Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

June 2004

Kay Armstrong, Narrow House

photo Heidrun Löhr

Kay Armstrong, Narrow House

Experiencing Kay Armstrong’s The Narrow House is like getting into the head of a murderer by way of her body, her words and into the evolution of a psychosis, onto the planning and into the crime. It’s a claustrophobic trip as the will to act forms and the rehearsal of the murder forces choices. Naked seduction followed by a knifing? Or a cup of poisoned tea served with domestic grace in an apron? The fantasy is full-bodied, sexual, likely bloody; the fact is the female murderer’s favourite, the inversion of nurturing: poisoning.

Unlike John Romeril’s early work Mrs Thally F, a play about a real Australian poisoner, Kay Armstrong’s murderer is an invention but a nonetheless convincing one. This worryingly sensual, perversely poetic dance theatre work is about a consuming state of being. As the passion escalates we see the murderer across the theatre’s pitch dark spaces through various psychologically refractive perspectives. She’s a naked woman (self-)fondled in a kitchen window. She’s a close-up confidante of the audience. She serves tea at a table over which a mirror swings low so we watch her from above, doggedly rehearsing the increasingly mad moves of her murder. She appears in a distant corner of the ceiling like a spider alert in her web. She’s disembodied, projected onto a wall perpetually entering the crime scene-to-be.

But it’s in the naked and vulnerable but aggressive body that we see both the desire and the torment of the compulsion, an idiosyncratic and increasingly tormented dance to an unseen force that tugs at her, drags the woman off-centre. It’s a barely controlled agony heard too in Garry Bradbury’s rich, enveloping sound score. This body connects only with a few objects in this closed universe: a large, threatening kitchen knife, a bone china teacup that glows like the Grail and a statuette of the Virgin. The Narrow House is an absorbing and disturbing creation. Armstrong’s writing needs distilling and her acting more restraint, but after some tentative and difficult steps towards creating her own brand of dance theatre, she has now proven herself capable of a bracing totality of vision, not least in the self-choreographyof an aching dance of limbs, of a body dissociated as painfully as its psyche.

One Extra, The Narrow House, performed and choreographed by Kay Armstrong, dramaturg Nikki Heywood, composer Garry Bradbury, video Samuel James, lighting Simon Wise; Performance Space, March 10-21

RealTime issue #61 June-July 2004 pg. 48

Velonaki, Rye, Scheding, Williams, Fish-Bird (work in progress)

With increasingly evil results to all of us, the separation is every day widening between the man of science and the artist…. [the artists] not only do not desire, they imperatively and scornfully refuse, either the force, or the information, which are beyond the scope of the flesh and the senses of humanity.
John Ruskin, 1883

Artists have been looking at what scientists of the day are up to since art critic and social commentator Ruskin’s time. Many have frowned at the notion of artists working with scientists, but artists have always worked with technology of some kind. And modern science, like contemporary art, produces knowledge through ideas. Concept and theory precede method, results are scrutinised critically, and occasionally outcomes are celebrated in public through the market place, exhibitions and forums.

Informal links between the disciplines have been cyclical in modern times. The Artists’ Placement Group (APG) in Britain, for instance, was instigated by artists in the 1960s to formalise processes for creating professional relationships between artists and those in science and commerce. It is only recently, with the broader recognition that advanced research programs are necessary, that initiatives like Synapse have begun to re-build these relationships here in Australia.

Synapse is a series of related assistance programs to encourage collaborative ventures between artists, scientists and technologists. As a structure at the junction between 2 neurons or nerve-cells, the synapse is an attractive metaphor for the program, representing the notion of connection. The Australia Council, starting with its commissioning of the Art and Technology report in the mid-80s, has been at the forefront of support for the establishment of bodies like the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) and more recently programs like Synapse. A joint initiative between the New Media Arts Board and ANAT, Synapse is a strategic alliance through collaborative research projects between key stakeholders, including the Australian Research Council (ARC), university research centres, the CSIRO and industry. Synapse is also a database, maintained by ANAT, bringing together information and advice for artists and scientists seeking to work collaboratively (www.synapse.net.au/). In addition, ANAT administers a program of residencies with specific host science organisations.

Three ARC bids have been successful in the first stage of the overall Synapse program, involving artists Nigel Helyer, Mari Velonaki and Dennis del Favero. There have also been several residency placements. The database is a substantial resource, though clearly speculative in its practical usefulness. A more coordinated branding of the scheme will develop as outcomes emerge from the 11 projects planned in the first phase ending late 2005, and as collaborative teams perfect describing their projects and processes to those providing funding.

The 4th century BC Greek term tekhne, meaning art in which creating, method and means are wholly integrated, is another useful image in the Synapse context. Nigel Helyer is a notable exponent, maintaining a consistent link between sound, the oral and their transliteration using the combined technologies of electronics, digital media and sculptural forms for over 20 years. Helyer’s practice has often included a close working with technology industries. Developing a relationship with Lake Technology in 1999, his approach to describing a research project using a narrative scenario with tangible outcomes was adopted over their more traditional practice. The tangible outcomes have been of considerable value to Lake, but because the intricacies of patent law (as distinct from copyright) were new to Helyer and the Australia Council, financial returns to the artist have been less than satisfactory. Though this situation is less likely to occur today, it remains an issue for careful negotiation between stakeholders involved in collaboration.

Currently, together with Daniel Woo and Chris Rizos at UNSW, Helyer is working on a raft of projects with a budget of $360,000 over 3 years from the ARC, UNSW and the New Media Arts Board. Some of the projects, such as the AudioNomad series, are developments of his earlier work with mobile augmented audio reality systems capable of navigation and orientation within real spaces. Others include a pedagogic project with the Powerhouse Museum for an audio trail around the Sydney Observatory, a “virtual wall” for Berlin and the Syren installation that will feature at ISEA04 in the Baltic. Here the ship on which ISEA04 will take place becomes the cursor within a sonic cartography, driving a surround sound installation.

Mari Velonaki is another artist with an on-going interest in the science-art nexus who has received assistance through Synapse. She completed the multimedia performance Phaedra’s Circle in the early 90s in collaboration with Suzanne Chammas and Tanzforum Ostschweiz (where she had studied in the mid-80s), before completing a PhD at COFA in 2003. Formal qualifications are essential in research environments, where they increase the chances of raising research funding. An impressive series of exhibits (including Pin Cushion and Amor Veneris A) were outcomes of Velonaki’s skill-development in electronics and collaborative work with creative coders like Gary Zebington. Through astute networking with the research community and learning their specialised language, Velonaki has immersed herself in the hybrid culture of cross-disciplinary art and science, a world which attempts to balance business and politics with creativity.

Of her current endeavours, she says: “For the last 8 years, the projected character has been a major feature in my interactive installations. With the new project, Fish-Bird, my work moves towards autonomous 3 dimensional kinetic objects. This is a large conceptual and technological shift in my practice and requires a different level of collaboration and support.” The shift from the studio to the laboratory complemented the development of her process: “I felt I had to collaborate with people who were not only proficient with such technologies, but were also innovative thinkers in the use of such scientific knowledge. Working in a large-scale collaborative project requires time to think and evaluate, space to work and test, and sufficient shared activity for ideas to cross-pollinate. The Synapse initiative was extremely important for me, as it provides a framework within which artists can approach leading scientific groups with proposals for collaborations.” The director of the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney, Professor Hugh Durrant-Whyte, introduced Velonaki to 3 roboticists (Doctors Rye, Scheding and Williams) who shared similar interests and concerns in human-machine interfaces.

In regards to the ARC application process, Velonaki comments: “It is much more complicated than anything I had come across in the arts funding structure. The application itself was 20,000 words and required the joint efforts and commitment of the team for a month.” The outcome was $247,000 over 3 years from the cultural and mechatronics areas of the ARC, along with various combinations of cash and in-kind assistance from the Australia Council, University of Sydney, ANAT, Artspace Sydney, the MCA and commercial company Patrick’s Systems. Defining “in-kind”, and classifying exhibitions as “publications” (academic publishing which scores points towards research status), remain grey areas in translation between the studio and the laboratory. Like patent questions, these issues need to be carefully negotiated on a case by case basis.

Velonaki reports that her group has a genuine collaborative spirit where people are willing to assist each other’s project and her own research and practice is valued and respected: “At ACFR I felt welcome and supported from day one. We have already created a light-reactive installation, Embracement, which was premiered in Primavera 2004 at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Fish-Bird is progressing very well and is going to be previewed as a work in progress at Artspace in August, during the Res Artis conference.”

As Anna Munster observed in RealTime 60 (p4); “By working from a position of mutual respect for their differences and armed with skepticism balanced by thorough research into each other’s respective fields, art and science can come together in modest ways on specific projects.” Through the unique Synapse program, negotiating the sharing of resources and the setting up of creative collaborations between art and science has begun in earnest. Many have high hopes for the rewards.

Intersted readers should check the Australia Council website (www.ozco.gov.au) in late July for information regarding another round of Synapse ARC Linkage Industry Partner grants.

RealTime issue #61 June-July 2004 pg. 38

The recent Empires, Ruins + Networks conference at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image came as a timely, if tentative intervention in the growing ‘crises’ of art and politics in these postmodern times. One surmises that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s controversial book Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000) provided the inspiration for part of the conference title and the theoretical impetus behind the many issues it explored.

The judgment of Empire bodes ill for the economy, for society, for politics and for culture. The authors argue that the interaction between neoliberal capitalism and the information technology revolution has produced a powerful system-logic. Since at least the mid-1970s, they argue, the whole of society has become connected, interdependent, and oriented towards the imperatives of capital. ‘Empire’ is thus the empire of capital; the interrelation of ubiquitous computing and omnipresent commodification that has seeped into every nook and cranny of contemporary life. The ‘ruins’ are the wreckage of a civil society where institutionalised politics are wholly ineffectual. And ‘networks’ are the global digital logic that makes this baleful prospect realisable.

A premise of the conference is that the theory and practice of art as a language for critique and as a dimension of a politics for change lies somewhere buried and lifeless beneath the rubble of civil society. Under the regime of neoliberal Empire, art that is not explicitly conceived as a commodity is nonetheless instantly commodifiable. Critique is either non-existent as part of the process of production or it is muted or distorted by the artifact’s exchange value. Coupled with the ineffectuality of mainstream politics, the crisis of art means that principle ways of understanding and changing the world have been repressed and silenced. Reading our children’s books and/or marvelling at, say, the ‘authenticity’ of a Tracey Emin is as good as it is going to get in terms of setting the world to rights or gaining insight into our contemporary condition. Mark Latham rapidly drops one solution for another and the obsession with the dregs of Emin’s life disconnects (and silences) the public politics of feminism from the highly marketable public persona of the artist.

Speakers at the conference, however, lifted the lid on another, presently subterranean logic that is emerging as the dialectical antithesis of neoliberal Empire. Across the world through many differing modes of articulation, networks, art and politics are coalescing in the production of alternative spaces for other ways of seeing and being. Digital technologies are central to this process. Artist/activists are increasingly turning to new media to connect and to collaborate as much as to produce the video or extend more traditional forms of visual art. Moreover, networking through the internet has made many projects observable to others who may want to connect with the existing connections. Through such networks art and politics simultaneously exist both locally and globally.

Highlights of the conference were many, but space allows for the mention of only a few. Keynote speaker Okwui Enwezor argued that the emergence of more collective work in art signals moments of crisis in society and a political reaction to these crises. He cited the political/artistic works produced by the Sarai collective based in New Delhi (www.sarai.net). Here theorists and artists from across the planet contribute to discussion lists, develop visual art projects and produce politically-oriented readers in new media theory and practice that are freely downloadable. Sarai, its website reads, is interpreted as “a very public space, where different intellectual, creative and activist energies can intersect to give rise to an imaginative reconstitution of urban public culture, new/old media practice, research and critical cultural intervention.” As Greek curator Marina Fokidis showed, Sarai has a sort of European-based equivalent in Stalker (2004) a Situationist-inspired Italian architectural collective.

The neoliberal empire takes ‘flexibility’ as its lodestar and ‘information and communication technologies’ (ICTs) as the solution to all problems. Ross Gibson, in his paper “Agility and Attunement” showed how, in a dialectical turn, these processes are being adopted and adapted to produce outcomes that work against the grain of the rigid instrumentalism of the neoliberal way. ‘Flexibility’ in the hands of ICT practitioners with a critical perspective on the dominant order, Gibson argued, may be a highly effective (and potentially deeply subversive) form that could be applied to developing new forms of politics. In this, Gibson echoes Geert Lovink and his theory and practice of “tactical media.”

Nikos Papastergiadis, co-organiser of the conference, closed the 2 day meeting with a reminder that art and politics intertwine. Their immanent power emerges as a “critical vector”, he argued, only when ideas “exist not only in the content of the work, but also in the way it joins up with the experience and ideas of other people.” In other words, in a world characterised by the “banalisation of information”, artists and activists need to make their own collaborations, develop their own matrixes of meaning and articulate these as critical and/or political interventions.

The difficulties facing the renewal of civil society through revivified forms of politics and art are considerable. Conference delegates came only with questions and pointed to scattered chinks of light emerging from the darkness of the ruins. In this sense the conference, one hopes, can be a catalyst for further explorations. What is clear is that collaborative and collective artistic practice will become increasingly political and radical as the crises of neoliberal postmodernity deepen. The key task is to develop ways to connect these emergent political and aesthetic languages with the everyday concerns of people before they become commodified and/or safely marginalised. What is also clear is that in a world reduced by ‘time-space compression’ and bounded by a single circuit of capital, the response must be both local and global, utilising what Ulrich Beck has termed global “networks of diversity.” These will be possible only though critical, aesthetic, political and tactical use of ICTs to create new spaces of meaning and resistance that form the basis of a new politics. The Empires, Ruins + Networks conference showed that this has already begun.

Empires, Ruins + Networks, ACMI, Melbourne, April 2-4

RealTime issue #61 June-July 2004 pg. 39

Gaming is the fastest growing industry in the world, now grossing more than Hollywood in immediate sales. It has been suggested by game theorist Espen Aarseth that “the mass market of computer games is the single most effective cause of the demand for increasingly faster computing from the general public.” Computer game technologies have extended beyond entertainment to be used in the fine arts, education, military, medical, and architectural industries, and have even been used as tools for political amelioration (the US military-designed game SENSE was played by the President and other officials in Bosnia to aid reconstruction efforts). For a technology of such social import, surprisingly little is known about the industry responsible for its evolution.

Offering the public first hand information from game industry insiders is Game Loading, a regular interactive forum organised by the Screen Education department at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). The forums are open to the public, but are targeted at secondary and tertiary students of multimedia, arts and media studies who are interested in games and might consider the games industry as a potential place of employment. In addition to outlining how animators, graphic designers, filmmakers and sound artists have found employment in the industry without specific game-making experience, Game Loading has raised broader issues faced by artists working in a creative industry which, in many ways, does not yet afford full creativity.

David Hewitt, lead designer at Tantalus Interactive, discussed the frustration faced by game designers who yearn to write interesting, creative games but are limited by the demands of a risk-averse industry. Publishers still prefer to back re-workings of last year’s big hit rather than experiment with novel content. In comparison to the film industry, where some auteurs easily source financial support after a single offbeat art house hit, game auteurs of equal calibre must repeatedly challenge publishers’ demands. Even Will Wright, with SimCity under his belt, found it difficult to develop The Sims because the concept looked poor on paper.

Hewitt feels that the problem ultimately rests with consumers, who continually purchase substandard games due to a lack of knowledge regarding game design potential. For example, Hewitt suggested there is currently room for improvement in the degree of emotional engagement aroused by computer games. He referred to Iko as a singular example of a commercial game that proffers sensitive emotional engagement, eliciting deep empathy between the player and a game character. Other complex emotions such as fear and sadness have yet to be drawn out by game content, rather than the currently sought after excitement and curiosity.

Other works presented at Game Loading, such as SelectParks’ AcmiPark game-based interactive, further illustrate creative avenues that could be explored by game designers given the chance. AcmiPark required the development of a new game engine that could support sophisticated sound requirements. These included: complex, realtime, interactive, generated audio; a live, in-game, streaming concert venue; and the programming of subtle, time-based, tonal variations in sound effects. These developments have put in-game aural aesthetics at a new level. Given the range and flexibility of technology and artistic media available to game developers, AcmiPark suggests that the surface potential of game design has only been scratched.

AcmiPark succeeded in delivering this degree of innovation because of its status as an art-based, non-commercial project. It received financial support from the Victorian State Government through the Digital Media Fund (DMF) and was provided sponsored use of Renderware.

Other game projects to receive arts funding include Escape From Woomera (Australia Council) and Street Survivor (City of Melbourne), but these projects are exceptions to the norm. DMF game funding has shifted direction dramatically since reverting to the control of Film Victoria. Despite the fact that the fund has provided a rich breeding ground for innovation because it is independent of publishers, new criteria demand that all funding applicants secure links with publishers. As a result, Victorian government funding for game development is now delivered to already successful developers, whilst mini-developers focused primarily on research and development are neglected. With the world’s largest publishers, such as Sony, now implementing research and development departments, Australian government funding must support non-commercial development if our industry is to seriously challenge its international competitors.

The next Game Loading will be held in early August, featuring programmer Paul Baulch from Atari discussing Artificial Intelligence in games.

RealTime issue #61 June-July 2004 pg. 39-

Twin Annie Lennoxes greet the visitor to the second stage of Video Hits at the Queensland Art Gallery. Positioned at eye-level on angled monitors against a cobalt backdrop, the double Annies, from the Eurythmics clip Thorn in my Side, emerge from edited loops of the singer saying, on one screen, the word “you” and on the other, “I”. This whimsical dialogue is at once a quirky comment on the hackneyed themes of love and identity in pop music, and a sly reference to the centrality of the narcissistic trope in video art. It also neatly introduces the exhibition’s key theme: the bringing together of music video clips and video art, forms which share a technological history but whose institutional history and context is significantly different.

The first instalment of Video Hits took place in the central gallery with large rear projection screens, headphones strung from specially constructed overhead beams, velvet-covered bean bags and the high-concept works of music video stars Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham and Spike Jonze. The second part of the exhibition consists of many smaller screens with headphones lining the length of one wall. The vision has broadened to include more Australian works and an historical survey featuring a range of music clip makers. There are also several key works of video art that engage with music and the visual representations of the music video form. Some of these confront the clichés of music video production with parody, others with creative re-imaginings. All engage in a conversation about the intersection between music, art and the moving image, encompassing the substantial divide between the television format of music video programming and the gallery setting of video art. It is this juxtaposition that generates the exciting frisson of the exhibition, facilitating new connections across genres of video practice and reconsidering the relations between differing histories and conventions.

The selection focuses on parallels and crossovers between contemporary art and music video production with a number of clips by major art-world figures. These include Wolfgang Tillmans’ clip for the Pet Shop Boys’ song Home and Dry and Doug Aitken’s for Fat Boy Slim’s Rockafeller Skank. Damien Hirst’s Country House clip for Blur highlights how dated both Britpop and Young British Art are in 2004, while one of the oldest clips in the display, Derek Jarman’s The Queen is Dead (1986) for The Smiths, holds its own admirably with skilful montage and chroma-key effects deployed to explore some of the aesthetic dimensions of iconographic Britannia.

Literally alongside the high-concept clips of auteur music video creators Gondry and Cunningham, made for big-name music stars such as Bjork and Kylie Minogue, is a selection of video artworks with different aesthetic and ideological prerogatives. Much contemporary video art continues to articulate themes first explored in the feminist video work of the 1970s. Personal subject matter encompassing identity, autobiography and remembrance, relation of self to others and exploration of self through personae was frequently expressed in the 70s via the direct address of the solo artist, whose body often formed the centre of the work. This same spirit of enquiry is still very much in evidence in today’s video art, with the added patina of ultra-voguish low-fi 80s fetishism.

Video Hits includes key works by Pipilotti Rist and Annika Strom. Strom sings her own compositions to the accompaniment of a simple Casiotone, and a meandering personal video featuring her parents, daily chores, footage filmed from a television screen and a diary of her art practice. Rist is shown singing along to other songs, overpowering and distorting the original with her version. Katie Rule’s garage re-enactment of the dance sequence from Thriller also affirms the body as an expressive site. While some may agree with Rosalind Krauss’ tart characterisation of video art as fundamentally narcissistic, a simplistic dismissal of these works as self-indulgent play-acting necessarily ignores their power.

These works continue the feminist project of validating personal history as subject matter and its challenge to dry formalism and ossified notions of ‘the beautiful.’ These artists conflate or sublate the division between art and life and understand art as a social practice. As part of this ongoing use of video art to generate discourse about ‘the personal’ and its political dimensions, artists featured in Video Hits can be seen to be reclaiming the female form—not just from male artists, but also from the commodifying proclivities of the video clip genre, where extreme examples of exploitation and unhealthy representations of women are, disappointingly, iconographic staples.

In addition to these performative urges are video artworks which emphasise editing as the central expressive device for moving images, such as Art Jones’ juxtapositions of popular songs with obscure and disturbing imagery, or Ugo Rondinone’s hypnotic re-edit of a Fassbinder film with different music. Though still crucial, music operates here as a creative element of post-production, rather than the raison d’etre for production.

Video art, while it emerged from the technology of television, is often centrally concerned with distancing itself from that medium, and its preoccupation with disavowing its ‘frightful parent’ can be seen at Video Hits in works such as the clips by Sydney video artists the Kingpins, which parody the unoriginal and aesthetically obnoxious visual clichés of many rap and metal clips, and Tony Cokes’ text-based dissertations on the politics of the music industry.

The exhibition has not tried to conflate video art practice with music video production; rather, it situates the 2 as overlapping in many areas (Jonze’s infamous Praise You street-theatre clip is also a masterful piece of video art), but with different prerogatives. In video art, ‘representation’ is unmoored from the band/performer as a central structuring element and floats freely through critique, parody and creative probing, whereas art and technique in video clips, ultimately, are subordinate to selling the band and their music. The music video genre doubtless offers a platform for remarkable innovation and the Video Hits selection showcases this with some stunning commercial works, particularly those from Gondry. However, the clever curation of video artworks that not only engage with the music video form, but mount a critique of music television, means that Video Hits also constructs a kind of intra-medium discussion.

In the same way that video artists work with existing imagery or songs and rework them, much of Video Hits is about recontextualising the art of music clips in the environment of the art gallery, where they can be considered alongside reflexive video art. Given the increasing attention being devoted to the music video form as art, it’s a timely vision and a bold project exploring the multifaceted bases of video practice.

Queensland Art Gallery, Video Hits, various artists, Stage 1 Feb 21-April 12, Stage 2 March 27-June 14

Courtesy of the artist and Margaret Moore Contemporary Art, Perth, 2004 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art

Any assessment of a survey like the 2004 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art is inevitably problematic. The works cannot be addressed on individual merit when their very inclusion is always an issue. Why that particular artist? Why that particular work? That the Biennials are themed is another facet attracting judgement, both in terms of the works’ relationship to the focus and the perceived validity of that focus. The grouping of traditional photography, film and digital technology this year under the nomenclature “photo-media” can also be interrogated or accepted according to individual opinion. There has been criticism of focusing on medium as a selection criteria, although it’s surely accepted that photography has transcended its materiality and become, as the most pervasive mode of representation as well as a key mode of self-representation, a valid avenue via which to assess contemporary culture and society. In this sense, the 2004 Biennial was certainly better than 2002’s conVerge: where art and science meet, where there was too much science and not enough art.

Although curator Julie Robinson stated that the Biennial had no theme “as such”, she also described how common threads appeared, with the artists engaging “with society, the world and the human condition” (exhibition catalogue). Some works do this explicitly. For example, Mike Parr’s painfully fascinating UnAustralian which documents the un-anesthetised artist having his lips sewn together, and Linda Wallace’s entanglements, a conglomeration of images culled from televised war coverage. In addition to the direct reference to the mediation of reality via television (framed by net curtains à la lounge room viewing), the slippery relationship of digital representation to reality is highlighted by the fact that, as Chris Rose points out in his catalogue commentary, any kind of magnification doesn’t evince detail, as would usually be expected, but rather disintegrates it.

Part of photography’s seduction is its status as a trace of the real, the result of a chemical reaction triggered by exposure to light reflected off the lines, curves and angles of physical objects and beings. Deborah Pauuwe’s photographs in particular seem to adhere to this in her sensuous tracing of her subjects’ surfaces. The young girls of Dark Fables, in party dresses with painted faces, are larger than life, their skin, hair and the curves of their features all rendered under incisive light that allows our eyes to roam their exteriors and visually consume them.

Craig Walsh’s ingenious video similarly offered an unusually intimate perspective. Cross-reference displays footage of crowds at an outdoor festival who, walking past the camera, bend down one-by-one and peer searchingly into the lens. Thus absorbed, they become completely unselfconscious and the viewer in turn unselfconsciously examines individual facial hairs, the outline of a nipple through a bikini top, or the very intimate movements of mouths slowly forming unheard words. As well, Walsh neatly addresses another common issue of contemporary photography: the viewer/viewed dichotomy. The work is rear-projected through an ajar ‘door’, creating the impression that these people are staring into the gallery space itself. While such scrutiny demonstrates the infinite individuality of human features, the procession of faces eventually blends into one. Likewise, the characters in David Rosetzky’s Untouchable speak with their own voices, cadences, rhythms and inflections, but the stories they tell are (literally) the same. Untouchable comprises 3 screens depicting actors performing monologues, of alienation, emotional abandonment, or the genesis of passionate relationships. Eventually it becomes apparent that, although narrated each time by a different character, the same stories are being told verbatim.

Derek Kreckler’s work also plays with narrative, with the paired images of Holey 1 depicting 2 views of the same beach scene, the tableaus only marginally separated in space and time and their temporal order left unclear. In addition, circles of the image have been excised and reproduced as small globes set before the photographs. This reconstitution in 3 dimensions seems both a comment on the way we see much of the world via 2-dimensional representation and a reassertion of (despite a Biennial’s worth of photo-media to the contrary?) the very 3-dimensionality of physical existence.

2004 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Contemporary Photo-Media, curator Julie Robinson; Art Gallery of South Australia, Feb 28-May 30

Three major group shows recently highlighted the healthy state of contemporary Tasmanian art practice. The local artists on display (one exhibition also had an interstate contingent) gave a good overview of the state’s current artistic trends.

Body Bag showed at The Carnegie, Hobart Council’s contemporary art space. The participants, from the dynamic Letitia Street studios, were asked by curator Malcom Bywaters to utilise the body as a metaphor for island. While it is doubtful that all 10 of the exhibitors entirely addressed this theme, varied and engaging work resulted and the participants are among the state’s best emerging artists.

Neil Haddon’s resolutely geometric painting, Slip No 2, with its skewed perspective, effectively uses high gloss household enamel on aluminium. However, it requires an anecdote in the catalogue essay to fit the work into the curatorial theme. Colin Langridge, a talented designer and sculptor of some sophistication, reverts to a style of sculpture that is figurative, yet almost primitive in execution. His work depicts a human vertebra. Richard Wastell, arguably one of Tasmania’s most important younger painters, offers a striking, large 4-panelled oil of a forest view with quasi-realistic elements and a kind of trompe l’oeil in play throughout. Sally Rees makes interesting use of video projection and Matt Warren’s video and sound installation is minimal and compelling.

At the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, the new Director of Contemporary Art Services Tasmania, Michael Edwards, curated Group Material. This was a show with potential, despite the scant dimensions of the TMAG’s new gallery space. Too many of the works had also been exhibited previously.

Group Material showcased the work of 6 important artists: Ben Booth, Neil Haddon, Anthony Johnson, Anna Phillips, Lucia Usmiani and Kit Wise. All are currently, or were recently Hobart-based. All incorporate everyday items or substances in their art-making. Appropriating and recontextualising these materials, the artists extend the discourse between art and consumer culture.

Standout exhibits include Anna Phillips’ 2 works featuring solidified shampoo, bathwater and colouring. One is a seductive gold blob, plinth-mounted; the other 3 replicated aqua towels, hanging on bathroom rails and again made from Phillips’ tactile and seductive shampoo mix. Lucia Usmiani’s wall and floor piece comprised silver-coloured bases of hundreds of soft-drink cans, overlapping like the patterning of fish scales. Usmiani is a dedicated practitioner of tremendous originality and the sheer beauty and ingenuity of this work made it a real crowd-pleaser.

The other exhibition recently curated by Malcom Bywaters at the School of Art’s Plimsoll Gallery features some very exciting work by artists with Tasmanian connections as well as interstate practitioners. I’m not sure why it was entitled Boogy, Jive & Bop, as the exhibition did not seem to address any of these, though the work was undeniably ‘hip.’ Moreover, the catalogue, via artists’ interviews, made extensive reference to September 11, an event not mirrored in the works. Perhaps the catalogue was intended as an ‘add-on’, or even a kind of discrete exhibit in itself, reminding us that art-making persists even in the face of the worst disasters.

Among some very stimulating pieces, Jane Burton’s Type C photographs, The Other Side, depict glowing, deserted telephone boxes at night with an eerie surreality. Stone Lee was born in Taiwan and now lives in Launceston. His 3 strange assemblages are fascinating in their simultaneous identifiability and recontextualisation of materials. All entitled Everydayness, they utilise acrylic media, newspaper and found objects. Danielle Thompson created some highly seductive and beautiful lightjet photographic prints full of abstract movement and lush colour. Shaun Wilson is an engaging artist and his hypnotic video My Sweet Mnemonic Wonderland also uses vibrant colour and slow, contemplative movement. This talented artist’s work provides a good foil, both in medium and style, to the other pieces in Boogy, Jive and Bop.

Given that these are some of Tasmania’s newest artists, it was heartening to see the intelligence, talent and originality on display in all 3 shows. On a related note, the work of Megan Keating, melding pop culture and an obsession with military symbolism, features in Body Bag and constitutes the first show at Hobart’s newest commercial exhibition space, Criterion Gallery in the CBD. With its sound artistic ideals this will be a venue to watch.

Body Bag: Somewhere Over the Rainbow, curator Malcolm Bywaters, Carnegie Gallery, March 18-April 18; Boogy, Jive & Bop, curator Malcolm Bywaters, Plimsoll Gallery, March 5-28; Group Material, curator Michael Edwards, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, March 18-May 2

Although presented as one body of work, the pieces comprising Matt Bradley’s Dark Crystal show each contained sufficient material to stand alone. Indeed, the series of suspended light boxes entitled Ghost Gum is the epitome of all that is currently favoured in contemporary art. Featuring the blue and white logo of the defunct airline TAA, its luminous arms were cool and aloof. However, its combination with the artist’s Cnr of Danby and Carlton, Torrensville and Giant, gave the exhibition a more experimental and nuanced effect.

Shadowed by Ghost Gum’s elaborate structure, Cnr of Danby and Carlton, Torrensville depicts a Qantas jumbo flying low overhead, lights blinking forlornly against a dim grey-blue sky. Printed large and cropped crookedly outside the image’s border, the still has been pinned upside-down to the wall. This isn’t, however, immediately apparent: the plane still looks ‘right’ and is instantly identifiable. So what gets thrown by this reversal? Not gravity—the plane is still definitely, defiantly suspended. Rather, the effect is reminiscent of a film in which someone has been shot walking backwards, but is then played backwards, so that they appear to be walking forward. Or when magicians Penn and Teller film themselves strapped upside-down, so when the footage is screened the ‘right’ way, objects released from their hands look like they are flying rather than falling. Despite appearances, we pick up from small cues that something is not quite right. The plane is flying, but according to rules of physics different from our own.

What would be the destination of such a craft? Maybe the realm of Giant, one of Bradley’s self-described alter egos whose world features in eponymous stencil works. The square-jawed giant—oversized by our standards but normal in his own environment—is one of the many fantastic dwellers in this blue-and-white-toned world of clouds, snow and castles. Presented on small, unevenly cut boards, the components of Giant are less finished works than works-in-progress, creating the sense that they might be documentation rather than the products of sheer imagination. Combined with the small photograph of a silhouetted tree branch, Lucy and the Apple Tree, and preliminary sketches for Ghost Gum, Giant is not so much a discrete piece of art whose meaning or purpose is at once internal and evident, or limited to itself. Rather, the addenda act as footnotes, annexes, yielding insight into an intriguing inner world. This is a relief from the pervasive self-absorption of so much contemporary art, and its charm lies in this turning outwards, towards fantasy, make-believe, other worlds. And all the works in Dark Crystal essentially offer this, via the airline that enables your getaway, the actual plane on which you can escape, and your other-worldly destination.

Dark Crystal, artist Matt Bradley, Project Space, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Feb 27-April 11

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Sandy Edwards, Marina and Laura in Lady Grounds Pool,
Bithry’s Inlet, Tanja, NSW, 1998

Indelible represents the suite of images that remained after photographer Sandy Edwards spent months viewing, re-viewing and culling the hundreds of rolls of colour film of family and friends that she had shot over the last decade. The images record Edwards’ visits to some of her favourite haunts, such as New York City and the New South Wales south coast, as well as documenting certain rites of passage and leisure activities of her close personal network. A child opens a Christmas present while another squirts a hose at the camera; a pair of adolescents pose in formal wear while others lie face down on the surface of a rock pool; a girl surveys a wedding reception, while another warms her legs by a fire.

The challenge faced by the artist, as Edwards herself describes it in her room-sheet notes, was the transformation of these images from personal snapshots into an exhibition with broader, or ‘universal’ appeal. Edwards has attempted to achieve this through honing in on content, selecting representations of those moments in life to which most of us are witness, events that mark the passage of time or personal change, such as weddings and birthdays, holidays and house-warmings.

There are several perils in such an approach. One is the by now familiar dubiousness of the traditional documentary photographer’s credo of truth and objectivity. Another is the equally problematic nature of any appeal to the ‘universal’, whereby culturally specific assumptions are necessarily made but not always acknowledged. Further, there is the related risk that in aiming for the general, one might lose the poignancy of the particular.

Edwards may have run these risks, but her erudition and experience allow her to navigate them, albeit with varying degrees of success. Her role in the documentation process—the images are to some degree autobiographical, with the artist herself appearing on occasion—is explicitly acknowledged, underlining the subjective nature of photography. The titles of the photographs locate them very specifically in time and place, as does the frequent reliance on the genre of portraiture that heightens the individual identity of the subjects; clearly these images are less universal than representative of a particular class and lifestyle. However, despite this, some of Edwards’ images fail to engage, and appear to suffer from a lack of intimacy. Perhaps, in seeking a more public mode of address, Edwards has at times sacrificed a personally charged register.

There is a sense of emotional reticence about some of the images, as if any scenes deemed too intimate or revealing have been edited out. For example, awkward moments are not really tackled, although there is a moving hint of discord in one title that tells us the artist’s mother no longer wishes to be her daughter’s subject. Indeed, at times the portrayals tip into the anodyne, remaining unremarkable and prosaic, not unlike those shots in an ordinary family album that attempt to evoke the significance of events through their sheer quantity rather than through a definitive image.

As a result, it is those photographs tending to the abstract, which demand a shift in the mode of spectatorship, that are the strongest and most evocative. When Edwards’ unmistakable eye for colour and composition is most in evidence, her photographs come alive for this viewer, as in the vibrant contrasts in Merilee’s hands, where fingers are outstretched to a pot belly stove and clothes highlight pattern and colour; or the cool sinuousness of Lisa’s legs in mum and dad’s pool; or the delight in the abstract arrangements haphazardly created by Adrian’s sarong blowing on my mother’s clothesline and Byron Bay Classics cozzies. The appeal of such images lies largely in Edwards’ ability, through her formal strategies, to transform the unremarkable into the aesthetically delightful. Her photographs infuse the ordinary with beauty in such a way that the viewer can bring a refreshed vision to his/her own surroundings, with eyes more attuned to colour, pattern, correspondence.

One correspondence that repeatedly structures Edwards’ images is between people and nature. A certain unapologetic Romanticism permeates her compositions: people are often shot in natural landscapes, or at least in contact with natural elements such as fire and water, with an emphasis on ‘naturalness’, ‘immediacy’ and ‘sensation.’ The urban shots, by contrast, tend to be less inhabited: fragments of the built environment, such as a neon sign or pedestrian crossing, stand as synecdoches for the city, while portraits shot in the street are closely cropped to limit the allusion to place.

While the emotional reticence and prosaic nature of some of the images detract from their power, this is counterbalanced by the formal rigour, aesthetic empathy and affirmation of human/nature interaction in others. On viewing this exhibition, I was reminded of Susan Sontag’s observations in her recent book about the ethically dubious nature of “regarding the pain of others.” Perhaps in offering us images of everyday beauty, Edwards is honing our powers of attention more effectively.

In The Passenger David McDowell explores the contrast between still images and time-based video as a way of demonstrating the traveller’s experience of time. These 2 media forms remain separate in this large installation, in which the artist sets up a tension, yet narrative connection, between motion and stillness.

Large panels hang around the gallery like makeshift walls in a theatre set. Each panel comprises a grid of separate stills. Printed on transparent film stock, the back-lit images resemble projected moving images, only they are motionless moments caught in time. The fragmented surface is deceptive, with each still like a David Hockney photograph, capturing part of a larger image. With different depths of field for each fragment, it takes some time to focus and decide whether the panels in their entirety capture the vista of a passing mountain range, the view through a travelling car windscreen, an aeroplane wing on a tarmac, or sleeping passengers in a transit lounge. It is as if you have lost your focus in that moment of travel through unfamiliar places.

The artist seems to revel in the romance of older forms of apparatus used to capture and display images, alongside an acknowledgement of modern technologies like the domestic handycam. The lighting set-up on the panels recalls the bygone era of slide projection and the family display of slides from overseas trips. The stills, printed in muted tones, have a warm old-fashioned feel, with the light seeping through from behind. Each image looks like an old monochromatic photographic plate that you hold up to the light to see detail. They reminded me of a very old clunky projector that my father had, which required the viewer to slide in each precious glass plate to bring the image to life on the wall. The notion of projection in these static images intersects with the 2 centrally placed video works when you enter the gallery.

The first video work you encounter is screened on a monitor. The second is projected onto a hanging panel constructed from the same materials as the panels of photographs. The video on the monitor has a highly compressed quality, making the image blurry and again hard to focus on. The projection seeps through the hanging panel and can be seen in fragmented parts on the back. Both videos capture a moment of travel; a plane leaves the tarmac on the monitor and a car drives through a tunnel in the projection. These moments of time are slowed down and looped in an endless monotony. There is a connection with the still imagery combined with a sense of dislocation, of the world passing by while you are standing still and going nowhere. I got caught up in the tunnel and found a connection with the low droning audio track that permeated the space of the gallery. The soundscape seems to use treated environmental recordings, which can only occasionally be synched with the moving images. There is an instant where the sound of truck brake exhaust can be linked with truck headlights gliding through the frame. Placing these sounds with the moving images resonates with our attempts to focus on the wider image on the panels and form some kind of connection and escape from the shifting terrain of being a moving passenger.

In The Passenger, David McDowell uses the differences between stasis and movement to play with our perception of time, questioning the progressive narrative of the moving image. The viewer reading the panels pieces together static fragments to create a scene. The viewer watching the moving imagery arrives in the looped narrative and travels only part of the journey, never really going anywhere.

The Passenger, photo and video works David McDowell, sound Somaya Langley; Canberra Contemporary Art Space, March 26-May 1

In the middle of a darkened space sits a heavy, old fashioned and roughly hewn kitchen table. A single spotlight illuminates fruits of the sea spilling out over the table top: dozens of oysters, a crayfish on a plate, squid, snapper, mullet and garfish. A knife rests on the edge, next to a lemon that is partly peeled, its skin curling away off the table. This cornucopia is laid out for our viewing pleasure.

Ricky Swallow’s sculpture/installation Killing Time possesses a ‘gasp’ factor that turns adult viewers into kids dying to touch. What takes our breath away is the fact that nothing is as it appears. The entire work—from the fragile curling lemon peel and the finely wrought legs of the crayfish, to the bucket and folded cloth—has been meticulously carved out of wood. Swallow’s mimetic skills are awesome and his ability to re-present reality captivates audiences who can’t seem to help taking a ‘reality check’ through physical contact with the work. Little wonder the gallery positioned an attendant to watch over it.

Ashley Crawford wrote in The Age (April 17) that Killing Time is based on Swallow’s childhood experiences as a San Remo fisherman’s son. Without doubt this work is personal, but it connects with viewers on a far more profound level. For all the carving skill demonstrated in the recreation of this laden table the work is disconcerting. There is no tell-tale fishy smell or seductive colour, no sounds of laughter or kitchen noises that such bounty would engender. It is as if all the life and colour has been bleached out of the scene.

Given that Swallow dedicated 6 months to crafting the work, Killing Time is an apt title. However, the title, the dramatic chiaroscuro lighting and the tableaux link the work to the Dutch and Flemish traditions of still-life painting or natures mortes— literally ‘dead life’. Seen in this light, Killing Time potentially takes on a political edge.

At a literal level, Dutch still-life paintings offer a skilful mimetic rendering of simple everyday things. However, simultaneously these everyday things assume symbolic meaning, a warning against the seductiveness and emptiness of material excess, reminders of the need to maintain balance between the spiritual and carnal. Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s La Raie (The Rayfish, 1728) for example, warns of the danger of licentious living, through its juxtaposition of sexually laden symbols: a cat with its hackles risen, oysters, jugs, the underside of a rayfish and a knife balanced on the edge of the table with its blade thrusting into the delicate folds of the tablecloth.

The similarities between the composition of Chardin’s La Raie and Swallow’s Killing Time begs a reading of one through the other. In La Raie, we are also presented with a rough hewn kitchen table groaning with seafood. And I ask: What does it mean to show the underbelly of a rayfish or to present a profusion of oysters? Is the knife balanced on the edge of a table just a knife or does it signify how delicate the balance of life is? Why is Swallow’s knife balanced on the edge of the table? Is the half peeled lemon hanging precariously off the side of the table intended to show the virtuosity of the artist, or something more significant? And why has the artist presented the crayfish with its underbelly to us in a state of helpless vulnerability and impotence?

In the silence of the gallery space viewers have responded to Swallow’s work in whispers and with an almost religious reverence. Yes, the work is a virtuosic feat. However, in the tension between its tactility and untouchable fragility it demands that we do more than just gasp in awe. In his interview with Ashley Crawford, Swallow makes the evocative comment that Killing Time is something to do with “owning up.” Perhaps this is what the work is asking of us.

Ricky Swallow, Killing Time, Gertrude Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne, April 2-May 1

Remember when we dreamt of cyborgs and talked about “becoming” as if it all actually meant something? As if it was possible, this future of endless human plasticity? It seems naïve now that we’ve grown beyond the narcissistic phase of our social evolution and have a better grasp of the limits of our bodies. Now that we remember before bodies mutate they break, mash, incinerate, humiliate, decapitate. Humpty can’t be put back together again.

It’s because of this that I feel if I was looking at the work of Marie Blaisse at PICA, say, 5 years ago, I might have had a different reaction. Today I cannot help but respond with a sort of melancholy; that of the disenchanted futurist. Blaisse’s work was for me a phantom limb, missing but present, a reminder of a whole we once enjoyed, that we maybe took for granted, made too much of. As such, it is somehow more than just Lucy Orta for jazz ballet fans…as the faintly thrumming pain throughout this latently morose show gives it a kind of dignity I wouldn’t have thought possible.

Admittedly, these sombre reflections were far from my mind when I first dipped into the show. It did what I’d thought it would: reactivated all the striving playfulness of the 1980s and early to mid-1990s. The retro, brightly coloured foam costume pieces Blaisse is known for were strewn about the floor with a casual, licorice allsort quirkiness. A few dangled from the roof. The feel was Yazz meets Bananarama downtown at Mangoes for Shirley Temples—light, giddy, soft. This cutie harmlessness was amplified by the kids playing with the costumes, supervised by smiling, good-natured gallery staff. They placed tubes on their heads, slotted skinny arms through cymbal-like shapes. It was goofy good times and arty/fashiony merriment.

This feel was matched in the Paula Abdul video piece where dancing fascists in Blaisse-molded attire gleefully gyrate and hump and goosestep and jitterbug and arse-bounce. Foam-fattened cartoon frames for the Abdul stage show, they were more properly part of an extended extravaganza that had begun with Kiss or Bowie and led to Michael Jackson and worse and then worse still. Art or fashion (or whatever the hell Blaisse does) was a stadium act, just for a moment, but in the process was reduced to being simply part of the era’s dominant culture’s yearning for surface glitz. It’s worth comparing Blaisse’s work for Abdul with Cirque de Soleil’s efforts for New Order in the True Faith video. The French company used a similar aesthetic but to a more rabidly creative and compellingly artful end. Blaisse’s effort couldn’t escape the gravitational pull of the middle-of-the-road. It ended up as its road kill.

Naturally, this satisfied-with-itself escapade was the least interesting part of the show. The film work (produced in collaboration with dancers/models and filmmakers) was an altogether different experience, albeit one that revealed its intensity only on repeat visits. It took solid time and effort to clear away the surface froth to get at the fragile, haunted skeleton of this richly cold work. In one monitor-based work, for instance, we see a woman wrestling with gravity wearing a red, bud-shaped hoop around her waist. One moment she’s Kafka’s giant beetle who cannot right itself. Next she’s Minnie Mouse. Then a ladybug. Oh, metamorphosis is just so fucking hard.

The other works, tucked away in the screening room, took this dynamic to another level entirely. Immensely, awkwardly artful and fun—Godard for the Xanadu generation—they were full of unexplained, unexplainable jump-cuts, formal interruptions and visual and auditory non-sequiturs. Uniting this strange fruit was the fact that the otherwise graceful models who sport Blaisse’s works are forever struggling with the limitations of their new appendages. Blaisse’s bodily additives are definitely, defiantly prototypes. The films are test runs. The models are the fashion world’s equivalent to crash test dummies (which maybe they always are?). My favourites involved rollerskating women (precursors to the genius video for Cat Power’s Cross Bones Style?). One skate flick features a gal with elongated arms connected to her feet. She’s a bug bent on all fours, but not quite; suddenly the arms dislodge from the feet, and she doesn’t know what to do. Then she (or was it a man?) is spinning around, legs splayed thanks to a foam insert.

The rollerskates are significant here. Both skates and the foam body attachments extend and amplify bodily pleasures. Despite this, the logic of the films offers pleasure and then achingly hems it in: the performers are specimens acting out their limitations and possibilities in rooms of clinical clarity and texturelessness. Ultimately, this instills a sense of elegiac melancholy that overrides any overt playfulness and evokes more than a whiff of S&M (in the Freudian sense).

So when, as in the glorious images of a woman’s back turning into a dove, the body reaches a state of grace, it does so surprisingly, as a temporary release made all the more sweet because of its cloistered context. What is clear is that elegance is also a result of being frozen rigid. Indeed, in the still shots of Blaisse’s work on models, the body is pure graphic. The head appears severed from the body. Limbs protrude, a new being is created. The film works, though, show that this is merely an empty promise. The condition of human as graphic is an interlude, a fantasy, a projection of art.

Of course, Blaisse’s work activates these dynamics within a very precise context of sartorial modernism. Elements of futurism and surrealism fuse with 1960s design sensibilities of a Panton-gone-to-the-Moon flavour. There’s something retro-futuristic about Maria Blaisse’s work, but it has learnt from, and moved past, its inherited utopianism. Nevertheless, the thin margin for pleasure, within and against restraints, is obvious and locates her alongside designers such as Belgian Martin Margiela who continue to make fashion along the line between containment and chaos.

Curiously, the flaws in the show’s presentation, while initially annoying—the lack of labels, monitors running side-by-side with inaudible sound—aided the Blaisse effect. Blaisse’s work is best approached at a remove, as a memory trace, as a gesture that doesn’t hold. At its best it opens up the problem of being human, at its worst it is a distraction. It’s pleasure and pain, pop and philosophy, lycra and foam as existential fundament.

Marie Blaisse, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, April 1-May 9; part of The Space Between: Textiles_Art_Design_Fashion

The performer smiles. She’s met a policewoman who has confided tales of her dysfunctional relationships. She makes a series of tentative moves, a little half dance of self-protection, a hand swinging almost instinctively over the groin. She moves along the wall, a dance suggesting impact and defence. An alarm summons her to a desk where she operates a transcription machine with her foot while typing the policewoman’s words onto a laptop (for us they unfold on the screen behind her). She stops, rewinds, catches up, ignores errors, speeding on as the story spills out. In it the policewoman transforms from victim to defender to near-murderer of her attacker, her partner.

The performer joins us at the front of the space, sitting, smiling, commencing a slow, silent writhing and twisting, conveying a desire to burst free, but also strain, the anxiety of the almost-murderer as the recorded voice runs backwards in aural space around us. Eleanor Brickhill’s performance in An Unknown Woman is the embodied emotional aftermath of the story, it is an act of empathy, acknowledging moral complexity, a taking in of a story and of a fellow being. This short, tautly contained work makes an intriguing companion piece to Kay Armstrong’s The Narrow House in which we see the premeditation of a female murderer (see article).

In Stand Still, a small precise work, 2 dancers share a space, together and apart, but never in a duet. One turns and turns, slowly, an arm out, leading. The other’s simple articulations suggest semaphoring, a vertical to the first’s horizontal reaching and turning back in. Stillness. They start up again, the movement slightly faster, more articulation, greater extension, Nalina Wait is fluid, bending at one knee to reach out further, arms arching out, hands in to meet with a sense of completion. Lizzie Thomson opens out and up, more angular, less certain. Stillness. Here too is empathy, across different forms and rhythms, sharing the same space, the same momentum and stillnesses, like a dialectic that almost but never resolves.

A man paces in his underwear. Is he lost? Looking for something? Mapping out space? The walking becomes almost hypnotic, its obsessive footfall subtly extended by a sound score evoking stranger spaces than the one we see before us. Between these walkings (rectangular mappings, sudden diagonals, impulsive stop-starts, on the spot reachings-up like involuntary signallings, half-squats, circlings) the man stops, faces a mirror, wipes himself down, drinks water. These are quiet, slow moments. He looks at himself. Each time he stops here he adds an item of clothing before coming to address us, or, once, singing…before setting out on another, more intense walk, the sound score sometimes pulsing as if rippling through him and, in a rare moment of extroversion, suggesting a demented carnival.

He addresses us quietly. He’s been to a psychiatrist, not that he’s off the rails, “but if the rails are not clear…” It’s about loneliness he says and the thin line between self deception and self perception. About what you want to be…a singer? Is it about happiness? He thinks we can get “homesick for sadness…we wouldn’t be happy without it.” Later he talks about a moment in his flat, an impulse to destroy, and acting on it, tearing apart magazines, documents, passports…but, unable to let go, keeping them in blue plastic bags sitting on the top of bookshelves. By the time he sings, a searching, fine interpretation of a Friedrich Hollaender and Robert Liebmann cabaret song, he is fully dressed. The suit appears to contain him, bulking the strange reaching gestures—a half-hearted aspiration for transcendence? He walks again, looking to connect. He stops, he shudders.

The piece resonates with the nuanced musings of Gail Priest’s improvised sound score which involves the miking of the space to pick up, amplify and ever so slightly alter del Amo’s footsteps, breath and movement. When he sings, the increasing resonance has the effect of separating the performer more and more from the real world as he retreats into that of the cabaret singer, and also pushing the microphones to the point where they too ‘sing.’

At 40 minutes, Unsealed is a complete, quietly disturbing, confiding and important work from Martin del Amo that makes an art of walking, invites our empathy and offers a sad paean to the virtues of melancholy.

Performance Space, Parallax: An Unknown Woman, Eleanor Brickhill, sound Michelle Outram; Stand Still, Nalina Wait, Lizzie Thomson; Unsealed, Martin del Amo, sound Gail Priest; design Virginia Boyle; producer Fiona Winning, lighting Simon Wise, project coordinator Michaela Coventry; Performance Space, April 21-May 2

PonySkate, the latest work from Sydney-based artist Kate Murphy, investigates the world of the child and the video camera. A 7-year old boy and girl from different families is each given a camera to record their lives from Friday afternoon through to Saturday. As they go about their normal routines after school, play, dinner, and Saturday morning fun at the pony club and skate park, a second camera, set and left on a tripod, is also running. Extracts from the resulting 4 video threads have been synchronised and shown on separate monitors in the final installation.

As Murphy observes; “The home video has now replaced the stills camera as the favoured instrument to record childhood occasions and history. From the youngest age, children now grow up understanding and at ease with performing/living in front of the camera.”

Video conventions are also replacing the traditional grammar of film. Big Brother contestants exist in a seamless video force field. Video is spontaneous, like everyday life, and unobtrusive, like surveillance. PonySkate explores not only the effect of the ubiquitous camera on the child’s evolving sense of self, but also points to a generation who will have a greater familiarity with the moving image as a means of communication than any before them.

Since graduating from the ANU in 1999, where she received the University Medal in Visual Art, Murphy has been exploring the documentary impulse, working with multi-screen installations to develop a space where the need to organise a beginning, middle and end from the messy stuff of real life is less pressing than in the linear form. Murphy reveals her subjects through the careful establishment of formal limits, both during shooting and in the installation design. Despite the absence of narrative, her works are compellingly intimate and thoroughly engaging.

PonySkate uses multiple sets of opposites to examine the lives of the 2 children: male and female, portrait and self-portrait, mindful and oblivious. A humming tension is established within and between these pairs, but it’s difficult to concentrate on all 4 screens at once, so the viewer becomes an editor, drawn to certain images, making selections and assigning hierarchies.

The central device of synchronised cameras, one operated by the child and one by the artist, is at the heart of the work. A real conversation builds between the 2 viewpoints, which are sometimes almost identical and sometimes completely divergent. You can almost apply the literary terms of first and third person voice, with the child’s camera as an ‘I’ and the adult’s as a more distanced ‘He/She.’ The technical consistency of the cameras, with their automatic iris and focus, only serves to emphasise the delicate, floating sensibilities of the children, who shift mercurially between different levels of performance for the camera and complete forgetfulness of its presence. As the kids carry the cameras from place to place, the wildly swinging images create a kind of visual imprint of their individual physical presences. As Murphy says: “The process of empowering the children to be the directors in the process that normally records them is an important aspect of the work, especially to make them comfortable in sharing their world.”

While still a student, Murphy made the stunning Prayers of a Mother (1999), a 5 screen piece featuring a woman discussing her life of prayer. The central screen shows her hands holding a cross and rosary. In a voice brimming with longing she talks about her 8 children, her desire that they will all come back to the faith, and the saints she invokes on their behalf. On the surrounding 4 screens, images of her children’s faces, listening intently, fade in and out. The stable central image, flanked by the extraordinary range of emotions and responses recorded on the children’s faces, suggests both an altar and a family tree. This structure economically emphasises the religious and family influences underlying the children’s spontaneous reactions. Prayers of a Mother was acquired by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, and exhibited in 2003 as part of Remembrance + the Moving Image (RT55, p22).

After graduating, Kate Murphy spent some months living and working in Glasgow, where she befriended Brittaney Love, an 11 year old girl. Their shared fascination with pop star Britney Spears resulted in Britney Love, a solo show held at the Canberra Contemporary Arts Space in 2000. This work comprises floor to ceiling video projection and 6 monitors arranged in a V-shape on the floor, just like a pop video or catwalk. The screens all show the young Brittaney in her lounge room, singing and dancing to a Spears song, radically fusing the private daydream space of early adolescence with that of the public and highly sexualised role model. It’s a slightly uncomfortable fit for the audience, mediated by Brittaney’s voice on the soundtrack talking about her hopes and plans for the future.

Murphy began to experiment with synchronised cameras only recently, influenced in part by the Mike Figgis film Timecode (2000). Joe Hill (2003) was her first work to explore this territory. Video testimony conveys his wish that the song Joe Hill be sung at his funeral, paired with footage from a second camera observing the man alone in the middle of the night, setting up and recording his message.

Anyone working in the documentary genre, which claims to have truth on its side, will inevitably face galvanising ethical and formal dilemmas when it comes to translating raw footage into a final work. For the time being, Kate Murphy plans to continue exploring the potential of multiple cameras to address this issue. Speaking about Joe Hill she comments: “Both (videos) document the same sequence of events. But the subtly different points of observation illustrate the contingency of truth… They also make it clear that the truth presented to the viewer is always one that has been framed for the audience.”

PonySkate shows as part of Interlace, artists Shaun Gladwell, Emil Goh and Kate Murphy; Performance Space, Sydney, May 28-July 3

Choreographer Sue Healey is a survivor in the Australian dance scene. Beginning her career with Dance Works (1983-88), Healey led the Canberra-based company Vis-à-Vis from 1993-95. Since then she has choreographed independently, creating works for a fluid company of dancers which has included Michelle Heaven, Philip Adams, Jennifer Newman-Preston, Shona Erskine and Nalina Wait. She has been commissioned by many Australian dance companies and has an ongoing relationship with the Aichi Arts Centre in Japan. Healey has worked with filmmaker Louise Curham (RT58, p15) on several film and installation projects since 1997 and has recently begun directing her own films, including the award-winning Niche (2002) and Fine Line (2003).

Healey is currently a Research Associate with the Unspoken Knowledges Research project, led by Professor Shirley McKechnie at the Victorian College of the Arts. Her recent Niche series has been part of McKechnie’s project and consists of 5 works created between 2002 and 2004: the films mentioned above, 2 live works (Niche/Japan and Fine Line Terrain) and an installation (Niche/Salon). Healey’s finely crafted, intricate choreographies are too rarely presented in Sydney and her upcoming season of Fine Line Terrain at The Studio (Sydney Opera House) has been much anticipated since a showing of the work last year. Since then, the piece has been performed in Auckland, Canberra, Melbourne and New York.

Healey talked to RealTime about the logic behind the Niche series, her interest in space and perception and the challenges she faces as an independent choreographer working with an increasingly consistent company of dancers.

The Niche series covers 5 works and has traversed a number of formats: film, video, installation and performance. Why a series and how is the variety of formats tied to your exploration?

Each work ‘found’ its own niche, so to speak. I started with a dance video focus—wanting to make dance for that specific space rather than my usual method of choreographing the action before its translation into video or film. As our focus was space, it made absolute sense to keep finding new spaces and contexts to explore, manipulate and extend our material, including the screen space, a traditional proscenium space, a white gallery, a new cultural context (Japan) and a ‘site specific’ (30 metre deep) space. I didn’t set out to create a series—it evolved quite organically. I can look back and see that the driving force was a search to place the ‘right’ work in the ‘right’ space.

You are particularly interested in movement and perception. How does this relate to your use of both live and screen formats?

I am not interested in dance as fashion or in movement that disengages perception. I believe that art can make a difference to the way we live our lives. (Experiencing) dance, whether as observer or performer, can enhance the way we perceive our reality as moving, sentient beings interacting on this fragile planet. Perhaps it is even vital. I explore this in both live and screen formats. My current choreographic research is devoted to the manipulation of time and space that video and film makes possible and which offers me a range of new devices only dreamt of when creating live performance. However, I think I will always need to have the visceral, the physical, the real, underpinning the work I create—to keep in touch with the tangible physical drama that occurs as you choreograph. This is because I highly value the memories of performing that I have in my own body.

You have a very strong group of dancers working with you now. How important is it for you to work in this way and what is the real economic viability of such relationships?

The dancers I work with are simply extraordinary. To say that they are fundamental to my process is an understatement. It is a top priority for me to maintain the relationships I have with my dancers. Sustaining employment opportunities for these dancers is the toughest aspect. I can only employ them for short periods scattered throughout the year—I can’t offer them any financial security. What I can offer is a creative framework that has an ongoing sense of development and support. This has been a successful model for us over the last couple of years. For example, Shona Erskine worked on every stage of the Niche series through an initial mentorship grant from the Australia Council. This sense of an ongoing partnership is unusual and difficult to achieve outside of a company scenario.

The difficulty lies in timing grant applications and negotiating around dancers’ other contracts, juggling dates, venues, budgets, schedules, in the hope that providence will bring everything together. Strangely enough it mostly seems to work out. At times I do wonder, however, about the work I could be making if things were different. I do have an occasional lusting for a company model that provides ongoing administrative and production support. Having had that previously, I do think that I have found a unique structure to create within. The success of the Niche series bears witness to this so I think I am on the right path.

Fine Line Terrain, choreographer Sue Healey; dancers Victor Bramich, Shona Erskine, Lisa Griffiths, Nelson Reguera Perez, Nalina Wait; lighting Joseph Mercurio, composer Darrin Verhagen; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, June 29-July 3

Light and Shade explores the boundaries, spaces and possibilities of darkness and light, blurring the notion that light is pure while darkness is a menacing force devoid of innocence. Conceived and curated by TasDance’s artistic director Annie Grieg, the show comprises Swimming the Luna Sea by Chrissie Parrott and Tanya Liedtke’s Enter Twilight.

In the opening sequence of Luna Sea, entitled “Dark”, Parrott situates 3 male and 3 female dancers in a stark and shattered landscape. Jonathon Mustard’s sound score of rainfall, howling dogs and the relentless creak of timber enhances the sense of unease and loss. Accomplices and competitors in an alien place, the dancers move between corporeal claim and counter claim of initial touch and support, to the squared-off angular movements of threat and abandonment.

In this space of lunar dispossession the ensemble (re)enact the frisson and fragility which co-exist in the habitual province of human encounter, potential and rejection. Theresa O’Connor’s lighting design has a precursor in the hoary light we associate with the first moon landing. The semi-dark state enhances both the group’s isolation and their body motifs: the recurring minutiae of a dancer’s clawed hand, a finger flick, an inverted foot, a jagged hip.

A stone rolls from one cheek to another, momentarily counter-pointing the alienation of place and space. Words have yet to assume the shape and potency of meaning. Consonant and vowel provide an aural ostinato, as sound stumbles on the tongue and splits around the mind’s incomprehension. Each dancer’s physical vocabulary moves between recall of lost humanness juxtaposed against the whip-strength and aggression of a non-human state. They move from acquiescence to a dominance of each other while remaining submissive to the hiss and whisper of a landscape before language.

The apprehensive mood shifts in “Light”, the second section of Luna Sea. Trisha Dunn appears as a White Dew figure draped in a silver gown and shedding astral dust. This figure of innocence and immanence offers declamatory gestures. She mouths half-realised sounds suggestive of a seer uttering fragments of language, which allay the sense of estrangement and terror.

Three bare-chested male dancers glide in white-hooped skirts like retainers in an imagined Tutankhamen court. They present an image of beauty and quirkiness as the dancers’ weighted skirts swing and wrap their bodies. When pulled over the head, the skirt accentuates the dancer’s facial structure through a taut cloth mask. Moving like wraiths in space, Craig Bary, Ryan Lowe and Malcolm McMillan offer gestural homage to White Dew as they mirror her hand motifs. This provides an enlivened and illumined resolution after uncertainty and darkness.

Tanja Liedtke is a choreographer who re-imagines the parameters and possibilities of dance. Her choreographic finesse in Enter Twilight explores the paradox that exists within life’s rituals through the allure, seduction, playfulness and danger enacted between a male and 3 female dancers.

Craig Bary sleeps on stage while 3 young women—Trisha Dunn, Lisa Griffiths and Tania Tabacchi—observe, chat and speculate. Liedtke knows how to set her dancers on a trajectory that makes deft and detailed use of the body. The performers split and navigate space, generating a simultaneous allure and frisson of excitement. They reveal the paradox of dangerous states teetering between humour, innocence and treacherousness.

This dance is stylish, pert, cheeky and flirtatious. Each girl targets, then engages in an alternately naïve, groovy and sensuous dance conversation with the boy/man. The dancers whisper and tease, embarking across the terrain of taunt and threat implicit in relationships. Composer DJ Tr!p’s lo-fi electronic sound score projects the crack, scratch and pop of tired vinyl, the result of too frequent playing by kids making their moves on each other and the world. Seated dancers are intriguingly lit from beneath as they glide around a wooden bench in playfulness, entanglement and pursuit.

Liedtke’s strengths include inventiveness and visual surprise. In one sequence each dancer falls and rebounds from the floor as an agile unit of momentum. The reversed upward movement is like watching a film in slow motion replay. In another visually arresting moment, 3 pairs of inverted legs disconcertingly appear in space, luring the eye away from the site of action.

Swimming the Luna Sea and Enter Twilight use the languages of the body and the tongue to illuminate the territories of light and shade, seduction, corruption and desire.

TasDance, Swimming the Luna Sea, choreographer Chrissie Parrott, music Jonathon Mustard, lighting Theresa O’Connor, design Chrissie Parrott with Darren Willmott; Enter Twilight, choreographer Tanja Liedtke; music DJ Tr!p, design Tanja Liedtke with Darren Willmott; Hobart College Auditorium, May 6-9

A radiant turquoise wall seeps pink light, warmly greeting audiences arriving for Stompin Youth’s latest dance work, Age of Consent. A futuristic vending machine requires us to speak into it before tickets are dispensed with a too soothing voice oozing automated menace. Extra-terrestrial lights crane above the hall’s tiered seating, to which we’re escorted and allocated age-tags. The space fills with urgent, automated whispers, sweeping us through a reverberating void.

The entrance wall of milk-crates is reconfigured to form 5 dividing walls on a central platform, each containing a peephole. The walls allow half the audience to partially view scenes played out before them, while the remaining half are privy to the uncensored version.

The vignettes—a girl dancing seductively in her room, young people venturing first touches, the surreptitious application of makeup, shotgunning a can—depict the forbidden in a voyeuristic form, while sound effects and voiceovers snake around the walls. In this way the work rotates and gradually unfolds on a spare yet cleverly devised set, reminiscent of Lars Von Trier’s Dogville and similarly functioning to bring the drama into sharper focus.

The set is suddenly and violently dis-assembled to the tense rhythm of a bouncing ball. Mattresses are introduced and the sexes divided. In a nice inversion, boys preen and groove in a nightclub while girls lounge and leer. As the night progresses, intoxication is conveyed in limp, puppet-like movement, accompanied by a slow, aggressive soundscape. Trouble could be just around the corner and there’s a sense of clinging eroticism, at once languid and intensely menacing. Voiceovers recounting bouncer/ID stories drop the intensity, but the energy rises again with a montage in which a progression of dancers is each asked to ‘act your age’ to dramatically different pieces of music.

Composer Luke Smiles manipulates electronic recordings live, dropping or accentuating layers in response to the energy of the performance. The symbiosis achieved between sound and choreography is one of the strongest aspects of Age of Consent and the director, Luke George, believes this is largely attributable to Smile’s considerable experience as a dancer.

Age of Consent emerged from an exploration of the written and unwritten codes that pervade and influence young people’s lives. A 12 month creative development involved 30 young dancers. Luke George says he was careful not to impose his stylistic preferences, preferring to shape the dancers’ own responses to the subject matter. The exception was the final sequence in which 2 groups of dancers move in formation to the rattling pulse of marching drums, but with an ironic twist. Influenced, he says, by the “highly objectionable Bitch Rock” band Peach, George introduced a defiant shoulder thrust, to represent the way it feels to ‘break the rules.’ Military elements gradually dissolve into ecstatic anarchy and Stompin’s trademark electric energy—a fitting finale.

Stompin Youth Dance Company, Age of Consent, director Luke George, sound Luke Smiles, design bluebottle; Pilgrim Hall, Launceston, May 6-9

Micronations

On September 2, 1967 Ex-Major Paddy Roy Bates decided to occupy an ex-World War II military sea fort just off the East Coast of England and have it declared a separate nation state. The principality of Sealand was born. Thirty seven years later Prince Roy, as he proclaimed himself, has handed over the throne to his son Michael and managed to gain de facto recognition of its sovereignty from a number of European countries. Over 25 years, lobbying the UN for nation state status has so far proved unsuccessful.

Sounds fanciful but it’s all true. The Principality of Sealand is today considered one of the leaders of what is often referred to as the micronations movement. Micronations are countries which have been declared independent by individuals or small groups. In many cases such claims have been made on pieces of land, usually tiny islands. Since the internet got into full swing the traditional concept of micronations has evolved into cyber and digitally programmed territories too.

The principality of Sealand was the fruit of an error in judgement on behalf of the UK government. It had designed Roughs Tower (the sea fort) approximately 7 nautical miles from the coast, more than double the then applicable 3-mile range of territorial waters. Basically it had unwittingly located it in the international waters of the North Sea. While Roy Bates’ experience has been perhaps the best known (he’s fought off invaders from Germany and landed himself in a court case for fighting against the British navy—and won), his Sealand functions like many other micronations in that it has its own constitution, issues its own currency and provides its own passport.

Such is the evolution of the micronations movement and its growing popularity amongst a number of artists and musicians that the Sonar Advanced Music and Multi Media festival has this year decided to run the very first Universal Exhibition of Micronations.

Holding an exhibition of micronations would seem in keeping with a return to the festival’s roots—Sonar has always enjoyed positive critical and public responses when it’s dared to be at its most cutting edge. And in the case of micronations you might even say, eccentric.

Sealands’ micronation will be on display along with 4 quite different examples of the phenomena—Barcelona therapist Evru’s Evrugo Mental State, the multilayered kingdom of Elgaland-Vargaland, State of Sabotage from the creative label of the same name and NSK, A State in Time from the Slovenian industrial music collective Laibach.

Multimedias

Now in its 11th year, Sonar has over a decade grown from a small, almost underground electronic music festival with a few strands of multimedia thrown in to become one of Europe’s most prestigious multimedia events. Its music programming has in recent times attracted criticism for its growing commercial and conservative choices and the organisers appear to have listened by focusing this year’s line-up around the explosion of hip hop both in and out of Spain.

The festival’s multimedia arm though has strengthened considerably over the past 4 or 5 years and according to Andy Davies, the curator of Sonarcinema, that might very well reflect a changing of the guard between the mediums. “I certainly feel there’s a shift in the electronic music/electronic image thing,” says Davies. “It seems to me that there’s more interesting new things happening in the image side than the music side. And that’s a technological thing—now the technology is becoming more available for the image and quicker and cheaper—all the things that happened in the music. So there’s a whole lot of people coming to work in video that wouldn’t previously have had access to equipment. And for the same reason there’s this explosion of work that was originally there in the 90s in electronic music.”

The Sonarama section of this year’s festival as usual will put on show some of the latest developments in new sound and audiovisual creations, installations, software presentations and audiovisual concerts. A highlight this year is Thomas Koner’s Banlieue du Vide, at once a critique of the repressive possibilities of internet technology and a reflection on the passing of time. Koner’s work recently won the prestigious Ars Electronica’s Golden Nica award in the digital music category.

Switzerland’s Hektor, a suitcase containing among other things 2 electric motors, a spray can holder and a circuit board, and Canada’s Artificiel’s light installation Bulbes are also eagerly anticipated. Along with the media lab presentations displaying software and sound combinations, Sonar importantly continues to give a space to new creators.

Oscar Abril, Sonar’s Multimedia coordinator, says the event is still making a place for itself internationally: “Sonar is most definitely the main festival of its type in Spain and it certainly plays a defining role overseas even though you couldn’t classify it as an arts electronic festival. Nevertheless, it still retains that independent streak and belongs to a movement within a global movement.”

Like Abril, Sonarcinema’s Andy Davies has this year conjured up a film festival from a wide range of sources. It’s a neat mix of the original—Simon Pummell’s unscripted and wordless Bodysong documentary (with a soundtrack from Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood) to the hysterical—Shynola’s computer animated adverts—to the retrospective—a showing of Ramon Coppola’s music videos that include Fatboy Slim’s Gangsta Trippin’, Moby’s Honey, Air’s Playground Love and Daft Punk’s Revolution 909.

In amongst that lot there will be a session on one of the pioneers of digital animation, Lillian Schwartz, and a menu of low budget electronic short films. To round it off there’s some very contemporary documentary takes on the hip hop scene in Venezuela as well as the punk and rap movements in Japan, China and India.

It’s this kind of visual social commentarist role that festivals like Sonar crucially play. “For me there’s places which produce a lot of interesting work and it’s surprising that should be so and I don’t really understand why it is,” ponders Davies. “Austria for example has fantastic video and visuals. Britain as well, there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening there, quite particular… Japan has a very particular take image-wise, especially graphically, so a lot of work that comes from there stands out. And I also think Finland is a very curious place. We show a lot of things from Finland!”

Davies believes it’s hard to get good local work to be shown in Sonar. He attributes that to a combination of cultural factors and a lack of investment from television and the state in experimental work or, for that matter, independent record companies who tend to finance low budget filmmakers in other parts of Europe. “One thing’s for sure. What makes a good public isn’t necessarily what makes a good creative environment.”

Morganics’ shows at Sydney Opera House’s The Studio and Brisbane’s Powerhouse are taking this hip hop virtuoso to a wider audience, recognition he fully deserves. He’s more often to be found in workshops for young people in regional areas, prisons and Aboriginal communities right around Australia and it’s that presence which frames and informs much of this solo outing. He plays it as if we are a group of young violent offenders in an institution participating in a hip hop workshop, teaching us beat-boxing and free-styling and demonstrating his moves: “this is about breaking, not entering.” He shows videos of his work, largely with Aboriginal youngsters, reflects on his hip hop beginnings as a kid (Circular Quay, 1984) and conjures a range of workshop experiences that reveal the pain of the lives of the people he teaches: teenage mothers, prostitutes, the dispossessed. As much as it’s a mission, Morganics’ journey is also an adventure, sometimes exhausting, as he crisscrosses the country, sometimes tense, as cross-cultural clashes loom. He recreates these moments with a vivid but laidback theatricality. It’s also a role model show. It’s hip hop evangelism with an Australian voice. It’s a critique of commercial hip hop (“I love it when I forget it’s a business”) and the sexism of the form, and satirical when it comes to record company and undergraduate responses to the art. And it’s a thrill when Morganics raps and dances: you just want more. His work with young Indigenous hip hoppers from Northern NSW is part of this year’s Message Sticks at the Opera House and will be reported in RT 62. The big question is will schools be able to use their $1600 pocket money from Johnny Howard’s 2004-5 federal budget to bring Morganics in to teach values? I hope so.

Morganics, Crouching B-Boy Hidden Dreadlocks, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, March 30-April 3

The CD cover photo says it all: Paul Grabowsky strolling around Manhattan looking very pleased to be there. And why wouldn’t he be, since he’s there to record 9 of his compositions with such top ranking American jazz musicians as Branford Marsalis, Joe Lovano, Ed Schuller and Jeff Tain Watts (although Marsalis, due to the dreaded ‘contractual obligations’, performs on only 2 tracks). Australian trumpet player Scott Tinkler jets in to complete the group. The sheer logistical effort of assembling these musicians in one time and place is no doubt a tale in itself, but the effort was worth it. This album is many things: a showcase of inventive compositions, a mix of styles and structures and a collection of uniformly excellent performances. Most of all, it is a statement of the possibilities of modern jazz.

The opening track Tailfin defines the album: highly ambitious, technically superb and a study in contrasts. At 9 and a half minutes, Tailfin is by turns blazing and meditative, yet it is the structure of the composition that leaves the final impression. It opens with a kinetic drum solo by Watts, played as if his mission is to compress as much dynamism as possible into 30 seconds. This serves as an opening statement for the album: beginning with a drum solo suggests the focus is to be on the compositions, not 88 keys and one ego.

Tailfin takes many surprise twists. Once the drums have settled down into the middle ground (Watts is never really in the background), a theme is played by Marsalis on soprano sax, accompanied by Tinkler on trumpet and toilet plunger (bought, according to the engaging album notes, from a Chelsea hardware store). This theme is a little disorienting: a fast vertiginous round that’s part folk dance and part Ornette Coleman. Once it’s done, Tinkler launches into an incendiary trumpet solo, backed only by the tumultuous drums. The trumpet is pure brazen energy, delivered in a clear tone that rides above and across the drumming. After this energy burst, the tune slows down, turning lyrical and reaching almost a still point. Grabowsky takes over the composition with melancholy piano lines, dropping to the lower register before stepping up to a chordal progression. This rhythmic development attracts the drums, which build up momentum again, this time summoning Marsalis. Now the composition is in a new phase, with Marsalis unwinding over drums and bass, while Grabowsky re-enters with those chords.

Marsalis takes the tune apart, in the decontructivist manner pioneered by Coltrane. Jack Kerouac described Miles’ bop trumpet as “speaking in long sentences like Marcel Proust”; Coltrane liked to play the same sentence over and over, from different angles until it was exhausted, an avant-garde re-writing of the Proustian sentence. This is what Marsalis does here, speaking one long soprano sentence upwards, downwards and sideways, building to a peak as the other musicians add their support. Then a return to the vertiginous theme, some stabs in unison like exclamation marks, and the trumpet trails off and upwards to end the composition. All this on the opening track: no wonder Marsalis cries “Great Caesar’s ghost!” when it’s over.

After this delirious ride, the album settles down a little but loses nothing in ambition. Tales of Time and Space is just that; a sweep across music history and cultural difference. Styles and methods are taken from a startlingly wide range of sources, from 17th century Spanish dance to Silverchair. But this is no postmodern pastiche. The various source materials are absorbed into Grabowsky’s jazz compositions, adding distinctive flavours but never spoiling the texture or status of the works. On a larger scale and at a different time, Duke Ellington did the same with his great compositions.

Sideshow Sarabande, the second track, is a jazz version of the Baroque triple-time dance, featuring Grabowsky in buoyant mood. Silverland is a sprightly tribute to the Aussie rock band, with bouncy piano, silvery trumpet, and a crescendo embracing the grunge-pop cadences of its inspiration. Angel is an overtly lyrical turn, featuring the album’s most beautiful melody. A collective commitment to simplicity allows the musicians to explore the lyricism while avoiding sentimentality, especially in the solos by Tinkler and Lovano on tenor sax.

The best—or at least most memorable—of the album’s tracks are these first 4; the second half of the CD does not quite match the first. Perhaps Grabowsky the pianist could have showcased himself on a solo or duet track to add formal variety. But these are minor quibbles. On this album the compositions and ensemble playing are the thing. The many times and spaces subsumed into this recording produce a here and now that is truly exciting to hear.

Given our everyday listening is spatial—the sound of the world is not in stereo, it’s 3 dimensional—it is interesting that its recreation through surround sound systems still seems a novelty. We are used to listening to our Dolby Surround Sound in cinema complexes, but it is still not standard sound event procedure to gather enough speakers and people with the techniques to perform live spatial audio mixes. So there was a degree of understated excitement about the evening at Lanfranchi’s Memorial Discotheque in Sydney’s Chippendale, featuring live surround sound performance by Sam Smith, Julian Knowles, Alex Davies and Melbourne duo Robin Fox and Anthony Pateras.

First up was Sam Smith, who has been appearing over the last year, as both sound and visual artist, but who is a relative newcomer to spatial audio. Smith’s soundscapes are luscious, featuring snippets of keyboard chords and broken melodies that drift in and out of focus, mixed with static sprays, tweaked harmonics and pulsing drones. He also blends in organic sounds, in this case the squeals and groans of children, perhaps, and grating metallic timbres. His spatialisation was intense, sometimes verging on the hyperactive, a temptation when you first discover the joy of pinging sounds around a room. It will be interesting to hear some more of his work when he has settled into the ideas and technology.

Julian Knowles is one of the undisputed masters of spatial audio, having worked in the area for many years before recent technology made it more accessible. Knowles’ sounds—the familiar palette of electronic hiss, click, crackle and drone—are so finely processed and sculpted that they take on new depths. His sense of composition is meticulous with an underlying tension, yet he never gets caught in the crisis of endless crescendo, instead shifting through different textural territories with fluidity, giving momentum and intensity to his work. What distinguishes Knowles from other artists is his restraint. He very rarely moves a whole sound, but sprays out elements of it. The effects play around you, frequencies swim while the core remains anchored. Knowles avoids the special-fx rollercoaster ride, preferring to work on a deeper psycho-acoustic level, expanding the sonic space of the room and creating a sphere of sound in which you are aware of every vibrating particle.

The initiator of the evening, Alex Davies, is well known for his interactive audiovisual installations so it was good to see him hone in on audio. Initially he showed a similar restraint to Knowles with a very slow accretion of details. Starting off with the organic sounds of voices, the work gradually developed into a beat piece with big bass and rhythmic glitch loops. Davies’ samples have a beautiful clarity, however some structural anomalies meant that the piece lacked cohesiveness, as we were often lead into zones that were not explored and then dropped. There is an interesting perceptual shift in spatialised audio when sounds are organic or completely synthetic. With organic samples there is a tendency to look for a ‘narrative’ cause and effect moving it closer to a cinematic experience, however when using digital sounds the placement becomes purely about the movement through space.

Restraint is not a word to be used when describing Melbourne’s Robin Fox and Anthony Pateras. Fox on laptop processing Pateras’ vocals and mixing desk emissions make for a fantastic aural assault. Facing each other like old men playing some demented card game they rupture the dominant trend of slow sustained works with pieces that are short abrasive bursts the length of rock songs. Each piece explores a different set of ideas. From Pateras there are snuffles, gurgles and belches, a bubbling cauldron of hisses and pops, bleeps and wild cries. Each of these textures is ripped apart and cellularly rearranged by Fox’s magic fingers creating sonic meteorites that burn brightly and disintegrate on entry. The works are so dense and fast that the spatialisation served merely to make the pieces twice as loud.

Fox and Pateras performed the same set 2 nights later at impermanent.audio in stereo, and nothing was lost with fewer speakers. In fact the multitude of speakers tended to separate the sound from the source, so that in stereo there was more of a visceral quality to Pateras’ cacophonic mouth clicks, lipsmacks and utterances, making the pieces, edgier and grittier. The piece based on kissing noises was particularly impressive in its uncomfortable over-amplified closeness. However even more impressive were the artists’ solos.

Robin Fox created a stir by bringing visuals into the well-defined audio only environment of impermanent.audio. (There have been 1 or 2 moments of visual stimulation previously but such things are generally not encouraged.) In Fox’s words his photosynthetic piece “explores the 1 to 1 relationship between sonic electricity and its effect on a single light photon excited across a phosphorous screen.” In other words his crafted oscillations make a little green dot grow and dance. The purity and fusion of the sound and visuals creates an interdependent realm that is at once mesmeric and invigorating.

Anthony Pateras performed a prepared piano improvisation on the already battered baby grand at the Frequency Lab. His approach to everything seems to be fast and furious, bashing at the keys to reveal all manner of timbres. Top notes rattle and vibrate like demented toys while bass notes thump and ominously thud. You hear the wood, the metal, the hammer, the pluck. Pateras plays a lot of notes…and then he doesn’t…letting a clanging chord ring out naked, carving silence out of chaos. A magnificent performance.

Fox and Pateras have just departed on a European tour, and it will not be long before they join Pimmon and Oren Ambarchi on the A-list of Australian sound exports taking the international scene by storm.

Sam Smith, Julian Knowles, Alex Davies, Robin Fox & Anthony Pateras, Lanfranchis Memorial Discotheque, April 2; Fox & Pateras, impermanent.audio, The Frequency Lab, April 4

Since 1995 Sydney-based Ensemble Offspring have been performing and commissioning new musical works. These new works are often presented in themed concerts alongside pieces written up to 80 years ago, highlighting some of the broad themes in recent music. Partch’s Bastards, for example, took up instrument building and alternative tunings, and other projects have centred on movements such as Parisian Spectralism and Polish Sonorism. This contextualising has an enriching effect, both in bringing out recent currents and ideas, and fostering new interpretative pathways within individual works. Offspring writer-in-residence Rachel Campbell talked to artistic director Damien Ricketson about the ensemble’s work.

Programming

At the core of the ensemble is a dedication to bringing out new material. A continual mission has been providing a platform, an outlet, for the aspirations of numerous young composers. This entails embracing risk in programming—the potential for failure is high but so too are the potential rewards, and some of these have been astounding.

The ensemble’s birth was an accident. Co-founder Matthew Shlomowitz and I, like any composers, just wanted a gig, a chance to hear our music. But we were able to seize on the enthusiasm of our performers to go on to promote fellow composers as well as countless seminal 20th century works that should also be heard.

It’s meaningful to draw new work into some kind of context, be it historical or just a broader, less parochial vision of contemporary Australian music. Profiling a key composer or theme and then drawing links to the activities occurring here and now helps to illuminate new material. Ideally we aim to present a new music event where the totality of the experience extends beyond the sum of its component parts.

Bozidar Kos

The forthcoming A Composer Profile—Bozidar Kos, Celebrating 70 Years features chamber music by Bozidar and by younger composers who have been his students at the Sydney Conservatorium. A particular highlight will be the world premiere of Fatamorgana, especially commissioned for the event.

Bozidar is a composer with an eye for detail, his works are like well-crafted gems—the more you go into them, the more you appreciate their depth and refinement. His music draws upon a raft of influences ranging from the French Spectralist tradition to his own jazz and folk heritage. His eye for detail also made him a highly respected educator. To this day, the best composition lesson I ever had was when he once tore strips off me.

We also have the world premiere of a piece by English composer Michael Finnissy dedicated to the ensemble’s co-founder Matthew Shlomowitz. In our postmodern milieu he is one of a few composers drawing tangible references to other musics in strange and wonderful ways. There are emotive extremes—he’s a new and different kind of romantic.

Philip Glass

The Philip Glass we’re performing in Concert 2, 2004: Art of Glass is the early stuff. This is the pre-Einstein on the Beach experimental process music from a period when the composer was little known outside of a small New York loft scene and his music was a profound alternative to Euro-modernism.

Over the years, as Minimalism has become more style than concept, the term has become something of a conservative war-cry. In this concert we hope to recapture the bold experimental aesthetic that underpins the music’s origins. This is music stripped to its bare essentials, mechanical patterns repeated again and again. It will either irritate the hell out of people or induce a wonderful hypnotic state of listening. Philip Glass has authorised us to perform these works usually reserved for his own ensemble. We find ourselves in the curious position of being the first band outside the Philip Glass Ensemble to perform works such as Music In Fifths.

There’s also a piece I’ve been working on with Melbourne poet Christopher Wallace-Crabbe whom I met on residence at Bundanon. The work, A Line Has Two, is a spacious meditation on time and impermanence. Temporal references pervade the music’s structure, drawing a boundary between the familiar and the unfamiliar, from citations of Strauss and Mahler to exotic instrumentation such as the Tusut, an ancient Arabic glass instrument, and the ancient Greek aulos.

International

We have an invitation to play at the World Music Days in Croatia next year. And last year we toured Europe as guests of the Warsaw Autumn Festival. We performed in London, Amsterdam, Krakow and Warsaw, and the festival commissioned my Trace Elements which will receive its Australian première in the Bozidar Kos concert.

At Warsaw we had a packed auditorium of over 300 people. The reviews were good and the standard of playing was commented on a lot—especially encouraging given that we were performing back to back with some of Europe’s leading new music specialists such as MusikFabrik.

The Future of New Music

I think the more experimental end of the spectrum will always cycle between a more peripheral and more central role in the creation of new classical music. We’ve had a very conservative decade or 2 but I am encouraged by signs of a renaissance of interest in musical alternatives to the mainstay classical staples. When I was talking with the artistic director of the Warsaw Autumn, he felt they went from the radical 60s to a very conservative position at the end of the century and now their audiences were back in the mood for something a little more challenging. Encouragingly, this demand is not coming from old die-hard modernists, but from the young generation. Indeed, over half the audience at our Warsaw concert were under the age of 30.

Ultimately I am a long-term optimist. I keep the flame alive. I genuinely believe that there is a new ‘new music’ and it will have its place enriching the art-music tradition of the future. The possibility of a novel, original sonic experience that has a profound emotive effect is still very much alive and apparent.

A Composer Profile—Bozidar Kos, Ensemble Offspring; Sydney Conservatorium of Music, July 4; Art of Glass, Ensemble Offspring; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, July 29, www.newmusicnetwork.com.au/ ensoffspring

Un/Cage[d] Version 1.1 was the latest live offering from Brisbane-based percussion ensemble Isorhythmos. The title gives a clue to the creative impetus behind the event: the words, music and ideas of John Cage providing the performance’s conceptual framework. The show was interspersed with recitations of texts by Cage and Gertrude Stein (a kindred spirit and influence on the composer). These effectively functioned as a structural and theatrical device during transitions, shifting the focus from energetic ensemble playing to the whimsical, obscure and profound words from these sages of 20th century art and thought. The characteristic ‘stream of consciousness’ approach and poetic deftness of both Cage and Stein set the pace for a performance that was rarely predictable and often surprising.

Cage’s Living Room Music for percussion and speech quartet (with text by Gertrude Stein) opened the performance. Members of Isorhythmos eased on to stage and made themselves comfortable in a make-shift lounge set up behind the main performance space. True to Cage events, the audience were disconcerted. “Has it started?” “Should we listen?” “Should we keep talking?” And then the music commenced. Clever speech rhythms, tightly rehearsed, soon had all of us enthralled.

Gerard Brophy’s Songo, a percussion composition influenced by Cuban drumming rhythm and style, was performed with great energy, precision and joy, the structure of the work allowing for high levels of interaction and improvisation among the players.

Guest artists Topology joined forces with Isorhythmos for Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm (Bartok arranged by David Montgomery) and the wittily titled Six Bulges in Dancerian Rhythm composed by Montgomery. The Six Dances, originally composed as piano studies for Bartok’s son Peter, were transformed into something altogether different, fleshed out and rendered in Technicolour through Montgomery’s arrangements.

Six Bulges represented something of a world tour of drumming traditions: West African, Brazilian, Senegalese, Turkish, Cuban and jazz styles all got an airing. Montgomery’s very clever creation of an ‘uber’ work gave Isorhythmos and Topology ample opportunity to show off their considerable talents. High energy performing alternated with moments of calm and delicacy, skilfully demonstrating the range of this 8 piece percussion ensemble.

Although it was difficult to pick one highlight, the performance of Toru Takemitsu’s Rain Tree was stunning. The text on which the piece was based, Kenzaburo Oé’s poem The Ingenious Raintree, was projected on the overhead screen. Even without the text, the piece is mesmerisingly beautiful. The keyboard percussion and especially the vibraphone with the added quality of crotales created a delicate shimmer and resonant raindrops of sound. Isorhythmos’ attention to detail and subtlety, the careful shading and interaction between parts and the precision of their playing reflected a ‘chamber music’ aesthetic in the best sense of the term.

The final work for the evening, Imago (Montgomery/Scholes/traditional) was another large scale multi-section piece designed to showcase the talents of Isorhythmos and Topology. Once again the strong influence of West African drumming was present, the work incorporating a mix of rhythmic cells and motifs. There were some very effective sound gestures, utilising the spacing of the performers to create waves of sound moving around the semicircle of drummers. Having sat comfortably in the ‘living room’ at the rear of the stage, Topology returned to the main performance space and joined with Isorhythmos for the final section of Imago. After an extended piece of drumming, Topology’s line up (strings, sax and piano) was a welcome addition to the sound world, with some lovely spots for soprano sax and viola woven into the piece. Imago was perhaps a little on the long side, diverging from the formula of carefully paced material that characterised the rest of the evening.

The audience’s enthusiastic applause at the end of the performance confirmed that Isorhythmos are doing something right. They are attracting large audiences to contemporary music and keeping them entertained, not just through their considerable skill as musicians, but also through the enthusiasm and imagination with which they present the music.

Isorhythmos, Un/Cage[d] Version 1.1, guest artists Topology; Brisbane Powerhouse, March 26-27

It’s not blood, it’s metres of colour splashed wide across the floor, rich red, yellow and blue, thick and waxy (Mark Titmarsh, installation) as if just cooled and come to rest. We gather round it for the sung whoops and cries and expressive double bass patterning of Raffaele Marcellino’s Via Dolorosa 1 (1993) for Station 1, Jesus is condemned to death. It’s Good Friday night in Sydney Town Hall and a large crowd has gathered for 14, a once regular musical and visual art collaboration resurrected from its last appearance at the MCA in 1993, the source date for most of the compositions for this program (unless otherwise indicated), but accompanied by 2004 art works.

We wander into Centennial Hall on the next stage of an engrossing joumey, reflecting on the power of one’s belief or the efficacy of myth for others; art is the means here. Directors Neil Simpson and Roland Peelman put the hall to excellent use, constantly shifting us and our perspective: we’re on the stage, up in the balcony, out in the ante-rooms, each area distinctively and evocatively lit, the main hall often radically transformed. Voices descend on us from above or speak to each other across the hall. Between compositions and showings, David Drury improvises with a fine sense of mystery and awe on the Town Hall organ.

The correspondence between music and visual art is variable, from lucid to opaque, with the compositions just long enough to reflect on possible connections. To Andrew Schultz’s beautifully fluent soprano duet, Silk, Michael Hutak releases a slow shower of small black papers from the high ceiling, worded “Every man for himself. Go back to your homes” (Station 2, Jesus bears his cross). Lee Paterson’s banner (“bird/mother/sun at 20 degrees/barking dog in the background”) obliquely but suggestively accompanies Moya Henderson’s “Now Madness Half Shadows my Soul” (2004) for Station 4, Jesus meets his Holy Mother. A sublime trio of female voices meets a male voice from across the hall above us.

For station 5 (Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus), Michael Whaites, lying on a bed of straw fringed with leaves, patiently loads bricks onto his body to Stephen Cronin’s grimly expressive Bright and Black Blood. A gagged Lucy Young is immersed in a tank of water (labelled “Absolution”) which is served to us in small cups by a helper, for Jesus meets St Veronica (Station 6), to Andrew Ford’s Palindrome. To Edward Cowie’s The Third Stumble (Station 9), Ana Wojak in high-booted military attire tugs at a cruel leash hooked into the back of a woman in red with sewn lips (Fiona MacGregor).

For the premiere of Elena Kats-Chernin’s Golyi (2004, to Les Murray’s A Study of the Nude), we gather in a long corridor where Kate Champion projects an image of Christ onto a surface that she tears at to reveal a blue sky and a red sun as Kats-Chernin’s music marches on with Prokofievan inevitabilty, all pain and beauty. Hobart (John) Hughes gathers us on the stage for Station 11 where he’s angled his projector to a screen with a Christ mask which he floods with rapidly morphing, surrounding imagery, creating a kind of furious timelessness, an animated Sydney-Nolan-does-Christ, finally focusing on the face so that it seems to come alive.

The sense of occasion and mystery is heightened at Sation 13 (Jesus is taken down from the cross) by Mary Finsterer’s remarkable Omaggio all pieta (video by Dean Golja) with its rich dramaturgy of voices nasal and guttural evoking some primal, quite foreign Christianity. With 14’s suggestive pairings of artworks and music, and the Song Company in superb voice and a wonderful set of spatial transformations, you didn’t need to be a believer to be moved.

The Song Company, 14: 14 Stations of the Cross, directors Roland Peelman, Neil Simpson; Sydney Town Hall, April 9

Noah’s job of getting pairs of the world’s animals onto the ark must have been a whole lot easier than moving some 1000 people through the streets of Lismore for the final night of NORPA’s The Flood. What could have been an effective tale soon became a distended epic, far removed from the economy of the comic Noah’s Flood of the great mediaeval English Mystery Cycles. But once we got to the riverside for the final act things looked up and that’s where most of the music happened with a small but very effective big band.

The Flood opens at an old school, now an arts centre, video monitors peering out of windows blinking images of the floods that have beset Lismore, accompanied by a projection of a flood level marker. On the ground there’s a truck dressed up like a ship, a modern version of the mediaeval float we recognise from modern street pageants. Neville, The Flood’s Noah, is a former plumber. He’s the town’s mayor and a man with an evangelical mission and a wary wife, in the classical Mrs Noah manner. Before Neville can get things going a 950 year-old prophet, a dirty, hairy man, tumbles from a carboard box, ready to predict the next Lismore flood. Neville’s not interested, he wants the town’s population to follow him on the straight and narrow.

The choir sings neo-gospel and we’re on the way into the back streets of Lismore. A garage door rolls up to reveal a large video screen featuring locals telling their stories of floods past. Neville and team quibble on the float (out of earshot at this point). Pairs of animals played by local children in immaculately made masks pass almost unnoticed through the dense crowd (we get to appreciate them later). We enter the Star Theatre by the fire escape to find it post-flood—the aisles and seats littered with possessions and wreckage, nets decked with photos, and more video footage of disaster, all cast in a grim blue light. A couple of blocks away we stop beneath a bridge with Neville’s float to witness an elaborate tussle between the mayor and the prophet who would like to end his career with a proper death by drowning rather than be recycled through more floods to come. The script hits and misses with the audience, the song delivery is wobbly. There are some nice jibes: “A flood is not a miracle in Lismore.”

Finally we crowd onto the riverbank, flood workers guiding us about, passing sandbags. There’s a band on a stand powering out Michael Hannam’s well crafted, dynamic mix of Latin, jazz and contemporary classical compositions. The old timber building at the end of the road turns out to be an illusion, a giant magical screen transforming variously into shadow plays, broadcasts of flood news and powerful images of swirling waters changing in colour, complexion and power. For Neville the flood is a time for revelation, “to get to know who you are.” But his epiphany is realised as a parade of cut-out white goods and the latest technology, in pairs!

Tension builds as water levels are reported to be rising, ebbing and then building again. Opinions contrast. An expert would like a little flood to see if the new levee will work. An Aboriginal woman tells how her people in the century before last watched in astonishment as the Europeans built down on the flood plain. Shadow figures rescue people and furniture, rushing about against mournful classical-jazz clarinet, bass and drums, with the organ calling forth until thundering, followed by a quick subsiding…Will the flood come? Optimistic partying is evoked by Latin numbers clashing with disturbing video imagery. One way or another, everything is eventually resolved. Neville, lost in the flood, is recovered in person and spirit, and the prophet set free. The question remains on the screen, ‘Can Lismore save itself from another large flood?’ The music parties on.

The Flood had its moments. As a blend of theatre, installation, video and concert it worked best when its images were strong and concise. However, big street theatre of this kind cannot sustain an elaborate script, let alone sometimes convoluted satire. It needs something spare that goes straight to the point and can make many of its points physically. Sure, the big crowd slowed things down until the last act on the riverbank, but the work itself lumbered along regardless of the multitude of talent involved. However, if you want proof that there’s an audience for work on this scale, The Flood was evidence of curiosity, patience and an encouraging sense of community.

NORPA, The Flood, writer Janis Balodis, composer Michael Hannan, director Patrick Nolan, designer Kathryn Sproul, lighting Bernie Tan, sound design Colin Black, instrument builder Steve Langton, visual artist Craig Walsh; Lismore CBD, April 8-10

The inaugural Australian Film Festival was held in Beijing during April and May, screening 10 recent Australian feature films, including Two Hands (director Gregor Jordan, 1998), Black and White (Craig Lahiff, 2002) and Dirty Deeds (David Caesar, 2002). The festival was significant, not so much for the films, but rather as an indication of the way government institutions are trying to set up the conditions for wider co-operation between the film industries of Australia and China.

The week’s events, which included an educational symposium and a series of high-level meetings, were staged by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), as part of a reciprocal arrangement that saw a package of 6 Chinese films tour Australia last year. China’s major government film bodies, China Film Group and China Film Bureau, were co-sponsors of the event.

Paul de Carvalho, director of the Sydney Asia-Pacific Film Festival and vice-president of the Australia-Asia Co-Production Association, hosted the festival opening. He claimed that: “It is extremely important to showcase Australian screen culture in Asia at the moment. It shows that Australia is serious about our 2 countries’ film industries and it continues the momentum created over the past few years to encourage direct co-production opportunities between Australia and China.”

Australian government agencies, led by Austrade, have recently been trying to create the conditions for increased connections with China. These include co-production opportunities, the import of Australian film and television programs (8 Australian films will screen in the Panorama section of the Shanghai Film Festival later this year), and the rising trade in film services which has been vital in sustaining sections of the Australian industry.

Both governments made a show of the importance they attach to this relationship. Madame Zhao Shi, Vice-Minister of State for the Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), the peak film administration body in China, opened the film festival, along with Australia’s Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, Amanda Vanstone who startled everyone with the fruits of her recent Mandarin lessons.

The Australian film industry was represented by Sam Neill, Bryan Brown and a delegation from South Australia, led by SAFC’s new CEO Helen Leake (see p21), the State’s Minister for Trade and managers from production houses Kojo and Guava Visual Effects. Leake said that the South Australians were there to “better understand the current state of play in the changing Chinese film industry and to meet with the main players at both government and, where possible, private level, and understand the inter-relationship between the two.” She said she was looking at co-production joint venture options and the possibility of filmmaker exchanges. As an AFC Commissioner, she was also interested in the possibility of future negotiations for an official co-production treaty.

The involvement of prominent Chinese directors, including Tian Zhuangzhuang (Springtime in a Small Town, 2002), Li Yang (Blind Shaft, 2003) and Liu Bingjian (Cry Woman, 2002) demonstrated the seriousness with which the Chinese film community is looking at connections with Australia. In fact, if you want to talk to a Chinese filmmaker at the moment, the best place to look is Australia. Since the making of He Ping’s 1995 film Sun Valley, Australia has increasingly become China’s preferred location for post-production services, particularly in Dolby sound. In April Zhang Yimou was doing post-production in Australia on House of Flying Daggers, his follow-up to Hero (2002). Feng Xiaogang, one of the hottest commercial directors on the mainland, best known here for Big Shot’s Funeral (2001), has also been in Australia working on a new film. If Chinese filmmakers haven’t been working here, they have been working with Australians who have set up facilities in China. Zhu Wen’s film South of the Clouds, which recently won major awards at the Hong Kong Film Festival, boasts a soundtrack laid and mixed at Melbourne company Soundfirm’s new facilities in Beijing, established in a joint venture with China Film Assist.

The festival in Beijing was preceded by an Australian Film Studies Symposium, hosted by the Beijing Film Academy, the biggest film school in China and famous as the birthplace of the Fifth Generation movement. Representatives from 6 Australian universities, including South Australia’s Flinders University, the Victorian College of the Arts, and the University of Technology Sydney gave papers on aspects of contemporary Australian screen culture and showed work made by their students.

So what’s the significance of events like these? It’s no secret that people have been lining up to criticise the Australian film industry over the past year, creating a general consensus that the forces driving local feature film production have failed to produce much of interest in recent times. The “telling our stories” brand of cultural nationalism has served as the pretext for too many people in the Australian film industry maintaining a stultifying lack of engagement with the rich diversity of film cultures emerging in our region. The more far-sighted view is that taken by companies such as Soundfirm and encouraged by government programs such as this (even as I write this I am amazed at myself for saying something positive about Amanda Vanstone). The idea that you define a national film industry by the small number of feature films made within it has never really been of much value in this country. Let’s start to think of Australian cinema in terms of services and expertise in sound post-production, digital effects and education. Through these services we can also begin to engage with other peoples’ stories.

The efforts of DFAT and Austrade have opened an important dialogue between Australia and China’s film industries. Let’s hope that the AFC and other Australian film bodies have been listening and are prepared to encourage a widened re-definition of national cinema. I like to think of national film industries as reflections of nationally-based concerns, and right now it’s clear that a major concern for many Australians is the need to understand and engage imaginatively with the ferocious processes of change underway throughout Asia. The nature of this engagement may well become the central issue for Australian cinema in the near future.

The debate intensifies

In Sydney there have been 2 recent forums focused on the state of the ABC, a Friends of the ABC Politics in the Pub session and a UTS Transforming Cultures Centre/Currency House seminar, Art by Stealth? The ABC & the Arts. The latter coincided with the launch of Liz Jacka’s comprehensive review of the ABC’s arts failings, commissioned by the Community & Public Sector Union (CPSU). In Melbourne, Fabian Autumn Lectures on the ABC were delivered by Fred Inglis, historian of the ABC with a revealing account of the reduction in ‘arm’s length’ between successive governments and the national broadcaster, and publisher Tony Moore’s incisive depiction of an out of touch ABC. The Artshub website has played a vital role in making these talks promptly available online as well as providing valuable editorial comment. What follows is an edited version of the paper I delivered for the UTS/Currency House forum. It’s an informal introduction to a longer paper on re-imagining the arts in Australia in ecological terms.

Life as a business

Among others, Don Watson in his book Death Sentence: the Decay of Public Language (Knopf 2003) has confirmed for us the appalling degradation wrought on language by managerialism. In education, the arts, sport and other realms, business terminology has invaded and distorted our lives. However, countering it is no mere matter of expunging words.

Accountability, viability, inputs and outputs, benchmarking, risk management, clients and stakeholders, export-readiness, core business, performance indicators and agreements, supply and demand…these surround us. They are rife in everyday speech as well as in bureaucratic esoterica. In a recent Australia Council report, small dance companies are referred to as “microbusinesses” (Resourcing Dance, An Analysis of the Subsidised Australian Dance Sector). Yes, they’re part of a “sector.”

This is a pervasive metaphorical condition in which one system is laid over another. But it not only explains the world in terms of business, it enacts it. It’s not just bad language. Children in schools, sports people and government-funded artists are increasingly entering into performance agreements with their bosses.

Now some of this is not bad. For a creative endeavour like RealTime becoming more business-like has had some real benefits if hard won (see p24). However, “business-like” sums it up, saying much about the governing business metaphor and its appropriacy, not least to art. Business is essentially about making money; art is and is not. In a business course RealTime staff did in 2001, 3 of the 15 sessions were about how to sell your business, not to love it or live it out as your life. Of course, for many business people their work is their life and they love what they do, but it has to make money. For artists this is not necessarily the case, but it is what is increasingly expected of them.

The overarching, metaphor of life as business has been developing for at least 20 years, with the rise of neoliberal, rationalist economics, the spread of ‘user-pays’, the pressure on the public sector to model itself on the private sector, a palpable celebration of greed and the increased push for privatisation—the Commonwealth Bank went from business-like to a business and Telstra is on the way.

Of course art has a sizeable commercial dimension, but the art that many of us care about doesn’t make much money, if any. While it can become more business-like it can’t go the whole way. What’s wrong with that? Well, if the dominant way of thinking is economic, there are things that this metaphoric model can’t explain about art, its makers and its audiences, let alone its costs. This is a system that is mostly incapable of dealing with art except in financial terms. By its very nature business is pragmatic. It is fundamentally conservative: risk is, above all, financial. Innovation must ideally provide a quick return, as in the Federal Government’s conditions recently imposed on research centres—partly rescinded after an uproar of protest. Increasingly the business model discourages risk in the arts as accountability (for ‘tax payers’ money’) takes precedence over vision. The business model takes talent, excellence and creativity as givens, as beyond debate and analysis; it has a limited grasp of the emergence of new forms; and it is incapable of providing a big picture of the arts. The business model cannot explain how integral art is to human nature because it can only comprehend it in terms of utility, or creativity when it is yoked to the word ‘industry.’ Art only becomes intelligible as a product in a market. Neoliberal governments therefore cannot take art seriously and will not properly invest in it, although sometimes encouraged by ‘economic impact of the arts’ surveys.

Better business practices will advantage artists but only if they have the staff and the resources with which to be business-like, and only if the business model doesn’t mess with vision.

There is however a bigger problem. For all its apparent logic and orderliness neoliberal economics is also deeply irrational, as Geoff Davies lucidly illustrates in his immensely readable Economia (ABC Books, 2004). The more we live out the business metaphor in the arts as an actuality, the more we will suffer its debilitating effects. Davies, like many others is turning to an ecological model to explain our economic behaviour and its impact on the quality of our lives and on the planet.

A new metaphor?

Do we really need a metaphorical model for the arts? We are economic animals, and arts animals, and also great users of metaphor as a way of understanding through analogy. We do this much more than you’d think, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have illustrated in their seminal Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago Press, 1980). Metaphor is, of course, elemental to artistic practice but also fundamental to science, for all its claims to the contrary. We’ve inherited from the 19th century a reductionist world view where the body, nature and the psyche are interpreted metaphorically as machines, a system that comfortably accommodates the managerial model. However, alternatives are emerging: “Both the new physics with its stress on self-organising, spontaneous systems, and ecology, with its insistence on the primacy of relationality, are at least potential rivals to the mechanistic paradigm” (Peter Hay, Main Currents in Western Environmental Thought, UNSW Press, 2002).

The ecological metaphor is in the air, it trips off our tongues. It is everywhere in discussions of new media, live art, science and, yes, business (think of shared concepts like sustainability and diversification). In Resourcing Dance, “Maintaining a healthy dance ecology” is listed second to “Promoting individual talent” in the grouping of recommendations.

Ecology is about finding patterns in nature and explaining them, which is what we desperately need for the arts. The good thing about borrowing from ecology is that it entails history and it is interdisciplinary (it can incorporate aesthetic, scientific, psychological, business and economic models from which it sometimes borrows). Ecology explores ideas, like emergence theory, which could have some interesting things to say about the ‘bottom up’ arrival of new artforms, hybrids and art movements (see Dennis Johnson’s Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software, Penguin 2001). And an ecological approach has creative dimensions satisfying for artists. It can address art directly rather than at the second remove of outcomes in the business model. Nor is it simply a matter of analogy. In his book The Blank Slate (reviewed, RT60, p5) cognitive neuroscientist Stephen Pinker urges us, in a dialectic played out between nature and nurture, to address just how much our lives are genetically and instinctually determined—art no less than gender, or politics or violence.

However casually deployed, the ecological metaphor is well and truly with us. But how far can we take it? Can it help us move towards a richer view of the arts? We can address habitat (local and ‘macroecological’ perspectives), the spread (‘dispersal’) of art, issues of ‘fitness’ and survival, emergence of new forms and audiences. Where does Richard Florida’s ‘new creative class’ fit in arts ecology, if at all? What is an audience for an artist? Nutrition? What is a critic? Nutritional or parasitical? Or is the relationship an example of ‘mutualism’ (mutual exploitation by otherwise toxic partners)? Population size is a key topic in ecology, but also the arts: what is the maximum number of (largely impoverished) artists Australia can accommodate (or ignore), how many tertiary arts courses (no wonder the job-oriented Creative Industries model has emerged), how many arts festivals? Are they just the compost from which great work will emerge? Or do they need to be ‘managed’?

Should art ecology be placed second to talent in a list of funding recommendations in a report on dance? American author Howard Gardner, reflecting on Mozart’s genius, has argued that without the right education, audience, artistic milieu and a pre-existing rich musical language for the young composer to engage with, talent might not have flowered into genius. It’s all ecological. A moot point but a reminder nonetheless of the variables that go into nurturing talent, and, more to the point, identifying it.

In the big picture of biodiversity, the issue is what do we preserve to keep the system alive and healthy and renewable. Is it worth supporting less ‘charismatic’ species in order to achieve a more balanced approach? What are the rarities; do we need to protect or rehabilitate them? What of intraspecies competition for limited funds: small companies against large ones in an artform area? The terminology starts to sound funny but the issues begin to constellate into a bigger picture.

Do the arts practice camouflage? Being business-like or community-oriented or running education programs can satisfy government funding criteria and be very valuable to the community but are they really what most artists are about? In the UK arts grants are now mostly conditional on a having ‘community output’ and some companies have adapted well to this requirement, others not.

The capacity to develop and adapt is a key issue eg innovating within existing forms or engaging with other forms (cross-art, multimedia) and absorbing new technologies to create effective hybrids, for which Australian artists have been internationally acclaimed. There is also interspecies adaptation to the emergence of competitive forms, for example infotainment and the rise of lifestyle media in the larger cultural ecology, a major issue for the arts.

The ability to disperse is important, to reach new audiences, realise new income, new responses, new ideas. Australian audiences are small, so artists, the Australia Council, DFAT and producers have worked steadily to explore overseas possibilities. For the Australia Council, this meant something of a switch from the supply to the demand side of the funding model, entailing the creation of the council’s Audience & Market Development Division. Limited arts funding has meant however, tour as they might, artists like Rachael Swain of the Stalker Theatre Company at the recent Australian Performing Arts Market (Adelaide, February) fear that if the primary work is underfunded the capacity to tour could diminish.

Using the ecological metaphor can be both serious and playful. Its main purpose is to defeat the fragmentary and utilitarian view of the arts that dominates, to make connections, to establish overviews of the arts that can be shared and debated. It could also, hopefully, initiate a shift away from the anti-arts elite attitude that came with the 1996 election campaign. This followed close on the heels of Australia Council Chair Hilary McPhee’s admonishment, “the Australia Council is not for artists, it’s for all Australians.” This sentiment was later compounded by the punishing ‘Saatchi & Saatchi Report’ (Australians and the Arts) which in large part seemed to blame artists for the apparently large number of Australians feeling out of touch with the arts. The education of those Australians and their access to the arts might have been critical to their attitudes toward artists.

A business-like ABC

The ABC is increasingly business-like: it doesn’t carry advertising, but it is ratings-preoccupied and relies heavily on a stable of personalities, increasing lifestyle and infotainment programming, and nostalgia, mostly delivered in its unabating commitment to British culture. Its management structure is strictly ‘top down’, reducing the independence of producers and departments.

There are two ways to look at the ABC in terms of the arts, first as an ecosystem in itself (as a maker and reporter of art), and secondly as part of the larger Australian arts ecosystem (commissioning and working with artists, representing Australian art), and of course these systems overlap.

The ABC provides a potentially nutrient-rich habitat, where art is reported and discussed. As Stephen Pinker argues, that’s half of what art is about—our response to and sharing of it. Interviews about and discussions of art are still strengths, if diminished, on Radio National, in the persons of Julie Copeland, Andrew Ford, Alan Saunders (bringing design into the field), Julie Rigg and The Deep End team. But Arts Today, 5 days of week, one hour a day of specialist arts reporting and debate is sorely missed. We now have 2 hours of Life Matters in the morning, and as important as some of that is, we have suffered a serious loss of national coverage of the arts of which there is so little in this country. We are again deprived of a sense of the ecological totality of the arts in Australia.

ABC Television’s Critical Mass is a small breakthrough, broadcast twice on Sundays. Compared with the arts magazines that preceded it, this talking head show is a low budget investment and, like the absorption of audiophonic work and new Australian music on radio into general programming, is typically generalist (and getting more so), that is to say, poor in terms of diversity. As is Triple J’s axing of its arts program Artery in favour of dispersing elements of it through the week as “one or two minute packages” and “occasional weekend specials.” The argument has grown too familiar: “the program only had a small if dedicated following” and “arts shouldn’t be pigeon-holed at a particular time.” The word ghetto has been used in another context to justify the removal of New Music Australia: the result is even further ghetto-isation and possible disappearance.

While this concern for a broader profile for the arts is laudable it also represents a diminution of choice. If you are interested in the arts how do you find out when to tune in? If you’re interested in punk, you’ll know exactly when to tune in—it’s the program replacing Artery. But this is also an issue of species competition: Triple J Station Manager Linda Bracken says, “New Australian Music is our core business.” The result: there is no place for the arts, no fixed address. It’s competition. Similarly the argument for removing The Listening Room from Classic FM was also that it was not a music program, although I would have thought that its credentials in the history of 20th century art and its hybrids would have secured it a permanent space, especially at only one hour per week. What is curious is an across the board generalist approach at a time of maximisation of choice online and on cable and numerous niche developments in most media. Even more worrying is the patronising ‘arts by stealth’ policy, seemingly based on a managerial belief that the arts are unpopular with listeners and viewers and should be presented in disguise.

As Liz Jacka’s report for the CPSU has revealed, an enormous amount of arts coverage has gone missing from the ABC. Certainly this is true of serious film discussion (which had its own significant space on Radio National before the advent of Arts Today). This represents a failure to respond to a film industry urgently in need of debate and profile. Other than SBS’ (now ABC’s) The Movie Show, a dash of Julie Rigg on Sunday Mornings and in The Deep End, and some film coverage on Triple J, what is there? We cannot regard The Movie Show as a serious contribution to Australian film culture. Where is the complementary program that addresses the range of Australian film and at length?

The ABC can also disperse art, spread it about: broadcast art nationally, to Asia, online and on-call to reach larger and larger audiences. But this will need commitment and an exploration of new channels of release. There is a huge archive to draw on which should be made available at minimum expense or free to users. There’s an impressive range of quality documentaries on Australian artists significantly added to over recent years by the ex-head of ABC TV arts, Richard Moore.

There are also other opportunities to screen the work of Australian filmmakers. But ABC TV’s engagement with Australian screen culture is again limited. Short filmmakers, animators and documentary filmmakers are being screened internationally and winning awards. For most Australians they don’t exist, save for a rare glimpse maybe on SBS. Dance film (not the documentation of dance works, but inventive creations often by Australian choreographer-filmmakers) is an emerging form with a growing international profile. Here and there over 20 years, the ABC has helped create film-dance works in this area (eg Microdance) but, and this is the issue, without continuity. In all these respects the ABC is out of touch with the larger arts ecology.

The art the ABC makes itself is to be found in series, telemovies and documentaries, largely co-produced. The second of the much vaunted mdTV music theatre films (the first was the Rachel Perkins directed One Night the Moon, the next is The Widower, with music by Elena Katz-Chernin) is rumoured to be on the way: it’s been a long time between shows. What of the other 2 ‘winners’ in the series? This has been a significant development and a potential boost for the struggling music theatre scene, but like other ABC arts ventures it will doubtless fall prey to discontinuity and fragmentation of vision.

Elsewhere the creative work is in audio art: it’s Radio Eye, inventive documentary essays with an audiophonic edge; The Night Air, a distinctive thematised blend of the audiophonic and documentary; and Radio Drama, an integral part of Australian theatre life, as well as realm for audio innovation. Radio was once a major part of the Australian arts ecosystem: for actors, writers, composers and musicians, for commissions, for performing, for learning about how to produce and innovate. Closing down The Listening Room was tantamount to species extinction. The withdrawal of stereo broadcasting for audiophonic works and radio drama can only be described as habitat deprivation.

We know that governments increasingly control the ABC through financial deprivation and political interference. But the problems to do with the ABC and the arts suggest an internal problem, a suspicion and dislike of the arts as difficult, and a total lack of vision that yields an abhorrent ‘arts by stealth’ strategy. The consequences are a diminution of audience choice and a reduction in the diversity needed to sustain Australian art as the ABC edges out of its cultural obligations, including the very art of radio and television.

Policies for the future

The ABC must develop policies addressing its ‘ecological’ relationship with the arts, as maker, reporter and documenter. It needs to plan for preservation and continuity, diversity and innovation. It must re-establish its relationship with Australian artists as a commissioner and employer. It must re-assess its relationship with audiences, refocussing on choice and encouraging audiences to engage with significant work rather than that which simply ‘rates’. The ABC must commit to a program of innovation, not initially concerned with audience responses, with which to create a sustainable future for itself, bringing new staff, artists and ideas to radio and television. This needs to be an area specifically budgeted for and protected. Yes, some of this will require funds that the ABC does not have, but much of it could be stated as principle and the process of reinstating the arts on the ABC initiated.

Such policies should result in the return of radio drama and experimental work in FM broadcast. This is work of international standing, prize-winning and often innovative and in line with developments in cutting edge new media and hybrid arts, and the work of new as well as established artists.

The overall issue is of reconnecting the ABC with the arts ecology of Australia, not just as a fixit job or ‘reform’, but a re-visioning of the ABC in terms of what art is now (a major discussion in itself), who exactly audiences are, and what precisely is entailed in notions of choice and representation. The thought and vision required cannot come from a managerial model.

UTS Transforming Cultures Centre/Currency House seminar, Art by Stealth? The ABC & the Arts, speakers Martin Harrison, Liz Jacka, Richard Letts, Tamara Winikoff, David Cranswick, Keith Gallasch, Jonathan Mills, April 4. Papers from this forum are to appear online.

In 2002 a Senate Select Committee assembled to investigate claims that the Australian Government had lied to the public over the children overboard affair in the lead up to the 2001 election. The full-house season of CMI—A Certain Maritime Incident is Version 1.0’s latest assault on the “sweaty armpits of the Australian body corporate”, their very own performative inquiry into the murky waters of evidential hearsay and political obfuscation that the 15 days of Senate hearings and 2,200 pages of Hansard produced.

The provocation of CMI lies both in the inflammatory political situation it deals with and the fact that, as performance, it is attempting to critique the very real political machinations that caused the Tampa situation to develop. In this sense, the political theatrics of the nation’s border ‘protection’ measures as played out by Tampa come to bear quite profoundly on questions such as how—and who—are we to engage in a performance of the national shame in which we are all to some degree complicit? It is tricky and dangerous territory. While politicians are masters of playing fiction as truth, of blurring the line between events as they happened and as they were imagined, performers in this context must be careful at every step to tread in just the right places.

Meet then, Peter Reith, roughly 7 years old, reading his statement as to the ‘veracity’ of children being thrown overboard (very cutely spoken into a lie detector by the young performer). As an introductory motif delivered before the backdrop of an inverted Australian flag, the child’s recitation functions as more than a moment of wry mockery. It establishes a performance code in which voices and gestures sifted from the Senate transcript are assumed, dropped and wrestled with as a way of imagining the kind of dubious political operations that can make national headlines alternately happen or disappear.

The performers themselves strike an exquisitely ambiguous relationship to their personas. Not quite complete characters, their tentative attempts at boardroom mannerisms—a pen twiddle, a cup stir, water pouring from a jug—catch us on that peculiar cusp of watching self-consciously coded physicalities and wanting to fall into the world they suggest. Likewise, their repeated spinning on chairs, signalling a comic tedium in the business of Senate proceedings, becomes poetically suggestive of anonymous bodies spiralling into unknown depths.

Samuel James’ widescreen video montage also holds its subject matter at an ambivalent distance. Circling Parliament House like a shark bearing down on its prey, then moving to the grainy interiors of an unnamed vessel at sea, the footage at once indicts the sites in which alleged events occurred and probes them as producers of fictitious national history. Within the theatre proper James’ camera turns its live eye on the performers, positioning their bodies as objects that at any moment can let slip the game.

One very long table pinions the Senators to their lengthy process, yet also spins in the space like a ship giddily changing course. The table lurches alongside the linguistic rhythms of a political charade that is decontextualised and now exists in “quotation marks.” We hear the ridiculous scrapings for definitions that separate recollection from narration, judgement from description. We witness the shield that language becomes as it writes bodies into acronyms such as SUNC (Suspected Un-authorised Non-Citizen) or PII (Potential Illegal Immigrant). We start in horror at the legislative logic that differentiates “these people” from “our culture” in a mission to find an “achievable and warranted” black and white answer.

Punctuated by projected meta-commentary and set against pop that emulates 1980s corporate musak, the performers undercut the sinister rhetorical backflips of the transcript with moments of comic fabrication. They waltz in a medley of mobile phone banter and militantly perform an aerobics class led by Senator Jane Halton. At the peak of their debauchery, a performer lists the group’s rehearsal strategies: “pick a witness…play with storytelling modes…make it boring…make it up.” As Serge Gainsbourg’s sleazy Je t’aime oozes into this heady, drunken climax of Senators toasting “professionalism”, their fluid and flailing antics of invention are starkly cut dry by the final and very real allegations regarding Australia’s involvement in the sinking of SIEV X, in which 353 asylum seekers drowned. As the closing computerised voice of one SIEV X survivor flashes in subtitles across the screen, describing the real horror of the event, it seems that in this party the job of ‘making it up’ carries a heavy responsibility.

So, do we exit politically charged? Do we exit emotionally gutted, paled by the final voice we hear? I admit I twinged with a grim satisfaction. My cheeks rosy from the electric zing of good performance, my political sensibility gorged on the cynical grotesquery that hacks at politicians and makes them swim (or drown) in their own acronymic juices. I wondered what it means exactly to take pleasure in great art that deals with horrific national policy, and even more horrific events. If performance can ‘do’ politics, creating a world in which Senators play their own witnesses is surely how it should be done.

Version 1.0, CMI – A Certain Maritime Incident; performers Danielle Antaki, Stephen Klinder, Nikki Heywood, Deborah Pollard, Christopher Ryan, David Williams; lighting and production Simon Wise, video and design Sam James, dramaturg Paul Dwyer, sound design Jason Sweeney; Performance Space, Sydney, March 26-April 11

Thanatonauts, Navigators of Death, by Brisbane-based cross-cultural and cross-artform performance group Igneous is not a video of a live performance, but rather a video in which the live and the mediated co-habit. The title, inspired by the novel Les Thanatonautes by Bernard Werber, is a blend of Greek words meaning ‘death voyager.’

In this 12 minute video, Igneous explore the country of Death and the idea “that death is not an end in itself but a separation of life into 5 elements: space, earth, water, air and fire.” These elements provide a series of landscapes to be navigated by the performers: James Cunningham (choreographer), Vinildas Gurukkal, Scotia Monkivitch and Simon Adams, all decked out like warriors of the afterworld.

The ingredients for this piece are diverse: a series of pre-recorded interviews conducted with Brisbane locals on the subject of death; contemporary dance; Kalaripayatt, a South Indian martial art with master/performer Vinildas Gurukkal; Zane Trow’s original music, Andrew Kettle’s soundscape and the Brisbane Powerhouse itself. Igneous’ ongoing relationship with this building, both as a venue supporting live arts and as a piece of architecture, is here taken to a whole new level, as it becomes the canvas against which they perform.

The interviewees respond to the implicit but unspoken question: what do you know about death? This question evokes everything from loss and release to “no more chocolate cake.” Particularly compelling are the personal stories that deal with the loss of a family member. The intimacy of these stories yields complex responses: sadness, struggle, fear, respite, happy endings. At first the interviews are delivered as voiceovers, part of the soundtrack to the images. Later the speakers themselves appear. Putting faces to anonymous voices grounds the material and it is this integration of the non-performed with the highly theatrical, the ordinary with the extraordinary that multiplies the resonances of this work.

The physical vocabulary integrates contemporary dance (Cunningham has performed with Dance North and DV8) with Kalaripayatt. Igneous’ Artistic Directors Suzon Fuks (director/editor) and Cunningham, met Gurukkal in 2000 during an Asialink residency in India. Since then they have invited him to Australia twice to conduct masterclasses in Kalaripayatt. His presence is most notable as the ensemble navigates the element of fire. In his mastery of the form, both a spiritual practice and a self-defence, Gurukkal’s is a powerfully grounded persona, endowed with the qualities of a guide on this journey. As the ensemble navigates the other elements, the viewer is led through an array of startling dream-like images that evoke the changing qualities of the elements. The integration and interaction between Kettle’s sound design and Trow’s score casts a delicate web around the action.

About 2 years ago I saw an earlier version of this work in one of the rehearsal rooms at the Powerhouse, which was my introduction to Igneous. The work combined video with live performance, engulfing the audience in a sense of landscape by projecting onto the bodies of the performers and the walls around us. The rawness of this version, its use of space (a memorable moment combined doors and projections to create a sense of access to another world) and the integration of live action and media helped to generate a sense of a third space that is less immediate in the video version. It has been replaced by the integration of the non-performed (in the form of the interviews) and the heightened cinematic quality of the world inhabited by the performers. The third place of this video is equally alien but perhaps a little less visceral; I craved a little more liveness in my Death.

Thanatonauts demonstrates Igneous’ ability to weave together disparate strands and to make each an essential component in the creation of the final product. As director and editor, Suzon Fuks’ command of the material is clearly apparent. Sound and image seem to breathe, rising and falling, precise and deliberate. The ultimate impact of the piece is achieved through an accumulation of information that works at both emotional and intellectual levels. One of the interviewees relates her experience of lying in the ocean and feeling as if water and air were one. For her, this is a perfect evocation of death. This metaphor of oneness captures Igneous’ marriage of form and content.

Igneous, Thanatonauts, Navigators of Death, video director/editor Suzon Fuks, photography Russell Milledge; Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, Feb 15

Kate Denborough, Gerard Van Dyck, Walter Lavarre,
The Day the World Turned Upside Down

When I spoke to theatre maker Tom Wright about his dark neo-pantomime script, Babes in the Wood (Playbox, 2003), he noted 2 major trends which have energised theatrical practice and style throughout history. These may be broadly categorised as “the loose” and “the tight”. Like Wright, Kate Denborough and Gerard Van Dyke of Kage Physical Theatre are strongly drawn to the theatrical traditions of pantomime and vaudevillian performance. With Babes in the Wood Wright was interested in reclaiming the darker aspects of this culture, its slippages and scandals—in short, the ragged political violence and instability of this ‘loose’ theatrical tradition. The relationship of Van Dyke and Denborough to vaudevillian pantomime is very different, as evidenced by their latest work The Day the World Turned Upside Down.

Like the pantomime tradition itself, Kage’s aesthetic consists of a series of bits and pieces, shards and fragments which are sewn together to create a world of comic magic and pleasure. It is partly these tropes and ideas, sensibilities and inspirations, that appeal in Kage’s work. But despite an ongoing interest in an episodic, abstract narrative structure, physical game play and theatrical illusion, Kage’s directors have yet to establish a clear relationship to the styles and genres which they mine and reinterpret. This has contributed to a somewhat uneven and, at times, slipshod feeling to their work. Wright’s interest in ‘the loose’ comes from a specific cultural politics. For him, it ensures that a certain aesthetic and political danger inheres in the performance. ‘Looseness’ is, in short, a tool for the creation of a potentially radical aesthetic. The Marx Brothers’ merciless send up of nationalism and trench warfare in Duck Soup is a good example.

In contrast, Kage are committed to looseness as a virtue in its own right, a relaxed comic feel which gives their otherwise theatrically sophisticated productions populist appeal. Perhaps the most radical aspect of their adoption of changeable structure and format is the implication that this is the language of dreams.

Their take on ‘the loose’ as an ideal accounts for my ambivalence towards Kage’s work. There is no denying the skill of Van Dyke and Denborough as theatre makers, gifted in creating slightly connected, yet intriguing theatrical images which pass before the eyes. But even the best of these images tend not to linger, precisely because the aesthetic politics of their staging remains gentle and light.

It is nearly 7 years since Kage was founded, and their combination of naff humour, physical game play and light surrealism is well established. Their tropes have become readily identifiable. There is the non-theatrical performer, or untrained child, or in the case of The Day the World Turned Upside Down, a delightfully aged veteran of big top performance, Walter Lavarre. There are circus tricks more or, in this case, somewhat less successfully incorporated. And there are the strange moments of bodily transformation, levitation, or other surprises. In this production, Denborough’s dress spontaneously inflates until her rotund form reaches absurd proportions. But what is the point of it all? Perhaps in the end there is no point, and this is the challenge of Kage’s aesthetic: that the strange, the bizarre and the comic will, in the end, recede, allowing audience and performers to return to normality, essentially unchanged.

The Day the World Turned Upside Down received a lukewarm critical reception in Melbourne. For me it seemed like a case of the Emperor’s new clothes. To be sure, The Day was not the company’s best work, but its essential structure and ambience was consistent with earlier pieces. If Kage’s previously lightweight but highly amusing shows satisfied, it is hard say what this latest production lacked which the others possessed. Perhaps it was simply the introduction of text. Theatrical illusion always seems strongest when presented in silence. Nevertheless, for me it is the question of cultural politics that is the most ambivalent aspect of the company’s work. This issue is inseparable from what one wants from comic theatre. If one is seeking something akin to The Lucille Ball Show on stage then The Day and Kage’s other works remain eminently satisfying. If one is looking for something closer to The Young Ones, then Kage’s current way of producing art will leave you dissatisfied.

Kage, The Day the World Turned Upside Down, performers/devisors Kate Denborough, Gerard Van Dyke, Walter Lavarre; lighting Niklas Pajanti, design Paula Lewis, sound David Franzke, special effects Gordon Wilson; North Melbourne Town Hall, April 3-18

The Art ’n Death Trilogy consists of 3 plays from writer Adam Cass and director Bob Pavlich, each exploring the work and demise of a theatre artist: early Russian avant garde director Vsevolod Emilievich Meyerhold, fictional Australian bush poet Bill Johnson and British shock Absurdist playwrigth Sarah Kane. The staging of this ambitious project is excellent, with Pavlich’s mostly ‘Australian burlesque’ direction, John Ford’s almost neo-Constructivist lighting of strong red blocks and footlights played against a demystifying use of simple white light, and masterful scoring drawing particularly on film music. There is also an impressive, mostly young cast. Art ’n Death is a bold, superbly realised project exhibiting great sophistication in its performative dramaturgy. It is enjoyable, funny and gripping. However, it’s a flawed masterpiece, its manifold pleasures paradoxically masking the problems of the writing and manipulation of concepts.

Have Dreamed of a Time, featuring Bill Johnson, and The Anniversary of the Death of Sarah Kane are stylistically closest, sharing a rough and ready episodic, comedic structure which, especially in Have Dreamed, seems straight out of the larrikin avant gardism pioneered by John Romeril and others at the Pram Factory in the 1970s. This works well for Bill Johnson, who is an amalgam of cliches about Australian writing from Ray Lawler to Robert Johnson, early David Williamson, and Les Murray-style blokey populism. The character’s anxious turning-over of Australian national identity is particularly of this era, but there is little which signposts, let alone addresses, the dated nature of this material.

This otherwise extremely skilful exhumation and caricaturing of national writing is interwoven with a drama about the character’s inability to deal with the ridiculous deaths of his family: his baby brother backed over by the parental automobile and his young daughter loudly protesting the stupidity of her situation as she is eaten by the neighbours’ lizards. The rollicking insanity of these scenarios, including a farcical representation of the afterlife presided over by a boozy, has-been vaudevillian hostess, gives Have Dreamed a wonderful sense of corrosively acidic fun. The final revelation that Bill has retreated into imagining the scenes which the audience sees on stage so as to escape reality seems, however, to replicate the very culture of anti-intellectualism which 1970s Australian art attacked.

Kane moves only slightly forward historically, to the increasingly politicised styles of queer cabaret which married drag with performance art from the 1960s (Valerie Solanas, Divine, Andy Warhol’s Factory scene and later Britain’s Neil Jordan). The addition of a wonderfully sexy, philosophic and camp Mae West (who composed scurrilous gay and transvestite burlesques) pulls us further into the past. Former enfant terrible of British theatre, playwright Edward Bond, also appears, as a coolly charismatic analyst of social violence. This deliberately ahistorical melange recalls Jordan’s work, as well as less cohesive combinations such as Velvet Goldmine (director John Cameron Mitchell, 2001) and Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Todd Haynes, 1998).

Bond is an eminently suitable comparison for Kane, Britain’s only recently deceased angry young woman playwright, being both a theatrical avant gardist and a social realist. The addition of Mae West, though fun, is less well handled. Kane includes a fantastic scene where Bond cautions the baby Kane about social evil, before removing her from her pram and stoning it, recreating the scene from his scandalous Saved (1965). West, however, is never situated with respect to Kane, and both her inclusion, as well as the choice of Kane material featured here, emphasises her banal attempts at sexually, physically and verbally shocking theatre and dirty realism. The less derivative, neo-Beckettian language of Kane’s best piece, Crave (1998), is largely absent here, causing Kane to appear merely as the theatrical equivalent of the bad boys and grrls of contemporary British visual arts featured in the Sensations exhibition—a Tracey Emin of the stage. If this is all Kane was, then such a play about her is hardly justified.

The difficulty with the Meyerhold piece, Fainting 33 Times, goes to the heart of the trilogy’s intent. As a Communist and sometime Constructivist artist devoted to a new radical aesthetic whose very form was to dramatise the essence of the human biological machine, its social status, and the culturally-imposed impediments on the maximisation of its bio-rhythmical structures, Meyerhold makes a perverse subject for a play about the “psychological world” of the individual artist. After an initial, superb section which lovingly recreates the incomparable idiomatic physical music and intonations of Meyerhold’s theories about performance, Fainting degenerates into a Fellini-esque personal drama in which the staging’s grotesque carnivalism represents the character’s sense of guilt over failing to oppose Stalin (unfairly, given Meyerhold famously and fatally did so in a 1939 speech) and for breaking under torture. As with Having Dreamed, this replicates the venerable anti-intellectual cliche that such scenography can only represent a disordered or deluded mind. Meyerhold himself would denounce The Art ’n Death Trilogy as reactionary bourgeois art for focusing on the individual psyche. Nevertheless, in sketching the personae of 3 very different artists through a montage-like performance, Art ’n Death creates a compelling sequence of theatrical events and scenarios.

The Art ’n Death Trilogy, writer Adam Cass, director Bob Pavlich, various performers, designer Paula Lewis, lighting John Ford, sound RL Beard; Trades’ Hall, Carlton South, Melbourne, May 8-23

You don’t play the beat where it is. You draw a picture away from the beat right up to its core with different notes of different sounds… so continuously that the core is always there for an open mind.

These words from jazz musician Charles Mingus introduce the program for A Love Supreme, Circa’s premiere production under its new name, Circa: Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus Ensemble. The name change reflects the company’s aim to “head towards new circus horizons” and this production continues a venture begun with Sonata for 10 Hands and Figaro Variations in creating a new dialectic of music and circus.

In A Love Supreme, artistic director Yaron Lifschitz takes on jazz, but it’s not your cruisey type jazz. We’re talking Mingus’s angular and discordant The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, a disturbing and demanding work offering the type of centreless challenge Mingus evokes in his words above. The music is confronting enough, let alone in conversation with circus. Bravely, Circa opens this improvisational show with 35 minutes of it. Matched with restless large-screen projection of animated text, the music and design overwhelm the performers as they try to display their tricks, interact with the screen text and complete their acts. Equally challenged is the audience attempting connections, not quite knowing if or when to applaud. We’re only partially comforted by the fleeting appearance of a message onscreen; “I feel no need to explain.”

This is courageous but difficult work for performers and audience alike and when the first act finishes with spinning china plates coming to their crashing ends in a suddenly silent theatre, there is immense relief. It’s like the first act split us open: the onstage onslaught and incompleteness jarring all too well with our complicated, imperfect lives. Feeling vulnerable, we accept the melancholic “spiritual quest” of act 2 with John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Four upstage spots allow for the improvisational antics to continue, but Coltrane’s saxophone offers a more poetic narrative with which to connect. The projection screen is softened with sepia realtime footage of lone figures performing centre stage: a man lying on the floor juggling, a woman caressing her hoops in a dance of strange solitude.

Some momentary images are extraordinary: in low light the spinning hoops create fascinating horizontal patterns across the moving body. And a high impact fragment is created when a couple form a feverish writhing sculpture of co-dependency within a single hoop while, across the stage, a man sits straight-spined and impassive on a chair as a woman teeters precariously on the chair’s back. He leaves, she stays, and the chair miraculously stays upright.

The contrasting acts of A Love Supreme are complementary, but with an uneasy tension—beyond what was intended—in the Mingus piece. Improvisation demands limitless energy and a confident intuition for the spontaneous ebb and flow of making work with an audience in situ. While the piece is about the very ideas of chance, fragmentation, and centrelessness, the ensemble’s improvisation (modelled on jazz techniques) felt much too tentative. The risks still felt too high for the performers to fully embrace the challenge of the improvisational and many tricks (apart from the intentionally incomplete) were miffed as a result. Then again it was a nervous first night and the show will undoubtedly grow. It made me think, however, that perhaps one of the fundamentals of circus, no matter how ironically self-reflexive and discipline-shattering, is the opportunity for performers to display unfettered skill. Somewhere amongst all the gaping unease and thwarted desire this important new work evoked, we still revelled, if fleetingly, in the human body amazing.

Circa, A Love Supreme, creator Yaron Lifschitz and the Circa Ensemble, performers Darcy Grant, Chelsea McGuffin, David Sampford, Rockie Stone; The Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Brisbane, March 31-April 10, North Melbourne Town Hall, July 28-Aug 14

Two productions for young people, Arena Theatre Company’s intimate Outlookers and Windmill’s epic The Snow Queen, are very different works, but both tackle contemporary issues to do with the child’s connection with the real and the virtual: one looks at the toy as virtual companion, the other at the computer game as alternative reality.
Anthea Davis, Outlookers

Outlookers

Arena’s Outlookers is about the anxieties of separation: friend from friend, child from parent, self from soul, human from animal. Young Tina loses her best friend who was moved away (the anguish is laid on with a musical trowel) and is obliged to work with the disagreeable Tom on a school project about endangered animals. The boy is short of a father, whom he variously projects as a train driver, a veterinarian, and a friend his own age. At a financially depleted zoo for rescued animals, the keeper’s beloved seal has its soul sucked out of it (a chilling moment) by a capitalist villain who downloads animal souls into a popular series of collectible toys called Outlookers. The Sealtor, a seal version of this toy, possesses Tom, using him to voice its plea for help. The children set out to rescue the real seal, in the course of which they have to deal with each other, their schoolteacher, Miss Walbury (in drag with a pink wig and large spectacles—a more than passable version of Elton John from Kevin Hopkins) who is a secret Outlookers collector, and the quipping villain (the same dextrous Hopkins). Kicked out of a zoo at the age of 3 “for sneezing on the feet of a butterfly” the crook is now head of the Outlooker Corporation. Kids, he says, are not interested in animals any more: it’s all computers and toys. The children enter a fantasy world where the boy conjures life-sized Outlookers to do knockabout battle with the villain. Alexis the seal is saved and heads out to sea with his friends. Boy and girl bond as do the zookeeper and schoolteacher.

Outlookers is entertaining enough, its young audience quietly attentive, its jokes hit and miss, its best humour physical, its songs a ragbag of styles (nothing to really sweep us along or stay with us). There are some striking costumes and hand puppets and the design is intriguing. A couple of large vibrating inflatables occupy much of the stage space, popping up additional shapes that suggest a cat, a seal, a zebra, a giant chicken and a kangaroo paw as well as various landscapes.

The curious thing about Outlookers is its stance on toys. We’re never sure what Outlookers are: simply toys with that little something extra, soul? But what does that mean? Are they techno-toys of some kind? We don’t know. The concept is incomplete. They’re not the Daemons of Philip Pulman’s stunning trilogy, His Dark Materials, souls made manifest. Certainly Outlookers are regarded as somehow bad, like mass-produced collectibles (Pokemon etc), and quite unlike real animals. However, as children we invest dolls with life, seeing them as real companions, not mere puppets. Presumably in the world of this play there are good toys and bad, capitalist toys. Compounding the confusion is the actual appeal of the Outlookers, whether as the Sealtor that speaks through Tom, or the attractive Spotiquoll and the wonderful Bat, or the Crocturaus, a hand-operated marvel that finally drives its maker, the capitalist, away. Nor is it clear why the Outlookers turn on their creator. Is it their animal spirits? It’s even less clear why, in the printed program, Arena encourages children to go online and create their own Outlookers!

Arena has a strong track record in creating large scale works that deal with the implications of technology while employing it themselves in a liberating way. I wondered what they’d make of robot toys (such as the Aibo robot dog) that are becoming increasingly popular beyond Japan and in which not only children but adults invest so much of themselves?

The Snow Queen

Windmill’s The Snow Queen is an ambitious meld of conventional theatre and new media performance. It’s an uneasy meeting if one rich in possibilities. The familiar problems of integration so common in this area (but overcome now by many artists) are only too evident here. The issue is not of technology but of its deployment. And if you’re going to use it, you have to commit yourself to it, and believe in it, even if part of your vision is critique.

In this version of the Hans Christian Andersen tale, the boy Kay (Cameron Goodall) is seduced by computer games—he’s a ready victim for the Queen’s icey, virtual, warrior game world. However, he and his friend Gerda’s (Nuala Hafner) reality is a warm, storybook, cut-out world, firmly rooted in 19th century illustration (and, here, theatre design too), a thoroughly old-fashioned place and as virtual in its own way as computer games. Already the narrative is creaking under the weight of didacticism. Whatever its problems, computer gaming is gaining status as an art form (as did film in the 20th century) and as an implement of dissent (Escape from Woomera), but here’s a play that uses the thrills of big projections of live interactive game playing to condemn it in no uncertain terms. And because the creators of The Snow Queen don’t believe in the technology they’re only too happy to exploit, they create a huge vacuum at the centre of the work.

While Gerda’s journey to save her friend is full of adventure, colour and invention, the game Kay plays is no game at all. It is the merest impression of a game. The drama of the Kay scenes is in the Faustian bargaining away of his soul with the Queen, it is not about the virtual world he wants to heroically inhabit: “I will match myself against the universe.” Although some of the game imagery is striking, neither the production’s writer nor new media artist have developed it as a world and certainly not as a seductive one for Kay or for the audience. The moral debate central to this version of the story is killed off before it is begun.

There is however visual power in the animated Queen, an eerie, androgynous 3D digital puppet (manipulated and voiced from the side of the auditorium in view of the audience), and also in the images of fragmentation, shards of ice and mirror, and, finally, her collapsing mask of authority. As other artists have discovered, a vocabulary of relationship needs to be established between live and virtual character in terms of space and scale on the stage. The unsolved problem, for example, of establishing an eyeline between Kay and the Queen, and of making real their kiss, lessened the power of their exchanges.

Gerda is an unwilling heroine, but prompted by her Gran (Nancye Hayes in a rather awkward good-witch-cum-narrator doubling), journeys in search of Kay, encountering the engaging world of a flower man and his entourage (bringing the audience to life at last!), some wonderfully comic birds (taking me back to the cartoon Heckle and Jeckle of my childhood) and a very strange young robber girl (unusually contemporary in garb and manner, and strongly played by Amber McMahon) and her ghastly tall-tree companions. The wary Gerda asks the girl, “Aren’t you scared to be so free?” Amidst all this drollery, eccentricity and colour, Kay’s world looks less than exciting. Gerda soon finds Kay and weepily rescues him by bringing her heart into play, her tears washing away the ice. Eternity is revealed as a sweeping view of the cosmos and the pair return to their old-fashioned world having “seen inside time.” Really? The dissolution of the Queen is a visually striking climax, but the stage drama is maudlin. What challenges to freedom has Gerda faced? The conjunction of 19th and 21st century narratives, images and values is an uneasy one in The Snow Queen.

Arena Theatre Company, Outlookers, director Rosemary Myers, co-writers Rosemary Myers, Lally Katz, designer Jeff Raglus, costumes Laurel Frank, composer Hugh Covill; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, April 14-25; Windmill, The Snow Queen, director Julian Meyrick, writer Verity Laughton, composer Darrin Verhagen, virtual world creator Wojciech Pisarek, design Mark Thompson, lighting Nigel Levings; Sydney Theatre, April 21-May 9

Victory is history in close-up. In the intimacy of the Wharf 1 Theatre, directors Judy Davis and Benjamin Winspear have realised an aptly gruelling and exhilarating production of Howard Barker’s great play. The totality of the playwright’s vision, his arresting linguistic invention, the actors’ taut ensemble playing and the enveloping sound design make for a uniquely immersive experience. The play is a fiction, but it is based on enough history to make it just that much more discomfiting as writer and directors load onto the shoulders of its audience, without concession, all the unbearable weight of being and wills it to endure. By the end, the smallest glimmer of hope and personal restoration is liberating, but the darkness of loss and brutal compromise refuses to disperse. The exhilaration the audience feels is twofold: awe at the art and joy that so damning a vision can allow at least one of its characters some grace.

In Victory the certainties of monarchy and revolution have both collapsed. In the aftermath of the Restoration— of Charles II to the English throne—monarchists and parliamentarians blunder towards jointly forming a new state. The balance of power shifts mightily, bloody vengeances are perpetrated, modern banking is uneasily initiated (as the middle class attempts to control the spending of its king) and chaos threatens at every turn. This unpredictability generates sustained tension and sometimes unbearable suspense as choices are debated, bargained, forced and made, coolly or crazily. The play’s full title is Victory, Choices in Reaction.

Parliament has begrudgingly agreed to Charles’ demand that those who beheaded his father, Charles I, be themselves executed. Bradshaw (Judy Davis), middle class and Puritan, is the wife of one of them, a leading revolutionary polemicist. She wants to bury her husband’s remains despite the government’s utter refusal, setting out on a journey to claim the body, risking murder, surviving rape and inveigling her way into the royal court as a servant. Bradshaw’s determination is blessed by clarity of vision, a capacity to go bluntly to the core of things. It is borne of the bitter years of revolution, the brutalities wrought by her husband’s dogmatic politics and her growing knowledge of the emotional and physical distance that there was between herself and man she loved. Her encounter with John Milton, another revolutionary polemicist (and ardent woman-hater), epitomises her attitude to her husband rather than to the great, blind poet when she belts him across the face and revels in the satisfaction. Soon, the body of the executed husband, what there is left of it, will not be as important to Bradshaw as coming to understand herself.

In the end, bereft of status, her home burned to the ground, Bradshaw is living with Ball, her Cavalier rapist, “a broken man” after his misjudged assassination of the banker Hambro. The unlikely pairing is part of Barker’s vision of the way forward, as people are dragged out of narrow worlds into more complex ones. At first appearance Ball is all ugly threat, by the end we have understood the depth of his feeling and disaffection. Similarly, Barker can portray the Duchess of Devonshire as someone with the values of Margaret Thatcher but in the next moment demand we attend to the horrors of her endless, failed child-bearing and the knot of love this mistress feels for the King. Charles himself falls from self-belief into a depression bordering on madness; he is a man deprived of the absolutism he desires. Throughout her journey, Bradshaw is accompanied by Scrope, her husband’s secretary. His crippling guilt and his blind loyalty to the dead ideologue throw into relief Bradshaw’s pragmatism, her capacity to learn and to separate herself from the past.

The performers inhabit Barker’s language as if truly their own, running with its staccato rhythms and embodying its patterned, tense altercations. There’s a barely repressed visceral quality in the performances, all the more frightening when it erupts. In its midst is Davis’ Bradshaw, often still and relatively quiet amidst the constant swirl of activity, but ever determined, learning and decisive. It’s a superb performance as is Colin Friels’ account of Charles, alternating helplessly between authority and passivity. Marta Dusseldorp’s Duchess is a challenging creation in its mix of arrogance and personal pain. As Bradshaw’s son, disaffected by the ruin the revolution has brought his education and career, Glenn Hazeldine conveys in a finely nuanced performance the adolescent petulance and adult despair that remove him from his mother’s love. John Gaden’s Scrope is a complex portrait of agonising self-deception and David Field’s Ball is a remarkable account of the forces underlying apparent villainy.

All of the performers, save Davis, create a number of characters, with Syd Brisbane, Peter Carroll, Genevieve Lemon, Martin Jacobs and Chris Heywood fleshing out smaller roles with great conviction (no one is minor in this play). Colin Friels doubles as Milton in a crucial moment. The scene where Heywood plays one of the bankers who wants his gold out of the government vault so that he can fondle it is hilarious, as well as a true marker of a historical moment in the managing of the economy (historically later than the play’s setting, but entirely appropriate). Paul Charlier’s sound score admirably evokes spaces and events around and beyond the spare set and Nick Schlieper’s lighting casts moments of radiance amidst the prevailing gloom.

Victory is one of the best theatre productions seen in Sydney for many years. Its power is partly derived from its acuity as historical recreation. Barker is a trained historian, however his aim is not to write history plays as such, rather to reflect on the present. As he told Jo Litson, the play was written during Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power in Britain: “I was interested in how moral change occurs in people and how politics and the dissolution of certain politics provokes and produces that…If you don’t know your history, you don’t know the present” (The Australian, April 20). Even more of the power of this play from 1983 comes from its resonance with subsequent history, in Bosnia, Kosovo and elsewhere where neighbour turned on neighbour. Judy Davis and the STC are to congratulated on staging the play. Except for Brink Productions’ commitment to Barker (including their co-production with the UK’s Wrestling School of The Ecstatic Bible in the 2000 Adelaide Festival) too little of this writer’s work is seen in Australia. In a more enlightened time, this astonishing production would tour the country.

Sydney Theatre Company, Victory, Choices in Reaction, writer Howard Barker, directors Judy Davis, Benjamin Winspear, designer Peter England, costumes Tess Schofield, lighting Nick Schlieper, composer Paul Charlier; Wharf 1 Theatre, opened April 20

Christine Johnson is a true chanteuse—a singer who may not startle from a technical perspective (though there is much technique) but rather with her very presence and interpretation of material. In her latest offering at The Studio, Johnson is joined by dancer Lisa O’Neill to create the gently peculiar Pianissimo.

Firmly rooted in the cabaret genre, the piece knits together a selection of the favourite songs of Madam Thumbalina (Johnson), a diva suffering some kind of non-specified crisis. She is also burdened by a new accompanist (O’Neill) whose pixie-like character torments and coaxes the Madam out of her stasis. The progression of Madam Thumbalina’s emotional thawing/healing is literally strung together with the conceit of some big green beads/peas, which first appear as O’Neill’s coveted necklace, then roll across the stage or pop up in mystical places to punctuate each section.

Johnson writes in the program that she has always been fascinated by the fairytale of the Princess and the Pea, and it operates well here as a grounding device, highlighting the idea that it is agitations and aggravations that make a person who they are. Overall this metaphor works to the dramaturgical advantage of Pianissimo’s subtleties and ironies. However the addition of the metaphoric power contained in each of the songs makes for a few too many resonances and a sometimes unfocused feel.

Not that Johnson hasn’t chosen some great songs. She opens with a remarkably quiet, a capella version of Lilac Wine that stands up to the classic versions by Nina Simone and Jeff Buckley. She wanders through varied musical territory, from nursery rhyme to The Velvet Underground to The Prodigy. Laurie Anderson, a clear favourite is allowed 2 numbers, and the bondage mistress interpretation of Black Cat Nights combined with O’Neill’s deft choreography is definitely a highlight. Vocally, Johnson is most interesting in the lower, quieter parts of her register, which allow her more room for interpretation. This is augmented by some beautiful musical arrangements by Brett Collery, particularly in the Anderson pieces. Though the irony was not lost, I could have lived without Somewhere from West Side Story as the finale—perhaps a matter of personal taste.

Pianissimo is a visually stunning work. To say that Johnson is statuesque is an understatement and with O’Neill barely reaching chest height they create a constantly engaging duo. Much of O’Neill’s choreography works with the music, but its true strength is evident when she seems to work against it, using stark geometries that add a darker tone to the work.

The costumes are magnificently gothic and surprise with all manner of conversions—O’Neill’s skirt is ripped off to reveal a go-go dancing outfit, and Johnson turns the skirt into a cloak creating an extraordinary image of bat-like majesty. The set is spare, utilising only a tiny red piano for Lisa O’Neill to straddle and tumble over, but is augmented by the dynamic and highly specific lighting designed by Matt Scott and realised by Jo Currey, which for the most part creates vivid atmospheric shifts although it has the occasional tendency to draw too much attention to itself.

Pianissimo is a bemusing entertainment, a distinctive cabaret/musical theatre/dance hybrid. Misgivings about elements of its structure are easily forgotten given the visual opulence and the sheer strength of these 2 intriguing and idiosyncratic performers.

Pianissimo, devisers/performers Christine Johnson, Lisa O’Neill; The Studio, Sydney Opera House; May 12-22

The world of war first enters through our ears in Song of Ghosts: the chilling, heavy, sharp tread of army boots along the nearby road draws close. Soldiers course through the courtyard audience belting out their ‘grunt’ chorus, a litany of fear and helplessness and a denial of moral responsibility, expressed with relentless mechanical vigour and battering volume. We are ordered after the troop into the theatre, a smoking, nightmarish installation of ruin and carnage, littered with TV monitors, saturated with the rumble and misery of war. This is the Trojan War, played not as widescreen historical fantasy but as an immersive, familiar war of the moment, part graphically horrific, part mass-mediated, if sharing with the movie Troy the same Achilles-Hector slice of Homer’s Iliad.

Two entwining forces consume us in Song of Ghosts: the sustained physical power of the performances en masse and solo, and the sound world they inhabit. This is PACT Youth Theatre working at a new level of intensity and precision, partly the result of the training of the imPACT ensemble, partly the presence of students from the Charles Sturt University theatre course in this production, and certainly driven by the current artistic directorship of Regina Heilmann and Chris Murphy and aided by Lee Wilson’s well-defined movement direction. The sound is an organic mix of the performers’ choral strength, the dark melancholy and pain of the live music (composed for Nexas Sax Quartet by Margery Smith) and the sound design (Gail Priest) with which it fuses. These merge in an anxiety-inducing, hollowing out of the world on a vast battle field. This is truly a song of ghosts, a music theatre of the dead haunting the present.

The physical performance dynamically contrasts the unnerving momentum of military and mob movement with smaller, occasional tableaux of isolation, despair and intimacy beside persistent images of characters locked into obsessive states of being. Amidst the marching and chanting, the group assaults and murders, mass panics and near desertions, individuals anchor the Iliad story—Helen with her endless lascivious gyrations, the caged Cassandra’s possessed writhings, a television reporter’s deadpan delivery of the hyperbolic Homeric narrative, and the unpredictable Achilles, all restless rock’n’roll machismo and charisma.

As much as this is Homer’s story it also belongs to Bosnia, to Kosovo and Iraq, whether referenced in video images or in language that without notice shifts gear from classical imagery to, for example, “three generations of the the Zubayev family were shot to death in their backyard” as Patroclus is strung up by Hector’s soldiers. We are told the origins and practices of the sniper (paralleled in Homer with a Trojan master archer singling out an important Greek target) and there is entertainment for the troops from an affecting, androgynous singer. The homoerotic wrestling match between Achilles and Patroclus for the former’s armour is fought over a leather jacket. Present and semi-mythic past become parallel universes.

Song of Ghosts is immersive, if you roll with it and let the wartime delirium set in. Even if you know your Iliad you’re pretty soon adrift in the cut and paste script (borrowings from various sources along with some original writing). After some initial “Who?” and “What?” mutterings, the young audience around me in a packed house settled into the viscerality of the production with its constant delivery of new images of horror and grieving, and were likely to later identify in a new way with Helen’s “There was a world…or was it a dream?” Performances sometimes teetered precariously on the edge of melodrama as did the production overall, relentlessness at nearly every level. But if Song of Ghosts took no prisoners it nonetheless made us willing victims to its consistency of vision, to its song of horror and of a war in which we as a nation are currently complicit.

PACT Youth Theatre & Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Song of Ghosts, director Regina Heilmann with Chris Murphy, movement Lee Wilson, dramaturg/writer Bryoni Trezise, composer Margery Smith, musicians Nexas Sax Quartet, sound design Gail Priest, set/costume design Kate Shanahan, lighting Shane Stevens, slides Heidrun Löhr, video Samuel James; PACT Theatre, April 15-25

In the history of the Sydney underworld, the names Sally Anne Huckstep and Warren Lanfranchi have taken on the aura of legend. Lanfranchi, gunned down in the back streets of Chippendale, has been canonised by a new generation with the naming of an alternative warehouse artspace in his honour—The Lanfranchi Memorial Discotheque. The story of his girlfriend Sally Anne Huckstep—found dead in a pond in Centennial Park—has recently been used as the inspiration for performance artist Hannah Furmage’s Scoring Dope For Sally, as part of Artspace’s durational performance series.

Durational performance is physically and mentally challenging at the best of times, however Furmage pushed this close to its limits as she lay fully submerged in a fishtank full of live (and eventually not so live) eels. In a wetsuit to prevent hypothermia, hooked up to an aqualung, sporting high heels and long blonde wig the image was certainly impressive, and awe-ful. The underwater sounds were sampled and manipulated live by Wade Marynowsky to great effect, with bubbles breaking down to static and a melodic drone that always seemed to suggest something very, very bad was about to happen. There was a sense of parody about Scoring Dope For Sally—a reflexiveness about the idea of durational performance—just how hardcore can you get without chopping off vital appendages? But the image suceeded in creating a lingering anxiety. The knowledge that the physical act was incredibly uncomfortable created a keyhole of pathos into the image and the story itself—an empathetic unease. The gently floating body, tendrils of hair mingling with the lithe eels and autumn leaves seemed bizarrely peaceful in contrast to the implied violence. The resonances of the aquarium setup piqued a disturbing sense of voyerusim.

At what point do famous stories and images become public property? The Huckstep family, hearing of the “play” being put on at the “Artspace Theatre” (The Sun Herald) objected to the unauthorised use of Sally’s story. But, sympathy for the family aside, how can you stop part of a city’s collective imaginings being used as impetus for an artwork? The threat of legal action proved toothless and the performance went on, complete with rottweiler and bouncer on the door enhancing the underworld feel—a fine example of durational performance in which the effect of the imagery itself was as strong as the shock tactic of the performative mode.

As a former lawyer with a passionate commitment to social justice, it is appropriate that producer Michael McMahon has focused on documentary film. The search for the kernel of truth at the heart of any story is what first drew him to the form. Since forming Big and Little Films with director Tony Ayres ( Walking on Water, 2002) 4 years ago, he has produced an impressive array of award-winning works, with Thomson of Arnhem Land (director John Moore, 2000) and Wildness (director Scott Millwood, 2003, RT60, p17) both earning AFI Awards. If there is a common element in the films McMahon has produced, it is their concern with people forced to fight for what they believe in.

In the 1980s I had a law practice and a lot of friends who were involved in the arts. I wasn’t going to have a stellar career as a lawyer so I thought I should find something I could do with a lot more passion. So in 1988 I produced a short film, Cruel Youth (1988). After that I went to work at the Arts Law Centre of Australia, focusing on the legal aspects of arts practice, and that has helped me enormously as I’ve moved more into producing over the last 6 or 7 years.

All your projects in recent times have been documentaries. Was this a conscious decision?

It was. After the success of Sadness [director Tony Ayres, 1999, based on William Yang’s stage performance of the same name] I was very keen to explore documentary as a form of story-telling with that core centre of truth. I enjoy the process of making documentaries and working with the writer and director to get to the crux of the story.

Your company profile states you are committed to creative partnerships between script writers, directors and yourself. How does this creative partnership play out in the actual making of a film?

I see my role as one of facilitation and support for the story-teller. Facilitation inasmuch as the writer/director has come up with the idea and as a producer I then have to facilitate the bringing of that story to the screen. That involves commenting on the script, getting whatever help is needed to improve the script, and facilitating the production in terms of finance. In our system it has to be attached to a market, so I have to think about the audience this documentary is going to appeal to. When that’s done and it’s time to actually make the film, I have to support the writer/director through that process: putting together a good crew and ensuring they work in a cohesive way, and then supporting the director through the actual shooting. Then there’s the post-production process, where I’ve always been happy to leave the editor and director in the edit suite until they’re ready to show me a rough cut.

Do you find yourself very involved in on-the-ground work during the actual shooting phase?

I think in documentary it’s often inevitable that as a producer you are pretty hands on. And I suppose that’s the role I’ve wanted to assume. I’ve been keen to learn and understand the process of making a documentary, and the only way I’ve been able to do that is actually be out there, on top of Mount Wellington in Hobart at 6:30am, trying to co-ordinate an aerial shot with cast and crew. You need to do that to know what everyone is going through.

To date with all the documentaries I’ve made I have been approached about being involved and I’ve made an assessment about the project. I guess I look for an intuitive personal response to the human story and the human journey that particular subject has undertaken. I think there’s always something about the core of the story that relates to my personal experience. And I have to be able to see that this story will work, educate and inform and possibly even change the views of audiences.

Have you felt the pressure to conform to what the broadcasters want in choosing your projects?

Yes. I think there has been a fundamental shift in documentary making in this country over the last 15 years or so to an almost absolute dictation by the broadcasters as to what gets made. That’s through the pre-sale system, which is really the only way you’re going to get a documentary made in this country. In the 80s documentary makers were able to make films and take them to the broadcasters. But that’s almost impossible now—we absolutely rely on pre-sales.

Have you had to knock back projects because you felt you wouldn’t be able to sell them to a broadcaster?

If it’s something I’ve felt really strongly about then generally I’ve taken it on, but not always with success. For example, there was a project called Pretending, which is about a gay man who was convicted of a murder here in Victoria about 5 years ago. It’s about the way the justice system deals with difference. I feel really passionate about that particular story, but we haven’t been able to get a pre-sale.

Would you agree with the prevalent view that a creeping conservatism at SBS and the ABC is limiting the potential for innovation in the documentary sector?

I think as a general statement yes, I would agree with that, but every now and then you get one under the radar. Last year I was executive producer on a documentary about 2 gay men [Man Made—The Story of Two Men and a Baby] who entered into a surrogacy arrangement through an agency in the United States and had a child who they brought back to Australia. It was pretty confronting subject matter, directed by Emma Crimmings in her first full-length documentary. I think the articles in the press and the publicity around the broadcast of that documentary did challenge the current prevailing notions of family. And I think SBS is absolutely to be applauded for supporting the making of a film like that. But I think overall there has been a much more conservative approach to documentary subject matter by both the public broadcasters in recent times.

What’s your perception of the current state of Australian documentaries in general?

I think generally film and television activity in this country is at a low and inevitably the documentary sector is part of that. But I think there’s a core of wonderful documentary makers. If that situation of the broadcasters dictating what gets made can be broken then I think we stand in a fantastic position to re-energise the sector. There is a core of wonderful people who constitute a very real and vibrant documentary sector but there is that fundamental problem of having so few opportunities outside the broadcasters to actually push the form, the way stories are told and the stories that actually get told. But we also have to remember that both our public broadcasters are now delivering documentary timeslots which are much better than we’ve had for quite a while.

Your company currently has some feature films in the pipeline. Are you wanting to move more in that direction?

Despite the success we’ve had with documentaries, as a company we’re probably moving away from the form. Just because of the difficulties in financing and the downward pressure on budgets. There are very few people in this country who can build a viable business on documentary production. So we have to diversify as a company, but that’s not to say we won’t keep doing documentaries.

I don’t think they’re any easier, but I do think with the changes to the FFC guidelines at the moment the possibilities of financing feature films are expanding. We have 2 feature scripts in the market place: Semi-Detached and The Home Song Story. On the documentary front we’re polishing the draft of You Can’t Stop at Evil, the story of a South African-based New Zealand-born priest who had his hands blown off in a terrorist attack in 1990. Our other documentary is the Brenda Hean story, Death by Flying, which Scott Millwood is writing. We’re developing it as a feature documentary with the aim of theatrical distribution. It’s a logical step for Scott after Wildness.

Level 5 Park House, home of RealTime Team,
Gail Priest, Dan Edwards, Virginia Baxter and Keith Gallasch

To celebrate our 10th birthday we’ve created a colour supplement in the centre pages of this edition. It includes a brief history of the magazine and an informal scan across a decade of artists and works and issues.

Congratulations Sarah Miller

Sarah Miller is a long-time ally and nurturer of the hybrid arts and contemporary dance, and a fine writer (much of it for RealTime, some for The Australian). She was formerly Director at Performance Space and is currently Director at PICA (Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts). Sarah received a Facilitator Award at the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Awards ceremony, March 29. Presenter Geoffrey Rush read the citation, which included the following: “In a career spanning some 20 years, from artist to producer and administrator, [Sarah] has been described as a ‘passionate instigator and vigorous collaborator, helping transform vision into sustainable practice; she has supported, encouraged and defended artists unstintingly’.” While thanking the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Committee for the award, Sarah hoped that it would “focus attention on the importance of and enormous contribution made by those independent artists and small to medium companies that are the bedrock of the Australian arts community but who nonetheless work in typically parlous conditions.”

Welcome babies

Congratulations to composer and writer Gretchen Miller and her partner Nick on the recent birth of Keir, and to Rebecca Youdell and Russell Milledge of Bonemap on the birth of Rose earlier this year. More babies, more emerging artists?

Farewell Spalding Gray

The recent death by suicide of Spalding Gray came as a profound shock. The story that subsequently emerged of his life over recent years explained the death but was even more saddening. Gray was an inspiration to many of us in the 1980s looking for new ways to work with language in performance. Gray was an experienced stage actor and a performer with The Wooster Group. As a monologuist he was in an American tradition reaching back through Will Rogers to Mark Twain, but he was also part of the postmodern remaking of narrativity. As a contemporary artist he showed us how to take a life, distil and shape it into a compelling performance, often about everyday anxieties. He once said he couldn’t make things up. The informality of the presentation (casual dress, a chair, a desk, a notebook occasionally referred to) and Gray’s direct address to the audience were an important part of his appeal as well as a departure from conventional theatrical norms. Just as important were the cadences of the Gray delivery, a beautiful sing-song musicality building through long sentences with the rising sonority of the American preacher. A similar music was to be heard in the very different micronarratives and images of his peer Laurie Anderson. Spalding Gray is greatly missed, but we do have films of his performances (including one by Steven Soderbergh), CDs and biographical novels: never enough, but they’ll have to do. RT

The Cannes Film Festival, 1960: 2 hours into a new film, a woman runs down the long corridor of a baroque hotel. Spectators shout “cut, cut!” amid laughter and jeering; Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti, the film’s director and star, flee the cinema. A petition circulates the next morning among filmmakers and critics forcing a second screening of what the signatories claim is a radically modern film. L’Avventura eventually receives a special Cannes Jury prize: “For the beauty of its images, and for seeking to create a new film language.” Two years later, Sight and Sound’s international poll proclaims it the second best film of all time.

Four decades later, the 2004 Sydney Film Festival is screening an almost exhaustive retrospective of Antonioni’s work. Since being at the very forefront of progressive ‘art cinema’ in the early 1960s, Antonioni’s reputation has waxed and waned. The festival’s purchase of this retrospective (first put together for Venice in 2002) illustrates a global resurgence of interest in his work. Today films such as L’Eclisse (1962) can be seen as both encapsulating what post-war modernity meant in 1960s Europe, and as a modernist rendering of an imagined future, a science-fiction challenge that has been only partially taken up.

After his impact on art-house film culture in the early 60s, Antonioni subsequently influenced the world of more commercial cinema with his 1966 hit Blowup, a freakish art/pop box-office success many directors sought to emulate. The film exemplifies why Antonioni films should be watched on the big screen with a good print: while Blowup looks merely dated on video, its precise sound-image compositions and framing provide the key to Antonioni’s subtle investigation of technology’s ability to render truth. With new 35mm prints, you can see the incredible depth and architectural detail that make up space as framed by Antonioni’s camera, and our eyes and minds are given time to glean thematic content from the canvas on screen.

Antonioni remains a challenging director, in his radical use of time and space. What so perturbed the L’Avventura audience at Cannes was that shots, scenes, even the film itself, continued after narrative interest had expired. The effect is something Antonioni scholars later described as temps mort or ‘dead time’. L’Avventura offers a tentative, lethargic kind of narrative energy in the first hour, but for the last 90 minutes space and time have a narratively entropic effect via the road trip of 2 characters through southern Italy. This not only flattens the later scenes’ dramatic tension, but retrospectively empties out the drama of the first hour, burying it beneath rising waves of spatio-temporal force so that it seems like a dream. With the forgetting brought about by space and time, as Gilles Deleuze argued, we are faced with an almost uniquely insidious Nietzschean challenge to human values via the filmic expansion of the world’s nihilistic forces.

La Notte (1961) features an especially reluctant narrative impetus from the start. For a long time, Milan’s modern architecture seems as important as the central characters’ subdued drama, the camera flattening Marcello Mastroianni against the imposing concrete surfaces of the urban environment and the contours of his chic interior spaces. The stasis of these early scenes is set off against the tellingly vacuous ‘action’ of the party sequence that comprises the second half of the film. Movement, including sexual pursuit, is never where the real action or meaning is; instead it functions merely as a regressive turning away from real problems.

This is brought to a head in L’Eclisse, which offers an extraordinary expansion of spatial and temporal power, totally disabling human action and decisiveness. From the sublimely composed temps mort of the first scene, this effects the whole film exponentially until Antonioni famously evicts his characters from the screen 7 minutes before the film’s conclusion. This leaves the viewer, tied to an increasingly non-anthropocentric camera, to explore the characters’ suburban milieu alone. L’Eclisse’s coda radically makes literal an idea that informs all these films: what we are used to thinking of as human essence is no longer viable under the conditions of 20th century modernity.

Following the perfection of his monochromatic film art with L’Eclisse, Il Deserto Rosso (1964) was Antonioni’s first colour film. Set in the environmental disaster zone of an oil refinery, where a functioning humanity seems almost entirely lost, an extreme use of telephoto lenses combines with a truly remarkable colour scheme to tip Antonioni’s cinema into a very reflexive version of Expressionism. Many critics see this film as the final chapter in Antonioni’s innovative work of the early 60s. Nonetheless, a few critics actually prefer the less extreme 1950s films, a notable example being Le Amiche (1955), a watershed for the director’s deep space architecture and suggestive framing of human groups against nature.

Some prominent Italian critics for many years preferred Antonioni’s ‘international’ period, including the big-budget MGM production Zabriskie Point (1970). A critical and commercial disaster in America, favourable critics now highlight the characteristically ambivalent gaze Antonioni casts over late-60s campus counterculture in Los Angeles and the film’s commentary on human culture’s frail relationship to a nihilistic universe. This is encapsulated by the film’s conclusion, when the detritus of consumer culture explodes into abstract shapes, the apogee of both late 60s apocalyptic fantasy and Antonioni’s fascination with the potential within entropy.

Although omitting Cronaca di un Amore from 1950 and The Passenger from 1974, the Sydney Film Festival’s retrospective offers a broad panorama of Antonioni’s work, including his notoriously elusive 1972 documentary on China, Chung Kuo Cina, and many short works from the early and late periods of his career. If you’re new to this filmmaker, it’s a superb chance to inaugurate a relationship many of us forged through poor video and archive prints of his canonical films. If you’re familiar with Antonioni, an engagement with his freshly re-minted oeuvre will generate a new appreciation of this exquisite, utterly unique filmmaker. Antonioni literally remade what cinema can be. Film modernism has never been so aesthetically ravishing, or so filled with fecund thematic possibility.

Michelangelo Antonioni: A Retrospective, 51st Sydney Film Festival, Dendy Opera Quays, June 11-26

Although the Festival of German Cinema this year offered, for the most part, formally conservative, if entertaining, mainstream cinema, there was one remarkable film which offered insight into developments in international documentary production that are perhaps passing Australia by, due to our resolute focus on the small screen. Edifice—VW in Dresden (director Thomas Tielsch) looks at the building of a Volkswagen assembly plant. On the surface this is not the most scintillating topic for a documentary, and it’s hard to imagine the idea even being mooted in an Australian context. What is unusual about the factory is that its walls are made entirely of glass, rendering the assembly process visible to outside observers. The edifice is constructed over the course of the film in the middle of working class Dresden, a poor city formerly of the Communist German Democratic Republic, where unemployment has been high since reunification.

Apart from its subject matter, what is immediately apparent about Edifice is its cinematic form. Shot on film and feature length, it unfolds at a uniform pace that is driven by analysis rather than by plot. The film’s dynamic evolves from 3 competing commentaries on what the factory represents and the role it will play in ‘revitalising’ Dresden. Firstly there is the factory’s architect, Gunter Henn, and the company executives, who articulate the factory’s innovative nature in explicitly philosophical terms. Their smooth rhetoric is balanced by commentary from German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. Lastly, there are the voices of the working-class residents of the neighbourhood around the factory, who watch its construction with a mixture of anxiety, envy and resentment. These 3 perspectives are gradually layered as the film progresses, illuminating the way class and philosophical outlook crucially inform the way we read the spaces around us.

Henn, for example, regards his architectural vision as entirely compatible with a world in which large corporations are increasingly responsible for the shape of society. Anyone with even a cursory understanding of the workings of modern free market economies would accept the claim that corporations are exerting a growing influence; what was striking was hearing this state of affairs so uncritically heralded as a progressive step by the Volkswagen representatives. As Henn explains, Volkswagen rejected the local government’s preferred site away from the city centre and took a site in central Dresden near the Zwinger Palace and Catholic Cathedral so that the factory could draw on their ‘energy’: “If the automobile is supposed to be emotionally charged then it has to be close to the valuable things that make up Dresden.” Physically, as well as symbolically, Volkswagen is seeking to occupy the site once held by the state, church and civil society.

The factory itself is more akin to a modern shopping centre: a transparent monument to consumerism which features a bar, bistro, restaurant and a museum displaying pristine products of the Volkswagen corporation. In one of the film’s most darkly funny moments, Henn reveals with straight-faced earnestness the inclusion of a special room at the end of the assembly line in which car buyers have their new vehicle revealed to them from behind a curtain of light. They are then left alone to bond before owner and car leave for their new life together.

The philosophical critique of the company’s position comes from Professor Sloterdijk who subtly illuminates the disturbing nature Volkswagen’s erudite-sounding rhetoric. The factory, he argues, is merely an extension of the design of modern cars, providing a sealed environment in which one can be in the world without ever being of the world: “[Modern] cars are dream machines. They help us hallucinate.” The implication being that a dream state is now something we buy and are permanently kept in by the cushion of consumer goods that surround us.

Sloterdijk goes on to claim that; “Nothing is more secretive than transparency, and when everything is transparent you don’t understand anything.” The key parts of the car production process—the extraction of natural resources, the actual manufacture of the parts, the operations of global capital that make industrial production possible—all take place elsewhere. What consumers see behind the glass walls in Dresden is simply an aestheticised space where sanitised “pantomimes of work are exhibited” for middle and upper class consumers kept utterly insulated from the harsh realities of modern globalised laissez-faire capitalism, allowing them to indulge without reflection in commodity fetishism gone mad.

The third element in the portrait presented by Edifice is of a more earthy nature. The factory is surrounded by working class residents whose applications to work in the factory are mostly rejected in favour of lowly-paid immigrant workers, a fact of the modern economy that helps turn resentment into racism. They watch the structure being erected with growing anger as it blocks the views from their Communist-era apartment blocks and the local, cheap trailer-based bar and eatery is carted away to make way for the factory’s expensive bistro. Volkswagen’s edifice is a symbol of everything they don’t have: money, a job and access to consumer goods. The supreme irony is that the plant is to build Volkswagen’s new luxury line, an attempt by the makers of the ‘people’s car’ to stake out ground in the higher end of the market. As one unemployed local observes of the factory’s products, “We press our noses against the glass and can’t even afford the tyres.”

Edifice provides a striking example of what is possible in the documentary form when filmmakers are afforded the resources to tackle unusual subject matter and the freedom to move beyond a classical narrative form driven by emotional conflict and resolution. It is precisely this kind of thought-provoking, open, analytical cinema that is markedly absent from the Australian screen cultural landscape. It is to be hoped that the Goethe Institut continues to program such challenging cinema alongside mainstream movies at next year’s Festival of German Cinema.

Edifice—VW in Dresden, director Thomas Tielsch; Goethe Institut, Festival of German Cinema 2004, various venues, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, April 15-25

$image1063} In a market saturated with groovy angst, one asset of Australian filmmaker Paul Middleditch’s briefly released feature, A Cold Summer, is its defiantly unhip take on 20-something alienation. Here there are no eclectic pop culture references, no celebrations of the thrill of impermanence and, mercifully, no attempts to make the actors look charming or sophisticated. Instead, there’s an often excruciating rawness to the stumbling intimacies exchanged between the film’s trio of drifting Sydneysiders: an advertising agent (Teo Gebert), a self-styled jazz singer (Olivia Pigeot) and a hippie florist (Susan Prior). With some allowance made for drama workshop conventions, the 3 are all recognisable types, frighteningly so given their clear proximity to madness.

Then again, the absence of visible social context makes it hard to judge sanity or realism. Families are invisible and friendships tentative at best. Vaguely, the characters strive to lose themselves in alcohol and sex, or dream of fulfilment through charity work for Amnesty International. In the meantime, they remain in constant motion towards nowhere in particular, chasing each other down the street, across parklands, in and out of cafes and bars.

As in a John Cassavetes film, or Patrice Chereau’s comparably gruelling 3-hander Intimacy (2001), seemingly-improvised performance is both artistic strategy and subject. With communication breakdown an ever-present threat, the characters recklessly vary their modes of self-presentation, plunging into whatever hyperbolic gestures might help define the parameters of each encounter. Olivia Pigeot’s Tia is the most conscious play-actor of the 3, flaunting blunt cynicism when not trying to seduce. Bobby the ad-man is superficially more flexible, puppyish, always on the make, though there’s more than a hint of self-contempt underlying his abrupt, mocking changes of role. In contrast, Susan Prior’s Phaedra fiercely guards a private sense of self, symbolised by the shrine she maintains to her dead boyfriend. Yet the vulnerability of this ‘authentic’ identity is palpable in her rising inflections, nervous laughter and naive confessions (“Sometimes I feel like I really want to hurt myself”) that seem prompted by a repressed urge to shock or wound.

The relationships between these characters are played out mostly as a series of extended, bruising one-on-one confrontations, shot from the perspective of an anxiously hovering observer. As with Cassavetes, the style is ‘raw’ but far from transparent or artless, less concerned with plot points than with the creation of surprising physical and vocal rhythms: a kind of emotional music, with performance crescendos augmented by flurries of camera movement and by the agitated strings of Claire Jordan’s score. Jump-cuts are frequent, laying bare the process of assembling a sequence from portions of different takes, as if the characters themselves were trying out multiple incompatible options at each moment. At dramatic high points the performers are often turned towards the camera, revealing their emotions to the audience alone: another “musical” effect, like having a melodic line carried by a solo instrument rather than the full orchestra. As Tia walks away from Bobby after they’ve fucked for the first time, there’s a wordless shot lasting around 10 seconds of her almost expressionless face in the sunlight; tension builds and finally subsides when she blinks, as if dazzled by pain, and runs a hand through her hair.

Beyond such cadenzas, Middleditch is faced with the same basic problem as his characters: how to impose structure and direction on lives which show few traces of either. As if unable to imagine even the possibility of community, he ultimately chooses to account for the traumas he depicts in terms of individual loss rather than any more general malaise. It’s disappointing that the film manages to arrive at a semblance of resolution only by insisting on distinctions that it has previously put into question: between love and sex, or a ‘true’ self and an invented one. This nostalgia for authenticity may be preferable to smug anomie or the tacky melodramatics of the Dogme school, but looks a bit glib alongside the earlier scenes of babbling bodies in free-fall, snatching at fragments of meaning as they recede. Fuelled by a typically actorly fascination with performance as self-creation, these scenes often don’t lead anywhere or mean much, yet it’s just this failure to signify which conveys a paradoxical impression of emotional truth. Without purposeful narrative, existential breakdown seems a less uniquely dramatic event than part of quotidien experience—inscribed in speeches and gestures you might meet with any evening in a bar or nightclub, or even closer to home.

A Cold Summer, director Paul Middleditch, producer Grace Yee; performers Teo Gebert, Olivia Pigeot and Susan Prior

The opening sequence of Let establishes the film’s theme. A north American male voice introduces us to the characters: “There’s John from China; Tegus from Dover, England; the lovely Annabelise from Argentina; and me, your humble narrator, from Paris….Texas.” A deliberately international flavour permeates both the story and form of the film, winner of the Most Original Script and Best Tertiary Drama categories at the recent Queensland New Filmmakers Awards.

Let concerns a group of young international students who devise a cunning way of manipulating their landlady. It’s also about co-existence and its impact on moods and feelings with a New Wave look. Black and white, grainy and handheld, the film moves through its 7.5 minutes with cool music and an ironic, self-reflexive voiceover that situates it squarely in the international artfilm tradition.

Filmmakers Joel Higham, Ching-Cheng Peng and Ricardo Diaz say the look and feel of the film was largely necessitated by their production situation. The film was a Masters project—the introduction of a 16mm course at Griffith University. Using the stock supplied by the university—14 minutes of black and white reversal—they had to script, shoot and edit the film in a matter of days. Deadline-induced pragmatism meant that roles were conflated, with all 3 acting as directors, producers, gaffers and cinematographers to bring the project off in time. As Diaz says, “It’s impossible to disentangle what each person did.”

The idea for the story emerged when Ching suggested focusing on their lives as international students living in Australia and Ricardo told them about the energetic woman who ran the student complex where he lived. Let was born as a ‘Spanish Apartment-style’ story about the joys and difficulties of multicultural and multigenerational co-existence. It’s also quite a risque story with drug abuse at its centre. The filmmakers were keen to produce something with an edge, and thought, says Ricardo, “it was time to play with being a bit twisted in a politically incorrect way”

As visitors to Australia, they’ve had time to digest some of the local politics around race, migration and refugees, and the film is a cheeky response to both right wing “paranoia about migration” and earnest, but safe social justice orientations in filmmaking. The play with stereotypes of “a bunch of students from different backgrounds” was a deliberate choice, with characters like “the Asian tech freak and the sexy Latin girl.” The filmmakers, Ricardo says, strove for “a ‘ridiculisation’ of Hollywood clichés.”

“Being a Mexican,” says Ricardo, “I really wanted to do this for the notoriously gross portrait of my fellow countrymen by the American industry and its ingestion by…well, everybody.” Ching’s first AD work in Taiwan provided technical expertise and another perspective: “Western and Eastern, they’re 2 very different ways of thinking. The others looked at a scene in very different ways to me, and I appreciated that—I want to know their way of thinking, their ideas, so I can grow, and be a better filmmaker… we worked together very well, with our very different talents.”

Joel, originally from Canada (it’s his laconic drawl we hear on the voiceover), spent a year studying in France and got “hooked on Godard.” All are fans of arthouse cinema and the New Wave in particular, but as Ricardo explains, “Aesthetically, we were framed by our materials and circumstances, so to do it New Wave was the perfect solution.” The lack of audio equipment dictated the voiceover and the “slightly voyeuristic shots and the use of handheld camera” was further enhanced “by the slightly satiric undertone of the whole piece”, says Ricardo. For Joel, “part of the beauty of that kind of style is that it’s not perfect.”

Production, Joel recalls, “really ended up being guerilla film fare. There wasn’t enough pre-production, there wasn’t enough crew. We had to work fast and cut shots on the fly. We were working with 15 minutes of film stock on a 7 minute script, which meant no room for error, and we had about a day and a half to shoot it. But I guess you get to a point where you have to go for broke and see what happens.”

Actors were recruited from the cinematography course and when it came to finding a location, they realised “we did know a big trashed house full of students who were happy to let us film there as long as we bought pizza. That means the whole film cost about $27—the cost of 3 pizzas.” An exaggeration, Ricardo points out, as they still had to purchase mini DV tapes, but with the course covering the film and equipment hire, and music supplied by acquaintances, the whole production cost less than $100: a triumph of turning limitations into attributes.

Let’s mature accomplishment proves what other Queensland filmmakers such as the Spierigs have been saying for years now: if you have a willing and creative crew, miniscule budgets need not prevent imaginative genre filmmaking.

Let, written, directed and produced by Joel Higham, Ching-Cheng Peng and Ricardo Diaz; Queensland New Filmmakers Awards, Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University Theatre, April 22

Earlier this year growing tensions in the South Australian film industry resulted in the unusual resignation of the South Australian Film Corporation (SAFC) CEO Judith Crombie. ‘Unusual’ in that Crombie tendered her resignation, citing differences with Chairman David Minear, after Minear had announced his position had not been renewed. This followed the resignation of a string of management staff and 2 board members over the previous 6 months. On the surface it appeared like dysfunctional internal problems for the state body, but wider industry dissatisfaction certainly played a part.

The Australian film industry is suffering as a result of the financial squeeze occurring nationally and internationally. Depleting funds, increasing numbers of independent filmmakers and the collapse of major end-users like Vivendi and Kirch Media have created an aggressive competitive climate for film financing. Despite the fact that the South Australian film community is credited with having triggered the mid-70s Australian film ‘renaissance’, statistics show that South Australia is now falling behind almost every other state in terms of production activity and industry growth.

Shrinking employment prospects and diminishing opportunities for emerging filmmakers have focussed attention on the SAFC and its traditional role as ‘leader’ of the South Australian industry. Criticisms of the SAFC have focussed on the ineffectiveness of running a wide range of small programs with no flow-on effect to larger projects, while at the same time a number of interstate-based productions have received development funds, a practice not endorsed by any other state funding body. The criticisms levelled at the SAFC are also indicative of the agency’s weak relationship with industry and the lack of consultation.

In response to the SAFC’s shortcomings, The United Film Group (an association of major Adelaide film businesses including Rising Sun Pictures, Scott Hicks and Kerry Heyson, sound facilities and senior practising independent producers) initiated a total screen industry forum, calling the ailing industry together to determine future direction and policies. This began in late 2003 as an online debate and airing of concerns, and concluded with a physical forum in February this year that was a synthesis of the arguments and proposals submitted online.

It became apparent from the vigorous online debate that there was a serious lack of long term planning for the South Australian industry. Many criticisms were levelled at the SAFC, including the feeling that the organisation was not fulfilling its leadership role. As expected, the initial industry reaction was cathartic, but as time went on it became clearer to many in the industry why the SAFC was in such strife. The screen industry is a complex one, encompassing film, television, new media and games. It is increasingly apparent that no one state agency is able to properly understand the whole industry while also keeping abreast of the particular problems for each sector.

Many of the questions that emerged from this debate and forum are relevant to other states as well, since we are all subject to the same national and international pressures. Some of the key questions that have emerged are: is the current relationship of state agencies to industry the most appropriate one?; how can state policies be developed and modified fast enough to keep up with the rate of change in the industry?; and to what extent should state agencies continue to assume a sole leadership position? So is it a case of just changing the internal structure of our state agency, or do we really need to have a major rethink? Rather than state government funds going out in dribs and drabs to different industry sectors at different times, perhaps it is time to look at a more coordinated approach. And rather than state agency policy and guidelines being constructed with little or no consultation, industry should be heavily involved in the development of policy.

After much debate, the majority opinion of the United Film Group forum was that the formation of a Screen Industry Council was the most constructive step forward. This council will have representatives from all parts of the industry (including the SAFC), will formulate industry policy and communicate directly with the Minister for the Arts. In other words; one industry, one voice. This is a major departure from past industry practice. For the first time the industry itself is moving to take charge of the formulation of policy. It is a move away from government reviews of the sector, to the industry actively communicating its needs and views directly to government. To use the bureaucratic jargon, the state agency will work in ‘partnership’ with the industry.

Concurrent with these developments, senior producer and SAFC board member Helen Leake (producer Black and White, 2002) was appointed acting, then permanent, CEO of the SAFC. Leake’s understanding of the local industry and its inherent tensions has positioned her well in the top management position. In a short space of time she has re-established industry relationships, increased outgoing communication, reshaped many internal structures and embraced the idea of ‘partnership’ with the industry. This perhaps has something to do with the fact that Leake has been an active South Australian practitioner and understands the inherent risks of working in the film industry. Leake’s positive influence thus far is a good indicator of how industry experience and contacts are much more important than bureaucratic experience in running the SAFC.

Leake, along with some of the SAFC board, attended the UFG forum and voted in favour of the formation of a Screen Industry Council. Of course this means the tough work of formulating industry policy no longer rests solely on the shoulders of the SAFC board, but it is also a recognition that the industry is mature enough to know its own needs and be involved in shaping its own future.

An interim model for the Screen Council has been developed and an online voting process will commence within the next few weeks. The Council is expected to be formed and active by July this year, with the SAFC as a participating observer. Leake is keen to work with the Council to help develop industry recommendations for SAFC and Government policy regarding the film industry.

Is this the beginning of fundamental changes that need to occur nationally? Should we be moving towards a “one industry, one voice” model, where practitioners are more directly involved in policy and decision making under a unified umbrella? Or are we too vigorously individual and disparate for this model to ever work? South Australia will be closely watched to see if these structural changes deliver an environment more receptive to the needs of the modern Australian screen industry.

In RT58 (p22), I interviewed a group of Melbourne directors and producers about the environmental factors that influence their films. Besides the weather, the main aspect cited was Melbourne’s geographic, financial and aesthetic distance from Sydney. The result: low-budget, gritty urban dramas. But what about Tasmania?

It’s difficult to locate historical information on Tasmanian film, except for the obligatory Errol Flynn references (and he, as we all know, fled the state in order to make it). Just 2 features have been made in Tasmania, the first being Roger Schole’s The Tale of Ruby Rose (1987), a richly observed psychological drama set in the highlands. The second was Richard Flanagan’s The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1998) which related the experiences of Slovenian immigrants in the island state.

Up until a few years ago, making films in Tasmania was pretty much a pipedream, but now the Tasmanian screen industry is finally taking off. Infrastructure is being formed despite the same problem facing the rest of Australia: not enough cash to go around (Screen Tasmania has a budget of just $1 million).

As well as the state government body, Screen Tasmania (www.screen.tas.gov.au), there is the Mobile Media Access Facility (funded by Screen Tasmania to provide accessible resources, training and contacts) and Fearless Media, which represents the Australian Film Television and Radio School, initiating a diverse program of short courses in film and broadcast production. There are also professional Tasmanian production companies such as Roar Film and Edward Street Films. Animation specialists Blue Rocket relocated to Hobart from Brisbane and have gone on to build an enviable reputation producing series and interstitials for European markets, as well as successful longer projects.

Craig Kirkwood is well placed to comment on this recent spurt of activity. Now the CEO at Fearless, he was on Screen Tasmania’s first advisory board. He cites the election of the Labor state government 5 years ago as the catalyst for screen culture in Tasmania. Jim Bacon and his team came to power with a “huge cultural agenda” and set up Screen Tasmania as well as the state’s first international arts festival (10 Days on the Island). Kirkwood also highlights the sense of positive growth in Tasmania: “the population is finally rising rapidly, housing is booming, the arts are growing.” As a result “screen culture and industry is beginning to take on a sense of confidence.”

Early this year Kirkwood launched the Tasmanian Screen Network (www.tasscreennetwork.org) with the aim of “increasing communication between screen practitioners and developing a professional infrastructure for Tasmanian filmmakers and producers.” Its central tenet, he explains, is to maintain “an industry body which represents the screen sector in Tasmania independent of government and enterprise.” Kirkwood’s vision is similar to the thinking that’s informed the formation of the Screen Industry Council in South Australia (see p21): “Screen Tasmania has acted as a de facto mouthpiece, but this is inappropriate really. If someone, like yourself, needs to know about Tasmania’s film culture it’s better to consult the industry rather than a government funding body. Not only that, but the industry needs to lobby and respond to actions that government take. Screen Tasmania is a funding body and while they play an important and strategic role, they should answer to, and respond to industry needs rather than the other way around.” Kirkwood is quick to add that the Tasmanian Screen Network was set up with Screen Tasmania’s blessing.

Despite Kirkwood’s hopes for the network, it seems inevitable that the government body will shape the direction of Tasmanian film in the immediate term. In recent funding decisions, there has been a strong focus on documentary: grants, workshops and a co-production initiative with SBS are among the developments. Is this out of necessity (limited funding precluding the production of feature films) or is it driven by a cultural agenda? Tasmanian society certainly seems to be focused on history (especially in the tourist industry) and documentary may be the perfect form for unravelling Tasmania’s turbulent past. Kirkwood agrees: “The bleak history is quite remarkable. The extermination of the tiger, Port Arthur’s past and modern histories, and the virtual annihilation of Aborigines are just some of the stories that need to be told. But it’s also breathtakingly beautiful here and the natural environment is very much in people’s consciousness. Documentary seems a logical area to specialise in.”

I asked Kirkwood if Tasmania stood any chance of producing more feature films? “The rumour mill has it that Richard Flanagan is working on a new production. Roger and Katherine Scholes have a feature called The Broken Hill, which came within a hair’s breadth of attracting funds, and Screen Tasmania has about a dozen feature scripts on the desk at any time, but of course they’re such a difficult thing to do.”

Kirkwood is optimistic about the future of the industry, citing promising names like documentary makers Paul Scott and Ella Kennedy, and productions company Miro Films. Tasmanian screen culture is building a unique and independent identity, and a reputation that’s certainly in sharp contrast to traditional mainland perceptions of the state. As Kirkwood notes, “I’m an ex-Sydneysider and I remember when Tasmania was considered a real backwater. Now it’s in danger of becoming fashionable!”

I would like to thank Hamish Ford for a thoughtfully critical review of my book, The Cinema Effect (RT60, p18). There are 2 points he raises that it might be helpful to clarify.

Ford suggests that, despite Adorno, I recommend simulation as an alternative critical mode. What I failed to get across is that I fear Adorno’s negative aesthetics has become the normative and hegemonic form of critical despair, precisely among simulationists like Baudrillard. What I wanted to develop was a critique that, in dialectical style, negated Adorno to propose instead a positive critique: a criticism aimed at enabling engagement in the making and viewing of film, rather than just uncovering their weakness, duplicity and inner voids. It is in this vein that I tried to argue that, far from splitting audiences into suckers who fall for the illusion and connoisseurs who revel in artifice, contemporary spectacle invites a double vision in everyone who watches them. I would go further now, and argue that these films democratise the aristocratic, supercilious gaze that Nietzsche popularised. It is a small point, but the necessity for getting beyond both the negativity of Adorno and the nihilism of Baudrillard seems to me a vital part of any 21st century critical culture.

Which is why I would also contest the description of the closing section of the book as “naïve hopefulness.” Hopeful, yes, but not so much naïve as willful. The closing section of my last book was called “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” after Gramsci’s great slogan. I believe that a teacher’s ethical obligation is to retain hope, despite the undoubted horror of the contemporary world. I am currently working on a book about ecology and media, which if anything leaves even fewer grounds for cheerfulness. Nonetheless the luxury of reveling in the slough of despondency, like the Bataillean cult of cruelty and acephalic art, is not something a teacher can afford, nor, in my view, a cultural critic. Whether it is acceptable among curators and artists is a different question, and one worth raising in these pages.

The spotlight was on the marginalised and disenfranchised in contemporary society at this year’s Real: Life on Film. This year’s program included 30 films, about half of which were Australian with refugee and Aboriginal issues particularly prominent among them.

The dominant style was conventional, generally mixing observational and interview-based techniques. Films that promised to head into more poetic or essayistic terrain, such as Tokyo Noise (directors Kristian Petri, Jan Roed and Johan Soderberg, Sweden, 2002) and The Future is Not What it Used to Be (Mika Taanila, Finland, 2002), failed to live up to their potential. This is not to say that some of Future’s archival footage of Finnish scientist, electronic music pioneer, futurologist and all-round obsessive compulsive Erkki Kurenniemi was not fascinating, just that this portrait of a man described as “one of the true visionaries of the European avant-garde” ultimately did not match the sum of its parts.

A number of the other international documentaries, such as A Boy’s Life (Rory Kennedy, USA, 2003), Angels of Brooklyn (Camilla Hjelm and Martin Zandvliet, Denmark, 2002) and Riles: Life on the Tracks (Ditsi Carolino, Philippines/UK, 2003), presented underprivileged subjects struggling to survive the challenges of everyday life. These came close to what critic Brian Winston might call “victim” documentaries, made by generally well-meaning filmmakers, they presented a familiar cocktail of poverty, lack of education, social exclusion, illness and imprisonment. Of these, Kim Longinotto’s investigation of female circumcision in Kenya, The Day I Will Never Forget (UK, 2003), was the most lucid in its use of first person testimony. Longinotto interviewed a number of girls, including some attending a school for students who have run away from home to avoid circumcision. These girls represent the human face of changing attitudes in Kenya. Their courage helped Longinotto to fashion an optimistic ending from this grim account of deeply entrenched patriarchal structures.

Of the local films centred on Aboriginal subjects, Dhakiyarr vs the King (Tom Murray and Allan Collins, 2003) and Lonely Boy Richard (Trevor Graham, 2003, RT58, p17) dealt with encounters between Indigenous Australians and the European legal system. Dhakiyarr investigated a 1933 case of conflicting laws, which saw Yolngu elder Dhakiyarr tried for the spearing death of Constable Albert McColl. Narrated by Dhakiyarr’s grandsons, the film is structured as a mystery pivoting on Dhakiyarr’s disappearance after his acquittal on appeal by the High Court. In a moving example of grassroots reconciliation, the resolution of this case 70 years later allowed the ghosts of the past to be laid to rest at a poignant ceremony attended by the Dhakiyarr and McColl families and current High Court judges. Lonely Boy Richard was less upbeat, following the life of compulsive drinker Richard Wanambi as he prepares for a rape trial. A case study of a community blighted by alcohol abuse, Trevor Graham’s film shows the damage wrought over the 40 years since the arrival of a mining company ended traditional life in the Yirrkala community.

Channels of Rage (Anat Halachmi, Israel, 2003) and All the Ladies (Colleen Hughson and Mary Quinsacara, Australia, 2003) both examined hip hop culture. Channels of Rage began with smiles all round as Israeli Zionist rapper Subliminal took Arab MC Tamer under his wing, sharing friendship and the stage. Echoing the geo-political fault lines between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians, there was a sad air of inevitability in the unravelling of their relationship over the 3 years following this initial brief moment of optimism.

More positively, All the Ladies stood out as a local gem, progressive without being preachy. The directors Mary Quinsacara (aka MC Que, who also performs in the film) and Colleen Hughson, focus on female performers in Australia’s hip hop scene. The buoyant tone was set by Melbourne MC Little G’s introduction: “My mother is Aboriginal, my father Greek, and that’s how I became a wogorigine.” While the participants acknowledge that the scene has previously been dominated by men, the charismatic female MCs prefer to talk about the moments of epiphany that led to their love affair with hip hop. Mark Latham and John Howard need look no further for the true face of Australian multiculturalism.

Those craving less linear alternatives at Real: Life were able to turn to the interactive and online component of the festival. Ross Gibson kicked off a panel session devoted to exploring interactive and online documentary forms by presenting his Life After Wartime (made with Kate Richards) an interactive database of post-World War 2 Sydney crime scene photographs. Tweaking John Grierson’s infamous definition of documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality”, Gibson characterised the database, which allows users to combine the photos with an array of text and sound options, as “the speculative investigation of actuality.”

Kate Wild, one of the creators of the Escape From Woomera video game, also contributed to this session. This game replicates the conditions in Australian detention centres. Based on television reports and the testimony of former inmates and employees, it allows players to assume the persona of a refugee trying to escape. It was fascinating to hear Wild recall how, during last year’s media furore surrounding the Australia Council’s funding of this project, almost all media inquiries began with the assumption that gaming was an inherently disreputable or trivialising form. This sort of boneheaded elitism indicates the challenges facing those attempting to explore the boundaries of new media and documentary.

Old school documentary lovers may demur, but this session raised an important question: how is the mediation of the world in a game like Escape From Woomera different from the (re)presentation of ‘reality’ in more orthodox documentary fare? The interactive and online exhibits within this year’s program demonstrate that the documentary form is a very broad church. Here’s hoping that next year’s festival works even harder to explore and probe its outer reaches.

Real: Life on Film, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, April 29-May 5

First a word from Tony MacGregor, Chair of the Open City Board of Management. This company was established by Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter in 1987 for the collaborative works they performed in theatres, galleries and on radio. In 1994 Open City began to publish RealTime+OnScreen which has been a fulltime operation since 1996.

FROM THE CHAIR

I’ve been free-associating around those words—real, time—looking for a way into writing about this thing I’ve been hovering around for these past 10 years. Longer really, because RealTime was an idea long before it was a reality, one of those determinations that Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter make and then work into existence: “mainstream theatre criticism is hopeless, we need a journal that deals properly with the performance community in all its hybrid, messy complexity.” (Or words to that effect.) And, lo, it was so.

How many ideas have taken shape, been given form in the endless conversation around that generous wooden table in the kitchen at Womerah Avenue, Darlinghurst where Gallasch and Baxter have lived since their arrival from Adelaide in 1986? Like so many projects which have been founded on their energy and ideas—Troupe in Adelaide, Open City, all those performances—once deemed A Good Idea, RealTime seemed inevitable, an idea made real through that seemingly irresistible combination of clear argument, creative invention, personal passion, A-grade grant writing skills and the sheer bloody mindedness that they bring to all their projects. Calmly, without hysteria or undue polemic. Real, not rhetorical. (The right time, too. Children, don’t ignore this lesson: timing is everything.)

Celebrating 10 years of any publication, is it right to dwell so much on 2 individuals at the expense of the many who have contributed to its success? I’m thinking here not just of the multitude of writers, the shoals of eager readers, but of stalwarts like David Varga, Kirsten Krauth, Mireille Juchau and especially Gail Priest, toilers in the vineyard too, and indispensable to these accumulated successes of the past 10 years. I tips me lid to all of you, heartfelt. (Head felt—the hat, I mean. Squashed bunny.)

But the knack of spinning the straw of rhetoric into the gold of action is a rare one; Keith and Virginia, a collaborative partnership, possess this gift in abundance, and it should be acknowledged. I am sure they too have long, dark nights; that age wearies them (as it wearies us all), but they will always seem to me indefatigable, unceasing. Just check out these pages, count the words, total up the hours.

Perhaps this is the nub of what I want to say: in RealTime, art can still be understood as a gift, not only as a commodity. Like much of the work they write about, Keith and Virginia, and Gail, have served an idea, served an ideal even, an ideal of the work of art as way of engaging with the world, as a vehicle for satisfying undying curiosity, for, perhaps, speaking about what might be true, or at least, of speaking about power. RealTime—and its editors—have done more than serve a community, they have, in so many ways, made it. That is their gift to us (readers, writers, makers, audiences), and I thank them for it.

Where’s the free-association, I hear you ask? Where’s ‘real’? What about ‘time’? I can hear it in my head as I write—a stupid refrain, rock’n’roll dumb—Lou Reed, circa 1970 something (I was stoned at the time):

We’re gonna have a real good time together
We’re gonna have a real good time together
We’re gonna have a real good time together
We’re gonna dance and bawl and shout together
Na-na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na, na-na
Na-na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na, na-na…

I think we’ve all had a real good time. And more to come. I hope we can all keep dancing, bawling, shouting, with RealTime leading the chorus.

FROM THE EDITORS

The early years of RealTime now seem like a distant dream, a fuzzy recollection of a fury of creation, learning on the job, reaching out across the country to engage writers and distributors, connecting with artists, knocking out grant applications, labelling bundles and loading trucks, covered in ink, wracked with endless financial trepidation, exhilarated every time an edition rolled off the presses and partying every time (we’re no longer up to that). Final layout happened variously in an old flour mill in Newtown (now home to the Omeo Dance Studio), graphic design studios in Surry Hills and, for years, the crowded city office of Art Almanac with artist Paul Saint patiently at the computer through the long nights.

HOME WORK

Our home was our editorial office for several years. A remarkable team would gather in the kitchen on a Saturday every 2 months to edit a new edition: John Potts, Annemarie Jonson, Jacqueline Millner, Catharine Lumby, Gregory Harvey, Linda Wallace and Michael Smith, with contributions from Colin Hood (a dab hand at droll headlines) and Richard Harris. Our first assistant editor (thanks to the enlightened Jobstart scheme) was David Varga. Judy Annear was our first manager, followed by Susan Charlton and then Lynne Mitchell. When RealTime became full-time we divvied up the management among ourselves. Gail Priest, an integral member of the RealTime triumvirate, started out proof-reading for us and moved into layout and design and advertising sales and web management! Having our own office and computers in the city made everything a lot easier. David Varga moved on, replaced by Kirsten Krauth who also took over and developed OnScreen from the pioneering work done by Annemarie Jonson and Alessio Cavallaro. Novelist Mireille Juchau followed Kirsten who went to work for the AFC. Before Gail, the hard yards of advertising sales had been valiantly run over the years by Michelle Telfer-Smith, Sally Thompson and then Sari Jarvenpää. Nowadays Gail and Virginia make an affable sales team.

Consultative editorial teams were set up in all states and some members have been with us for many years: Sarah Miller, Chris Reid, Josephine Wilson, Darren Tofts, Richard Murphet, Philippa Rothfield, Anna Dzenis, Diana Klaosen, Eleanor Brickhill, Linda Marie Walker, Barbara Bolt and Erin Brannigan. Others have come and gone, too many to name here, and, like the current contributing editors, have all been invaluable.

MOTIVATION

In 1993 we were lamenting the diminishing coverage of the arts in the mass media and, specifically, the lack of engagement with performance, hybrid practices and what we then called techno-arts. It was the absence of a national perspective that irked us in particular. We watched performing arts and then film magazines struggle and collapse over the years. We wanted to know what was happening across Australia, what was innovative and who was making this work. The Performing Arts Board of the Australia Council was offering seeding grants for arts magazines, we got one and away we went. A trial edition in February 1994 was followed by an unbroken string of bi-monthly RealTimes from August that year, once funding was secured. We had argued in our grant application that we wanted to produce a magazine that looked across the arts because we thought that was the only way to survive and, more importantly, that reflected growing cross-artform practice. We were right on both counts. We encouraged readers to look for innovation and to go beyond their particular artform interests. We provided a broader context for artists’ work and the writing about it. At any time almost half of RealTime’s writers are practising artists.

THE BIG PICTURE

Over the years we critiqued reports by Gonski (bad news for screen culture) and Mansfield (worse for the ABC), tore into Creative Nation (as you’ll see on the pages that follow) and the restructuring of the Australia Council (quite a stoush), screamed arts murder in the wake of the Howard election (see the cover for RT14), and looked at the cultural ramifications of Mabo and Wik. We’ve addressed issues of censorship, globalisation and Free Trade and countless funding issues. We’ve monitored the growth of the international marketing of the Australian arts, the changing nature of arts festivals, the rise of the improvisation movement, issues and successes in the arts and disablilty field, and surveyed Aboriginal film and new media. Through Philip Brophy’s inspirational Cinesonic column we all learned to listen to films while Hunter Cordaiy’s Writestuff put us in touch with the complex screenwriting side of our film industry. Kirsten Krauth edited WriteSites, an important record of the literary aspect of new media art. We’ve also surveyed the integration of digital media in performance and dance and extensively reviewed new media artworks and the festivals and conferences that constellate around them here and overseas. Experimental, contemporary classical and improvisational music have always had a place in RealTime. As has sound art, right from the beginning, with a number of the editorial team and some of our key writers in the 90s committed to the field, sometimes as creators for the ABC’s The Listening Room. Associate Editor Gail Priest has maintained our commitment to sound culture with its growing number of young adherents. Recently we’ve addressed the burgeoning video art scene and Mireille Juchau has focused our attention on photography’s return to centrestage.

FOUNDATIONS

When we celebrated our 5th birthday in 1999, Sydney was being knocked down and rebuilt in a pre-Olympic development delirium. It’s become a permanent, wracking condition, but at least it’s no longer evident right around our little office. Though we have received notice of imminent east-west tunnelling directly beneath us this year. The building is antique and the foundations seem solid, but our own were not in 1999. We had excitedly pumped up our print run and expanded our distribution network, anticipating increased advertising income. It didn’t happen and we slipped into a deficit. It didn’t take us long to climb out in 2000 but it coincided with growing pressure from the Australia Council for arts companies to become more ‘business-like.’ We secured our Triennial Funding for 2001-03 but it had been substantially cut (and other funding was not what we’d hoped for 2001). Things looked tough. It was one thing to be more business-like, another to do it on an insubstantial financial foundation. But we were about to learn how to do business: our grant was conditional on it.

Open City Board Member Kath Walters, the small business writer for Business Review Weekly, wisely recommended that, rather than hire a consultant, we own our business plan by creating it in a 5 month course with the NSW Enterprise Workshop. Virginia, Gail and I did the course in 2001, though it nearly killed us—weekly and weekend seminars, lectures and presentations, consultations with a mentor, judging sessions and getting RealTime out as usual. The course was run and largely delivered by and attended by men of a pretty conservative persuasion. Lecturers’ stories of success were invariably from the top end of the pile eg motor vehicle sales, major medical inventions, leaving us with improbable transfers of learning. Every time we were assessed we had to repeat to our nonplussed judges that our product was free, our income a mixture of funding and advertising sales, and we couldn’t take on a whole lot of their recommendations: certain kinds of investment, seeking commercial partners or on-selling the business. A big part of the course was how to sell a business you might not even have yet started up. Loving your business was not on the agenda. Nor was there any reciprocal interest in what we might have to offer business looking to think ‘creatively.’

However, despite never wanting to see another Power Point presentation ever, and becoming weary of viewing the world through the incredibly narrow lens of business and its pervasive lingo, we did create a plan, got a lot of help and inspiration from our mentor, David Prentice, who had worked for major advertising agencies, and our Board, especially Kath Walters, and we made the plan work over the next 3 years. All of us look back and laugh at the horrors of the course, relieved that our idealism survived a battering.

Except for this grim, if enlightening, and, yes, productive interlude, our relationship in general with funding bodies has been very good; the continued support of (especially) the Australia Council and the Australian Film Commission, along with the NSW Ministry for the Arts and FTO (Film & Television Office NSW), has provided a firm foundation on which we have been able to grow and sustain a vision which in turn supports so many artists.

DIVERSIFICATION

One thing that did impress our business course judges was the publishing we were doing for the Audience & Market Development Division of the Australia Council and the Industry & Cultural Development wing of the AFC. They liked this diversification of income, especially since it built on our intellectual capital—the years of knowledge and data that RealTime had accrued in its files and in the hearts and minds of its editors and writers.

We’re particularly proud of editing and producing the In Repertoire series for the Australia Council in collaboration with designer Peter Thorn. These books on performance, dance, new media and Indigenous art are a logical extension of RealTime’s commitment to promoting the work of hundreds of Australian artists, the majority of them innovators and working solo or in small companies. The praise from overseas producers and presenters for the series and the gratitude of artists has been a great reward as has the satisfaction in being a partner with AMD in its vital work. Nor is it just a matter of marketing Australian work to the world: exchange is critical. We have been impressed by the international collaborations initiated by the likes of Elision, Aphids and the PICA-Performance Space Breathing Space program with Bristol’s Arnolfini contemporary art space.

There are never enough festivals and reporting them on the ground, in print and online is a RealTime pleasure, another way to diversify our presence and to meet the artists we write about. We’ve had writing teams at the 1996, 1998 and 2000 Adelaide Festivals, LIFT 97 (London International Festival of Theatre), Asia Pacific Triennial 3-MAAP99, the 2001 and 2003 Queensland Biennial Festivals of Music and Next Wave 2002. This year we’ll also be at BEAP (Biennial of Electronic Art, Perth). We also welcome individual festival reports which come in regularly from Australian artists on their travels.

BAD SIGNS

The odds have been against artists over the decade. Arts funding has remained static or decreased in frequency for many artists. The positive outcome of the Myer Report is essentially a catch-up for visual artists. Federal government initiative funding for the youth and regional arts has been small scale and held out at election time. Censorship has been on the increase. The threat of Free Trade looms. The film industry struggles on with limited funding and little room for experimentation or vision. Sessional teaching by artists in universities has severely diminished. The commissioning of artists by the ABC has seriously declined across the decade. The managerial model increasingly dominates art at the expense of vision.

Certainly there has been acknowledgment of problems, with funding bodies seeking increased funding and commissioning reports. The Small to Medium Sector Report and Resourcing Dance: An Analysis of the Subsidised Australian Dance Sector, however, proved to be impoverished documents. The recent Theatre Board Report on triennially funded companies, on the other hand, focuses on one strand of organisational practice, clearly defines its problems, proposes what needs to be done and puts a price on it.

However, and this is one of the great ironies, Australian artists have still managed to create an embarrassment of riches, gathering increasing international accolades. This proliferation of art and its successes has so far let governments off the funding hook, but how long before the supply side cannot meet the demand because it is so diminished and so tired? Over the decade, we’ve also sadly watched many talented artists leave the field—quite unnatural attrition.

GOOD SIGNS

On the positive side, while federal arts funding in real terms has declined dramatically, state governments over the decade have steadily invested more in cultural funding—though not always reliably—as in South Australia’s funding redistributions and the travails of Melbourne’s ACMI. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s collaborations with the Australia Council have improved opportunities for the international marketing of Australian arts. Australia’s international arts festivals have featured more Australian work since the Kosky and Archer Adelaide Festivals of the 90s. Idiosyncratic festivals like Next Wave, Artrage, This is not art, Noise and others consistently nurture young talent. 10 Days on the Island and The Queensland Festival of Music (with its wonderful regional commissioning model) have shown how festivals don’t have to be city-centred. They are mirrored by the growing arts strength of Darwin and centres like Launceston, Mildura, Cairns, Newcastle, Lismore and others from which our arts future is emerging. The advent of the Quarterly Essay and the forthcoming arts equivalent from Currency Press along with Artshub’s invaluable daily online round up and reporting of local and international arts news provide us with a growing opportunity to build a picture of Australian culture that we can discuss and debate.

THE NEW

In 1994 and again in 1999 we reported the suspicion with which hybrid and new media arts were greeted in certain quarters, not a little because limited existing funding had to be shared with new forms. Much has changed since, in attitude if not funding. Australian works are consistently acclaimed in Europe and elsewhere for their multimedia and cross-cultural innovations. New media might not be that ‘new’ any more but what is remarkable is the constant inventiveness and relative ease with which Australian artists explore the relationship between the physical and the virtual, the potentials of interactivity and computer gaming, and the art-science nexus. It is an increasingly rich site for new ideas and tough-minded social critique and it is happening across all art fields, much of it documented in our pages over the decade. Dance, for all its financial difficulties, has excited with its commitment to new media explorations and a burgeoning dance screen culture. In film the assuredness of Aboriginal film directors (and actors and cinematographers) reveals not only great talent but the success of its nurturing through carefully tailored training and funding schemes, let alone a strong sense of community. And across the board there has been, in the last few years, a real intensification of political and ethical concern evident in the arts, finding its way quickly into theatres and galleries and, through documentary (but rarely feature) films, onto screens.

GENERATIONS

Many of the artists we have covered since 1994 have become prominent well beyond the pages of RealTime. Others enjoy occasional success and persist with vision and determination, contributing to a milieu where the body, history, cultures and technology are explored with passion. These are the innovators, often hybrid arts practitioners, whose work is increasingly known around the world, if less so at home, their creations neither mainstream nor conventional. New artists are always appearing on our pages, but in the last few years there has been a surge of young artists for whom hybrid practice is second nature: in SCAN 2003 (RT57) we profiled 100 innovative artists under the age of 30.

THE PHOTOGRAPHS: HEIDRUN LÖHR

Until 2000, we weren’t in a position to store photographs; we didn’t have the office or the hard drive space. Therefore, pulling together images for this celebration has been quite a challenge, and we don’t have a lot of room in this edition. So we decided to focus largely on hybrid performance, creating an opportunity to pay tribute to Heidrun Löhr, a photographer who regularly frequents our pages and is respected by the Sydney performance, dance and theatre scene, as well as exhibiting her own work in galleries. Performance theorist (and now novelist) Jane Goodall wrote of Heidrun’s work in 1995:

…Löhr does more than document. She is one of those rare photographers who has an instinct for witnessing the instantaneous unfolding of an event and she captures the figure of a performer in ways that convey something of what it is to risk live action.
RT5, p 16, Feb-March 1995

THANKS

Our contributing editors in all states are integral to the success of RealTime. We thank them for their advice and patience and, in many cases, sheer endurance. To all our writers, our thanks for your willingness to respond generously to the art around you. Our thanks for many years of support from Tony MacGregor (Executive Producer, Radio Eye, ABC) who chairs the Board of Open City, steering us through the high times and the hard with humour and insight. Out thanks too to our Board members John Davis, Julie Robb, Rhana Devenport, Juanita Kwok, Josephine Barbaro and David Young, and previous members Gretchen Miller, Hunter Cordaiy and Kath Walters, for their guidance through the periods of doubt and stress that accompany a venture such as this. Thanks also to our printers, Harris Print, especially Keith Dunham, to our distributors in all states, and to the managements of the 1000 venues across Australia who allocate space for RealTime.

AND ABOVE ALL

Since 1998, the astonishingly multi-skilled Gail Priest has been Advertising Sales Manager and Design & Layout Artist, and now Associate Editor, as well as a writer for RealTime, all the while enjoying a developing career as a sound artist. She is also a co-director for Electrofringe 2003-04 (This Is Not Art, Newcastle). Blessedly cheerful, utterly committed and ever perceptive, Gail is truly part of the team and we cannot imagine RealTime without her. Recently, Dan Edwards, our OnScreen Commissioning Editor, also took on the role of RealTime Assistant Editor, giving us the additional editorial and writing strength we are so hungry for.

To our readers, subscribers, advertisers and funders, we look forward to informing and challenging you in the years ahead, a shared venture in supporting the artists who nourish us all.

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