culture (The Matrix films for example) already exist and testify to the regular meeting and interchange of postindustrial, cyber and sexual fetishism. It seems odd, given fetishism’s entry into the mainstream, that we have had to wait until now for the kind of sustained cultural analysis of this phenomenon found in Amanda Fernbach’s Fantasies of Fetishism. It is this very proliferation of forms of fetishism that provides fodder for her academic investigation, which simultaneously acknowledges the publishing industry’s demands for fetishisation: it’s presented as a hybridised cultural studies coffee table book. The book provides just enough theory to titillate, while a range of large format black and white photos offer glimpses of club freaks; features objects of worthy art criticism such as Stelarc; and provides some free advertising for New York’s professional dominatrix community.

Although Fernbach’s book should provide a much needed cross-subcultural study of the pervasiveness of millennial fetishes, most of it is a diatribe against the psychoanalytic theory of fetishism. In classic Freudian terms, the fetish provides a mechanism of both acknowledgement and refusal; a disavowal that the male subject uses to hide his traumatic sighting of the female genitals. The fetish, such as fur, lace, whip or cane, is the last thing he remembers seeing before his moment of horror and so he clings to it ferociously, worshipping and adoring it above all else. As in many post-Freudian feminist readings, Fernbach suggests that Freud sustains a phallic sexual economy in which women are always seen as lacking and threatening to male sexuality.

Her contribution to a more nuanced understanding of the contemporary fetish comes through suggesting other forms of fetishism that can come to terms with the transformative and transgressive qualities of present fetishistic fantasies. She introduces new and old alternatives for understanding posthuman, S&M, technopagan and cyborgian fantasies. These range from decadent fetishism, in which she compares fin de siècle culture with millennial crises of disintegration, to magical and pre-oedipal fetishism. This strategy proves useful when she undertakes a reading of, for example, Stelarc, suggesting the many competing fantasies at work in the man who needs his body to interface with the technology he claims is overcoming it. However her overall analysis is haunted by a naïve desire to always configure the cyberpunk, the dominatrix, the club kid as radically transgressive, whereas anything mainstream, such as the cosmetic industry, remains trapped within classical Freudian fetishism. Ultimately this has the effect of holding onto the Freudian fetish as an object against which we should fight the good fight until the very last of the book’s 230 pages.

There is something lacking academically in Fernbach’s conceptual apparatus that I found surprising in a book that stakes so broad an interdisciplinary theoretical claim. For the fetishism lacking in Fantasies of Fetishism is contemporaneous with both Freud’s and our time: the commodity fetish. There is a corpus of theoretical work as rich as the psychoanalytic understanding of the fetish from Adorno, Benjamin, Baudrillard and beyond, that analyses consumerism as a culture of the commodity fetish. Here the commodity, like Freud’s fetish, disavows the social relations of consumerist exchange that provide the fetishised object with its value. And yet this hardly rates a mention in Fernbach’s book. If it had, it may have proved more difficult for her to paint the technofetishist and commercial S&M world as necessarily transgressing subjective norms. For the utopian, pre-dotcom crash desire to remake the self via the gadgetry of cybernetic hard and software, along with the belief that the commercial dominatrix is a figure autonomously choosing her professional destiny, belong to the fantasy of individual freedom that is the bedrock of consumer fetishism. The libertarian philosophy of both subcultures can be found strewn across the glossy pages of Black and Blue (advertorial for the US commercial S&M community) and Mondo 2000. Fernbach’s failure to acknowledge consumerist culture in the structuring of contemporary fetishisms, and her dated choice of material for analysis, keep the book in a kind of mid-90s bubble of longing for the coming techno-queer cultural revolution.

Amanda Fernbach is an Australian writer who has published widely on the subject of feminism, and lives in New York.

Amanda Fernbach, Fantasies of Fetishism: From Decadence to the Posthuman, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2002, ISBN: 0748616160

Nicola Loder’s solo show wild thing appeared at Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography April 10-May 10. Her work has featured in several local and international exhibitions including Telling Tales, the Child in Contemporary Photography at the Monash University Gallery in 2000, Strangely Familiar at the Australian Centre for Photography and Orbital at Lux Gallery London. She has also curated several shows, received project grants from Cinemedia/Experimenta and has lectured in media arts and photography at several Melbourne universities.

“…The movement of crowds across these spaces resemble the meandering of desire lines of sheep across a paddock. Indeed, these are images of tourists ‘flocking’ to the attractions of London, Sienna, Florence and Venice, corralled like sheep toward one prominent site or another. Contrariwise, a field full of sheep is reworked into an exclusive, loving portrait of only two newly clipped merinos, caught frolicking in a soft clear light. So while tourists pay homage, grazing the rich cultural pastures of Western civilisation, another introduced species makes itself at home on the cleared plains of a new land….

“Not surprisingly, Loder’s images were first conceived a few years ago at the height of debate over genetic engineering, and in particular the cloning of the first living thing, a sheep called Dolly. The interrelation of key terms in her work bears this out: crowds, sheep, species, digital manipulation. And let’s recap the benefits of new media technology too: co-extensiveness in time and space (or omnipresence); manipulability and mutability; infinite reproduction and refinement. Photoshop is not just a useful tool but also a terrifying premonition of things to come, after war, at the end of the world. To judge by Loder’s virtual scenarios, public space, as it turns out, is a cul de sac and the ideal paddock is where the real sheep plays happily with its identical copy.”

wild thing, Nicola Loder, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, April 10-May 1. Photographs and text reproduced with permission.

A couple of years ago New York art historian Shelley Rice predicted that spirit photography was going to be big. Speaking at the Art Gallery of NSW’s World Without End exhibition (2001), Rice seems to have forecast a Zeitgeist (fittingly ‘time ghost’) manifest in recent Sydney photography shows that evoke the phantasmagoric, the spectral and the uncanny.

At the Gitte Weise Gallery, 19th century spirit photographs with their white plumes of ectoplasm are directly referenced in Cherine Fahd’s A Woman Runs. The first of Fahd’s 9 large black and white photographs is a composite image of 3 women. One superimposed, cloth-draped figure dominates the frame, hovering like an oversized genie. Through her smoky shape we see a woman in a landscape of dark trees, running across the pine-needled forest floor. Another translucent figure appears to lie limp in the arms of the genie, legs askew, head out of frame, neck bent awkwardly back. In appearing to haunt the running woman, these pellucid forms suggest we cannot escape—running or standing still—the constant spectre of our inevitable death.

Because it hangs near the gallery entrance this work, A Woman Runs into the Invisible, has a prologue effect—its deathliness, its invocation of an intangible plane (also suggested by its title) ghosted me as I viewed the series. All works feature women, singly or in pairs, running from a stand of pines. In all except one shot, the women are photographed face-on, they are often barefoot, occasionally bare-chested, partially clothed in shawls or skirts of grass and underwear as if in preparation for some woodland ritual. The composition prompts the question: who or what are the women running toward? Because they wear expressions of serious intent or abandon rather than fear, they do not appear to be escaping or fleeing but we sense they will inevitably arrive. With arms outstretched, some seem about to alight in robust flight.

Fahd’s work is strongest when its slightly naive and overtly celebratory qualities are implied: in the final work the face and torso of young Alicia are centre frame and though we cannot see the body running, the suggestion of movement—her blurred features emanating light, the grass tossed around her neck—is enigmatic. Alicia’s adolescent face has an inchoate quality, her expression of tender expectation beguiles because it’s ambiguous. This last image completes a kind of magic circle, in which we move backward from the spectre of death, through exuberant feminine energy to blithesome youth. In all works the introduced landscape (pines, not native bush), the women’s dress and behaviour suggest an evanescent realm outside real time and place: an otherworld.

Also haunting and otherworldly but far less ethereally so, is Polixeni Papapetrou’s bold series Phantomwise at Stills Gallery. On first glance these one metre square, unframed prints, tacked poster-style on the walls, seem to depict lifeless dolls, in quaintly cliched scenarios. These character ‘types’: The Last Pharoah, Gatsby Girl, Pilgrim Quilting, Turkish Pasha, Gypsy Queen were inspired by a set of Victorian masks that Papapetrou purchased before the birth of her daughter, Olympia.

It’s 4 year old Olympia, we discover, whose eyes and forehead are masked in each photograph. But like the subjects of 19th century portraits whose heads were sometimes clamped to still them during the lengthy process of taking the shot, Olympia appears more statuary than flesh, hardly alive, but not quite dead. Because of this, I found myself searching her masked and costumed body for signs of life, of her identity. In Granny (2003), Olympia in bonnet and nightgown, perches on the edge of an iron bed clutching an impractically long wooden cane (it would tower overhead if she stood beside it). Because it was at odds with the scene I liked to think that the frosted polish on Granny’s fingernails was Olympia’s contribution, a perhaps unnoticed glitch. In all the works there are identifying signs—the small brown mole that punctuates Olympia’s chin, the delicate wings of her protruding ears, the neatly pursed lips. But we cannot see her eyes through the holes in the masks. Because they are widely set, the eyeholes give all the characters a strangely encephalitic countenance (which we expect only in the regal Elizabeth 1 with her fashionably receding hairline.)

Why do we search these deathly pictures for signs of life? Perhaps because as Papapetrou’s title suggests, the frozen charades in each photo seem less like child’s play than a phantasmagoria, less like performance than stasis: a series of lifeless caricatures. Of course, that’s the thing about archetypes—as generalities they are inevitably bland. But we might expect, given a child’s involvement, an element of ‘play’ here: it’s dressups after all. And if play is a metaphoric state that enables the child to move from one experience to another via the imagination, we get the feeling this is Polixeni’s game and her imagining. Each scene is painstakingly composed, with a touching and uncanny fidelity to detail. In Pilgrim Quilting, the dour subject, stiff-backed in her chair, sews by candlelight; books piled by her side include, of course, The Bible. The Gypsy Queen sits at a table with 6 Tarot cards, a crystal ball and a delicate teacup for spooking up mystic wisdom; the Turkish Pasha poses—naturally—on a flokati rug.

If this is child’s play then it’s a peculiar hybrid of hide-and-seek and statues. There’s no active abandonment in this inert masquerade. In most photos Olympia reclines—demurely on the chaise lounge as Gatsby Girl, primly in smocked dress and milkmaid plaits beside a chipped enamel bucket of tulips as Dutch Girl. But where she is posed more dynamically we have a greater sense that she is truly present—the wonderfully moody Jack Tar shows sailor-suited Olympia spoiling for a brawl, hands on hips, a length of rope slung over her shoulder. In Indian Brave she sppears even more alive (see cover image). Standing close to the frame, cut off below the torso, in feathered headdress, she poses bare-chested without props against the velvety black background. By exposing Olympia’s skin, in the light and shadow that highlight the grooved architecture of her ribcage, the unique knot of her navel, Papapetrou literally gives us more of her. And Olympia’s defiant, macho stance is poignantly contradicted by the youthful doughiness of her arms, the lovely formlessness of her muscles and the fact that we know he’s a she. Just as Cindy Sherman’s work suggests the scripted predictability of feminine cliches in contemporary culture, Papapetrou’s images play with cultural and national archetypes, age and gender. By miniaturising adult personas in the body of a child there is an uncanny dislocation between what’s real and what’s being enacted. And in suddenly accelerating Olympia’s physical age through the simple act of masking, these pictures also carry an eerie premonition of death.

While 19th century spectres seem composed of light and air, Papapetrou’s phantoms are entirely solid. Their spectral effect comes from the literal effacement of the human subject: Olympia’s neat mouth, slightly open in Court Beauty, reveals nothing more of her self but blackness.

Those early spirit photographs resulted from re-used glass plates during processing. A less intentional but equally apparitional effect can be produced from darkroom chemicals. While pondering an increasingly digitalised environment in the impressive, recently relaunched Photofile, editor Alasdair Foster notes the uncanny qualities of an anonymous 1920s snap shown at the MCA’s Other Pictures exhibit last year. The lighter tones in this image of a man in a white suit, Foster writes “…had faded, creating a luminous aura around the figure.” Because it was insufficiently fixed, the photograph, with its slowly growing bloom of white had, from its very beginnings, assured its subject’s “eventual disappearance” (“Art Without the Artist”, Photofile No 68, “Futures”)

A Woman Runs, Cherine Fahd, Gitte Weise Gallery, April 30-May 31; Phantomwise, Polixeni Papapetrou, Stills Gallery, April 23-May 24

Among critics who regard innovation and aesthetic worth as closely linked, it is common to see Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami referred to as one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers. It is particularly exciting, then, that this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival will feature a retrospective of his work. The retrospective and the presence of Kiarostami, should be a great attraction for the festival given its significant history of introducing his work to the Australian public.

Born in 1940, Kiarostami started his film career in advertising and film titling before working on educational films for the Centre for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (KANUN) in the late 1960s. It was this background, away from the Shah-ist entertainment cinema, that provided a path to the post-revolutionary cinema (which in some ways resembles the Soviet cinema of the montage period) in which everything was suddenly up for grabs.

Is he representative of Iranian cinema? I’d like to say yes, and make the case that given Australia’s recent role in international affairs, we need to see films that help us past the glib abstractions of conservative geopolitical agendas. Whatever one believes about Iran, it has undeniably produced some of the strongest cinema of the past 20 years, doing more to reinvigorate realist filmmaking than any recent national cinema.

But while he is its most internationally prominent director, it is problematic to read Kiarostami as a representative of Iranian cinema. His international success has tended to make him an isolated figure within Iran. His films stake out increasingly oppositional positions within increasingly isolated physical spaces. Kiarostami’s protagonists have always felt more at home in their cars than in the social world of Tehran. His work has moved toward reflexive concerns rather than the sentimental art cinema represented by a filmmaker like Majid Majidi (The Colours of Paradise, Children of Paradise). Kiarostami has more to tell us about the axis of action than the axis of evil.

As with any truly visionary artist, it is difficult to provide an overview of Kiarostami’s films. They are rich in uniting previously opposed ideas and tendencies, producing complication where facile simplification has reigned.

From the criticism of authoritarian education practices in 1989’s Homework through to the man intent on suicide in Taste of Cherry (1997) to the divorced woman’s discussion of her atheism in last year’s Ten, Kiarostami’s social critique has been that of the individual trying to maintain a place for personal choice, for the creative imagination.

It is this personal politics that provokes a discussion of Kiarostami as a distinctive cinematic innovator. If he’s often compared to Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, it is because of their common interest in exploring alternative stylistic systems based on imaginative invention rather than the dictates of convention.

Ten, for example, is an austere narrative consisting of 10 conversations all taking place in the front seat of a car. One conversation shows only the passenger, the next shows only the driver, while a third takes the conventional approach of shot-reverse shot cutting. A formulaic construction of space is defamilarised and shown merely as one option among others.

Kiarostami has spoken of his films as “half-made”, meaning that they leave gaps to be filled by spectators. He has said, “you did not always have to show something to let your spectators know about it.” Perhaps this explains his increasing interest in off-screen space. There is always more around the frame than what is shown, always more to be believed than there is to see.

A case in point: in Taste of Cherry there is a medium shot of the protagonist in his car. As he pulls up, the voice of a man is heard off-screen. A conversation ensues in which the camera simply holds on the driver. He pulls away, the car turning in a circle before pulling up again and we see, in the deep space of the shot, a man in a telephone booth. The space of the scene is unpacked in a gradual and complicated way, and the pleasure for the spectator is in putting it together from the unconventional cues we are given.

Related to this concentration on off-screen space is the way Kiarostami is unafraid to prise apart picture and sound. In Homework, he simply turns off the soundtrack during a school recitation, the better to observe the anarchic individualism of the children in preference to the rehearsed chant they are repeating. In ABC Africa (2001) the screen is black for a prolonged period as the filmmakers stumble around during a power blackout.

One constant at the heart of Kiarostami’s style is a fascination with repetition. Characters repeat actions, traverse the same spaces which are shown using the same framings. Consider the narrative example of The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) in which the protagonist has to drive time and time again along the same route to get to the one elevated point of good telephone reception. Consider the documentary example of Homework in which children give the same answers to the same questions framed in the same shot punctuated with the same cutaways.

There is a refusal here of major ellipses or compressions so that the spaces between, the throwaway material of conventional narrative, start to matter. Where is the Friend’s House? (1987) is one of the greatest meditations in the cinema on getting from point A to point B. Like other great realist works, it finds fresh methods for renewing our wonder at what has been right under our noses all the time.

This unconventional attitude toward space motivates Kiarostami’s interest in people driving. This represents a way of being both in the social world and profoundly private, of seeing landscape in a direct way and abstracted through the framing of windscreens. Kiarostami is interested in restricted spaces but these tight framings also set up extreme long shots, such as the conclusions of Life and Nothing More (1992) and Through the Olive Trees (1994) in which the decisive narrative actions are rendered in such extreme long shot as to be implicit.

This brings us to the nub of the narrational dialectic in these films. On one hand, they are built around simple, tangible tasks—a small boy tries to find a schoolmate’s house, a filmmaker tries to find a small boy, a man tries to find someone to bury him. Kiarostami’s protagonists have a single goal, though the complication is that these quests are generally left in a nebulous state. In Life and Nothing More, the inability of a car to ascend a steep slope closes the film, while in The Taste of Cherry narrative resolution evaporates into Brechtian gesture. The Wind Will Carry Us is about how a film doesn’t get made.

In keeping with the idea that there is always more than we see, these narratives beget other narratives. Where is the Friend’s House gives birth to the filmmaker’s quest to re-find his child actor following an earthquake in Life and Nothing More from the interstices of which a romance is generated in Through the Olive Trees. Behind the narrative space there is also a complementary space from which the narrative is constructed. Life and Nothing More, Close-Up, Through the Olive Trees and The Wind Will Carry Us all feature filmmakers as their main characters.

This retrospective provides a rare opportunity to consider the work of a filmmaker with the courage to see differently and to reinvent the way films tell stories. If Australian cinema is to step away from its decline into international irrelevance, there are lessons here that we need to ponder, and acts of imagination to stun us with wonder.

52nd Melbourne International Film Festival, Forum Theatre & various cinemas, Melbourne, July 23-Aug 10

Duncan Thompson, Blake Ayshford, Christina Andreef, Sofya Gollan, Raymond Devitt

Aurora’s artistic director, Duncan Thompson, opens the door of the slow combustion fire and suggests we throw our scripts in to burn. With scriptwriters Christina Andreef, Ray Devitt and Sofya Gollan, I’ve been selected for the New South Wales Film and Television Office’s Aurora Scriptwriting Workshop. It’s our first day at a remote campsite near Jervis Bay and we’re gathered in the camp’s central meeting area when Duncan makes his suggestion. That, he says, is what the coming week is all about.

Aurora involves flying in international writers and directors, and local industry figures, to work with 4 creative teams for a week of intensive script development. This year’s industry advisers are producer Jan Chapman (The Piano, Lantana), screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty), screenwriter and director Bill Forsyth (Gregory’s Girl, Local Hero) and screenwriter and director Chris Noonan (Babe, The Riddle of the Stinson). The teams are: Cut Snake, writer Blake Ayshford, producer/director Nicholas Parsons; Shiver, writer/director Christina Andreef, producer Helen Bowden; Ice, writer/director Sofya Gollan, producer Matt Carroll; and Highway Toll, writer Raymond Devitt, producer John Cruthers, director Marcus Gale.

Christina Andreef remembers Duncan’s script-burning suggestion as “one of those moments where your breath stuck at the back of your throat—half angry at the arrogance of it, and [yet] three-quarters flying, and open to making the most of what such fine filmmakers might offer.”

I felt disbelief, and fear. I knew I had work to do, but expected it would revolve around the 108 pages of my existing script, which I’d been writing for 3 years. Wrong. Over the next week my script would be taken apart, debated, expanded, deepened, cut to pieces till I was left with an exhilarating glimpse of the film it could become. And all without ever having taken the script from my bag. Aurora is about the ideas behind the script, not the words on the page.

Now in its second year, Aurora was established by the New South Wales Government through the FTO to solve the problems of existing script development models where many Australian projects are under-funded and pushed to seek production finance before they are ready. Aurora is intended to substantially reduce development time as well as provide intensive script focus for the selected projects.

Although based on the successful models used at Sundance (USA), Moonstone (UK) and eQuinoxe (France), the Aurora Workshop differs in that it involves the collaborative team—writer, director and producer—rather than solely the writer. Aurora also provides significant funds for the teams to produce another draft, followed by a formal feedback process. One of the scripts from Aurora 2002, More Than Scarlett, is already in production while another 2—Axe Fall and Little Fish—are both very close to being financed.

The workshop takes place at the remote Paperbark Camp where each writer stays in a luxury tent. The proximity of bush and wildlife and abscence of distractions creates a camaraderie amongst the writers and advisers and seems to help trigger creative script solutions. While we are there our 4 scripts seem to be the only films in the world and the possibilities for them appear endless.

My first session was with Bill Forsyth, described as the director “who gave hope to a generation of British filmmakers.” Bill’s approach was gentle, low-key. My film, Cut Snake, is a love story between crims, loosely based on the burning of Brisbane’s Whisky Au Go Go nightclub in 1973, which killed 15 people. It’s an Aussie crime drama about men who find violence easier than love. So it was a revelation to hear Bill explain that the script’s theme was the main character’s search for family. As he explained it I saw how this theme was present in every scene of the writing though I’d never consciously set out to put it there. But after he’d said it, I’d never see the film the same way again—he’d given me a tool for writing the script, and he hadn’t changed a word.

Jan Chapman was perceptive and penetrating, zeroing in on parts of the script I felt least happy with, but hadn’t been able to find solutions for. I soon discovered I couldn’t bluff my way out. That wasn’t the point.

Simon Beaufoy’s mission was to put the ‘sex’ into my film. He was energetic and generous with ideas and excited by the territory the script explored. With Chris Noonan we looked for striking images and tried new techniques to dramatise those moments in the script I wished to change.

Because in my case the advisers agreed on the direction the script required, the process was like a rolling conversation, one taking up where the other had left off. I found them rigorous, generous, and respectful of writers and our scripts. Sofya said she loved the freedom of the discussions—any story direction felt possible, and “right.” For Christina, “the most refreshing surprise was that not one of the 4 advisers mentioned a “3-act structure in the entire week, nor a Hero’s Journey, or Arc.”

In between sessions we dined, wined and jokingly plotted the world’s worst film, in which we cast the world’s worst actors, titled Bad People. In Huskisson we saw films Road to Nhill and This is Not a Love Song and afterward had a Q&A with the films’ writers Alison Tilson and Simon Beaufoy. Halfway through the week the other members of our creative teams arrived and after ‘debriefing’, the script meetings were repeated. Luckily my director, Nick Parsons, agreed on the areas I proposed and so we spent the rest of the week refining our ideas with the advisers.

Each writer now has 4 months to produce a new draft for the 4 advisers who will provide written feedback, and for 3 new consultants, chosen for their knowledge of the international and local feature film marketplace and their creative abilities with script. Also scheduled is a reading of the scripts with experienced actors. Sofya says the workshop “…will be a highlight of my writing career, in that I will always wish for this level of involvement with future scripts when they’re ready for feedback.” And I agree. As Christina says we’ve been given “myriad fantastic ideas” as well as “an enormous amount of work…sorting and trying them out.” And as well as friendships, and confidence, most importantly the process has given me a belief in my abilities and courage as writer.

Aurora Scriptwriting Workshop, NSW Film and Television Office, Paperbark Camp, Jervis Bay, April 5-12

As a central part of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition Liquid Sea, 6 of Jean Painlevé’s enchanting surreal films from the 1920s to the 70s, were screened at The Studio, Sydney Opera House. The screenings were introduced by Brigitte Berg, the Director of the Painlevé archive at Les Documents Cinematographiques, Paris. Her informative and stimulating lecture shed invaluable light on Painlevé’s art and life. All of us who regard him as one of the bewitching marvels of surrealist cinema are indebted to Berg’s dedication to keeping Painlevé’s unprecedented poetic and acategorical films, photographs and documents (including broadcasts) alive for appreciative generations of art lovers, cinephiles and scientists.

For me these screenings were a watershed viewing experience. The multifaceted and quirky combination of surrealism, science and cinema that distinctively characterises this artist’s magical oeuvre has so far eluded all existing film canons. Who was Painlevé and what of his rarely known and seen films?

Born in 1902, Jean Painlevé was the son of a distinguished mathematician and French Minister of War. Originally trained as a biologist, he became interested in films in the 20s. In 1924 he became a founding member of the French Surrealist movement. Painlevé’s absorbing marine study films were surreal hybrids: research works about aquatic life for scientists; and films that popularised science for a lay audience. It’s the latter that are usually celebrated.

Painlevé was a friend of Luis Bunuel (he almost fainted when Painlevé showed him a real eye surgery film!), Antonin Artaud and Jean Vigo. He was more than a marine biologist fascinated with the strange balletic movements of a seahorse (The Seahorse, 1934), the erotic life of an octopus (The Love Life of the Octopus, 1965), or the allegorical Nazi-like attributes of a vampire bat (The Vampire, 1939-45). He was a tireless promoter of cinema. Arguably, his films were a vital precursor to the multimedia creativity of the 1960s and beyond. In the 1970s he was working on the creative and technical possibilities of the video self-portrait.

Painlevé was a political activist who, in the 1930s, became interested in supporting popular democracy and popular science. During the French occupation and the following decade, he fought for French cinema’s independence and the documentary form.

As a surrealist, Painlevé’s quirky sensibility is immediately recognisable in its idiosyncratic interplay between science and surrealism. Possessing a remarkable eye for life’s eerie curiosities, Painlevé’s cinematic art pivots on the premise that science is fiction. As a pioneer of underwater filmmaking, he introduces us to the wonderfully weird creatures and their rituals that comprise underwater life—a world extended to our television screens in the 1950s and 60s, by Jacques Cousteau. Our ceaseless anthropomorphic amazement at Painlevé’s uncanny films have much to say about our dreams and passions.

Irrespective of their subjects, his films also force us to reconsider our devotion to categorical thinking. Noted for their unsettling amalgam of droll clinical matter-of-factness, playful irony and surreal perversity, Painlevé’s exquisitely photographed and lit films generate wonder and unease. They also innovatively embrace art and science, cinema and documentary, educational function and surreal spectacle. As a surrealist poet of the nature film, Painlevé, is in a class of his own. His films bring to mind Bunuel’s definition of cinema as that marvelous white eyelid screen reflecting its own light to blow up the world.

One of the many inventive qualities of Painlevé’s cinema was his unpredictable use of music such as hot jazz (Duke Ellington) in The Vampire; avant garde music (Darius Milhaud) in perhaps his most famous film of all, The Seahorse; and electronic music (Pierre Henry) for his 1960s octopus film. Painlevé’s ear for marrying unusual sounds to his images is distinctive in French cinema. It was Painlevé who introduced the film composer Maurice Jaubert to Jean Vigo. My first viewing of The Vampire with its combination of Ellington, the hideous bat and its unsuspecting victim was an unsettling imagistic and sonic encounter that remained with me for years. Only in film noir do we find such an engagingly resourceful use of jazz in the cinema.

A welcome surprise at the screening was the 1938 satirical animation Blue Beard, with its vivid and dramatic use of red, blue, yellow and brown and its strange clay figures (fashioned by sculptor Rene Bertrand and his 3 children) forming a hallucinatory fairytale film of explosive lyricism with an operatically inflected soundtrack (Maurice Jaubert and Jean-Vincent Brechignac). This is a film that deliberately seeks to unsettle our most basic assumptions about reality. An extraordinary achievement.

For too long Jean Painlevé’s surreal eclecticism has been paid lip service in certain quarters of film history and theory. Curator Rachel Kent and the MCA are to be congratulated for bringing these films of “accidental beauty” (Andre Bazin) to a wider viewing public. Painlevé’s legacy is a singularly marvelous one: zoological documents that double as provocative cine-poems of unparalleled chance, humour, lyricism and unsettling beauty. A cinema to engulf you with its delirious magic.

A life in film: The extraordinary world of Jean Painlevé, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, March 14, part of Liquid Sea, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, March 14-June 8

“Moist is a video created using light microscopy. I use blood, phlegm, pus, cervical mucus and tears—fluids with emotive qualities—to translate out the biological self into meteorological or interstellar geographies.”
MAAP in Beijing 2002 catalogue

Justine Cooper is a leading Australian new media artist who has been working productively at the nexus of art and science with some outstanding creative results. Back in 1998 an image of her foot, scanned using Magnetic Resonance Imaging in the work titled RAPT, appeared on the cover of RealTime 26. RAPT attracted great attention (Cooper writes about the work in the Tofts, Jonson & Cavallaro collection, Prefiguring Cyberculture, Power Publications, 2002). She has subsequently created a number of significant works and exhibited internationally in over 30 shows in 12 countries across 5 continents, most recently as part of MAAP in Beijing 2002 with the large scale video work Moist, and this year at the International Center of Photography, New York and the Earl Lu Gallery, Singapore. As well 2 of her videos have been exhibited this year at the Julie Saul Gallery in New York. Reduction, a striking video work for 2 performers was part of the Another Planet collection of Australian video curated by Keely Macarow (see review RT 54) and shown in Chicago and New York.

It’s fascinating to see you working in a variety of formats from gallery installation to animation, with performers, to creating components for use in live performance. How have you arrived at such a diverse way of working?

My first encounter with the collaborative process was at the age of 5, in the surgery room of my parents’ veterinary clinic. I opened sutures, squeezed the bag on the anaesthesiology machine, powdered gloves and kept my eyes open. It only took another 25-30 years before I went back to the ‘theatre’ for a collaborative work called Tulp with Elision [the Brisbane-based new music ensemble] and composer John Rogers.

I was commissioned to be the visual director. But in general I try and match an idea to a medium, and that’s partially led to working across disciplines. I like the sense of alchemy that comes from combining varying sets of skills and fields.

The more work I make the more I begin to see my own patterns or themes returning in different incarnations. Sometimes the connection is fleeting, but it gives me a sense of the matrix I’m working within. I think there is an aesthetic of pacing. The rate at which elements move and unfold has a certain consistency, even when one piece is quite abstract, and another one is more narrative.

You have been strongly associated with science in your work. What is the connection and the inspiration for you—awe, critique, the artistic potential?

My interest in science has evolved. RAPT used a medical technology, it didn’t use science. That’s a distinction not always made—science versus the technologies of science. RAPT came out of an interest in trying to map a shift in the way technologies (not science) affect our concepts of space and time. That was a rather large supposition to make. But I’m not doing science, I don’t have to prove anything, I don’t have to have consistent results. I don’t have to ask how? Rather I can interpret in anyway I choose: I can ask why?

So I attempted to define that cognitive shifting through the prism of the body. What I mean is that we are accustomed to the physical boundaries of our physical selves, and they are fairly consistent from one individual to the next. So it was a natural starting point. I then exploded that physical body via technology. RAPT both disrupts time—in the animation the body is built and dismantled—and space. In the installation you can walk through my thorax, for instance. So I saw the artistic potential, and it was a natural fit to use a machine (MRI) built for bodies. Scynescape and Moist used other forms of imaging—SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy) and light microscopy, respectively. Both ‘processed’ and created the content through imaging systems used in science. Scynescape maps the external body at high magnification while Moist used bodily fluids, but both rebuild a corporeal landscape that is unfamiliar.

I absolutely think there is an aesthetic quality to these visualisation tools. If you talk to histologists [cell and tissue scientists] many would say they were attracted to the field in the first place because it is so ‘aesthetic.’

If I were to talk about more recent work, like Transformers, there I actually start to build content that engages with ideas from science, particularly molecular biology and genomics. And the body that I’ve been using all along stops being my own (as representative of a universal one) and starts becoming a body with individuality—an identity.

There is a more critical element to Transformers because the subject is loaded. How is identity a merger of science and culture? There’s an element of intangibility and contestation there. It can’t be locked down into a percentage. There’s not an empirical assessment process. Any time you broker a relationship between two or more entities there has to be a real assessment of what’s at stake, what the benefits are, where’s the added value?

How did you go about creating your video work, Reduction, with the performers and with what technology?

Reduction was a collaboration with Joey Stein. We had access to a thermal infrared camera, which registers heat. If you look closely you can see the tracery of veins and arteries running beneath the skin. While it is a camera, it must be connected to a computer to actually interface with it. We needed to control what was going on within a very prescriptive framework. So that was one consideration in making a performative piece: we could choreograph it.

Each performer was shot separately with the idea that this could actually be a 2 channel work, the channels on side by side monitors or screens. That type of presentation would accentuate the ambiguity over whether the characters are trying to communicate with the audience or each other. The ‘language’ they use is pretty responsive and primal. Originally we were looking at dead or near extinct languages, and then ended up layering another ‘aural performance’ over the visual track, where the sound is created by recording the performers responding with a small delay, which was then re-aligned in post-production.

New York is difficult in terms of accessing facilities; or rather it takes longer. However it does have a much stronger tradition of philanthropy and corporate giving. A work like Reduction can be done at little cost, but the projects I am interested in developing now are more ambitious, involving public spaces and large technical and equipment costs. My hope is that I can make them happen. I didn’t come to New York simply because there is more money here—the cost of surviving here is considerably higher after all. There are opportunities, though, and I feel I’ve been very fortunate in both Australia and New York. I see my path as more of an orbit, moving through both places on a regular basis, working on projects in both countries.

When the 2003 Queensland New Filmmakers Award screening night opened with Peri Campbell’s experimental short Eating Disorder, an imaginative video self-portrait cleverly effacing its 90s-feminist-sounding title, viewers might have expected the other shortlisted films to be similarly bold exercises in style and content. But with a couple of exceptions, most of the works selected—particularly the winners—from the many entries (QNFA won’t give exact figures) strove more for industry-mimetic technical proficiency than innovation.

Teenager Campbell received an award for her hyper-kinetic, absurdist piece—complete with alphabet-soup text—about her diasporic family history. Another successful film, Pens at Ten Paces (dir Tim Noonan), about 2 dueling letter writers, illustrated the potential for formal experimentation within the confines of the ‘odd couple’ narrative structure. Painting the Tomatoes (dir Elizabeth Murphy), with its ambiguous, dreamlike story about an elderly man’s recollections, and daring thematic use of colour and texture, was one of the few defiantly arthouse films seen at QNFA in recent years.

Nonetheless, the winner, Prep Rules (dir Luke Mayze), which received numerous awards, was a typical—some would say archetypal—QNFA winner. Technically faultless, with strong performances and a cautious, if irresolute melodramatic narrative about bullying in a boys’ school, its key creative talents have significant but unrecognised industry presence, like the professional animators of the much-rewarded Cane Toad (dir David Clayton). In both cases the awards confirmed the industry standards achieved by both works and their semi-professional makers.

Since its launch 16 years ago, QNFA has become Australia’s biggest industry-sponsored award event, which explains the judicial emphasis on technical perfection over formal innovation or risk-taking content. The inherent conservatism of the film industry hardly needs reiterating: the capital-intensive nature of film production usually results in filmmakers avoiding anything too adventurous that might limit a film’s profit potential in the market. Risky work has a necessarily small niche in the industry and QNFA explicitly recognises that by rewarding the films (and they are usually films, video is still considered the province of the novice, amateur or artist) that most closely reproduce the industry’s commercial criteria.

However, QNFA’s critics argue that adhering to the conformity-as-survival model obviates innovation and ignores other kinds of emerging talent. Some say few audaciously different films make it to the judging round: films that are very experimental, that are anti-plot or deliberately disjointed are the ones that miss out on selection. Whether or not QNFA’s initial selectors are bombarded with a panoply of adventurous, innovative audiovisual works remains shrouded in the famous mists of QNFA secrecy about the judging process.

However, along with the unambiguous commercial orientation within the field, there is discernible discontent about the selection process—judges are given a shortlist of about 5 films from which to select the winner. John Willsteed from Scope Sound Post Production, a QNFA Craft Industry judge for 6 years, says he “hates” the abbreviated selection he receives as “most people have cloth ears.” Other judges expressed similar concerns about the selection process, which they consider flawed because “…you see films up for awards in other categories that are much better than 3 out of the 5 you were given in your category.” Willsteed, as famous for his witty and incisive speeches at QNFA as he is for mentoring young media makers, makes a convincing case for more expert involvement in the pre-selection process.

Other critics, particularly from the production sector, are more concerned at what they see as the Awards’ subtly coercive role. Sarah-Jane Woulahan of Square-eyed Films says there is an internalisation of the status quo among budding film talent in Queensland. At “…precisely the moment young media makers should be taking risks and pursuing their own unique ideas” they are encouraged to produce “what the QNFA wants”—inevitably something “safe and bland.” Woulahan says this sense of implicit compulsion, stemming from the Awards’ hefty industry backing, inures both makers and audiences to staid, prudent modes of practice. “[T]here are some great works that slip through the cracks because they’re not seen as ‘marketable’ forms. The issue here is…how does the market know what it wants if it doesn’t even get a chance to choose?” When the financial security assured for work that fits commercial standards is set against the risks posed by experiment—the industry wins outright.

Others still argue for the importance of the awards given their function as a gateway to the industry. But how much do QNFA winners represent the greater production of emerging talent in Queensland? Independent producer Judd Tilyard says QNFA “is an awards ceremony with particular tastes and attracting limited submissions. No festival, market or awards ceremony could ever hope to represent the work of an entire state, or even an entire city for that matter…QNFA reflects the kind of filmmaking that people thought stood a good chance at winning QNFA.” This tallies with other voices from the production-sector that commend the awards’ unique nursery/laboratory role in bringing industry sponsors and aspiring filmmaking teams together.

Forcefully pragmatic considerations of ‘quality’ and ‘professionalism’ underlie QNFA’s commercial imperative. However, though the Australian industry undoubtedly needs commercial talent, it also needs equally bold attempts to re-invigorate old forms.

There is an argument for a greater balance between the QNFA’s role in perpetuating sanctioned modes of filmmaking and fostering the exploration of new forms and ideas. Perhaps, as Tilyard says, Queensland film and video artists could one day dare to dream of “a whole new awards ceremony, maybe sponsored by an arts body, where the emphasis is on creativity instead of commercialism.”

Warner Roadshow Studios 17th Queensland New Filmmakers Awards, Queensland Conservatorium of Music, April 30; public screenings, Hoyts Regent Cinemas, April 14

Australian cinephiles will be well and truly aware by now of the stir that Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark has produced around the globe. The film has sent many a respected film critic into raptures over its artistic and technical merits. Our own filmmaking culture is so often accused of being formally and thematically conservative that it is worth examining any overseas film that has been almost universally hailed as groundbreaking on both counts, and asking what lessons, if any, it can offer Australian filmmakers.

Russian Ark takes place entirely in and around St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum, formerly the Czar’s Winter Palace. As the film opens, the audience immediately have the sense of falling into a dream. We hear an unseen narrator, through whose eyes we see the entire movie, mutter something about experiencing an accident, and suddenly finding himself stumbling into the Winter Palace, unseen amongst a group of 19th century aristocratic revellers. Inside the Palace, he comes across a fellow time traveller, the Marquis Astolf De Custine, a 19th century French diplomat, and the 2 begin a journey through 33 rooms and 300 years of Russian history. Among other things, they see Catherine the Great wandering in the snow, Czar Nicholas II dining with his family, and the last great ball held at the Palace on the verge of the First World War in 1913.

One of the primary reasons Russian Ark has attracted so much attention is the film’s immense technical accomplishment. By shooting on high definition video and recording the uncompressed image straight onto hard disk, Sokurov was able to capture the film’s action in a single, uninterrupted take lasting approximately one and a half hours. When one considers that the film involves a thousand extras, takes place in 33 different rooms, and had to be set up and shot in the course of 3 days (the time the Hermitage’s directors were prepared to have the museum closed to the public), one begins to comprehend what a stupendous technical feat Russian Ark is. What all this logistical genius actually adds up to, however, is at best an empty spectacle dressed up with all the trappings of old world, pre-modern classical art, and at worst, a deeply conservative and ahistorical piece of reactionary nostalgia.

There is a long tradition of modernist filmmaking heavily reliant on the long take, stretching back at least as far as the Italian Neo-Realist films of the 1940s. The contemporaneous commentary on Neo-Realism provided by French critic Andre Bazin still provides an incisive reading of the philosophical implications of this stylistic approach. At first glance, a single-shot film like Russian Ark may seem like the realisation of the ultimate Bazinian filmmaking fantasy, but as Benjamin Halligan argued in a recent essay in Senses of Cinema, Russian Ark actually goes against all of Bazin’s philosophical ideas [www.sensesofcinema.com.au]. Not that Sokurov is obliged to conform to the views of a long-dead French film critic. However, the ways in which Russian Ark violates what Halligan calls the “Bazin maxim” can illuminate how the film’s seemingly innovative technical approach dovetails with its conservative and profoundly anti-modern agenda.

For Bazin, the long take had value only to the extent that it left the film’s action in its objective spatial and temporal context. Which is not to suggest the long take presents a more objective ‘truth’ in any essentialist sense. Rather, it allows the action to be ‘played out’ before the camera, potentially demanding a more mentally active attitude from viewers required to read meaning into the image, rather than having the scene analytically broken down for them through a more classical editing schema.

In Sokurov’s film, however, the single continuous shot functions as a stylistic choice allowing the narrator and audience to float over the surface of history, divorcing the scenes we witness from any kind of historical and political context. Although Russian Ark is ostensibly about history, it is history as a rather facile costume parade, blankly played out as a series of disconnected scenes held together by a wandering camera. The effect is of a sense of self-contained wholeness that allows the narrator to pass through countless historical episodes without ever having to stop and deal with the messy question of what it all actually means. Not that the film should provide definitive answers, but Sokurov does not seem interested in the questions pertaining to the historical period through which his film moves. This approach might have worked well as part of a critique of the hermetically sealed world of Russia’s aristocracy in the early 20th century. Rather, Russian Ark appears to maintain the same kind of blind, uncritical investment in the values and traditions of the pre-modern world as the historical characters themselves.

While the sheer material grandeur of Russia’s upper classes prior to 1917 cannot be denied, it seems deeply abhorrent to nostalgically celebrate and mourn the passing of that grandiose tradition without any acknowledgment of the absolutely grinding poverty upon which this opulence was built. In the end, it was the sheer intensity of this poverty that brought down Russia’s royal ruling class, not the intercession of some ‘outside’ disaster, as the film seems to imply.

Russian Ark’s final scene, in which the doomed aristocracy slowly exit their last great ball, positively drips with a sense of melancholy and mourning. The entire ball sequence is shot with a sumptuous celebratory glow. In contrast, of the 3 scenes that take place after 1917, 2 are shot in heavy shadow and near darkness. In one, the current director of the Hermitage discusses the extreme financial strain of preserving the Museum’s cultural riches, while in another we see a coffin maker working furiously during the siege of Leningrad in the middle of the Second World War. The modern world is associated with darkness, death and destruction, while pre-revolutionary Russia is uncritically celebrated as a world of eternal beauty, glowing luxury, and untroubled wealth. In this way, the film is a fundamentally dishonest dip into Russian’s history. Whatever horrors the country endured under the Communist regime, they cannot nullify the arrogance, stupidity, and cruelty of Russia’s royalty under the Czar. The tragedy of Russia’s history is not that the aristocracy’s last great ball took place in 1913, but that such an event was still taking place at a time when most of Europe was rushing head-long into the 20th century. If the aristocracy had spent less time ensconced in the dream world evoked in Russian Ark, and more time engaged with what was happening to their people, they might have spared themselves, and their country, the whole tragedy of the Russian Revolution.

If Russian Ark has any lessons for Australian filmmakers, it is that technical innovation does not, in itself, represent something of value for cinematic art. When innovation is harnessed in the service of an essentially reactionary agenda it hides the implications of that agenda. Australia, like much of the world, is currently facing a deeply uncertain future, and the last thing we need is an uncritical retreat into a nostalgic, glossy dream of past repression.

Russian Ark, Aleksandr Sokurov, distributor Potential Films, various cinemas nationally

The AFC-ScreenSound Australia integration

“The Australian Film Commission welcomed tonight’s Budget announcement by the Federal Government that the AFC and ScreenSound Australia will be integrated from 1 July 2003, foreshadowing that the integration will enable the continuation of the important work of collecting, documenting, preserving and providing access to the national film and sound archive alongside an enhanced program of audiovisual cultural activities for all Australians.”
AFC press release, May 14

Integration’s the word. It’s peppered through the press release and, when I speak to him by phone, in Chief Executive Kim Dalton’s reassuring words that neither organisation will suffer. It’s not immediately clear however which party is being integrated into what—ScreenSound into the AFC, which is what it looks like—or is this going to be a merger into a new entity?

Dalton explains that the AFC Act “will be amended and for the first time require the AFC to be responsible for the collection of our visual heritage.” What will the organisation be called? “The AFC.” There’ll be no ScreenSound? “Not strictly. The name is secondary. This is a critical task and we have made a commitment to it.” Dalton is adamant that the AFC and ScreenSound will each “maintain the integrity of their function and retain their own identity.”

There would seem to be positive implications in the merger for Australian screen culture. Use of that term was apparently discouraged on Dalton’s arrival at the AFC. However, he says he is “absolutely excited at the prospect of new ventures, in an area in the middle—screen education, national exhibition, interactive media-where [the AFC and ScreenSound] are both involved and can work together…providing national perspectives and leadership.”

Things look good, if, as the press release promises: “The integration will enable expansion of current audiovisual culture activities, enhance coordination of such activities, and provide leadership with a national focus by what will be a key cultural organisation.” Australian “audiovisual culture” will be well served if this merger is not a cost-cutting, staff-slashing exercise. Dalton says it is definitely not.

The Friends of the National Film and Sound Archive are “surprised by the merger” (integration’s not a word they use), cautiously optimistic, if rather anxiously “pointing to the dysfunctional relationship following the British Film Institute’s merger with the National Film and Television Archive in 1998—which was reversed after 4 years.”

In their press release the Friends are also concerned about representation: “Strong credentials in film or sound culture are vital prerequisites for those representing the National Film and Sound Archive on the new AFC Board…The Archive should have a long-term guarantee of a minimum of 3 dedicated expert positions on the AFC Board.” The Friends are eager to restore the title National Film and Sound Archive “after its ill-considered ‘rebranding’ as ‘ScreenSound Australia’”, as a matter of priority.

New OnScreen Commissioning Editor: Daniel Edwards

The Managing Editors are pleased to announce the appointment of Daniel Edwards to the position of OnScreen Commissioning Editor, a significant position in RealTime, dealing with film and digital media across Australia and working with Contributing Editors in every state. Daniel is a post-graduate at University of New South Wales, where he tutors in film and edits the UNSW Union magazine. He has made several short films and written about film for a range of publications. Daniel commences his editorship with the August-September edition of RealTime+OnScreen. KG

Thirty years ago the only way to a career in cinema, and it was risky, was to find cinema by subterfuge. The usual trick was to take a degree in literature or history, and work film into the final project somehow. At the time there was almost nowhere in Australia to study film as itself because it was always subsumed within the theoretical confines of literature, history or anthropology.

This was how the head of Ronin Films, Andrew Pike, found himself in Canberra at the Australian National University, doing a Masters in the history of Australian cinema. Quickly the degree became tangential to the real objective: to watch, critique and make films.

There is something, he says, about the “scale of the experience” of the darkened cinema and the projected image that is irresistible. This same sense of magic, of calling, has affected the humblest and the greatest of cinephiles, from the anonymous film watcher to obsessives like Godard or Wenders. For Pike the cinema was more than images and the totality of its experience has been his guiding force.

Now there are support networks, courses and grants and the legitimacy of film as art and business is well understood. But Ronin’s struggle in the preceding period was based on a passion rather than a decided and clear pathway. That’s not to say that current structures are unwelcome, or unnecessary to sustain an Australian industry that is by turns fragile and prosperous, but for Pike as for myself, there was some satisfaction in the loneliness of the cinematic obsession.

This might seem romantic in the cool cash world of today’s film industry, but we are only here because others have taken a chance on what we might want to see. Imagine the effort involved, the quiet sense of pioneering, of working outside the system.

Andrew Pike’s early contacts with cinema are best described as pure and personal. Anything less is trifling with the greatest art. First sightings are always important and often not revealed in public. Pike cites Jules et Jim and Rashamon as the first and earliest influences beyond the standard Hollywood films he saw in the suburban cinemas of his youth. The classical and the new authorship, a perfect conjunction in the history of cinema. This was the best of times to encounter the art of cinema.

Like the New Wave directors so admired then, ensconced in the Cinematheque Francais, it was important to watch as much cinema as possible. The canon as it has come to be known, was developing, but not always accessible in Australia.

This was not movies but cinema, and that difference has driven Pike ever since. His approach has set him apart from other distributors and financial supporters of emerging film projects in Australia. He admits his choices are often “eclectic” and based on self-interest, or perhaps self-pleasure. There is a degree of this in every cinephile, and it is an acceptable indulgence. One only has to read the early writings of Bazin and the directors he inspired to understand that the obsession with the cinematic experience is something that takes over a life.

From writing his first book, Australian Film 1900-1977 (Oxford University Press, 1980), Pike took a natural leap into making films. As history was his intellectual base, production started with documentaries. Along with other emerging filmmakers based in Canberra, such as Dennis O’Rourke, Pike went to New Guinea with a 16mm camera. His instinct was to film the real. The result was Angels of War, an award-winning film about New Guinea in World War II.

Pike shies away from admitting to a career plan, but it’s obvious that inevitable steps were taken to shape a life in film. If the documentaries were shot, who would see them? It was at this moment, in 1974, that he and his wife, Dr Merrilyn Fitzpatrick, made a most important decision to move into distribution. Pike has always believed there was an audience for the theatrical release of documentaries.

For 30 years his company, Ronin Films and the cinemas Pike has been associated with (Electric Shadows in Canberra and The Academy Twin in Sydney), have championed the cause. He remains convinced that distribution is a nurturing process and that each film has an audience that must be attracted and rewarded. He has never believed in the ‘day-date-release’ method of distributing films where a title is simultaneously opened across the country and if it does not find its audience immediately, is withdrawn. The possibility of the darkened room and the white screen also allows for other, niche audiences to be found and for word-of-mouth and critical support to spotlight a film. This balance between the mass market and the niche is well known in publishing, music and other arts, yet in film distribution it seems to be increasingly pressured off the circuit.

“At first we distributed the films we wanted to see and hoped others would like them too,” he says. It is an innocently disingenuous explanation for the creation of a local art house cinema that has had enormous influence on screen culture in Australia. His passion for French cinema began in the late 1960s with 2 important retrospectives on Resnais and Truffaut then later Ronin distributed titles by Rivette and Resnais such as Celine & Julie Go Boating and Melo. Ronin also began to invest in Australian feature films at script stage and he admits to successes such as Strictly Ballroom and to some “awful failures.”

As regional and suburban independent cinemas struggle to get first release titles or even a fair proportion of art house films, the importance of distributors such as Ronin Films cannot be overstated. Following the early French titles came new and often challenging Japanese and Chinese films, matching the increasing influence of what might be called the ‘new art house’ extending from Tokyo through Beijing to Taiwan. There was then, as now, little room for these cinematic and cultural experiences in the programs of the multiplexes that now dominate the circuit and which clearly have a different business objective.

Ironically, Pike is now back where he started. Production of a new documentary set in New Guinea is underway (Betelnut Is Bad Magic) as is a feature film about asylum seekers, White Lilies, written and directed by Canberra-based Iranian film-maker, Jamshid Malekpour. He also plans to direct a new project later this year.

Andrew Pike has come full circle from his early 16mm documentaries in New Guinea and has retained the principles that enabled him to chart an independent course. He knows that passion can be eclectic and difficult and the most interesting cinematic careers come from the combination of conviction and risktaking rather than predictable and cautious decisions.

Kay Armstrong’s first full-length, one-woman show has been a long time in the making. Parts of the work were seen in Twosome at One Extra in 2001, a showing of The Narrow House at PACT in 2001 and LEDA at the Sydney Fringe Festival in 2002. Armstrong has had to make her own opportunities to present most of her work, which is par for the course in Sydney, as is maintaining and funding her own rehearsal space. For Rara Avis however she was aided by Western Sydney Dance Action (WSDA) in partnership with Paramatta’s Riverside Theatres as part of WSDA’s Dance Bites season of works by independent artists.

Armstrong is a very watchable and genuinely comical performer, particularly in ‘storyteller’ mode. Elements of her past work have come together in Rara Avis in a more coherent way. The 2 themes of Rara Avis-Australian car culture and Swan Lake-have both featured throughout this idiosyncratic dancer’s career. Although an unlikely combination, there are moments where the themes have been worked to advantage. The final image of Armstrong perched on a car bonnet, draped in fabric blown against her, is a striking moment where bird and hood ornament merge. Another is the dancing dog designed for car windows, here balanced on a car tyre, jiggling to the Swan Lake ‘theme song’ cranked by the dancer from a tiny jewellery box mechanism. And there’s the dying swan, performed in a car seat with a sound score of aggressive traffic forcing Armstrong down and down again every time she tries to raise herself up.

Small objects throughout the work are ‘animated’ and suggest an interest in puppetry. Tiny cars move magically out from the dancer’s body curled on the floor. The dancing dog is another instance where the inanimate undergoes a tricky transformation. Armstrong’s dance with an exhaust pipe during which she transforms herself into several animals in a forest of pine tree car fresheners is a clever play with mimesis and the nature/industry opposition, again transforming props and giving them a ‘life.’

The episodic format of the piece, a structure so familiar in dance theatre work, ultimately works against the dual themes of Rara Avis with most sections devoted to one or the other. The “101 things to do in cars” monologue is my favourite section with its pumping movement-piston-like action and aggressive, half-formed gestures of road rage working Armstrong into a frenzy. The problem with such structures is that a few strong scenes are sometimes expected to carry a loosely formed totality. Jumping from one idea to the next involved, in this case, some bold leaps with major changes in performance mode and tone. The more dance-based sections, such as a movement across the floor with a side mirror or an arm solo from behind the back curtain, seemed oddly subdued and abstract given the more literal, comic and whimsical mood of the rest of the work.

Rara Avis, performer/deviser Kay Armstrong, dramaturg Kate Gaul, lighting Stephen Hawker, music selection Kay Armstrong, Drew Crawford, Parramatta Riverside Theatre, April 30-May 3

There are now 2 cathedrals on each side of Flinders Street. For more than a century, visitors to St Paul’s Cathedral have been quietly contemplating the life of a Jewish rebel, celebrated in stained glass. Alternatively, we can now cross the road and descend into the Screen Gallery at ACMI, and be lulled by the glowing projections of lost lives.

These 2 ‘halls of light’, from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, seem to fulfil similar needs. Urbanites are given the chance to step back from the world of dizzying possibility to contemplate the realm of presence. This odd symmetry raises a question. St Paul’s places the aesthetic delights of its architecture in the context of religious faith. What’s the context for ACMI?

ACMI is in the unusual position of evolving its own context: it takes the moving image out of the cinema and into the gallery. Rather than experiencing film while trapped in the dark by comfortable seats, conspiratorial silence and ushers, ACMI brings this ritual into the public domain.

The cultural politics of this transformation is an interesting story in itself. ACMI’s curatorial staff were mostly imported from Sydney. They brought with them a culture of reverence for the archive (see Museum of Sydney). The first exhibition, curated by Victoria Lynn, was originally shown at the Art Gallery of New South Wales as Space Odysseys: Sensation and Immersion; it made the most of the opportunity to realise the moving image as a spatial journey.

Prior to Lynn’s appointment as Director of Creative Development, former Director Ross Gibson sketched out a series of themes that would feature in the first years of operation. Since his return to Sydney, Gibson’s own curatorial work is limited to Remembrance + The Moving Image, a series of 2 exhibitions, of which Persistence of Vision is the first instalment to be followed by Reverberations.

Gibson’s Melbourne sojourn was critical. His slim-volume thinking helped extract ideas from their French incarnations and bring into play local experience. With Gibson came an understanding of the metropolitan archive as repository not only of historical data but also of mystic revelation. He brought Sydney light into the Melbourne darkroom.

On first visit, there is much in Remembrance to justify this graft. The signature work, Bourgeois Dictionary, by Péter Forgács, trawls a Hungarian film archive for wartime images. We are conditioned to associate this era with footage of jackbooted parades taken from official newsreels. By contrast, Bourgeois Dictionary shows us an almost defiant intimacy as middle class Hungarians play up for the camera. History becomes less a story of the masses and more a journey of individuals captive to their own worlds. The graphic design for Remembrance extracts a still from Forgács of a father and son ice-skating. The quest of the archive seems to be in finding such ecstatic moments.

But Remembrance doesn’t relax into nostalgia. The ‘eyes’ prevent that. Traces, by Naomi Bishops and Richard Raber, was commissioned by ACMI and drawn from donated Super 8 home movies. Their deft editing released a nascent poetry from its suburban context: short excerpts are punctuated by moments when characters frozen in film look out to the viewer, as though a spell is being continuously broken. This halting eye contact was reinforced by the naked characters lined up against an invisible screen in Versifier by Gina Czarnecki, and the piercing stares of Tibetans in Mind of Tibet by Geshe Sonam Thargye & Sue Ford. Such eye contact with the past threatens to unnerve the confidence of gallery visitors.

In a curious sideline, Remembrance stumbles on a popular suspicion about galleries. Though usually associated with the ‘Pete and Dud’ school of art criticism, the sense that the subjects of portrait paintings have eyes that follow viewers around the gallery bears some thought. It doesn’t take much analysis to understand this suspicion as a displaced recognition of voyeurism. While as omnipotent viewers we appear to have the power to gaze into the souls of painted subjects, we must also find a point of identification if that gaze is to be meaningful. Imagining ourselves in their position makes us the subject of our own gaze. In granting images on gallery walls the power of movement, perhaps ACMI is releasing the spectre of paranoia previously consigned to tired jokes. Yes, the eyes are following us around the gallery.

It is the gift of Remembrance to take such things seriously. In her review for The Age (May 3), Philippa Hawker used the exhibition to meditate on the role of cinema as a house of memory. In an article of surprising seriousness for a daily newspaper, she writes, “Much of the exhibition invites us to summon up our own memories, to engage with the memories of others and to conjure up other images; to imagine unseen, unrecorded, unmemorialised stories.” This seems the ultimate testament to Remembrance—that it gives a Melbourne writer licence to publish a reflective essay for a general audience. We step back from the escapist world of cinema to consider the inner fantasies that draw us to it.

So is this what ACMI has given us?—a kind of confessional for delving into our internal cinema (or what Saint Augustine called “a cloister of my memories”)? That might be so, but I think there is something more going on.

In going from cinema to gallery, the moving image is transformed from a diachronic to a synchronic medium. In Remembrance, this process is almost machine-like. The curatorial mechanism for this transformation is the dissection of continuous works into discrete parts that are screened simultaneously. Permission was sought to present the 6 parts of Aleksandr Sokurov’s epic Spiritual Voices on simultaneous screens. Andrish St Clair’s single video of his Trepang opera performances is cloned to form an installation. Classic cinema is kaleidoscoped into splintered reflections in Les LeVeque’s 4 Vertigo. This pervasive curatorial method goes beyond personal memory and works at the medium itself.

Difficult questions are raised. Is this film dissection a way of carving up cinema into bite-size pieces small enough to fit a contemporary attention span? Does this synoptic overview of cinema befit the transcendence of narrative, as we move into the realm of metadata and sampling?

But there is nowhere to ask. Though the curatorial method in Remembrance raises important questions, they are abandoned by its thematic framework. The evangelical call to visitors fails to measure up to the structural experiments at play in the exhibition itself.

I can understand the reticence. Federation Square represents an investment in the elite arts that is out of step with a populist state government. It’s reasonable that its prime tenants, National Gallery of Victoria and ACMI, take great pains to present work in its more accessible form. And politically it seems to have worked.

But such populism also comes at a time of increasing insularity in contemporary art, with few opportunities to encounter experiences beyond the self-referential. Tying the exhibition to a theme that brought our attention to the media might have provided more room for thought.

In terms of cultural chemistry, there may in the end have been a little too much Melbourne and not enough Sydney in Remembrance. The works themselves call for something that touches on the mise en abyme, time travel and Batman’s cave. Not just remembering, but also looking back.

Remembrance + the moving image, Persistence of Vision , curator Ross Gibson, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, March 21-May 25

The New York Times recently posited that only 2 things succeed on the internet: shopping, as perfected by Amazon and searching, as perfected by Google (pornography could be added, too, perfected by everyone). The Times (May 11, 2003) paints a flat, numb panorama, with creative pursuits and the promise of genuinely new media levelled by e-commerce. The pestilence of spam is a direct illustration of this—base levels of consumerism replicating themselves and subsuming online space with exhortations to buy, sell, consume.

Is the net really dead as a viable medium for original artistic concepts? In Australia, our arts bodies seem to have a waning interest in online content. The Victorian Government’s launch of 6 new digital media funds, while positive, is skewed towards animation and game platforms (there’s a brief deference to internet content under these categories). But the net has obvious potential for interaction and collaborative action that is done a disservice by this abduction into the arena of “things that move”—animation and film.

Cornerfold, an SBS website, subverts this impetus by melding comic art and zine-style writing with multimedia techniques. Cornerfold editor, Michele Sabto, defines zines (including some comics) as “independent, not-for-profit self-publications made for love, not money.” She points to a developing trend in Australian zine and comic publishing: the switch from punk-style anti-establishment rants to autobiographical writing—immediate, short reflections on everyday life, but still resolutely non-commercial. It’s an aesthetic she says is ideal for the web—and it’s the stuff of Cornerfold.

Initially Sabto wanted to publish examples of Australian zine writing as a stand-alone e-book for Palm Pilots. “But no one really thought e-books would go anywhere,” she recalls. “Then I took the idea to Film Victoria and they put me with a great program manager, David Tiley, who’s no longer there (because they don’t really have program managers any more). He said, ‘Why not do it as rich media?’ So we reworked the whole thing and that was really valuable because David guided me through the entire process.”

Tiley recommended the joint SBS/Film Victoria fund. Sabto then met Suzie Hoban, SBS’s New Media supervisor, and discovered that the reworked proposal fell in neatly with the broadcaster’s new media aims. “SBS want to position themselves towards the youth market,” she says. “They have this particular idea that they’re a niche publisher and so the whole ethos of Cornerfold really appealed.”

But Cornerfold is not simply a writers’ platform. For the site’s art director, Dylan Nichols, “it’s about content-driven multimedia. In terms of what’s out there that’s similar, the closest would be Born magazine, but that doesn’t have the zine focus. Born is high art and more experimental, and a lot of the pieces aren’t really that cohesive.”

Cornerfold consists of the cornerfold ezine, featuring writing and comic art commissioned by Sabto (each edited piece is given to a designer who builds a visual complement in consultation with the writer); 2 web logs: pixelstories, for visual essays, and like it is, for text (anyone can post to these, although they are vetted by Sabto); swap, run by the designers, with the aim of pitching writers and artists together in “madcap creative schemes”; and spit it out, a discussion forum. Cornerfold is themed and renewed every 5 weeks—all components must address the theme and the word limit is 800.

A recent highlight was “Jesus Christ: A Who Weekly Tribute”, a Flash-built piece written by Melissa Sorini and designed by Adam Horne. Sorini’s insights on celebrity culture were presented as a hand-drawn tome, with flippable pages. When certain highlighted words were clicked, mesh-like illustrations draped over the page to reveal hidden meanings in the text.

The piece’s execution demonstrates Cornerfold’s mission to reinvigorate web-based writing. As Nichols and his fellow designers (all from the Forecast Project collective) are keenly aware, reading lengthy text from a computer screen can be quite a chore. For Nichols, “it’s a hard balance to have an 800-word text on the screen and keep it interesting, and to also have movement and animation while not being too literal or too filmic. We distil key themes and ideas and try to keep the reader interested as well.”

That approach has paid off. Sabto points to very positive feedback that has “picked up on the design. There’s a lot of writing on the internet, but it’s rare for good design and writing to come together coherently. Sites driven by authors tend to have images whacked on as an afterthought, and sites driven by designers tend to be too conceptual.”

Is there tension in the idea of a corporation like SBS co-opting “independent, non-commercial” art forms? According to Sabto, “It’s all in the way it’s done. The pieces aren’t massaged or commissioned to fit some marketing person’s idea of what the ‘target market’ wants. For Cornerfold authors, getting paid doesn’t mean selling out—it just means they’re being remunerated for their efforts for a change.”

Cornerfold has successfully built a welcoming online community for new writers, and has introduced many of those writers to new avenues for publishing their work. Sabto and her team demonstrate that the internet’s potential for artistic expression isn’t limited to porn, or to heavy design that treats text as just another graphic. And although Cornerfold’s web future is finite (funding is for 9 issues; there are 4 to go), it will live on—SBS plans to repackage selected pieces as television “interstitials” (short blocks between programs), and there’s talk of a print anthology.

“Cornerfold got up because it did fit in with SBS’s aims,” Sabto says. “But perhaps there should be more scope within digital funding guidelines for independent, specifically internet-based content—rather than seed money for concepts. It’s a shame there are no longer program managers to guide applicants through the often arduous and confusing application process.”

It remains to be seen whether the Cornerfold baton will be passed on. Perhaps that’s up to the rest of us—and to the funding bodies.

It made the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald: “Escape game wires the minister” (April 30, 2003). You’ve probably heard about Escape from Woomera (EFW), the new Australian game being developed with funding from the Australia Council for the Arts. Needless to say, Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock is less than impressed about the project, which recreates 4 detention centres, including the now mothballed but infamous Woomera, for players to escape from. He and Arts Minister Rod Kemp have been highly critical of the Australia Council’s decision to award $25,000 in development funding to the Melbourne-based team, with Kemp demanding an urgent explanation from the Council. Chairman of the New Media Arts Board, Michael Snelling, told the media that while he was aware the project could be controversial, the application had ranked competitively and met all the criteria.

Ruddock’s main claim is that the game will promote unlawful behaviour, and support for his position came from unlikely directions. Some refugee advocates were keen to denounce the project, claiming it “trivialised the plight of asylum-seekers”, and was “tasteless”. And Human Rights Commissioner, Sev Ozdowski, issued a press release calling the project “at best…insensitive.” At least one refugee spokesperson took a different view, welcoming the Council’s support for any project that highlights the horrors of mandatory detention.

These quick opinion grabs, framed adversarially by the news media, conceal much that is of interest about this project. A significant cultural intervention, its complexities should give us pause. EFW is the first computer game in this country to tackle such a contentious issue. And while a few games elsewhere comment on important politics (the Syrian intifada game Under Ash being a notable example), this project has the potential to transform the way we think about games.

Computer games possess a rare capacity for mobilising public anxiety, so it’s unsurprising that some have reservations about the project. But what needs to be understood is that, far from constituting training for ‘real life’ actions, computer games enable players to do things that they can’t do in ‘real life’. Players report that this is one of the things that makes playing a game enjoyable. Claims that EFW will encourage detainees to break out, jeopardising their chances of a visa, or that the project characterises them as criminals trying to “bust out of jail [sic]”, as Ozdowski puts it, largely miss the point. Rather than being a game ridiculing the situation of detainees, EFW will enable those who are unlikely to ever get inside a detention centre, to imagine themselves there. Virtually recreating these sites elegantly undermines their ‘no go’ status, simultaneously shrinking the space between ‘us’ and ‘them’. As Julian Oliver, one of the EFW team says:

EFW is, therefore, an exciting project with a bold vision. It is edgy because it addresses one of the most divisive issues that citizens of Australia have faced in recent years: the governments’ detention of refugees in their name. The game will not be everyone’s cup of tea, but as it is planned to offer the game for free download over the internet, no one need play unless they want to.

To equate the playfulness of this project with triviality, as some have done, is a mistake. Like humour, play is anything but lightweight: play is important because it enables that which has become stale, old news, a source of anxiety even, to be reapproached. In playing a game, one partially leaves behind the workaday world and its competitive pressures—to ‘keep up’ and ‘get ahead’. Play enables different engagements and encounters, making it possible to envisage things being otherwise.

In inviting us to play at escaping from Woomera, then, the makers of this game are returning something precious to us, namely agency. Amidst the government double-speak and blaming, where enough seeds of doubt are sown (about asylum-seekers’ motives, backgrounds, health and wealth) so we never really know quite what to think, EFW offers action, for players to actively experiment with what it’s possible to do and be, in a game. Making a game that enables players to seize some initiative in relation to the refugee question is significant.

The EFW team knows it takes more than a good idea to make a great game. While their credentials as refugee activists have received attention in the mainstream press, their expertise in game design and development is arguably as important to the final product. Gamers are astute judges of interactivity, and any game that sacrificed gameplay for an earnest political message simply would not cut it. Between them, the EFW team has many years experience in the commercial games industry, including work on the biggest budget Australian game for international release. Other credits include public art commissions and work on the popular ABC satire CNNNN. The main assembled team includes Mark Angeli, Julian Oliver, Ian Malcolm, Stephen Honegger, Kate Wild and Morgan Simpson. Rather than trying to offer solutions to mandatory detention, the team’s focus is, as one member puts it, on asking “what are the great game elements about these stories, and trying to make a game out of those, rather than actually try to present all the information and points of view.”

With all the controversy over this particular game and its content, it is easy to lose sight of the significance of this project receiving Australia Council support. Many already recognise that as a medium, games are ripe for artistic experimentation. But this funding indicates that the New Media Arts Board also recognises the maturing of games as a medium, and the significant potential of games for contemporary art.

The release of a playable demo of the EFW game is still some 6 months off. But the importance of this project is already becoming apparent. Since it hit the headlines there has been an amazing degree of discussion of the project. Apart from postings on gaming message boards, pro-refugee e-lists, and games industry news sites, EFW has made it into classrooms, onto TV comedy shows, and, significantly, onto talkback radio. Over the space of a few weeks, it has become a powerful meme, a concept for thinking with—about refugees, their detention, and the humourless state of current politics in this country. Evidence that it has fired imaginations is contained in the witty suggestions for sequels, posted to newspapers: Escape from Nauru and Manus Island and Escape from Camp X-Ray.

We might not have known it, but we needed an Escape From Woomera. It broadens the field of what can be said, thought, and felt about Woomera, refugees and detention. That is where the art lies. That it also leaves Ruddock spluttering with indignation is icing on the cake.

In the second half of 2003 Australian artists will be highly visible in Berlin in artsaustralia berlin 03 (following on from the premiere 2002 program) and in Ancient Future in Japan. These events manifest recognition of the need for long-term Australian programs that become part of the cultural lives of other countries. The way they’ve been put together indicates a maturing integrative and cooperative approach, not only between Australian arts bodies but also with their overseas equivalents.

In recent years the foray of Australian art into Europe seems to be growing from strength to strength with innovative performing arts practitioners now making a strong and consistent impact. The venture into Asia has been less certain, with moments of success but with some strong foundations, for example in the work of Asialink, and improved long-term planning.

The Asian market

Karilyn Brown, Executive Director of the Australia Council’s Audience & Market Development Division reminds me that “for Asia in the early 90s there was a very strong focus on an almost quota system. Something like 50% of the Australia Council’s international budget was to be spent in Asia. In recent years it’s not been seen as the most appropriate way to go. There’s always the issue of balance. How do you create developmental opportunities for the work you want to market and at the same time respond to demand from various parts of Asia, where there are market strengths in some areas and not others.” To achieve this, Brown believes that partnerships play a key role, as does identifying potential demand.

Brown cites as a recent, successful example of a joint initiative between AMD, the Literature Board, the Tokyo Australian Embassy and the Australia-Japan Foundation in identifying a market and acting on it—the Bungei Shunju Australian Crime Fiction Project. 15,000 copies of a paperback with translated works by Shane Maloney, Peter Doyle and Marele Day were published by Bungei Shunju last December and a very effective publicity campaign mounted. “The project came out of the Visiting International Publishers Program,” says Brown, “where we brought a Japanese publisher here a few years ago, creating the opportunity as well as responding to the interest…With Asialink we’re looking at a broader strategy over 3 years, 2 countries per year, a real focus on contemporary Australian writing involving touring, workshops, reading presentations and establishing a very strong connection between publishing industries in Australia and Asia.”

Brown explains that developing relationships with Asia, “is a long haul, something some of us have recognised for a while. But recognising and implementing it are 2 very different things, because it’s not about 2 or 3 years, it’s about 8 or 10 years. You have to be consistently present to sustain relationships.” In consolidating its programs, AMD always has an eye on the bigger picture, on how to consistently make the best use of performing arts markets, art fairs, publishing groups and the expertise of presenting partners in Asia and Australian collaborators like Asialink, the Australian Film Commission, the Australian Tourist Commission and others, as well as key collaborators, the Federal Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the Australian International Cultural Council (AICC).

Brown rates the Melbourne-based Asialink very highly for its pioneering work in brokering relationships, connecting Australian artists with Asia, opening up networks of opportunity and as a partner in the AMD’s ventures. The Asialink program (partly funded by the Australia Council) also caters for arts managers and administrators, offering them experience with arts organisations in Asia where they can develop contacts. On the visual arts front, the Asialink Studio Program and the Australia Council’s own (through the Visual Arts & Crafts Board) have been very productive and, as Brown points out, there has been a long history of touring exhibitions to Japan.

She also points to the importance of co-curation based on pairing galleries from each country. “Asialink sought proposals from Australian galleries and curators. They negotiated with Japanese galleries, building on the interest in and knowledge about our art. That’s how you can tour works that are fully contemporary and fully embraced by the presenting partner—because they are involved in the selection, the promotion, and the financial risk. The program was set up in consultation and with substantial investment from the Australia-Japan Foundation—a major commitment to a 3 year, in-depth project and based on the very long term visual arts engagement with Japan through the VACB and Asialink. The array of artists is fantastic. These shows represent very important areas of contemporary practice and finally open some doors to really key museums and galleries around Japan that we’ve been trying to engage with for some time.”

Japan

Ancient Future is based on strong Japanese interest in Australian art—contemporary and Indigenous. It’s a 6 month program in the second half of 2003 managed by the Australian Embassy in Tokyo in close collaboration with AMD. It has a strong visual arts, craft and design focus, including the Spirit Country show after its Shanghai visit and, later this year, Patricia Piccinini’s Venice Biennale work, “a breakthrough follow-on showing”, declares Brown. The program also includes performance, music, film and literature. How did it come about? “AICC and DFAT were thinking about where we are going in the next 3 to 5 years and where that meshes with the Australia Council, AFC, the Tourist Commission etc. DFAT approached all its posts and the Australian Embassy in Tokyo came up with a very good proposal. We all identified Japan as a key target: it is dynamic and offers opportunities at the moment. This has meant that a number of players got together in Japan, primarily driven by staff at the Australian Embassy—Katherine Hunyo [Cultural Officer] and Cathy Gallagher [Counsellor, Public Policy].”

Many of the 20 events in Ancient Future were going to be taking place anyway, Brown explains, but together they will have a stronger impact, bringing together a range of partners and with a government imprimatur that helps open important doors in Japan. “There are new projects as well like an ACO concert and the Dinosaurs Design exhibition (originally shown at Sydney’s Object Gallery) as part of the Tokyo Design Block which is a huge contemporary design event that was highly successful last year for an exhibition prepared by RMIT.”

A major visual arts component in the program is the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial 2003 [July 20-Sept 7] in the 6 largely rural municipalities of the Echigo-Tsumari region. Of the 120 artists selected internationally, 5 are Australian: Janet Laurence, Nigel Helyer, Robyn Backen, Lauren Berkowitz and Anne Graham, curated by Sally Couacaud. Most of the works are to be permanent installations. Spirit Country will also appear at the triennial before its Tokyo showing. Touring exhibitions include Light Black from Adelaide’s Jam Factory: works by Catherine Truman, Robin Best and Sue Lorraine exploring the links between art and science [Tokyo May 7-June 29; Kyoto Sept 8-Oct 13].

With Spirit Country at the centre of a program with individual and collective shows, there will be a series of accompanying lectures on Australian Indigenous art and a Japanese theatre company will perform Roger Bennett’s riotous Up the Ladder, a play about what life in tent-show-boxing meant to Aboriginal people.

Berlin

A key component of the artsaustralia berlin 2003 is Australian participation in literaturWERKstatt berlin, a literary festival quite unlike any in Australia or, in fact, anywhere. It is focused on contemporary literature in its many manifestations in and well beyond the book. It is network-based, across Europe and with many other countries, includes the commissioning of international collaborations, often cross-artform, a superb online introduction to the words and voices of many poets (lyrikline.org) and numerous translation projects. Its large scale poetry event, the Weltklang Festival on Potzdamer Platz, attracts thousands; the festival can draw 100,000 visitors in all.

The director of the festival, Thomas Wohlfahrt, visited Australia and invited sound poet Amanda Stewart to literaturWERKstatt berlin as part of artsaustralia berlin 2002. This year he’s invited her back not only to perform but also to curate a program of leading international sound poets including Henri Chopin. Wohlfahrt has commissioned collaborations between visual artist Ruark Lewis and the German dance duo, Rubato and between the dancer-choreographer Lucy Guerin and German sound poet Michael Lentz. UK-based Australian new media artist Simon Biggs is also in the program, as is Elision, the Brisbane-based new music ensemble already well known for their international collaborations and presenting here works inspired by poetry and myth, Eastern and Indigenous Australian. Australia is represented at every level of this festival under the banner, Australia 5th Dimension.

Ruark Lewis & Rubato

On a dour Good Friday afternoon, to the accompaniment of the footsteps of the Kings Cross congregation of the Church of St Canice negotiating the stations of the cross above us, I had the pleasure of watching a rehearsal performance of the literaturWERKstatt commission that Ruark Lewis and German dancers Rubato (Dieter Baumann, Jutta Hell), had been working on for 3 weeks before further rehearsal in Berlin. Rubato was formed in 1985. They have created 28 works, a number of them televised, and performed in many countries. Their recent work has often emerged from intercultural residencies: working with the Guandong Modern Dance Company; teaching at the Beijing Academy for Dance; choreographing for the Jin Xing Dance Theatre in Shanghai and the modern dance ensemble at the Ankara State Opera in Turkey.

Ruark Lewis is a visual artist with a substantial body of work, often “translating” the work of others (Rilke, Rimbaud, Beckett, Sarraute and a number of Indigenous Australian artists) by various means (tracings, palimpsests, lithographs) into other forms so that we read them afresh. In Raft, a work inspired by Carl Strehlow, the German missionary documenter of an Indigenous song cycle, Lewis collaborated with writer Paul Carter to create an acclaimed and widely exhibited sound sculpture with a dynamic interplay of text on timber and a soundtrack sourced from Central Australia.

With Rubato he is involved in a very different act of translation, between words and the body of a dancer. Hell is physically, almost violently, implicated into Lewis’ delivery of his collation of found texts, Banalities, until a reversal occurs, transforming the speaker himself into physical performer in the very space he has verbally generated. It looked very good in rehearsal and should be even more powerful in Berlin.

There will much else Australian in Berlin over the rest of the year, one of the most exciting events being the exhibition of some 14 Australian artists at the magnificent Hamburger Bahnhoff gallery in Berlin. More later.

The 2001 Queensland Biennial Festival of Music was a memorable event, immersive and provocative, remarkable for its commitment to new music, to music-making in communities urban and regional and to debate about the ways music is written about and reviewed in the media. It’s on again in 2003 with an even more ambitious program and a greater regional reach, furthering connections established in 2001, making new ones and inviting Australians to be part of contemporary music.

For Artistic Director Lyndon Terracini (a renowned baritone, expert in contemporary music theatre and opera, and director of NORPA—Northern Rivers Performing Arts—in Lismore) it was never a matter of taking 20th-21st century music to the regions. Like the best examples of Australia’s developing model of cultural exchange (Elision ensemble’s international commission process, the Nigel Jamieson-Paul Grabowsky collaboration with Indonesian artists in The Theft of Sita), it’s a matter of joint effort and openness, of drawing on each other’s resources. The people of Barcaldine who made and played their own marimbas for the 2001 festival get to play again in 2003, joined by other communities and international artists. Having got to know the composer Elena Kats Chernin through the symphony she successfully composed for them in 2001, the musicians of Rockhampton (orchestra, brass band, choir) get to tackle Symphony No 2 and play No 1 again.

At the press launch of his festival in Sydney, Terracini says that his brief “is to create a festival of international excellence accessible to all Queenslanders…”, and quips, “a pretty easy thing to do really!” In 2001 the festival was realised in 13 centres, this year it’s 17. He says the festival has never been conceptualised “as a tour but as growing a new work in each of those centres so it relates to their cultures, so they can embrace and own it…And it’s obligatory for those city and town councils involved to pay or we don’t play there. I believe that if they don’t contribute a significant amount of cash that they will not support the event.”

As for the challenge of the brief and the inclusiveness of his vision, “it is the largest festival in the world geographically…It’s 23 hours on the train from Brisbane to Barcaldine for example…It can be a logistical nightmare sometimes which is part of the challenge, part of the charm.”

Percussion paradise

The festival again starts at sunrise in Barcaldine at the Tree of Knowledge, with the 250 strong Barcaldine Big Marimaba Band on the same bill as Slava Grigoryan, Synergy Percussion, and percussion virtuosi Omar Faruk Tekbilek (Middle East), Hossam Ramzy (Egypt), and Ali & Adama N’Diaye Rose (Senegal).

The same players feature in The Big Percussion Concert in Brisbane, says Terracini, “a 4 hour percussion and World Music extravaganza that’s on Saturday night. On the Tuesday we’ve commissioned the Queensland composer Gerard Brophy to write a new piece called Brisbane Drumming with the featured players and 100 kids from Brisbane and nearby. Leading instrument makers Elliot Hall and Steve Langton have worked with the kids to make their own djembes and tonga bells. Brophy’s written this piece for those kids and all those percussionists.” The equivalent event in the 2001 festival, also with a Brophy commission and the Anumadutchi ensemble, was a full-house, rousing celebration of music-making.

Talking up music

The ubiquitous Spiegeltent makes its first Brisbane appearance where it will provide a centre for the festival with daily talks with musicians, some significant forums on the state of the arts, Australian Contemporary Music Market showcase performances, a cabaret every evening at 8pm and a festival club at 10pm. The tent will be located by the Queensland Performing Art Centre. With the market stalls and the adjoining Sound Forest (an expanded version of Linsey Pollak’s hugely popular ‘instrumentalisation’ of Southbank’s Rainforest Walk) it will, Terracini says, provide a village atmosphere. Festivals need a day and night centre providing a gathering point for artists and audiences, a focus for the exchange of opinions and starting points for networks and collaborations. This is a significant development for QBFM.

An important initiative in the 2001 festival was the introduction of the International Critics’ Symposium, a rare opportunity for overseas reviewers, music writers and the musicians to mingle with their Australian peers and to assess the calibre, standing and influence of critical writing. The event will be held again in 2003 at The Powerhouse, this time with Andrew Porter [UK], one of the world’s leading music critics for the last 50 years; he’s written books and translated many operas, including The Ring.

Heiner Goebbels

Goebbels is one of the most exciting of contemporary European composers, employing a vast palette of integrated musical styles and collaborating with musicians who sometimes incorporate their own scores into Goebbel’s. His Black on White was a 1998 Adelaide Festival hit, with Ensemble Modern as both musicians and choreographed stage performers. QBFM 2003 presents Goebbel’s Surrogate Cities, which Terracini decribes as “an extraordinary symphony. It premiered in the same year as Louis Andriessen’s Rosa [in which Terracini featured]; both are large scale pieces with massive orchestration, a wall of sound, but incredibly intimate at times.” In Surrogate Cities, musical forms jostle, mixed with sampled ambient sound and texts from Heiner Müller, Hugo Hamilton and Paul Auster. The Queensland Orchestra gets to play with the featured artists who performed the work at the 2002 Edinburgh Festival—conductor Andrea Molino and soloists Jocelyn B Smith and David Moss. Terracini says of Smith that “she is an amazing singer of opera, jazz, blues and has a very high range.” Surrogate Cities was recently released on the ECM label: the Australian premiere concert is a major reason to be in Brisbane for the festival.

Meredith Monk

I saw American singer, composer and dancer Meredith Monk perform with her company in Japan in 1982. Her vocal technique is ethereal, the group singing an ideal companion to the Rautavaara choral program (see below). Along with Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson and John Adams Monk is an iconic figure, and like her peers can range from the intimate to the epic, as in her opera, Atlas. She has never been to Australia. With her vocal ensemble she will perform a concert version of Mercy, an opera she wrote about compassion and refugees with Ann Hamilton. Terracini admires her as a key initiator “in the whole minimalist movement, before Glass, before Adams and with work characterised by an absence of words. It’s wonderful the way she expresses sounds, expresses the exact meaning of what she wants to say…it is an amazing experience to be at a Meredith Monk concert.” For those readers who have experienced only the more ethereal Monk creations, Mercy is an overtly passionate work, dark, sometimes raw and certainly moving.

Elision

Elision, the internationally acclaimed, Brisbane-based new music ensemble is back from Europe with many plaudits for its opera, Moon Spirit Feasting, and its massive music installation, the Australian-Norwegian-British collaboration Dark Matter. Their QBFM concert is titled Burning House after the work of the same name by composer Liza Lim for solo voice and koto on a program with works by Richard Barrett [UK] for electric guitar and live electronics and John Rogers for water dripping crotales and dog whistles, plus a new work from Melbourne saxophone virtuoso Tim O’Dwyer.

Einojuhani Rautavaara

One of the major composers of orchestral music and opera of the moment in Europe (though little performed in Australia) is Einojuhani Rautavaara. He is one of a number of notable contemporary Finnish composers, certainly no longer an avant gardist he forever expands orchestral possibilities in the tradition of Sibelius, Shostakovich and Holmboe with uncommon melodic invention and dense and stirring string and brass textures. Like many a Baltic composer he revels in writing for a living choral tradition. His Vigilia and a selection, Sacred Works for Mixed Chorus, both available on the Ondine label, reveal a theatrical vigour, innovative orchestral-style layering, moments of sheer transcendence and an absence of the church choir mustiness some audiences fear and avoid. The 30-strong Kampin Laulua choir from Finland perform the sacred music of Rautavaara for the first time in Australia at St Mary’s, the politically progressive church a few blocks back from QPAC.

Terracini has commissioned a second St Mary’s Mass from Australian composer Stephen Stanfield: “I wanted to do this at a time when very few composers are writing for the church, and the last one, Critical Mass, about homeless people, was incredibly successful. This one is called We Choose and features the Queensland Choir and the Symbitronic electro-acoustic ensemble. We also have a choir of refugee children in a concert called Alafiah, a creole word for freedom, in a range from symphonic to hiphop and pop in a concert they share with Australian-born kids at Brisbane’s Powerhouse. They have a CD out called Scattered People.

Serious jazz

The Gonzalo Rubal Caba/David Sanchez Quartet are giving their first and only Australian performance at the 2003 QBFM. “All of them,” declares Terracini, “are frontline players.” The highly-rated pianist and saxophonist are joined by drummer Ignacio Berroa and bassist Armando Gola.

Terracini describes Katie Noonan, lead singer with pop band George, as “a kind of Queensland icon.” He recalls, “When I first heard her she was singing jazz with her other band called Elixir at the Woodford Folk Festival and I took Paul Grabowsky to hear her. It was pouring, rain running down our backs in the tent, but Katie was singing and Paul was impressed. So we got him to write a jazz song cycle for her with a text by Dorothy Porter, the first cycle ever written for Paul’s trio and for Scott Tinkler, a wonderful trumpeter.”

To market, to market…

Terracini is very proud, and rightly so, of this latest development, an Australian Contemporary Music Market in partnership with the Australia Council’s Audience & Market Development Division. Although an admirer of the bi-annual Performing Arts Markets, he says, “My feeling was that music had been badly served with a 20 minute Spotlight performance. By the time the musicians have set up it’s time to pack up and leave…and the venue wasn’t particularly conducive either. This market is only about contemporary music and we’ve invited 15 of the major programmers from all over the world, from the Barbican, from Southbank (London), BAM (New York), Germany, Singapore…they’re coming to Brisbane specifically to see Australian new music in the Spiegeltent at 5.30 every evening and they’ll see 40 minute showcase performances. There will be stalls outside and artists and companies and organisations and state arts ministries will be represented.

“The managers of the performing arts centres throughout Australia will be at the market. Contemporary music has changed a lot and I feel that all these centres that were put off in the past and wouldn’t book it, would be attracted now to companies like Toplogy and the David Chesworth Ensemble who could easily travel regionally. This is about creating a new market for Australian contemporary music here and abroad.”

And a lot more…

The festival program also includes a Prokofiev celebration with Stephen Savage playing all the remarkable piano sonatas, 2 days of electronic music from the Melbourne-based Liquid Architecture Event (with special guest, international sound innovator Bernard Parmegiani), Small Black Box (Brisbane’s experimental sound listening space), the ACO premiering Carl Vines’ Pipe Dreams for Flute & Strings, Sound Builders (Instrument Makers Exposition) and, for the first time, the National Music Therapy Conference. In towns and heritage houses and woolsheds across Queensland there is a wealth of performance from locals and festival guests.

Bobcat Dancing in Mt Isa

Terracini is excited about the festival’s Mt Isa venture. “Philip Dean has written the text, John Rogers (The Sunshine Club) the music. It’s about a drifter who comes into town. ‘If you can fix the bobcat,’ says a local mechanic, ‘I’ll give you a job.’ He starts the machine unintentionally and wins acclaim as a Mr Fixit with his laying on of hands. And so the bobcats dance and 25 ton excavators do a love duet…the bobcats are their progeny. It’s set by the Leichhardt River with the mine looking, as people say, like an amazing ‘ship in the desert.’ We’re using local talent, 50 performers, the show has 3 night-time performances and like most of the shows outside Brisbane, it’s free.”

The QBFM legacy

Terracini is a keen commissioner of new works and has built the commissioning process into his festival so that its legacy goes beyond recollections of inspiring concerts and events. Communities will own works that they can play again, locals will become musicians inspired by the instruments they’ve made, and towns, it is hoped, will develop their own contemporary music programs. In Winton, locals will collaborate with hands and voices with Graeme Leak to create a musical fence, which they can play but which also can be played by the wind alone on one of the flattest landscapes in Australia—an installation that will become part of Winton’s heritage. In 2003, Terracini has also commissioned a new didjeridu, a film about its making and a symphony from the maker and composer, William Barton.

William Barton

Terracini explains: “Young Indigenous composer and didjeridu maker William Barton is from east of Mt Isa. [He went to] his tribal land to find a tree and to make a didjeridu from that tree. And we sent a filmmaker, Brendan Fletcher (Black Chicks Talking) with him, camping out for 2 weeks, and William made the didjeridu in the traditional way. The film will be shown at the Singsing Bilong Pasifik exhibition of the musical instruments of Pacific peoples at the Queensland Museum. William will play the didjeridu to launch the film and the exhibition on July 19.” Roland Peelman will conduct the premiere of Barton’s Songs of the Mother Country, a fusion of traditional and contemporary music, at The Lagoons & Mackay Botanical Gardens on July 26. Terracini regards the premiere as a unique moment for Australian Indigenous music and for this composer.

Queensland Biennial Festival of Music, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Southbank, and Brisbane Powerhouse, New Farm, July 18-27

The burgeoning sound culture scene, in its many and often overlapping manifestations, moves from strength to strength. Audiotheque—Cinema for the Ears at Sydney Opera House’s The Studio (April 14) was a sell-out success combining works created for radio with some deftly coordinated video. The outcome was an audience eager for more events of this kind. The International Symposium of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology was recently held in Melbourne (see p30) and the coming months offer a plethora of other events. They include the national sound art festival Liquid Architecture in its 4th incarnation, spreading its sonic wings across Australia and the history of an artform.

The greater part of Liquid Architecture 4’s program will be held in Melbourne, but there’ll also be a 2-day program as part of the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music. As well, the festival’s famous guest, French sound art pioneer Bernard Parmegiani, will be appearing at the Australian Computer Music Association Conference in Perth (July 6-9), impermanent.audio in Sydney (July 15,16) and the Brisbane Powerhouse (July 18-19).

In its Melbourne program of performances, workshops, forums and gallery exhibitions, Liquid Architecture is hosting some 30 artists from Australia and beyond, including Scot Arford and H Y Yau from the San Francisco noise/sound art scene. Women artists are given prominence in 360º: Women In Sound, featuring Ros Bandt and Thembi Soddell. Gail Priest appears in the Brisbane program. Other Australian artists include Lawrence English, Phil Samartzis, Bruce Mowson and up and coming local electronic musicians and video artists. On Saturday July 12 and Sunday July 13 in Legends of Electronic Music, a surround sound concert, Ferrari and Parmegiani will present retrospectives of their work hosted by Philip Samartzis.

Another unique feature of Liquid Architecture 4 is GRM Soundtracks, a cinema screening at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. As the festival press release puts it: “During the 60s and 70s, composers at the GRM (Groupe Recherches Musicales—France’s most important experimental music institute) studio in Paris produced soundtracks for moving image makers of the day. Two of its composers, Ferrari and Parmegiani, will be present to provide a live accompaniment and commentary.” Curated by Jim Knox the proposed program will include Jean Painlevé’s Amants de la Pieuvre, scored by the great Pierre Henry. (See page 17 for a review of the Sydney screening of the Painlevé films.) With this program Liquid Architecture 4 honours a tradition of which it is a vibrant part. RT

Liquid Architecture, directors Nat Bates, Bruce Mowson, producer ((tRansMIT)) sound collective; Melbourne, July 1-26; www.liquidarchitecture.org.au

The last couple of years have been busy for percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson and pianist Erik Griswold of Clocked Out Duo. They have performed individually, as a duo, and in collaboration with a range of other musicians, artists, writers, dancers and theatre performers—in China, Korea, the US, UK, Perth, Melbourne and Adelaide, as well as appearing at the London Jazz Festival and the Shanghai International Festival. They’ve recently released 2 CDs: water pushes sand (their second CD as Clocked Out Duo), and More than my old piano, Griswold’s second solo piano CD (reviewed on earbash, www.realtimearts.net). Now based in Brisbane, where Tomlinson is Head of Percussion at Griffith University, they are collaborating on a new project Bridge Song with new media performance group Bonemap (profiled in RT 54). And in the midst of all this, they’ve recently had a son.

I recently saw Clocked Out Duo at a series of “house concerts” staged at an Adelaide artists’ cooperative. Pitched in the space where vaudeville and Dada intersect, the concerts involved a stunning variety of musical styles and theatrical gestures. Sitting astride an enormous balloon, Tomlinson performed a virtuosic solo that coaxed a surprising range of moods from the unusual ‘instrument’, from the low rumbling of a motorbike engine, through crisp violin-like notes to the wavering ethereal sounds of the theremin. One of Griswold’s piano solos, in the tradition of the one-man-band, simultaneously combined prepared piano, toy piano and melodica (a kind of toy keyboard instrument with a tube and mouthpiece, like a miniature melodeon). Duets involved Tomlinson drawing on her impressive collection of percussion instruments, from the tam-tam (an enormous gong) through to the tiny sounds of tinkling shells and ceramic bowls, while Griswold extracted a similar range of colours and intensities from the piano. Collaborations with other performers involved, among other things, bravura choruses of rapid-fire chanted nonsense syllables, Fluxus-inspired interventions where audience members shouted, stamped and clapped on cue, and live phone-in performances from collaborators overseas.

However, the remarkable thing about Clocked Out Duo’s performances is not so much their wild eclecticism, but the way they maintain a strange cohesiveness and integrity. Attempting to explain how their collaboration works, Griswold jokingly paraphrases Donnie and Marie Osmond: “I’m a little bit jazz; she’s a little bit classical.” Tomlinson’s background is in the European avant-garde, and reflects her interest in women’s performance art, while Griswold’s influences stem from American improvised music traditions. The pair recently spent 5 months in Chengdu, China, where Tomlinson studied Sichuan opera percussion and Griswold explored the structured improvisations of folk and street music traditions. So, with so many diverse influences behind their music, how do they manage to produce music that is aesthetically coherent?

Tomlinson explains: “While our travels, experiences and collections of instruments continue to effect the sound of our music, the actual method of making it is consistent. Whether it’s balloons, prepared piano or conventional instruments, the working process is the same. Often it’s a case of one of us coming up with a musical idea, and the other failing to understand it. Then it becomes necessary to push it and play with it until it becomes something we can both work with.” She likens the process to a foley artist working on a film soundtrack. “It’s a matter of building up a sound world with whatever happens to be around in the studio.”

The vaudeville atmosphere of their concert performances, with their constantly shifting moods and stark contrasts of styles, is a way of balancing eclecticism and integrity. Griswold explains: “We want to set up an environment where it will seem natural that a complex, sophisticated piece can come up next to a pop song. There’s a certain amount of nostalgia there, going back to a time before the split between high art and low art became such a dominant part of culture. In vaudeville, serious musical performance can rub shoulders with slapstick theatricality, and neither is the worse for it.”

Both Griswold and Tomlinson are renowned for the ways they explore the outer limits of their instruments. For Tomlinson, this means not only extracting new sounds from familiar instruments, but also exploring the potential of unfamiliar instruments. Her interest in playing the balloon came from seeing pioneer virtuoso Judy Dunaway perform in New York (one piece on the new CD, “Dear Judy”, is dedicated to her). “Trying out the balloon for myself, I was amazed at the range of sounds you could get from it. It has a very powerful palette. I wasn’t interested in playing it in an orderly or mannered way. What was interesting was that it was so difficult to control, that here was an everyday object that had a wild and unruly world of sounds within it.”

Tomlinson is also exploring the sound of Chinese ceramic bowls. Rubbing the rims of bowls filled with different levels of water, produces a much more earthy and grounded sound than the ethereal sound produced by wine glasses, but with a similar shimmer of overtones. “As a percussionist, the collection of instruments you build up over your lifetime maps out the course of your musical exploration. But a percussion instrument collection is never complete; it’s an ongoing record of where you’ve been that is constantly changed by the journey itself.”

Griswold’s explorations of prepared piano are taking him in 2 main directions. There’s the potential of prepared piano, with its twanging strings and array of wooden and metal percussive sounds, to sound like a quirky folk instrument, reversing serious concert music’s colonisation of home and community-based musical traditions. On the other hand, prepared piano is also capable of producing similar sounds to electronic music. “It’s a way of reclaiming the space of electronic music, raiding some of its sounds and bringing them back into the domain of the acoustic.” Most notably, Griswold’s version of Al Green’s Tired of Being Alone on the new CD sounds exactly like an electric piano in the middle register, with the upper register producing music box effects, while the lower register sounds like a twanging acoustic bass guitar.

Attempting to find ways for the piano to express sounds that are apparently alien to it is one way Griswold keeps exploring the boundaries of the instrument. “We spent a long time developing a musical language in which the balloon and the piano could interact. It’s one of the more difficult things I’ve ever done on piano. The musical language we developed was based on spoken languages, especially Vietnamese and Chinese, which, with their rising and falling tonal inflections, have a certain melody built into them. It makes it natural to adapt them to music.” Tomlinson had to develop a clear understanding of the balloon’s musical language before they could work with it as a duo. “I ended up with 12 sound groups which I then taught to Erik. We’re both interested in discovering the dormant sounds within things, and this was the perfect example—first finding the sounds within the balloon, and then finding the balloon sounds within the piano. In other words, the balloon taught the piano how to play the piano.

Bridge Song, Bonemap in collaboration with Clocked Out Duo, Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, June 12-14

Information about Clocked Out Duo’s performances and CDs is available at www.clockedout.org/

Find

June 2003

Dead Man Walking

The women’s pages

Dramaturgy and screenplay writing now

New editors

Dah Teatar

Cristina Castrillo and Margaret Cameron

Stace Callaghan

Julia Varley

New media performance

And more…

Vitalstatistix: Maude Davey

Playworks: Francesca Smith

The AFC-ScreenSound Australia integration

New OnScreen Commissioning Editor: Daniel Edwards

The Asian market

Japan

Berlin

Ruark Lewis & Rubato

Percussion paradise

Talking up music

Heiner Goebbels

Meredith Monk

Elision

Einojuhani Rautavaara

Serious jazz

To market, to market…

And a lot more…

Bobcat Dancing in Mt Isa

The QBFM legacy

William Barton

realtime