Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

February 2005

In 2005 in Hill End, five hours out of Sydney, Erin Brannigan is continually surprised and thrilled by Julie-Anne Long’s The Nun’s Picnic, encountering in the tiny town a flock of nuns (with sexy underwear and travelling to “Like a virgin”), evocations of inner spiritual life and an hilariously provocative, and locally controversial, night-time performance by a stellar cast.

RealTime issue 65, Feb-March 2005

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Top image credit: Julie-Anne Long, Kathy Cogill, The Nuns’ Picnic, photo courtesy the artists

Paolo Cherchi Usai

In April 2004, the ScreenSound film and sound archive was merged into the Australian Film Commission. The move was not without controversy, especially when the AFC mooted plans for the relocation of some activities away from Canberra, and for changes to the Archive’s public programs. In September 2004, Paolo Cherchi Usai took up the position of the Archive’s new director. The appointment was widely applauded, given Cherchi Usai’s international prominence. He is a founder of Italy’s Pordenone Film Festival, which has become a focal point for the study of silent cinema, and the author of several books on archival history and practice. He was also Senior Curator at George Eastman House in New York.

In November 2004, the AFC Board approved Cherchi Usai’s initial vision statement. It is a bridge-building plan aimed at reconciling the opposing camps which had taken up positions around the archive’s integration into the AFC. The plan highlights 5 points: (1) the development of a curatorial culture; (2) the maintenance of Canberra as the central hub; (3) the establishment of an Indigenous Branch; (4) consideration of the role of digital technology; and (5) an integrated approach to acquisition, preservation and access. The divisive ‘ScreenSound’ name has also been jettisoned in favour of the institution’s original title, The National Film and Sound Archive. Cherchi Usai says that the change “is of symbolic significance and of political significance. It has a political meaning because of the words national and archive—a reconfirmation of the primary mission of the institution within the AFC to collect, preserve and make accessible the heritage and to do this as the national entity responsible for this.”

The place of the Archive within the AFC has been a sensitive issue, and Cherchi Usai is at pains to resolve these tensions. “I am being asked ‘what is the distinctive contribution of the archive actually and potentially to the development of the AFC?’…it is not a matter of seeking independence in disguise, it is a matter of making very clear the cultural identity of the archive per se, as an organisation which has a national mandate, a cultural mandate and is now being asked to be part of a broader cultural agenda.”

He claims that emphasising Canberra as the centre will restore faith in the future of the archive for its staff, as “the historical identity of the archive is here.” He adds: “this doesn’t mean that the archive has to see Canberra as a sort of fortress where the archival culture is cultivated in isolation from the rest of the country. Quite the contrary, being based in Canberra gives the archive a clear responsibility to become the centre from which audio-visual culture is disseminated across the entire Australian territory.”

He plans to emphasise a more heavily curatorial approach in order to “give the archive a stronger sense of intellectual authority in the audio-visual community, especially now that the archive is part of the AFC, which is now declaring the intention to position itself as a national cultural institution. We want…to have the archive as a protagonist, as a leader, in the cultural debate within the AFC.” This will involve the creation of “a team of highly qualified and highly motivated people with specific expertise in their own areas of activity, who will be given the responsibility to determine the cultural, intellectual profile of our strategy.”

He also calls for “a highly diversified range of access and programming activities.” These may range from internet access to the collections, programs designed and implemented by the archive or in collaboration with other divisions of the AFC, to simply fulfilling its institutional mission to make audio-visual artefacts accessible for projects, educational purposes and festivals. So, the spectrum really includes the archive as “the leader and the protagonist, the archive as the collaborator, and the archive as the provider.”

Cherchi Usai speaks of strengthening the exhibition galleries in Canberra, which the AFC’s Directions discussion paper had called into question, “in order to reflect not only the identity of the Australian audio-visual heritage, but also to highlight what the archive does.” He also stresses he found agreement with the AFC commissioners in the “development of publications which are meant to create very authoritative points of scholarly reference for the study of the national audio-visual heritage and culture…works that not only remain but also become the symbols of an intellectual leadership of the archive…These publications will also be part of the agenda of a new entity within the archive called the Centre for Scholarly and Archival Research, which will be the hub where the internal intellectual energies of the archive, and the scholarly and archival community around the archive nationally and internationally, will gather in order to promote new approaches to the study of the audio-visual culture.” Planned publications include national filmographies and discographies as well as a registry of audio-visual collections in Australia.

Cherchi Usai adds that he wants the archive to encourage a “pluralistic and diversified” approach to audio-visual research: “There may be areas or approaches I may not particularly care for, but it is our moral responsibility to make sure that those who come here don’t see this as a place where the audio-visual culture can be studied only in a certain way.”

The collection policy of the archive has been criticised in the past for pursuing a nationalist cultural agenda to the point where rare international films and related materials have been sent off-shore. Cherchi Usai wants a more internationalist collection policy, arguing that the ‘national heritage’ is all that Australians have heard and seen: “In practical terms, this also means that if we found a collection of international films that no other national archive has, it would be absurd to give this collection away. This collection would be an intellectual asset for the archive.”

Where the AFC had initially considered moving Indigenous collection responsibilities to Sydney, Cherchi Usai has won approval for the establishment of an Indigenous Branch in Canberra, in part because of the proximity of IATSIS (Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies). While recognising that he has much to learn regarding Australian Indigenous culture, he is adamant that “in creating an Indigenous Collection Department, I do not wish to create a ghetto for Indigenous culture and I would very much like to foster communication with Indigenous culture as a priority for the organisation. Recruitment will be an important challenge in that we want to empower Indigenous curators in the development of Indigenous culture at the Archive.”

The last of Cherchi Usai’s 5 points is the need to address the role of digital technologies in preserving and making accessible audio-visual material. While he claims the intention “to aggressively develop digital technologies for the sake of access to the collection”, he warns that “digital technology is not meant to be a long-term preservation or conservation medium, as digital technologies of today are inherently ephemeral.” He also cautions that “access in digital form should not distract the archive from its mission to make accessible the audio-visual heritage in its original form. Australians should have the right to choose whether they want to see a 35mm film in the glory of its original format, or in the practical, democratic, but different medium of digital technology.”

See full interview

RealTime issue #65 Feb-March 2005 pg. 24

John, Fahimeh, Fahimeh's Story

Refugees have been a hot topic for Australian documentary makers over the past half decade, with recent notable examples including Tom Zubrycki’s Molly and Mobarak (2003) and Clara Law’s Letters to Ali (2004, RT64, p20). Given our draconian detention laws, it is not surprising that most of these films have focused on the plight of incarcerated asylum seekers or those enjoying the precarious ‘freedom’ of temporary protection visas. Faramarz K-Rahber’s award winning Fahimeh’s Story takes a slightly different tack, focusing on the 47 year old Iranian woman of the film’s title, who fled her comfortable middle class Tehran existence to escape a desperately unhappy marriage. As Fahimeh puts it: “Everyone saw what I had on the outside, nobody saw the unhappiness on the inside.” She arrived in Brisbane with 2 sons and obtained a divorce, only to fall in love and marry John, a 77 year old white Australian ex-soldier she met at a bus stop. The film begins soon after Fahimeh and John’s first meeting and traces their relationship across the course of a year.

Although largely shot in observational style, K-Rahber resists the temptation to leave himself out of the story. Fahimeh and her family frequently glance at the camera, sometimes in embarrassment, sometimes with sly grins, and the filmmaker often questions them from behind the lens. He positions himself in the story from the beginning, telling us in voiceover that he met Fahimeh through one of her sons, became fascinated with her tale and decided to make a documentary. Rather than any pretence at objective depiction of the situation, the finished work comes across very much as K-Rahber’s experience of becoming increasingly entangled in the emotional web of Fahimeh’s family.

This impression is reinforced by the director’s refusal to hone in on one aspect of the multi-faceted situation, following the strands of the family web in a loose manner that allows all the ambiguities and intricacies of familial relations to play out over the film’s 83 minutes. Fahimeh and her sons are refugees making their way in a foreign land, but K-Rahber never reduces them to stereotypes or symbols.

Like Fahimeh’s sons, many viewers would undoubtedly be dubious about her relationship with John when it is introduced. Initially he comes across as a vague and somewhat doddering old man who appears to have little understanding of what he’s got himself into. Appearances are deceiving, however, and John gradually emerges as the film’s most intriguing figure. He has a keen interest in leftist politics and we’re given the impression that as a younger man he was involved in the labour movement. At one point, he and Fahimeh go on a march to Villawood Detention Centre, protesting the imprisonment of refugees.

John also has a 30 year old son who cuts a tragically pathetic figure, forever unemployed, depressed and constantly returning to his father for handouts. At times John is driven to distraction by his son’s inability to look after himself. But it’s his own actions and attitudes that make John so intriguing. Despite his good-natured demeanour and salt-of-the-earth air, he becomes an increasingly enigmatic figure, his motivations more and more difficult to fathom. He seems to genuinely love Fahimeh and goes to extraordinary lengths to please her, including converting to Islam. At the same time, he spends prolonged periods away from her living in his own home, and by the film’s end is spending most of his time alone.

John’s affable indeterminacy is nicely counter-balanced by the straight-talking attitudes of Fahimeh’s sons. As teenage boys harbouring healthy doses of resentment towards their Iranian father, while also negotiating a foreign culture and coming to terms with a 77 year old ‘step dad’, they are the most volatile of the film’s subjects. The elder son is deeply alienated from the rest of the family and is living in Sydney at the beginning of the film. Even when he returns to Brisbane, he seems to have little contact with his mother and refuses to meet John, despite earlier cautiously endorsing his mother’s right to choose whoever she wants as a partner. He becomes increasingly bitter in interviews, glaring at the camera with a palpable anger. K-Rahber offers us tantalising glimpses of this boy’s views and daily life, but remains frustratingly distant from the details of his situation, giving us few clues about the precise source of his antagonism.

In contrast, Fahimeh’s younger son appears throughout, and despite being clearly suspicious of John, tries to help his mother and to tolerate the older man’s presence. His animated comments to camera when away from his mother provide some of the film’s funniest moments, as he expresses frank amazement that his Mum “actually seems to like John!”

Oddly enough, although Fahimeh exudes energy and a vivacious charisma, she is the film’s least interesting figure. Which isn’t to say we don’t feel sympathy; our impression of her simply doesn’t develop beyond that conveyed in the opening minutes. It’s hard to judge whether this is a failing on K-Rahber’s part, or if Fahimeh is simply more straightforward than the rest of her family.

K-Rahber’s film is quite different in tone to the sense of outrage generated by Clara Law’s Letters to Ali, or lesser-known works such as Seeking Asylum (Mike Piper, 2002), Out of Fear (Bettina Frankham, 2003) and Through the Wire (Pip Starr, 2004). At a screening of Letters to Ali before last year’s election, I wondered where the refugee ‘genre’ could go if John Howard was returned to power. Was the anger of our documentary-makers having any impact and could the rage be maintained if the Coalition won yet again? Perhaps it is important to simply keep bearing witness to the atrocities being perpetrated by this government and endorsed by many Australians, even if these films don’t seem to be having any political effect. K-Rahber’s documentary also indicates that refugee stories can provide a vehicle for examining broader issues.

Although titled Fahimeh’s Story, the work is really a snapshot of the social, racial, cultural, class and generational tensions that run through contemporary Australian society. Representing the full range of refugee experience is as essential as protesting asylum seekers’ arbitrary imprisonment. Fahimeh’s Story is a political film not because it offers a didactic or polemical position on refugees or race, or because it attacks specific government policy. Fahimeh arrives on an aeroplane and never has to endure the horror of detention. The film instead shines a light on the infinite complexities of familial and emotional relationships, in the process undermining the essentialist, one-dimensional, homogenising discourse around family and the notion of what constitutes “Australianness” that currently dominates our public and political spheres. In other words, K-Rahber textures Fahimeh’s story with the shades of grey that Howard’s vision of Australia erases.

Fahimeh’s Story, director Faramarz K-Rahber; producers Ian Lang, Grigor Axel, 2004

Fahimeh’s Story will screen as part of the SBS Independent Signature Works Festival, Western Australian Museum, Fremantle, WA, Feb 26, and will be broadcast on SBS later in 2005.

RealTime issue #65 Feb-March 2005 pg. 23

Butterfly

For those looking for a cool, dark room to escape the in-your-face Mardi Gras street festivities this year, the 2005 Mardi Gras Film Festival provides the perfect solution. Opening night will see the works of 9 Australian filmmakers screened in the sumptuous State Theatre in the My Queer Career program of locally produced queer-themed shorts. Highlights include Oranges (director Kristian Pithie), focusing on 2 school boys coming to terms with their nascent feelings for each other, and Moustache (director Vicki Sugars), an absurdist tale about the unexpected effect of over-active female facial hair on a flagging marriage. Oranges screened at Germany’s Oberhausen Short Film Festival last year while Moustache appeared at the illustrious Venice International Film Festival.

Queer Screen has always sourced a wide selection of gay and lesbian features from around the world for the festival, but this year has a particular Asian focus. From Japan comes Queer Boys and Girls on the Bullet Train, an omnibus of 10 five minute films by different directors, running the stylistic gamut from sex dramas to anime. Queer Boys and Girls will screen with 2 gay-themed shorts from India: Barefeet (director Sonali) and Calcutta Pride March (director Tejal Shah).

From Hong Kong comes Butterfly, directed by up-and-coming talent Yan Yan Mak. A 30 year old woman’s chance encounter with a young singer triggers memories of a rocky relationship while at university during the turbulent period leading up to the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Man skillfully flits between past and present to forge a poignant tale of personal loss that is also a mourning for the youthful idealism that characterised China’s pro-democracy movement of the period. The colour-saturated visual style and fragmented narrative is strongly reminiscent of Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar Wai.

The festival also features 2 programs of Asian-related shorts, providing audiences with an interesting point of comparison with the Australian works of My Queer Career. They are Gaysia, a collection of films by Asian directors from around the world, and Hong Kong Lesbian Shorts. The latter will be introduced by one of the directors of Hong Kong’s Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

Several documentaries are included in this year’s schedule, including Wash Westmoreland’s Gay Republicans. One million voters identifying as gay or lesbian voted for George Bush in the 2000 Presidential election; this film asks why these voters support a party and president seemingly at odds with their own interests.

The festival’s closing night film is A Dirty Shame, the first work in 4 years from the legendary John Waters. With plenty of full-frontal nudity and crooner Chris Isaak in the lead role, A Dirty Shame promises to provide a happily trashy conclusion to some serious and culturally diverse proceedings.

2005 Mardi Gras Film Festival, curators David Pearce, Megan Carrigy; State Theatre, Palace Academy Twin, Valhalla Cinemas; Sydney; Feb 17-March 3; www.queerscreen.com.au

RealTime issue #65 Feb-March 2005 pg. 25

Short Site: Recent Australian Short Film
edited by Emma Crimmings & Rhys Graham
Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, 2004

While turning the pages of Short Site: Recent Australian Short Film, I dozed off and had a nightmare in which I was at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and got trapped in an industry-sponsored forum where all the sessions had titles like “New Ways of Seeing” or “Off the Beaten Track” and were illustrated by clips from Harvie Krumpet, with a sidebar focus on new digital technologies and Cate Shortland and Ivan Sen giving masterclasses in script structure to spellbound graduates from the VCA. I was about to leap up and set myself on fire, or something of the kind, when an angel came to me and said: “Oh ye of little faith! Imagine a world without Australian short filmmakers! Think of our cultural impoverishment if young artists did not strive to produce significant work on low-to-moderate levels of government funding, reflecting the many facets of our diverse contemporary society!” I was at a loss to reply, and so awoke.

Returning to the book, I felt bound to agree with its editors, Rhys Graham and Emma Crimmings, that local short filmmaking stands in need of serious criticism. But in focusing on primary documentation through interviews and scripts, they don’t go a long way towards filling the gap. The essays that make up perhaps a quarter of Short Site’s content—a few pages on each of the 10 films featured from half a dozen writers—are billed as “personal and passionate” responses, meaning they move between sometimes flowery evocation, craft-based analysis, and stabs at cultural or historical perspective. As introductions to their subjects they’re mainly serviceable, though often marred by a stylistic carelessness that forces the reader of goodwill to sort through masses of cliches (“seamlessly edited”, “fluid camerawork”) to retrieve the occasional buried insight. On the other hand, in the more stylistically assured contributions the confession of “personal” feelings and attitudes begins to look like a familiar rhetorical weapon, which a writer like Clare Stewart (covering Ivan Sen’s Dust) wields with a touch of knowing melodrama.

What the book lacks, in a nutshell, is a genuinely critical approach. And not just because the assessments are cover-to-cover positive—the unrelenting tone of ‘celebration’ does get a bit wearing. Whatever the editors might claim, the choice of films covered suggests committee-think rather than anyone’s personal taste, gathering together plenty of well-known names and relevant social issues. My own “personal” assessment of the films covered in Short Site which I’ve seen range from decent (Cracker Bag) to dire (Harvie Krumpet, the Aussie Forrest Gump). But more important than the book’s specific endorsements is its unexamined reliance on a particular model of “quality” short filmmaking, a model largely shared by festivals such as St Kilda. Mostly, this means fictional narrative (a single documentary, Shannon Sleeth’s The Meat Game, makes the cut). It also means that the discussion of craft in the interviews leans on a common set of terms and assumptions: even the blokey team behind the Tropfest-winning comedy Wilfred joke with appalling ease about structure and sub-text as hardened veterans of the script-editing process.

Above all, the rhetoric of sincerity that sets the critical agenda for Short Site is mirrored by the uniform emphasis which the interviewees place on their desire for emotional connection with an audience. In most cases, the technique used to establish this connection is the familiar one of fictional epiphany: inviting identification with a protagonist, then structuring a narrative around an image that challenges their sense of self. Thus the abortive firework display in Cracker Bag, the rush of sounds that restore memory in Mr Wasinski’s Song, the guy in a dog suit in Wilfred. There’s nothing wrong with the principle, but when taken for granted such dramatic devices harden into cliche as quickly as the terms of praise used by critics—in both cases, a sense of the “personal” being exactly what vanishes.

One of digital video’s mixed blessings has been to allow even rank amateurs to aspire to professional production values, on the whole reinforcing the dominance of industry standards of “craft” and storytelling (video artists and the local Super 8 diehards like Tony Woods seem to be operating in a whole different medium). What’s sacrificed here is the possibility of an aesthetic that’s both more primitive and more expansive, with less attention given to the script as a blueprint for a cohesive world (invented or documentary) and more to the activity of capturing and playing with images. At events like St Kilda, it would be nice to see more patchwork movies—diaries, documents, improvisations—as well as forms of narrative that are neither naturalistic nor locked into established genres (shorts being obvious vehicles for such experiments, as demonstrated, say, in the work of Chantal Akerman). Of course, this kind of play still goes on in Australian cinema—in music video for example, a field several of Short Site’s interviewees have worked in. But the book barely acknowledges the existence of these different options, much less placing them on any kind of map.

In response, the editors might say that Short Site was never meant as a comprehensive index of current Australian short film, or of anything except individual critical “passion.” But it’s precisely this innocence that feels symptomatic of a disease probably familiar to anyone who has been following the mixed fortunes of ACMI, where a commitment to promoting undervalued work becomes indistinguishable from the hype-driven mindset that “celebrates” the already known, and personal feelings are happily found to correlate with success as defined by crowds pleased and awards won. One mystery remains: why didn’t ACMI try releasing a DVD-ROM including all of this material plus the films themselves? As well as demonstrating their enthusiasm for multimedia, from a marketing point of view such a package would surely have ideally supplemented this book, or replaced it.

The 2004 Seoul International Media Art Biennale took its name, Homo Ludens, from a book published in 1938 by Dutch Historian John Huizinga, on the importance of play in human culture. A team of 5 international curators including Liz Hughes, Director of Experimenta Melbourne, put together this impressive exhibition of 45 works exploring the language and structure of games and play. There were 8 Australian pieces included and I was there with Bio-tek Kitchen, a computer game modification made in collaboration with Leon Cmielewski.

The speech by the Director of the Seoul Museum of Art delivered at the opening oozed with pre-dotcom crash rhetoric about the promise of new technologies, whereas the Korean artistic director, Yoon Jin Sup, spoke about the importance of artists bringing the human spirit to modern media and counteracting what he sees as the negative effects of computer game violence. As the line between computer games and military training and recruitment software is becoming increasingly blurred, it is not surprising that war emerged as a strong theme throughout the exhibition.

Eddo Stern, an Israeli artist based in the United States, built a small robot to play pre-programmed scenarios in the game America’s Army. Released by the American military as a recruiting tool, America’s Army was recently cited in the press as the most popular computer game in the history of the medium. In Stern’s installation, the game is housed in a miniature medieval fort reflecting the role-playing Dungeons and Dragons fantasy element that permeates gamer culture. The work’s title, Fort Paladin, references American military base-naming conventions.

Velvet Strike, a project by US artist Anne-Marie Schleiner, began as a response to the war on terrorism, with a competition inviting people to create and submit anti-war graffiti for Counter-Strike, a game allowing the user to play on a team as either terrorist or counter-terrorist. Counter Strike, a modification of the computer game Half-Life, was initially released as free software and quickly became so popular with online gamers that a commercial version was released in 2000, with enthusiastic gamers creating hundreds of new maps or mods for the game. The Velvet-Strike website (www.opensorcery.net/velvet-strike) presents a collection of images to be downloaded and used as graffiti on the walls, ceiling and floor of the game’s 3D environment. Schleiner is concerned about the current direction of computer game culture, and writes: “…although briefly showing signs of progress in the late nineteen-nineties, computer games have again been gendered as male fighting zones with so-called ‘realistic’ military sims gaining in popularity. This male militaristic culture coincides with a war climate in the US and other parts of the world where patriotism and military fetishism are on the rise” (catalogue essay, Games, Computerspiele von KunstlerInnen exhibition, Dortmund, Germany, October 2003).
Shilpa Gupta with her untitled installation at Homo Ludens

Shilpa Gupta with her untitled installation at Homo Ludens

In the video installation by Mumbai artist Shilpa Gupta, viewers interact with video loops of a row of young women dressed in various camouflage fashion outfits. Clicking on each figure triggers different movements, such as marching, squatting, jumping and spoken phrases like “don’t interrupt”, “order order shop shop”, “shut up and eat”, “look straight” and “I belong to you.” As the viewer plays, it becomes clear that they are all the same woman—the artist herself. The work explores issues of control and fear, reflecting on the position of young middle class Indian women. Gupta says the concept for the piece was sparked by her observation that camouflage clothing had become hip since the war on terror began.

Back at my hotel in Seoul I watched the US Armed Forces TV station, where camouflage is definitely the preferred fashion of the blonde news presenters. The Korean War ended in 1953, but there are still 37,000 US military personnel stationed in South Korea, and Christmas messages were going out to them with images of troops enjoying time out with their families and giving presents of toy guns to their kids. There were also community announcements encouraging the military to say no to drugs and giving advice on how to cope with suicidal soldiers under one’s command. Apparently suicide is the second biggest killer of American troops, although we weren’t told what the first is.
Telescopes overlooking the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea

Telescopes overlooking the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea

I travelled north from Seoul to visit the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea and followed the tunnel excavated by the North Koreans for a planned invasion of the South in the 1970s. Apparently this and other tunnels were discovered before the North Korean army had a chance to invade. At the border there is a row of binoculars set up on a platform, allowing visitors to gaze across the DMZ to the other side, where the North Koreans have set up a ‘freedom village’ so visitors can see how they live. I put my coin in the slot but my time ran out before I spotted any people in this part of the “axis of evil.” However I watched an eagle soaring over the DMZ, which has become a sanctuary for plants, birds and animals too small to trigger the landmines covering the area.

In a square white room, 8 monitors, facing in, are arranged in a circle in front of a wall marked with pencil lines. The video commences on the first monitor with a hand holding a lead pencil drawing a horizontal line on a white surface from right to left and then on to the next monitor and so on, until it starts all over again on the first monitor. The manner is loosely systematic but the result is quite effective. The drawn lines overlap continuously until the dark lead almost fills the screens.

Conceptualised in 1999 by video artist Poklong Anading, Line Drawing is probably one of the best examples of Filipino multimedia art. Poklong started out as a painter in the mid-90s while studying Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines. Before the decade ended, Poklong discovered a medium that could carry his ideas and a new kind of approach through the convergence of what was commonly known as traditional art and the technology already prevailing at that time—video. Poklong explained, “My works based on video started way back in 1997 when one of our art teachers at the university began offering classes on video, and extensively experimented on the medium. We were still using Video-8 back then, and there was no such thing as editing; all we did was cut-to-cut.”

As video components and computer peripherals became more commonly available, Poklong rode with technology’s evolution. Today he knows his computer, shoots video and stills on digital and edits on Adobe Premiere. “The thing about video is that it’s immediate,” says Poklong. “And with digital technology everything seems to be easier to access and manipulate.” Despite the Philippines still being identified as a third world country, technology—particularly in the capital Manila—is almost on par with its more affluent Asian neighbors. Mobile phones are in the hands of almost 30 million Filipinos, IT infrastructure is visible all around and broadband connection is readily available. So, there is no excuse for a Filipino artist to avoid the onslaught of technology and handle modern video and audio electronics.

In Walking Distance (2002), Poklong’s video collaboration with award-winning visual artist Ringo Bunoan, 2 video frames are played side by side with both showing a hip-level shot of a short back and forth walk, one on a narrow art gallery corridor in Manila and the other on a pedestrian overpass in Gwangiou, South Korea. Again, the framing is slightly out of synch but the effect is visually hypnotic just the same. For Poklong, “since the technology is readily available, it has now become an extension of my own ideas that I can easily project to my audience.”

Artist-photographer Wawi Navarroza, who manipulates photographs with the available technology, says, “…multimedia art is just a collective term I use for the different modes of expression I’ve chosen to utilise. I travel across platforms.” She describes herself as a “darkroom baby.” She is in love with the chemicals, the magic, the romance and all the secrets under the red light. Yet, she cannot escape what technology offers her kind of art. “When digital came about, I didn’t abhor it. It was a stranger that I gladly sought out to know. And it was another tool in the bag that opened other possibilities for me in terms of imaging. I stumbled upon this new world of post-production and a strange but familiar world of ‘digital darkroom’ alias Photoshop…I wanted to create an amalgam of analogue and digital. I wanted to bring together the organic beauty of film and the precision and control of digital. I’m still learning the ropes and I guess it will never end. One thing I know is that digital is here to stay and it should be up to something good.”
Tad Ermitaño, Hulikotekan (2002)

The multimedia experience is very obvious in Navarroza’s artworks whose combination of old school photographic style and computer manipulation techniques radiate from a Victorian Gothic backdrop with a wonderfully dark and gloomy inventiveness. “Artists can’t be contained”, she says. “The thirst of the artist for expression often leads to exploration of new ways to articulate meaning, which change with the spirit of the time, and which eventually alters the world-view of an era.”

For established video artist Tad Ermitaño, who has been doing video and sound art for almost 2 decades now, it’s a different and relatively cautious approach. “The term multimedia is a terrible phrase. There is a lot of stuff that would like to call itself multimedia just because the artists use sound and image, even if the channel of interaction is a mouse and a monitor,” says Tad. “I think the word multimedia ought to be tossed out and at least 4 new categories put in its place: audio/sound art, video art, smart art and interactive art. Audio and video art would encompass everything that involves playing looped audio and video, while smart art would involve having the art react to the audience. As in evolution, smart artworks currently aren’t very smart, but I’m sure that could change. Some of the virtual characters in computer games are full-fledged AIs already. Smart art could be the new film: requiring a level of investment and expertise that can only be matched by corporate backed teams of specialists.

“Definitely we should go back to using the word interactive the way the coiners used it…mean(ing) that the audience would be free to create permanent and maybe fertile changes in the work. In this original sense, a folk song or a recipe with a 100 variants is interactive, while a CD-ROM game, however entertaining, is not. This, I think, is a very radical and exciting option, striking hard and deep into and against our ideas of what art is, what artists do, who artists are.”

One of Tad’s independently produced video artworks, Hulikotekan (2002), a 9-layer video feedback of found instruments gradually synchronising was exhibited at the Hong Kong Film Festival in 2002 and was also shown at The Library in Singapore during the 2004 Singapore International Film Festival. His work with experimental sound art group Children of Cathode Ray was also included at the MAAP Festival at the National Institute of Education last October of 2004, also in Singapore.

Poklong and Wawi are a small sample of characteristic multimedia artists in the Philippines, Tad expresses the need for more focus on the genre. “Well, there are a lot of people playing with sound and video, because there are a lot of computers and a lot of pirated software. But there have been almost no shows focusing on it. Nor is anyone writing on it, giving feedback that leads anywhere. Feedback on sound/audio art (like feedback on all art here) is mostly on the “Okey yan pare” (that’s pretty much okay, man) level. The possibilities that a work opens up, the questions it raises etc remain completely unraised/unpursued.” Reasons for this include a lack of a recognised multimedia movement and of an acknowledged venue for the genre. “Aside from places like Big Sky Mind in Cubao and a handful of other art houses, there is really no place to exhibit multimedia arts here in the Philippines,” says Poklong. Wawi has had to rely on pocket exhibitions at alternative spaces, producing them herself or even showing at one night-engagements, right before a band performance, notably her own, The Late Isabel. “So many ideas on the shelf,” she quips.

Nonetheless, the constraints don’t prevent these artists from continuing to find ways to make multimedia central to the structure and evolution of their work. Multimedia art has become a part of a new energy of expression. In the Philippines, as in many parts of the world, it is a crossroads where artists and techies meet, or, as Wawi describes it: “the left and the right hemisphere of the brain collaborating.”

PROOF is an investigation into evidence and truth. While overtly political—not least in the PROOF Overboard title of the cinema program—the line of questioning extends to a tracing of proof: its mediums, trajectories and traces, from the mechanistic to the digital and the phenomenal, drawing in sound, movement, space and light.

In Ross Gibson’s startling, ruminative Street X-Rays, the fixed evidentiary nature of crime photographs gives way. The space is dark, contemplative; 5 screens are arranged in the space. The projections travel through the screens so an imprint registers on the walls; the effect is ghostly. On the screens, archival crime scenes are juxtaposed with recent footage of the same places. Present and past are conflated, layered upon one another, interacting. No one perspective is allowed to dominate: our eyes move between screens, to the ‘X-Rays’, to the sculptural projectors; we move in space as time and place collapse and things become “little pulses in history.” One effect of multiple screens (such as in Jem Cohen’s Chain Times Three, which uses 3 screens and makes you wonder how you ever watched a film on one) is to highlight the artificiality of the fixed perspective. This is extended in Gibson’s work: the use of small screens arranged in a spatial matrix creates a kind of living space. And there is an emphasis on darknesses which are to be imagined into, that are engendering. When I entered Street X-Rays, with its use of light and incantatory sound, I was reminded of Mizoguchi’s film Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), not in terms of content, but in the clamouring, haunting forces drawing the present and past into an akashic vortex (the akashic record is a Sanskrit term which refers to an etheric field or realm where everything, past, present and future, exists, simultaneously, as a permanent record)

The collapsing of past and present also emerges in Nizar Jabour’s Greetings from Iraq. After exile in northern Iraq, detention in Iran, escapes, arrests and 7 years waiting for an answer from UNHCR at the Pakistan-Iran border, Jabour was accepted as an Iraqi refugee by Australia in 1997. After 17 years in exile, having been declared dead by the authorities, he returns to Iraq. We watch as his father sings a song; his son is still alive. In the streets there are palm trees, rubble, people walking on their way to another city. The footage is intercut with family snapshots, those icons of family unity. Here is the pain of exile. It is also a place of censorship, a place in which Australia has gone to war, but whose people (especially victims of the war and refugees) have never been shown in the media. What’s the danger in seeing the truth of another place, of people? Surely a pertinent question for a government that rode to victory by re-captioning a picture of children struggling in open seas.

Questions of evidence and the right to know arise explicitly in Jeff Riley’s arresting Obstruction, a montage of scenes involving obstruction of the camera: often a hand across the lens. The camera as witness is extended to the camera as threat and the relationship between subject and camera becomes very loaded, even scary. A logger, having picked up and thrown an environmentalist, turns his wrath onto the camera, and by extension, us. A police officer yawns as he removes his identification badge before heading into one of the most violent protests Melbourne has known. Obstruction records damning evidence, not least of all the testimony of obstruction itself.

While Uluru might be the centre of our aspirations regarding tourism and national identity, Woomera, having hosted missiles and atomic testing as well as a detention centre, seems to register our national fears. This is the point Peter Hennessey makes in My Woomera Project (What do you fear?). The Ikara missile—developed in the 60s to be launched at distant submarines—is re-created in pale wood; but unlike the contained miniature models, this re-creation dominates. Monitors feature a static image of the missile overlaid with voices in languages such as Arabic, creating a complex sense of the feared expressing their fears, drawing on Woomera as detention centre, but circling the place of contention. We never see Woomera, we don’t know if the voices are those of refugees: it’s unsettling and elusive, circling this island that, from its deep heart, has always feared threats from the sea.

The behaviour of information, truth and proof emerges as phenomenal: its interactivity; its replication of living systems. In Adam Donovan’s beautiful Heterodyning Cage sound and image movement are generated through interaction with exhibition visitors, and the 3D images move almost imperceptibly, as if breathing. This idea of information being physical and phenomenal is also explored in Paul Rodgers’ The Spectrum Chart and the Spectrum Drum, which traces normally unseen electromagnetic pollution. Rodgers provides evidence: a fluorescent tube is lit up under powerlines, shortwave radio picks up signals that seem discarded in the ether. The spectrum drum underscores this culture of waste, constructed out of discarded materials. Like John Hansen’s Senju-Kannon Buddha Bot No.1—a gorgeous buddha that looks like it’s from the set of Dr Who, with moving wooden and metal arms holding defunct data storage—it sits on the border between mechanistic and technological. In both pieces there’s a strong sense of excess and multiplication. Hansen’s Buddha’s face is supplanted by faces made from contemporary facial creation software comical in its already-dated look. The intruding faces effectively evoke maya and proliferation (Maya is the Vedantic term which speaks of the unreality of matter).

Proliferation is also manifest in Sarah Waterson and Kate Richards’ sub_scapePROOF. Here, political rhetoric is spliced with footage from confessional shows and treated to effects that rupture: Dr Phil’s are you honest with her? sits alongside one of George Bush’s speeches. The turbulence of truth and untruth—making, a texture of bombardment and disruption, creates a chaos that we are familiar with: patterns arise and with them a deeply political questioning of rhetoric.

This immanent critique where the movement and meaning embody each other, and which can move along a line of questioning from the phenomenal and philosophical to the political and playful, shows us what ACMI can do so well. It should also be considered that the hybrid arts of the moving image may be the only forms which can represent our world in this way, something I hope our funding bodies are considering carefully.

PROOF, curator Mike Stubbs, Screen Gallery, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Dec 9 2004-Feb 13 2005

Pink-themed, multi-layered, and at times violently noisy, Mechalust is a small international exhibition of new media works exploring “robot love/automated lovers/machine desires” packed tightly into an empty Fortitude Valley shopfront space and the IMA screening room over the first 3 days of the Straight Out of Brisbane (SOOB) festival. Curated by Thea Baumman, artists from Melbourne, Tokyo and California utilised 3D animation, slides, sculpture and photography to interrogate and rework specific narrative conventions, identities and fan-informed emotions within Otaku (anime lover) culture, first person shooter gaming and the broader anime culture.

In Skinpack 2000, Melbourne-based artist Linda Erceg has modified the Quake 2 game engine using pornographic shareware and deconstructive editing techniques to satirically overplay the violent, sexualised agencies and objectives of first person shooter games. Modded avatars like Crack Whore, Chastity Marks and Nude Chick wear clichéd buxom nude skins, all pulled from Quake 2 fan-sites, crouch, duck, and splay their fannies in long episodes of masturbatory gun-play. The codes of subjectivity in first person shooter genres are further disturbed: the ‘I’ identifying gun barrel close-up is often absent; shooting between all players is unnervingly put off for long periods; and when shots are let fly, killing is slow, nonsensical (moreso because of the viewer’s uncertain orientation) and jackhammer-loud against the eerie silence of the game/gallery environment. Meanwhile, close-ups and disorienting points of view voyeuristically immerse the viewer in the action (or its absence). If you hang around long enough, despite the lack of narrative connection between various players, every girl eventually dies in a naked heap of clunky, low-polygonal-count reality. A glitchy and unnervingly ambiguous all-girl, go-nowhere act, this highly choreographed work throws into stark relief some of the more disturbing codes of immersion and performance embedded in First Person Shooter game culture.

Mechalust is about machines, but it is also about artists themselves, and their passions—the kinds of identities that are forged from personal histories spent producing and consuming virtual pop-cultures. SomeGuy’s 8 Bit E-Motion Comik is a self-published net-based geek’s soapie (www.wearethestrange.com -expired). Heavily plumbing the visual styles and romantic narrative conventions of anime works like Battle Angel Alita, this Californian artist’s self-confessed fantasy girl, ‘Blue Wander’, travels through a strange robotic underworld, and over 9(!) melodramatic episodes, escapes the clutches of Star Trek-style robot foes and monstrous n’er-do-wells on her journey towards self discovery and true love.

Gaunt, widescreen shots of the blue-black haired heroine drive a somewhat patchy narrative and are overlaid with a dissonant Commodore 64 soundtrack and eerie, cliched subtitles, like: “Someday you will find a voice and sing a beautiful song that will change the whole universe.” It’s awkwardly clunky, amateur and mishmashy—part comic, part cartoon of 3D, 2D and claymation techniques—but it’s also richly pop-referential, beautifully drawn in parts, and sincerely affecting.

Also very much within the Automated Lovers’ theme was Tetsuo Takahashi’s G-Spot-Pleasure of a Japanimation robot. Tetsuto positions himself as a self-reflexive Otaku, making independent erotic art for mecha-Otaku’s (lovers of anime with a particular penchant for robot mechanics). “I want to find the G-spot of mecha-Otaku, and why they love Japanimation robots like Gundam. The study of mecha-Otaku is also the study of myself, because I grew up in Otaku culture.” Exhibited across 3 horizontally aligned projection screens, G-Spot consists of hundreds of freeze-frame still images of a single, intricately rendered Japanimation robot made by the artist with 3D CG software. Perhaps Maya? Each image closes in on body parts in masterful detail, unashamedly emphasising the masculine capabilities and aesthetic beauty of head, torso, sword-wielding fists and a massive flailing penis. Also within the slide collection are partially rendered sketches of a robot in development. It’s incredibly detailed work; tiny screws, shadows, and reflections of other body parts are visible even upon the metallic surfaces of his body. Collectively, the 3 carousels of images provide a disorganised narrative montage of swordplay and general might, in which the robot finally masturbates to climax all over himself and then commits harikari.

The ‘Otaku’ label is derisory in Japan, and the artist’s own mechalust is hardly the norm, let alone an acknowledged meme of discussion in Otaku culture. But Tetsuo’s artist statement goes beyond reclaiming words and divesting the Otaku of self-loathing, towards a revolutionary homoeroticisation and politicisation of current forms of mecha-Otaku subjectivity: “After (the robot’s) destruction it is reborn. To let the Otaku see the world in new ways, we need to crush and reconstruct the Otaku’s conservative nature with our own hands. This era demands a new breed of Otaku. Otaku must be reincarnated as the New type. Otaku, wake up now!” The choice to exhibit such masterful, high-tech artistry depicting such antiquated technology is what makes this work most interesting. Instructional, clinical, masculine, and emphasising a moment of past production, the slide show format intimidatingly frames the artist as a master of CG art, and exaggerates the masculine exhibitionism inherent within the work itself.

The Straight Out of Brisbane program gives equal importance to both the critical discussion of artists’ practices in context and the display of finished works. This combination of skills workshops, panels, and exhibitions in temporary galleries worked well in packaging Kirsty Boyle’s multi-layered practice. Her ‘Girltron’ photographic prints Dolls in Space made less rewarding viewing as art objects in themselves but the premise is clever fun—a recombinatory gluing together of ‘boys toy’ body parts (robot), with girl toy’s heads (dolls) as part of a practice that the artist conspicuously labels ‘toy hacks.’ (Additional toyhack sculptures were also constructed by workshop attendees during the festival, and added to the Mechalust exhibition space.) It’s a very material, feminine and tactile redefinition of hacking which, interestingly, entirely bypasses coding—that back-end, practice/habitat of electronics and computer programming overrun by masculine forces. For festival-goers who managed to attend the Mechalust-related panel and workshops, Kirsty’s background in Linux ladies user groups and her anthropological studies into robot cultures like Karakuri added important layers of meaning to her art practice, and to the exhibition as a whole.

Mechalust, curator Thea Baumann; TC Beirne Centre, IMA, Visible InK (Brisbane City Council); 2004 Straight Out Of Brisbane; December 5-8, 2004

The Anne Landa Exhibition + Award is the first in a biennial series of exhibitions, each with an acquisitive award of $25,000. It’s also the first significant award in Australia for moving image and new media work. The award was established in honour of Anne Landa, a Trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales who died in 2002. As Anna Munster’s talk at the January 24 meeting in Sydney held to discuss the Australia Council’s axing of the New Media Arts Board suggested, the juxtaposition of the arrival of this major new media art award and the demise of the board that has had nurtured such work was deeply ironic.

Craig Walsh’s wonderfully witty DVD projection, Contested space, is adroitly installed into the architecture of the main entrance of the gallery (see cover) suggesting an institution infested with giant cockroaches on a horror film scale along with more metaphysical speculations about art and nature. The pleasure of unexpected transformation and the revelations afforded by scale are also to be had in Peter Hennessey’s giant 1:1 plywood recreation of Voyager 2, My Voyager, amusingly installed in the foyer below Walsh’s swarming insects.

In the gallery space dedicated to the Landa exhibition, the first encounter is with a vertical wall screen full of more cockroaches, providing a gruesome level of intimate inspection on the way to Van Sowerwine’s child-scale doll’s house for Play with me. This installation looks quaint until you squeeze in and activate the animation of a little girl, triggering terrible acts of self-mutilation which no amount of panicky mousing can halt. Fellow gallery-goers peer accusingly at you through the doll’s house windows and you move quickly on to Shaun Gladwell’s big-screen Woolloomooloo (night), a contemplative, slightly slo-mo’d video of a Capoeira practitioner performing in a petrol station, as if that’s what you do in the everyday Gladwell world.

David Rosetsky’s Untouchable features 3 video monitors elegantly integrated into a stylish piece of display furniture on which 3 domestic duo scenarios are played out in 3 different rooms, sometimes sharing the same dialogue and, all at once and whimsically, a dance. The pleasures of these short film narratives (essentially monologues, but whose and about whom?), the video clip verve, the challenge of adding up the 3 experiences into one and choosing where to direct your gaze make for an entertaining engagement in the art of interpretation, sharply heightening the sense of one’s subjectivity.

Guy Benfield’s Exploring pain (electric wheelchair boogaloo), is a large-scale action painting work which entails video documentation of its creation onsite in the gallery. It’s a work that afficionados of the form regard as their Landa winner. Peter Hennessey’s Golden record (Fitzroy remix), a companion piece for My Voyager, is a video animation of the craft eerily breaking up in outer space while bland messages from Australians of various cultural backgrounds are broadcast to whoever might be listening out there. The Rosetsky, Walsh and Van Sowerwine works looked like the chief contenders for the award with Rosetsky taking out the big prize.

The award and the exhibition raised a few queries among video and new media art watchers. With only one work that could be called interactive and given the absence of other new media art forms, was the show really about new media art? Why wasn’t there a new media art curator/artist among the selectors? Certainly as an illustration of the current varieties of ‘moving image’ art facilitated by new technologies, it succeeded, and that’s part of the new media adventure, and Rosetsky is widely regarded as an innovator in the new media art scene. It is, however, to be hoped that future selections will move further into the growing new media terrain.

Anne Landa Award + Exhibition, selectors Wayne Tunnicliffe, Juliana Engeberg, Edmund Capon; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Dec 2, 2004-Jan 23, 2005

SAWUNG GALING kembalinya Legenda (BLACK ROOSTER the legend returns), Bandung, Indonesia Tagor Siagian

Sawung Galing depicts a wild and fantastic world where despots sow confusion and cultivate prejudices amongst the people to maintain their power and justify war. Into this world is born Joko Berek, a young girl raised as a boy, who with the help of her magical black rooster reconciles the warring kingdoms of Fazzar and Crazzar. Sawung Galing (Black Rooster) was adapted from the popular Indonesian Sawung Galing myth from East Java, an inspirational story about the struggle against Dutch colonial rule. I was immediately attracted to the story because I saw it essentially as a critique of leadership. The Sidetrack production maintains the mythic dimension but develops new angles on the story.

Sawung Galing had its first performance in September 2004 in a fallow rice field beside the village of Nitiprayan. It was rehearsed for 6 weeks in Yogyakarta (Central Java), mainly at a wonderful place called Joglu Jago where we ate, slept and rehearsed. In the final 2 weeks of rehearsal we moved to Nitiprayan on the outskirts of Yogya where we were able to rehearse and at the same time trial the show. It was there that the production really took shape. Each night we would rehearse and up to 200 people would turn up to watch, giving us invaluable feedback and practice at finding the tempo and energy necessary to make the show work.

The performance team comprised 12 performers and 5 musicians lead by Sawung Jabo, my co-creator and musical director, plus production and support personnel. Six of us were Australians. Rehearsals started at 6am with voice and choreographic work and training in Pencak Silat (an Indonesian martial arts form which we used as the basis for the show’s fight scenes) lead by our fight director Pepen. There would be a short break for sarapan pagi (breakfast) and work on the play would resume until makan siang (lunch) at 1pm. In the hottest part of the day we would rest and then rehearse from 4pm through to prayer time at 6pm, returning to work for a further 2 hours from 7.30pm. The day would end with a half-hour yoga recuperation session.

Getting Sawung Galing to its opening performance took around 4 years. It began with a casual remark from Sawung Jabo as he was exiting the Sidetrack Studio Theatre following a performance of The Promised Woman; “How would you like to make a show like that for Indonesians in Australia?” I remember replying something to the effect that I would love to make a show with him, but not an Indonesian version of The Promised Woman. It would have to be something different. I had no idea what that was but we agreed to discuss it.

There is always a degree of audacity in making a completely new show. There is never enough money, never enough time, and a deadline is set which then conditions everything. You start with a vision splendidly contained in a series of ‘what ifs?’—expansive, heady, glorious, perfect. The rest is a story of compromises. Sawung Galing was indeed an audacious project seriously compromised by shortages of money and time. But it was also a work in which a collaborative team from Australia and Indonesia defied compromise and extraordinary difficulties to turn what should have been a creative development project into a major performance that toured to 5 cities in 2 weeks.

When we started rehearsals we knew we only had enough money to get the first show on. We had been living with this awful fact for sometime. Back in April when I had gone to Indonesia to cast the show and obtain real costings on the technical equipment and tour, I almost cancelled the project. The deficit seemed impossible. We were more than $50,000 short. The expensive part was touring this large production to 5 cities. Even though the initial aim of the project was simply to develop and trial a show, we couldn’t cancel it as we had already obtained large amounts of funding and sponsorship by promising a tour across Java.

One very late night in Bandung at Rumah Nusantara, the arts space managed by our production manager Tompel Witono, Jabo, Tompel and I talked over the problem until the early hours of the morning. The later it got the more pessimistic I grew. Then Kurt Kaler, an American who grew up in Indonesia and who now runs a music production business, joined the discussion. “Have you got enough money to get the first show up?” he asked. “Yes if we cut the rehearsal period to about 7 weeks, we could have an opening night, but that’s it” I said. “That’s enough” he said, “you can do it, push ahead, this is Indonesia, the place of magic and miracles, all you need is faith and courage and to find a few more sponsors.” Kurt’s enthusiasm and conviction that others could be found who shared the desire to foster a living example of Indonesians and Australians working together somehow made it all seem possible. So we resolved to push on.

And eventually the sponsorship came. Perhaps it was a miracle or maybe it was that the show had something important to say about the world, articulated with energy, joy and laughter by a joint Indonesian-Australian team. It was certainly also the product of the relentless search for sponsors by Jabo and Tompel, Kurt and Sue Piper, using all their contacts and local knowledge to find companies who wanted to share in the making of Sawung Galing.

The night of the first show in Nitiprayan was certainly magical. The audience arrived early, sat on the ground, stood, or climbed onto what ever they could to catch a glimpse of the 2 hour, 20 minute show. Later Heri Ong, the village leader and main organiser of the Nityprayan festival, told me he estimated the crowd to be about 3,000 people. He was ecstatic with its success. I have always dreamed of theatre drawing large community audiences, but the huge crowd that night, made up of people from all age groups and walks of life exceeded even my wildest dreams.

We then took what was a show of circus proportions on the road; 5 trucks and 2 buses journeyed to Solo, Surabaya, Bandung and Jakarta. With the exception of Jakarta we played to huge audiences. This was especially so in Surabaya (the home of the original story) where it was estimated that the audience exceeded 4,000. In Jakarta the show played to a meagre 600 or so, as the performance space was a sports field only a few hundred metres from the Australian Embassy, which had been bombed exactly a week before. That night, the then President Megawati decided to mark the tragedy with a visit to the Australian Embassy site, causing a traffic jam of Jakarta proportions and leaving us with a comparatively small audience, half of whom were police, the bomb squad and our own security people (all “black belt” members of our fight director’s Silat group).

We started the show late, partly in the hope that more audience would find their way through the traffic, partly for security reasons. By the time the show started the only people who seemed to be taking their job seriously were the Silat group; the bomb squad had relaxed and were enjoying the show. Clearly Sawung Galing had become community theatre of a different kind.

So stage one is complete. Now we have the challenge of getting Sawung Galing to Australia.

Sidetrack Performance Group in association with Wot Cross-cultural Synergy, SAWUNG GALING kembalinya Legenda (BLACK ROOSTER, the legend returns), writer/director Don Mamouney, musical director Sawung Jabo; performers Sawung Jabo, Fajar Satriadi, Gusjur Mahesa, Sri Erita, Desiandari, Nunung Deni Puspitasari, R S W Lawu P.U., Agus Margiyanto, Anton Obelix Triyono, Wrachma Rachladi Adji, Yoyojewe, Indrasitas, Donny Sawung, Abdul Syukur Paembonan, Sept 4-16, 2004, various venues, Java, Indonesia

I embarked on a short visit to Manila in late November from Perth, a prelude to a project called the life and wandering times of arnulfo tikb-ang, a performance work-in-progess. The purpose of the visit was to track and bring together people I had not seen for many years—people who worked closely with my father, a piano-maker, who passed away 20 years ago. Taking my video documentation and recorded conversations along with old photographs, personal objects and mementos from the past, I packed my gear in the middle of a familiar, raging typhoon and embarked on a flight to Singapore for Future of Imagination 2.

Coordinated and directed by Lee Wen and Jason Lim, Future of Imagination, initially staged at the Substation in 2003, was re-launched as Singapore’s first international performance art event in December 2004. This ambitious 5 day event aimed to provide an expanded platform for the revival of performance art. It was an inspiring undertaking, a creative collaboration made possible by the generosity of the local artist community and its growing support network of students and volunteers.

Bringing together artists from 14 countries in Europe, North America and South East Asia, FOI2 was a welcome opportunity for local audiences to experience and actively engage with a diversity of practices of live and time-based art. It was also a community celebration, a milestone marking the lifting of an effective ban on performance art through the no-funding policy of the state—the punitive action imposed by the National Arts Council for 10 years following an overblown and sensationalised attack by the conservative press on the pubic-hair snipping performance by Joseph Ng in 1994.

Staged in Chapel Gallery at Sculpture Square, a late 19th century Methodist church, there couldn’t be a more fitting venue for the resurrection of faith in this marginalised artform. In his welcome, Lee Wen improvised an illustration of the state of cultural affairs in Singapore with regards to live art. Holding a benevolent looking, soft white-haired grandma doll in his right hand and a rather cheeky looking red devil with a hammer in the other he randomly picks victims from the congregation, pounds his prey on the head, recoils and squeezes the wheezing, mocking doll against his cheek. The devil takes on many victims from the assembly, each one submissively accepting its blows. A religious style rant follows about an archaic obscenity law in the Penal Code designed “to protect the man on the street”, on which the restrictions on performance are based. Just who is this man? Lee backs off, jokingly blaming the chapel for his behaviour. Nervous laughter. Opening night was a curiously ambivalent but intensely engaging affair, an occasion for jubilation, but the policing of performance persists.

In background: Lee Wen, Jason Lim

Lee collaborates with Jason Lim on a symbolic hair-shaving, an historical rewind, refreshing the audience’s memory of the infamous pubic-hair-snipping incident. With an electric clipper they take turns to shave each other’s heads while 3 teenage performers dance to high-octane hip hop, the sound of the clipper powerfully amplified. Then Lim burns joss sticks in a trance-like, body purification ritual, running the bundle over his body, with only the groin escaping the burning tips. Lee takes a bird from a cage, hobbles it with a string, tying leg to neck. The bird frantically flutters, heads up towards the beams overhead and falls exhausted to the floor. Lim shaves his exposed body forcing the clippers into his skin. An angry young woman emerges from the audience with scissors and cuts the string. The performance is aborted. Lee Wen regains his composure and asks the woman to complete the removal of the string before she releases the bird outside. It was a disconcerting and poignant moment as I too was dislodged from my own role—I had been asked earlier by the artist to assist in cutting the string, on cue, just before this intervention occurred. What was the performance about now? I was aware that it had a very personal meaning for Wen about the suicide of a very close friend a month earlier, something more than the issue of censorship and ‘the man on the street.’ More accusations dogged the artist that night, prompting him to post an open email to explain and contextualise the work.

Ironically, no one intervenes as Lim’s skin reddens from his aggressive shaving but the collective relief is palpable when the clipper is turned off. He stretches out on the floor like a model in a photo session, applies waxing strips and rips the remaining hair from his body. The performance ends.

While the opening performance focused on issues of censorship, freedom of expression and state power, Silent Logistics explored the dynamics of power between individuals in personal relationships. Performing a series of repetitive actions, Canadian partners Julie Andree T and Dominic Gagnon defined the central area of the chapel as a temporal stage, cordoning it with elastic lines stretched mid-level between walls. The domestic setting included kitchen objects, a water-filled plastic bucket, a glass mixing bowl, a brown paper bag, flour, a tray of eggs and 3 durian fruits, the smell distinctly reminding us of the season, 2 more buckets, newspaper strewn under the table, and an empty chair nearby. In sustained silence, the protagonists mirror the other’s gestures, position their mouths against the elastic line and walk towards each other. The illusion of the squared-off area is broken as the lines stretch and literally form a cross. The performers lean forward and fall together, shoulder to shoulder—the stretched cross-line presenting an illusion of two bodies suspended in space.

A series of actions, including being slapped while holding eggs in the mouth, is followed by the man covering his head in pink slush from a bucket while the woman splits open the durian fruit and cups the flesh under her shirt, dramatically enlarging her breasts before immersing her head in the pink liquid. The pair return to their opening positions, the elastic line in their mouths, and suddenly and aggressively lunge at each other with an intense animal cry. The display gradually becomes a sustained, passionate kiss, with the two pink heads amazingly morphing as a single entity, reminding us of Magritte’s iconic surrealist painting The Lovers, with the sludge substituting for the cloth. They slowly manouver a release from the locked kiss and pivot their heads in opposite directions while remaining balanced together, the crossed lines still in tight tension. They slip and fall. A cigarette is lit. The act is consumated. The intensity of this piece draws its power from the multitude of metaphors animated in this temporal space.

A number of works from the region were participatory and playful. Using different flavoured icy poles, China’s He Cheng Yao instructs participants through an interpreter to join her in an intimate game of sucking, later asking them to write a description of the experience, which is then projected onto a wall. The effect was relaxing, animated by teasing, physical humour and shared laughter. Yuan Mor’o (Philippines) offered ritualised walking on a narrow path in a maze-like floor mandala made from rice seeds before throwing a spherical object into the surrounding space. A similar strategy was deployed by emerging Singaporean artist Dennis Tan with his dust-collecting performance inside the chapel. This later developed into a participatory walk around the physical architecture of Sculpture Square, climbing and traversing surrounding sidewalks, footpaths, walls and the rooftop ledge. Ray Langenbach’s (Malaysia/USA) engaging work took the form of an illustrated academic lecture, in drag, on information systems as the apparatus of state hegemony and the way transgressions of performance art are assimilated back into the system. He demonstrated this by re-enacting Vincent Leow’s urine drinking action (a precursor of the 1994 Ng incident), in which Leow would ask the volunteers from the audience to go on stage and urinate in a plastic cup which he/they would later drink. This was a performative illustration of the feedback response to the body, a recontextualisation of performative, critical art practise within a politically conservative state.

Sakiko Yamaoka (Japan) performed a mesmerising 4 part action, a poetic meditation about the cycles of time, about permanence and change. Grains of salt crushed between her hands fell onto a mirror on the floor. In the repetitive passing of water between 2 vessels, a basin and a cardboard box, until the water finally disappers, the box is reduced to mushy pulp. A brown bag is cradled until it breaks open and pours out its contents—granules of seeds, beads, and marbles, scattering and colliding in all directions. The final segment was a poetic orchestration of previous elements with repetitive cycles of emptying, falling, crushing and retrieval as Sakiko climbs up and down a tall ladder, emptying her coat pockets of apples and descending to retrieve the fallen objects. The higher she goes the greater the battering until the apples too are reduced to pulp. The act of watching became a highly pleasurable experience, engaging all my senses in a heightened awareness of detail, colour, texture, movement.

I had a similar experience with the powerful durational work of Alastair Maclennan (Northern Ireland) who performed in the small windowless, air-conditioned space of the Lower Gallery. Two hospital beds are littered with animal body parts. Rows of heads, claws and feet from chickens, pigs, rabbits and fish as well as well as burnt limbs from plastic dolls are neatly arranged for forensic examination. Known for his early works commemorating people who have died from the political conflict in Northern Ireland, Maclennan invites us to reflect on the fragility of life and our own mortality. Clad in black balaclava, trenchcoat and a pile of 6 bowler hats on his head, the performer slowly moves like a masked shadow haunting the walls of this space, fixing a propped fishing rod, arranging upturned hats, filling them up with burnt debris. The overpowering smell of dead flesh is punctuated by the haunting squawking of animal cries. The audience was allowed to view the work between other performances in the chapel. Experiencing it at various intervals created a disconcerting perceptual dislocation as the earlier images were later recreated in the opposite corner of the space, the slow and suspended replay creating a state of temporal confusion.

Roddy Hunter’s (UK) Joy of Life was similarly structured in a gruelling 8 hour duration. While MacLennan used ‘mirror-objects’ as fixed markers via which the slow moving masked body navigates, Hunter employed life-size ‘mirror-image’ video projections of himself. Standing near one corner of the room (with the words “Joy of Life” spray-painted on his right), he faces a video camera, the shot projected to the opposite wall by the other corner, juxtaposed with the same words. The presence of a blinking camera makes it appear as if this is occurring in real time. Hunter slowly raises his arms at intervals, which also appears to be a time measuring device. But the projected image betrays our perception as it is not synchronised with the live action. Recorded earlier, it runs as a loop accompanied by the artist’s soliloquy about the future of the imagination.

Future of Imagination is a significant development in contemporary art practice not only in Singapore but also in the South East Asian region. While performance art has been around since the 1960s, its recent popularity may be attributed to the parallel socio-cultural and political climate of the region. A significant number of regional artists at FOI have also been actively engaged in the advocacy of political and social awareness in their respective countries regarding issues on human rights, the environment, AIDS and globalisation.

After reassembling and returning a borrowed piano and naming and finding a temporary home for Foi, the beautiful rooster who assisted me in my storytelling event, it was time to pack my gear and head back to Perth with inspiring memories and stories shared with new friends and with the many creative people who made Future of Imagination a profoundly rewarding and enriching experience.

Future of Imagination 2, An International Performance Event, curator-performers Lee Wen (Singapore/Japan), Jason Lim (Singapore), performers Alastair Maclennan (N. Ireland), Alwin Reamillo (Australia/Philippines), Andrée Weschler (Singapore/ France), Ben Denham (Australia), Cassandra Schultz (Singapore/ Australia), Dennis Tan (Singapore), Dominic Gagnon (Canada), He Cheng Yao (China), Irma Optimist (Finland), Iwan Wijono (Indonesia), Jeremy Hiah (Singapore), Julie Andrée T (Canada), Juliana Yasin (Singapore), kAI Lam (Singapore), Lynn Lu (Singapore) Marilyn Arsem (U.S.A.), Padungsak Kotchasumrong (Thailand), Ray Langenbach (U.S.A./Malaysia) Roddy Hunter (UK), Sakiko Yamaoka (Japan), Yuan Mor’o Ocampo (Philippines); Sculpture Square, Singapore, Dec 8-12, 2004, http://www.foi.sg/

As 2004 drew to a close, a producer of The Producers claimed that the show’s success was partly the result of an increasing conservatism in local audiences. Australians, apparently, “want a safe bet…they’re not particularly interested in experimenting and going to new things.” Anyone who attended anything besides The Producers last year (and there are a few) will know that 2004 wasn’t nearly as “safe” as this statement would imply. Audiences were challenged in a variety of ways, and a number of events in the latter half of the year specifically called into question the various relationships possible between audience and performer. Blowback, by not yet it’s difficult, asked viewers to make sense of a dystopian future defined by recognisable media images; the Little Asia touring dance festival Double Happiness brought to light the complex expectations contemporary audiences bring to movement-based performance; and La Mama’s Season of Explorations included works harking back to the “audience reflexive” days of 1970s experimental theatre.

A Season of Explorations

A Season of Explorations is La Mama’s annual mini-festival of works-in-progress, experimental off-cuts or embryonic fragments of future projects. The proceedings kicked off with an audacious happening by director Laurence Strangio, taking the text of Peter Handke’s Kaspar as its launch point. The original drama, the first full-length work from the enfant terrible of 1970s European anti-theatre, is a confounding riff on the power of language—how words speak their speaker. In Strangio’s production, the seating lay scattered across the space, chairs on their side, graffitied in chalk, missing legs, backs, safety. Po-faced actors wearing sunglasses stood vacantly amongst the audience. I thought I’d nabbed a secure vantage point, then turned to discover that the ‘wall’ behind me had risen to showcase a blank-faced Kaspar slowly peeling fruit. If there is no “I” outside of language, there is equally no safe place outside of Kaspar’s performance itself. To view it is to move within it.

The historical Kaspar Hauser appeared in Nürnberg in 1828 equipped with a single sentence (“I want to be a rider like my father.”) In Handke’s text his phrase is the more evocative “I want to be somebody like somebody was once” and for a time this is the only phrase spoken, incessantly. Initially, the effect is that of stumbling into a novice drama class, actors playing with a line for no purpose other than to explore its phonic potential. We are given no frame within which to interpret the utterance.

Amidst the linguistic chaos, Strangio himself darts to and fro scribbling notes for future performances, a surrogate scribe aping each audience member’s own process of interpretation and uneasy participation. Strangio has already proven himself a strong director with works such as Portrait of Dora, Alias Grace and a gripping recent adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ La Douleur. Here we see him in action, and indeed the overall impression provided by Kaspar is of watching the creative process in media res, as it flowers, unpolished and unpredictable.

If Kaspar conjures phantoms of 70s experimental theatre, Penny Machinations summons up more distant shades. La Mama’s theatre, courtyard and carpark are dressed like a faded carnival sideshow, curtained booths hiding different performances. Audiences buy tokens for each booth, choosing their own route for the evening. I sat in on a poker game featuring dialogue cribbed from popular songs, answered a telephone that offered a garbled rant from a tourist in India, and watched a couple fight over dinner (I chose “Dance” from the menu, and so this piece was movement-based). For each performance, the audience consisted of a single person; the confrontation with actors in an unknown setting created a wonderful thrill of fear. Penny Machinations, developed by Telia Nevile and Matt Kelly, turned out to be a fertile and highly entertaining experience. With many versions of each performance available, I found myself returning to Kelly’s Car Tape, performed by Bron Batten and Kate Summer. From the back seat of a car, I watched 2 performers play out a ritualistic gestural pattern of everyday driving, accompanied by the mix-tape I’d chosen. For my second visit, I chose the “Bloopers and Out-takes” reel, and was given a show of mistakes and mishaps ‘deleted’ from the original.

Blowback

In an article in The New York Times, the late Susan Sontag noted that since the advent of the camera, wars have come to be known primarily by iconic images which reduce the complexities of conflict to simple, mediated moments. “Photo-graphs,” she wrote, “have an insuperable power to determine what we recall of events,” and it is this repository of images, the “Western memory museum” which underscores the political potency of the most recent production from the increasingly prolific not yet it’s difficult (NYID).

Like many NYID events, Blowback situates its audience in the middle of things: upon entering the performance space, we are ushered into a live television studio ringed with video cameras, monitors, actors making small talk and a mixing desk/production HQ issuing orders through amped mics and headsets. As cameras are positioned, we find our own faces flashing up on screens, or are repositioned in our seats by PAs according to gaffered marks lining the floor.

Eventually, the ‘show’ begins. We’re here for a live taping of the final episode of TV soap A World of Our Own. The first scene features lead cast members Scott and Charlene (Todd Macdonald and Roslyn Oades) trying to escape the confines of suburban domesticity to strike out and discover a life less ordinary. Then things change. Across the space a prisoner is led, naked but for a makeshift hood. He is beaten, humiliated. More stories emerge, each as jarring. A military officer educates her junior through a cruel exercise in power; a media-starved prisoner submits himself to a sympathetic interrogator; a cheerleader is brutally questioned by a monstrous, nearly silent figure. Slowly, cross-currents appear suggesting that what we are viewing is a future Australia dominated by imperial rule, a world in which identity has become fused with the culture of our oppressors. Our cheerleader thinks she is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and it’s impossible to tell where Scott and Charlene end, and the actors portraying them begin.

Lost in this funhouse, there are repeated attempts by the characters to “break through” into another, less mediated reality. A recurrent motif is that of the body slamming against a white door—several characters launch themselves frontally into these frames with a bone-jarring impact. The visceral, then, would appear to be offered as one form of escape from a disconnected reality, but this is soon problematised as an exercise in masochistic futility. The interrogation victim who is thrown against the white square by her captor and viciously raped is gradually revealed to be her tormentor’s accomplice, re-enacting her own victimisation as part of an education program for the colonised.

But if Blowback is damning of the image’s power, it is not unambiguously so. It comes as a surprise to find the various strands of the narrative converging on a single piece of grainy video footage depicting trees alongside a bush highway. A number of characters are hunting down this image, and it appears to hold a kind of key to the psychic liberation of the people in question. The video was apparently shot via a camera placed within Scott’s eye, and has been coded virus-like in the computer networks of the oppressing regime.

To offer this dreamy, near-silent panoramic piece of footage as the catalyst for some sort of change, however, is a disconcerting twist in the prevailing logic of Blowback. Does it suggest the possibility of a more “authentic” simulation? Is it an ironic folding back of our hopes for a cliched, Truman Show door out of the mediated sphere? Or is it a sudden re-emergence of a Romantic innocence which can once again find meaning purely in what is represented, regardless of its mode of representation?

To add to this complex and troubling conclusion, we are finally left with a short sequence of non-diegetic dumbshow re-enactments of several iconic images from last year in Iraq. As the cast recreated the degraded humanity revealed in the photos from Abu Ghraib, I was left unable to reconcile the horrifying power of this image with the preceding denunciation of that same power. As a postmodern meditation on contemporary war as simulacrum, Blowback produces a commentary quite unlike anything else I’ve seen, suitably composed of incommensurate elements that cannot be reduced to a single statement. Yet from another standpoint, such as that of the post-colonial critic, this could equally be seen as a failure to offer a political position by a work too lost in its own internal complexities. Either way, the richness of NYID’s latest offering is indisputable.

Double Happiness

Double Happiness, this year’s Little Asia Dance Exchange tour, brings together dancers from Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo, Melbourne and Hong Kong. Each participant presents a solo work and collaborates with the others to produce an ensemble piece to accompany the tour.

Requiem, by Hong Kong artist Daniel Yeung, is an elegy of sorts. For much of the piece, the dancer’s body lies prone in darkness while black and white video footage of a prerecorded performance plays out on a massive screen above. The images of Yeung’s naked body hint at death, loss and decay. When the screen darkens, Yeung rises from the floor to repeat many of the same gestures seen before, but the potent physicality of his presence carries a sense of reanimation, of life breathed into the lifeless. Most stunning are his vertical leaps, limbs jackknifing forward with whiplash intensity.

Natalie Cursio, also Blowback’s cheerleader, is the local participant in the exchange, and produces a piece fairly representative of Melbourne’s contemporary dance climate. Cocooned in a doona, haunted by fairytale horrors and suburban banalities alike, Cursio’s ticcy gestures reflect the critical dominance of Chunky Move’s modes of charming defiance. The piece’s refusal to provide a narrative grounding, and its foregrounding of fragmented moments and sudden revelations, echoes the trajectory of Dance Works under Sandra Parker; and the tongue-in-cheek allusions to myth and childhood stories resonate with the recent directions taken by Phillip Adams’ Balletlab.

Interval arrives, and the house lights go up. But we slowly become aware of a figure at the far end of the stage, standing nearly motionless but for a simple, repetitive extension of the arm, hand across the chest and forward into space. A slight step. Jung Young-Doo’s performance—if it can be called that—has begun. The same gesture, repeated again and again. He disappears offstage. He returns, on his back, arching his spine and inching across the space. He leaves. Is this a butoh-style exploration of nothingness or, as a companion remarks, heroin-chic for the dance crowd? Jung’s apparent indifference to the presence of his audience walks the fine line between nonchalance and neglect.

After the interval proper, the various participants in the project present a group-devised piece, Doubling. It’s easy to see that each member has taken the reins at various points, and the particular styles that have been showcased previously are given a new slant through the involvement of other dancers. Cursio’s contribution forms a glorious climax: the archetypal Aussie pub classic Khe Sanh makes an incongruous accompaniment, but it’s presented here without a hint of sarcasm. It challenged my preconceptions of parochial ‘ocker-ness’ and its opposition to dance, and the sense of joy radiating from the performers challenged the somewhat limited emotional palette so often employed in Australian dance today. Doubling was always dynamic, sometimes daggy and utterly delightful.

A Season of Explorations: Kaspar, writer Peter Handke, director Laurence Strangio; November 2-4, 2004; Penny Machinations, creators Telia Nevile, Matt Kelly/Interior Theatre; La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, Nov 2-Dec 5, 2004

not yet it’s difficult, Blowback, writer/director David Pledger; St Kilda Memorial Hall, Melbourne, Nov 25-Dec 4, 2004

Little Asia Dance Exchange, Double Happiness, North Melbourne Town Hall, Nov 11-13, 2004

In a political climate that bears the hallmarks of a 1950s church revival, the staging of religious subject matter in contemporary theatre runs alongside the Bush Administration’s sermonised rhetoric in the push for electoral victory and Tony Abbott’s resurrection of the anti-abortion issue. Sidetrack Performance Group’s latest production, Sanctus, takes on religion in its most classical of incarnations and tweaks it with a touch of panto-camp wryness in an attempt to cut through this alignment of Church and State mythology. Set in the antiquated world of a simple young priest, Sanctus is Carlos Gomes and Liam Wallington’s adaptation of Friar Bentinho of Saint Anthony by Brazilian playwright Djalma Di Frattini. Written in the late 1980s, the work is an exploration of Catholic and evangelical notions of the divine, the miraculous and of faith. It is also an attempt, as the program suggests, to critique the ways such notions gain weight in a world that ignores both the sacred within religion and the secularity of state life.

In this context, we enter a sacrosanct space. Mystic panpipes float in the gloom. A friar sits, praying, draped in monkish brown robes. In the background beckons the silhouette of a humble church, its small steeple casting shadows out to the edge of the space. Incense burns from an altar outside and peels smoke into the dimness. This is theatrical realism in all its unfamiliarity, with a historical mise-en-scène akin to a BBC medieval drama. Played in Marrickville’s Sidetrack Theatre, I’m not sure whether to read the sober tone as deeply sincere or highly ridiculous. But then, as God’s voice booms wrath at humankind’s bent for illusion and falsity and promptly drops a letter of “mission” from the heavens above, wry humour undercuts the solemnity and gives a taste of the satire to come.

Friar Benjamin’s (Kirk Page) calling is to restore the vandalised and abandoned Chapel of Saint Anthony, but as he begins dusting off the local church iconography 4 religious statues resurrect themselves and with a crack of thunder from above their comedy of “miracles” begins. St Francis, St Anthony, St Clare and Our Lady (Carlos Gomes, Drew Fairley, Kym Vercoe and Katia Molino) stand in holy repose, their faces stretched with expert choral grimace—eyebrows lifted, teeth gleaming—to begin their battle over who can produce the best divine intervention to save the world. What results is an up-tempo, witty burlesque in which the mere prospect of “a papal announcement, an act of healing, the raising of the dead, a statue with bleeding stigmata” becomes cause for the church to debate its own irrelevance in an era “that feeds on celebrity and wickedness.”

Gomes’ theatrical exuberance, the precision of his images, his timing, rhythm and comic technique are all revealed in the expert choreography and physicality of a Mass-turned-musical. Part camped-up pageant figurines, part Commedia stock, the saints jostle, bicker, hymn, shudder and pray; a malleable flock out of kilter with itself and the world it is trying to save. Our Lady wears a knife in her heart that is painfully removed, only to be ironically re-inserted in the name of martyrdom at the close of the piece. St Clare offers an orgiastic rendition of holy service, climaxing with a sly afterglow sigh at the effects of repression. The impeccable production values combine sophistication with simplicity to enable church pews to become objects of suggestion: a pilgrim’s forest, a bed of lust. The performers whirl the pews in the space as poetic evocations of transformation, miracle, acts of the divine; layering physical grace against their more rudimentary caricatured states.

Sanctus is a frivolous portrayal of Catholicism and its various hypocrisies, offering more in surface reflection than deep interrogation. If you can ride with the fun, the polished production and animated performances offer a deliciously gleeful parody of all things sanctified and harmonious. If the humour starts to grate after a while, the play’s claim to social relevance also increasingly wanes. I laughed but felt let down by the didacticism, the kind of critical tactic certain politicians have recently practised only too well.

Sidetrack Performance Group, Sanctus, writer Djalma Di Frattini, translators/adaptators Liam Wallington and Carlos Gomes; performers/devisors Carlos Gomes, Drew Fairley, Kirk Page, Kym Vercoe, Katia Molino; Sidetrack Studio Theatre, Sydney, November 18-28, 2004

Michael Kantor was appointed artistic director of Playbox Theatre earlier this year, taking on a brief to revitalise the financially troubled Melbourne institution without breaking it. As a symbol of the organisation’s new direction, it is now to be known by the name of its home: the Malthouse. Kantor is enthusiastic about the programming changes he is introducing and the company’s novel eponym: “What I like about the name ‘Malthouse’,” he explains, “is that it refers to a melting point with the aim of intoxication. It’s about a confluence of elements: malt, water, barley—or sound, text and image, in the case of theatre. So it’s about collaborative forces coming together to create something which is seductive, which is ultimately transformative (like alcohol) and which allows for a multi-disciplinary approach to what you put on in a theatre.”

Kantor agrees that the Playbox name was apt in the past, when the company’s primary brief was to stage new Australian scripts. Under Kantor’s stewardship however, this will no longer be the case: “The previous name, Playbox, enshrined the centrality of plays in everything we did,” he observes. The new Malthouse is to be, in Kantor’s terms, a “theatre of the senses” as much as a theatre of scripts and writers.

Vintage re-mix

Kantor is launching the 2005 Malthouse program with 4 productions early in the year, 2 of which he is to direct. These are Patrick White’s The Ham Funeral and Tom Wright’s Journal of the Plague Year, to be staged with the same ensemble of performers and designers, and the same set. The inclusion of a play by White serves as a model for the way Kantor approaches theatre, text and performance. The director notes that the author of such difficult Australian classics as Voss still “hovers over Australian theatre as this sort of naughty godfather in the cupboard who whispers: ‘It doesn’t have to be this way! It doesn’t have to be naturalistic! It doesn’t have to be logical!’ White was a great writer who had great thoughts about the theatre and he merged the two into these messy theatrical events, offering up volatile Australian worlds. But they’re not well made plays…They’re actually kind of awkward things. But they have the tactility of great works, and when you’re dealing with something conceptually great in that sense there is an inherent strength that means you can take risks as you tear into it. One thing we should be doing is looking back at our theatre history and saying, ‘What are the things that need to be thought about again?’” Given that debate still rages around White’s theatrical writings, Ham Funeral is an ideal choice for such re-evaluation.

A similar mining of history to produce radical new visions underlies Wright’s Journal of the Plague Year. Kantor and Wright collaborated last year on the darkly acerbic, crazily satirical contemporary panto Babes in the Wood. Just as Wright trawled through 19th century Australian and colonial history and writings for Babes, so the writer is now examining the religious and political discourse which emerged from the tensions between the restored British monarchy and the post-revolutionary Parliament while plague ravaged London in 1664-5. “Tom excavates history on the stage,” Kantor explains, “using artefacts, novels and extant plays to access an historical moment which he feels has great relevance for us right now. So it’s about dredging up history to present it as part of the now.” Kantor adds that for Journal of the Plague Year Wright is drawing on descriptions and metaphors which arose in the 1660s relating to “the physical decay of bodies, of a city and of a people—and the mounting hysteria that was attached to that. There is this overarching contemporary metaphor of a morally diseased society.”

Wright notes that before today’s Western alliance became bogged down in protracted conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the collapse of the Soviet bloc had led to much talk of the “End of History.” Instead we saw “the Balkans and Rawanda implode; and to me, it seemed like history was a disease of bestiality which periodically bubbled up, destroying our illusions.” Journal of the Plague Year thus constitutes a critique of the messianic delusions of Western rulers, and the way the very materiality of flesh, and of societies, make a mockery of them.

Intoxicating curation

Perhaps the most significant change which Kantor is inaugurating at the Malthouse is in transforming the organisation into a curatorial venture. Rather than hiring out the Malthouse’s theatres when the company is not staging its own productions, outside artists will be selected according to how they meet the aims and programming needs of the company. All productions housed at the venue will be scheduled as part of an overall season of adjacent works, much like a curated show at a gallery. Currently, the only institution to employ this model is La Mama, which chooses works from a wide pool of applicants that are then staged within La Mama or the nearby Carlton Courthouse.

The Malthouse will also be hosting regular workshops and popular fora. “We want to create great opportunities for theatre-makers,” Kantor explains. “Not only writers, but also directors and actors to work on shows which they think are important—and to imagine an audience for them. It’s about a series of relationships. We want to make the theatre about not merely a play, but an event, which starts as soon as you arrive. It’s about what’s going on in the foyer and how shows are talked about beforehand; what’s the relationship between shows that you might see in any one season.” With Kantor at the helm, Malthouse should be curating intoxicating goodness for years to come.

Malthouse Theatre’s Autumn 2005 program can be accessed and ordered from www.malthouse.com.au

Director Rose Myers and Arena have long been addressing 2 major challenges in producing young people’s theatre: how to theatrically engage adolescents whose major cultural references are popular television, movies and music; and how to produce theatre which is educationally or morally instructive without being didactic. The consistent, a priori linking of juvenile aesthetics to instruction—however ambiguous—has secured Arena considerable resources and impressive multimedia technologies. It has, however, also reduced the inherent complexity of the company’s work.

Gamegirl deals with the emotional conflicts experienced by Lila following her parents’ separation. Lila is shown using a gaming environment to ‘work through’ her emotional conflicts. Writer Maryanne Lynch’s elementary metaphors lie at the opposite end of the spectrum to the complex Christian or feminist symbolism of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or Ursula LeGuin’s fiction for young people. The game character of the “Weeping Woman”, for example, unsurprisingly represents the mother. Lynch is nevertheless to be commended for presenting gameplay itself as positive: a rare phenomenon in depictions authored by adults.

Revelations within the play suggest that earlier paternal infidelity during the marriage caused the break-up, yet the piece ends with a ‘happy families’ conclusion that sees father, mother and children all embracing following a brief period of largely implied parental friction. This is presumably to foster supportive post-show discussion with school groups, but the blatantly contrived simplicity of the finale blunts the theatrical affect and interest of Gamegirl. Previous darker Arena productions like Panacea (1998) and Play Dirty (2002) have also tended to channel their exuberant and technically sophisticated energies into a fairly banal closing motto of ‘have confidence in oneself and everything will come out alright.’ The trade-off between aesthetic stimulation and confidence building seems to produce dramaturgically mixed results.

This is, however, to take a particularly sharp and adult (though not inappropriate) eye to Arena. Gamegirl also brims with Myers’ strengths, although the performances are somewhat uneven. Myers largely resists turning the father’s ditsy girlfriend into a comic villain but this leaves actor Amanda Douge little to do but wander around looking dim and uncomfortable. Luke Elliot though is excellent as the father, his gently assertive yet consistently felt physical presence making even the mother’s cartoonish boyfriend (complete with cheesy grin, blond wig and a macho, bent-leg pose) appear sympathetic—if at a loss before the children. Jessamy Dyer as Lila is moreover suitably charismatic and confident, if at times brittle.

The most interesting development in this work is in the gaming projections from Anna Tregloan and Cazerine Barry. Arena has previously employed slick and in some cases custom-designed multimedia tools, from the revolving screen which encircled the performance space for Eat Your Young (2000) to the ingenious use of weather balloons as screens in Panacea. Here, real time projections of Lila are matted onto animations shown on 2 screens above and behind the stage. Rather than exhibiting the company’s typically glossy aesthetic, the gaming design consists of rough, shuddering montages of ingeniously assembled cut-outs and scraps. The visual mapping and animation is jerky and imperfect, stressing the provisional nature of this fantasy and its construction from shards of experience, post-industrial cast-offs and cultural tropes. The setting of such overt formal ambiguities amidst the otherwise closed circuit of Gamegirl’s narrative helps punch holes in the simplistic dramaturgy, creating a space for dreaming and allusion. In short, this design enables real play.

Gamegirl is a pleasing, accessible and not entirely unchallenging young person’s theatre piece. I have reservations though. Having attended the recent festival of director Hayao Miyazaki’s gob-smackingly inventive, disorientating and yet hugely affective animations such as Spirited Away (2001)—also made for children—one cannot help but suspect we are selling young people short if we accept that youth theatre cannot be as abstract or complicated as the music produced by the 6 year old Mozart.

Arena Theatre Company, Gamegirl, writer Maryanne Lynch, director Rose Myers; performers Jessamy Dyer, Dave Lawson, Carole Patullo, Luke Elliot, Amanda Douge; Playhouse Theatre, Perth, Awesome Festival, November 24-27, 2004

PACT Youth Theatre’s Suspect vividly places the surveillance issue in the bigger context of a voyeuristic, Reality TV culture, but at the same time draws stark parallels with more familiar intrusions by peeping toms, stalkers, policemen, private detectives and bureaucrat interrogators. Here surveillance can turn transmute to murder and disappearance. New technologies of surveillance appear at times to be mere extensions of some nasty human impulses. The wide stage, multi-level design populated with video monitors, systems operators and the perpetrators and victims of surveillance generates a density of the surveillance experience with a range of comment and many opportunities for a well-trained, large cast.

Even so, not all the characters are realised with the same attention to detail and theme, iconic figures (like the film noir femme fatale) don’t connect, some performance images seem to be repeats from PACT’s previous show Song of Ghosts without rationale, and the final sequence where the whole cast line up to reveal what’s been been surveilled of their lives is unrevealing. There is no sense in the finale of intimate detail, whether real or fictional, of the pain of being opened out to a prying world. The mechanical performance conceit sits oddly beside the angst and raw humour played out in the first part of Suspect. And the suggestion that we the audience were part of this surveillance process was not convincing. Direction and most performances are strong, as we’ve come to expect from PACT. They’ve set their benchmark high, but here the focus on types undercuts the power of the surveillance theme except where an idiosyncratic persona is realised, as in the case of the ‘dog lady’, where we witness her loss and its impact, not naturalistically played but surreally embodied.

In the latest Breathing Space program (an enterprising collaboration involving Performance Space, PICA and Arnoflini, UK), Dan Belasco Rogers’ (UK) solo performative lecture, Unfallen, was a delight. He has a curious aesthetic and thematic kinship with the late Spalding Gray if with none of Gray’s seductive poetic musicality. But the melding of personal anxieties with larger speculations and the calculated shaping of revelations are familiar, though very different in tone and effect with Belasco Roger’s quiet, hesitant delivery. Synchronicities of mapping (he uses projections of overlaid city maps to reveal disturbing conjunctions) and of accidents (with a touch of Gray’s almost superstitious fatalism) suggest a universe as dangerous and sometimes as funny as Douglas Adams’, but more worrying. On the same program it was good to see the return of Martin del Amo’s Unsealed (RT 61, p47) confirming the work’s distinctive power. As a quite lateral exploration of self and a career fantasy it was an ideal companion piece for Belasco Roger’s reverie on destiny.

PACT Youth Theatre, imPACT Ensemble, Suspect, directors Regina Heilmann, Chris Murphy, design Kate Shanahan, video Sean Bacon, music/sound Nik Wishart; PACT, Dec 2-12, 2004

Breathing Space: Unfallen, Dan Belasco Rogers; Unsealed, Martin del Amo; Performance Space, Nov 25-27, 2004

There is a notion current in contemporary experimental music that you can define a musician as ‘new’ or ‘old’ school. Is this division real and helpful? Is there a paradigm shift here? Or is the division a construct of a cocooned scene, inbred and preoccupied with its own little twists and turns?

We also have labels ascribed to the so-called new schools: ‘minimal’, ‘reductionist’, ‘New London Silence’ and ‘New Berlin Silence’. Wittgenstein once said:

Either a thing has properties which no other thing has, and then one has to distinguish it straight away from the others by a description and refer to it; or, on the other hand, there are several things which have the totality of their properties in common, and then it is not possible to point to any one of them. For if a thing is not distinguished by anything, I cannot distinguish it—for otherwise it would be distinguished.

You can imagine what an affront it is to experimentalists to be distinguished as ‘old school.’ So are there distinguishing features to the new school? What Wittgenstein says lends some weight to the idea that a real schism is taking place. So are there defining features to music of the early 21st century? Should we be making distinctions, and are the labels good?

Darn negative labels

Reductionism, outside of music, is associated with neo-conservatism (and experimental music has always situated its ethical and philosophical soul to the left). It suggests fewer events per minute. This begs the question, “What is an event?” In non-notated music there is no easy tally.

Reductionism could mean limiting certain parameters in the music and allowing others to flourish. But all music limits some parameters and concentrates on others. You would never label Western classical music ‘melodically reduced’, or Indian music ‘harmonically challenged’; it’s too darn negative. I don’t believe that a trend towards reducing or minimising is the thing that makes the ‘new’ new (although there is some quite stark work).

One such work was performed in February 2004 by Basque musician Mattin and Sydney-based Matt Earle as part of Sydney’s What is Music? festival. Mattin employed computer feedback using an internal microphone and Earle was using a no-input sampler. They produced blocks of loud sound and abrupt long silences. It was impossible to distinguish Mattin from Earle; they were not playing individual lines.

One could only describe the resulting sonic material as reduced if you heard the blocks as simple events (you would have been bored out of your brain). If you listened carefully you could only describe them as immensely complex; it was beyond my power of analysis. They were sound events across the frequencies all at once and none of the fleeting particles of sound were long enough for me to define; they seemed to be weightless, but too interesting in frequency to be described as ‘noise’. They composed open ended, chaotic systems which interacted with each other in ways that they didn’t want to predict. To suggest this is minimal seems silly.

In one view there were myriad events per minute, in the other there were about 4 events over 40 minutes. But looked at from this minimal or reduced perspective the work made no sense at all. It was not minimalism that was giving the work its power and novelty.

Subminimal minutiae

A more scientific use of the term ‘reductionism’ means trying to explain phenomena in terms of its smallest or simplest constituents. It seems misguided to say musicians are breaking musical phenomena into their smallest constituents in order to explain them, because explanation isn’t the function of this music. But just as physicists have been inspired to understand the nature of matter by colliding particles at faster and faster speeds, musicians are focussing on sonic material. Was Mattin and Earles’ search analogous to the search for the Higgs Particle?

I’d like to think now about the trumpet playing of Axel Dörner. I sent a CDR of myself and Axel to Martin Davidson of the Emanem label because he had released a CD of the group Lines in 2000, which included Axel and me. The new duo seemed a logical extension. He wrote back:

I am afraid it’s too subminimal for me. 30 years ago, I used to like it when people used to go to that area during performances, but they came out of it when they had exhausted the possibilities. I don’t find much of interest in extended performances which limit themselves to that area.

I respect Martin’s honesty; he made and named a distinction, but what could he mean by “subminimal”? Presumably we explore an area so lacking in input that ‘minimal’ is too weak a term. So I listened as dispassionately as I could to the CD concentrating on Dörner’s contribution.

We hear huge flexibility in the duration of the units of music. There is the potential for the next bit to be as long as it needs to be, not shaped by the limitations of phraseology based on breath. Silences are part of the music and can be as long as they need to be. The underlying rhythmic pulse of the music is unpredictable but much calmer and more patient than improvised instrumental music from 5 years ago. Frequencies are often at the extremes of what is possible on a trumpet. Many of the complex events are multi-frequency and inherently polyphonic. They are not drones; these events are dancing internally. Dörner employs glissandi and microtonal movement when he plays a solid tone, so we hardly ever hear a discrete note; frequency-packed noises yes, but notes that are employed in a system and organised on a time line to produce a melodic unit or phrase, never.

I would say his music is the opposite of submiminal (and I certainly don’t remember hearing anyone sounding remotely like him 30 years ago). There’s too much undefined ephemeral phenomena and hence the number of events per minute is indeterminate. Just like Matt Earle and Mattin, he asks you to listen deeper than the surface. He wants you to follow the short-lived, high-pitched whistle tones at the edge of the noise; he wants you to juxtapose that with the low growls at the bottom of his range.

Martin Davidson may be judging the CD as bad, but I think he is listening in the wrong direction. More evidence of a schism, and hence a need for new terms? But how useful is a term like subminimalism?

The note split

Is another definition of the new possible in a rethink of the role of frequency and the abandonment of conventional notions of melodic and harmonic systems? We find now an interest in frequencies at the extremes of the listening spectrum where they don’t function within conventional systems. In the mid-range there is no reference to the well-tempered scale and its harmonic constructions, only the harmonic potential of feedback. The smallest particle of sound is no longer the note; the note has been split, and the focus is on ephemera. Minutiae are of great interest; musicians are going microscopic, focussing on tiny fissures and amplifying them.

It is not only the note that has been split. In the 80s and 90s the use of samples, concrete recordings within a piece, was an important feature. However, appropriation has all but disappeared from the new. Not that samplers or recording devices disappeared; as we saw from the performance of Mattin and Earle, these instruments have stayed and proliferated. But here there is a focus on going inside the sample, and inside the sampler, making something from scratch rather than making new things from old. I find this tendency touching in its positivity.

With Will Guthrie’s Building Blocks (Antboy 4) we hear 3 works that cannot be broken down into units—the music is not constructed using conventional phraseology, or episodic form. He employs battery-operated vibrators, and mechanical devices, as well as haphazard sounding and promiscuous attacks with his hands, playing a multi-layered and eccentric array of percussion. There are no sequencing engines here; by deploying mechanical devices Guthrie has multiplied the attacks to uncountable events per minute and allowed himself to create polyphony. The effect is an escape from any personal touch or expressionism; he sets up long events and sculpts the music from its one moment of attack and eventual decay or stop in one sweep.

Of course, dispensing with conventional phraseology and the discrete note has been going on for decades. The work of Austrian trombonist Radu Malfatti is an example. But Malfatti set his fleeting sonic quarks in a pool of silence. Axel Dörner confidently asserts that you can create big sound objects, and Guthrie, Mattin and Earle make their blocks gigantic. These are significant changes that leave listeners from the old school scratching their heads, hence the negative terms ‘reductionist’ and ‘subminimal.’

There is a ‘new.’ There are now too many practitioners for anyone to have an authoritative overview, but the new has been named, because it can be distinguished. Whether the labels are good enough to stick remains to be seen.

the NOW now events have always charmed with their low key loungeroom feel, squeezed into the urban grunge venues of Space3, LanFranchi’s Memorial Discotheque and the Frequency Lab. Surprisingly the shift to @Newtown (the former Newtown RSL) did nothing to damage the intimacy and ambience; rather it added slickness and confidence to a festival that has grown in only 4 years to be one of the most significant and satisfying events of the Sydney (and national) sound and music scene.

the NOW now 2005 brought together 70 artists in 4 days of spontaneous music creation, using all manner of instruments. With 7 sets per night there were many moments of wonder but I will focus on Thursday January 20, as it offered a concentration of the highlights and some relatively new faces.

Opening the evening was Ubercube—Monica Brooks on accordion/laptop and Emily Morandini on glockenspiel/laptop. Playing single sustained notes, they sampled and processed the minimal live input to incrementally build up sustained drones. The tones separated and harmonics rubbed up against each other creating pulses and gentle undulations. The set was serene and controlled with the shifts happening almost imperceptibly, which is why the end felt rushed—the peak had only just been reached when the layers were too rapidly removed.

In dramatic contrast to the flow and space of Ubercube was Ben Byrne and Shannon O’Neill’s hyperactive aural agitations. They created a frantic set filling every moment with shredded sounds—squelches, lashings, tears, rips, rendings, blendings. O’Neill has been known to be passionate about issues plunderphonic, so it is was not surprising to find unidentifiable music samples adding a pop to the snap and crackle of their palette. Though it was clear that creating a solid barrage was the structural choice, I did find myself wondering: is there such as thing as too much texture?

International guest Audrey Chen (USA) works with cello and voice, frequently taking the voice into the aurally challenging and sometimes abject, while sawing, scratching and plucking at the cello. The most beguiling moments arose as the half-piped vocal explorations twined around the squeaks and scratches of the cello, so that neither source was identifiable. She concluded the piece by passionately kissing and nibbling her instrument undercutting any perceived seriousness in such extended explorations.

An addition to the 2005 event was a film component. Along with screenings in the tiny alcove misnamed “cinematheque” there were also live soundtracks presented to significant avant garde films (projected from 16mm prints) curated by Sally Golding. On this evening it was James Heighway on an ancient analogue sampler to Paul Sharits’ 1966 Ray Gun Virus, which consisted simply of shifting colours. Heighway’s stutters and chunks of brutally undecorative sound worked well with the stark abstraction of the vision. The previous evening’s exploration by Robbie Avenaim on percussion activated by vibrating devices responding to Duchamp’s infinite spirals in Anemic Cinema (1926) was particularly beautiful in its subtlety and sensitivity.

The highlight of the night, and the festival, was NOW now co-director Clare Cooper on the ancient Chinese guzheng and Chris Abrahams on (what some described as equally ancient) DX7 keyboard synthesizer. Perhaps inspired by Robin Fox and Anthony Pateras’ whirlwind tour in early 2004 (see RT61, ), Sydney artists have been gradually realising that the 20-30 minute escalating set is not the only structural possibility. Cooper and Abrahams chose to play 6 pieces focussing on different techniques and sonorities. The first was a frenzy of gesture—digits fidgeted over strings and keyboard making a solid wall of rattly texture, impossible to separate sleights of sound. The second piece involved metal rods suspended between the strings of the guzheng hit with a mallet producing sustained vibration—the pure ringing tones accompanied by crystalline additions from Abrahams. Moving through bowing, scratching and moments of bravely held silence, the duo created a set that was awe-inspiring in its precision, quiet confidence and beauty.

The quality of the evening was maintained by Anthony Pateras on prepared piano coaxing liquid bubbles, clatters and glassy tones out of the instrument, though it seemed he lost momentum in the final section, missing several possible natural endings. The sensitive collaboration of Lawrence Pike on drums and Adrian Klumpes on prepared piano on the opening night should also be mentioned as a highlight, with its minimal delicacy and broken arpeggios creating a mesmerising piece.

The final set featured Robbie Avenaim and Tony Buck on drums and Max Nagl (Austria) on saxophone. Developing slowly and tentatively as the 2 drummers negotiated their territory it eventually found its feet, building into an all out frenetic drum battle with Nagl’s sustained drones and split notes making for an exhilarating finale.

The NOW now has always run on collective enthusiasm, passion and obsession, and despite a lack of funding, directors Clare Cooper and Clayton Thomas were able to create a bigger, more tightly coordinated event in 2005 than ever before. Audience numbers were more than healthy with some nights attracting over 400 people. Part of this is due to the art school patronage of the scene at the moment, as well as a significant growth of general interest in sound/music culture. Hopefully this will be maintained and, more importantly events like the NOW now will be supported by meaningful funding to further develop the artform and its audience in the future.

Musicircus—a festival of music for John Cage brought together a prodigious number of performers to perform an equally prodigious 20 Cage pieces across one day at the Brisbane Powerhouse, proving a test for both audience and musicians alike. Through the integration of sounds taken from our daily milieu, Cage endeavored to make music where “sounds are just sounds” and “people are just people”, unencumbered with psychological and theoretical allusions.

Musicircus was organised by Rebecca Cunningham and modelled on the first version of the event staged by Cage in 1969, where numerous musicians, ensembles and visual artists were allocated space to perform simultaneously in a large hall. There were no scores, focal points, formalities, admission charges or performance fees. The Powerhouse generously supported this rare opportunity to hear Cage pieces in performance, allowing musicians and audience to become acquainted with the composer’s complex, unique and unconventional methodologies. In accordance with the Cage ethos, as each performance began and ended the next, unannounced, had already begun in another space.

Telephones and Birds (1977) was performed by Cunningham and Miranda Sue Yek, triggering bird sounds recorded onto a laptop and a list of phone numbers that were responded to by answering machines. The selection of bird tracks and numbers was determined according to the I Ching through the chance process of flipping a coin. The use of the I Ching, characteristic of Cage’s compositions, makes each performance unique, while the eloquent simplicity opens the performance to unpredictable encounters and asynchronous tempos. This relinquishing of ego-dependence renders the very fabric of the pieces free of judgment and conditioned aesthetics.

For Roaratorio, Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979), a particularly virtuosic piece in the Cage oeuvre, the composer laboriously listed the sounds from 626 locations in James Joyce’s novel, recorded them, and painstakingly converted the book’s text into spoken word. The Powerhouse performance used the original recordings of Cage’s distinctly engaging and affable voice, combined with the original ambient sounds and Irish music to elicit a kaleidoscope of visionary sounds as Jan Baker-Finch, a eurythmic dancer, engaged in a gestural flux to the dynamics of the language.

Here and there across the day Zane Trow read randomly from Cage’s various writings, overlapping with screenings of 2 important films on the composer: From Zero (directors Frank Scheffer and Andrew Culver) and I Have Nothing to Say and I am Saying it (director Allan Miller). A key event in the afternoon was Music For… (1985), which here was Music For Fourteen, an Australian performance debut. For comparatively conventional instrumentation, the piece offered extremes of playability, including long passages of single notes and challenges to the physical limitations of the performer through parts generally regarded as impossible to play.

Cartridge Music (1960) was performed by 2 players, each selecting, according to the I Ching, a map of irregular shapes which was overlaid with transparencies determining actions and timing. Dispensing with modified record cartridges, the performance was updated using highly sensitive microphones with one performer making music with mushrooms (another John Cage obsession), the other with a vessel of water, each applying the actions of splashing, mashing, tearing and stirring, resulting in an unstable rummaging and delicate melange of vibrating timbres.

Variations IV (1963), for “sounds or combinations of sounds produced by any means with or without other activities”, was performed in the Powerhouse lift by Joe Musgrove, Scott Sinclair and Andrew Thomson using laptops, electric toothbrushes and an assortment of electronic toys rollicking in screeching feedback.

At the eclectic and avant-garde end was a performance of one of Cage’s later pieces, Four4 (1991), by Petar Gocic, Markos Zografos, Kahl Monticone and Joel Stern. Proving Cage’s enduring ability to astound and confront an audience the performance incorporated a tricycle, toast making and violin playing with bread crusts.

Musicircus—a festival of music for John Cage, Brisbane Powerhouse, December 11, 2004

In April 2004, the Federal government announced that ScreenSound would be merged into the Australian Film Commission (AFC). The move was not without controversy, especially when the AFC announced plans for the relocation of some of the archive’s activities away from Canberra and changes to its public programs. In September 2004 Paolo Cherchi Usai took up the position as director. His appointment is generally seen as a major step forward for the archive, given his leading role in the international archiving community. He was one of the founders of the Pordenone Film Festival, which has become a focal point for the study of silent cinema. He is the author of the books Burning Passions and Digital Images, and was the Senior Curator for many years at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York.

In November, the AFC board approved an initial vision statement prepared by its new director. This was based around the following 5 points: 1) the development of a curatorial culture within the archive; 2) the maintenance of Canberra as the central hub; 3) the establishment of an Indigenous Branch; 4) the institution of a role for digital technology; and 5) a holistic approach to acquisition, preservation and access. As a symbol of this new direction for the archive, the ScreenSound name was abandoned in favour of a return to the original name, The National Film and Sound Archive.

Paolo Cherchi Usai spoke to Mike Walsh shortly after the announcement of the name change.

Well it is of symbolic significance and of political significance. It is symbolic because it represents a vindication of the archive’s original mission in Australian audio-visual culture. It has a political meaning because of the words ‘national’ and ‘archive’–a reconfirmation of the primary mission of the institution within the AFC to collect, preserve and make accessible the heritage and to do this as the national entity responsible for this.

Primarily it is the fact that it is a rare example of a national audio-visual archive with a very strong, active connection with the audio-visual community. Archives are normally perceived as entities floating somewhere in an indistinct area that is accessed by researchers, by TV stations, by filmmakers. Here I see a much greater degree of involvement of individuals in what is happening to the archives, so it is clear that this archive does not exist in a vacuum. There is a very strong, vibrant community of people with diversified interests, with diversified agendas, who look at the archive as a point of reference. To be able to bring my contribution to a situation of this kind is a way for me to engage directly in a debate with this community.

One of the 5 points of your vision statement involves the development of a curatorial approach. What are the means by which you plan to develop this?

I wish to create a team of highly qualified and highly motivated people with specific expertise in their own areas of activity, who will be given the responsibility to determine the cultural, intellectual profile of our strategy. These are people who will decide what needs to be acquired first. They will decide how audio-visual archives will be preserved and what are the parameters for their dissemination. This is to say that they will be given a high degree of authority on the cultural criteria of their activities. In deciding what needs to be done, it also has to be explained why certain acquisitions have to be made. So far the archive, for very plausible reasons which I understand and respect, has taken a process-oriented approach in terms of functions, in terms of work flow. This has been beneficial to the archive. I think it is time to now make a step forward, a step further and give the archive a stronger sense of intellectual authority in the audio-visual community, especially now that the archive is part of the Commission, which is now declaring the intention to position itself as a national cultural institution. We want to make the archive stronger within the AFC and we want to have the archive as a protagonist, as a leader, in the cultural debate within the AFC.

You’ve described the relation between the archive and the AFC as one of collaboration. Do you see it as important for the archive to maintain a separate identity within the AFC?

The AFC is made up of different areas. In all likelihood, these areas will become divisions. Each division of the AFC will contribute to the activity of the AFC and will contribute to the implementation of a strategic plan which is being designed by the AFC with the active involvement of all the divisions, meaning that I am being asked, in the course of this discussion, what is the distinctive contribution of the archive actually and potentially to the development of the AFC. When I say ‘distinctive contribution’, these 2 words are equally important. It’s a contribution because we contribute towards the overall plan. It’s distinctive because it’s something that the archive, and only the archive, can provide. So, it is not a matter of seeking independence in disguise, it is a matter of making very clear what is the cultural identity of the archive per se, as an organisation which has a national mandate, a cultural mandate and is now being asked to be part of a broader cultural agenda.

You emphasised Canberra as the intellectual and strategic centre of the archive. What do you see as the advantages of maintaining a Canberra base as the strong centre of the archive’s activities?

First of all it gives back faith in the future of the archive for the people who work for the archive. The people working for the archive feel empowered; they feel that they are here for a reason. The audio-visual artefacts are here, the historical identity of the archive is here. It is for me also a way to explain that, being a national institution, there are very strong reasons why the archive has to be in Canberra, in the capital of the country. This, as I explained many times to the stakeholders and to the Commissioners, doesn’t mean that the archive has to see Canberra as a sort of fortress where the archival culture is cultivated in isolation from the rest of the country. Quite the contrary, being based in Canberra gives the archive a clear responsibility to become the centre from which audio-visual culture, from an archival perspective, is disseminated across the entire Australian territory–in Sydney, in Melbourne, but also in other capitals, also in major cities, and everywhere in Australia. So Canberra…should not be perceived as the ivory tower where policies and collections are being held. It should be a sort of catalyst for a debate and I think that should really spread all over the Australian territory and actually, internationally as well.

You have put a lot of emphasis on the need for a programming policy. What kinds of programming do you want to give the highest priority?

I’m thinking of a highly diversified range of access and programming activities, ranging from internet access to the collections nationwide and internationally, to programs designed and implemented by the archive, to programs designed and implemented in collaboration with other divisions of the AFC, to programs where the archive simply fulfils its institutional mission to make audio-visual artefacts accessible for educational projects, for other projects, for festivals. So, the spectrum really includes the archives as the leader and the protagonist, the archive as the collaborator, and the Archive as the provider.

As far as exhibitions are concerned, I would like to strengthen the current exhibition galleries in Canberra in order to reflect not only the identity of the Australian audio-visual heritage, but also to highlight what the archive does. Clearly, there is a way to explain to our audience, whether it is specialised or non-specialised, that archive work is quite exciting, it’s quite compelling. It can reflect the interest of primary school audiences and highly specialised scholarly audiences. We should be proud to show what we are doing, because what we are doing is not only important, it is also quite interesting. As for publications; as the archive exists within the AFC, there will be a holistic approach to publications within the AFC. The archive, in my view, should contribute, and I found the agreement of the Commissioners in the development of publications which are meant to create very authoritative points of scholarly reference for the study of the national audio-visual heritage and culture. So I’m talking about the works that not only remain, but they also become the symbols of an intellectual leadership of the archive. The examples I brought up to the Commission are the creation of a national discography and a national filmography, the creation of a national registry of audio-visual collections in Australia. These publications will also be part of the agenda of a new entity within the archive called the Centre for Scholarly and Archival Research, which will be the hub where the internal intellectual energies of the archive and the scholarly and archival community around the archive nationally and internationally will gather in order to promote new approaches to the study of the audio-visual culture. It is very important that we take a very pluralistic and diversified approach to this. The archive has sometimes been accused of privileging certain aspects over others; for example the social history component over other components, and I’m receptive to this kind of comment in that I think the archive should encourage a variety of approaches. The archive should be equally welcoming those who are interested in social history and those who are interested in completely different approaches–even in approaches we may not be personally interested in. There may be areas or approaches I may not particularly care for, but it is our moral responsibility to make sure that those who come here don’t see this as a place where the audio-visual culture can be studied only in a certain way.

It is premature for me to say anything specific. We have just received a study prepared by an outside consultant [Peter Spearitt], who has provided an overall view about what the Centre could be. I would not yet want to discuss this paper. As I have been dealing with research centres for most of my professional life and have created a study centre at George Eastman House, this is something that is very close to my heart. I want to have a very direct involvement in the development of this centre and I am going to listen to as many opinions as possible in order to design a plan which I think will position the Centre as a place where the diversity of approaches I have mentioned can find full expression.

You have mentioned the need to develop an international collection. What criteria will guide your collection development policy here?

The main criterion will be the recognition that there is an audio-visual canon. As you know, as an organiser of the Pordenone Festival, I have been questioning the canon all my life, but in order to question the canon, one has to know what the canon is. The archive should be prepared to discuss the canon by making it available. The second criterion is the fact that to perform its mandate including access and programming, I would like to make sure that the archive has at least some archival resources necessary to integrate international film culture into its programming activity. Third, national heritage is to me what Australians have heard and seen. If I found in Australia a collection comparable to the Desmond Collection in the Netherlands, I would consider this as part of the Australian audio-visual heritage. It would be international but I would fiercely protect its Australian identity and promote the archive within the AFC as the custodian and interpreter of this component of the audio-visual heritage. In practical terms, this also means that if we found a collection of international films that no other national archive has, it would be absurd to give this collection away. This collection would be an intellectual asset for the archive.

Another point in your plan involved an emphasis on Indigenous material. What complications are there for you in working with other organisations such as IATSIS who also have interests here?

I would not see these as complications so much as opportunities. We recognise that IATSIS plays a leading role in the development of an Indigenous audio-visual culture and that is part of the reason why I wanted to have an Indigenous collection department based in Canberra. I recognise that what we call Indigenous culture is a highly diversified, and to some extent, fragmented entity. It is not this monolithic entity which is implied by this term ‘Indigenous culture’. We might better refer to Indigenous cultures in the plural…I am aware that the existence of a separate Indigenous Collection Department is a matter of debate. I know that in creating an Indigenous Collection Department I do not wish to create a ghetto for Indigenous culture and I would very much like to foster communication with Indigenous culture as a priority for the organisation. Recruitment will be an important challenge in that we want to empower Indigenous curators in the development of Indigenous culture at the archive.

Finally, I’m finding that the most exciting part of this is that I have a lot to learn. I am a newcomer. All I have read about Indigenous culture comes from books and not from direct experience. Fortunately, I am not totally unfamiliar with the issues of ethnic cultures, linguistic cultures. In Europe there has been a whole theory of regionalisation of archives based on the interests of linguistic and ethnic minorities. There are archives where specific linguistic and ethnic minorities are represented. In North America, African-American and Native American audio-visual heritage, in Canada, the Inuit’s audio-visual heritage has been part of the archival state. A different approach has been taken. So I’m keen to compare these past experiences with what is clearly going to be a new experience for me, an experience requiring a great deal of consultation with stakeholders and with specialists in the field.

Part of your vision statement involved developing a role of digitisation. What role do you see for digital technologies in the work of the Archive?

Digital is perhaps the magic word of today’s culture. I do recognise that digital technology can make, and should make, a big difference in the dissemination of audio-visual culture internationally. Digital technology offers unprecedented opportunities to make archival holdings available to all Australians in a way that would not have been even imaginable 15 years ago. It is therefore our intention to aggressively develop digital technologies for the sake of access to the collection, without forgetting 2 important principles. The first is that digital is not meant to be a long-term preservation or conservation medium, as digital technologies of today are inherently ephemeral. The second principle is that access in digital form should not distract the archive from its mission to make accessible the audio-visual heritage in its original form. Australians should have the right to choose whether they want to see a 35mm film in the glory of its original format, or in the practical, democratic, but different medium of digital technology.

The launch of Don Bate and Nick Lesek's album Tonewheel in Hobart saw the audience taken on a visual and aural journey where some of the landscape was recognisable and some wonderfully intangible, but always with a mercurial groove. An electronic funk soundscape emerged from the layering of 'organic' live elements with 'synthetic' recordings taken from the pair's ongoing collaboration and live improvisation. Electronic amorphousness moved in and out of more familiar sounds – a snatch of vocal narrative, a radar blip-before dissolving again into the abstraction of stylised beats and bass lines.

Bate and Lesek's creative relationship began around 7 years ago when the 2 realised they had similar approaches to composition, albeit with very different styles. They shared backgrounds in classical trombone and a mutual love of big band and funk. As the project's stylist, Lesek generally manipulates the overall sound effect, while Bate steps in as the traditionalist with melody, songs and improvisation.

The 2 brought together their trademark lay-it-down bass samples and loops (Lesek), and largely jazz inspired tunes and vocal rantings (Bate) to original tracks that Lesek subjected to his dismantling and remixing. In the course of the Tonewheel collaboration, the physical rendezvous took place in Hong Kong, Sydney and Hobart, but the majority of jamming and tinkering took place over the net via broadband. An extended session in January 2004 saw a collaboration with artists from the fluid musical outfit Benjafield Collective, who also appeared at the launch.

The Tonewheel album begins with the quiet tangle and an expectation of an orchestra settling in. Bate's melancholy vocal sweeps over the top, tumescent with longing before opening out into funk which Lesek has manipulated and looped back at various speeds. Elsewhere, cascading piano, brass exclamations and throaty gesticulations weave through a ballooning and reverberating bass. Using Live software at the launch, Lesek recorded, imported and arranged multiple audio clips and loops, altering the pitch and tempo of recorded material in real time and layering recorded audio on top of Benjafield Collective's live jazz/funk improvisations. On-the-spot recordings of the Collective were also woven into the mix.

Lesek drew on creative connections in Tokyo, recruiting one of Japan's leading video jammers, Jeff Klein of Terabyte Station (www.terabytestation.com), for the launch. Klein's bleeding of live performance footage and pre-shot material matches Lesek's live-synthetic approach. Klein projected his footage onto 2 adjacent screens that dropped from the bar's ceiling to bracket the stage. The screens flashed images that, like the music, moved from coherence to abstraction. Footage of Japan's bullet trains, monorails and cityscapes were used with aerial footage of the Tasmanian wilderness to build on the project's organic-inorganic juxtapositions. Klein also converted the Tasmanian footage to NTSC and sped it up to warp the contrast. A particularly nice effect was achieved, via the 'luminance' key, by transporting dynamic Japanese cityscapes to the Tasmanian clouds.

Like the everchanging Benjafield Collective, Tonewheel defies neat labels. Its soundscape segues between chill, disco, funk and death metal country, and Bate is confident that Tonewheel's 'moving feast' will be the first in a long series of similarly inspired, transpacific collaborations.

Some astounding contemporary performers came out of the artist-driven Brisbane venues The Crab Room and Cherry Herring in the 1990s, and they have continued to astonish with their pursuit of strikingly individual lines of development. Christine Johnston and Lisa O’Neil come to mind (both singly and in collaboration), as do The Kransky Sisters (including Johnston), who recently wowed the Melbourne Festival. Brian Lucas is also of this ilk and generation. He has remarked that his career decision to remain in Queensland has paid off in terms of a supportive and non-competitive peer milieu and an environment that has nurtured the continuation of his practice. These are artists who are deeply personal in their approach, less the progeny of a suspect deep north Gothicism than the result of new found freedoms in the aftermath of the Bjelke-Petersen regime. It is work that is singularly impressive and has legs, despite sometimes falling outside the neat categories of touring bodies. It is self-proven and self-generated, rather than subject to fashions.

Lucas’s The Book of Revelation(s) is the product of his ongoing tenure as artist-in-residence at the Brisbane Powerhouse. It has matured through a lengthy process, beginning as part of the EMERGENCY project funded by the Australia Council and performed as a work-in-progress at Sydney’s Performance Space during the Antistatic dance event in 2001, at Brisbane Powerhouse as part of the National Review of Live Art 2002, and the Brisbane Gay and Lesbian Pride Festival 2004. It is his second major solo work of dance theatre since his acclaimed Monster produced under the same aegis—a moving and tender piece about family and an ended relationship.

This work is a successful interweaving of text and contemporary dance with a beautifully crafted score by sound artist Brett Collery adding its own layer of meanings. Lucas is a strong, mature performer, and his tall, imposing physicality and tangible inner repose lend authority to his utilisation of the simplest, most iconic modern dance moves. Lucas is less interested in investigating new pathways of movement than in exploring personal themes, so meaning is foremost when he moves from naturalism to abstraction.

Repetitions in different contexts suggest the accumulated ‘scars’ we wear. Lucas wants to describe being in motion, the process of momentarily becoming the idiosyncratic ‘I’ that emerges from multiple selves. He moves, as does the text, by association and metaphor, dealing concretely with quite complex philosophical ideas. As a raconteur Lucas is engaging, fascinating us with the details of his life.

The structure is elegantly formal, composed of 10 sections, 10 words, 10 gestures, 10 steps, 10 songs etc. The piece is driven by a series of encounters delivered by anecdote and powerful physical exposition. Lucas’ grand guignol treatment of the findings of the coroner’s report on Mary Kelly, Jack the Ripper’s sixth victim, is an outrageous tour de force performed chillingly to Pink Martini’s Bolero and effectively enhanced by Morgan Randall’s clever lighting. This is essentially a detective story, and Lucas is careful in laying his clues. His uncovering of an accidental fatality that occurred in his family before he was born was laconically (devastatingly!) disclosed at the end by a slide projection. As Lucas moved between projector and screen, his body was visibly made permeable by this new found knowledge as he tangentially recited his own bodily litany of sensuous memories (“That was then, this is now…”). Poignantly, the body cannot go back, cannot inhabit a time before there were only stories, only this story, this performance.

Nudity is confronting for certain viewers, including some of those who aver the most sophistication in the hierarchies of looking. But it is crucial to Lucas’s idea that the body is the “book of revelation(s)”, “a personal text that continues throughout our lives, written and embellished by the experience of being.” Lucas’s divestiture in fact asks questions about the body’s relegation to the necessities of function, its performability, a constant self-questioning of limits and expectations that surmount purely artistic considerations.

He deftly and wittily explores the endemic preoccupation in his solo work with being both subject and object, self and other. He darkly circles the changes on this notion when he speculates about meeting Paris Hilton in the flesh but concludes that it is pointless because he already knows her cloyingly enough—through her media representation. But the inference is that the highly mystified concept of the artist’s ‘presence’ is both a presence and an absence: “Now, I’m not really sleeping—but you know that. Who’d sleep on stage?”

Ten things to admire about this work: it is accessible; it is not hurried; it knows when to stop; its sophistication is stimulating, not intimidating; it is funny and frightening; it makes you feel you live in your own skin; it is in-your-face live; it is about death; it is consummately ‘cooked’; it validates a long working life in the arts.

The Book of Revelation(s), creator/performer Brian Lucas, sound Brett Collery, lighting Morgan Randall; Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, Dec 15-18, 2004

At the meeting convened by ANAT, dLux media arts, Performance Space, Experimenta, MAAP and RealTime at the Paddington RSL, Sydney on January 24 we hoped to hear from Australia Council staff why the Taskforce’s proposed restructuring of the organisation entailed the dissolution of the New Media Arts Board (NMAB) and why there had been no consultation with the sector and, at the time of the December press release, none offered in the future.

Over 200 people gathered at the RSL, including many new media and hybrid artists, artists from other fields including music, visual and community arts, academics, curators, managers, a range of Australia Council staff, AFC staff and members of the press. Kim Machan, director of MAAP flew in from Brisbane, Artrage director Marcus Canning (also on the NMAB) from Perth (carrying a detailed response to the restructure from WA artists and BEAP), Fabienne Nicholas, manager of Experimenta, from Melbourne and visiting artists from the UK all attended. The mood of the meeting was serious, often emotional as concerned artists tried to express the depth of their feelings.

ANAT director Julieanne Pierce hosted the meeting, outlining the issues she hoped the Australia Council’s CEO Jennifer Bott and Acting Executive Director, Arts Development and NMAB Manager Andrew Donovan would address. She then introduced 3 speakers: artist and academic Anna Munster, artist Lynnette Wallworth and me. I spoke about the field’s response to the restructuring from replies to RealTime’s December email and other documentation.

I looked at the language of the response to the proposed changes, how the impact was felt viscerally and how metaphors of blindness, lack of vision, short-sightedness were used by correspondents to describe Council’s actions along with images of regression, of their “going off the map” and “back to the dark ages.” The second strongest feeling I reported was of betrayal, that the Xmas-time announcement and lack of consultation amounted to “a pre-emptive strike against innovation in the arts.” Above all there were feelings of imminent loss: of identity (new media and hybrid arts were being un-named, un-represented by an artform board and at Council level), of expertise (the accumulated knowledge of NMAB), of coherence and continuity (the forms scattered to other artform boards). Finally, the restructure was felt to parallel the growing conservatism of Australian society, here with the return to the fundamentals of traditional artform categories. I described the key issue as not being about money, after all the Council was saying that the same money, even more, would be spent on new media and hybrid arts, but the very standing of the forms was at stake if their names were to be erased or relegated to the small print.

Central to Anna Munster’s talk was the significant role of the NMAB in building an experimental arts culture in Australia. She also pointed to the careers enabled by the AFC’s short-lived but highly significant Interactive Fund. New media art might not yet have the commercial outcomes some had fantasised for it but, said Munster, its social potential was strong, its place in universities and other institutions growing. Why then should the Australia Council demote it? She felt particularly for graduating students utterly familiar with new technologies but having no place to turn to where support for experimental art would be visible. Overall, Munster saw the Taskforce “turning away from delivery to outcomes” at the same time as university research was being impelled into dull empiricism and homogenisation. She forecast an arts brain drain of the very same kind as has happened in other fields where the costs of reversal are already high.

Lynnette Wallworth described new media art as an emerging form, impossible to categorise in simple terms because it requires knowledge of and responsiveness to the constant changes in technology. Wallworth, like Anna Munster thought the restructure would cut off the possibilities for emerging work by denying artists a board responsive to change, a board ready to fund unknown outcomes, a board ready to dialogue with artists.

Michael Keighery, chair of the National Visual Arts and Craft Network (NVACN), spoke briefly from the floor, reporting that the network was perplexed by the proposed restructure and sought clarification on how the model had been researched and analysed, whether other options had been considered, and on the attitudes of Australia Council staff. NVACN looked forward to meaningful discussions with the Australia Council, and other parties like state and local governments who would be affected by the changes.

Jennifer Bott declared that the Taskforce’s recommendations “had been made with the best of intentions” and for strategic reasons in the “competition for the public dollar.” She explained that the Taskforce had not been consultative in the way that Nugent, Myer and the Small to Medium reports had been because those had been strategies of Council, not an assessment of the Council and its workings as a whole. In other words, this was an internal report. She said that the Taskforce had noted the significant reduction in the value of grants over the years and that to ignore that was to “put our heads in the sand.” The report was developed from May to October, its delivery delayed by the federal election and “not for any sinister reason.” Council, she said, “was unanimous” that the Taskforce’s recommendation was the direction in which it wanted to go. Central to the plan was the belief that to get increased government support there was “a need to do bigger projects that would show what art could do for Australian life” as opposed to offering “more small grants.” Pivotal to Council’s planning was its own forthcoming application to government for triennial funding. Clearly it is hoping that a restructure and some big public outcomes will attract additional funding or at least the long-term possibility of it.

Council’s aim, said Bott, would be to use its funds “for maximum impact.” Many at the meeting assumed that existing grants money would be taken from artists and absorbed into these large projects, of which no clear example was given, no joyous sales pitch, or even the suggestion that it was something which artists present could be part of. A reduction in grants is not intended and took a while to clarify, an indication of how unprepared the Council is to sell its new model. What muddied the waters was Bott’s reference to doing big, long term community projects (presumably a Richard Florida-type model involving urban/suburban/renewal), “rather than spending $20,000 each on lots of small projects.”

Bott thought that the new model with its big projects would speak to government and to the public: “as artists we talk to each other too much instead of to the public.” This was going to be a better model and was not, she emphasised, an attempt to get rid of community and new media arts. More money could be invested in infrastructure in the new Key Organisations section and Council itself would be involved in strategic initiatives, using the discretionary funds hitherto allocated to the artform boards. Bott invited the audience to participate in “looking at how we can make [the restructure] work.”

Of the many questions and statements that followed, the assumption that very big projects would have any impact was challenged, as was the increasingly top-down model of Council’s operations. The success of many of Australia’s small to medium projects was pointed to as part of our international reputation. Rachael Swain from Marrugeku Company pointed out that a company like hers already created large scale, long term works with communities (see interview with Swain).

On the matter of political interference or compliance in the decision to restructure Bott was adamant that “all our boards continue to offend and the Australia Council defends them.” As to why the NMA and CCD boards were dissolved, she replied, “It’s not just a board which validates an artform.” She iterated that funding to these areas would be maintained and that the new Inter-Arts Office “flagged an investment in new media arts.” Rachael Swain outlined her concern that without a board specifically committed to new media and hybrid arts her company could not continue the carefully established conversation that had enabled the company’s work: “how can we continue that process?” The projected staff numbers for the Inter-Arts Office are 2 and with no ongoing peer presence the situation looked like “a vacuum.” Andrew Donovan suggested that there would be dialogue with relevant peers and others on specific projects that would provide “a more focussed and targeted assessment.” But, again, the process had yet to be worked out.

Lyndal Jones spoke eloquently, declaring that we were really discussing a conflict between identity and strategy. Here was a strategy that included dissolving the NMAB. The anger which had greeted this was, she said, to be expected as the Council had helped form the new media arts’ identity. Kate Richards thought it too late to turn the clock back and fold the complexities of new media arts into traditional artform categories. Others pointed out that without the branding and the status offered by the existence of the NMAB, artists would find it increasingly difficult to form the partnerships and sponsorships that have been typical of a field that can work with commerce, science and education. A number of speakers were alarmed by the loss of status that the erasure of the board would mean for the standing of Australia’s new media arts both here and especially overseas where Australia is widely regarded as a leader in the field.

Above all, in the face of Bott’s clear commitment to push ahead with the restructure, speakers from the floor wanted assurance that their concerns would be taken to the Taskforce and to Council. Could there be change? Bott only anticipated small changes from working parties and consultations up until the end of February, prior to the March 11 meeting where Council would ratify the plan which would take effect from July 1.

At the end of the meeting, Fiona Winning asked how the current boards would equip themselves for the change in such a short time frame and what staff training would be involved. She called for a lot more time for consultation and asked how we might go about rebuilding trust between artists and the Australia Council.

After the meeting there was little sense that Council’s plans or their rationale for them had been made much clearer. The erasure of NMAB seemed to be solely in terms of cost-effectiveness rather than its success or potential. People were angry at the fixity of Bott’s position constantly reinforced in the manner of the modern politician with the “at the end of the day …” mantra. There was also curiosity about the new leadership role forecast for the Australia Council. What kind of leadership will it offer? Increasingly hierarchical and less and impinged on by peer assessment? If, as is being suggested, the new Directors (previously Managers) of the artform boards are to go to Council with proposals for the ‘big projects’ as their own initiatives, will their respective artform boards be involved in the process? Will Council, strategically allocating funds to the winning directors, become in effect another group of peer assessors? Is that’s what Council is there for? Will the Australia Council become itself a cultural producer as well as a facilitator? Is that part of its charter?

Pressure is being applied to the Council by organisations across the country to suspend any changes for a year, in which time serious consultation could be undertaken. If Council decides to push ahead (we’ll know this as of March 11), and will not change course, then we need to urge it to visibly commit to the promises currently made about preservation of funding levels for new media, hybrid arts and community cultural grants, and to argue for improved ways of handling these in the new structure. Above all, the terms new media arts and hybrid arts must retain prominence in whatever ways feasible so that their standing and the opportunities that go with it are not lost.

The Australia Council, having done much to acknowledge and nurture new media and hybrid arts must not abandon them or the key role it plays in their development and dissemination around the world. To do so is to betray itself, to be blind to its own achievements as well as those of a plethora of remarkable Australian artists. As a communications industry consultant observed after the meeting, this is a moment when Council should be investing more in new media arts, let alone retaining the NMAB.

Beyond the breezy prelude to the exhibition (diary notes, postcards, family photos and snapshots from the 2-year road trip that Trent Parke and his partner, photographer Narelle Autio, have just undertaken around Australia), the atmosphere is apocalyptic—dark walls, portentous text rolling on a black screen, an animated clock-face counting down. In the installation of the work, Parke says, he wanted to create “an experience for people—something on the grand scale of epic cinema.”

Minutes to Midnight is a vivid experience. Parke has returned from his odyssey with a dark vision to share of an Australia that he sees as very different from the one in which he grew up.

“I suppose it’s a hard country with the droughts and firestorms and poverty. And while there is a kind of freedom to it, there is also a stifling sense of ‘this is the way it is.’” Diary entry, Trent Parke

Our journey begins with a midnight self-portrait taken in outback Menindi, the photographer annointed in his own ghostly light. In the series of large, unframed photographs that follows, Parke works the film to its limits, employing his trademark wide-angle slabs of black intersected by myriad patterns of light to powerfully reveal a shadowland of violence and unease. There’s a palpable sense in his pictures of the photographer wrestling with what he sees. It’s a tough, sometimes frightening view but nuanced with signs of exuberant life. Threatening looking crowds transform into ecstatic tableaux or become transcendent in a shower of rain. There’s roadkill, but also animal life and evidence both brutal and benign of human co-existence with nature.

“At times I feel like I’m looking through the eyes of an actor in a film. We stop at some strange place, pop into the live set and click away as the plot unfolds before us, the scene and characters ever changing as the reality reel rolls on.” Diary entry, Trent Parke

Some images appear snatched in passing, others offered freely to a welcome visitor or through gritted teeth to an intrusive one. Transience abounds—people living in caravans, sleeping in cars. A camper sleeps beneath a dead pig dangling from a tree; a line of local lovelies draped on car bonnets is caught between smiles as their funereal parade stalls. In one of the few portraits in the show, the photographer is held in thrall as a strange young girl sizes him up.

My eyes rest for a minute on pictures that glisten from light-boxes—a slither of silver of Sydney Harbour, a jellyfish preening for the camera. I read in the floor notes how this image turned into a nuclear explosion for the photographer and am drawn back to the dark.

In the last room are 3 large photographs, some collaged into diptychs. A playground at night spells out some sudden poetry, a word in light—”Hum.” Then, the most desolate of all the images in the exhibition, a group of Aboriginal people in a dusty street exposed to the glare of their country’s neglect. “Welcome to Paradise” says the sign above them. On the wall opposite, the hauntingly serene image of the photographer’s parents, he motionless in pyjamas, she ghostly in her nightgown. What do these pictures whisper to each other at minutes to midnight, I wonder? The sound of insects. Overhead, a fluorescent flying fox and a circle of moths drawn to the light. In the corner, the photographer’s newborn son—another outcome of the journey—rises from water like the moon, a vision of promise.

We leave as we entered, past the collage of what seemed at the outset like sunny snapshots and as we pass the photo nostalgia, the romance of the journey, a shot of Narelle Autio’s legs covered in insect bites leaps out, then Parke rinsing film in a grimy shower block, his strips of film like flypaper drying in dead trees. In the final image as we leave, on a TV screen in some nondescript interior, John Howard announces Australia’s entry into the Iraq War.

Minutes to Midnight, Trent Parke, Australian Centre for Photography January 7 February 20 2005. Curator Alasdair Foster.

Jayalitha is a smoky-eyed mistress of the lash. Whip toting and dressed like a man, she is clad in black from head to toe with a belt of knives around her waist. Whether she is a huntress, a stealthy liberator or an agent of vengeance, I can’t quite translate. She stands casually and assertively against the painted backdrop of a domestic interior, ready and waiting. Pushpamala N and Clare Arni’s collaborative photographs, Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs Series is the first work encountered on entering the ground-floor gallery space of Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India at the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA). As an entrance statement, their work clearly sets the tone for this survey of 37 artists from across the country. Pushpamala N and Clare Arni combine a clever, staged critique of ancient Indian customs against the introduced classification systems of colonial times, while referencing the format of early studio-based photography. Native Women of South India engages in the politics of power, sexuality, tradition, religion and caste—prevalent themes throughout the exhibition.

Surendran Nair’s large-scale painting, Mephistopheles…otherwise the quaquaversal prolix (cuckoonebulopolis) (used as the promotional image for Edge of Desire) is one of the most sinister and unnerving works in the show, depicting the stylised form of a man levitating in a yoga position. His face is elaborately and beautifully masked while the fingers of his left hand form the sign for silence against his mouth. His right hand morphs into a pistol and he wears a severed tongue on a necklace. Mephistopheles is presented by Nair as the thirteenth sign of the zodiac, following his smaller watercolour series Precision Theatre of the Heavenly Shepherds, an apocalyptic symbol of deceit exacting both censure and violence.

Upstairs, Nalini Malani continues this line of enquiry with her light-based installation The Sacred and the Profane. Her paintings of gods and monsters made with synthetic polymer on large, rotating mylar cylinders have seen some exposure in Australia through the Queensland Art Gallery’s Asia Pacific Triennial in 2002. When back-lit her images become animated and intermingle on the back wall in an orgy of worship, sex and death, all inextricably linked.

A video self-portrait by Sonia Khurana entitled Bird shows the artist—an overweight, middle-aged woman—naked and pushing her body around in an uncoordinated dance, testing the limitations of her physicality. The video speed is also pushed and fed through a digital filter so that her body becomes less sexualised and more cartoon-like. While the computer-generated solarisation is tacky and cheap, watching Khurana spinning out of control with jerky little leg extensions, almost falling over and rolling round on the floor is mesmerising and hysterically funny.
Subdoh Gupta, Bihari, 1998

Likewise, the self-effacing humour of Subdoh Gupta sees the installation artist representing himself as both erotic and abject figure. In the photograph Vilas he is naked and smeared all over with Vaseline, slouching resplendent in a green leather chair. In Bihari he has painted an image of himself surrounded by actual cow dung with a flashing neon light. ‘Bi Ha Ri’ is the name of the poor town he was born in, and also a vernacular phrase used by Indians to imply stupidity. The works of Khurana and Gupta tackle conventional and accepted modes of behaviour, and in Gupta’s case the transcendence of class.

Artists manipulating traditional artforms and crafts to critique contemporary issues include NS Harsha and Sharmila Samant. Harsha’s large-scale drawing in green ink, For you my dear Earth, is about 10-15 metres long and divided into 3 parts. Intersecting the middle is a panel of gold leaf from which the dainty, botanical drawings of plants and flowers on either side begin to sprout. As the drawing extends, the plant forms become larger and more unruly, incorporating introduced species and gradually evolving into monstrous looking, Day of the Triffids-style blooms. Sharmila Samant’s A Handmade Sari, made from rusted Coke and Diet Coke bottle tops, incorporates the traditional mango motifs that appear on many Indian fabrics. While each of the works is aesthetically stunning, both artists interrogate the effects of globalisation on the environment and the cultural economy of India respectively. On the way out of the exhibition, Dayanilta Singh’s framed portraits of political and spiritual leaders in-situ in people’s homes and work environments remind one of the omnipresent politics and political thinkers in India’s population. It’s hard to imagine Australians choosing to wake up to the uninspiring likeness of John Howard.

Outside the gallery, in the lead-up to the exhibition opening, Shilpa Gupta re-staged a performance inviting us all to “use blame—feel good” by handing-out free samples of a new product, BLAME! as a remedy to the world’s problems. These small bottles of red liquid were installed inside the exhibition on shelves, and lit by red fluorescent tubes like luxury cosmetics set against a video promoting the product. Shilpa’s previous work includes the fabrication of candy kidneys and an installation representing a designer store for the trade of human body parts. She critiques the cultures of discrimination, commodification and power that effect both Indian society and the global culture at large. (For more on Shilpa Gupta see page 27.)

Installed on 2 levels of AGWA, and travelling straight from Perth to New York, Edge of Desire is diverse in its selection of artists, and is contemporary in the broadest sense of the word. As a survey, the exhibition has its share of overtly didactic and poorly resolved pieces, but these are countered by the work of some of India’s finest contemporary practitioners. With such a broad scope, the exhibition should have been teeming with visitors, but was rendered quiet by a prohibitive ticket price that left most punters hovering on the edge. Outside the exhibition, and appropriately close to the exhibition store, the Paan Beedi Shop was one of the only works made accessible to the non-paying public. Literally an uprooted stall selling such everyday items as cigarettes, sweets, incense and biscuits, the shop’s keeper was replaced by a recessed monitor repeating an endlessly entertaining selection of video-fillers from MTV India. With a plethora of history and tradition to lampoon, these shorts by Cyrus Oshidar take off everything from Bollywood dance sequences and cheesy Indian pop stars to the simultaneously painful and relaxing, all inclusive hair-cut at an Indian barber’s shop.

Edge of Desire, curator Chaitanya Sambrani, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Sept 25 2004-Jan 9 2005

Established in 1974 as Australia’s first government funded experimental visual arts organisation, the Experimental Art Foundation (EAF) celebrated its 30th anniversary by introducing important new strategies in its 2004 program. Under the leadership of Melentie Pandilovski, director since mid-2003, the EAF’s program has emphasised new media, the nexus between art, technology and science, the impact of globalisation on art and, most importantly, international cooperation in commissioning and exhibiting art.

Bioteching

The EAF’s main event in 2004 was Art of the Biotech Era, coinciding with the Adelaide Festival of Arts in March. This involved an exhibition, symposium and workshop, and a forthcoming book documenting the event. The 5 day workshop led by Gary Cass and Oron Katz of SymbioticA (see Fargher's Bio-art: adventures in ethics ) addressed subjects such as DNA extraction, plant breeding, tissue culture and biological research ethics. The symposium addressed a range of subjects including bioethics, genetic manipulation and the definition of life itself, asking questions such as whether it is possible to ‘kill’ a ‘living artwork’ of tissue cultivated outside the body? The workshop will be exported, and in March 2005 will be conducted in London under the auspices of Arts Catalyst.

The number of artists working on biotechnological themes is growing exponentially, and Pandilovski previously organised exhibitions and seminars on this theme in Europe. He secured international grants to help fund Art of the Biotech Era, which was seen by some 8,000 people (RT60, p4). Many works were deliberately controversial. Heath Bunting’s Natural Reality Superweed Kit 1.0, for example, is supposedly a weed that will kill GM crops. As Pandilovski notes in the exhibition catalogue, such artwork is neither image nor text-based, nor is it simply an encoded program in action: “it is conceptual beyond its biomateriality.” There is an emerging aesthetic concerned with the conceptualisation and evolution of biotechnical processes. As well as showcasing existing work, such exhibiting catalyses new work and theorisation.

Video perspectives

For the remainder of the 2004 EAF season, Pandilovski mainly selected artists concerned with photographic technologies, primarily through video. Shaun Gladwell and Samstag Scholarship winner TV Moore, both young Sydney artists with an urban youth culture focus, showed CONCRETE 000, a series of collaborative video works that included Moore’s paranoid chase scene and Gladwell’s introspective skateboarding. Oliver Musovik of Macedonia followed in June; his photographic work in Friends, Neighbours and Others also addressed urban existence, resonating with the work of Gladwell and Moore. The idea of the observing camera, central to our society of surveillance, permeated these artists’ work.

Dundee-based Lei Cox’s July exhibition Retrospective Elements brought to Australia a scaled down retrospective of his work from the past 15 years. His typically large-scale installations, in which we see giant hand-made flowers and artificial grass that interact with the viewer, could not be brought to the gallery and so videos were used instead.

Irish artist Grace Weir followed Cox’s exhibition. Her video installation A Fine Line explored the philosophy of science, featuring scientist Ian Elliot as actor/presenter/philosopher and Weir as the investigator. Her elegiac work conveys information televisually and induces a meditative state, approaching the subject of physics both intellectually and psychologically.

Russian performance artist Oleg Kulig’s videos, shown in an untitled exhibition in October, are records of his performances from 1994 to 1999. His work challenges the social standards of the former USSR and contemporary Russia. By portraying guard dogs and the EU flag in the work I Love Europe he questions various political tendencies in Europe such as the territory’s expansion and the appearance of new borders and their ‘guarding’. He also questions the nature of the police state and the dichotomous nature of such dogs, who are at once obedient friends and uncontrollable monsters. Kulig’s video also muses on what it is for a human to behave like an angry dog confronting an unaware public. His performance I Bite America, America Bites Me references Joseph Beuys’ 3 day performance in New York I Like America and America Likes Me (1974) in which Beuys cohabited with a coyote.

In the 2004 work System of Coordinates, naked actors in a water tank photograph themselves and each other, challenging the boundaries of pornography and disclosing aspects of human sexuality. Such work has a sociological edge and becomes a way of mapping (Russian) societal development.

The Slovenian connection

The final exhibition for 2004 was Slovenian group IRWIN’s Like to Like. This exhibition, complete with a visit by IRWIN members, was made possible through cooperation with Sydney’s Artspace, where it was also staged (RT64, p32). Established in the early 1980s, IRWIN is central to Slovenian contemporary art. As Igor Zabel notes in the catalogue, IRWIN’s defining characteristic, in addition to functioning collectively, is their concern with the ‘retro-principle’—combining images and symbols from past high and low art to re-examine art itself. Like to Like features a series of large Type C photographs, each of a carefully staged scene constructed to represent an adjacent diagram. Each diagram is a reconstruction of an earlier tableau or event. For example, Wheat and String 2003, by commissioned photographer Tomaz Gregori, is a photographic reconstruction of a work by the 1960s Slovenian art group OHO. The original Wheat and String (1969) was in turn inspired by Suprematist art. As the artist’s statement notes, the work references environmental concerns and ‘earth art’, but is ephemeral and conceptual. An accretion of artistic forms and history is embodied in each image.

Opposite the photographs is Corpse of Art, a recreation of Russian Suprematist artist Kasimir Malevich’s lying in state. A sarcophagus, designed by Malevich, contains a frighteningly realistic mannequin of the artist, above which hangs a facsimile of a Malevich painting. IRWIN’s work addresses the impact of Russian revolutionary art on the USSR’s satellite countries and, more broadly, the cultural and political history of Slovenia and its neighbours. IRWIN’s exhibition also included extensive videos and artists’ books tracing past work, and commentary by theorists such as Slavoj Zizek.

Global resource pooling

Pandilovski has brought to Australia important European work that would not otherwise travel here. The EAF’s networking has also assisted local artists to exhibit and travel overseas: Adelaide artist Martin Thompson exhibited at Web 3D Art in Monterey (USA) and SIGGRAPH 2004 in Los Angeles, while Adelaide writer Maria Bilske participated in the curatorial seminar Trans-global Art-ground at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, in December 2003. This seminar involved curators from several countries addressing the question of a global art system. Pandilovski is looking at Australian video artists for an exhibition planned at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje and other European venues.

In 2004, workshops were held in Adelaide for artists to learn new technologies, and further workshops are planned for 2005. Karl Dudesek, from Van Gogh TV, will run a 3D web art workshop, presentation and exhibition for the local industry in February; and Brazilian-American artist Eduardo Kac will undertake a residency and conduct a workshop on Biotech and Telematic Arts.

The EAF is planning more twinning arrangements such as the one with Artspace that sponsored IRWIN’s visit: Pandilovski is working with the art and technology centres in Britain and Germany on parallel projects. Oleg Kulig’s work will also be shown at Artspace. The book of Art of the Biotech Era will be sponsored by the IMA (Brisbane) and the Gordon Darling Foundation. There will be thematic exhibitions on the intersection of art, technology, science and information mounted in tandem with overseas institutions, which will see local and overseas artists being shown together. The EAF will rely on funding from overseas institutions to underwrite such projects and the exhibitions will travel to those institutions.

Pooling resources in this way permits the mounting and touring of larger scale projects and international travel by artists, curators and theorists. The EAF sees itself as a traffic manager. Pandilovski’s intention is to enrich Australian art as a whole, not just that of Adelaide. Importantly, the EAF is positioning itself as an international player and linking Australia to the global scene. In this age of rapid evolution in art, technology and society, it is essential that Australia’s art is closely connected to the world circuit, and organisations such as the EAF (as well as CACSA, Artspace, IMA and others) play pivotal roles. As Melentie Pandilovski says, “we can’t work in isolation in the 21st Century.”

Experimental Art Foundation, Lion Arts Centre, North Terrace, Adelaide, www.eaf.asn.au

The practice of Tasmanian digital artist Mary Scott evolves, as ever, seamlessly, from one series of works to the next. From her painting to her current digital prints, seemingly disparate yet tangentially related themes recur to create a quirkily pleasing continuity in a masterful body of work.

Scott’s interest in digital imaging developed when she lectured in painting at the Tasmanian School of Art, where she was a founding member of the Digital Art Research Facility (DARF), “exploring the aesthetic potentials of digital imaging technologies” (exhibition notes). In what can be a slow process of intervention and experimentation, Scott combines several techniques—appropriation, collage and digital manipulation—to enable each work “to resolve itself.”

In her solo exhibition skirted, Scott addresses themes of identity versus social standards and subjective intimacy—the tension between social expectations and the individual unconscious. With these notions, she interrogates defiance and rebelliousness as her subjects “refute social obligations through…evocative gestures and insolent stances.” Women parade, turn their backs and swing their skirts, their stiff waistbands and respectable gloves contradicted by seductive fabrics that enhance their bodies and create a tangible aura of sensuality.

Pinch, for example, is an association-laden depiction of an archetypal 1940s or 50s demure woman seated pertly on a stool, her back turned on the viewer, her magenta short-sleeved top and skirt dominating the image and forming, thanks to her ideal figure, an hourglass configuration. The image is at once familiar and surreal, whimsical and threatening; this is by no means a conventional portrait of a hausfrau from a cosy bygone era. Scott has taken a very innocent subject and subverted it utterly.

The Blue Joke triptych is a particularly strong example of Mary Scott’s style and her ongoing interest in identity encoded by prevailing social standards and the individual’s revolt in the face of expectations of respectability and conventional behaviour.

In Blue Joke Dangle, the series’ subject, a gamine, Audrey Hepburn type in a 50s floral patterned dress wafts upside-down in the top left corner, defying gravity and logic, as does a partly glimpsed small canine below her.

In Plunge, the central and most seductive of the 3 Blue Joke works, the same woman appears to be falling rapidly through space, her skirt billowing around her legs which are pointed and straight, diving-style. This work is a triumph of composition and form.

In Blue Joke, disembodied elements float on a visually powerful blue-black background. The woman appears physically fragmented, as bits of her drift through the ether, a trick of the eye that works well. Again, the print is cropped to show only parts of the subject and in each of the 3 works, the woman’s red and white dress contrasts strikingly with the dark blue background, a result, perhaps, of Scott’s painterly eye. These works are difficult to apprehend, but clearly speak about female freedom, “respectability” and sexuality.

The subtly erotic Magnolia is emblematic of Scott’s current work. In the contemporary context a portrait—or figure study— of a semi-clad female, buttocks naked, ought not to cause a frisson. But Scott has deftly taken this subject, complete with billowing skirt, à la Monroe, and defiantly turned her back—the surprise at the juxtaposition of elements is palpable.

The exhibition is full of other females asserting themselves in the face of social mores of an era recent enough, but clearly before modern feminism. Trick features 3 identically dressed young girls, again cropped so that only the middle girl is seen in full. They flaunt their digitally enhanced pink coats, socks and fancy shoes, just as the women in Gathering Lies, Skirt and Prink swish their party finery.

skirted is an exhibition that displays a very strong and satisfying thematic coherence. The works all address aspects of Scott’s leitmotiv—feminist ideas that are here contemplated in new and challenging ways. This is significant work, very much worth the making and achieved with wit, skill and discernment. The works all ‘speak to’ and inform each other in interesting ways, so that the sum of the seductive parts makes for a very satisfactory viewing experience.

The Saraswati Arts Program is a new initiative of the Australian Government’s Australia Indonesia Institute. It’s designed to encourage greater cultural exchange between the 2 countries. There’s been a steady stream of activity over many years with some fine examples, for instance in the performance installations of Deborah Pollard, the puppetry and music collaboration The Theft of Sita (Paul Grabowsky, Nigel Jamieson and leading Indonesian artists) and, more recently, Sidetrack Performance Group’s collaboration with Indonesian performers and musicians. On page 32, Sidetrack Artistic Director Don Mamouney recounts the challenges and the excitement of collaborating with Indonesian artists, playing to large, eager audiences and touring the new work to Javan cities. There’s also the ongoing work of Indija Mahjoeddin’s adaptation of the West Sumatran performance form, Randai. It’s intriguing that her work includes the martial art practice Silat, which also features in the practice of Sidetrack and in the Marrugeku Company’s latest Broome-based work (see the interview with Rachael Swain on page 12). The Sydney group Actively Radical Television recently worked with Teater Buruh Indonesia to develop and stage a theatre work on the plight of women factory workers in Jakarta, called Beyond Factory Walls. These are just a few of many successful projects that have also included visual arts exhibitions, CDs, textile workshops and Australian involvement in the Ubud Writers Festival and interest in the growing significance of the Jakarta Film Festival.

However, proportionate to the size of the Indonesian population (200 million) the volume of cultural exchange has been fairly small and the Australia Indonesia Institute would like to change that.

In partnership with the Australia Council the institute is launching a new program to support collaborative ventures for artists in both countries. The Saraswati Arts Program, named after the Indonesian goddess of learning and the arts, provides up to $20,000 for up to 10 projects per annum to organizations and individuals. The program is aimed at supporting projects where there is already an existing relationship and where the outcomes are “lively, contemporary and collaborative.” The closing dates for 2005 are in February and June. RT

Enquiries: Bill Richardson, Director, Australia Indonesia Institute, tel 02 6261 3827. Information: www.dfat.gov.au/aii Institute Board member Alison Carroll (Director, Asialink Arts program) is available to speak to potential applicants, tel 03 8344 4800

Complex, rich, sophisticated, funny and critical, Travelling Light is a collection of collaborative projects that makes eloquent and intricate connections between past and present, cultural and personal histories, cultural inheritance and colonial practices. It also explores our multi-layered ideas about identity, inheritance and migration.

Interference travelling light by Jonathan Jones and Jim Vivieaere, an installation comprising plastic plants, a chandelier and the sound of waves coming languidly to shore, makes reference to our cultural constructions of nature and the fakery of history and myth, highlighting the objectification of all three. The work inhabits the ‘viewing cube’ of the Museum of Sydney, site of the colonial view, of property and real estate (a hot topic elsewhere in the Museum), taking on the logic of both the gaze and commodification. The work is at first deceptively simple, its elements then setting up a rhetorical cascade of images that traverse history, colonialism, nature and culture. By creating a kind of spatial and temporal vortex, the work both enters into and withdraws from the past and present; history and the street; landscape and culture.

Against this backdrop—the screen of the city—and especially at night, the space becomes a glowing hothouse, a deck encased in glass, and a specimen cabinet all at once. The plants included Asia Pacific generics (gums, wattles, palms), making reference to the bush and the tropics. These plastic imitations functioned as signs of a nature/culture reversal. It reminded me of tree works by Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik, only Interference is ironic, even cheeky, inhabiting the space with both humour and a critical edge. It calls the viewer to bear witness to a contradictory and not easily assimilated present. The sound of waves lapping the shore is seductive, mesmeric and embedded in a kind of aural authenticity broken only by the irregular sound of buses lurching their way to Circular Quay. It transports me into a concept of nature. A nature that is, however, purified, abstracted and represented—acculturated and signified.

Bright faux candles burn in the antique crystal chandelier (sign of European proto-modernity) and conjure the faded, nostalgic glitz of the ballroom. This direct allusion to the 19th century and its defining colonial practices undercuts the postmodern seriousness of museum practice, not only qua museum, but qua architecture. It presents a clash of history and kitsch; a wrangle for the ‘facts’ of the site, of which this space, though slightly hidden, is paradigmatic—elevated, privileged, and a cipher for the scopic/mastery paradigm. The historiography and museology of the site is made apparent, and the viewer is drawn by the context into a present conditioned by fragments, quotations and fact files from the past.

The other works of the exhibition were all staged at Performance Space. Wish you were here by Hilda Ruaine, a collection of images, includes snapshots from the 40s, black and white images from perhaps earlier, washed-out 70s Kodachromes and old fashioned portraits. They depict sports days, holidays, lounge rooms, landscapes and groups of friends. It is part family photography, part postcard collection; intimate, personal, yet, as with all photographs, marked by time and place and the emanation of the referent.

The work traces correspondences: between family; between faces and photos; between personal private history and photographic codes. As an archive it documents the evolution of life, of time, of relationships. Aesthetically, the images also show the signs of subtle distortion and changes in scale and focus, simultaneously partaking of the ‘documentary’ nature of the analogue image, and the myth of memory. The images are affecting in a slow, modest way, a testimony to identification and difference.

Take Taki Tiki by Keren Ruki, hung from the opposite wall, is a series of oversized cast Tikis. By changing the scale and colour of the familiar icon, remaking it and drawing attention to its origins, the work challenges the uses and politics of kitsch, tourism, exploitation and commodification, of the object detached—and perhaps reattached—to its symbolic and cultural content. The reappropriation of the Air New Zealand souvenir proved, not unlike some of Destiny Deacon’s work, that there is a compelling critique to be made of the relationship between the forces of racism and the aesthetics of appropriation, commodification and the trivialisation/symbolic evacuation that ground kitsch.

Stripsearched again by Haro consists of a carved base on wheels and a lamp with the artist’s signature tag. It references design, domesticity, furniture, and the language of identification that is available only to those familiar with a particular kind of belonging. In some ways it sat on the cusp of the signature as that which is most personal and most abstract, most singular and most general at the same time.

These 3 discrete works spoke a common language of personal memory, lived experience and symbolic exchange, demonstrating a refreshing stillness and directness.

The projection Pacific washup, by Rachael Rakena, Fez Fa’anana and Brian Fuata, is part performance document, part short film. Floating on the waves of Bondi are a group of people in large plastic checkered bags. Coming to shore, they are washed up like beached sea creatures, resting, rising, walking out of the ocean. The sequence is a contemporary narrative of migration, undercutting historical and anthropological discourse with culturally located signs that are commodified, anonymous, temporary, disposable, functional. Simultaneously full and empty, the imagery evacuated expected meanings and the weight of personal and cultural baggage.

Also at the Performance Space, Day of Invigilation by Victoria Hunt and Brian Fuata with consultant Barbara Campbell, is a compelling exploration of ethnography and identity. Five pairs of busts inhabit the room, its walls painted in panels of brown reminiscent of a 19th century museum. Four pairs are backlit and made of tissue paper—delicate, descriptive and seductive, caught up in the rhetoric of historical object, discourse and power. The paper figures trace a lineage and a naming process, the relationship to language always doubled by exhibition discourse. They demonstrate that there are always 2 versions of identity, one objectified and one lived experience. The work accentuates the realities brought about by a clash of discourses and places of enunciation, and it directed a challenge to both museum and viewer.

The fifth exhibit—‘live’ performers encased to their shoulders in plinths—is startlingly visceral. Representational and individual at the same time, they implicate the viewer in the colonial gaze and in the construction of identity and representation as an always-political act. Hunt and Fuata re-made themselves as bodies simultaneously of the past and the present, subjected to the objectification and ‘othering’ of exercises of power.

This inspired critique of anthropology and history lays bare the falsified objectivity that is not only an historical violence, but a personal encounter. Profoundly affecting, the work speaks of the reality of an embodied, internalised gaze through living, breathing portraits. It distills the real, the image and our ideas of representation, and quietly demonstrates why really good performance work is so powerful.

I was fortunate to see the performance during which Hunt cried, her tears leaving a wet trail on her cheek: a deeply moving moment that in turn brought tears to my eyes. It would be significant to see this work re-staged somewhere like the Museum of Sydney. It was a terrific show—I hope you saw it.

Travelling Light—Collaborative Projects by Pacific Artists, curated by Blair French and Fiona Winning; Performance Space, Nov 20-Dec 11; Museum of Sydney, Nov 13-Dec 5; Pacific Wave Festival 04

The Marrugeku Company’s new work is Burning Daylight, an evocative response to Broome, that idiosyncratic and richly multicultural coastal town in remote north-western Australia. Intriguing and highly entertaining excerpts were presented last December at Red Box. This huge, well-equipped rehearsal and workshop space is the erstwhile home of physical theatre and performance companies (Stalker, Marrugeku, Erth, Gravity Feed, Legs on the Wall) in Lilyfield prior to their move to their eventual home at Eveleigh St Carriageworks in Redfern, along with Performance Space. These are some of the Carr Government’s very welcome arts initiatives over recent years which have included significant developments in Western Sydney, regional NSW (see RT64) and, recently, the Critical Path dance program (see RT66) and its wonderfully located Drill Hall workshop venue in Rushcutters Bay.

The capacious Red Box showed off the potential of Burning Daylight’s emerging dance vocabulary, its vigorous and sometimes strikingly surreal sense of humour, powerful performers, a well-tuned ensemble sensibility and a dynamic design prototype heightening a sense of fantasy and of the past in the present. I spoke to Rachael Swain, artistic director with both Stalker Theatre and the Marrugeku Company, about Marrugeku’s latest venture, the point of instigation and why Broome as its subject. The company’s Crying Baby emerged from a long, complex process of successful cultural negotiation (the company was founded in 1994) and went on to tour internationally. “There was a sense from the founding company members,” says Swain, “that we had done everything we could do in Arnhem Land without continuing the same model. Three of the company members are from Broome and the community there had been wanting us to come and perform for some time, but the show was huge and getting there—before Virgin started flying to Broome—was outrageously expensive…so we failed.”

But Broome still beckoned: “We started a dialogue about what it would mean to translate the intercultural and collaborative process we’d developed in Arnhem Land into the context of Broome, which basically meant completely reconceiving our approach to negotiation with the community, our approach to choreography, and the kinds of relationships we’d built up between notions of traditional and contemporary performance.” Negotiation proved to be a key issue: this was a very different place from Arnhem Land where, says Swain, cultural practices are still strong despite significant social problems. “I think the big difference in Broome is the legacy of the assimilation policy of the Western Australian Government which was one of the most brutal and far reaching. And even though Broome was exempt from the White Australia Policy it still had a major effect. Cohabitation was illegal, so there were a lot of deportations, a lot of ‘lost’ relatives and family breakdowns. The forced removals had a big impact on the way communities and families pass on stories, dance, song and relationship to country. We were interested to work with what the legacy of this means for young people in Broome now.”

Cultural negotiation is even more complex in the circumstances of the Native Title Case that’s currently before the Australian Government for Rubibi, the whole of the Broome Peninsula. “Being in the shadow of the case with disputes over authenticity, arguments about who’s ‘real’ and who’s ‘fake’ and who can really talk for country, means that the community is very tense, and very careful, as it should be. It’s a very different experience from Arnhem Land. After several research trips and the support of people like Pat Dodson I am happy to say that there is a lot of excitement and trust in the community about Marrugeku’s process. I hope that the way we are working will help to bridge some of the tension Native Title builds in a community.”

Burning Daylight is “about halfway through its creation”, says Swain, and beginning to realise its choreographic dimension. “In the last rehearsal period we focused very much on the choreographic process we’re trying to build. Dalisa and I had lots of conversations about how we could inject some new influences into what we think of as contemporary Indigenous dance in Australia.” To this end, with the support of the NSW Ministry of the Arts, Swain went to Europe “to explore what was happening in the crossover between contemporary European dance and traditional and contemporary West African dance, because in some ways there’s a parallel set of issues being explored over there.” Swain cites the work of Mathilde Monier from which emerged the Salia ni Seydou company in Burkina Faso; the French Government-funded AFFA which runs the Afrique en Création program; and Dancas na Cicade in Lisbon with its focus on contemporary dance exchange. She was inspired by the consciousness about the importance of exchange from both sides and the awareness of the damage done by colonial attitudes.

Swain talked with these organisations, participated in classes and “took the skin completely off my feet—I had to try it out on my own body—and ended up being introduced to West African choreographer Serge Amié Coulibay…He was mixing traditional and contemporary forms himself and he was working with Belgium’s Les Ballets C de la B.” It was seeing him dance in Platel’s big new work Wolf that convinced Swain to “invite him, more or less as an experiment, to come to Australia” because “he mixed what I would think of as traditional and contermporary in such a way that the definitions didn’t matter anymore.”

Swain recalls that Serge’s first experience of Australia was a hot night at a Pigrum Brothers concert at the Roebuck Bay Hotel. “I’ll never forget the look on his face, with his chin on his chest looking up at Aboriginal Broome celebrating itself. And all these people were coming up to him and putting their skin next to his and saying, ‘Where you from?’ And he’d say, ‘Burkina Faso,’ and they’d say, ‘Where’s that?’ So he started carrying around a map in his back pocket.”

The focus, says Swain, “has been on what it means to be working with ‘a memory in tradition’ in a contemporary choreographic process.” This came after the first stage of working in Broome with Yawuru elders and “learning the dances and the company members showing each other the traditional styles. We’ve had in-depth conversations about traditional dance, ‘tourist dance’, ‘semi-traditional dance’ and what’s okay to do with it and what’s not.”

The choreography that is emerging is also textured with another influence, Silat, the Malaysian and Western Sumatran martial artform which, as Swain explains, “the elder ethnic Malays in Broome still practice. Datu Amat, one of the Malay grandfathers in Broome taught class to the company the whole Broome period, and he’s allowed Dalisa to go on teaching it. So I guess we’re trying to devise a movement style that the locals would call ‘mixed breed’, responding to the multiple traditions that exist in Broome. I feel like we know what we’re doing choreographically now and we know where we’ll go with it and it’s time to start making the show..

For Swain and Pigrum the kind of Indigenous dance and its representation in Burning Daylight is a key issue. Pirgrum writes, “I think that more Aboriginal choreographers are needed, coming from a wider variety of trainings and backgrounds so people can see that there are other styles of Aboriginal dance to appreciate and understand…In proposing a new work for Marrugeku in Broome using different forms of performance in new ways with Aboriginal dance (contemporary or traditional) we wouldn’t be taking anything away from what has already been developed. We would only be increasing the possibilities of what we think Aboriginal dance is today. I think other Aboriginal groups in the Kimberley and Pilbara regions for example and many more have not had the opportunity to have their story told or their dance style shown.”

Although the work-in-progress showing focused on dance passages there were narrative moments, indications of emerging personae, bursts of satire, songs and some of the ingredients for the musical score to come. In what way would all these come together?

Swain says that a key inspiration for the show is the image of Broome from the turn of the 19th to the 20th century as an “Asian Wild West”: “the traces of that are still very strong.” Another inspiration is Tracey Moffatt and her working from “particular filmic and photographic genres and playing with the cultural stereotypes within those frames.” Just as influential are the “noodle western” genre (big in Thai cinema) and the Broome-style karaoke night at the Roebuck Bay Hotel on Monday nights—“seriously wild west”, quips Swain. Consequently Burning Daylight is set in the street outside the karaoke bar from midnight to dawn with songs from the whole multi-skilled cast. Swain explains that “with each karaoke number there will be a noodle western-inspired video: “The videos will have classic interracial melodrama narratives. They’ll be shot by the fabulous (cinematographer and filmmaker) Warwick Thorton featuring the historic characters of Broome—the pearl diver, the Aboriginal stockman, the geisha—as the characters in the noodle western, set against the backdrops of the White Australia Policy, assimilation policies and the internment of Japanese locals during World War II. There’s a kind of haunting of the contemporary world of Broome with these historic figures.

“We’re just at the point now where we’re starting to weave backwards and forwards between the video narratives and the characters we’re developing onstage and looking at the echoes and reflections between the live performance and the video content.”

How long before the work is realised? “We were very happy to get 2 development stages in one year: quite a big achievement for us in terms of raising funds. We hope to build the set, shoot the videos, have 6 weeks rehearsal and begin commissioning at least half an hour of music this year. And we plan to have a showing of all of that in Broome in September. It will probably take us another 9 months to put it all together with lights and costumes, edit the videos, put the whole jigsaw together and run it. We’re aiming for an avant-premiere in August-September 2006 which we’re hoping will take place in Broome, Kununurra and Darwin, playing the show in front of the audience who will have lived the experience of the subject matter.”

Marrugeku Company, Burning Daylight, a work-in-progress, director Rachael Swain, co-choreographers Dalisa Pigram, Serge Aimé Coulibaly, cinematographer Warwick Thornton, designer Joey Ruigrok van de Werven, dramaturg Josephine Wilson, musical director Matthew Fargher, musician/consultant Lorrae Coffin, composer/musican Justin Gray, composer/musican Cameron Goold, composer Kerri-Anne Cox, performer-devisors Dalisa Pigram, Trevor Jamieson, Yumi Umiumare, Katia Molino, Scott Grayland, Owen Maher, Sermsah Bin Saad (Suri), trainee Toto Djiagween

A one-off performance by Julie-Anne Long with a cast including Narelle Benjamin, Kathy Cogill, Martin del Amo, Rakini Devi, Bernadette Walong and Michael Whaites, had a bunch of Sydney-siders driving to Hill End an hour west of Bathurst on a dirt road in the middle of summer for an overnight stay. With a 6 month-old baby, and technician Mark Mitchell in tow, we too set out. Of course 5 hours is a modest journey in Australian terms, but as expected, the journey amounted to more than the clicks of the odometer.

Like a breadcrumb marking the trail, the installation component of The Nun’s Picnic was exhibited at the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery. Heidrun Löhr’s eerie oversized prints of Julie-Anne Long in nun’s habit were hung outside a room containing Samuel James’ footage of Long and the Hill End landscape projected on 2 adjacent walls. Inside an old wooden wardrobe, flickering images lurked in a drawer and deep inside the open closet. James’ black and white films are heavy with dark drama, drawing visual parallels between the nun and a magpie, both deliberate shapes against the spiky clutter of nature. These images were intercut with scenes of the nun’s living quarters, the camera revealing her alone at prayer, or scanning her possessions as if part of a narrative. The installation works up the striking visual spectacle of a nun in the Australian landscape, tantalising the visitor with what is to come at Hill End, while also drawing together the convent and the landscape to suggest an interior life.

Outside Bathurst we hit the dirt road which passed from dry, drought stricken contryside complete with ambling goanna, into the oddly green oasis of Hill End. Discovering that the centre of town is actually the town in its entirety, we joined other wandering souls in the heat for some nun spotting. We encountered them coming around a bend at the far end of town, walking solemnly in formation. There were more dotted in the following crowd—the crew had also donned habits—and it seemed we were surrounded by a black and white flock.

The figures moved like the nuns in The Sound of Music, floating serenely along as if on another plane. They popped up above fences, were seen kipping and twitching on the grass, revealing sexy underwear as they trudged across fields, praying before some grassy mounds and piling into a Tarago blaring Madonna’s Like A Prayer. Some more literal images such as a nun on a cross seemed misplaced in this otherwise gently poetic and humorous performance. The action led us around the town and eventually to the Catholic Church where picnics were distributed.

But the evening performance was definitely the hot ticket in town, the dress rehearsal open to the Hill End locals having stirred up controversy the night before. There were whispers of beautiful naked women and upset parents. The husband of our Bed and Breakfast host also had issues with the use of the crucifix during the day. Suddenly the 5 hours we had travelled from Sydney meant more than just a historical, rural location.

Long’s subject matter is bound to Hill End via Jeffrey Smart’s painting The Picnic (1957). Long has been regularly sneaking off to the town since May 2003 on a residency program instigated by Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, taking collaborators James and Löhr along with her. The residents must be accustomed to having artists blow through town, but it is unlikely that many of the resulting works have inhabited Hill End in quite the way Long’s performance did. What did they make of the curious, old-fashioned and entertaining ‘vaudeville’ that erupted in their steamy town hall that night?

Everyone sang along to Too Good to be True, guffawed at sight gags and ogled amazing physical feats. After a couple of teaser acts, including a deadpan version of the ridiculously patriotic G’day G’day by Martin del Amo, Long opened the proceedings as a Mae West-style show ring mistress, strutting across the stage in a bustle and a feather, whetting our appetite for the coming acts with an introductory song and a montage of mock one-reelers projected onto her skirt.

The acts rolled on. Benjamin and Cogill performed a take on contortionism in white bloomers to Aren’t Women Wonderful? Whaites, Del Amo and Long all appeared in drag, the latter 2 lip-synching to Nellie Lutcher and Nat King Cole’s Can I Come in for a Second? (Hats off to Long’s choice of music throughout and Drew Crawford’s impeccable job as music advisor.) Four bearded, heavy footed dancers performed the iconic choreography of the 4 cygnets to The Flat Foot Floogie. And my favourite (and cause of the aforementioned controversy): Cogill’s erotic fan dance, into which Long entered as a grumpy red rabbit to consume Cogill in a flurry of feathers.

The show shifted gear after a del Amo monologue about a relative who was a nun; she quit the convent and was outraged when she rang them and was put on hold to Ravel’s Bolero. Did his aunty know this was music people had sex to? Segue to a simple walking dance by Whaites against James’ video projections of the dancer in the Hill End landscape. The mood became sombre for this ‘postmodern turn’ played out to Bolero’s musical drama. Then we were back again with Cogill’s rendition of My Heart Will Go On and a stirring finale with audience participating in a quickly taught dance sequence.

Our first response was how the hell did Julie-Anne Long do it? This idea, that team, those songs, costumes, films…in this town? As Mitchell put it, she is just remarkable, and the audience, locals and blow-ins alike, went off like a cracker in the big Hill End night sky.

Hill End is popular with visual artists as an ideal location for residencies. Recent artists-in-residence have also included video artist Sam James, new media artists Andrew Gadow and the Svenja Kratz and Sarah-Mace Dennis team whose pre-Electrofringe encounter with a Hill End ghost was reported in the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald. Photographer Heidrun Löhr will take up a residency in the town this year, as will ceramicist Toni Warburton, poet Rudi Krausmann, painter Marnie Wark (SA), painter Kate Dorrough, sculptor Mary Douglas, photographers Tamara Dean and Dean Sewell and new media arts curator Sarah Last (of Wagga Wagga’s unsound) among others. Bathurst Regional Art Gallery has invited a total of 20 artists to participate in 2005. RT

The installation component of A Nun’s Picnic will appear at Performance Space as part of Reeldance Installations #1, One Extra, February 10-March 5.

The Nun’s Picnic, director/choreographer/performer Julie-Anne Long; performers/collaborators Narelle Benjamin, Kathy Cogill, Martin del Amo, Rakini Devi, Bernadette Walong, Michael Whaites; video Samuel James; music advisor Drew Crawford; photography Heidrun Löhr; Hill End, NSW, December 4, 2004

Australian work is increasingly registering at major international dance screen events. Narelle Benjamin’s On a Wing and a Prayer and Madeleine Hetherton’s Together have been presented at a number of festivals and Sue Healey’s Fine Line (RT61, p48) took out the Independent award at Coreografo Elettronico in Naples last year. With very few of our independent dance artists being presented overseas, film or video work is a way of having a presence on the international scene. How this will pan out in terms of overseas performance opportunities remains to be seen.

I attended Monaco Dance Forum 2004 to present new Australian films and videos within a meeting for dance screen festivals. There were about a dozen participants mainly representing European festivals from a variety of countries, including Finland, Italy, Spain, Greece, the Netherlands, the UK, Norway and Portugal. Russia, Canada, the USA and Japan were also represented.

A challenged forum

At Monaco Dance Forum 2002, the dance screen component of this enormous event was hosted by IMZ Dance Screen—Europe’s largest dance screen event—and a forum for curators was set up. In 2004 IMZ were not hosting but the Monaco Dance Forum was keen to continue offering a dance screen event, this time focusing on festival organisers rather than producers, television programmers and the filmmakers themselves. The absence of the latter was a significant omission and ultimately diminished the event for everybody involved. Those attending in 2004 were mainly representatives from small to medium sized festivals, who were each given an opportunity to describe their events and present work from their respective countries. The screening of Australian work, which included new films by Peter Volich and Michelle Mahrer, was well received with concrete outcomes for a number of filmmakers.

Overall, the Monaco Dance Forum seems to have run aground regarding organisation and programming. The sprawling event meant that participants stuck more than ever to their particular program. These included: the live performance program that ran day and night and included a one-off performance of Australian Dance Theatre’s Held (RT60, p28); the aDvANCE project on ‘career transition and the professional dancer’ attended by members of the Australia Council’s Dance Board and Ausdance; a forum for works selected from a call for digital projects in which Gideon Obarzanek presented Chunky Move’s Closer installation; and multimedia presentations including Chrissie Parrott’s Trans send project with composer Jonathan Mustard. There were also installations, a workshop on dance and technology led by Johannes Birringer, a scenography conference, the First Job Auditions for young dancers and a dancesport event. For this reason it seemed less like a festival than a series of discrete events run by one organisation clearly stretched to its limits. Or maybe it was only my particular component that suffered from technical hiccups, room allocation hassles and a poorly organised video library.

New tech and no-tech

The performance program seemed, at first glance, to be tied together by the engagement with new technologies—a theme running across the entire festival. This was true of Held, Jyrki Karttunen’s Fairy (Finland), Henri Oguike Dance Company (UK) and Compagnie DO Theatre’s Bird’s Eye View (Russia). But other key performances such as Emio Greco’s opening night work Orfeo ed Euridice (Netherlands/UK), Compañía María Pagès’ performance (Spain), and Gahar Azimi and Emanuel Gat’s trilogy of works (Israel), were not compatible with this theme. As in 2002, the performances were too mixed in style, quality and vision to create any cogent spectatorial experience.

Karttunen visited Sydney in 2001 performing Digital Duende at Performance Space. Fairy is worlds away from that, set in a fairyland with Kartunnen playing an elegant imp desperate to fly. Combining his graceful and incredibly light-footed figure with projections of the character onto transparent scrims created a magical effect that the kids in the audience loved, especially when he bared his bottom on screen. DO Theatre’s performance was an incredibly dated piece of dance theatre grounded in the circus arts and full of World War II imagery. Opening with the plane-ballet footage from Flying Down to Rio (1933), interest was sustained only by some very skilled performers.

Ex-Richard Alston dancer Henri Oguike’s work came for me at the end of a long week of chronic back problems. For this reason I can’t be sure that the heavily percussive quality of the choreography was as irritating as I remember it. I stayed for only 2 of the 4 works which were immaculately framed by ‘modernist’ lighting and video design that is uncredited in the program and on the company’s website. The dancers worked incredibly hard but it showed, and the unrelenting pace had a numbing effect that eventually shut down my ability to ‘marvel’. Music by Shostakovitch and Scarlatti was tackled head on with choreography that rhythmically attacked, adding thumps and stamps to the aural field. Baroque flourishes and parading from court dances sat oddly with this extreme physicality, but it did look and feel fresh, which would account for Oguike’s new status as the darling of the UK dance scene.

María Pagès’ formidable presence was riveting in her company’s epic 2 hour performance. Like a Spanish version of Garland/Minnelli, Pagès’ physique is all limbs which makes her braceo—curling arm flourishes—hypnotising. The overall effect of her towering height, burning expressions and incredible grace is astonishing. But when combined with her signature contemporary twist the artistry seems compromised. A solo to John Lennon’s Imagine brought this to a head while the chorus dancers had few opportunities to show off their flamenco skills, more often dancing as an ensemble in a contemporary, jazzy hybrid form.

All about dancing

The works of Gahar Azimi and Emanuel Gat sat well together. Neither use sets and the choreographers perform in their own works that are all about the dancing. Azimi’s So Said Herzel resembled animated conversations that kept missing the mark. Two interchangeable bald men fought for the attention of a very feisty young woman in this physical piece that had nothing new to say but did have surprising moves, a sparky energy and unforced humour. Gat’s duet Winter Voyage (again 2 bald men) was performed to a Schubert score in high-necked frock-coats and was elegant and serious with a touch of sacred tranquillity. The dancers are not so much partners as point and counter-point in this swirling, seamless dance that, like Akram Khan’s work, stresses the upper body over the lower. And as with Khan’s choreography performed in the same theatre 2 years earlier, the dancers seemed hemmed in by the venue’s small stage.

Opera as dance

Emio Greco’s collaboration with Pieter C. Scholten (Emio Greco/PC) and Opera North of Leeds (UK) was a stark, powerful version of Gluck’s opera, Orfeo ed Euridice. Having seen more dance than any other performing art form, when watching opera and theatre it often seems to me that the performers are remarkably unaware of their physicality. However, like many other recent opera collaborations, this work shifted a huge amount of the focus toward physical performance and mise-en-scene. It opened with a line of characters upstage, Greco and Claire Ormshaw (Amore) moving downstage in a duet. Greco scanned the space before him with small twitching movements and Ormshaw manipulated his progress. Ormshaw moved remarkably easily between choreography and song in a way that the other principals, William Towers (Orfeo) and Isabel Molnar (Euridice), did not. The chorus also seemed uncomfortable with the simple, stylised choreography; the distracting large white robes and matching Robert Smith-style wigs did not help. Orfeo was dressed incongruently in street clothes but with a bizarre hair style combining baldness with long hair which also grew out of his T-shirt sleeve. A chorus of dancers who flurried around Towers completed the ambitious and mostly successful integration of dancers and singers, and their movement echoed Greco’s twitching, sliding, mercurial quality. There were intensely dramatic lighting changes (designed by Henk Danner) and bold silences in this fascinating if slightly awkward production.

Anne Landa Award/Australia Council Restructure

One of the great ironies of the moment is the simultaneous demise of the New Media Arts Board in the Australia Council’s projected restructure and the launch of the first Anne Landa Award + Exhibition with a $25,000 prize for the winning artist working in moving image or new media art. The winner was David Rosetzky whose cryptically engaging installation Untouchable, is pictured above. Another artist selected for the exhibition was Craig Walsh whose Contested space appears on our cover. Click here for more on the exhibition.

Some 200 people including many artists gathered in Sydney to meet Australia Council CEO Jennifer Bott to voice their dismay at the restructure and to ask her for an explanation of how it came about and what would happen to new media and hybrid arts funding, assessment and standing as a consequence. See detailed report.

International

As part of RealTime’s expanding international coverage, we have reports on multimedia artists in the Philippines, an international performance event in Singapore and an Australian collaboration with Indonesian artists in Java. The latter coincides with new funds becoming available through the Australia Indonesian Institute and the Australia Council for collaborations with Indonesian artists in the Saraswati Art program.

OnScreen

Our focus in OnScreen is on activism in film, video, TV and new media, a realm energised by recent election battles. Despite conservative victories, artists in these media have learnt a great deal about practising dissent and establishing alternative means of distribution. OnScreen also introduces you to the delights, dangers and ethical risks of Bio-art as they are met head-on when Catherine Fargher enrols in a SymbioticA workshop. It’s a timely reminder too that there’s more to new media than screen art. RT

A man in a dank apartment vacuums, staples back peeling wallpaper, and tidies up. But the activity has little result. The room—with its exposed pipes, old furniture and solitary shaving sink—remains shabby and tired, barely concealing the banal awfulness of past lives. Two other men sit nearby, one reading, the other contemplating breakfast. In a sense, they are ‘everyman’, occupying themselves with quotidian routines. But when cockroaches scramble from behind the hands of the one eating, it becomes evident that something more sinister and unexpected simmers beneath the surface.

Upbeat Hawaiian muzak, a precursor to a delightfully synchronised dressing sequence, gives way to moodier strings and a crescendo of crickets, indicating a surreal move to eternal night. In a compelling shift of choreography, a suited man yields to the dark power of his environment as others physically manipulate him to disturbingly graceful and measured effect. As with many moments in Splinter Group’s Lawn, there are allusions to a real horror never quite revealed.

To call Lawn a ‘horror fantasy’ is close to the mark, but any attempt to categorise risks cheating this work of its sophistication and inventiveness. Even with major adaptations made to accommodate performer Vincent Crowley’s serious opening night injury, the Brisbane Powerhouse premiere season of Lawn was inspiring stuff: exemplary dance theatre, playing most effectively in the margins of visual perception and reality, while at the same time providing an edge-of-your-seat narrative tension. It was like a well-crafted horror film with moments of surreal quirkiness, such as the unannounced appearance of composer/performer Iain Grandage in various guises inside the wardrobe.

Yet Lawn also operated on a number of other levels. The yearning for an open, uncomplicated and spatially unencumbered life (represented by the motif of an expansive Australian lawn) was frustrated by the claustrophobia of a northern hemisphere indoor existence and an imposing European heritage. Set in an old apartment in Berlin during winter, utopia is signified by the vista of a tropical beach which emerges from behind the wallpaper. Wedged in this divide between the real and the imagined, personal neuroses become physically manifest: one performer scales the walls; another is trapped and bound in cling wrap (“I am running, in the forest, with eyes tight shut…”); another marvels at Houdini’s amazing escapes while watching television programs dubbed into German.

The acknowledged influence of the eerie domestic dioramas of American photographer Gregory Crewdson is evident as repulsive subtexts erupt in the otherwise grey setting. The humour is dark and even cheeky at times, and there’s a delectable weirdness to it all, owing much to the films of Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, 1991; City of Lost Children, 1995).

Lawn is the first production of Splinter Group, a threesome comprising Australian dancer-choreographers Vincent Crowley, Grayson Millwood and Gavin Webber. Since working together as members of Meryl Tankard’s Australian Dance Theatre in the early 1990s, they have worked across Europe with choreographers such as William Forsythe, Luc Dunberry, Maguy Marin, Joachim Schlömer and Wim Vandekybus. Back in Australia, they recently formed Splinter Group and were commissioned by the Brisbane Powerhouse artistic director (and production dramaturg) Andrew Ross to develop Lawn with designer Zoë Atkinson and composer Iain Grandage. Atkinson is working with Compagnie Philippe Genty and Theatre DRAK in France, while Grandage is the current Western Australian Symphony Orchestra composer-in-residence; his composition credits include Cloudstreet, Plainsong and Corrugation Road. Crowley, Millwood and Webber are continuing to split their time between Europe and Australia: Grayson performs with Sasha Waltz and Guests in Berlin; Crowley continues to work with Schlömer; and Webber regularly returns to Brussels to teach for Vandekybus’ Ultima Vez. The considerable experience of these artists is apparent in the dramatic texture of Lawn, as is their finely-tuned precision as performers and their obvious ease as collaborators.

Atkinson’s set is integral to Lawn’s success, its bleak surface at times revealing the horrors of history as well as the dreams and delusions of the present. In perfect complement, Grandage’s score literally and metaphorically emerges from under the surface as he performs live behind the apartment walls, appearing at strategic intervals on stage and helping to bring the performance to its nauseating climax. Outside the Powerhouse Theatre, the work continued to resonate in exhibitions by photographer Tim Page, who captured various rehearsal moments, and Kellie O’Dempsey, whose ink, acrylic and pastel drawings (presented on a very ‘backyard’ Hills Hoist) extended the moody movement of the piece.

Lawn leaves its audience with images that disturb and delight, and definitely deserves a repeat viewing. It will undoubtedly become a festival favourite highlighting as it does the depth of Australian dance theatre.

Splinter Group, Lawn, performer-choreographers Vincent Crowley, Grayson Millwood, Gavin Webber, composer Iain Grandage, designer Zoë Atkinson; Brisbane Powerhouse, November 11-20, 2004

“You are about to be implicated in genetic engineering, are you sure you want to go on?”, asks Oron Catts, director of SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia as workshop lab scientist Gary Cass starts a procedure with a group of 12 participants to clone some glow-in-the-dark e. coli bacteria. We will create genetically modified organisms painted onto Petri dishes, which will not live beyond the duration of our experiment. They will later be destroyed in the ‘autoclave’—a kind of giant pressure cooker that kills biological waste.

In this way we confront one of many lessons that arise during a week of experiments and wet biology practices: we are responsible for the organisms we create. If they come into being it is because of us, and if they need to be destroyed, it’s our responsibility. It’s perhaps fitting that 2 of the students participating in the workshop, Tim Watts and Ali Bevilacqua from Edith Cowan and Notre Dame Universities in Western Australia, are doing research for their production of Frankenstein.

I’m participating in the SymbioticA Wet Biology Workshop, held as part of BEAP 04 (Biennial of Electronic Arts Perth, see RT’s online coverage). There’s a group of us ranging from 82 year old Professor David Allbrook, formerly head of the School of Anatomy and Human Biology of which SymbioticA is part, to UK-based visual and performance artists Kira O’Reilly and Julie Freeman. As well as the drama students, Tim and Ali, there is an anatomy and anthropology student Megan Schlipalins, already an old hand at dissecting foetuses and asking ethical questions, and 2 bio-artist participants/ workshop leaders. Phil Ross is from San Francisco and sculpts with fungi, and Marta De Menezes is a Portuguese artist who creates visual art using biotechnology. Both artists exhibited in the Bio-difference exhibition at BEAP (see RT’s online coverage). Most of us are interested in the ethics and practice of incorporating biology into our performance/installation/visual work.

“We want you to ask questions”, say Oron and Gary. “The more you get involved in the science, the more complicated the lines become and the more you will confront your audience and ideas. It’s so easy to paint a fantastic picture of what you can create with this science when you have never practiced it. Maybe if Patricia Piccinini did our workshop she would make totally different work.”

Oron stresses that rather than creating monsters, most of the partially living beings which can be made through cell culturing are in fact highly vulnerable and need to be taken care of in laboratory conditions. He also encourages us to think about presentation, rather than representation, of the science in our work as a means of taking the ethical debate to a wider public.

Throughout the workshop we’re working with hazardous chemicals. “We will deal with possible mutagens”, Gary tells us. We hear about lab explosions, contaminants and genetic materials that can escape. We have been warned.

The first day involves extracting DNA from plant material. It’s as simple as following a recipe and the result is thrilling. I cut and measure one gram of snow pea leaves and pound them in a mortar and pestle with an “extraction buffer” (a basic detergent like lauryl sulphate), literally breaking down the cell walls. We centrifuge it for 5 minutes and then add some ethanol to the extracted liquid that contains the DNA. We put in a glass hook to ‘spool’ the DNA strands. The strands hang off my hook like tiny threads, or tendrils that curl up, literally winding around it. A thrill runs through me—this is life. Later I find out that the DNA threads themselves can be dried and maybe even spun and knitted, which I hope to pursue for my new media work, Chromosome Knitting.

The talk between participants is excited and intense. How great are the bio-hazards? How often does genetic material escape from labs? Are people working on genetically modified organisms despite the 5-year government moratorium?

The next day the work becomes more intense. We’re in a cell-culturing lab working with cells from freshly killed meat, in this case a pig’s trotter straight from the butcher. Oron has outlined the work of 2 pioneering scientists, Dr Alexis Carrel and Dr Honor Fell, who were the first to culture living organs from embryonic cells. In our own experiments we work under a sterile flow hood, trying to keep the contaminants from our skin, nails and hair away from the cells we are trying to culture. There’s the roar of saws as we cut deep into the flesh and bone, locating the marrow, which is scraped out, pipetted into dishes with nutrient solution and placed in an incubator to culture. The atmosphere in the lab is a palpable mixture of fear, curiosity and excitement. Three vegetarian drama students, here for the day, are recoiling in the corner.

In the corridor outside the lab door, Julie spots an empty cardboard box. “Contents: six mice, one pregnant female.” We look at each other. Where is the pregnant mouse? This is a workshop full of lines to be crossed and questions to be asked. Would I be prepared to kill animals? Is it different if I work with cell lines and materials which are now ‘immortal’, but involved many invasive processes to reach that point?

I interview Marta about her ethics. She says she will not work with live animals but is prepared to work with cell lines or materials that are already in existence. She says that science can’t be stopped, but we can’t do everything just to know more. “It has to be flexible enough to be re-evaluated constantly… but you can’t just stop science, you can’t just go back, no matter how romantic you want to be.”

That night, when I return to the airy North Fremantle flat where I am staying, I close the door and am relieved no one is home. I feel the need for sanctuary after a day facing such intense questions, making decisions about life and dominion over others. Is this how surgeons feel? My mind is racing and my body is tense. I remember the first time I saw the cloning of a human embryo on film, and the strength of my gut reaction to that procedure. I remember the effect of the amniocentesis needle penetrating my uterus during antenatal genetic testing. This is not about glossy life science brochures with happy smiling faces and life-science solutions; this is also about invasive procedures on animals and humans in the name of science. I know it isn’t popular to question the progress of science, and a lot of these views can be seen as ‘pro life’ and aligned with the religious right. I can also see how seductive the science is, and how curious humans are; despite ‘gut’ feelings I might do it again in pursuit of a goal.

The next day the discussion heats up. The personal stories make this like a consciousness raising group. Tim has spent the night contemplating ethics. “I was playing with my dog and I thought, ‘I don’t want my dog to die.’ I just felt really hypocritical and guilty.” Marta, who grew up on a farm is unfazed “I always knew our pet pigs would die at slaughter time, I don’t have this ‘yuk factor’.” Megan on the other hand felt that as an engineer of genetically modified organisms, however tiny, she had a responsibility: “I am a creator, I take a moral responsibility.”

In our final discussion on selective breeding in plants, animals and humans, Kira recalls her friend, Matt, a performance artist in the UK with disabilities from a genetic abnormality. He performs without words, but with a sign around his neck that simply says ‘kill me’. We do have the power to question scientific ethics through art.

SymbioticA wet biology workshop, BEAP 04, Perth, University of Western Australia, Sept 20-24

For anyone interested in local screen culture, or the arts in general, it’s difficult in the wake of last October’s election result not to sink into a quagmire of depression at the relentless downward thrust of arts funding, dismantling of the public sector and erosion of civil liberties and free speech. So what does another 3 years (at least) of Howard mean for the film industry? One of the key tenets stressed in the government’s film funding policy released shortly before the election was “attracting greater levels of private finance”, but there was little interest shown in seriously investing public money in the flagging sector. Of the money that was promised, some was earmarked for specific projects, such as $7.5 million for a government commissioned “10-part series of high quality documentaries on Australia’s history” from Film Australia. One wonders what the content of these documentaries will comprise, given the government’s open refusal to countenance any historical perspective that doesn’t conform to its own. Tom Zubrycki wrote about how openly censorious the government has become in RT60 (p15), describing an attempt by Joint House Leader Bob Wedgwood to prevent a screening of Zubrycki’s documentary Molly and Mobarak at Parliament House, on the grounds that the film “promotes the theme of widespread opposition to government policy.”

Most of the rest of the government’s film-related election promises were a list of vague measures aimed at attracting money from the private sector, which in recent times has been singularly uninterested in local film investment. The AFC was promised another $2.5 million this financial year, and an additional $5 million per annum for the following 3 years. This money will be used to develop “better Australian scripts” and fund “a slate of low budget, first time feature films.” Worthy aims, but tinkering with the edges of the industry in this manner will not alter the fundamental problem: a lack of money has meant fewer films and a prevailing conservatism in the form and content of the films that are being made. Nor will it change the fact that the vast majority of our first time filmmakers will never get to make a second film.

The production and box office figures for local feature films in 2004 tell a dire tale, with just 15 features produced in the last financial year, nearly half the average annual output of the mid to late 1990s. Of these, Khoa Do’s ultra-low budget video feature The Finished People (RT59, p16), conceived and shot without state funding, was one of the best, and is indicative of a broader trend that official industry figures don’t reveal.

Video features made outside the traditional funding and distribution networks are becoming increasingly common, creating a vibrant and innovative film culture running parallel to the subsidised commercial industry. In our last issue we covered David Barison and Daniel Ross’ The Ister and Paul Jeffrey’s In The Moment. In this issue we focus on a younger generation of socially engaged filmmakers taking a guerrilla approach, harnessing video and digital technologies to get their work made and distributed. In the long term this cultural insurgency may prove more effective in developing innovation and expressing dissent than lobbying an increasingly constrained bureaucracy. DE

Time To Go John (TTGJ) represents a new incarnation of cinema on the net and DVD. It is also part of a new documentary genre. In the bar of the 2004 Melbourne International Film Festival, Pip Starr and I whined about the lack of Australian documentaries critiquing the government. There was Tahir Cambis and Helen Newman’s Anthem (RT62, p18), but it seemed unlikely to attract distributors. Otherwise there was a dearth of brave filmmakers willing to critique their principal patron, the government. After Pip left, I realised it was possible to create a documentary critique of Howard’s government and get it onto screens before the next federal election. The key was to create a compilation of 5 minute works by individual filmmakers. There was no way the TV broadcasters would have the stomach for this, so it had to go into the cinemas.

For years now the film schools have been training documentary makers, and at the same time TV hours for screening documentaries have been dropping. This has created a crisis. Baby boomers (bless their radical souls) have addressed this by lobbying the broadcasters and the funding bodies. But generation Xers have, on the whole, been quietly discussing for some months the possibility of bypassing the limited TV hours and moving into the cinema and onto DVD and the net.

Meanwhile, in America new laws have restricted the use of campaign money. To deal with this the political parties have set up arms-length web sites and organisations. Robert Greenwald (director of Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War Journalism) has been commissioned by moveon.org to make a series of films about what’s wrong with America under Bush. Greenwald’s team have taken underground techniques into the mainstream. They combine direct sales from the internet with copyright free versions of the films, so people can burn and distribute them themselves. The audience then watches the DVD at home with their friends. I was handed a home-burnt copy of Greenwald’s recent doco on the Iraq war, Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War, at a party in Melbourne in mid-2004. Here was a distribution network that thrived on the increasingly fragmented nature of modern cultural consumption.

Back in Australia, John Howard represented a common ‘enemy’ that united a group of producers, editors, distributors, post-production facilities, cinemas and filmmakers from around the country who would never normally have co-operated. In 8 weeks the TTGJ team created a feature film from conception to opening night. No mean feat. Thank you John!

The production team used old activist techniques that they probably hadn’t employed since their uni days, the difference being that everyone was now professional, and very capable. Kate McCarthy headed up the production team who organised the shooting of the linking segments featuring Rod Quantock. With no budget she sourced a set, studio, crew, a top post-production facility and audio mix. Philippa Campey became the liaison with the filmmakers who submitted segments, and she kept track of the money. While it was a no-budget production, DVDs were selling at quite a pace. Carmela Baranowska teamed up with HT Lee to coordinate the theatrical release. Jennifer Hughes had already begun the process by securing seasons at the Lumiere (Melbourne) and the Mercury (Adelaide). The sweetener for the cinemas was that TTGJ wouldn’t take any box office; in return cinemas had to show a film they wouldn’t see until they turned on their projectors for opening night. It hadn’t been cut at the booking stage, so no-one could tell them how long it was going to be or which filmmakers would be in it. They were also asked that they slot it into schedules normally booked months ahead.

Carmela brought Gil Scrine’s film company on board to help with marketing and distribution. Gil pulled screenings of his own so that TTGJ could hit the screens in Sydney. The theatrical release team identified all the marginal seats and heavily promoted small screenings in these areas, using the Greenwald distribution model. Buyers of the DVD registered to have literally hundreds of classification-exempt screenings. Andrea Foxworthy liased with the censorship boards in each state to organise the classification, pushing the bureaucracies to the limit.

Meanwhile the website was constantly growing. It started as a call for entries and internet guru John Pierce together with Keren Flavell worked with a Sydney designer to transform it into a fully fledged site containing all the films in download versions. The site was a winner. DVD copies of the film were sold before it was edited, let alone burnt, and that funded the initial DVD production and post-outs. Here was a national release film self-distributed and funded entirely from internet DVD sales.

John Pierce created a full version of the film using ‘bit torrent’ technology and people from around the world started to download. There are over 1,190 mentions of TTGJ on the internet. At the same time emails were sent out by everyone involved in the film. These emails generated an audience for the screenings, the site and DVD. Keren Flavell headed up marketing and promotion. Drive-time ABC radio and a lengthy review in Le Monde produced the biggest spikes in sales. One of the marketing ploys developed by the team was to organise other people to endorse the film. Margo Kingston, who was touring with her book Not Happy, John, was more than happy to promote screenings in each city that she visited. This helped enormously. Unexpectedly, a large percentage of the audience for the film were baby boomers. The only part of the chain that didn’t link up to the project were Australian film reviewers. TTGJ challenged the ‘sacred cow’ view of cinema, and sadly on the whole critics ignored it.

The election has come and gone but the film still has legs. Kate McCarthy and Keren Flavell are working on a new version of the DVD to be released by Madman in time to challenge Howard’s takeover of both houses of parliament. It includes interviews with the filmmakers about the process of making TTGJ and a commentary track by a range of comedians.

TTGJ is a success story. The filmmakers loved it because their work was out there. The cinemas loved it because it attracted sell out crowds. The audience went because it was immediately relevant to their situation, proving that viewers are prepared to open their wallets to see a documentary—and they don’t expect it to look like a million dollar flick.

“Television can no more speak without ideology than we can speak without prose. We swim in its world even if we don’t believe in it.”
Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time

“If young people are not engaged in the gathering and trading of data that directly informs their perception of the society, the potential for a widespread tactical overthrow of the system is threatened. And if activist content producers are not willing to use all the means at their disposal to compete with the mainstream broadcast spectacle, then they are not serious about building a movement to silence it.”
Stephen Marshall, Guerrilla News Network founder

The histories of video practice are characterised by regular confrontations with its ‘frightful parent’, television. Brisbane-based anarcho-activist video collective Kill Your Television (KYTV), in producing a series of works designed to screen on TV and stream on the web, represents a particular mode of engagement with video’s forebear: oppositional television.

Audiences at the 2004 Straight Out Of Brisbane Festival (SOOB) sampled a cross-section of KYTV’s boisterously political endeavours from the last 2 years. Although openly hostile to the central role of television in the mass media’s production of spectacle, the manufacturing of consent and cornerstone support of consumer capitalism, KYTV does not tread the same formal ground as previous radical television collectives. Unlike many radical videomakers, particularly from the 70s and 80s, the group is less interested in the aggressive pursuit of viewer alienation through form than the subversion of television’s representational regimes. Political articulation is central to most of their work, but KYTV eschew radical video works’ earlier myopic fixation on foregrounding formal devices. Rather, the programs generally seek a specifically televisual aesthetic and audience engagement.

Crowning the popular SOOB screening program, the episodes of KYTV looked and felt like 3 hours of variety-style television, albeit with a distinct political bent. Comprising a plethora of segments, ranging from news, animations, short documentary, skit-style comedy and fly-on-the-wall observation, the anarchic, fast-paced concatenation of the KYTV format could feasibly unsettle some viewers’ expectations of television. ‘Reality’ TV is a particular target, as mercilessly lampooned as that other contemporary newspeak phrase requiring quotation marks, the ‘Pacific Solution’ (the subject of Laura Krikke’s clever stop-motion animation Overboard, in which ‘Phil’ and ‘Johnny’ meet natural justice when marooned at sea). The Keaneysville segments saw experimental poet/street philosopher Gerald Keaney accosting bemused market shoppers and demanding they define ‘freedom’, or debating the merits of reform versus revolution with a local councillor, upturning the narrow conventions of the managed confessional talk show.

The greatest challenge to the normative artifice of Reality TV emerged in the short observational fly-on-the-wall documentary segments. Some of these were warm but not particularly consequential conversations with artists and activists. However, in the more intimate observations, KYTV offered some truly unique, if not easy-watching, television. In a particularly memorable segment viewers were confronted with the paranoid delusions of speed psychosis as a member of the artist colony at the Chateau House (for a time, the nerve centre of KYTV) repeatedly checked the window for the police car he was convinced was waiting for him.

However challenging the individual segments, the collective’s conscious employment of broadcast television’s conventions and appropriation of the youth-oriented, attention-deficit aesthetic of music television and other cable shows made the work intelligible for a substantial audience. Co-founder and independent filmmaker Sarah-Jane Woulahan sees the central goal of KYTV as challenging the “moribund, artificial, dishonest, manipulative and repetitive” mediascape by creating works that “challenge viewers to construct their own meaning from what they see…We are making media ourselves that seeks to challenge, offend, incite, excite, educate and entertain…We want KYTV to feel like it’s your friends speaking directly to you without all the candy filters, lies and desperate attempts to sell you something. KYTV is about simultaneous television consumption and action.”

In this, they differ profoundly from previous radical television undertakings such as Jean Luc Godard’s characteristically introspective forays into a “television of opposition.” The high production values and manifest confidence of the KYTV program not only evince the expertise of Woulahan, Squareyed Films partner Sean Gilligan and other experienced video and filmmakers in the collective, but invite comparisons with other alternative television projects. In its marriage of pop aesthetics and politicised content, exemplified in Michael Tornabene’s cutting to the beat in a piece showing the most graphic imagery of atrocities in Iraq an Australian audience is likely to encounter, KYTV resembles the video work of the Guerrilla News Network (GNN, www.guerrillanews.com).

GNN’s Stephen Marshall argues that activist television “can either snobbishly reject the ‘populist’ approach or take our cues from the mainstream realm of advertising and music television and deliver socio-political commentary in the most charismatic style possible.” GNN’s short, rhythmic political documentaries have enjoyed significant international festival success, are featured on community access TV and streamed on the web—all long-term goals of the KYTV collective. However, where GNN’s aim is to seriously compete with mainstream corporate media, KYTV’s orientation is less ‘serious-leftist’ and more ‘chaotic-libertine.’

Indicative of KYTV’s anarchic style was a piece in which a member of a prominent Brisbane band related his experiences standing at a urinal after playing at the World Cup next to “this short little man in a suit and a scarf…then I realised who it was and wondered if in that moment, I would piss on the Prime Minister’s shoes.” But suddenly he is frightened by the little man’s “evil presence, like someone who is very angry and his vibe is like a hot coal up your arse, it freezes you.” With painful sincerity, Paulie apologises to Australia: “Sorry…I just froze…and passed up the opportunity…Hopefully if you have the opportunity you will be more brave than me. I’m sorry.”

KYTV’s anarchic approach was also evident in the way their program unfolded at SOOB—a mad jumble of heterogenous segments, punctuated by Gilligan’s acutely constructed newsflashes—and in the other activities of the group such as mobile guerrilla screenings, underground film and music nights, and staged, videoed actions. The overwhelming aesthetic is of an insouciant, freewheeling onslaught with committed subversion at its core. In its libertarian reinvention of political protest, KYTV employs tactical media to counter the media manipulation of neo-conservative governments and global corporations. In this weaponisation of the tools of representation, KYTV has the same transformative goals of GNN and other new wave video warriors.

Kill Your Television Second Annual Screening, Straight Out Of Brisbane Festival, Village Twin Theatre, Brisbane, Dec 12, 2004

PVI Collective is a Perth-based new media and performance art collective with a mission to expose our deepest public fears and interrogate our most private experiences. Established in 1998 by performance artist Kelli McCluskey and visual artist Steve Bull, PVI’s members include visual artists, sculptors, researchers and performance artists collaborating on site-specific works for galleries and public spaces.

PVI’s work is grounded in conceptual frameworks both political and psychological, and is presented in a way that encourages audience interaction, making participants reconsider their assumptions about everyday activities. Their latest project, tts:australia, had its beginnings in tts: route 65, a performance produced as part of Perth’s Artrage festival in 2002. Billed as an “intimate, alternative sightseeing tour of the Perth cityscape”, tts: route 65 invited participants onto a customised 22 seater bus for a multimedia tour of local architecture and tourist attractions, creating a simulated pseudo-military “tour of duty” which sought to expose security lapses and hidden corners in familiar business and government-related sites.

The original impetus for the project was a consideration of the post-September 11 political climate as seen through the lens of the mainstream media. “tts” stands for ‘terrorist training school’, the project’s original title. In essence, PVI’s terrorist training consists of performance artists at the helm of a simulated mobile training school that is ‘alert’ and ‘alarmed’ in its surveillance of city streets—a satirical response to the federal government’s call for the public to be on the look-out for potential terrorist threats in the wake of September 11.

Four days before tts: route 65’s opening in 2002, the Bali bombings hit the newspaper headlines. At the behest of the show’s sponsors and out of respect to those who died on October 12, the show was postponed and remounted in December 2002, using the abbreviated acronym. However, the project’s topicality was, if anything, reinforced as the mainstream media picked up on Western political leaders’ renewed commitment to the ‘war on terror’ and re-instigated heightened security alerts across the globe.

The positive response to tts: route 65 enabled PVI to secure funding for a 3 city eastern states tour of the project. Having conducted extensive research on sites of interest in each city, and with a rotating roster of city-specific volunteers and collaborators, tts:australia kicks off in Sydney on March 17, then travels to Melbourne and Adelaide.

Exploring the theme of terrorism as a form of social control, tts:australia is a response to the media’s role in creating a climate of fear amongst individuals and communities and, at the same time, a consideration of the way this mediated climate affects our understanding of our geopolitical landscape. This climate of fear can translate into wariness about the safety of living in our own cities and homes, affecting our sense of place in both public and private spheres.

Conceptually tts:australia draws on everything from the tabloid media’s war on terror, Charles Darwin’s survival of the fittest, Nietzschean philosophy, Hollywood action films, conspiracy theories, military training manuals and the works of various terrorism theorists and analysts, including Walter Lacquer’s influential book Terrorism and Andrew Sinclair’s Anatomy of Terror.

The project engages with the idea of urban mythology, taking well-known sights, monuments and buildings and removing them, in the psychology of the viewer, from their established context or significance via “on-site activities that just don’t quite ‘add up’: paranoid tour guides, security defects, bus inspections and simulated ‘training’ exercises… Passengers are forced to question their susceptibility to scare-mongering. Where does the caution end, and the unnecessary panic set in?” (www.ttsaustralia.com).

Steve Bull says the tts tour aims to disorientate its audience by playing with their perceptions and preconceptions through black humour and satire. How well do we really know the cities in which we live? How secure are we going about our everyday lives? Are threats to our safety in the public sphere real or imagined? And to what extent do we internalise the war on terror discourse we are exposed to via the mainstream media?

The most crucial aspect of tts’ “tour of duty” is its interactive and participatory nature. McCluskey says the tours are intended to challenge the notion of tourism as a passive act, and performance art as a one-way delivery of meaning from performer to audience. One of the core concepts behind PVI’s work is the idea of exchange between performers and audience: “We’ve always wanted to find a way of directly involving people in the work, whether it be volunteers getting involved on the spot, or people working directly with us”, McCluskey comments. “A lot of the projects we’ve done involve members of the public actually coming in and experiencing the work—either unwittingly, or by filling out a questionnaire online and then joining in…I think people are becoming a lot more receptive to this style of performance art. We’re really interested in the idea of breaking down barriers between performers and audiences, the idea of the audience becoming really immersed in the work.”

In keeping with tts’ multimedia focus, PVI Collective has produced a DVD to accompany the tour. tts: recruit will be available as a limited edition DVD on sale at performance sites, but will also be available to rent in video stores. As a “step-by-step guide” to military recruitment, the PVI DVD draws on traditional recruitment formulas—motivational videos, aptitude tests, game-play and role-play scenarios—to critically interrogate the methods by which a heightened state of alert is translated into a combat mentality.

A critical reader will also accompany the project, incorporating essays, writings, images and research intended as a conceptual “back-up” to the live work. “It was really good for us to be able to write about the work”, says McCluskey. “You don’t normally get a chance in performance art to talk about the processes of what you’re doing. We wanted to be quite playful with it; it’s a kind of training manual that you can refer to during the tour, or read afterwards as a companion to it.”

tts:australia is a truly multimedia performance art concept. It is deeply conceptual and politically questioning, but also promises to be a great deal of fun. In the words of PVI Collective: “Join up. Board the bus. And hold on to your seats.”

tts:australia, written, filmed and performed by PVI Collective in collaboration with Version 1.0 (Sydney), Cicada (Melbourne), Drive by Shooting (Adelaide), March 17-May 22 www.ttsaustralia.com

“If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him.”
The Google Buddha.

Resfest, the sexy Brazilian wax of the film festival world, has pores that bleed. These were evident in the clips curated for Bushwhacked, Resfest’s compilation of mostly animated George Bush Jnr pisstakes, but the selection also served to spotlight pain in ways the selectors might not have expected.

Eat my shorts

A month after Bush’s re-election was never going be a good time to dissect his bad points. Given the amount of US influence on our country, it is bad enough that we don’t get a vote. Watching another country make the collective decision to reinstate him was gruesome on another level entirely. Granted Resfest have a busy globetrotting calendar, but during pre-US election cocktails, surely they could’ve pencilled in some provocative clips for the post-election audiences that went beyond the ‘Bush-bad’ genre, if only to dull the pain, or help map other potential universes.

In his 1961 farewell address to the nation, US President Eisenhower warned about the dangers of “unwarranted influence…by the Military Industrial Complex.” Post World War II, it was still possible to smell the approach of a machine that might eat up governance and civic society. That machine is so well oiled these days, machine-fearers instead call it the ‘Military-Petroleum Complex’, or in reference to the heroic PR machinations involved in maintaining any such enterprise, the ‘Military-Entertainment Complex’.

While Bushwhacked piled on the potshots at the monkey dangling atop that complex, precious few of the clips aimed below the monkey veneer. Pirates and Emperors was probably the best of those with fangs. It was directed by Eric Henry, best known for his co-direction/animation of Wave Twister, the revered hip hop animation feature for Q-Bert’s album of the same name. Opting this time for a simple 2D cut-out animation style, Henry managed to provide a sharp and nimbly visual analysis of current ‘freedom fighting’, tracing aggressive US foreign policy from contemporary assaults, back through Nicaraguan conflicts and linking it to Alexander the Great. Snappy as a soft drink commercial yet a little more illuminating than many of the films on offer.

What Barry Says by Simon Robson (UK) similarly combined inventive lateral visualisations with critique of US foreign policy to great effect, though it was the filmmaker’s succinct condensation of ideas through motion graphics that really made the piece sing. With a heroic effort in Adobe After Effects, Robson delivered persistently sublime vector transitions—the oil, it flows from Middle East pipes, across the Atlantic, then up the Statue of Liberty until bursting into flame, you know? All with a rumbling soundtrack underbelly detailing the Neo-cons’ ‘Project for a New American Century’. Google and debate amongst fellow conspirators.

The Horribly Stupid Stunt (Which Has Resulted In His Untimely Death) found another Yes Men prank stretched across 25 minutes, with typically absurd anti-World Trade Organisation punchlines, and a WTO audience passively accepting a Yes Men proposal to let the market place buy votes from disenchanted voters (the Yes Men had received another conference invitation sent to their fake WTO website, and accepted). Alt-doco pin-up boy of the month, Michael Moore, also got a leg in with an edited clip for System of a Down, cutting together charged scenes of anti-war rallies around the world. Warming, if not revelatory.

Careful listening in most Melbourne cinemas can often reveal collective pain—the whisperings of film graduates, buffs and camcorder owners: “I could do better than that.” Another burden carried by such creative audiences is balancing the hope that their skills might bring about change with the knowledge that a monster the size of Fahrenheit 9/11 failed to make a sufficient splash. Rubbing their noses in the even dimmer impact of a range of Flash-animations and 30-second nobody clips was probably a case of too cruel, too soon.

Seen the site that jockeys uncannily resemblant monkey photos beside 20 different George Bush facial expressions? If anything, it demonstrates the almost too obvious ease with which monkey-boy is satirised, which was part of the problem with Bushwhacked; the appeal wanes once you dip into the exhaustive catalogue of audiovisual collage techniques and realise each has the same cartoon punch-line of ‘bush=bad/absurd/evil’. Johan Soderberg’s guerrilla lip-syncs probably deserve some accolade, but even re-animated lips inevitably wear thin.

Exhibiting a wide range of techniques would seem to be where Resfest finds its niche, rather than in ‘ideas’ as Jeremy Boxer, the Res-boy argued. Or if they really do plan on running the gauntlet with ‘ideas’, now that ‘digital DIY’ ain’t novel no more, let’s hope next year’s selection offers up a platter of world-changing insights and possibilities as Res wrestles with the rest of the Bush presidency. As it stands, the festival’s breadth of audiovisual exploration seems to draw in the curious creatives who in turn lure the uber-brands (eager to prey on ‘tastemakers’) and soon enough, there’s the Branded (or was that branding?) Session, where audiences pay money to see Brand-funded flicks resonating with corporate identities. Knowing I wasn’t in that session at least soothed some of the pain.

Bushwacked, Resfest Digital Film Festival, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Dec 3-7, 2004

This article arises from an ongoing struggle to realise a series of works that address notions of low tech interactive TV which started for me in the USA in the early 90s with The Operators, a cable show about a bunch of answering service operators staving off unemployment caused by the advent of the answering machine. The show was designed to be interactive and contextually narrative—that is, the interactive element was in keeping with the narrative drama, so viewers interacted in real time via telephones in a drama about telephone operators. After considering the resurgence of talk-back radio occurring at the time, and influenced by early live television as personified in the US by Ernie Kovacs, I wrote an outline for a live, low-budget TV series which became the manifesto for Community TV that I delivered to CTV in Perth in 1995.

In 1998, I took a job in the Media Department at Edith Cowan University developing a practical teaching program utilising the instigation of community and educational TV in Western Australia as a focus. In the first 6 months of operation my students and I produced 42 hours of TV and Artoffical, an arts program which won the CBAA award for infotainment that year. However, my recommendations for live and interactive TV fell on deaf ears at the university and the TV consortium set up to manage education and community interests.

In 2001, I was able to present THIS IS I.T. (with the help of the Festival of Perth Fringe and CTV) to illustrate the power of interactivity. I used a small studio set up for the weather at Channel 31. Although the virtually content-less interactive show was unpopular with the TV station and the cultural elite of Perth, Telstra phone records showed it had over a million viewers and over 1000 calls an hour during the 4 weeks of broadcast. Ironically, it proved to be the most watched production in the festival. It was only a gesture towards our vision for community interaction but it was as far as we got. After Channel 31 shut down the show, SBS bandied around a narrative version with a budget and upgraded computer interactivity, about a transparent TV show. Eventually they refused to develop it even with the financial support of ScreenWest. Comments included that it was another retro stereotypical office drama (such as The Office). Six months later the office drama 24/7 emerged on SBS with its non-contextual interactivity (ie via email and not inside the characters’ real time).

The Australian Film Commission then granted me production money (the first time it was given for a program produced on Community TV) if Channel 31 would schedule the show in Melbourne. After 6 months, with sponsors in place and on the point of signing a development contract, Channel 31 Melbourne refused to program the show.

One reason for the sector’s reluctance to embrace interactivity is an irrational fear of people saying the wrong thing or using ‘inappropriate language’ on air. The possibilities of slander and defamation charges have created a climate where self-censorship dominates. However, the ABA guidelines are quite liberal in relation to these issues, with different standards for different time slots and an understanding of the differences between factual, fictional and satirical programs. In my opinion, self-censorship has become so pervasive that there is now virtually no politics, social comment or discussion of serious community issues in community media—and this is without even considering the possibility of live interactivity with the public. Yet the on-air surveys that we did on both TV and radio indicate that this is what the ‘community’ wants. They want talkback and interactivity. The ABC realised this and their ratings on radio have increased as a result. My local community radio station plays music without any talk, commentary or discussion, something you could do on your CD player at home. Even the 2003 CBAA conference of community presenters and produces at Surfers Paradise couldn’t take the idea of talkback or interactivity seriously in their ‘innovation’ think tank sessions. Yet another demonstration of how creatively conservative we are in this country.

The other big stick waved about by cultural bureaucrats is ‘quality’ and the mantra of ‘good sound, picture, cuts and always use a tripod’. It must look like regular TV. The word ‘quality’ is used to cover anything programmer executives don’t like—consequently all programs now look the same. There is very little stepping outside the structures imposed by commercial stations. The art world, while developing all sorts of time-based video works, has not embraced nor been embraced by Community TV. If ‘form follows function’ then a new form of broadcasting needs to be developed to provide a continuing function for Community TV. And developing true television interactivity is a way to achieve this.

Manifesto for CTV, 1995

1. That the Broadcaster has facilities for live transmission of television from studio facilities.

2. That it incorporate interactive facilities such as telephone and computer interface for community participation and comment.

3. That it operates on a non-professional, hands-on presentation system based on a radio station set up, allowing a community group to come in with minimal technical expertise and present a show.

3A. That it emulate the talkback radio format with interchangeable studios, even supporting the technical hierarchy of sound over picture.

4. That the content be prioritised over form. This is not an aesthetic position, but rather a political one, in which aesthetics will develop in unexpected ways inside the formal constraints as familiarity and provera (poor) methodologies are celebrated and demonstrated.

5. That it experiments with low end available technologies like computers and online systems to create interactivity and participation.

6. That there is no “NO”, it is “YES, but what about…” followed by a positive suggestion.

Flickering between past and present in a visual and narrative rendering of childhood memories of pain, fear and resilience, Victim is the audacious directorial debut of Perth-based filmmaker Corrie Jones. The film takes its viewer inside the mind of Sera, a kidnap victim who wakes up bound, gagged and trapped inside the boot of a car. Through a voiceover, Sera recalls situations in which she felt afraid as a child (a bike accident, a visit to hospital), compulsively reminding herself that she has survived these relatively minor traumas.

The film’s frequent childhood flashbacks are dreamy and visually beautiful, suffused with a light deliberately contrasted with the dark, grainy images of Sera’s terrifying present. The film opens with images of the young Sera chasing butterflies through a field, as the camera lingers on a book whose blank pages are ruffled by the wind. The symbolism of these early images—butterflies as symbols of flight and freedom, a blank book as a story yet to be told—becomes evident once the voiceover intrudes and reveals a much darker tale. A close-up of young Sera’s innocent face transforms into a shot of a darkening sky, and suddenly the viewer is confronted by a fear-stricken, panicking face, mouth taped, terror in the eyes.

This balance between dark and light, terror and resilience, claustrophobia and open space is beautifully crafted and delicately maintained throughout, as the film moves between images of the adult Sera’s struggle against her kidnapper, her childhood experiences and her memories of loved ones she fears she might never see again. Victim’s mood of psychological intensity is quite extraordinary given its brief 10 minute duration. Tight editing, unusual camera angles by cinematographer Torstein Dyrting and an eerie score by Alex Ringis further contribute to Victim’s escalating sense of tension. The voiceover by New York poet Nicole Blackman is eerily hypnotic and calm, a whispered soundtrack to an unimaginable ordeal.

Corrie Jones discovered Nicole Blackman’s work during his time as a film student at Curtin University (he graduated in 2001). A friend working at the independent music store, 78 Records, recommended he listen to Blackman’s spoken-word recordings after noticing the sort of music he was buying. Victim was the first track on the album: “The first time I listened to it, I was totally captivated, in awe of it”, says Jones. “I kept playing it over and over. But the idea to actually do Victim as a film didn’t come until a couple of years later.”

Jones contacted Blackman via her website and proposed translating the poem into a short film. Blackman’s initial response was tentative; according to Jones, she felt deeply protective of the piece, but was convinced by his script treatment and the strength of his emotional response to the narrative.

With limited student work to show potential financers, Jones had to rely on extensive storyboarding and director’s notes to persuade investors he had the ability to make the film. Amy Lou Taylor, a producer with a commercial background, was brought on board and a $120,000 budget was secured from ScreenWest and the Australian Film Commission. Victim was filmed and produced in Perth by a group of relative newcomers, but its local impact was immediate. The first screenings in Perth were controversial, where it was shown with Siddiq Barma’s Osama as part of the 2003 Perth International Arts Festival. With the serial killings of 3 young women in Perth’s northern suburbs still haunting the newspaper headlines, Victim hit a raw nerve. Although the film shows a bound and gagged woman at the mercy of an armed kidnapper, many viewers interpreted the film as being about a woman’s rape, which is not even indirectly implied.

Jones views the film’s real subject as self-empowerment rather than victimisation. His protagonist struggles to the end, and when she realises she may die, she attempts to live the last moments of her life with psychological strength and resolve, rather than annihilating terror. “I wanted to show an inner strength through the detachment of the narration”, Jones explains. “The film is about a woman confronting her fears, dealing with them as they hit her.”

Victim has already won a number of prestigious Australian awards, including an Early Career Award at the 2003 WA Screen Awards, the SBS Eat Carpet award, and Best New Director award at the 2004 St Kilda Film Festival. Jones is now in the embryonic stages of developing a script for a feature film. He admits making the transition from a critically acclaimed 10 minute short to a feature is a little daunting. With influences ranging from the European avant-garde to Wong Kar-Wai, Jones envisages a more autobiographical story that explores the impact of memory and moments of personal significance. He claims to be uninterested in making mainstream films, and suggests he is naturally drawn to darker themes and issues: “In Victim I was trying to push the envelope”, he says. “I wanted to go to places that were a bit darker, a bit more risky.”

Victim, director Corrie Jones; producer Amy Lou Taylor; writers Corrie Jones, Nicole Blackman; performers Rebecca Davis, Jade Richards

In 1995, Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell broke new ground in anime aesthetics, pushing the medium towards uncanny realism with unforgettable imagery and attention to sound. It proved that the form could also be used to explore philosophical questions rather than simply market game cards and cheap plastic toys. The sequel, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, seeks to take these aesthetic and thematic projects further. On a recent visit to Australia sponsored by the Japan Foundation, Oshii said that he “put everything he knows” into this film, and it shows. But while undeniably gorgeous, the film is not an unqualified success.

The time and money spent and the labour of his team of artists and animators are abundantly evident on screen, but the sequel’s reliance on 3D digital imagery for backgrounds is strangely jarring. The film is also at times overloaded to the point of distraction and confusion, with borrowed ideas and imagery from both recent sources (notably Blade Runner and A.I.), the music video for Björk’s All is Full of Love and older texts (Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Eve Future and writings by ETA Hoffmann and Descartes).

Oshii is obsessed with the uncertain and ever-blurring lines between life and death, human and machine. This film, even more than its precursor, is one long riff on those themes. At the Australian premiere at Sydney’s Valhalla Cinema, we were fortunate enough to be addressed by the reclusive director himself. A short, rumpled man muttering softly in Japanese, he apologised through a translator for reneging on his promise to come to Sydney in 2000. What seemed at first a touchingly silly excuse (the death of his pet cat) elicited a ripple of giggles from the audience—giggles that fell into awkward silence as he continued to speak of his loss and what the cat meant to him. This tale of mourning segued into a more general point: that the death or loss of those we love tears an aching hole in us that is never really filled. A self that is torn by successive losses is perhaps the non-corporeal “ghost” of his films’ titles: a ghost forever disappearing piece by piece. Mourning, prosthetic technologies, the guilelessness of animals, and the struggle to retain our ‘ghost’ are just some of the strands running through Oshii’s work.

Set in the year 2032, Ghost in the Shell 2’s central character is cyborg detective Batou, Major Kusanagi’s colleague in the first film. A hulking figure with blank camera lenses instead of eyes, Batou and his mulleted sidekick Togusa are assigned to investigate a recent spate of killings caused by concubine “sexaroids”, androids designed for sexual pleasure produced by the Locus Solus company. The sexaroids have inexplicably turned violent, murdering their male owners. These “Hadaly type” (in reference to L’Eve Future) robots adorn much of the promotional art for the film and are appealingly girlish, pale and plump, with rosebud mouths and sleepy vacant blue eyes. The bulk of the main narrative is taken up by Batou and Togusa’s quest to uncover why these figures, valued for their compliant sexual innocence, are becoming violent puppets—who is controlling them, by what means, and for what broader purpose? The answer turns out to be quite sinister, especially in the context of the Japanese sexual fetishisation of school girls, but it is not the answer you may expect.

Batou’s sordid investigation is broken by interludes of a slower, more contemplative pace where we are shown clouds of birds wheeling through the sky, the majestic scape of the metropolis, and almost indescribably beautiful images of a religious festival parade. Here, gargantuan red and gold gods and mythological figures sway in glacial motion down rainy streets crowded with onlookers beneath a sea of umbrellas. As in the first film, Kenji Kawai’s spare and striking use of percussion and ululating female voices mark these changes of pace. It is not merely the music, but the use of real sound, the vibrations recorded from street and traffic noise, that conjure a physical sense of things and people moving in space.

Recorded sound also contributes to the essential “dogginess” exuded by Batou’s basset hound, a pet that serves as a gentle respite from the cold violence of the detective’s work. While the introduction of animal characters into many films can signal cloying sentimentality, the hound is so well realised that it reminds us why humans adore pets and their innocent exuberance. Perhaps Oshii is suggesting that the unconditional love and animal innocence of our pets is one of the few things that keeps us from becoming truly dehumanised while living and working in dehumanising systems.

Elsewhere, this moody rain-slick world, with its cityscapes, hallways, carparks, stairwells, alleys and many machines, is rendered in painstaking and startling hallucinatory detail with a heavy reliance on 3D digital imagery. Every surface seems layered with the grime and wear of use and pollution, as though the artists have been using a rendering software that at the click of a mouse covers everything with a Blade Runner patina. This detailed 3D context emphasises the stark flatness of the 2D characters, with their faces composed of ridges and ungraded planes of dark and light. At times they become haunted drawings brought to uncanny life, drifting forlornly through a world that is more solid, real and ‘alive’ than they are.

Later the action shifts to a locale with an entirely different atmosphere. Batou and Togusa enter a baroque mansion decked out in gold filigree and filled with the chiming and ticking of clockwork, its gilded rooms inhabited by a variety of enigmatic dolls and automata. It is as though we have travelled back in time to a perpetual twilight in the machine age. In this mansion, didactic and ponderous conversations take place on the human and the machine. The characters seem to become puppets themselves—mouthpieces for Oshii’s own explorations of ideas not fully thought through. Some insight does float to the surface though, regarding our uneasiness around dolls and automata: the human form reduced to matter is a reminder of our terror of death a future in which we are reduced to lifeless object.

After the film has finished it is less the mish-mash of platitudes and philosophical questions that stay with you than certain images and their sounds: the hiss of a spent cigarette crushed into a plastic cup of butts suspended in filthy liquid, or the lovingly drawn basset hound snuffling eagerly as he scrapes his metal food bowl around a tiled kitchen floor with his soft wet snout and skittering claws. The attention to these everyday details bring a grounding realism to the work that takes it beyond the usual anime fantasy world of sci-fi and cynical toy-marketing.

There is no doubting Oshii’s sincerity and the effort that he has put into this work. He reminds me of a character in a JG Ballard novel, obsessively gathering together clues and repeatedly arranging them in bizarre patterns, with a belief that the perfect alignment will create a blinding enlightenment. Perhaps the film requires repeated viewings on DVD before his magical patterns can emerge with clarity. Upon first viewing, don’t struggle with interpretation; simply surrender to aesthetic pleasures and let the maelstrom of images and ideas roll over you. As Oshii himself suggests, this is a film that should be less understood than “vaguely felt.”

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, director Mamoru Oshii, producers Mitsuhisa Ishikawa, Toshio Suzuki, Japan, 2004

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