Australian
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exploratory
performance and
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June 2005

Topshop, Berlin

In 2004 Australian artists created cheap multiples for sale under the title NUCA (Network of Uncollectable Artists), their droll ‘salespeople’ appearing with cases at art events around Australia. Adam Jasper reports on a like venture in Berlin, though initially in a shop, but now online. Eds.

There are benefits to a depressed real estate market. Along the northern extension of Berlin’s iconic Friedrichstrasse can be found an array of abandoned shopfronts, derelict warehouses and despondent government buildings. Specialist stores have made way for $2 shops, which in turn have shut their doors and papered over their windows. In their wake, galleries of a diverse nature have colonised the city, taking advantage of the cheap rents and desperate beauty that a decaying urban environment provides.

Topshop is a movement set up and run by a group of Berlin artists whose project bears witness to the capriciousness of a marketplace that has alternately indulged and neglected them. For 2 weeks of September last year their flagship locale was one of Friedrichstrasse’s failed dime stores. Modelled on an imaginary supermarket chain, the store was decked out with wire shelves, products helpfully highlighted by ‘Magenta Spot’ specials, 99c bargain tables and special offer corners.

A Topshop is different from an ordinary supermarket in a number of ways. Firstly, instead of tight regulation of prices in line with supply and demand, original work is sold at an arbitrary price by the artist, with the emphasis on the absurdly cheap. Topshop artists tend to produce Fluxus-style multiples–usually small, cheap objects that have been manufactured in limited runs. The way they are sold follows the financial logic of mass produced commodities (pile it high, sell it cheap) but their production shares in the logic of exclusion associated with fine art (the object is the unique work of an artist). Samples and failures, as well as misguided concepts and mistakes, are sold for 99c a piece.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Topshop encourages the unrestrained copying, appropriation and modification of artists’ work. In the discount area, the exhibiting artists are free to decide which objects they will classify as “material for reproduction”, but any work under that classification can be photocopied by shoppers at machines near the checkout. This cheerful encouragement of brazen piracy is offered as a sort of defence against the assault of industry on the last bastions of avant garde notions of authenticity and originality. Industry appropriates innovations so fast that it is impossible for innovators to keep up. If it’s impossible to be authentic, because being original means owning a pair of Chuck Taylor Originals, then one might as well camouflage one’s self with inauthenticity, with derivative ideas, with objects and concepts so far removed from their origins that they don’t have owners anymore, and consequently can’t be sold.

Many of the pieces enter into an explicit, knowing and mocking dialogue with the notions of value, price and prestige that inform the economics of the art market. Christian Romed-Holthaus, for instance, sold his artworks–small, egg shaped concrete sculptures–by weight, as if they were fruit. His work then becomes not so much the objects as the act of selling art as if it were primary produce.

Another play on the economic relations of supermarkets and their standardising power was made by Inga Zimbrich with her European Day Trip Bar Coder. The barcoder draws on an archive of generic experiences within European cities to generate a completely normal looking EAN–compliant 13 digit barcode recording the events of your day. Within the archive are all the activities, locations, methods of transport and equipment that might feature in a day trip, as well as descriptors, ranging from hectic to placid. An unintended advantage of the bar coder is that any standard bar code also corresponds to a random set of experiences. This means that ordinary consumables gain a set of connotative experiences. Weetbix will always be linked to a maudlin day in a sultry Athens with an umbrella and bicycle. Your day or someone else’s, it barely matters.

One potential criticism of Topshop is its overt inclusiveness. Photos, clothing and pranks make repeated appearances. Catherine Shea’s garishly coloured badges declaiming “Saying It Loud Makes It True” made sense, in that they are designed to be smuggled into stores and left for consumers in a reverse form of shoplifting that both commodifies the artwork and reduces its price to zero. However the contribution of Berlin duo Good and Plenty just seemed a joke, although admittedly one in the Fluxus vein: Genuine Yakuza Slippers, consisting of 2 concrete blocks and a belt. However, as Ulrike Brückner (who along with Sabine Meyer is Topshop’s convener and founding member) pointed out: “The exhibition contained works of vastly differing aspiration. We were initially concerned that this would result in the denigration of some of the more serious works. But it was actually quite the opposite; the result was deeply exciting. To see these works of varying quality next to each other–for instance, a piece of museum-shop giftware next to an artwork with a rigorous conceptual content–had an astonishing effect. The statement of the artwork only became stronger” (my translation).

Chicks On Speed, the art school electroclash band and erstwhile darlings of New Musical Express were also prominently featured in Topshop, perhaps as representatives of the Berlin art scene currently most favoured by the vagaries of commerce. Chicks On Speed sold their new book It’s a Project in conjunction with their new album 99¢ (I couldn’t establish whether this album is named in honour of the Topshop bargain tables). Both book and music are marked by a pronounced DIY aesthetic, as if Chicks On Speed were never meant to be a real band, but a fake approximating a pop sensation better than most real bands. They also feature the only current Australian contribution to Topshop: band member Alex Murray-Leslie.

So is Topshop political art or a trendy prank? Collective vision or agglomeration? Futuristic or retro? Duchamp’s ‘readymades’ of the 1920s (a bottle drier, a urinal, a snow shovel) constituted the most corrosive assault on pre-modern assumptions about art, but paradoxically also embody one of the few art manoeuvres that has never tired. They assert the peculiar right of an artist to simply declare their output art, as if by fiat. It is a strategy that reaches its dialectical endpoint in Manzoni’s 1961 Merda d’artista (the shit of the artist) but has not ceased to resonate as a tactical possibility. But the commodities sold in Topshop are not exactly readymades. As Dieter Daniels (Professor in Art History and Media Theory at the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig) observed at the Topshop Panel Discussion:

“The readymade is a mass produced object that has been isolated from its kind. It is released from the masses, taken off the shelf, and set upon the stage as something unique. The multiple…is something produced in high numbers by an artist and could potentially end up in a shop, on a shelf.” (My translation.)

It is therefore in Fluxus that the Topshop movement finds its appropriate historical roots, in the creation and dissemination of ‘limited edition’ artworks that are sold at such low prices they refuse to be identified as artworks, and are instead confused with prank objects, objets d’art, and novelty gifts.

In August a workshop on Topshop will be held at Estonia’s Art Academy of Tallinn. Readers are encouraged to investigate the Topshop concept further and, in line with the official Topshop endorsement of piracy, are welcome to franchise, steal and misuse it.

Topshop, Friedrichstrasse, Berlin, September 16-26, 2004,
www.topshop-berlin.de

RealTime issue #67 June-July 2005 pg. 42

He introduces himself as S* from Baxter IDC. He spends his time in detention with nothing to do but write and write as the days fade by. He wrote his first poem after spending days on Christmas Island mingling with children and families, enjoying seeing the kids going to school. Now in Port Hedland he is separated from their smiles and writes to remember the faces of his sons. He produces a regular newsletter to “unveil all the hidden suffering inside electrocuted fences.”

I introduce myself to S* as a member of PEN, a writers’ group that supports other writers wrongfully imprisoned in jail and in detention. When I begin to write letters I struggle for words, the right tone. Do I tell him what I see through the window on the train winding through the Blue Mountains? Does he want to know about the diversity of cultures, the beauty of landscapes; that there’s more to this place than red dirt, warped heat, hatred and endless languid days behind barbed wire? I start to create my world on a page with a new perspective. I re-create it for him and for me.

And so our dialogue begins. I send S* a program of the play I saw last night, Through the Wire, which offers accounts of relationships that have slowly developed between Australian women and men in detention seeking asylum. Similar themes are explored in documentaries: Clara Law’s Letters to Ali and Tom Zubrycki’s Molly and Mobarak. The play’s power comes from exploring the dynamics between the Australian women, one of them Jewish, and the men they want to help. The women, who include a psychologist, a guard and a lawyer, become mums, minders, activists, and one a lover, to the men–roles they perform well. A daily voice on the mobile, an unexpected birthday cake on the doorstep. My own voice is echoed in the script as the women negotiate how to communicate, even celebrate, slowly unfolding lives on different sides of the fence.

After its Sydney season, 22 suburban and regional centres lined up to present Through the Wire. However an application put by Performing Lines to the Playing Australia fund of the federal government’s Department of Communications, Information Technology and Arts (DOCITA) was unsuccesful. Surprised but undaunted, writer and director Ros Horin toured the production with Performing Lines and the assistance of the NSW Ministry for the Arts for 4 weeks in NSW and one week in Canberra to near sell-out seasons and standing ovations in most centres. Horin raised funds from many sources (“a kind of people power”, she says) and got the support of the Melbourne Theatre Company, who marketed the play gratis, to present it at the VCA’s Grant Street Theatre where it enjoyed another successful season.

The script of Through the Wire is based on words spoken by asylum seekers. It is theatre stripped back to essentials in both its stagecraft and performative elements. Writer/director Ros Horin has shaped the play over a number of years. She says she works like a sculptor, paring the dialogues back so new details are slowly revealed.

The asylum seekers are played by actors–except for an Iranian actor/playwright Shahin Shafaei who, it is revealed at the end, is one of the authors sharing his lived experience:

It is prison, you know, the detention centre, the whole shape of it…You have no idea how long you are going to be there. There is…no information about what is your status or situation here…at the second day of arrival, there are some people coming along to interview you…who ask you “Why did you come to Australia?” You would tell your story. If you don’t mention that I want to seek asylum in Australia, you will be considered a screen-out, so you are not entitled to seek asylum in Australia because you have never asked…my people smuggler wasn’t that smart to tell me you should say that.

This dynamic between performance and tragic reality reframed my experience of the play. In one of the most harrowing scenes a camera is set up in front of the actors, zeroing in on each face as they describe the circumstances that led to them fleeing their countries and families: smiling at tourists in a hotel, exposing corruption in local courts, writing theatre and performing it illegally, finding friends murdered because they’ve dared to question authority. The men’s voices mingle, rise and fall softly. A close-up of the actor’s face on a large screen above the stage means there is no place to hide and it’s hard work–a dense monologue, haltingly painful, at times beautiful imagery.

The first time I see Through the Wire I am least engaged by Shahin’s performance. This unsettles me for weeks but when I go the second time I realise this man tells his story with the distance and abstraction of a writer/actor through necessity; he can be deported at any time. How can he juggle such emotions and fears day to day in front of an audience, given that writing, acting and watching plays was what led to his being persecuted and fleeing Iran in the first place? Actor Wadih Dona (who plays Farshid) also had to flee his home (Lebanon) during the civil war. I ask him about working with Shahin:

Shahin is still on a Temporary Protection Visa…He has had his final interview as we were on tour and we still don’t know. It is incredible to watch him…but he is playing himself as a character in a director’s vision of who he is in a play that we are performing! The first reading, Shahin couldn’t even finish his story. He got up crying and left the room. It was so moving for me…because that was the first day I met him and I really got it in my heart how important this play is to him. It is not another theatre job, it is about his fucking life.

Wadih and the other actors in Through the Wire are fully aware of the crossover between perceptions of reality and performance in this work. When Wadih originally auditioned, he was in the unusual position of being up against the real Farshid for the role:

He was the real guy so you can imagine how I felt in hindsight. I didn’t actually know that it was him in the room. I though it was some exotic actor that [Ros] had selected to read as well. Later I put it all together when I met him onstage after we did opening night at the Sydney Festival. Shit, that’s Farshid! Oh my god that was the guy from the audition!

All actors were approved after the audition process by the men who had originally spoken/written about their experiences in detention and prison. But Wadih sees no difference between performing a fictional role and his characterisation of Farshid:

Word are words…it does not matter to me what their origin is. I don’t believe in psyching myself up in order to get into a certain emotional state to tell Farshid’s story…it’s like surfing to me. You go on the wave of the story and hope you can ride it to the end! Just commit to the ride and don’t worry where you want to take it.

The strength of a play like Through the Wire is its resilience and continuing topicality, as more is revealed about the government’s lack of mental health care for those in detention, about how up to 200 Australian citizens may have been deported by ‘mistake’, about the harrowing treatment of Cornelia Rau and others like her. The show continues to tour, hitting regional areas and giving asylum seekers a voice. Performing Lines has been instrumental in this. Their programming policy and regional tours encourage and nurture plays that are innovative, unique and of ongoing benefit to performers and audiences. Performing in intimate venues in places like Penrith, Wagga, Albury and Griffith, the actors get to gauge a wide variety of responses, from those who know a lot to those who know a little. A mark of the impact of the play is that audiences sometimes have difficulty differentiating the actors from the characters. Wadih tells the story of a little old lady who approached him after a performance and said tenderly:

‘I really hope you get to stay in Australia’. But the usual reaction from the audience is a profound sense of shame…and they usually ask us what they can do.

Like most in the audience of Through the Wire at Penrith, west of Sydney, I left the theatre angry. But the encounters between the asylum seekers and the women–and between the men and their writing, art, theatre, music–continue to nourish and sustain, inspiring me to write more letters to S*, to be less afraid of giving him glimpses beyond the walls. Only one thing now bothers me. Where are the women’s voices from detention?

Shahin Shafaei’s comments are taken from an interview with Andrew Denton on Enough Rope, www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope.

Through the Wire, writer, director, Ros Horin, performers Ali Ammouchi, Wadih Dona, Rhondda Findleton, Katrina Foster, Eloise Oxer, Shahin Shafaei, Hazem Shammas, Jamal Alrekabi; designer Seljuk Feruu, lighting Stephen Hawker, sound Max Lyandvert, music Jamal Alkrekabi, costumes Genevieve Dugard, film Heidi Riederer, Nick Meyers; producer Ros Horin with Performing Lines

RealTime issue #67 June-July 2005 pg. 28

Matthew Whittet, Journal of the Plague Year

photo Lisa Tomasetti

Matthew Whittet, Journal of the Plague Year

Ham Funeral & Journal of the Plague Year

Though Max Gillies’ The Big Con was the official titleholder, it was The Ham Funeral and Journal of the Plague Year which really inaugurated Malthouse Theatre’s first season since its transformation from Playbox. Both shows opened in the same theatre on the same day, featured the same cast and, perhaps most importantly, the same director: Malthouse’s new Artistic Director and very visible face of the overhauled company, Michael Kantor. After the many changes announced since his appointment, this was the opportunity to see precisely what sort of theatre Kantor is committed to producing.

The more striking of the 2 works was Plague Year, written by Tom Wright after the story of the same name by Daniel Defoe. The play is structured as a series of tableaux covering 12 months in the plague-infested London of 1665, and features Robert Menzies as Defoe, guiding us through a society whose external sickness is mirrored by an internal decay. The rest of the ensemble take on multiple roles as denizens of this Dante-esque world.

One of the difficulties posed by the task of adapting Defoe’s tale stems from the original’s status as a kind of mockumentary: billed as journalism, many of the text’s stylistic devices exist almost purely to test the credulity of its reader. An abundance of trivial details, diagrams and first-person reminders of the narrator’s position as a kind of embedded reporter work to bestow an aura of authenticity. Lacking this requirement, however, the staged adaptation struggles to find a reason to include such devices; Wright must not only convert Plague Year to a new medium, but reinvent its generic setting as well. In fact he inverts the original by shifting it into the realm of the fantastic.

In freeing Plague Year from its original meanings, there is the danger that it will not find anchor elsewhere. Though a vague air of allegory permeates the production, it isn’t clear how we are to interpret the significance of events, an especially peculiar fact considering that a fatal pandemic plague has such obvious metaphorical resonance. Contemporary events are occasionally invoked (a passing reference to biological weapons, for example), but these potentially fertile references are rare.

Kantor’s ‘more is more’ approach sees the employment of a bewildering array of theatrical modes: mask, dance, farce, song. There is a sense that the real theme motivating directorial choice is simply the theatre itself as a vehicle for the production of wonder. If this is the case, Plague Year is an unabashed success. However, I find it slightly (though thrillingly) problematic that this production relies on an apocalyptic vision to achieve its effects. Apocalyptic visions can be seductive: lacking the psychological intimacy of tragedy, they instead use impersonal destruction to connote cleansing, starting over, even the possibility of rapture. Certainly, the mounting chaos engulfing Plague Year’s narrator is played out with ecstatic abandon, at one point incarnated as a very literal carnival. Here Kantor and Wright’s earlier work with Barrie Kosky’s Gilgul Theatre is revealed. Kosky has long been an exponent of carnival, grotesquery and excess.

The gleeful, heterogeneous vulgarity of Plague Year is echoed in the excesses of The Ham Funeral, but is moderated by the play’s iconic status as a misunderstood moment of shocking modernism in Australian theatre history. Viewing the work now, one can’t help but measure it against that which came before its controversial 1961 opening in Adelaide. More damagingly, one must compare it to what has appeared since. It’s not an especially challenging work to audiences weaned on absurd irony, black humour and alternatives to realism. It’s still a powerful piece of writing though, with Patrick White’s control of language shining through from the first lines of dialogue. The Ham Funeral is White doing his best Peggy Lee: if that’s all there is, then let’s keep dancing, break out the booze and have a ball. It’s revelry borne of despair, though there are times when this dips dangerously towards undergraduate angst.

An anonymous Young Man (Dan Spielman) moves into a squalid hotel/rooming house run by the basement-bound Mr and Mrs Lusty, a bloated, gluttonous pair. When her husband dies abruptly, Mrs Lusty announces a grand funeral featuring the titular ham, a dramatic absurdity which doesn’t bear quite the same vulgar connotations it may have when White first penned the play in 1947.

The performances are uniformly strong: Dan Spielman brims with confidence in a daunting role, inhabiting the character while retaining its ambiguous status as stand-in for White himself. In contrast, the rest of the ensemble tackle their roles with a vigour verging on the (entirely appropriate) hammy. Julie Forsyth and Ross Williams are the grotesque landlord and lady of the Young Man’s lodgings, and their bawling, belching banter carries most of the piece’s comic weight. Forsyth’s Mrs Lusty is a delirious rendition of the monstrous feminine, the antithesis of the somewhat ridiculously angelic woman upstairs (Lucy Taylor), whose disembodied voice and spectral presence obsesses the Young Man. He finds his libido pulled in contrary directions by carnal Lusty and her lofty, intellectual opposite–the symbolism is laid on with a trowel. The Jungian figuration of these and other characters comes across a little creakily, and this is perhaps the one area in which White’s script has not aged well. At the same time there is a joyous eulogising of outdated theatrical forms. The Young Man asks us “Is this a tragedy, or just 2 fat people arguing in a basement?” The answer to that question, I expect, holds the key to your appreciation of the piece. Both Journal of the Plague Year and The Ham Funeral are actors’ pieces, and it would seem that the new Malthouse is very much an actors’ theatre.
Anita Hegh, The Yellow Wallpaper

Anita Hegh, The Yellow Wallpaper

photo Peter Evans

Anita Hegh, The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper

Another work which used a classic text as the launching point for a performance testing the boundaries of theatrical convention was Anita Hegh and Peter Evans’ The Yellow Wallpaper at The Store Room. The slim volume written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1899 offers us a narrator confined to her room for a “rest cure.” We are made witness to her slow descent into madness as the room’s wallpaper begins to take on an hallucinatory life which mocks and mirrors the woman’s own incarceration.

Hegh’s performance is all in this production: a plain set and simple lighting allow us to focus on her hypnotic portrayal of a woman driven to hysteria by patriarchal dictates. If the style of presentation is not overly embellished, neither is it minimalist: Hegh’s monologue is occasionally interrupted by pre-recorded voiceovers continuing the narrative, and at times she dons a pair of sunglasses and grabs a microphone to continue her tale as a spoken word slice of punk protest. The performance is note-perfect, reverent to its source but willing to stray from it, illustrating the power of the performer to reinvest texts with new meanings.

Journal of the Plague Year, writers Tom Wright after Daniel Defoe, director Michael Kantor; performers Julie Forsyth, Dan Spielman, Lucy Taylor, Ross Williams, Robert Menzies, Marta Dusseldorp, Matthew Whittet; The Ham Funeral, writer Patrick White, director Michael Kantor; performers as above; Malthouse Theatre, April 11-May 8

The Yellow Wallpaper, based on the novella by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, director Peter Evans, performer Anita Hegh; The Store Room, Melbourne, March 15-April

RealTime issue #67 June-July 2005 pg. 29

Elise May, Brian Lucas, Churchill’s black dog

photo Mark Dyson

Elise May, Brian Lucas, Churchill’s black dog

Beneath his gruff, no-nonsense exterior, Winston Churchill experienced a world of darkness and depression manifested in violent mood swings, emotional doubt and personal insecurities. Churchill called it his “black dog.” In a new work created by Clare Dyson in collaboration with performers Avril Huddy, Brian Lucas, Vanessa Mafe-Keane and Elise May, the dog takes centre stage. Churchill’s black dog is the result of Dyson’s tenure as artist in residence at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, and had its first public showing in Brisbane in April prior to a full production in Canberra later this year.

Churchill’s black dog attempts to choreograph depression and make physical the effect on sufferers’ family and friends. It’s an ambitious aim, but this collective of established Brisbane-based artists, working under the name Subject to Change, has created a strong exploratory piece that slips in and out of historical specificity (ie Churchill’s 1940s) to creatively respond to questions such as: what was the effect of the illness on Churchill’s wife or Virginia Woolf’s husband? Is the black dog a metaphor for conquest or acceptance; familiarity or ownership?

In an unsettlingly silent prologue, the piece opens with 2 naked bodies vulnerable against a brick wall. The stage is littered with autumnal leaves and, in a far corner, there is a bathroom. As a house’s inner sanctum, the bathroom harbours private turmoil and here Huddy silently flails in a bathtub of despair; while at a sink the everyday rituals of cleansing and shaving continue on empty faces.

The dulcet tones of popular 1940s music begin as a man in long johns (Lucas) hunches over a table purposefully reciting the micro tasks involved in the simple act of signing off and posting a letter. The process of naming and listing each action is a survival strategy, a way for this character–could it be Churchill?–to maintain a semblance of control over the present. Later, the table becomes a sanctuary, with the tall man curling into a foetal position beneath it while a voice-over narrates common familial refrains: “I am really worried about you…You can’t just lie there…You need to make more of an effort…You’re pathetic…You’re not trying hard enough…Sad and pathetic.”

Throughout the performance, the torment and anguish of the mind seeks bodily expression. At times, a well-worn physical vocabulary of mental illness is relied upon: anxious twitching, frenzied scratching and butoh-esque muscular strain. All 4 performers follow their own trajectories around the confined space, appearing not to see each other as they play with shadows and sweep up leaves. In theory, this individualised action seems appropriate to the dislocation and isolation of depressive illness, but the longer it is sustained, the more dissipated the energy of the piece becomes. Where are they taking us? Is the historical context meant to clothe each performer in character or are we meant to read this as an everyman/everywoman experience? The ensemble has worked together to create some strikingly original images and text but they are mostly disconnected moments–which is perhaps the intention. For the most part, the audience’s eye is drawn inexorably toward Lucas who best embodies mental turmoil with a startling clarity and fluidity of movement. With him, depression builds as a slow eruption from within.

There is brief respite in a series of delightful knock-knock jokes posed by Lucas as he sits inert facing a door. But the atmosphere soon darkens again as the performers gravitate together in a paranoid calling to the abyss: “Does it matter if you lose your favourite game?…Does it matter if you lose your mind?…Does it matter?” The choreography shifts to convey an angsty and torrid wretchedness. The solo energy that has characterised most of the performance finally becomes collective and, in turn, more forceful and compelling. We are torn from the 1940s as the performers drop and writhe in cold blue light. In time, each finds the fortitude to stand again and, although one woman continues to collapse, the overall image is of strength gained in a momentary togetherness. A sense of hope, perhaps, in the body collective?

Returning to the sepia light and wartime songs, the context turns historical once more. Churchill is in the bath, though he soon disappears. May sits at the table reading aloud from a newspaper: “Dr Genie’s tips for stress-free living.” Lucas reappears pushing the entire bathroom set-piece across the stage and turns it around, away from the public gaze.

We are left with the women, carrying on as usual with a public veneer of competence. Despite internal eruptions of their own, they continue with the laundry, with listing, with ordering, with dressing. Lucas returns to the open door to await the comforting arrival of a cat, but “the dog has come to stay for a while”–and in this performance we have glimpsed its true estranging effect.

Churchill’s black dog, creator Clare Dyson in collaboration with performers Avril Huddy, Brian Lucas, Vanessa Mafe-Keane, Elise May; lighting designer/production manager/photographer Mark Dyson; text advisor Gordon White; music Sia and Sunno; sound Chris Neehause; Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Brisbane, May 27-2

RealTime issue #67 June-July 2005 pg. 30

Opening his solo performance Nothing But Nothing, asylum-seeker Towfiq Al-Qady immediately engages his audience by repeatedly asking “Are you my friend? Can you help me?” The answer is yes, of course, but backed by a giant “NO” constructed on the otherwise bare stage of Brisbane’s Metro Arts Theatre, Towfiq replies: “Really, I want to stay with your yes. I have missed this word for a long time. But between yes and no I have spent all my life.”

With this the dramaturgical framework for the performance is established and, as a newborn audience-community, we bear witness to Al-Qady’s life story: a beleaguered search for ‘yes.’ From childhood dreams and youthful passions to a gruesome ‘choice’ of either becoming a refugee or being executed, we see Al-Qady as an artist and young lover keeping his dreams alive by rejecting everything about a war in which “beautiful things have no meaning.”

Born in Iraq, Towfiq Al-Qady is a painter, cartoonist, actor, writer and director. When he was young, his father, like many other adult men from his region, disappeared without explanation. This had an enormous impact: as Al-Qady explains in his performance, his “dreams were stolen.” When as an adult Al-Qady refused to join the Iraqi army, he was told that he could continue working as an artist only if he painted portraits of Saddam Hussein. Instead, he became a political cartoonist and participated in political theatre, mainly in Syria. Exhausting other avenues to freedom, he emigrated to Australia by boat and was recently held in Curtin Detention Centre for 9 months.

Al-Qady’s depiction of his time at sea is harrowing. Constraining himself within the oval “O” of the onstage “NO”, he plea-bargains with the boat and the sea: “Please, boat, help us…Sea, I like you but I am scared of you.” After enduring the vessel’s motor failure and a life-threatening lack of food and water, he joyfully dances at the long-awaited sight of land. Yet, perhaps as a measure of his graciousness, Al-Qady refrains from lingering on his experience as a detainee in Australia. While in the program notes he describes this period as “very hard” and “not healthy”, in the performance the experience is indicated simply by a short strand of razor wire and a barrage of bureaucratic questioning. Like the off-stage bloodshed of a Greek tragedy, we are left to imagine the pain. In a poignant portrayal of the double-edged ‘compassion’ of Australian authorities, Al-Qady rests his weary cheek against the sharp wire as he plays a waiting game: “Will you say yes? When will you say yes? I should wait? Sorry. OK.”

Currently living in Brisbane on a Temporary Protection Visa, Al-Qady continues to paint and create theatre. He is an active member of Actors for Refugees Queensland, an organisation which has raised awareness of refugees in detention with readings of Michael Gurr’s Something to Declare, devised in collaboration with Actors for Refugees Melbourne using text from detainees’ letters. Nothing But Nothing takes this awareness-raising a step further by creating a unique opportunity for cross-cultural dialogue. Strongly supported by Brisbane’s Iraqi community, Al-Qady’s performance allowed for vibrant post-show discussion with his diverse audience.

Nothing But Nothing lays bare Towfiq Al-Qady’s tortuous journey facing a series of ‘nos.’ Yet this artist’s resilience, passion, and ultimate dream of peace make this performance remarkably optimistic. Nothing But Nothing is infused with Al-Qady’s positive attitude, while refusing to shy away from the immense physical and emotional toll this journey has had: “The war destroyed everything: my life, my love, my heart…My dreams become very small, alone, empty…NO–you are a very small word, but you have a very big impact on my life.” If only this performance was mandatory viewing for Australian politicians, they might finally realise that, in Al-Qady’s words, “I do not make me a refugee. War makes me a refugee.”

Actors for Refugees Qld, Nothing But Nothing, writer/performer Towfiq Al-Qady, musical accompaniment Taj Mahmoud, directorial assistant Leah Mercer, Metro Arts Theatre, Brisbane, May 10-1

The last few months have provided some inspirational performances, not something that can be claimed very often of the always hard work of making art, but when companies of young artists like Sydney’s My Darling Patricia and Melbourne’s Squealing Stuck Pigs Theatre realise haunting visions that thrill with their meticulous crafting and assuredness, the pleasure is palpable, the word is good and faith in the future of performance is restored. Both companies mix their media into a seamless totality–performance as installation, acting, movement, puppetry and film. Add to these the work of Matthew Lutton in Perth (p37), version 1.0 in Sydney (see RT68), Lucy Guerin’s Aether (p14) and the new lease of life for Melbourne theatre in the form of Michael Kantor’s Malthouse (p29), and the sense of possibility, of invention and renewal is pervasive.

Politely Savage

This is a very, very strange experience. We are greeted in the tiny PACT foyer by 3 young women (Halcyon Macleod, Clare Britton, Katrina Gill) all a-flutter like 50s cocktail hostesses in matching full red dresses, high heels and fixed smiles, speedily distributing bland snacks, cheap champagne and snippets of party banter. A nearby crash plunges them quaking into shocked silence, a sudden nervous fragility revealed, a crack in the façade followed by brisk recovery. A no-nonsense housekeeper (Cecily Hardy) arrives, announcing that she will be our guide, and leads us into the PACT performance space to encounter…a house. A very complete 2-storey ruin of a house through which we are led, first down a corridor of tattered wallpaper, splintered timber and embedded signs of life–old postcards, photos and clippings. Our hostess speaks ominously of someone who once lived here, a dry woman in a dry landscape, waiting to be flooded with feeling as much as with rain. She recalls the flooding of the Todd River in Alice Springs every decade, always leaving behind unidentified bodies. Our transformation is well underway, from innocent party guests to guided visitors, to curious confidantes.

We are led into a claustrophobic, dimly lit dusty room where our giddy girls appear in sombre mood to show a film (silhouette puppetry of a child barked at by increasingly monstrous and interchangeable women and dogs) and to act out 2 grim little vignettes with puppets. The first skinny puppet child plays with blocks, throws them away, becomes anxiously aware of us, is strapped to a chair, blind-folded and left, only to make a furtive escape. To the sound of wonderfully mock-Japanese music (toy piano, a high-flying voice) the second child puppet, with its outsize moon-face, is painstakingly, agonisingly coaxed into walking by its red-dressed manipulator, but then cruelly dumped. Dust pours down from the ceiling, instant karma perhaps, over the woman. She remains impassive. Shocked, we are taken upstairs.

We find ourselves on a rooftop looking deep down into the house, into a pool where 3 bodies float face down in water. Our hostesses in petticoats. The frightening vision expands, the walls are mirrors, and we are observed–a girl sits by the pool, lifelike, but, we soon sense, a mute witness, a statue, There are signs of life in the pool, the women slowly emerge and climb the stairs. They pass by like ghosts, treading a narrow bridge over the void to a newly revealed bright field of long grass into which they sink, only to be resurrected on film in their red dresses, movance & dramaturgy Chris Ryan; PACT Youth Theatre, Erskineville, Sydney, April 20-30 ing into the far green distance. As in Noh theatre, we have been entertained and then haunted by the dead–our hosts are ghosts, but have been released from their purgatory of drought and repression (with its child victims) into idyllic pastures.

Now you might not want to reflect too deeply on all of this: it’s iconic gothic Australia–Picnic at Hanging Rock, lost children, The Ghost Wife. The power of Politely Savage comes from its consummate realisation and the idiosyncratic way it deals with these familiar images, making them strange once more. It would be an astonishing achievement for any performance company let alone an emerging one. The performance is considered, carefully shaped and its personae and rhythms meticulously realised and sustained. The 4 young women (Halcyon Macleod, Clare Britton, Bridget Dolan and Katrina Gill) who comprise My Darling Patricia wrote, performed and designed the work, made and operated the puppets (with the assistance of Sam Routledge), built the set and collaborated with a team of artists. A blend of performative styles, puppetry, film and sound, the live-in set for the audience with its alarming changes of perspective, all suggest a confidence in practice and vision. As for the title, it’s just right, Politely Savage, well-mannered gothic–mythic rural darkness beneath suburban veneer.

The Black Swan of Trespass

With a like sense of totality, vision and conviction, Melbourne’s Stuck Pigs Squealing Theatre create an intimate and inverted but seductive world, and with Australian iconography again at the core. While My Darling Patricia built a house for us, Stuck Pigs have created a tiny old-fashioned stage world (red curtain, foot lights, pedal organ) for a small audience, using only half the space of Belvoir Street Downstairs. Such intimacy is just right for this fantasia in which writers Chris Kohn and Lally Katz present the creations of the anti-modernist hoaxers of the Ern Malley affair as cartoonishly real: the dying, mechanic poet Ern and his sister Ethel. Their grim, restrained lives and Ern’s bursts of creativity, pain and unrequited sexual desire are framed by the hoaxers’ narrative (Harold Stewart and James McCauley hilarious as a stuffed cat and rooster respectively), period songs from a fine crooner (Gavan O’Leary doubling as Ern’s mosquito antagonist, Anopheles) in a tux and a musician (director Chris Kohn) on organ and guitar. Christopher Brown as Ern is all quivering, junked-up vitality in a performance that is physically virtuosic and which, against the odds of the poetry that pours from him and the ruin that is his life, becomes increasingly real. So too does Ethel (Katie Keady) as she reveals her quiet possessiveness for Ern and her fear of the world. And the poetry makes better sense than its customary rejection as mere parody or the acclaim for its inadvertant modernist achievement by 2 significant poets. Ern’s naivety, his verbal fecundity, his delirium and his desires, the popular songs that haunt him, and a dark Albert Tucker milieu (especially in Princess [Jacklyn Bassaneli] the goddess-whore of Ern’s affections) churn and meld, vomiting up lines from his unconscious that the poet can barely grasp as his own.

The Black Swan of Trespass has enjoyed success in Melbourne (where it returns soon to a Malthouse season), New York (where it picked up a NY Fringe Festival prize and an invitation for the company to return) and now Sydney. Aside from wanting more integrated roles for the singer and musician, I found this an exhilarating work, both in its theatrical inventiveness and its creative response to the Ern Malley story.

The New Breed

The Melbourne based National Institute of Circus Arts made its first visit to Sydney with The New Breed, featuring final year students in a demonstration of individual and collective skills. The show was directed by Brazilian circus artist Rodrigo Matheus with choreography by Carla Candiotto and NICA’s Guang Rong Lu directing the circus routines. Loosely centred on the theme of miscommunication, especially when it comes to love, The New Breed entertained on many levels with a judicious distribution of expert solo routines and duets, verbal and sight gags and sudden surges of collective action keeping the show well-paced and rhythmically engaging. Hoops, stilts, bungy, trapeze and bicycle work kept soloists busy. A worker casually climbs chairs stacked by his mates indifferent to his spectacular balancing. Particular challenges came in the execution of routines while engaged in conversation (a xenophobic paranoid niggles at a slack wire artist) or while being verbally abused (a man balances virtuosically on bricks which are later snatched away by an angry woman). A woman reflects on love while adroitly manoeuvering a giant wheel, herself at its centre.

Some of the best and most confident collective work involved the tall poles distributed across the space. Performers matter-of-factly scaled them, sometimes travelling upside down, or leapt from one to another with simian ease, or kicked each other to the floor in climbing competitions to the strains of a grand waltz. One of the most effective scenes took the shape of a fight between 2 gangs. Tautly choreographed it involved dramatic gesturing and sudden flights through and over a fence, comic moments in which individuals find themselves on the wrong side, and bodies appearing to be magically sucked back through holes in the fence. Other crowd moments, like the repeated pedestrian routine where walkers took on ever stranger animal-like and insect shapes and movements, worked well, but not so the group juggling with clubs, which faltered badly and seemed to breed a wider nervousness early in the show.

The New Breed proved to be a promising advertisement for an important institution. Although unevenly scripted and acted (not all of these performers are going to excell here and nor should they have to), occasionally flawed in skill execution and sometimes too thematically loose, the show kept its audience eager for more and the performers were rightly rewarded with generous applause.

PVI: TTS: Australia, Tour of Duty

The Perth-based PVI new media arts collective focus their gleeful attention on the impact of the Australian government’s response to terrorism–it’s an excuse for an open assault on civil liberties. Despite the sombre mood induced by being lined up for TTS (Terrorist Training School), checked over and checked in at Performance Space prior to boarding the bus on a tour of Sydney’s terrorist target hotspots, the tone soon switches to madcap. We’re sworn in like fascistic Cubs and, once on the bus, we find our leering guide is masked, half-naked and has a severely limited vocabulary. In case of accident we are instructed to “wait until the smoke reaches your chest” and, helpfully, “not to fuck with daddy.” The video entertainment in the tiny bus is a protracted performance art account of interchangeable terrorist/anti-terrorist training replete with brutal body scrubbing, explosives detailing and associated gruesome tales (our host cackles at an incineration story). For the duration of the trip we can’t escape the video. It’s torture, perhaps not PVI’s intention, but a pertinent thematic side-effect. However, we are gratefully distracted, if anxious for, the ‘red man’ in track suit and runners who pursues us across the city, catches up and crouches in a start position for the next leg of the journey. His is a surreal presence as we course through the city.

At Hyde Park, while watching balaclaved tai-chi practitioners and a police car cruising around the fountain, we are told that the park’s fig trees are highly flammable, and we are given our first ‘pop quiz’, which includes guessing what kind of burns you get from battery acid–2nd or 3rd degree? We indicate our answers with the provided card, but our success at getting the answer right is not confirmed, here or in most future tests. It’s that kind of educational trip.

Of the locations we visit, the Opera House is the most memorable on a couple of counts. First, the lights are out, like some war-time blackout; it’s one of those rare nights when no shows are on in the building. From the far side there’s a sudden burst of fireworks from some event or other. Then it’s dark again, Small groups of determined tourists and security guards with dogs look on as we follow the instructions from the headsets we’ve been given, creating a weird collective miming of bomb chucking at the Opera House. We’re not arrested. When we’re parked outside Centrepoint Tower, a passerby traps her heel in the pavement, creating a momentary 2-way diversion between performers and public. Snaps are taken. Beneath Sydney Harbour Bridge we are joined by a host of PVI extras who fling themselves to the ground, as if reacting to an explosion we have not sensed. But unlike the Opera House moment, we’re observers more than participants.

There’s more to this trip, a few more locations, more quizzes, and, at one stage, a tougher (“smiling is not permitted”, “losing is hateful”), sonically-distorted guide who briefly ups the terror tension when he replaces our loopy host who goes off to send our protest postcards to the Telegraph. Looking back on it, TTS was impressive, a logistical and performative challenge involving all kinds of police, council and security negotiations and management of a cast of extras from the Sydney performance scene. There were striking images, like the red man and the initial impression of our tour guide, or the extras dotted across the already dramatic Sydney cityscape, or our own performance beneath the Opera House. Some more moments of heightened participation like this would have been welcome. What disappointed was the sense of a show petering out as we headed to the terminus. Our host seemed lost for words, there were no PVI staffers to receive us at Performance Space, the bar was closed, there was no dialogue, no post-mortem on the terror scenario we’d shared. And whatever happened to the mysterious red man? However, despite the desire from time to time to scream, “Is there a dramaturg on the bus?”, it was a trip worth taking, not least for its mad mocking of the anti-terror regime. The accompanying TTS: Australia Critical Reader, edited by Bec Dean, proved a highly readable bedtime substitute in the absence of a de-briefing.

Tenebrae

The Song Company’s latest Easter celebration is the first part of a projected trilogy, a music theatre creation that merges song with dance as singers and dancers move as one; interpolates the responsories of Gesualdo’s nocturnes for Passion week with Jeremiah’s Lamentations in plainchant; and gradually and ritually extinguishes the light. The audience crowds onto the Sydney Town Hall stage, witnessing voice and movement fill the vast dark space before them. But the core of the performance is intimate and sensual, the performers joining us on stage, their bodies entwining, forming a constant flow of images–sudden non-literal evocations of collapse, the wrack of pain, the lowering from the cross, the laying out of the dead and the pieta. Kate Champion wonderfully and distinctively through-choreographs the performance, ever attentive to the demands on the singers but integrating them seamlessly into it, their brave bodies raised, lowered and embraced; they, in turn, shaping the dancers. The singing is immaculate, refulgent with Gesualdo’s idiosyncratic blend of the chaste and the sensual, and like images are realised in the movement with the fall of hair, a look into the audience, the care that becomes caress. Song Company Easter events are now a significant part of the cultural calendar: the collaboration with Champion’s Force Majeure and the ambition of the trilogy are welcome for believers and atheists alike.

My Darling Patricia, Politely Savage, created by Halcyon Macleod, Clare Britton, Bridget Dolan, Katrina Gill; performer Cecily Hardy, puppeteers Bridget Dolan, Sam Routledge, additional puppet-making Bryony Anderson, lighting Richard Manner, sound Phil Downing, music Marcus Teague, Phil Downing, film Sam James, costumes Jade Simms, Kirsty Stringer, Tanya Aston

Stuck Pigs Squealing Theatre, The Black Swan of Trespass, writers Chris Kohn, Lally Katz, director-composer Chris Kohn, performers Christopher Brown, Katie Keady, Jacklyn Bassanelli, Gavan O’Leary, design Danielle Brustman, sound Jethro Woodward; B Sharp, Belvoir St Theatre Downstairs, April 14-May 1

PVI Collective, TTS: Australia, created by Kelli McCluskey, Steve Bull, Kate Neylon, Chris Williams, James McCluskey, Christina Lee, Jackson Castiglione with Jason Sweeney; Performance Space, Sydney, March 17-27

Song Company & Force Majeure, Tenebrae Trilogy–Part 1, musical director Roland Peelman, artistic director Kate Champion, lighting Sydney Bouhaniche; singers Clive Birch, Richard Black, Tobias Cole, Mark Donnelly, Ruth Kilpatrick, Nicole Thompson, dancers Tom Hodgson, Shaun Parker, Katerine Cogill; Sydney Town Hall, March 28

The third 10 Days on the Island arts festival celebrated the richness of island cultures through a diverse program presented in locations across Tasmania, from Flinders Island to Couta Rocks and Southport. Modelled on a Spiegeltent and made in New Zealand, the Pacific Crystal Palace on Hobart’s Parliament Lawns provided a new focal point for the festival and a venue for world music, cabaret, theatre, forums and a late night lounge. Sue Moss reviews 4 productions from the main festival program.

The Garden of Paradise

Terrapin Puppet Theatre’s production of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Garden of Paradise (1839) is based on the premise of promise. A raked bare stage leads the eye upward to an imagined garden. A prince begins his obsessive search for a mythical garden described by his grandmother. As in all inter-generational tales her story is leavened by partial truths and exaggeration. She warns him not to become mesmerised by the magical flower. His task is to carry a message from the phoenix. If he fails to deliver it the garden of paradise will disappear.

Jason Lam animates his body so that it doubles as dancer and puppet. Lured by his grandmother’s story the young prince walks too deeply into the forest and becomes captivated by the alternately visible and invisible fairy princess (Emee Dillon). Too wilful and brash to grasp the distinction between myth and reality, the prince obsessively follows the fairy princess into the cavern of the 4 winds.

The prince’s journey is told through the magic of silhouette puppetry against a stage-wide diaphanous scrim. Constantine Koukias’s sound score, including a harp played live by Christine Sonneman, evokes an ethereality associated with magic and other-worldliness. This is a subtle production, with director Benjamin Winspear deploying the performers as both stagehands and puppeteers, the ambiguity of roles enhancing the sense of mystery and strangeness. Lam and Dillon’s forest pas de deux is redolent with power, memory and forgetfulness. The garden of paradise sinks into the earth and the prince wakes on top of the tallest tree. After failing to deliver the message he is banished to the mortal world. Another cycle of 100 years begins.

Tempting Providence

Tempting Providence is based on Robert Chafe’s finely crafted biographical script. It is the story of British nurse Myra Grimsley (Deidre Gillard-Rowlings) living in the isolated community of Daniel’s Harbour after signing on for 2 years as the only nurse on the remote coast of Newfoundland, where she remains until her death at 100. Entering this lonely and isolated world, Grimsley practises duty without sentiment, observing “there’s nothing that catches my eye or my peripheral vision.” The nearest doctor is 200 miles to the north. The islanders fear Nurse Grimsley yet need and appreciate her medical skills. She brings efficiency and officiousness to her task of ministering to injuries while assisting in an unusually high number of breech births. Only later does she make the connection between the number of babies being born feet first and women in advanced pregnancy repeatedly leaning over to harvest and lug potatoes before the onset of winter.

As the seasons change so does Nurse Grimsley. While caring for the Daniel’s Harbour community, there are times of loneliness and doubt, a sense of absence and emotion “as still as the grass.” Despite this ambivalence, it is the shared commitment, strength and generosity displayed by 8 men who assist after a saw-logging accident that removes her uncertainty. This mercy dash involves reattaching her brother-in-law’s near-severed foot and trudging 100 kilometres through winter snow to reach the nearest doctor. Nurse Grimsley enters the province of providence and stays. Her story is performed with nuance and precision by Theatre Newfoundland Labrador.

The Island of Slaves

The theme of exile continues in The Island of Slaves, local writer-director Robert Jarman’s adaptation of Pierre Carlet de Marivaux’s 18th century work first performed in 1725. Stories located on islands often involve inversion of existing social hierarchies. From Sophocles to Shakespeare, Robinson Crusoe and Lord of the Flies to the Reality TV of Survivor, this inversion results in the emergence of behaviours characterised by experiment, foibles and violence. De Marivaux commented on the uncertainties that arise when class and social protocol are sufficiently challenged to disturb the optimism of the Age of Reason. This in-the-round production by Tasmania’s Big Monkey Inc places 4 castaways (Brett Rogers, John Xintavelonis, Susan Williams and Noreen Le Mottee) on an island beach. Tutored by an island resident and former slave (Les Winspear), roles and rules are reversed. Each begins to usurp the protocols and behaviours of the master and servant relationship. The result is vengeance, mayhem, farce and ultimate redemption.

Passport to Happiness

Passport to Happiness is the story of Thomas Cauker from Sierra Leone, who fled his home in Bonthe on Sherbro Island to spend 3 years in a refugee camp before arriving in Tasmania. Cauker’s story conveys the reality of a contemporary and terrifying inversion of reason. It is told through video and visual theatre, physical performance, percussion, poetry and narration.

Set in the claustrophobic confines of a shipping container, Cauker tells his story by enacting the joy and ease of life on Sherbro Island. Invasion by rebels and subsequent deaths, family dispersal and existence in a refugee camp dramatically alter his life. Cauker inhabits a world of khaki tents, open pit toilets and frustrating UNHCR bureaucracy. He inscribes his name beside hundreds of others on the metal wall of the container and waits for the processing of his passport and the eventual realisation of his dream. Refugees, he observes, are like shipping containers. They do not know where they will be “dropped down.”

Directed by is theatre’s Ryk Goddard, Passport to Happiness is direct and powerfully engaging. In the opening sequence Cauker offers water as a blessing and a welcome to the narrative of his life. We sip and proceed to witness Thomas Cauker’s journey of tragedy, despair, humour and renewal.

Ten Days on the Island, director Elizabeth Walsh, artistic advisor Robyn Archer, Tasmania, April 1-10

The Garden of Paradise, director/co-writer Benjamin Winspear, artistic advisor/co-writer Scott Rankin, choreography Graeme Murphy, puppetry director/designer Ann Forbes; puppeteers Tim Denton, Kirsty Grierson; dancers Emee Dillon, Jason Lam; Theatre Royal, Hobart, April 1-3; Tempting Providence, writer Robert Chafe, director Jillian Keiley; Playhouse Theatre, Hobart, April 1-5; The Island of Slaves, writer Pierre Carlet de Marivaux, direction/adaptation by Robert Jarman; Hobart Town Hall, April 3-6; Passport to Happiness, performer Thomas Cauker, director Ryk Goddard, Salamanca Square, April 8-10

Circa’s latest work This Text Has Legs blends contemporary circus, improvisation, music and multimedia. The audience is invited to leave their mobile phones on and their text messages are projected onto a screen and incorporated into the performance. This evokes the rare feeling that what happens on stage is at least partly in your hands.

Fumbling in the dark for your mobile, you break one of theatre’s traditional taboos to be rewarded by the temporary thrill of seeing your tiny private message projected onto the screen for all to see. This level of mild titillation is what initially grabs your attention. You want to know who wrote “2moro i will be reborn as a chicken”, or “CSI Toowoomba cow abduction unit.” There is also the constant question of the degree to which the performers’ actions are responses to the SMS messages.

More than anything, this is a performance that thrives on accumulation. At first it seems like nothing more than a highly skilled Viewpoints exercise, an interesting use of time, space and gesture. Initially this is purely mechanical, as if the audience is watching a warm-up. What becomes clear is that this is also the audience’s warm-up period. The first 20 minutes or so was a texting rehearsal, and as we got better so did the performance.

It’s a show in which the performers’ actions–the usual expertly executed circus tricks (juggling, jumping through hoops, skipping on a unicycle, doing the splits on a tightrope)–are secondary to what the audience does. When the SMS “is the other lady only part time?” appeared on the screen, “the other lady” (Rockie Stone) moved more centrally into the action. Her series of ‘Strong Woman’ stunts prompted another SMS: “I bet she could kick your ass part time.” From this point the to-ing and fro-ing between audience members, and between audience and performers accelerated until after a particularly stunning trick it culminated with the message “part timer you rock my world.”

The set piece was what I’ll call the ‘Patrick Swayze’ episode. It began after a particular trick when the SMS “i saw that in dirty dancing” led to a running gag centred around the movie. How this unfolded demonstrated the possibilities of improvised interaction. Suddenly the soundtrack is Swayze’s She’s Like the Wind, one of the performers is quoting from the movie and an SMS is asking “whatever happened to patrick swayze?” For an audience rarely authorised to exercise their creative muscles, the power of making narrative choices (or not) dawns on them slowly. It only really became clear after the event when, considering all these moments together, a predominately whimsical performance experience now seems more lively and lucid than it did at the time.

It’s both a revolutionary way to enrich the connection between audience and performance and a revolutionary way to order beer, like the smart arse who texted, “may i have another boags please?” And that’s just it; you’re at the mercy of the audience, they can raise or lower the tone, or most likely keep it hovering somewhere in between.

Circa, This Text Has Legs, artistic director Yaron Lifschitz; performers Darcy Grant, Chelsea McGuffin, David Sampford, Rockie Stone; composers Zane Trow, Lawrence English; Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Brisbane, March 22-26

Sydney-based performer Rosie Dennis appeared at the third National Review of Live Art held in Midland just outside Perth. The parent festival, directed by Nikki Millican is based in Glasgow. Dennis performed her Access All Areas at NRLA in Midland and, on return, kindly met our request to describe the works in the festival that interested her. Eds

The UK’s Bobby Baker opened this year’s National Review of Live Art in Midland with Box Story. For those unfamiliar with Baker’s work she almost always works with food and adopts a housewife persona: Box Story begins with Baker lugging on a huge refrigerator box in very high, very expensive, very uncomfortable electric blue shoes. The box is full of other boxes: a wine cask, washing powder, matches, juice–about 10 in total. Each box comes with a personal anecdote attached, most of them tragic, ranging from the trivial (a failed perm) to the bleak (the death of her father). The contents of the boxes are used to make a map on the floor. The mess she has made comes to represent the world. Individual dark chocolates (from the final box) are thrown amongst the mess to represent the innocent victims of incest, of plane crashes and of wars.

Baker has a cheeky stage presence; she’s got a great smile and wins the audience over within the first few minutes. However, the structure becomes a little tired, especially since all 10 boxes are revealed at the beginning. After only 30 minutes I find myself counting how many remain.

Lone Twin (Gary Winters and Gregg Whelan), also from the UK, have been making work together since 1997, most of it involving walking and some of it dancing. Sledgehammer Songs is a culmination of the stories collected on their travels over the last 4 years. It evokes the mystery of the medicine show, the poetry of pub rock, the loneliness of the European busker, and the drawings of the great and the cursed.

We are invited to stand outside under rain threatening clouds, just as Whelan, dressed in thermals, gloves, hiking boots and layers of polar tech, finishes dancing. He’s been dancing for about 40 minutes, to 21 songs taken from a tape Winters listened to as a child: a guitar practice tape with no lyrics. He’s hot and sweaty. We are each given a cup of water. Cat Stevens’ Wild World blares from the amp and Whelan strips off, inviting us to throw water on his body. He is trying to make a cloud. We watch as condensation rises from his shoulders. Success! From that moment he is known as Gregg The Cloud.

The performance moves inside. We walk the length of the great Midland Hall–about 200 metres–and settle in to watch the 21 stories. Only this time the roles are reversed: Whelan narrates and Winters dances. Winters’ aim is to become Gary The Cloud (at the moment he is Gary The Revolver). During the next 80 minutes there are bull rushes, Bruce Springsteen and tales of lost love. All the while Gary The Revolver dances, adding more layers of clothing and dancing more and more complex choroeography. Finally we are invited outside again; the temperature has dropped and the sky cleared, making way for the clouds that now rise above the shoulders of Gary The Cloud.

Singapore’s Lee Wen has been performing variations of Yellow Man since 1992. We arrive and sit in a semi-circle of chairs. He is already standing in the space. He has objects laid out in anticipation: a paper bag, a plastic shopping bag full of PK chewing gum, local newspapers, a branch and yellow paint. He is quiet and intense. Over an hour Lee Wen moves through each of the objects on a clear trajectory, from punching his fist in the air inside the paper bag, to filling his mouth full of PK–causing him to dry retch–while repeating the mantra: “the state domesticates the artist as soon as the artist calls the state home.” He undresses, revealing an extraordinary body; perhaps the worst scoliosis I have ever seen. This serves to heighten an already politically charged and provocative performance. He uses his shoes as fists and beats himself, one cheek and then the other until his face is dusty and red. The branch is used to whip his tired body. I look around at the audience, people are wiping tears from their eyes. This was a beautiful and deeply moving work; although created 13 years ago many of Wen’s images seem more relevant than ever.

Cat Hope’s Voyeurgers (Australia) is a contemporary investigation of the journey. The work consists of travel footage Hope shot over the last 5 years. Ten distinct journeys are projected onto 10 bare backs to stunning visual effect. Each body sits on top of a 44 gallon stainless steel drum. Each has a voice recorder in their mouth to amplify the sound of wind. The audience moves in and around the bodies, invading the personal and metaphorical spaces of Hope’s travel memories…

Other works presented at NRLA worth mentioning are Grace Surman’s Midland White (UK), a quirky and whimsical take on the assistant, ever ready to serve the non-existent master. She popped toast, crunched apples and chased rubber balls. Bangkok-based Varsha Nair unpacked, stacked and built shapes from her childhood house in in-between-places. Croatian artist Zoran Todorovic gave the audience the opportunity to have their hands washed by 2 Serbian women, using soap made from his own body fat. A photographic installation accompanied this durational performance. Canadian sound artist Alexis O’Hara closed 2 nights of the festival with I Require Electricity. Outfitted as a nurse and plugged into her sampler she attempted to answer our questions–some more successfully than others.

There was a strong line up of Australian artists this year, most of whom had attended the national laboratory Time_Place_Space. A blindfolded Domenico De Clario performed Codependent Arising: bathed in blue light, he played piano from midnight until sunrise. Carolyn Daish offered 2 video installations, caravaggio heart and You Can’t See Me, exploring the play between the projected and real self in space. Kerrin Rowlands invited us to adorn her naked body with objects that included bunny ears, shaving cream, a cap gun and pegs in Rastro (meaning residue or canvas in Spanish). Anne Walton stretched time and lycra, moved ladders and shaped space in her time-based projection installation per:former, assisted by sound from Michelle Outram. Collectively they added texture to a festival that allows artists from the UK, Asia and Australia to exchange ideas about practices and politics, and present provocative new work.

The National Review of Live Art, curators Sharon Flindell, Andrew Beck, Nikki Milican; Block 2, Midland UK; April 8-1

For the first time, the hybrid arts research and development laboratory, Time_Place_Space, makes strong regional connections with its choice of visual artists Shigeaki Iwai from Japan and Ahn Pil-Yun from Korea as facilitators, joining open-air performance maestro Threes Anna from the Netherlands and Australian facilitators Derek Kreckler, Elizabeth Drake and Teresa Crea.

Shigeaki Iwai’s recent works deal with communication and multicultural phenomena in cities and rural areas, often involving long-term fieldwork and extensive filming. For Dialogue, Iwai filmed speakers of 58 languages across Europe and Asia between 1996 and 1999. His works incorporate sound, text, video, and installation. He has exhibited internationally and across Japan. He lectures at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.

With Korean shamanistic rituals at the centre of her work Ahn Pil-Yun attempts to transcend the social constraints on the artist at the same time engaging with computer technology to explore issues of cultural identity in a globalised world. Threes Anna is a novelist and filmmaker “who creates visual stories based on extreme places and circumstances”, and was artistic director, writer and director of Netherlands’ site-specific theatre company, Dogtroep, from 1989 to 1999. The company’s largely open air performances, drawing huge audiences, have been staged on the remains of the Berlin Wall, at the Winter Olympics in France, in the slums of Uzbekistan and on an artificial lake at the World Expo in Seville.

The artists who are attending T_P_S4 represent a spectrum of practices from physical theatre to sound art: Greg Ackland (SA), Kirsten Bradley (VIC), Sohail Dahdal (NSW), Sam Haren (SA), Noëlle Janaczewska (NSW), Elka Kerkhofs (NT), Jason Lam (NSW), Fiona Malone (NSW), Stephen Noonan (SA), Simone O’Brien (VIC), Abigail Portwin (NSW), Bec Reid (Tas), Sarah Rodigari (VIC), Jodi Rose (NSW), Yana Taylor (NSW), Ingrid Voorendt (VIC), Sarah Waterson (NSW), Tim Webster (VIC). RT

T_P_S4, curators Teresa Crea, Sarah Miller, Fiona Winning; produced by Performance Space; Adelaide Centre for the Arts, July 9-24; www.performancespace.com.au/tps

Swiss-German playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s (1921-1990) work has recently entered the English language repertoire, much as George Büchner’s did before him. As a result Dürrenmatt’s place within European dramaturgy has been much debated. He is typically identified as reconciling Bertolt Brecht’s political theatre with the moral-cosmic dramas which Martin Esslin proposed as the basis for his existentialist reading of Absurdist theatre. Under this uneasy alliance, Dürrenmatt’s The Visit is placed alongside Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, their complex meanings being distilled into a critique of the ease with which the individual submits to social pressures and becomes complicit with fascistic aggression, violence and retribution.

The Visit is certainly a moral allegory. The now fabulously wealthy Claire Zachanassian returns to the debilitated town she was driven from as a pregnant and abandoned youth, with no recourse in law to appeal her unjust expulsion. She offers to give the town a billion marks if they kill her former seducer, Alfred Ill. Despite their initial horror, the townspeople gradually succumb and rationalise their decision. But is this all the play has to tell us? That money corrupts, that poverty speaks, that justice is a sham, that few individuals can resist the tide of communal violence, craving and complicity? This is not a new message, now that, as director Jonathan Miller describes it, the “mixture of excrement and edelweiss” which underwrote Austro-German fascism and its lingering aftermath has been repeatedly identified.

In his production for youth company BSX Theatre, director Matthew Lutton does not reject this interpretation. The climax of the staging is the final town meeting in which the schoolmistress–the last to hold out against Ill’s execution–argues with force for its moral necessity. This differs from Simon Phillips’ 2003 Melbourne Theatre Company version, which climaxed with the last, somewhat reconciliatory visit to the woods by Ill and Zachanassian. Phillips rendered Dürrenmatt’s social satire as a humanist drama of love lost. For Lutton, the piece remains a drama of ideas, a portrayal of (sub)human conversion.

Lutton offers more than just dramaturgical doodlings in the textual margins to realise this on stage. His production is non-realist and highly dynamic. A pair of screens at the back are adorned with blown-up images beamed live from a camera resting inside a sad little grey model of Guellen’s railway station suspended from the ceiling above the action. The lack of colour in the image and the station’s hard, blocky architecture suggest indifference and inevitability. Actors periodically retrieve this object and move it forward, before the camera is finally collared about Ill as he commences his death march.

The stage begins awash with clothing, as though a flood of detritus has clouded the theatrical space, before Zachanassian’s arrival reawakens the populace. Zachanassian brings a coffin with her, which periodically grows along with the townspeople’s complicity. Chairs and tables are moved about by the cast to serve as miniature hierarchical stages.

There are other performative flourishes: a pleasing evolution of colour in costuming and make up and open wings where the actors are seen changing. One could ascribe meanings to these motifs, interpreting the central space as a kind of cabaret of moral decay, but in the end there are too many devices to fully cohere. The train arrives in Guellen as a dazzling floodlight is rolled out from behind the rear screens. It passes back and forth several times before Zachanassian’s silhouette steps through. This is a great image, creatively solving the problem of how to represent the train. However, the exaggerated posing of the cast every time it goes past, like refugees from Gustave Munch’s The Scream, is an ostentation on top of an already established sense of doom.

Lutton is not celebrating a sense of theatrical excess or purposelessness, as Daniel Schlusser did with the carnivalesque exaggeration of his 1999 Melbourne production. There is nevertheless a sense of sheer performative invention spilling over the sides of the moral, political and cosmic meaning implied through the spoken text. By staging so much, Lutton makes the production exceed its stated import, performing for us without leaving us quite sure what is being performed. While this may not be intended, Lutton’s overweening theatrical imagination complicates the play sufficiently to add an engrossing sense of unease regarding the now commonplace and hence banal interpretation usually ascribed to The Visit, cutting through these interpretive traditions to suggest something more arresting.

The Visit, writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt, director Matthew Lutton, BSX-Theatre, Melbourne, May 10-28

The Lens Project is an ambitious attempt at delineating the relationship between literature and performance, while ruminating upon the mind of a man who has lived an uneventful life. Leonard Stone, a fictitious Melbourne spectacle maker, is the central character of a real book by Megg Minos. Seven days after the book’s launch, Leonard is the subject of a performance written and directed by Willoh S Weiland.

At the book’s launch, the author sells copies of Lens from piles on a trestle, but this is really Leonard Stone’s show. Objects indicating Leonard’s past are precisely arranged throughout the space. A city made from cardboard, Leonard’s home in miniature, a varnished wooden case containing various types of spectacles, and a delicate piece of lace. As those attending engage in raucous chatter, a woman appears, glides through the audience, sits in a chair and mouths words from a recorded song. Drenched in nostalgia, her voice wafts in and out of earshot: a memory from the life of Leonard Stone. Meanwhile, a technician has set up a microphone stand, only to return and dismantle it a short time later. Like the furtive imagination, Leonard Stone is enigmatic, everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, until I am quietly informed by the technician that Leonard’s life story has just been launched.

In the book, Leonard Stone’s entire life is on display: his birth in a rural town, the death of his father, Leonard and his mother moving to Melbourne, the First and Second World Wars, and the economic opulence of the 1950s. Within these personal and historical episodes further detail is extrapolated: Leonard’s mysterious illness, the family home as convalescence facility for returned servicemen, Leonard attending university, then opening a spectacle business. The 2 constants in Leonard’s life are his ubiquitous mother and his failing sight. In contrast, Leonard is introduced to the spectrum of light, initially by a convalescing painter, and then a university physics lecturer.

Leonard senses the possibility of life as an artist–perhaps a writer–only to be pressed into a career as a spectacle maker. Irma, his literature loving friend from university escapes to Egypt, and Leonard is left alone to trudge the streets of Melbourne in the winter of his years. The book ends with him meeting the apparently blind woman Grace. Upon this meeting Leonard Stone is: “…calm and free from the dialogue of eyes.”

How can a book that covers a time frame of 50 years, populated by 12 or so characters across several locations, find expression in a performance of 40 minutes? This project implicitly asks how is literature made theatrical? What should be included and excluded in the transition between literature and performance?

The staged version shifts between Leonard Stone’s business premises, the streets of Melbourne, Leonard’s home, and a rowboat on a river, without a designating word. The performance excludes the 2 World Wars, uses a dress to indicate the omnipresence of Leonard’s mother, and centralises the character of Grace, who is a minor character in the book. Leonard’s existential fear in the performed version finds expression in a spatial configuration that swings between intimacy and alienation, isolation and obsessiveness, with astute, considered performances from Merfyn Owen and Nicki Paull.

The Lens Project, writer-director Willoh S Weiland, writer Megg Minos; performers Merfyn Owen, Nicki Paull; fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne, March 23-April 2

Alice Springs has always been a crossroads for travellers, explorers, seekers and pioneers. The surrounding space, the clear air and the shimmering colours of the landscape inspire adventure, challenge perceptions and inspire artists.

Watch This Space, a local artist run initiative, has been a centre for creative action during the 12 years since its inception. Its current space in George Crescent is near the railway station where the Ghan pauses on its way across the continent. There is a large gallery with studio spaces for artists out the back.

It began in 1991 when artist Pam Lofts, who had majored in sculpture and installation at Sydney College of the Arts, came to make art about country. She had exhibited at Sydney’s First Draft and knew of 24Hour Art in Darwin but found there was nothing similar within a 1500 km radius of Alice. Anne Mosey had lectured at the College of the Arts and moved to Alice in 1989. She’d been involved in a community pottery gallery in Glebe and the Old Flour Mill Studio in Newtown. Jan Mackay and Angela Gee, artists from Redback Graphics who’d come to Alice, were missing Sydney’s contemporary arts activity.

Initially they met in each other’s homes to talk about work in progress and then about finding a gallery space as a network focus. They were interested in experimental work and no-one had their own studio at that time. Pip McManus, a ceramicist who had moved to Alice, was asked to join the others and put in a joint proposal to the Australia Council. The 5 artists needed a shared studio to play around and experiment in, with exhibition space.

A charter was drawn up stating that it was essential that Watch This Space be an artist run space; it would provide a forum for works in progress and resolved works; it was not only for fully fledged professionals but a non-commercial space with no pressure to sell; it was to host an exchange between artists around Australia and internationally with 50% local and 50% visiting artists. There was a strong emphasis on collaborations and all media. In 1993 they were granted $7,500.

Pam discovered the ice factory, a cobwebby, concrete-floored industrial building down a small alley behind Mbantua Aboriginal Gallery, in the heart of town. The rent was low and huge working bees were organised during the hot January of 1994.

The name evolved from the potential for something to link with the space in the desert. This first space matched the original vision as it had installation possibilities and hanging space. It would nurture exposure to artists practising cross-disciplinary art who came through Alice. Everyone was excited and keen to show. There was often a show a week in the early days.

A curatorial committee was established and in 1997 and WTS became incorporated. Many local artists have served on the committee since. It has a huge following in Alice as an ongoing participatory community event for everyone in town interested in art.

Local artists exhibit and explore ideas and artists come from the coastal cities to share their work. There have been too many events to detail fully, but some memorable ones include: a performance by Tess de Quincey and later her Triple Alice workshops; Alice Prize winner, Chris Barry’s green bra installation which later expanded into a photographic exhibition entitled Country: I come from a Big Breasted Woman and Soft Skin; and Jenny Taylor’s Rooty Tooty All’s Fruity celebration of the desert blooming.

As Mbantua Gallery grew, WTS had to find a new space. Smarter premises were found off Todd Mall with a back office but less creative space for experimental work; still the amazing exhibitions continued.

Following Pam Lofts, co-ordinators have included Christine Leonard from Aboriginal Arts, Cath Bowdler, who moved on to run 24Hour Art, Harriet Gaffney from the commercial art world, and Catriona Stanton, a new media artist who first appeared in the Space one hot summer night performing Gutted and Filleted in a diving suit among real fish and blocks of ice.

Adelaide trained installation and performance artist Joy Hardman joined the committee and brought in Sue Richter, a graduate of the SA Art School who had explored new media and performance art since the 1970s and studied at the AFTRS in the 1980s. Shows in that period included Joy’s video installation and performance exploring the assumed emptiness of the Centre; the striking photographic works of Michael Riley (sadly missed); Ruark Lewis’ Water drawings: red yellow and blue from his Raft installation based on text from Arrernte Songs translated from German and English by Strehlow; Siamac Fallah’s durational piece transferring Bahai sacred texts into a 9-pointed star; Anne Mosey’s Might Be on the sorrow and harshness of Aboriginal community life; Indonesian installation and performance artist Dadang Christanto producing with local performers the highly political and heart wrenching Reconciliation; the Artists’ Camp in the ancient dry Finke River bed beyond Glen Helen with visiting artists John Wolseley, Kim Mahood and Wendy Tiekel as well as locals. Where works were produced on site, artists gave talks and work from the camp was shown at WTS.

Then WTS had to move on again due to high rent and lack of funding. The committee and members searched for more appropriate and affordable space–but the art did not stop. Over the years many events have evolved in non-gallery spaces. Works in the Outsite sculpture competition were shown in the Desert Wild Life Park; Passage, a collaboration between Catriona Stanton, Sydney poet Tim Doon and local filmmaker Declan O’Gallagher was projected at the old drive-in cinema with the McDonnell Ranges as a backdrop; artists’ camps, music and sound events have been staged in the dry river bed; The Red Shoes ensemble’s site-specific performance of Unspun traversed the landscape of descent out among the rocky hills beyond Alice.

For a brief time the Space paused in a house on Stuart Terrace. Isabelle Kirkbride co-ordinated an amazing members’ show which attracted 250 people on the opening night. The present Space was found by the sculptor Jbird (who died tragically last year). Ben Ward took over the co-ordination of WTS which now includes studio space for members to rent. The opening exhibition was the video and sound installation Lalila from the Solar Polar new media and alternate energy event in Tasmania.

Last year the co-ordinator was dancer Anna Maclean. Shows included Sue Richter’s retrospective of experimental video and TV dramas over 2 decades; the What is new media art? forum with visiting speakers; Rendezvous, a collaboration between local visual artists and writers; and Sue McLeod’s paintings and prints of desert scenes, dogs and camels.

The present co-ordinator, Kieren Sanderson is a new media artist who studied film at Griffith University where she made digital photography and video works. She’s organised Multiverse, a new media exhibition opening in June. It will bring together her collaborations with Scott Large and work by 3 visiting artists (Janet Gallagher, Anne Maree Taranto and Amanda King) who are all coincidentally making the overland journey to the Centre.

People involved with Watch This Space over the years feel it has enabled their arts practice to expand and grow in a way it could not have done if they had worked alone. They feel the dialogue between Alice, interstate and international artists is important and needs to grow. The town of Alice Springs and the country of Central Australia attract people of energy and vision so WTS survives as new, enthusiastic artists involve the community and push boundaries and arts practice. Everyone knows more funding is needed but WTS should continue as an artist run initiative with grass roots objectives and opportunities to encourage the diversity of experimental and contemporary arts practice. Artists from everywhere are encouraged to get in touch.

Two recent exhibitions in London highlighted the diversity of contemporary moving image practice and the increasingly central role of the art world in educating and supporting moving image makers. Both Daria Martin’s work in 16mm film and Christian Marclay’s video artworks are examples of the kind of formal innovation that is hard to imagine increasingly conservative film bodies encouraging, but which fortunately finds support in art institutions.

Christian Marclay is the embodiment of the modern multidisciplinary artist. Equally known for his musicianship and his visual arts practice, he has collaborated with luminaries such as Sonic Youth, John Zorn and Merce Cunningham, rejecting distinctions based on material or disciplinary boundaries. Marclay’s practice takes place across the spectrum of object construction, work with found objects, sculpture, installation and most recently, video art. The unifying thread through all his work, as befits an artist with a musical background, is a central aesthetic of sound: from his early performances with turntables (he was one of the first and most notable musicians to ‘play’ turntables and has been referred to as “the most influential turntable figure outside hip hop”) to sculptures entailing instruments and installed objects using or referencing record cover art. The hilarious False Advertising series of mock concert posters, featuring the artist in the daggiest of costumes and poses advertising fictional gigs, suggests a mockumentary impulse (or the worst of the parental record collection).

More explicitly ‘about’ sound, one of the most fascinating pieces in Marclay’s recent show at the Barbican was the terrific installation Tape Fall, which uses a reel-to-reel recorder sans take-up reel, perched high on a ladder, spilling tape onto an ever-growing pile on the gallery floor. The experience of simultaneously hearing the incessant trickling drip-drip noises as the silky red-brown pile snakes slowly upwards is hypnotic and beautiful.

Engaging though these pieces are, they simply can’t compete with Marclay’s stunning Video Quartet. Sampling musical, concert, sung, and instrumental segments from 700 (mainly Hollywood) films from the golden era to the present in 4 side-by-side screens, it is a sonic extravaganza. Kaleidoscopic in its range and dizzying in its intensity, the piece begins pianissimo and builds, over 13 minutes, to a thundering crescendo that threatens to overwhelm. However, despite the exhilarating speed of the images flying by and vertiginous split-vision effect, the piece is surprisingly coherent as Marclay carefully loops, repeats and reverses some segments to maximise the musicality of the composition in a way that the viewer can instinctively ‘read’ musically. While the parade of recognisable faces is a reminder of how films are a collection of ‘moments’, their recontextualisation in this collage creates an artwork that backgrounds stardom, narrative and drama and foregrounds the sonic, and particularly percussive qualities of many films. Marclay’s musician’s ear is revealed in the brilliance of the composition, which is much more intelligent than many of the plunderphonic arrangements flooding contemporary music. Reversing the traditional ocularcentrism of cinema, Marclay’s remix is a powerfully sensual interpretation of ‘film as found object’ in which skilful montage transforms film samples into instruments in an innovative video orchestra.

Daria Martin’s film work similarly exemplifies the innovative approaches to the moving image by artists untroubled by the conformist groupthink often encouraged in film schools. Many of the UK’s finest experimental filmmakers came via art schools and though Martin’s work is representational and uses human figures, its aspiration is more aesthetic than narrative-dramatic. In the beautiful Closeup Gallery, recently at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts as part of the Beck’s Futures exhibition, Martin uses a sleight-of-hand artist and his frilly-frocked assistant to explore ideas of illusion and artifice. Coloured cards are shuffled, spread, dealt, turned over, flicked around and painted rhythmically to a delightful tinkling jazzy sound track. Spread on a spinning circular glass table with metal spokes beneath, the controlled palette of emerald green, fire-engine red, cobalt blue, black and white suggests near-constructivist abstraction achieved via material objects (which are still very much moored in their social context by the activity of the film’s subject).

Unlike some young moving image artists whose work unknowingly repeats past experiments or proceeds in ignorance of the incredibly rich history of experimental film, Martin has demonstrated a strong understanding of the continuum of artists’ cinema. Though projector problems disappointingly prevented the much-anticipated screening of Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen at the film night Martin programmed at the Tate, her other choices (Carolee Schneeman, Kenneth Anger, Guy Sherwin and others) nevertheless revealed an informed and discerning taste. Martin’s Closeup Gallery avoids the pitfalls of ignorance, its deceptive simplicity not immediately suggesting (nor trendily referencing) other artists’ work but making an aesthetic point of its own. Revelling in the scopophilia of its subject matter and tinged with nostalgia for a bygone era, Closeup Gallery is a unique artwork that positions its maker at the forefront for the lucrative Beck’s Futures awards.

Christian Marclay, Barbican Gallery, London, Feb 17-May 2; Daria Martin, Closeup Gallery, 16mm film, Beck’s Futures Exhibition and Awards, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, March 18-May 15

Recent video portraiture evokes the stillness of photography, but also includes minimal facial movement over limited duration. The line between stillness and mobility blurs with potent effect. We can still attend to detail in the same way we respond to photographs, reading the idiosyncratic textures of skin, bone structure and the expression that suggests personality. But slight movements on video and subtle expressive changes provoke new musings and re-readings.

When I saw the Asialink-ACMI touring exhibition, I thought I knew but I was wrong, in Singapore as part of MAAP04, I was absorbed by a number of makers’ attention to faces: Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser’s volatile child subjects in Forced into Images (2001); Lyndal Jones’ weeping men in He Must Not Cry (2004); David Rosetsky’s morphing subjects in Without You (2003-04); Marcus Lyall’s patient victims of food assault in Slow Service (2003); and the vivid ‘gallery’ of family faces in Ivan Sen’s Blood (2002). These are very different works but the duration of each maker’s gaze allows us the luxury of intense familiarisation and, as well, most of the subjects look back at us in the tradition of much of classic portraiture. The children in Forced into Images are reserved, lively and agitated in turn, but we are with them long enough, even when they are masked, to immerse ourselves in interpretation. Sen’s video is a very different matter, a welter of home-video faces and bodies, intensely re-coloured and overlaid, but with rhythms and repetitions that soon suggest the recurring physiognomies of blood relatives. These videos and others–the gentle turnover of faces with their eyes shut as if sleeping in Merilyn Fairskye’s Eye Contact (2000)–suggest a reinvigoration of portraiture.

Face Value: video portraiture from the Pacific at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery in Sydney takes portraiture face-on. The standout works are in fact the ones that work close to tradition, allowing us duration, attentiveness and the curious pleasure of being eye-to-eye with an absent subject. Lyndal Jones’ He Must not Cry is again on display, if on one screen (as opposed to its multiscreen and more effectively theatrical presence earlier at Artspace) but still drawing painful attention to the effects of weeping (incipient or repressed) on pores, blood vessels and the soft tissues around mouth and eyes, as well as on the whole, wrung-out demeanour as some subjects abandon saving face.

Denis Beaubois’ Constant (2004) offers a familiar idiom, faces morphing one into another, but does it with such precision and sensitivity that the transition from one life-size face to another, even from one race to another, goes unnoticed until it has passed you by, consumately making its point. Constant suggests a shared human face, beyond the distinctions and politics of race, but without ever sacrificing the individual idiosyncracies of its 11 subjects. There are 1,000 transitional frames in the movement from just one face to another in Beaubois’ digital video. Constant’s dialectic is that it is never constant, but always so. John Gillies’ remarkable My Sister’s Roomm (2000) is built from humbler and very different transformations made by the artist holding a video camera in one hand and photographs of his late sister in the other. The photographs pixelate into shimmering yellows and golds and the occasional wavering of the artist’s hand eerily triggers apparent movements in the face. The work becomes a moving meditation on the act of looking at photographs.

James Pinker and Mark McLean’s South video documentation 01/02 (2003) at 60 minutes liesurely, even meditatively, superimposes engaging video portraits of Maori couples, friends and families over the urban landscape of South Auckland as shot from a moving car, while Vernon Ah Kee’s whitefellanormal (2004) at 30 seconds is a stark if poetic face-to-face encounter with dispossession. Christian Thompson appears as famous alter-egos in Gates of Tambo (2005) but the photographic series of the same work is preferable for the intensity of its not always ironic vision. The other works in Face Value are all interesting in themselves, especially in introducing us to New Zealand artists, but curatorially represent a 90s explosion of the concept of portraiture that has little bang left. Face Value is nonetheless a fascinating starting point for reconsideration of a genre.
Panos Couros, Omphalos

At the nearby Kudos Gallery, Panos Couros’ Omphalos is an engrossing, immaculately crafted installation comprising a circle of seven 2-metre tall, elegant, white ceramic urns with a smaller one at its centre. Sound swirls through the gallery: long, ethereal notes, distant voices, a rush of wind, tumbling water, a soaring chorus. The sound is everywhere, emanating it seems from nowhere, until a voice speaks from the central urn inviting you to approach, to face down into it and ask a question. A surge of sound is followed by an answer (from a selection made by the artist from various divinations). I ask, “When will the drought end?” The oracle replies: “Make a serious commitment to your new project.” I resolve to pass this advice on to the government. A friend is quite taken with his response.

By the entrance there are explanatory notes about the Oracle at Delphi which inspired the work and, intriguingly, a small Byzantine statuette of Mary and the baby Jesus. In a work that combines classic ceramic skills (Neville Assad-Salha) and computer-driven interactivity (Adam Hinshaw, Alex Davies), Couros juxtaposes the era of the oracle with our own information age, raising questions about belief. Belief aside, Omphalos (Greek for navel, and for the oracle at the centre of the world), is an engaging, contemplative multimedia experience.

Face Value: Video portraiture from the Pacific, curators Rilka Oakley, Annabel Pegus; Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, April 14-May 14 and touring

Panos Couros, Omphalos, Interactive Sound Installation; Kudos Gallery, Paddington, Sydney, April 20-30

Leah King-Smith, Buttons (from Beyond Capture series), archival inkjet on cotton rag

When the discourse surrounding archival ethnographic photography came under the control of Indigenous artists and writers in the 1980s and 90s, modes of representing and deconstructing Aboriginality moved out of the hands of white Australia for the first time. In her Patterns of Connection series (1995), Leah King-Smith was one of many contemporary Australian artists to engage with 19th century ethnographic archival photography. This recombinant, ‘Indigenous’ media art, colliding with the visual culture of Australia’s colonial past, did much to reveal the mediated nature of Indigenous oppression and present a cogent visual history of the camera’s constructions of whiteness.

However this late transition in Australian visual cultural discourse aligns the camera itself with a suspect politics; furthermore, the success of these artists in exhibiting and communicating their work to the burgeoning postcolonial consciousness of white Australia has presented new anxieties. Leah King-Smith finds ways around the camera’s historicising functions as a means of liberating herself from the ‘onus of representation.’ Her latest works continue the process of excavating and re-framing colonised visual cultural histories. However, by connecting her practice with visual cultures and colonial histories outside of the Australian imaginary (Indigenous and non-Indigenous), and by increasing the degree of abstraction with which this iconography is treated, the terrain of her inquiry becomes more personal, ambiguous and arguably universal.

King-Smith’s Beyond Capture series (2004) consists of 10 cotton rag prints constructed with the artist’s signature layering technique. Landscapes and native plants are juxtaposed over fragments of nearly imperceptible images of Koori figures painted from photographs. The prints Buttons, Dresses and Ferns employ the same 19th century ethnographic prints used in the aforementioned Patterns of Connection series (1995); they exude a similar ghostly presence here. Interestingly, this is achieved by merely referencing fragments of those earlier photographed figures. Liminal Interstices: The crevice in ambiguous space (2005) is the artist’s most recent work: a 12 minute animation in 9 sequences, composed from drawings, sound, analogue and digital photographs, digital prints, and Super 8 film (and unfortunately drained of much colour by the high light levels of the exhibition space). Nine digital lamda prints from the animation take up the last wall of the exhibition space.

In Liminal Interstices… ghostly, animated photographs of Australian native plants and grasses double over the surface of equally transparent historical images and cultural icons. Kitsch Singaporean tourist pamphlets of colonial era paintings–of urban landscapes, and of Singaporean women in traditional dress (collected by the artist from street stalls on a recent visit)–form the background to many of these juxtapositions.

In the Sand sequence, line drawings made in sand on a beach and captured in colour photographs squiggle playfully over a colonial era painting of HMS Lady Nelson (1879). This ship was captained by John Murray during his celebrated discovery of Port Phillip Bay over the French, who had set out to explore the same coastline during this period. A shadowy figure with a walking stick appears momentarily, looking on–but to which era? Skewed temporal references to events within early colonial paintings are repeated in Sky, where a modern window frames a lithographic depiction of settlement by French artist Deroy, a prolific lithographer and engraver of historic events within the colonies (Singapore, the South Pacific, and even North America). Both of these paintings were sampled by the artist from the online exhibition Why Melbourne?, a quaint, didactic journey through the maritime adventures and settlements of Victoria’s colonial past.

Beyond the disconnected historicity of these references it is possible to detect a tentative narrative interconnecting the notion of chance and the interpenetration of (visual) cultural languages (Indigenous/settler, ‘Pacific’, ‘Singaporean’), with a philosophy of perception in which the past is coexistent with the present. Soundscapes by the artist’s partner, Duncan King-Smith, shift from tranquil environmental ambience–birds, insects, grasses and foraging noises–to more ominous, momentous sounds of church bells, drumming and thunder. The interplay between sound and image constructs a presence beyond the frame, thereby building upon the sense of ambiguity and the experiments with under-representation evident in the artist’s double-exposed digital cotton rag prints. In an interview King-Smith discusses her new engagement with time-based media as a continuation of the conceptual focus of her cotton rag print-making:

The intention is that these digital prints are all moving. We don’t see them as moving, but they are, and my idea here [in the animation] is to have them moving–these are all animated photographs. When people look at my work they have a static sense of time in an aesthetic sense, a formal sense. So the animation has become a psychic enterprise…for the soul, rather than engaging very established terminologies and aesthetics.

King-Smith talks about the trajectory of her practice as an intuitive leap away from the monotheistic drive of Western thought, into a personally constructed poly-cultural aesthetics, using found images and scraped mirror surfaces to explore simultaneity as a philosophy of perception. This emphasis on simultaneity is rooted in the artist’s own double-exposure to Koori (mother) and white Australian (father) cultures, and the irreconcilability of this double-autobiographic experience. The new injection of Singaporean visual culture into Liminal Interstices… further deconstructs the binaries within discussions of King-Smith’s practice, and works against the specificity expected of Indigenous Australian artists in their artistic references to spirituality and place. By consciously constructing a sense of ambiguity the artist intends a conceptual and perhaps political strategy of movement around and through categories of identity, and multiple historical truths, as much as an abstraction away from them. King Smith explains:

The issue is really about the prevalent view that several views can operate at the same time. That is what ambiguity is. Meaning might shift from here to there, depending on whatever psychic framework is operating…and that’s why I’ve called this Liminal Interstices…, because an interstice is a crevice or a place right on the ridge between something which is beyond our threshold of perception, and it only just makes it into our understanding. That’s what I am trying to navigate. And it seems like it is perfectly alright for me to do that. But at the same time it’s very hard for me to claim that ideology–it’s always shifting or I’m always trying to find what those terms are.

Leah King-Smith, Liminal Interstices: The crevice in ambiguous space and Beyond Capture; QUT Art Museum, Brisbane, February 17-May 8

Like so many towns in the Western Australian wheat belt, Kellerberin is dissected by the Great Eastern Highway. Two and a half hours east of Perth, it is a strange and remarkable place in which to find oneself, particularly in the context of producing art. The International Art Space Kellerberin Australia (IASKA) program, initially set up to support international contemporary artists from non-English speaking countries, now includes a broader range of work. This year’s program and exhibition, curated by IASKA director Marco Marcon has grown from an 18 month series of residencies and includes a range of Australian artists.

The title of the exhibition, From Place to Space, proves to be a surprisingly accurate description of the process and ultimate manifestation of the IASKA project. Most of the work traverses the playful and personal, but there’s also a sense that the artists are trying to capture something that is slipping away. Perhaps they have found this to be the inescapable destiny of country towns, where populations are ageing and younger people are leaving in record numbers. Ironically this may also be why Kellerberin is so supportive of the IASKA project.

Some works in the exhibition are more successful than others. Wilkins Hill’s The Samboy International Challenge (2004) is oddly mesmerising: a video that contains a series of sometimes funny credits, facing a wall of incomplete circles under a green tent-like construction. If only the work was explored further, even in some accompanying text. Sadly it is the only piece in the exhibition where none is provided.

White Cock (2004-5) by Hayden Fowler is hard to pin down, but it stayed with me. I found myself enjoying the anti-aesthetic of his gold-framed video projection of a cockerel that crows and moves every now and again, despite being attached to its perch by a gold chain.

The most atmospheric work is Untitled (2005) by Anna Nazzari, the sound and quality of the black and white DVD akin to early Dada films. I was disappointed, however, to so quickly comprehend the narrative which explored the never-ending presence of the train-line that hugs the Great Eastern Highway.

Sean Cordeiro and Claire Healy present Maintenance (2004), comprising large orange geometric shapes protruding from the portals of an abandoned farmhouse, as if a new support structure is emerging from within and taking over. Both beautiful and sad, this work responds eloquently to the dynamism of the surrounding landscape so often overlooked by the unsympathetic eye.

Youth Club (2005) and Afternoon Tee (2005) by Bruce Slatter are plinth-based models of recreational areas within Kellerberrin. Though beautifully constructed, something of the town and the artist seemed to be missing in this work–perhaps this is the point. I had hoped for more evidence of the complex social interweaving of these places–the tension between the memorable and the mundane experiences of outback life.

In Frontyards (2004), Izabela Pluta sensitively records the attempts by Kellerberrin residents to transform the red dusty soil of their front gardens to reflect the lives within. The photographic process she employs flattens the landscape from a bird’s eye perspective; bits of rubbish, children’s toys and rubble mingle with carefully tended plants, enlarged on 2 metre vinyl prints. Pluta makes us aware of the minuteness of detail and the narrowing focus that occurs when our frames of reference encroach on us.

Matthew Hunt reminds us that escape is in fact possible in Helipads (2004). The artist painted a series of helicopter landing pads on an abandoned concrete slab, formerly an engineering works that could not sustain itself. While dealing immediately with the population decline in rural areas, the work also makes reference to wider social issues of asylum and escape. In the exhibition Hunt displays 9 images of the site.

Tom Nicholson’s After a Marching Season, Kellerberrin (2004-5) is a work inspired by an image of local students holding a Union Jack on the occasion of George V’s coronation in 1911. The artist organised 2 banner marches through the town, which concluded with a communal meal.

Raquel Ormella focuses on physical remains. In Remnant (2004) she traces cardboard outlines of items she happened across in her journey through Kellerberrin’s streetscapes. These things are clumsily, but somehow carefully, depicted on cardboard while the names of birds who rely on the maintenance of local natural habitats for survival are painted over the work. The cardboard cut-outs sit casually propped up with water bottles like the set of a children’s play. Ormella is one of my favourite Australian artists and her work provides a whimsical but sinister dimension to the exhibition.

James Lynch’s Earliest Memories (2004) consists of 4 DVDs and a ‘stuffed log’ set up as a viewing platform for monitors sitting on the floor. This comic style runs through the video as well: like a collage, hand drawn animations interact with actual footage of the town focussing on the early memories of some of the townspeople.

The Nat and Ali duo presented 2 of what may be their last works as artistic collaborators: Honk 4 Art and Feeling Groovy (both 2004-5). The work contains all the self-mockery that has made their work so successful and unique. Nat, 7 months pregnant, dances along railway tracks in a bathing suit and cowboy boots in Feeling Groovy. Honk 4 Art, part of a video series produced throughout outback Australia, shows the 2 artists pitched with camping chairs and knitting needles on the side of the Great Eastern Highway, dressed in anything they could lay their hands on from the Kellerberrin op-shop and holding up placards to passing motorists and road trains.

IASKA is one of the only contemporary art spaces in Western Australia to regularly develop and tour exhibitions in regional Australia. From Place to Space had its shortcomings, but also featured some very strong work. The exhibition is a commendable demonstration of the range of ideas that can arise out of such a program. From Place to Space will tour to 13 regional venues around Australia in 2005-2006.

From Place to Space, curator Marco Marcon, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, March 31-May 8

Pat Brassington has on the tip of her tongue a taste for flesh and blood or, to put it mildly, the mysteries of physical presence. Compared with her images, words fail. Entering her latest exhibition, You’re so Vein, feels like falling into some powerful infantile fantasy. Here are partial views of the body, sensuous and disturbing maternal images from the subconscious rendered in soft focus, like dreams. I sink into the capacious lap and watch until, as in all memories from childhood, images morph into elongations, dismemberments, form little fetishes of mouth, hair, shoes, neck, pink-of-petal nipples, stockinged thighs, powdered feet. I make way for the fearful distortions, the leaks and slippages: animal appendage or human genital?; flesh, flower or fruit? Hybrid visions from when the world was one. All feeling. All sensation. I am the milk and the milk’s in me. Now I know why babies cry.

And who is behind these strange visions? At her Artist’s Talk at Stills Gallery, Pat Brassington reveals that she started out as a mature-aged student. Now one of Australia’s leading photomedia artists, she lives and works in Tasmania where she’s been practicing for 22-years. She is blatant about her role as an experimentalist which she sees as “not a bad thing to be.”

Her source material is mixed and heavily appropriated. As well as photographing her own body, she favours unidentified images by unknown artists and putting them together to make compilations “of previous lives.”
Pat Brassington, Vivian’s Spring

Apparently, there are some images that recur in her work: a foot, a red hand pressing on something, and a pillow (“a big lumpen thing”) that belonged to her mother.

Some of my favourites among her works are arranged in what might loosely be called ‘narrative series’ but Brassington sees this exhibition as the antithesis of narrative. Her work springs from early life experiences, she loves film, has been through her “horror” phase. There are too many influences to elaborate and they cross all artforms.

Some images are “straight” but in this exhibition, all except one are manipulated. For some time now, Brassington has been exploring the possibilities of pink, the tinted colours and tones of flesh. She’s experimented with the blue/green end of the spectrum but abandoned it.

Though the technology she uses might suggest otherwise, Pat Brassington works slowly. As she conceives her images, she and her partner (“like chalk and cheese”) must live with them over time. She likes to have them “in and around her.” With some in this exhibition, like the lolly pink ‘penis’, she thought, “That’s gross!”, but visitors to the house said, “I like that,” and it stayed. She’s interested in the personal, emotional responses of others. She doesn’t censor. She has a big reject file.

The enigmatic titles come last: Close, Until, Angel Lust, Topography in Pink, Varnish, Crush, Drummer, The Wedding Guest, Vivian’s Spring.

Pat Brassington admits to a penchant for the “uncanny”, that psychological space where things that are barely familiar are made strange. In psychoanalytic terms, she says, she might be assumed to have suffered some trauma. She doesn’t know what she’ll do next. It’s not concepts that lead her on so much as a reservoir of images and her intuition. And she’s hard on herself.

Entering the labyrinth of Pat Brassington’s exhibition reminds me of the seductive spaces of Jenny Kemp’s theatre, the installations of Sophie Calle or Lyndal Jones or Rosslynd Piggott, Monica Tichacek or Susan Norrie. “Entering a room of works by Susan Norrie”, says Victoria Lynn, is “like being engulfed in a temporal process of shifting ideas and curious connections that slows down our perception to a quiet and thoughtful pace” (V Lynn, “Laminae”, catalogue essay, Susan Norrie, AGNSW 1994). Tranquil or transgressive, these are female domains in which another kind of contemplation is offered. They are places that hum with possibility.

Pat Brassington, You’re So Vein, Stills Gallery, 26 Gosbell Street, Paddington April 20-May 21, 2005. Informal notes on the Artist’s Talk, April 30, provided by Stills Gallery.

Joan Brassil was a late starter to investigative art practice, but she more than made up for lost time. While I never had the pleasure of collaborating with her, she had a longstanding collaborative practice of great distinction. Many who worked with her, the sound artists, musicians, dancers, scientists, filmmakers and other visual artists can attest to her gifts as a collaborator.

Her contributions to the whole fabric of cultural practice in Australia were multiple and varied. She was particularly supportive of emerging artists and women in the arts. Her practice was a great inspiration to countless young creative people. One of my great pleasures was to sit facing an audience of super cool young art students when Joan Brassil got up to speak about her work… You could almost read their minds, ‘Here come the flower paintings’… As she spoke, there was a pattern of recognition that began with disbelief and ended with uncool admiration.

For me, the most wonderful thing about Joan’s practice was that she shamelessly took her process right into the gallery when she was setting up an installation…This infused the work with a tremendous sense of the immediate, partly because of the risks of being creative in the here and now. As she collaborated with each person associated with the installation, they exchanged sensibilities, skills, humour and life experiences and the result was a unique poetic experience shared between them in the special time and place that is an installation in an art setting.

She responded to these unforseen, often serendipitous, encounters by improvising with them, which only the bravest and truest souls undertake because of the intensity and rigours of this kind of exposure. She was often totally depleted after putting up a work, because she often gave more than her body had in reserve. But after a few days rest, she was up and dreaming the next work. She revealed much of herself in her works, abstractly and poetically, bared for all to experience. And the response to her works matched her level of sensitivity and revelation.

Joan Brassil was a great storyteller. She once told me a story that over the years has become the abiding image of her spirit. She was out camping with her two young sons. They were staying on a bush property and sleeping under the stars on cots or in swags. She said the old bushy who was their host woke early and sprinkled food for native birds all around the sleeping Joan. At dawn, the birds began to feed, to fly in and out, surrounding her as she awoke. I have always thought that the bushman truly understood Joan’s spirit and her inquiring mind. At the same time that she was entranced by the beauty of native fauna she so loved and celebrated in her art works, she was no doubt thinking of the vortices in the air caused by wing movements and the aerodynamic lift of birds.

Our colleague and friend is gone now, we have only our memories of her. But our mentor lives on in the legacy of her works. We have the practice to continue to inspire us beyond ourselves. She lived the latter part of her life almost exclusively for art, she LOVED art (and frequently said just that).

Our thanks to Joan Grounds for providing at short notice this excerpt from her tribute to Joan Brassil which she delivered among many others who spoke about the artist’s life and work at the memorial gathering, Campbelltown Art Gallery, April 30.

The work of Adelaide artist Thomas Buchanan hovers curiously between states. At first glance it seems firmly grounded in the traditions of representational drawing and painting. However, by colliding this mode with performance, video and animation, Buchanan manages to work both at the edges of drawing practice and within a traditional idiom.

In 1999, motivated by a passion for drawing and an ethic of accessibility, Buchanan began making drawings live in several of Adelaide’s nightclubs, accompanying bands, DJs and electronic musicians. Working on an ambitious scale, he creates ferocious drawings that resonate with the club environment and reflect the artist’s love affair with mark-making, gesture and rich, charcoal-dusty materiality. These drawings are held in a constant state of flux, erased and reworked until the last moment when the artist walks away. The drawings exist parallel to the music which is by nature ephemeral and experienced in the moment. The drawings are often perceptual, depicting their immediate surroundings, but frequently feature invented architectural spaces, like the work of Giovanni Piranesi re-imagined in an urban framework. Buchanan is aware of this lineage and also cites Jeffrey Smart and Edward Hopper as influences, evident in his definitively urban aesthetic and subject matter. However, the artist’s live drawing in particular suggests that the real subject of Buchanan’s work is drawing itself. His frenetic mark-making, fuelled by hundreds of visual decisions per minute, recalls artists like Frank Auerbach, Alberto Giacometti and Cy Twombly.

Early in his practice as a ‘performance drawer’ (for want of a better phrase), Buchanan began documenting the club sessions on video. He has since extended the video aspect beyond documentation into short films that act as adjuncts to his drawings, as well as being works in themselves. The videos are collaborative affairs, his primary partner being digital artist and filmmaker Paul Rohan. The videos also feature soundtracks from the bands that Buchanan accompanies in Adelaide’s clubs: in a nice reversal the musicians compose music to complement the drawings.

Using very simple and direct techniques, video works such as Viewing Point and Transition explore the artist’s fascination with drawing as a time based activity. The archaeological quality of Buchanan’s drawings, densely layered with strata of decisions and marks, suggest that for him, time is as much a material in his work as paper and charcoal. The medium of video has allowed the artist to manipulate elements of time, dissecting his process and compressing the evolution of a drawing over several days into a single event. Both the aforementioned video works have been edited to operate as loops and the films are cyclical in both form and content.

In Viewing Point a split-screen, time-lapse sequence shows Buchanan creating a large scale, heavily worked charcoal drawing, which then plays backwards to return to a pristine sheet of paper. In Transition, the artist ‘draws’ a line around Adelaide by filming a circular journey through the city, arriving back at his starting point. Interestingly, the loop is also the building block of much of the music that features in the videos and that fuels Buchanan’s live drawings.

The Transition DVD also shows Buchanan’s drawings passing through the filter of video and coming out the other side. The work segues between moving images, stills and transcriptions into charcoal drawings. In shifting these images from video stills to drawing, Buchanan carefully transcribes the properties of the video–the focus, resolution, light conditions and so on–into drawing terms. In other words, the quirks and imperfections inherent in the video inform the drawing in a rigorous and meaningful way.

There is a strong sense that Buchanan is entering a new cycle of work, one that seems to be propelling him directly to the heart of his concerns with space, mark-making and the conventions of drawing. In the self-produced documentary/promotional video Fusion, his friend and mentor Christopher Orchard speculates on future directions in Buchanan’s work and predicts that the artist will “probably walk into one of his own drawings and just wave as he passes through the picture plane.” During a recent visit to his studio, Buchanan excitedly described to me his upcoming video work Detour, in which he plans to do just that. Informed by William Kentridge’s remarkable films, 7 Fragments for George Méliès, Buchanan uses animation to enter his own work, playfully confusing real space with the notionally illusionistic space of his drawings.

Other works currently in progress include paintings–or perhaps more accurately, drawings in paint–on perspex, enabling the artist to view his surroundings through the drawing surface. This allows him to play further with space, transcribing the environment in a very direct way, while all the time watching for the slippages and nuances that cause the work to shift.

In testing his drawing practice in so many varied ways and in collision with so many other modes of working, Thomas Buchanan takes on the role of a speculative thinker, searching out an elusive synthesis of disciplines, media and sensory experience. Throughout this search he is constantly asking ‘how many states can the thing exist in?’. He answers this question with increasingly eloquent propositions on the elemental business of drawing. Buchanan’s work is a powerful assertion that artistic innovation lives in the attitude of the artist, not necessarily in the advance of technology.

In response to the growth and strengthening of sound arts, the last 5 years has seen the emergence of numerous small CD labels. This survey, though by no means comprehensive, looks at several of the labels to see what they make and why, and if recorded sound art is finding a market.

One of the longest running experimental labels is Dr Jim’s Records. The Melbourne-based label was founded in 1990 by Jim Glaspole and Edgar Lee and features releases by prominent artists such as Tim Catlin, Adam Simmons Toy Band, Philip Samartzis & Rasmus B Lunding, Sean Baxter, David Brown, Tim O’Dwyer and various combinations of the above under the different monikers–Lazy, Bucketrider, Western Grey and Candlesnuffer. With 35 releases over 15 years, and an impressive international distribution network, Dr Jim’s is evidence that running an experimental music label is not complete madness

Synaesthesia has also proved a fine example for many of the newer labels. Encouraged by Peter Rehberg of renowned Austrian label Mego, Mark Harwood’s first release was Fennesz + Rosy Parlane Live @ Synaesthesia in 2000. Since then he has released a prolific catalogue of CDs and vinyl by artists including Anthony Pateras, Robin Fox, Snawklor, Dèlire and Canadian artist Tim Hecker–19 releases by the end of 2005. Of particular interest is their latest 4LP set by Marco Fusinato, 0_Synaesthesia. Fusinato is a visual artist who has produced 4 albums of nothing–no actual intentional sonic content–instead concentrating on drawing the grooves that are then pressed to vinyl. This is the commercial realisation of Fusinato’s prior gallery explorations. Harwood has solved some distribution problems, not only for himself but for many other labels, by expanding his vision into a record store (Synaesthesia is also the name of Mark Harwood’s store, a place of pilgrimage for all experimental music lovers visiting Melbourne), stocking a vast array of local and international releases. While he has secured international distribution he is not too concerned about the size of the companies he uses, preferring to connect with smaller communities rather than massive networks. Next up on the catalogue is the ‘bedroom explorations’ of Francis Plagne, a split 12″ by luminaries Bernard Parmegiani and Phil Samartzis, and an LP by Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood.

In Sydney, Dual Plover is the brainchild of the always surprising and usually extreme performer Lucas Abela who decided to create a label to document his own work and the projects that interest him. The first release in 1994 was of recordings of his kombi van. Now run by Abela and Swerve, the label seeks “artists who share a maverick attitude to music making. We have had everything from the electro pop of the Funky Terrorist to the splatter rap of Suicidal Rap Orgy and now show tunes from Singing Sadie.” Abela isn’t completely sure who the audience for this work is, “quite possibly because I never pandered to them to start with. I’ll happily press a disc without knowing if anyone would be interested in it.” But he believes that “people follow the label so intensely [because] they like the surprise of what’s next?” On average Dual Plover would press 500 units which in the past would take around 5 years to sell out. Recently the new titles have cleared in around 2 years. The label has just secured US distribution through Revolver and has small distributors in various cities in Europe. “You need to choose between small niche distributors that love your work but have minimal clout or a large distributor with wide distribution but too much to deal with to realistically promote your label.” Abela believes the solution is to “consider publicists to create a label profile or, better yet, tour as nothing is more effective in creating interest in music than playing live in front of people.”

Just approaching its fifth birthday is Brisbane-based room40, run by Lawrence English. English started the label because he had “come across some incredible recordings [that] weren’t seeing the light of day.” He describes it as a “friends and family label”, having a strong relationship with all the artists he releases, and looking for “projects that have a unique voice–something that sounds intense and focused. I feel that’s an important quality for a document to have…it lends it longevity.” As well as his own work his catalogue includes releases by Ben Frost, Erik Griswold, DJ Olive, Chris Abrahams, Rod Cooper and several limited edition live recordings with visiting internationals such as Scanner, David Toop and Maria Rosenfeld. English isn’t sure who the label’s audience is but feels that a lot of his sales are off-shore, although he does say about international distribution, “I’m not sure if we’ve made any [large] effect as such, just another dedicated boutique label focused on releasing sounds that excite us and adding another layer to the discourse on sound and new music.”

Associated with the impermanent.audio performance events is caleb k’s impermanent.recordings. He started the label feeling that “there were…very few Australian labels who support[ed] truly experimental music. As with the live scene here at the time there were one-offs but no Sydney-based labels.” In 2002 he simultaneously released Stasis Duo’s Hammer & Tongs and Peter Blamey’s Salted Felt. “All of the artists are somehow related to impermanent.audio. The label does not accept submissions, instead it invites musicians to release work.” Not just focused on Australian artists, last year saw the release of Toshimaru Nakamura and Brett Larner’s After School Activity–Toshimaru’s event Off-Site serving as the inspiration for impermanent.audio. Caleb K has no illusions about the audience for this type of work, admitting that it is small, moving around 200 units. “A-musik who distribute the label in Europe (through Germany) stated that they believed Stern and Guerra’s Stitch was the best experimental release of 2003 [but it] only sold a small number of copies in Europe. They are having a tough time moving any stock let alone a label of obscure Australian musicians. Basically I am dreaming of a format somewhere between a CD and a CD-R. 500 units is way too many for this music but I don’t want to go into CD-Rs.” Impermanent.recordings fifth release, Arek Gulbenkoglu’s Points Alone, will be out in the next few months.

Relative newcomers are Cajid and Nature Strip both emerging in 2003 in Melbourne. Cajid is the creation of Jacques Soddell who states, “we have a preference for composed rather than improvised music and actively seek women composers.” Cajid has released albums by Thembi Soddell (his daughter), Bruce Mowson and Lawrence English with a new one by Camilla Hannan and Thembi in the pipeline. 500 copies are distributed via the internet, Synaesthesia and at gigs. “[It is] very difficult to get a response (even a negative one) from international distributors, despite excellent reviews in major publications like The Wire.” Cajid is planning a 12-concert national tour to further promote the work and Soddell hopes to release video art in the future.

Nature Strip founded by Hamish Sinclair, and now involving Joel Stern, has a clear agenda–”works must have an inherent connection between the music/sound and the/their environment.” Nature Strip has 3 releases–solo albums by Tarab and Toshiya Tsunoda, and a compilation of Tarab, Tsunoda, Stern and Lawrence English with one by Loren Chasse due for release in 2005. While acknowledging the audience is small, Sinclair believes it is global–”without international distribution we would not exist.”

So predictably, the audience for this work is passionate but small. Is CD production for small labels really viable? This is a question that Shannon O’Neill, founder of Alias Frequencies is tackling. Alias Frequencies was “founded in the late 90s after bad experiences (as artists) with other labels. We are driven by a love of interesting and under-appreciated music, but…we keep expectations low and don’t make promises we can’t keep.” The house genre tends to be “electronic music with a collage aesthetic.” After releasing 4 CDs (some with additional computer playable video) and 2 CD-Rs by artists such as his own duo, Wake Up and Listen, Puzahki, Hinterlandt and Rik Rue, O’Neill has decided to concentrate on “MP3 releases published on our website and distributed free through p2p [peer to peer], audioblogs etc.” Instead of paying, there will be an option to donate via Paypal, although O’Neill is realistic about how successful that will be. He justifies this approach–”Only a tiny proportion of (popular) artists have ever been able to make a living from CD sales alone…So far we’ve lost money releasing CDs which leads to cashflow problems, which slows down the release schedule. By releasing MP3s instead we can keep costs down [and] release a lot more…digital propagation of music is the underground musician’s best distribution option at the moment…The CD format is dead. Files are the future. Music recordings want to be free.” Bold rhetoric–it will be interesting to watch the development of this new strategy.

While the Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) functions primarily as a traditional concert ensemble, it also presents performances that explore the possibilities of placing a live orchestra in a multimedia context. Luminous was an instance of the orchestra collaborating with significant Australian artists: in this case photographer Bill Henson, sound sculptor Paul Healy and singer Paul Capsis. The ACO performed works beneath a screen onto which Henson’s photographs were projected. Paul Healy’s contributions were heard, while the staging was set, between the live music performances.

Although multimedia extensions of classical concert performances are not unheard of (including perfume occasionally wafting through auditoriums in 19th century song recitals!), they are still rare. While some contemporary composers conceive collaborative works with installation components–some of ELISION Ensemble’s performances are excellent examples–there are an increasing number of live performances by orchestras and ensembles providing music to film.

In Luminous most of the music and all of the photographs were conceived separately and later combined for the performance, an approach that resulted in both strengths and weaknesses. Imaginative presentation of a rich body of musical works in conjunction with other artforms may enhance the experience of both. There were moments in Luminous in which this was certainly the case.

Bill Henson’s photographs of adolescents–portraits capturing the sense of transition inherent in teenage life–have been described as “darkly glowing.” These, as well as his pictures of lonely, derelict urban landscapes, were presented on a screen in images which panned across and zoomed in and out of the original photographs. This sense of movement proved effective in its relationship with the music. It was not, however, a significant factor in the most powerful moments of the concert, when the combination of photographic subjects and music worked to suggest something more than the sum of the parts.

One of the many things music can do is suggest the progression of private thought and emotion. There were points in Luminous when this power of suggestion, combined with stills of adolescent faces and bodies captured in particularly expressive moments, produced a hauntingly evocative result. It was also a wonderfully subtle effect, as Henson’s work is often ambiguous: his images don’t tell a story so much as quietly suggest one. And the temptation to simply provide a blatantly emotional ‘soundtrack’ was generally avoided.

The main weakness in Luminous stemmed from the problem of pacing the images against musical works which, intended to be experienced only aurally, have an emotional structure dependent on the return of elements, their transformation, and the introduction of contrast. This was not such a problem early in the program with the Schnittke Trio-Sonata and music by the film composer Gabriel Yared. But in the second half, during the violin concerto by Peteris Vasks and Good Night from On an Overgrown Path by Janácek, there was a definite sense of disjunction between the play of images and the development of the music. There was also a problem generally in matching the images with fast music: images ceased entirely in the solo cadenzas of the Vasks, and then resumed whenever the music slowed.

Individual moments in Luminous were more effective than the concert as a whole. Highlights for the audience included Paul Capsis’ singing and Tognetti’s performance of the Vasks, as well as the opportunity to see Henson’s work. Other aspects did not cohere as one might have wished: none of the music matched the darkness of Henson’s photos for example (I don’t find George Crumb and Schnittke quite as shockingly sombre). And while Healy’s electronic compositions seemed to embody this character effectively, placing them around the live performances made them seem extraneous. That said, one can’t expect an ambitious attempt at such a combination of media to be without flaws.

Australian Chamber Orchestra, Luminous, artistic director Richard Tognetti, vocals Paul Capsis, photographer Bill Henson, sound sculptor Paul Healy, City Recital Hall, Melbourne, April 10-1

Innovation

As I explain in Innovation: in a word (p2), the ‘i’ word gets more use than usual on our pages. This is an edition full of innovators and reflections on innovation, whether in cultural exchange, arts festival programming, sound art, interactive and network art, documentary, experimental and Indigenous filmmaking, or the work of bold young performance makers like My Darling Patricia and Stuck Pigs Squealing Theatre and established artists like Michael Kantor and Lucy Guerin.

University arts threatened

As part of the federal government’s rabid anti-union campaign (any union will do, blue collar, white collar, and now student unions), Brendan Nelson, Minister for Education, has introduced a bill in parliament to prevent universities from collecting fees to support student services. This will jeopardise legal, employment and advocacy services, childcare, sport and especially the performing and visual arts. Many artists, including the 800 who signed a protest placed in the country’s major newspapers, acknowledge just how important university arts life, outside formal courses, has been for their broader education and, often, their arts careers and for the community in general. Protests are escalating.

Australia & Germany

This edition features the Australian-German connection in interviews with Dr Roland Goll, Director the Goethe-Institut Sydney, and Gitte Weise, the Sydney-based gallery director who now has a gallery in Berlin where she promotes Australian artists. Goll frankly addresses the not inconsiderable challenges of the cross-cultural relationship and how to improve it with benefits to the arts. Weise’s work parallels the Australia Council’s long term commitment to promoting Australian work in Germany. As well, Adam Jasper reports on a frisky new venture in Berlin with German artists selling idiosnyncratic, bargain multiples in-store and online.

Indigenous artists

Indigenous arts figure strongly in this edition. Theatre director Wesley Enoch reflects on his own work as writer and director in the broader context of Aboriginal art and performance. Lisa Stefanoff describes 25 years of successful Indigenous media production and broadcasting at CAAMA (Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association), based in Alice Springs. CAAMA’s birthday will be celebrated with screenings of their films at the Sydney Film Festival. Rachel O’Reilly visits Leah King-Smith’s latest exhibition in Brisbane and Sarah Jane Norman reviews Screenwest-ABC-FTI’s Deadly Yarns series of short films by emerging Indigenous filmmakers.

Farewell Dan Edwards

RealTime Assistant Editor and OnScreen Editor is leaving RealTime to work as Managing Editor of the Publications Unit of the Australian Film Commission. He’s been a hard-working and integral member of our tiny editorial team. He responded to the brief to build OnScreen’s coverage of documentary film with enthusiasm and increasing authority, introduced new writers to our pages and significantly increased the supplement’s explorations of Indigenous and Asian film. Although seriously sorry to see him going, we wish him well in his new venture, and we hope that he keeps writing. KG

This is the letter I sent to, but did not appear in, The Age in response to Helen Thomson’s reviews of Malthouse’s The Ham Funeral and Journal of the Plague Year (April 18).

Over the years, Helen Thomson’s enthusiasm for staged literature as opposed to live theatre has become reassuringly predictable. I have lost count of the reviews that have failed to conjure any sense of the production and yet provide a thorough and approving account of the text, so long as the play in question includes some Shavian social do-goodery or is immediately available to a kind of Year 12 Literature essay-analysis.

If audiences have attended the dullest examples of dead theatre due to her advice, then her damnation of Michael Kantor’s productions of The Ham Funeral and Journal of the Plague Year should be read as an enthusiastic recommendation to all of us who still believe that going to the theatre can be a blood-pumping adventure full of unexpected, tough and unusual visions. I say these productions are just what we need and exhort inquisitive minds to go; you will find yourself an invigorated audience member in an invigorated theatre.

But there is a massive problem here. One that must be rectified by the appointment to The Age of a reviewer that can, at the very least, approach this new theatre with something more than a cinematic understanding of narrative value (in the Robert McKee tradition) and an insufferably patronising tone. Thomson is patronising both in her choice of words and in the assumption that the bold, clearly controlled choices evident in these productions have failed according to her own limited and prejudiced critical framework. It is unforgivable, even if damning a production, not to credit artists of this calibre with intelligence and intent. But this last point is subtle compared to the broad problem.

What occurred at the Malthouse Theatre was by anyone’s definition, an extraordinary event: 2 new mainstage productions, premiering on the same day in a re-vamped theatre under a fearless artistic director who commands an ensemble of our finest actors and pushes the technical capabilities of the theatre to its limit. Instead of giving us any sense of the excitement that was palpable in the audience, Thomson writes that we were “unmoved”.

Neither will any future reader of her reviews have any impression of the epic nature of the undertaking or the theatrical spectacle. Capturing the flavour of the event, describing it and the context in which it occurs is a basic journalistic requirement, irrespective of the overall critical opinion. But this largess is beyond Thomson who instead wastes valuable space pedantically explaining the “failings” of the productions with the arbitration on taste of a bristling school ma’am.

This reviewer quite clearly has control of the language (and we should never take that for granted) but the mental gymnastics that she performs in order to reconcile her cool authoritative tone with her strangely infuriated, reactionary agenda results in a description of a production that didn’t actually exist, peppered with revealing derogations (songs that are “merely amusing”, dialogue that is “merely unconvincing”) and conclusions that are nothing short of bizarre: the idea that today’s audience have “moved on” from a Jungian framework is hysterical (and would certainly amuse most of the practising psychologists that I know), her assertion that there exists a “genuine Absurdist” theatrical approach is positively alarming, if not oxymoronic, while referring to Kantor’s individual voice within the broad church of Expressionism as Kosky-esque is simply lazy journalism (Robert Wilson, whose Black Rider was seen at this year’s Sydney Festival, springs to mind as a more apt, potentially illuminating comparison for understanding Kantor’s approach.)

For an event such as this we need to demand a reviewer who can offer something more discriminating, useful to readers and historically meaningful. These are exciting times for Melbourne theatre, our daily newspaper has a duty to provide us with a reviewer who is up to the task.

Born in Bangkok, a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts (1997), explorer of Butoh and Ideokinesis, Naree Vachananda is about to premiere Opposite My House is a Funeral Parlour. On September 11, 2001, writes Vachananda, “My sister, who works in downtown New York, just got out of the subway when she saw people flocking in the street. When she got up to her office with windows facing south, she saw the twin towers collapsing right in front of her eyes. When I spoke to her on the phone, she joked, ‘It’s just like looking at the funeral parlour.’”

At the time Vachananda lived in Fitzroy, on Moor Street opposite a derelict funeral parlour with a for-sale sign that read: “Revive the corpse!”. She also discovered that there was a coffin warehouse next to the parlour and that the coffin-maker used to live in her own house. She started a diary: “The result was not so much an emotional journey as a visual diary written in words.” She was also inspired by poet Jenny Joseph’s Persephone (Bloodaxe, 1986) and decided to create a dancework about mortality. “I looked at various streams of Buddhist thought–to my surprise, one link led me to quantum physics, another to the cyclic flow of life and death as parallel to the myth of Persephone. I chose these 2 ideas as the structural theme of the work.”

The work has been created in collaboration with sound composer Edward Kelly, the sonic component comprising a mix of the performer’s diary, Joseph’s poems and Kelly’s own compositions. With the support of Dancehouse’s Space Grant program, Yeap Heng Shen worked on the visual multimedia component. Vachananda says that a key visual image, among others drawn from Joseph’s poems, is of a train on a journey to an unknown destination. With 2 screens, one at each end of the performance space and the audience facing each other, Vachananda and her collaborators will evoke destinations both in our own world and the underworld. Opposite My House is a Funeral Parlour merges local reflections and metaphysical musings in what looks to be an intriguing multimedia performance. RT

Naree Vachananda, Opposite My House is a Funeral Parlour, fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders Lane Melbourne; June 9-12; bookings 03 9662 996

The relatively young dance-makers of STRUT’s Dance #1 offered several different models of the dancing body’s intelligence in performance. Arguably the most ‘venerable’ interpretation was that of Alice Holland’s Unpinning, an evocative, often athletic solo involving the fluid posing of the body through the smooth yet nevertheless complicated redirection of its inertia and weight via circular swirls, down, across and up again. This created the somewhat paradoxical sense of a highly crafted self-presentation coupled with an unreflective physical palette, linked to breath, spine-curving inflation and chest-hollowing deflation. With her poised presence, Holland skirted Expressionist clichés to create an intriguingly traditional yet contemporary work.

Owing less to Martha Graham was Debbie Robertson’s Lit. Sequentially choosing circumscribed spaces, she offered not a body linked via breath to nature or psychological depths, but an intensely intimate, cognitive body. Careful extensions and tracing of lines out from the torso and diagonally back characterised movement which was somewhat reminiscent of the choreography of Rosalind Crisp. The audience was offered a representation of the thinking body, a physique carefully retracing the spatiality of memory and proximity. While Holland shone in clear light and a white dress close to the audience, Robertson remained at a consciously suspended distance at the edges of the space, in shadowy light and a crisp, dark costume.

Different again was Bianca Martin’s blank-faced representation of failed romance, Honey You Lied. Elvis’ Love Me Tender filled in the ironic content of Martin’s ambivalent physical performance, her movement shifting between restful standing positions in which one arm traced the side of the torso where her lover’s arm used to be before the body dropped to the ground and legs crossed above it, flashes of underwear implying a sense of sexual distress. This was a fun study with hints of darkness, which promised greater depth in a future, full-length work.

Another sense of narrative was provided by Sermsah Bin Saad’s Totem. The piece opened with didgeridoo music and the low, horizontally-held chest and bent-legged cross-stepping of much traditionally informed Aboriginal dance. Bin Saad avoided the familiar fusion style of Bangarra Dance Theatre Company, retaining a somewhat harder physical stance in the first section before the body slipped into capoeira and hip hop style ground work and flips accompanied by electronic beats. Moving from an abstracted representation of his Aboriginal totem–the pelican–to a highly athletic body swinging from a rope, Bin Saad’s dance suggested a more interesting confluence of influences than the often kitsch populism of Bangarra.

The most choreographically sophisticated piece was Jessyka Watson-Galbraith’s Insufficient Funds. Beginning with a dancer sitting on a chair placed horizontally along the floor to complete an asymmetric triad, the 3 dancers rearranged each other and paused as though offering stills from an emotionally eviscerated chess game. Bony, anatomical articulations similar to the choreogaphy of Gideon Obarzanek tended to dominate, while Watson-Galbraith’s leg spinning ground work similarly recalled the hip hop and popular culture influences of modern dance. Her main motif was an alternation of implicit tension, moving between languid, barely motivated bodies with no apparent connection, to physically scattered forms linked by an abiding sense of flexed unease. Without any overt expressiveness, this was nevertheless a highly theatrical piece, suggestive of relationships between individuals. A former veteran of youth dance company Steps (which also staged the delightful Mania in May, featuring the disarmingly cabaretic presence of composer Cathie Travers), Watson-Galbraith and the other Dance #1 choreographers presented a strong, diverse season which promised great things to come.

STRUT dance, Dance #1, curator Sue Peacock, including: Honey You Lied, choreographer-performer Bianca Martin; Insufficient Funds, choreographer Jessyka Watson-Galbaith; Unpinning, choreographer-performer Alice Lee Holland; Carry Oga Champ choreographer-performer Chelsea Funnel; Lit, choreographer-performer Debbie Robertson; Totem, choreographer-performer Sermsah Bin Saad; Exhale, choreographer-performer Aimee Smith, Chapel Space, Perth, May 5-8

Gitte Weise has been director of her eponymous Paddington gallery for 13 years and in 2004 opened a space in Berlin to promote her Australian program internationally. Originally from Karlsruhe and then Heidelberg, she migrated to Australia after meeting Australian artist Christopher Snee while holidaying in Greece. In Germany, she practised as a social worker, although even then she was surrounded and intrigued by art, sharing her communal house with several art students (many of whom are now well known contemporary artists). On arrival in Australia in 1981, she settled in Snee’s home town on the Gold Coast, but the couple soon moved to Sydney, where Snee began a visual arts degree and he and Weise produced and sold silk screened shirts.

It was not until Weise enrolled in COFA’s Masters of Art Administration that her arts career gained focus. During her first practicum with the 1986 Biennale of Sydney she worked with mentors Nick Waterlow and Ann Flanagan. Upon graduation, she worked for a small commercial gallery, before landing the exhibition manager’s position for the 1988 and 1990 Biennales. Here she gained invaluable experience overseeing the transformation of industrial sites into exhibition spaces at Pier 2/3 in Walsh Bay and the Bond Store, and working with her ‘mentor of mentors’, Berlin-based curator René Block. In the early 1990s, an opportunity came up to take a lease on an Oxford Street shopfront with a small, sunny room upstairs. There was just one proviso: that Weise set up and manage a deli-cafe downstairs! She fulfilled the brief, and in 1992 Kunst opened its doors with a show by Bill Seeto.

When you first opened your gallery, how did you select your artists?

I followed the program of artist run spaces, especially First Draft. And I followed my own aesthetic, what I responded to.

I find that always very difficult. I suppose most of the artists I take on are informed by art history. And you can see that in the work, they can transform that into something new. I look for something that’s solid, that’s got a background, that’s anchored in art history. There’s a certain aesthetic, a certain strength that goes through each artist’s work that brings it together.

Yes, but…that’s what they’re looking for in Germany. There, they love it when you say “I just show concrete art.” But I have always resisted being put in a drawer like that. The artists have to experiment and I always welcome that. I like that there is constant change, evolving with the material. I would never say to them “You have to stick with that because that sells.” Maybe from a commercial point of view one should do that, but I don’t fit into that mould. My accountant thinks I’m mad.

I love beauty. We all do. What I get excited about is the ability to transform a concept into a beautiful object.

That is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot over the last year, because I feel that things have totally shifted. My idea was, and still is, that the role of the gallery director is to look after the careers of a particular group of artists. I’ve never had more than 12-13 artists in the program, that’s all I can really do. In a philanthropic way, what I want to do is find people who support and nurture these artists’ careers, like I do. But that hardly happens any more. That whole notion of art as decoration has changed everything. Art’s become very fashionable, so that a gallery now is almost like a restaurant: when a new one opens, everyone flocks there. So I am questioning my role. I don’t want to be a shop. If I wanted to be a shop, I’d go back to selling sausages! But this idea is very idealistic, and I don’t know whether I’m actually able to sustain it. Can I really do enough for the artists in this context? You have to be quite pushy and aggressive, which has never really been me. You do as much as you can: you send out information, you try to educate. But it’s not enough anymore. More and more you get people who come in and say, “I’ve bought a new house and I need something to hang above the green couch.” You might sell something to them, but then they may never come back to see what the artist is doing. I find that quite depressing.

Do you think it’s also part of the role of a commercial gallery to put great art out there, to nurture ideas, to contribute to the broader discourse of art?

Yes, I hope so, definitely. I also love to have my artists in international exhibitions. One has to go beyond the Australian boundaries. My main objective in going to international art fairs is to meet curators and writers. Once an artist gets into an international show, it’s a snowball effect. Most of the host institutions have money to produce a catalogue, so the art gets seen again.

It’s a fantastic supportive tool, and very necessary. Each of the artists I show would now need a comprehensive catalogue, but it is very expensive to print in Australia. I can do small booklets which document the exhibitions, but this doesn’t compare with the European standard of a glossy catalogue that even very young artists use as their calling card.

They’re mostly 40 plus, professional couples who may have been in contact with the artist, or who are members of Contemporary Benefactors; a lot of gay clientele, academics, lawyers, doctors. Amongst them there are passionate people who come back to see the next exhibition, but there are just not enough. There are some corporations and institutions, such as the AGNSW, NGA, and some regional galleries, but sales have been affected by their budget cuts. I’d say about 80% of my clientele are individuals.

How do you see the role of Room 35 [an exhibition space downstairs that artists can lease]?

To encourage more experimental work and media, and offer artists the experience of showing in a commercial setting. We provide hands on advice, installation, publicity and we look after the show. It’s also fantastic for us: the artists come to us, and it can be a great way of developing talent. Three artists—Cherine Fahd, Maria Kontis and Sarah Robson—have joined the stable after showing at Room 35, while others such as Dani Marti, nell, and Tim Silver have been taken up by other commercial galleries. It costs money for the artist, but it’s an investment in their career. We put on 8 to 9 shows a year, and I have up to 60 applications. I select the artists again using my own aesthetic, but also taking into consideration the proposal itself; whether it shows commitment. I always put decorative works aside, seeking out more edgy or confrontational things. I have also built up a great private collection by buying works from Room 35.

I can only take on a new artist when another leaves, and I have to consider very carefully, “Can I really offer you a future, a career?” People approach us all the time: I may advise them to apply for Room 35, which gives me a good idea about whether they are committed and serious about their work, and whether I can work with them. It’s never been the case that I’ve taken on an artist after they’ve cold called. And then there are people who stalk you, which means they’ve got completely the wrong idea. But then again, with some artists, I’ve stalked them, such as Sarah Ryan, whose work I saw at Primavera [an annual show profiling young artists at Sydney’s MCA] and whom I followed up after the opening. I still go to First Draft, other artist run spaces, and grad shows at the art colleges, or sometimes will respond to an artist’s booklet/catalogue if it intrigues me.

An artist winning a prize, or getting into a prestigious group show, or placing work in an institution or fantastic private collection. Also, seeing an artist evolve, like Cherine Fahd, who first showed at Room 35, and now has shown in Berlin.

The Berlin gallery opened in January 2004, and is now into its 9th show. The gallery came out of doing international fairs, like New York, Madrid and Berlin: I wanted something a bit more permanent. The fairs can be very political affairs, and whether you’re included can depend on whom you schmooze on the board. Also, an art fair can cost you anything between $40-$80,000, so you have to sell a lot of work just to make that back. The gallery is in Mitte, in the former East, in a gallery precinct with hundreds of other galleries. Kunstwerke [a public contemporary art space] is just behind, while major museums are between 10-15 minutes’ walk away. You get so many people coming through, including curators, from all over Europe. And people like to engage with the work at openings. There’s been quite a lot of interest in the gallery director being a German who has come back. And we’ve gained a good reputation for being a unique space that shows Australian art—even though the work is totally international [Weise’s stable includes Renate Anger, Berlin; Micah Lexier, Canada, lives in New York; and Pip Culbert, London.] So far, the response has been terrific, with some artists like Maria Kontis already included in some great international shows. The only drawback is that some of the Australian collectors would like me to be more here, in Sydney. So I’m talking now with some other Australian galleries about having the Berlin space as a joint venture, as a way of profiling Australian artists to an international audience on a more permanent basis, without having to spend as much time there myself. I would like to keep that Australian focus, as it’s worked very well in developing an identity for the gallery.

The Australian artists represented by Gitte Weise Gallery are Aleks Danko, Cherine Fahd, Helga Groves, Maria Kontis, Jude Rae, Sarah Robson, Sarah Ryan, Paul Saint and Christopher Snee.

Gitte Weise Gallery’s current exhibition is Looking Glass, photographs by Cherine Fahd, May 18-July 2, www.gitteweisegallery.com

Lyndon Terracini is as excited and voluble about his third and last Queensland Music Festival as he was about his first in 2001, but I sense a restiveness, a desire to move on to new terrain. Already at work on his first Brisbane Festival for 2006, Terracini has firmly established an innovative and successful statewide Queensland Music Festival. No token shows travelling to regional centres in the Terracini model: towns across Queensland invest in the festival and in local performers joining in collaborative works with visiting artists from around Australia. Each year more towns come on board, there’ll be 23 in 2005. Each year more festival events become integral to local cultures, whether in installations, instrumental groups (the Barcaldine Big Marimba Band, this year’s Winton Musical Fence Band), or a repertoire of new works involving local musicians (Elena Kats Chernin’s symphonies for Townsville musicians in 2002, 2003; Sarah Hopkins works for Childers, 2003, 2005). Terracini has always wanted communities to own their creations and to be inspired to incorporate music-making into their lives beyond the festival timetable. Meanwhile in Brisbane the festival ranges from big concerts of major works (Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony in 2001; Heiner Goebbels’ Surrogate Cities, 2003), packed-out world music shows, cutting edge new compositions (from Liza Lim and others) and events with a socio-political commitment (St Mary’s Church in 2001). I spoke with Lyndon Terracini just prior to the launch of the 2005 program, first asking him about the scale of this year’s event.

Credo: music theatre by satellite

It’s a 17 day festival this time rather than the 10 days of last time. It’s grown enormously. It allows us to have longer seasons for some shows in Brisbane and other centres and we’ve been able to invest in some big productions that I thought were important to do, that reflect the philosophy of the festival. The biggest of these is Credo, The Innocence of God, produced in partnership with Fabrica in Italy. It’s live out of the Concert Hall in QPAC (Queensland Performing Arts Centre) via satellite with Jerusalem, Istanbul and Belfast. Three big screens will hang above the stage so that you can see the musicians in those 3 cities. The Queensland Orchestra accompanies them live at various times. It’s a very powerful piece about oppressed peoples.

Credo’s been done before in Germany [produced by Fabrica with Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe], but this is virtually a new production. All the actors here are Australian, half of them Aboriginal women, including Justine Saunders and Rachael Maza. The works played by the musicians in the different cities are traditional, or based on traditional music, with fantastic singers. Andrea Molina who is conducting–he did Heiner Goebbels’ monumental Surrogate Cities for the 2003 QFM–also wrote this monster of a piece. Some of it is also quite extreme music. Vocal experimentalist David Moss is singing again–he was in Surrogate Cities–with 2 singers from his Institute of Living Voice, one of them Icelandic. When she starts to sing you would swear she is whistling, it’s that high. There are also 4 Brisbane instrumentalists–3 percussionists and William Barton, the didjeridu player and composer–who have gone from Brisbane to Musica Fabrica where Fabrica offers 40 fellowships each year to young artists in Treviso. They’ll come back and be soloists in Credo.

Fabrica is the Benetton Creative Research Centre. Benetton have invested $160m in it. Fellowships, travel and accommodation are paid for, and there’s a fee for the artists to live on. They get full use of all the facilities there, including a film studio and the Colours magazine office. Some of the Benetton campaigns have been devised by these students.

When people buy their tickets to Credo they’ll receive a full libretto by email prior to the show. It’s tough material. Andrea interviewed the parents of a Palestinian bomber and then the mother of the Jewish child who was blown up. The Palestinians don’t know why their son did it and why he hadn’t come to them first, and the Jewish mother hates the Palestinians. It’s confronting to see these juxtaposed images. When they arrive, the audience receive a booklet with the text, photos and transcripts of the interviews–they play in the foyer on monitors and also in the body of the work.

Credo is about serious content with the support of technology. We decided to give the audience as much background information as we could, so that when they’re in the concert hall–I’m starting to call halls and theatres ‘communication centres’–they’ll have a complete experience.

They are very close friends and think about making a work in much the same way, though Andrea’s musical language is a bit more extreme than Heiner’s, more in the Italian modernist vein, which is exciting in the incredible justaposition, say, between a folksong from Ireland and his music that jars you into the ferociousness of the piece and subject matter.

On the same program…

We have the Leni-Basso contemporary dance company from Japan with Finks, another multimedia show. I saw them in Tokyo. The dancers are incredibly skilful and they dialogue with the screen and with the sound score. The Glass House Mountains installation is an IMA-Elision collaboration between composer Liza Lim, visual artist Judy Watson, cellist Rosanne Hunt and sound designer Michael Hewes [described in the program as “inspired by Queensland’s Glass House Mountains, featuring sculptures, video, floor and wall pieces made with volcanic soils from each of the 10 mountains, standing next to topographical drawings, environmental sound recordings, spatially manipulated electronics and live cello performances.” QFM Brochure].

Liquid Architecture will present soundscapes in 3 city malls, transforming the usual urban sonic experience into something new. [The QFM program also includes Ed Kuepper’s Music for Len Lye, the New Zealand experimental film innovator from the 30s; and Tyrone performing with Topology in a program of Weill, Radiohead and others.]

On the jazz front we have Omah Sosa, a Cuban pianist but with a distinctive African flavour which I find really exciting. He’s looked to as a new leader in the jazz world. And we’re doing Ruby’s Story with Ruby Hunter and Archie Roach with arrangements of their songs by Paul Grabowsky in the Brisbane Powerhouse and then in Cherbourg for the Aboriginal community.

Epics

Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, where all new music began, is almost sold out. It’s a concert version with Lisa Gasteen; Brisbane’s her home town. John Treleaven sings Tristan, he’s Cornish–he sings it in Hamburg and then he comes here. I heard him do it in Amsterdam; he’s the best Tristan in the world at the moment. The Australian Youth Orchestra will be conducted by Richard Mills. It’s a 6 hour experience.

We’re also doing Schumann’s Dichterliebe, Schubert’s Die Wintereisse and his Der Schwanengesan with a great young Canadian baritone, Phillip Addis. He’ll do the complete 3 cycles in one week. These days you rarely hear one of these cycles live. He’ll be performing at St Mary’s Church where, in the same series, Lisa Moore will be playing Janacek piano music; Stephen Savage, John Chen and Ian Munro are playing Tippet over 3 nights; and Erik Griswold will play his own remarkable compositions. This series will be at 6 o’clock every evening for a week.

Statewide

Twenty three centres are part of QFM. Around the state there are about 12 world premieres: a big new piece in Mt Isa that writer Sven Swenson and composer John Rodgers are creating, called Bobcat Magic [building on the great success of 2003’s Bobcat Dancing]; a new piece in Charters Towers with 200 local performers, text by Janis Balodis and Shenton Gregory writing the music, called Charters Towers, the Musical; a huge event in Cooktown with the Huli Wigmen from Papua New Guinea and the Narasirato Are’Are Panpipe Ensemble from the Solomon Islands. They’ll live in Cooktown for a week, build a village and, with local Aboriginal and South Sea Islanders, will eat together and have ceremonies nightly and a big corroboree, Gunbu Gunbu on the final night.

Sarah Hopkins is writing a new piece in Childers. After the success of the work she created for the town in 2003 for massed community choir, orchestra, didjeridu and percussion, they want to call the new subdivision there after the piece, Childers Shining. There’s a mosaic in the footpath with parts of the score.
Michael Haskill is writing a new piece for the drumming community of Caboolture, called Caboolture Drumming, with Taikoz and djembe expert Elliot Orr. In Moranbah, we’ve commissioned The Musical Railway Line, a permanent installation by Steve Langton using old railway materials and played by locals along with leading percussionists from around the world.

To market…

With the assistance of the Australia Council and Arts Queensland the Australian National Music Market has been considerably expanded, with more concerts and artists from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Mexico. They include 29 artists from the Northern Territory–including terrific Indigenous bands. There are Mexican DJs. And there’ll be international presenters and representatives from Germany, US, UK and Asia.

Moving on…

Terracini is happy to be moving on from QFM, “it’s time for someone else to do it.” He thinks the festival is in very good shape. It has raised $4.1m of its budget itself, “It’s grown and people have confidence in it. It’s been adventurous–Tristan is the most conservative thing we’ve done–and the people of Queensland have come on the journey. QFM will continue to be biennial and in the other years I’ll be able to focus on theatre and dance in the Brisbane Festival.”

“In an age where everyone’s got a laptop what are the implications for the computer as musical instrument?”, asks the 2005 Australian Computer Music Conference. To find out, be there, listening, talking and workshopping.

The conference will be held July 12-14 in Brisbane as part of the Queensland Festival of Music with 9 concerts over 3 days featuring Garth Paine (see page 12), Gordon Munro, Donna Hewitt, Jeremy Yuille, Robin Fox and Cat Hope. Works commissioned for Queensland new music ensembles Topology and Elision can also be heard. The concerts will incorporate multi-speaker surround sound playback systems, so audiences are in for a substantial aural treat.

Among the sounds will be words of wisdom and vision in papers delivered by, among others, Ross Bencina, the renowned audio software innovator and AudioMulch creator, and Katharine Neil, a leading game sound designer and programmer for Atari. Conference topics include artificial life, software development, instrument building, performance practices and psychoacoustics.

Bencina graduated as a specialist in electroacoustic music composition and moved on to sound design, performance, and software development. In 2002 with composers Steve Adam and Tim Kreger he formed Simulus, an improvising electroacoustic ensemble. He is the creator of AudioMulch Interactive Music Studio, software for music composition and performance (www.audiomulch.com). Bencina is currently a visiting researcher at the Music Technology Group, Audiovisual Institute, University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.

Katharine Neil has been game sound designer and programmer at Atari Melbourne House since 1998, creating the sound for 7 published game titles on various platforms while producing audio-based ‘demos’ for game console hardware in her spare time. Neil has written on the subject of censorship for RealTime.

For hands-on pleasures, Friday July 15 is dedicated to workshops hosted by leading computer music practitioners.

ACMC05 will be hosted at QUT’s Creative Industries Precinct, Kelvin Grove, with some off-site concerts at White House Art Space.

The work of leading Australian theatre director Wesley Enoch is focused on the Australian Aboriginal culture of which he is a part. His productions range from The Sunshine Club and The Sapphires, rousing entertainments with a socially critical edge, to the sad and angry intensities of Black Medea (see review) and The 7 Stages of Grieving, created with performer Deborah Mailman. Significantly, these creations are Enoch’s own–as writer or co-writer as well as director. The 7 Stages of Grieving and his production of Jane Harrison’s Stolen have played to acclaim around the world

I met with Enoch during the recent Sydney run of his Black Medea at Belvoir Street. Originally staged as part of the Sydney Theatre Company’s 2000 Blueprints season, it has been re-worked for Melbourne’s Malthouse, premiering in Sydney before opening in Melbourne in May.

I like writing with groups of actors. I was talking to Wayne Blair about this, about relationships–that’s where the best work comes from. It’s not about the lone writer working in isolation. And now the actors can argue with me to get the best results in the writing–at the beginning they were much more respectful of the text. They tell me what’s not working and we shift things around.

I’m not a great improviser. I prefer to talk through some ideas, get some inspiration, draft some stuff up and then hear it in the actors’ mouths. Improvising is too unstructured for me.

It interests me that a number of key works have emerged from writers and sometimes directors working with performers, shaping their words with them, especially for solo shows–Angela Chaplin and Robyn Archer with Ningali Lawford, Louis Nowra with David Page, Neil Armfield and Reg Cribb with Gulpilil, Scott Rankin with Leah Purcell.

The issue of the authentic voice is very interesting, especially now in verbatim theatre which is playing everywhere, and as we look for the true representation of something as opposed to believing in a fictitious world. While news and current affairs have become so editorialised, creative types are being drawn to the issue of authenticity as a way of connecting to an audience. Is it our response to reality TV?

It was a starting point. My body of work involves a fascination with women, so the idea of a woman who goes against her maternal urges and can kill a child attracted me. And she’s from another culture. It was something that came up when I worked with Simon Philips on the MTC production of The Tempest with Caliban and Ariel as Aboriginal inhabitants of the island. It’s a way to comment without having to do a capital P political thing–’we poor blackfellas.’ And it goes back to when I was working at Contact Youth Theatre 15 years ago. We did a version of Romeo and Juliet with Aboriginal kids. The basic story can be assumed; the audience know enough about it so that you can twist it and look at form, at issues, parallels…

It’s over-used, but the concept of story-telling theatre is fascinating for me. An older actor approached me and said “Your actors are storytellers”, as if that was somehow different from acting. It’s interesting how people sense storytelling as a dropping of pretence, of the layering on of character.

In Black Medea, your chorus [Justine Saunders] provides the direct storytelling. My favourite moment is when she quietly gives voice to the silent Medea’s anticipation of death.

That’s part of the narrator’s framing of the story where she often says things like, “He’s thinking…” or “You think she’s thinking such and such, but…”, as if she’s inside their heads. So at the end she can say “When my time comes…” for Medea. The work is about the integration of all the artforms–acting, story-telling, the sound and the visuals. This will sound awful: the work is not actor-based. Of course it is, but the other elements are just as important, they’re more than background–they come into the foreground. The story-telling can happen through lights and set as well.

It’s about how working relationships have developed over time with particular actors, for example Deborah Mailman, Rachael Maza, Margaret Harvey, Wayne Blair, Ursula Yovich and Luke Carroll. We feed off each other a lot. For me The Sapphires was a coming together of all these people, and Matt Scott, the lighting designer, and Richard Roberts, the designer. Things start to mature in a different way. This year there are new relationships: it’s my first show with Aaron Pedersen and with the sound designer Jethro Woodward, and my second time this year with the designer, Christina Smith. Rachel Burke, who did the lighting on the original Black Medea, has also done it this time. Our discussions are great–it’s a matter of not pigeon-holing our roles too early in the process. Stage manager Tiffany Noack’s role is a creative one for me: I think this is about our 7th show together. Doing Conversations with the Dead with Wayne Blair came from discussions where he said he wanted to challenge himself, and it grew from there.

The question, I guess, is what kind of director am I too. I work almost exclusively on new work and I’m not a great fan of the dramaturg. The dramaturg is this country’s way of buying more time by getting another brain in that wouldn’t be needed if you had 8 weeks rehearsal time, or the writer and director could work together on the script for 2 years. Directing for me is a form of writing: you watch, you edit, you make changes and there’s a point where I’m working with a writer when I treat them like they’re dead. I say, “You can make it work on the page all you like, but unless I make it work here on the stage…” My own writing is a natural extension of my relationship with the work on the floor. I’m more of a director than a writer. It’s a matter of time too, most plays take at least a couple of years to write.

In an interview in the Sydney Morning Herald you spoke about not having a cultural adviser on Black Medea.

I’ve worked with cultural advisers before but in this show the performers are much more empowered, and there are multiple generations on stage. So we’ll talk. Perhaps it’s a form of arrogance on my part: I know the story I want to tell and I don’t want someone telling me I can’t say it. This goes back to a conference where we were discussing something like domestic violence and I was told it was women’s business and I couldn’t talk about it and I shut up and sat down. It’s a matter of finding the right adviser; the wrong person will toe the line, they’ll be scared of where you can go. They want to stay in the celebratory as opposed the critical mode. To be an artist you have to go into the critical mode.

How important is film culture to Indigenous art? A small group of filmmakers is really making a mark.

The Australia Council’s gotten into a rut about how it supports what I would call contemporary Indigenous work. It’s a multi-artform board with limited funds that has to work right across the whole nation. But the Australian Film Commission has found a way of saying, we’re going to do these initiatives and they’re exclusive. And you have to have done this and this and this to qualify, so that you get really interesting people ‘filtering up’, thanks to Wal Saunders and now Sally Riley [previous and current directors of the AFC Indigenous Film Unit], who’s from a theatre background. The best writers and other talents have been drawn to film and television, especially writers. Meanwhile we’re still caught in the whole ‘genre’ of the first-time writer in Indigenous theatre. The first-time writer is everywhere. The second-time, third-time writer is so rare and someone who has written 5 or 6 plays is rarer.

If a dance company like Chunky Move thinks about its work in terms of dance productions, film, installations, interactivity, then perhaps Indigenous performing arts companies too need to broaden their brief–perhaps take on film projects, given that’s where directors, writers and producers are going.

There’s some really interesting, talented artists around but there is not a great volume of talent. And there’s a lack of confidence among Indigenous artists.

Expectations are so high for a small population of artists that you can get burnt. And you need to be able to take criticism and not as an affront, which stops artists from growing. They are so willing to hit the racism button. Peers might want to engage in discussion about the quality of a performance, but some Aboriginal artists will say “they’re white, they don’t understand.” They evade criticism. We’re still in that phase where we’re supposed to look after each other, be soft and gentle…In fact we can be a lot more robust and engaging.

I don’t see enough of it. In the Melbourne Comedy Festival it involved different ways of telling. It’s cheap: a string of 5-6 performers for an hour, with Lou Bennett doing Captain Cook on trial! After the heaviness of Stolen and Conversations… there has been a bit of a switch to let’s get some fun stuff out there, so you get The Sapphires. Bitin’ Back, the farce I’m directing next for Kooemba Jdarra is adapted from her book by Vivian Cleven. It’s about a woman whose footballer son starts wearing a dress: eventually we find out it’s about him getting in touch with his feminine side. It’s set in a small regional town, so what he does has to be hidden and then what does it mean?…It’s a farce but it makes interesting observations about people in small towns.

It’s part of a charm mechanism as well, what I call ‘the smiley blackfella’–’I’ll charm you into liking me…into giving me what I want…I’ll beguile you with stories.’ It’s an empowering position.

And the performers can gently mock their white audience…Ningali, Purcell, Gulpilil…

In something like The Sapphires, it’s a bit cheesy to say, but there’s a sense of the more heartache you have, the louder the laughter. It’s interesting that the Stolen Generations narrative has subsided after becoming the dominant one. Not everyone doesn’t know where their family comes from. I let go the original production of Stolen 3 years ago, Rachael Maza took it over, and now Wayne Blair is doing it for STC.

There is less innovation and less engaging in debate about it in Aboriginal theatre, and maybe that’s because overall there’s less contemporary performance than there used to be. It’s shrinking. The supply-demand rhetoric that came through from the Australia Council a few years back has meant that instead of thinking of the key theatre companies as the keepers of technique, practice and history, they’ve become more and more geared, in an awful way, to audience development–instead of thinking that audiences need to be kept hungry for what’s coming next. Michael Kantor is working on what’s coming next at Malthouse. I saw The Ham Funeral with a mix of school kids, who I thought might not get it, and older people, but there was something really going on between all of them and the performance.

Many Indigenous artists seem to work across forms and media. In film Ivan Sen will write, direct and compose; Wayne Blair acts in theatre and directs film; Warwick Thorton is a cinematographer, now he directs and he provides the imagery for the Marrugeku Company’s live performances.

That’s where Tracey Moffat is fabulous. I saw her retrospective: the medium doesn’t stop her. She’ll go wherever she wants, wherever the story takes her.

Is that what’s innovative about Indigenous art? A fluidity between forms? You have a vision that’s your own but, as you’ve described it, you work very integratively.

Yes, there’s a real energy around it. But it’s about purpose first, not the form or the medium. Purpose is the driving thing…it might mean one day wanting to make a film, or writing poetry.

Writer-director Wesley Enoch’s Black Medea is an uncompromising account of tensions between urban and traditional Indigenous cultures, represented by a woman caught between the two. This Medea lives on the land with her clan, falls in love with an Aboriginal man, Jason, who works for a mining corporation, and leaves her traditional life behind. Jason, haunted by his father’s failures and terrified of his own, soon wants to banish Medea to clan life, but not their son. Meanwhile an older woman from the clan arrives and demands Medea return to her cultural roots. Medea’s thwarted ambition, the loss of her husband’s love and the threat of being forced into a cultural abyss yield the inexorable logic of psychosis that drives her to murder her loved son rather than surrender him to the violent Jason.

As ever the grafting of contemporary fable onto mythology-cum-classic drama is a tricky business, especially given the very different cultures of origin. There are times in Black Medea when it works, the resonance between these disparate worlds pulses deeply; at other times the connection feels slight, or facile–Jason, in a miner’s helmet, as the raper of the land. Then there’s the matter of tone. Given the mythological foundation of the play, Enoch boldly eschews the characteristically engaging naturalism of many Indigenous productions for something almost operatic. This means that for Margaret Harvey (Medea) and Aaron Pedersen (Jason) much of the text is delivered white hot: states of being are immediately entered, the words intoned or belted out, bodies vibrate with frustration and anger. Harvey sustains this admirably. Pedersen (a fine, intimate screen actor) wavers, though when he hits his note his Jason is aptly both pathetic and frightening.

In counterpoint, the old woman (Justine Saunders) speaks quietly, conversationally, insistently arguing her case for Medea’s return, but also addressing the audience directly. She is the chorus, providing narration, speaking on behalf of a society and, at times, eerily voicing Medea’s thoughts when the distraught woman is beyond words.

The action is tautly choreographed and each scene framed as an image: in fact, the show opens impressively with a series of quick-fire still images sketching out the tragedy that will ensue–a potent, wordless chorus. Compounding the power of bodily images throughout the work is the sheer beauty of Christina Smith’s set as Rachel Burke’s lighting transforms it from enveloping cave to over-arching night sky and distant spiritual space. Inspired by Dorothy Napangardi’s painting Salt on Mina Mina, the set’s apparently metallic surface is patterned and punctured with holes through which light glows or radiates suggesting the otherworld of myth.

Jethro Woodward’s sound score works evocatively in its quieter moments, it too producing a sense of ominous otherness, but its heavier underlinings of the play’s climaxes sometimes pushed the production perilously close to melodrama, denying the requisite sense of interiority and consequence.

Reactions to Black Medea were extreme. The set and its deployment were uniformly admired, while the boldness of the play’s conception was debated, and the operatic inflection of the work seen as out of kilter with Indigenous theatre (including the director’s own)–Enoch’s version of Conversations with the Dead certainly unleashed intense pain and anger, but balanced outburst with introspection. When the fundamental premise of playing out a Greek myth with an Australian Aboriginal story is already a hard call, and when that tension is duplicated in big acting versus the chorus’ intimate naturalism, a subtle stage design and an overwhelming soundscore, not all of your audience is going take the trip to catharsis with you. For me there was much that was exciting and memorable about Black Medea, passages of fine writing that rose above the less inspired, striking imagery that fused body, set and wonderful lighting, and acting that, if variable, reached moments of wrenching intensity.

Black Medea, writer-director Wesley Enoch, performers Margaret Harvey, Aaron Pedersen, Justine Saunders, Clive Cavanagh, Kyole Dungay; set Christina Smith, lighting Rachel Burke, composer Jethro Woodward; Malthouse at Company B, Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, April 13-May 8

Roland Goll is a man with a mission. As Director of the Goethe-Institut Sydney he has eagerly explored the Australian cultural landscape, scheduled numerous exhibitions, performances, forums and masterclasses, created partnerships, fostered artist exchanges and initiated the successful Festival of German Films, now in its fourth year. Nearing the end of his term as director, Goll reflected on his almost 6 years in Australia in a discussion with me at the Institut. His enthusiam, energy and insights, peppered with generous good humour, are tempered with some frustration, a sense perhaps that he could have achieved more during his tenure. The reasons for this are complex and not a little to do with Australian attitudes to art, and to Germany.

Even after its 30 years in Australia, says Goll, the Institut is still often misunderstood as being either a marketer of German art or a funding body for Australian artists or organisations. He is emphatic that “ours is not a mission, like a coloniser, to export a Goethe-Institut vision. The first approach for the Goethe-Institut is to look at the framework of art production in a country, and the levels of operation and development in the different artforms. We have some comparative ideas in terms of what’s happening in Europe, although it’s very difficult to talk about standards. Through discussion we hope to develop ideas in Australia about how the circumstances for the arts can be improved.

“It embarassed me on arriving here that we were only being approached as a kind of sponsor. We don’t have huge budgets. We have different resources, other tools we can use, like sending people to Germany [on language-learning and familiarisation trips]. But the centre-piece of our work here is negotiating partnerships and it can be very hard work.”

Goll explains, for example, that the Goethe-Institut has sent Australian arts festival and theatre company artistic directors to Germany, “just to let them know what a broad range of theatre styles there are in German speaking countries.” There has however been little in the way of outcomes, although he acknowledges the efforts of Sydney Festival Artistic Director Brett Sheehy. This has not been an attempt by Goll to sell German work to Australia but part of his vision to present an expanded vision of what is possible in theatre, a subject we return to later in a discussion on dramaturgy. Once Australians have seen the range of German theatre, he says, then the discussion about partnerships is much easier.

German-Australian theatre

He recalls, “I arrived in Sydney at the time that Benedict Andrews was commencing his series of productions of German plays at the Sydney Theatre Company. It was the beginning of close cooperation over some years with Stephen Armstrong [then Associate Director at the STC] and together we developed a program of rehearsed readings of new German plays, and later, through Tony MacGregor at the ABC, produced some of them on radio. Later this year we have readings of plays by Falk Richter, probably at the STC in the Blueprints Literary program run by Nick Marchand, and then on the ABC.”

The presentation of a handful of German plays on the Australian stage that still looks to the UK for its imports has been a breakthrough if occasional rather than continuous. “My experience,” says Goll, “is that if something is happening in the UK, it’s much easier to get it to Australia. The Royal Court Theatre focus on German playwrights doubtless assisted Benedict Andrews’ project. Marius von Mayenburg’s Fireface was an STC program choice, but then I proposed other playwrights like Igor Bauersima (norway.today) or Roland Schimmerpfenig (Arabian Nights) for rehearsed readings. We invited David Gieselmann here for a very sophisticated production of his Mr Kolpert by Benedict. We translated several of these new plays to English.”

It’s interesting that the directors whose work Goll has most admired in Australia, Barrie Kosky (for his Oedipus) and Andrews (for his STC years), both direct from time to time in Germany. The Goethe-Institut has supported Chris Bendall, Artistic Director of Melbourne’s Theatre@Risk, who has included German plays in his programs. Goll explains, “He did the language course in Germany and then joined the International Forum of Theatre Pratitioners at Theatertreffen 2004 in Berlin, for which you have to speak pretty fluent German. He’s now doing another Roland Schimmelpfennig production in Melbourne (The Woman Before) after doing his Arabian Nights in 2004 (RT60, p39).

Although Goll also thought Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen another theatre highlight, he was less impressed with the recent showing of Democracy: “Some of the figures are still living, and it’s strange, because there is no similarity to them on stage. The play serves an educational purpose, for example about East German spying, but the role of Brandt is not convincing. He was pretty charismatic and very good with rhetoric but in this play his language is limited and repetitive. Australian theatre needs to grow away from this kind of English conversation piece.”

Comparison & cooperation

Goll finds the constant focus on developing Australian playwrights wearying and the Australian perception of world literature limited. “There are so many good plays from around the world. The approach to theatre here is often antique: a void, without dramaturgs. Companies don’t really work the text, don’t invent a new story from it, develop a new subtext; they don’t explore the relationship between the play and our society. This common dramaturgical work is just not happening. In the 80s in Germany very good production teams emerged with directors, designers and dramaturgs, and focused together on the play, not fearing to edit the text. If a play here is 157 pages, then it is 157 pages on stage–I couldn’t believe it. What I’ve been missing here is theatre used as a tool to explore society.”

Goll admits that he knows the circumstance for these limitations: “the low level of public funding and the search for sponsors. These have a huge influence on productions, but aesthetically you can still explore different ways of working, different styles, but there are not enough directors who meet the challenge. All you can do is ask politicians for more money for the theatre and foster directors who have vision. Generally the artistic conditions for development towards international standards are pretty good with so many gifted actors and designers in Australia.”

Among the other “deficits” (as he calls them) in Australian theatre that Goll elaborates on are: the delegation of challenging productions to the secondary programs of large companies; “young directors losing focus, doing what they like”; and the loss of Bogdan Koca’s Sydney Art Theatre which provided “a lot more inventive work than many big productions.” He has also been horrified by the casual attitude towards the translation of plays, where the adaptor of the work does not speak the language in which the play was written! At the 2005 Australian National Playwrights’ Conference (ANPC), courtesy of the Goethe-Institut, playwright-director Roland Schimmelpfennig will present a reading of his play Before/After in English and participate in a discussion dealing with the challenges of “Translation, Transliteration and Adaption” (Newcastle, June 29, www.anpc.org.au).

Geoffrey Milne in Theatre Australia Unlimited (Rodopi, Amsterdam-New York 2004) has detailed the diminution of Australian theatre over recent decades, and Julian Meyrick has described the erasure of the theatrical middleground in Trapped by the Past (Platform Paper No 3, Currency Press, 2004). Roland Goll argues that, “You create a theatre culture only where there’s a lot of work and competition. The flagships can’t do that.” He is loathe to compare Sydney and Berlin, but does Sydney and Munich as capitals of NSW and Bavaria. The latter has a population of 1.5 million, less than half of Sydney’s, but has “a state theatre, a music theatre, the ballet, 4 or 5 other theatre stages and 15 supported small theatres. This generates a lot of competition, a lot of employment, work on new theatre styles and developing aesthetics. Munich is smaller than Sydney but the differences are unbelievable.” And this despite cuts in arts funding in Germany since reunification.

One of Goll’s contributions towards developing an expanded vision of theatre in Australia has emerged from his discussions with the ANPC, and again it’s based on partnership and cultural exchange. He explains, “I’ve talked with the ANPC about creating relationships between theatres in Germany and Australia through dramaturgs. But this will not be with the Schaubuehne as the point of reference, because it is not the equivalent of a state theatre company here. What you have to look for is a kind of well-run city theatre in Frankfurt, Cologne or Munich, and start creating awareness of the different production systems involving dramaturgs. This is what we will do next year, send an Australian to Germany on a language course and a work visit at a theatre and, vice versa, send a German dramaturg to Australia to work on a production over a long period, using the Australian National Playwrights Conference as a focal point for their visit.” Schimmelpfennig’s visit signals a starting point.

Visual connections

The Goethe-Institut’s visual art program includes its own projects, like ArtconneXions, German artist tours and masterclasses, and involvement in a range of exhibitions and major events like the Sydney Biennale. Through the work of 9 of its centres in Australia, Asia and New Zealand, 18 individual artists and subsidised and commercial galleries, the Goethe-Institut has created ArtconneXions, a major regional photomedia event. ArtconneXions, bringing together Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam in an exhibition later this year at ACP and including Australian artists Leah King-Smith (see p38) and Shaun Gladwell.

The Goethe-Institut has assisted Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art in inviting an artist network in Germany (outside public funding) to be involved in a forthcoming show Situation: Collaborations, collectives & artist networks from Sydney, Singapore and Berlin (June 6-Aug 21), curated by Russell Storer.

Exhibitions by German artists are toured on the participation and exchange model. Goll explains that their works are shown, new works made here and talks and masterclasses held. “Günther Uecker produced a work for Sculpture by the Sea (2002), delivered lectures and ran master-classes, and the same will happen with Wolfgang Laib who will be shown at AGNSW in August and Peter Pommerer who has been invited to be Artist-in-Residence at the College of Fine Arts, to create a new work and to give a presentation at the Sydney Festival of Drawing in July.

“Herlinde Koelbl is a very politically engaged photographer who did a long term study of our Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, other politicians and businessmen over 8 years. She did interviews, photographed the men and made videos, tracking their development, from tennis shoes to black tie in the case of Fischer. At Sydney College of the Arts she conducted a master class, came back after a year and student works were presented with hers in a show about multiculturalism and immigration (me & you–them & us, SCA Gallery [2002]). Some of the SCA students objected to having to be politically engaged. And we displayed her work Writers’ Portraits–At home with writing at the STC during the Sydney Writers Festival 2002. There was a floor talk with Herlinde and Andrea Stretton about all the famous German, Austrian and Swiss writers she interviewed and photographed. Our main focus is to create contexts with universities and colleges, who are very willing to participate, to give students the chance to have a more international view.”

Another positive dimension to the visual arts exchange has been the contribution of Margaret Hamilton, who until recently worked for the Australia Council from the Australian Embassy office in Berlin where the Council has been committed to a significant long term cultural program. Goll says that the outcome is “a strong visual arts and literature connection between the 2 countries, a great network with big projects. But you cannot manage to continue this without an Australian representative in Germany.”

In music, as with visual art, the Institut offers masterclasses when German musicians tour Australia, sometimes in collaboration with Musica Viva. As well, Goll says, “We’ve presented a French-German hip-hop collaboration, jazz groups and sound artists at Electrofringe. We are involved in the German Operatic Award (provided by the Australian Opera Foundation) giving Australian opera singers the chance to work for one year with the Opera in Cologne and offering a language course in Germany in one of the Goethe-Instituts.”

Dancing partners

As with theatre, dance has also offered challenges in establishing partnerships. “The Goethe-Institut was involved in the Pina Bausch visit before the Olympics, but normally it’s a matter of smaller projects. I’m very happy indeed to see the establishment of Critical Path to develop NSW choreographers and dancers in an international perspective.” Critical Path is a distinctive NSW government project that includes excellent workshop space in Drill Hall at Rushcutters Bay, financial support for short-term project development, and visiting international choreographers and others running classes. Goll says that the Institut has assisted with the 5 day visit of leading German choreographer Antje Pfundtner in August. Her workshop is on the use of voice and music in dance. “Later, we’d like to have her here over a longer period with more dancers and to produce a work for the public.” Goll says that he is more optimistic about Critical Path than the partnerships attempted with large dance companies, and he’s impressed with director Sophie Travers’ knowledge of European dance.

Radio on

Goll declares, “Radio is still a very important medium that should be fostered.” The Goethe-Institut has been engaged with the medium in a number of ways. As well as the broadcast of new German plays in English there has been a collaboration with the National Archives and the ABC’s Radio Eye, on “a topic we pick up once in a while–Germans who migrated to Australia and did some remarkable things. The subject of the radio play was Wolf Klaphake, a German scientist who was kept in detention camps in the 40s for years. There was also an exhibition on Egon Erwin Kisch at the State Library and we hope there will be a radio play about him.” A Czech-born, German-Jewish journalist and communist, Kisch came to Australia to speak against fascism in 1934, was incarcerated and deported.

Australians to Germany

I ask Goll about the scholarships that take Australian artists to Germany. He explains, “We have scholarships for artists to learn German, to dig a bit deeper into the German art scene instead of speaking English and not really making enough contact. The language courses start in Australia followed by a 4 or 8 week immersive course in Germany, and then, ideally, we offer the artist the opportunity to join a seminar, for example for the theatre festival–Theatertreffen–in Berlin or the Berlin Film Festival. We do not have huge resources but each year we send 10-20 people. They enjoy it very much. We are offering several programs : a “Visiting Program to Germany” (partly with the German Embassy) and “Key Positions in the Arts”–for people with a special professional interest in Germany. In the last couple of years we invited representatives from different areas: Karilyn Brown, Roger Wilkins, Brett Sheehy, Robyn Nevin, Benedict Andrews, Chris Bendall, Miriam Gordon-Stuart, Kevin Fewster and Scott Millwood. I would like to mention in this context that this year Simone Young received the Goethe-Medal, an official decoration of the Federal Republic of Germany, for her extraordinary engagement in German-Australian relationships.

Distances

I ask Goll if he thinks that the cultural distance between Australia and Germany is diminishing. He points to 2 problems: Australian lack of interest in Germany, and the ever-present problem of distance. “Even with the visit of a German politician like Joschka Fischer, who was here last February, or our President Johannes Rau a couple of years ago, nothing happened. The media could have picked it up in terms of our special bilateral relationships, but nothing. Germany is not a main topic in Australian self-understanding and consciousness. When it looks to Europe it’s the UK and, less so, France. It rarely goes beyond Hitler and reunification. My main aim has been to create a relationship: you can get a lot if you’ve got more contact with German artists.” And then there’s distance: “The big challenge is distance: it’s a big topic for me. It’s the reason why it is pretty difficult to establish more intense collaborative relations because Australia is so geographically far away from Germany.”

Despite these limitations, Goll feels his period here–”just the right amount of time”–has been “very motivating.” It is clear that he is very pleased with the Festival of German Films, a labour intensive project that has required much of him and his assistant Claudia Kuehn in a very competitive field. Goll feels that film has a major role to play in fostering intercultural understanding. For the fourth festival, he says, “there was great box office, a 35% bigger audience and the media were very responsive. Downfall [the film about Hitler’s last days] helped but 4 or 5 other movies also sold out. Film is the most important way to create an expanded awareness, and the way that German filmmakers are working allows people to gain insight into our culture. Often these are not big budget pictures.” Goll reassures me that the festival will continue after his departure and will hopefully include Adelaide as well as Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra.

Goll is looking forward to his new post in 2006 as director of the Goethe-Institut regional office in London (which includes the co-ordination of 11 institutes in North-West Europe from Brussels to Helsinki) and “to its density of cultural scenes and subcultures.” There is art in Australia that he appreciates very much, there have been successful partnerships, and as a place “Sydney has been like paradise after my postings to Jakarta, Amsterdam and Munich.” His son did his HSC here and is now at university, and Goll would like to return here for some time when he retires. Roland Goll’s tenure here will be fondly remembered by many artists, not a few of whom would readily concur with his opinions on the limits of the Australian vision of art and cultural interaction. His practical contributions, like the creation of the Festival of German Films, his push for dramaturgical connections between Australian and German theatre, and the partnerships in dance and in the visual arts are particularly relevant and truly welcome. It is to be hoped that his successor here has the same vision and drive.

Garth Paine is a composer, sound designer and installation artist. He has worked in dance and theatre and his immersive sound and video installations have inhabited galleries, gardens and museums. Behind all of Paine’s work is a desire to explore human behaviour within defined environments and a relentless pursuit of new technologies to implement his vision. Currently working as a Senior Lecturer in Music Technology at the University of Western Sydney, seconded to the MARCS Auditory Research Labs, I caught up with Paine between meetings with his PhD students.

Paine began his career as a flautist with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. Realising that playing Beethoven was not his true calling he undertook a sound engineering traineeship at the ABC. While working as a sound engineer in a commercial studio, he began to write his own music which led to several years as a composer for Tasmanian companies such as Zootango and Terrapin Puppet Theatre. “That’s where the technology really started coming into the composing and production side. Theatre companies never have any money and as a composer you want to make a rich score so you need computers and samplers.” However it was while working with the London-based dance company Second Stride that he really started to engage with ideas of interactivity.

“Second Stride have a workshop every year called Fast & Dirty where they get people they are interested in working with and spend a couple of weeks doing quick little exercises to test things out. For a Fast & Dirty experiment I went to a guy who did keyboard repairs in London and asked him to take the brain out of the keyboard, stick it in a box and attach terminals so that I could plug floorpads into it–security triggers and light beams. I had 20 triggers that sent out a midi note whenever it was turned on, replacing the keys on the keyboard, and we made a little interactive dance piece with it.”

Moving to Melbourne, Paine continued to develop his ideas working in theatre, and by 1996 he’d created his first large scale interactive installation, Moments of a Quiet Mind, at Linden Gallery. “I’ve always had an interest in music and sound as an exploration and communication of our environment, and our relationship to it–physical, emotional and spiritual I guess. So Moments of a Quiet Mind was the first of a series of interactive environment pieces [in which] movement behaviour patterns generated the quality of the environment. I was starting to ask questions about how you perceive your environment, how your behaviour conditions your environment and how the environment conditions your behaviour… I made CDs with 99 tracks of audio ranging from meditative–the space in stasis–through to intense, chaotic sound and the length got shorter as the intensity increased.” Building an interactive system, the work collaged up to 6 sound elements at a time accompanied by 5 video projections working on similar parameters to create an immersive environment. “[It] was interesting because it was composing lists of potentials rather than structures and form. The actual composition of the polyphony occurred realtime.”

Paine continued these investigations in his next installation Ghost in the Machine (1997) in collaboration with Rebecca Young, however in this the interactive response was inverted. “The space treated any human presence as an irritant. It worked through these stages of intensity in an effort to rid itself of the people in it. The more energy you put in the calmer it got, so by running around continuously in the space you could send it back to this single cell amoeba and it would be really tranquil while you were going crazy. I always put comment books outside these pieces and I got long diatribes about how I didn’t understand what interactivity was. People expected that their instruction to the work would dictate the outcome rather than the work dictating their behaviour within it. It forced people to make those decisions about what kind of environment they wanted to inhabit.”

Through his installation practice Paine was approached to create work for the then newly constructed Crown Casino. While he declined the offer, it did make him aware of other potential avenues for this work, and so by approaching exhibition designers he began to create immersive environments for clients such as the Immigration Museum, the Australian Jewish Museum and the Museum of Victoria.

“The first major project was the Eureka Stockade Centre at Ballarat. I think all my experience in theatre and dance (I’d been working at that stage with Company in Space developing interactive sound scores with them) came into play. I was wanting to influence these exhibition designers to think about these museum experiences as immersive, creating a sense of being in the history–an active engagement in the history rather than the passive.”

Working in the museum sector allowed Paine to realise large scale installations with relatively permanent outcomes. “The [work in the] Museum of Victoria has 70 loud speakers and 36 channels of computer driven spatialisation. We have speakers through the floor, through the roof, 3 foot off the ground, 7 foot off the ground–it’s fantastic. It was a business decision to do this work where the funds were available to realise it at a high level. I’ve always been bloody minded about my creative output so I’ve pushed those jobs to be about what I want them to be–fulfilling and interesting, [utilising] new technology that nobody has used in Australia before.”

Paine’s interest in discovering new technologies and repurposing them is very much at the heart of his practice. For the Immigration Museum he had to find a company to import a demo model of the Richmond Audio Box to enable the desired multichannel spatialisation. For his Reeds installation in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens created for the 2000 Melbourne International Arts Festival, he was attempting to create custom weather stations to relay data to the reed pod sound sculptures floating in the pond and was told by several major companies that it was technically impossible. Eventually he found someone to custom build the technology, Paine himself adapted an in-ear monitoring system and then invited the original companies to see it working.

“I believe the arts drive a lot of these [technological] developments because somebody has got to be out there making the vision. Industry is often driven by the fact that they can now put all this on this little chip, but what are they going to do with it? They have a whole team thinking up applications but it’s driving it from the technology rather than need.”

Paine was recently invited to a 2 day workshop on gesture and interactivity at the National Innovation Centre (Technology Park, Sydney) in which the tensions and potentials of collaborating with science based research was made very clear. “In the sciences they often have very heavy constraints. An example was some video tracking technology for perfecting golf swings. The technology is really fantastic but if the person steps a foot to the left it doesn’t work any more. I was saying this is all terrific but let’s start applying it to dance choreography. Let’s remove the constraints and evolve the technology so we can deal with this stuff. The arts can push these technologies forward. Industry often fails to see the benefit of that as they want to package something they can sell. But there are a lot of good illustrations of where companies have been aware of that–Interval Research in the States and other things that Microsoft have bought up over the years–because they could see these hotspots of technology development. All of that is being driven by artists saying ‘I want to be able to do this’ and engineers and specialists getting together and solving the problem. ARC (Australian Research Council) need to pay more heed to that. We need to have major funding injections…pools of equipment that can be shared and broader resources…a 2 way street [between art and science]. We can make that operate better with ARC support.”

Paine is practicing what he preaches and is currently working with industry on a ‘secret project’ developing a new electronic musical instrument. Other upcoming projects include Metrosonics, an online adaptation of the Reeds installation. People will be able to ‘play’ sonic interpretations of the data from weather stations in Canada, England and Australia. He is also continuing his Endangered Sounds Project premiered at BEAP04 which is looking at the trademarking of sounds. Paine sends volunteers test tubes and asks them to capture the air through which particular sounds have passed and return them to him. The resulting installation includes these along with large vacuum flasks into which trademark sounds are played, illegally–however in the absence of any vibrational medium the result is silence. Paine is not only exploring issues of copyright and the corporatisation of the very the air through which we hear, but also the idea that the sounds we make today live on indefinitely, possibly forming the basis of the silence of the next millennium. (See Sonic Difference Conference Report, and other BEAP online coverage).

Garth Paine is also concentrating on live performance, experimenting with using a Wacom Graphics tablet as a musical interface. His explorations with Michael Atherton on acoustic instruments, including the hurdy-gurdy, are planned to be released by the end of the year. Paine will also be performing at the upcoming Australian Computer Music Conference Conference in July (see page 6) where he may even bring back the flute. Well, it’s a possibility.

Since the mid-90s Australia’s international arts festivals have increasingly become the realm of artists turned festival artistic directors. Barrie Kosky (Adelaide 1996) did it as a striking one-off, but Robyn Archer (Adelaide 1998, 2000; 10 Days on the Island, 2001, 2003, 2005 [advisor]; Melbourne 2002, 2003, 2004) and Lyndon Terracini (Queensland Music Festival, 2001, 2003, 2005), both music theatre virtuosi, have made it a serious career move, and both are significant festival innovators. American stage director Peter Sellars (Adelaide, 2002) struck out, leaving a new model only partly realised, while Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Stephen Page (bearing the weight of the post-Sellars reaction, Adelaide 2004) and opera director Lindy Hulme (Perth International Arts Festival, 2005) have presented standard model festivals where you get diversity but little in the way of thematic depth or formal challenge.

Now another artist is taking on the Melbourne International Arts Festival after Robyn Archer’s 3 year program which gave local artists the highest profile they’ve ever had in that festival and which successively focused on text, body and voice, yielding rare insights into where the arts are moving. Her successor is the straight-talking Kristy Edmunds, a Washington State artist turned curator who established a successful alternative artspace, PICA, in Portland, Oregon in 1995 and subsequently transformed it into the producer, from 2000 on, of an annual 10 day festival of international contemporary performance, dance, experimental film and installation titled TBA, the Time-Based Art Festival. It’s a unique event for regional USA, in fact for the USA all over, and its programming is innovative, provocative and enviable (for the range and character of the programming see www.pica.org). This doesn’t mean that Melbourne will neccesarily get that kind of program from Edmunds; the 2 festivals are very different, and Edmunds will doubtless create her own careful trajectory over her 2 to 3 year tenure (the third year is optional): she conveys a sense of pragmatism as well as vision. The bold shift of PICA’s focus to TBA was not without its critics, and a glance at the Portland press online reveals an uncertainty about the benefits of sharing her with Melbourne while a new director is sought. Edmunds, as founder of PICA and TBA will stay on in an advisory role. She lives in Melbourne with her partner, innovative Australian dancer Ros Warby, and their son.

I met Edmunds recently in Sydney to discuss her work as an artist and festival director. Her 2005 festival program is due to be launched in June, much earlier than usual. But we didn’t discuss that. Who knows, we might get to see some really progressive American work, a rarity here in the cultural wasteland of US movies, pop and TV selected for us.

I tend to be an artist who gravitates towards the idea first and then figuring out how to make it real. It could come from film, theatre, visual art and I’ve tended in the past few years to mostly be making visual works and objects or installations. I have an idea and then I hope I actually don’t have to pursue it–because it’s too hard. [LAUGHS] The great fun of art-making is that there’s a feeling state and then the rest is about labour, hard labour usually and convincing people or collecting a lot of yesses from every other industry that you need support from economically or materially. I start from an idea which in some works has led me to learn a whole different medium…I might feel like making a film, but the idea is best suited to being written on the back of a napkin and stuffed in a shoe box. But at other times it’ll work better as a body of etchings or prints…or photography quite a lot. I sketch photographically.

The images of women wading in water…[photomedia works produced by Edmunds]

I was on sabbatical here from PICA working for a lot of time on 3 bodies of work, one was a set of monoprints which came from photographs, then some photographs that were called Signs of Life. I blew the photographs apart and reassembled them as monoprints. And then I did a video installation as well.

How important is your art practice when you have a life as a curator and a festival director?

I’ve been working as a curator for 15 years. It’s interesting, coming from the US in particular, when you’re curating you’re also advocating for resources to come to bear on other people’s ideas, so you erode your own economy to make work. You have to sit on the grant panels, and you encourage the collecting of other artists’ work–the collectors become the funding base for PICA. So I don’t make work a lot but it’s probably the first thing that drives how I see the world, from the perspective of an artist, but not in conflict with the curatorial work I do. A lot of curators abandon their own work.

Sometimes an idea takes the form of movement, so it’s not that I have a particular affinity for dance. Curatorially I find dance very hard. It’s an incredibly diverse field, and in any of the different mediums or disciplines what I resonate with is the thing that actually manages to really get out an authentic voice. I find it in dance but I have to sit througth a lot of dance where I don’t see it at all. The same is true of theatre, and film and…

I was working there because an alternative space had merged into the museum at a time when the museum had been actively criticised by the community for not seriously addressing contemporary work. I was to take on the live arts with a mandate of drawing on work from around the country. It was really about introducing a contemporary dialogue into the museum at a quite aggressive level.

Yes. It’s one thing to have a program with a loyal following inside a major institution, but if the institution changes its mind, that small thing can go away quite quickly. In certain US cities you’ll have often the high beacons of artistic culture and the self-made, independent arts community. I was interested with PICA in that small to mid-sized animal which was a big gap in the ecology. So PICA was set up so that it would be absolutely dedicated to contemporary forms, ideas, language, emerging and international, as well as national and regional work.

I was 29 years old so it’s not like I would have looked at it through the lens of ‘who do I have to convince.’ It was more that unbridled energy of knowing that there was a gap and a need and that I was in an unusual position of being able to have contact with and good relationships with artists nationally and internationally to an extent at that time and locally for sure. And then giving it a go. And I had an identity as an artist as well which gave me access to a certain kind of collecting base and different people, and had a little track record from curating the museum. It was really more about bringing people along one by one. Audiences were certainly there for it. I remember thinking, well I’ll set it up, that couldn’t take more than a couple of years [LAUGHS]. There’s curiosity, there’s all this interest, there’s capacity, there’s will, it just needs someone to flip the switch to start moving it forward and then I’m sure it can deliver.

Sure. I was filmmaker-in-residence for North-Western Film Festival and also curating the regional film festival and the young people’s film festival. Film less, because there wasn’t as much of a gap: the North-West Media Centre was really doing quite a lot of things. After a number of years I was taking PICA forward with time-based art forms–film, cinema, micro-cinema, performing arts and everything that wasn’t object-oriented–and saying I think a festival format would work really well for this, which allowed us to address cinema better.

When PICA’s annual program changed in 2000 from an annual season to a 10-day condensed event. It was a major structural shift for an organisation. Year-round there were still visual arts, residencies and development opportunities for artists, which we were very involved in. In the US we work quite collaboratively and you start realising you’ve got a lot of responsibility around big projects across the whole country, tours, co-commissioning, co-producing, development periods in different parts of the country–and then coming into PICA for the show–or cultural policy, conferences and discussions so that PICA would be very involved in a lot of the national discussions.

PICA is a presenting organisation as well as helping commission, which isn’t grant giving, but about investing resources, whether human or in-kind, and getting onside with an artist about how they want to make it real. Yes, there’s producing that goes on in that, you’re taking responsibility for the economy of the life of the project, but it’s not done with any artistic input. It’s not like saying ‘I could really sell this show if you collaborated with so-and-so.’ It’s much more about how do you use an institution’s capacity to reach economies and colleagues and audiences in ways that artists often can’t do on their own. You use the nimbleness of the organisation to help the project. So I don’t think of PICA’s role as a producer, but certainly as an instigator, a facilitator.

It’s 10 days and it’s on a much different scale than the Melbourne International Arts Festival. Its absolute, complete focus is on emerging international ideas, again in all the performing arts genres and some cinema and some digital, and a lot around ideas and workshops and teaching and institute behaviour. There are 18 venues. Portland’s not a huge city, and there’s no really huge art centre although there is a performing arts centre, so it’s run from the masonic temples, concert halls, sometimes church facilities and then the major theatrical venues. And we usually convert a warehouse space or something for late night. It’s like PICA has the main programming and its own fringe all programmed in the same bundle.

It’s a European model festival and the US doesn’t tend to do that. There are usually 3 day festivals that focus on jazz, or blues, or events where the primary concern is not usually the arts, or BAM’s Next Wave lasts a couple of months. TBA is a place for artists to gather and increasingly a place where an international community of curators, colleagues and artists gather. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to make it a festival: you’re not going to fly into Portland, Oregon over one weekend in May to see one performance from Japan. We also try to keep the artists performing in the festival in the city as long as we can, so that they have a chance to see one another’s work as well. This was one of the reasons for creating the festival.

There’s lots of them, lots of inclusion in TBA in different contexts. It’s a challenge in a certain way, because you can’t disrupt the independent self-producing mechanism of artists, because it creates a feast and famine moment. At the same time you really want to get behind the work, so it’s all about the appropriateness of that sort of balance. Then there’s selection: is the project ready for an international gaze upon it?

It’s not about drawing on countries, but on artistic talent that you put in a context that you can facilitate to a localised community. The work has ranged from people like Elizabeth Streb, Robert Ashley, Cecil Taylor, Philip Glass and Spalding Gray or artists on a much more emerging level, for example Lone Twin (UK). You don’t know if history will recognise these artists, but in the time period they are mobilising themselves they are making the forms question themselves and they are adding a huge contribution. It’s about identifying the pulse points that are really authentic and the people who are pushing boundaries, and asking how do I build a bridge to a curious public, rather than a complacent public.

Regional arts development here is at an important stage with collaborations between city and regional artists playing a key role. How in your experience should this be handled?

I’m loathe to give advice from another culture. Sometimes regional developments are driven by funding bodies or a sponsor’s interests. The most important thing is that artists initiate the relationships together, and then you have at least half of a chance of it working out well. If artists are mutually interested in one another, they can at least see one another’s work. That kind of detailed long-term relationship is a really important part of regional development and of international development. I see them as very similar. International collaborations are as complex as regional ones. It can’t be led by a carrot, it has to be driven by an organic artistic interest.

Lucy Guerin’s Aether

Writing about dance, perhaps more than other forms of performance, is always an act of translation. In attempting to think about dance, there is often the tendency to characterise it in terms of the thinking with which the writer is most familiar–namely words. But unlike text or orally based modes of performance, movement provides a form of experience which is not reducible to language, though it may be possible to use words to approach this experience at an angle, as it were. But this act of translation always carries with it the risk of losing something in the process, or even adding something which did not exist in the original.

Lucy Guerin’s Aether brings language into the field of dance in a daring way. Halfway through the performance there is an interruption, during which one of the artists moves downstage to deliver a monologue about the work. We are told that the second half of Aether will include dialogue delivered by the performers. The monologue becomes increasingly self-reflexive as the dancer explains how this introduction of language, of dancers speaking, was a point of contention during the rehearsal process. One dancer, we are told, was uncomfortable with the idea of speaking during a dance work. Moreover, she felt that audiences found male dancers speaking more forgivable than female dancers.

All of this only begins to suggest the remarkable density of Aether, its layering of rich and provocative ideas and contradictions within a busy, visually dynamic and formally innovative structure. The monologue, as mentioned, works to split the piece into 2 halves. The first part is more coherent, a sustained attempt to use dance to think through the shapes and outlines of postmodern communication and technology. The performers, heads shaven and clad in billowing shifts of neutral hue, are genderless clones, lacking individuality or identity. Contemporary dance frequently invokes a mechanicist philosophy to present the body as a machine, whether idealised or problematised; Aether offers us bodies as networks, nodes, radiation and flickering signals. These are bodies as frequencies, variable rather than immanent. There is a strong focus on fingers, skittering across keyboards or seeking out an available socket; as electrodes, antenna, spidery points of connection. The overall movement of the dancers appears chaotic rather than unified, but a logic slowly emerges. Relationships between them, when they exist, are fleeting and almost random, as if they are tuning into each other by accident rather than design. What Guerin offers here is an impressive and successful way of imagining the body mediated by technological forms. The glut of visual information presented by the dancers is matched by the overload of sliding images and text in Michaela French’s projected graphics and the electronic soundscape composed by Gerald Mair.

When Aether’s second half commences with the introduction of language, communication takes on a less abstract form as the dancers begin to seek out ways of interacting. We are offered a series of moments, duets for the most part, in which dancers communicate through garbled or squeaky voices, pidgin squeals or incoherent mutterings. Once again, hands often lead movement, but they play a less obvious role: it is interesting to see eyes, or more accurately eyelines, given a more prominent position. Dancers watch each other as they attempt to find a common tongue, or a physical point of connection. This is an observant touch, given the role of the visual in interpersonal communication, but it also takes the audience into less familiar territory, as eye contact between dancers is frequently given second billing to the contact between bodies. An eye that observes becomes a subject, and a subject that speaks defines itself even more closely. In these ways, the second half of Aether charts an original and intriguing course. It’s not nearly as accessible as the former section, nor as noisy and unstructured. The latter part doesn’t appear to be held together by the same set of underlying thematic concerns, and at times it can be difficult to ascertain the intentions behind certain sequences, or the reasons for their juxtaposition. But again, this may just be the part of my brain possessed by the linguistic bias attempting to find a syntactic order in a construction not defined by the lineaments of language.

Dance Card

The pleasures afforded by viewing improvisation are entwined with this same hunt for an ordering logic: why has this choice been made, and how did it spring from the previous motion? How long has it been building towards this, and how can I predict what will come next? The 10 performers in this year’s Dance Card season all gave 8 minute improvisations which varied dramatically in style and quality. Vicky Kapo scrawled chalk upon the floor while delivering a discomforting rumination on a teenage sexual assault of sorts; she eventually took up a microphone to sing a song and asked her audience whether all this was stepping outside the acceptable bounds of dance. Sheridan Lang, in a retro grey and orange cashier’s outfit, gave a more conventional performance centring on the dancer measuring the various fragments of her own body. Lang made excellent use of the space in which she moved, demonstrating a fine sense of the relationship between performer and environment.

Luke Hockley’s contribution was the simplest but most daring of those played out on opening night: a figure attempting to complete a sequence of 3 consecutive backflips, most of his time was spent in suspense, warming up, trying for one or 2 flips and mentally preparing the final motion. The work played upon ideas of failure more common in sports or in street performances.

New Yorker Bob Eisen was touted as the draw card of The Dance Card, but his performance was only a partial success. Crowned by a wild shock of coloured hair, he offered us a shuddering, spasmodic vagrant or street preacher, words spewing as erratically as his movements. Consciously devoid of technical sophistication, it was a kind of art brut of the body, the physical equivalent of automatic writing or speaking in tongues.

Lucy Geurin Company, Aether, choreographer Lucy Guerin; dancers Antony Hamilton, Byron Perry, Kirstie McCracken, Kyle Kremerskothen, Lee Serle; composer Gerald Mair; motion graphics design Michaela French; North Melbourne Town Hall, March 14-27

The Dance Card 2005, performers Bob Eisen, Helena Yuk, Vicky Kapo, Alice Cummins, Kimberley McIntyre, Tim Harvey, Sheridan Lang, Bronwyn Ritchie, Luke Hockley, Sela Kiek; sound designer Mark Lang; lighting Niklas Pajanti; Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 9-20

A corner of the stage is piled with books: old, gilded spines, gold, red and leather binding, a 20th century curiosity on the edge of the present. It looks like the fragment of an old bedroom, fusty with childhood and single beds. A book is extracted, unlikely words spoken representing ‘time.’ Jodie Farrugia dances towards a book, mesmerised. It moves out of her reach, jerking its own jig. For a while I am intrigued by the locomotion of the books, disappointed to unravel their mystery–fishing line.

Three performers successively reach for these books. Clearly they stand for something. They are everywhere, above, below, always out of reach, stepping stones to an abyss. What do books stand for? In my lifetime, they have become archaic: papyrus leaf, cave paintings, scrolls and parchment, remnants of an old world. Yet their outdated status belies the vigour of writing, the dynamic relations that enthral the reader. My bedside novel insinuates itself into my imaginary body. But when I look at these artefacts dangling, they appear alien, inert objects not up to much, as distinct from the 3 performers–Farrugia, Darren Green and Dylan Hodda–who exude vitality. Much of their movement quality is athletic, sometimes dancerly, with an overlay of naturalistic interaction. In Outside aims to convey a relationship between people and these objects.

Despite the bookish theme and the implications of its symbolism, In Outside is brought alive through the energies of its performers. Farrugia works with an acrobatic idiom, adapting its form towards staging human modes of interaction by producing a choreography which combines acrobatics with human meaning. The play between performers elicited gasps of amusement from the audience. There were also moments when Farrugia reverted to a dancerly series of movements, skating across the floor, seeking out spatial coverage. Her performers had signature phrases, occasionally echoed in duet. There was a satisfying middle section involving all 3 performers, intertwining their material, and a striking section against the back wall–3 dimensions squashed into 2, splattered, suspended, slowly disintegrating. Farrugia also used the books in a lateral manner, attached to her joints, in the space between her legs. These imaginings brought them to life in a different way, their pages yawning like piano accordions.

According to the program notes, this is a piece which has evolved over a number of years. In Outside bears the mark of time; it is a polished piece of work. On the question of future polishing, it would be nice to see a greater variety of movement qualities, timbre, speed, energy, breath. Does acrobatic work require a certain kind of approach or attack, or can it be enlisted to produce a wider range of performative solutions? Perhaps it’s an issue of what occurs in the space between movements, in breath prior to action. Similarly, the more dancerly traversals of space had a recognisable locomotive quality, a gliding motion across space on softened knees, with limbs extending from the centre. How is it possible to challenge an idiom so that it can become more than itself?

As a work, In Outside represents challenge, anticipation, aspiration, subjection and overcoming–themes ably animated by athletic imagination and dynamic performance.

In Outside, choreographer Jodie Farrugia; performers Jodie Farrugia, Darren Green, Dylan Hodda; sound score Chris Amor; lighting Mark Gordon, Sam Johnstone; Dancehouse, Melbourne, April 28-May 8

Through darkness a curtain ripples and a dancer lifts the arm of pianist Gabriella Smart. On release, Smart strikes the treble register, and commences with Qin Yi’s Suo, an evocation of water. This opening gesture sets the theme for the evening’s performance: understated, strongly evocative dance accompanied by a versatile piano score featuring contemporary Chinese and Australian composers including the 82 year old Zhu Jian’er and Constantine Koukias and Carl Vine. Chinese Whispers is the first project of Creative Futures, producer Reckless Moments’ program of artistic and cultural collaborations between Australia and China. It’s an evening of dance duets and piano solos, combining contemporary music, dance and film.

The physical and stylistic contrast between the 2 dancers is slowly illuminated by Amanda Phillips and Stephen Dean’s lighting design. Classically trained Hou Honglan is the principal soloist with the National Ballet of China, while Anastasia Humeniuk is a guest artist with the Australian Dance Theatre. Wearing simple black costumes designed by Jason Dallwitz, the dancers alternate a frenzy of arm movements with an energy radiating upwards from the feet, through the back and along the arms. The allure of Phillips’ choreography is the frisson generated by the dancers’ immaculate transitions, extensions, balance and control. This is contrasted with the sheer excitement of hearing the reverberation from Gabriella Smart’s bass combinations.

Each dancer appears immersed in her journey as feet and hips angulate into and through space. Moving between the spotlight and half-darkened edges of the stage they confront each other and move away. Like wayang kulit figures, shadows of the dancers’ elongated bodies appear against a back curtain. Their shapes disappear and return, alternately benign and ominous. We imagine the contours of connection and possibility.

The dance is interspersed with a piano solo and the dancer’s physicality is replicated as Smart engages in her own bodily permutations, caressing and cajoling the piano while playing with her right elbow, left arm tucked under right armpit.

Amanda Phillips’ film When There’s Only provides the segue. Shot in back and white, the film provides a complementary and surreal contrast with the Whispers costumes and lighting design. The film’s set is reminiscent of catacombs. Phillips revisits the once modern world of old-time dancing, contrasting inter-generational memory and dancing styles. The dancing partners circle while solo women line the walls hoping to be invited to dance.

Chinese whispers is a game where participants are arranged in a circle and the first player whispers a message which is passed around the circle. When the final version is revealed threads of the original may remain but exaggeration and distortion make the original story unrecognisable. Similarly, when Honglan floats onto the stage in a final en pointe sequence, she offers the fluency of familiarity while infusing Chinese Whispers with new meanings of rich strangeness.

Reckless Moments, Chinese Whispers; Conservatorium Recital Hall, Hobart, March 15

Innovation. The word is over-used, appropriated, wrung-out. And not all of it is good. Phillipe Vasset’s prophetic Script Generator©®™ (Serpents Tail, London, 2004) is a wickedly droll, satirical novella doomed to its own appropriation by an innovative new software aimed at cost–effectively eliminating writers. Corporations can be innovators. Tyrants too. But let’s not get depressed. What we need is principled innovation. But it’s the unpredictability of innovation’s destination that requires open minds and the braving of risk. Being principled often has to come after the event.

Ethically…

After reading Alain Badiou’s Ethics, An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (trans Peter Hallward, Verso, London/New York 2001), I attempted to summarise the French philosopher and political activist on the subject of innovation. He describes an innovation as an event, a break with the past or an extraordinary modification of what has become ordinary; the unleashing of a truth at the expense of mere opinion and the realm of established interests and differences. The innovator is implicitly or overtly a militant who lives with the consequences of their innovation. Their fidelity to their invention is critical, as is that of those who enjoy, fund, promulgate and write about it. This is innovation as a tall order but worth debating in future editions of RealTime. In the meantime, let’s look at the event.

The event

Innovation is of course about creativity, conscious or unconscious–the not uncommon surprise at finding something new in one’s work, or having someone else take it up. Innovation can be invention, pure and simple. But more often it’s about the application of an invention: what you do with it, with the tools, the hardware or the software, with the transformation or perversion of an established form (which is often the way it’s received–are you fucking with our art? Our truth?). It’s all innovation. Even the copying of innovation as trend, as fashion: it’s innovation’s way of dispersing itself. And innovation, it has been argued, is one way we provide feedback on our capacity to adapt.

RealTime has focused for over a decade on innovators in the arts, seeking them out and urging them on. But we’re cautious about using the word. Our writers use it rarely. Innovation has to discerned. The plaudit has to be earned.

Unusually, however, the word does crop up frequently in this edition of RealTime and the way it is used is revealing. A recurring theme is that it’s not the tools, not the technology, but the artist’s vision that is key.

Vision first

Melbourne Festival Director Kristy Edmunds says of her own creative work that she chooses the medium (film, photomedia, choreography) that will best realise her vision: the idea comes first. Theatre director Wesley Enoch likewise admires Tracey Moffat for seeking out the tools that will best express her vision: “…it’s about purpose first, not the form or the medium…Purpose is the driving thing…it might mean one day wanting to make a film, or writing poetry.” Roy Ananda, a visual artist himself, says of Thomas Buchanan that his work (a dynamic fusion of performance, drawing and video) is “a powerful assertion that artistic innovation lives in the attitude of the artist, not necessarily in the advance of technology.”

Innovating tradition

The relationship between innovation and tradition is another recurring theme. Ananda observes that innovation can engage with the past as much as it breaks with it: “…by colliding [representational drawing] with performance, video and animation, Buchanan manages to work both at the edges of drawing practice and within a traditional idiom.” Gallery director Gitte Weise, when quizzed about her aesthetic and her choice of artists, answered: “I suppose most of the artists I take on are informed by art history. And you can see it in the work, they can transform that into something new.”

Formally…

John Bailey draws attention to an innovative break in the representation of the dancing body in Lucy Guerin’s multimedia dance work, Aether (in collaboration with new media artist Michaela French): “Contemporary dance frequently invokes a mechanicist philosophy to present the body as a machine, whether idealised or problematised; Aether offers us bodies as networks, nodes, radiation and flickering signals. These are bodies as frequencies, variable rather than immanent…What Guerin offers here is an impressive and successful way of imagining the body mediated by technological forms” (p14).

Sometimes formal innovation is admired, but is valued ambivalently when the ideas underlying vision are not evident. In his review of Malthouse’s new program, when commenting on A Journal of the Plague Year (p29), Bailey writes: “There is a sense that the real theme motivating directorial choice is simply the theatre itself as a vehicle for the production of wonder. If this is the case, Plague Year is an unabashed success. However, I find it slightly (though thrillingly) problematic that this production relies on an apocalyptic vision to achieve its effects.”

Hybridity

Current attention to innovation is often on the hybrids emerging from cross-artform and multidisciplinary practices. Sandy Cameron reports that “director Liu Jiayin won the Asian DV prize for…Oxhide (2004) at the 29th Hong Kong International Film Festival this year; the jury commended her for ‘demonstrating the new possibility of cinema, and radicalising the process of filmmaking…’ Oxhide manages to bring together the traditions of conceptual artwork with domestic drama and comedy…Liu obviously enjoys blurring the line between documentary and fiction” (p22).

Form/content

Dan Edwards finds much to admire in Australian documentary filmmaking in his survey (p17), but sees it as often radical in content, but rarely innovative in form. However, he comments that Indigenous filmmakers show a greater willingness than their peers to work across media and forms. Wondering at the constraints on documentary form he quotes producer Michael McMahon: “There is a core of wonderful people who constitute a very real and vibrant documentary sector but there is that fundamental problem of having so few opportunities outside the broadcasters to actually push the form, the way stories are told and the stories that actually get told” (RT61, p15). This is a reminder that innovation is not the realm of the lone inventor, but of support networks, collaborators, producers and audiences, all required to be receptive to innovation.

Experience design

Greg Hooper, reviews transmute collective’s interactive installation, Intimate Transactions, singling out an unexpected innovation, not just in the work but in new media art in general: “The pragmatic upshot of [Keith] Armstrong’s ethical position is the development of work that requires prototyping, interviews with people about their experience of the work, and further prototyping. Perhaps that is the contribution of new media: the introduction of user testing in the arts…” (p26).

In our culture, innovation is increasingly tied to the prospect of profitable outcome, the scenario satirised by Phillipe Vasset. In this edition of RealTime, new media art watchers Hooper, Lizzie Muller, Melinda Rackham and Garth Paine describe works that are hard or impossible to commodify, though, ironically some have commercially viable spin-offs from the software and hardware innovations demanded by artists’ visions. More important though is the innovation that interprets the world for us, or takes us beyond it into the realms of speculation.

Hooper writes that “Intimate Transactions isn’t a game, there is no sense of moving to an outcome or nearing the end. It’s a piece of experience design, an opportunity to enter a world like ours but different.” Lizzie Muller makes a like point in her overview essay on interactivity, describing key new media art works where, “We are not shown the effects of new technology; we experience them, living through them in all their complexity.” Muller goes a step futher with a semantic twist that reveals the particular importance of new media art: “Interactive artworks reveal the way new technologies ‘innovate’ human existence, the ways we are re-made by our inventions. They offer us opportunities to inhabit and reflect upon revolutions in human experience before they engulf us and we are no longer able to see their effect” (p24).

Artists first

While Muller allows that in new media arts “there is a degree of technological fetishism at play, the image of an art form following like an eager puppy at the heels of ICT development misrepresents interactive art’s role in driving technological innovation. Artistic visions can often only be achieved with software and hardware created specifically for individual artworks. Such ambitious productions require collaborative relationships with developers at the cutting edge of technology.”

Sound artist Garth Paine makes the same point: “I believe the arts drive a lot of these [technological] developments because somebody has got to be out there making the vision. Industry is often driven by the fact that they can now put all this on this little chip, but what are they going to do with it? They have a whole team thinking up applications but it’s driving it from the technology rather than need” (p12).

Muller reports on the work of a group of scientists working with artist Mari Velonaki on Fish-Bird, which comprise a pair of communicative, robotic wheelchairs. The scientists feel that “realising Velonaki’s imaginative vision so completely without aesthetic compromise is the work’s great achievement. Interestingly it was the exacting nature of the artistic vision and its real world requirements [the user-testing that Hooper refers to] that drove a great deal of the technological innovation.”

Networking

New media artist Melinda Rackham surveys network art, wondering why Australia, an early innovator in the field has paid it less than due attention and in doing so draws attention to the broader needs of innovation and to the network as a medium. Rackham shows how programs at Colorado University and RMIT are creating “students multi-literate in network and software, utilising blogging, podcasting, videoblogging, and conducting collaborative research…The crucial innovative factor is that students learn to operate within a network rather than learning to design work for networked display. These focused but flexible environments encourage experimentation, and most importantly acknowledge failure as a crucial part of the innovation process.” Of course, these days failure is rarely a creative option, but we need to reminded of its importance in the process of innovation.

Rackham reports that networked art is thriving overseas, but not in Australia. She thinks that the reasons for this are that “funding bodies and commissioning organisations often profoundly misunderstand the media” and “that networked art challenges the very foundations of the commodification of art, as it defies conceptions of uniqueness, stability and collectability. It is a practice that has never slotted neatly into existing institutional and cultural establishments.”

In Australia, as we know only too well, new media arts are suffering various forms of dimunition and erasure. Network art needs to be clearly acknowledged so that it can be properly supported and funded. Rackham argues that “When network art is positioned as a discrete discipline…innovation can be recognised and fostered.”

Recognising innovation

The Australia Council’s decision to eliminate the New Media Arts Board and distribute new media artists to the Visual Arts and Music Boards represents a profound failure to engage with innovation, with new works and audience experiences both independent of and entwined with commercial media. Audiences are being engaged in ways hitherto unimagined, as interacters and, not least, as co-creators of works that can be constantly remade, that are, in effect, never finished. Lizzie Muller provocatively claims that, “Unlike a book, a painting or a video installation, an interactive artwork is an open field, which means in effect that every instance is an innovation.”

While there is an emphasis in this edition on the artist’s vision as primary and the tools for its realisation a matter of choice, the very tools are often the stimulus for creation, not least in new media arts where the technologies are increasingly accessible and an integral part of the everyday, and the distinctions between their form and content significantly hard to make. The Australia Council’s scoping review of new media arts will soon commence: it is to be hoped that it will acknowledge, as Melinda Rackham has argued, that the formal recognition of new media arts practices is vital to their well-being and their continued capacity to innovate.

In an era when our feature films are frequently ignored by audiences and slammed by critics, documentaries represent the most active, stimulating and innovative sector of the contemporary Australian industry. Furthermore, local interest in documentaries has been steadily rising in line with a global trend. So what does documentary innovation represent in an Australian context? Apart from the rapidly growing field of Indigenous filmmaking, which demands special attention and will be covered in a forthcoming edition, the most prominent trend in recent local production has been the preponderance of films focusing on refugee experience and the wider political context of the ‘war on terror.’ These films have played a key role in exposing stories and alternative views excluded from mainstream media, while also revealing some of the key strengths and weaknesses of our documentary sector.

Refugee stories

There is a venerable tradition of Australian political documentaries, of which refugee stories have long been a part. The early 1990s saw Tom Zubrycki’s Homelands (1993), centred on an El Salvadorian couple living in Melbourne, and many lesser-known television documentaries such as Jeffrey James’ The Embraced (1993), about Chinese students seeking asylum in Australia, and Sally Ingleton’s The Isabellas (1995), focusing on the detention of Chinese ‘boat people’ by the Keating government. The list of contemporary films focusing on refugees and the broader socio-political context is long and many have been covered in RealTime: Fahimeh’s Story, Letters to Ali, Molly and Mobarak, Anthem and The President Versus David Hicks to name just a few. In an era in which the mass media operates on an hourly turnaround and even the biggest stories can disappear within days, these works have provided a broader perspective on the rapidly shifting political sands, while also keeping contentious issues in the spotlight.

Keeping governments on edge

The Australian Government has shown nervous displeasure on several occasions at documentary makers’ implicit questioning of government policy. In RT60 (p15) Tom Zubrycki related the attempts of Joint House leader Bob Wedgwood to ban a screening of Molly and Mobarak at Canberra’s Parliament House because, to quote Wedgwood: “this film promotes the theme of widespread opposition to government policy.” Nevertheless, Australian documentaries seem to have had little influence on our voting patterns.

A panel discussing the Time to Go John project at the Australian International Documentary Conference in February addressed exactly this issue. US filmmaker Robert Greenwald (director of Outfoxed) convincingly defended the importance of films that present an alternative view of current affairs. He argued that while no film will change the mind of a die-hard ideologue, documentaries can influence those who oppose government policy on principle but who lack the knowledge to construct an informed critique to back up their views. Additionally, these films play a role in building communities of resistance and change across national borders. Melbourne filmmaker Pip Starr supported Greenwald’s point with a story about footage he shot of the mass breakout from the notorious Woomera Detention Centre in March 2002. As well as forming the basis of Starr’s powerful verité short Through the Wire (2004), the footage later turned up in a documentary screened during a protest at a detention centre on the Slovenia-Hungarian border.

Formal limits

For all their politically tendentious content, however, comparatively few Australian documentaries push the formal boundaries in the manner of recent overseas films like Brian Hill’s ‘musical documentaries’ such as Drinking for England (RT63, p22), or the German film Edifice–VW in Dresden (RT61, p17), which analyses the construction and perception of space in a world dominated by corporations. The recent Festival of German Films featured the similarly innovative I Love You All, constructed around the writings of a former Stasi agent (East Germany’s secret police), detailing the agent’s long career and devotion to the East German state. The visuals comprise largely de-classified Stasi surveillance footage. Over 90 minutes, the film provided a fascinating insight into the psychology of state security apparatus without utilising any classical techniques of emotional identification. In contrast, almost all Australian films about refugees rely on identification with an individual caught in a situation of conflict and seeking particular goals (will Mobarak be able to stay in Australia and will he get together with Molly?).

Dennis O’Rourke’s films, notably The Good Woman of Bangkok (1991), foreground the authorial voice of the filmmaker to a degree unusual in Australian documentaries, although this is less evident in his recent Landmines–A Love Story (2005, RT66, p25). On the television front, John Safran has forged a kind of gonzo documentary style, placing his performative subjectivity and interaction with his subjects centre stage in series such as John Safran Vs God. In a more serious vein, the only recent local documentary which comes close to the stylistic audaciousness of films like Drinking for England, Edifice and I Love You All has been The Ister, described by Hamish Ford in RT64 (p23) as “the ultimate philosophical road movie.” Tracing a journey up the Danube through a series of lectures by Heidegger about Holderlin’s poem Der Ister, this remarkable film is the most un-Australian of documentaries: deeply philosophical, meditative and analytical in nature, with no central protagonist or principle conflict. In what would be considered an heretical statement by most local commissioning editors, directors David Barison and Daniel Ross describe the filmic medium as an “incredible tool for framing concepts, for telling abstract stories.”

While the The Ister doesn’t necessarily represent a model appropriate for films on Australian refugee experience, I wonder whether our singular focus on individuals means we are missing out on an important broader analysis of our current situation. The aforementioned I Love You All is part of a long history of innovative and disturbing European documentaries examining the psychology of repression while eschewing strategies of individual emotional identification. Alain Resnais’ chilling Night and Fog (1955), for example, remains one of the only Holocaust films that maintains a distance from individualised stories to convey the truly impersonal, bureaucratised horror of the Nazi genocide.

The problem?

So why are we not making more films that push the formal and thematic envelope? Back in RT57 (p16), then Commissioning Editor for SBSi Marie Thomas said of the documentary sector: “the industry is loosening its stays.” Thomas’ comment is ironic considering that the overwhelming message emanating from filmmakers on the pages of OnScreen over the past 2 years has been that broadcasters are the key factor limiting the scope of Australian documentaries.

Scott Millwood’s experiences are emblematic in this regard. His 1999 film Proximity documented an epic solo journey he undertook through Asia and Asia minor. This essayistic work is part travelogue and part meditative reflection on love, life, politics and death, inspired by the work of French filmmaker Chris Marker. SBS offered to purchase the film if Millwood cut scenes of a dead animal floating in a river and of a leprosy sufferer considered too confrontational for Australian viewers. The fact that these scenes represent the film’s thematic climax made no difference. Millwood refused, with the result that only a few festival aficionados have seen one of the most unusual and engrossing Australian films of recent times. Millwood had several other innovative projects rejected by funding bodies and broadcasters before making the poetic but relatively conventional Wildness in 2003 (RT60, p17). Millwood’s producer Michael McMahon commented in a RealTime interview last year: “There is a core of wonderful people who constitute a very real and vibrant documentary sector but there is that fundamental problem of having so few opportunities outside the broadcasters to actually push the form, the way stories are told and the stories that actually get told” (RT61, p15).

One of the central problems seems to be the reluctance of broadcasters and government funding bodies alike to back projects with unpredictable outcomes. At Macquarie University’s Nonconformists symposium last year, Australian filmmaker Kriv Stenders detailed the exploratory process he employed making Motherland, his evocative 1994 documentary about his Latvian grandmothers. With only a rough idea for a film at the outset, Stenders’ work constantly changed direction in response to his grandmother’s stories and Latvia’s unexpected liberation from Soviet rule during production. While SBS supported him throughout the process, he felt that such an approach would simply not be permitted today. At the same symposium Brian Hill claimed that he secured backing in the UK for all of his ‘musical documentaries’ with only the most rudimentary of ideas.

Admittedly Brian Hill had a proven track record before making his more experimental films, but so few local filmmakers get the opportunity to make more than one documentary it is almost impossible to build up a body of work, let alone develop a distinctive stylistic voice. One of the most striking things about looking over back issues of OnScreen is the number of first time documentary makers we’ve covered who have yet to make another film. Even if a few realise more than one project, the length of time between films is hardly conducive to building the kind of confident authorial voice that characterises the most memorable documentaries. It has been argued that digital technologies will free filmmakers from reliance on funding bodies and broadcasters, and it is significant that both Proximity and The Ister were shot on video without financial support. But without the involvement of broadcasters, the distribution of these films will always be limited.

SBS and the ABC are to be applauded for creating more prime-time slots for documentaries. If they can truly free up what can be done with the form, instead of creating half-baked imitations of Reality TV such as The Colony, then documentaries might become our most formally innovative, as well as thematically challenging films.

This issue of OnScreen features several articles on Indigenous filmmaking, a focus set to spill into RT68 with coverage of Sydney’s Message Sticks festival. In what has generally been a troubled period for the industry, Indigenous films have been one of the few consistently strong areas in contemporary Australian cinema.

There are several key factors characterising the Indigenous sector that may provide useful pointers for the long term survival of industry as a whole. Firstly, the current wave of Aboriginal practitioners is partly the result of carefully targeted nurturing by film schools, funding bodies and Indigenous media organisations like CAAMA (see p19). Additionally, Indigenous media organisations, particularly in the Northern Territory, have provided crucial ongoing practical experience for emerging practitioners. The success of this process belies the oft-stated claim that film funding bodies are incapable of generating excellence and innovation, and highlights the importance of a continual working schedule for developing young filmmakers.

The second factor has greatly contributed to the sustainability of Indigenous filmmaking: the scale of productions. As Michaela Boland noted recently in the The Financial Review (“Motion Picture Sickness”, May 20) with very few exceptions it has only ever been low-budget Australian features that have enjoyed a degree of financial success. While the budgets of Australian features generally have been steadily escalating, Indigenous productions have remained modest. Ivan Sen’s debut feature Beneath Clouds, for example, was a financially restrained small-scale affair, and since then Sen has continued to develop his filmic voice through a series of half-hour video documentaries: The Dreamers (2004), Who was Evelyn Orcher? (2004) and Yellow Fella (2005).

The third factor follows on from the last: Indigenous filmmakers use any means necessary to get their stories told: working across forms has become the norm. As well as documentaries, dramatic shorts and a feature, Sen has produced video art (Blood) that has exhibited in spaces such as Melbourne’s ACMI galleries. Rachel Perkins is another prominent Indigenous practitioner working across forms.

Finally, for all their modest scale, most Indigenous films engage directly with our contested history or the conditions of contemporary Australia. In other words, these films address a specific audience and tell idiosyncratic stories with a strong sense of place.

So rather than asking whether Aboriginal filmmakers can “save our industry” (Katrina Lobley, “The Great Black Hopes”, Sydney Morning Herald, May 20), the rest of the industry should observe the lessons of the Indigenous sector. Australian cinema will never compete with Hollywood in terms of budgets, star power and sheer spectacle, but we can successfully make small movies telling stories that resonate with the experiences of targeted audiences.

On a personal note, I’m sorry to report that after 2 years this will be my last issue as RealTime’s OnScreen editor. I’m leaving to take up the Managing Editor position with the Publications Unit of the Australian Film Commission.

I’d like to say a heartfelt thanks to Keith and Virginia for the opportunities they have given me while working at RealTime, and to all the writers who have contributed to OnScreen’s growing critical strength. One of the job’s great pleasures has been making contact with so many talented writers and practitioners in Australia’s film and new media communities. DE

25 years of Indigenous media production and broadcasting at CAAMA (Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association) began with a second-hand car, some donated equipment, a typewriter, rent-free office space, and some very ambitious dreams. Out of these dreams has come CAAMA Productions, the film and television branch of the CAAMA group of companies, one of Australia’s most abundant and groundbreaking well-springs of national screen culture. Indigenous filmmakers affiliated with CAAMA are now at the forefront of Australia’s presence at prestigious film festivals around the world.

The appearance of Rachel Perkins’ first feature Radiance in 1997 and Ivan Sen’s acclaimed Beneath Clouds in 2002 (which won 2 AFI awards, including Best Cinematography for long-term CAAMA Director of Photography Allan Collins) drew media attention to Indigenous filmmaking and the emergence of a generation of Indigenous auteurs. While a dozen or so individual names have rightfully risen to prominence through this kind of exposure, many audiences remain unfamiliar with the fundamental role CAAMA has played in the development of Australian screen culture, through the creation of a distinctively Central Australian Aboriginal-controlled working base and founding commitment to the preservation and promotion of Aboriginal languages and cultures.

Recent CAAMA documentaries including Dhakiyarr vs The King (2004), Beyond Sorry (2003) and Rosalie’s Journey (2003) interrupt and revise non-Aboriginal narratives of Australian political, social and cultural history with an acumen, and a sensitive empirical humanism, that is very hard for conservative contributors to the ‘history wars’ to challenge. The confidence of CAAMA documentaries is grounded in the self-conscious ethos of the company’s long-running Nganampa Anwernekenhe television series: to foreground the film subject’s voice, in his or her original language, and allow this voice to shape the film.

The language and culture preservation and promotion project underpinning the Nganampa Anwernekenhe (‘Ours’ in the Pitjantjatjara and Arrernte languages) project is unique in Australia and all CAAMA filmmakers have gained practical experience through this series. Early episodes focused on traditional law and culture stories and many of these are no longer available for public viewing. Social issues including women’s welfare, health management and language change became central after about 5 years, followed in subsequent series by individual meditations on different Aboriginal identities. Contemporary historical accounts have come to prominence in the most recent instalments. Nganampa Anwernekenhe programs are delivered in Aboriginal languages and thus made available to specific Aboriginal audiences. They are also available to literate non-speakers through subtitles. The challenge inherent in the Nganampa Anwernekenhe ethos of balancing the subjects’ and filmmakers’ voices has produced innovative and beautiful resolutions. Subtitled Aboriginal voiceovers taken from interviews with the films subjects’ are, for example, both lyrical and arresting in their capacity to frame and reframe stories by focusing viewers’ attention on interpretive Aboriginal perspectives that can surpass the filmmakers’ knowledge.

Underpinning this ethos is CAAMA Productions’ highly trained skills base; most of the film personnel have AFTRS diplomas or degrees. This is matched by the practical experience of making tight budgets cover a lot of ground in physically, economically and politically challenging environments.

CAAMA Productions also invites some of the industry’s most sought after non-Aboriginal writers, editors, designers, composers and sound artists to collaborate on projects. Aboriginal authority is ensured by assigning Aboriginal people to key creative roles in production crews. Documentary and drama production at CAAMA also involves complex intercultural relationships between people of different Aboriginalities. With very few exceptions, Aboriginal control of story form and content remains primary, concerted and definitive. The making of films at CAAMA is a social experience in which creative collaboration and cooperation is key.

Film Australia’s decision to present CAAMA with the 2005 Stanley Hawes Award for Outstanding Contribution to Australian Documentary has proved timely; in January Dhakiyarr vs The King featured at the Sundance Film Festival alongside new Indigenous short dramas Plains Empty (director Beck Cole) and Green Bush (director Warwick Thornton). Thornton’s story of a night in the life of an Aboriginal radio broadcaster at a community station went on from Sundance to win the Best Short Film at the 2005 Berlinale Panorama. It will also screen at this year’s Message Sticks and Sydney Film Festival (see p22).

Alongside Thornton’s film, the Sydney Film Festival will be showcasing 7 other CAAMA documentaries in a special retrospective, and hosting a forum looking at CAAMA’s cultivation of black screen voices. The 1990 documentary on CAAMA and Imparja Television, Satellite Dreaming, will introduce festival audiences to the first phase of Indigenous media production and broadcasting.

Ivan Sen’s Yellow Fella (2005) has just screened in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival and will have its Australian premiere at Sydney’s Message Sticks festival. The film is a road movie connecting national cinema history to the personal challenges of mixed identity. Tom E Lewis, the Aboriginal anti-hero of Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), and director Ivan Sen are equally involved in a journey to find the resting place of Tom’s white father. Tom’s mother Angelina is brought to the edge of her comfort zone as a passenger on, and an authority for, her son’s quest but the film never once pushes its subjects to reveal private anguish.

Steven McGregor’s 5 Seasons is an observational documentary focused on Numburindi man Moses Numumurdirdi and his living relationship to the cycle of 5 weather seasons affecting his country in South East Arnhem Land every year. Moses’ extended family use modern technologies to hold onto their traditional way of life. Exquisitely shot by Allan Collins and Warwick Thornton, 5 Seasons moves effortlessly between environmental detail and human responsibilities.

Karli Jalangu (Boomerang Today) (2004) is a short documentary by long-term CAAMA sound recordist and first-time director David Tranter. Karli Jalangu exemplifies the Nganampa Anwernekenhe mandate of preserving specialist, rare or unique traditional Aboriginal knowledge in language. Four senior Warlpiri/Anmatyerr men teach how to make a “Number 7” or “Killer” boomerang. We watch the men select the right wood, then shape and paint it, all the while listening to the intimate dialogue of master craftsmen working together. This film has brought David Tranter to the attention of Canadian Indigenous film festival programmers, resulting in invitations to the ImageNation festival in Vancouver and Terres En Vue in Montreal.

Beck Cole’s Wirriya Small Boy (2004) is an observational documentary that presents an ordinary day in the life of 8 year old Ricco Japaljarri Martin, as he moves between his home in a town camp on the outskirts of Alice Springs, Aboriginal school, the town pool and the library. Shot over 2 months on a mini-DV camera, Wirriya features a voiceover by Ricco and occasional exchanges with the filmmaker. Cole was granted rare access by the local organisation directly responsible for the welfare of the town camps.

Warwick Thornton’s Rosalie’s Journey (2003) presents Rosalie (Ngale) Kunoth-Monks speaking for the first time, in her Arrernte language, about her life in central Australia as a young woman and the profound cultural challenges she faced when selected by Charles Chauvel to play the lead role in Jedda, opposite saltwater country man Robert Tudawali. Recreating scenes that match remaining archival footage from St Mary’s girls home in Alice Springs, Thornton and editor Dena Curtis have woven a moving portrait that brings forth memories and stories that have simmered quietly beneath the surface of the acclaimed and controversial icon of Australian cinema for over half a century.

Mistake Creek (2001) was made as part of Film Australia’s ‘Everyday Brave’ initiative of Indigenous stories by Indigenous filmmakers. The interest of director/cinematographer Allan Collins in personal stories about unrecognised achievements drew him to the stoic marriage of Mistake Creek cattle station managers Steven and Jo-Anne Craig, and the tensions between town and bush worlds. Beautifully shot in widescreen on Digital Betacam, this film reframes romantic visions of the outback and re-places Aboriginal people in national narratives of struggle in cattle country.

One of CAAMA Radio’s (8-KIN FM) longest running weekly programs is Green Bush, a show that connects Aboriginal prisoners in Alice Springs’ Gaol with their families through song requests and messages. Recalling the actual circumstances of 8-KIN FM’s first independent decade of broadcasting, and the current situation of many BRACS (Broadcasting for Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme) operations in small Aboriginal communities, writer/director Warwick Thornton and designer Daran Fulham created the set of Green Bush inside Alice Springs’ Little Sisters town camp, where CAAMA used to live.

Like other Indigenous drama productions in Australia, and throughout the world, CAAMA’s ‘fiction’ storytelling–first seen in Danielle Maclean’s My Colour Your Kind (1997), then in Steven McGregor’s Cold Turkey (2003) and now Green Bush–employs distinctive realist codes, where appearances by non-professional actors and location shooting operate as signs of cultural authenticity. The style recalls Rossellini, Cassavetes, the Dogma ‘95 directors and Jean Rouch. While CAAMA’s emerging drama strand draws on the film school training of its writers, directors and cinematographers, it also has foundations in the grass-roots script-writing, story-boarding, directing of actors, and editing of educational films and community service television spots produced in Alice Springs since the late 1980s.

In the relentless whirl of activity filling the 3 permanently-staffed downtown Alice Springs offices of CAAMA Productions there is no question where the heart of Australian Indigenous filmmaking action is beating hard. A slate of over 15 short and long documentaries, short dramas, a television drama series and music video clips, and monthly schedules that can include bush work, training, meetings or post-production work in the cities down south, and overseas festivals and markets keep Executive Producer Jacqui North, Production Manager Rachel Clements and Production Co-ordinator Trisha Morton-Thomas and their network of Indigenous freelancers working at rates enviable to many in the industry.

The survey of CAAMA works at the Sydney Film Festival will illustrate continuity and transformations in the depiction of Aboriginalities as a spectrum of dynamic social, cultural and historical identities. As a critical incubator of Aboriginal screen production ethics and distinctive styles of narrative and character presence, CAAMA will continue to influence the look, sound, feel and politics of Australian film and television for years to come. The retrospective will also illustrate the radical potential of Central Australian production to transform the landscape of contemporary Australian film.

A Tribute to CAAMA, 52nd Sydney Film Festival, State Theatre and Dendy Opera Quays, June 12-16

What does the Australian film industry have in common with that of Hong Kong? This year’s Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) suggests that our futures may both become increasingly tied to a rapidly emerging cinema industry in mainland China. Not only is the production of feature films in China increasing at a rapid pace, from 100 in 2002 to 212 last year, but the bulk of these films are co-productions, opening up possibilities for potentially rich connections with other regional industries. While the talk in Hong Kong, like here, is of doom and gloom for local production, this is always accompanied by an emphasis on the possibilities of expanded links with the mainland.

The big breakthrough at the HKIFF 2005 was a Chinese Renaissance strand, featuring the year’s major works from the Peoples’ Republic of China. There has typically been a dearth of new Chinese films at the HKIFF, due to the division that existed in China between officially sanctioned films and works made without government script approval and distribution arrangements. The PRC government now seems intent on repairing that breach and bringing the underground film movement into the mainstream. Leading Sixth Generation director Jia Zhangke noted while introducing his new work The World at the HKIFF that it was the first of his films to receive government support for screening at international festivals (the film had its Australian premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival in February). Although several commercial romance films were included in the Chinese Renaissance program, many continued to mine the miserabilist tradition of the Sixth Generation. This involves a critique of the dead heart at the centre of an economic transition which has not been accompanied by any equivalent transformation in social values or institutions.

The most impressive of these films was Jia’s The World, about an amusement park on the outskirts of Beijing in which all the world’s tourist attractions are replicated in miniature, including the Eiffel Tower, the pyramids and Manhattan complete with Twin Towers. Despite the park’s global reference points, the people who work there remain trapped in an extremely small world of limited possibilities.

Wang Chao is another established filmmaker (The Orphan of Anyang, 2001) whose work centres on the psychical and material poverty of the new China. His coldly beautiful Day and Night shows the ways in which a low-fi grunge cinema can develop given access to higher budgets. The other highlight was Yang Chao’s debut Passages, which details the cross-country journeys of a young couple who discover just how much perseverance and imagination is needed to leave the social world.

While a new and more assured cinema is emerging in China, what have been the effects on Hong Kong cinema? The fact that most of the acceptance speeches at this year’s HKIFF Film Awards were made in Mandarin rather than Cantonese gives an indication of the degree to which Hong Kongers are looking northwards.

Several of the year’s more commercial films thematise this turn to the mainland in provocative ways. Cheang Pou-soi’s Love Battlefield tells the old, old story of a mainland gang who hit the SAR (Special Administrative Region) with a bad attitude and a small arsenal. In the process, though, the intensities of their family loyalties provide a lesson in the ferocious nature of love to a couple of Honkie yuppies. There are places in the world where love is still a matter of life and death. Derek Yee’s One Nite in Mongkok takes up similar themes with 2 of Hong Kong’s biggest stars, Daniel Wu and Cecilia Cheung, playing northerners who hit the streets of Kowloon looking to make a killing–literally. Hong Kong has a thankless position as the pot of gold at the end of the Chinese dream. National fantasies about the quick buck being what they are, things go wrong very quickly.

The vice-director of China’s Film Bureau recently claimed that although his country now rates as the third largest producer of films in the world, “problems still exist in China’s film industry. We have very few good films, for example.” He explained these remarks by saying that only 3 features (House of Flying Daggers, Kung Fu Hustle and A World Without Thieves) had been financial successes last year, accounting for nearly 60% of China’s box office.

It is worth noting that these 3 films had 2 things common: all had Hong Kong stars (Andy Lau and Stephen Chow), and all had postproduction done in Australia. As big budget Chinese films become increasingly reliant on Australian postproduction facilities, it may be that the fates of the Australian and Hong Kong industries become increasingly tied to each other, and to mainland China.

Young love in Melbourne. Boy meets girl in the supermarket checkout queue–or in a movie, at a record store. He’s “struck by the recalcitrant beauty in what Durkheim would call her ‘anomie’”. She asks him “What’s the difference between a commodity and something else?” Soon enough they’re hanging out on campus and arguing about Shakespeare and feminism; after graduation, he gets a job at the Federal Environment Office, while she tutors in politics and tries to think up a sexy topic for her thesis. Before they know it they’re equipped with a child and a mortgage, fretting about their incipient conservatism and counting their pennies.

If the joke seems facile, that might be part of the point. The intended wit of Elliot Perlman’s 1998 novel Three Dollars depends on a circular irony that mocks its own tendency to classify and label: Eddie and Tanya Harnovey are self-conscious intellectuals who wryly observe themselves in the act of running true to type. What’s less clear is how far these soft-left yuppies differ from the book’s more immediate satirical targets, the apostles of economic rationalism with their unreal calculations of profit and loss. The will to abstraction is almost equally evident on both sides, but while Eddie is allowed his lapses, he’s also held up to the reader as a decent bloke doing his best: a representative of the truly human.

The problem is ‘humanity’ remains just another abstraction: the more Perlman insists on Eddie and Tanya as recognisable and sympathetic characters, the more he robs them of the complexity that might make them so. Too often Eddie’s voice has the sanctimony of any consciously noble narrator (“Perhaps people like me would not survive…Would all those who could not take even the smallest pleasure from inflicting pain die out?”). So immediately, there’s one reason why the film of Three Dollars, directed by Robert Connelly, might improve on the book: where Perlman traffics largely in received ideas, Connelly can call on concrete faces and voices to bring these ‘human’ values to life.

Certainly, the lead roles are ideally cast. Francis O’Connor has the quasi-neurotic charisma required for Tanya, and her forthright manner lets her convey the character’s earnestness without looking silly. On the other hand, David Wenham as Eddie is (thankfully) a different animal to his priggish literary counterpart: a subtler ironist than Perlman, Wenham is able to get laughs from some of the book’s worst lines by making them sound like distracted ad-libs by a man at the end of his tether. Where Perlman’s Eddie rarely misses a chance to show off his mental equipment, the keynote of Wenham’s acting is a casual miming of naivety, updating an archetype that runs deep in Australian culture: while Tanya sounds off about women’s rights, he slouches against the university library shelves with his hands in his pockets, looking every inch the country cousin.

By comparison with Hollywood smart-arses from Bogart to Bill Murray, David Wenham’s irony is superficially unthreatening, a defensive stance that highlights his potential vulnerability. Beneath the clowning his screen characters tend to be emotionally reticent, though it’s not always clear what emotions are being repressed. Both this film and Connelly’s earlier The Bank (2001) have a touch of Frank Capra, with Wenham cast each time as the ordinary man who goes up against the system. But where Capra was more than able to show the dark side of the American Dream, Wenham is yet to find a movie role that fuses the folksy side of his persona with the capacity for sociopathic rage he displayed in The Boys (Rowan Woods, 1998).

In fact it’s Tanya rather than Eddie who comes closest to Jimmy Stewart’s crack-up in It’s a Wonderful Life (1948) though nowhere in Three Dollars is there the kind of dramatic crux that might reveal the limits of a complacent liberal world view. When Eddie is effectively forced to choose between his principles and the welfare of his child, it seems inevitable that his faith in himself as a decent human being will be threatened if not destroyed. Yet after a couple of unconvincing feelgood gestures the story simply peters out. As a result, the film’s political message amounts to little more than a generalised plea for compassion, with Eddie and Tanya seen as victims of a largely faceless system rather than agents with responsibility for themselves or others.

Again, there’s a failure of concrete imagination, at least when the film tries to picture anything beyond its central characters. Robert Menzies’ mumbling prole is an embarrassingly stereotyped representative of the underclass, while visually Connelly does little to repair the want of sensuous detail in Perlman’s prose. For the most part, the domestic scenes are staged in an inert, vaguely theatrical manner, the kitchen bench or living-room table used as a proscenium arch behind which the actors move back and forth. Though Connelly takes the opportunity for striking long shots when Eddie heads out to the countryside, in the city he seems unable to place his hero in a wider visual or social context: his use of flashbacks, home movies and dream sequences reinforces the book’s limited first-person perspective, with Wenham’s voiceover steering us through Eddie’s biography as if through a narrow tunnel.

“This is how healthy people feel in unhealthy times.” The line is rousing but paradoxical, since it depends exactly on the split between the personal and the social that Connelly and Perlman would presumably oppose. Moreover, there are hints that the Harnoveys have been less than entirely healthy from the outset: Tanya’s anomie has no simple cause, nor can economic deregulation be wholly blamed for Eddie’s shadowy fears of impotence and death. Children, rational argument, the songs of Joy Division: these fragments we have shored against our ruin. What’s the difference between a commodity and something else? Trapped in self-reference, the nominal leftism of both versions of Three Dollars is finally closer to a solipsism that finds its emotional justification in its own defeat: as if some of the unhealth of the times had rubbed off not only on the people, but the artworks as well.

Three Dollars, director Robert Connelly; writers Robert Connolly, Elliot Perlman; Producer John Maynard; Arenafilm

In awarding Liu Jiayin the Asian DV Prize for her small masterpiece Oxhide (2004) at the 29th Hong Kong International Film Festival this year, the jury commended her for “demonstrating the new possibility of cinema, and radicalising the process of filmmaking.” While such hyperbole risks saddling the 23 year old director and her work with unrealistic expectations, Oxhide is the type of startling, refreshing film, at once experimental and familiar, that can revitalise the most jaded of viewers. Liu, a student of the Beijing Film Academy, is surely destined for larger stages than the theatre of the Hong Kong Science Museum lecture hall.

Oxhide captures the domestic squabbling of a small family (father, mother, daughter) in their cramped apartment as the family leather goods business endures recession. The narrative plays out in one location across just 23 shots on grainy digital video. From such stylistic minimalism and a seemingly banal narrative premise comes an engaging work that combines abstract formal composition with tender, humorous and honest domestic warmth.

Remarkably, Liu operated the camera, recorded sound, was production designer, edited and stars in the film. Her real mother and father play the parent characters. The resemblance to a home movie or any youthful amateurism ends there: the meticulous framing, staging and selection of conversational fragments reveals an astute cinematic mind. The shots are composed so as to give a disconcerting spatial perspective on the family flat; the family appear to have only a few square metres to live in. Lamps, leather materials and curios clutter the frame and obscure the protagonists, and the home is under-lit, completely masking room corners and silhouetting faces. It is interesting to note that each shot remains static, the immobility focusing the viewer’s attention on the intricate movement and staging.

Liu’s unusual camera angles sometimes focus on the cast’s midsections rather than faces, with off-screen dialogue and action more than enough to pique curiosity. A conversation seemingly about the significance of the heritage and style of scripting Chinese characters turns out to be, after a printer spits a flyer into frame, a chat about the layout of a brochure advertising a half price sale. The film is full of these revelatory moments, with humour often underpinning serious scenarios.

Indeed, such a contained, spare and personal piece is saved from being merely an exercise in low fidelity aesthetics by extensive use of irony, humour and affection for the characters. Despite the strained times through which the family lives, a genuine emotional warmth suffuses Liu’s non-figurative compositions. The film effectively taps into family dynamics as recognisable in suburban Australia as they are in provincial China. Liu, whose diminutive stature is a source of constant angst for her father, is plied with dairy products in an attempt to stretch her frame beyond the 5 foot mark. The eager patriarch then enforces his daily ritual of measuring her height against a doorframe. “If anything, you’re getting shorter!”, he wails at his full-grown daughter after one such check. There are some excellent dinner table scenes, in which the bickering family air their quotidian grievances. The exchanges are well observed, relating to the annoyances of loud noodle-slurping rather than any real aggressive tension. However, the family’s precarious financial situation is always in the foreground, as is the father’s obsession with saving face.

Oxhide draws immediate comparisons with the work of Abbas Kiarostami, in particular the recent Ten (2002) and Five (2003), and Liu cites the Iranian veteran as her primary influence. However, where a film like Ten has one straightforward camera set-up and Five no immediately tangible narrative thread, Oxhide manages to bring together the traditions of conceptual artwork with domestic drama and comedy.

Liu, like her hero, obviously enjoys blurring the line between documentary and fiction. While casting her family and articulating their financial difficulties and domestic squabbling may seem like a strand of neo-realism, this is offset by a visual style distancing the film from the kitchen-sink tradition. Liu pulls off the difficult trick of capturing the raw sentiment of neo-realism while still experimenting with a deliberately alienating visual style.

It seems that countries in the Asia region take it in turns to produce the world’s most challenging art cinema each year. 2005 switches the spotlight to mainland China, with the Chinese Renaissance and Asian DV programs at the Hong Kong International Film Festival offering a range of thought provoking, visually stunning works. While its grassroots, underground pedigree makes Oxhide not entirely representative of China’s recent output, it does focus attention on the innovative potential of the mainland’s new breed of filmmakers.

Oxhide was awarded the Asian DV Prize at the 29th Hong Kong International Film Festival, March 22-April 6.

“Diversity” is Lynden Barber’s watchword for his inaugural program as the Sydney Film Festival’s artistic director. The festival guide suggests more scattershot populism, the gathering of a vast array of apparently safe choices in categories where everyone will find something they like. The approach is understandable given the festival’s ongoing financial woes, but will strategies such as utilising the George Street cinema complex for a ‘rock flicks’ retrospective attract larger audiences? Although there is no single program strand likely to generate the excitement of last year’s exhaustive Antonioni retrospective, there are certainly interesting and significant films scattered across the program incuding recent works from major filmmakers and a celebration of CAAMA’s (Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association) 25 years.

In a break with tradition the festival will open with UK film My Summer of Love (director Pawel Pawlikowski) rather than a local offering. However, there are 2 Australian premieres that look set to continue the growing trend of innovative low-budget features made outside traditional funding structures and engaging intelligently with contemporary Australian milieus. Kriv Stenders’ Cassavetes-influenced Blacktown is set in Sydney’s western suburbs and sounds far more raw that his ponderous feature debut The Illustrated Family Doctor. Mosaic, by Brisbane writer-director Aaron Catling, also promises a break with the often conservative form of Australian dramas, relying on long takes and an episodic narrative to tell the story of a father-daughter relationship poisoned by the daughter’s sexual abuse at the hands of an older man.

A genuine festival highlight is the celebration of CAAMA’s 25 years with 8 films representing some of the very best in contemporary Australian filmmaking. Ivan Sen’s new documentary Yellow Fella examines the life of actor Tom E Lewis, who played the lead role in Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith in 1978. Also featured is the new documentary 5 Seasons by Steve McGregor, who directed the excellent Cold Turkey in 2003 (RT56, p18). OnScreen joins in the celebration of CAMAA’s success with Lisa Stefanoff’s account of the association’s history and achievements (p19).

The program also features some of the great names of international cinema: Angelopolous, Ruiz, Herzog, Araki and Kim. Trilogy: the Weeping Meadow is the first feature in 7 years from Greek auteur Theo Angelopoulos. It’s the first part of a series dramatising the events of the 20th century. From Chile’s legendary Raul Ruiz comes Dias de Campo, the first film the director has made in his homeland since fleeing Pinochet’s coup in 1973. South American cinema generally has been enjoying a recent resurgence, and will be highlighted with a small program of new Argentine films.

The New Asian Cinema strand features 2 works from prolific South Korean director Kim Ki-duk, whose brutal films of violent love have been festival regulars for several years. Unusually, 2 Vietnamese period films will also be screening. Buffalo Boy is a ‘Western’ set in the 1940s, while Bride of Silence, touted as “Vietnam’s first feminist film”, focuses on a young girl hounded from her 19th century village when she refuses to name the father of her unborn child.

The sheer number of strands at this year’s festival program, and the small number of films in each, means that none is likely to investigate theme, region or country in depth. However, the fact that single tickets, as well as 10, 20 and 30-film Flexi-Passes are now available should make it easier for festival goers to distill a personalised program to suit their taste.

Sydney Film Festival, artistic director Lynden Barber; State Theatre, Dendy Opera Quays, George St Cinemas, Art Gallery of NSW, The Studio Sydney Opera House; June 10-25, www.sydneyfilmfestival.org

Recently aired as part of ABC TV’s Message Sticks program, Deadly Yarns is a collection of 5 short films by 5 emerging Indigenous filmmakers, produced in WA under an FTI initiative supported by ScreenWest. I have to put my subjective foot forward here: I often find the short film format stifling, lending itself either to naff endings, or in the case of these films a certain propensity for STATEMENT.

The ethos driving the script development of these films seemed to be if you only have 5 minutes of screen time you’d better ‘say something.’ Personally, I crave stillness and space in film, particularly shorts, where there’s seldom room for more than a crystalline moment, a gesture, or an ineffable push towards something outside the frame. I think the medium makes anything more impossible. When a short film embraces this essential impossibility you can end up with something beautiful. The most resonant moments in the Deadly Yarns films occur when they gesture to a more complex reality outside the dramatisation, something not quite so over-produced. However, if statement dominates this series of films, it is to the credit of the filmmakers that each is delivered at a different pitch and volume.

Ashley Sillifant’s Broken Bonds is the visually and sonically lush montage narrative of a Nyungar boy and his totem, the Serpent, and how this Dreamtime spirit leads him out of a cycle of domestic abuse and into a championship boxing ring. The film has won 2 WA Film Awards, one for director Sillifant and one for cinematographer Rob Bygott. The film is tightly produced, and Sillifant is obviously talented. But I came away with the impression that the film had been stylised within an inch of its life. The saturated macho aesthetic teeters dangerously close to beer commercial territory at times, and I suspected the aesthetic was concealing something more real, giving the emotional core of the story a protective coating.

Don’t Say Sorry (directors Paul Roberts and Christine Jacobs) is raw by comparison. Jacobs delivers a first person recollection of her experiences as a stolen child, and entreats white Australia not to say sorry, but rather “understand and acknowledge.” It’s a fair enough expectation, and Jacobs puts her case forward passionately, but again production dominates content.

Ganggu Mama (director Mark Howett) has spunk and personality and the performances are solid. The screen presence and sensitivity of the 2 leads carries this one. David Starr Ngoombujarra (who also wrote the script) plays Dave, a didjeridu maker, opposite Clarence Ryan as his nephew Jackson, a young Wadjarri boy struggling to heal the split between contemporary and traditional identities. There’s a raw energy to Ganggu Mama that I liked, though the awkwardly sentimental final scene could have done with some pruning to create a more poetic and less didactic conclusion.

The last 2 films in the series, Miss Coolbaroo (director Michelle White) and Sugar Bag (director Gary Cooper), are the most fully realised and confident of the series. This can be partly attributed to the skill of the filmmakers, and partly to the inherent qualities of the 2 women, Monica Jones and Laurel Cooper, whose fragmentary recollections form the basis of each film. It was not so much the films themselves but their subjects that held my attention. Monica and Laurel recount their different stories with a sense of dignity and total self-possession. They’re both real Aunties, maternal gatekeepers of personal history who seem to know how much of the story needs to be told and how much tells itself.

There are some big voices in Indigenous film, and there are lots of big things that need to be said about contemporary Indigenous culture and identity. There are some big histories, big steps that need retracing, and big gaps that need to be bridged. The question is, how big can you be in 5 minutes? The fundamental schism here was between form and content; one drastically outsized the other, and they failed to meet. There are points where the filmmakers seem to realise this and roll with it. The camera backs off and all the mute things, like Laurel Cooper’s treasured photographs of her parents in Sugar Bag, are allowed to speak for themselves. It seems to me that filming History, particularly Indigenous history, is crucially invested in what can’t be re-enacted, recorded, or bashed into the shape of an exclamation mark. Laurel Cooper’s photographs, mounted and immaculately kept in plastic sleeves, succeeded beautifully in allowing all the unsayable things to momentarily resonate. I’m glad that it was this moment that concluded the series.

Christine Jacobs

On May 25, as this edition was being laid out, OnScreen received the tragic news that Christine Jacobs, director of the Deadly Yarns film Don’t Say Sorry was run over and killed in Canberra. Her film was to screen as part of the launch of National Healing Day at Federal Parliament. The screening went ahead and Jacobs’ speech was delivered by her 14 year old daughter Tamara. Everyone at RealTime extends their deepest sympathies to Christine Jacobs’ family and friends.

Deadly Yarns, 5 short films by WA Indigenous filmmakers, screened on ABC TV, April 22-May 20

ScreenWest, the ABC and FTI are currently assessing projects for a second series of Deadly Yarns.

Mari Velonaki, David Rye, Steve Schedding, <BR />Stetan Williams, Fish-Bird, at State Parliament House, 2004″></p>
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Mari Velonaki, David Rye, Steve Schedding,
Stetan Williams, Fish-Bird, at State Parliament House, 2004

Computer-based interactive art is one of the very latest art form innovations, part of the new media arts family born of revolutionary developments in information communication technologies over the past 50 years. Unlike some of its siblings it makes use of these technologies in more than just its means of production and presentation. Interactive art uses human-computer interaction, one of the defining features of computation, as its very medium.

Unlike a book, a painting or a video installation, an interactive artwork is an open field, which means in effect that every instance is an innovation. From networked garments that sense and transmit bio-data projected around the participants as sound and animation (Thecla Schiphorst and Suzan Kozel’s Whisper [2003]), to an exercise bike pedaled by the user through a virtual landscape (Jeffrey Shaw’s Legible City [1989]), the world of interactive art is full of radically new experiences.

Not only is the work characterised by continual artistic innovation, but also technological innovation, the field’s short history being inextricably linked with the history of computing. For some this is its major failing. It is a common criticism that interactive art too often simply functions as a shop window for the latest technologies. While it must be allowed that there is a degree of technological fetishism at play, the image of an art form following like an eager puppy at the heels of ICT development misrepresents interactive art’s role in driving technological innovation. Artistic visions can often only be achieved with software and hardware created specifically for individual artworks. Such ambitious productions require collaborative relationships with developers at the cutting edge of technology.

Hybrid spaces

In Pathways to Innovation in Digital Culture (1999, www.music.mcgill.ca/
~mcentury/PI/PImain.html) Michael Century traces the history of a phenomenon he calls the “Studio-Laboratory”, a site for combined art production and technological research. These hybrid spaces have many different configurations, from commercially funded research laboratories, such as the Xerox Parc Artist in Residence Program in Palo Alto (USA), to creatively focused academic institutions such as MIT Media Lab in Boston and independent arts-led organisations such as ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie) Karlsruhe in Germany whose mixture of research and production with public presentation and high profile debate has defined the field of new technology arts for 2 decades.

Sydney’s iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research, founded in 2001, is one of the most recently created studio-laboratories. Positioned between the University of New South Wales’ School of Computer Science and Engineering and the College of Fine Arts, iCinema is directed by Jeffrey Shaw, previously founding director of ZKM and one of the most influential artists and theorists in the area of interactivity. iCinema produces artworks of vast technical ambition such as Conversations (2004), a multi-user virtual reality work exploring the ethics of capital punishment. The work’s creation generated 2 technical ‘world-firsts’ in computer science.

The knowledge economy

Such endeavours require large scale investment, and in this regard interactive art’s close relationship with innovation has served it well. The knowledge economy feeds on innovation. John Hartley has written, in the preface to Innovation in Australian Arts, Media and Design (Rod Wissler , Brad Haseman, Sue-Anne Wallace, Michael Keane eds, Post Pressed, Queensland, 2004) that “innovation is research and development for the knowledge based economy and it is what creativity needs if it is to find a use and therefore a value.” The hybrid environments of studio-laboratories offer attractive prospects for funders and commercial sponsors because the promise of technological and artistic innovation translates investment in creativity into profit.

Vision first

But while the supreme value of innovation seems clear to funding bodies and some theorists of the knowledge economy, it is not always so clear to the artists and technologists producing the work. “Our funders ask us to answer the question of innovation and significance in the same box on our grant application, but the value of the work has nothing to do with innovation”, says Steve Schedding, an engineer in the collaborative team at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics producing the interactive art installation Fish-Bird.

Fish-Bird is by any measure a tremendously innovative artwork which has captured the imagination of both artists and experts in robotics. Two robots appear as wheelchairs impersonating the characters Fish and Bird who communicate with one another and their visitors via movement and text, producing small printouts (see image above). Fish and Bird learn the behaviour of audience participants and reason independently to decide their actions. The work was presented at Ars Electronica 2004 as part of Timeshift—The World in 25 Years. It has produced “mountains of copyrightable software” according to Steve Schedding, and numerous original technical solutions which are translatable to other domains. Nothing similar has ever been produced in robotics.

The team includes technologists David Rye and Stefan Williams and artist Mari Velonaki. All are exceptionally proud of Fish-Bird, and when pressed admit that its uniqueness and newness are part of that. But it is not the whole story; for Rye satisfaction comes from knowing they have “made something that is so complicated, and so far beyond what anyone else is achieving in the world, but it looks so simple and is so effective as an artwork. It absolutely does the job it was meant to do.” For him the fact that they could realise Velonaki’s imaginative vision so completely without aesthetic compromise is the work’s great achievement. Interestingly it was the exacting nature of the artistic vision and its real world requirements that drove a great deal of the technological innovation. In contrast to the common impression that the creativity of the artist brings life to straitlaced engineers, they claim it was the rigorous demands of the artistic specification that spurred the technical innovation: the fact that it needed to work for 8 to 10 hours a day, tour to un-predictable places and encounter audiences who would test the work to its limits. This encounter between real people and new technology may be the most important aspect of the relationship between innovation and interactive art. The most significant works in the fledgling canon are often technical pioneers that bring revolutionary technologies to the gallery in a way they are not experienced elsewhere.

Benchmark interactive

Another example is Char Davies’ celebrated virtual reality work Osmose (1995), which has been shown around the world, including Melbourne’s ACMI in 2004. Davies was founding director and head of visual research at Softimage, the pioneering Canadian company whose software brought Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs to life. Osmose is a work of astonishing complexity which uses a head-mounted display and breath/body-position sensing interface to immerse the user in a virtual space which can be navigated through breathing and balance. The virtual space emerges from an overlaying of ambiguous natural landscapes, the computer code that generates the work and philosophical texts exploring the nature of perception and space.

Osmose has given many people their first experience of virtual reality. The work uses VR to allow participants to “cross over the 2D picture plane” and experience a non-Cartesian space of dematerialised and semi-transparent forms. In doing so Davies explicitly challenges what she describes as the “hard-edged-objects-in-empty-space aesthetic” of conventional VR. At the same time the work questions the fate of nature and human experience in a technologised world. When the work is shown in public a silhouette of the ‘immersant’ is projected into the gallery as he or she navigates the virtual world. This is intended to draw attention to the embodied nature of the experience, but also renders the immersant as a lone cyborg isolated from those around them.

They’re innovating us

Osmose both drives forward and reflects upon the effect of technological innovation on our lives. Like the best works of interactive art it has a special relationship with the times in which we live, exploring our current technological capabilities in both content and form. We are not shown the effects of new technology; we experience them, living through them in all their complexity. Interactive artworks reveal the way new technologies ‘innovate’ human existence, the ways we are re-made by our inventions. They offer us opportunities to inhabit and reflect upon revolutions in human experience before they engulf us and we are no longer able to see their effect.

We all know what slippery commodities innovation and creativity are. Despite the establishment of comfortable centres of excellence and well-resourced educational institutions, the ‘it’ factor often elusively springs, like a pop up window, from left field. After all, networked art itself first emerged in the gaps and margins of the military and educational internet and our first generation of Australian net artists like Francesca da Rimini, Ian Haig, Garry Zebbington, Mez, Graham Crawford, John Tonkin and myself, were all self-taught. In the mid 1990s it was a necessity to be innovative with online practices, and artists had the excitement and advantage of working in the uncharted territory of a fresh media.

A decade later things have changed. The net has been through a period of exponential growth, conformity, and inevitable bust. Now the network is firmly established as a way of life, disillusionment has been dusted off and more sustainable practices are emerging. But is innovative networked art still emerging locally and globally today?

Innovations

The answer is yes, and screenfull.net (expired), a collaborative blog which starts by promising the viewer “we crash your browser with content”, is one example. It doesn’t actually crash your browser, but it does confront the viewer with raucous and chaotic content, forcing a re-consideration of the multiple narratives with which we engage each day. This is not safe, clean, bland web design–it breaches good taste and sensible research practice, looking beyond the familiar to create its own rules of engagement.

The artists responsible–jimpunk (France) and Abe Linkoln (USA)–know their stuff, rigorously mashing theory, humour, hybrid-media immersion and larrikin impudence. Linkoln’s previous curatorial projects display an intelligent understanding of, and inquiry into, the unique qualities and decade long history of networked art. Likewise jimpunk smartly exploits the Rococo potentialities of HTML, JavaScript and Flash to create sites that give you a scary and exciting media-rich roller coaster ride unlike anything you’ve experienced online before.

Learning networking

This generation of artists grew up with the network and are often being educated by experienced online practitioners. One of screenfull.net’s authors is a graduate student at Colorado University’s TECHNE practice-based initiative. The program was instigated by veteran net.artist Mark Amerika and encourages investigation into the complex and intuitive processes that revolve around emerging forms of knowledge in networked digital culture. The students built the course website, curate shows and conduct interviews with global practitioners, creating works for real world consumption rather than classroom assessment. In fact screenfull.net was recently recognised as the Graduate School’s top research project over the usual winners from physics and engineering. When network art is positioned as a discrete discipline, retaining its unique language and strengths, rather than being squeezed into a scientific model, then an environment is created where innovation can be recognised and fostered.

Locally we are implementing similar strategies, such as Integrated Media Practice taught by Adrian Miles, himself the creator of the video blog or Vog, and Jeremy Yuille at RMIT. This course ensures students are multi-literate in network and software, utilising blogging, podcasting, videoblogging, and conducting collaborative research in an ongoing wiki (server software allowing users to freely create and edit web page content using any web browser). The crucial innovative factor is that students learn to operate within a network rather than learning to design work for networked display.

These focused but flexible environments encourage experimentation, and most importantly acknowledge failure as a crucial part of the innovation process. If we continually operate from a position where funded projects must have successful outcomes for the recipient to be re-funded, then spectacular failures from which innovative work often arises will be swept under the carpet. When research projects jealously guard their Intellectual Property, others waste time and money examining similar issues. We need visionary direction to nurture openness in our educational and research cultures. Mature policy makers understand that the creative process is playful, involving the sharing and breaking of things to create newness.

Australia out of step

While the emergence of innovative networked art is unpredictable, it may also never reach a wider Australian audience. Although networked art is a well established international genre, the same net artists who are shown globally in biennales, film festivals, and media exhibitions are rarely seen locally. In contrast, network art is promoted daily to 3 million commuters in the London Underground through Platform for Art Online. Net art and net communities account for 2 of the 5 major artform categories in competition in Austria’s Ars Electronica, the largest annual media festival in the world. The Tokyo’s NNT Inter-communication Centre (ICC), and Seoul’s Art Centre Nabi, focus exclusively on media works, with internet and mobile art predominating. File in San Paulo, XX in Montreal…the list of dedicated networked exhibitions is extensive.

If networked art has such a prestigious international profile why is it different in Australia? Having recently sat on the jury for net.art commissions for New York based organisations Rhizome and Turbulence, and looked at hundreds of proposals from around the world, it was disappointing to see only a very few (but great!) proposals from Australia. What has happened? Australians used to be well-represented and universally regarded as innovators. It seems locally, there is a dampener on the otherwise vibrant world of networked art. Why does smart, fast, often funny, sometimes socially aware content and a unique low-resolution pixelated aesthetic generate an aura of poor cousin?

Several structural problems spring to mind. Funding bodies and commissioning organisations often profoundly misunderstand the media, a prime example being the AFC-ABC broadband initiative (RT66, p20). While the initiative funded important works such as UsMob, it missed the point that the internet is about 2 way interconnection between users. It is not an appropriate delivery platform for what would otherwise be CD-ROM, TV or film content. As well, user control and censorship are often the first concern of curators considering internet work, an unfortunate reflection of the 1950’s morality pervading attitudes to art and film in this country. Yet the same censorship principles are not applied across the board, allowing open access, for example, to Bill Henson’s undoubtedly scrumptious photographic teenage orgies at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Where do you get it?

Thankfully there are exceptions. The new spatial initiative (www.nga.gov.au/spatial) at the National Gallery of Australia displays a bold and changing program of net artists. dLux media arts actively promote the newest distributed media forms with d>Art, their annual exhibition of mobile, sound and web.art works. The Biennial of Electronic Arts Perth (BEAP) shows net art as a major stream of its program. Adelaide’s Experimental Art Foundation (EAF) promotes networked art and Newcastle’s Rocketart gallery shows networked art as part of emerging practice. Other institutions have experimented with the genre: Perspecta 99 at AGNSW had an online component, Experimenta has previously commissioned net art and I curated the networked section of 2004: Australian Culture Now at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.

Network = the medium

However, a major obstacle to mainstream visibility is that networked art challenges the very foundations of the commodification of art, as it defies conceptions of uniqueness, stability and collectability. It is a practice that has never slotted neatly into existing institutional and cultural establishments. Sean Cubitt wrote in Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark’s refreshing look at the precursors to online art practice, At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet (MIT Press, 2005): “The network artist is not a person…authorship…is profoundly shared with the medium…The network is more than the medium: it is the very stuff of the work” (“From Internationalism to Transnations: Networked Art and Activism”). This requires a shift in our understanding of what art is, how it is delivered, and the fundamental principles of authorship and ownership.

As commercial galleries begin to exhibit the safer forms of new media like video, I wonder whether there is a space for networked art? There is both merit and danger in funding and curatorial policy which considers networked art as just another part of new media, just as there is danger in new media being considered simply part of the visual arts. These forms are each so significantly different, emanating from such radically oppositional positions and with often incompatible delivery modalities. Affirmative initiatives and supportive groupings are needed to ensure certain practices are not marginalised.

Possibilities

Let’s hope, for example, that Sydney’s ACP (Australian Centre for Photography) and Melbourne’s CCP (Centre for Contemporary Photography), who include internet art in their expanded definition of photo-based practice but have no specific affirmative policy, get a significant level of proposals from network artists. Likewise the CarriageWorks at Eveleigh in Sydney, to house Performance Space from 2007, will be network cabled, and so could support highly experimental networked performance and exhibition projects.

Most heartening is that our younger curators, from independents such as Thea Bauman and Rebecca Cannon, to the directors of Electrofringe and Next Wave festivals, actively promote the full spectrum of networked art: games, internet, performance, sound and mobile works. By nurturing networked practice now, we create an environment where innovation is possible, and emerging artists won’t have to leave the country to find creative and financial support. Otherwise we will wake up to an online world of overseas content, intellectual narrowness and aesthetic poverty.

As Sean Cubitt predicts: “We have the future to build. It will be global, networked, and utterly new, or it will not be the future at all.”

Up at the desk, hands to the keyboard, slump and slouch, the arse creeps forward on the chair as gravity takes over. The brain-in-the-vat signals to the peripheral effectors–I choose to press that keypad now. Intimate Transactions drops the periphery as our only extension into the world and brings back the back, the trunk, the torso, as the core embodiment within new media experience.

Intimate Transactions comes from transmute collective, directed by Keith Armstrong with Lisa O’Neill, Guy Webster, and numerous advisors, designers, programmers, fabricators, industry bigwigs and funding bodies. It continues Armstrong’s development of ecosophical praxis, used here as a pragmatic philosophical take on new media production that chucks out the techno-fetish and puts in a fusion of ecological theory and ethics. New media as experience design rather than commodity production. The pragmatic upshot of Armstrong’s ethical position is the development of work that requires prototyping, interviews with people about their experience of the work, and further prototyping. Perhaps that is the contribution of new media: the introduction of user testing in the arts.

But there is still plenty of tech in the work–sensors to transduce pressure and motion, realtime graphics, immersive sound, lots of grunt at the server. And it’s running across GrangeNet, a high-speed research network down the east coast that is a million times faster than the old 56k modem. A 2-week download on the modem or a day or so on ADSL is one second on GrangeNet.

I got to play with Intimate Transactions at the Block, one of the exhibition spaces at QUT’s Creative Industries Precinct. The room is dark and smallish, set up to give that distractionless isolation ward experience that signals new media installation. There’s a bunch of equipment: speakers all about, projection wall in front, strange apparatus in the middle. The strange apparatus is the Bodyshelf, an almost vertical backrest with a shelf to rest the feet on. Physiotherapy meets high-tech correctional facility.

The Bodyshelf is designed and built for Intimate Transactions, and is central to placing the body at the core of the work. You stand on the shelf and lean against the padded backrest. There are sensors to detect the pressure of your body. Padding is adjusted so that the sensors line up right. There’s some training before the work begins, moving the back about to activate the sensors or shifting weight on the feet to wobble the footrest and drive the system that way. I put on a harness with a rubber suction pad that plops onto my stomach. Later on it will vibrate but I won’t notice.

The apparatus is not for individual use: down at Melbourne’s ACMI someone is using another Bodyshelf to enter Intimate Transactions at the same time. We will be in the work together, each of us knowing what the other is doing. This is one of the smart bits of the design because we infer so much about others from their movement–maybe seeing them walk, maybe just the sound of breathing, or maybe the glimpse of shadows moving across a wall. Even though we are both going to use a completely novel interface we can each see the impact on the system of what the other is doing, and so infer each other’s motivation. That builds community, the intimate knowledge of people whose behaviour is more predictable than the behaviour of strangers.

So the whole system forms an ecology and we have avatars within the system: jellybaby angels or glowing discs floating submerged in a dark ocean. The graphics move slowly as we shift our weight on the footrest, roll sidewards across the Bodyshelf, curl and unfurl our backs. Navigating the virtual. No hands.

Most times the action is solitary; I go into one of the system spaces and look around. The space is 2D, translucent creatures float and dart around the edges. Sounds move about, creepy and comfortable. The goal is to hover over one of the creatures, get intimate and be transported into another space, the place of the creatures’ treasure: skeletal, x-ray fragments that rotate and fluoresce around the perimeter. Get intimate again and the treasure is mine, collected at the centre of the projection. I can take all the stuff from all the creatures but the underlying maths of computational ecology change the system if I get too greedy. The creatures become reluctant to share. The treasures can be returned if we co-operate–Brisbane to Melbourne–a little intimate snuggling in the submerged world.

I realise I’ve spent way too long exploring and just soaking up sensation. I start to chase my colleague around the screen. I get off centre and lose my place on the bodyshelf. It doesn’t work right. I think about my position, where I am, how my body moves. I make adjustments, make mistakes, start again, reorientate. There are rules. Predictions can be made, actions calibrated, then it’s over–just 20 minutes of participation which is way too little. Or maybe 20 minutes is just right and I should do this more often, get to know the system better, build up a relationship.

Intimate Transactions isn’t a game, there is no sense of moving to an outcome or nearing the end. It’s a piece of experience design, an opportunity to enter a world like ours but different. I left excited, alert, and without immediate memory–inside the work the experience was too engaging to allow for the hiving off a little bit of brain to run an analytic commentary for later.

Intimate Transactions has been awarded an Honorable Mention in competition at the forthcoming Ars Electronica 2005, Linz, Austria.

Intimate Transactions, transmute collective; director Keith Armstrong; choreographer/performer Lisa O’Neill; musician/sound artist Guy Webster; furniture designer Zeljko Markov; networked between QUT Creative Industries Precinct, Brisbane and ACMI, Melbourne; April 28-May