Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

August 2004

The Laminex Man

photo David Wilson

The Laminex Man

Recognising the challenges involved in touring a company as large as Restless Dance, artistic director Kat Worth identified the need for 2 shorter works in the company’s repertoire. Laminex Man by Michael Whaites and a shortened version of Worth’s Starry Eyed fulfilled this need. Presented as part of the biennial High Beam Festival for Disability Arts, these works highlight the versatility and unique performance quality of the Restless dancers.

Laminex Man begins with a prologue of projected black and white images from the 50s of traditional male activities. Wrestling, gymnastics, farming, labouring, playing football, boxing, driving tractors, boys with their dads and military marches appear on screen as a lone performer plays a solo card game. Slowly the other 4 cast members appear in a series of scenes playing out the inherited roles of manhood. Laminex Man suggests that male behaviour remains rooted in the past.

The work is woven with Whaites’ signature humor. A chasing game sees the ringleader and antagonist fly through a paper screen leaving a torn, jagged, greenish lit space. Beginning as play to alleviate boredom, boyish antics of tickling and belly raspberries give rise to mirth as the scene begins to smack of a bucks’ night in disarray. Tackling, jumping and rolling combine to create an energetic and sweaty space precipitating a climatic shirts-off Cleo centrefold moment. Five heaving young male bodies stare brazenly out at the audience, slowly moving into Marlboro man poses, flexing James Dean muscles, boldly displaying the male body beautiful.

The understated costuming by Gaelle Mellis hits the mark, with the young men dressed in suits, shirts and thongs. The lighting by Geoff Cobham crafts the space in muted shades of black, white and green. The video by Closer Productions is looped, allowing the content to become familiar and lessening the tendency of moving images to dominate the live action.

The gestural actions of spitting, scratching nether regions, pelvic thrusts and manly poses gradually increase in magnitude. As a touching contrast, the next scene at first appears like an innocent pyjama party. But as it unfolds a homophobic defensive touch-and-repel sequence alludes to the underlying pain and difficulty men may experience in communicating more subtle and fragile emotions. Images of men coming to the aid of a fallen comrade rang in my perceptual retina, offering a counterpoint to the superficial bravado of more familiar acts of cliched masculinity. Parody and pastiche acts as the laminator in Laminex Man, keeping the surface dry.

This is an accessible work which utilises simple choreographic structures such as tableau and repetition to humorous effect. Further investigation into contemporary masculinity would thicken this work. I wanted to know how this particular group of young males feel in the year 2004. Manhood by Steve Biddulph started a whole men’s movement as a reaction to previous epochs, the legacy of which is not reflected in this work. Are we glued like laminex to archaic role models? Might youthful boyhood exuberance and play give hope to the Laminex Man?

The new version of Starry Eyed is 15 minutes shorter than the original, condensing the formerly strong sense of unfolding time (RT58, p32). The smaller cast enabled a tightening of certain scenes, strengthening the concepts being investigated. As a double bill these works are excitingly different, providing a rich and varied theatrical experience. I would have been happy to witness the full-length version of Starry Eyed, but left satisfied nonetheless.

Restless Dance Company, Laminex Man and Starry Eyed, May 4-8

RealTime issue #62 Aug-Sept 2004 pg. Onl

Stephanie Miller, Robert Meldrum, Wounds to the Face

photo Susan Gordon-Brown

Stephanie Miller, Robert Meldrum, Wounds to the Face

In 1862, the French physiologist Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne attempted to render transparent the soul and emotions of man by mapping physiognomic movement through electro-stimulation of compliant subjects’ facial muscles (including professional actors). But in using electrical probes to mould such expressions as “Lady Macbeth’s malice”, Duchenne de Boulogne displaced the “truth” which he sought to reveal behind the mask of flesh. The face remained a mysterious combination of involuntary responses, sculptural and performative artifice, and over-determined symbolic expressions derived from the history of art, literature, myth, culture and political rhetoric.

In contrast to Duchenne de Boulogne’s experiments, Howard Barker’s Wounds to the Face purports to reveal nothing. Rather, it provides a layered exploration of the ambiguities enfolded within the values of physiognomic beauty, ugliness and expression. There is no dichotomy here between the “false” plastic surgeons who ply their skills according to the dictates of perfectible beauty and the “true” revolutionaries who seek to liberate the ugly, to maim the former elite and hang the surgeons. This is not a world in which the “good” mother who indulgently stands by her war-wounded son is set against the “evil” fiance who flees, repulsed, when confronted with the son’s physiognomic death. As Keith Gallasch wrote of the playwright’s Victory: “Barker can portray…[a character]…with the values of Margaret Thatcher”, but in the next moment demand we attend to the horrors of her personal miseries and unfulfilled desires (RT61, p12). There are no heroes or villains here, only mortals with their flesh mired in the clay and make-up which one woman spends the entire production obsessively applying to her anxious visage.

Jess Kingsford has worked with Howard Barker in London and her direction is deeply indebted to this offshoot of the British repertory tradition. There is a toughness to the performance, a firm physical poise and subtly intense declamation which recalls Steven Berkoff’s reinterpretation of Shakespearean and Greek tragedy. The unrepentant poetry of speech and tautly placed bodies manage to embody a sense of commonplace physicality and British working-class language. The rediscovery of the popular in the high art of Jonson, Hogarth and others within British theatre of the 1960s and 70s infuses this production with an unrelenting force and an even, muscular pacing. However, unlike Berkoff this does not lead to an ambivalent valorisation of masculinity versus a horror of the feminine. In terms of performance, it is the relatively fresh female faces represented here which give the production its quiet dignity and restrained sexual allure.

It is indeed a bold dramaturg who stages a work concerned with physiognomy, since the subject sharply focuses the audience’s attention on the actor’s craft. Kingsford and her cast respond to this by eschewing excessive facial gesture and melodrama. Despite the pitch-black absurdities and horrors mounted on stage, which include the treacherous duplicity of lover and tyrant alike, the straight faces of these performers recall glassy ponds, disturbed only by slight ripples or calm waves of expression. Each performs more than one character, further highlighting the ambiguity and multiplicity of these visages.

As a result, the rare tight constrictions of muscle or sudden convulsions of the zygomaticus major become brutal performances, harsh articulations of the pragmatism of Narcissus during the revolution, or the pain of the surgeon transformed into a portrait of fear. Cutting away the face does not reveal truth, only more bloody flesh.

Black Box Theatre Company, Wounds to the Face, writer Howard Barker, director Jess Kingsford; Theatreworks, Melbourne, June 17-July 4

RealTime issue #62 Aug-Sept 2004 pg. Onl

Jo Holder started The Cross Art Projects in September 2003 to promote contemporary art practices and investigations which could not be undertaken in the established gallery/museum matrix. The low cost space in Sydney's Kings Cross was conceived in tandem with The Cross Art + Books, which sells second hand and imported books on design, art theory, gender and cultural studies. The 2 establishments are divided by a corridor but there is a conceptual and spiritual flow between them. The Cross Art + Books displays publications which complement the current exhibition and provides a spillover area for gallery crowds.

The site is relatively low cost but elegant, spread across the lower storey of a grand Victorian house. The Projects is a charming but decidedly professional space, big enough to allow large paintings the required sweep of perspective and provide an area for lectures and public discussion.

Holder has the needs of independent curators very much in mind. In her opening night address, Merryn Gates, the curator of Vivienne Binns' show Twenty First Century Paintings, talked of the artist's long career as an investigative and collaborative artist, and of travelling in the Kimberley with Binns during her persistent search for the ideal ant hill. Although the talk was marked by academic distance and all sorts of theoretical and historical contextualisations, it was shot through with a warm personal regard and humour not usually associated with academic discourse. Holder's space encourages this kind of personal engagement.

Peter Fay curated The Cross Art Projects' first show, by naive artist Gina Sinozich. Sinozich's response to the war in Iraq and other public events attracted major media attention and widespread admiration. At the same time selected works from Fay's personal collection were being exhibited as Home Sweet Home in the National Gallery, the first time a private collector's vision and taste have been given space on that gallery's walls. Fay was the right person to be given this honour, as his acquisitions are imaginative and courageous in their taste and judgement, though of a kind that no professional art buyer would be likely to even see, much less give a second glance. They are awkward and true, challenging and poignant.

Sinozich's show, The Iraqi War, was similarly terrible and true: rockets aimed at fleeing Iraqis burst in delicate, beautiful colours. Its popularity revealed how this artist speaks to the fears and needs of Australians. Fay donated this group of works to the Casula Powerhouse in the artist's home suburb of Liverpool.

Holder has also provided an opportunity for local resident Gail Hastings, an artist much better known in Europe and the US than Australia. Her exhibition But Is It Art? invited the viewer on a participatory mystery tour of minimalist paintings, 'sculptural situations' and texts which posed questions about the nature of art and its reception. It was a demanding exhibition by a painstaking artist. We might remember that Godfrey Miller was undertaking a comparable exploration of theory through practice in Kings Cross in the post-WWII era.

Holder not only wants to give curators and artists working outside established institutions the opportunity to mount challenging and experimental shows, but to offer a site for artists working outside their perceived range or employing content and form not usually given professional respect. The Projects displayed large watercolour works by the late cartoonist/architect George Molnar for the Cross Arts Festival. Their subject matter was familiar Molnar, offering a gently wry commentary on contemporary life and controversial urban events. But their scale, careful construction, colouring and gold framing put them outside the recognisable Molnar style of idiosyncratic, stylish pen and ink newspaper cartoons. Later, The Projects twittered and rustled with the paper and cardboard birds, plants and portrait assemblages of ex-country and western singer Slim Barrie. His works are irresistibly fresh and enthusiastic in their discovery and proclamation of creativity. “Every work a masterpiece” their maker declared.

Holder's Projects offered a response to Mardi Gras with It All Started at Patch's, curated by Robert Lake. Lake had curated a series of shows about queer art, leading to the comprehensive Hung Drawn and Quartered (with Jim Anderson) at the Tin Sheds. The Projects provided Lake with an opportunity to explore more tangential historical significances, art practices and ideologies through works such as the video Patch's People by Night and Day, c. 1979-94 and a video of a week-long party. This was supported by talks from Lake, Tim Hilton and well known curator and theoretician Craig Judd, under the ambit title “Cross Conversations: the Necessity of Queer Art.” The lively audience discussion broached sexism, the historical placement of the week-long party video in terms of 60s staged happenings and the uncovering of parties as an historic means of gay expression. The show was underwritten by local doctor Robert Finlayson, and Holder continues to encourage this kind of local support for Projects exhibitions.

Holder's goal for The Projects is to give the work exhibited and uncovered under its auspices wider exposure, since she can encourage raw, radical and critical art processes which the gallery/museum circuit, with its built-in need to market and merchandise, finds uncongenial. It is only through spaces such as The Cross Arts Projects that the works of key, socially responsive artists like Vivienne Binns are given their due.

The Cross Art Projects, 33 Roslyn Street, Kings Cross, Sydney, Wed-Sat 10am-6pm

RealTime issue #62 Aug-Sept 2004 pg. Onl

Frankenstein

photo Glenn Dickson

Frankenstein

My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me…I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the unhallowed arts kneeling before the thing he had put together.
Mary Shelley’s introduction to Frankenstein (1831)

Mary Shelley’s Gothic tale inverts the rational and scientific thinking associated with the Age of Reason. The scientist Victor Frankenstein cannot relinquish his desire to create a human in his image. Mixing science and alchemy, he tampers with the remains of the stolen dead, creating a monster with human longings that are at odds with its eight-foot ugliness.

Terrapin Puppet Theatre’s Frankenstein is not the 1931 film with Boris Karloff where the Monster shambles around with bolts in his neck, although Matt Warren’s black and white video montage of monsters reminds us of our fascination with filmic representations. With puppetry design by Graeme Davis, this story of obsession and carnage is portrayed with the beauty and finesse that puppetry makes possible.

The puppets embody the strangeness of the ‘other’: the monster has human form and longs for acceptance, while in the skilful hands of Kirsty Grierson, Colin Sneesby and Melissa King it is are also imbued with human qualities. It is easy to forget that puppetry is deception.

Greg Methé’s set design uses the device of the triangle to convey the character’s journey from heaven to purgatory and then hell. Elizabeth, her fiancé Victor Frankenstein and the Monster continually traverse 3 levels, including the upper book-lined library and the site of Victor’s obsessive experimentation in the cellar.

In Victor’s subterranean laboratory we peer through the portal of a boiler, mesmerised by an inchoate form suffused with purple light. Ben Sibson’s sound score of dripping water, thunder, lightning and dark piano chords accentuates the Monster’s grotesque birth. Sprawling like soft clay, inanimate and without differentiation, he stirs and assumes life, head down, bum up, moving onto his hands and knees while shielding his eyes from the alternating light and dark. The Monster repeatedly stands and falls before reaching out to the terrified Frankenstein. Victor takes no responsibility for the life he has created. The Monster remains an abject creature, abandoned and unprepared for any role in the world.

Love, desire and rejection are the central concerns in Jessica Wilson and Anne Thompson’s interpretation of the tale. This production re-enacts the horror of the Monster as he takes his first breath and proceeds to snuff and sniff his way through torment to oblivion after killing Elizabeth, whom he loves, and Victor, his creator.

First published in 1818, Mary Shelley’s story still evokes fascination. Terrapin’s production revisits and reinvents Frankenstein, imbuing the tale with a timely resonance. Through the processes of economic imperative and tribal tension the world continues to spawn monsters. Each day the media presents recurring primal scenes beyond our comprehension. We remain trapped in the bind of observing horror while recognising the apparition as a manifestation of our own dark dreaming.

Terrapin Puppet Theatre, Frankenstein, director Jessica Wilson, dramaturg/concept development Anne Thompson, puppet design Graeme Davis, puppeteers Kirsty Grierson, Melissa King, Colin Sneesby; Peacock Theatre, Hobart, May 18-29

RealTime issue #62 Aug-Sept 2004 pg. Onl

Barbara Campbell’s performance/installation The Grimwade Effect is a curiosity about curiosities. The research springboard is the fetishes, passions and discoveries of a certain Russell Grimwade, a 19th century industrialist, collector, wood carver, researcher into eucalypts and promoter of their oils, who established a glassworks and co-owned a leech aquarium. Hence the elements, materials and processes on display in the room: leeches, ceramic ornaments, eucalyptus plinths and shelf-brackets. Fat and thin legs on floor and wall. Factory portraits reflecting on Grimwade’s aspirations and realised dreams. An exquisite glass heart, metal screens, a magnifying glass. Things are examined, extracted, concealed. The leeches are applied to the performer’s thighs – succulent, sedulous drinkers of the internal world. Blood and thoughts are harvested and extracted from these intersections.

The performer enters an already-hushed space, a body in a bandage dress. She becomes at once both crafter and patient, calling forth our patience or impatiences. Her body on the low plinth is itself an exhibit and tool for the harvest. We watch her try to persuade the leeches to take on her thighs (Cleopatra waiting for her asps). When they do, she lies back, patient with their actions. The electronic stethoscope she holds to her breast carries her heart beat through to the glass heart, where it is amplified.

For at least 20 minutes, waves of expectation pass through the room, curiosity refusing to peak as the slowness of progress sets up its irritations. In a way I am disheartened at this inevitability of hushed expectation. Historically, leeches were used to purify, rid of excess, salve ills. Which humour here is being worked on, and whose? Blood, bile, phlegm, pride? Half the audience smirks with the pleasure of its own endurance.

No matter how old performance art is, it still seems to call up this edge. It doesn’t help that galleries are so white, so hummed in their controlled climates, so anxious in their attendants, dressed here in black clothes, white gloves, a body angle of caution. One has a propensity to travel around the room ordering people to listen when they fail to maintain silent reverence to the heartbeat amplified. How sorry I am for this literalness. Personally, I need to ignore the amplification in order to maintain my own connections.

Any artwork, as an event in itself, is an interplay of surface and subliminal responses spanning past, present and future time. Curiously, the present is weakened by such interferences. The literalness of the heartbeat and the overworked analogies between body, wood, leg and plinth dulls my own re-creative sensory process. But strangely, this contributes to the installation’s investigative success.

While some of the objects here imprint their present exquisiteness (glass heart, ceramic millefiori), the largest object, the body itself, is curiously easy to put aside. Grimwade and his intellect do not become embodied for me through a body interacting with his interests; rather, the event focuses on the intersections between materials and ideas he made in his lifetime. Thus the event is a curating of process—a documentary of qualities of thought, mapping out parallels and seeing where, and how, in the new-born context of this time, the ideas could be re-manifest or reconfigured with new techniques and on new ground. But my time here does not matter:

“There remains the rather unsettling sense that her behaviour takes place more for her than us (a ‘working through’ on the most solitary of levels) and that the performance would in fact occur regardless of whether or not audience was present to witness it.” Kelly Gellatly, metis program notes

As long as Campbell’s body is present in its visual and aural insistence, it seems to prevent me from deepening my relation to the mounted objects and in fact may keep them separate from each other. In the event, there is little room given for my attentive and re-creative disobedience. As such, the event is a very particular success.

Barbara Campbell, The Grimwade Effect, in metis: TIME 04; Craft ACT, Canberra, May 1

Along with Nino Rota, Ennio Morricone is one of the great composers of the Italian cinema. Best known for his defining contribution to the spaghetti western, for which he created a musical spaciousness and idiosyncratic sonic vocabulary to match the widescreen operatics of the genre developed by director Sergio Leone, Morricone has also composed for many other film directors including Pasolini, Polanski, Malick, Fellini and a host of commercial operators.

One of the first assessments of the significance of Morricone materialised in John Zorn's versions of the spaghetti western scores, which fully acknowledged not just the unique melodic invention but especially the sonic punctuation and add-ons so characteristic of and integral to the scores. Zorn being Zorn, these sounds are taken to new extremes but still with a jazzman's fidelity to the original conception. Melbourne's The Ennio Morricone Experience stay much closer to the ground in their exhilarating and inventive recreations, but at the same time manage to yield other insights into the master's creations. This is echoed in the very theatricality of their presentation and the absence of any film excerpts. We watch and learn, but it's the music-making we learn from, something we can take back to the films with a greater appreciation of both image and score.

With whistling, musical saw, trigger samples and an array of things to crack, whack and crunch (including a one-off bite of an apple and some body-slapping), the 5-strong ensemble (playing keyboards, drum-kit, timpani, marimba, vibes, trumpet, all kinds of percussion) recreate the Morricone sound world with the dexterity of jugglers and all the acuity of expert musicianship. The young, initially wary audience (“What, no film?”) soon warmed to the visual thrills and to the droll hosting of trumpet player Patrick Cronin with his slo-mo, say-everything-twice delivery so appropriate to the Leone western mood. Versatility likewise appealed with Cronin, keyboardist Boris Conley and bassist Dan Witton singing in top form, and percussionists David Hewitt and Graeme Leak excelling on musical saw and strung can respectively.

Even greater pleasure was to be had from the performers speaking the original dialogue: guttural, breathy, strung out, punctuated with strange sounds, and inherently musical, a horse opera no less. It was this dramaturgical sensibility that gave the performance its peculiar powe—alertness to timing, to the power of silence, the musicality of language and instrumental performance as inherently gestural and dramatic. There are plenty of aural thrills, from the chill of arching melancholic solo lines to the full ensemble in choral mode with timpani thundering.

The evening concluded with an hilarious, rousing, audience-participating rendition of the song from the poorly regarded Seven Guns for the MacGregors (1967), a bit of silliness after the high drama of A Fistful of Dollars, Once Upon a Time in the West and many more unforgettables.

The Ennio Morricone Experience offer one of the most satisfying music theatre encounters of recent times, frequently funny, often insightful and right up there with the same musicians' collaboration with composer Gerard Brophy on Chamber Made Opera's Phobia (RT 59).

The APRA-Australian Music Centre Classical Music Awards have become a significant part of the Australian musical calendar. This year the ceremony was broadcast on ABC Classic FM from the Sydney Conservatorium's Verbrugghen Hall, an indication perhaps of an improving sense of connection between the arts-faltering national broadcaster and the community of which it is a part. The awards recognise the achievements of artists for specific works or across the span of their creative lives. There are no dollars, as yet, but the recognition counts highly and the more Australians who hear about them, the better.

Award winners for 2004 included composers Andrew Ford (Best Composition by an Australian Composer: Learning to Howl), Gordon Kerry (Orchestral Work of the Year: This Insubstantial Pageant), Gerard Brophy (Vocal/Choral Work of the Year: Berceuse) and Richard Charlton (Instrumental Work of the Year: Stoneworks, for guitar). Best Performance of an Australian Composition was won by young clarinettist Richard Haynes for his performance of Peter Rankine's Time and the Bell. Viola virtuoso Patricia Pollett was awarded Most Distinguished Contribution to the Presentation of Australian Composition by an Individual for her performances of Australian works she'd commissioned and has played on her CD Still Life (reviewed by Chris Reid on Earbash).

The Most Distinguished Contribution to the Advancement of Australian Music in a Regional Area went to the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music and was accepted by its artistic director Lyndon Terracini—a well-deserved award for a truly innovative approach to developing regional engagement with music-making. The Distinguished Services to Australian Music award went to Miriam Hyde, composer, teacher and poet, now in her 90s but a confident presence at the ceremony. The Award for Long Term Contribution to the Advancement of Australian Music went to composer Felix Werder (for biographies of Hyde and Werder go to www.amcoz.com.au). Among the state awards (SA) composer Bozidar Kos was recognised for Long-term Contribution to the Advancement of Australian Music (his 70th birthday concert by Ensemble Offspring is reviewed in this edition). The full list of awards can be found on www.amcoz.com.au.

Initially muted by live broadcast decorum, but loosening up as the night progressed and the winners quipped drolly about career ups and downs, the sense of occasion was heightened with memorable performances. There were vividly dramatic excerpts from Andrée Greenwell's multimedia music theatre work Dreaming Transportation; Ensemble Offspring gave a dynamic account of Michael Smetanin's engaging Spray; and oboist Diana Doherty and company revelled in Ross Edwards' flirtatious and sensual Love Duet.

Ananda Sukarlan played a contrasting and increasingly dark selection from his In Memorium commissions in remembrance of the victims of the 2002 Bali bombing; and Robert Hughes, a 2003 award winner, offered a great flourish in the form of his Prelude for Organ (played by Sarah Kim) to open the evening.

Given the national importance of the awards, it's looking like the ceremony will move on to other capital cities in the years to come. It's a well-organised, good-humoured blend of prize-giving, spare, witty speech-making and excellent performances worthy of the winners and the culture they represent.

APRA-Australian Music Centre Classical Music Awards, Verbrugghen Hall, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, July 12

The future looks bright for the 30 young dancers who recently performed in FAST. Be they aspiring professional dancers or simply dance enthusiasts, their verve, skill and exuberance was the major reason FAST season was a sell-out.

At break-neck pace these ensemble performers swerved, veered and propelled themselves across the Mitchell Street car park, a concrete space canopied by sky, atop Darwin’s newest multi-level complex. This central city venue encouraged site-specific choreography which had dancers sweeping across the concrete expanse one moment and performing tight, discrete vignettes making use of ramps, split levels and steel fittings the next.

Particularly pleasing were the high production values. Visually striking costumes, each a variation on the last, added to the frenzied chaos while also creating an overall design aesthetic. An eclectic music score, which included pop, jazz and hip hop, seamlessly evoked the rhythmic pulse of ensemble dance.

If the pace was ultimately too busy—intensity without relief becomes gruelling—FAST nonetheless accentuated the work’s exploration of the desires, pressures and choices that young people experience as they attempt to seize all of life’s options and possibilities. The articulation of these themes through movement assaulted the audience and clearly conveyed the reeling momentum of young people traversing a technologically mediated, globalised world. Contrast came in the shape of twists and turns between dance forms of all persuasions. From the balletic to back flips, with gestures from Indian folk dance and the Highland fling, it all formed a choreographic entirety through which the dancers literally flew.

Produced by Tracks, FAST marks a new era in Darwin dance. Artistic directors David McMicken, Tim Newth and Julia Quinn are to be congratulated for their ongoing encouragement of young Northern Territory dancers. Experiences such as FAST build upon the excellent work of Darwin’s dance teachers, opening the way for the next wave of professional dancers and choreographers.

Tracks, FAST, direction and concept David McMicken, Tim Newth, Julia Quinn, Mitchell Street Centre Car Park, Darwin, May 12-15

The preset is of 3 hanging screens, an orange light projected onto each. Slowly, we see a pattern of wide wooden floorboards at odd angles, upside-down, rocking, tilting, turning over. This place looks like a boat —seasick, unsteady, dancing. A woman is rolling, almost writhing—perhaps she’s already on the rocks? Her hands become spasmodic, claw-like, but there’s overt sensuality in every move. The camera work is fast, disorienting, moving from one screen to another.

Each screen is a different room in a house. The room we see her in becomes furnished for travel with suitcases and stacked boxes. Suddenly, we’re aware of another person, first through a doorway and then in the room itself, from the back, sitting in an armchair. The woman now seems anguished. She unpacks boxes, sets up a lamp, turns it on. Her actions are jerky, crouching.

Live dancers enter. Suddenly, the scene is here and now, alive and hot. There’s a bed on the floor and 3 rooms on screen. As if in filtered sunlight, the woman rolls towards satin sheets. Is this a predictable bedroom scene? Blotches suddenly appear on screen to mess things up. In the domestic life of this couple, trouble seems inevitable.

On screen, he’s packing very fast—a reprise, or a rewind? The piece begins to acquire a peculiarly unsettling quality. It’s a turning point, but are we looking towards the future or the past? It folds back on itself at the same time as the plot begins to unravel.

The mix of live performance and video is seamless. As he leaves her, his face is ugly and he spits words with no sound, but every facial muscle is eloquent and derisive. At a peak in his ferocity, he tries to strangle her. A feeling here of ghastly inevitability. They appear to make up, but you know it’s the beginning of the end.

I wondered whether this feeling of inevitability was planned or accidental; is it a narrative device or just un-worked angst? The camera rolls around, as if we’re back at the beginning of the story, and the nausea begins to make sense. We must have begun somewhere in the middle. A lonely, live ballroom dance sequence unfolds, where the embrace is back-to-front. Is it deliberate? A small thing, but it contributes to the odd, edgy feel.

The camera rolls you around in perpetual upheaval. In the ultimate tactic to prevent him from leaving, she reaches the end of her rope and kills him. There ensues an almost comical scene as she drags his leaden body from one frame to another, through the house, and we see his body propped up in the chair in which he first appeared. She is trying to talk to him, pretending he’s alive, and we see at last the sadness and madness in her actions. She is unpacking again, making him stay, in futile denial.

It has become a sad and awful story. Slowly she lowers herself into a bath and the water closes over her face; it’s turned a little too real. The beautifully unsettling structure means what you think you’re seeing is later revealed to be a different act entirely.

Inasmuch, choreographer Jason Pitt, video and film Jason Lam, Jason Pitt; performers Marnie Palomares, Jason Lam; Performance Space, Sydney, May 22

The 6 works of Sue Healey’s Niche series cover live performance, installation and dance film, and include an international commission in Japan (RT 61, p48). It would be interesting to experience all of these works in a single location within a unified time span, to see how the different textures of sound, movement, light and space resonate with and against each other. Fine Line Terrain is described as “the major live work in the Niche series”, but it is essentially a non-linear collection of fragments, of stops and starts, as though the installation aspect of Niche had seeped into the live durational work.

The atmosphere of Fine Line Terrain is charged, tense, but inconclusive. There are moments of beauty and moments of banality. Dancers come together and come apart. The lighting by Joseph Mercurio frames their movements in boxes. The film and video projections by Louise Curham pick up the theme in Michael Pearce and Healey’s linear set design. The soundtrack by Darrin Verhagen veers from what sounds like static played backward to gently rolling, sad songs. Dancers develop strange relationships with the walls that enclose them. The soundtrack’s collage turns international when the clipped counting of numbers gives way to some German text and then some floating, perhaps resonant, perhaps pretentious lines like “the dangerous sea”, and then something about “indifference”, “satisfaction”. Dancers entangle themselves in each other and turn upside down. They play with and get caught up in the detachable white lines that frame the otherwise dark blank set. There’s a charming duet, a searing solo, a sudden building momentum in a trio, a silent line of 4 bodies in space with someone looking on from the darkness…Some of these events happen again in a different order but one gets the impression the order doesn’t really matter.

What carries us through all this is the presence of the dancers. Nelson Reguera Perez has outstanding moments of breathtaking, fully coordinated, leaping physical grace. There is a wicked smile of delight as Nalina Wait disappears into the darkness with 2 men. Jacob Lehrer is a quiet but thoughtful presence. Shona Erskine is playful and expansive. But above all Lisa Griffiths is outstanding in this work – a lovely dancer with whom one feels fully present at all times. She brings luminous beauty and complete humanity to the tangle of lyricism and awkwardness, darkness and confusion, the pockets of levity and unspoken desire, the expected and the unexpected.

Fine Line Terrain is undoubtedly a mature work, and perhaps viewing the whole of the Niche series would shed light on its interesting but inconclusive gestures. On their own, the lines in Sue Healey’s Fine Line Terrain are fractured. It’s as if we are in a labyrinth but Ariadne’s thread has long since been cut into many pieces. There is nowhere to go. There is no chance of finding the centre or the exit. And so—dance.

Fine Line Terrain, choreographer Sue Healey, composer Darrin Verhagen, film projections Louise Curham, lighting Joseph Mercurio; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, June 29-July 3

When Marshall McLuhan outlined his thesis about the global village in 1967, the web didn't exist. However, the web and qnoors (queer non object orientated radio signal) brings his vision to fruition. qnoors is a live digital media networked installation, from co-net radio operators Jason Sweeney and Jaye Hayes.

From a makeshift mobile media bunker of broken cardboard boxes and flashing fairy lights, Sweeney (net name Dubhustler) sat with a minidisc recorder, computer and modem. With these he SMS'd, blogged and online chatted to his co-qnoors creator and net mate Jaye Hayes (net name Subliminal) who was in a boot lab in Berlin. Nearby were 2 transmission sites with real time video streams from Jaye's venture in Berlin.

At qnoors' internet relay chat room geography, time and space becomes meaningless and qnoors becomes a global village square. Dubhustler and Subliminal describe themselves as “net radio out-casters”, queer operators with an outlaw attitude, secret audio agents with hidden agendas. Their mission: to generate queer post-consumer noise, mis-communicating dissent and recycling it into 'noo media.'

Sweeney and Hayes's project was initiated during a 6 week residency in 2000 at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada. At Banff they used the tools of Radio 90, a terrestrial pirate radio station that also streamed online 24 hours a day.

Sweeney and Hayes befriended Virtual Artists and “radioqualia, server-based companies from Adelaide and New Zealand. These companies provide access, advice and space for digital media artists. As a writer, musician, sound artist, broadcaster and radio trainer, Jason Sweeney worked for 15 years in community radio and on the band circuit, witnessing the transition from analogue to digital radio, from the terrestrial (traditional radio) to the extra-terrestrial (net radio) and the development of the world wide web in the mid-1990s. Hayes had a background in performance and noise making before she left queer spectacle behind in search of a queering of process. While re-training in contemporary dance, she found her footing in the realm of networked media, where she was inspired by the creative and political energy of online communities operating outside the institutions and expectations of the arts industry.

I ventured into qnoors chat room to interview 'dub' or 'dubhustler' and, 'sub' or 'subliminal', about their fuse with this cool, interactive, non linearity, hypertext paradigm.

Andrea9671: hi to both if u, 1st would like to start with how you both define Sovereign Media and is qnoors a prime example of that?

dub: there is a definite alignment with what was being talked about in the area of sovereign media – we certainly don't have a defined audience when we transmit.

Sweeney subsequently described the Sovereign Media phenomenon as “related to people who are in their bedrooms with all this equipment…sending out these signals and these ideas by the web…[they're]…not really there to be part of some big market force…but to use the tools to communicate to their friends.” In his article “Media Without an Audience” (2000), Eric Kluitenberg defines it as a mediated environment of digital networks forming a complex phenomena of social interaction. Sovereign Media produces signals with an origin, sender and author, but no designated receiver. Kluitenberg writes, “Sovereign Media are the cream of the missionary work performed in the media galaxy. They have cut all surviving imaginary ties with truth, reality and representation. They no longer concentrate on the wishes of a specific target group as the 'inside' media still do. They have emancipated themselves from any potential audience…Sovereign Media insulate themselves against the hyper culture. They seek no connection, they disconnect.” Now the qnoors exhibit made some sense.

Andrea9671: ok, how successful was the installation work you both produced for ACMI, what did u both get out of it?

dub: failure has become our greatest success. discovering the various ways things can fall apart. technology stutters, doesn't work, it fails more often than we do.

qnoors, Jason Sweeney, Jaye Hayes, 2004: Australian Culture Now, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, June 7-13; http://fluidtransmissions.va.com.au [expired]

Embrace: an immodest green is the second in a series of ongoing exchanges between De Quincey Co and Indian artists. It builds on a 2003 residency with collaborator Santanu Bose, choreographer and the director of the Monirath Theatre in Kolkata (Calcutta). The main structural and conceptual source is the Natyashastra, an ancient Indian treatise on artistic practice. Seeing this work for the second time, I found it warmer, richer, and the audience participation less formal. The performers became hosts, inviting us into a strange and exquisite culture.

We enter a scape, either city or elsewhere—a profusion of events, things, a chaos of bits and pieces: garishly coloured Buddha lights all in a row, a profusion of small flashing video monitors repeating people and places over and over, a huge pile of earth, a box of disembodied blonde wigs, large bowls and jugs of milk, cushions piled on stairs.

The performers are chopping vegetables and spices, a beautiful array of colour, and we’re invited to kneel and talk with them instead of distantly observing. A huge cauldron of dhal is being prepared by Santanu Bose on the stage. There’s a sense of great potential, a depth of generosity, of boundless sensation, of a fullness as well as a coldness and strangeness. The sparse text (some of which is selected from the Rig Veda) seems heightened and full of portent-of what we are not certain. At one point Victoria Hunt swings a brazier and the smoke is potent and atmospheric as it begins to cloud the scene. Candle making is a sensual experience, rolling up trouser legs, rolling the cloth over the calf, laying the wick in a dish of oil and at last lighting the flame.

It’s a durational performance, but I don’t want to leave in case I miss something. In a way, it’s a story about Kolkata and the tremendous profusion of life in all its extremes. Not linear, but timeless and cyclical. As Tess de Quincey says, a story of “magnificent discordance…defiant skirmishing…extraordinary acceptance.”

Having your feet washed in milk is by invitation. Then there’s dancing in long blonde wigs around a pile of earth, a burlesque of Westernised music and movement in an absurd Bollywood culture. One memorable scene sees a dancer reclining amid the dirt, slight impulses twitching through her body, both a travesty of seduction and the real thing.

Video images are fast and flashing: masks, gods, icons, poverty and richness. At one point the performers create a fascinating duet between the seating blocks, of strange marionettes, vile cries, expression taken to an extreme, almost hideous and open-mouthed like a cry, or a great breath, or a gasp of surprise. This is followed by dissolute undressing, and video slo-mo of decrepit, mange-ridden dogs.

Throughout there is a constant bafflement of images, sumptuous fabric, dress, sensuous aroma, all within the same scape of starving dogs and vultures fighting for offal. We leave strangely and quietly with multiple screens showing, as a fugue, a dog riddled with vermin, chewing on its own body.

De Quincey Co, Embrace: an immodest green, performers Santanu Bose, Kristina Harrison, Victoria Hunt; video Sam James, sound composition Shannon O’Neill, installation and lighting Richard Manner; Performance Space, Sydney, May 27

When the technocorporate world makes false promises or spins attractive fictions, we call its artefacts “vapourware.” This is accepted, more or less, as an industrial by-product, the collision of overcooked marketing and accelerated rates of change. New media art has often assumed the trappings of the techno-corporation, sending it up while exploiting its brand power, using vapourware as an ironic container for critical and artistic substance. Patricia Piccinini's early L.U.M.P work comes to mind, but there are many other examples.

In The Symbiotic Bacterial Light Project, however, the container is empty and the artwork itself is vapourware. Artists Kathy Takayama and John Nicholson set the work up with cues announcing “science”: a shelf of test tubes with coloured liquid and specimen jars. A giant mirrored Luxcorp logo is affixed to the wall. In the main darkened room of the installation are more objects: a futuristic solarium bed emitting a greenish glow and an array of gently bubbling liquid-filled, green-lit tubes. Tiny green lights are suspended around the room. The objects are quite blank in themselves-they seem too simple to be authentic, like theatre props seen up close.

From the title of the work we might infer that we're bathing in bacterial light, but as the objects suggest this is a big fake. The artists' statement in the ante-room dissembles: “Through deliberate fictions, LuxCorp applies research strategies to create real technology.” They go on: “This product is not of our time but a product of the future, or rather, Science Fiction.”

The artists imagine a kind of domesticated biotechnology; luminescent bacteria as lifestyle option, a neat counterpoint to modern antibacterial hygiene. A fine idea, but the work does nothing to address it with any substance. Most frustrating of all, bioluminescence is a real and interesting phenomenon which the work doesn't engage with, despite the stated aims of the project: “The Symbiotic Bacterial Light Project…was formed to research and develop the functional capabilities of the natural process of bioluminescence with respect to its creative application towards visual media and interactive technology.”

Perhaps, in the fine tradition of vapourware, the technology just isn't there yet. If so, I would have much preferred the artists to be a bit more open about it.

The Symbiotic Bacterial Light Project, artists Kathy Takayama and John Nicholson; Gorman House Arts Centre, Canberra Contemporary Artspace; May 14-June 18

There has recently been a significant increase in access to information and communication technologies across the Asia-Pacific region. In some countries new media practices are well established and recognised as part of the art world, in others they have yet to carve out their own cultural space. In December 2003, a 2 day international joint UNESCO/SARAI colloquium, Old Pathways-New Travellers, was held to explore these issues and initiate the development of new media and digital art networks across the Asia-Pacific region.

The aim of the colloquium was to come up with a plan of action for the promotion and development of media arts and electronic music in Asian and Pacific societies. The event was run in co-operation with UNESCO's Digi-arts web-based program (portal.unesco.org/digiarts) and SARAI (www.sarai.net) a program organised by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, India. As the colloquium invitation stated:

We need to recognise that despite a diversity of conditions, certain basic features are similar in a host of Asian cultural contexts-these include the co-existence of old and new communicative cultures, a dynamic history of popular media practices, the cross fertilisation of cultural materials across ethnic, linguistic, geographic and cultural divides, a diversity of languages and traditions, and a ready acceptance of technological innovation.

With this context in mind, a key discussion item of the forum was the building of sustainable networks not reliant on constant referrals to 'the north.'

A real collaborative space has not previously existed in the region, nor have the means been there for networks to develop. Border cultural and fiscal issues have often prevented, or at least hindered, collaboration and exchange. But as Japanese freelance curator Yukiko Shikata suggested, media art is not just about using technologies, it's also about how artists conceptually and intuitively develop communicative and connective works. If there is a 'new' element in new media practice, it is perhaps a return to an art embedded in culture, rather than an art that stands apart from and comments on society.

Discussions on curatorial practice for the region spoke of building a collaborative model where the roles of artists, curators and technicians break down and become blurred. If new media practices have precipitated a major shift in the arts of the region, it has been through encouraging a method of cultural production inherently centred on collaboration. This is why local networks need to be developed to allow practitioners to work together, understand local cultural specificities and share their knowledge and experience. To date it seems that much cultural collaboration has been based on bilateral exchange with countries outside the region. Hopefully this meeting has begun a process of multi-lateral exchange closer to home.

The ongoing aim is to enable the creation of new media arts and electroacoustic music works through inter-regional partnerships, masterclasses, exchanges, residencies and mobile media labs travelling to different cities in the region. A database of regional artists and musicians is also being developed through the Digi-arts portal on the UNESCO web site. These resources will be useful to curators and cultural workers, as well as artists interested in identifying opportunities for exchange and collaboration.

Old Pathways-New Travellers: The Impact of Digital Arts in the Asian and Pacific Cultures, UNESCO and SARAI; New Delhi, India, Dec 4-5, 2003

For some time now, local hip hop stalwarts Morganics and Wire MC have been conducting workshops with the young Indigenous communities of Bourke, Wilcannia and Broken Hill. The aim has been to arm the kids with a fresh, potent form of expression that they can own and share. The first big success to come out of this process was the Wilcannia Mob with their 2002 hit Down River, which made it to No. 51 on JJJ’s Hottest 100 and scored the group a set at Homebake. River Rhythm Beatbox delivers something quite different. A showcase of 23 young, outback hip hop artists with Morganics and Wire sharing the production seat, the show is a multimedia smorgasbord-beats, words, visuals, documentary, movement—in effect, performative storytelling, that essential practice where Indigenous and hip-hop cultures speak to each other.

The night begins with a dual acknowledgment of ownership—to the traditional owners of the site, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and then to the traditional owners of hip hop. As we enter, a video montage of the streets of the Bronx circa 1971 is playing on the largest of the space’s 3 projection screens and DJ Swipa is spinning Grandmaster Flash’s The Message. The flavour of the space at this moment is overwhelmingly urban and American—we are a long way from Broken Hill. But it’s just a passing, respectful nod to the Old Skool. Respect, after all, is the motto of the medium: acknowledge and have pride in your roots, but don’t strangle yourself with them. The room blacks out. When the screens come back to life, we’re all on the dry road out west, listening to Charlie Pride on Koori Radio.

The performers mingle casually in the space, taking turns in the limelight, while audiovisual material—of the river, of the desert, of the local chicken shop and the IGA—anchors us at the narrative source. We hear testimony after testimony from the kids and the locals about the benefit that hip hop has had in the community. We see the recording studios; we hang out. At no point are we allowed to forget that this show, these performers, have come from somewhere, a somewhere that we are allowed to see and feel instead of just imagine. But this documentary element is necessary not only to provide context, but to remind us that what we are viewing is not a neatly packaged finished product. It’s a window into a process—dynamic, honest, warts and all.

The word ‘showcase’ is often read as ‘amateur night.’ This is not the case here. With ages ranging from 7 to 20, it is true that the bulk of the performers are young and green, but there is some real talent here. Standouts include the Back Lane Brothers (a group of boys with serious presence and skills), the Broken Hill Girls (present only in video form, but with great lyrics), Victor Riley and Lisa Webster (high energy and a sense of humour) and the Wilcannia Mob (they haven’t lost their touch: the room goes wild for Down River). Any grumblings about the grafting of an “American culture” onto an “Indigenous landscape” emanating from the more cynical corners of the audience have been silenced by the end as the perfection of the partnership becomes self-evident.

It’s about time Indigenous culture was given the freedom to hybridise, and River Rhythm Beatbox pulls it off beautifully. Traditional culture permeates the entire performance. It’s present in the instrumentation (the didj has a sound almost tailored to hip hop), the unique arrangement of beats, and the rhymes themselves. But at no point does this feel forced, like the performers are trying to actively ‘Indigenise’ hip hop. They are far too honest for that. Their roots are just there, constantly present as an ancient influence on a contemporary practice. It seems that it is not just hip hop that’s benefiting Indigenous kids; Indigenous kids could teach hip hop a few new tricks as well.

Message Sticks: River Rhythm Beatbox, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, May 28-30

As one of the most significant and widely employed art forms of the past decade, video occupies a central position within Australian contemporary art practice. This is attested to by the establishment of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, as well as exhibitions like Primavera at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (RT57, p21). Several of the Primavera 2003 artists currently feature in Mix-Ed: diverse practice and geography at Sherman Galleries and Interlace at Performance Space. As part of the Biennale of Sydney’s Parallel Program, these exhibitions feature works by some of Australia’s leading younger artists.

Curated by Simeon Kronenberg of Sherman Galleries, Mix-Ed presents an assortment of local and international talent, including 4 younger artists whose film and video work takes everyday subject matter, as well as conceptual paradoxes, as its focus. Sydney artist Emil Goh creates intimate projection works featuring the artist trailing anonymous individuals as they navigate the urban jungle. In this instance, the simple act of filming a mother and her young daughter as they stand together on a subway escalator takes on a range of subtle meanings. It speaks of the implicit bond between parent and child, of the daily human encounter with technology and of the isolation and anonymity of urban environments with their impervious, metallic facades.

Sean Gladwell likewise takes the city as his backdrop in the projection work Hikaru Sequences (2001), which presents a solitary figure performing complex maneuvers on a BMX bicycle. Slowed down and balletic in appearance, it creates poetry from the mundane. Daniel Crooks presents a large projection work featuring the revolutions of a circus carousel, its seats flying outwards. Like the “time slice” video works that he presented at Primavera 2003, this work re-constitutes our understanding of time by breaking down the carousel’s revolutions into individual frames.

Finally, Daniel von Sturmer presents viewers with a conceptual conundrum on a small television monitor showing a hand repeatedly dropping a crumpled piece of paper, a plastic bag and other objects. As the actions unfold over and over again before our eyes, we ponder the visual trickery of the simple gestures and their playful, associative meanings. Von Sturmer is concurrently exhibiting in the Biennale of Sydney at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where his tilted table with projected images is a highlight..

Taking the ordinary and rendering it extraordinary is also a feature of works exhibited in Interlace. The fourth in a series of exhibitions curated by Blair French collectively entitled Video Spell, it introduces new, specially commissioned works by Goh, Gladwell and Kate Murphy, who some readers will remember for her delightfully cheeky 2000 documentary Britney Love. The exhibition is accompanied by a substantial CD ROM catalogue, as well as video footage of other works by each artist, providing a comprehensive overview of their practices to date. The role of performance in daily life is a recurrent theme in each work, from Gladwell’s documentation of individuals as they perform repeated actions and gestures in city locations, to Murphy’s dual screen work PonySkate (RT61 p37).

Goh documents the interiors of inner city apartments in Seoul, Korea, using a rotating camera mounted atop a tripod, one interior merging into the next with almost seamless precision as day passes into night. A meditation on urban life and lifestyles, its neon signs, cluttered interiors and conversational snippets co-exist with the pink light of the evening sky and occasional glimpses of temple eaves.

“Televisual culture” is identified by French as a driving force behind Interlace, with the works addressing the “means by which both our private and public actions and our personas are inflected by a conscious self-image—of how we appear to others and the quality of our apparent performance in various situations.” Murphy’s Ponyskate in particular captures this quality, with its combination of images shot from the perspective of its 2 young protagonists and documentary-style footage of the same scenes shot by the artist.

The idea of the video camera as a physical extension of the human body, observing and interacting with the world around it, is illustrated well by works within these exhibitions. Drawing upon conventions of documentary and portraiture, and referencing art history as much as cinema and pop culture, they bring the city and its inhabitants to life in often unexpected ways. Streets, subways, fun fairs and other public spaces are contrasted with the privacy of interior, domestic spaces and individual lives, while simple gestures and acts are given suggestive, even mysterious potential. The role of the moving image is pivotal in capturing these moments, while the durational nature of the works invites a viewing relationship based around time and space.

Screens permeate our daily existence, from the television sets in our living rooms to the screens scattered across the metropolis featuring constantly shifting news footage and advertisements. Bridging the worlds of art and daily life, the works in these exhibitions attest to the status of video as the quintessential medium of the moment.

Mix-Ed: diverse practice and geography, Sherman Galleries, Sydney, June 3-26; Interlace, Performance Space, May 28-July 3

National and cultural identity are becoming increasingly fugitive concepts as globalisation spreads, which means the theorisation of cultural evolution requires constant reconsideration. Events such as the Asia-Pacific Triennial mounted since 1993 by the Queensland Art Gallery, and the 2002 year of Asian and Asian-Australian Art at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia (CACSA), have greatly increased awareness of our region’s rapidly shifting culture. The existence of the Asia-Australia Arts Centre in Sydney has complemented such ventures, providing a forum for exploring contemporary artistic development in the local region.

Conference

The Centre’s Asian Traffic is a series of rolling exhibitions showing from June to September, 2004. It involves 30 artists exhibiting on rotation through 6 phases, each of a few weeks’ duration (hence the term “traffic”). Chinese, Indonesian, Thai, Malaysian, Singaporean, New Zealand and Asian-Australian artists are participating. Elements of the program will travel to CACSA later this year. Artists’ talks, panel discussions, performances and a 2 day conference are part of the wider event.

The central question of the conference, held in June, was how Asian diasporaic experience might be theorised, which included assessing whether cultural theorisation based on the experiences of African or sub-continental communities in Europe is applicable elsewhere.

The speakers took various approaches to these questions. Chaitanya Sembrani (ANU) pointed out that the concept of “Asia” essentialises certain characteristics and argued the idea of “contemporary Asian art” as a product of the imagination. In a panel discussion about her own landmark essay “On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West” (2001), Professor Ien Ang (University of Western Sydney) noted that the terms “Asian” and “Chinese” are indeterminate signifiers—there is no homogenous experience of “Chineseness.” Many conference participants reported varying experiences of, and attitudes towards, the interpellation of Chineseness or Asianness in Australia and elsewhere. Artist Suzann Victor (the Singaporean representative at the 2001 Venice Biennale) questioned whether an individual’s acceptance of Chineseness—that one has “Chinese blood”—is a surrender of agency, and whether cultural centrality is a form of chauvinism or a nostalgic gesture. The term “Asia” remained central throughout the conference and perhaps remains central to the theorisation of these questions in general.

Associate Professor Leng Lin (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing) addressed the effect of rapid social, economic and political change on culture, suggesting that globalised systems of cultural production and consumption destroy the traditional sense of social belonging. In the context of developing capitalist economies and rapidly changing societies, personal identity, subjectivity and the reshaping of the self emerge as key themes. Asian art, he noted, is now involved in the globalisation process and artists, whose role in society is itself being transformed, must make choices of form, style and subject which were not previously imaginable.

Several speakers addressed the fundamental concepts of diaspora and hybridity. Dr David McNeil (UNSW) noted that diasporic artists have always been central to evolving international art practice. The term ‘diaspora’ no longer refers only to evicted peoples, but identifies ethnic minority groups culturally linked to home while residing in a host country. He suggested the alternative term ‘sojourner.’ Dual-allegiance sojourners, he suggested, are alienated from both cultures since there are limits to translatability and commensurability. But they also challenge national mythologies of belonging. Diasporic art critiques the idea of an essential originary art, and the presence of the diaspora is a precondition of hybridity, which generates new art forms. One conclusion to be drawn from the conference is that the meaning of hybridity is context-dependent. Terms such as ‘diaspora’, ‘hybridity’, ‘Asian’ and ‘Chinese’ need to be appropriately qualified, even though doing so can itself be problematic.

The speakers also showcased a wide range of artistic developments springing from the movement of artists and communities in and out of the Asia region. Sembrani outlined the Aar-Paar project involving communities in Karachi and Mumbai swapping public art, a project sensitive to the partitioning of India at the time of independence (Sembrani discusses this project more fully in the July edition of Art Monthly Australia).

Paris-based curator Hu Hanrou showed an extensive range of images demonstrating developments in the urban art of Asia. He outlined the concept of “curatorial suicide”, whereby curatorial and institutional intervention is downplayed to permit the art community to self-organise. Dr Alice Ming Wai Jim (Centre A Gallery, Vancouver) noted the current popularity of Asian art in North America and questioned how the idea of Asian art is invoked in galleries where it is shown. Citing Spivak’s view that there can be no non-institutional environment, she suggested that institutions co-opt and polarise cultural debate and that postcolonial discourse can mask class, regional and other concerns that deserve recognition. She outlined her gallery’s potential role in building community in Vancouver, a city of many diasporas with the second largest Asian community in North America.

Suzann Victor suggested that the state can precipitate a condition of abjection in certain inhabitants, including refugees. This condition provoked Australia’s refugees to sew their lips and refuse the government’s food, thereby redirecting the flow of power away from the state. Mike Parr’s face-sewing performance might thus be seen as art that similarly redirects the flow of power. In these accounts, the evolution of art in Asian countries is accelerating and informing rapid cultural change, assisted by a globalised network of exhibition and reporting.

Exhibition

Throughout the Asian Traffic season, the gallery of the Asia-Australia Arts Centre will be continually evolving. Asian Traffic Phase Two (June 22-July 10) included Shen Shaomin’s Unknown Creatures, which dominated the gallery. One was a skeleton of a 3-headed, 8-legged being constructed from animal bones, its ribs inscribed with texts referencing Islam, Buddhism and Christianity. Such an imaginary hybrid was emblematic in this context. Manit Sriwanichpoom’s Pink Man in Paradise is a series of landscape photographs taken in Bali, in which the sole observer is a diminutive pink-suited man pushing a pink shopping trolley: the archetypal consumer. Leung Mee Ping exhibited children’s drawings on McDonald’s paper napkins, referencing the experiences of Chinese children who are cared for by relatives while their parents work.

Performance artists have included Jiang Jie, whose dolls in strollers representing orphans in China, are for sale, and Vasan Sitthiket, whose shadow puppet theatre satirised Thai and world politics. Sitthiket’s show culminated in a hilarious conversation between Osama Bin Laden, Mahatma Gandhi, Hitler and Jesus Christ.

Coda

The Director of the Asia-Australia Arts Centre, Bingui Huangfu, suggested that while Western postmodern art initially influenced contemporary work in Asia, artists of the region now tend to address social issues. Increasingly visual art in many countries of the Asia region appears to be an arena for political and cultural commentary. While there remain conceptual and terminological problems in theorising hybrid and diasporic art, the Asian Traffic program provides a valuable showcase of significant regional artistic developments.

Asian Traffic, Asia-Australia Arts Centre, Haymarket, Sydney, June 4-October 2, www.4a.com.au; Asian Traffic Conference, College of Fine Arts, Sydney, June 25-26

Have you noticed that something important is changing? In what seems like a flash, we have become addicted to visual modes of communicating through video phones, computer systems, TV, film, advertising, electronic and print publications, and through the many manifestations of art and design in our everyday lives, especially those determined by new technologies. Visual skills have become essential for everyone to realise their vocational, personal development and entertainment objectives. However, this is not reflected in the preparation provided by schools and the tertiary education sector.

Recognising this, the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) has been organising meetings of a group of art and design education specialists and concerned industry bodies—the Art Education Group of the National Visual Arts and Craft Network. The group is pressing for an urgent review of the current purposes and quality of visual communication, arts, craft and design education at primary, secondary and tertiary education levels. They are also examining the role played by public galleries and service organisations in providing life-long education for the general public.

International research indicates that in future it will be vital for economic and cultural sustainability that everyone be proficient in visual communication and able to engage with and contribute to the “creative industries.” The Art Education Group contends that demands for visual literacy now parallel those of numeracy and text literacy. As well as contributing to general learning outcomes, they believe appropriate training could prepare students for a steadily growing variety of creative and aesthetically oriented occupations. These include fashion, advertising, marketing, media, publishing, IT, design and heritage interpretation—the areas loosely described as the ‘Creative Industries.’ Or it could be in less clearly related areas such as health, community service, education, business or manufacturing, as well as skills for unknown future industries.

Despite the enrichment provided by artists to the cultural life of the community, there is still a lack of recognition of the visual arts as a profession. Taking these subjects at school has come to be regarded as a soft option, and in some states students are disadvantaged in achieving higher education entrance because of the lower weighting given to art subjects. This indicates a necessity for more appropriate streaming to be provided from primary school through VET and/or University and into a professional career. But currently, each step along the way is beset with obstacles.

In the last few weeks, members of the Art Education Group have met with politicians from all parties and staff of the Australia Council, seeking their support for work to be undertaken to define targets and provide data that can be used to realign Australian curriculums and teaching to better meet the needs of professionals in the field and the larger community. Keep your eye on election policies.

In his book Pictures and Tears (Routledge, 2001), art historian James Elkins comments that our “lack of intensity” in the face of painting is a “fascinating problem”: “If paintings are so important—worth so much, reproduced, cherished, and visited so often—then isn’t it troubling that we can hardly make any emotional contact with them?” His book is an attempt to understand this phenomenon, by gleaning testimonies from those (exceptionally few) people who have cried in front of a painting. Elkins takes the involuntary rupture of the body’s integrity that is the shedding of tears as the most measurable evidence of an emotional connection with art.

Elkins’ observations provide a useful point of departure from which to consider this year’s Biennale of Sydney, curated by Lisbon-based Isabel Carlos around the theme of “Reason and Emotion.” In her brief and fragmented catalogue essay, Carlos suggests that her selection of artists was guided by the arguments of neurologist Antonio Damasio, who claims “emotion is crucial to human intelligence”, that “we have an emotional brain” and that feelings are “indispensable to be able to deliberate.” One of her aims “was to bring together artworks that create a total physical and psychological experience” and to highlight the “political and ethical aspect of stating that reason and emotion are inseparable.”

Given this purported aim, what is curious—and disappointing—is the overall lack of intensity that characterises the exhibition. There are too few works that address the theme in a compelling manner, let alone connect with the viewer emotionally, while the curatorial decisions too often appear arbitrary (or based simply on personal taste and cultural proximity). Moreover, the curator has woven the theme together with some highly suspect cultural stereotypes of the sensuous, fluid, resourceful South (emotion), and the rational, ordered and consumerist North (reason), putting an emphasis on the south within the exhibition. While this approach allows for the inclusion of a number of Hispanic, particularly Portuguese and Latin American, artists who have not shown in Australia before, it also perpetrates categorisations that have long been problematised, to the point where the curator’s authority is almost undermined.

Carlos has foregrounded the apparently self-evident emotional nature of intelligence by selecting works evoking a response that mingles rationality and feeling, an approach that has been roundly critiqued by several commentators (for example in Artspace’s collection of critical essays Criticism + Engagement + Thought). Not only is this considered a dead letter as a philosophical concern, it also flags as novel the truism that art is defined by the engagement of sense and sensuality. I would argue, however, that this has been far from self-evident in recent years, with the institutional privileging of contemporary works that are heavily indebted to conceptual and minimalist forebears whose concern was to expunge aesthetics from art altogether. In other words, it may well be innovative at the present time to assert that it is ‘contemporary’ to make art that is emotional, in the sense that it engages us in the full swoon of aesthetic experience and takes us beyond the intellectual and institutional games of conceptualism. Carlos fails to make the link and develop this fruitful line of argument by selecting works that deploy beauty and delight rather than promulgating what Paul Virilio calls “the academy of bad feelings”, an all too familiar approach whereby artworks aim to repulse or rebuff the viewer.

Despite the thinly argued curatorial rationale and the related lack of intensity in a great deal of the exhibition, certain individual works do indeed provoke complex and satisfying aesthetic experiences. For example, New Zealander Daniel von Sturmer’s kinetic still life The Truth Effect (2003) is simultaneously self-reflective and absorbing, analytical and lyrical, beautiful and conceptual. It comprises a suite of small-scale video projections of simple everyday objects animated to create various patterns. As we walk around a large tilted plane on which are installed 5 canvas-like screens, we are as likely to laugh with bemusement as gain understanding of the artist’s process. We also become aware of our own conventions of seeing. One screen depicts the interaction between 3 different sized rolls of tape, whose movements illustrate scale and proportion, fundamentals of painting and drawing. Another depicts the superimposition of one circle of colour on another on a spinning wheel, again referencing the building blocks of painting, while at the same time creating engaging op art with the simplest of materials. The work invites us to analyse the process whereby we create meaning by looking, to confront our assumptions about the banality of everyday things, and to enjoy the beauty of simple pattern, colour and composition.

Pat Brassington’s wondrous digitally manipulated pigment prints also can’t be accused of a lack of intensity; they provoke a strong and multi-faceted response. Her work on display includes Small Thing (1998), Bloom (2003) and Beautiful (2003). Like von Sturmer’s images, Brassington’s prints foreground their materiality: both artists’ work is digitally reproduced, yet they are hardly examples of the alleged immateriality of bits and bytes. Instead, these images engage us in a tactile way and assert their physicality, partly through an accent on texture, colour, weight and the presence of objects, but also by directly referencing the body. Brassington’s surrealist tweaking of the human form—her continuous transmutation of adult into child, male into female, human into animal and object into organism—ensures her images remain in that endless limbo where we attempt to categorise in order to make meaning. Her images occupy the site that French philosopher Julia Kristeva designated as that of abjection, where the split between mind and body this exhibition invokes is confounded, the site signalled by the rupturing of established boundaries, as when the body leaks, as when the eyes weep…

If we were to apply Elkins’ ultimate measure of emotional engagement, I admit there was one work here that caused me to cry: the excruciatingly frank and eloquent testimonies of female psychiatric patients at Sydney’s Rozelle Hospital, as filmed and edited by New York-based Venezuelan artist Javier Tellez. The self-possessed quiet integrity and restraint of certain storytellers was underlined by the overblown melodrama unfolding on the screen opposite, where the artist projected excerpts of Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1927-8). In a scene that evoked Winston Smith’s conversion in 1984, one patient read a journal account detailing her journey from vehement resistance to ECT, to grateful appreciation of its effects. Another woman in her late 40s recounted her teenage experiences at the hands of mental health professionals. She ended by noting how little has changed; the cruelty that struck her then remains the definitive principle today. The pain of these women is powerfully denoted when the impassive face of Renee Falconetti as Jeanne fills the screen, finally devoid of affect and beyond suffering.

Reason and emotion, the relationship between them and their relevance to contemporary art hold great potential as means of engaging with current practice. However, this particular exhibition failed to take up this theme in a sufficiently critical, erudite and illuminating way. Nonetheless, in such an exhibition it is possible to find testaments to the power of the artwork to elicit an intense experience, to integrate beauty and concept such that they become mutually sustaining.

Next Wave's Short Circuit had the usual strengths and weaknesses of a mixed bill, being at times awkward and at other times sublime. Overall the theatrical pieces tended to be weaker than the dance.

Kath Skipp presented one of her first choreographic works, Beyond Skin, a duet performed with dancer Amber Haines, a pleasing glitchie score by Ryan Ritchie and video projections by Norm Skipp. Though the program notes implied the collaborative integration of projection and dance, in truth the video acted largely as attractive wallpaper. Very short repeated loops containing distorted images of the 2 dancers provided the main material, projected to one side or on top of the live action. Kath Skipp has worked with Anna Smith's co.motion, and the same slightly balletic, elongated grace, fluidity and lyricism informed much of the choreography of this work. The dancing was enlivened by the more angled, broken folding of the body typical of the work of Lucy Guerin, Gideon Obarzanek and Phillip Adams. Although Skipp has yet to develop a unique inflection of these elements, the execution was uniformly good, especially when the performers moved away from unison movement and instead counter-pointed each other. This, together with a simple design aesthetic of red and white, made for a fine piece.

Paul Romano offered his latest self-performed movement sketch, Birdtalk, apparently inspired by working with multiple, shifting characters. The choreography did indeed have a sense of constant rearrangement and settling into new states. Some of Romano's previous pieces drew on yoga and there is a strong sculptural sense to his choreography. A gentle yet nevertheless precisely articulated progression from one central resting place or pose provided the central temporal, rhythmic, physical and spatial structure for the show. Although Romano's work remains within an essentially unadorned studio aesthetic, the emotional correspondences of the movement with David Corbet's variegated, abstract electronica and musique concrete score shows that the dancer is beginning to seriously address such questions as lighting and a more totally designed performance environment.

Romano similarly offered some relief from his typically blank-faced yet open performative execution, with snatches of pedestrian activity and facial gestures absurdly arising from within this otherwise rather formalistic work. Running, chewing and indistinct vocalisations gave a pleasant sense of fun to this generally cool performance.

The highlight of Short Circuit was Rosie Dennis' disarmingly simple Polish. This superb improvised solo involved the self-conscious selection and execution of a never-ending stream of straying thoughts, small, repetitive, almost imprisoning gestures, and beautifully slight, measured nuances. Dennis made small, careful steps about the space, walking, running, and standing awkwardly, one hand raised in question, fingers fluttering, while quietly burbling associative ideas. The material was marked by the revelation of otherwise suppressed tensions, hidden ideas and normally held-in jitters. Concealing and revealing provided the central motif, articulated through musings about card playing, dice and mathematical results (“4 by 4 is 16. 16. Square.”). The willow o' the wisp poetry of the piece was a sheer delight, recalling Margaret Trail's studies in vocalisation and Amanda Stewart's concrete poetry. Short Circuit showed that Skipp, Romano and Dennis are artists to watch out for.

The agonies and the ecstasies of viewing the 3 d>Art.04 experimental screen programs are a reminder of the riches, cliches, excitements and tedium of the form. The nature of bad video art and the function of boredom was in fact an unresolved aspect of the Performance Space/Sydney Biennale discussion of the form (June 26). Not only is it a matter of the variety of work and of curatorial aesthetics (the 3 programs in d>Art.04 were strikingly different), but also of what's on offer— after all, these screenings comprise a best of whatever is submitted rather than the best of the best.

In curator Claude Gonzales' Australia Screen, the raw subjectivity of Denis Beaubois' vertiginous Fall from Mataval (1'17) and the dizzying, highly crafted transformations of the world and photographs in Hobart Hughes' The Wind Calls Your Name (4'24) excelled in technique and vision. Of the rest, the only work to reveal any verve was Janet Merewether's droll “experimental documentary” Palermo—history standing still (11'), a visual one liner with some nice variations and black and white neo-realist flavouring. Mireille and Fabian Astore's documentation of their Tampa: A Walk on the Beach (13'3) was pretty much that, a documentary with little if any of the sting of the exhibited photos, the website and Mireille Astore's accounts of beach-goers' agitated responses to her caged self. Although lyrically shot and edited (with a too, too ominous soundtrack) it was hard to see why it was programmed.

Australian Emerging Screen, curated by Brendan Lee and Angelica Mesiti, exhibited a more informal, sometimes raw aesthetic suggestive of formative skills or a dogged resistance to anything that might look slick. The program included mini-movies with corny dramatics, some slight animations, a mock movie trailer (that like its kind promises more than it can fulfil) and a dry visual arts show documentary (again why?). Relief came in the form of Yasmin Sabuncu's Esmerelda Videos (1) and (2) (both 4') with their wildly performative and often jocular play between the artist's selves and those projected onto her (male/female; east/west). Alana Tracey's Structure (7') is simply too busy, but the suggestion of interiority and delirium through intense close-ups and some moments of striking animation showed promise.

John Gillies might not have had an agenda for his International Screen selection, but it proved to be a coherent, deeply satisfying and challenging program, one which, as he said at the screening, turned by chance on the utopia/distopia axis. Christina von Greve (Germany, 3') in Desde la Memoria transforms documentary material of the Spanish Civil War and its legacy into a canvas-grained montage with curiously rich colouring, deeply etched faces and the intoning voices of elderly subjects, and sublime merging of old footage and new. Editing is almost everything here, as is the grim musicality of the recurrence of the words “blood” and “misery.” The despair of a generation is summed up in the bleak coda, “Don't excel at anything: you will lose the war anyway.” This is a demanding but darkly rewarding 3 minutes. The 2'38 Nuée (Myriam Bessette, Canada) proves to be a calming antidote as beautiful folds of watery colour run down the screen against an intensifying sound score. Situationist Guy Debord is celebrated in The Society of the Spectacle (A Digital Remix) (Mark Amerika, Trace Reddell, Rick Silva, USA, 10') with a furious collage of black and white images (and sudden flarings of colour) and theory-saturated subtitles that you can only grasp at as they roll by, occasionally recognise, and go with the odd beauty of their flow. It's appropriately playful (“everything is fucked but fun”), pulsing, pop-ish and engrossing—the hypertext crowd stoked on Godard (who is, of course, invoked).

Gillies again lowers the temperature with one of the highlights of d>Art.04, Building (Anouk de Clerq, Joris Cool, Anton Aski, Belgium, 12'), a pleasingly non-documentary approach to homaging the work of architects Robbrecht and Daem. The experience is like watching an ever metamorphosing, highly geometric woodblock print, starting in the dark and gradually revealed as shafts of light, white and grey, mutate, 2-dimensional, shifting into third, gradually generating the spaces of a just recognisable building, the lines of light pouring through windows and down corridors, still abstract, ever suggestive of the vision of the architects almost made real. The cool, sometimes ominous imagery is pitched against a growing, cacophonous sound score evoking creative ferment and a less cool world beyond.

Caroline Hu's Remembrance (Hong Kong, 9') takes us from the architectural reverie of Building into a Calvino-ish estimation of a city, the vision alternating between the personal and the theoretical, the banal and the magical in the play of light, the tilt of the camera eye and the dissolution of images. Gentle reflection is rudely supplanted by the demanding geometric and theoretical abstractions of Marcello Mercado's Das Kapital version 0.7 (Italy, 17'). The geometry not only vibrates with a kind of organic life force but whirls into glorious, seductive floral and vegetable forms, reminding us of Marx's observations of how, in commodification, the economic can be made to appear natural with little thought of the consequences – here represented by colour saturated images of the murder victims of state terror. The discomfiting text coda, “Overflow to zero…Return”, perhaps bespeaks a regenerative, ever duplicating capitalism (as if out of Chaos Theory) with a life of its own. As with The Society of the Spectacle (A Digital Remix), the rapid editing and churning information flow reflects the struggle to connect with global politics, the impossibility of slowing down, but at the same time conveys a manic playfulness, a creative resistance against considerable odds.

The pulse of the program again changes dramatically. Ellen Bornkessel's It's Possible (Germany, 7'30) is a long, continuous tracking shot from a train of a deserted semi-urban landscape (homes, stations, small industries with ample green space between). The stark neatness of the scene, the absence of people, the left-travelling movement of camera/train and lights on in the daytime (a summer evening, presumably) collectively and quietly disorient the viewer as a child's voice-over fantasizes an ideal world, one with a “green supermarket.” It's Possible completes the program with a wary optimism and a rhythm that allows for reflective re-entry into the not too real world outside the cinema. Gillies' program of experimental screen works is one of the best I've seen, not only for the selection of works of high quality (their immaculate crafting nothing to do with 'slick') but also for the order in which they have been programmed, with a musician's sensibility.

dLux media arts, d>Art.04 Experimental Screen, Dendy Opera Quays, Sydney Opera House; Sydney International Film Festival, June 17-27

I was trying to jot thoughts down during the performances. The first thing I wrote was: “Why does dance always start on the ground?” This was in response to One 700, choreographed by Anton.

The trouble is time has gone by and the event has become one fabric instead of the 10 different fabrics that it was made of. The notes appear like a list, and prompt me in ways that are not useful, like: “after break”; “white flower”; “cabaret.”

Ignition is an annual season of dance choreographed by dancers from the Australian Dance Theatre; this year it also included guest choreographers from outside the company (theatre workers and independent choreographers). It’s an opportunity for choreographers to develop their craft at the invitation of the Artistic Director of ADT, Garry Stewart.

It was an evening rich in possibility. Each of the pieces had something to offer (humour, glamour, dexterity, beauty), yet overall were of a kind and seemed in retrospect familiar and without the risks that one longs for (something extreme or excessive or minimal or austere, for instance). This is not a bad thing really, though it would have been exciting to see the works move into another gear, more brutal and difficult. It’s the sharpness which comes from deep questioning—about why and where and how, in terms of what ‘the thing’ is that comes into being, and how it is then given as a ‘work’—that was missing. It is not satisfying to try and name what is ‘missing’, as it’s never specific or singular or other than a shape measured by another already known shape. It might be though something in the realm of the immeasurable, the unimaginable, the banal. One of the bountiful effects of ‘sampling’ is the making live of the already over-lived. And ‘sampling’, or re-inventing, was at the heart of the Ignition 5 season, given that the subtitle was ‘Reincarnation’—”ghosts of the past are given a second chance” (wrote Stewart in the introduction to the programme).

There were fine performances by Larissa McGowan and John Leathart and Paul Zivkovich. And there were fine physical and emotional moments; but I’m always struck by how narratives so often go the way of the expected—like the showgirl who is drained of her verve by the plucking out of her feathers. Why? Why couldn’t she become even more fantastic. This work was titled Table Twelve, choreographed by Larissa McGowan and danced by her (with Ross McCormack). McGowan was wonderful. Maude Davey’s My C**T was funny and ‘sick’ at the same time. I always like dance works with language. Probably if it had been less hammed up and more darkly sober it would have been seriously (intoxicatingly) disturbing—and it deserved to be. And the two dancers, McGowan and McCormack, certainly had the capacity to go to the limit.

Maybe the sense of ‘missing’ that I’m scratching at stems from too much being left in; there was a relentless drive to tell a story (throughout the event, at all cost), to retell/spin a known story, but only to adjust it (not send it to Venus or Hell), and to force dance to make and convey ‘meaning’ (still, again)—to teach and correct and judge (somehow). This made each body a serving unit, a vehicle—the body was there to serve. The body though is usually, in itself, too present without even trying, and this can be the fascination—to watch that presence, to be present when it attempts, rather than achieves (whatever it is doing to itself). Although you can see this momentarily, for example in This Time and My C**T (the drive for narrative over-riding the wonder of the body turning itself inside out, for who knows what end), it is especially spoiled by the appearance of the ‘plumber’, as if a full-stop). It is within the site of the body that the practices of ‘sampling’ and ‘referencing’ can be most powerfully applied (maddened in some form), and at the same time can be most willfully resisted too. It seems like the body adores its own ability to show off what it has taken on, and so it’s a refrain in a container (given half a chance). That the ‘missing’ thought came to pass (in a rhetorical sense, in the writing here) suggests perhaps (in a re-sonant kind of way) that literalness, a sense-making activity in terms of explanation, was privileged (and maybe not interrogated—as it is story-telling that really is at stake in past tales, it’s the very dilemma of making-again). The tenuousness of trying to work out what is inexplicable (in Yvonne Rainer’s words the body’s “actual weight, mass and unenhanced physicality” (quoted by Anne Thompson in the programme) was abandoned, or perhaps considered ‘wanting’ (the risk of restraint or being misunderstood—a great chance).

This all came home in a rush with the last work, Play It Again. It had the effect of cancelling what lead up to it. It was ‘musical theatre’, and its good intentions about the Iraq war were heavy and exuberant. This is not to say that it was not well conceived and performed, just that such immediate subject matter can be attended with delicacy and cruelty and hesitation.

In the programme there are notes on each of the works, as well as three essays that carefully ‘re-view’ the word ‘re-incarnation’. These essays indicate the infinite capacity of given—things (of already conceived and embodied acts, writings, findings, etc), of their waiting potential to do ‘the dirty’, to surprise, and “foster awakenings and to practice an act of faith” (Vicki Crowley). This is the difficult work of re-making, it’s a practical duty and embraces longing and desire, not just to show—again, but to smash the smithereens out of the ‘world as it is’, in all the small ways it appears (to structure and doctor us, body and soul). These essays, by Crowley, Sam Haren, and Anne Thompson remain underpinnings (and as potent places of re-visitation) for the after-image of the event. Within them lies the disaster(s) that could (maybe, perhaps, some old time, down the track) haunt ‘reincarnations’ of the works. And perhaps that might be it, the ‘missing’ could be merely that the works had yet to be put through the process of re-incarnating themselves—”to unravel their complexities (Sam Haren)—that they needed to return over and over again until only the bones and the resilient muscle sat like ‘horror’ before us, testing our own short lives, and the ground that we find ourselves staring at.

The essays are left-over touchstones, as is the memory of the sound works. In my useless notes there are occasional words like: “the music, yes”; “train, oh no”; “pulse”; “click click”, “don’t shut up.” The engineering of the sound for each work, and in total, felt firm and worn-in. It didn’t exist, or so it seemed, to perform a platform role, but to be integral to the choreography. It wasn’t just ‘music’ to caption the movement, I mean. It had its own, and separate, strata, which in a ‘sampling’ kind of way, added a layer (or layers), and at times was the powerful component.

Australian Dance Theatre (ADT), Ignition 5, reincarnation, choreographers: Anton, Shannon Anderson, Maude Davey, Ross McCormack, Larissa McGowan, Lina Limosani, Sarah Neville, Amanda Phillips, Carol Wellman), Wonderland Ballroom, Hawthorn, May 18-23

Parking at the Opera House always makes me feel like an interloper, neither old money nor nouveau riche. But since The Studio opened, strident new vectors see me spiralling down into the underground carpark more often.

Tonight, The Studio is transformed into Gymea train station for Inna Thigh: The Sista She Story. Looking at the eerily unpopulated set is like discovering terra suburbia in the land atop Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree. There’s just the station bench, turntables and graffiti. And because the genre is hip hop theatre, because you’re not quite sure what that will be, because of the ‘fringe’ and ‘comedy’ expectations, because it’s a girl thing, you have the precognition that this might be really fun. Like something you’d usually see in a less auspicious location: a scratch event or a night at the Sly Fox, but with the added bonus of no smoke and a perfect view of the stage. There’s definitely a sense of curiosity in the audience. What will the night throw up? As the lights go down Shelia MC Eila, Rasheda Eda MC and Busty Beats (with biceps to die for) form their huddle.

From the moment Sista She begin performing you’re hooked. It is like a hip hop rock eisteddfod, the kind of old-school joy you haven’t felt since high school. It’s all so 80s, with sun visors and bum bags to boot. Live autobiography delivered by the consummate raconteurs of the next generation. Sista She list their influences as everything from Queen Latifah to John Farnham: listen up yo’ peeps “you’re the voice, try to understand it.”

Gymea station is where Sutherland Shire (Sheila) meets Campbelltown (Rasheda), a reminder that the idea of the suburbs as Anglo enclave is now something of a nostalgic dream. Everywhere, that is, except in the Lord of the Rings-sounding ‘The Shire.’ At one point there’s a mock battle between Sheila, “Miss Whitey White Sutherland Shire”, and bi-racial Rasheda (or “chigger” from chink/nigger); a searing moment for all its comedy. In this show, whiteness is not invisible; it’s constantly being negotiated in terms of cross-cultural friendship, as Rasheda, from a refugee family, clearly delineates some of the differences between Sheila’s racial experiences and her own. The conventions of hip hop are employed to broker both difference and inclusivity, and add a live culture from beyond the theatrical framework one not so steeped in Anglo-centricity.

Sheila MC Eila and Rasheda Eda MC are supported by the Sista She 3: Busty Beats (Rasheda’s sister), DJ Jonah and Tom Tom to-da-B on double bass, perhaps best known for their Triple J hit What R Yooze Girls Doin’?. Accosted at Gymea station by the ubiquitous sleaze bag, they’re responsible for that catchy riff “Have ya got a big dick?”.

Inna Thigh was developed by The Studio and Brisbane Powerhouse under the direction of seasoned comedy professional and choreographer Chrissie Koltai. Sista She put together a series of simple but infectious routines. It’s a tried and true tale, parodying the path to fame (familiar from countless films like Flashdance and 8 Mile), made all the less pretentious by the unabashed repetition of the telling. Soon we are waving our hands in the air on demand and abjectly fawning over the 2 charismatic MCs.

Sheila is irrepressibly theatrical, delivering a stellar Girl from Ipanema in a made-up language. Rasheda is more of a wordsmith, with quirkier references and a wider range of moods and broods. This is better than Kath and Kim (though they also speak in a suburban idiom) and you hope that a comedy career will not see them end up on TV like Merrick and Rosso or Ali G. Right now they are on that cusp between subculture and commercialism, and so hot (“like Bikram yoga”) I want to believe a whole new form of superstardom might yet be born for these gals.

The finale is the Sista She anthem Inna Thigh, for all the women out there who wear out a pair of corduroys each winter (Hey, that’s me!). It’s delivered to the sound of live scratching and rubbing, for there’s a fraction too much friction. YEAH.

Sista She, Inna Thigh: The Sista She Story, director Chrissie Koltai, performers Sheila MC Eila, Rasheda Eda MC, music Busty Beats, DJ Jonah, Tom Tom to-da-B; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, May 18-24

What better use for 15 shipping containers than as exhibition spaces for a group of artist-run-initiatives (ARI's) from all over Australia? ARI's are typically coordinated by committees of practising artists often numbering up to 12 people, so the biggest problem for each group was effectively displaying work by all members in their designated container. The solutions were diverse and ingenious.

The Upholstery (Cairns) members collaborated by wallpapering the inside of their container then roughly painting outlines of a life-sized couch and 2 windows providing views of beaches with threatening World War II bombers and giant sharks. Platform (Melbourne) gave over their container to a group of designers (Panderosa), who decorated the interior with off-cuts of coloured vinyl. The Farm (Brisbane) allowed a couple of their exhibiting artists to give politics a go with 9/11 propaganda posters. The members of Kings (Melbourne) worked together on a statement about the festival's curatorial theme with vinyl lettering reeling off clever references to unpopular culture. Two artists from Rocketart (Newcastle) made a celestial display from a large backlit panel of wood with tiny holes. Bus (Melbourne) featured the work of Anton Marin, who did an amazing luminescent wire-frame installation using fishing line and UV lighting.

The Network of UnCollectable Artists (Sydney) attracted lots of attention, using their container to sell packets of swap cards depicting “Australia's 50 Most UnCollectable Artists”, including Will and Dave (the protestors who painted “no war” on the Opera House). I was lucky enough to get Bec Dean's LED project, which several people tried to swap for some other unknown artist.

Conical (Melbourne) opened with a collaboration staged by 5 board members. The centrepiece was a generator, an alternate power source that symbolised independence from the mainstream. Thereafter a series of other artists added found materials that were configured into meaningful and playful arrangements with no sign of discrete art objects.

On the other hand, Seventh (Melbourne) used their container as a gallery, allowing Drew Martin's woodwork guitar and speaker unit to be conventionally appreciated. Downtown (Adelaide) also divided the space between the artists, but the artwork was more esoteric. It housed a video projection that was washed out by daylight, but this meant the smallest piece took on greater meaning: Andrew Best's Weeds from paradise comprised tiny plant forms stuck into corners of the container, evoking a wasteland, a powerful reference to the desecration of the South Australian environment.

2004 Next Wave Festival: Unpopular Culture, Containers Project, curator Tristian Koenig, Federation Square, Melbourne, May 18-30

I’m told “sleep music” is a new genre: music to listen to while dozing off. Emboldened by this, I visited Bus Gallery with palpable excitement. I’ve often yearned for a club that, instead of inducing forward motion through hyper-accelerated beats, piped in music to induce catatonia. Imagine such a place: neck a few drinks, kick back with custom-made “sleep music” through state-of-the-art headphones and drift into oblivion. Minus the booze, that was exactly the set-up for the Melatonin sound installation.

Melatonin curator Lawrence English invited Australian and international sound practitioners to explore their personal experience of how dream states can be warped by sounds bleeding in from the outside world. The idea of making art out of this symbiosis thrilled me. Only recently I dreamt I was a trapeze artist, accompanied by that irritating traditional circus theme that everyone knows and hates, only to awake and find the tune blaring from the TV. Just as I was about to put my head in the mouth of a lion…

I know melatonin is a natural hormone secreted by the pineal gland that helps the body to regulate sleep, so I arrived at Bus eager for my dose, only to find 2 people occupying the beds. Apparently, they’d been in stasis for the best part of an hour and weren’t stirring. I chatted to a woman also waiting. It was a miserable Melbourne afternoon, and having braved the elements we were both keen to lie down and delay our journey home for as long as possible.

Finally, the bed hogs roused and we took their place. “Sweet dreams”, my new friend bid me, but I just couldn’t shake the fantasy that we were long-haul astronauts submitting to hypersleep—and everyone knows there are no dreams in hypersleep. But from there on in it was all crickets and insects, Eno-like piano tinklings, disembodied voices and sweet female lullabies, fragments of conversation overlaid with clattering kitchen utensils. I remember laughter, rain, jet engines-great washes of sound peaking and troughing, punctuated by jagged violin scrapings. There were images associated with these sonic properties, but they are less easy to recall (lacking distinct visuals, it felt like I was reading minds, free falling in other people’s inner space). Then the world of the gallery knitted back into place, but the transition wasn’t dissonant-it was a seamless interlocking of worlds.

I checked my watch: I’d been under for 45 minutes. I was now groggy, but invigorated, like awakening from deep slumber. My acquaintance had vanished, which was a pity; I wanted to gauge her reaction, although I was honestly having difficulty remembering if she was real or part of my dreamscape.

Happily, I walked outside and there she was, staring at the drab sky. Lost for words, I stammered: “That was…uh…incredible”, then followed her gaze to the clouds. But when I looked again, she was no longer there.

Melatonin-Meditations on Sound in Sleep, curator Lawrence English, Bus Gallery, Melbourne, May 23-29

The Melbourne Workers Theatre’s DiaTribe offered a punchy, snappy sound-bite from Melbourne’s inner city hip hop. Though the room’s confines required all manner of contortions from the audience in order to be able to sit down, the spatial situation only served to magnify the power and velocity of the words. Spittle flew and hip hop maestros Little G, Elf Tranzporter and Vulk Makedonski were more in yer face than ever, performing only centimetres from the front row. Paso Bionic, providing the scratching and backing tunes, sat in his own booth beyond the action, though his sounds reached every crevice of the tiny room.

The performance was a moral rap and modern day fairytale, in which the utterly dim-witted and morally ambivalent Shannon (Vulk Makedonski) had his very existence placed on trial before the sharp and sadistic Death (Elf Tranzporter). With no-nonsense Ace (Little G) as his defense lawyer, withering looks were plentiful as the moral journey formed its dynamic: a dangerous pull between Death’s seductive word play, Little G’s biting, politicised fight-backs and Shannon’s moronic, high-pitched ditherings. It was a fight between the uninformed sitting ducks and the action-taking doers of this world, ambling precariously along the wire of death. Using popular culture icons like Eddie McGuire and Jamie Durie, the performance delivered some pretty clever assertions about both those worlds, and took the audience to the core of their own judgmental self: did we despise Shannon or pity him? Were we players in his world or was Shannon alone?

Narrative aside, the verse performance itself was flawless, furious, frenetic and heated. The pace was at its best during the hip hop versing, when each of the 3 dynamic performers took the stage doing what they do best. The beats hit hard and the words bounced. Things tended to slow down between the rhymes, with scripted conversational interactions pulling the story along. Though these were a bit stilted and dry, they offered respite from the pretty heavy lyrics. They were also, of course, a necessary device to make this ‘theatre’ as well as hip hop.

Writer Angus Cerini and director Chris Kohn, along with the 4 performers, produced a seamless hybrid form that still has me wondering whether it was all scripted or freestyled, acted or ad-libbed? And therein lies the thrill of hip hop theatre.

Melbourne Workers Theatre, DiaTribe, writer Angus Cerini; director Chris Kohn; performers Little G, Vulk Makedonski, Elf Tranzporter; composer/DJ Paso Bionic; Croft Institute, Melbourne, May 19-22

Medal-worthy rope gymnastics prevailed in Ladiez of da League's jump-rope theatre piece Tour of Booty. Everything about these girls is kick-ass: their moves, their voices, their messages. The troupe combines hip-hop, singing, hardcore skipping and a generous helping of cross-cultural references to deliver an hilarious and often-times seriously political smorgasbord of a performance.

Attention grabbing and oozing raw energy, Tour of Booty attains a degree of physicality that is astounding: imagine the difficulty of break dance moves performed over a rapidly turning rope. The Ladiez hold their audience in a state of suspension with a spectacle of polished moves and cabaret-style duets.

Action aside, the content is very clever. Storylines weave in and out of the sometimes amusing, sometimes poignant song/hip hop interludes. The battle becomes one between “Anglos” and “Asians”, somewhere in the midst of which love has blossomed. Heterosexual love paradigms are turned sideways and inside out, replaced by a (ooh aah) lesbian relationship, whose main point of taboo lies in the fact that it crosses racial boundaries.

A fitting interlude to the Ladiez performance arrived in the form of drag king posse The Kingpins who paraded their booty in a brilliant send-up of gangsta rap misogyny, miming and thrusting to the likes of Public Enemy. The beauty of The Kingpins lies in their uncanny representation of the male gangster music world without trying to caricature it. Rather, they merely re-present the images and sounds of the rap genre with a tiny twist. In leaving the audience questioning the performers' true gender (are these young boys or girls?), the mockery becomes subtle and quite captivating.

With tongue in cheek humour and a take-no-prisoners attitude, Tour of Booty manages to convey the ridiculous ways society still views race and sexuality, without undermining the serious implications of such views.

Ladiez of da League with special guests The Kingpins, Tour of Booty, BMW Edge, Federation Square, Melbourne, May 29

Bree Chesher and Bec Nissen, Untitled # 56 <BR />from 100 Hot Boys [seen from a passing car], 2004″></p>
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Bree Chesher and Bec Nissen, Untitled # 56
from 100 Hot Boys [seen from a passing car], 2004

Spacement, a new Melbourne gallery, was launched during Next Wave with a series of exhibitions and performances. Five visual arts shows were installed in the 3 galleries and in-house cocktail bar.

Work in Progress and Domestic Bliss were the larger curatorial compilations exemplifying the Next Wave spirit of breaking with the convention. Unfortunately, in the case of Domestic Bliss, the structure of the show fell apart because most of the works were unrelated to domesticity. The exception was Jessie Scott's Interiors (2003), a video which melodramatically re-created a day in the life of a 1950s housewife. The filming was slick and the work well conceived, but was made painful by the terribly stagey acting and the whining cello soundtrack.

On the other hand, Work in Progress was a terrific compilation , including exemplary pieces by Emma Price, Alison Carpenter and some fascinating new work by Nick Mangan. The expectation was that there would be insights offered by the artists on the presentation of their work, but we were not told when this might happen. This would have been particularly interesting in relation to the installation art, such as Nick Jones' The Red Bower, in which musty editions of red cloth-bound books were carefully arranged within a set of bookshelves to create the form of a cairn, an ancient dome-shaped structure historically used as a memorial marker. Aside from the initial disappointment at not seeing any of the works being set up, this show had a fine selection of fresh artists and an innovative curatorial premise that dealt effectively with the irregularities of the space and the serial interventions of live performances in the gallery.

Porte Publique brought the dunny into the realm of high art, with a series of toilet doors appropriated from notorious pubs in Melbourne, producing an assault on both eyes and nostrils. Projekt: Next Wave presented 4 videos, including a fantastic take on the genre of 80s skateboarding videos remixed by Matthew Tumbers, entitled Pablo Velasquez Shoeboard.

On the walls of the plush Spacement bar was the photographic collaboration 100 Hot Boys (seen from a passing car). These images are effective and the reason is obvious: men are available for women to observe, made fodder for our gaze. From the safety of their moving vehicle, Bree Cheser and Bec Nissen spent 2 years taking photos of men around Brisbane: walking, talking, driving, smoking, skating, talking on mobile phones and just hanging out. Caught in the act of everyday life the boys' response to the camera's presence ranged from surprise to suspicion. In the tiny bar, lines of people shuffled past, breaking into chuckles over 100 photos that tickled boys and girls alike.

2004 Next Wave Festival: Unpopular Culture; various exhibitions, Spacement, Melbourne, May 18-June 03

Art schools in a new cultural economy

Those of us in the business of contemporary art education often hear it said that students aren’t being taught the traditional skills that were once the mainstay of art schools. This is said with a tone of nostalgia for the apparent certainties of a mythic classical academy, or at least the British form from the 19th century, or even the 20th century model such as the Bauhaus. It has also been said that these same students are being distracted from their true path by the temptations of art theory. This particular objection is of course code for a general discomfort with the challenge to the humanist canon and the critique of an art history that has been underway for much of the 20th century, at least. It is of course a false claim that students are not being taught important things. It may be that the rhetorical framework is different and perhaps not recognizable to the casual observer or even some closer to the task.

Interestingly, it is not the students who have these complaints. And that is not to say that some of them don’t engage with so-called traditional skills. They just don’t feel like victims being hard done by or excluded. They complain about other things, such as needing extended access to studios, 24/7, as they are all working jobs and need to maximize their time at school. They want faster internet speed and the latest software and more digital cameras, and they want greater interaction with academic staff. The contemporary world is theirs and I would attest that students in art schools today feel much more empowered and in charge than these unsolicited apologists would have them.

So, here’s some breaking news! It is 2004 and rising. We are operating in a new cultural economy, an economy of ideas, events, gestures, critical positions and artifacts.

The students

In all my years of involvement with art students this focus on skill and tradition has not been the issue at all. They live in their time and space as we do in ours. And there have been some wonderful ceramicists and printmakers amongst them as they do have access to the facilities and support they need. There have been some beautiful and intelligent paintings, enticing and haunting photographs made by students with all the critical and aesthetic quality that you could hope for. There have also been students who start at a point of interest, go off on a tangent, follow their creative instincts, break new ground and invent new forms. The good thing about the contemporary art school is that it takes all sorts! These students are given a worthwhile education for the world they are entering, this being one of contingent realities and constant change. It is this world that has significantly transformed over the past 30 years and so, in response, have art schools.

The 2003 Venice Biennale artist Patricia Piccininni is an example of the contemporary artist who uses a highly developed visual and critical understanding to produce artwork that captures minds and imaginations in a diverse way. Not only did Piccininni study Painting and Art History at the VCA, she developed inventive ways of transferring such sensibilities to a range of media. She works, in true Renaissance fashion, using skilled artisans, albeit digital technologists or panel-beaters, to help realise her work. Ricky Swallow, the Australian representative at the 2005 Venice Biennale, was a student in the Drawing Department where he explored art-making in broad, highly intuitive and critical terms, and now performs extraordinary sculptural acts in creating his carved wood works. No-one told Ricky Swallow how to do the Ricky Swallow technique, he invented it. These are just 2 examples and there are many others out there and more waiting in the wings.

Demand for places in art schools is high, and students graduate in what seems to be thousands. There is intense activity amongst generations of these graduates. A whole new economy of culture exists in the artist-run galleries and contemporary art infrastructure, and increasingly new applications for art school education. One might ask what is the measure of success? This is a question not just for art schools and one that has many forums. What makes for a good life? What should the public purse support? What are people prepared to pay for and how do they want to live, work and play? There must be an incentive greater than the prospective income. Students clearly want to be part of the creative ambiance that is offered by art school. Since the introduction of HECS fees in the late 1980s the Higher Education culture has changed along with the globalised world. Students are quite pragmatic. They will carry a debt for this experience so they expect it to be good.

What we are seeing is a highly motivated generation of graduates who get out there and just do it, a trend that has been in place for 20 years at least. Our role as teachers is to help them prepare artistically, critically and practically, to provide support for their hopes and ambitions and to assist them in realizing these.

The Art School

The art school has a role in generating cultural, intellectual, and creative capital in the broadest sense of the term. In a pluralist culture there is increasing circulation of artistic forms and ideas and much of the dynamism in contemporary art can be seen in this exchange between and within the works, like one big cultural think tank. A good art school creates a milieu, an atmosphere, a critical context, an occasion for these explorations and opportunities, in many cases generating a new conceptual marketplace, new desires to be fulfilled. An art school campus is a place to go and to mix it with other creative people, to learn, produce and reflect. It’s a launching pad for cultural experiment.

To this end a good art school offers a form of agency, providing the means for linking talent (perhaps a shorthand term for a cocktail of qualities) and opportunity through presenting content and studio-based experience, and also providing ongoing learning strategies for students to take with them. The art school should offer a responsive form of cultural advocacy, creating a network of opportunities, offering active support for students’ developing artistic and professional projects. There is, inevitably, a wide range of graduate outcomes, impossible to comprehensively predict and to provide for through a prescribed canon.

Emerging artists

I would like to say something about the emerging artists I have encountered over the past 10 years in art schools in Australia. They define their practices as they see fit either along conventional market lines using traditional methods and media or through more experimental and critically challenging approaches. Art schools support this wide spectrum of expectations. An observable characteristic of this new social and artistic culture is that it is highly socialized and performative. This follows the general trend in contemporary culture that has shifted art, one could say, from preoccupations with forms of representation alone to the creation of artistic events and critical actions. With this comes an increasing expectation of effective, sophisticated and immediate communication. Students are invariably driven by their own cultural preoccupations, selecting from the various options on offer. It is important not to assume that what is true for one generation is true for the next. One could argue that this generation of students, now the cultural leaders in the art schools, have their own social and cultural parameters. Their influences and reference points are different from those 30 years ago, their recreational activities are highly empathic, ecstatic even, affective and communicative. In most cases, and it is hopelessly fraught to generalise, (but I will) they love to talk, they are good to each other and are demonstrative. They expect professional behaviour from the academic staff and others with whom they interact; they understand their rights both as human beings and as consumers. They come to us for our expertise, not for a free hand, but for our critical and aesthetic judgments that they then evaluate and adapt for their own use. They are not at art school for a rest or some fantasy about freedom, but for the living of a creative life. They want to get on and be successful, in whatever way that may be manifested. They are competitive but also supportive of each other. They have a well-developed sense of justice and fairness. They have grown up through education and social systems that have been influenced by positive public policy based on equity of access and opportunity and diversity of outcomes, and the promotion of ideas of natural justice.

It is beyond dispute that we now live in a new ‘natural’ environment for education and so also art schools, based on equity, diversity and service provision. This last term enrages many people and makes them feel betrayed, offended by the crassness of it all. I am not sure the students see it that way. Students come to us not just to attain their ‘personal best’, although that is a big thing, but to do so in terms of contemporary artistic practices and contemporary cultural theories, not just traditional, historical media or a fixed art historical narrative. But rather they require us to provide them with the critical tools to explore the many histories of culture in an environment of investigation and research, with encouragement of experimentation and innovation; and not just a notion of “originality” acknowledged by the master’s approbation. This might take some adjustment for those committed to the certainties of the past; to models of teacher/student relations based on passing on the Word, or the anointing of the Chosen Few. My generation, for example, exerted considerable energy overcoming the same indulgences of the ‘brothers of the brush’. [I say this with all due affection!]. Let’s hope history is not going to repeat itself—because then we will have a mighty farce to deal with, and that would be just plain silly.

People emerging from trunks to lead the arriving audience through the fringe world of the fairground and vaudeville in a story inspired by Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus. People do clever tricks. Some walk a dangerous path across chairs that arrive just as their foot descends. There is slapstick-the simple hysteria of funny, round, silly people, battling each other 3 Stooges style. Snatches of circus are cleverly suggested through sound and images. A wild wheelchair does laps at the end of a rope.

All this humour and roughness, sawdust and seductive dancing, is woven together with interludes which have a delicate focus on tiny movements and a touching closeness. And so begins a deep, slow-building exploration of an interior world removed from all that is public.

We are introduced to Bird Woman in this place of sepia tones, romance and uneven beauty. In a drifty dress she itches all over and begins to sprout wings. But is she real, this half-bird, half-woman trapeze artist? Her fans scream, crowding to see her beauty. Her celebrity is assured. She is unsure. A man quietly asks: “Are you real? Do you have a soul? Can you love?”

In such a public world, some become famous celebrities, some are funny, some fall in love. But at any moment the fame, the laughs and romance can crack open to reveal tiny sadnesses, disappointments, uncertainties and rejections.

Sideshow allows us to watch the beauty of the illusion and at the same time the disappointment of knowing it’s not real. Then we see another, more subtle beauty: “I’m sad. I’m not a performer. I won’t come down.” But if you do come down, Valerie, you can show us the simple elegance of a woman in a swirly dress, spinning in soft light, on flat feet, with wings.

Kate Sulan’s direction and the company’s assured ensemble performance make clever use of bold bright circus tricks and sparkling celebrity to point to the truth of that which is absolutely ordinary.

In the end, the trapeze remains empty, a shadow of flight. Instead we are shown something much more remarkable: a man moves without his shell. Using his arms, without his chair, he pulls himself across the stark space of the floor towards a group of standing people. In the shock of this moment it is clear that the things we see in the air are not more extraordinary or beautiful than the things right in front of us—on the ground, as it were.

Rawcus Theatre Company, Sideshow, director Kate Sulan; design Emily Barrie; sound design Jethro Woodward; lighting design Richard Vabre; dramaturg/video Chris Kohn; North Melbourne Art House, May 27-June 4

It is easy to think of the ancient Sumerian myth of Gilgamesh as a story about overgrown boys in possession of big toys and a dubious sense of masculine virility. Gilgamesh battles both men and epic beings with little compunction and constantly embarks upon apparently random quests. After meeting his companion Enkidu, Gilgamesh declares they should journey to the Cedar Forest and carve a gate for their city, though there is no real reason to engage in such a hazardous venture. The tale is a reminder that the classical gods were little different from mortals except in their degree of power. Demigods (Gilgamesh) and gods (the good/bad Shamash) were vain, arrogant, violent, lustful, compassionate and heroic, all in equal measure.

Gilgamesh is nonetheless an archetypal story whose coda involves the hero’s futile search for self-knowledge through his attempt to defy mortality and retribution. Despite Gilgamesh’s breathtaking feats and dogged endurance, even he and Enkidu find they must submit to the dictates of mortality and die.

Uncle Semolina and Friends is a new ensemble co-directed by Christian Leavesley and Phillip Rolfe. Their high energy, grime-encrusted adaptation of this tale is a cross between the nasty childishness of Jacques Le Coq’s interpretation of clown performance, and the pained, bodily perseverance and drama of Jerzy Grotowski’s Poor Theatre. An audience of only 16 is locked inside a stained hulk of a shipping container along with 3 performers, an assortment of toys, some impressively battered, low-tech sound and lighting equipment and a ton or so of dirt. By the finale, the denizens of the play pit are shock-haired, battered, wild-eyed, panting and painted with great strokes of black sweat and soil.

The delivery of the text at times has a sense of enfolding poetry, which puts a halt to the succession of plastic trucks, action figures and aggressive, childish braggadocio which elsewhere dominates proceedings. Katherine Tonkin plays an ambiguously monstrous guide, her torso protruding from the centre of a roughly hung shabby curtain as she dangles over an obsessed, filthy Richard Pyros as Gilgamesh.

Images such as these, together with moments where the mysterious magic of the text truly breathed, were the strongest elements of the performance. The unrelenting machismo of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, smashing plastic figures together while block-razing thuds of electronic sound amplified their performance, tended to work against the more poetic motifs of the production. And as a study in masculinity, Gilgamesh has little to offer beyond the unsurprising revelation that some heroes, politicians and warriors are adolescent boys with too much power. Nevertheless, in its brutal, low-fi resolution and exhausting performance aesthetic, this was a true gem of the 2004 Next Wave Festival.

Uncle Semolina and Friends, Gilgamesh, co-directors, lighting and design Christian Leavesley, Phillip Rolfe; performers Richard Pyros, Mark Tregonning, Katherine Tonkin; 2004 Next Wave Festival; Federation Square Car Park, Melbourne, May 18-28

Choreographer Fiona Cameron is developing a distinctive, albeit piecemeal, aesthetic. Having danced with both Gideon Obarzanek's Chunky Move and Kate Champion's Force Majeur, Cameron is strongly drawn to the pedestrian humour and accessible comedy of the everyday which underlies much of her associates' work. Her latest piece, The Physical Story, begins in this vein.

We see a telephone surveyor (Sally Smith) moving from her kitsch but reassuring apartment, bedecked with porcelain statuettes, to her quietly maddening job, high above the stage, within the metal latticework of the theatre walls. We see an obsessive compulsive introvert (Elissa Lee) rearranging materials within her dwelling (a squat, perhaps?) and making awkward, darting journeys into the outside world, a hood pulled over her head. We see a tall, slightly camp black man (Earle Rosas) move into a room which he adorns with a poster of Marilyn Monroe. He settles into his tedious, potentially demeaning work behind a checkout stand, his eyebrows ever raised and pupils making swift stabs about the space as he observes the strange goings on of the urban community he has entered.

Cameron's attention, however, soon shifts elsewhere. Having established her characters and the familiar world which they inhabit through a smattering of gestures, words, pieces of costume and fragments of set, the straightforward dramatic situation quickly unravels. The movement becomes less and less everyday as we enter strange, abstract realms of physical awkwardness and imperfect attempts at physical contact or communion, with little or no preceding dramatic exposition to give these sequences a clear metaphoric import. To seen this as sign of arbitrariness in the allocation of dramatic significance would be ungenerous. Rosas' particularly beautiful, elongated, balletic poise rises above any potential dramaturgical imprecision to impart a strong sense of emotional and cultural ambiguity to his movement.

The style of the work thus moves from essentially straightforward dramatic physical theatre into something closer to the abstract European dance theatre of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Alain Platel's Les Ballets C de la B or Abdelaziz Sarrokh's Hush Hush Hush (2Pac, Melbourne Festival 2001). Movement comes to function here in an imperious fashion, the strength of the image or the physical pose breaking through any narrative or dramatic conceit, to take us into the realm of pure affect.

Cameron begins The Physical Story using dance to represent conventional occurrences, but by the finale we see such unlikely images as Rosas, dressed in an elegant, form-fitting evening gown, tangoing with Lee, who is now relaxed and clothed in a trendy, body-hugging purple dress. First she, and then he leads. Movement becomes the language of dreams and desires, of fear and anxiety, ecstasy and frustration. The match between these 2 approaches to dance is imperfect, and it is disappointing that Smith was not also included in the final, ambiguously liberating duet. But Cameron is to be commended for daring to combine the intensely abstract with the painfully banal.

Dance Party, The Physical Story, choreographer/director Fiona Cameron, choreographers/performers Sally Smith, Elissa Lee, Earle Rosas, lighting Jen Hector, sound Byron Scullin; BMW Edge, Federation Square, Melbourne, May 24-26

Melbourne's Next Wave Festival has a strong history of supporting the contemporary visual arts and, even more importantly, its hybrid mutations with other artistic forms. Under the moniker “Unpopular Culture”, the 2004 Next Wave Festival illuminated alleyways, squeezed into window boxes, and occupied car parks and warehouses. The festival momentarily possessed the city and provided a glimpse of the transformative potential of the rich and complex artistic practices developed by Australia's so-called “youth culture.”

LAMP, a performance/installation duo originally from Tasmania, staged a series of works entitled Loading Zone, which took place in the ubiquitous alleyways of Melbourne's Chinatown. Exploring the dislocated emotional state between 2 protagonists and the quiet, unspoken spaces within relationships, the works compellingly combined live performance with projected imagery and site-specific installations. Each 15 minute performance took place on a different night and in a different laneway, for an audience of around 15. This made for a satisfyingly brief encounter, yet one which momentarily transformed the audience's relationship to the disused urban spaces in which the performances took place, reanimating neglected, overlooked corners of the city.

Meanwhile, in a residential house on Fitzroy's Gore Street, Arlene TextaQueen held her fittingly-entitled exhibition Textanudes: postcards from home. Using her well-known textanude portrait format to focus on women in domestic environments, the drawings were launched at a spectacular opening event which lay somewhere between gallery opening, performance installation and house party. Reconfiguring the domestic as a site of feminine empowerment may not be a particularly new idea, but its redeployment in drawings unusually ornate and decorative for TextaQueen, combined with the refreshing context of the exhibition, provided an important insight into a new generation of feminist aspiration and practise. TextaQueen continues to move from strength to strength, remapping the boundary between performance and the 2-dimensional richness of drawing.

Also in Fitzroy, in what might be one of the only remaining unrenovated warehouses in the inner north, the popular Fort transported an old garage space into a parallel dimension in which colourful kitsch met a fantasy landscape resembling a Louise Weaver installation on acid. The minute attention to detail, from mutated trees to sparkly spiders, provided a level of intricacy and intrigue which undercut the throwaway kitsch aesthetic of the installation, making Fort a fascinating space to contemplate, ponder and explore.

Perhaps most representative of the Festival's theme of “Unpopular Culture” was Matchbox Temporary Art Spaces, installed in a public art space known as Platform 2 in an underpass at Flinders Street station. This space comprised a series of window boxes, with each box allocated to an artist as a studio for the duration of the Matchbox exhibition.

Each artist periodically squeezed into their miniature work space and proceeded to plug away, with the passing commuter traffic by turns bewildered, intrigued, engaged and outraged. A critical response to both the exclusion of “youth” from public space and the plight of the artist in an increasingly commercialised economic and urban landscape, Matchbox Temporary Art Spaces spoke to the festival's loaded theme in an accessible yet critically engaged manner.

This type of project is what festivals do best, actively dissolving boundaries between public and private space, artistic practise and institutions, and between art forms. There are precious few outlets or opportunities for this kind of vital, risky work.

The Centre for Contemporary Photography presented a solid, well-realised series of exhibitions by Paul Knight, Marcia Lochhead, Julie Vinci and Isobel Knowles, but they were, in effect, indistinguishable from the CCP's regular, year-round exhibition program (which admittedly does support young and emerging artists on a regular basis).

New gallery venue Spacement, which opened during the festival, held what amounted to a fairly run-of-the-mill series of exhibitions which only served to highlight the vitality of the other, more experimental projects in the festival's calendar.

Notwithstanding the important resources which institutional partnerships bring to any festival, what was really exciting about this year's Next Wave was its successful reach beyond the established paradigms of contemporary art practice. The festival opened up, if only momentarily, some inspiring new physical and conceptual spaces. We can only hope that other organisations will follow suit.

2004 Next Wave Festival: Unpopular Culture, various venues, Melbourne, May 18-30

In a simple concert format, Ruby Hunter, Archie Roach, Paul Grabowsky and the Australian Art Orchestra offer their audience an intensely rich musical experience drawing thematically on Hunter’s origins, the couple’s relationship and the culture of “river people.” With the sparest of accompaniment Roach and Hunter are engaging performer-songwriters, but here they are supported by and integrated into the satisfying totality of Grabowsky’s orchestrations. Country and western, folk, rock’n’roll, reggae and hip hop have all informed popular Indigenous music. Grabowsky, however takes his cue from the gospel, blues and ‘trad jazz’ of the American south and ragtime riffs without ever being literal about it. With gospel and blues he’s building on something already in the compositions of Hunter and Roach, but he takes it further, in the same way, of course, that gospel and blues evolved into jazz.

What could be a tricky balancing act between bracing simplicity and demanding complexity works well with Grabowsky keeping his rhythms carefully anchored and often aligning a singing voice with an instrument -whether trumpet, violin, trombone, saxophone or guitar – so that one seems to magically flow out of and back into the other. Hunter’s voice is intimate, deep, if delicate, with a well-spaced vibrato; Roach’s is characteristically craggy, tuneful, calling the listener to attend. The songs are about place, birth, identity, love and loss. Hunter’s premature birth is recalled-saved by the warm ashes from a campfire so that she “looked like a little rabbit cooked in the ground”—amidst a sparkling musical reverie. A Hunter song about children’s games is rich in ragtime playfulness and is visually and aurally heightened by a solo from percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson playing anything she can lay her hands on. The gospel-ish “They took the children away” from Roach in full voice, is a sad brass band march that turns triumphant as “the children come back”, featuring an inspired solo from saxophonist Sandy Evans. The couple’s first meeting at Adelaide’s People’s Palace, a Salvation Army hotel, is fondly and comically remembered, and sensually celebrated in a sublime guitar solo from Steve Magnusson.

The other instrumentalists (violin John Rodgers, reeds Paul Cutlan, trumpet Phillip Slater, drums Simon Baker, bass Philip Rex, and Grabowsky on piano) are excellent, whether alone or in ensemble in a concert which celebrates the greatness of this (ensemble version) of the Australian Art Orchestra as much as it does Archie Roach and especially Ruby Hunter. Roach sings more songs than Hunter as the concert goes on, though its clear that the songs are by, or for and about her. Even so we were left hungry for that most unusual and haunting of voices, but relished the sight of her idiosyncratic dancing to the singing of her partner, with a gentle swaying, arms and hands evoking traditional gesturing, along with a radiant smiling. An expanded version of the show with a larger Art Orchestra is programmed for this year’s Melbourne Festival.

The Australian Art Orchestra, Ruby’s Story, performance, music and lyrics Ruby Hunter and Archie Roach, musical direction, arrangements and additional music Paul Grabowsky, director Melinda Collie-Holmes, lighting Chris Day; Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, June 4-5

In 1991 Tracey Moffat curated In Dreams, an exhibition of the photographs of Mervyn Bishop for the Australian Centre for Photography. A selection of personal shots and images taken for the Sydney Morning Herald (where Bishop worked for 17 years) and the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, In Dreams was a potent portrayal of the achievements, struggles and everyday lives of Indigenous Australians documented in lucid black and white.

Flash Blak is another rare opportunity to see some of this work and the history it unfolds. It’s a stage show in the manner of William Yang’s autobiographical explorations. Yang directs Bishop using a similar, if more informal structure to his own works. A physical journey is embarked on and others are undertaken through exploring sets of photographs.

Yang and Bishop travel to the northern New South Wales homeland where the latter grew up, meeting numerous relatives on the way and encountering pockets of social despair.

Cutting across the trip are other strands—Bishop’s frank account of his immediate family life (a difficult relationship with his daughter, pride in a son now performing with Bangarra Dance Theatre) and the death of his wife; his ancestry, emblematic of Indigenous history and rich cross-cultural intermarriage; and his growing engagement as a child with photography, inspired by his mother’s striking ability with the camera.

Between these intersecting narrative lines are woven video images of the passing landscape as the photographers travel north, Drew Crawford’s accompanying romantic minimalism evoking the pulse of the journey with elegaic empathy.

As Flash Blak draws to a close a sense of the power of inheritance grows in strength, particularly through Bishop’s grandmother, with photographs of her morphing from adolescence to old age, all conveying pride and beauty. Flash Blak is a gentle, conversational account of a life in which pain, anger, despair and joy are heard between the lines and glimpsed in images.

Merv Bishop, Flash Blak, co-devisors Merv Bishop, William Yang, director William Yang, composer Drew Crawford, visual design Gus Weinberger, lighting Richard Montgomery; commissioned by Sydney Opera House Playhouse

Singapore is exhilarating. The close interweave of Malay, Chinese, Indian and British culture plus the presence of Australians, American and other international residents, many from Asia, makes for a dynamic mix. The language of the locals is rich in code-switching and cuisine and art practices come in many varieties. Like Australia, Singapore is a deeply urban culture, but this island is a city-state of some 4 million people with little in the way of natural space. It seems all city, all shopping and eating out: a promotional campaign declares a month of “retail therapy.” And the arts are on the shopping list: there’s a steady flow of major international art through the capacious Esplanade theatre complex, little of it travelling on to Australia. What’s more Singapore sees art as part of its identity, its serious engagement with contemporary art just over a decade old. Its growing investment in contemporary art is aided by a necessary easing of censorship. There’s a lot of nurturing, training, promoting and branding. “Uniquely Singapore” is the island’s latest piece of self-branding and it includes art. Australia, with a longer history of contemporary art practice, has barely arrived at this conjunction between art and tourism. Singapore’s advertising includes an onscreen recommendation from Philip Glass, declaring that “Singapore plays its own tune.”

I was one of a group of arts journalists from around the world generously hosted by the National Arts Council and the Singapore Tourist Bureau to visit the Singapore Arts Festival for 5 days in June, to meet artists, visit galleries and theatres and learn about the structure of arts-making and promotion within Singapore and beyond. Just that conjunction of arts and tourism was pretty exciting in itself, to find the mostly young staff of both agencies speaking with enthusiasm and expertise about the arts. Singapore sees itself as the hub of South-East Asia and a major part of its pull is its building and promotion of a huge events program (sport, entertainment, art) with the Esplanade arts centre and a growing arts culture playing a key role.

Global City for the Arts

In the old world luxury of Raffles Hotel, our hosts, the Singapore Tourist Board (STB), power-point their way through their vision of Singapore, as “Global City for the Arts”, describing their attempts to achieve leverage from “a cultural hotchpot” by branding it a distinctive whole. They see the city as “poised to become the events capital of Asia.” STB’s vision of the best of traditional and modern comprises a big picture that brings together the arts, entertainment and sport with an annual turnover of $800m, 11,500 employees and 1,300 establishments. The goal for Singapore, they say, is job creation (with a focus on investing in training and management), developing local work to world class standards, and increasing access for local audiences.

Events make up 5% of the tourist industry, with some 20 events taking place every day: “a lot for a small metropolis.” Recent events include a fashion festival, a touring Lord of the Rings exhibition and the hosting of the Indian Academy Awards. Figures indicate that the events audience is growing with a strategy of encouraging tourists to extend their stay to take in more events. The Singapore season of Mama Mia is expected to draw a large regional audience as is a major Botero exhibition. Planning for a visual arts biennale is under way.

Arts infrastructure

The National Arts Council budget ranges from $30-40m annually. Arts grants are capped at 30% of the total cost of a project and the council runs an impressive scheme for the housing of arts ventures. We visited the Little India Arts Belt, part of the NAC’s Arts Housing Scheme. Implemented in 1985, tenants pay 10% of the rental in addition to running costs. In 2001, 10 former shop-houses in Little India were purchased for Arts Housing. We visited 2 of these adjoining spaces adapted from old merchant buildings—narrow, high-ceilinged and with cool, tiled floors. One is Plastique Kinetic Worms, an artist-run visual arts space, also publisher of Vehicle magazine. Next door is spell#7, one of the organisers of the 2004 Performance Studies International conference, curator of a 2003 new media arts exhibition (www.livedigitally.net, October 2003), and currently promoting its Desire Paths audio tour of Little India (more about this in RT 63). The upstairs space is licensed for performances with audiences of up to 30. Other arts houses in the area include those of Dramaplus Arts and Wild Rice Ltd. The NAC supports a large range of artists and projects, many with international standing.

Esplanade

Pivotal to the promotion of Singapore as “a global arts city” is Esplanade— Theatres on the Bay, cased in huge shells textured like the skin of the durian fruit and with a superbly equipped concert hall (1600 seats) and theatre (2000 seats), both acoustically sublime, large in scale but intimately realised. There also studio spaces for experimental work, restaurants, shops, outdoor performing space and water views. The aim to create a multicultural, multi-racial arts centre for all Singaporeans is realised in a number of ways, through judicious programming (ranging from Robert Wilson to orchestral and rock concerts), a 5-tier ticketing policy, and, we are told, no free tickets for staff—they must set the example of buying their own. Some 16% of tickets are purchased by tourists. The Esplanade cost $600m: the goal we were told is not to recover costs but to bring world class art to Singapore. It is proudly pointed out that the centre is operated “by 150-170 full-time staff, half of that of the Sydney Opera House”, along with 300 casual employees.

Singapore-Victoria

You might have noticed that the Australian artists and companies programmed in Singapore Festivals are mostly from Melbourne. This is not surprising given that there’s a Memorandum of Understanding between the 2 states. We gathered in the Blue Room of the former Parliament House to witness the signing of the third of these successive 3-year agreements. The respective heads of the arts departments, Penny Hutchinson, Director Arts Victoria and Lee Suan Hiang, Chief Executive Officer of Singapore’s National arts Council sign the document witnessed by Victoria’s Arts Minister Mary Delahunty and Singapore’s Dr Lee Boon Yang, Minister of Information, Communication and the Arts. Speakers claim a ‘natural connection’ between the cities given their size and British background, their proximity (only 7 hours away), the parallel developments of Federation Square and Esplanade-“new venues in search of new audiences”-and the strong connection between their respective festivals. It was pointed out that some 18 artists, companies and arts organisations had been involved in the Singapore-Melbourne relationship. Hutchinson said that there were 12 projects currently selected for development. The Singaporeans emphasised a desire to go beyond exchange to “more joint efforts and artistic collaborations in all the art forms including the literary and visual arts, and new media.”

The Singapore Arts Festival

Since 1999 the Singapore Festival has become an annual event, with 50% of programming international and 50% Singaporean. The festival is seen as a springboard for Singaporean art to dive into the international scene, either on its own terms or as part of collaborations, as in the Singaporean-Australian-Japanese production Sandakan Threnody (see below) or the Singapore-Hong Kong multimedia chamber opera Opiume with Singapore’s acclaimed T’ang Quartet (2002 Melbourne Festival) and also featuring Australian singers.

The festival is an inclusive one with an outreach (“arts on the move”) and weekend programs (eg an all night Indian cultural event), “kids’ focus” and visiting artists residencies (eg British choreographer Akram Kahn). The festival budget is $6.5-7m (the Singapore dollar was almost equivalent to the Australian at the time of my visit) with government input at 40-45%, sponsorship at 30%, and ticket sales making up the rest. 50,000 tickets are sold, 10% of these to tourists. Overall attendance for the 2004 festival, including free events, has been estimated at 900,000. The festival is operated by the National Arts Council, something which appears as unusual to Australians used to the relative freedom of festivals and their artistic directors from government agencies. This is a reminder of the evolution of government-led Singaporean culture. In a discussion with the council the significant role of Goh Ching Lee as Festival Director is acknowledged (she is NAC’s Director, Programmes & International Development), however the emphasis is equally placed on collective and committee decision-making within the council along with input from local artists and arts experts.

The 2004 festival includes some very strong programming, some of it provocative, most of it showing before my arrival. A 3-hour Othello (Meno fortas, Lithuania), Conjunto di Nero (Netherlands/Italy), Compagnhia de Dança Deborah Colker (Brazil), El Autmóvil Gris (Certain Inhabitants’ Theatre, Mexico), Butterflies (Golden Bough Theatre, Taiwan) and Sandakan Threnody sat side by side with Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble concerts, the wonderful Budapest Festival Orchestra, Cantonese opera and flamenco dance. The festival organisers see new works and challenging imports as calculated risks and an important part of their programming. Regional input is also vital with works programmed from China, Taiwan and South Korea. Above all the festival is eager to find partners, to create more collaborations and co-productions. The Australian connection has been significant this year with the programming of Helen Herbertson’s Morphia, Urban Dream Capsule (a huge success), Stiff Gins and the Sandakan Threnody co-production with the Brisbane and Melbourne Festivals, As one official put it, there is a desire “for the Singapore Festival to become iconic for the region, like Edinburgh, and increase its budget by 100%!”

Ah Hock and Peng Yu

Over 5 days and between numerous briefings, venue inspections and lunchtime meetings, I caught a handful of festival shows. In the studio of the Esplanade, Singapore’s new Ah Hock and Peng Yu dance company presented 3 works with precision and commitment, if not with the greatest of choreographic flair (Esplanade Theatre Studio, June 18-20). In Homelands (choreographer Ix Wong Thien Pau, Singapore), men in uniform suits walk with a kind of purposeful purposelessness back and forth across the space, some dropping out of the rigid line only to be quickly drawn back in. Suddenly alone, individuals perform displaced solos, or stand still, aimless. Fluid duos and trios break from the insistent lines of walkers, entwining and tangling in moments of vigour and determination before falling back into line and, finally, a collective stasis. Ingram Marshall’s Fog Tropes II and Steve Reich’s Triple Quartet are not compositions I’d usually associate with a theme of alienation (Homelands is about men working away from home) but they add to the curious beauty of a fluid but essentially damned-up masculinity.

Kilt Bill (Yuri Ng, Hong Kong) opens informally in very low light as a female figure inches around the boundary of the space, her back to us, contorting oddly if erotically in her slip of a frock to Blossom Dearie singing Let’s dance. She turns out to be a he and is soon joined by 2 other cross-dressers in an adroit piece of kitsch about dancing in high heels—and they do it splendidly to Ravel’s Bolero. Tautly choreographed and executed the piece requires expert timing, calculated tapping and tottering, dancing in one shoe, stepping seamlessly into vacated ones and illustrating the art of shoe taking-off and putting-on while furiously and unanimously on the move. Some kind of plotting in the end transforms shoes into guns, but the pleasure is not in fetish symbolism but the dexterity of the dancers. While kitsch can rarely transcend itself, Kilt Bill at least celebrated choreographic ingenuity and dancer virtuosity.

Fu Cao by Adelaide-based choreographer Zhang Xiao Xiong was demandingly and sometimes tediously intense, portraying a culture of erotic tyranny and passion with broad, lyrical movements (arms extended like birds of prey) and robust athleticism. Like Homelands, Fu Cao appeared to delve into the fraught limits of masculine freedom. Oddly it was only in Kilt Bill that any release was achieved, and that by adopting female personae.

In this brave venture into an all male program (11 including 1 Japanese and 5 Taiwanese dancers), the company proved itself equal to the sometimes considerable demands of choreography that belonged more to the 90s than the present. The company looks strong and impressed its young audience.

The Substation

Substation, an intimate contemporary artspace with strong connections with Australia, was hosting a documentary film festival of works from the region which I couldn’t attend, but the word around was very good, as was the opinion that Singaporeans were making some excellent short films, while feature films remained problematic, with the very occasional hit. The pop shots exhibition in the Substation gallery focused on “rituals, objects, body” from everyday and popular culture angles. The strongest of the works included Lim Kok Boon’s Apache Toy, a large image of the helicopter ominously straddling pancakes in a Macdonald’s; Keng-Li Wee’s Vegas—evocative C-prints of, among other things, stark Las Vegas buildings, a “Jesus Action Figure”, a woman suntanning by a big hotel industrial laundry bucket—and Gilles Massot’s installation of impressionistic snaps of everyday objects rendered odd to the point of transcendence and strung delicately before us on wire (pop shots, The Substation and Alliance Francaise, June 4-20).

Singapore Tyler Print Institute

Matin Tran, the eloquent marketing manager of the Singapore Tyler Print Institute, guided us through the building, from the ample exhibition space and print room down to the residency studio (where Bernard Quesniaux from France introduced us to his work), deeper down into the printing and paper-making rooms where children were having a thoroughly enjoyable time making their own paper while we wandered amidst the presses, the screen printers, huge blotting blankets and the racks of drying and finished prints.

STPI is a good example of investment with considerable foresight. The famous New York printmaker Kenneth E Tyler offered his 4th workshop, which he wanted to be state of the art, to Singapore as non-profit establishment if the Singapore government would buy it outright. It required the renovation a 19th century warehouse, with equipment brought in from New York. The complex is perfectly ventilated, uses recycled water and has its own drainage system. And there’s a restaurant in the building (featuring Australian wines). The goal, says Tran, is to create “100% sellable prints” and at prices to encourage Singaporeans to invest in art. The house has its own publishing program, creating limited editions. What seems in retrospect a small investment has turned out to be an invaluable one, making it the most complete print and paper-making house of its kind, central not only to printmaking in Asia but a model for similar institutions elsewhere in the world. Artists from China (Ju Wei), the Philippines (Pacita Abad), the USA (Donald Sultan) and France (Quesniaux) are among those who have enjoyed residencies here. STPI encourages artists to go beyond the normal bounds of printmaking with Pacita Abad sculpting paper pulp and Donald Sultan merging flocking, orthography, dyeing and woodblock techniques in single works. STPI asks visiting artists “to arrive with a concept, but no fixed image.” In collaboration with the British Council STPI exhibited an impressive collection of often sardonic and well-crafted British printmaking during the Singapore Festival.

Wu Tong at The Arts House

Sometime member of Yo Yo Ma’s ‘world music’ Silk Road ensemble, Wu Tong performed in The Arts House in the old parliamentary chamber with Singaporean/Indian collaborators Nizam A Halar on sitar, Jatinder Singh on tabla and vocals by Ghanavenothan Retnam. Wu Tong has been a major pop star in China as member of Lunhui, bringing together rock and traditional music. But he’s also had classical training in playing the flute-cluster sheng, yielding a rich and varied soundscape suggestive of everything from solo flute to organ. Despite an uneven sound mix, this was an interesting cross-cultural experiment, often feeling more improvised than through-composed, a fascinating first stage in a collaboration with pieces alternating between a primary focus in either Indian and Chinese modes, one of the most effective based on an evening raga.

Originally a courthouse with cells (1827), subsequently Parliament House until 1999 and officially opening as an arts venue this year, The Arts House preserves the past while presenting contemporary art in a well-equipped, intimate black box theatre (Play Den), a small cinema, the parliamentary chamber (where Wong Tu performed), meeting rooms, a shop, restaurant and cafe. Our host described The Arts House as “a platform for aspiring artists…and with a number of spaces available to adapt rather than treat as fixed venues.”

Singapore Art Museum

The Singapore Art Museum provides a focal point for the viewing of Singaporean and Southeast Asian contemporary art as well as some traditional art (eg exquisite Chinese finger drawing by Wu Tsai Yen) and educational programs. The latter on this occasion included C.A.S.T. (Covergences of Art, Science and Technology), a showing of works influenced or driven by new technologies, including a striking museum-style installation of ‘genetically-engineered’ butterflies with, among other things, advertising on their wings. The feature exhibition for the festival was a Pierre & Gilles showing (Beautiful Dragon, June 17-July 18) mixing familiar output with a set of unusually dark works of Asian subjects including depictions of male sacrifice but without the usual glitter and easy eroticism.

Sandakan Threnody

Late in World War II, prisoners of war, including many Australians, were marched to their deaths by the Japanese as they shifted from one camp, Sandakan to another, hundreds of kilometres away, deep in the jungles of northern Borneo. Six Australians out of 2,400 prisoners survived starvation, exhaustion, disease and execution. Australian composer Jonathan Mills’ father, a medical officer at Sandakan, had not been included in the march when he was transferred to another camp and survived the war. Australians know a little of this grim story. Singaporeans, said Ong Keng Sen director of Sandakan Threnody in a post-show talk, know even less. He put this in context by explaining that many in the region had seen themselves and their countries as trapped in a war between empires. Only now were they beginning to appreciate the role of Australians and the complexities of responsibility.

Mills and Keng Sen (artistic director of Singapore’s acclaimed TheatreWorks) agreed to collaborate on a multimedia performance using the composer’s 30-minute Sandakan Threnody. The director saw an opportunity to put the Sandakan marches into multiple perspectives: Singaporean, Australian and Japanese. At its very best this is what happens, a quaking ethical incertitude amplified by contrasting points of view and multiple means of conveying emotional responses, through design, projections, dance and acting. The music is powerful, densely orchestral and choral, existing very much on its own terms but reflected in the huge layered, refractive set-cum-installation that wraps around the performance. For all its force, without a live element the music risks some diminution: hybrid performance can easily upstage itself with focus on some elements at the expense of others. Even so this soundscaped version of the music grips: an open, public grieving (from the Greek, threnos), alternating between long passionate lines, a sad lullaby and harsh metallic marching and entailing strains of traditional Japanese music.

In RealTime 59, I reported the pleasure of encountering Elision’s Tulp: the body public, describing it as a new hybrid: documentary, multimedia music theatre. Sandakan Threnody is a similar creature and much of the first half and more of the performance is a sublime interweaving of documentary film, dance and acting, of passages literal and symbolic. After that, however, the symbolic and the abstract take over, and while it’s interesting to see 2 soldiers of warring cultures in the end as Beckettian figures, it remains a conceit, barely a concept and is never convincingly embodied however passionately performed.

Matthew Crosby as the Australian soldier brings his experience in Japanese theatre to bear with an intense physicality and an uncluttered version of how a tormented soul fantasizes his way to survival. Koto Yamazaki, a Japanese dancer with modern American dance and butoh background, excels as a kind of physical alter- and counter-ego to the Australian, moving about him in intense parallel patterns. Another Japanese presence is onnagata performer Gojo Masonoskue, who while impressive is the least integrated into the work, taking up significant stage time as the work appears to unravel. Keng Sen describes this female figure as a symbol of hope, “like a gold thread through the tapestry of war and pain” (program note). Sandakan Threnody is at its best when the weave is tight and the alternation of elements and shifts in patterning are rhythmically insistent. This is mostly in the first half where the totality of the hybrid is most felt as organic.

A large vertical off-centre screen is central to video artist Margie Medlin’s projections. Above hangs a fractured, shining sheet of metal, reproducing and distorting the screen image below. A huge, high net of small, sometimes glittering squares bounds the performing space and, behind, a cyclorama becomes another space for enormous projections or fiery washes of colour. Medlin’s deployment of videos and her lighting are integral to Justin Hill’s set design, creating a remarkable depth of field and surprising perceptual shifts without dwarfing the live performers. (Hill is a Singapore-based Australian and a founding member of TheatreWorks.)

While the stage performances suggest psychological complexity and hint at ethical agony, it is the videos that carry much more weight, whether in the nightmarish opening documentary footage of the execution of a Japanese war criminal, or in 2 interviews central to the work. The first is of the daughter of one of the survivors of the marches. She describes her father, Bill Moxham’s despair at his survival, his refusal to be applauded as some kind of hero, and his subsequent suicide in 1961. She thinks that, like Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness (her point of reference is Coppola’s Acocalypse Now) her father had entered “the dark side” and its torments were too much for him. Crosby’s Australian prisoner does not suggest this, the production going for something more difficult, and less convincing, in having the actor double as Yamamoto, the camp commander. The other interview, even more distressing than the first (although problematically coordinated with stage action), is with the son of the executed Yamamoto. No matter how saddened by or apologetic for his father’s misdeeds, the son is quietly and resolutely proud of his father. These interviews are public grievings, complex and deeply affecting, resonating with Mills’ score and the more impressionistic anguish in the lyrical onstage scenario.

Sandakan Threnody does not attempt to reproduce the death marches, rather it reflects on their consequences and poses disturbing questions about our ongoing relationship with war, with the maltreatment of prisoners and the clash of loyalty and morality. Although partly flawed in its first outing, reshaping and editing could focus its considerable power for the Brisbane and Melbourne Festival showings. Australian Tim Harvey, local performer/musician Rizman Putra and TheatreWorks regular Lok Meng Chue complete the strong cast.

Uniquely Singapore?

Singapore’s exciting cultural mix, its intimacy and intensity, its conscious development as an urban culture with strong arts aspirations and extensive arts facilities (and excellent public transport) make it unique. There’s a sense of synthesis, a bringing together of cultures, of the countries in the region and beyond, and a vision of art as integral to Singaporean life. I look forward to returning to Singapore as part of the RealTime writing team collaborating with local writers on covering another Australian-Singaporean collaboration, the new media arts event MAAP (Multimedia Arts Asia Australia Pacific) in October.

TheatreWorks, Sandakan Threnody, director Ong Keng Sen, composer Jonathan Mills, set Justin Hill, lighting and video Margie Medlin with Choy Ka Fai, soundscape Steve Adam, Jonathan Mills; recording, Sydney Symphony Orchestra; Victoria Theatre, June 18-20

d>Art.04 Sound, curated by RealTime Associate Editor and sound artist Gail Priest, was an intriguing and enveloping journey into 10 sound spaces while seated on glowing design furniture (2Design: Henrietta Gothe-Ellis + Roger Veitch) and headphoned into attractive players (Yamaha MusicCAST interactive wireless home music network). The engaging ambience of the space, the easy utility of the players and the brevity of the works encouraged taking in the whole program, replaying or skipping at will.

In Ben Byrne’s Sewing Machine Beheads itself (Feet Up) bright signals play across your head, go chordal, and loop in and out of sync like a cloud of busy morse-coding critters. Camilla Hannan’s Itchy is like a journey across a landscape of industrial squeal and electrical discharge, almost familiar but otherwise quite alien, until finally a crackling right inside your ears begins to take you down into something deep, very dark and you fill with water. Lithuanian Gintas Kraptavicius’ titled#9dub seems one of those pure sine wave experiences that for all its apparent abstraction hits like a 100% alcohol Vodka-chaser. In fact it’s not all distillation: there’s a lot going on as high bright sounds blip and glide up yielding increasing musicality. Jasper Norda’s A week in June in a space of 5 minutes/Butterfly (Sweden) has a similar purity of tone, ticking and whistling around spoken word that reflects on cancer, death and time, deep in the ears.

Untitled, a 15 minute collaboration between Kazumichi Grime and Anthony Guerra, begins with crackles and bells and a spacey depth of field which it gradually fills out with big riffs and rumbles, layers of vibration and bristlings, generating a liquid density with breaking waves of sounds and booming closure. It’s a sonically interesting if structurally predictable romantic soundscape. Matt Warren’s So Close reflects on his mother’s near-drowning when she was a child with a kind of aural simulation of the event, moving from a literal surface (the sounds of kids at play in water) into the big splash that takes you under, the thump in the ear, the dark vibrations of some big, other space, a consuming high pitched buzzing and the gasping eruption of escape.

Philip Pietruschka’s Valeria listens attentively to the playing of musical instruments (electro-acoustic guitar and percussion), to plucking, vibration, the scrape of surfaces, the spaces in between and curious incidental effects that, like a watery clacking, are not easy to locate. Not surprisingly, the composer cites Takemitsu’s film scores as an influence. Acutus (Takumi Endo, Japan) is described in the program note as “an exploration of a hyper-monochrome sound environment”, the artist calling it “dance music for the synapses.” It fairly bops along, shuffling and blipping like some hip morse-coder across great distances, growing nearer and sharper and increasingly hypnotic.

Tim Catlin’s Friction is another close listening venture, this time to household sounds resonating like old machinery, the aural space gradually opening out, the higher rattlings and squeakings anchored by deeper notes from something unidentifiable. Although more interesting for its collection of intriguing sounds than its compositional virtues, the ambience is oddly like being in the bush at night. In Kerr, Vicky Browne conjures up a spooky room from her childhood without literal referencing, generating something much larger, humming, surging, plummeting and expanding harmonically with all the spaciness of Kubrick’s 2001. Must have been some room.

d>Art.04 Sound is a collection of class acts, the cliches are few, and, as with d>Art.04’s screen program, although not every work appeals there are more than enough of high calibre, whether in the developing aural-tracking idiom of Camilla Hannan, Matt Warren’s experiential micro-narrative, or in the new experiences offered me by Gintas Kraptavicius, Jesper Norda and Takumi Endo.

dLux media arts, d>Art.04 Sound, Exhibition Hall, Sydney Opera House; Sydney International Film Festival, June 17-27

Robyn Archer has done it yet again, created another unique festival program, richly themed, grippingly lateral, passionate and inclusive for a wide range of audiences. Best of all Archer’s choices reflect the state of the arts mid-decade: exploratory, innovative, hybrid and with a potent interplay of the local and the global. Archer celebrates the voice with mass yodelling singalongs, competitive karaoke, intensive workshops with some of the world’s most adventurous vocal virtuosi, new generation operas by Australians and others, sonically designed multimedia performances, song recitals, live poetry and classics from Mozart and Schubert sung live in interpretive dance scenarios from great choreographers.

As Archer puts it, her festival is about the voice “metaphorical and literal.” In Alladeen, The Builders Association (NY, see RT#57, p28) and motiroti (UK) collaborate on a sophisticated, multimedia response to the Aladdin tale in terms of the new economic colonisation that transforms Indians working in call centres into masters of vocal disguise. In Victoria’s (Belgium) üBUNG 6 children onstage watch 6 adults at a dinner party onscreen and create the vocal soundtrack for the film—charming at one level, says Archer of this drama of mimickry and socialisation, but disturbing at another.

There’s also a strong strand of puppetry vis a vis the voice in the festival. Ronnie Burkett (Canada), the tour-de-force puppeteer for adults manipulates and voices his many onstage charges in full view of the audience in Provenance, an art mystery about the history of a painting. South Africa’s astonishing Handspring Puppet Company directed by animation maestro William Kentridge present Monteverdi’s opera The Return of Ulysses in a contemporary setting and in collaboration with the Ricercar Consort. Each character is worked by both a puppeteer and a singer. Melbourne’s Aphids will present their miniature puppet plays, A Quarelling Pair, including one by the American writer Jane Bowles.

Operatic voices are explored through an onstage interplay with dancing bodies. In Mozart/Concert Arias 1992 the wonderful choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker with her company Rosas (Belgium), 3 sopranos, director Jean-Luc Ducourt and Alessandro de Marchi conducting the Australian Brandenberg Orchestra, entwine Mozart and dance in a widely acclaimed performance. De Keersmaeker herself will perform Once, a new solo meditation on American culture from the Civil War onwards to the music of Joan Baez’s In Concert Part 2 (1963). In another interplay of voice and body, with 3 dancers, a pianist and the acclaimed British baritone Simon Keenlyside, the great American choreographer Trisha Brown transforms Schubert’s Wintereisse song cycle into a visual drama, integrating the singer boldly and seamlessly into the dance. “Not a note is lost”, says Archer.

The festival offers some intriguing perspectives on opera and music theatre in the early 21st century. For younger audiences, Windmill Performing Arts, Opera Australia and MIAF have combined to premiere Midnite, based on Randolph Stow’s novel. It’s composed by Raffaelo Marcellino with Doug Macleod as librettist. In the long-awaited “opera in 4 orbits”, Cosmonaut, a doomed Russian astronaut communicates with an Australian woman while the USSR crumbles. Cosmonaut is by composer David Chesworth to a libretto by Tony MacGregor and premieres under the direction of David Pledger.

The Busker’s Opera is multimedia virtuoso Robert Lepage’s take on John Gay’s 18th century The Beggar’s Opera (Ex Machina, Canada). As in the original, popular tunes of the day are deployed, “from hard rock to klezmer, delta blues to show tunes, rat pack to Gay’s originals” in a timely tale about a busker destroyed by the “cultural industry, copyright laws and heroin.” Archer says this is high quality trash, with outrageous but miraculously engrossing singing and heaps of bad taste. Musiektheatre Transparent’s Men in Tribulation (Belgium) is a new opera by Eric Sleichim for counter tenor, narrator, saxophone quartet and electronics to a text by Jan Fabre inspired by Antonin Artaud’s time spent with the Tarahumara Indians in central Mexico. The great Vivian de Muynck (previously seen in Australia with Needcompany and the Wooster Group) performs with experimental vocalist Phil Minton.

There’s a lot more on the program. Ruby Hunter and Archie Roach collaborate with Paul Grabowsky and the Australian Art Orchestra on Kura Tungar-Songs for the River, a large-scale reworking of the engrossing, moving and sublimely orchestrated Ruby’s Story (see www.realtimearts.net). Japan’s Granular Synthesis appear in Modell 5, an extreme merging of sound and visual image as the projected head of performer Akemi Takeya is subjected to multiple transformations on 4 screens and in surround sound. Very loud, very subtle. The Singapore-Australia co-production Sandakan Threnody is a powerful account of the consequences of war crimes (see review of the Singapore Arts Festival premiere, p47). And The Audiotheque: Night Voices is a live to air broadcast for a very live audience of Radio National’s The Night Air at the National Gallery of Victoria.

If you want to lift your vocal game, Institute for the Living Voice, originally out of Belgium, is a unique 11-day offering for singers and others to work with some of the world’s most remarkable voices, including David Moss, director of the project. Or yodelling or karaoke might be more your thing. Whatever, the arts pilgrimage that once coursed its way to Adelaide will again this year head to Melbourne, to celebrate voice newly embodied in the works of De Keersmaeker, Kentridge, Lepage, Brown, Keenlyside, Burkett, Moss, de Muynck, Granular Synthesis, Chesworth, The Builders Association, Marcellino, Archie Roach & Ruby Hunter and many, many more. KG

The 4 new Australian documentaries screened at this year’s Message Sticks Film Festival were all about giving voice to the silenced, either through reclaiming the past or giving space to contemporary voices generally excluded from mainstream public discourse.

Opening the festival was Ivan Sen’s The Dreamers, revolving around interviews with 3 young Aboriginal professionals: a singer, a soccer player and a champion surfer. Shot on video in hand-held style, Sen focuses resolutely on his subject’s faces as they relate their dreams and hopes for the future. There is no attempt to analyse or even portray these young people’s social or familial contexts. Instead Sen constructs 3 impressionistic character studies, his intimate framing and constant cross-cutting between interviewees suggesting the uncertain nature of their futures and the intensity of their desire to succeed.

The Dreamers furthers Sen’s reputation as a chronicler of young Indigenous Australians, begun with the short drama Tears (1998) and the feature-length Beneath Clouds (2001). Sen deals with the complexities of identity throughout his work, avoiding one-dimensional notions of its construction. The Dreamers conveys something of the character and hopes of 3 young Australians whose Aboriginality is integral to their identities, rather than being imposed by those around them.

Beck Cole’s Wirriya: small boy follows a few days in the life of Ricco, an 8 year old child living with his foster mother in Hidden Valley, an Aboriginal community on the outskirts of Alice Springs. Cole’s simple style allows Ricco to narrate his own story, although her camera remains a detached observer that sometimes contradicts him: “I’m not naughty”, he informs us at one point, after we’ve seen him acting boisterously in class and being scolded by a teacher at the local pool. At the same time, Cole’s observational approach and interactions with the boy bring out Ricco’s charm, bubbling energy and fierce intelligence.

Wirriya: small boy doesn’t shy away from showing the social problems that beset many Aboriginal communities. Ricco’s mother is the victim of domestic violence and despite her absence from the film and Ricco’s daily life, we get a definite sense of a troubled relationship between mother and son. At one point, Ricco and several of his step-siblings play truant from school and their foster mother freely admits her inability to stop them. Later, another small girl joins Ricco’s already crowded household due to parental ill health at home.

Despite the problems in Ricco’s life and community, the overall impression left by Wirriya: small boy is one of warmth, with Ricco’s foster mother lovingly presiding over the children in her care. At one point she relates Ricco’s promise to her: “I’m gonna work and I’m gonna look after you.” She smiles affectionately, but her nervous laugh belies her awareness of the obstacles that will confront him as he gets older.

In contrast to The Dreamers and Wirriya: small boy, Rosalie’s Journey and Mr Patterns delve into the past. Rosalie’s Journey provides a textbook example of how documentaries can reclaim and rewrite historical narratives. It tells the story of Rosalie Kunoth Monks, primarily known as the young woman selected by director Charles Chauvel to play Jedda in the eponymously named film of 1955. Through a contemporary voice-over, Monks recalls her life growing up at Saint Mary’s Boarding School in Alice Springs and Chauvel’s visit to the school looking for an Indigenous girl to star in his film. She recounts without bitterness his utter insensitivity to Aboriginal lore during the shoot. Monks was forbidden to look strange men in the eye, yet she was made to act as a love interest and object of lust for her co-star Robert Tudawali, a man she had never met prior to production.

Rosalie’s Journey fulfils the important task of relating the making of Jedda from the viewpoint of one of the film’s Indigenous stars, but what is most striking is how minor the entire episode has been in Monks’ life. She views her present role as a mother and language teacher as far more important to her sense of identity than her brief stint of screen acting in the 1950s. Director Warwick Thornton explores the way personal and historical narratives intersect and diverge, revealing how an individual’s identity as a historical figure can live on quite independently of the actual person and the direction their later life takes.

Unlike Rosalie Monks’ brief experience of fame, the life of Geoff Bardon was crucially determined, and ultimately destroyed, by the historical episode examined in Mr Patterns. Through a skilful blend of archival footage, old and contemporary interviews and expressive passages of time-lapse cinematography, director Catriona McKenzie tells the story of Bardon’s involvement in the Papunya Tula Art movement. Posted as a teacher to the Papunya Aboriginal settlement in the Western Desert in the early 1970s, Bardon displayed ground-breaking cultural sensitivity in his teaching methods, employing a translator to teach the children in their own language and encouraging them to express their cultural heritage through their art. This led to contact with tribal elders who Bardon encouraged to paint ancestral dreamings in acrylics. Bardon helped the elders sell their works, bringing income into the community and revitalising their cultural traditions. However, the mild-mannered teacher was ill prepared for the ruthless and unscrupulous nature of the art market and the backlash his actions generated in the education bureaucracy. He was eventually driven from Papunya suffering a nervous breakdown. Back in Sydney he was admitted to Chelmsford Hospital and endured Harry Bailey’s notorious deep sleep therapy, a form of ‘treatment’ for depression that left dozens dead and many others, including Bardon, physically incapacitated for life.

Unfortunately most of the Papunya elders involved in the story have passed away, so by necessity McKenzie relies largely on white interviewees. She talks to the school principal from Bardon’s early time at Papunya, an Indigenous woman who was taught by Bardon as a child, several of Bardon’s friends and Bardon himself. The love and affection all the interviewees feel for the teacher emanates from the screen.

Bardon himself appears as a hunched, trembling figure, a sharp contrast to the smiling, open young man we see in footage from the early 70s. The difference in his appearance poignantly brings home the extent to which Bardon’s experiences at Papunya and subsequent treatment at Chelmsford physically destroyed him. He died in May 2003, shortly after his interview for the film was completed.

Mr Patterns hints at the enormous cultural potential that exists if non-Indigenous Australia were prepared to open itself to Indigenous ways of thinking. The film also demonstrates how fragile this sense of possibility will always be when much of white Australia remains utterly oblivious or hostile to Indigenous culture, at best viewing it as something to be financially exploited.

The documentaries at this year’s Message Sticks Film Festival brought the stories of marginalised people to the screen and rewrote old tales from new perspectives. Curators Rachel Perkins and Darren Dale pulled off the difficult task of presenting a program of distinctly Indigenous films that retained a sense of Aboriginal culture in all its fluid, porous and varying forms.

2004 Message Sticks Film Festival, curators Rachel Perkins and Darren Dale, Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, June 11-13.

This year ScreenWest and the WA Film and Television Institute (FTI) presented a special showcase of emerging WA talent at the 2004 Revelation Perth International Film Festival. The Get Your Shorts On program contained 9 short narrative films in all, including drama, comedy and animation.

By far the most impressive was Victim, directed by Corrie Jones and produced by Amy Lou Taylor. The work embraced the short film form as integral to its narrative strategy. Based on a spoken poem by Nicole Blackman, Victim creates a dark and unsettling journey for the viewer, beginning with a woman locked in the boot of a car and progressing inexorably in a downward spiral. The slow measure of the hypnotic stream-of-consciousness voice-over (despite the annoyingly Americanised accent) maps a juxtaposition of images. Memories of life and loved ones filter through a bleak landscape of gender violence and the stark, brutal reality of the victim’s bound and imprisoned body. The psychological impact of this film lies in the fragmentary glimpses of interrupted vitality and the mental struggle for escape. This is a fine and polished piece of filmmaking, which has also recently won honours at the St Kilda Film Festival (see p25).

The surprise package of the selection was satirical mockumentary Going to the Dogs, written and directed by Paulo Alberton and co-produced with Rachel Way. This curious film begins with a breezy magazine-show tone, the narrator offering a tour of Cottesloe Beach and the culture of prestige pooches that features on the promenade. At first the film appears inanely preoccupied with this little subculture of affluence, but it reveals a clever commentary on multiculturalism and immigration within its examination of exotic dog ownership and the disparities between human deprivation and over-indulged pets. The mixture of animation and real footage is assembled with flair and the overall effect is genuinely funny in a fresh and playful way, with the social critique handled well.

Other comedy offerings also proved enjoyable. Renee Webster’s Scoff is an amusing tale of sensuality and desire. A young female cook on an isolated outback station transcends her binge cake-eating habits when she discovers the erotic possibilities of the showerhead spray, all the while voyeuristically observed by the team of 4 male station hands. Here a simple narrative premise is rendered with a fluid technique and solid performances.

The Olympiads Lounge (writer/director Pierce Davison) was another animated mockumentary, in which various gods and demi-gods from Greek mythology become hopeful stand-up acts in a comedy club. The mis-adventures of these unlikely contenders are well animated in a droll satire of the ‘behind the scenes’ documentary form.

The series of 5 one-minute animations comprising Suicidal Balloon (writer/director Randall Lynton) offered a set of kooky scenarios in which various precarious situations become chaotic as the dreaded balloon flies in, smiling broadly before exploding. The basic silliness of this narrative premise somehow works, particularly when all 5 one-minute pieces are screened in a row.

The remaining dramatic short films in this selection proved to be a mixed offering, with fundamental narrative and formal problems limiting their effectiveness. To hold a viewer in the time and space of a short film, all elements need to come together with a transformative magic, so that the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts.

The Cherry Orchard (director Elissa Down) presents a Magic Realist tale in which a woman’s fertility and fervent desire to create a hybrid cherry plant results in a strange crossover with her gynaecology. While offering some beautifully composed shots, the end result was undermined by the period setting and epic time-scale of the narrative, combined with stilted performances and the stiff realism of the film’s narrative technique.

Julius Avery’s Little Man gives the viewer a glimpse into the harsh social realities of a little boy whose dysfunctional home environment becomes shrouded in tragedy. Here atmosphere and technical deftness are burdened by a heavy-handed thematic treatment and over-determined narrative.

Waiting for Naval Base Lily (writer/director Zak Hilditch) presents an older man in a sterile motel room confronted by the likeness of a young and inexperienced prostitute to his daughter. A bright and saturated use of exterior light gives this piece a stark visual appeal, yet the narrative is awkwardly conveyed through dialogue and characterisation that frustrates the viewer’s ability to inhabit this fictional world.

The challenges of dramatic narratives highlighted by these films provide important lessons for aspiring filmmakers. Narrative form must be seriously addressed so that films can achieve an internal coherence and provide a rewarding journey for the viewer. Nevertheless, for the best of the short films in the Get Your Shorts On program, Revelation is to be congratulated for its admirable commitment to fostering local screen culture.

Get Your Shorts On, 7th Revelation Perth International Film Festival, Luna Cinema, Perth, July 8

An important part of a burgeoning animation career is the exploratory or experimental phase. The results can be rough, brilliant or both. This year’s Melbourne International Animation Festival (MIAF) suggested that, with few exceptions, Australian animation is still at an exploratory stage. The program featured an eclectic program of student films, music videos, documentaries, Eastern European classics and the latest work from veterans such as Phil Mulloy. The emphasis on the richness of Russian and Estonian films highlighted the shortcomings of works from other countries.

The festival opened with a showcase of early Russian films demonstrating what makes for terrific animation: deeply textured plots, inventive characterisation and satirical twists. It was the perfect way to start MIAF—an example of what can be achieved with original ideas even on a slender budget. The Estonian Panorama proved another highlight, despite that country’s small industry of only 2 animation studios. Priit Tender’s masterful Gravitation centred on a surreal road trip, playing with conventional perceptions of story and of the film frame itself. Tender’s Mont Blanc overwhelmed with vivid images of an insurmountable mountain of suitcases, ominous ravens and menacing life-size pliers chasing the protagonist along a train of faceless workers. Much of the beauty of the Estonian films lies in what is not overtly stated, leaving interpretation wide open and creating an atmosphere of weird splendour without compromising the narrative. 3D technology is used minimally to enhance the animation rather than demanding to be noticed for its own sake.

The Priit Parn Retrospective showed the Estonian filmmaker to be a master of the form. The Night of the Carrots explored, via a labyrinthine hotel, our obsession with celebrity and the fear of computers taking over everyday life. The closing scene, in which evil rabbits perform voodoo on their carrots to control the world, was a festival highlight!

Films displaying the level of complexity evident in the Estonian works can only be achieved with sustained development involving government or private backing, something generally lacking in the Australian context. Of the local films, the widely discussed Harvie Krumpet (Adam Elliot, RT57, p19) sustained its story and clever characterisation over its half hour length, and Jonathan Nix did in Hello (RT58, p22) what few other animators are prepared to do, allowing the mood and theme of the soundtrack to lead the story. Generally, however, the offerings of the Australian Panorama came across as simplistic. The constant and gratuitous use of 3D computer animation showed that no amount of money spent on technique can make up for an ordinary script. Flat by Sebastian Danta was promising, with a scratchy illustrative approach and entertaining peek into the lives of flat-dwellers, but the computer technology applied to eyeballs and exteriors served merely to detract from any stylistic cohesion. Placement by Bill Chen was a wonderful futuristic story about human cloning, combining animation seamlessly with live action. But only Fog Eyes by Hamish Koci pointed towards a whole new strain of contemporary Australian animation being done with Flash.

A mix of media characterised the output of many films in the International Program. It’s Like That by the Southern Ladies Animation Group from Melbourne deservedly won the prize for best Australian animation. Using real-life recordings of refugee children in detention, the group deftly combined stop-motion knitted characters, Flash animation and cell drawings to create a deeply moving film about life behind barbed wire. Contamination (Carl Stevenson) created an eerie, unsettling atmosphere by merging animals with human parts and vice-versa. The Dave Brubeck soundtrack and frenzied squiggles of Cameras Take Five (Steven Woloshen) could have been created by the Canandian master Norman McLaren himself. I was pleased to see that an elemental technique like scratch-on-film could still get an enthusiastic reaction from the audience.

With only 6 days of screenings, it would be difficult for MIAF to give a total snapshot of current world animation, however the dearth of Asian content was a glaring oversight that many patrons commented upon. The main impression left by the festival was the disparity in quality between the Australian and international programs. Are we still at an exploratory stage? Is the problem a lack of funding, or do we need to direct our resources in different ways? Although the local offerings at MIAF were uneven, films such as Hello and It’s Like That indicate the immense, if largely unrealised potential of Australian animation.

Melbourne International Animation Festival 2004, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, June 22-27

Korea, 1951. A young boy plays amongst the ruins of his country’s civil war. The landscape is a drab brown, devoid of life. The boy stages a game of soldiers in the streets of his dilapidated village, childishly re-enacting the conflict that has left its marks all around him. He returns home to find his father’s possessions neatly parcelled and sitting on the doorstep. Unaware of the significance of such a ‘present’, he slings his father’s dog tags around his neck and marches up and down outside the house. That night he plays sleepily with his toys as his mother arrives home. Her cheerful greeting indicates her ignorance of the news that awaits her.

This simple tale is the basis of Birthday Boy, a short in the anime style made by Sejong Park while studying at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. In 9 minutes, Park’s work manages to convey the twofold horror of war.

Firstly, he shows us how conflict seeps into every aspect of people’s lives. The child of Birthday Boy is not only surrounded by the detritus of war, it permeates every aspect of his life and behaviour, down to the toys he plays with and the games he enacts. He runs among abandoned military hardware littering the landscape. A train passes, laden with tanks. The endless procession of silhouetted man-made monsters starkly illustrates the faceless nature of modern, mechanised warfare, recalling a similar scene from Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence (1963). Ironically, the boy uses the passing train to crush pieces of scrap metal to use in his collection of homemade toys, all of them replicas of the war machines from which the scrap metal comes.

The second, more unsettling experience of living in a war zone evoked by Birthday Boy is that of absence. The town is unnervingly deserted. There are no other children and none of the bustle of urban life. The boy’s home is also empty. His mother works and his father has been taken by the army. The tragedy is that the child has no idea that the loss of his father is permanent. He plays on, oblivious to the bereavement that will shape the rest of his life.

Birthday Boy movingly sketches the kind of tiny incident that occurs countless times in any armed conflict. In doing so, Park’s film reminds us of what politicians and generals would have us forget: that it is not the grand battles and levelled cities that represent the true horror of war, but the accumulation of innumerable individual absences in the lives of those left living. These are the holes that remain long after the material damage has faded.

Birthday Boy won the Yoram Gross Animation Award at this year’s Dendy Awards for Short Films, 51st Sydney Film Festival.

The first thing that strikes you about a Cate Shortland film is just how much meaning is conveyed by purely visual means. In marked contrast to the dialogue-driven nature of most Australian dramas, where the image all too frequently serves to simply reify what is being said, Shortland’s work is characterised by striking compositions, textures and colours, moments of narrative drift and countless temporal ellipses that leave everything to the imagination. Although Somersault is Shortland’s first feature, it represents the fruition of a style developed across 4 short films made over nearly a decade.

Somersault, premiering at the 2004 Sydney Film Festival, focuses on a troubled teenage girl called Heidi (Abbie Cornish), caught in the transition from childhood to adulthood. Early in the film, an incident involving her mother’s boyfriend propels her out of the family home to Jindabyne in the Snowy Mountains. Forced to make her own way, she strikes up a relationship with a local young man, Joe (Sam Worthington), and the body of the film traces their largely unsuccessful attempts to understand their budding emotions and desire for each other.

Superficially, Somersault is a study of alienation. Heidi escapes to Jindabyne upon losing the trust of her emotionally distant mother, but despite a naive openness that is sometimes painful to watch, she is unable to form lasting bonds with anyone in the town. A similar sense of isolation characterises all Shortland’s films. Joy (2000), her last short before Somersault and made while studying at AFTRS, portrays a day in the life of a young girl who inoculates herself against feeling by plunging into a haze of alcohol and frantic activity. The middle-aged central character of Pentuphouse (1998) risks her singing career and physical safety to be with her young lover, only to realise he will never be able give her the mutually fulfilling relationship she craves. Shortland’s most accomplished short, Flower Girl (1999, RT35, p13), focuses on a young Japanese tourist living in Bondi. He remains detached from his surrounds and unable to express his desire for his flatmate Hana, except through obsessively videotaping her.

Shortland’s characters are estranged from each other and the wider society in which they live, but what makes her cinema so resonant is their constant, desperate and often painful struggle to transcend their isolation and find ways of connecting in a world where traditional couplings and familial formations have ceased to be meaningful. The question at the heart of Shortland’s cinema is how to be in the world and with each other when established emotional and social structures no longer seem valid.

This longing for connection is played out in Somersault through the extraordinary lead performances of Abbie Cornish and Sam Worthington. In an interview with RealTime, Shortland explained that she engaged the actors in a 3-week rehearsal period prior to shooting in order to attain the restraint and subtlety evident in the finished film. Both actors embody the psychological fragility of people in their late teens and early twenties learning who they are and where they fit in the world. Cornish’s portrayal of Heidi conveys all the rawness of adolescent sexual and romantic awakening. Worthington exudes a tightly bound energy in the abrupt, awkward and angular movements with which he plays Joe, suggesting a repressed longing to embrace the world and escape the narrow confines of the town.

Joe’s reticence reflects an ambivalent relationship to language that runs throughout Shortland’s body of work, where words often block communication as much as they facilitate it. This thematic plays out explicitly in Joy, with phrases from standard parental lectures scrolling across the screen as the main character engages in a spree of shoplifting, fistfights and chance sexual encounters. These well worn adages highlight the way the language of cliché frequently functions as a substitute for real communication between parents and children. Similarly, in Somersault Heidi resorts to formulaic romantic phrases to express a very genuine need for support and validation, plaintively asking an incredulous Joe if he loves her after they have spent just a few nights together.

This ambivalence vis-à-vis language crucially informs Shortland’s emphasis on the visual. Over the course of making Flower Girl, Joy and Somersault, Shortland has developed a close working relationship with cinematographer Robert Humphreys (RT50, p23). Shortland explains that their expressive use of colour has been influenced by American photographers such as Nan Goldin and Todd Hido, and cinematographer Christopher Doyle, particularly his work with Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai. Like Doyle, Humphreys’ expressionistic style never descends into pure abstraction, instead relying on a heightened sense of colour drawn from the film’s environment. The characters in Somersault live in a world of freezer-cold blues, evoking the crisp, frost laden air of the Snowy Mountains winter setting. Strident splashes of red stand out against the wash of blues that constantly threaten to overwhelm them. The colour scheme reflects the mental state of characters living in an emotionally ossified world, caught between passion and fear, distance and warmth, fear and desire.

The meandering pace and recurring moments of narrative drift allow the audience to sink into the mood evoked by Somersault’s colour palette. The film is littered with poignant, incidental moments of everyday life that add nothing to the plot, but convey everything about the sensibility of the central character. For all her immaturity, Heidi is able to see the transient beauty of the world around her. Shortland draws us into this awareness, taking the time to picture Heidi drinking gracefully from a backlit water fountain, scattering a pile of dried crumbled leaves off a balcony, and watching a small boy jump on a trampoline.

“What I really love is beautiful things”, Shortland says, and perhaps ultimately this is the essence of her cinema. As a director and scriptwriter, she has the ability to find beauty in the prosaic poetry of everyday objects. Underpinning this sense of wonder is an enduring sense of hope born of our desire to be at one with each other and our surrounds, even if this desire is constantly thwarted.

Somersault, writer-director Cate Shortland, producer Anthony Anderson; performers Abbie Cornish, Sam Worthington; Hopscotch, 2004, various cinemas nationally from September 16

Ivan Sen’s documentary Who was Evelyn Orcher? opens with a close-up of grief, a face caught in the remembrance of loss. He holds the shot longer than seems necessary or appropriate, not because he’s being unkind or vicarious (this is his own family he’s filming) but because he wants us to feel the full force of the pain.

As Sen stated in his introduction to the documentary at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, he is “sharing the grief of one Stolen Generation family.” It is an attempt to personalise the generalised term ‘Stolen Generation.’ He does this through the story of Evelyn Orcher, an older relative who was abducted from her family at 14 years of age and reunited with them 31 years later. In the aftermath of the reunion and Evelyn’s subsequent death, Sen listens to his family to find out who this person was and what it means to have something as precious as a life restored 3 decades after it was stolen.

The words of the remaining relatives, especially the women, make it clear that the grief doesn’t stop when the missing person is found. In fact it aggravates the pain and gives it fresh impetus.

Sen’s film is close-up and personal, the camera moving in and out of focus, shifting around to find new ways in. The shots taken while driving through the flat plains of western NSW—moving and yet immobile—recall his feature film Beneath Clouds (2001, RT48, p13). The vastness of the land provides a backdrop to the intricacies, interactions and ties of people’s lives in a place where they are lost and found. There’s no doubt Sen is there, intimately connected and involved, but he doesn’t personalise the story or make the film about his attempts to find out about Evelyn. Instead, he relies entirely on the spoken words of his family and Evelyn’s friends.

Likewise, he refuses to provide the type of narrative usually supplied from a privileged position by the documentary maker constructing a ‘complete’ picture strung together from people’s testimonies and carefully researched ‘facts.’ There is no official, authoritative version here of what happened to Evelyn or who she was. That’s not to say that such a narrative could not be constructed if necessary; there are glimpses of photographs and official-looking documents. But by denying an ‘authorised’ account, the film refuses to legitimise any narrative that purports to say what really happened. In the end, such a version of events cannot provide consolation for the pain of the Stolen Generations. Such trauma is not easily assuaged. The life in question can never be restored.

Instead of filling in blanks, the film leaves unanswered questions and loose ends. Why did Evelyn end up living the life she did? Who is responsible? That’s not really what this film is seeking to resolve: there is no satisfactory answer to the question “Who was Evelyn Orcher?”, just a few snaps, scraps, and raw memories. Evelyn’s painful, fragmented story remains where it should—in the minds and voices of those who cared for her most, not just her family but also the people who lived with her from day to day.

Personal documentary filmmaking was the topic of a forum held during the festival looking at why the ‘I’ of the beholder has become so prevalent in the form. Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock were cited as examples of filmmakers who, in expressing a viewpoint, become the subject of the film. Who was Evelyn Orcher? is different, an example of a personal film in which the ‘I’ is present but dispersed, manifesting itself through its relation to others.

Filmmakers Tahir Cambis and Helen Newman were part of the documentary forum, and their film Anthem screened at the festival as a work-in-progress. Both of them appear in front of the camera in the course of a film that is a personal odyssey through the events of the past few years, starting with the Kosovo refugees and continuing through 9/11, Tampa, Afghanistan, Iraq and the whole ‘War on Terror’ scenario. It is quite a jolt to revisit so many recent events and realise how far the social and political lexicon has shifted in a few short years.

Covering so much ground, Anthem is profligate in its use of material. Half a dozen potential storylines are opened up but never fully explored in the ceaseless movement from place to place. This is defiantly non-mainstream, eschewing any pretence of balance, impartiality or a ‘neutral’ territory from which to observe events.

The film’s best moments are the unexpected encounters—Ruddock being patronising at a public meeting, Howard looking shifty at a memorial service—that slip beneath the radar of daily media representations. The footage of protest actions at various detention centres is similarly revealing. Other parts of the film are less well integrated: for instance, the plight of an Iraqi family in detention who are subsequently returned to Iraq gets a bit lost in the mix. We’re not given much of a chance to become intimate with these people, which may be because Cambis and Newman are not solely focussed on making the type of documentary that attempts to humanise a subject, but the refugees are never really allowed to escape their status as victims of circumstance and politics.

Anthem is all about the buzz, the outrage, the exhilaration of events as they unfold. At one point, Cambis is filmed moodily standing on a pier, contemplating leaving for Afghanistan in the morning because “it might be interesting.” As a viewer, you wanted to scream “No! Don’t go!” Too late. Next moment we’re off on a race-around-the-world excursion, a backpackers-in-hell journey with bouncy taxi rides and late night drinking sessions. The “I wanted to find out what it was really like” motivation seems worthwhile but remains unresolved. Documentaries that try to get inside another culture from the outside require time, but Anthem doesn’t have that luxury.

For a personal record of contemporary events, Anthem comes across as strangely impersonal. We never really know these people, but then maybe circumstances don’t permit too much introspection. The filmmakers are drawn into events as they occur but reveal little about what the journey means to them as individuals. That’s not their project. Like Sen, Cambis and Newman realise the film is not about them or their story. But it is equally hard to determine the significance of parts of Anthem, apart from the fact that the filmmakers are there. Perhaps in a climate of such accelerated and radical change, simply bearing witness is one of the most important things a documentary maker can do.

Who Was Evelyn Orcher?, writer/director Ivan Sen, producers Ivan Sen, David Jowsey, 2004; Anthem, writers/directors Tahir Cambis, Helen Newman, producer Ross Hutchens, 2004; 51st Sydney Film Festival, State Theatre, June 11-26

Although Melbourne is currently dominating Australian animation, in recent years Western Australia’s Film and Television Institute (FTI) has been laying the educational ground work for a new wave of animators. The Centre for Advanced Digital Screen Animation (CADSA) was established in 2001 in conjunction with a broad coalition of industry partners. The Centre was “conceived and implemented as an animation production training incubator” in which students receive theoretical and technical training, as well as hands-on experience making animation productions. Several projects have already been completed by students at the Centre, including the film Desperado 2185 (Tim Beeson, 2003) and the game Children of Sivara. OnScreen will be watching future developments at CADSA with interest.
RT

Australian animators are a hardy mob. Working in an industry that’s noticeably cramped, they are largely under resourced and mostly undervalued. I recently talked to a range of animators from around the country who have had one or 2 short films screened at festivals and asked whether their tertiary experience has helped jumpstart their careers.
I first looked to Queensland, where there are some fine animators making successful short films, including Andrew Silke (director with Dave Clayton, Cane Toad, 2002) and Mark Traynor (The Shapies children’s TV series, 2002). However, they’re not recent graduates, and according to Michael Viner of Brisbane’s animation and digital production studio Liquid Animation, there is no new crop of filmmakers coming up behind them. Viner claims the Queensland scene is “pretty dead”, despite burgeoning opportunities for animators in the games industry.

Similarly, Craig Kirkwood of the Tasmanian Screen Network (RT61, p20) warns against reading too much into the relocation of production house Blue Rocket: “They moved down here some years ago from Brisbane, and while they’ve created jobs and opportunities for quite a few animators, I don’t really think that’s necessarily a trend.”

The Melbourne International Animation Festival (MIAF, see p22) has a component entitled Australian Panorama and a commitment to showcasing current Australian animation. However, given Viner and Kirkwood’s remarks, it wasn’t really a surprise to discover that of the 11 films screened this year in the Australian section, 8 were made by graduates from Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) and RMIT.

Festival director Malcolm Turner says the panorama was as representative as it could be: “The bottom line is that Melbourne is the mother lode. This year’s festival actually had a lower than normal percentage of Melbourne stuff because we pushed as hard as we could to include material from other places. It’s the same with festivals overseas—if an Australian film turns up in an international festival, it’s 80% likely to have come from Melbourne.”

Jonathan Nix had 2 films screening at MIAF. He graduated from RMIT’s Centre for Animation and Interactive Media (AIM) with a postgraduate degree in 2002, and is currently based in Sydney working on his next film for Cartwheel Partners. He made his first animation in high school, but said it was so appalling he didn’t animate for another 20 years. What lured him back? “It was a snap decision after returning from overseas”, he says. “I liked what I saw on the AIM website—their philosophy seemed to encourage individual expression—and the lecturers asked intelligent questions during the interview. A bit too intelligent—I didn’t understand some of them—but luckily they had a sense of humour as well.” Nix was used to working in isolation, but says his tutors encouraged him to relax and open up his work to outside influences. His award-winning short Hello (RT58, p21) was developed while at RMIT and Nix still considers AIM’s Jeremy Parker to be a mentor of sorts: Parker has edited 2 of Nix’s films.

Mark Ingram works as an assistant animator at the Disney Studios in Sydney. He graduated from the VCA School of Film and Television in 2002. He chose the school because of the calibre of former graduates: “Does the name Adam Elliot ring a bell?” Like Nix, Ingram was drawn to the course’s focus on individual expression: “The course promoted personal creative growth, as well as teaching animation in its entirety—script, music, editing and so on. I was amazed at what I was able to achieve in a single year.” As the program unfurled, he found his style “shifting dramatically from a focus on technique to story and character”, an important development as “the industry is very small and you really need to be a great storyteller or you won’t get far.” Ingram adds: “The lecturers’ wealth of knowledge was highly influential, opening up pathways and possibilities I’d never imagined before. My lecturer, Andi Spark, was my mentor—and in some ways, still is.”

Ingram was influenced by Disney cartoons and is understandably pleased to now be working for the studio. Ideally, he wants to take the next step and become a fully fledged Disney animator, but he sees his time at VCA as crucial in giving him his start: “My year at the VCA is the sole reason I’m now working in the industry. I’m sure I would have found my own way somehow, but it would have taken years of fumbling around. Studios, for the most part, are only really interested in seeing a show reel or proof that you are capable of doing the job with limited or no training on their part. University is the only place you can get the experience necessary to get a job in animation.”

Xavier Irvine, another recent graduate from VCA’s animation degree, concurs. He says of the second half of the course: “[It was]…structured like a real world production. We had to submit budgets and work to schedules—just like the film I’m working on now at 3D Films. Actually, I saw the whole program as being relevant to working in the industry.”

One of the few non-Melbourne animators screened at MIAF was Bill Chen, with Placement. Chen graduated from Sydney’s Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) in 2002 and says the ratio of students to tutors there was around 3 to one, “which means I got to pick my tutors’ brains all day.” He adds that the course had a substantial vocational element: “Most tutors there are industry professionals, so you get to learn the industry standard. Although the qualification itself didn’t help me get a start in the industry, the work I produced during the course did, plus the contacts I made.”

Chen says AFTRS was realistic about the limited funding and job opportunities available once study had finished. Ingram got a similar heads-up from the VCA: “Right from the start we were informed, even warned, about the unsteady nature of the industry. It was a reality check I very much needed.” According to Nix AIM was equally up front about the students’ prospects, frequently inviting professionals to speak on the state of play and organising visits to animation companies and studios. The situation was made clear—sometimes too clear: “It was quite depressing, really. However, AIM seems to have a good percentage of ex-students working within the industry, which was encouraging.”

Could the courses be improved? “Yes—with more funding” was the unanimous response. Ingram explains: “We were working on such a tight budget that it often seemed impossible to get the job done. More time would have helped too—2 years instead of one. We could then have had more in-depth training in techniques and practical hands-on experience.” Irvine agrees: “More specific technical training was something I wished we had more of, but then again you walk out with 2 films at the end of the day. Too much focus on technical issues might well impede some of the current strengths.” Chen believes AFTRS needs “less screen studies and more practical work, as well as less [interventionist] departmental policies.”

For Nix, the AIM course needs improvement of a different kind. He observes: “Some films produced through other courses end up finished to film and are heavily promoted by the course itself…there needs to be the commitment [from AIM] to look beyond video in terms of the finished product.”

All the interviewees, however, were quick to state that the institutions are doing their utmost with limited resources, and all hope the Oscar success of Harvie Krumpet might help counter the ongoing Australian cultural cringe and lead to increased funding. Yet Ingram is not confident this will happen any time soon. Globally, he says, animators are suffering greatly: “We are in transition and confusion as we wait to see what 3D will do to the industry. On top of this, we are unfortunately at the mercy of the American industry. They’re in strife, therefore we’re in strife.”

Given the generally dire financial situation, I asked the group if a tertiary education was essential to make it in animation. “Not necessarily” replied Nix, “for me, though, I needed a concentrated environment and definite deadlines in order to progress.” Ingram categorically states: “Animation is an art, not a piece of paper that gets you a job. It’s talent and experience first and foremost. Tertiary courses simply provide the environment to gain that experience.”

Ultimately, in such a tough marketplace, Nix believes animators need more than just talent: “[You need]…a functioning business head—either split your own, or find someone else’s you can borrow now and again.” The example of the Adelaide-based People’s Republic of Animation is instructive in this regard. The collective comprises 6 members, all in the final stages of tertiary study. The group’s head, Sam White, didn’t study at the VCA or RMIT. In fact he didn’t even study animation. Instead, he is due to graduate this year from the University of South Australia with a Business (Commercial Law) degree. White says the course imparts “professionalism and the ability to understand the legal framework in which a company operates.” His business acumen helped the collective in their successful application for funding from the South Australian Film Corporation and the Australian Film Commission.

White, however, is a producer, not an animator. Are the days of animators beavering away in isolation and scrapping over scarce funds over? Perhaps collective models like the PRA are the solution, with divisions of labour ensuring animators concentrate on what they do best. As well as the increased focus on technical skills suggested by the interviewees, perhaps animation courses also need to teach more ‘real world’ business skills or facilitate contact between animators and producers trained in business.

Diegesis is the premier showcase for film, video, photography and digital media works produced by Australian school students. Ideal for those studying design, drama and media studies, Diegesis aims to challenge young audiences through exhibitions, screenings, classes, career forums and industry seminars. Now in its tenth year, the event is hosted by Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI).

The Diegesis screenings include a season exploring animation in all its forms through the work of some of Australia’s most innovative animators. It also includes a showcase of videos and interactive media works by primary and secondary school students from around the country. The Diegesis Screen Awards will see a prize of $5,000 in computer equipment go to the winning school. Additionally, a trophy will go to the winner of the Diegesis Photography Award, selected from approximately 140 student works exhibited at ACMI.

A series of forums will give students invaluable insight into arts and media-based careers. Game Loading will feature professionals from the rapidly expanding gaming industry, while in A Life in Pictures professional photographers host a series of sessions providing a comprehensive picture of photojournalism. In a masterclass held in the ACMI Digital Studio, photographer Brett McLennan will instruct students in the translation of traditional photographic practices into the digital domain.

With thousands of student and teacher participants since 1994, Diegesis has become a vital part of Australia’s screen educational landscape. RT

It’s a mad, bad world all right, and yet here in Australia we’re living high on the hog (in a manner of speaking). So perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised about the current Perth-based resurgence of interest in Theatre of the Absurd. BSX-Theatre, the youth initiative of Black Swan Theatre Company, has just completed a double bill comprising Striptease by Polish playwright Slawomir Mrozek and Mountain Language by Harold Pinter. Prior to this, BSX director Matt Lutton directed Ionesco’s The Bald Prima Donna, while independent performer/director Marta Kaczmarek recently performed Beckett’s Happy Days at the Blue Room Theatre. She’s also planning a production of Ionesco’s The Chairs in 2005.

As anyone interested in performance will know, ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ was a term coined by critic Martin Esslin for the work of a number of playwrights mainly from the 1950s and 60s. Given John Howard’s nostalgia for that golden time of blue skies, white picket fences and happy families, it seems only fair that we also remember the other determining characteristics of the era: post-war trauma, refugees, McCarthyism, totalitarianism, cold war and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Paradise for some. A living hell for others.

Absurdist playwrights share the view that humankind inhabits a universe whose meaning is indecipherable. Human life is precarious, meaningless and without any kind of surety. We are perpetually bewildered, troubled and obscurely threatened. In formal terms, the Theatre of the Absurd was also a rebellion against conventional theatre. In fact it was anti-theatre: surreal, illogical, plotless and without dramatic conflict. The ultimate realism perhaps? In First World communities, we watch the horror of life in other places from the comfort of our living rooms. It’s a bit like going to the theatre, but what have we learned and how should we act?

In Striptease, 2 men arrive on stage as if hurled by a violent, unknown and unnameable force. They are wearing identical suits and ties and carrying matching brief cases. They don’t know why they’re here and don’t understand why they can’t leave. They don’t know their crime and no one will speak to them. Sound familiar?

What differentiates them is their respective responses to arbitrary detainment. Man 1 (Crispian Chan) is adamant, Buddhist-like in his refusal to act. He is determined to sit quietly and await his fate, no matter what the provocation. Man 2 (Stephen Whiley) is restless, aggressive. He wants to know his crime and confront his captors, whoever they might be. Each time he protests or attempts to leave, a giant mechanical hand enters and will not leave until a piece of clothing is sacrificed. Slowly, each man is divested of his clothing, until they are handcuffed together in their underwear. Simultaneously the walls draw closer and closer together, so that by the end of this short play, the almost naked, trembling protagonists are left with literally nowhere to go, no place to be and nothing to say.

Pinter’s Mountain Language was written in response to the conflict between the Kurds and the Turks in the late 80s. Once again we are confronted with troubling, horribly familiar images. The mountain people are no longer allowed to speak their language. Their world has been invaded and is under the control of an unnamed and brutal occupying force. In an almost black space fitfully illuminated by the glare of white searchlights, hooded and bound prisoners are menaced by large (actor) dogs. Protest seems futile. ‘Language’ is forbidden. Little more than a powerfully extended image, with a poignant but restrained sound design by Ashley Greig, Mountain Language painfully evokes our present time. There is no resolution and no happy ending.

Nineteen year old director Matthew Lutton and his young cast have created mesmerising theatre of great value. It’s just a pity it’s so goddamned relevant.

BSX-Theatre, Striptease, writer Slawomir Mrozek; Mountain Language, writer Harold Pinter; director Matthew Lutton; Dolphin Theatre, University of Western Australia, June 10-19

Two days before the winter solstice a large black edged screen looms in front of a sandstone quarry. The trees are bare and a freezing wind buffets shoppers traversing Hobart’s Salamanca Square. Windows of a multi-storeyed apartment complex face a wall of shops and restaurants. In another time and context the square would be the site for political gatherings and revolution. Today it is the locale for is theatre’s U.T.E. 2.

Five artists arrive in a white 1977 HX ute: Scott Cotterell, Sarah Duffus, Cameron Deyell, Jen Cramer and Ryk Goddard. Their combined skills include dance, digital media art, performance, fashion design, installation, composition, sound, clowning and free form improvisation. For 5 days they sample and interact with the physical and social environment of Salamanca Square. In response to what is seen, heard, felt, discussed, dreamt, glimpsed or intuited, the U.T.E. group conceptualise and improvise a “Universal Theory of Everything.” Using diverse media, the artists process their materials in response to emergent themes. Ideas and insights combine and collide to create a free-form work which incorporates image, electro-sound-scores and sculptural installations leavened with excerpts of text. The result is passionate, unpredictable live art.

The back of the white ute, central to the production of U.T.E. 2, is a glorious installation in itself, carpeted and crammed with cameras, computers, sound and technical equipment and participating artists. Images of Salamanca Square are captured and projected from inside.

What fascinates about the U.T.E. 2 improvisation is the way unnoticed or unremarked upon elements of the Salamanca landscape are given back to the viewer. The intersecting mesh of the quarry’s perimeter fence provides an on-screen grid projection that is softened and hazy. Leafless trees backlit against the winter sky bring to mind a scene from a Paul Cox movie. Blue eyes on a female face dissolve to facelessness. The audience watch themselves watching.

Text developed in response to Salamanca Square is incorporated into the screened performance: Windows frame choices/ choices windows frame/ living vs lifestyle/ window frame choices. Performers assembling and reassembling white squares attached to a frame augment the inversion and double reading of the windows text.

The changing sculpture triggers fragments of questions: When do edges become a totality? What is the view between? Navigating the square, where does the line of vision fall? By rearranging the squares and clipping them to another part of the frame, the sculptors provide a shifting view of the square, echoing the projected text.

U.T.E. is a long term project, occurring twice a year for 3 years. It aims to thematically develop creative processes that can interact with artists or communities in diverse places and eventually become a tool for international collaborations.

is theatre ltd, U.T.E. (Universal Theory of Everything) 2, guest designer Greg Methé, technical support Ben Sibson; Salamanca Square, Hobart June 19

It is easy to see why Steamwork’s Sally Richardson was keen to obtain the rights to Adam Rapp’s award-winning monologue Nocturne. In the words of the New York Times: “[Rapp is] a writer on the cusp.” Nocturne is a self-consciously literary script that strives for the original metaphor and the striking simile. It is also a well crafted and eloquent tale of tragedy, exile and overcoming.

In this recent production at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, American-born Gibson Nolte plays the son who has inadvertently brought tragedy upon his family. Nolte immerses himself fully in the demands of the 2 hour monologue and he is well supported by Andrew Lake’s simple yet effective design. Under Sally Richardson’s direction, Nolte offers the audience an intense and at times moving performance that strives to mesh psychological realism with the extended poetics of the text.

The opening line of Nocturne is the perfect narrative grief hook: “15 years ago I killed my sister.” The son writes the line across the back of the stage before reading the sentence out loud and then dissecting its various syntactic possibilities, none of which, we are to understand, can change the nature of the catastrophe that has occurred. The opening thus places writing and storytelling centrestage, only to signal its inadequacy and lack in relation to “the real.”

The opening line also establishes a relationship with the audience that is predicated on revelation and the uncovering of truth. Is this really murder? How was the girl killed? Why? We learn that the son was 17 at the time of his sister’s death, that it was an accident, that the brakes failed and that it ruined the lives of his mother and father. We also learn that at the time of re-telling, the son is a writer with a well-reviewed novel under his belt.

Nolte is rarely silent throughout the 2 hour show. I find myself thinking about much more than culpability and narrative drive. What kind of character speaks like this? What story does theatre tell itself to rationalise its peculiar behaviour? Why is the son telling us all this? Is this monologue a defence? A confession? Catharsis? A cover-up?

Nolte’s performance strives for an off-the-cuff quality, as if the character were composing his speech as he went along. In trying to naturalise the ‘writerly’ origins of this script (signalled then disavowed in the opening), Nocturne glosses over the fraught relationship between guilt and storytelling, trauma and repetition, and the ways in which grief is cauterised by the act of telling unreliable but necessary tales of overcoming.

Nocturne is ultimately not about trauma, repetition and storytelling: it is about how a boy overcomes tragedy to become a man and an artist. In this theatrical take on the Künstlerroman (the novel of the artist’s education), the death of his sister ultimately releases the writer-to-be from twin instruments of oppression: the study of piano and family obligations. Estranged from his family, he ekes out a meagre life working in a bookshop on New York’s Lower East Side. Forced to make do, he constructs his table and chairs from well-thumbed orange Penguin paperbacks that he reads voraciously. Literature literally furnishes him with a life. Nabokov, Updike, Hemingway…the list is erudite, if familiar. Nocturne is powerful and affecting theatre, but there remains something depressingly predictable in this modernist tale of masculine creativity.

In the final scenes, the son narrates his reluctant journey at the behest of his dying father back to the grim, cold Mid-West of his past. I realise that I do not like this son and that I do not completely believe the well-crafted story he tells himself and us. There is no rule that says I have to empathise with a character, but in this production I sense that it is important, and that there is little space for non-believers in the audience.

With the death of the father and the lack of narrative interest in the mother (she is in an asylum), the son is safe to claim what Nocturne sets up as psychological closure, but looks a lot like narrative expediency.

If this is realism, then how does it feel to have your identity as a writer dependent on the sacrificial death of an innocent? Here is a character who transforms trauma into speech, but at what cost? Must the family die so the writer may live?

“You see in 1967, while I was trying to take my first vacation, my mother killed herself.” This is the first line of Spalding Gray’s Monster in a Box. For Gray, who played on the edges of autobiography and performance, personal tragedy and loss were never easy to narrate and his story certainly did not obey the dictates of a happy ending.

Steamworks Arts Productions in association with B Sharp, Nocturne, writer Adam Rapp, director Sally Richardson, performer Gibson Nolte, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, June 9-27

Walking into Bankstown District Sports Club, your body is instantly arrested by a dizzying sensory glare: vomit-motif carpet set against the trill of pokies running inane bleeps up and down the octave; coloured lights that flash, and lighter lights that pulse your brain and make the world seem incessantly, fluorescently candied. Young families, old codgers and stilettoed teenage girls gather for a cheap feed, a bit of a twinkle or a sly flirt. Everyone loves a club. What a scene. What a place for a show.

Contemporary performance in Sydney can get a little heady at times, which is why the ‘getting back to basics’ approach to theatrical exhibitionism offered by Urban Theatre Projects’ (UTP) latest community work Karaoke Dreams came as relief and pure pleasure. Set upon a faux fernery stage, the performers went about making a show of their showiness, one-upping us all in the stakes of watching and making performance. Inspired by the insidious talent quest/reality TV genre that rudely shoves unknown, untalented anybodies into our loungerooms every night, Karaoke Dreams takes the notion of talent and plays it against expectations. Who do we like? Who do we judge? Who’s gonna make it?

The tone of the work is playful in its surreptitious beginning. Chintzy jazz and lounge piano blend into Bingo numbers rattled off as the stage manager and gold-laméd competitors prance on and off stage. Occasional nods from half interested punters propped sideways suggest that this cheeky pre-show rendition of sports club life draws precariously close to the showman heritage of their local turf. Yet this performance is not about making farce out of popular entertainment, nor is it about the novelty of ‘performance’ encroaching on Karaoke territory. It is actually about using one form to reframe another, to expand the possibilities of performance and importantly, the people whom performance may or may not include.

A hostess with “the mostest” booms her introduction to the competitors who will stake out their fortunes on the grand stage of talent quest history. Backed by projected game cards detailing personal histories, they emerge ready to “do anything, or anyone, to win.” We meet a ventriloquist with a repertoire of classic vaudevillian gags, a fruit poet spouting lines of lyrical produce, a walking tree, a sequined tap dancer and some vocal balladeers. We hear heartfelt confessions from them too. One songster happily dreams of being a backup singer for the rest of her life. In a monotone, the Bingo lady pins personal facts to the numbers she reads: “For 5 years I’ve worked in this club, number 5. Ninety-two is the size of my bust, 92.” Her expert drollness is mirrored by a heckler standing dormant at the bar, animating himself only to jeer at the judges when they make their call.

As act follows act, the more interesting action revolves around the increasingly dirty competitiveness and botched romances between players. The Trivia Quizmaster has some recent love history with the hostess or the Bingo lady or both. The ventriloquist starts playing hide-and-seek with his puppet’s voice on the ceiling, the fruit poetry disintegrates and the MC and Trivia Quizmaster engage in a Sumo wrestling match to settle their scores. As the competition runs amok, with a mess of disillusioned dreams spilling out of the fernery, one wonders how the piece can salvage itself from complete disarray. But then, a pause. It’s time for Bingo.

Should I be embarrassed that I don’t actually know how to play Bingo? Given the classic prize of an enormous meat tray, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but the reprieve from the competition format and the return to an interplay between cast, club-goers and audience was welcome. So too was the finesse with which the wrap-up of the contest allowed for a few home truths about the making of the work to bleed through. Sucked into the cheap glitz of it all and mesmerised by the beautiful vocal talents of the cast, I found myself caught up in the stakes of the competition. Yet the players are very aware of the role they are inviting us to take, hissing at each other with derogatory taunts—even UTP gets stung for exploiting the cast’s talents to further their own agenda.

And yet it is obvious that these would-be wannabes are much more talented than any ‘real’ talent show would reveal. As a final pink-feathered peacock traipses on stage to sing a closing homage to Britney or Beyoncé, I sit back and enjoy the fun of a decidedly fake talent show. And there’s drink, cheap drink. What a place for a show.

Urban Theatre Projects, Karaoke Dreams; directors Katia Molino, Alicia Talbot, musical director Peter Kennard, video and animation Fadle El-Harris; Bankstown District Sports Club, Sydney, May 19-29

Nostalgic and wistful, Ingrid Voorendt’s Babushka is a mixed media performance featuring the talents of some of Adelaide’s most interesting independent artists. Produced as part of Parallelo’s Open Platform (POP) initiative, this historical reverie was created from the performers’ childhood memories with selective interpretations of family life, dreams, aspirations and regrets. Voorendt fashioned the performance around re-enactments and responses to moments past.

The Russian Babushka doll is employed as a metaphor with small scenes recounting personal history embodied and voiced by Helen Omand, Naida Chinner, Solon Ulbrich, Astrid Pill, Jason Sweeney and Zoe Barry. The performers reminisce as they dress up in their parents’ and grandparents’ clothes and step into their shoes. We see a combination of tableaux gleaned from photographs and movement choreographed through gestural references, all bound by a motif of running that slows, halts, repeats, races and drags like childhood memory.

The 6 performers create parallel journeys inside a child’s playroom. Designer Justine Shih Pearson’s scaled-down glasshouse could also be a transparent doll’s house modelled on the venue for the performance, the auditorium at the Art Gallery of South Australia. The children’s toys, which are at the same time creative tools for the performers, are arranged prettily and metaphorically to illustrate their personal recollections. There’s a giant dress, piles of toys, tea sets, some electronic equipment and old shoes. This installation of micro-worlds implicitly invites the audience to respond with their own childhood memories.

The distinction between the real world of children and Voorendt’s theatrical excursion is that children generally act out imagined futures whereas the players, dressed in mostly 1940s style, act out family memories in the guise of children and portray childish actions. An exception is the moment when Helen Omand dons some trainers and sprints around the room expressing concerns about her age, marital status and past achievements. Naida Chinner’s solemn drinking circle in which she skols shots of white liquor in quick succession is also distinctly adult. Here the performers might be reflecting on their present lives or on the actions of parents or grandparents. The origin of the actions appears to be purposely ambiguous.

Aside from a shared European heritage, each performer’s journey appears unrelated to the others. The standout performance is from Astrid Pill who uses her beautiful, classically-trained voice to express sentimental emotions derived from Naida Chinner’s memories of her grandmother. The Latvian lullabies she sings are poignant and haunting. Pill’s performance is captivating and slightly spooky, her grounded physicality working against any overly nostalgic interpretation. Her wonderful rendition of David Bowie’s Let’s Dance, accompanied by Zoe Barry on piano accordion, is a highlight. Likewise Helen Omand’s comic ability comes to the fore as she energetically demands attention from everyone in the room with a noisy pair of kid’s slippers and then attempts to integrate herself into family portraits via some tempestuous posturing. Solon Ulbrich’s eloquent movement and muttering vocals perfectly illustrate a stoic domesticity. Later he dances cheek to cheek with Naida Chinner who, throughout the piece, appears curiously lost in her own world while simultaneously in constant flight.

Jason Sweeney’s soundscape is appropriately subtle, punctuated at one time by the voice of Omand’s grandmother telling an animated story about a goanna and at another by the melody of Puff the Magic Dragon that locates the work in an imaginary, childlike realm. Both Sweeney and Pill speak the unfulfilled wish lists of their ancestors into electric light bulbs (which are also microphones). The dialogue extends into the audience when Chinner and Pill play an intimate Chinese Whispers game followed by a call and response scene (“Put your hand up if…”) warmly inviting us into the children’s world.

The audience is given lit candles to hold and extinguish at will to signal the end of the show. The piece could easily have been repeated or continued in a durational fashion as it employs no apparent dramatic score.

Babushka displays moments of wistful montage recalled and re-enacted with considerable skill but without analysis or attitude. I was left trying to open the next Babushka doll, wondering how each family history had affected the outlook of individual or community and how the experience of one generation might have influenced the next.

Parallelo Open Platform (POP), Babushka, Auditorium, Art Gallery of South Australia, North Terrace, Adelaide, May 25-29

Karen Therese is one of the brightest talents in the Sydney performance scene. Her training, vision and collaborative instincts successfully came together in 2003 to realise Sleeplessness, an intense, autobiographical and multimedia journey into her family’s past both in Sydney and Hungary. I met Karen recently to discuss how her work had arrived at this point and the role training has played in it.

Dorothy

Karen Therese recalls being 8 or 9 years of age and playing Dorothy “in a kind of performance version of The Wizard of Oz. I had this teacher who looked like Cindy Lauper and her influence was significant. We were always singing and doing drama in class for 2 years. So that definitely planted the seed.” But nothing else theatrical entered her life until she was 19. Having left school, she says, “I was kicking the pigeons and throwing stones and stuff. And then my sister said ‘write a list of everything that you’ve really liked in your life.’ And that teacher and playing Dorothy were on the top of my list.”

The actor

Therese’s sister persuaded her to take acting classes. They were Stanislavskian, twice a week for 6 months: “I remember after my first class just bolting home and feeling really elated. It was really exciting. After 6 months I found a script I was really inspired by and I put the play on in a small space on Brunswick Street in Fitzroy. And my sister, who’s a visual artist, designed the set. And I got amazing reviews. It was a solo piece called Adult Child, Dead Child about an androgynous person’s journey from 5 to 21. I thought, hmm I want to do this but write it. I kept doing classes and I had a company called Tallulah Presents with a friend. We did Sam Shepard and other plays in the same small space in Brunswick Street. Then I had an agent and did lots of short films for the Swinburne Film School. Lots of those. And acting work.” After 2 years of this Therese says she stopped: “I think I was just going a bit crazy. The whole acting thing just lost all meaning. So then I stopped and moved to Sydney.”

The Journey

At 24, Karen Therese decided to get back into acting, but wanted to first refuel. A key influence at this stage was Tanya Gerstle (who now teaches at the VCA) at the Actors’ Centre. “I felt a real connection with Tanya. And so for the first time I did an audition that [felt right]. The cost of The Journey was alot and I didn’t know if I was going to be able to come up with that kind of money, but I got in.” Asked what she thinks was good about The Journey compared with what she knows of other acting courses, she says “it was fantastic because it focuses more on developing you as an artist and human being rather than as a product for the industry.” As well as being challenged, Therese enjoyed the space to dream offered by the course being only 3 days a week.

At the end of the year, Gerstle and Chrissie Koltai asked their students to write pieces for a performance instead of doing a play. Karen’s contributions were included and she thought, “That’s what I want to do. I’m gonna write it and do it. And so everyone else from that year went off to NIDA or WAAPA or whatever…I just said no and then it was just like free-falling. Then someone introduced me to PACT Theatre.”

PACT

Karen Therese was cast in PACT Youth Theatre’s The Dark Room, a work created with director Nikki Heywood, a key figure in the Sydney performance scene whose own training had been in Body Weather through Tess de Quincey. Therese believes “that was pretty pivotal, working with Nikki. I’m still working with her. And I loved that type of work and I completely understood it.” Heywood added a focused physicality to Therese’s standout performance in The Dark Room’s childhood fantasia.

At 25 turning 26 Therese began to worry about her lack of tertiary education and enrolled in a bridging course to enter university as well as working days and rehearsing with PACT at nights. While angsting that “there has to be an easier way, you know, this is just insane” she was contacted by the VCA to let her know that a position had opened in the one year Animateuring course: writing, movement, directing and performing.

Animateuring

The VCA course unleashed the director in Therese and helped initiate the trilogy of which Sleeplessness is the first part and was first produced in the course. “We had to direct some actors from the first year acting course. I can remember thinking, okay what do I know? I actually struggled with it a lot. Making decisions was a huge learning curve.” A significant influence in the final stage of Therese’s time at the VCA was training in physical theatre with Teresa Blake of desoxy Theatre. And she made Sleeplessness: “the culmination of everything I’d learned that year.” She also created an outdoor performance called The Elephants with Katrina Douglas, which later became Species with figures based on the Borg Lady in Star Trek’s First Contact. It was performed in a Melbourne Festival and at the Melbourne Fringe won an award for best outdoor performance, attracted funding and “lots of gigs.”

For Therese the time at the VCA meant the creation of “3 years work for myself…I’m still going with the trilogy.” But she also had offers, to direct for Salamanca Theatre Company, to appear in Performance Space’s Unbecomings season and to work with desoxy Theatre. “I took them all up! Unfortunately (Laughs). And then I applied for a Next Wave Kickstart grant for emerging artists. And I got that. It was insane. And I did them all—to varying degrees of satisfaction. Then I burned out.”

Therese trained with desoxy on and off for a year and co-developed the show Species, “a work that was communicated solely through movement and costume. I wanted to focus on movement. I felt that I hadn’t done much of that. That was my main focus for about 3 years. Teresa Blake is extremely skilled and disciplined. desoxy were fantastic in terms of training.” What also impressed her was the development period desoxy undertook before putting on a show: “I think that’s really valuable. I developed Sleeplessness quite a lot before it went up.”

Time_Place_Space

After some development work on y.smith, the second part of her trilogy, Therese went to the desert for a break and then participated in Tess de Quincey’s Triple Alice outside of Alice Springs before moving back to Sydney with a desire just to focus on making her own work. Playworks supported development of Sleeplessness and she started work on the piece with Nikki Heywood.

Participation in the Time_Place_Space hybrid arts laboratory proved another vital element in the growth of the work: “I think I’d started to lose confidence in a lot of things but got to meet new, fresh people and I started to gauge an understanding of the possibilities of multimedia. A lot of my ideas come in film [images] and I had an idea of what Sleeplessness was going to be, of what I wanted. And I got to discuss the idea with [filmmaker and designer] Margie Medlin and [new media artist] Keith Armstrong. So we really focussed on creating ideas for the show. I did a showing at Time_Place_Space and Fiona Winning [Director, Performance Space] was there and the following year [2002] she arranged a residency for me at Performance Space. At the same time, I asked Margie to go to Budapest with me to film some of the stuff. I got about $3,000 from the Myer Foundation. I paid for the rest and my dad gave me some money, which was really nice, and I got a RunWay grant. Margie Medlin is pretty amazing. She’s turned into another mentor along with Teresa Blake, Tanya Gerstle and Nikki Heywood. I’ve kept in touch with them. I’m always asking them questions.”

Forward and back

As well as freelancing as a director, Karen has been looking at staging Sleeplessness in Budapest, further developing y.smith (pending grants) and is thinking about a more substantial phase of professional development, say at Das Arts in the Netherlands. As a performer she keeps in trim, as do many other members of the dance and performance scene in Sydney, with the improvisation classes held at the Omeo Studio. Karen says “I felt really distant from performing. I looked at Sleeplessness and asked myself what do I need to work on. So I’m trying to get into the studio twice a week and staying really connected with it. Because you can lose it a lot in being at a desk writing applications and sitting around waiting.” Always up for a challenge, Therese is also currently employed as an alcohol and drugs worker for the Ted Noffs Foundation working with youth in crisis.

On reflection Karen Therese thinks that the varied history of her development and her animateur training could have put her at risk of becoming a “jack of all trades, master of none.” All the more reason, she says, to focus on performer training when other skills and demands threaten to take over and to look at ways of further developing herself as a performance maker. On the other hand, the range of skills have allowed her to create a growing body of work that is truly her own. “Since the VCA I always do workshops based on what skills I think I need. So I’m continually in training.”

After an interminable wait, Australia finally has a touring circuit for contemporary performance. Mobile States links venues in 5 cities: PICA in Perth, Performance Space in Sydney, Salamanca Arts Centre in Hobart, Brisbane Powerhouse and North Melbourne Town Hall. The other partner in the venture is Performing Lines. First cab off the rank is Jenny Kemp’s Still Angela in August-September touring 5 cities (but not Melbourne)—Adelaide joins the circuit this time with performances at Star Theatres hosted by Vitastatistix, This is great news for Australian audiences but also for artists whose work has long deserved a wider audience. If Australia really was the land of the fair go, Jenny Kemp would be a household name by now. As it is, she’s well-known and respected in Melbourne but her works have only rarely been invited interstate.

Making a writer-director

Given the education focus in this issue, I asked Kemp to talk about her training. Recently she’s been teaching young directors and animateurs at the VCA, swapping roles with partner Richard Murphet who’s on leave to concentrate on his writing. Born in 1949, the daughter of artist Roger Kemp, she acknowledges family life as offering important early training in understanding art, spatial dynamics, “how everything works within the frame and continues beyond it, the figurative and non-figurative world. We were always drawing, always talking about art.” She trained as an actor at NIDA with the likes of Gillian Jones and Nico Lathouris in the days when the intake for the first year was around 40. Not finding her name amongst the 12 accepted into second year, she headed instead for England where she gravitated towards experimental theatre circles including a US company called Liquid Theatre that gave her a sense of theatre as total experience. Back in Australia, a seminal influence came in the form of New York’s Rowena Balos in Melbourne for a 5-month workshop sponsored by the Myer Foundation. Balos introduced Kemp to the intimate connections between body and breath and their relationship to text.

In the Balos workshop she met actor Rob Meldrum who asked her to join Stasis Group, a laboratory company working within the Pram Factory and interested in investigating the relationship between the body, space, action, rhythm and text. “We were doing Shakespeare and Ibsen but at the same time building performance, asking questions: What is performance? Why perform? What is the relationship with the audience?”

John Ellis at Rusden College of Advanced Education (later part of Deakin University) invited Kemp to direct student productions. “This was extremely valuable training in developing your own practice, working with students on plays by Artaud and Strindberg and at the same time learning to work within an institution.”

Later she was invited to teach at the VCA where she worked on classical texts: Racine, Chekhov, Tennessee Williams. This constituted a major period of training in trial and error. “I’d stay up late trying to work out, what is directing?” She drew on the Rowena Balos work, that actor training and her solid background in the visual arts.

A continuing preoccupation was the theatrical frame and the connection between what was happening on the stage and the way ideas were being received by the audience. Later, this linked to her interest in dreams and their analysis—the idea that theatre is synonymous with dream because you’re both watching and participating in the event and dreams are full of metaphor and symbols. “They represent something else. Like the visual arts and theatre they are non-literal.”

Kemp sees attending theatre and analysing her reaction to it as another form of training—being an active audience rather than a reductive one (“I didn’t like it”), asking yourself when you’re engaged or disengaged, why?

What differences does she detect in training directors now? Being a female director was pretty unusual when she set out. Also she went into theatre with no academic training. “These days you’re much more likely to have an undergraduate degree before you tackle NIDA or VCA. You’re required to be more educated. Those pathways that used to exist that you could negotiate with sheer experience or will are not so evident. This is not a bad thing necessarily. These days there are more resources. Technology makes more complexity possible. There’s much more knowledge of performance and broadly there’s more freedom to play with form in multimedia and interdisciplinary work. However, as soon as you add more freedom, you encounter another problem. What are the boundaries?”

Still Angela

Still Angela looks at a repressed memory of loss. “Basically, all of my plays are negotiating something that has been pushed under but comes back (in Freud’s terms, “the return of the repressed”), perhaps sexuality, subjectivity, spontaneity, autonomy, grief, desire. And the plays attempt to give form to the way we psychically order and negotiate experience.

“When something returns after being submerged for quite a long time it can come back in strange forms and with strange distortions. In a way, as a writer, I feel like I work with this energy—both as a kind of fuel for my writing and as a focus for the conceptual work. The plays give voice to women’s experience, not that it’s exclusive to women, but it happens to be particular to women. So for instance Call of the Wild (1989) was looking at a young mother in her domestic role and the way society and religion had repressed her. Remember (1993) concerns a woman who has been raped. Black Sequin Dress (1996) is about a housewife going out to a nightclub in a glamorous dress and slipping and falling on the nightclub floor. I see these explorations as ‘experiential narratives’.”

Time and space are crucial considerations in all of Kemp’s works. “I’ve always felt that the way time is organised in our society is repressive and has resulted in a shutting down of space, both inside and outside ourselves. This is a space I want to open up in my performance work.” Still Angela began with a rumination on time and an image that wouldn’t go away, of a woman of 40 sitting in a chair on a shiny floor. She is still: “There’s this illusion propagated that we don’t have any time, that we’re sort of running out of time. I think this is really interesting…It actually starts when as children at school we’re told that there are certain things for which there is no time—things like daydreaming, remembering, waiting, imagining, thinking slowly.

“To find a form for these ideas I organise the performance narrative around 2 grids. I structure this by creating a visual storyboard, which I then workshop further with the group. One line is moving forward on a linear narrative structure—a causal concept of time. Then there’s the other part of the grid, the vertical where the movement is downwards, sometimes backwards. This is where time is no longer a factor. Time stops. It’s like timelessness or eternity—Aboriginal people have a concept called ‘the eternal now’ in which the past goes on existing in the present. I’m interested in dream states, unconscious states, meditative states, memory, states based on extreme emotion when our sense of time dissolves. I’m looking for a form which can give expression to the relationship that we continually negotiate between the everyday world of social time and the imaginary or inner worlds of asocial or acausal time.

“The action of stopping and the image of sitting on a chair and staying there and not getting up—that one particularly fascinated me. How was I going to find anything (dramatic) in it?”

Angela 3: A kitchen, a kitchen sink, a window, a clothes line out the window, a chair on which I sit. A small table. Lino under the chair, checks, an ordered type of lino. Pink shiny walls. Flesh pink. A kettle. A stove, a few saucepans, a bench, a chopping board. All these things to keep me going. Cups, saucers, knives and forks. A fridge, frozen food, ice blocks. Alaska in my fridge, mini Alaska. A broom, a blowfly, a back door.

The longer she is still the deeper Angela goes inside herself. Slowly, over the course of the performance, the constituents of this woman’s inner world are released in acts of remembering, sifting, deep thinking. Slowly begins to dialogue with 3 versions of herself at different ages.

The miraculous sleight of hand in Kemp’s work is that she takes a woman on a chair and spins her into the social realm, the landscape, the stratosphere and then returns her safely to the earth. How does she make this intimate world so vast?

“One experiences an extensive, diverse world inside oneself, a large and complex sphere, a deep place. After all, it reflects years of life, the unconscious realm, the dream world, memory, images retained (which give us our) ability to play, conjure, to practice the future. And when you think of it our ability to imagine affects our capacity to act, to do. Whatever we do, we imagine first.”

There’s a deceptive spareness in Kemp’s texts that contrasts with the seismic shifts that take place as we enter the meditative realm of her theatre. As well as the idea of characters sharing space with their past and future selves, Kemp’s staging is seductive and highly sophisticated. Her regular collaborators include a fine ensemble of performers, composer Elizabeth Drake, designer Jacqueline Everitt, choreographer Helen Herbertson, lighting designer David Murray and, for Still Angela, filmmaker Ben Speth. All contribute immensely to the creation of this lush cosmos.

And who is this Angela? “She’s a human being who’s getting older, becoming an adult. There’s a time you do that, realise you’re no longer a child. It happens, most obviously, every birthday (and probably each day between).”

Embarking on this tour of Still Angela, which premiered at Playbox in 2002, has entailed some re-thinking of the original which Jenny Kemp has embraced with customary enthusiasm. “I’m very happy to re-work and re-write. It’s like I’ve been a snail travelling. This is a chance to look at the trail I’ve left behind me.”

Quotes are from a phone interview with Jenny Kemp and from a talk she delivered as part of Getting the Word Out, a RealTime/Performance Space forum held in November 2003. The full transcript will be online shortly.

Three theatre practitioners, Lucy Taylor, Benjamin Winspear and Katherine Tonkin, who have graduated from actor training schools in the last 7 years have had very different experiences since leaving their respective institutions. Each provides important insights on their training.

Taylor, who graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) acting course in 1999, says that although she has worked in film and television, most of her employment has come from theatre: “My training at VCA prepared me extremely well. Of course when I graduated I realised there was a huge amount to be learned on the job, but I’d say the training I received has been like a strong but flexible backbone in the body of my work so far.”

Tonkin, a graduate of the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), believes the course provided sound training and gave her the opportunity to “meet and work with some pretty amazing people.”

Winspear graduated from the NIDA actors’ course in 1997. He believes: “The important thing to get from actor training is the beginning of a process.” He stresses that this happened for him through connections with guest tutors Barrie Kosky and Leisa Shelton, as well as the straight drama training he was doing at NIDA. After graduating he responded to the physical work of Nikki Heywood, Benedict Andrews and Kate Champion.

Winspear is now a Resident Director at the Sydney Theatre Company: “I never dared to imagine directing anything while I was at NIDA. I thought that directing was something you came to later in life once you had developed a body of work in another field. My desire to direct came through a vague dissatisfaction with the types of work available to me as an actor.”

Theatre-makers

Being a collaborator in the creation of work for the theatre, contributing to conception, writing and other aspects of a production have all become important parts of the creative lives of many actors.

After graduating, Benjamin Winspear worked as a performer in shows that toured to the Adelaide and Sydney Festivals and the Weimar Festival in Germany. It was meeting people with a strong sense of continuity in their work and a rigorous, exploratory approach to theatre-making that led to a decision to “consciously pursue partnerships with people I really wanted to work with.” Barrie Kosky was really important for Benjamin in this phase of his career.

Lucy Taylor has also responded to the notion of theatre-making, a philosophical and practical approach for which VCA is well-known. “VCA’s commitment to theatre-making has been the best foundation for the work I have been engaged with in the past 3 years. The training in this area encouraged a creative autonomy that has made my recent work as a performer really satisfying and challenging. It’s been invaluable in my experience working with a director like Jenny Kemp, who encourages the theatre-making process with her collaborators.” Taylor appeared in the premiere of Kemp’s Still Angela and is in the Mobile States national tour of the work.

Winspear found the process of performing in shows at NIDA frustrating at times: “Drama schools can often be quite limited…There are a whole lot of interesting plays that never get up. The restriction of that approach was shown when Barrie Kosky came in and we devised a piece that was so fantastically like building theatre from scratch. That’s when I felt most empowered as a performer.” At times it was a struggle to remain in the pressured environment of the school. What kept him there was friends and collaborators. He enjoyed the “passionate disagreement” with his fellow students as well as the sense of a developing ensemble. In 2003 Winspear received a Fellowship from the Gloria Payten and Gloria Dawn Foundations which enabled him to travel to Europe for 3 months to work with Barrie Kosky: “To be immersed in a process and to see so many different kinds of work was as valuable as 3 whole years at NIDA.”

Technique

In terms of skills, Katherine Tonkin says there isn’t any one single thing that she keeps using: “All the aspects of the training are inside me, and have been absolutely instrumental in building an autonomous process.” She quotes a teacher who told her: “Technique is only something you fall back on if your instincts fail you.” She enjoyed the diversity of approaches at WAAPA: “I have had the good fortune of being able to do a range of different things since graduating—from working with the MTC to doing a show in a 40 foot shipping container [Gilgamesh, Next Wave]—and I feel grateful for the openness of my training in preparing me for these experiences.”

Lucy Taylor draws heavily on the physical training she received at VCA: “Even though the classes nearly drove me demented at the time, the skills I learnt with Valeria di Campo in Commedia dell’Arte in first year have proved invaluable…Precision, timing and the ability to find freedom and high energy within a strict frame have been really useful.”

The actor as director

Benjamin Winspear alternated between performing and directing in his first years out of drama school. The directing helped illuminate the acting. Soon after graduating he was working in the MTC production of Great Expectations: “If I hadn’t the directing experience I wouldn’t have understood why all the technical requirements were necessary—it was a very technically demanding show.” He also found that as an actor, the directing experience made him much more accepting of the role of the director.” He now thinks it should be “mandatory for all actors in drama school to direct something so that they understand what a difference it makes to have actors who say ‘yes’ rather than ‘no’.”

Making bad text sing

Lucy Taylor is aware that there is debate about the very particular approach to text that is currently taught at VCA: “Unless you happen to work with a director who employs this method, it’s rare to use the technique in all its stages and detail. I suppose that might lead many to question its usefulness…I may use aspects of it in preparation for a role, or if I am stuck with a piece of text I can’t make move. But then I always did think that, as with any aspect of my training, it could be interpreted and accessed as required.”

The luxury of delving into great texts, which is so intrinsic to the actor training experience, can create another set of challenges once the acting graduate is released into the world. Katherine Tonkin notes: “Whereas at drama school you get to sink your teeth into really great roles from complex and well-crafted texts, you soon realise that the reality in the industry—especially for actors my age—is that these types of roles are really few and far between.”

Taylor also speaks about a similar problem: “It’s a strange thing to say but one thing I wasn’t taught at VCA is how to deal with really bad text. I haven’t breathed a word of Shakespeare since I left 5 years ago, but I’ve had to deliver some really rotten dialogue, mostly for television and I’ve found it a challenge to make text like that sing. This is critical, especially when newly trained actors find themselves in an audition and this ability means the difference between getting the job or not. In hindsight, perhaps some different approaches to text, other than the core method employed might have been to my advantage.”

Perpectives

Benjamin Winspear was able to revisit and perhaps resolve some of the difficulties he experienced in his actor training when NIDA employed him 2 years after he graduated to direct a third year production. “I remembered vividly the difficulties of the process of working on a show, and I tried to guide the students past the sticking points I had found in myself when I was a student there.” He acknowledges he is in a privileged position and is grateful to Robyn Nevin, Artistic Director of the STC where he is currently directing Seneca’s Thyestes: “She has a great capacity for picking people up and offering them impossible opportunities. She’s acutely aware that larger companies should be offering opportunities to new and emerging artists.”

Lucy Taylor’s hopes and wishes for work in the industry have changed relatively little: “When I graduated I was really clear about the work I wanted to do and the people and companies I hoped to work with.” In the past 3 years she has realised many of her goals, working with Jenny Kemp, Neil Armfield and Michael Kantor. However, she has had to learn to diversify as well: “I’ve learnt that to do the work I love, I have to do a lot of work I don’t. Like a lot of grads I came out of VCA thinking I wouldn’t do bad television or be in an ad. Five years on and several ads later I’d advise any young graduate to take the money and run.”

“I always knew it was a competitive industry”, says Katherine Tonkin “but it’s been a hard road discovering just how little work there is out there, and yet I count myself as having been very fortunate.” Lucy Taylor believes the training institutions “shouldn’t be in the business of preparing the actor not to be employed, but instead providing the tools and inspiration to remain active in the craft when paid work or work that is artistically gratifying is scarce.” This challenge is central to the theatre practitioner’s working life. Says Lucy: “You are never as busy out of school as you were in. This can be hard when you are committing yourself to a career you feel passionate about, and your working week consists of an audition for a washing machine commercial. It’s a challenge sometimes to stay creatively charged and engaged.”

The challenge facing any artistic movement is to find an audience. While the sale of Tracey Moffatt’s iconic Something More No 1 for $74,000 in 2002 was seen by many as an indication of Australian photography’s new status as legitimate and collectable art, let’s not forget that medium had been around for 176 years at the time of this sale. In comparison, new media arts are mere pups. Public interest is however on the rise. This is in no small part due to the hard work of a number of key government agencies and arts organisations. The Australia Council’s New Media Arts Board has played a crucial role in the promotion and development of this work in Australia, as have organisations such as Experimenta Media Arts, dLux Media Arts, the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), to name a few key players.

However, it is the artists themselves who have done the most to move new media more firmly into the public eye. They have had to be adept at writing funding submissions, negotiating and installing sometimes complex technical infrastructure for exhibition, and marketing their own output. The desire to lift this burden on individual artists drives the model for new media arts management being pioneered by Melbourne-based company, Novamedia.

The company was founded by Alessio Cavallaro and Antoanetta Ivanova in December 2001. Their experience as curators and producers informed them of the need for Australian new media artists to be represented, professionally supported and promoted beyond a rather narrow circuit. Managed by Ivanova, Novamedia is Australia’s first new media arts agency and its primary business objective is to encourage and support the development of a broader market, locally and overseas, for Australian new media art. It provides specialist producer, management and advisory services that not only help artists realise projects, but also stimulate greater visibility and appreciation of their work and of new media art in general.

Currently, Novamedia represents an impressive stable of well known artists including Justine Cooper, Linda Dement, Stelarc, Ian Haig, Jon McCormack, Tina Gonsalves, Troy Innocent and The Lycette Bros, as well as emerging artists such as Mari Velonaki and Metraform. The kind of work created by these artists is diverse, ranging across net art, digital photo-imaging, medical imaging, interactive art, artificial life, animation, desktop video, holographic art and robotics. Novamedia works closely with individual artists to ensure their needs are met. These range from management and partnership development, through to matching artists with interested public and private collectors.

Introducing new media art to collectors is something that distinguishes Novamedia from other types of agencies working in the field. It is notoriously difficult to find a market for this work. Consequently, the kinds of rewards afforded other artists through the sale of work are not always available to those working in new media. In a ground-breaking initiative Novamedia will be staging the first commercial new media art exhibition at the Melbourne Art Fair in September this year. Ivanova is enthusiastic in her appraisal of the possibilities for new media art collection: “If we are true to our times we must look into preserving and learning to appreciate [new media works] beyond the odd gallery or event visit.” Ivanova says that Novamedia is working with public institutions on developing collections and educational resources with a new media focus: “I encourage Australian public art galleries and museums to invest not only in digital images, and DVDs, but also to consider acquiring interactive installations, net art projects and games, as Centre Pompidou and the Whitney Museum have been doing for several years now. Educational institutions should be acquiring works, especially by Australian artists, to be incorporated into the curriculum. The State Library of Victoria has also started a collection of Victorian-produced games, which is a fantastic initiative.”

Ivanova is acutely aware of the need for intervention in the circuit of distribution and promotion if the profiles of both the artists and the artworks are to be elevated. Ivanova says, “We provide collectors with expert advice on developing quality new media art collections. There are complex tasks associated with this type of art, such as technical maintenance, durability and archiving. Perhaps most importantly we provide a collector with the essential knowledge of the particular development and context of the artwork, which in new media terms often involves other disciplines such as medicine, science, astronomy, engineering, ethics.”

How does Novamedia fit in with the vision of the New Media Arts Board and the Audience and Market Development Division of the Australia Council, whose current 3 year plan includes the international promotion of Australian new media art? Where does it sit in terms of ACMI, and events like MAAP (Multimedia Arts Asia Pacific) and BEAP (Biennial of Electronic Art Perth, see page 27)? Ivanova sees Novamedia as “an independent agency, established to provide a range of services that at present none of the above, or any other Australian institution for that matter, provides. Novamedia responds to the needs of a developing niche market of new media artists, collectors, corporate clients and the education sector. It does not have a public program/exhibition agenda the way BEAP, MAAP or ACMI do. However we do focus on developing specific international touring programs. Last year we presented ozone, a survey of Australian digital media art at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Barbican Centre in London. Novamedia produced Melbourne DAC (Digital Art and Culture) 2003 Conference which took place for the first time outside Scandinavia and the USA.”

Novamedia is currently working on a raft of projects to raise the profile of their artists here and overseas. It is the Australian producer for Japan’s Granular Synthesis, who are making their Australian debut with the performance of Modell 5 at the 2004 Melbourne International Arts Festival, and the producer of Game Time, a major international event dedicated to game culture.

Novamedia has also initiated and produced a tour of Australian new media art works by Metraform, Jon McCormack, Troy Innocent and Mari Velonaki to be presented at Ars Electronica in September in partnership with the Australia Council’s New Media Arts Board. To coincide with the 25th anniversary of the festival, Novamedia is publishing Unnatural Selection providing an overview of a range of internationally renowned new media artists who have contributed significantly to the field in Australia and beyond. As well, an Australian-French exchange exhibition entitled Reactivate! in collaboration with a consultant/curator at Centre Pompidou will be presented in Melbourne and New Zealand later this year, in partnership with the State Library of Victoria. As Ivanova says: “There is a lot of work to be done by all of us. We have a better chance of succeeding if we work together.”

Novamedia is aware that it has to respond to the very particular needs of new media artists. It has to be innovative because there is no single model to follow. Ivanova says “as well as offering production and management, collections development and acquisitions, Novamedia is working with associates on a legal advisory service that will deal with commercialisation of Intellectual Property, partnership negotiations and contracts. In many respects the complexities of new media art are much closer to film or architecture than other art practices.” Novamedia was established to help new media art succeed in such challenging terrain.

Lisa Gye is a Lecturer in Media and Communications at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. She is also a facilitator for fibreculture, www.fibreculture.org.

The excerpt from Blue at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Manuka, begins in a corner of the gallery with projections on 2 perpendicular walls. The first image is of a naked toddler with curly hair, lying asleep on his side. His hair is a halo almost larger than the rest of him. It appears to be a still, yet we slowly perceive his small wrist flicker, breath fluttering his bones. The subtlety and surprise of these small movements catch one’s own breath. The image is of an exquisite vulnerability. The projection of the words “a child sleeps” on the other wall sets up an opposition between the inviolate restfulness of the child and the potential for violation. It also sets up a correlation in the piece between prediction (catching the smell of something about to happen) and the dread of its impending realisation.

Wendy Morrow enters the space and begins to dance. Her motions are fine, ideokinetic gestures (movements directed from an internal sensing), soft yet direct, evolving from somewhere well beneath the brickwork of the body’s structure—yet also, we suspect, capable of knocking down a mountain. In retrospect, I think of something almost martial in the actions: the movements of a mother in history, mutely rehearsing a defence. They are very finely placed within the frame of the 2 projections, both hinge and fulcrum, absorption and deflection of what passes on the screens.

A shocking image passes on the second screen: a jet with a stream behind it travels left to right, then disappears before reaching the edge of the screen. A quiet implosion. The tension this creates—the long journey from there to here, the disappearance before visible impact—renders the image a subliminal rehearsal for what we now, post-September 11, already know, and of what we then, in the dream or prediction state, knew as the about-to-become, and as the always-capable-of-happening. The dancing body, mediating between the images, knows, stores and re-creates both the fears and the horrors, the memories and the capabilities of attack. Because history is this. And we are capable of this: violent, violating of the inviolable. Morrow’s body knows all this; her breath holds against it (even in its release).

A pixilated image depicts a line of national flags waving in a night sky. It is a horrible sight. So self-certain. To paraphrase TS Eliot, post-World War 1, so “unreal.”

Morrow’s work again captures subliminal knowledge with great, humble agility. Her partnership with Leigh Hobba has produced a subtle, complex, startling piece, full of the yearning for protection and sanctity that any parent knows, and that anyone in the West post-September 11 has come to understand, was always fragile.

Blue (excerpt), performer/realisation Wendy Morrow, video/writer Leigh Hobba; Dancing in Time program, metis: TIME 04, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Manuka, May 19-23

Described in the program as paintings you can hear and dance you can listen to, Dis-Patch is a performance event that comprises 5 separate pieces integrating dance, music, video and technology. The audience is met with kaleidoscopic video images of fish neurons, which then become the backdrop to the opening piece Strange tides (redraw my boundaries). Performed by composer Lindsay Vickery on soprano saxophone, the piece begins with breath sounds, which turn into a note and finally a siren-like cry. This composition, which grew out of an improvisation using digital delay, employs the soft malleable sounds of the saxophone and its echo to create a conversation of sorts. The video images provide the prompt, but the saxophone doesn’t just talk to itself. There is a symbiotic relationship between images and instrument as the landscape and pace of the dancing neurons combine with the sound to evoke a rapid, free-flowing series of responses.

Performer Darren Anderson is central to the third piece, Your sky is filled with billboards of the sky. Clad in a MIBURI body suit fitted with electronic sensors, his gestures are translated in real time by these sensors, controlling the musical elements and mixing the video component, including a live camera feed of the performance. This piece is prefigured by a long description of the technology involved, a tactic that tends to overshadow the act of witnessing it. Described as an exploration of “identity in the context of a world increasingly comprised of mediated experiences”, the piece remained, for me just another mediated experience—an intellectual exercise rather than a visceral one.

The title piece Dis-patch was the major work of the evening, also introduced with a lecture-like preamble which represented an unnecessary attempt to authenticate what was to come. In this work the architecture of choreography was transposed into composition. Applying orange and green ultraviolet paint directly onto the body, a hulking figure masked in black cloth transforms before our eyes into a skeleton, then into (a) man. There is an almost primitive quality to this performance, the clash with technology bringing to mind Frankenstein’s monster with all of its associations.

Meanwhile the female dancers, Tracy Holden and Elise May, look like they’ve been fashioned from the stuff of the black box space as they progressively alter parts of their costumes, constantly exiting and re-entering, generating enormous flux and energy. It is in this combination of costume design, movement, image and a soundscape that buzzes the speakers and rattles your chest that all the elements combine to create a dazzling and compelling experience. Jonathan Mustard’s score sets its own mood, while maintaining the centrality of the performers’ movements.

The final moments of the piece are startling, with audience and performers under house lights and the dancers in rehearsal clothes while the user interface is projected onto the screen behind them. The scene was touching and revelatory. Here, as the credits roll, we witness the effort and flesh of the dancers’ work.

Dis-Patch, choreographer Chrissie Parrott, composer Jonathan Mustard, music and video Jonathan Mustard, Lindsay Vickery; dancers Darren Anderson, Tracy Holden, Elise May; The Loft, QUT Creative Industries Precinct, June 22-26

‘Cross-cultural’ was the theme of the night as I stepped off a busy Church Street full of Parramatta Eels fans streaming towards a football game, into the alternate world of the Parramatta Riverside Theatre and the world of Rakini Devi’s Indian dance performance Kali Yuga.

A man and woman appear on a screen, indecipherable text scrolling over their dancing bodies. The classical Indian movement makes me conscious of the transmission of ancient knowledge through the body. The unreadable words remind me of the inaccessible mysteries of another culture.

The lighting reveals a dozen or so female dancers, their movement apparently traditional, legs and arms turned out, finite articulation of fingers and feet, the poise of reverence. Words, now in English, scroll across the screen, telling of the cycle of life and the war between the lovers and enemies of knowledge. The music is tense, the postures and movement war-like, particularly 2 superb male dancers, whose legs swish through the air like swords, filling the space with angular and whirling lines, juxtaposed at times with quiet, intricate, imploring movements. The women step sideways, backs to the audience, twisting around, each reaching out an arm towards us.

The costumes echo the martial theme. Hands, feet, eyes are painted in blood red, mouths covered with black sashes. The binary of seeing but silent eyes, and peerless but speaking mouths seems reversed, particularly when the women, while performing backbends, present inverted faces to the audience. The eyes look like red mouths, ‘speaking’ to us, penetrating the inky audience space. The program note tells us that Rakini Devi is concerned with the “sacred” and “taboo” as they affect women. At this point the silence of the female dancers is emphasised, but their eyes suggest they know of the blackness of war, death, injustice and unhappiness.

All of the dancers performed with passion and technical proficiency. A mesmerising solo by Katy Alexandra Macdonald was particularly exhilarating. She appeared as the god Shiva, legs crossed, arms resting on her knees, thumb and forefingers together. Such was her power and the intricacies of her movement I felt she was actually speaking with the infinite tones and inflections of an articulate voice.

There are many ways of knowing, and by the end of Kali Yuga I was no longer grasping for meaning. Rather, my eyes were riveted to the multiple tongues of limbs and fingers, eyes, unspeaking mouths, speaking bodies—singing bodies.

Kali Yuga, Rakini Devi, dancers Kenny Feather, Nelson Requera, Katy Alexandra Macdonald, Cherie Goddard, Miranda Wheen and students of the University of Western Sydney, Paramatta Riverside Theatre, May 19-22

The dance artists I interviewed for this article had different expectations and estimations of their courses and have had very different career trajectories, but it is obvious that some important legacies of their time at university were the broadened social and artistic networks they were able to develop; either formal or informal, supportive mentorships; continued resource sharing and fostering of skills; and a deepened awareness of both the possibilities and limitations of Australian dance culture.

What kind of dancer?

At 17, Phoebe Robinson (Advanced Diploma in Performing Arts, Dance, West Australian Academy of Performing Arts, 3 year course, graduated 1999) went to WAAPA primarily to study ballet with Lucette Aldous. “We were all very young, and most hadn’t finished school. My view of dance at that time was pretty narrow. But whatever’s going on in your head at that age, you’re so malleable, open to almost anything. Lucette’s classes were very holistic, and her approach was quite different to what I’d experienced. But over time I began to realise some of the limitations of being a ballet dancer. There were new experiences too: Feldenkrais, Body Mind Centring, improvisation, choreography…which I didn’t necessarily do very well at uni, but worked on later. There seemed to be a big divide between the ballet and contemporary classes and at the time I wanted not to feel that separation. I wanted to try everything.”

Simon Ellis (Bachelor of Dance, Performance, Victorian College of the Arts, 1996) entered the program hoping to be exposed to dance strategies and techniques, and in this sense his expectations were met. “I like it that the staff were prepared to go about their thing, sharing ideas, understandings and then leaving it reasonably open as to how we were to dialogue with these ideas.” In the process of completing a Masters in Kinesiology, his relationship to teaching, writing and thinking was a little different from other students. “I think the training was limited in terms of preparing me for the professional world, even though my ‘technique’ was adequate by the time I graduated. But I didn’t see this as problematic as I don’t see tertiary institutions as serving this vocational role.

“In terms of understanding my corporeality, the VCA provided a suitable platform. We were treated to a lot of different forms: various contemporary/modern techniques, ballet, tastes of classical Indian, tap, flamenco, jazz. But it was also limited by a model that I think might still exist; students being trained to be employed in dance companies, becoming virtuosic dancers. I remember being frustrated by the quality of the theoretical subjects, and at that time we didn’t do any contemporary theory, which the students do now.” Ellis commented on “the tension which existed between those students who ‘just wanted to dance’ and those who were interested in developing a practice that might include making, performing, project development—very different to, say, training as a visual artist, where there is less ambiguity about your relationship to making and doing.”

Re-thinking

After a long career in dance, both in Europe and Australia, Vanessa Mafé completed the Master of Fine Arts program at Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology in 2002, also taking subjects in visual arts. With no undergraduate degree, and the fact that her formative years were spent in non-English speaking countries, she feels that she “put the world together a little bit differently…When you stop dancing, the way you interact with information changes, and how you value it. The course has opened something up, and I know that won’t close down ever again…I did much more than a MFA, because there was a lot of catching up, trying to push myself into some idea of a future, where I wanted to be. I spoke to people in visual arts because that was more the process that I used. I was trying to find my voice as an artist, as opposed to myself in the context of dance.

“The MFA was something I could craft the way I needed to…as long as I could articulate what it was I trying to do, and Cheryl Stock [Head of Dance] was very supportive…My emphasis was on research. I had always thought my research was adequate, but I realised I was barely scratching the surface…

“In my last installation project, Listening to People Move, I put more emphasis and value on the process rather than the outcome, and that shifted things a lot. It meant that the research had to be relevant, and I had to find a way of applying it. Suddenly I didn’t have to restrict myself to dance outcomes. What might be the most appropriate way to present something? Through the body, a series of drawings, or something else? It seems obvious now that all those things are part of [my] practice, but it takes time to be able to manifest it in ways that have any meaning.”

Beyond the curriculum

Jodie Farrugia and Luke Hockley graduated from the 4-year Deakin University Bachelor of Education in Dance and Drama [Rusden] in 1996 and both commented on the flexibility allowed by the use of “contract” units at Deakin. For Hockley “it was flexible enough so I could define my own study. Within this, I was able to work with choreographer Helen Herbertson at Dance Works in my final year.”

Importantly, Farrugia also commented, “It’s sometimes difficult for me to separate what was in the actual curriculum with what was going on around it. I used the studios a lot out of hours; we had our own creative performance group. You never just trained in dance. There was a really holistic approach to theatre making, whether dance or drama. I think I developed a really good idea of how it all—design, sets, lighting, costume—hung together.” After graduating, Farrugia approached Rusden for the use of space and was able to make work with some of their students. “They organised an artist-in-residence program for me, which was wonderful because they were so supportive…That’s when I started experimenting with my own work for 6 months.”

The 6 month course at National Institute of Circus Arts (1999) was a pilot project which later became the full-time Bachelor of Circus Arts degree at Swinburne, and was another turning point for Farrugia: “There came a time for me when I became interested in accessing a wider audience and therefore looked at more accessible forms such as circus and physical theatre.

Mentors & communities

“With Maggie Smith, the history teacher, Nanette Hassall and Lucette Aldous”, says Phoebe Robinson,”it was at the end [of the program] that I realised how amazing they all were. Now I have a bit more of a clue…but then I didn’t have the questions to ask. The community that surrounds the institutions is really important. Sometimes that’s just as valuable, and you learn more from your peers and sessional teachers than you do from the course structure itself. The year I graduated, I met Jo Pollitt, who was doing her Masters. I spent 2 years in her improvisation group, Response, which was amazing, and really part of my continuing education. Jo and Alice Cummins (who was teaching improvisation for the degree program at WAAPA) also had connections with Ros Crisp in Sydney, whose Winter Moves workshop I did in 2001. I can’t really remember how I managed to afford it and how I got there, but I think it was through Alice…I did a Body Mind Centring workshop with her and found it so informative and useful. So she was a catalyst.”

Jodie Farrugia describes the importance of her training with Garry Lester as teacher and mentor: “[He] was a big advocate of dance education, not just mainstage dance presented for an elite audience. He wanted students to understand the benefits of community art, group-devised performance, education; and this allowed us to develop broad, open minds about what dance and choreography could be. I walked away from Rusden really wanting to create accessible work, and particularly interested in the importance of the creative process, guiding performers and students through honest processes, honouring the real emotional content of work, as opposed to just giving them information.”

Ellis’s experience endorses the value of mentoring in an informal way. “I believe I was influenced in a very positive manner by a couple of the teachers at VCA who have since become friends and colleagues. I value this notion of having a mentor, or acknowledging and being stimulated by this simple development of lineage, and I feel it in my bones when I am dancing.”

Aloneness and surprise

Jodie Farrugia comments on informal networks: “In terms of accessing my close peers, it hasn’t necessarily been just dancers. If I’m interested in exploring things from an education point of view, they’re not the same people that I would explore my choreographic side with. So, in a way, I feel my connections are really dispersed in many directions. And then there’s the circus industry, which is completely different. Because my work, since I left NICA, has been more about acrobatics I feel a little lonely, because there aren’t many people who I can talk to about that. I’ve had a bit of a solo journey with all of that.”

Robinson too comments on a useful sense of working alone. “Melbourne was a good place for me to come to (as it was also home) and try to get work with either Chunky Move or Dance Works. But now I feel quite fortunate that I was out of work for so long, because it really helped me develop my own ideas. My life is satisfying for now: doing a project and then going back to the café for money, letting ideas tick over and then going into the studio, collaborating. What I want now is much simpler than when I was younger. I want a more fluid experience in dance: seeing what comes up, and being surprised by things.”

The Mobile Connections conference and exhibition at Futuresonic04 in Manchester brought together diverse creative and critical approaches to working with mobile media technologies. The event was also an opportunity to reflect on the way sound artists have dealt with location-specific experiences and the bearing these may have on current location-aware practices.

As devices become smaller and various wireless networks become more widespread, how does our ability to take our media with us affect the way we communicate and experience our surroundings? How do phones, handheld computers, GSM cell spaces and wireless internet nodes describe and define our movements in physical and data space? What are the personal cartographies, chorographies and choreographies of moving in and between street and media spaces? Where are we when we are on the phone, the radio, the internet and the bus?

Several works at Futuresonic employed GPS (Global Position System) technology, which uses signals from a network of satellites around the earth to deliver accurate positioning data via a device you can put in your car or hold in your hand. This technology is becoming cheaper. A couple of years ago the military scramble that made it less accurate for civilians was removed. Not surprisingly, it has fallen into the hands of artists, some of whom use it in works exploring interactions between mediated and direct experiences of time, place and motion. The work of Teri Rueb is one example.

By itself a GPS coordinate doesn’t tell you anything about how to get from one place to another. If the data has any significance it is in clarifying an existing relationship between the map and the territory. If it is to be interesting, then perhaps there must also be a relationship between the cartographic and what Gregory Ulmer calls the chorographic: the layering of meanings from places onto maps.

(area)code by Jen Southern used a simple SMS interface to exchange historical and personal data about specific sites in phone cell spaces around the city, building a layer of shared knowledge over the functionality of the city street plan. Other projects at Futuresonic simply allowed audiences to identify their own position on a map to indicate where they were in the work.

There are material constraints in working with mobile technologies, for example the models of consumption imposed by proprietorial wireless and GSM networks. Many practitioners are involved in encouraging different ways of working within these networks, or are setting up alternative environments within areas of the electromagnetic spectrum legislated for public use. Phonebook.com encourages people to become producers of mobile media by commissioning miniature literature and teaching people how to make their own ringtones and operator logos.

In Take2030’s performance Richair2030, renegade rollergirls surf the city connecting found wireless bandwidth into larger networks using homemade lunchbox computers. They present a cute invitation to think about who might control internet connectivity in a not too distant future “after the net.”

The collaborative DIY enterprise of community wireless networks has a more immediate practical application in the work of Free To Air and Consume, London-based wireless network projects who gave workshops at Futuresonic. An important feature of these networks is that the communities who use them are also responsible for maintaining them. Their viability depends on communication within a human network and on practical relationships of trust.

The question of trust is also explored in Uncle Roy All Around by Blast Theory, where the audience is invited to participate in a game on the streets of Manchester. Clutching handheld computers with a map of the game area, participants are sent out to find Uncle Roy. Help is provided in the form of instructions from Uncle Roy and guidance from online players offering advice that may or may not be spurious. The trail eventually leads into a flat, in which players are asked to complete a number of tasks. They then get into a car waiting outside with a stranger, who asks players to enter into a year-long relationship of mutual help and trust with one of the online participants, shifting and questioning the temporary suspension of values that can accompany game play.

This exploration of the provenance of information and the basis of social trust in remote interactions represents a much more interesting premise for participation than Blast Theory’s earlier project Can you see me now?, a hide and seek in which the performers ran around the streets catching online players. But the theatrical manner in which the question of trust was introduced and the fact that I received no follow-up made the commitment less tangible.

The sonic components of the conference and exhibition sat slightly awkwardly alongside the other elements of Futuresonic. The tentative juxtaposition of elements underlined the importance of bringing different perspectives together in the same context. For people working with sound, location recording has always been intimately tied to experiencing particular points in space and time as uniquely meaningful. Generically machine-readable coordinates such as GPS data or GSM cell IDs don’t carry meaningful information about places in and of themselves; they are only of interest if used in concert with other techniques and processes of making meaning.

Max Eastley’s narrative of travelling to the Arctic to record the bearded seal was a far cry from the abstract act of attaching sounds to map coordinates. The recordings were exquisite and moving documents of an extremely rare experience of place. Knowing the actual coordinates of the sites where the recordings were made would not, in this context, add any meaning to the sounds beyond the significance conveyed by his story.

Stepping back out of the gallery into the street, Akitsugu Maebayashi’s Sonic Interface was a superbly crafted composition of shifting temporal processes that reconstructed the sonic environment in real time. In doing so, the work completely shifted the participant’s perceptual relationship to their surrounds.

Wearing enclosed headphones and accompanied by a festival staff member to stop you walking under a truck, you move through the streets at your own pace for 15 minutes, along any path you choose. At first the sounds around you become detached from their origins, arriving several seconds late. Then sounds begin to layer and hang around you as aggregates of experience. Finally the sonic surrounds begin to utterly fragment into a mosaic of sound. By taking the separation between sound and its recording into such an extreme “almost” relationship with the direct sonic experience of place, this work underlines how meaning is made in the process of mediating our temporal experiences in situ.

Some of the questions that arose from engaging with these technologies at Futuresonic have been raised before, during the rise of the internet in the 1990s. How do we coordinate our experiences of layered virtual and actual realities? Who do we trust? Who has access to these spaces? As we move onto the streets with our gadgets and take our virtual selves for a walk, we encounter the performative, social, embodied aspects of interactions in a physical context to a greater degree than ever before.

There has been a significant shift in the approach to sound education over the last decade in response to its engagement with rapidly evolving technology. Formerly taught through time-based art classes in visual art degrees and experimental and electronic modules in music courses, the predominant methodology now combines sound studies, video, computer and media based practices in electronic media arts or creative communications courses. Since most of these have developed over the last 5 years it is too early to tell what effect they will have on emerging artists and the practice itself. The artists interviewed for this article graduated over the same period and were thus on the cusp of the new courses.

From dots to digits

Somaya Langley’s (ACT) trajectory illustrates the multi-input approach to sound education. She studied a Bachelor of Music (Composition) at the Australian National University in Canberra with a focus that was split between Instrumental and Vocal Composition, and studied Electroacoustic Composition at ACAT (Australian Centre for Art and Technology), graduating in 2000. “At the time they were 2 very separate streams of education, separate ideas on how you should approach your composition [and] done in complete isolation. You would hand in your folio of 10-15 score-based works and then walk over to the other building and sit in front of a UNIX work station and do some coding, trying to get something interesting happening algorithmically.” From these different approaches she felt that the electroacoustic stream was more process oriented, while the traditional composition put more emphasis on final product. She was always seeking a synthesis of these apparent clashes, adding to it her own research into popular electronic music and radio production. “I was trying to find the bridge between popular culture electronic music and art based electronic music, so I’d present a paper on Kraftwerk and argue with traditionally trained composers about the validity of that.” However she is quick to point out that this is not the case now. “At the Centre for New Media Arts which is what ACAT just evolved into, there are people in there with the technology and the ideas, and they don’t care about where an idea came from, whether from the popular world, from advertising, from a dance party last week, or some history book from 50 years ago.”

Hannah Clemen also developed her interest in sound art from the classical instrument training and composition. She initially undertook a 3-year diploma course in classical clarinet at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) where she was drawn to 20th century composers such as Arvo Pärt, Gorecki and Stockhausen. Her disillusionment with the classical repertoire, and encouragement from her Harmony teacher, led her to undertake a Bachelor of Composition at the University of Western Australia. Through listening to artists like Brian Eno, Faust and Einsturzende Neubauten she developed an interest in electronic music and was tutored by Lindsay Vickery who was at both the University of Western Australia and the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA). Clemen describes the discovery of digital tools as feeling like “this was the orchestra I had been waiting for…Although I’d liked writing for instruments I always found it a little bit abstract and detached…Actually working with these sounds that I could see and hear and play was amazing.” Since this discovery Clemen has now almost finished a Masters degree focusing on interaction involving performance and installations.

From visual to sound

Both Sam Smith (NSW) and Thembi Soddell (VIC) have approached sound from the visual arts perspective. Soddell started a Bachelor of Creative Arts at the Victorian College for the Arts (VCA), but after a year entered the Bachelor of Arts in Media Arts at RMIT on the strength of her visual arts folio. “[It was] from studying sound in first year that I first engaged with it on a more serious level, and discovered I found it far more interesting than photography. From there I began to do less visual work and ended my degree specialising in sound.”

Smith already has a hectic exhibition and performance schedule despite only just completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours in 2003, majoring in Sculpture/Performance and Installation at the College of Fine Arts (COFA), University of NSW. During the course he took 3 sound classes which he describes as technically-based. “From the sculptural base I have always been interested in the spatial qualities of sound and also the constructed 3 dimensional space inside a 2 dimensional video screen. I am pursuing an interest in constructing spaces with sound through the use of multiple speakers. This has come directly from working with 5.1 surround sound in my audio-visual gallery installations.”

Tech plus theory

Soddell believes one of the main benefits of studying at RMIT was “access to equipment and being taught how to use it proficiently.” However she does wish that there had been a more intensive theory component. “Media Arts was always very focussed on your practice…Theory classes were always fascinating, but still tended only to touch on things, never going into too much depth or encouraging much critical discourse beyond the 2 hours allocated in class time. In my year of Creative Arts at the VCA (which was very academically focussed) the Media Arts theory subject really challenged the way I viewed cinema, through essay writing and discussion, which provided me with a lot of inspiration in my photography and video work.”

Smith would have liked a little bit more of both. “I would have like to have had an advanced technical class in sound production, focused on the use of Max/MSP or similar software for the creation and exploration of specific sound ideas for both live and installed audio. Also I would have liked the opportunity to take a history/theory class devoted to sound.”

As Clemen moved into sound art at the postgraduate stage she has found that she has developed the technical skills herself, with assistance from Vickery, research into other interactive projects and mailing lists, while research has developed the conceptual side. Somaya Langley found that taking a sub-major in Interactive Media Arts through the Canberra School of Art was really beneficial in developing a conceptual framework for her practice that she felt was lacking from the traditional compositional ways of thinking.

Out of the bedroom

Of course there are many sound artists who forge a path for themselves, learning software and exploring techniques in their bedrooms. Scott Sinclair, one of the forces behind Brisbane’s Small Black Box is one of these. A Bachelor of Commerce at the University of Queensland, he had discovered guitar at 17, developing his practice through experiential learning, going to performances, tinkering and exploring the internet. Even though the a shift in approach within sound-based courses was already underway at the time he was commencing tertiary education, he felt that his lack of formal musical training or technical grounding was an impediment to entering a sound oriented course.

Communities and collaborations

Soddell is keen to point out that one of the major benefits of studying at RMIT was being part of a culture of creativity and developing networks that helped her professional practice. This has also been beneficial to Langley who now collaborates with her photomedia lecturer David McDowell on installation works and is part of Hypersense with CNMA lecturer Alistair Riddell. Sodell and Langley both thought their education beneficial in terms of seeking funding, either through professional practice classes in grant writing or through networks with established artists.

Sinclair points out that in the process of running a monthly sound art event his contact with university communities has been very valuable. “You can draw upon their infrastructure. They have the most accessible audience base for people that you know are interested in music.” Mutually beneficial, universities can assist in financing visiting artists through artist presentations.

Present practice, future studies

Frequently it seems that the pursuit of a sound art practice qualifies the artist with a side-line career in information technology. Scott Sinclair works as a self-confessed “IT Geek.” Somaya Langley has drawn on her interactive media submajor to work at the National Library as a Web Audio Analyst/IT Business Analyst. Sam Smith works as a graphic designer part time, and also manages to sell artworks. Hannah Clemen has survived in the past on clarinet teaching and arts administration. After spending the last 11 years in tertiary education institutions, she is going to wait before she considers a PhD, and feels it may be in a different area of study.

The artists are all involved in significant projects. Sinclair will play events in Sydney in early August and Small Black Box will present a large scale installation in the Queen St Mall, Brisbane as part of Queensland Biennial Festival of Music 2005. Langley has funding for a site-specific installation called Familiar Circuits in Canberra at the end of October. Both Soddell and Smith will be involved in i.audio at Performance Space in September, and Smith and Clemen will give presentations at Electrofringe in October.

It will be interesting to follow the trajectory of graduates from the more tailored electronic media art, creative industry and creative communication courses over the next few years. Sinclair is concerned that a new approach targeting and attempting to second guess “industry” may perhaps backfire, producing a glut of artists doing what is already being done, instead of producing artists who can provide new ideas and ways of thinking. However collaborations between tertiary institutions and major sound culture events such as RMIT and Liquid Architecture, QUT and the REV festival, John Curtin University and BEAP, the recent collaboration between UWS and Electrofringe and initiatives such as the newly established UTS Sound Collective presenting the monthly disorientation event, indicate that the impetus for innovation and new ideas remains at the forefront of the education agenda.

To celebrate Bozidar Kos’ birthday, Ensemble Offspring presented a most interesting kind of composer portrait. Alongside several of Kos’ best known compositions were pieces by former students Matthew Bieniek and Damien Ricketson, as well as 2 world premieres: one by Kos and the other by Michael Finnissy. It was an event that clearly demonstrated the interconnectedness of all composers and underlined Kos’ continuing importance as composer and teacher.

The concert opened with Kos’ Catena 1. According to Rachel Campbell’s lucid program notes, the title means “chain, succession or series”, which Kos says “refers to the form of the work which consists of a closely connected series of segments.” This became a concept around which the entire concert was constructed, with each work further exploring different configurations of instruments and ideas.

In Catena 1 the metaphor of a chain or series is most audible in the instrumental combinations that are continually engaged in a succession of formations and dissolutions. The violin and cello are frequently paired, as are the clarinet and flute, and marimba and piano. When one instrument is virtuosically active, the others are relatively static. Large melodic arches juxtapose fragmented flurries. The result is a fascinating, if restrained, variation of material and colour.

Catena 2 explores similar ideas. Instrumental combinations are constantly reconfigured, though the average density of material remains unvaried. The work attempts a higher degree of counterpoint than Catena 1, however the long drones played by instruments awaiting their next solo became wearing. What might be considered utterly conventional in Kos’ earlier career as a jazz musician did not find such satisfying purpose in this piece. However, like jazz and folk traditions, these works reward good playing, and each musician was able to characterise their part.

Intersecting these 2 pieces was Ricketson’s Trace Elements. Taking its impetus from a collection of Renaissance lute music, the score is notated using tablature that provides the performers with directions about finger placements but not definite pitch. The subtitle, “four undefined genres for four unidentified instruments (two bowed strings and two winds)”, points to the enormous range of interpretations possible. For this performance, the chosen instruments were flute, clarinet, violin and cello.

What remained unclear throughout the performance was the degree to which interaction between parts was important. The players were situated in a straight line, allowing the audience a good look at what they were doing, but reducing the possibilities for in-the-moment reactions between them. As individual parts, there was a great deal to like about the music. Particularly impressive were Kathleen Gallagher (flute) and Geoffrey Gartner (cello), who both played with flair and virtuosity. Gallagher’s flexibility of sound was on show as she subtly varied the degree of breathiness and articulation, although it was not entirely clear why the tuning of the flute differed from that of the clarinet (Jason Noble). As a quartet, the music might have been more interesting had the performers been required to play without a conductor, heightening the cohesion of the voices. I look forward to hearing future performances of Trace Elements with less quotidian instrumentation and tuning.

The second half of the performance contained the evening’s 2 world premieres. Kos’ Fatamorgana was written in response to the death of his wife Milana. In this piece each instrument has a fairly distinct role. The violin (Sophie Cole) and cello remain in an accompanying position playing drones and slow glissandi. The piano (Katarina Kroslakova) and percussion (flawlessly played by Jeremy Barnett) comment on the material played by other instruments. Launched above this is an intricate interplay between the flute and clarinet (Diana Springford). These lines are detailed and intense, their shaping clear and decisive. Gallagher’s trills were quick and virile.

Finnissy’s Springtime was the night’s highlight. Formed in 2 sections, the first requires little coordination between parts. As is the style with these kinds of passages, much of the music consists of long unadorned lines. The second section relies on intense listening for both performer and audience. For the first time in the concert, textures were allowed to grow in density and some genuinely climactic moments ensued. Noble’s clarinet playing was effortless. The glissandi in the violin and cello, common to most of the evening’s works, had incredible life. The piece ended with slowly descending tremolo cello harmonics and fleeting jeté col legno battuto violin ascents.

What better birthday tribute for Bozidar Kos than good music played with flair and sensitivity.

Ensemble Offspring, Bozidar Kos: Celebrating 70 Years, works by Bozidar Kos, Damien Ricketson, Michael Finnissy, Matthew Bieniek; conductor Roland Peelman; Sydney Conservatorium, July 4

Not so long ago, would be musicians only had performance and teaching as career options. Now a range of professional alternatives reflect increasingly hybrid artforms and a diversity of music industries. A comparable array of training programs are also now available. Students are wise to remain flexible, however, as many will have to rely on diversity to sustain their careers. As Rick Rogers recently wrote in Creating a Land with Music (HEFCE, London, 2002): “Being a musician today involves having the opportunity to take on a series of roles, different from and broader than the act of performing or composing.”

The options

The Australian Guide to Careers in Music (Michael Hannan, MCA, Sydney, 2003) lists over 150 categories of professional opportunities for musicians, describing the nature of the work, potential remuneration range and required training. Music institutions reflect this diversity: a survey of music training providers conducted by the Australian Music Centre (AMC) in April 2004 uncovered more than 30 undergraduate degrees in music, 40 postgraduate degrees with music specialisations and a similar number of vocational awards. Now that Australian conservatoriums are located inside universities, it’s not surprising to find combined degrees pairing music with commerce, law, psychology, science and visual arts. Musicians have the chance to play around with their emerging careers and fewer opt for performance in its traditional guises. Even teaching now comes in a range of shades: studio, classroom, multi-instrumental and community mentoring. Some options are available online.

Music has always included many traditions and styles. What musicians do and how they do it parallels social, economic and technological factors as much as new forms of artistry, so inevitably current trends in collaborative practice and recording have created new careers. Some emerge from technology: multimedia, complex audio production, delivery of real time performance online and composing direct to computer all offer fresh options for performers and composers. Courses in music technology are now extremely competitive and demand high quality applicants with music ability on entry. Increasing reliance on technology is also making room for more specialist librarians. In fact, behind all this technology lies an array of career options arising from music’s associations with engineering, production, administration, management, distribution, publishing and law.

Therapy, theatre, film

Then there are the makeovers. Music Therapy was previously available only at postgraduate level at the University of Melbourne, but is now offered to undergraduates at the University of Queensland. Interest in Music Theatre inspired its early elevation from an elective to a discrete degree at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, followed by more recent programs devoted exclusively to music and Musical Theatre at Central Queensland Conservatorium of Music and the Arts Academy at the University of Ballarat. Screen composition, originally the postgraduate responsibility of the Australian Film Television and Radio School, now appears in varying forms elsewhere.

Pop/contemporary

The pop music industry holds numerous potential careers for musicians as performers, audio/video engineers, producers, entrepreneurs, agents and distributors. Recognising this potential, some institutions have adopted pop (or ‘contemporary’) music in a serious way. Most providers within the Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector focus on ‘commercial contemporary’ music performance, music technology and music business as complementary pathways into the industry. Box Hill Institute (Victoria) is a notable example: it is an accredited Digidesign Pro School offering certification in ProTools, which is essential in cutting edge production of live and recorded audio.

Southern Cross University was the first to move away from traditional training, and has focused on contemporary music since the late 1980s. The Gold Coast Campus of Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University has since joined the pop-only club, collaborating with a conveniently co-located multimedia department. While other universities offer popular music as an option, only these 2 have devoted their resources exclusively to this field.

The jury is still out on whether institutions can keep up with the rapid pace of change in pop music, but its recognition as a formal training option can’t help but strengthen interest in the industry as a viable professional arena. Clearly its inclusion has underlined the range of specific and generic skills necessary for survival in the commercial music industry: “Contemporary popular music practice typically involves instrumental performance, vocal performance, songwriting, record production and business skills in equal amounts” (Michael Hannan, “The Training of Contemporary Popular Musicians”, Music Forum, vol 7, no 1, Sydney, 2000).

Institutions/Industry: poor partners

Despite expanding professional possibilities and a range of training to match, there is still little evidence of effective collaboration between institutions and industries. Few universities take seriously their potential to assist graduate placement. Some provide short-term projects in their local communities or with professional organisations such as festivals, orchestras and opera companies. Fewer exploit non-traditional alternatives within the commercial sector or Indigenous companies. Recognising that musicians are likely to need a diversity of skills to sustain a career, several universities encourage activities which develop self-sufficiency. However, on the whole “no-one could accuse Australian tertiary education of being in the (music) industry’s pocket” (Andy Arthurs, “Creative Industries and Music”, Sounds Australian, no. 64, 2004).

Surprisingly, the AMC survey found Vocational Education and Training (VET) institutions less likely to interact with industry than the universities, even though VET focuses on skills-based training. Further, the potential for the VET framework to feed into universities has yet to be realised. Only a minority of universities are dual sector providers offering parallel VET awards, and relatively few recognise VET equivalents in their degree requirements.

Monitoring outcomes

Australian institutions are not required to maintain a long-term professional profile of their graduates—so they don’t. The only national indicator of graduate destinations measures successful first placement, no matter what its specific nature. However, in 2000 the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) introduced the following crucial and specific criterion for premium funding of specialist institutions: “More than 75% of graduates are working primarily in professional music performance, as performers of music, within 5 years of graduating from the institution” (Funding of Specialist Higher Education Institutions, HEFCE, London, 2002). This funding implication confines institutions to performance training, contrary to existing Australian trends toward more disparate outcomes. If current discussions on higher education reform in Australia eventually result in similar policies, institutions will be forced to develop more tangible professional connections.

The survey asked music institutions how they interact with graduate destinations. Responses largely centred on informal tracking of graduates via alumni associations and teacher networks, with no indication of how this might be useful. Some draw on visiting lecturers to link with professional practice. Only a few recognised the question as inviting detail of industry involvement in planning, internships or graduate placement, probably because these are less common.

Because many music graduates freelance, they don’t relate to a single career destination in the traditional sense. Still, institutions could do more to forge effective links with various industries. Currently, less than 20% of institutions confirm that they apply industry advice to their courses. Only 12% offer work experience or field placements, and 10% provide showcase opportunities with industry personnel for their graduates, an activity appropriate only to specific programs.

Perhaps these statistics result from attempts to provide some professional practice within the curriculum. However, beyond the lofty claim by one respondent that students “receive all the information that successful musicians need” (Survey of Australian Music Institutions, AMC, Sydney, 2004), the data suggests that while most institutions offer some training in technology, relatively few provide music industry electives, business skills and career-oriented projects.

Go solo or collaborate?

The reality is that building and sustaining a successful career is largely the responsibility of the graduate. With the competitive nature of the music profession, this is a positive requirement for any emerging musician, but it may create a dilemma for those who choose a program with a narrow range of available options. Most will need to apply their creative skills in developing a career path parallel to developing their art. When Lucy Holmes of Brisbane enrolled in a Bachelor of Music Theatre at Central Queensland Conservatorium in the late 1990s, she had no thought of a career based on impersonating pop singer Kylie Minogue. Yet Lucy’s 100% Kylie show has since made her an international success.

The trend toward collaborative practice offers access to a wider range of opportunities, encouraging students to become responsible for their own learning, a positive quality for musicians who must build their own careers. Most institutions encourage and support collaborative work, but relatively few devote specific programs to it. Leading the field, Queensland University of Technology’s Creative Industries focus explores “forms which cannot be easily categorised”, encouraging students “to work across boundaries.” The University of Wollongong has recently redesigned all programs into one Creative Arts degree requiring collaboration in each strand.

Despite inevitable concerns about reduced focus and lack of quality, interdisciplinary experiences soften the edges for musicians who have yet to decide where their individual boundaries lie and how much ‘playing around’ they wish to do.

Artists reflect on their education

The articles on training in dance, sound art, theatre, film (animation), performance and new media art in our education feature are based on interviews with artists who graduated in the last 3 to 7 years. Already some of the courses they completed have changed substantially, others not. However, discrete new media art and especially sound art courses had barely begun in this period. It’s not surprising then to find that the articles about sound art and new media art are largely about visual art school experiences.

That a considerable number of new media and sound artists have emerged from art schools says something about the way in the 1990s those schools were responding to and even initiating changes in the art world around them. For that reason, these articles should be read in conjunction with the spirited appraisal by Su Baker (Head, School of Art, Victorian College of the Arts) of students and their relationships with art schools. Given the assumptions of some critics that students are being duped and that Australian art is therefore in a sorry state, it’s heartening to read former students reflecting on the many advantages, challenges and occasional conflicts in their training. Access to equipment, the importance of theory and multidisciplinary skilling, the significance of mentoring (formal or informal) and the introductions to invaluable networks all rate highly in their assessment of their education.

What is also regarded highly is a certain flexibility, the need sometimes for the student artist to change direction and for courses to be responsive. A number of the interviewed artists found their professional careers by circuitous means or sudden shifts of interest. Some worry that in the age of the pragmatic approach “targeting and attempting to second guess ‘industry’ may perhaps backfire, producing a glut of artists doing what is already being done, instead of producing artists who can provide new ideas and ways of thinking” (p34).

There is a difference between training students in terms of industry and the university entering a relationship with industry. In her article on music education, Helen Lancaster, while appreciating the career opportunities that are expanding beyond performance and composition for graduates, writes that “there is still little evidence of effective collaboration between institutions and industries. Few universities take seriously their potential to assist graduate placement.” She also reports that, unlike their UK counterparts “Australian institutions are not required to maintain a long-term professional profile of their graduates—and they don’t.” What she does applaud in a number of courses is “the trend toward collaborative practice offer[ing] access to a wider range of opportunities, encouraging students to become responsible for their own learning, a positive quality for musicians who must build their own careers.” It is that sense of independence which is most often felt when the artists in this edition reflect on the impact of their education. One factor that might have a negative impact in this respect is the problem growing around teacher-student ratios.

The arts, ecologically

My thanks to those of you who responded to my article on the problematic relationship between the ABC and the arts community and, more particularly, on developing a new way of thinking about the arts, one not predicated on the prevailing business model. There’ll be more about this in RealTime 63 with a report on the forthcoming seminar “Culture and creativity in Australia: the role of arts and cultural organisations in innovation in the arts.” This is to be held on August 27 at the University of Technology Sydney and is organised by UTS (Writing Centre and Transforming Cultures Centre) and Currency House.

Innovation and the arts

RealTime 63 will focus on innovation in new media arts and hybrid performance. The term ‘innovation’ is increasingly deployed as a claim for significance, it’s a common criterion for arts funding and part of the justification for the arts-science-industry nexus. What does innovation mean, when does it happen, in what kind of work and who are the innovators?

RealTime-BEAP

A RealTime writing team will be responding to the exhibitions and conferences in the 2004 Biennial of Electronic Arts Perth, September 7-12. Log on to our website for daily coverage of the event. KG

Gateshead is just across the River Tyne from Newcastle in England’s north-east, and like many second cities it’s a poor relation. Newcastle has all the accoutrements of a successful financial and social hub. Gateshead is depressed. Its major industries (heavy engineering, mining and shipbuilding) were victims of the rationalisations of the late 20th century and left a legacy of long-term unemployment. Crossing one of the many bridges from Newcastle is always a shock, with the sudden transition to dereliction and poverty as soon as you hit the southern bank of the river.

Gateshead Council has tried to address the problem by building one of Europe’s biggest shopping malls. The MetroCentre combines a fantasy world of Disney-style themed areas—fibreglass olde English village squares inside ugly, windowless concrete hulls—with “the exciting world of retail therapy.”

Then, remarkably, they commissioned what must be one of the world’s largest public sculptures, Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North. Completed in February 1998, it dominates the southern approaches to the city and welcomes visitors who travel by rail, road and even air. Over 33 million people see the Angel every year. The website proudly declares its wingspan (54 metres) is the same as a jumbo jet. And that’s exactly what many of the local residents think it resembles. These are working class families with long term links to the area and its heritage. Many are in their second generation of unemployment. Their nice view of the countryside to the south is now dominated by something they compare to the rusting hulk of a crashed 747.

Their humour wasn’t improved when the council began a major regeneration of the south bank of the Tyne to commemorate the millennium. The Gateshead Millennium Bridge is an exquisite example of articulating engineering design. It leads the wealthy and informed citizens of Newcastle to the courtyard of the old Baltic Flour Mill, now converted into the impressive BALTIC centre for the contemporary arts. Next door is the soon-to-be-completed Sage Gateshead, a curvaceous, glazed performing arts centre fondly referred to by locals as “the slug.” Behind these buildings are fashionable high-rise apartment blocks whose windows look north to Newcastle, where their inhabitants will work and play.

Urban gentrification schemes of this kind are the subject of a major new work by Mike Stubbs called City Strapline Industries (www.strapline.org.uk/). Stubbs has gained an international reputation for his work as an artist and curator, and was recently appointed Curatorial Manager at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne.

Straplines are the hyperbole of the branding agencies. Here Gateshead is not a run-down city in urgent need of repair, but “the UK’s premiere urban opportunity.” Witness BALTIC and the Slug. The decision to premiere City Strapline Industries at BALTIC was inspired, since the arts centre epitomises many of the themes that Stubbs’ work explores.

City Strapline Industries consists of 2 simultaneous video projections on opposing walls of the BALTIC’s performance space. To the left are clips of the official proceedings as The Newcastle Gateshead Initiative prepare their joint bid to be European City of Culture in 2008. Stubbs was artist-in-residence at the agency and casually records their planning, rapture and eventual despair when the official announcement is made that rival city Liverpool has won [Robyn Archer will direct the cultural program. Eds].

On the screen to the right, a hidden camera in some deprived area of the city indifferently records locals watching as a gang of kids destroy a parked car. Eventually the law turns up and the kids and locals melt away as the police lethargically collect the debris. The viewer has to decide whether to focus on the straplines and fantasies of the branding exercise or watch a stark piece of urban realism; the real city behind the bullshit.

Between the 2 screens, gently rotating on a large turntable is a classic work of urban folk art. The late Tex Widderington turned his car into a homage to his beloved Newcastle United football club. Every surface is decorated with club miscellanea: logos, players’ names, supporters’ slogans and so on.

Stubbs’ work explores the space between the spin doctors who believe in gentrification as a means of revitalising neglected urban ghettos and the disenfranchised population who suspect both the motives and ambition behind such projects. In the endless grey space between the 2 is a work of art made by a local as an expression of love for his football team—a work that may well get scrapped because it isn’t ‘real’ art. Real art looks, at least to the locals, like a crashed 747, costs £800,000 and spoils the view.

Putting this large-scale installation in BALTIC prompts an important question. Why did the city burghers of Gateshead choose to build an arts centre that is so emphatically aimed at the elitist European artworld? Comparisons with Ipswich, Brisbane’s poor relation in Queensland’s south-east come to mind. There the city council of an equally impoverished region (which had also lost its industries) created Global Arts Link (GAL), an arts centre specifically oriented towards the local community. Their founding director, Louise Denoon (now at the Museum of Brisbane) curated shows that reflected the local community and gave them a strong sense of ownership.

In Cumbria, just 50 miles west of Newcastle and Gateshead, is Carlise and the Tullie House Gallery. A show was mounted there in October 2003 based on the remains of the Blue Streak rocket-testing grounds built in 1956 at nearby Spadeadam. The show included photographic and video work by John Kippin and Louise K Wilson. It was an overwhelming success. Local residents visited and recounted the way their houses shook when the rockets’ engines were fired, and ex-Spadeadam employees from around the world (including many who had migrated to South Australia to work at Woomera) came to see the show. Like the program at GAL, the show emerged from, and fed back into, the local community.

Large scale electronic artworks that grow out of the community are not unknown at BALTIC. In 2003 they commissioned the remarkable A Free and Anonymous Monument by Jane and Louise Wilson. The commission involved 6 local kids whose participation is documented on their website, “The Way We Live.” It’s a multi-screen video installation which includes huge hanging concrete slabs based on Victor Pasmore’s Apollo Pavilion at Peterlee (recently saved from demolition) and Pasmore and Richard Hamilton’s 1956 show Environmental Painting (Suspended Construction). The shots of kids climbing Pasmore’s graffiti-coated concrete construction are reminiscent of scenes from City Strapline Industries.

So is BALTIC a postmodern zoo where the inhabitants of these deprived areas are put on show for the amusement of the wealthy and educated art cognoscenti? Pippa Coles, curator of Stubbs’ show, defends their position. In 2 years BALTIC has establish a reputation as one of Europe’s leading centres for the contemporary arts. She quotes Tessa Jowell, UK Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, in saying that art does not need to have a social agenda.

Emma Thompson, BALTIC’s Education and Public Program officer provides more statistics. Over 60% of general visitors and over 80% of education visitors come from the local region, though these statistics don’t differentiate between the affluent (Newcastle, Corbridge) and poorer (Gateshead) areas. OfSted, the British government’s education watchdog, has commended BALTIC’s dynamic linking program with Gateshead schools. The centre also has a growing outreach program involving local community and youth centres.

As an artist myself, I like the Angel of the North and admire BALTIC and its outstanding programs. But as someone who has some distant roots (and remaining relatives) in Gateshead, I feel uneasy. With such a large space and a major budget, couldn’t BALTIC be doing just a wee bit more to relate to the local community? As Louise Denoon’s example at GAL in Ipswich demonstrates, it’s possible to achieve this without having to compromise either reputation or integrity.

Mike Stubbs, City Strapline Industries, BALTIC, Gateshead, UK, March 27-April 30

UK-based festival onedotzero has cornered the world market in digitally generated moving imagery, its slick and fashionable brand celebrating the fusion of artistic expression and commercial opportunity. It brought to the Sydney Film Festival its signature, well packaged compilations of what Director Shane Walters describes as “nanotainment”, a mixture of motion graphics, pop promos, computer game graphics and animated films. But inside the shiny packaging lurked some dark and unsettling themes that questioned the impact of technology and commercialism on our lives and the powerful role of nanotainment in anaesthetising us to their effects.

Nanotainment is all around us, defining our visual culture and even our reality. Our lives are filled with bite-sized servings of moving imagery. On the bus, on mobile phones, on the internet, at the ATM; all these media delivery locations are short-attention-span zones where we do not have time to question or reflect on what we have seen. We may not even notice the scores of mini-movies we consume everyday.

So it is a strange experience to sit and watch hours of the stuff in one go. It’s a bit like making a meal of hors d’oeuvres, the feeling of fatigue and over-consumption obliquely suggests the negative effect of the saturation of moving images in our daily lives.

Among the inevitable cutesy animations, comic inventions and upbeat dance videos, the darker works gravitate to themes of biotechnology, urban disintegration, propaganda and consumption. The clash of the natural, artificial and commercial is explored in films such as Quietus, by Precursor, a journey through a fantastical artificial life system where organs, hooked up to a chaotic mass of plastic tubes, leak blood and sprout exotic flowers. There is also Ebaby, by Pleix, in which a baby in a computer incubator is connected by a “remote relational system” to an unseen “mother” via sensor gloves.

Others explore urban distopias. Plates Animation’s video for Let It Go (Cormega/MOP) depicts a post-nuclear apocalyptic stand-off where gas-masked police nod their heads to the beat. Alexander Rutterford’s video for Radiohead’s Go To Sleep features automata in business suits walking obliviously through an imploding city.

The most self-aware and ironic of the works expose and deconstruct the rhetorical power of graphics and advertising, or nanotainment. Knife Party’s (Simon Robson) polemical What Barry Says illustrates a monologue on American foreign policy with an ingenious sequence of stencilled graphic slogans which morph into swastikas and tanks, revealing the totalitarian function of logos and visual design. Richard Fenwick’s Safety Procedures demonstrates the power of graphics to sanitise dangerous realities. An animated airline safety card shows a crash landing in water, as the voiceover calmly recites the emergency drill. The simple graphic characters demonstrate a counterpoint reality in which uncooperative oxygen masks, lifejackets and escape hatches thwart passengers’ attempts to follow the instructions.

Most disturbing, however, is the profoundly ambivalent Psyop agency’s theme tune Anthem, in which animated characters sing a cheerful homage to their ability to “persuade, change and influence.” The economy will fail if we don’t keep selling things to people: “That’s where Psyop comes in” they sing, as mushroom clouds explode around them. “You won’t notice you are dying—just as long as you keep on buying.” What’s scary about Psyop is that they depict themselves and the media they produce as an essential part of an insane, dangerous, manipulative reality, catapulting itself towards destruction. But a look at their list of clients, which includes Pfizer and Starbucks, shows that they are happy to play their part in the insane reality they depict.

onedotzero demonstrates a similarly paradoxical attitude to the powerful weapon of nanotainment. In a Q and A session during the festival, Shane Walters spoke with excitement about the proliferation of possible commercial outlets for the content he deals in. He has positioned onedotzero to take advantage of these outlets not only by collecting and showcasing work, but also by producing and distributing it. As the organisation goes from strength to strength it is hard to say whether this is commercial savvy at the service of critical and alternative artistic expression, or whether the political and subversive content is just part of the “edginess” of the onedotzero brand. Given the overwhelmingly commercial nature of the format, are the more challenging works neutralised by being employed as just another selling point?

onedotzero_Sydney, 51st Sydney Film Festival, Dendy Opera Quays and The Studio, Sydney Opera House, June 17-22

Revelling in a world increasingly dependent upon technical toys and worrying at the growing global challenges to life and art, Electrofringe 2004 poses 3 options for survival: replicate, automate, infiltrate. With this provocative theme, the festival explores the many manifestations of media art practice in a 5-day program of workshops, panel discussions, masterclasses, showcases, exhibitions, screenings and performances.

Wade Marynowsky and Emma Stewart have teamed with 2003 festival co-director Gail Priest to create a 2004 program with a more fluid approach to the areas of sound art, audiovisual fusions, screen-based explorations, new media performance and interactive installations. Looking at ideas of replication, discussion panels will deal with bio-tech, a-life and art science fusions. What is compelling artists to make digital progeny and how are they going about it? What is the interplay of virtual and real through mediated environments? Automation opens up discussion of DIY robotics, generative art and cellular automata, querying where humans fit in an expanded reality. On the infiltration front, artists discussing their works will explore appropriation, connectivity and digital communities, locative and mobile media, asking how technologies can be used for alternate and subversive purposes.

The main body of the program takes the form of panel discussions with topics such as Appropriate or Perish? with Wake Up and Listen and Soda_Jerk; The Poetry and Politics of the Art Science Nexus with Boo Chapple and Dusan Bojic; DVD Creations and Mutations with Vikki Wilson and Corin Edwards. There is strong focus on interactivity with panels such as Cause and Effect 1: the Human in the Interface presenting the latest installation work by George Khut; Cause & Effect 2: Performance Integrations looking at recent projects such as Anna Helme and Louise Terry’s Electric Dreams and Fiona Malone’s Obcell; and Sentient Screens, interactive video works by David Wolf, Mel Donat and Tim Webster.

Electrofringe confirms its growing international standing with a workshop and presentation by Eric Singer (USA) and his League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR); video artist and VJ HC Gilje (Norway/Germany) from the award winning 242 Pilots; nMn aka Lieven Menschaert & Jan De Pauw (Belgium), the Ghent chapter of Dorkbot who will be making music with microscopic creatures; and Aki Onda (Japan), producer, composer and photographer.

With an increased emphasis on hands-on skills sharing there will be several intensive workshops on the first day of the festival including Locative Media co-presented by ANAT, dLux and Electrofringe. Sampling Site/Instant Places is a combined audio and visual workshop with Anthony Magin and Joel Stern on the use of contact microphones to sample the audio environment with Ian Birse and Laura Kavanagh (Canada) guiding the visual sampling. Along with other interested artists, Laura and Ian will then be in residence for the next 4 days in ProjectSpace working with the material and presenting the results on the Sunday evening. ProjectSpace will also function as a media lounge with screen-based works and net.art projects on display during the festival. Courtesy of the University of Western Sydney there will also be a dedicated Patcher Lab for all manner of technical tinkering in the software world of Max/MSP and related methodologies.

In the Newcastle Region Art Gallery Electrofringe will present 2 programs. The first is Oribotics by Matt Gardiner, an installation that combines origami, robotics and an interactive audiovisual interface. The second is a screening program curated for gallery viewing. Electrofringe is also collaborating with local gallery Rocketart to present an exhibition curated by Rebecca Cannon and Ashley Whamond, looking at technological mediations of the everyday. There will also be a satellite exhibition of screen and net.art works at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space through October.

The screening program, a huge hit of the 2003 festival, returns with another ElectroProjections series of experimental screen works from a global call for submissions, as well as the international showcase from Transmediale04, The Marler Video Art Prize showcase courtesy of the Goethe Institute, excerpts from Rebecca Cannon’s NeoPoetry and the return of Resolutionary TV, curated by Tim Parish and Undergrowth collective.

Also back again is QuantaCrib, run by the Not Art Cadets, who will be creating a workshop/performance space for improvised, collaborative explorations. Throw in some mutant industrial robots and the program is looking wild, loud and full of provocative ideas. Immerse yourself. RT

Electrofringe 2004, This Is Not Art, Newcastle, Sept 30-Oct 4, full program available mid-August, www.electrofringe.net

Much of the particular joy of experiencing internet art is that it enters your own private space. Curating and exhibiting internet art in a gallery shifts the context of the artwork from the private to the public, creating new meanings and experiences for audiences. Something is lost and something is gained.

In the case of d>Art.04 Web a great deal of significance was added by the public context. The exhibition was part of dLux media arts’ annual showcase of digital art presented at the Sydney International Film Festival. The 6 internet works selected by curator and web artist Melinda Rackham were exhibited alongside sound art selected by Gail Priest in the Sydney Opera House Gallery. The illustrious venue, dLux’s skilful staging and the festival context all conspired to give this small exhibition added impact.

Drawn from 6 different countries, Rackham’s selection covered a range of current themes and approaches, from the relationship between real, virtual and networked spaces in Selectparks’ ACMIpark (www.acmi.net.au/acmipark.jsp), to explorations of web aesthetics in Enrique Radigales’s Ideal Word (www.idealword.org).

Some works suffered more than others in the shift to a public context. Pac Man and the Minotaur by Brazilian designer Andrei Thomaz (rgbdesigndigital.com.br) explores the parallels between eponymous maze-dwelling characters through a retro-aesthetic of 1980s low resolution graphics. Prosthetic Component Interfaces is a series of monochrome interactive sound toys by American-based Andrew Bucksbarg (www.adhocsound.org). These pieces of web whimsy would have been refreshing distractions if encountered while immersed in the labyrinthine structure and goal-oriented interaction of the internet. Divorced from this context they seemed simplistic.

In contrast, the experience of Stained Linen by Canadian artist Linda Duvall (www.lindaduvall.ca) was enhanced by the exhibition setting. The work is all about eavesdropping. It allows users to select and pursue snippets of private dinner party conversations from tantalising hook words such as “condemn”, “innocent” and “in love.” The choices made, which are almost unconscious when in private, gain in significance in public. The user’s interactions become very much part of the work’s illicit quality, both for the player being watched and for those watching.

Despite the failures of some individual pieces the exhibition itself was a pleasure to experience. The design skillfully exploited the potential of this individual mode, paradoxically producing a social experience. Alluring neon seats on a raised platform at the far end of the gallery turned the sound installation into the focal point of the exhibition, providing a vantage point from which to gaze back at those interacting with the web art. The room was full of people watching each other listen and interact and this became part of the spectacle.

Exhibiting internet art is as much about watching, enjoying and sharing the experiences of your fellow audience members as it is about the work itself. The gallery space compensates for what you lose in privacy by providing the opportunity of literally seeing other points of view. The diversity of visitors at the Opera House made for a rich set of social experiences. It was particularly interesting watching a group of American school boys interact with ACMIpark, a 3D model of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and its Federation Square surrounds, produced using game engine technology. One boy had a very clear idea of what a multiplayer online game world was, but no conception of ACMI, Federation Square or possibly even Melbourne. He attempted to kill oblivious virtual inhabitants of ACMIpark with disappointingly non-lethal light balls. “It’s not a game, Steve” said one of his friends with regret, “there’s no point.” “I don’t think you’re meant to kill anyone,” replied Steve, “I think it’s just art.”

The major gain in showing internet art in a gallery is encouraging just this kind of conversation, by putting an art-form on display that still falls below the radar of the general public and even much of the art press. The invisibility of web art is particularly noticeable in Sydney at the moment due to its complete absence from the Biennale. In contrast, the current 2004: Australian Culture Now show at ACMI and the National Gallery of Victoria has a major online element, also curated by Rackham. So our virtual projection from Sydney to Melbourne via ACMIpark was a reminder that in a national and international context this small 6-piece exhibition was only a glimpse at an art form of growing significance. Hopefully dLux will expand this component of the annual d>art showcase to produce an event of greater magnitude in the future.

d>Art.04 Web, curator Melinda Rackham, 51st Sydney Film Festival, Sydney Opera House Gallery, June 17-27

If anything stands out from the themes of the 5 constellating exhibition/conferences of the BEAP 2004 (Biennial of Electronic Arts Perth) under the banner of SameDifference, it’s an implicit evocation of a world in transition, same but different—very different. While the themes are those we have grown up with as new media evolved as art in the 1990s, they have become more focused, more acutely suggestive of profound perceptual shifts (subtler than the imagined impact of VR) and politically actual (everything from electronic voting to advanced genetic manipulation).

However BEAP Director Paul Thomas is just as concerned to “reduce unnecessary difference”, such as that accentuated by geographical distance. He sees BEAP as vital for Perth, with the capital becoming “a digital city” in the course of the event, integrating local artists into the international scene. As he explains, Perth already has much in the way of new media assets, including the bio-art of SymbioticA, an artist-run laboratory uniquely placed within the Biological Science Department at the University of Western Australia. It’s time, Thomas thinks, for Perth to transcend its old-tech US branding of “City of Light.” The integrative aspect of BEAP is reflected in the way that the event is based in partnerships with universities, galleries and companies, and expanded beyond the immediate event with BEAPWORKS, which provides grants for local new media artists whose art will be showcased in the 2005 Perth International Festival of the Arts. Perth, says Thomas, is “a microcosm for exploring the social impact of biological, sonic, perceptual and distributive effects of new media without creating difference.” Each theme in BEAP is realised as an exhibition: 5 openings on successive days, and a conference relating to each exhibition on the subsequent day. Wisely, the conferences don’t compete; you can attend the lot.

Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of SymbioticA are curating Bio-Difference: Born and Bred an exhibition and conference that will consider notions of normality versus abnormality and the monstrous. Technologically sustained artworks featuring “living and (semi-living) objects/subjects” will raise issues of otherness and eugenic manipulation and will certainly test the notion that art is well-placed to debate current ethical controversies. The sometimes seductive, if worrying beauty of these creations warrants aesthetic consideration too in the relationship between laboratory and gallery.

Data-Difference: The Dissolution of Locale is an online exhibition curated by Pauline Williams with an accompanying conference focusing on the impact in public and private places of immersive media on our experience of space: “the blurring of the boundaries between place/space and viewer/artist.” How we describe this space is critical. Williams cites Legrady: “one should consider Internet space as a metaphoric space accessed through a technological window linking individuals in real time across geographical territories.” (Legrady, G., New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative, ed. Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp, BFI publishing, London, 2002).

Sound artist Nigel Helyer is curating Sonic-Difference: Re-sounding the World. Helyer argues that “audio has habitually been forced to play poor cousin in visually over-driven cultures.” However sound artists “have retained their position as pioneers of new creative methodologies and technologies”, consistently operating at the science-art juncture and playing a seminal role in developing immersive technologies. The Sonic-Difference Exhibition will feature architecturally site-specific works and outdoor or environmental projects while The Sonic-Difference Audio Lounge + the Aural-Web will provide both a physical listening space housing a comprehensive experimental sound archive as well as hosting a virtual sound-space in the form of web audio-cast.

Perceptual-Difference: Vision Systems is curated by Chris Malcolm of the John Curtin Gallery presenting works “exploring the boundaries of our current understanding of perception.” The conference will “investigate current theory and research into perception examining new technological developments that enhance artists’ abilities to visualise the invisible, help us unravel the real from the virtual and explore the moments in between.” New technology offers artists new ways to communicate, new ways for audiences to experience: issues of newness (and our neophilia) and neurological and phenomenological reconceptualisation will figure in the conference. The social and political impact of new media is the subject of Jeremy Blank’s Distributed-Difference program, an investigation into the shifting ground of local/global in networked distribution looking at globalisation, surveillance, tactical media and virtual culture.

BEAP promises full-on immersion in new media art, discussion and debate. The full program and an impressive list of visiting artists and thinkers will be announced in early August. Keep up with BEAP as it unfolds by joining us online as the RealTime team reviews exhibitions and reports conferences daily from the digital city (www.realtimearts.net).

BEAP (Biennial of Electronic Art Perth), John Curtin University and various venues, Exhibitions Sept 7-Nov 17, Conferences Sept 7-12, www.beap.org

Bilbao is a city well suited to exploring the “Challenges to a Ubiquitous Identity” theme of this year’s Ciber@rt festival and conference of digital art, since the city is in the midst of transforming its own identity from industrial powerhouse to cultural centre. It is the site of the new Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Gehry (with the aid of computer modelling), a wonderful building that stretches out along the river in a sculptural medley of titanium, limestone and glass.

Ciber@rt is a biennial event that began in Valencia, Spain in 1996 and relocated to Bilbao in 2004. This year’s festival was held at 2 different venues about 15 minutes walk apart. The exhibition was located in an old indoor market place, The Mercado del Ensanche. A total of 237 pieces were on show, most of them screen-based internet works providing an exhilarating investigation into internet culture in the broadest sense. The organisers were able to draw from a wide range of activity happening on the internet, thereby dodging the impasses of territorial contests. The works were divided into 5 separate categories: Net-Art, Multimedia, Minimisation (which included narrative and experimental work), Animation and Interactive Installations.

Christane Paule also curated a small show of 3 interactive installations entitled Evident Traces. The most dramatic and popular of these was Between Bodies: wearables for the telepathically impaired (Canada), a real-time interactive in which participants exchange data and sensations of muscle contractions through computer devices embedded in skirts which you wear. Quite an uncanny experience! Between Bodies is a collaboration between Thecla Schiphorst, Sang Mah, Robb Lovell, Susan Kozel, Norm Jaffe, Gretchen Elsner, Jan Erkke and Diana Burgoyne (http://whisper.iat.sfu.ca/).

The Net-Art part of the festival consisted of 26 works. One of the most enjoyable was Italian Francesco Michi’s Thebigear Project. Reminiscent of conceptual art strategies of the 60s and 70s, it asks you to build a soundscape by “imagining…such a powerful ear that it can perceive sounds coming from an endless acoustic horizon.” To participate you only need describe the sounds that you can hear wherever you are, which has the effect of making you stop and actually engage with your audio environment (www.aefb.org/thebigear).

Rosanne van Klaveren and Herri Behereak’s Braintec—Memoires of a Testee (Holland) is a very elaborate and quietly humorous work in the tradition of The Museum of Jurassic Technology. It is the sort of site that has a peculiar attraction for internet artists working in a medium where identities can so easily be fabricated or mimicked. Think Mouchette. The site creates a ‘scientific’ world of research scientists, labs, projects, even publications in reputable science magazines, and of course test subjects or ‘testees’, with diaries and pictures. The project asks you to believe that memes, or memory cells from the human brain, can be copied, removed from the brain and stored as binary code outside the body, an idea reminiscent of early cyber-fantasies. The slippage between fact and fiction creates a strange dual sensation of belief and disbelief (www.memoires.braintec.info/).

The multimedia section was also screen-based, consisting of 22 separate works, 8 of which were by the legendary Nicolas Clauss from Paris who has been working on the internet since 2000 (www.flyingpuppet.com/). In this short time he has produced an amazing quantity of work, often in collaboration with composers, sound artists or programmers. At a time when so much internet art is concerned with programming or networking, Clauss’ work is delightfully different. He focuses on the human, the fragile, the whimsical and the sensuous. Most of his pieces are small and exquisite, inviting you to engage through rollovers, which can set off unexpected sounds or shift an already strange image. One of my favourites, Le Cri, is a powerful reworking of Munch’s The Scream, conveying an inconsolable anguish.

David Crawford’s Stop Motion Studies need to be experienced in order to feel the full effect of their mesmerising power (www.stopmotionstudies.net/). If I were to say they are pictures of people on subways in 5 different cities, this would not convey the addictive fascination these studies inspire. Crawford has used the unique capacity of the digital to examine the tiny gestures and body movements of people as they sit, stand, run, walk, or sleep on subways from New York to Paris. In the Tokyo series people sleep standing up as well as in their seats, businessmen smoke in an odd nowhere place as if performing a strange ritual, young girls exchange secret messages and a woman appears and disappears as tiny figures behind her scuttle across a vast and empty space. There is a wonderful filmic sense to these studies, where the setting is just as vivid as the tiny animated movements of the actors.

The Minimisation section of the festival turned out to be vector animations done in Flash. There were some great examples of this small but lively art form. Insomnia (Fernando Rabelo, Brazil, 2003) is a hilarious interactive exploring the endless obsessions and irritating noises that we’ve all experienced while trying to sleep.

Another very quirky piece was Just off the A40 (Mantlepies, England, 2002, (www.mantlepies.com/fancyteeth/fancyteeth.html). This peculiar animation is part of a series of equally strange and surreal animations done for Channel4.com in London by the duo Mr Wellington and Mr Peters. The series is entitled Fancyteeth.

Ciber@rt Bilbao was a lively, if exhausting, event. It was exhilarating to see so much work collected in one place and good to see all the internet-based works given their own computer. However, there are still many challenges to overcome in showing internet and digital work. Curator Christiane Paul touched on some of the issues in her talk at the conference. But the greatest challenge from the point of view of artists is still the question of sound; as it is not a containable element there is always unwanted spillage. It will be a challenge for the next generation of architects to go beyond the weird shapes and materials of the Guggenheim Bilbao to spaces that really work for sound, image, video, internet and networked art.

Ciber@rt Bilbao 2004: Challenges for a Ubiquitous Identity, Bilbao, Spain, April 23-30, www.ciberart-bilbao.net/home_en.htm

Perhaps the best way to evaluate the benefits and pitfalls of tertiary art education is to speak to people who have recently completed their studies and are now practicing artists in the ‘real’ world. I conducted a series of interviews with some emerging new media artists and asked them to reflect on their educational experiences.

Generally their responses were overwhelmingly positive, with most artists heaping praise on the people, technology and experiences to which they had been exposed. Perhaps the most inspiring answer came from Michaela French. During the screening of a Super 8 documentary she made while studying printmaking, a visiting lecturer pulled her aside and told her she really needed to be making films: “From that moment my direction changed, my focus shifted and I began making things move. It was like being shown a door to my world, like finding a place where I fit, somewhere where all my ideas, stories, narratives and sequences had a context in which to exist.”

Following are excerpts from email interviews with the following new media artists: Kate Murphy (NSW), who attended the Canberra School of Art at the Australian National University (ACT) from 1995-1999; Michaela French (VIC), Canberra Institute of the Arts (ACT) 1988-1991; Thea Baumann (QLD), Queensland University of Technology 2000-2002; Mel Donat (NSW), School of Contemporary Art, University of Western Sydney 1998-2003 (including MA); and Kelli McCluskey and Steve Bull (WA), who both studied at the Cheltenham and Gloucester College in the UK between 1995-1998 and 1988-91 respectively, before coming to Australia in 1999.

Murphy: Ah, the old nature versus nurture huh? I don’t have the answer to that question! Art school has been a huge influence, technically and conceptually. Obviously you don’t have to go to art school to be an artist but I am glad that I did.

French: I think I was born with an inherent creativity and I have always known that I am happiest when I am creating. Going to art school taught me a lot about how to mould that creativity into an ongoing artistic practice. It taught me discipline and a lot about the management of artistic practice within a real world context. But in truth I don’t think I actually learned to be an artist until quite recently and the change was much more about a belief than a practice…It’s hard to say where the edges of being and learning start and end but it has certainly been a fulfilling process and in some ways I feel like I am now at the beginning.

Baumann: Yes and no. I think through my studies I learnt how to engage with and analyze art on a more critical, theoretical, complex level. Engaging in arts-based academic discourse was integral in developing my visual literacy skills, and honing my ability to articulate my own art practice. However, it was the professional endeavours I undertook outside of a formal institution…such as coordinating content for multi-arts festivals…and volunteering…that taught me more practical curatorial, people and management skills.

Donat: I believe I learnt to be a better artist at art school…[by learning] how to hone in on my creative talents. You can’t teach anyone to be an artist if they’re not one.

McCluskey: I think I learnt the value of collaborative practice and that’s stayed with me. I think also the notion of having a number of tools in your creative kit-bag: writing, research, video making, performing, directing. Seeing what form best suits the idea and being able to follow through with it was a great discovery.

So how would you say your current practice has been affected by your art education?

French: It is difficult to quantify exactly…Art school provided a clear foundation in terms of the ideas, process, discipline and context that now informs my work. I would not be without the experience…

Baumann: I probably wouldn’t be messing around with pixels. I’d still be at home playing with gouache and masking tape.

Donat: I would never have had the opportunity to work with and develop my art practice with the moving image without access to the equipment and teachers at university.

Bull: It certainly encouraged me to be brave, to try things out, take a risk here or there and work with other people as often as possible.

Did you learn many technical or craft-based skills at art school that are still relevant to your practice?

Murphy: In my department there was more emphasis on concept than technique, however I did learn technical skills which I still use today. Most of the skills, however, which I required weren’t taught at the time so I had to teach myself these and continue to do so.

French: A huge amount of what I learned regarding the development and articulation of ideas and the composition and construction of image remains completely relevant to my practice. I also studied a semester of colour theory and this perhaps had the strongest influence of all; my increased understanding of colour totally altered my way of seeing.

Baumann: I was introduced to technical equipment, software and new media technologies at art school. I had a great tutor who was very helpful, patient and encouraging when it came to giving us the lowdown on how equipment and software functioned. However, I would say that I am predominantly a self-taught new media artist.

Bull: I experimented a lot with video, sound and installation, made lots of mistakes and learnt from them. They are certainly relevant to my contribution to the group’s practice now [Bull is a member of PVI Collective], both conceptually and technically.

A common challenge facing many emerging artists is how to make art and be financially independent. Did your art education teach you how to survive as artists in the ‘real’ world?

Murphy: Art school offered a course called Professional Practices. It was a great course which gave advice with grant writing, contracts, tax etc. It was very helpful, I still refer to my notes.

French: Art school didn’t teach me how to make a living, but I did develop a determination and formed a strong commitment to my practice whilst I was there. These things, combined with a huge amount of persistence and endless support from family and friends, have made it possible for me to get to a point where I am able to survive through my creative endeavours.

Baumann: No. My time at art school was like dozing in a nice warm, youth allowance-encoated bubble. I was never tutored in what I would consider the fine art of grant writing, how to capitalise on my art works, business skills or taxation. It was only after I graduated and was thrust into the harsh world that I had to learn about these issues—and quickly!

Donat: Yes it did, but making a living in the sense that you could earn some money and notoriety from producing works. I more often use skills learnt such as being a sole trader and understanding copyright issues etc.

McCluskey: Hah! No, but I do remember getting advice on funding applications at one point, which helped greatly, as that really felt like an elusive creature to tackle when you left study.

Murphy: Yes, I would. The school has great teachers and programs. The theory workshop is also great. I think Canberra is a great place to study. There’s a really tight and committed art community there which is very encouraging…Also Canberra doesn’t have a lot of distractions so you study more and it is a lot cheaper to live there!

French: I would certainly recommend an art school as a place to formulate and experiment with ideas and develop strategies for an ongoing creative practice.

Baumann: Yes. If you are looking for a strong emphasis on exploring new media technologies (video, sound, gaming), experimentation, play and anti-traditionalist philosophies.

Donat: Yes, because of the multi-disciplinary thinking, access to different mediums and equipment and the teaching staff who are practicing artists. There is an overall attitude to help you develop not only as an artist, but also as an individual…I’m always of the belief that your work can be created by whatever means necessary and I believe this multi-disciplinary thinking has stemmed from attending UWS.

McCluskey: Going to any art school gives you clarity, something to kick against, opportunities to experiment and find your feet. I think it’s really important to have the breathing space to just make and to fuck up, to stay passionate and be supported and occasionally make something that you know will stay with you, whatever you choose to do afterwards.

In a typically pithy speech marking the commencement of this year’s St Kilda Film Festival, director Paul Harris noted the serious, even confrontational nature of many of the films in the program. He remarked that the opening night session reflected the provocative nature of the material many short filmmakers had elected to focus on.

Of the 7 films on offer, comedy and drama were evenly represented, with Ash Wednesday (Jason Tolsher, 2003), The Paddock (Peter Carstairs, 2003) and Alice (Garth Davis, 2003) tackling the grim topics of fratricide, rural isolation and the trauma of stillbirth. While Ash Wednesday suffered from an overly histrionic treatment of the family melodrama, The Paddock and Alice impressed with more considered approaches to their respective subjects.

These films flagged the uncompromising nature of many of the dramas featured in the festival, with topics ranging from pedophilia to suicide. But the opening night session was also instructive in another respect. It featured 3 films that focused on children—Clutch (Jackie Schultz, 2003), Alice and Marco Solo (Adrian Bosich, 2003)—establishing a recurring theme in the overall program. Youth-centered scenarios were conspicuous across all genres and formats including comedy, drama and documentary, and were equally well represented in the festival awards. Of the 150 films that screened at St Kilda, the most inspired were the short dramas that combined a focus on young lead characters with the sort of provocative subject matter Harris alluded to in his introductory comments.

I was less enamoured than the judges with 2 films that featured prominently in the festival awards: Martha’s New Coat (Rachel Ward, 2003) and And One Step Back (Mark Robinson, 2003). While both were undeniably well crafted, with strong performances from their youthful leads, neither tackled the dysfunctional family scenario with particular originality. There was a certain sameness to these polished, child-centered melodramas, to the point where both films featured half-sisters dealing with unreliable mothers and absent fathers.

Two films focusing on young boys, Green Eyes (Diana Leach, 2003) and Ice-Cream Hands (Gavin Youngs, 2002), made a much more powerful impact. The former is a stylistically sophisticated study in sibling rivalry. Leach initially establishes a fairytale feel to her period piece featuring a family who live in a lighthouse. But as the young son’s resentment of his baby sister intensifies, Cordelia Beresford’s atmospheric cinematography gives the film an increasingly surreal and sinister quality.

Gavin Youngs’ Ice-Cream Hands similarly interrogates the idea of childhood innocence, tackling the topic of pedophilia in a courageous and original fashion. Minimal dialogue and an intentionally whimsical visual style mixing naive animation with stylised live action offer an appropriately disturbing take on the subject.

Victim (2003) takes a more oblique approach to the youth oriented theme. Directed and co-written by Corrie Jones, this taut, unsettling drama deals with the violent abduction of a young woman. Beautifully shot and edited, Jones uses odd camera angles and grainy images to register the victim’s point of view. As her voice-over takes on a retrospective tenor, the constant presence of a child suggests innocence irretrievably lost. With a restrained but genuinely shocking denouement, Victim is a strikingly assured work that justifiably won Jones the Best New Director Award in addition to sharing the SBS Eat Carpet Award.

Other films worthy of mention included 2 coming-of-age teen dramas: Redskin (Melanie Horkan, 2003) and Oranges (Kristian Pithie, 2003). The former, with its melancholic tone and compelling teen heroine, recalled Christine Jeffs’ debut feature Rain (2000). Oranges, with sensitive performances from its 2 young male leads, surprised with its unexpected dramatic twist. Mittens (Emma Freeman, 2003) and Postie (Nathan Keene, 2003) positioned their young protagonists in period settings to excellent effect. The former is a moving story of childhood disability and alienation, while the latter’s startling outback imagery provided the 19th century backdrop for a young Aboriginal girl’s struggle to reconcile family and tribal loyalties.

Perhaps the predilection for youth oriented themes in this selection of short films is hardly surprising, given that emerging filmmakers might be drawn more consistently to personal or autobiographical material in the early stages of their careers. More noteworthy is the bleak tenor of most of the films. These are not nostalgic portraits of childhood and adolescence, but troubled sagas of juvenile disaffection, where flawed adults routinely fail their younger counterparts.

Having emphasised the strength of short dramas in the festival, it was striking that the most inspiring documentaries and comedies also addressed childhood and adolescent concerns. Moving (Brodie Higgs, 2003) and Twenty Minutes with Les Twentyman (Anne Wooley, 2003), both produced by Sally Ingleton, explored adolescent isolation and homelessness. But the most telling non-fiction accounts of youthful alienation came from 2 documentaries dealing with children in Australian detention centers. Amanda and Ali (Karen Hodgkins, 2003) is a touching, no-frills portrait of a friendship across the barbed wire fence. Even more compelling, the animated documentary It’s Like That (Southern Ladies Animation Group, 2003) matched the recorded voices of detained children with childlike, animated imagery to heartrending effect. The latter film deservedly took out the award for Best Documentary.

Of the comedies, the cine-literate Confessions of an Animation (Steve Baker, 2004) and the sustained scatological riff Kenny (Clayton Jacobson, 2004) pleased audiences and critics alike. But again, it was the child centered whimsy of the opening night comedies Clutch and Marco Solo that really caught my eye.

As the largest Australian short film festival, St Kilda is a showcase for a diverse range of genres and styles. It is not always possible, or even helpful, to try and identify specific thematic and stylistic concerns across a single festival program. But one thing is evident. Judging by the films sampled in this year’s festival, the current generation of short filmmakers is clearly and commendably not interested in making films for the emotionally faint-hearted.

St Kilda Film Festival 2004, George Cinemas, The Palais Theatre, Melbourne, May 25-30

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