Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

February 2004

Christiana Edwards, Wet, 2003

photo Neil Haddon

Christiana Edwards, Wet, 2003

There is surely no need to ask, these days, if photography has killed painting. While both are strong and successful artforms, the hybrid of the 2 has created, if not a new medium, then, in many cases new ways of working with and viewing these popular expressive forms.

A good example is the group exhibition Real Space at Hobart’s newest non-commercial gallery and sole artist-run space, Inflight. The initiative supports the work of young and emerging artists and in just one year has become a vital part of the city’s art scene. It is an accessible, central venue contributing greatly to the arts in Hobart with strong solo and group shows. In the latest exhibition, Real Space there are some intriguing flaws and a certain lack of resolution in some pieces, but this only makes the show more interesting.

As the artists in Real Space acknowledge, “digital photography and image manipulation has profoundly affected the way many contemporary painters construct their paintings” (media release). The camera can be used as a device to create a mood, narrative or environment. The 5 participating painters have integrated photography and digital imaging into the evolution of their images. Using these techniques they contend that it’s possible to reinvent and modify our perception of reality.

The artists take different approaches and use different subject matter while addressing “…what space to put into a picture. It is a mediated space”—layered, digital or photographic. “It may not be the space of the real world or the virtual world, but it is the real and palpable space of painting” (media release).

The paintings here range from photorealism to abstraction and quasi-abstraction. Artists have used computer-generated images to create working studies for paintings and to conceptualise space within their 2-dimensional works. While photography has lent itself to such art making for decades, the effects achievable with computer imaging—the layering of digital images and mixing pixels—are especially appropriate to painting.

Among the most interesting works are David Salter’s vividly figurative What, where and A Place to Go, the former featuring a Munchian screaming child against a sinisterly enveloping background of a stark brick wall and writhing vines. The latter work depicts a bikini-clad figure in a strikingly-rendered swimming pool and both paintings “…are collaged, layered images from various digital sources, …portraits constructed [by] placing the figure in digitally manipulated unreal space [to] visually capture a state of mind” (artist’s statement).

Andrea Warren’s digitally constructed works, Zoom 1, 2 & 3, explore the world of bureaucracy and in their realism, use of light, cropping, skewed perspective and monotonal colour, strongly reflect the influence of photography. They feature large-scale close-ups of subjects such as office furniture and a reclining cropped figure, feet in the foreground and hands folded on his torso, again referencing the photographic. Warren explains, “Issues such as voyeurism, power struggles, identity within bureaucracy and the politics of the office environment are pivotal focuses within this investigation.”

Abbey MacDonald’s paintings explore the rather odd idea of flesh as fabric; somewhat unreadable works in carnal pinks and browns depict cushion-like forms that recall body parts. “The use of photography is vital for my work when searching for source material and digital imaging has been necessary when trying to create a flesh/fabric hybrid and make visual these specific points of tension,” says MacDonald. These are technically competent works, but not always visually seductive, except in their strangeness, and their premise is tenuous.

Julie Jacobs’ patterned canvases are inspired by the landscape, specifically the Tasmanian midlands. Some of her untitled oils seem overworked to the point where colours have become muddied and they seem to owe rather a lot to the landscape work of Richard Wastell, one of Hobart’s most significant young painters. Her use of repetitive design and texturing nevertheless shows potential.

Christiana Edwards’ explorations of the visual conceits of film noir and contemporary scary movies—referencing beauty, fear, sexuality and violence—transfer well to the canvas and add another dimension to an engaging show.

Real Space, Christiana Edwards, Julie Jacobs, Abbey MacDonald, David Salter, Andrea Warren; Inflight Gallery, North Hobart, Nov 28-Dec 19

RealTime issue #59 Feb-March 2004 pg. 37

Oceania Indymedia Newsreal

“Just do it” was the catch-cry of the Straight Out of Brisbane (SOOB) artists whose work reverberated among locals and visitors from Newcastle, Melbourne and Sydney. The second annual independent and emerging artists’ festival, SOOB 2003, was broader and better this year, characterised by more gaming, tinkering, hacking and awareness of trends in new media. Specific Australian cultures were represented alongside global art/political schisms. The festival had strong curatorial edges and an emphasis in the media arts on new forms and compilations of artists’ work.

Using Newcastle’s This is Not Art model, SOOB is an ambitious 3 days of free panels, exhibits and workshops followed by colourful late night club gigs. Local bands, DJs, VJs and multimedia performers emerge from everywhere. Centred on Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley cultural precinct, the festival began in 2002 amidst a furious buzz about Brisbane’s prolific “bedroom artists”, yet to emerge as worthy of consideration by the Australian cultural intelligentsia. Over 2 years, SOOB has successfully explored and showcased this independent and emerging arts culture. And in a psychogeography of venues which include outdoor, off-limits and illegal spaces as well as parent venues, bright hopefuls from Brisbane’s increasingly wired local scene present themselves in the context of experimental art.

The festival began with a cappella voices from the Turrbal people ringing out over the Brunswick Street pedestrian mall which focused attention on their reclaiming ownership of the area. Land rights, such an important issue all over Australia, has a particularly poignant place in Brisbane, where property development is eating up many of the bohemian and artist-inhabited suburbs and the Turrbal people have recently won a title deed. Incoporating their voices into SOOB acknowledged the city’s past amidst the festival’s themes: art in the city, art’s recombination, re-use and future.

Several ‘independent’ cultures were represented this year. Australian comic book art was explored through panels, with a handout on related websites created by quiz.cat, underground zines curator and prolific poster artist Sean Taylor. There were also stellar sessions on independent television, including screenings, production workshops and panels organised by the Kill Your TV collective (which brought together Access News, Actively Radical TV, Kill Your TV, Undercurrents UK, the Guerilla News Network and the solar-powered Lab Rats). A video competition was sponsored by Kill Your TV, offering thousands of dollars in production support for the socially aware and politicised. Panels challenged the reality TV of Big Brother, the infotainment industry, home renovation and lifestyle programs. Participants included Nathan Mayfield and Tracey Robertson (Fat Cow Motel), Chris Taylor and Charles Firth (CNNNN), Tim Paris (SKA TV) and Jackie Ryan (producer of the pilot, Burger Force). Local filmmaker and activist Belle Budden programmed Indigenous Flix, a collection of activist-related documentary works from Aboriginal communities. All this experimental media was topped off by a screening of the recent video Oceania Indymedia Newsreal.

The interdisciplinary nature of new media art was reflected in the spaces it occupied. A shopfront renamed The Electronode was a hub of activity, featuring carefully selected screen works in several formats and settings. Noteworthy was Fiona Smith’s Flow On, an interactive documentary in which 2 laptop terminals battle for land in the Mekong Delta. Based on the artist’s travels, the work is a CD but not yet online. Sam Whetton’s Gristle Mania, an interactive sound work “meat fantasy” and Ben Ashcroft’s Terror in the (Kitsch)en were quite funny interactive works and a pleasure to play.

Curated by new media artists Thea Baumann and Tara Pattenden, Electronode exhibited about 25 works and several day-long programs of looped films. Other new media installations requiring more room appeared in other shopfronts and were joined at the end of the festival by a screening of the new video compilation, Neopoetry. The new media spaces hinted at more wireless and networked possibilities for exhibition and were a strong component of the festival.

Curator Tim Plaisted’s visual art exhibition, Neocontre, addressed neo-conservative political agendas affecting Australia. Of particular note were works by Brisbane photo-text artist Angel Kosch and James Dodd’s portrait triptych (Gollum from Lord of the Rings, John Howard and the Queen), which was repeated several times on a front wall. These works seemed to encapsulate many concerns debated throughout the festival: street art versus gallery co-option, culture jamming, activism as art and art as activism. How do we brand ourselves? What kind of spaces are we making in the streets and on the walls? For whom or what are we making these spaces? In what kinds of new and old spaces can we intervene? Several feisty discussions were hosted by the underground projection troupe, Pixelbusters, independent media maven Danni Zuvela, Mickie Quick, Emile Zile and others.

Highpoints of SOOB included the sporadic ‘agit-prop’ anarchist pamphleteers and the noisy exclamations of experimental musicians performing at the busy Improv Space. Agit 8, meatwave, unhappy bee person and others played home-made and modified instruments at an excellent closing event, Shit n Stuff.

To paraphrase one of the panels on urban representations, SOOB 2003 “invaded” the space of inner Brisbane with dozens of public projects, defying legal and cultural dictums on what art space is and the definitions of legitimacy and cleanliness that make Brisbane’s public and street life non-existent. Walls, alleyways, empty grass lots and even tabletops were all used as spaces for art as SOOB took culture out of the institutions. Pope Alice Xorporation’s See You No More assured us of a healthy queer presence and the hilarious Clothes Rodeo swapmeet (you had to be there) offset any fashion consciousness. The official space of cyberfeminism was brought to us in a Wired Women panel, and Creative Industries’ “Microbusiness Forum” offered methods and means to young entrepreneurs.

For a few days, the Valley business district was genuinely transformed and Brisbane’s independent arts culture rendered visible as artists partied all night and languished daily in the streets. While sometimes caught in a cultural cringe and driven underground by the crusty old guard, this culture is alive and mutating…and that’s true SOOBin’.

SOOB 2003: Straight Out of Brisbane, festival managers Susan Kukucka, Louise Terry, Ben Eltham; various venues, Brisbane, Dec 3-7, 2003, www.straightoutofbrisbane.com

RealTime issue #59 Feb-March 2004 pg. 28

Cre8ive Challenge Kambalda Residency

photo Poppy van Oorde-Grainger

Cre8ive Challenge Kambalda Residency

Cre8ive Challenge is an Awesome Arts initiative designed to bring young people and local artists together. Participating groups engage in an open-ended, process-based exploration of identity by examining the significant and distinctive features of their local community and environment. Groups are organised through schools, youth and arts centres.

Each year Cre8ive Challenge is focused on a different project. In 2003 the project came in 2 parts: the first, a celebration/presentation of each group’s exploration of identity; the second, the collection of significant sound samples for a collaborative project with UK sound artist, Scanner. The latter become a soundscape accompaniment for a journey through the urban environment of Perth as part of the Awesome Festival in November.

A significant part of Cre8ive Challenge involves taking participants out of their comfort zones by exposing them to a range of contemporary arts strategies and processes. This can be a complex operation as it sometimes reveals major disjunctions between creative processes and the participants’ expectations, but on the whole produces highly idiosyncratic and distinctive outcomes.

The focus of the groups’ final celebrations was diverse and embraced several modes of arts practice. My group was Campbell Primary, situated in a recently built area south of Perth comprised of walled estates, each with their own feature lake and landscaped entry. My group of 30 Year 6s (aged 10 to 11) decided to focus on the swampland that had previously existed in the area, with their school’s shiny elevator functioning as a symbol of development and the group’s dreams and aspirations. They opted for a walk-through installation where we would create a fictional history of characters and ghostly presences within ‘the Swamp.’ We created a sensorily saturated space through the use of digital video projections, improvised electronic sounds, kooky plants, tree cuttings, constructed creatures, rich woodchip mulch and a model skeleton with lights kindly lent by an inventive parent.

The school’s celebration night was well attended and the kids threw themselves into the challenge of intimate performance with relish, creating an experience that exceeded all our expectations. The scale and success of our project was in large part due to the school’s support in terms of time and money, as well as the skill and energy of my fabulous collaborating teacher, the music specialist Wendi Horne.

The approach of other group projects was diverse and included several sound-focused works. Mark Cain and Gingin District High year 5 created a soundscape of elements from around Gingin Brook: frogs, jets, rain, thunderstorms, a bird-park and interviews with locals (such as a 4th generation Gingin beekeeper who told stories of catching water rats and selling their pelts during the Depression). Students created their own instruments to play with the collected sounds.

Petro Vouris and Maylands Primary (Perth) explored memory through sound and an installation, creating a horror house and a detective mystery scene complete with interrogations and a survey of the audience at the celebration.

Cat Hope and St Patrick’s Primary (Katanning) created a soundscape from sounds and interviews which explored the impact of natural events such as earthquakes, floods and snow. Assisted by some local Aboriginal women, they situated the sound works in cubbies built from natural elements overlooking the river in a revered Aboriginal site named after the ear of a monster from Dream Time legend.

Sohan Ariel Hayes and Mt. Lawley Primary (Perth) developed a sound project. The group sonically re-created significant events in a tour of 12 sites, with the sound experienced through headphones via a radio transmitter. Sohan also worked with Yerecoin Primary, where the group explored the cycle of life by creating a macabre funereal procession of striking characters, including a 5 metre inflatable which burst from the coffin to fly away, taking several characters with it.

Other groups explored the space of their social and physical environment through mapping. Stuart Clipston’s group in Carnarvon (Carnarvon Primary, St Mary’s Star of the Sea and Burringurrah Community School) mapped their movements through town and explored the relative distance between meaningful sites according to the kids’ awareness of what is significant in their lives. These maps were displayed as part of the celebration, revealing the diversity of cultural backgrounds in the one town.

Annabel Dixon and North Lake Senior College explored mapping with a year 11 group, as well as collecting objects to monochrome in blue and creating a series of photographic portraits with captioned signs.

Tony Nathan and Bolgart Primary experimented with photographic processes such as photograms and documented significant sites in the cultural/physical landscape, culminating with a community portrait to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Town Hall.

Poppy van-Oorde Grainger and the Kambalda Youth House group explored the significance of the bush as a landscape of freedom. They created dummies on BMX bikes in the ‘hands up’ pose of triumph, set aflame on the reflective salt lakes in homage to the recent Antony Gormley WA salt lake art extravaganza. Poppy also worked with Lakewood Primary, exploring multiculturalism and migration by creating a mythological flock of birds as well as developing a special secret language for them. The celebration climaxed with the birds’ release via helium balloons, alongside real homing pigeons.

Kerry Wilkes and Tammin Primary (years 4 to 7) used the highway as a defining element of local identity and explored it by sampling sounds, images and found elements from key sites along the road. They created a large installation in the Town Hall using road signs, tarpaulins and fertilizer tubs.

Shaun Spicer and Marble Bar Primary investigated the importance of the town’s jasper deposits, echoing the textures of the stone through ‘marbling’ the walls of a historical local tin-shed church with 300 litres of paint. This was combined with a large Dream Time snake sculpture and projections of the painting, interspersed with kids improvising dancing shadows on the outside of the church.

Steve Aiton and Perth Montessori decided to explore the group’s diversity via the territory of their school. They built models and employed digital technology to create an 8 minute animation in which the head of Maria Montessori functions as a house for a crazy architecture of spiral elevators and dream bedrooms containing significant objects and fictional alter-egos of the kids.

Simon Perecich and Rockingham Senior High created a series of dolphins with images and symbols featured on the sides of the creatures.

echoricochet, the parallel project of gathering sound samples was an enjoyable process for all the groups. Scanner has a history of working with ‘found’ samples and was interested in distinctive sounds specific to the local area. This focus gave a new awareness of each of the groups’ local environments, especially when their celebration involved a soundscape. The Katanning group were so interested in the field recording process they continued their recording project after the Challenge was completed.

The soundscape collaboration was part of the Awesome Festival in central Perth. While a large, spectacular array of Chinese silk lanterns in the shape of various animals filled the main space of Forrest Chase, echoricochet was presented from an orange transit van with a little cluster of creatures that had evolved from the Challenge. The public borrowed headphones and CD players and embarked on a sound-walk through the city, guided by instructions. Perth ebbed and flowed with its usual rhythms as the soundscape evolved around the listener, offering a relaxed yet heightened awareness of the urban environment’s passing details. The layering of these far-off sounds–animals, machinery, people talking of rural experiences, children laughing and chattering–with the smooth ambient wash of gentle rhythms and pulses created an enjoyable ‘soundbath’.

The presentation of echoricochet left me feeling that the more dynamic and interesting aspects of Cre8ive Challenge remained under-represented in the festival. The absence of visual documentation meant that the raw, energetic and idiosyncratic elements of young creative processes had been largely filtered from the finished product: Scanner’s soundwork was smooth and sophisticated, reflecting the refined sensibility guiding the editing process. Perhaps the final collaboration would have benefited from an accompaniment of images and explanatory material. Nevertheless, Cre8ive Challenge was a rewarding process for all involved–artists, young people and hopefully the audiences who enjoyed the final results.

The Awesome 2003 Cre8ive Challenge, various artists, schools and community groups, May-Nov 2003, Western Australia, The 2003 Awesome Festival, various venues, Perth, WA, Nov 21-30, 2003, www.awesomearts.com

RealTime issue #59 Feb-March 2004 pg. 28

Mel Donat, Memory Playback

There must have been something in the air at the University of Western Sydney around the turn of the millennium—a wormhole the students fell into so that they emerged from the institution with a distinctive fetish for old and arguably obsolete technology. Or perhaps, as rumour has it, the old equipment was being disposed of and some students discovered strong scavenger instincts. Tim Ryan, Philip Williams, Andrew Gadow and Mel Donat exemplify this phenomenon. Over the last 3 years they have individually and collectively clocked up an impressive list of exhibitions. The latest is Digital Decoupage at First Draft Gallery where they truly revel in technological obsolescence and the endlessly surprising outcomes of analogue and digital interactions.

Tim Ryan’s Future Proof consists of 3 7” LCD monitors placed side by side in an empty room displaying landscapes of light and texture. The development of pattern and tone is subtle, the result of harnessing technology’s mistakes and idiosyncrasies. The images are obliquely related, morphing between screens and the play from right to left provides a disconcerting backwards flow, as the vision disappears into the linear past. Reflecting on in-built obsolescence, Ryan believes that, “As a technology advances, the user becomes further disembodied from their actions, which makes it more difficult to find the source of technological problems” (artist’s statement). The easiest solution is to make replacement technology—Ryan asks can any technology be truly future proof.

From a different perspective, Andrew Gadow’s MoogLighting suggests that no technology is obsolescent, it’s just waiting for a new use. He converts the audio signal of a 1970s Moog synthesiser to video. As he uses a wide range of frequencies some of these signals are almost inaudible, yet still produce visual material. The result is work of clean patterns and lines and a pleasing sparseness and restraint. This is as integrated as the audiovisual relationship gets—a truly synaesthetic experience.

Also manifesting invisible information is Philip Williams’ non-linear feedback. With black leader tape from video, radio static and tape hiss, Williams effects and layers his material using digital processes to draw out the colour, texture and movement hidden in apparent detritus. Most impressive is the elephantine video projector used to show this work that requires 3 people to lift and has separate red/green/blue bulbs that highlight the work’s colour composition. Although as visually and sonically subtle as Gadow’s work, non-linear feedback revels more in grain and texture and often looks reminiscent of astronomic vistas. There is also a monitor piece, with the viewing surface laid horizontal, demonstrating a monochrome investigation of the process. The impact of the work builds with our knowledge of the process behind it.

Williams and Gadow are exhibited in the main room of First Draft, not ideal for displaying works whose audio outputs bleed and whose visuals fade in afternoon light. It would be good to experience these pieces again in a more contemplative environment.

Mel Donat’s Memory Playback takes a more tactile and interactive approach. On a plinth in the centre of the room lies a large floppy stuffed bunny attached to the wall by a mysterious cord. On a screen is projected a 3D animated rabbit. By finding and pressing switches in the toy’s body the animated rabbit responds. These responses are focussed on the corresponding body part but are interestingly free of narrative, generating a strange gestural language. The rabbit’s surface is composed of textured horizontal static and floats in a world of vertical static as if it has grown out of its environment. The work is all the more engaging because it does not fall into cuteness or the Chuckie’s Back toy-turned-sinister theme: Memory Playback has an intriguing obliqueness in its action/interaction. The animated rabbit goes through its motions efficiently and returns to rest, staring at you as if it’s expecting something and no matter how many switches you activate you’re still not quite giving it what it wants. The increased tactility required of the viewer—you have to prod and squish the toy to find the triggers—highlights the transition from real to virtual and the causal relationship between the 2 that is so often elusive and unfulfilling in interactive works.

Digital Decoupage satisfies with its conceptual cohesion and investigative and aesthetic rigour. All the works have a pared back clarity borne of concerted efforts to control unwieldy processes and materials. It will be interesting to follow the development of these 4 artists as they continue to discover and tame the strange mutations that live between old and new technologies, between analogue and digital worlds.

Digital Decoupage, First Draft Gallery, Sydney, Dec 3-14, 2003.

RealTime issue #59 Feb-March 2004 pg. 29

Maria Miranda’s The Museum of Rumour manifested both online and onsite in late 2003 at the Sydney College of the Arts. The college was formerly an institution for the incarceration of the insane, established in 1886 with 630 patients, peaking with over 3000 patients in 1968 and dropping to 579 in 1988 before being closed. You’d at least expect to encounter the ghosts of rumour in this work as you wander about the building where inmates were herded to eat their meals. But there’s very little that’s literal about Miranda’s creation. Even so, associations inevitably spring to mind as you peer into a hole in the floorboards that cannot be accounted for, or at a kneeling stool, a chest of drawers or a view of a nearby spire. A headphone set guides you point to point where a voice gently coaxes your contemplations. Each reverie is followed by an exquisite if all too brief sound composition (Norie Neumark). I would have preferred the sound before the words, to let loose more associations, and then the opportunity to relish the sound again after the delivery of the text. Even so this is an interesting and unusual experience thematically reminiscent of Company in Space’s multimedia performance work The Light Room (2002), also inspired by mediaeval and renaissance mappings of space by associations, metaphor and memnonics rather than literal representation.

The website of the Museum of Rumour offers a very different experience if on a continuum. It uses the great avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein as the primary node for a network of association and influence in six frames, each with a life of its own, aptly titled ‘degrees of separation.’ These include rumours of war, cats (feral, domestic and Tourneur’s Cat People film), the Gene-Hackman French connection, Our Lady of Coogee and a set of Steinian cups that fall and clink and spill the writer’s words. There’s also a Stein page where clicking on scrolling lines of letters triggers an acrobatic dance of words (lesbian, postmodern, writer…) and sounds. There’s also a delightful ‘Interferometer’ with an active grid that responds like an oscilloscope to the speed of rumour at your choice of drift, walk, wander, meander, lurk or float. This is a good-humoured, finely made, altogether eccentric museum that suggests different ways of archiving experience and tracing the lateral paths of memory and association.

At this year’s Adelaide Festival, the Australian Dance Theatre (ADT) will premiere HELD, a collaboration with internationally acclaimed dance photographer Lois Greenfield. Garry Stewart has been Artistic Director at ADT since 1999 and his directorship has seen a huge increase in the company’s popularity both here and in the US, where ADT toured in 2001 and 2002. Stewart discusses the new project via email with Erin Brannigan.

Lois Greenfield is a photographer of the highest calibre. How did this collaboration come about?

I was in New York in January last year as a delegate for the Australia Council at APAP (American Performing Arts Presenters), the largest and most important arts market in North America. ADT had completed a 7-city tour of the US a few months earlier. At the conference the US delegates knew who we were and there seemed to be a great deal of interest. I was introduced to Lois who had heard about the company and after I showed her some images of the ADT dancers—suspended in the air and inverted—she immediately said she would like to photograph them. I suggested that perhaps we could actually extend the collaboration by utilising a live photographic session within the performance itself. Lois was immediately taken with this and so the idea developed from there. This set up had also been partially tested by Lois where, in one instance, she actually did have an audience witness a photo shoot in a theatre. Even in this simple set up she found that the audience seemed fascinated by the images she could extract from the dancing.

The American interest in your work seems natural given the tradition of high-octane work in that country—Stephen Petronio and Elizabeth Streb for example.

I think that the broad interest in ADT in the US is borne out of a cultural connection to the aesthetics of the formalist modern and postmodern dance heritage, which is an American phenomenon. Therefore there is a comfortable context for our work. Moreover, as is the case with Australian audiences or audiences anywhere for that matter, beyond the conceptual concerns I think our work can be received through its visceral immediacy. My works aim at a kind of poetics of extremity arranged through a formal structure. For the viewer, I think there is a vicarious thrill in witnessing extreme athletic dance, giving relief to our subconscious desires for flight. I guess some people see my work as a form of organised violence toward (and with) the body. Whether I agree with this or not, I do find this a much more interesting reading than just seeing it in the ‘joy-of-dance’ context.

Lois’ role in this project is the extraction of seemingly impossible moments that usually remain hidden within a given passage of choreography, images which will be projected instantaneously on a screen during the performance. Her photography allows the viewer to witness relationships between the dancers that are normally so fleeting they are rendered invisible. She takes photos at an incredible 1/2000th of a second. Her work is an assault on time and perception. [These images seem] surreal and magical because they defy our hard-wired comprehension of the physics of the everyday world.

Beyond Lois’ actual role in the work, the project is conceptually centered [on] the broader parameters of photography… I’ve had to embark on a bit of a crash course, reading everything from books on camera technique and the chemistry of film processing to writings on the philosophical and cultural meanings ascribed to photography and the image. I’ve also been looking at the work of other noted contemporary photographers such as Cindy Sherman, Diane Arbus, Tracey Moffat and Wolfgang Tillmans.

In HELD, the stage becomes the photographic studio and in a sense an atelier—a space of work and process. Lights are wheeled around the stage, gaffer tape marks an ‘x’ to position a dancer and in each scene there are observers as well as photographed subjects present. Of course this is a stylised, theatricalised ‘studio’, so the phone isn’t ringing every 5 minutes and people aren’t sitting around eating order-in pizza. But the notion of stage-as-studio is something that drives the set design, lighting and the division of space as well as the demeanor and attitudes of the performers onstage. Other threads are drawn into the work such as framing and partitioning, the manipulation of light and darkness, being ‘in focus’ and ‘out of focus’ etc.

At times the choreography is performed in total darkness…Through the absence of light, the audience is invited to reflect that the act of ‘seeing’ is a result of perceiving light waves reflected off objects. In HELD I’m also using freezes, where the choreography will cease and the dancers remain frozen on the spot—a metaphor for the frozen slice of time that photos represent.

You have referred to the video component of HELD as offering an intimacy with the work through close up and the photographs as emphasising the heroic and virtuosic aspects of the choreography.

Lois’ work is, to a large extent, focused on the heroic, the virtuosic. And to an equal degree so is my choreography. Hence the chemistry between Lois and our dancers in the studio has been immediate. At its best, Lois’ work is primarily centred on the dancers relating to each other within an aerial orientation. Because the ADT dancers train and work regularly within this dimension the choices that are available to them in the air [are] far greater than those available to conventionally trained dancers.

In the last couple of years, I’ve also been developing a kind of sub-set vocabulary, which is antithetical to the virtuosity. I call this vocabulary ‘micro-movements’ where we reduce phrases down to minute physical impulses. I ask the dancers to express phrases through their bodies just beyond the level of the initial thought so that the movement produced is barely perceptible. This is an interesting counterpoint to the gymnastic end of the spectrum more commonly associated with my work. This ‘micro-movement’ also possesses an oblique relationship to ‘popping’ in breakdance, which has at times also formed part of the company’s movement vocabulary….[I]n HELD, the ‘micro-movements’ seemed to offer a powerful physical analogy to animation, so we created a series of projected mini-animations using Lois’ photos that are juxtaposed with the performance of the ‘micro-movements.’

In HELD I’ve also been attempting to give value to the…spaces that fall between the ‘uber’ moments in the air. Part of the video element in the work [includes] images of the dancers in moments of rest, featuring slow-motion close-ups on discreet gestures or simply their faces in a passive moment of listening. The interior world of the performers is referenced and amplified here in order to provide a psychological and emotional balance to their representation. Not all is bravura. Likewise with the movement. Some of the high speed, high powered gymnastic skills are represented in close-up and extreme slow motion in an attempt to shift the perception of the audience to the interior of the body. This stretching in time [through] video is a sort of deconstruction of the ballistic choreography into an experience that is more intimate for the audience.

Still photography is an interesting counterpoint to the speed of your choreography—the challenge it presents to photographic reproduction. Have you come across problems regarding dance and reproduction before this project?

I have never really attempted to represent the dancing body through reproduced body images before, apart from a couple of short films I made when I was a student at the University of Technology in Sydney. In the past it has actually been one of my pet hates to see the choreography reproduced on video in the same space as live dancers as it seems to be used too casually, not being inherent to the work. However, I…loved Ros Warby’s solo Eve which combines live performance with film images of her made by Margie Medlin. This is the most successful use of corporeal reproduction in a live dance piece that I’ve ever seen.

HELD also offers an excellent opportunity for the documentation of our work. As an adjunct to the fleeting emphemerality of dance as live performance, the photos become powerful emblems of our identity as well as the identity of the specific dancers. The David Parsons Company, for instance, are known just as much through Lois’ now iconic images of them as through their live performances. For us this is perhaps one of the very few instances where we may be able to gain some leverage out of mass media reproduction. As you know, this is not something that comes by every day in the marginalised realm of contemporary performance making.

Australian Dance Theatre, HELD, directors Garry Stewart, David Bonney, photography Lois Greenfield; 2004 Adelaide Festival, Her Majesty’s Theatre, March 1-6; www.adelaidefestival.com.au

Art plunders the world, and other art, for its contents and forms. Dance in recent times has rapidly and inventively absorbed, among other things, break-dancing, martial arts, sports and the virtual bodies and worlds conjured by new media. The absorption of training regimes and sundry physical aesthetics into the body of performance is sometimes problematic, especially when the digestion appears incomplete and the audience are faced with the raw materials of uncooked art. The lesser disciples of Suzuki Tadashi, for example, have produced mere stomping demonstrations and Butoh-borrowers empty images of slo-mo angst. The power of integration vis a vis influence has been witnessed, to name only a few examples, in the work of Tess De Quincey, Nikki Heywood (eg performing in her own unforgettable Creatures Ourselves) and Sue-Ellen Kohler, dancer and yoga practitioner par excellence in her unique live dance and film creations. Kohler springs to mind when seeing Narelle Benjamin’s Inside Out. Benjamin, a virtuosic dancer with One Extra Dance and Chunky Move (and a filmmaker of considerable potential), here passes on her formidable skills to young dancers Kristina Chan and Clare Holland.

The admirably executed shapes, extensions and contortions of yoga dominate the work in a series of short scenes. It’s in the transition from shape to shape and movements within each posture that the choreographic sensibility is glimpsed, if insufficiently. Unconvincing scene-shifts, deployed via see-through black-outs, cut short the duration of movement that would test Benjamin’s vision. Even so, the sense of yoga showreel is lessened in the moments when the dancers’ bodies suggest alien forms (as in the opening, unfolding images) or serpentine liquidity in the mutating pools and columns of Simon Wise’s lighting. Less readable were the signs of torment in the performers and Huey Benjamin’s “noise” soundtrack, okay in itself but too big for this intimate bodywork. As the Sydney independent dance scene revivifies after some hard years, it’s heartening to see the passing on of skill and the emergence of a new choreographic vision.

On the same program, as 2 strangers on a park bench, Michael Whaites and Michael O’Donoghue play at waiting, drawing on the language of everyday gestures, rituals and anxieties, here elevated into the pathos of lost love (laboriously stated via soundtrack songs) and the discovery of each other as potential partners (neatly duetted). It’s a nice idea and it has its moments but mostly totters between shapelessness and episodes of over-articulation, between acute behavioural observation and a thin narrative. There’s something in Waiting for Michael, but it’s not been realised in this incarnation.

Film and video have become increasingly important to dance, not only for documentation but as significant means of expression for filmmakers, not least filmmaker-choreographers. To reflect on the ways film ingests dance was the wonderful opportunity One Extra offered an inquisitive audience when it hosted the appearance of UK artists Miranda Pennell and John Smith in Sydney. This followed a filmmaking workshop, with both artists also exhibiting works at Performance Space. Smith’s 30 years of eccentric, good-humoured and enlightening radical filmmaking opened up endless possibilities for visual creativity. In The Girl Chewing Gum (12 mins, 1976) his voice-over wonderfully ‘directs’ the movements of suburban Londoners as if they are his film extras. His Worst Case Scenario (20 mins DVD loop, 2003), comprising a stream of movie-like images from rapidly shot camera stills taken on a Vienna street corner, is an exquisite documentation of everyday waiting, eating and road-crossing, with just a whiff of Freud.

Pennell is a wonder, creating films with a choreographer’s sensibility but whose subjects are movers of a different kind—marching soldiers (Tattoo, 9 mins, 2002), people dancing in their living rooms (Human Radio, 9 mins, 2001) and girl ice-skaters and boy guitarists (Magnetic North, 8 mins, 2003) shot in Finland. Pennell bravely showed some of her early idiosyncratic creations featuring herself, proof that the real world is her meat but that the way to it is indirect, but nonetheless intriguing. One Extra’s commitment to “film dance” whether here or in the reel dance festival provides a key stimulus and focal point for the making, understanding and display of this expanding creative form in Australia and beyond.

One Extra Dance, Inside Out, choreographer Narelle Benjamin, performers Kristina Chan, Clare Holland, lighting design Simon Wise, noise Huey Benjamin; Waiting for Michael, directors, performers Michael Whaites, Michael O’Donoghue, dramaturgy Robert Jarman, lighting Tim Munro, composer/sound designer Ben Sibson, set design Greg Methe; Dec 3-14. reel dance, films by Miranda Pennell and John Smith, screenings Dec 6-7, installations Dec 3-13, Performance Space, Sydney 2003

The greatest challenge for the contemporary visual artist is capturing the audience’s undivided attention. Art is getting bigger, louder, and bolder every minute, and the death of contemplation seems imminent. In this regard Jo Scicluna’s recent exhibition was unusual. from a slow dark light is a journey of 2 kinds, both territorial and spiritual.

At BUS (a Melbourne artist-run gallery) there is a narrow passageway that goes nowhere. At its end Scicluna has installed a large photograph of a nocturnal landscape illuminated by a lightbox and, halfway down the gallery, a small wooden construction made of contour-map jigsaw forms. The lightbox is like a window to another world, drawing you to the end of the space. On the other hand, the wooden construction, built into the wall and dimly backlit, is only noticeable when you pass it.

Landscape is often used as a metaphor for existential yearning, the nocturnal image even more so. The photograph in from a slow dark light is of a suburban park at night. It’s a spooky image. Two trees in proscenium arch formation frame the scene and the shadow of a third tree is strongly cast across them. What a looming shadow it is, animated like a tree from a haunted forest. Beyond are the distant lights of the city, but they are blurry and out of reach. Like walking through a park at night, the danger is prescient. Light is used here as a central element, but it’s the dark that prevails, our gaze drawn into the depths of the shadows. It’s the dark night of the soul and darkness might swallow us up.

Lightboxes are seductive. They embellish images and lend them theatricality. The allusion to cinema is often made but in this case Scicluna probably employed the device for other reasons. In from a slow dark light the visual relationship of the 2 components exists primarily through the technique of backlighting. Illumination from beyond was a device of Romanticism in its celebration of the Sublime and its evasiveness—what is missing is meant to keep you searching.

Scicluna’s contour construction is a graphic representation of the formal patterns of light and dark in the photograph. It is here that the 2 elements of the work magically meld despite appearing quite contradictory. The wooden contours speak of analytical thought, in contrast with the sublime experience of the landscape. Which is more real? The topographical map is a formula for space, an index in which both real and virtual coexist. But we are more likely to trust in the photograph as evidence of something real. Even so, Scicluna’s image is difficult to trust. It is beautiful, but feels like an illusion. It has all the staginess of trompe l’oeil and about as much reality as a Claude Lorrain painting. The one fact of the photograph remains—it appears to be the archive of a moment, a passage to the past.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow Up (1966) is about a prominent British photographer (played by David Hemmings) who discovers, as he enlarges one of his pictures in the darkroom, that a murder has taken place within his frame. In the scene where he is working with his enlarger, the movie camera zooms in on the photo of the park and the ambience of the room is replaced by the sound of wind and rustling trees. The suggestion is that in the absence of seeing a greater truth exists. Jo Scicluna’s work is just as suggestive—something strange emerges from a slow dark light.

Recently, while visiting Jim Moss’ new house/studio, designed by the late Nick Opie, I saw an ‘exhibition’—2 paintings by Ian Grieg, one a patterned black work in 2 parts, the other a grid of a repeated water image. Both were Grieg’s gifts to the house. In Kay Lawrence’s office around the corner from mine in the city are many exquisite woven works by various artists (including Lawrence). Across the road in a streetwear shop is a set of prints by the urban artist KAB 101 (shown to me by Anton Hart). And a little further down Hindley Street on an old cinema hoarding there is this sign:

(Beneath this sign is a whole ‘cinema screen’ of characters, scenarios, colour fields and texts; the cartoon face of Blotchwoman, for example, has appeared throughout Hindley Street over the last few years—she’s a ‘filmstar’ of the West End). In artists’ studios there are innumerable works that never see the light of day. On my own loungeroom wall there is a new John Barbour work.

Sometimes, perhaps always, there is art ‘all around’—not organised to be officially viewed, or offered as officiated presentation, but nevertheless ‘exhibitions’ that one sort of bumps into. Then there are, in more ordered and contained ways, sites where art appears outside designated galleries, like shop fronts, artist-run spaces, clubs, library foyers, corridors etc.

In the ‘all around’ premise, art and architecture become the ruins (or erosion) of each other. They take within themselves—absorb their own appearance, as if holding themselves to themselves—the singular presence of their appearance in the world as odd, as stubborn manifestations of conscious effect. What I mean is that art and architecture, when they appear together like this, resist incorporation—however mild—into the straight-line of dominant (art) sense, and wind up in the middle of contrary stories. A shattering beauty results. The black Grieg is high above the silver stove, catching the summer light from the west. It’s as if one ‘finds’ it there. One finds, in some way—by chance or invitation—these works and their architectural context (in the case of the Grieg, one’s eye is drawn to the height of the wall, and to the upstairs space).

And then…one finds entire (planned) exhibitions right under one’s nose (and just a little to the side of the galleries one usually haunts expectantly) which seem to be about—or so one imagines—the very idea of space-gift, of the ‘found’, of what is there (in the present) for the taking.

In his first solo exhibition NARROW, Nick Harding has used the limited space of the Flightpath Architects’ office to arrange a set of small digital photographs taken within a 100m radius of the space. These poetic, quietly composed images are each of a liminal or marginal space, an everyday architectural moment of endurance—an infinite moment of abandonment; the compositions are only just there—chosen from a tiny territory that effortlessly offers endless imagistic opportunities. Here in the strict angles of architecture—brutal corners, gaps, planes, grids, materials—a ruinous activity of surface subtraction and addition undoes and redoes the appearance of the world, as if an art of constant reworking (“sweet disorder”, says Jane Rendell in Occupying Architecture, Between The Architect And The User, ed Jonathon Hill, Routledge, London & New York, 1998). There, where no-one’s looking, stories come and go, the city’s undercurrent messes with its wrap of staid geometry, pulls it out of alignment and occupies it. The wrap is an invitation, an offered surface—the word NARROW in yellow on a grey concrete wall, with the word HIDDEN on the bricks nearby; a compelling Mondrian, by ‘someone’, appears in aqua and blue on the back of a building. This ‘someone’ is a crowd, an amalgam of strange energies, which employs strategies to liquefy the meaning of space; the space of architecture is borrowed and given its proper due—a love without judgment. Time, ‘someone’, shifts it ‘all around’; Harding records 11 shifts of time.

Jason Namakaeha Momoa makes 3-dimensional collages from the fragments of time left lying around on streets and rubbish tips, in sheds and shops. Not revelations nor didactic evocations, the collages are all brownish, modest, worn and crumbly. They are ‘poems’ which trust that their materiality—in its acquired broken, ruined, melancholy beauty—will not be dismissed via the language of nostalgia or longing, but will be taken on in other less ready terms (like, corrosion, accretion, duration, and attention—an attention of minute intensity, eg why has that small cardboard box been reinforced with metal strips?; to what picture did those canvas prayer flags once belong?).

Namakaeha Momoa’s solo exhibition, The Brown Bag Diaries, is hung in the central space of Kintolai Gallery, right next door to Harding’s exhibition at Flightpath Architects. The 10 mixed-media works, in their role as ‘collage’ or ‘construction’, belong to the long history and tradition of making-do, combining and juxtaposing (although juxtaposing, as a way of infusing ‘meaning’, is of little concern here; each element pretty much keeps its own counsel) with exceptions if one bows to clues. Several of the works use the back of picture frames as the ground/surface on which to apply other minimal materials—a piece of barbed wire (Hokusi), a drink coaster (Eye Of The Holder), a metal disk (Barn Burned Down Now I Can See The Moon)—and these grounds are themselves rich, porous, and textured, whole regions of nuance.

Viewed together these 2 exhibitions speak in similar tongues. In Harding’s work the collage is ‘found’ and left in place, yet ‘taken’ too—extracted pictorially. In Namakaeha Momoa’s work the collage is found in disparate pieces in disparate (local) places, physically ‘taken’ and ‘given’ back out of context and architecturally ‘planned.’ They look like maps of curious interiors or floor plans for future structures: “Things in ruin give shape to the new structures, they are transfigured and changed. Like the tail of a comet they detach themselves from the cathedral. The whole world and the whole memory of the world are continuously designing the city” (Alvaro Siza in Bruno Marchand, “Inspired By Ruins”, A + U, 355, 2000).

One comes across these 2 bodies of work, they emerge within the wider circle of the contemporary visual arts and perform (consort) with the works one finds ‘all around.’ They gather, momentarily, a crucial imminence, or in Harding’s exhibition notes about liminal space, an “ambiguity; a marginal and transitional state, a transitional passage between alternate states…neither one place nor another; neither one discipline nor another; rather a third space in-between.” And, to extend this notion of ‘neither/nor’, across the street (Hindley Street, one of the great small streets in the world, let’s hope it doesn’t get cleaned to death) from both these exhibitions is the State’s organisation for the arts, Arts SA. Within these offices is an extensive exhibition of South Australian art curated by Julie Henderson and Joe Felber that will go ‘unseen’ by almost everyone—neither public nor private. This brings up, into the political cultural arena, the necessity (and urgency) for a location—an architecture (one of those sites recorded by Harding, and fantasised via an amalgam of Namakaeha Momoa’s ‘floorplans’, for example)—dedicated to the collecting, curating and showing of South Australian visual art (an archive, research facility, gallery, a site for events, residencies, education). A location that seriously takes up (consolidates and extends) the multifarious and complex work of our contemporary visual art spaces, commercial galleries, the state-wide South Australian Living Artists Week, artist run projects, studios, offices, shops, sheds and lounge rooms.

What Harding and Namakaeha Momoa’s exhibitions ‘exhibit’ is an indication of the vast passing of ‘local’ imaginings and intimate sensibilities which if valued and attended to would help reveal the specific and manifold resonances that a particular human environment is—in its extraordinary ‘doing’ endeavours. “Through telling new stories, the unknown, undiscovered city can be laid open to critical scrutiny, to new urban practices, new urban subversions…I would like to suggest that the unknown is not so easily known—indeed, it may be all too visible, right in front of our eyes…” (S. Pile in Rendell, Occupying Architecture, Between The Architect And The User).

Thanks to the artist Joe Felber for a conversation about the huge uncollected collection.

NARROW, Nick Harding, Flightpath Architects, Hindley Street, Adelaide, Dec 2003-Jan 2004; The Brown Bag Diaries, Jason Namakaeha Momoa, Kintolai Gallery, Hindley Street, Adelaide, Dec 2003-Jan 2004

Projekt#6 is the final instalment in a series of 6 compilations of recent video art produced by Australian artists. Initiated in 2000 by video artist Brendan Lee, who funded and curated the first 2 issues before securing support for the subsequent archives from the City of Melbourne, Projekt provides an invaluable archive of the development of video art as an emergent and dynamic force in Australian art. It addresses the key questions of accessibility and exposure raised in the Video + Art = ? forum (see RT-Performance Space forum transcripts).

During my pre-Christmas visit to Kings artist-run studio in Melbourne, Lee loaded me up with videos, a DVD of Projekt#1-6 and the URL for the Projekt website (www.projekt.com.au). For the first time I coveted my neighbour’s home theatre. The ability to move between works, DVD, video and the website make this archive versatile and accessible. While the archive in no way replicates the experience of the work in the gallery space, as envisioned by the artist (and this certainly affects those video pieces which have been exhibited as site specific installations such as David Noonan and Simon Trevaks’ SOWA), it does enable a different and interactive engagement. It establishes a context in which to think about the work that video does.

For Lee, video art begins and ends with a question, whereas film tends to be self-contained and plot-driven. He feels that video or video art’s relationship to film is like comparing a poem to pop music. While poetry is intended to make you think and reflect, pop music offers pure distraction. This assessment is borne out in several videos which take the video clip as an incitement for their work. Kate Murphy’s Britney Love draws on her own and the fictional 11 year-old Brittany Love’s fascination with Britney Spears to reveal the incongruous relationship between highly sexualised pop video clips and their primary audience: young, mainly female viewers. In the production, young Brittany performs a highly evocative and sexualised dance routine to Crazy as she reveals her total preoccupation with a kid’s life: school, Spears and her hopes and dreams. In their video, Versus (Projekt#3), The Kingpins also draw on the conventions of the music video clip, using irony and parody to reinterpret traditional stereotypes within a cross-section of music genres. Although critiquing these constructions, the artists betray their own debt to the genre. Unlike the video clips they imitate, The Kingpins see themselves as “cheap imitators, simulating pop icons and pillaging media stereotypes, giving birth to their own reinventions.”

In Lyndal Jones’ Crying Man 1 (2003), the questioning nature of video is shown at its starkest. This work offers no narrative or resolution to the puzzle of why this particular man is crying. Here, as Jones explains, “there is no background that could anchor the tears in a particular incident, no words spoken that could explain the situation, no music to manipulate our emotions or our actions. We are free to watch him cry, to stop him or to leave.” Similarly, Alex Gawronski uses minimal means to achieve a gravity of situation. In Territory, Gawronski uses the medium to explore the covert relationship between art and war. While nothing really happens, he creates a palpable tension through his use of viewpoint, slowed down action and selective references to formalist traditions—banners, flags, uniforms and ritual—in the lead up to a political procession.

A feature of much of the work included in this archive is the simplicity of technique and approach. In contrast with what Keely Macarow (RT 54, p22) has termed the “cyberish polish invested in much ‘new’ media art”, many artists in this collection seem more interested in exploiting the gritty low-tech potential of video to raise questions. Leslie Eastman’s Erasehead (Projekt#5) and Daniel von Sturmer and Meri Blazevski’s Driveway Sequence (Projekt#5) are both successful precisely because of their awkwardness. In comparison, Alysa McHugh’s Suspension (Projekt#4) makes use of a sophisticated and self-conscious film noir technique, while Laresa Kosloff offers refined simplicity in Swell (Projekt#2).

All the works included in Lee’s archive have been shown previously in either private or public galleries in Australia. In a sphere where artists are closely aligned with galleries, Lee had to deal with the sensitive issue of protecting both artists’ and gallery rights. In negotiations with the galleries, Lee made it clear the Projekt was not selling the copyright or artist’s right and that a major spin off from the archive was promotional. As part of the arrangement with the galleries, Lee undertook to send the archive to every curatorial institution in Australia and promote it overseas. The scope of his vision, his charisma and enthusiasm, the promise of national and international exposure (for both artists and galleries) and the tangible results, overcame any concerns that the galleries might have had and they’ve enthusiastically supported the archive.

Lee’s next entrepreneurial venture is to make money for these video artists. As he sees it, art buyers will invest in photographs or video stills, yet still don’t really know what to do with video. At the forthcoming Melbourne Affordable Art Fair, Lee plans to circumvent such buyer resistance—buy a photograph or framed video still and get a DVD of the video.

In offering an archive of contemporary video work, Projekt introduces video to wider audiences in a way that is no longer dependent on the gallery context. It also provides a rich historical and educational resource for artists and scholars. One can only hope that ongoing funding will be found to enable the growth of this valuable resource. However it will not be able to rely on the restless and irrepressible energy of Brendan Lee. He has other plans and projects including his own video work. He will be participating in VideoSpell 3 Reanimate at Performance Space, Sydney from February 25 this year.

A graduate in Visual Arts from the University of Western Sydney, artist Brad Cook currently works in youth radio and has been an ARIA nominee 3 times for album cover design. His ‘stream-of-consciousness’ drawings tap the immediate environment, particularly television, the internet and the quirks of short-term memory. Cook’s intuitive approach means that the idea, the mark, and the construction spring literally from the moment.
Brad Cook, Biker

Brad Cook is represented by Barry Keldoulis GBK Gallery 19 Meagher Street, Chippendale, Sydney, 0414 864 445, www.gbk.com.au

Ranging from abuse and hostility to identification, curiosity and concern (including a touching handwritten note passed through the bars), reactions to Mireille Astore’s sculpture/performance on Sydney’s Tamarama Beach read like a palimpsest of the wider public mood on asylum seekers.

From her lonely cell of bamboo stakes, Astore documented the responses of passers-by to her 18-day ‘internment’ as part of the 2003 International Sculpture by the Sea Exhibition. Her photographs capture the iconic beach, foam-capped waves, lifesavers, schoolkids and tanned bodies that surrounded her 24.6m x 3.2m patch of sand inside the bars.
Mireille Astore, Tampa

Astore’s Tampa referenced the rescue of asylum seekers from a leaking boat by the Norwegian ship Tampa after the Government’s refusal to let them ashore before the 2001 elections. Amid the swimmers, personal trainers and sunbathers, Astore built her cage of 2.1m bamboo bars, each 15cm apart, in a scaled-down version of the Tampa. Carrying all her requirements in a suitcase, she inhabited the cell from 10am to 6pm for 18 days. Through photographs and diary entries she recorded the responses of passers-by, later posting these on her website. (www.crixa.com/mireille/Migrant/Tampa.htm )

Group of young girls: “Excuse me…why aren’t you talking to us? Are you supposed to be in there? We want to get in…damn it! Why don’t you talk to us? Nah! Nah! Nah! We vote One Nation. You’re probably a filthy rich bitch! Why don’t you go home and cook dinner for your husband?…Look, did you see that? Even Americans were talking to us and you’re not. Who do you think you are?”
Mireille Astore, Tampa

Astore’s transcript of exchanges reveals a public at turns admiring and admonishing. While some people insisted she interact with them or made offerings of food and drink, others considered her work an incitement, giving them license to vent their opinions. On her website diary, Astore records the following:

“A football lands on me inside the Tampa where I am sitting immobile for the last hour. It was thrown by a group of young adults. They ask me, ‘Excuse me could you pass the ball? Hello…can you pass the ball please? Will you do us a favour and pass the ball?’ A man [interrupts]: ‘Would you ask a person in detention now to do you a favour? This is real…this is happening now!’ A middle-aged woman: ‘Come on, be nice to them and pass them the ball! It’s only a sculpture!’ The young woman from the group slithers through the bars and grabs the ball. I break my silence and tell her that she disappoints me. The same middle-aged woman: ‘That’s not a very nice thing to say!’”

Astore writes, “The inversion of the gaze as an exploratory tool and an illustration of the privileged artist’s position were critical to the outcome…the sculpture and performance acted as a dichotomy between the sense of freedom and grandeur the individual experiences at the seashore and the imprisonment refugees faced as a result of their trust in the most basic form of humanity at that seashore”.

Just as assumptions and generalisations abound about the stories and personal details of asylum seekers, Astore’s performance generated similar responses, with some passers-by wanting to impose their own, often stereotyped versions of how she should look, behave or perform:

Anonymous: “It’s hot in the sun, isn’t it! Ah! well! You’ve got the skin for it!”

Male photographer with tripod: “Excuse me, could you please stop walking and sit on your suitcase with your head cupped in your hands. Please… please…please…”

A fellow artist in Sculpture by the Sea: “Mireille! This is an aggressive piece, you must explain it to people when they ask you. Most people don’t understand art!”

A woman sunbather in a sarong: “You’ve been here a week now, have you discovered yet what it’s like to lock yourself up?”

A video of the work and the complete set of 200 photographs Astore took throughout the project will be shown at Conny Dietzschold’s Multiple Box Gallery, Sydney in June this year. It will also be shown internationally at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest in Romania in February.

Canada is home to several internationally renowned institutions and individuals active in interdisciplinary and media arts. The nation’s many similarities to Australia in population, culture and history make it an excellent reference point for our own activities and support mechanisms in this rapidly evolving field.

Arts funding in Canada is provided by well-established infrastructure at all 3 tiers of government (federal, provincial and local) and new media projects are often supported by a combination of these. Related industries such as multimedia production and game development also receive government assistance. As in Australia, there is not a strong history of private or institutional philanthropy for the arts.

At a federal level, funding to new media arts is administered by institutions that reflect technological and disciplinary developments over the past century. Artistic practice is supported by grants to individuals and organisations from the Canada Council under its Media Arts and Inter-Arts programs. Since 1998 production projects (eg multimedia, web and game development) have been assisted by the New Media fund at a current rate of CAN$9 million per annum. This fund is administered by TeleFilm, established in the late 1960s to underpin the local film and television industries. This structure and history bears a strong resemblance our own Australia Council and Australian Film Commission.

Recognition for research practice in new media is well established in Canada. The New Media Initiative from the Canada Council and National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) provides grants for collaborative research between artists and scientists. This program, introduced in 2002, is mirrored in the joint Australian Research Council (ARC) and Australia Council Synapse program which began disbursing funds in 2003.

While funding for research in the arts is now commonplace, these programs have very successful precedents in Canada. Collaboration between the Canadian National Film Board (NFB) and the NRC in 1960s and 1970s, for example, yielded many innovative computer animation techniques. Installing animators, filmmakers and composers as artists-in-residence led to animations of unprecedented realism, including the first Academy Award winning computer animation in 1974, Hunger. The research work was recognised with an Academy Award for technical achievement in 1996.

Artists and scientists involved in this ongoing collaboration eventually established software companies now important in the computer graphics industry: Alias (Maya), SoftImage (XSI), Discreet (compositing tools) and SideEffects (Houdini). That some of these companies are prominent sponsors of Canadian new media arts institutions and practice illustrates the significance of this creative cluster.

The Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta has also hosted significant interdisciplinary collaboration. In the early 1990s when the centre diversified into media arts, its Art and Virtual Environment project (1991-1994) explored the aesthetics of virtual reality. Participants, including the pioneering artist Char Davies, went on to SoftImage and Discreet. Davies founded SoftImage with Daniel Langlois, where she further developed the Osmose project (completed in 1995). Osmose and Davies’ later work Ephémère (1998) are currently exhibited at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne.

Community-based organisations play an important role in the development and exhibition of new media arts in Canada and in the careers of prominent Canadian artists. In Canada’s 2 biggest cities, Toronto and Montreal, there are well established production and exhibition spaces with high public profiles and levels of accessibility. David Rokeby, winner of the Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Interactive Art in 2002 has had a long-standing involvement with InterAccess in Toronto. Interactive video artist Luc Courchesne is president of Société des arts technologiques (SAT) in Montreal.

The InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre has offered facilities and instruction for electronic arts in Toronto since 1982. They also have a 200 square metre exhibition space. Supported by operating grants from Toronto, Ontario and Canadian arts councils, the Centre relies on a volunteer staff. The collective has regular courses, workshops and discussions as well as undertaking group projects.

SAT provides workshops, residency, exhibition and performance space in Montreal. Formulated in the wake of the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in Montreal in 1995, SAT has recently moved into a very large permanent location with the support of city, provincial and federal funds, in addition to private sponsorship from companies including Discreet. Incorporating workshops for residencies and a cafe/bar, the SAT’s venue hosts new media development, organised discussions, exhibitions, performance and informal meetings in a community environment.

Montreal is also home to another prominent new media institution, the Daniel Langlois Foundation (DLF). An animator at the NFB during its period of computer animation research, Langlois made his fortune building SoftImage (sold to Microsoft in 1995). In addition to his philanthropic foundation, Langlois has also developed and funded several media operations including a digital cinema facility (Ex-Centris), the Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media (FCMM) and a digital content distribution network (DigiScreen/Pixnet).

The DLF’s mandate is to “further artistic and scientific knowledge by fostering the meeting of art and science in the field of technologies.” It operates an archive of new media documents and artworks (Centre for Research and Documentation) and has provided individual and institutional grants to international recipients to the order of CAN$1.5 million a year. Although its 2 main grant programs have been suspended in 2004 “to assess the impact of its programs and decide on future directions”, the programs have been acclaimed since their inception. Philanthropic funding for the new media arts regardless of where recipients are located is rare.

Canada’s support for new media practice offers some important insights for Australia. Its rich community of new media artists, scientists and researchers have produced internationally recognised artworks, research and institutions. These successful models of interdisciplinary collaboration lend support to similar endeavours such as QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty and programs administered by the Australia Council and ARC.

However, Mike Leggett’s concern about the trend in favour of institutional funding for research in the arts is salient here (RT 57, p26). Accessible new media research environments appear to be missing from Australia’s new media landscape. Where are the artist-run workshops, collectives and collective facilities for new media research and exhibition in Australia? Canada’s experience with InterAccess and SAT indicates that such organisations continue to have a place in new media practice, and can play an important role in their communities and in the artistic development of participants.

After what seems inordinate waiting, just too much realtime, even for a contemporary art space, the future for Sydney’s Performance Space suddenly looks brighter than it has for years. A new home for the national centre for contemporary art and hybrid performance has been confirmed, a 12 month program announced for 2004 and ventures in national training and touring realised. Director Fiona Winning, Associate Director Blair French and Chairman of the Board Tim Wilson announced these developments at the 2004 launch (December 9, 2003), replete with riotous performance excerpts by version 1.0 and The opera Project from the coming program and a flaming pink birthday cake to celebrate PS’s 21 years.

Winning was pleased to be able to say, instead of declaring another crisis, “We’re here, we’re healthy, we’re almost 21 and we’re looking forward to another dynamic 3 years in this space we’ve called home since 1983.”

Retro

Blair French said that the birthday would provide an opportunity “to share anecdotes about art that was made here, debates that have raged here, people that have worked here—artists, administrators, board members, technicians, front-of-housers. There’ll be a birthday party late in the year and a symposium looking at some of the major streams of work that emerged in our first 21 years. And an exhibition that traces the lineage of queer performance work here.”

Living-in

Instead of the usual announcement of a quarterly program (not a little determined in the past by funding body timetables) Winning was proud to be able to present a full program in 2004, “a mix of our own productions, co-productions with peer organisations and artist-initiated projects.” She began however with residencies, a reminder that the primary importance of PS is not solely its status as a venue or even a producer but as a nurturer and hub to a vigorous hybrid arts community. Winning explained, “In a broader political context where research and development is increasingly devalued, our residency program…offers critical research and development time to 6 collaborative teams of hybrid practitioners throughout the year. In the last 3 years, one residency each year has succeeded in securing support to go to production and one each year has secured further development support.”

In 2004, residency artists include dancer/choreographer Rosalind Crisp who will return from Europe to collaborate with local artists on her new work Duck Talk; new media artist Keith Armstrong and members of the Transmute Collective from Brisbane will develop their Intimate Transactions project (see p20-21) ; and visual artists Gordon Hookey and Deborah Kelly who will, French said, “continue their ongoing conversation regarding issues of whiteness, blackness, place and the contest for Australian history via a process of learning to literally animate each other’s representations of land.” A number of these and other residencies will be programmed simultaneously in the theatre, the galleries and the studio in the Head Space open laboratory event with showings in early August.

At home & abroad

Winning and French described 3 major national and international projects scheduled for 2004. The third Time_Place_Space laboratory in partnership with PICA, ANAT and the Australia Council will involve 20 artists from around the country converging at AIT Arts in Adelaide, working with 5 facilitators including Marianne Weems, director of New York’s Builders Association (see interview RT57 p28) and Clare Grant, performance-maker, dramaturg and academic currently working at the University of New South Wales. The second project is Breathing Space Australia, a collaborative project between Arnolfini, a contemporary art space in Bristol, PICA and Performance Space, that brings together British and Australian hybrid artists and curators in an ongoing exchange. In 2004, Breathing Space will present works by UK and Australian artists that will tour Sydney, Perth and Melbourne. In 2005, the Australian work will tour the UK and be presented at Arnolfini’s Inbetween Time festival and at Tramway in Glasgow.

The third project, and one of considerable long-term significance, is the launch of a nation-wide touring consortium for innovative performance work. Winning reported that, “In conjunction with Performing Lines and presenting partners around the country, in 2004 we’ll present our inaugural tour.” The work to be toured will be the remarkable Still Angela, by Melbourne writer-director Jenny Kemp (see RT49, p28).

Winning pinpointed the significance of this venture as “a breakthrough for us as it will encourage more national dialogue, provide opportunities for audiences to engage with ideas and creative practices from elsewhere and offer artists the benefits of presenting a work beyond its premiere season, so that the work can be refined, leading to a maturing of practice in the long term.”

In production

The 2004 performance season commenced in January with The Boxed Set, 5 short shows in a shipping container, co-produced with Theatre Kantanka in association with the Live Bait Festival at the Bondi Pavilion and featuring Gravity Feed, Frumpus, Julie-Anne Long and Sam James, Clare Britton and Halcyon Macleod, and Theatre Kantanka (see review, RT60). During New Mardi Gras, Nigel Kellaway, Katia Molino and collaborators from The opera Project will present The Audience & Other Psychopaths (see p43).

Resident dance company One Extra Dance is presenting The Narrow House, a solo by Kay Armstrong combining movement and text in an exploration of a female killer and the way she undermines our sense of the idealised female. It’s inspired by an account of a serial murderess in the 1950s who killed her victims (often her husbands) with cups of poisoned tea. A work-in-progress showing at UNSW in 2002 displayed a palpable menace and a finely nuanced physical characterisation from Armstrong.

Performance company version 1.0 will premiere CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident), devised from the Senate Select Committee inquiry into the “children overboard” scandal. Six Senators wrestle with their wills, their words, their politics and each other. (See p40)

Winning briskly listed highlights from later in the year’s program: a series of dance commissions including Unsealed by Martin del Amo; Frumpus with a new version of Crazed after an Adelaide season with Vitalstatistix; De Quincey Co presenting Embrace 2, a performance emerging from the company’s residency in India; Women in Transit—3 women, 3 solos and 3 cultures by Rakini, Yumi Umiumare and Didi Dorvillier; Castrati by The opera Project; events for Pacific Wave 2004; and Plaza Real, co-produced with Urban Theatre Projects and Branch Nebula, a physical theatre work blending break-dancing, BMX bike-riding and martial arts in an investigation of diversity, ethnicity and cultural resistance through the micro-cultures of a shopping mall.

Screen appeal

At a moment when video is enjoying new prominence in galleries and new media screenings around Australia, Performance Space has taken a leading role in showing and debating the work of leading and emerging practitioners. Blair French’s Video Spell program, begun in 2003, explores “the relationship of video to performance and media culture.” Video Spell 3: Reanimates will feature works by Brendan Lee and Margaret Morgan, “2 artists who rework pre-existing cinematic forms and footage.” Video Spell, said French, “culminates in Interlace a major exhibition of newly commissioned work by Sydney-based artists Shaun Gladwell, Emil Goh, and Kate Murphy, artists who explore performative elements of everyday life. Interlace will tour to Tasmania later in the year.”

French also announced a welcome “series of annual solo retrospective exhibitions surveying and celebrating the work of key figures in Australian video art. The first will feature John Gillies, an artist whose work across video, sound and performance since 1980 has been presented in numerous international exhibitions, screening programs and festivals. This exhibition will tour to Brisbane in 2005.” This retrospective will happily coincide with a major new work from Gillies (see interview, RT60).

Talk

The Condition of Video Art Symposium, an afternoon of discussion on the impact of video on contemporary visual art of the past decade, will be held on June 26, running alongside the Biennale of Sydney. Cathy Naden, a founding member of Forced Entertainment will speak at PS on March 3 before the UK performance company’s Adelaide Festival season (see p14). The popular RealTime-Performance Space artist forums will return with, among others sessions on dramaturgy in performance and dance.

A new home

The Chairman of the Board, Tim Wilson, declared, “The whispering’s over. We’re saying loudly and happily we’ll be moving to the CarriageWorks at Wilson Street, Redfern. It’s a wonderful building that’ll house great performance spaces—one large-scale flexible space unlike any other in Australia, and other smaller spaces for performance and rehearsal.

“The CarriageWorks has been developed by the NSW Government through the Ministry for the Arts and promises to be an amazing facility that’ll be home for a range of innovative physical and site-based performance companies. The design team at Tonkin Zulaikha Greer have come up with a fantastic concept and building begins in the next year or so. We hope to move in during 2006 ready for its opening to the public in 2007. It’s a new phase for Performance Space and one the Board and staff have worked hard over the years to secure. There’s an enormous amount of work to do between now and then to prepare for the shift, but we’re in really good shape to do it.”

The new centre will be home to Performance Space, Stalker Theatre Company, Theatre Kantanka, Erth Visual & Physical, Legs on the Wall and Gravity Feed Ensemble. There will be a large flexible performance space for an audience of up to 800 and a smaller one for up to 350. There will also be multiple rehearsal and training spaces, a sizeable production workshop and office spaces. Smaller venues and a gallery will be built in the second stage of development. As to the management of the complex, that seems to be an open question at this stage. One thing that will surely need to be taken into account is Performance Space’s history of managing a building which it controls guaranteeing continuity and consistency of innovative programming and allowing for a richly creative response to the architectural and performative potential of its home.

Until it finally gets the key to the door, Performance Space will continue to be based in its Cleveland Street home, the former railway workers’ union hall, where every performative possibility will be further wrung from the building. Happy 21st! RT

Performance is everywhere, not just on stages and screens. Erving Goffman’s descriptions of the forms and strategies of everyday behaviour gained great popularity in the 1970s, prophetically prefacing the obsession with reality TV—some of it unfolding with a realtime liesureliness that makes performance art look positively speedy. Verbatim Theatre has also made a comeback, for example in Company B’s Run Rabbit Run by Alana Valentine (about the rescue of the South Sydney football team from corporate erasure), in Nick Marchand’s work with playwrights in the Sydney Theatre Company’s Blueprints program and in numerous plays across Australia about asylum seekers. In everything from joke-telling, to the patternings of body language and the overt rituals of religion, the courtroom and parliament, there is an abundance of raw material for the artist to distil into…something else. So why not a senate inquiry?

version 1.0’s CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident) is not verbatim theatre but it is a performance devised from the transcripts of the Senate Select Committee Inquiry into the “children overboard” scandal in which, says the company, “6 senators wrestle with their wills, their words, their politics and each other.” Doubtless that means real wrestling and real politics if the company’s first work, the wickedly funny, sometimes searing Second last Supper, a reverie on universal corporatisation, is anything to go by. The text is drawn from the inquiry and is matched, says version 1.0, with a movement score “drawing on physical performance disciplines and sports training to express a bodily, visceral outrage.”

Producer David Williams is critical of the inquiry “for not aiming to uncover the truth, but simply appearing to be doing so, stalling for time, going through the motions. In CMI we seek exposure: to read between the lines, to air the thoughts left in the dark, to seek the faces behind the masks, to hear the questions never said aloud. We ask where is the place for truth in this inquiry? What are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves through this inquiry? This inquiry talks the talk that numbs the intellect and paralyses the body’s capacity for outrage. CMI is a public act of outrage.”

The company has distilled 2,200 pages of the inquiry transcript successively down to 250 and then 50 pages in editing and workshop sessions. They have also added some words of their own, for example some imagined thoughts from a “lost” senator who never turned up to the inquiry and a “Ruddockesque telephone call.” Williams says the performers are interested in the verbatim approach, but didn’t want to restrict themselves: “We’re not quite that pure and we like to get lost, just like the senators did, starting at 9 in the morning and sometimes finishing [after midnight]and loopy by that time, throwing in stupid jokes…” Williams says there’ll be monologue, for example a bit of Captain Norman Banks’ 30 minute testimony, which never gets round to the children overboard issue. As in the company’s Second last Supper dialogue will be layered with action taking place elsewhere on stage.

In a company with a mixed background of acting and body-based aesthetics, says Williams, there will be a range of approaches to the language of the inquiry, some literal and some quite lateral, ideal ways it would seem to portray contradictions, unmask euphemisms and undo propaganda.

There’ll also be a test for truth. As part of the performance, version 1.0 are using multi-channel video and the Ex-Sense lie-detection software package to analyse the emotional stress in the voice of subjects, displaying continually updated reports on their believability. This is in collaboration with Perth’s pvi collective who have made a performative speciality out of the methods and politics of surveillance.

So what did the language of the inquiry reveal? More of the abstraction and evasion we all encountered in the wake of the “children overboard” incident. Williams says refugees were spoken of not as individuals but only in terms of race or acronyms. The report opens with 3 pages of these including SUNC (suspected unauthorised non-citizen), PIIs (potential illegal immigrants) and UAs (unauthorised arrivals). Half of the people called before the inquiry were from the military and used to thinking this way. More significant, says Williams, “was the Liberal Party’s clear line of attack, bringing volumes of information to cast the asylum seekers in as bad a light as possible, as evil, as engaged in child abuse.” Labor, he said, didn’t seem to have any equivalent strategic approach.

In the end, what was the truth? “Only what we knew already. There was no smoking gun to prove the Howard government as evil as we like to think it.” Howard’s language had already achieved such currency and seductiveness that “it appeared to fit with appearances and our desire to believe ourselves good people”, whatever the evidence to the contrary from the inquiry about misinformation and the origins of published images. The inquiry could do little to break the complicity between a government and its people. Williams thinks that the fact that there was an inquiry was enough to satisfy many people, with “the appearance of democracy at work, justifying the political process.”

Therefore, says Williams, version 1.0 has to propose a problem, for itself and its audience—how to “criticise ourselves and explore our outrage and what paralyzes us—not that self-loathing is necessary.”

But to get at the truth, at what went unsaid, at the appalling complicity that has made asylum seekers’ lives so miserable for so long under successive Australian governments, that is the real task. Much of the theatre that has emerged since the Tampa incident has been strongly felt, but has been mostly a rallying call, if a necessary one, to the converted. Ben Ellis’ Some People for the Sydney Theatre Company promised an undoing of the language that has so knotted Australia into acceptance of Howard dogma, but despite moments of real insight—the everyday turned surreally political—it went down the predictable path of Australian family pathology. Perhaps it’s at the physical-psychological juncture that version 1.0 will hit the personal-political target they are aiming at. version 1.0’s approach can be savagely satirical as well as yielding disturbing imagery. Williams predicts that CMI will be “more anarchic (performatively) and less anarchic (more serious) than Second last Supper.”

In the weeks ahead, as the company completes the work, the big challenge”, Williams says, “will be how to deal, in the final act of the performance, with the drowning of 352 asylum seekers and the question of whether the Australian government was in any way responsible.”

version 1.0 in association with Department of Performance Studies, Sydney University, CMI, performer/devisors Danielle Antaki, Stephen Klinder, Nikki Heywood, Christopher Ryan, David Williams, producer David Williams, dramaturgy Paul Dwyer, Yana Taylor, lighting Simon Wise, video and design Samuel James, sound Jason Sweeney, lie-detection software Kelli McCluskey, Steve Bull (pvi collective); Performance Space, March 24-April 11, bookings 02 9698 7235

Murder in the late 19th century criminal “baby farming” industry is the subject of Crime Site, an ambitious collaboration between PACT Youth Theatre and Theatre Kantanka. The show opens at Erskineville Public School with a re-enactment of the school’s opening and a speech declaring the new school “a salvation from crime.” Newspaper sellers announce the discovery of the babies’ bodies and we’re led to a nearby park where metal rods pierce the earth in the search for more victims. In the PACT Theatre the trial of the accused commences, a grotesque set of melodramatic proceedings replete with Victorian prejudices embodied in the roping of the mothers of the dead into an hysterical bundle of grief and guilt. While the killers soon stand condemned (he to hanging, she to life imprisonment, their daughters freed), the women who have handed over their babies to crooked carers are not understood as victims of a cruel society so much as complicit in the murders. The narrowness of this vision is then celebrated in the theatre courtyard as a massive carnival of death, entirely focused on the thrill of the hanging and the erotics of murder. Theatre Kantanka’s facility with spectacle makes this hubbub of sideshows, body organ displays and gross memorabilia a thrilling nightmare as you’re swept about by the curious crowd.

Crime Site is engrossing, if at times demanding for its young but often fine performers. The opening in the schoolyard and the park lacks focus and pace (although there’s a fine speech from Georgie Reid). The courtroom drama is full of clever theatrical devices and nicely crafted movement but the volume of emoting is wearing and the legal figures are characterless if forceful. The daughters of the killers, however, are fascinatingly played by Zoe Coombs Marr and Mish Grigor, all nerves and naivety. Based on the crimes and trial of John and Sarah Makin in the 1890s, Crime Site is not only an intriguing slice of social history, but also provides an entirely relevant analogy to our own times: child abuse is again a prominent issue and capital punishment is back on the agenda, while the Coalition of the Willing’s indiscriminate carnival of vengefulness threatens the lives of many. KG

PACT Youth Theatre, Theatre Kantanka, Crime Site, co-directors Carlos Gomes, Regina Heilmann, Chris Murphy, designer Kate Shanahan, sound Felicity Fox; Dec 3-14, 2003

Stephen Sondheim has the venomous, working class protagonist of Sweeney Todd sneer: “There’s a hole in the world/ like a great black pit.…./ and it’s filled with people who are filled with shit/ and it goes by the name of London.” Although the dramaturgy of directors/adaptors Anne Thompson and William Henderson is far from Sondheim’s melodrama, Todd’s evocative pronouncement would be an apt introduction to Eleventh Hour’s entwining of An Ideal Husband with The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

After entering the old church hall that is the Eleventh Hour Theatre, the audience turns to face a great, grey cloaca opening onto a murky, patterned floor, across which the sewer’s noisome contents have been vomited—performers, spectators and all. The uncluttered, cream walls and isolated, draped set-pieces dotting the space create the impression of almost heavenly cleanliness, but this is an illusion, resting uncomfortably atop moral sludge. Even this grotesque surface is not without beauty though. Like the blood red flowers that sprout amidst Genet’s poetry, pools of glassy piss are here transformed into golden-hued mirrors, which reflect all the beauty and ugliness of those who walk upon them.

Mary Moore’s design encapsulates the production’s dramaturgy. Oscar Wilde’s at times greyly satiric comedy An Ideal Husband has a strong sense of ‘upstairs/downstairs’, of great moral probity and luxury resting a breath away from hideous reversal into venality and ruin. This undercurrent is rendered in grand scale by juxtaposing scenes from An Ideal Husband with readings from Wilde’s rhythmically unrelenting, tragic ode The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Performer Christopher Brown marches unassumingly yet powerfully out of the pipe’s mouth, and the apparently light feeling of the drawing room space is transformed into a frail conceit. As a well-to-do husband tries to retain his moral renown and hide a single act of youthful corruption, it is clear that he, but for the grace of God, could be the condemned man moving funereally through the mire of prison and poverty. Thompson and Henderson do not so much add something novel to Wilde’s approach (Lady Windermere’s Fan is equally fraught yet light, after all) as deepen this theme through a dramaturgy rich in metaphor, musicality and dialectic contrasts. Where Brown himself barely speaks during The Ballad, his social betters fill the air with fine but superficial talk. Brown is muscular, low and close to the earth, while the others are upright, poised, effete. The staging thus enhances the sense of honour embodied in the guilty, condemned murderer. At least his strong brutality was honest.

The relatively spare, unadorned staging also enriches the impression of theatrical deus ex machina central to Wilde’s theatrical style. Letters and doors become powerful instruments of intrigue and undoing, of action and import. Through them secrets are learnt or from behind them a dizzying assortment of entrances and exits are executed, crisscrossing the space with tension and wit like ribbons from a maypole. By investing so heavily in such small but crucial details, Henderson, Thompson and Moore build a haven for audiences seeking a poetic theatre based in the spoken word.

Eleventh Hour, “…yet each man kills the thing he loves”: The Ballad of Reading Gaol with An Ideal Husband, direction/dramaturgy Anne Thompson, William Henderson, design Mary Moore, lighting Niklas Pajanti, performers David Tredinnick, Fiona Todd, Christen O’Leary, Miria Kostiuk, Marco Chiappi, Christopher Brown, Richard Bligh; Eleventh Hour Theatre, Nov 14-Dec 6, 2003

Max Lyandvert and his collaborators did a good job of Richard Foreman’s My Head was a Sledgehammer at Belvoir St Downstairs in 2002, a rare and welcome opportunity to see the work of a modern master in Australia. Although the small space was less revealing of the New York playwright/director’s integral design vision (magically mutating habitats often re-shaped by the performers), the production nonetheless realised Foreman’s manic, jokey, esoteric and sometimes affecting vision. One of the performers in My Head was a Sledgehammer, Melissa Madden-Gray gives a vivid account on page 4 of this edition of Foreman’s latest work at the recent Zuercher Theater Spektakel.

With their associative constructions and broken theatre rules, Foreman’s plays particularly appeal to connoisseurs of contemporary performance and visual art, but they can be refreshing for the jaded theatre palate. In I’ve got the shakes, says the company, “the characters are disoriented, unsure of where the stage begins and ends. They are caught up in inscrutable plots and speak as though they have just begun to learn language. The play only exists in the present moment, and the whole evening is made up of numerous present moments…which invite the audience to refocus their attention and revise their interpretation.” For the characters, performers and audience alike this should prove an entertaining night of metaphysical pratfalls and existential sublimes. RT

Richard Foreman, I’ve got the shakes, director Max Lyandvert, The Darlinghurst Theatre, Sydney, from March 4

I thought she was rather attractive in a strange way…She had beautiful manners and a low voice and she smoked incessantly. She didn’t walk or behave in a butch way at all, she was well-bred and had a kind of elegance. Yet her loneliness showed in her face—a cloudiness, an ugliness really—which would go when she laughed, a strange low chuckle. …Sex with her was like being made love to by a boy. Her hands were very masculine and big and she was hipless like an adolescent boy. She wasn’t at all repelled by the male body, she was intrigued by it.
Ronald Blythe in Andrew Wilson, Beautiful Shadow, A Life of Patrica Highsmith, Bloomsbury, London 2003

A vengeful jilted diva (Karen Cummings), a manic female director (Katia Molino) and a drag queen extra (Nigel Kellaway) with a psychotic attachment to the persona of a Hitchcock killer clash on the set of a new film. In The opera Project’s latest music theatre extravaganza, hot on the heels of the popular success of Another Night: Medea (2003), the audience too are extras, cajoled and abused by the director as she shapes her deadly melodrama under the glare of the lights (designer Simon Wise) and through the probing eye of the camera (video artist Peter Oldham). A memorable work-in-progress showing 2 years ago and a slice offered at the Performance Space 2004 program launch revealed a wickedly funny, queer blend of opera, Fellini (or is it Wertmuller, or Caviani?) and Patricia Highsmith a la Hitchcock.

Using a combination of live and pre-recorded visual images the video work will not only suggest the cinematic environment of the narrative and what’s happening offstage but also blur the real and the actual in line with the characters’ fantasies. While the audience will see itself as seen by the camera, each night one male will enjoy the privilege of playing the leading man in the director’s movie-making.

And if that’s not enough to whet your appetite for blood and hysterics in a swirl of red roses and big screen camera gyrations, performance poet Amanda Stewart has co-written the off-beat libretto. No stranger to new music, Stewart is a member of the Machine for Making Sense ensemble and in 1997 she created The Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior with composer Colin Bright.

The musical score for The Audience & Other Psychopaths is by Sydney-based composer Stephen Adams. His participation is a welcome new dimension to The opera Project’s predilection for radical displacement of opera classics from the 17th to the 19th centuries into the 21st. Adams’ task is a very special one, to compose for the “disembodied voice.”

Director Nigel Kellaway says he’s always seen opera as “an intensely physicalised theatre form,” especially in the sheer physicality of the voice. One of the original intentions behind this work when it was first conceived, some 4 years ago, was to tackle the “disembodied voice” in performance. But the problem, as Kellaway saw it, was how to corporealise it so that the audience could treat the voice as a serious entity even if they couldn’t see where it was coming from. They could at least imagine the body and the place from which it was emanating. The solution is to offer a few character and narrative hooks. This woman is in the dressing room, refusing to come on stage. “Is she the ex-lesbian mother of the B-grade film auteur? Or a fantasy voice from the film director’s neurotic desire to be loved, loved, loved?” asks Kellaway.

The disembodied voice is performed by Cummings. In fact, save for a passage from a Rossini overture accompanying the filmmaking, the music and the soundscore for the work entirely comprises a pre-recorded Cummings singing Adams’ compositions and delivering Stewart’s text. Kellaway describes Adam’s creation as “a huge choral work for a single and multi-tracked voice.” No musical instruments are used.

Stephen Adams has a background in choral music, experimental rock bands and theatre, as well as training in formal composition with Peter Sculthorpe. His exploration of the human voice includes two major a capella works, Memory Pieces (1995) for the Sydney Chamber Choir, produced on CD by Tall Poppies and performed across Canada in 1999 by the Canadian Ensemble de la Rue, and Desires: Movements Toward The Divine (1997) for the Song Company, premiered live on ABC Classic FM Radio and performed on tour in Italy.

Adams says that his major focus as a composer has been on the voice whether solo, choir, in music theatre or digitally interpreted. In particular he’s interested in music’s relationship to other things, especially the texts of performance poets such as Amanda Stewart and Ania Walwicz. He likes “the obsessive quality they share about language, kicking between semantic overload on the one hand and discarding it on the other,” pushing language to the limits but “demanding it say things as clearly as possible.”

For The Audience & Other Psychopaths Adams recorded his own long vocal improvisations, wrote them down with modifications and gave these “relatively fully developed melodic lines” to Cummings whom he recorded. He edited and organised these fragments, changed the pitch here and there and began to shape the overall soundtrack for the performance. Some of the pieces “became independent lines and some of the sounds slough off and have a life of their own as Karen’s voice continues on.” As the performance progresses “the space gets more and more sonically cluttered with bits of her, as opposed to the opening where she’s in one naturalistic space, the dressing room. This shifts to become an aurally omnipresent soundscape.”

As ever, The opera Project will offer strong performances, this time from artistic director Kellaway whose extensive career in performance is founded on majors in piano and composition at the Universities of Melbourne and Adelaide, training in performance with Tadashi Suzuki and his Suzuki Company Of Toga and with Min Tanaka in Tokyo. Katia Molino trained in corporeal mime (and performed with Entr’acte Theatre), with Suzuki Tadashi in Japan, in stiltwalking and aerial techniques (working with Stalker and Marrugeku) and recently performed in Stalker’s Incognita at the Perth and Melbourne International Arts Festivals. Soprano Karen Cummings is committed to performing contemporary music. She has sung in opera, cabaret and recital, appearing as a soloist with the Victorian State Opera and Opera Australia and performing the premieres of several Australian works including Andrée Greenwell’s Laquiem at The Studio, Sydney Opera House (1999).

Outside Opera Australia and Pinchgut Opera’s delivery of the classics and rare productions of new works from Music Theatre Sydney, it’s The opera Project that music theatre audiences are increasingly turning to in Sydney for pleasure and provocation. Amidst the rude hubbub of New Mardi Gras 2004, The Audience & Other Psychopaths should provide lovingly crafted and memorable transgressions of every kind: “Archetypes to offend everyone in the gay community,” quips Kellaway.

The opera Project, The Audience & Other Psychopaths, part of New Mardi Gras, Performance Space, Sydney, Feb 10-21

Jeannie Marsh, Grant Smith, Love, Death, Music and Plants: A musical infringement on the life of Baron Ferdinand von Mueller

Love, Death, Music and Plants is the latest production from writer/director Brian Lipson. Continuing the style Lipson developed for his solo performance A Large Attendance in the Antechamber (2000), the dramaturgy and mise en scène of Love, Death… functions according to an essentially museological logic. Lipson’s staging is consistent not only with his chosen topic, but also with the building which houses the piece—the National Herbarium of Victoria. Lipson creates a space within which characters, words and songs are mounted and placed within semi-static tableaux.

The opening image of the former botanist and director of the Herbarium laid out on a wooden slab like one of the many specimens that surround him, fussed over by the botanists of today, remains in the eye and senses of the audience throughout the performance, imparting a density and materiality to this production which summons those ghosts that adhere to objects and spaces from across time. The depth of this museological approach is strikingly effective—every movement and every gesture has a firmness and weight through Lipson’s careful judging of spatial volume and depth for each on-stage position. Diagonals from corner to corner, horizontals at the back or slightly forward of the rear wall carefully offset pairings and other directional axes: these are the coordinates of 19th century rationalism, science and botanical classification embodied in Lipson’s dramaturgy.

The set elements and objects (tables, cases, dresses, hats, coats, specimens) do not so much dance within the performance as move along invisible yet fiercely determined corridors within the space. It is here that the libretto, music and especially the use of voice is so crucial. Love, Death… is not just an homage to 19th century Victorian botanist Ferdinand von Mueller. It is also a critique of the man and his values. Alongside this dramaturgical clarity of line and space which the display of specimens in museums and herbaria has embodied since Mueller’s time, there is also a sense of the poetic, of flow and dance, as the voice and the score play with the conventions of classicism, opera and gentle atonalism.

The closing image of Mueller, dressed in glowing, spectral white, standing in the gardens outside the Herbarium while singing in falsetto to a spreading Moreton Bay fig perfectly reciprocates the opening tableau. Here the dreams of the earlier prone, sleeping figure are allowed full flight in the form of pure voice and sound, in speech and text which strokes and seduces the surface of the bark and the ear.

This interplay between 2 models of life and experience—the rational and the poetic—is most fully realised when Mueller sings to his would-be fiances. The botanist becomes Pygmalion, but at several key points it’s he who is transformed, shaped and classified by his feminine role models, rather than him sculpting them into his ideals. Mueller’s first rejected fiance, Euphemia Henderson, dresses herself in the botanist’s own authoritative top hat and coat to sing in loud, sour, sarcastic tones of how she/he “picks” and “dries”, “samples” and “presses”: “I grunt … I groan,/ sleep briefly, excrete infrequently,/ eat bleakly alone…/ …and worship / a white goddess.” As Mueller himself takes up similar themes, a degree of vocal and imaginative transvestism creeps into the performance.

The clear distinctions of Mueller’s professional life, between sedges and heaths, eucalypts and deciduous, break down at the most fundamental distinction within his personal life: between man and woman, husband and wife. Mueller is in the end “unsexed” by his own obsessive actions—like Lady Macbeth, though less violently. It is therefore finally both Lipson and we, the audience, who mount Mueller on a pin; who turn him one way and another to gaze at his barked sides. The spectator and the director come to stand in for Euphemia, effeminising the great man as we hear his voice slip out of conventional masculine range. Love, Death… thus not only unleashes the expansive genius of 19th century science and classification, but also the demons and sprites that dwelt deep within their roots; the poetic beauty of a vision of an orderly universe mapped and possessed, as well as the tragedy that lurked within the didacticism and impossibility of this project.

Love, Death, Music and Plants: A musical infringement on the life of Baron Ferdinand von Mueller, director/writer Brian Lipson, composer Matthew Hindson, musical director Mark Shiell, lighting Chris Sanders, design Andrew Bailey, producer/performer Jeannie Marsh (Euphemia Henderson), performer Grant Smith (Mueller), The Baron’s Choir; Mueller Hall, National Herbarium of Victoria, Nov 18-30, 2003

From the time hip hop was an underground phenomenon known only to a few New Yorkers, film has played an important role in recording and propagating this urban subculture. Celebrating the audio-visual side of hip hop culture, the inaugural Hip Hop Film Festival plays in Sydney and Melbourne over 2 consecutive weekends in February and March.

Showcasing the latest in contemporary hip hop cinema, the festival also aims to give some historical perspective on a form that is now more than 2 decades old. Movies like Beat Street and Krush Groove helped bring hip hop to international attention in the mid-1980s, but several smaller-scale New York films pre-date these Hollywood releases, capturing the fashions, graffiti art and personalities of New York’s nascent hip hop scene before it broke across America. One of the earliest films, Wild Style, will screen at the festival. A docu-drama from 1982 directed by Charlie Ahearn, Wild Style features several early hip hop performers including Grandmaster Flash, the Rocksteady Crew and Fab Five Freddy.

In a more contemporary vein the festival will be screening Joslyn Rose Lyons’ recent documentary on ‘underground’ hip hop, Soundz of Spirit. Lyons’ film features interviews with such hip hop luminaries as Michael Franti and members of Outkast and Jurrasic 5. The burgeoning local scene will be examined in 3 Australian documentaries: Sprayed Conflict (directed by Robert Moller), Street Level (Madeleine Hetherton) and All the Ladies (Colleen Hughson).

In presenting works from over 2 decades the festival will trace hip hop’s often controversial history and the political undercurrents that have fuelled the culture on its journey from the streets of New York to MTV screens around the world. RT

2004 Hip Hop Film Festival, Valhalla Cinema, Sydney, Feb 26-28, ACMI, Melbourne, March 4-6, www.hhff.com.au

The rise of Melbourne bar culture has enabled new music, sound art and anarcho-jazz to establish a foothold in the city—notably in the northern side streets behind the Windsor Hotel (Meyer’s Place Bar, the Loop Bar etc). The Loop is a way-cool, lounge-style bar with impressive AV capacities, making it ideal for relative newcomers Transparent Means, an ensemble led by keyboard player Alex Carpenter and electronics and percussion manipulator Russell Goodwin. The duo is particularly influenced by 1950s/1960s musique concrete ideas about texture, minimalism, repetition and “microsonics” (ie very small, slow shifts of texture, timbre, tempo or quality). Their most recent performance featured electronica classics by key composers of Fluxus, John Cage (Fontana Mix) and La Monte Young (The Melodic Version of the Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer).

Wearing their historical influences on their sleeves, Transparent Means’ music appears somewhat dated and yet the microtextural investigation of well-worn motifs allows for extremely subtle and expansive ways of interpreting the technology through which such musical ideas may now be realised.

In their most recent performance Transparent Means included striking imagery by Michael Carmody, including a particularly beautiful sequence featuring spreading, abstract blots of light and colour on a black background for Young’s The Melodic Version. Like many aspects of this ensemble’s work, though, this needs further development. Carmody’s video materials consist of a series of fully-prepared tapes which are simply set going at the beginning of each composition, radically reducing the possible interactions between sound and vision in a live environment.

Perhaps more importantly, in all 6 pieces they performed, Carmody’s accompanying imagery was drawn from relatively circumscribed sources (footage of an old woman at the hairdresser, a bike in a park, urban landscape through train windows or from the streets). Several of these were the same, unprocessed source materials that he has manipulated, flared and distorted for other Melbourne commissions—notably his projection for director Bagryana Popov’s excellent community theatre piece Stories From the Hidden City (Melbourne Museum, 2002). Carmody therefore needs to record some new raw footage and to mix his video materials live if his work is to fully support the structured, minimalist, Fluxus-style improvisations currently championed by Transparent Means.

Carpenter provides the most visibly interesting contribution to the events as a performer and composer. His principal technique involves using his keyboard as a triggering device for slow, predominantly chordal changes characterised by extreme overdrive processing, which makes the organ notes sound similar to electric guitar feedback. These materials are allowed to accumulate and decay, or are given a wave-like throb through the use of delay, reverb and similar methods. Goodwin on the other hand works predominantly from behind a small mixing desk connected to other pieces of electronic equipment. His various theremin-like electronic punctuations and his mixing of layered audio static provide both a satisfying depth and various temporal markers within Carpenter’s more clearly enunciated contributions.

Apart from the as yet unresolved relationship to history embodied within the work of Transparent Means, the group needs to address pragmatics and staging. It is a sad indictment of the electronica sound art world along the Australian south-eastern seaboard that so few shows start on time and most are characterised by frankly embarrassing intervals during which musicians and roadies battle to make their equipment function properly. The 2003 iaudio concerts showed it’s possible to smoothly swap from one ungainly mechanism to another, yet most other sound art performances like What Is Music? and independents such as Transparent Means seem incapable of planning a sound check prior to the performance.

Despite shortcomings, Transparent Means makes an important contribution to Melbourne sound culture by reinjecting Fluxus influences through what might be considered the sonic, electronica equivalent of “rough theatre.”

Music of Transparent Means, performers Alex Carpenter, Russell Goodwin, projection Michael Carmody; Loop Bar, Melbourne, Nov 25, 2003

The significance of The First Australian Percussion Symposium and Eisteddfod cannot be underestimated. It was a gathering of around 100 students, performance groups and teachers of national and international standing in a week of workshops, eisteddfods, scholarly papers and celebrations of the variety and virtuosity of recent contemporary percussion practice.

In many cultures, percussion music (whether generated via instruments, or directly from the human body) has a spiritual and cultural significance that lies well outside Western parameters of ontology. In Bali, China, Japan, Africa and the Middle East, percussion is often intrinsically linked to the calling up of gods, spirits, daemons and the appeasing of illness. Perhaps the closest parallels in Western experience are practices such as raves and dance parties, where participants enter different states of consciousness from those of habituated daily perception.

Perhaps what John Broomfield (Other Ways of Knowing, Inner Traditions International, 1997) calls our propensity to classify knowledge as either “scientific” (provable) or “hysterical” (indigenous, intuitive) is part of the reason why percussion has traditionally stood as the dogsbody at the “poor man’s desk” of the orchestra. Despite the extraordinary versatility of percussionists (they seem able to play everything, from broomsticks to sirens, Chinese zithers to Taiko drums), players talk of traditionally disparaging attitudes from conductors and other instrumentalists. The attitude of composers also reflects this disparagement, with only the most recent of compositions calling on much more than 15 minutes playing time within a 3 hour performance or rehearsal call.

Yet, like architecture, percussion has the potential to communicate some aspects of knowledge and experience more directly than artforms reliant on structures of melody, harmony and narrative. This leaves percussion open to exciting cross-cultural improvisations.

At the symposium, international players Michael Udow, Mark Ford and Steve Schick were generous in their teaching and performances, demonstrating the extraordinary scope of performance work available for percussion. Local teachers/performers and composers included Gary France (Symposium Convenor and Head of Percussion, ANU), Michael Askill, Daryl Pratt, Peter Neville, Tim White and Vanessa Tomlinson. The astonishing variety and virtuosity of compositions included works from Udow, Ford, Schick, Endo, Bartok, Lim, Smetanin, Pollard, Antheill and Pye, as well as improvisations.

The final concert was a highlight, showcasing conservatorium/university and independent professional ensembles from across Australia, such as the engaging portable-drum-thrumming Karak Duo (Brisbane) and the dynamic and hyper-energised Tetrafide Percussion from WA, who proved as capable with broomsticks as with South Indian drums.

Steve Schick embodied the intensity of Iannis Xenakis’ work, performing Psappha as if he were strung and pulled with high-tension wires.

Ford’s Stubernic transposed Caribbean street performance practices into a joyful yet delicate composition which saw 3 players on one marimba slipping like butter around each others’ bodies. Wyana Etherington and Jessica Dai from ANU performed with remarkably cool aplomb.

Udow’s Coyote Dreaming explored the Colorado canyons as if the marimba were an animal, played with dynamism and an admirable combination of discipline and release by Elder Conservatorium’s Fleur Green. Udow’s solo piece, Tennei-ji, based on a Noh drama, is virtuosic in its demands, with 3 speaking/singing characters embodied in one performer playing marimba. Garbed in kimono, wig and painted mask, Udow displayed an extraordinary combination of discipline and transformation, rendering the marimba a trans-cultural instrument both Oriental and Occidental. Michael Askill, a long-standing inspiration as performer, composer, teacher and mentor to generations of Australian percussionists, composed and directed the Finale. This finely-staged work combined a knowing theatricality (dozens of church bells travelled from all entry-points in the auditorium towards the stage) with an exploration of sound densities. The roaring, rolling final movement saw all 120 participants in the symposium playing at once. The miracle of this piece was that despite its extraordinary volume and power, it managed to remain as intimate as a string quartet. The work ebbed and flowed, alternating between a meditative delicacy (a short, integrated reading of Calvino poems dropping like liquid from Udow and Schick quietly sitting at the front of the stage) with vibrant, Taiko-like volume and passion. That such a dynamic and edgy performer as Schick could rest in such quiet in his role was a symbol of the humility that characterised the week as a whole.

This was a week of great complexities that explored the peculiar and special place that the lowly percussionist, emerging into virtuosic realms, now holds. The symposium provided a valuable forum for the peculiar risk involved in percussive improvisation.

The First Australian Percussion Symposium and Eisteddfod, director/convenor Gary France, ANU School of Music, Sept 22-29, 2003

A land of documentary fodder, scenic locations, tourist icons and a very long shiny rail line, the Northern Territory is populated by just 200,000 people of whom around 110,000 live in and around Darwin. Another 50,000 Aboriginal residents live mostly in remote outposts. The young, extremely multicultural population and the amazing landscape make the NT totally different from the rest of Australia in character and culture.

The Territory’s film and television industry employs about 200 people. Although 3 NT-based broadcasters have their own production facilities (the ABC, Channel Nine and the Indigenous-owned Imparja Television), they produce little more than a smattering of local origin news, sports and current affairs. Seven, without production facilities, tends to be supportive of local independent production.

Those 100 or so in private enterprise work hard to win and create work, surviving on an eclectic mix of TV commercials, corporate videos and whatever jobs large or small pass through. Possessive of their hard-earned market, these multi-skilled practitioners are not happy when interstate production companies take jobs. Indigenous education and training in radio and television broadcasting and organisations, like CAAMA (Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association) and BRACS (Broadcasting for Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme), have given the NT numerous emerging filmmakers in remote communities, producing for remote broadcasts but with little opportunity for further training and work experience in the industry.

The NT arts community is strong and the current government has begun cultivating the talents of their constituents in all fields of the arts. The absence of any substantial training or education and massive skill gaps in the arts sector have also been acknowledged, with practitioner needs just starting to be explored. The long forgotten and neglected film and television industry, for example, has toiled away for years with little or no assistance or intervention. The small rogue industry is extremely active, with a conservatively estimated annual turnover of $30 million including broadcasting, production-related activities and the new media sector. After much consultation with smaller stakeholders, the Northern Territory Film, Television and New Media Office (the name may change) will open its doors in Alice Springs in late February 2004.

Much humbug concerning the location of the office and available grants followed the announcement of its creation. Alice Springs was chosen, as it is located closer to the rest of Australia’s capitals and is better known in the film world. Time will tell if Alice Springs is a more advantageous location than the more populous Darwin.

Only $300,000 has been allocated in grants for projects and production over the next 3 years. The first round of grants was announced in late January, with 22 applications for the available $30,000 and another $20,000 to be allocated to skills development and special projects, both using the existing Arts NT grants administration system. Given such a meagre starting point, stakeholders are hoping that the Director’s priorities will include finding investment and funding avenues. Arts NT is about to announce the Director for the Office who will work with one staff member.

FATANT (Film and Television Association Northern Territory), a mob of industry professionals, was also recently established to help local players catch up with the rest of Australia. With government assistance, FATANT will eventually create a network via a directory web site, lobby for industry needs like professional development and training opportunities and guide government and the Office in their decisions.

Held in early August as part of the Darwin Fringe Festival, Fist Full of Films, the Territory’s growing annual short film festival, is a true representation of the eclectic lifestyle and character of the NT. The second Down Under International Film Festival in Darwin in April will bring together the many emerging filmmakers and industry professionals for workshops, production and a hoot of an awards night. With the lack of training and the few jobs available in the industry, film festivals have been essential in cultivating local talent.

Territorians have waited eons for the train to arrive for film and new media industry support. Hopefully establishing an effective and responsive Film, TV and New Media Office will take much less time to set up. Increased funding and support for the rich potential in Territorian screen arts can only enrich the entire nation’s film and new media culture.

“Tradition with Future” was the catchcry of the 2003 Zuercher Theater Spektakel held amidst the heady heat and electrical storms of summer at Lake Zurich. It is a treasure-trove of the avant-garde and the contemporary in an old-world, carnival set-up.

Outdoor stages, buskers, boaters and bathers, big tops, multi-culti gastronomic stalls and wooden box-like theatres join a complex of permanent venues. Lift the top off any of the magical performing spaces and you might find, for instance, the frenetic activities of Richard Foreman’s ‘brain’, Ong Keng Sen’s sonic global travellers, the drag-singer of Rina Yerushalmi’s take on the Oresteia, or the unrelenting cries of Michael Laub’s naked, shivering little match girl. It’s a strange, rarefied art world, yet simultaneously accessible and community-based.

Artistic Director Maria Magdalena Schwaegermann sees the divisions theatre/music, theatre/dance as no longer valid, and has focussed this year on “Performance Art; the Mediterranean” (enticingly subtitled “blood-revenge, exodus and erotic”) and Australia. She has also included Swiss and youth theatre, local and world music in the Club and the Alpentöne festival. “We do not choose a theme,” she says, “we choose artists, and let the theme reveal itself.

“I want to introduce people to the Old Masters (such as Foreman and Mexican Guillermo Gómez-Peña) before they’re not there anymore. They have been so formative for so many contemporary artists.” Naturally, the political comes into the equation. “The fact that we have companies from Israel, Turkey, Italy, Algeria, Palestine [shows] that there is an intense movement of intellectuals and artists [who] work even in a situation of intense political problems…I think culture and the arts is our platform to create something better. And cultural identification is the beginning of tolerance.”

The Australian presence was well-received—I didn’t get to see Back to Back’s Soft, but it reviewed very well—“poetic and touching” (Musik & Theater)—while Acrobat, wild and wiry on the lake stage (Zurich’s spires and mountains formed an extraordinary night backdrop) received roaring crowds and rave reviews for their explosive “stripping back” to the “essentials” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung) in a highly charged performance of artistry and energy. Sans glitter, sans forced smiles, Acrobat’s is a strong Australian aesthetic—beards and bodyhair and not much else, sunburnt, springy ‘outback’ forms and the nasal tones of the vernacular whirling around the soundscape. One Zurich critic wrote that Tim Barrass’ intense guitar and sample score of “noise, nonsense phrases and trashrock” was worthy of a separate review, another that “this is Circus in the time of Acceleration…a one hour hellride through the centre of the earth to the end of the world.”

From this ‘outback’ realm of simple body and little language to the multifarious MoMO, Neil Thomas and Katy Bowman’s Museum of Modern Oddities. Obscure and perfect at the end of a long wooden walkway, Odd Hours—an ‘installation bar’ created with Andrew Morrish and Zurich artists—was billed to run “from midnight to 7 in the morning of the night before.” ‘Time’ was its broad conceit, and it was a haven for festival guests and for the locally found objects fantastically explained. MoMO became a hub of hilarity—the curator/performers allowing an easy mix of their own brand of infotainment and crowd mayhem. The night I attended, Thomas massaged feet with a vintage contraption, a pickpocket tried his luck, Bowman told a story of a little boy who tried to dig his way to Australia with a spoon, a hillbilly band wandered in, dancing erupted, and Morrish was expert on a vast collection of “CG Jung’s trouser buttons.”

Time was also of the essence in Richard Foreman’s theatre. In sweltering heat, the New Yorker prefaced his latest work Panic! (How to be Happy) by announcing that art is important, but that you don’t have to die for it, and placed a clock facing the audience so that we could monitor the seconds spent sweating. There were many walkouts that night—whether because of the heat or the idiosyncratic nature of Foreman’s work was unclear—but stayers were treated to what the papers dubbed a “search for sense by eccentric desperadoes” (Tages Anzeiger, Zurich) or in Foreman’s words, “a mirror” in which to observe him. “Let’s all join…the misfit club,” said the rosy-cheeked, falsetto trilling pirate…and so we did.

Trademark voiceover loops with a jumpcut score of Schönberg, Mahler and punkrock, crashing glass, sirens, pings, and telephones. An intricate, dissected set of strings and seesaws, spheres and feathers, cabbalistic symbols, magicians’ tools, Egyptian eyes, unwieldy phallic constructs, a giant vagina with hovering bee, a cardboard magic-mountain, and ornate dolls costumed perhaps to echo the performers (a pirate? a highland hell’s angel? a Lolita? a gypsy vamp?). We are in familiar, but endlessly inventive Foreman territory.

This is a landscape of permanent, almost automaton activity and frustration, “Not Yet!” was the most frequent voiceover interrupting the actors’ frenzied rituals of pleasure/death/meaning-seeking. “This is my ticket to a much better life,” says one of the women, and her intermittent hope and resignation in the chaotic circumstances is unusually touching. “Most of my art/life is about wanting grace, transcendence, and the constant failure to achieve this,” said Foreman in a fascinating workshop for actors run concurrently with the festival. “I get irritated with art that doesn’t show this.”

Foreman’s world is unrepentantly his own. It goes nowhere and everywhere. “This is my private collection of lost ideas and the whole world feeds itself with my vanity. Okay?” booms the voiceover (God or Foreman?). “This is the paraphernalia of my youth,” and “this play is like the sacred text of a forgotten people.” ‘Old master’ he may be, but the machinations of his Panic! are as intriguing as ever.

Michael Laub’s The HC Andersen Project had great reviews in Zurich, and I caught it in Berlin. Laub melds snippets of the contiguous kitsch and tragedy of Andersen’s fairytales, artwork, diary entries and Hollywood portrayals with his more perverse predilections and the private stories of his performers. The show begins with Hildigunn Eydfinsdottir’s simple story of her “favourite dress” (in which she received her first kiss) and segues into Andersen’s story of the little match girl. Laub pushes his artists to their extremes. He says he knew in rehearsal that asking Eydfinsdottir to take off her dress and recite the fairytale would make her cry (Taz, Berlin). The images of Astrid Endruweit’s manic red shoe dance, Stephanie Weyman’s contortion from beauty to frothing-faced masturbator (taunting Andersen and us) and the little mermaid’s non-dancerly feet simply crossed to form ungainly, joli-laide flippers pounding helplessly on the floor, will remain poignant and stark in my vision of the Zurich idyll.

Responding ineptly and naively to the 2004 Sydney Festival, The Sydney Morning Herald editorial of January 26 (“A city in search of a festival”) worried that “So much of what was offered seemed bleak. So many events were about darkness, death or despair. In short, it was a festival strangely unfestive…Art’s short answer—that its role is to challenge and confront—will usually suffice. It is also true, however, that even if dark realism is in artistic terms a good thing, a festival can still have too much of it.” Two pages on, arts reviewer Bryce Hallett enthused over the critical and popular success of the festival program, finding its suburban expansion westward “was heartening and put store in the notion that the people of Sydney do own the festival.” The fact is the 2004 program featured numerous works that entertained and amused, but it also presented a quotient of major works that were collectively more provocative than in any previous Sydney Festival. That their darkness yielded light, that their craft exhilarated, that they responded acutely to the historical moment escaped the attention of the SMH editor. What can an arts festival do first of all but celebrate art and the best of it? In Sydney there is a ceaseless, massive outpouring of happy entertainments and conventional art that doesn’t stop for the festival. Brett Sheehy’s 2004 festival offered some rich alternatives, exemplars of the new extremes of art that resonate with the world of the early 21st century.

Alibi

Meg Stuart, Damaged Goods
Town Hall, Jan 19-22
In a vast concrete-walled bunker fitted with video monitors, a basketball net, a viewing room, loudspeakers, desks, chairs and a mattress, 7 actors and dancers perpetrate casual acts of violence on each other and sometimes themselves. The precise nature of the space is elusive—a schoolyard, a prison, a psychiatric hospital exercise room, a big city public playspace…? There’s more than a passing resemblance to the shifting meanings offered by the respective terminus and rooftop settings of Les Ballet C de la B’s La Tristeza and lets Op Bach. These works and Alibi share violence, ritualistic behaviour and moments of compassion and redemption, though the latter are fleeting indeed in the Stuart vision, much darker than in her 1996 Adelaide Festival showings, No Longer Readymade and No One is Watching. There is a kind of empathy in the Alibi community, but it is of bodies apart sharing a wracking cold turkey shivering or a viral neck jolt that spreads from one man to all the others as they watch him from the viewing room.

Alibi is a meticulously staged, engrossing 2-hour performance created by choreographer Meg Stuart and her Switzerland-based Damaged Goods company. Apparently random behaviour soon reveals itself to be tautly patterned, but because it is so determinedly un-dancerly it remains suspensefully unpredictable. Sustained episodes of physical interaction (bodies tripped and dragged, pulled 2 or 3 ways at once, flung, trapped in headlocks) are interpolated with solo passages. A man accompanies a film of himself (glowing out of the concrete wall) with a reverie of anonymity (“It’s not me, it just looks like it”); a woman repeatedly and meaninglessy signals to the audience; a man delivers a litany of banal confessions; a woman abjectly offers anything for love (“If you don’t want children I can get my uterus removed”); and a young man goes looking for a fight, prowling, provoking, spitting. But, in the end, no one will play. Instead, isolated bodies shake in collective waves for a small eternity…into the dark that ends the performance.

It’s the physical reality of Alibi that grips. The texts sit poorly amidst the action and for the most part suffer from an actorly delivery at odds with the super-realism of the movement. The notable exception is the aggro young man whose barely audible utterances emerge from the very state of almost animal being we are witnessing.

The power of Alibi resides not only in its viscerality and the grim empathy of feeling the body of suffering, but in grasping the world of these people. The action is invaded by cameras that peer at those in withdrawal. Voiceovers direct actions and deliver intimidating queries: “Why are you a winner?” they ask a man who can only walk, totter and fall. But you soon notice that this is a self-contained world: the participants themselves take turns at wielding the microphones, cameras and instructions as if playing at power and surveillance. There is no sense of an external, manipulative force. Only the film images that emerge on the walls and monitors seem to have their own authority: unwatched pictures of war and prejudice or, more dominant, recurrent shots of a vibrating corridor. But even these suggest the subjective state of the players. Their lives are a tedium of assault, struggle and self-abnegation, but these people are not victims in any simple sense. They are perpetrators, observers and documentors of their own brutal condition. We recognise ourselves in them, or not.

What is striking, and what surely worried those of the audience who walked out, is the extremity of Stuart’s vision, first experienced in the sheer violence of its action and apparent pointlessnesss. The world of Alibi is one of play—dangerous play. No one is wounded or killed and after a while you can see the pattern of the play and the exhaustion of it in the aggro young man. But it still looks risky and unbearably hostile. The deeply textured soundtrack amplifies this uneasiness with a machinic hum and electrical surges bordering on the explosive: something to vibrate to, if relieved here and there by melancholic strings. Paul Lemp’s score suggests a sadness rarely shown on stage.

Dance, like so many other forms of play, has recently taken to extremes, as with extreme sports, extreme circus (Acrobat, The Jim Rose Circus, The Happy Sideshow) and the outer limits of reality TV. Choreographer Garry Stewart comments in this edition (interview p30): “My works aim at a kind of poetics of extremity arranged through a formal structure. For the viewer, I think there is a vicarious thrill in witnessing extreme athletic dance, giving relief to our subconscious desires for flight. I guess some people see my work as a form of organised violence toward (and with) the body.” The body for Meg Stuart is even more basic, far from athletic, consuming its owner in uncontrollable spasms, quick to violence, resting only in exhaustion. What game can these people possibly be playing? Tim Etchells, artistic director of Forced Entertainment, a guest of the 2004 Adelaide Festival (p14) and advisor on Alibi, has spoken of the versions of ourselves we construct in order to survive structures and games “as a way to survive in this world, or that world.” In Alibi this is a world short of rules, full of failures to construct selves but in which the most basic of games are being played: surviving violence, meeting violence with violence, living with a body off the leash.

Tulp, the Body Public

Elision Ensemble
Art Gallery of NSW, Jan 15-17
Tulp is another work of extremes, again about the body and our ambivalent relationship to it, but the dynamic between pain and release, despair and hope is this time delicately balanced. In its most accessible work to date, the Elision new music ensemble has created a wonderful hybrid, fusing documentary, new music and digital art into a vibrant new form of music theatre. Composer John Rogers and interdisciplinary artist Justine Cooper come together to realise a sustained reverie on the body, from birth to death, with many remarkable tales told by volunteers.

On its first outing, Tulp occasionally suffered a superfluity of images, vagueness in the deployment of the soprano performer early on, insufficient camera or projection power to make good use of images of the audience (the soprano has a tiny camera bandaged to a hand) and some imbalance between the onscreen voices and the music. These challenges will doubtless be addressed as the work develops.

The musical frame oscillates between beautiful early Baroque admonitions against vanity with reminders of mortality and a pervasive electronic score (Anthony Burr, Michael Hewes) with the live saxophones of Timothy O’Dwyer providing darker textures as well as orchestra-power hellish groans and blasts. In the course of the performance, Deborah Kayser’s elegant soprano and the Baroque instruments (conductor Simon Hewett) supporting her dramatically merge with these subterranean sonic forces. Tulp is driven by this kind of dialectic: live performer/filmed subjects; live music/electronics; Baroque imagery/technological body imaging, and, within its screen narratives an unresolvable tension between the body as material and the body as spirit and the strange interplay between art and science.

Kayser, in a fine latex gown is a deathly figure, at first laid out on a gurney, her magnified eye flickering hugely on a screen above. Screens either side of her scroll the lyrics she sings, in Italian on one and English on the other. These soon reveal anatomical drawings of the period and later dynamic animated, tormented figures suspended upside down like spectres from Dante’s Inferno. The outer screens are latex, bodies and instruments push against them from behind like eruptions of the skin. One slices open to reveal the soprano, attached with a glowing umbilical cord bowed by a musician.

Shot in tight close-up, in what appears to be black and white with the faintest touches of radiant colour, the interviewees, American and Australian, tell fascinating tales and offer surprising opinions about the body. A doctor opines, “Nobody is fascinating when sick. The disease is fascinating.” A girl confides, “My puberty was clinically induced.” A woman in her 50s becomes the surrogate body for the birth of her granddaughter. Another woman recounts the mediaeval conditions of her treatment for scoliosis, hanging in a hospital basement. The faces from Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicholas Tulp look on from the side screens. A man cheerfully recounts a home operation on his anus with gear borrowed from a vet and a doctor who runs out of anaesthetic. The pair agree to forge ahead, the pain is horrific, much whisky is consumed. The man tells us that the pain was not as bad as severe depression. A woman talks about her transformation from male to female: she enjoyed being a man for 30 years and saw the transition not as change but “more like evolution.” The complexities of the operations sound truly daunting, especially when she experienced it alone: “Nobody knew about it.” In the final stages of Tulp the focus is on the body in decay, of patients whose bodies are there, but whose minds no longer function or whose personalities have departed. The most affecting tale is told by a nurse who sees her craft as spiritual training. The eyes of an elderly man whose frail body can no longer support him meet hers and she knows that he is still someone special with whom she will briefly bond: “Death is to do with the body.”

In this post-Cartesian era where we claim to ‘be’ bodies rather than to ‘have’ them, Tulp is a reminder that the body-psyche relationship is in fact a dialectical one—the body can elevate or abandon us, just as we can nourish or neglect it; we are at one with it, apart from it. It is also tells us how much and how little has changed since the Renaissance went looking for the body with a scientific eye and a scalpel. Attitudes and operations can still be ‘mediaeval’; imaging, endoscopy and microsurgery ‘miraculous.’ Tulp ends with a mother’s lullaby to her baby, the words dancing, folding into each other on the screens, an expression of affection and hope after a gruelling foray into the complexities of what it means to be a body.

Hashirigaki

Conception, music, direction Heiner Goebbels
Parade Theatre, NIDA, Jan 9-12
Hashirigaki is a work of gentle extremes, a magical undoing of language a la Gertrude Stein, so that we learn to listen to ourselves anew. The Stein recitations—droll litanies of anxieties of being and identity—mesh with wonderland imagery and the music of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds as presented by 3 engaging singer-dancer-musicians on samisen, theremin and organ (Yumiko Tanaka, Charlotte Engelkes, Marie Goyette). The outcome is a lyrical, pop-existentialism where our heroines build a cardboard city, play bells descended from the heavens and transform into turntable statuettes, a dancing ball of light, an over-the-top Kabuki musician and an elegant pop trio. Goebbels’ arrangements of songs from Pet Sounds are both true to themselves and to the originals, creeping up on you sometimes like the ghosts of forgotten melodies, at other times awaited and yearned for. The all too brief sell-out season of Hashirigaki left its audiences dazzled and happy, bemused by the work’s reminders of the spiralling relativities of the self—if you dare attend to them—and the peculiar pleasures of art that is never literal, never real. [“‘Hashirigaki’ is Japanese for ‘rushing’, ‘writing’, ‘running’ and refers both to a flowing script and to the idea of talking while walking.” Program note.]

Phobia

Chamber Made Opera
Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, Jan 15-17
Another fascinating new music theatre experience was Gerard Brophy’s Phobia for Chamber Made Opera, in which there was a lot of music but no singing. A bit extreme, some would think, but in fact utterly magical. The ‘theatre’ bit comes from the way the music is created. The set is nothing more than a finely lit, dense assemblage of instruments for making music, noise and special effects, as you would for a film or a radio play. The 6 sound artists and musicians on stage create a soundtrack for an unseen version of Hitchcock’s Vertigo with frantic vigour and precision. It’s a bit non-plussing if you don’t know the film or at least its plot, but pleasure is still to be had moment by moment in the sheer inventiveness and multi-skilled talents of the performers. Structurally the tension dips away too towards the end, nothing that a bit of reworking couldn’t solve. Brophy’s score has a fluidity that can percussively yield both tension and release as well as, more lyrically, an apt period feel, all amplified by the performers’ investment in their art. Phobia is a unique creation opening up possibilities for Australian music theatre.

The Transmigration of Souls

Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Jan 22-23
American composer John Adams’ memorial for the New York dead of September 11, 2001 is an elegantly constructed musical palindrome, beginning quietly with a litany of the names of the dead and ending with the same, but rising in the middle to huge enveloping, elegaic passion. The structure is unexpected but rewarding. So is the sound design. Street noises of New York wrap around the audience in the Opera House’s huge Concert Hall. Lone voices of the bereaved speak from behind you, to your right, from somewhere beyond the orchestra. Visually, this is one of a handful of occasions in the festival when projections worked effectively rather than becoming mere ‘background media.’ Australian photographer Greg Barrett’s images were projected onto a screen suspended over the orchestra. Their power resided in Barrett’s restraint. His black and white shots of New York gutters, pavements, grilles and walls all evoke the act of looking down while walking. And in most of the images there is a human shadow, symbolic of those people lost but also resonant of the radioactive shadow traces of the victims of Hiroshima. The exception is a mid-piece, slow long shot of a corridor, the camera moving towards a curtain gently wafting in the breeze, eerily reminiscent of a similar shot in Meg Stuart’s Alibi in a very different scenario.

While not on first hearing the most memorable of the Adams’ repertoire, the synthesis of orchestra and image worked unusually well and conductor Antonino Fogliani kept the pulse and the sheer scale of the work’s power in discrete check. The projections in the same concert accompanying Ross Edwards’ Symphony no 4 (a choral work peculiarly lacking the composer’s facility for memorable motifs) were in surplus and poorly integrated with the composition, while the video works supporting Maya Beiser’s multi-track cello concert at Angel Place (Jan 21, 23) were very ordinary. The huge images of water, nature and moonlight added little to David Lang’s impassioned, reiterative response to September 11, World to Come.

Tense Dave

Chunky Move
Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, Jan 20-24
Gideon Obarzanek was the choreographer who introduced Australian audiences to hard-edged, fast, pop culture-inspired dance with his Chunky Move company. The company has long since diversified, though the inspirations of popular culture are still in evidence. Tense Dave, however, represents a great leap forward for Chunky Move in working the dance theatre terrain with an expert ensemble, great design and powerfully consistent inventiveness.

Obarzanek invited fellow choreographer Lucy Guerin, innovative theatre director Michael Kantor, dramaturg Tom Wright and designer Jodie Fried to work with him on realising his vision and it’s paid off. The non-stop stage revolve as theatrical device transforms from mere conceit to metaphor to total embodiment: the performers are seemlessly integrated with its world of endless mutations. Dave (played with great aplomb by Brian Lucas) wanders into the lives and fantasies of his neighbors and the walls come down (literally). He is subject to their desires—romantic, sexual, murderous and paranoid—to the point of near extermination. But Dave gets up and struggles on, a rather trite conclusion after the magic of the preceding hour but not diminishing too much the power of a very singular work. Once again, violence is the modus vivendi and the relentlessness of the revolve evokes a kind of helplessness beneath the work’s comic veneer.

The packed-out series of showings of Through the Wire (writer-director Ros Horin; Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, Jan 22-24), a verbatim theatre work-in-progress account of the lives of asylum seekers and their relationships with people visiting them at detention centres, revealed the extremes of cruelty that we as a nation have perpetrated against fellow human beings, but also a great need for audiences to be told the story. The appearance of Shahin Shafaei, one of the refugees playing himself (and as the least theatrical of the performers, the most effective), and the presence of the other subjects of the story onstage for the curtain call added power to a simply told but crucial tale.

Def Poetry Jam from New York featured American performance poets from Afro-American, Hispanic and Arabic backgrounds in a celebratory, often comic, sometimes bitterly angry account of their lives in a slick, quick-fire show that lacked the incisiveness and anger of some of their pop contemporaries. Young audiences, especially in Parramatta, were totally and loudly engaged.

The Glass Garden (GoD BE IN MY MouTH productions, Jan 14-17) was staged in a secret location which turned out to be the old armoury on the edge of Olympic Park, an evocative choice of site. However, once we were in the hall the connections quickly slipped away in the conventional end-on staging of this pop-opera of a young man’s decline into madness, murder and a subterranean Planet of the Apes ruled by a Fu Manchu figure. The trigger for this descent in the Glass Garden is the young man’s discovery that he has breast cancer. He encounters various female figures on his journey, including the raunchy dancing apes (who emerge from a huge toilet bowl), but resolved love or redemption are not in sight and electrocution is. Brennan’s quiet, nervy characterisation of the young man and Brian Lipson’s over-the-top baddies made for an odd dynamic. The writing is excellent at first but subsequently uneven and the overall structure unwieldy, none of which seemed to bother the young audience enjoying the extravagance of Brennan’s narcissistic vision. I confess I couldn’t get any perspective on this work—I felt time-warped back into the 1970s—a Jungian trip demanding Freudian attention.

Sydney multimedia whizzes, The Brothers Gruchy, turned on a very different dream. For their Museum of Dreams they built The Pod, a kind of mini-Imax wide-screen kiosk for 3 or 4 viewers with movies of dream-tellers accompanied by excellent sound. From one part of the screen, someone tells you a dream as they’re superimposed over its visual approximation. It’s a logical step on from Playback theatre where performers act out the audience’s dreams. But the aim here is more magical and archival than therapeutic and is not concerned with literal interpretation. These brief works are beautifully filmed with framing that evokes dreams—as an older woman speaks, the screen is dominated to the right by a close up of a child bicyclist’s hair in the wind. We can’t see her face, but the pleasure of movement is palpable. The Pod was busy when I visited it (Riverside Theatres, Parramatta), so my glimpses of other’s dreams were few, but their impact was strong. The pod also has a facility for recording your own dreams, addressed to a camera in the booth and later collected by the Brothers Gruchy for their archive. Let’s hope this idiosyncratic museum soon finds a permanent home.

Last word

The 2004 Sydney Festival yielded dreams, visions and extremes true to the uncertain and exploratory nature of the times. The dialogue with our bodies intensifies and our awareness of and responsibility towards others are writ large.

A report on the Breaking the Cycle music theatre event at the Parramatta Riverside Theatres will appear in RT 60.

In Japanese, wataboshi means seed of the dandelion flower. The image of the wind scattering these seeds across the world inspired the vision of the Asia-Pacific Wataboshi Music Festival. Hosted by Access Arts, the first Australian manifestation of this festival, Living the Dream was presented at Brisbane Powerhouse in November 2003. Retaining its original focus on music, Wataboshi has expanded its vision to include theatre, visual art, literature, comedy, cabaret and workshops.

Founded in Japan in 1975, Wataboshi was conceived as an educational festival focused on realising and harnessing the creative potential of people with disabilities, primarily through musical expression and performance. Promoted as a multi-layered cultural experience celebrating the lives and experiences of people with a disability, audiences are invited to celebrate art by “doing.”

The usual festival hustle and bustle was largely absent at Wataboshi, although the audience increased and the energy intensified as the week progressed. This was a deliberate strategy—the 8-day program was designed to progress from the local to the global, culminating in a traditional gala concert showcasing the musical talents of 14 Asia-Pacific countries. An unfortunate consequence of this programming, however, was that many international participants did not get to see the work of local performers. With its meagre budget, festival funding rarely extended to supporting the artists, thus some of the more prominent companies and artists may not have attended. Nevertheless it had the look and feel of a generous festival with all the trimmings.

In keeping with community development principles, the festival allowed all those expressing an interest to perform. Primarily motivated by a concern with identity, self-expression, participation and community development, the festival’s strength lies in the process of participation and in the subjective experiences of participants.

Wataboshi 2003 was the largest disability arts festival in the world, according to its public relations director, John Michael Swinbank. The public program included 81 events, varying in maturity and stage of development. More than 40 Indigenous participants were among the 420 artists performing at the festival (240 of these from Queensland). Many shows, activities and exhibitions were free to the public in the open spaces of the Powerhouse while the ticketed events were usually reserved for theatre spaces, loosely reflecting the distinction between professional and community based work. An unexpected treat was the post-gala performance in the Spark Bar by the festival’s international ambassador, well-known pianist David Helfgott. Workshops included The Tutti Ensemble from South Australia, storytelling with Aunty Maureen Watson, Delmae Barton and Vi McDermott, members of the Butterflies Theatre Group including directors Wolfgang Stange and Rohana Deva Perera from Sri Lanka, musicians from WA band LooseTooth and Melbourne rock and blues group the BiPolar Bears.

Theatre-based events included Mouse Matters, David Shortland’s musical dealing with visual impairment issues and The Unknown Sister by Brisbane stand-up comedian and performer Liz Navratil, a work-in-progress exploring her fascination with Elizabeth, the unknown sister of Marlene Dietrich. In Confessions of a Trainspotter, local jazz musician Jeff Usher wove a tale about his passion for trains and their sounds in a work using narrative, video-sound recordings and live piano. Usher’s use of visual material left many perplexed because it didn’t seem to fit within the context of a work by a blind artist demonstrating an embodied account of senses that excluded sight. New Zealand comedian Philip Patston entertained with his usual captivating charm, beginning his show by translating Wataboshi into the “wash your bottie” festival and asking us to imagine what such a performance might entail. Also from New Zealand was the young concert pianist Zeb Wulff.

Music theatre included Horse to Water by Gold Coast’s PAKTI (Power of Art: Key to Inclusion) and A Garden on the Moon by Brisbane’s Cascade Place. Both made use of the mediums of facilitated voice communication. In fact, the development of live improvised prose, communicated through interpreters was an interesting feature of the festival and a communication innovation within the theatre setting.

In A Garden on the Moon, written primarily from the ideas of Shane Macfarlane (known in character as Finbar) we get a slice of real life intermingled with musings and imaginings about the moon from someone whose world transforms once given access to communication. The fast and furious narrative spills out throughout the production, countering the pejorative labels and assumptions so readily applied to people like Finbar in certain discourses. Although the multimedia techniques were simple, the lighting, music and puppetry maintained integrity and offered many moments of seditious humor and sensory stimulation. A Garden on the Moon is a work with enormous potential if allowed the space and time to develop further.

Horse to Water is similarly evocative in terms of new communication techniques but with a serious tone. Combining improvised narratives derived through facilitated communication from poet Glen Sheppard and Peter Rose, translated by song through the voices of Terri Delany and Florence Teillet and brought to life by the music of Linsey Pollak, Horse to Water is both intelligent and emotionally engaging.

While the profundity of the stories evoked in A Garden on the Moon and Horse to Water cannot be denied, there is a tendency to draw from disability experience and deploy it as core subject matter. This kind of work is intriguing in the first instance but risks distancing its audience if the focus remains quasi-didactic. Moving beyond the personal narrative to more fully use the nuances and alternate tropes of meaning that disability can generate demonstrates artistic maturity.

Wataboshi 2003 continued the healthy debate amongst artists attending disability art festivals over whether to set boundaries between professional and community arts or to eclipse the notion of disability and be absorbed into the mainstream. The debate will no doubt continue at the next international Wataboshi festival in Shanghai in 2005.

Asia Pacific Wataboshi Music Festival, executive producer Neal Price, executive director Lesley McLennan, festival director Ludmila Doneman, executive committee Vaughn Bennison, Michael Pini, Ken Stegeman, production manager Malcolm Prendeville; Nov 16-23, 2003

He was raised in Canberra, lived a long time in Sydney, then in Berlin for 5 years before returning to Australia last May. On October 2, he went missing. His body was found on November 14 at Manly. He was buried in Canberra in December, at a ceremony attended by his partner Martin Del Amo, his family and friends. Nobody knows of his last hours. We do know he’s gone.

Ben was an actor, dancer, performance maker, musician, singer, writer and thinker. All these skills coalesced in an idiosyncratic and utterly memorable marriage of physicality, musicality and intellect. It made him a wonderful artist. In performance, Ben was electric, elastic, alert. He had a kind of jerky elegance, an ability to move in multiple directions simultaneously, unwinding minute gestures to reveal an endless array of tiny narratives across his body.

Ben began training and performing in Canberra in 1983 with Canberra Youth Theatre’s Troupe. He went on to perform with the Ensemble Theatre Project, Fortune Theatre and People Next Door. In the late 1980s and early 90s he worked with an incredible range of artists and performance makers, including Sydney-based companies Death Defying Theatre, Entr’acte, One Extra, Stalker and Nikki Heywood. He performed at Performance Space, in schools and outdoors, in international festivals, in Europe and with his band, The Blue Crush Club, in pubs, clubs and at parties.

In the late 90s Ben’s desire to train, rethink his practice and broaden his professional horizons took him to Europe. He freelanced in Germany, Belgium and Holland with small ensembles and premier companies such as Schauspielhaus Hamburg and Company Felix Ruckert.

Most recently, in Sydney, Ben performed exquisitely in Rosalind Crisp’s tread at Performance Space, reminding Australian audiences of what we had missed during his 5 years away. He also worked as the physical trainer on The Living Museum of Fetish-Ized Identities, generously offering his skills and encouragement to his peers. Around this time he also worked as a community carer.

I’m lucky to have worked with Ben in the early 90s. As with many of his colleagues, we became friends. We’d spend intense times together, then stay in irregular contact, but were always able to pick up where we left off, with one intimate detail or another, sitting in the kitchen chatting, gossiping, giggling into the night about recent exploits and dilemmas—personal and professional. We’d compare work experiences and aspirations, our states of hair, insomnia and relationships.

Ben was unencumbered by worldly possessions—though he was in his own way extremely stylish in his endless collection of midriff tops. He was encumbered with enormous desire. Desire to participate in our world meaningfully but lightly. Desire to make great work. Desire to critically unpick his surroundings, himself, and all that makes up this complex culture.

He interrogated life in general through his performance work and learnt much about his own life through performing. He was always interested in work with political and emotional depth. Making work was serious business for Ben. He gave it a lot. He was wickedly funny and could make tragedy, confusion or loss seem hilarious on stage, in the dressing room, at the after party, even at 6am boarding the minibus as it began its trip to Penrith for an 8.30am school show.

He was simultaneously generous and demanding of his collaborators. Demanding in the sense that he wanted to collectively crack it, to break through a work to create heart and intellect. He wasn’t petty or sycophantic. He wasn’t interested in industry success or recognition or a cosy career path. He was driven to make great, urgent and beautiful work. And he often did.

Many of his collaborators and friends gathered at Performance Space at the end of last year to farewell Ben and engage in a collective act of remembering. While mostly Sydney-based people were able to attend, the event reminded us of how many worlds Ben inhabited over time. He passed through many people’s lives but always with an intensity that was unforgettable. Perhaps Clare Grant put her finger on it when she described the effect of Ben’s reflexivity on his collaborators/ mates: “He watched what he made through a lens that was so complex you found ways of seeing you didn’t know you had.” There’s no doubt this was hard work for him.

A few days before he disappeared, Ben joined the closing night party of The Living Museum. He was elated and as usual, wickedly funny. He was wearing a pink wig, dancing around the space, giggling as he sang cheesy pop songs. He said goodbye at least 17 times.

When I spoke recently with Jane Packham, a very old friend of Ben’s, I asked her the name of a show that she and Ben were making in the late 80s which I never saw but heard so much about at the time. She laughed and said, “I don’t remember, and if you’d asked Ben he probably wouldn’t have remembered. All I know is that I loved him with all my heart.” For many of us whose relationships with Ben began through making work but extended into intense and enduring friendships, this is our experience also—we know we loved him and we know we miss him.

The photograph of Benjamin Grieve by Heidrun Löhr was taken at Rosalind Crisp’s tread, Performance Space in May 2003, his final performance.

After a noticeable absence in 2003, What Is Music? returns to its former time slot, allowing the summer festival frenzy to stretch through February. The 2004 festival driven by Oren Ambarchi, Robbie Avenaim and caleb~k, has benefited from the year of quiet consolidation (which included incorporation and key organisation funding from the Australia Council) to re-emerge as an east coast extravaganza with the addition of a weekend of events at the Brisbane Powerhouse for Live Arts, as well as 5 nights in Sydney and 6 nights in Melbourne showcasing the work of more than 60 Australian and international artists.

The festival began in 1994 when Oren Ambarchi and Robbie Avenaim returned from an international tour. Inspired by the work of John Zorn, they were interested in mounting an Australian version of his musical game Cobra. Glenn Wright from the Harbourside Brasserie encouraged them to present a week’s worth of performances. Ambarchi recalls the first festival as including “really high-brow and low-brow stuff. For example, Machine for Making Sense and then the MuMesons. We just had things we liked. We didn’t really differentiate…we just threw them together. In the beginning there was more of a [pressing] reason because there were so few gigs in Sydney for experimental artists. So it was a way for us to play, try different things out and get different people to play together. We were interested in digging people out of the woodwork… presenting work that was really important but that no one knew about—bedroom musicians and strange people who have been doing stuff for years [like] Daevid Allen from Gong. He’s an Australian artist in his 60s and plays in Europe 3 or 4 times a year and we put on his first Sydney show in his whole career.”

Ten years on, the guiding principle is the same, but over the last 6 years the introduction of key international artists has heightened the festival’s profile. The curatorial directive is to expose Australian audiences to artists who have played revolutionary roles in international music culture. “For example, we’re presenting Merzbow (Japan) and Whitehouse (England) who are probably the top noise practitioners in the world, heavy historical figures in that genre…At the same time there are artists like Annette Krebs and Andrea Neuman (Germany) who are amongst the most interesting improvisers working today.”

The Japanese contingent is particularly strong. Along with Merzbow, the festival will also feature Keiji Haino, a key historical figure in the Japanese avant-garde scene who has been involved in psychedelic free jazz projects since the late 60s. Ambarchi enthuses, “He completely revolutionised avant-pysch music in Japan and around the world…he’s in his own realm, a guitar player and vocalist unlike any other. Unbelievably personal and intense music, quite transcendental. Also quite draining and heavy going but in a beautiful way.” On the lighter side is Noriko Tujiko who performs quirky electronic pop with digital textures.
Merzbow

What Is Music? has had a reputation for wild performative events and it looks as though this tradition will be upheld by Whitehouse. The program tells us to “expect rock noise on the edge of aural damage and extreme adrenalin rush…testing the artistic and aesthetic limits of even the greatest connoisseurs of avant-garde sound.” In the Sydney show at Candy’s Apartment, Whitehouse will be supported by a little known sound artist from Uzbekistan, Fahalim Ooshcasky, feedback artist Mattin from the Basque Country and locals Dead Man Eating and Rizili. In Melbourne they will be joined by Neil Hamburger from the USA, Mark Harwood and the intriguing Von Crapp Family featuring guitarist Gary Butler, his wife and 2 children. Keeping things in the family, there will also be performances by Avenaim and his nephew Michael, and as part of the Brisbane shows, Clocked Out Duo’s Vanessa Tomlinson will perform with her 19 month-old son George Griswold. There are too many local artists to mention, but emphasis is on collaborative improvisations between local and international artists with some fantastic combinations set for the Sydney Conservatorium shows and the Melbourne Iwaki Auditorium nights supported by ABC Classic FM.

What Is Music? 2004 has also expanded to include some free events as part of the Melbourne program. From Monday 16 to Friday 20 at the Kaliede Theatre there’ll be a cinema series co-presented with Transmit Collective and RMIT Union Arts that includes Fassbinder’s Satin’s Brew, Sun City Girls’ Cloaven Theatre and Take Me By The Throat’s Satan Rides the Media. Miles van Dorssen and Nick Wishart’s soundscultpture CELL—a shipping container fitted with MIDI-activated pneumatic devices—will be located in the City Square. And for the first time there will be a festival club for late night revellings in Sydney at the Frequency Lab, and in Melbourne at BUS Gallery which will also feature a photographic and video exhibition curated by Lisa Campbell-Smith and Robbie Avenaim.

So now that the festival has survived for a decade, what’s the future for What Is Music? caleb~k believes that there needs to be period of consolidation. Expanding to a fully national tour is possibly not financially feasible for a festival that offers up to 6 nights in each city (although there are some events this year presented in association with South Australian and Western Australian promoters following the festival). The push now is on developing audiences, particularly in the newest leg of the tour, Brisbane. Other plans include setting up a recording label, a series of presentations across the year outside of festival time and some potential tours internationally. With the increasingly healthy audio culture in Australia, caleb~k would like to see What Is Music? operating as a support and informational hub for the innovative music community. In the meantime, audiences will have to be content with 12 days of some of the newest, wildest, loudest, quietest, messiest and rigorous sonic offerings this summer.

What Is Music?, directors Oren Ambarchi, Robbie Avenaim, caleb~k, Brisbane co-ordinator Lawrence English; Brisbane Powerhouse for the Live Arts, Feb 6-8, Sydney, various venues, Feb 10-14, Melbourne,various venues, Feb 15-20

Over the last decade the Adelaide Festival has developed something more than the bold programming which has been its inheritance. It is a thematic acuity which in the hands of artistic directors Barrie Kosky and Robyn Archer yielded events that systematically provoked the intelligence as well as the senses. The performance program for Stephen Page’s 2004 festival has a number of intriguing elements, but what does it add up to?

If contemporary performance is your thing then you can comfortably program yourself for the festival, or not so comfortably if some of these companies live up to their rhetoric. There’s UK premiere performance ensemble, Forced Entertainment, making their long-awaited first visit to Australia. With 22 performers Canada’s Canstage is presenting its award-winning, wordless account of Gogol’s The Overcoat and Diary of a Madman to a Shostakovitch score. Madrid’s La Carniceria Teatro (“the butchery of theatre”) explores the underside of leisure time in the everyday with 3 performers in I Bought a Spade at IKEA to Dig My Own Grave.

The affinity between performance and contemporary dance is strong these days, so you could certainly add to your selections from the dance program—Emio Greco and PC’s Conjunto di Nero, ADT’s Held (see p30) and Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Triple Bill (with Indonesian performer and choreographer Mugiyono Kasido). You could also add contemporary music to the mix with Elena Kats-Chernin’s new opera, Undertow (director/creator Vanhakartano; lyricist Andrea Rienets; State Opera of South Australia/ Finnish National Opera) and the concerts Absolute Zappa (the Absolute Ensemble play Frank Zappa) and Blood on the Floor (Absolute with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra), UK composer Mark-Anthony Turnage’s bracing fusion of classical and jazz forms. The great John Scofield is the guitarist on the recorded version (Mark-Anthony Turnage, British Music Collection, DECCA CD 468 814-2), so it’ll be interesting to see how Absolute’s guitarist measures up.

There’s one other vital ingredient for your programming, something to take you back to the roots of performance in the living tradition of the Dhuwa and Yirritja clans of the Yirrkala peoples in Body Dreaming, directed by Banduk Marika and Djakapurra Munyarrun (ex-Bangarra).

If you want more body in your festival choices, Circus Oz will be in town with The Big, Big Top Show in their tent and The Blue Show at Universal Playground (a welcome reprise of the Red Square format of 1996). New York’s Daredevil Opera Company promises “pyro-rock-stunt-clown” mayhem in another Edinburgh Fringe sell-out success.

Plays usually don’t figure strongly in Adelaide Festivals, but there are some distinctive ones in the 2004 program. Guy Masterson and the Assembly Theatre interpret 12 Angry Men, the stage and film courtroom drama classic, with 12 standup comics—a big hit at the 2003 Edinburgh Fringe. Also from the UK comes 100, The Imaginary Body, about 4 people in limbo faced with choosing the one memory they will each live with for eternity. Company B is presenting Gulpilil, with the film actor and dancer David Gulpilil directed by Neil Armfield. The State Theatre Company of South Australia has adapted Robert Dessaix’s novel Night Letters for the stage. Wesley Enoch directs RiverlanD for Windmill Performing Arts with Indigenous performers and children from Kuarna Plains School. Inspired by the art of Ian W Abdullah, RiverlanD is written by Scott Rankin and draws on the spirit of place and the impact of the great River Murray Flood of 1956.

The rest of the program is pretty much straight festival fare and should keep conservative Adelaide Festival-goers happy, something of a return to the mixed bag of yore. However, the festival’s best, combined with the pull of the Adelaide Biennial, the Adelaide Fringe and the inevitable influx of artists for the Performing Arts Market, the Fringe and the Artists and Writers Weeks should make for a strong turnout. Bookings are reputedly already heavy.

So what does the 2004 festival add up to? There’s a welcome commitment to contemporary art practices, including some bold choices, especially Forced Entertainment. The Indigenous arts strand is the festival’s great strength, with Gulpilil, RiverlanD, Body Dreaming, Bangarra’s Triple Bill, Peter Sculthorpe’s Requiem (with the Pitjanjatjara Choir and William Barton on didjeridu) and Talk’n Up Country, a collection of exhibitions, talks, screenings and events centred around Tandanya Cultural Institute and including a Sacred Symposium at Elder Hall, February 29, featuring leading Aboriginal artists and thinkers. In total it’s a modest representation of what Indigenous art adds up to in this country, but it does make it an integral part of the festival, certainly a more restrained vision than Peter Sellars’, but a significant one.

Forced Entertainment

Forced Entertainment has been a collaborative, cross-artform ensemble since 1984 in theatre, performance, digital media, video and installation, creating work that “asks questions and fuels dreams…Our long-term commitment is not to specific formal strategies, but simply to challenging and provocative art…” (www.forced.co.uk).

What Forced Entertainment has to say about their work reveals parallels with their Australian peers in contemporary performance. They share an ongoing concern with the possibilities of performance, often by abandoning the usual rules and forms of theatre. They address their audience directly and insist on “being with the audience in real time.” They have gone beyond acting—”we made versions of ourselves.”

In his talk, “A six thousand one hundred and twenty seven word manifesto on liveness in three parts with three interludes” at the Live Culture forum (Tate Modern, London 2003, www.tate.org.uk/audiovideo/ live_culture_conference.htm), artistic director Tim Etchells details the company’s vision and its dialogue with its audience. Our capacity to generate versions of the self is, for Etchells, what enables us to survive as we encounter the various sets of rules, games and structures that comprise our reality. Not surprisingly he sees this as operating on the border between reality and fiction.

Forced Entertainment is offering 2 works for Adelaide festival audiences, First Night and And on the Thousandth Night…, each demonstrating the company’s preoccupations. First Night is very much about performance (of all kinds), while the epic And on the Thousandth Night… is about story-telling, another aspect of performance and, as in its inspiration One Thousand and One Nights, on occasion a matter of survival—the lie that saves or a culture preserved in its stories.

First Night (2001) was commissioned by the Rotterdamse Schouwburg (Rotterdam), the SpielArt Festival (Munich) and Festival Theaterformen (Hanover). The company describes it as “a kind of disastrous vaudeville” with a sparkling lineup of 8 performers opening “with a grand welcome, but soon disintegrat[ing] into dark predictions of the future, psychotic escapology acts, unexpected dances and unhinged show-biz anecdotes.” True to the company’s mission First Night “concerns itself with the nature of the theatrical event itself, exploring what happens when it all goes wrong and when audience expectations are challenged or toyed with.” Historically, Adelaide audiences have been more tolerant of such challenges than their Melbourne and Sydney counterparts (where the respective festivals have been less provocatively programmed), but Forced Entertainment could provide a new level of testing given First Night’s reputation as the company’s most confronting work.

And on the Thousandth Night… (originally for Festival Ayloul, Beirut 2002) is a 6-hour durational performance. The audience can come and go as they wish during this epic of interrupted storytelling which “explores the live relationship between a story and its public, a story and its teller…A story is told, made up live, dragged from memory by a line of 8 performers dressed as Kings and Queens, wearing cheap red cloaks and cardboard crowns. It is a long, mutating and endlessly self-cancelling story. It is a story which somehow, in its many dips and turns, seems to include many—if not all—of the stories in the world. Moving from the extraordinary to the banal, it mixes everything from film plots, religious stories, children’s stories, traditional tales, jokes and modern myths, to scary stories, love stories and sex stories” (www.forced.co.uk).

For those of us waiting many years for Forced Entertainment to visit Australia, this is a rare opportunity, one made doubly valuable by having 2 of the company’s recent major works on the festival program—grounds enough to be in Adelaide in March.

Cathy Naden, a founding member of Forced Entertainment, will speak at Performance Space, Sydney, March 6, 3pm. Free. Members of the company will speak in the Adelaide Festival’s Knowledge Ground program.

See RT 58, p 14 or go to www.realtimearts.net for a preview of the Adelaide Biennial visual arts exhibition.

Despite shifting cultural and political sentiments over Australia’s relationship with Asia, cinematic reflections of the state of play have barely gone beyond deploying entrenched stereotypes. Sue Brooks’ recent Japanese Story joins an array of prominent Australian films from the last 3 decades in which Asian characters are ‘sacrificed’ for the sake of the white protagonists’ emotional fulfillment.

Believe me, I wanted to like Japanese Story. The idea of exploring the relationship between a white Australian woman and a Japanese man in the harsh Australian outback seemed rich with possibility, if not entirely new (Clara Law attempted something similar with The Goddess of 1967 in 2000). However, the film does very little to shift prevailing cultural stereotypes about the Japanese. The character Hiro (Gotaro Tsunashima) functions merely as a cipher for Sandy’s (Toni Collette) own process of self-discovery, and he is conveniently eliminated once he has served his purpose. The film continues a long tradition in Australian cinema whereby Asian characters are denied autonomy as characters.

Japanese Story elicits audience identification with Sandy; we are invited to join her emotional journey and to experience our own ‘Japanese story.’ However, the fact that this journey is predicated on an affective relationship with 2 stereotypes seriously undercuts this cause.

Imagine, if you will, a Japanese film called Australian Story about a Japanese girl stuck with a boorish Australian in the middle of the Okinawan countryside. Perhaps it would have been more accurate to call Brooks’ film Australian Story, since it uses an ‘Asian’ element—a stereotypical Japanese businessman and tourist—to define Australian self-identity. ‘Journey films’, where a character attempts to find him or herself by meeting an ‘Other’ along the way, can only be as interesting as that ‘Other’ is allowed to be. In this sense the shallow, fetishised representation offered by the character of Hiro does not aid what we might understand to be Sandy’s journey of self-discovery.

Throughout most of the film, Hiro’s only line is a conciliatory “Hai” (“yes”), unless he is commenting on how much space there is in Australia. At moments where the film attempts to be self-reflexive, by deriding Sandy’s attempts at cultural or linguistic translation, it again falls into old traps. When Sandy is told that she has to accompany Hiro into the desert, she implores her best friend for advice: “So, tell me about the Japs.” Unbelievable as her total ignorance may seem in a contemporary, educated Australian woman living in a major metropolitan city in Australia (and working as a geologist in the Japanese-dominated mining industry), Sandy endeavours to find out more about “the Japs” through her intimate engagement with one of them.

I found the first sex scene in Japanese Story completely unerotic, and worse, almost laughable. Hiro lies naked (presumably) under the bed sheets while Sandy puts on his pants and gets on top of him. The scene is yet another example of the Australian cinema’s feminisation of the Asian man, so painfully obvious that I began to wonder whether I was missing some more complex form of gender play.

Many critics have drawn parallels between Japanese Story and Clara Law’s The Goddess of 1967, and indeed structurally they are very similar. In Law’s film, Rose Byrne plays a blind Australian girl who convinces an eccentric Japanese man to travel across the country with her in search of her father. He agrees because he wants to buy the 1967 Citroen DS in the girl’s possession, which is his reason for travelling to Australia. Again, the sex scene between the 2 characters is rendered as a site of ‘connection’, with Byrne ‘on top.’ Cross-cultural exchange and understanding is made to be heterosexually resolvable, but only through a reconfiguration of gender relations applied to a hierarchy of race.

One recuperative scene in Japanese Story shows Sandy’s attempt to haul Hiro’s body into the back of the truck before driving back into town. Only then is the materiality of his body, as something physical and palpable, portrayed. For once, he becomes a ‘real’ body, not just a fetishised representation, and we are made to feel the weight of that implication. Too bad he has to be dead for that to happen. At the end of the film, we see Sandy crying in the airport lounge as she watches a casket-shaped package being loaded onto the plane; Hiro is being returned to Japan like a faulty item or a bad import that was never welcome in the first place. The film speaks of a utopian vision for Asian-Australian relations, where Asia is ‘in’ Australia, but Asians are not of Australia.

Of course, this treatment of the Asian ‘Other’ is hardly a new phenomenon in Australian cinema. In Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), Mel Gibson plays Guy Hamilton, a journalist covering the dying days of Sukarno’s rule in Indonesia during 1965. His cameraman is Billy Kwan (described as “a Chinese-Australian dwarf with a giant-sized heart”), played by American Linda Hunt. Kwan is one of the most pernicious portrayals of an Asian character in Australian cinema, particularly in the use of a white woman to represent an Asian man. Naturally, after teaching Hamilton some lessons about commitment, an ‘aberration’ such as Billy must be killed off, before Hamilton returns home to a white(r) Australia.

A decade after Weir’s film, Stephen Wallace’s Turtle Beach (1992) engages with the enduring antipodean concern with refugees and detention centres, but it again does this safely off-shore, in Malaysia. Joan Chen plays Minou, a Vietnamese woman married to an Australian ambassador. She befriends a journalist from Sydney, Judith Wilkes (Greta Scacchi). After watching Minou sacrifice herself for her children on Turtle Beach, Wilkes is able to return to Australia with a better understanding of motherhood and an affirmed sense of Asian women as self-sacrificing creatures.

More recently, Craig Lahiff’s Heaven’s Burning (1997) gives us a strong character in Midori (Youki Kudoh), although she too is sacrificed at the end of the film. So many of these films seem unable to offer any workable vision for the future of Asian/Australian relations, besides a (metaphoric) death that eliminates the figure of difference. Disappointingly, Japanese Story also takes the easy way out, implying that even today any other kind of relationship is untenable. Asian characters are simply not allowed to ‘live’ in the sense of being fully-formed, autonomous characters.

Counter-representations are beginning to emerge as Asian-Australian filmmakers begin making films about their own experiences, attending more to the specificities of what it means to be ‘Asian’ and the constituencies that comprise it. For example, there is Clara Law’s Floating Life (1996), Tony Ayres’ documentaries Sadness (1999) and China Dolls (1997) and most recently, Khoa Do’s remarkable The Finished People. At a time of rampant fear and panic, and increased border control against the threat of ‘foreign invaders’, the release of more ‘Australian stories’—of all kinds—is not only welcome but vital.

Khoa Do’s ultra low-budget digital feature The Finished People is everything that most contemporary Australian cinema is not: politically charged, socially engaged and stylistically brazen. It has one foot in the traditions of Italian Neo-Realism and the other in the kitchen-sink dramas of British directors like Ken Loach.

It’s often said that the digital revolution in filmmaking will democratise the image and allow previously unseen stories to burst onto the screen, but so far in Australia we have seen little evidence of this. Although digital tape formats have allowed several genre films of the sort normally disdained by government funding bodies to be made and released, until now nothing produced locally has matched the stylistic and thematic audaciousness of Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten, or the Dogma films of Denmark. It has taken a young first-time filmmaker like Do, working outside the usual funding structures, to produce a local feature that responds to this pioneering trend.

In RealTime 58 (p19), I described the lack of a concrete sense of place and cultural specificity that plagues most recent Australian films. In contrast, Do’s direct and unrelenting engagement with the harsh environment of Sydney’s Cabramatta is striking. Disdaining the glossy cinematography that characterises most local product, cinematographers Oliver Lawrence and Murray Lui capture Cabramatta’s flat, concrete landscape in a washed-out image that highlights the grey glare of Sydney’s south west suburbs. The film’s prosaic appearance, produced by a semi-professional mini-DV camera, allows the lives of the protagonists to be mirrored in the very texture of the images on screen.

The use of a small, lightweight digital camera allowed Do to capture the performers moving through the streets of Cabramatta as the life of the suburb went on uninterrupted around them. The impression of life caught “on the fly” as it played out around the drama greatly enhances the powerful sense of a very specific time and place that permeates the film.

The potent sense of a particular milieu is also intensified by the presence of the performers. Much has been made of Do’s use of ‘real’ street kids, and it’s true that the performers are all untrained actors who met the director while he was teaching a film course at Cabramatta’s Open Family Welfare Centre. But it’s an oversimplification to say these people are just playing themselves. Do generated the film’s script with the performers during workshops in which the cast drew upon incidents and stories from their own lives and those of their acquaintances and friends. Rather than being autobiographical, the stories in the film are an amalgam of the cast’s collective experiences.

In bringing these stories to the screen, Do sails against the prevailing wind in Australian film acting and employs a resolutely non-naturalistic mode of performance, tapping into a rich tradition of filmic performance that stretches back at least as far as the Italian Neo-Realist films of the 1940s. At one level we regard Do’s cast as characters in a fiction, but their rough-hewn performances also constantly remind us of another reality informing the drama and shadowing the bodies on screen. We never forget that these kids and young adults are playing parts, enacting a distillation of their lives and experiences drawn from the environment around them. They don’t use their lives to neatly inform their portrayals the way a method actor seamlessly incorporates his or her emotional memories into a role. These actors’ personalities, emotions and experiences are unconsciously inscribed into their every movement and gesture, and Do harnesses their lack of formal training to allow these traces of their off-screen lives to constantly encroach on their acting. During Tommy’s (Jason McGoldrick) conversations with Sara (Mylinh Dinh) for example, we can see a lifetime of hurt and repressed emotion expressed in his nervous stance and constantly shifting gaze. Joe Lee as Van moves through the environs of Cabramatta with the ease of someone who has spent a lot of time on the street. And when Simon (Shane MacDonald) flatly tells his friend Des (Rodney Anderson) that he has no dreams, we can hear the resigned fatalism of someone who knows that for some Australians having hope implies unrealistic expectations about the future.

The result is an unpredictable and fascinating set of performances, informing a film that resonates with more emotional and social truth than any other recent Australian feature. Not because it depicts “reality” in any unmediated, transparent or naive sense, but because it shows a group of young Australians in their everyday surrounds, self-consciously enacting a representation of their own reality. Do’s approach means that we never forget there are real people behind these characters, and the story doesn’t end for them when the lights come up. The Finished People may be a fiction, but it is a fiction entwined with a reality much of Cabramatta’s youth lives every day.

Australian feature films seem determined to avoid any kind of engagement with the rapidly widening fault lines running through Australia’s social landscape. For those who have been waiting for a film that not only speaks of our contemporary context but responds to the potential offered by digital video technology, Khoa Do’s The Finished People may be the harbinger of the revolution we’ve been waiting for.

The Finished People, director-producer Khoa Do, cinematographers Oliver Lawrence, Murray Lui; actors Rodney Anderson, Joe Le, Jason McGoldrick, Shane MacDonald, Daniela Italiano, Mylinh Dinh, Sarah Vongmany; distributor Dendy Cinemas.

Korean cinema’s rapid ascension to international attention over the past decade has been paralleled by the rise of the Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF) as Asia’s leading festival. In only its 8th year, Pusan is an inspiration to those of us who see festivals playing a vital role in screen culture.

This year PIFF moved to Pusan’s beachfront area where the accompanying film market events have established themselves. Opening night was a huge affair replete with fireworks, fanfares and schoolgirls screaming as cool stars sauntered into the open-air arena. The festival draws an astonishingly young audience from all over the country. You have to envy the Koreans the genuine popularity of their national cinema.

One of the tropes that spanned films from several countries this year was that of mirrored relations between characters. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s opening night Doppelganger was built explicitly around this conceit. Japanese cinema has always contained a strain in which deep structures are laid on the surface. Here a repressed workaholic splits, generating a double who does everything his original self fears.

After the successes of Cure and Bright Future, Kiyoshi Kurosawa is invoked in the same breath as Takashi Miike and Takeshi Kitano, though this film plays out the doppelganger motif in a rather tedious fashion. Its major interest is the means employed to show the split in the protagonist. Digital effects are downplayed in favour of old-fashioned solutions such as montage and split screen opticals.

Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai’s take on the double was played out through the romantic comedy Turn Left, Turn Right. To has always shown an interest in abstraction and this tendency is growing stronger. The premise here is that 2 lovers are destined for each other, but they have a hard time meeting because their lives are so symmetrical. Mirroring here is a way of keeping people apart. As in Kleist’s story The Earthquake in Chile, the earth has to open to produce the asymmetry necessary for narrative closure.

The third mirroring story was perhaps the highlight of the festival. We’re due for a big evaluation of Thai cinema pretty soon. Pen-ek Ratanaruang works a variation on his 1999 film 6ixtnin9 with Last Life in the Universe, which deals with a relationship between opposites whose difference brings them together. The film takes its stylistic cues from its obsessively neat Japanese librarian who meets a messy Thai bar girl when they are both involved in the death of a sibling. Filmed by Christopher Doyle, whose reputation is associated with his hot, handheld style for Wong Kar-wai, this is a beautifully controlled meditation on the balance between the needs to create order and disorder. In examining this balance, Last Life in the Universe traces a movement from an empty, fatalistic freedom to a hopeful state of unfreedom.

Speaking of empty freedom, Tsai Ming-liang’s new film Goodbye, Dragon Inn is indeed another Tsai Ming-liang film. This means that we get some brilliantly conceived long takes which foreground long moments of stillness, and a subtly complex sound mix built around ringing silences. We also have characters who interest the director for their pathologies, highlighting the gulfs within his yawning spaces.

The film is set in a cavernous old movie theatre screening King Hu’s great martial arts movie Dragon Inn to a small crowd whose primary interest is extremely repressed homosexual cruising. In one of the few lines of dialogue, someone observes that the theatre is haunted and it’s a small interpretive leap to see the characters as ghosts, with the spectacle on the screen having a greater purchase on human passion. Films such as King Hu’s translate desire into action, a transaction impossible in Tsai’s world.

The 2 big auteur-driven successes this year will surely be the new films by Takeshi Kitano and Kim Ki-duk, though both are calculated in their appeals to international art cinema. When Kim was in Australia in 2002, his only English was “I make dangerous films.” His new film Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter…and Spring deals with the art cinema trifecta of tranquil landscapes, Buddhist philosophising and cute children. The director himself has a sizeable role, stripped to the waist and showing off his martial arts moves in freeze frame.

While Spring… is a bit too beautiful for its own good, there’s still a lot here for those interested in Kim’s career. It is clearly the reverse image of The Isle as both films deal with marginalised characters who seek refuge in the middle of a lake.

Zatoichi will undoubtedly return Takeshi Kitano to international favour after the fiasco of his US crossover attempt with Brother. Kitano has learned the lesson of Akira Kurosawa’s international success—namely that the jidai-geki (the period action film) is a version of Japaneseness that travels. Reinventing the Zatoichi franchise, Kitano spices up the character of the blind master swordsman with his characteristic alternation between bloody violence and whimsical humour. Perhaps the only way you can get away with a tap dance in a movie these days is when it follows some spectacular blood-letting. There is a thematic celebration here of the hero and the artist as frauds, but there isn’t the rich stylistic play with space that constitutes the most interesting aspect of Kitano’s filmmaking.

The Korean cinema has enjoyed a huge expansion over the past year and the price has been several large budget films falling flat. After last year’s Resurrection of the Little Match Girl, this year’s sci-fi fiascos have included Natural City and the animated Wonderful Days.

The strongest Korean genre is the psychological horror film, with Tale of Two Sisters as this year’s prime example. It manages to combine art cinema introspection with a commercial storytelling that appeals to both genders. As the Korean industry grows to a point where larger budget spectacles become feasible, filmmakers have to become more conscious of the need to foreground narratives that appeal to multiple audiences.

Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder is deservedly the break-out hit this year, pulling off the combination of police procedural and social allegory. Based on a true story of unsolved murders from the 1980s, the film suggests that the viciousness of Korea’s recent history still hangs in the air, as the murderous violence the police chase is within themselves. Coming after the revelation of his debut feature, Barking Dogs Never Bite, Bong may indeed be the major auteur around whom international interest in the Korean cinema coalesces.

India, with its huge domestic audience, has long had the world’s most prolific film industry. The recent international prominence of Bollywood films signifies the country’s rising influence in world cinema.

In Australia we’ve seen Bollywood films, with their flamboyant mixture of music and melodrama, begin to cross over from diasporic audiences into arthouses. Recent successes include the Beginners’ Guide to Bollywood series which showed at various cinemas in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth late last year. This is a reflection of the situation in the UK and America, where Indian films consistently feature in box office charts.

From Australia’s point of view, there are significant advantages in exploring regional connections with the emergent Indian powerhouse. To foster these links, the Australia-India Film, Arts, Media and Entertainment Council was formed in Sydney at the end of 2003, under the umbrella of the Australia-India Business Council. The Council is headed by Anupam Sharma, and enjoys significant co-operation from AusFilm and several state film agencies.

An increasing number of Indian films are now being shot offshore. This allows productions to contain costs as crews of 35 can be substituted for the 140 typically employed on a shoot in Mumbai. Stars are more likely to be available to work uninterrupted on offshore shoots. Foreign locations add to the cosmopolitanism of the films while also appealing to diasporic audiences.

Australia is a prominent location with over 80 projects shooting here in the past 5 years. Sharma attributes this to a combination of varied locations, skilled crews and lower costs relative to Britain or North America. Many of these projects have been TV commercials, though the list includes several feature films, most notably Dil Chahta Hai (Heart’s Desire) from 2001, which was partly shot in Sydney.

Sharma line produced another major feature, Janasheen, in Australia last year. He believes that the Australian film industry must develop a global perspective: “It has been proven again and again that as the world becomes more global so does cinema. Imagine all the film professionals in Australia working on at least one Australian story related to their culture/origin (for example Ireland, Greece, India, or Korea).”

One of the Council’s goals will be a co-production treaty between Australia and India, so that Australian filmmakers can take advantage of tax concessions when working in India. Sharma also wants Australian immigration and trade authorities to be more welcoming to Indian filmmakers and encourage the use of Australian locations. He is organising an Australian delegation to the Frames film market in Mumbai in March, and promises Australian audiences a “comprehensive, official, and spectacular festival of Indian cinema” during the year.

This last aim is one to savour. The debate over the effects of a Free Trade Agreement on Australian film tends to revolve around the polarised alternatives of Hollywood dominance or maintaining an exclusionary national identity. There is an important third way—regional cinema alliances. The profusion of Indian cinema we’ve seen here in the past year demonstrates the richness of Indian film culture and the benefits Australians have to gain from engaging with it.

2004: Celebrating 10 years
of RealTime

It’s been an amazing decade to be involved in arts publishing, responding to a mighty wave of innovation in hybrid and new media arts that have had ramifications right across the arts.

In 2004 we’ll be celebrating 10 years of innovative magazine publishing. It’s a chance to seriously reflect on a decade of work and to anticipate developments in the next. There’ll be a celebratory edition in June tracing our publishing history and the works and artists we’ve documented. There’ll also be associated events. Join us in celebrating out 10th birthday. More news soon.

The ABC does it again…

Our RT 58 editorial reported the abolition of The Listening Room and New Music Australia. Australian music is to be distributed across Classic FM programming. Now Triple J management have axed the Wednesday night arts program, Artery, aiming to distribute its contents in brief grabs (one or two minutes) across weekend and morning programs (Arts Hub News, Jan 20). As with the dismantling of New Music Australia the assumption is that this way more people will come in contact with the arts. Once again listener choice has been eliminated in the interests of generalist broadcasting. The arts on radio will now become a chance encounter rather than a programmed certainty and utterly deprived of decent duration. Once again, a deep-seated hostility towards the arts within the ABC has been revealed, disguised as a rescue operation saving the arts from “ghetto-isation” and “pigeon-holing.” It sounds remarkably like the depiction of the arts as elitist that emerged in the 1996 election campaign.

Nor is our report on the fate of the arts on ABC TV altogether heartening (p23). Increased investment in the Sunday arts program will yield more Australian arts “packages and interviews”, certainly a good thing, and the show is to be themed—which could be enlightening or just another way to stitch together old material. Critical Mass will continue with a slightly broader brief. But the rest of the new ABC programs fall resolutely into the entertainment basket.

Whose art?

The ABC’s reductive approach to the arts, The Sydney Morning Herald’s editorial criticising the Sydney Festival for not being a festive entertainment and the current debate over the future of ACMI in Melbourne all come at a time when the artist is increasingly expected to meet audience expectations and art is meant only to be accessible. The traditional give and take between artist and audience is being undermined by the mythology of a tyrannous arts elite. Making audiences accessible to the arts doesn’t appear to be on the agenda. Interestingly, this is the year on which the Australia Council’s Audience & Market Development Division turns more of its considerable energy to Australian audiences. More on this soon.

RealTime 59

This edition is rich in arts issues. OnScreen focuses on the Asian face of Australian film, leading with Olivia Khoo asking why Asian figures often play sacrificial roles in the emotional development of Australian characters. An interview with Brisbane-based new media artist Keith Armstrong highlights the importance of the underpinnings of testing and re-thinking in the development of new media work. Two articles on Canadian film and new media art provide instructive comparisons with Australian models, with some surprising differences in outcomes pinpointed in film. Congratulations to Ian Haig on his success at Melbourne’s Sexpo and its flow on into the US, as interesting in its own way as Patricia Piccinini’s Venice Biennale achievement. RT

With the exception of Khoa Do’s The Finished People, (see p16) the 2003 crop of Australian features seemed like forlorn cultural objects, hopelessly isolated both from the challenging trends in global cinema and the audience they purport to represent. I approached the Flickerfest International Short Film Festival this year wondering if our shorts would be as uninspired as our features. The generally high standard of the Australian programs came as a pleasant surprise, although interestingly the short films often reflected the same strengths and weaknesses of the broader Australian industry.

Most of the dramas, for instance, continued Australian film’s obsession with rural settings. This is possibly a product of the high cost of permits for filming in urban areas, especially in Sydney, which is always going to be a serious issue for cash-strapped emergent filmmakers. But the result is a highly de-urbanised cinematic world which is utterly foreign to the majority of Australians. This sense of disconnectedness from actual experience is a phenomenon I’ve written about previously and to my mind is one of the major weaknesses of contemporary Australian cinema.

Furthermore, most of the Australian dramas were very much in a conventional naturalistic vein. Which is not to say they didn’t succeed on their own terms. The Rouseabout featured an impressive performance from its young lead Tom Budge and a strong script by writer/director Scott Pickett. There was, however, little at Flickerfest to indicate anything new on the horizon for Australian drama in terms of subject or style.

Similarly, the comic shorts generally worked well and raised laughs, but past experience has clearly demonstrated that our flair for snappy, sharp amusing shorts does not necessarily translate into an ability to produce substantial features, be they comic or otherwise.

So while the dramas provided some strong, if conventional, entries Flickerfest confirmed that the most interesting innovations in Australian cinema are currently occurring in documentary and animation. Australian animators are taking off on surreal, imaginative flights of fancy while our dramatic filmmakers stay close to the ground. The lovesick character of the AFI Award-nominee Hello (RT 58, p.21) with a tape deck for a head is hardly your typical Australian protagonist. Nor was the naked purple claymation man of The Diamond Cutter (directors Dominique O’Leary and Darren Hughes). Although the film’s story couldn’t quite justify its 19 minute length, The Diamond Cutter featured some beautifully crafted scenes devoid of dialogue, as the central character moved through his town on a nocturnal quest for warmth.

It was the documentary programs, however, that showcased the best in emerging Australian filmmaking talent. Although both of Flickerfest’s documentary programs were international, they featured several outstanding Australian works which illustrated the diverse approaches that now characterise the form. Out of Fear (director Bettina Frankham) featured the voices of 5 refugees who have endured time in Australian detention centres. Although we hear the refugees’ voices and see them engaged in various activities around their homes, we never see their faces. We are so used to a physiognomic accompaniment to the sound of human speech that initially this device made the film quite difficult to watch. But over time a complex relationship developed between image and sound that reflected the twofold experience most of us have of refugees: on the one hand asylum seekers represent a largely faceless social and political phenomenon; on an individual level these people have horrific stories that would leave most of us open-mouthed with disbelief. Out of Fear not only gave voice to some of these stories, but in its form subtly reflected the relationship between the audience and the film’s human subjects.

In contrast, David Vadiveloo’s Bush Bikes employed no dialogue at all to portray the extraordinary lengths a group of young Aboriginal boys go to in order to build and maintain their bikes. The film relied on the camera’s rendering of these boys’ faces and their physical interactions with their environment and each other. Bush Bikes illustrates how documentary, perhaps more than any other form, is able to play upon film’s dual status as a record of people and places and a means of creative expression, opening the viewer to whole new ways of seeing.

More conventional in style, Rebecca Barry’s The McDonagh Sisters used a mixture of archival footage and re-creations to excavate a story from Australia’s filmmaking past. The McDonagh sisters made a series of successful features in Sydney during the 1920s only to have their careers curtailed by a financially overwhelming Hollywood film machine. Films like The McDonagh Sisters play an important rehabilitative function in rescuing forgotten historical episodes from oblivion, but like all effective historical documentaries, the film also managed to blast a piece of history out of the past and make it a relevant part of the living present. Barry’s film does this by demonstrating that the difficulties faced by contemporary Australian filmmakers are far from new, and that without an awareness of this fact we are destined to constantly repeat our history of wasting our best artistic talent.

This year’s crop of Australian films at Flickerfest indicated that there is plenty of talent and originality in the local filmmaking community. If we can bring the imaginative flights of our animators and our documentary makers’ willingness to push the boundaries of subject and form into the realm of feature filmmaking, we might once again have a local cinema of which we can truly be proud.

The 13th Flickerfest International Short Film Festival, Bondi Pavilion, Sydney, Jan 3-11

Interdisciplinary artist Keith Armstrong has been building a body of impressive work in new media arts over the past decade. This has been largely in collaboration with performer Lisa O’Neill and other members of his Transmute Collective. Armstrong’s attention in new media installations and performance is on the performativity of the artist but also of the audience member as interactor or participant. Currently a post-doctoral new media fellow at the Creative Industries Research and Application Centre, QUT (Queensland University of Technology), Armstrong is critical of new media art where the purpose of interactivity is either unfocussed or pointlessly literal and he is committed to thinking beyond technology to situate his work in an ecology of survival.

Armstrong came from England 14 years ago with a Masters Degree in Electronic Engineering and Information Technology, backpacked around and became an Australian citizen. He’d always dreamed of being an artist, did a TAFE course in Fine Art and Design to get a folio up, a visual arts degree at QUT and later a PhD (“Towards an Ecosophical Praxis of New-Media Space Design”).

I decided right from the beginning that I would call myself an artist and I would canvas for work. So I just started to do it in earnest and I worked very hard. I never stopped working. And I would like to acknowledge QUT as having supported mostly everything I’ve done in the last decade in terms of equipment, resources, people and time. With this sort of work, the number of people you need and the technology is not easy to sustain without a generous benefactor.

I’m very interested in performance and in the performing body. I suppose it’s what marks my work as somewhat different from many other new media practitioners. I started as a performance artist, then worked with interactive technology and really have incorporated ideas of performance in almost everything that we’ve done since. I’m very interested in how people like Lisa O’Neill or Tess De Quincey, who we worked with recently, have a strong understanding of the body. I’m very engaged in how that knowledge can be used as a means for the choreographing and navigation of virtual space and what we can understand about interactivity from it. I’ve just instigated a project, an arts/science collaboration, working with a human movement scientist, a ‘tangible interface’ designer and performers to actually look in much more depth at new ways of interfacing.

Beyond new media

I’ve always been extremely engaged with ideas of ecology, particularly ecological philosophies and an understanding of the self in dialogue with the world. Ultimately that’s what drives me. It’s not new media really. It’s not even performance. It’s the discussion of those ideas which I see as central to survival. Tony Fry calls humanity “a de-futuring force” (New Design Philosophy: An Introduction To Defuturing, UNSW Press, 1999). We’re taking away our future day by day and he asks how we might be able to re-future.

Fry is a design theorist who talks about many of the choices we’re making inadvertently that take away the future. For example, when Henry Ford designed his motor car he didn’t think about how it would re-design the city. As an artist, you do what you can do to add to that conversation and attempt to generate a place for discussion and reflection. One can’t change the world through art but one can tickle people’s imaginations to re-think.

Securing our future means re-thinking our selves and our relationships to others and how we act. Fundamentally, my works are about interconnection, communication and a way of understanding the implications of action and choosing forms that are co-creative and collaborative.

Intimate Transactions

The participant reclines on an abstract form of furniture with embedded sensors, smart materials and computer vision recognition. It becomes a tangible interface device for detecting subtle bodily movements and gestures. These generate responses in the body and text projected on the screen. In its final form participants in different networked locations will simultaneously interact with the work, generating an evolving, flowing combination of ghostly bodies, dynamic texts and spatial sound.

Performer Lisa O’Neill, sound designer Guy Webster and Canberra-based visual artist, sculptor and conceptual furniture designer Zeljko Markov are Keith Armstrong’s key collaborators on Intimate Transactions (for other collaborators and project details go to http://embodiedmedia.com/ ).

Each of the collaborators came to the body shelf with a different critical perspective. My interest was to generate different types of movements with different kinds of conceptual focii. With my interest in ecological subjectivity I was exploring ideas of things that are close to what I understand as ‘me’ and then moving towards things that appear to be ‘separate from’ or ‘unknown to me’, yet that I understand my body is undivided from. Lisa’s idea as a performer was about a changing state of tension. So she interpreted that idea of the me-zone [as being] very much about tension moving into the stomach area—a key principle of the Suzuki method where stomach tension relates to a strong holding of the floor and a sense of grounding. The next position is to lean out from that centredness.

You really feel like you are leaning out into the void, a black void because it’s in a black theatre with a huge screen sweeping up in front of you. At that point, your hands become part of the interface. It’s very gestural and the energy is moving out. Zeljko Markov, the furniture designer, was interested in creating an object that didn’t have a strong presence but put the body in an unusual position. You’re very stable but as you move out there’s only so far you can actually move. And sonically, Guy interpreted those ideas as sounds that are familiar or sounds that are unknown or hard to pin down. He had a graduated database and the program Max running, spinning in 4 or 5 samples at once, mixing them in real time. It’s impressionistic, but very fluid, very effective.

As you move you’re going through the ‘me’, ‘us’ and ‘other’ zones. If there are 2 scenes side by side and one is the body and one the Calvino text, you can navigate your way through the body, through the text and back around. You’re in a fluid space. It was actually possible to fall off the top and into a holding space. This is something we really want to work on because what we were trying to do was to generate a 2-dimensional abstract map and it’s very difficult to follow when your body’s moving in 3 dimensions. Our new script design will work in 3 dimensions.

You want to network Intimate Transactions rather than it being only an on-the-spot interactive work. Why?

It’s been designed as a multi-locational work, a bit like Jeffrey Shaw’s Web of Life. You can add nodes to the network and a node can log in and off and increase the scope of the work. We’re interested in this idea of presence within a network and what that might mean. We would like people to engage in intimate transactions with other people in other sites whom they don’t know, whom they won’t be able to see or hear—only sense their effect.

A way of seeing it might be as an ecological footprint, the sense of the effect that your actions have in other spaces that you may not consider. Each person will engage with this work within the network—there’ll be physical and online spaces—and they will always be transmitting.

We’ve started to build the idea through a sense of a shared body we’re imagining. We’re now thinking about a thematic of pain. Physical pain is incredibly hard to share in discrete bodies, but if those bodies were shared and we could choose to take on each other’s pain at a certain level, what could that mean, pain flowing through a network of bodies…?

I’m not interested in actually hurting people, but I don’t think there are many examples of long meditations on pain. Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers comes to mind. Emotional pain is dealt with in just about any artwork you can imagine but physical pain…it’s beyond words.

Re-working

We’re happy with the form of the body shelf but we’re going to change it to a much more bodily sensitive interface. So rather than the hard surface with the small sensoring faces, we think we’ll change the rear body shape to a sprung surface so you can actually match your spine and your body into it. We’re going to drop the hand movements because the whole hand gesturing thing loses meaning. It becomes too much like every other interactive we’ve become frustrated by. It’s really important to me that you ask people to do something which has a meaningfulness in terms of physical response. So we’ve got the back support and we’ve also got a kind of harness system that you move into.

We’re working towards this for the residency Fiona Winning has asked us to do at Time_Place_Space 3 at AIT Arts in Adelaide. To do anything networked requires a server to handle all the intercommunications. To place more than one person within an environment conceptually requires a whole reorganisation of the script. So that has to be re-thought. And the notion of collaboration within that zone has to be re-thought too. So it’s quite large.

Plus an online ability. It feels to me that every project we’ve ever done is always working in a place that we don’t yet quite know how to get to. We always set ourselves challenges which we’re not really sure how to achieve but we do make it. We never seem to go to a safe place.

Testing

The responses to Intimate Transcations were incredibly varied, as you’d imagine. In general everybody found the experience strong, but there were real differences. It was quite daunting, set up in the Powerhouse with small groups and with [an intense] level of vision and sound. Some people were very self-conscious and tense, and froze. Some wanted to control it, to go everywhere and sense a bit of everything. And there were those who were happy just to get on it and start to drift, or to play without attempting to do everything. Those people seemed to have the strongest experiences.

Did you have Lisa there talking to people about how they were using their bodies?

Absolutely. It was very much a team. Lisa, Zeljko, Guy and myself. I talked about the structure of the work, then Lisa and Guy took the participants onto the machine and through the different phases of body shapes that were required. And we were on hand in case they needed us. As much as we could, we let them drift into it.

The performativity you’re interested in is about how people behave on this device?

It’s also about shaping the whole theatrical experience. There was a waiting room as they arrived and a ritual dressing in white suits. There were technical reasons for the suits and the red and yellow gloves in terms of colour recognition for the motion tracking. The system knew where your right and left hands were and the white suit kept the rest of you neutral. But of course, the white suits became a big thing—you know, the space metaphor, biogenetics, the nuclear thing. Not exactly intimate.

What we discovered was that some people found a very strong connection between themselves and the body on the screen. Others felt remote and I believe these were mostly the ones who were looking for control.

The bodies were originally conceived in a blue screen studio with the camera pointing down on Lisa O’Neill performing on a gym horse. She’s on her back performing upwards or on her stomach performing downwards. So the centre of her body never moves…The problem is that people expect an avatar, to see something that represents them because that’s the standard thing. So some people wanted to know if it was them, why wasn’t it always doing what they were doing? We were thinking more of an indirect relationship.

Not directly. There is a matrix of computation you’re travelling through, but it’s how you get there. Where you’ve come from and where you’re heading and the velocity at which you’re choosing to move through the system depends on whether you pause and you spend time in an area or you whiz around.

Unlike a video arcade game, a work like this is more analogous to listening to music or looking at a painting. The responses and processes are open-ended.

A sense of agency in interactive work is important—the need to see something of yourself within the interface. But to my mind, if you overdo that you actually lose the power of it.

Grounded Light

We may say “But we walk on the ground”, yet we should be aware of an ambiguity. For we walk on the ground as we drive on the road: that is, we move over and above the ground. Many layers come between us and the granular earth…Let the ground rise up to resist us, let it prove spongy, porous, rough, irregular—let it assert its native title, its right to maintain its traditional surfaces.
Paul Carter, The Lie of the Land

Grounded Light was a collaboration between myself and O’Neill working with trombonist Ben Marks from the Elision new music ensemble. It was part of Floating Land, a festival convened by Noosa Regional Gallery and directed by Kevin Wilson. This is the second year he’s done it and it’s a 5-year project—very ambitious. This one was a national project and future ones will be international. We worked on a piece on Mount Tinbeerwah, a well-known lookout on the way to Noosa which gives you a 360-degree panorama of the town, lakes and national park. A very nice place to spend time.

We decided to make a work that would take people from the car park to the top of the mountain. A half-hour walk on a moonless night. There were certain places where Lisa stopped and performed. I’d built a costume with controllable lights in it. She carried the sound in her parasol which also had lights. So you’d see this figure in the pitch black, self-lit, moving up the mountain.

At the summit we built an installation of tiny white lights and a video projection on one of the display boards in the lookout. Grounded Light is based around ideas from Paul Carter’s Lie of the Land. He says at one point in his book, “Many layers come between us and the granular earth.” One of the many theses in that work is our inability to touch the land, the Australian landscape. He writes about Colonel Light and Ted Strehlow as characters who were of their time but who were transgressional, who were able to touch the earth conceptually or practically in a different way. So Lisa was dressed in a turn of the century costume as a transgressive character—the grounding of the light was literalised by the lights in her dress that allowed her to press her body down into the landscape. We were making parallels between light and campfires and that different sense of floating and groundedness between the two.

You also see floating lights [on stalks], ungrounded lights, if you like, in the black sea floating round you of Noosa and the hinterland. These completed a net of lights over the mountain. So when you stood in the lookout, you could see them and the lights in the valley and imply a connectivity…a net of human civilisation on the landscape that’s pushing up. Lisa walks through the light field, fading herself out—she had dimmers and switches she could control so she could dissolve into the landscape.

People made their way through the light field and up to the lookout to a display panel of the area. You could point out dots of light: “that’s this mountain; that’s that one.” We also had a crew on Mt Cooroy 3 and a half kilometres away signalling with morse code. Imagine a mountain you can only just see in the darkness and, right at the very top point, a light comes shining out. There was a collective “Aaaah.” Kids loved it. The whole thing had a magical-real feel. And then they saw an animated view of the landscape projected on the display board with quotations from Carter. It was a quiet installation, a wind-down, a 5 minute looping animation with a video projector powered by a solar battery rig.

Absolutely. Although it was a site-specific work it could be re-contextualised relatively easily to a range of other mountains: sites where you’ve got a good view of the city lights below and some sense of a traverse and a place to build an installation.

Grounded Light, Transmute Collective, interdisciplinary artist Keith Armstrong, performer Lisa O’Neill, musician Ben Marks, Esther Cole (QUT design student), production James Muller, Earthbase Productions; Floating Land, presented by Noosa Regional Gallery, Oct 17-18, 2003

Intimate Transactions, Transmute Collective, artistic/visual director Keith Armstrong, performance director Lisa O’Neill, sound Guy Webster, systems designer/programmer Glen Wetherall, electronic sound designer Greg Jenkins, Max programmer/sound system design Benn Woods, 3D Artist Chris Barker, furniture design Zelgko Markov; test showing, Brisbane Powerhouse, August 19-21, 2003

Futurotic manifests Ian Haig’s ongoing interest in the strange relations between the body and technology and, in particular, the peculiar and often disturbing uses people find for the gadgets that increasingly surround us at home and work. While the impetus for Futurotic arose from this interest in “looking at everyday technological items and re-thinking them, transforming them”, the specific preoccupation of this work involved the perverse sexual uses of domestic appliances. In the context of the trajectory of Haig’s work, there is something appropriate in this conjunction of, for example, vacuum cleaners and masturbation. But there is actually a vast literature devoted to the history of domestic appliances as sex devices and Haig has clearly done his homework.

Futurotic takes this inquiry further by defamiliarising the very idea of prosthetic sex. Haig’s preposterous yet vaguely functional assemblages cleverly reinterpret the idea of the sex toy as a slightly bizarre concept. The care with which he has made these objects draws attention to the artifice and craft at the heart of the sex industry. Just think of the verisimilitude of dildos—you know what I’m talking about—fake vaginas, ‘signature’ penises, prosthetic anuses and the like, their deft simulation of human anatomy, abstracted from the body and endowed with the portability of any other object. The titles of Haig’s works—Afternoon Delight, Perfect Day, The Things I Love About You—are ingenious overtures to commercial erotica and their invocation of intimacy and pleasure. But you won’t find anything like The Mole, I Feel Much Better Now or No Place Like Home in Sexyland, Club X or even the Toolshed. In Haig’s hands, the conjunction of machinery and gratification brings with it extreme scenarios, as in Over the Rainbow, a “preparatory sex change device” in which the utilitarian Bamix becomes the basis of a sinister looking instrument, the sex toy of choice for the transgendered individual.

The plausibility and stylised functionality of Haig’s futurotic devices astutely draws attention to the strange, obsessive nature of the sex industry. “I consciously drew on this reservoir of ideas…from the sex industry to do with links between sex and technology. The things that you can actually buy in sex shops are strange things in themselves; so I was conscious with my works that they had to be even stranger than that, more extreme. A lot of popular culture is actually more interesting than a lot of art, and art needs to be aware of things that are visible in popular culture and take them somewhere else.”

Somewhere else for Haig is an imaginary future, though still grounded in actuality, in which the technology of sex, sex itself as technology, dismantles any remaining boundaries between the human body and machinery. “I wanted to make these modified household devices, which have actually been used for different kinds of masturbation, such as the vacuum cleaner, and turn them into sex toys for some kind of super evolved human, or…alien species.” In this sense Futurotic is a complex mix of satire, irony and play and, at a much more profound level, dread. Haig’s work brings us back again and again to the conviction that our interfaces with technology transform us in ways that are not always positive, nor always foreseeable. Not that he is especially po-faced on this point, nor in any way moralistic. On the contrary, Haig is interested in the deeper, psychic dimension of what it means to be technologised.

“One of the other big references here was [filmmaker] David Cronenberg and his investigation into the psychopathology of sex and technology, especially [in] Dead Ringers with its instruments for operating on mutant women. One of the punters who came to the stall said if Cronenberg was here he would probably whip out his gold American Express card and buy the whole lot.”

The most dramatic aspect of Futurotic was not so much its content but its context. Why exhibit at Sexpo? “Let’s be honest, a regular gallery is going to attract the regular punters, pretty much, I’m kind of exhibiting to the same crowd. I wanted to avoid that and take the work to a whole other audience, take it back into the context from which it came.” Haig is quick to point out that Futurotic is in no way a critique of the porn industry, but rather a temporary engagement with it, an active participation in order to connect with a different context for his work. Given the usual ways of curating and installing new media art Futurotic was a distinctive event. It inventively found a new, site-specific context for the exhibition of works that admittedly suited the venue, but which, nonetheless, were also out of place because they were not really functioning sex toys. (Experimenta Media Arts’ Altered States exhibition of 1997 did something similar, locating itself within the corporate context of the Interact Multimedia trade fair.) However for Haig, this blurring of work and context created an unexpected and pleasing confusion that actively engaged people with the art, because the site-specific aspect of Sexpo was “as much a part of the art itself…Sexpo went off. It was the most surreal experience I’ve ever had exhibiting work. After doing this kind of work for years, Sexpo was the most intense response I’ve ever had…”

The overtly playful, reflexive element of Futurotic seems to have prompted people to take the time to stop and look, ask questions and relate to the work as a kind of dialogue with sex toy erotica. “Absolutely,” Haig says, “in fact there was a lot of confusion there as well because the works do look vaguely realistic and I ended up explaining quite a lot to people that they were art pieces and not functioning sex toys. But that didn’t change the situation. They still really responded to that, to the idea that they were art about sex toys…I tried to create tensions between fictional and non-fictional scenarios that people could actually have a stake in, like the works were props from some soon-to-be-seen science fiction film, or things that have been used in some pre-existing context, which I really liked.”

The success of Futurotic at Sexpo has opened up a number of international exhibition opportunities. In June 2004, Haig will take Futurotic to the mecca of the sex industry, Los Angeles, for LA Erotica and in January 2005 to Las Vegas for the Adult Entertainment Exhibition. Potential buyers of the work, including the LA Museum of Erotica, have also encouraged Ian Haig that the project has been worthwhile and successful. “Well you can’t go wrong with sex. It’s the great equaliser. In some respects it does make sense that art can also deal with that as an everyday kind of thing that we experience.”

The wall between science lab and art gallery is coming down in Spikes, a multimedia exhibition examining the science/art interface at the University of Technology Sydney gallery. Featuring work by 6 internationally recognised multimedia artists, Spikes will interrogate the social and ethical concerns thrown up by the accelerating pace of technological and environmental change that characterises 21st century life.

“The project takes the possibility of technological and population spikes within the next 50 years as a conceptual starting point,” says curator Jacqueline Bosscher, “a spike being a period involving change of immense speed and scale that could end in human obsolescence or transformation.”

Examining future trajectories of human and animal species and visions for a sustainable future, Spikes will feature video, sculpture, new media and living biological material in the form of tissue cultures and plants. At a forum during the exhibition, the artists, curator and UTS staff will discuss ‘next’ media art—’next media’ being a term for biological or living material.

Artists featured in Spikes are Rod Berry, Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, Joerg Hubmann, Andrew Smith and Astrid Spielman. RT

Spikes, curator Jacqueline Bosscher, UTS Gallery, Sydney, Feb 24-March 20; forum Feb 26, 6pm

In November 2003, ABC TV’s publicity department proclaimed more Australian content, more primetime Australian programs, 31 new Australian shows and 20 returning Australian programs and series. Does this mean 2004 will see “innovative programming reflecting the cultural diversity of the Australian community”, intended to “encourage and promote the musical, dramatic and performing arts in Australia”, as per the ABC Charter?

In the past 15 years the ABC has been through enormous changes, including numerous restructures, none of which has masked cutbacks in funding, staff and local programming. Since the 2001 appointment of the widely respected Sandra Levy as Head of Television, the ABC has achieved higher ratings and broadened its audience demographic.

Under Levy, Head of Programming Marena Manzoufas has built a regular schedule for audiences. In primetime, we expect murder and mayhem on Friday, comedy on Thursday and quality drama and cultural programming on Sunday. The programs have been of a high standard and included some strong locally produced shows. But something has been missing.

Despite the new dramas, excellent current affairs and comedy, there is no hiding the overall erosion in the quantity and breadth of Australian content on our screens. The ABC’s 2002 Editorial Policies state: “Experimenting with new ideas also means accepting that some programs may not succeed. By pushing the boundaries, the ABC stimulates and develops creative new program genres and styles. This may result in programming which challenges some community sensibilities but also contributes to the diversity of content in the media.” But in-house ABC TV programs that push style and content boundaries have been rare, making challenges to community sensibilities or the development of new genres unlikely.

For some time the ABC has been commissioning independent producers to make much of its leading edge Australian content. However, it seems goodwill is not particularly high since producers find themselves barely breaking even on work they produce for the national broadcaster. At the SPAA (Screen Producer’s Association of Australia) Fringe 2003, respected documentary maker Michael Cordell (A Case for the Coroner) commented on increasingly tight margins. Many other program makers have made similar remarks.

The ABC’s editorial guidelines encourage arts coverage, take pride in the ABC’s place in Australia’s cultural life and clearly state that experimental programming is one way to meet the requirements of its charter. Changes are afoot in the newly merged Arts and Entertainment department under the management of Courtney Gibson. The extension of Gibson’s portfolio in late 2003 was interpreted by many, including RealTime (Editorial, RT58), as indicative of the arts’ diminishing importance at the ABC. Gibson argues that the merging of departments gives the arts more muscle, much needed stability and her own fierce commitment. Many of the new Australian shows for 2004 have been generated by her department. Several are studio-based, making them cost effective because they use existing ABC resources. These include Strictly Dancing (Come Dancing meets Strictly Ballroom, hosted by Paul McDermott), a new version of The Inventors and Amanda Keller’s Mondo Thingo.

Cost is often cited by ABC executives and staff as a major barrier to increasing Australian programming. While budget limitations are real, Gibson is very approachable and interested in new ideas: “I want us to speak directly to program makers and not hide behind another layer of bureaucracy. That way you can know in 2 weeks rather than 2 years if we are interested. We need to make quick but considered decisions, and not be paralysed by the amount of work under consideration.”

Gibson is equally refreshing on the subject of her role as Head of Department: “At SBSi [SBS Independent] I learned how to treat people, how to be of service to the industry. That’s what you’re doing in these jobs. You’re trying to support work and provide a means by which emerging filmmakers and arts practitioners can have their work explored on television. It’s a service orientation. I’ve tried to bring that to the ABC.” She is also adamant that senior management supports her endeavours: “Any idea that arts programming is not fully supported is not borne out by the fact that I asked for extra resources for 2004 and got them.”

Given her short time on the job, Gibson and her newly appointed Executive Producer Amanda Duthie have taken some bold steps in reshaping arts programming in 2004. With Deputy Programmer Ian Taylor they’ve developed a more coherent approach to Sunday afternoons. Gibson notes: “Sunday afternoon has treble the resources it had last year, treble the shooting and edit days, the addition of 2 full time producers plus the commissioning of packages and interviews from all over the country, breaking that Melbourne-Sydney nexus that’s formerly held sway.”

Sunday afternoons have been programmed in a series of themed seasons beginning with photography. As acquired shows differ in length, there is room in the schedule for purpose-made programs about Australian artists and relevant short films. Across the year the department will also produce a series of ‘in conversation’ style interviews. New faces can be expected in the interviewer’s seat, including Bec Smith (ex-IF magazine) on film and Sherre Delys (ex-The Listening Room) on contemporary classical music, and Gibson says they will be looking outside the ‘usual subjects’ for interviewees. The material garnered from these interviews can be packaged to fit available slots but will also form an important archival resource.

Expect changes to Critical Mass, with Gibson clear about directions the panel show might take: “I am as interested in what a geneticist thinks about the work of Patricia Piccinini as I am in what a photographer thinks. That is a program where we can, and should, have different perspectives.” Critical Mass will be broadcast on Sunday night following Compass and be repeated the following Sunday afternoon.

But what of Australian arts in primetime?
While Amanda Keller’s Mondo Thingo is billed as an entertainment show it will be covering popular culture, including film. The New Inventors features a rotating panel of designers interrogating work and inventors.

There is an enormous amount of production on Gibson’s shoulders and reason for caution about the likely success of so many new programs. Fortunately, Gibson does not work in isolation. She has the support of management, as well as a skilled staff and an external network of program makers and artistic practitioners.

Somewhat in the background is a discrete enclave known as the ABC Arts Advisory Group. Chaired by the formidable Margaret Seares (former Chair of the Australia Council), the public hears little of their deliberations but the following exchange between Seares and Tony Jones on Lateline in 2001 gives an idea of her position:

Jones Do you hold the view that at the present moment the ABC is failing to deliver its charter?

Seares: I think a lot of us were quite taken aback…when on the Littlemore program [Mediawatch] we had a retrospective of arts…on the ABC going back to the 70s and 80s, and I think a lot of people realised then what the cuts in funding have done in terms of depleting that sort of representation on our television screens today. So that’s why I think it is an important issue to have some debate around.

The equally important matter of the coverage of Australia’s unique and invaluable indigenous art remains unexamined. If the arts should be everywhere across the ABC schedule, surely Indigenous issues and perspectives should be treated just as seriously.

While funding cuts have undoubtedly contributed to the decline in the depth and diversity of ABC local programming, senior management also bears responsibility for embracing strategies that do not effectively meet the requirements of the charter. Ratings are often used by the ABC as a key indicator of success, undermining the notion of developing challenging works and diminishing the immense value of arts programming that documents and furthers the evolution of Australia’s rich creative and cultural life.

Lisa French ed, Womenvision: Women and the Moving Image in Australia, Damned Publishing, Melbourne, 2003

When Japanese Story blitzed the 2003 AFI Awards most of its honours were received by women. Given this, some might think that women have finally achieved equal footing with men in the Australian audiovisual industry. However, this is not quite the reality.

For all the success of female directors such as Gillian Armstrong, Jane Campion and Jocelyn Moorhouse, producers like Jan Chapman, and television executives such as Sandra Levy (head of television at the ABC), inequalities remain. According to the 2001 census, there has been little recent change in the percentage of women working in Australian film: 44% compared to the 43% recorded in the previous census year of 1996. Women represented only 28% of directors. Female producers fared better at 45% but writers fell from 50% to 39%. There are still few women found in technical areas even if there were significant increases in some of these occupations (Australian Film Commission, Get the Picture, www.afc.gov.au/gtp/oeoccupxgender.html Jan 2, 2004). While these numbers suggest many obstacles remain for women entering the industry, there are many remarkable stories of their considerable impact on Australian cinema.

Many of these stories are found in Womenvision, an anthology on women’s participation in the Australian audiovisual industry, edited by Lisa French. By comparing Womenvision to a similar work published 17 years earlier, Don’t Shoot Darling!: Women’s Independent Filmmaking in Australia (Annette Blonski, Barbara Creed, Freda Freiberg, Greenhouse Publications, Melbourne, 1987), we develop a comprehensive understanding of important gains and contributions in different areas of the industry during this period. These achievements have taken place in a continually shrinking funding environment. Specific programs like the Women’s Film Fund ended and funds for experimental and independent films, in which women filmmakers are still most likely to participate, diminished. The lack of funding for childcare is still one of the biggest barriers to many women remaining in the industry.

Womenvision is divided into 5 parts, bringing together perspectives on the historical, industrial, economic and social factors influencing women’s input to the industry and how their works are critically received at the beginning of this new century. It includes personal essays from practitioners in technical occupations, ranging from director of photography Jane Castle’s reflections on being behind the camera on mainstream productions, to the musings of Fiona Kerr, a 3D artist working for computer games companies. Also included are accounts from an animator, an editor and short, art, documentary and experimental filmmakers. These essays are mixed with scholarly texts on the history of women’s involvement in the industry, the representation of gender and identity, the development of particular female character types, and discussions of the work of directors such as Monica Pellizari, Clara Law, Tracey Moffat and Jane Campion. There are also interviews with Ann Turner, director of Hammers over the Anvil (1991) and Dallas Doll (1994), and the successful team behind Japanese Story and Road to Nhill (1997), Sue Brooks, Sue Maslin and Alison Tilson.

All these entries are framed by a ‘postfeminist’ point of view. A difficult term to pinpoint, French defines postfeminism in her chapter “Short Circuit: Shorts and Australian Women Film-Makers” as a position that “essentially describes…re-engaging with feminisms to see how relevant they are.” Postfeminism can be understood as a position that offers a more fluid vision of gender and identity (sexual and/or otherwise) than that proposed by second wave feminisms.

Certain entries in Womenvision, particularly those written by older practitioners, are nostalgic for the sense of community and sisterhood that characterised groups like the Sydney Film-Makers Co-op in the 1970s. One of the main goals of second wave feminism at that time was to raise women’s political consciousness and actions under one uniform opposition to the patriarchal order.

A major omission in both Womenvision and Don’t Shoot Darling! is any discussion of actors. Why don’t the female faces that represent the Australian moving image industry in the global market merit attention? Why isn’t there any discussion of the global attraction of celebrated and multi-award winning performers such as Nicole Kidman, or the multi-Emmied Judy Davis, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Naomi Watts, Rachel Griffiths and Frances O’Connor? Why are Australian women performers so sought after? Does it have anything to do with how we nurture and develop their talents through our professional schools and how these link to the national audio-visual industry? What marks these actors as different? Do they have an impact on shifts in the representation of women and the roles available to them? These questions deserve consideration.

Like other anthologies, there is a certain unevenness in the quality of the writing in Womenvision, yet together the contributors strongly convey the diversity, creativity and dynamism of the Australian women involved in one of the most successful national audiovisual industries. Womenvision testifies to the fact that women have always and will continue to surmount obstacles to equality. As Lisa French notes: “the success of women in Australian moving image industries is attributable to hard work and talent; they have done it on their own merits—which are considerable.”

A distinctive feature of the Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC) is its confluence of craft and commerce. It is a place for practitioners to pitch new ideas, find out what people are buying and selling and participate in the DocuMart sessions with international buyers. The conference is also a forum for discussing ideas about documentary making from various perspectives (technical, textual, visual, ideological). This year’s theme, “The Journey”, asks where we are literally and figuratively coming from and challenges delegates to consider where they are headed in the 21st century.

For the first time in its 17 years, AIDC in 2004 will become an annual event. This follows the success of last year’s conference which attracted about 800 delegates. Conference Director John Beaton says the decision indicates the pace of change in the film industry, and is a strategic move to strengthen Australia’s position on the documentary scene internationally. Having just returned from similar conferences in France and the Netherlands, Beaton is mindful of Australia’s standing in the international market as a small but significant supplier with a reputation for high quality product. The purpose of AIDC, he says, is not to put Australia on the map—it’s already there—but rather to confirm that presence.

Beaton’s personal picks for the conference include the opening plenary session “Refugees in the World”, with Julian Burnside QC and noted academic and filmmaker Trinh Minh-ha discussing the portrayal of human rights in documentaries. This will be followed by a session with Tom Zubrycki, Ned Lander and Dennis O’Rourke, entitled “Thinking Inside the Box”, which will look at government interference in documentary filmmaking in the wake of September 11. Another session will examine the success of feature-length documentaries such as Bowling for Columbine and Travelling Birds and ask whether the sudden interest from distributors is driven by box office returns rather than a love for documentary per se. Beaton says this session will also investigate the proposition that Australian filmmakers are ill-equipped to work internationally with feature documentaries because they lack understanding about the theatrical context, or because short-sighted funding bodies provide few opportunities to work on such projects. “Endangered Species—arts programming” features the ABC’s Courtney Gibson.

AIDC is also a chance to screen local documentaries. The only work confirmed as RT goes to print is Fahimeh’s Story (producer Ian Lang, director Faramarz K-Rahber), about an Iranian divorcee who remarries and converts a retired Australian army sergeant to Islam.

There is also the Australian DocuMart, in which documentary filmmakers get their very own Idol moment. Of 60 applicants, 15 are chosen to present their projects and ideas to an international panel, with the prospect of winning valuable funding. This year’s forum will be hosted by Pat Ferns from Canada’s Banff Television Foundation. Several international judges will sit on the panel including Discovery Networks Asia’s Vikram Channa, CBC’s Jerry McIntosh and NDR’s Wolf Lenwenus. Short-listed DocuMart applicants will also join a training session conducted by Christoph Jorg from ARTE France and Barbara Truyen from Films Transit, Netherlands.

Previous DocuMart projects include the now released Dances of Ecstasy (producer Nicole Ma, director Michelle Maher) (RT 58, p.18) and The Real Mary Poppins (producer Ian Collie, director Lisa Matthews). Finance negotiations are almost complete for several documentaries pitched at the 2003 Byron Bay DocuMart. One project, Selling Sickness, produced by Pat Fiske and directed by Cathy Scott, is currently in pre-production.

While the reputation of AIDC may reside in its ability to attract the big names and industry heavyweights, Beaton believes the conference’s greatest value is for industry players with little or no track record. If you don’t go, he asks, how do you know what’s going on? There is nothing like meeting your industry peers and hearing about what people are doing, how they pitch ideas and what people want to watch. There is, says Beaton, a “serendipity” about conferences: that unlikely meeting in the lunch queue can lead to unexpected projects, collaborations and opportunities.

The 9th Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC), Fremantle, Feb 26-28, www.aidc.com.au

Last year, Canada’s federal funding for its domestic television and feature film production was more than double that of Australia. Yet no English-Canadian television dramas made the weekly top 20 rankings, let alone the top 10, while the English-Canadian share of domestic box office in 2002 was less than a third of Australia’s share in its own market. It seems English-Canadian producers have the money, but no audience, while the cash-strapped Australian industry still captures at least some of its domestic audience.

English-speaking Canada is similar in size to Australia and possesses a comparable multi-ethnic population. Both countries have a similar history. The development of their respective feature film industries have also often mirrored each other. Both were once under foreign economic control through American ownership of the distribution and exhibition sectors. At the production level, both countries have developed 2 separate yet interrelated components: a domestic and a runaway side, whereby Hollywood-based producers use local infrastructure to make films at a cheaper rate. Both countries have experienced cycles of boom and bust in local production. Australian and Canadian societies have periodically gone through nationalist phases where the cultural elites pressure their federal, state or provincial governments to revitalise local production. In the 1960s, these pressures finally produced direct government interventions which resulted in the creation of federal agencies supporting national film production. In the 1980s, the Canadian and Australian industries experienced the mediocre output of a tax shelter era where bad quality American clones were produced. After that period, these industries restructured themselves in similar ways.

Same but different

Both national industries possess a federal agency and a national film fund: Telefilm Canada administers the Canada Feature Film Fund (CFFF), while Australia has the Australian Film Commission (AFC) and the Film Finance Corporation (FFC). Other funding sources are available through state or provincial agencies and tax concession schemes which apply at both levels of government. In the 1990s, these industries also became sites of an ever increasing service industry producing runaway films. In both cases, the majority of domestic audiences are more inclined to choose American screen products over domestic ones.

As well as the CFFF, Telefilm Canada oversees the Canadian Television Fund, Canada New Media Fund, the Canada Music Fund and other minor programs. Its overall budget in 2002/3 was CAN$239.3 million (the Australian dollar was at parity with the Canadian dollar in January 2004). Around two thirds of this amount, or CAN$159.5 million, is allocated to English-Canadian projects. For feature films the main federal source is the CFFF, which subsidises development, production and marketing programs, including funding for co-productions. The CFFF also funds a Screenwriting Assistance Program and Low Budget Independent Feature Film Assistance Program. The total for feature film funding comes to CAN$84.4 million. Last year the English-Canadian share was 71% of this.

Although the structure looks similar in Australia, there are important differences. The funding for development is not from the same sources as the funding for production and there are no separate funds for television and film production. Last year, the Australian Film Commission oversaw film, television and new media development with a budget of $19.9 million. The funding of screen production is under the administration of the FFC which oversees the production of feature films, adult television, children’s television and documentary. Last year, its budget was AUD$57.5 million. Comparing the 2 federal funding regimes for screen production (including co-production), Canada spent around CAN$198.7 million last year, while Federal funding in Australia amounted to AUDS$81.4 million.

Canadian solutions

English-Canadian producers may have more money than the Australians but their products have a lot less impact on their domestic audience. According to Richard Stursberg, the executive director of Telefilm, the highest ranked English-Canadian drama in 2002 was Da Vinci Inquest at number 35. The domestic box office share of Canadian films was 1.4% in 2001/02, and 2.6% in 2002/03. The English-Canadian share for the same years yields even lower figures of 0.2% and 1.4% respectively. To give an idea of the difference between the English and French-Canadian share of the domestic market, the French-Canadian box office for the same periods was 10% and 12%. According to the AFC’s reference publication Get the Picture, Australian producers in 2002 had 7 of the top 20 drama series, with All Aussie Adventures (Big Crack Productions, Network Ten and Working Dog) starring Glenn Robbins, the top performer at number 2. Australian feature films performed consistently better at the domestic box office than English-Canadian features, with Australian films taking 7.8% of the box office in 2001 and 4.9% in 2002.

To remedy this sorry state of affairs, Telefilm Canada has come up with 2 main changes in direction in its funding policies. Firstly, preference will be given to more commercial projects linked to audience-friendly genres, like the comedy Men with Brooms (Paul Gross, Alliance Atlantis Communications and Serendipity Point Films, 2002). Secondly, Telefilm has relaxed some of its rules regarding transnational filmic elements, such as accepting the use of foreign actors with marquee potential. In a sense, this new direction imitates some Australian strategies. All these changes are designed to boost the box office take from local films to 5% by 2006.

Funding future?

But what of Australia’s federal government funding future? According to the AFC’s National Survey of Feature Film and TV Drama Production 2002/3, for the first time in 8 years the production of Australian television drama and film has dropped. Only 19 Australian feature films were made in the fiscal year 2002/3, compared with 30 in 2001/2. One reason for this is the stagnation of federal funding under the Coalition government between 1996/7 and 2000/01. There were some slight increases for the fiscal years 2001/02 and 2002/03, and more are set for the AFC and FFC in 2003/04, but it is still unclear how the integration of ScreenSound Australia and the AFC will impact on the AFC’s budget. Brian Rosen, the Film Finance Corporation CEO, has made noises about transforming the FFC into a kind of super-fund, where private sector investors can invest vast sums of money for a set number of years at a fixed interest rate. Rosen foresees that this new scheme could represent over AUD$100 million a year for Australian screen production. If his plan succeeds, it will be wonderful news for Australian producers.

Free trade fear

A huge grey cloud is casting a shadow over the enthusiasm of Australian producers about the future of domestic screen production: the proposed Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the US. In October 1987, Canada signed a Free Trade Agreement with the US, and in 1994, endorsed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the US and Mexico. In both cases, Canada managed to preserve its control over its cultural policies. In particular, the Canadian government kept its quotas for local content and funding programs, as well as introducing new ones. However, if one of the parties involved in NAFTA find that these programs are adversely impacting on their commercial interests they can take action in any economic areas to recover their losses. In the current negotiations between Australia and the US, Australian government representatives have assured the local audiovisual industry that they will be able to keep their quotas and government funding schemes. However, in the push to finalise the Free Trade Agreement and please their US counterparts, the Australian government could jeopardise the future of the audiovisual industry by being soft on questions regarding the regulation of digital modes of distribution (feature films and television drama available via the internet). Australian products may be ousted from this new mode due to the sheer number of American products. There seems little point in producing Australian television drama and feature films if future Australian audiences may not be able to access the finished products.

Queer Screen has revamped Sydney’s Mardi Gras Film Festival for 2004 with a new management team and a massively expanded program. The festival runs across 3 venues and features a record number of Australian films.

New Australian features include Low Fat Elephants (director Phillip Marzella), Prisoner Queen (Timothy Spanos) and Max: A Cautionary Tale (Nicholas Verso). To lend a historical perspective to the proceedings, filmmaker Barry McKay has scoured the ScreenSound archives to compile Imagining Queer, an overview of gay, lesbian, queer, transgender and camp images from Australian film and television from 1910 to 1970.

As well as Australian work, the festival features many movies from countries not known for their visible gay cultures. The award winning documentary Straight Out (directors Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdottir, Thorvaldur Kristinsson), for example, claims to be Iceland’s first gay film. Yossi and Jagger (Eytan Fox) takes a look at Israeli military life through the true story of 2 officers conducting a secret affair while serving in Lebanon. And in keeping with Australia’s growing fascination with Indian popular cinema, The Pink Mirror (Sridhar Rangayan) is a Bollywood-style look at gay culture on the sub-continent.

For the first time this year’s festival will have 4 youth-orientated sessions open to anyone aged 15 and older. These programs feature international and local entries, including Pink Sheep (directors Peta Jane Lenehan, Craig Boreham), a collaboration between Sydney’s Twenty10 Gay and Lesbian Youth Support and Channel Free.

Finally, for cinema lovers there is a documentary trilogy on gay filmmakers Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rosa von Praunheim.

With such a diverse and extensive program, this year will hopefully see the Mardi Gras Film Festival reclaim its reputation as the home of thought-provoking and provocative queer cinema. RT

11th Mardi Gras Film Festival, State Theatre, Palace Academy Twin, Dendy Newtown, Feb 11-22, www.queerscreen.com.au

The infamous Stelarc has created an interactive head that talks with viewers—type in a question and dread the answer. Canadian Char Davies will take you on a serious trip in her immersive virtual reality environments and if that doesn’t get you going, check out Chris Cunningham’s robot sex, filmed for a music video for Icelandic singer Björk.

Transfigure: Perception, body, space & landscape transformed by the moving image is arguably one of the most ambitious—and successful—new media exhibitions Australia has ever hosted. Curated by Alessio Cavallaro, the senior producer and curator of new media projects at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Transfigure features 15 artists from 6 countries. The show is downright weird, in a wonderful way.

Transfigure is Luna Park for the new millennium. Teenagers interact with acmipark, a 3D game world depicting simulated versions of ACMI and Federation Square which morph into strange fictional spaces. A teenage boy inquires whether you can shoot people in the game.

But Transfigure has much more to offer than a shoot ‘em up video game. Next to Cunningham’s essentially emotive response to robotics, are Paul Brown’s chromos, Ed Burton’s Sodaconstructor and Drew Berry’s body code which play with notions of genetics, chromosome structures and DNA formations, all of which are linked by an almost painterly approach.

Down the hall Justine Cooper is being cut up slice by slice. Her work, Rapt, is the result of the artist undergoing 6 hours of Magnetic Resonance Imaging which uses magnetic fields to map the body for diagnostics. The resulting video is elegant and chilling, a fascinating dissection of the human body. The video finishes with an image of Cooper’s face, which a number of viewers say has a powerfully spiritual impact, a kind of curious analogy to the Shroud of Turin.

The exhibition moves into a realm of powerful video works. Ian Andrew’s Departure comprises found video footage. Grainy and damaged, it evokes a sense of conspiracy a la the famous Zapruder footage of the JFK assassination. The work is presented on 3 tiered high-resolution plasma screens creating a strange contrast between discarded detritus and the hi-tech. The result suggests an obsessive forensic approach to uncovering the unseen.

Similarly surreal, Hungarian artist Tamas Walicky’s Landscape depicts a European village frozen in time, snowflakes suspended as the viewer revolves around the buildings. It is a technique used in the first Matrix film, however Walicky used it 3 years before the Wachowski Brothers.

Transfigure concludes with the stunning immersive works of Char Davies. Not for the faint hearted, Davies world is a spectacular example of the potential of virtual reality. Her installation, Ephémère, is a mind boggling trip into virtual reality. There are 2 very distinct experiences here. The first is that of passive observer, watching a screen version of Davies’ world and the shadow of an individual in full VR gear traversing her strange landscapes. The second is becoming an actual part of Ephémère, donning the VR helmet and flying through Davies’ grainy multi-coloured landscape.

Ephémère and Davies’ other work on show, Osmose, are immersive virtual environments with stereoscopic 3D computer graphics, spatialised sound and real time interaction colouration. Davies’ desire to convey a sense of spatial envelopment is what led her to abandon painting in the mid-1980s and become involved with 3D computer technology. She hoped the new technologies would free her from the limitations of the 2D picture plane, and allow her to effectively work in an enveloping 3D space. “Once I was making images with 3D software, I wanted to bring my audience with me into that space,” she says. “So I turned to the medium of immersive virtual space—or what many people call virtual reality.”

The other work that leaves a lasting impact is Stelarc’s Prosthetic Head. Stelarc stitched together an IBM text speech engine, modified, customised and personalised the Alice Chat Bot Engine and then used a source code for facial animation. “The difficulty really was interfacing bits of software that weren’t actually designed to run with each other,” writes Stelarc. The project was put together over an intensive 8 months with the assistance of 3 programmers in San Francisco. The head had to be constructed as a 3,000 polygon mesh and the digital skin was then wrapped around it, giving it the appearance of the artist.

More than a little unnerving, the huge head dominates a dark room, looming and hovering, deep brown eyes occasionally darting around the space. A visitor sits at a keyboard in the corner. Checking just how self-aware this strange creature is, he types in “What colour are your eyes?” “Blue,” comes the reply in a guttural, almost machine-like voice, “But I’m wearing contact lenses.”

Transfigure: Perception, body, space & landscape transformed by the moving image, curator Alessio Cavallaro, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Federation Square, Melbourne, Dec 8, 2003-May 9, 2004

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