Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

October 2005

Dan’s eloquent reading captures the vividness and thematic cogency of his review of director John Hillcoat and writer Nick Cave’s feature film The Proposition (2005), a seeming Western that tests white Australian myths.

Read the text:
RealTime issue #70 Dec-Jan 2005

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Image credit: Guy Pearce, The Proposition

The OnScreen New Media Art Course Guide is available as a PDF (76kb)

RealTime issue #69 Oct-Nov 2005 pg. 27,

Mike Stubbs

I interviewed Mike Stubbs the day before RMIT’s Vital Signs, a 2-day conference on new media art that brought together several hundred artists, theorists, curators and writers from around the country to discuss the standing of the field and the key issues of practice, distribution, reviewing and curation (see RT 70 for a detailed report). It’s appropriate for Vital Signs to be held at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image; it’s one of the hubs of Australia’s new media art scene and, internationally, a unique, specialised home for the latest in art practice. Stubbs is Head of the Exhibitions Unit at ACMI.

Trained at Cardiff Art College and the Royal College of Art, Stubbs was the founding director of Hull Time Based Arts (1985-2000) and developed EMARE (European Media Arts Residency Exchange). He co-founded Metamedia, a Soho-based production company specializing in art and music. As a producer he commissioned the award-winning media performance POL by Granular Synthesis featured at the 2001 Venice Biennale, and curated new media programs for the Kiev International Media Art Festival in the Ukraine and the Microwave Festival in Hong Kong. He also established strong collaborative links with European art organisations through establishing the Hull Time Based Arts’ Root Festival.

Stubbs’ commissioned films Donut (2001) and Resistor (2001) were broadcast on BBC 2 and Channel 4 Television; many of his films have won awards; and a retrospective of his video work was shown at the Tate Gallery, London. In 2001, he completed Zero, a short film made in zero gravity on board a Russian military aircraft at the Yuri Gagarin Training Centre. He has also created large scale outdoor projections and streamed works.

Curator and maker

After art school, Stubbs worked with film and then video. He recalls his first show, curated in a temporary cinema space in a supermarket in Cardiff city centre in 1980, was called Not just another art show. As for the difference between making work and curating, he says he has “never been able to separate the two. It’s the sense of working with materials, whether 16mm film or computer digits or expertly ironing shirts (my mother), or arranging the work of other artists; you take pleasure in the craft, the duty of curation, the ability to question, whether creating work or programming or curating. Of course they are different but the underlying principles are the same.”

Stubbs came to Melbourne from Hull via Scotland where he was a Senior Research Fellow at Dundee University. He refers to the experience as “a recovery period [from his 13 years at Hull Time Based Arts] when I actually got to make a body of new work which was, in a sense, critiquing agendas of social economic cultural regeneration which I’d become aware of through my work in Hull. My most significant collaborations have been with social scientists, health care, psychiatrists and scientists, not because they’re better than artists but they challenge your assumptions.”

Two cities

Stubbs describes Hull’s decline from being a highly industrial, masculine culture: “It lost its fishing industry which provided 80% of its employment and had the lowest education attendance figures and the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in the UK. Talent drained to the south. Here was a city that wanted to be part of the information age. It was strategically important for Time Based Art to be in a dysfunctional part of East England in terms of government funding. I was young, I represented techno-music and clubs, and I was up against ageing male councillors, the city fathers. It led to a sense of independence—Time Based Arts became the primary promoter of live and new media art in Britain. I don’t think we really tried to meet their measures of social regeneration but they turned a big-enough of a blind eye to what we were doing to continue to fund us, because enough people in positions of power supported us because we were developing an international reputation, which gave Hull something like having a premier league football club. I was working through the network I’d got from my filmmaking, capitalising on trips to film festivals and then establishing good solid working relationships. We had very strong connections with Holland and Germany, Hong Kong, the Ukraine…”

For Stubbs, Melbourne was very attractive: “a liveable city, security good, good for raising children, images of a relaxed environment, sun etc, but, ironically, it turns out Australians work harder and longer than anyone else.” ACMI is “an amazing site, challenging expectations for people about what they see and where. It has one of the best screen galleries in the world. And there are some great artists working in Australia.” He’s also taken with Australian culture: “Australia has masses of potential, it’s highly distinctive in terms of its history, the mix of migration. It can connect internationally but also with its Indigenous population. Christian Thompson is an intern here, it’s a small thing, but it is important.”

Curating history

Curation and programming are historically significant. Stubbs describes his work as the Head of the Exhibitions Unit and that of his fellow curator, Alessio Cavallaro, as “taking snapshots of particular practices at particular times, and in a way that’s artistic. I’m not a cultural theorist but historically you can see who’s been able to dictate ‘history’, impart versions of the world, for various reasons.”

He is alert to how a curator has to read the signs: “people want to manufacture movements because it’s convenient, because it post-rationalises theory—and Australia is full of theorists. In the early 1990s, he says, the scratch video movement was “romanticised as underground, uneducated garage culture, which didn’t really exist; it was students.” Similarly, being alert to what’s happening around the world is vital: “You have to take on multiple sources of information. I’m always interested to know what great art artists are seeing, otherwise you end up with biennale shopping, which is justified in terms of Australia’s isolation, but risks it being subjugated to a homogenised culture.”

Stubbs describes the unit as “a small team doing 3 or 4 exhibitions a year, but they’re big exhibitions. ACMI is over its start-up period, there’s a new director, Tony Sweeney, with a sustainable model for the institution. Exhibitions had been pretty much specialised media shows, but recently have become more variable in texture and curatorial brief. From here on they’ll be intermixed with shows like the Stanley Kubrick exhibition; a collaboration with the National Gallery of Victoria; something on the history of Australian television [in its 50th year]; and experimental film from Germany; and an emphasis on building audiences.”

White Noise

The current show, the Stubbs-curated White Noise, is a seriously entertaining exhibition of curated and commissioned abstract works in new media, a nice contrast to Experimenta’s equally engrossing Vanishing Point with its more representational animations and interactives. Both shows will be reviewed in RT 70 (December-January).

White Noise is not primarily interactive, but it can be intensely immersive, and that includes the exquisite installation design—a dark corridor with glowing blue frames receding into the distance, each the entrance to a visually and sonically discrete and often powerful work.

Stubbs recalls that as a young filmmaker, “I used to reject abstraction. I was always more interested in the representational than the non-representational. I had that need…but I came to know a lot about abstract filmmaking and loads about new media art. My tutors at the Royal College of Arts were eminent materialist and abstract film makers, Peter Gidal and Malcom le Grice.” Stubbs enjoys the beauty of much of the work in White Noise and is impressed by the artists each having a strong philosophical base.

The show also represents continuity for Stubbs: “There are artists in this exhibition I’ve worked with over a long period of time, more as a producer. I have confidence in them, a close working relationship, and I want to see where they’re going next. And I want to encourage that, provide the opportunity for them to make masterworks. I don’t know how many shots I’ll have to do this here, in a great gallery, with a great body of artists, with a show highly focused in terms of architecture and engineering, at every level. The balance in White Noise between having the right slate of artists, a significant thesis and a great audience offer is a dream scenario.”

White Noise, curator Mike Stubbs, ACMI, Aug 18-Oct 23, www.acmi.net.au

RealTime issue #69 Oct-Nov 2005 pg. 26

Wooster Group, House/Lights

In investigating fundamentals of performance, Peter Brook, Richard Foreman and Elizabeth LeCompte have maintained their reputations as theatre innovators over long careers.

Peter Brook, at 80 years old and with a 60-year career, is the oldest and most venerated of them all, the most influential director in the world. His The Empty Space is theatre gospel. Historic productions include Marat/Sade, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, Conference of the Birds and The Mahabharata. Though he has made a vast and varied contribution to the theatre, he is most frequently associated with a cross-cultural quest to discover universals in human performance. His interpretations of Shakespeare combine psychological insight, incandescent intelligence and a sublime imagination.

Richard Foreman has been making theatre for 37 of his 67 years. Early in the development of his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, founded in 1968, Foreman’s interest in phenomenology produced a theatre that isolated objects and moments, concentrating focus and stretching time. Performers emotionlessly going through movements to the sound of flat voices over the loudspeakers, buzzers sounding within and between speeches, and ludicrous intrusions into stage action were among devices promoting Brechtian distance. Over time, the interruptions and non sequiturs became increasingly strong aspects of his work as he focused on realising his own trains of thought on stage. Most recently, Foreman has used theatre to consider aspects of contemporary culture.

Elizabeth LeCompte’s Wooster Group came about in 1980, growing out of Richard Schechner’s Performing Group, founded in 1967. The associative construction of performances, the alienating devices, the director’s meticulous control of all action, light and sound on stage have much in common with Foreman’s work. The collisions of texts drawn from high and low culture, classic texts and material drawn from improvisation, and juxtapositions of live performance and technology characterise the Wooster Group’s more recent work. Director Peter Sellars has described the work as “high-energy, show-biz media-blitzed theatrical grandslam.”

Peter Brook

Peter Brook and his company presented Tierno Bokar at Columbia University where Brook was an artist-in-residence. (How difficult it is to imagine an Australian university having the resources or the will to pursue such a residency!) Set in 1930s Mali, the play tells the true story of an Islamic mystic who demonstrates the courage of his convictions when he refuses to change his religious practice to fit the dictates of a more powerful sect. As a result, he is rejected by his fellows and left to die alone.

Tierno Bokar recalls another portrait of steadfastness, Robert Bolt’s depiction of Thomas More in A Man for all Seasons, but while Bolt’s More had more than a touch of ego, the holy man in Brook’s production is all gentleness and humility. He says on several occasions, ‘’There are three truths; my truth, your truth and the truth.”

The floor of Barnard College’s gym appears covered in dust for the show. There is an exquisite and characteristic minimalism to staging and gesture. Sticks suggest struggling trees. Two musicians at the side of the area provide wind and percussion for the action. Everything is essential and maximally expressive.

There is no rushing, either. Tierno Bokar is not so much the telling of a story as the staging of a quality; peaceful humility. The meditative pace takes at least some of the audience into a zone in which there are quite different relationships to time and space than the ones we are accustomed to in the West, especially in a city such as New York. At the end of the performance I saw, there was a very, very long silence before tumultuous applause began.

Richard Foreman

Richard Foreman’s The Gods Are Pounding My Head (AKA Lumberjack Messiah) is an endgame in at least 2 senses. Before it opened, Foreman announced his retirement from the theatre he has been making for over 3 decades. The Gods is also an elegy for a culture slipping from sight, leaving the sort of wasteland described by Beckett and Eliot.

The set is vintage Foreman. A steam engine protrudes from a wall. Golden planets with Roman letters around their equators hover among medieval chandeliers with doves hanging from them. The stark utility of industrial chutes is balanced by a whimsical playground slide. Valve arteries protrude from a giant, heart-like planet. Biblical tablets are blank. There are the trademark crossed wires and transparent shields, in case we forget about the 4th wall and whose show this is. Inhabiting the set is a chorus in Ottoman pantaloons, German helmets (complete with cross) and 60s sunglasses. The Exodus, changes to the conception of the universe, the Crusades, the Industrial Revolution and 60s youth culture are among the cultural disruptions thus evoked. Rationality/science and intuition/religion are also in the mix, as are ignorance, innocence and experience.

The director’s note in the programme reveals the reason for the myriad cultural associations. In it Foreman alleges the passing of “the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West” and “the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’”, he describes this “new self” as needing “to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become ‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere press of a button.” He speculates whether this will “produce a new kind of enlightenment or ‘super-consciousness’”, professing himself sometimes optimistic and sometimes shrinking “back in horror at a world that seems to have lost the thick and multi-textured density of deeply evolved personality.”

There is much here in common with Eliot’s regrets about modernity and, indeed, the 2 bewildered lumberjacks at the centre of the piece are hollow men for whom, ignorant of its cultural riches, their environment is a wasteland. Far from being destructive figures, they are incapable of using their axes. For them, “Between the conception/ And the creation/ Between the emotion/ And the response/ Falls the Shadow” of something like ennui or exhaustion.

At the end of the play, mushrooms sprout as characters drink a ‘magic elixir’ that might be a regenerative liquid, like the wine symbolising the blood of Christ or a suicidal potion. The clang of falling cups as the lights fade suggests the latter and confirms the aptness of Foreman’s description of The Gods as an “elegiac” product of “anguish.”

Elizabeth LeCompte & The Wooster Group

While Foreman’s piece is unusually dour for him, the Wooster Group’s House/Lights, first performed in 1998, is especially zany. The show juxtaposes two texts linked by their treatment of power and pursuit, “Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights”, a 1938 libretto by Gertrude Stein, and Olga’s House of Shame, a 1964 B-grade lesbian crime thriller.

In its use of technology in performance, House/Lights has much in common with other recent Wooster work such as The Hairy Ape that came to the Melbourne Festival. Not only are there bells and whistles but clanging platforms, cameras, TVs, headsets, voice manipulations and interminglings of live and recorded action, pop culture and high culture. There is a joyous playfulness to House/Lights. It provides frenetic fun for the audience and its techno-business is impressive. But ultimately it is rather shallow along lines suggested by Foreman. With sufficient cultural background and a lot more motivation, his lumberjacks might have made this show.

* * *

Considered together, these 3 remarkable theatremakers present an array of pleasures missing from most theatre currently on offer. But it is sobering to recall that these productions have occurred during the drab and dangerous Bush era. Seen in this light, Brook’s poetics, Foreman’s erudite elegy and LeCompte’s wizzbangery may well amount to fiddling in the flames.

CICT,Tierno Bokar, director Peter Brook, Le Frak gymnasium, Barnard College, Columbia University, March-April 26; Ontological Hysteric Theater, The Gods Are Pounding My Head (AKA Lumberjack Messiah), writer-director Richard Foreman, St Mark’s Church, Jan 18-April 17; Wooster Group, House/Lights, director Elizabeth LeCompte, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Feb 2-April 10

RealTime issue #69 Oct-Nov 2005 pg. 32

From the moment of being directed to Circa’s studio rather than the main performance space at the Judith Wright Centre, The Space Between is something out of the ordinary. With the audience placed up against the 4 walls in a single row of seats facing a rectangular mat in the centre of the room, the space is bare, except for a single trapeze hanging in the centre. This sparse beginning is a kind of empty canvas that we will watch paint itself.

Lit only from above and sometimes assisted by projections, the mat becomes textured with shadows that create shapes, or inversely, spaces in which the performers place themselves. In the light and in between, the performers are confined and defined. This recurring attention to space is in keeping with the production’s exploration “into the things that keep us apart and our desire to be together”.

These lighting states also ensure that this is a piece about bodies rather than faces and when these bodies (performers Chelsea McGuffin, Darcy Grant and David Carberry) enter and take their place there is an impassive quality, an effortlessness that is neatly contradicted by the moment they engage and the performance begins. The passion and effort builds in an accumulation of moments, of stunning solo dexterity, beautiful duets and gorgeous ensemble work. This is a work of momentum and of images tumbling one after the other. The moving bodies, the riffing physical images and the constant, changing patterns of light on the floor create rich impressions.

The integrated soundtrack ranges from Jacques Brel songs to industrial sounds. When it describes “walking and falling at the same time” we seem to have lost track of which way is up and which way is down as the performers defy our logical understanding of what bodies can do. When McGuffin is lifted up to the trapeze, the vertical dimension of the space—right there in front of us the whole time—seems to open up. And that’s one of the many qualities of this work, what it creates out of thin air. McGuffin’s work on the trapeze is stunning, an exquisite, crash mat-free, heart-stopping duet, performer melding with apparatus.

The other two performers are equally compelling. Carberry has the flexibility of a rag doll coupled with amazing feats of strength, while Grant brings a mix of grace and danger. The only false note came in the stories told by McGuffin and Grant. Without the flair or seamlessness intrinsic in every other element of the production, the texts seemed oddly out of place.

This is a brave work, a simple performance that is strikingly complex, without tricks and yet full of them. Resting on the skills and presence of its 3 performers, The Space Between gives them no room to hide, nor do they need it.

Circa Rock’n’Roll Circus Ensemble, The Space Between, director Yaron Lifschitz, Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, Aug 17-Sept 3

Enter ‘Him’ and ‘Her.’ They sit in a nondescript, aqua green set, reading from scripts, actors playing roles in a show at The Storeroom, Melbourne. Yet each carries a pencil and uses it to make alterations. Actors yes, but actors playing writers who have written a play, joking and laughing about the vain silliness of the theatre. A self reflective dig at a scenario all too familiar…Yet ‘Him’ and ‘Her’, and the oceanic set they are immersed within also hint at an interior space—the masculine and feminine sides of playwright Ross Mueller. Two sides of one personality walking a line between melodramatic realism (a child has died), expressionism, and a self-reflective preoccupation with not just the writing process, but the process of creating a play. The passage from reading to rehearsal through to the public performance of private lives grieving over the loss of a child. Is it the playwright’s ‘baby’ that has gone to the grave? An intimate piece of writing Mueller has offered up for scrutiny to an arbitrary audience ? Or is it a ‘real’ child who has died? Does it really matter?

The human heart is a labyrinth of interconnecting chambers, at its most palpable when dissected in the theatre. Overlay the glib and distant recorded voice of a character who may be a representation of the surface mind of the playwright masquerading as a TV boothman, and Mueller’s play is complete. The omnipotent playwright, aware of his absurd situation, and the absurdity of his creation, delineates the contours of a ‘heart’ that can only be made apparent by a strange contradiction—a distant view of intimate space. One eye is on the story being told, another on the effect of the story as it unfolds on the writer’s emotions. Or perhaps this is just a play about the loss of a child and its effect upon 2 ordinary people? What is this dream we call the theatre and what of the theatremakers whom playwrights ask to interpret their dreams?

Director Brett Adam skilfully teases out the manifold concerns of a difficult script while Todd MacDonald and Fiona Macleod provide the emotional crunch that made Construction… a go-see show, one that entertains yet also challenges its audience by suggesting its melodrama is just another device within a play, within a play, within a play…Such is the oblique resonance of a work well constructed within Construction of the Human Heart.

Construction of the Human Heart, writer Ross Mueller, director Brett Adam, performers Todd MacDonald, Fiona Macleod, lighting design Rob Irwin, set design Luke Pither; The Storeroom, Melbourne, Aug 2-21

You know the set up. The party’s over and it’s time to leave. If you don’t, things may get ugly. Instead, you stay on, trying to recapture the spirit of an event as it diminishes. One too many pills, a bottle or 2 of vodka, and the party just gets uglier…

The End of Romance has something of this ugliness. A pudgy, bearded Jason Sweeney in white singlet and Y-fronts disco dances with balloons. Vampish Julie Vulcan repeatedly stabs a heart shaped chocolate cake with a knife, stuffs cake into her mouth, and later offers it to members of the audience (many choosing to eat the mess). The End of Romance might be muddled, self indulgent and excessive, but what of that moment when a relationship fails—that transitional space, that haemorrhaging of a fruitful, satisfying partnership in our capacity to abandon those we love? This is the space that The End of Romance inhabits, but it is not just a show about personal relationships. Sweeney runs around the space with a framed map of ‘Old Australia’, singing an ironic song that reinforces “Howard’s Way”—back to the 50s while charting a 21st century path. The political dialectic of the show is all too familiar, but Sweeney and Vulcan move beyond this mundanity.

The performance is conducted from a trestle table with 2 laptops. The computers appear to have no other function apart from receiving confessional emails from a collaborator supposedly situated in Brussels, who also appears on Sweeney’s screen singing a bastardised version of a popular song. The whole set up suggests a dubious dysfunction that may or may not be intentional: artists propelled back in time to 50s Australia, a surreal place in which metaphors of shit, blood and vomit prevail. Might this be symbolic of the end of the romance between the Australia Council and new media and hybrid artists brought about by the recent dismantling of the New Media Arts Board? Possibly, but you may not glean this from the performance if the allusion was not included in the publicity. Perhaps artists should have known that once the business world dispensed with its short lived fetish for new technology, it would only be a matter of time. In a sometimes shabby and often eccentric show, there is power in Sweeney and Vulcan’s suggestion that the party is over. Like dead meat, the characters are left hanging on a butcher’s hook. And the blood flow is slow and painful from a couple of wounded hearts drunk in the kitchen at a party now trapped in time.

The Rouge Room: Unreasonable Adults, The End of Romance, performers Jason Sweeney, Julie Vulcan, outside eye/collaborator Ingrid Voorendt, remote artists Caroline Daish, Jaye Hayes, Stephen Noonan, Kerrin Rowlands, Theatreworks, Melb, Aug 25-Sept 1

Zen Zen Zo’s latest work those with Lucifer is the first of what will be an annual In The Raw Studio Season providing a space where the company, now in its 13th year, “can return to its experimental roots, and develop new, challenging and edgy works.” It also marks the first time that Artistic Directors Lynne Bradley and Simon Woods have handed over the directing reins, in this case to their newly appointed Associate Director, Steven Mitchell Wright.

According to Wright, those with Lucifer was inspired by the myth of Lucifer’s fall from heaven as punishment for sin. Told from the perspective of contemporary humankind or “sinners”, using the Seven Deadly Sins as a framework and the fall of Lucifer as a starting point, the performance and its audience moves through the space of Sub-Station 4 (a disused power station). Along this journey, we and Lucifer (Katrina Cornwell) are introduced to sins written on the wall and performed by the ensemble or by various configurations of duets and trios. All the usual suspects appear: Sloth, Gluttony, Greed, Envy, Lust. Variously depicted through images of yuppies socialising (“Sloth”) or babies slopping up pasta (“Greed”), these episodes were engaging and entertainingly performed, but for the most part steered clear of exploring the consequences of sin. Those episodes that did left a lasting impression.

“Pride”, the final episode, began with what was a signature image for the work, one which opened and closed the show, each performer standing before the audience with arms and fingers extended straight up, faces tilted towards the sky, in an exquisite expression of abandon and endeavour. The race-like scenario that followed provided a compelling image for a physical theatre company, where training is all and ego is often one of the first hurdles. Here, as in “Envy”, which honed in on the consequences of body image, “sin” seemed to take a toll.

The shifting ground of what qualifies as divine, or moral or just plain good taste makes it difficult to know what constitutes sin nowadays. When bureaucrats and politicians lock up children in the desert and callous indifference to human life seems the norm, these old sins just don’t seem to cut it anymore. Or perhaps a redefinition of sin is in order. In those with Lucifer ‘sin’ was for the most part associated with things that seemed more fun than evil.

Zen Zen Zo has a knack for nurturing emerging talent whose passion for performance feeds and enriches their work. The abandon and joy exhibited by this young ensemble created a kind of ‘total performance.’ Particular mention should be made of Katrina Cornwell, her Lucifer acted as both observer and participant, providing the perfect conduit for the audience. This was a sold-out season, with extra shows added. To see young audiences and young performers clearly engaged by the potential of live performance demonstrates that this In the Raw season represents an exciting new step for Zen Zen Zo and for their work with emerging talent in Queensland.

Zen Zen Zo, those with Lucifer, director: Steven Mitchell Wright, performers Katrina Cornwell, Mary Findlay, Kat Henry, Mark Hill, Katie Hollins, Tora Hylands, Robbie O’Brien, Kat Scott, Helen Smith, Peta Ward, Annabelle Winkler, co-choreographer Lynne Bradley, composer: Colin Webber, sound artists Emma Dean, Lyndon Chester, lighting Simon Woods, designers: Steven Mitchell Wright, Suzie Russell, Annabelle Winkler, Sub-Station 4, Brisbane, July 20-30

Stace Callaghan and Margi Brown Ash, The Great Exception: or, The Knowing of
Mary Poppins

In a year in which Queensland celebrates the centenary of the women’s vote, theatrical testimonials to a renegade feminist history in the state have been surprisingly few and far between. Sue Rider’s The Matilda Women springs to mind as an earlier contribution. With such offerings to the national body politic over recent decades as Lady Flo, conservative socialite/mayoress Sally Ann Atkinson and a certain red-headed rightwing firebrand and ballroom dancer, turning to the world of letters by way of inspiration seems a much more edifying option for contemporary performance makers. Whatever the gender or political hue, Queensland undeniably does a fine line in radical individualism and it is fitting, then, that the determinedly eccentric P L Travers (creator of the character Mary Poppins) should have emerged from federation era rural Queensland. As theatreACTIV8’s production The Great Exception: or, The Knowing of Mary Poppins asserts, the home-grown cultural milieu certainly gave Travers something to run passionately away from in the long trajectory that was her gloriously idiosyncratic life.

Taking Valerie Lawson’s biography Out of the Sky She Came as a departure point, director Leah Mercer pooled a strong ensemble, including writer Marcel Dorney and actors Margi Brown Ash, Stace Callaghan and Carol Schmidt to create a unique performance experience in which theatreACTIV8’s bold physical sensibility combines effectively with Dorney’s dialogue driven text. The actors each inhabit an aspect of Travers’ female (if not always avowedly feminist) psyche: a triptych Travers herself describes as comprising nymph, mother and crone. The cast glide effortlessly between these constructions at various points of Travers’ cantankerous life, intruding upon and contradicting each other’s sketchy and subjective accounts of her narrative.

Particularly intriguing in this regard is Travers’ complicated relationship with men, who, if women are assigned 3 basic archetypes, might also be correspondingly described as either genius, father or fool. Certainly, her first major love interest, the Irish poet ‘A.E’ is nominated by Travers as the former; whilst mystic, Gurdjieff, might be considered any of the above; and studio chief, Walt Disney, absolutely the latter if not the former. Callaghan in particular does a fine job of animating Dorney’s amusing popinjays and patriarchs, creating the chilling sense of a fourth (male) actor in the ensemble (whom I was faintly disarmed not to find appearing in the curtain call).

The famous Poppins iconography—umbrella, starched blouse and long skirt (equally at home in the Kransky Sisters’ Esk Valley mise en scene) and crisp uber British consonants and nasal vowels—wend their way with marked constraint into the performance text. Poppins-esque gewgaws hang from Celtic wiccan-like totems in Conan Fitzpatrick’s initially intriguing (but ultimately under-utilised) scenic design. Schmidt’s Poppins only occasionally utters the iconic “spit spot!” and the overall effect is aptly one in which the complex personality that created Poppins, rather than Poppins herself, takes centre stage. Indeed, as Ash Brown’s wonderfully world weary crone suggests, it was never a matter of having ‘created’ her at all, but of allowing her to descend, enigmatically, from the ether. Robert D Clark’s evocative and jaunty sound design is worthy of special mention here by way of invocation.

There was much to like about The Great Exception. With an all too brief 4-day run, this rough gem, with a little further polishing, deserves a second appearance before a wider audience.

theatreACTIV8, The Great Exception: or, The Knowing of Mary Poppins, director Leah Mercer, writer Marcel Dorney; Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, August 17-20

!Metro Arts’ Independents series began with a trial run in 2002 under Sue Benner’s pioneering artistic directorship. More an attempt to forge a hothouse environment for the city’s freelance performance practitioners than an effort to house any pre-existing overflow of activity, the series was an immediate success and has become a fixture in the Brisbane arts incubator’s annual programme. !Metro promotes itself as being “in the centre…on the edge”, and indeed it’s an edge the city desperately requires. Having championed physical theatre and circus longer than most Australian capitals, and having one of the nation’s most committed mainstage writers’ theatres in La Bôite, !Metro has stepped up to the plate and provided the forum for a genuine affordable fusion space for artists across the span of the city’s eclectic contemporary performance spectrum to collaborate, experiment and push parameters. It’s a space where artists—at various stages of their careers, and regardless of their area of performance specialisation—can try and fail, though in the case of the Restaged Histories Project’s latest offering, The Greater Plague, the signs of success are strong.

Set during a plague year—an iconic plague year, as it transpires—during the 17th century, writer-director Nic Dorward’s heterotopic exploration of disease takes place in a specialist London asylum in which denizens of the city unaffected by the epidemic are quarantined for 40 days of sustained physical deprivation and psychological abuse. The most immediately arresting image is Kieran Swann’s starkly ingenious design: !Metro’s inflexible black box is subverted by a white box within. The Plague House is represented as an antiseptic white puzzle box—a berko Rubik’s cube that shifts, slides and reveals slots that double as windows, doors, fire grilles, escape hatches, peepholes and gaudy picture frames.

Two sisters, Lettice (Morgan French) and Edith (Saskia Levy) stumble in through the floor, having broken in through the neighbour’s cellar. They are escaping a domestic abuse nightmare in Paris, and inadvertently find themselves trapped in an exponentially more ghoulish world within the asylum’s macabre confines. Theophilia (Emily Tomlins) is about to give birth, and faces an extended 40-day incarceration in the hellhole if the baby survives. The deranged Nurse (Louise Brehmer) and Bearer (Jonathan Brand) prey on the inmates in fiendish (and, in the latter’s case, necrophiliac) delight. All the cast are excellent.

Dorward’s idiosyncratic directing combines improvisation and extended physical scenes as well as robust adherence to immaculately researched and intellectually rigorous dialogue that makes no apologies for its historical fetishes and predilections. Indeed, the whole piece is refreshing for its refusal to kowtow to lowest common denominator audience expectations, without ever lapsing into prosaic self-indulgence or obscure self-referentiality. It is not a naturalistic narrative. The audience is required to work, to use its imagination to piece together the individual character back-stories (told in impro-styled comic flashback).

There is a feast of physical, visual and linguistic images woven together and driven along by an exceptional sound design by Luke Lickford. There is a renegade bonhomie in the ostensibly mordant study of incarceration that augurs extremely well here, not just for the careers of the team of emerging artists involved, but also perhaps for the future of independent contemporary performance in Brisbane.

The Greater Plague, writer-director Nic Dorward, designer Kieran Swann, sound Luke Lickford; producers Restaged Histories Project and !Metro Arts Independents!; Metro Arts, Brisbane, Sept 7-24

Rawcus & Born in a Taxi

During an Australian tour last year, New York dancer/theorist Bill Shannon expanded upon his performances by incorporating discussions of a particular politics he saw as essential to the reception of work by those with bodies outside of the social category of ‘normal.’ Shannon, on crutches since the age of 5, articulated an aesthetics of “failure and heroics”—a kind of grass-roots discourse of performance as becoming, rather than being, of process over product. Every performance is an attempt, and ‘failure’ is not an aberration but a component of expression with its own significance. The majority of live performances seek to conceal the attempt in favour of the end result, but differently-abled bodies draw our attention to the normative politics of such an endeavour. The distinction between what could be termed the ‘try’ and the ‘act’ is something that separates sports, circus, comedy and some forms of dance such as breakdancing or tap from more traditional modes of performance which seek to pave over the effort that goes into delivery.

Viewing performers with disabilities can reveal some of the underlying assumptions we bring to our interpretation of all performances. Do we judge disabled performers differently? Probably. But works like the recent Not Dead Yet can help us to understand this as a productive way of seeing. Judging an actor’s ‘ability’ here takes on a new dimension: after all, we often praise or condemn a non-disabled actor’s ‘ability’ in a role without considering the kinds of politics which might surround such interpretation.

The cast of Not Dead Yet is made up of contemporary physical theatre ensemble Born in a Taxi and Rawcus, a company featuring performers with and without disabilities. Born in a Taxi’s Penny Baron devised the piece after a South American journey which introduced her to Aztec and Incan cultures’ worship of disabled individuals as guides into the afterlife. Not Dead Yet is a group-devised response to death and the hereafter, and though there is a loose narrative thread to the piece (a woman’s slow journey after death), the piece is largely composed of a series of disjointed responses to the overall précis. Part of the work’s enjoyment comes from realising the questions posed by each scene: how would you least like to die? What are you afraid of leaving behind? What would you most hope the afterlife to hold for you? This last question underscores one of the piece’s most moving sequences, an initially cryptic scene in which performers throw paper planes, play in a sandpit, or slow dance together. When blind and wheelchair-bound Ray Drew, who was himself pronounced technically dead after being electrocuted, begins to cry “I can see again! I can see again!” it becomes apparent what is being explored here. Moreover, the emotional affect of this scene is so powerful precisely because it acknowledges the embodied experiences of its participants, both disabled and otherwise.

Theatre@Risk

Australian theatre has sometimes struggled to find a footing when dealing with urgent political issues. The tendency towards didacticism must be tempered with a realisation of the sophisticated theatrical vocabulary of audiences, many of whom are sensitive towards overtly polemical narratives. Theatre@Risk has already demonstrated an ability to address contemporary affairs with delicacy in mounting recent works from abroad (Terrorism; Arabian Night) and original productions (The Wall Project; 7 Days, 10 Years). Stalking Matilda engages with the politics of paranoia and the treatment of refugees, ostensibly exploring the mysterious death of its heroine as a means to uncover a society of trenchant racism, institutionalised xenophobia and ultimately explosive class tensions. An ensemble of uniformly strong performers creates the social environment in which the doomed Matilda and her immigrant husband move, and as we learn more about the 2 we begin to question our own complicity in such a perilous state of affairs.

While the politics of stalking itself offers fruitful ground for a theatrical work, the title of this piece initially appears somewhat misleading. A trenchcoated voyeur occasionally hovers at the fringes of proceedings but only rarely becomes a notable figure. As the story unfolds, however, it begins to appear as if the audience itself is the stalker, looking in on, at times, obscured views of the central character’s life, piecing together a distorted composite image of her complex existence. It is a testament to both Tee O’Neill’s writing and Chris Bendall’s direction that the idealised, glamour model portrait of Matilda is always rendered only partially, while remaining a distinctive and many-levelled characterisation. As Matilda herself, Jude Beaumont creates an entrancing intensity for a character who is in other ways composed only of surfaces. In this she is matched by Rob Jordan, whose charismatic portrayal of Matilda’s husband Suleyman is both sympathetic and bold. Staggering through a city street, clutching a rag to an open stomach wound, it is apparent that Jordan understands the importance of subtlety in what could otherwise have been an overplayed death scene. In this, as in most of Stalking Matilda, Theatre@Risk has once again produced a keen-edged and incisive investigation of local and international politics and the pressures which place both social and personal ties in crisis.

Stuart Orr

The recent remounting of Stuck Pigs Squealing’s Black Swan of Trespass and the commissioning of Telefünken are part of Malthouse Theatre’s new Tower Theatre program. Independent artists and companies are invited to stage existing or new works in the intimate venue and are given creative freedom to present their final product without interference from the company. At the same time, they are required to provide the kinds of progress reports and budgets which would be expected of a larger, professionally mounted production, thus schooling emerging artists in the kinds of practice which await them later in their careers. It’s a gamble, but one which has so far resulted in strong works which add a vital energy to the Malthouse calendar.

Telefünken is a solo show devised and performed by Stuart Orr and directed by Barry Laing. I’m not sure if Orr was inspired by author Thomas Pynchon’s magnificent opus Gravity’s Rainbow, but this was the text which most forcefully impressed itself upon my interpretation of the piece, and that’s a potent recommendation. Like Pynchon’s notoriously difficult work, Telefünken re-imagines the closing moments of World War II through a cacophony of voices and embedded narratives. Trapped within a Berlin moviehouse as Russian tanks roll into the city, the audience is confronted by an SS soldier eager to relate the story of his life, but the manic deserter does so by both describing and enacting his tale as a movie with storyboard, commentary and dialogue, amongst other framing devices. The plot unfolds through this series of competing mirrors, and Orr’s incarnation of Mann, the increasingly erratic storyteller, emphasises his position as the postmodern Unreliable Narrator, who may be mad, sick, duplicitous or forgetful. We are never provided a safe position from which to make sense of these events, instead attempting to navigate this explosive terrain in the same method as our guide.

Like many of the postmodern authors of the late 20th century, Orr also offers us Telefünken as an encyclopaedic narrative, one which matches densely textured detail with an impressive scope. The many streams which carry through the piece include Northern European mythology, reality television, the modern psychology of crowds and the mutability of history. Orr plays a multitude of characters, and though his accents are impressive there is room for development in the area of vocal delivery. This quibble aside, if the rest of Malthouse Theatre’s Tower season matches this level of brave innovation, few will argue with the direction the company has chosen to take.

Not Dead Yet, directors Penny Baron, Kate Sulan, designer Emily Barrie, lighting Richard Vabre, deviser-performers Steven Ajzenberg, Clem Baade, Kellyann Bentley, Ray Drew, Rachel Edward, Nilgun Guven, Carolyn Hanna, Valerie Hawkes, Nick Papas, Kerryn Poke, Louise Riisik, Jolan Tobias, John Tonso, presenters Born in a Taxi, Rawcus Theatre Company; Theatreworks, St Kilda, Sept 15-25;

Theatre@Risk, Stalking Matilda, writer Tee O’Neill, director Chris Bendall, performers Jude Beaumont, Irene Dios, Odette Joannidis, Rob Jordan, Toby Newton, Jeremy Stanford, designer Kelle Frith, sound Kelly Ryall, lighting Nick Merrylees; Theatreworks, St Kilda; Aug 5-21

Telefunken, writer-performer Stuart Orr, director Barry Laing, Tower Theatre, Malthouse. Melbourne, Sept 14-25

For the past 4 years Hobart’s innovative is theatre ltd has conducted the National All-Media Improvisation Laboratory under the umbrella of the Boiler Room Improvisation Festival, holding a series of workshops in sound, words and voice, movement, technology and physical comedy. At the end of each day a performance highlights the skills and techniques achieved. The final night—the performance I saw—was described as a “cross-artform slam.”

Artistic director Ryk Goddard explained, “Everything you see tonight will be improvised, from the lighting to the sound, movement and images.” Part 1 evolved as a wryly amusing, absurdist piece with kung-fu moves, a tentative love scene, an engrossing, rambling monologue from a ‘Chinese doctor’, a skit-like interlude with a female protagonist and a gnome, and lots of use of 2 chairs and a cupboard, the ‘characters’ almost generating a coherent narrative. There was plenty to entertain, provoke and amuse, much of it beyond rational explanation.

Part 2 of the presentation, UTE (the Universal Theory of Everything), was a process researching improvised performance as a site-specific collaborative practice. To quote the Boiler Room program, “the challenge [is] to lift impro beyond the interesting and make work that combines the power of theatre, the visual impact of installation and the physicality of dance.”

Titled The Room, this manifestation of UTE investigated the room or cell as a site for “interaction and performance, refuge and imprisonment.” The 3 performers navigate their way in and out of a flexible, multi-purpose, interactive space created from swathes of suspended translucent fabric. Music is integral to the piece, a minimal, repetitive guitar solo setting the tone. Performers dance, pose and make abstract movements. They interact with the white cube, moving in and around the space, pulling at and manipulating its fabric walls into a fascinating variety of shapes and configurations—after which, thanks to ingenious design, it all springs back into its original form. Digital projections onto the walls add to the ambience.

Without the safety net of script and rehearsal, Boiler Room was genuinely entertaining, frequently amusing, thought provoking and absorbing, a triumph of improvised theatre.

Another unconventional performance was Jeff Blake’s anarchically original one-man show Cancelled by Popular Demand. Its non sequitur comedy is reminiscent of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Groucho Marx and the Theatre of the Absurd—to name but a few elements. Physical comedy features prominently—cricket balls are lobbed at speed against a side wall; Blake climbs into and over the audience, muttering grumpily all the while; shuttlecocks are randomly hit into the auditorium; and the performer’s neatly suited character intersperses the early parts of the performance with shuffling, deliberately self-conscious ‘cool’ dancing.

The comedic dialogue zanily dissects humanity’s woes and evils, astronomical phenomena, Shane Warne’s bowling, crooner-style cabaret…the list beggars belief but it all works outstandingly well. One of the most absorbing performances I have seen in Hobart for ages.

National All-Media Improvisation Laboratory, Boiler Room, performers scot d cotterell, Cam Deyell, Ryk Goddard, Bec Reid, Martyn Coutts, Greg Methe, Aaron Roberts, James Wilson, Caleb Doherty, is theatre ltd, Backspace Theatre, Hobart, Aug 25-28; Cancelled by Popular Demand, writer-performer Jeff Blake, Peacock Theatre, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, June 22-26

My memory of Romeo Castelluci’s Giulio Cesare at the 2000 Adelaide Festival (RT 36, p22) is frighteningly vivid. Although a substantial variation on the text and themes of Shakespeare’s play, it served nonetheless as a radical reading of the classic, the problems of the protagonists writ large and displaced into bodily distortions and the wasteland generated by civil war made devastating almost beyond imagining. Benedict Andrews’ production for the Sydney Theatre Company is, instructively, a very different creature, revealed in the portrayal of an altogether cooler, pragmatic culture as epitomised in Robert Cousin’s set—a bleak cut-away concrete amphitheatre, evoking both the senate house of ancient Rome and the brutalism of modern stadiums. Here there are gross entertainments straight out of Abu Ghraib prison, a fairy floss seller, thuggery and conspiratorial gatherings, but the mood is of restraint and paranoia. This is epitomised in the portrayal of the crowd, so pivotal in Shakespeare’s Roman plays. Andrews has disappeared the crowd, but in very revealing ways.

First seen, the crowd comprises surreally masked, distracted and isolated individuals scattered across the amphitheatre. They hardly warrant the lecturing and hectoring by their betters in the opening scene. After Caesar’s death they become mere noises-off during the orations of Brutus and Anthony: none is physically present, their whisperings and calls transmitted through loudspeakers on stands placed about the Forum. It’s as if the crowd is mere background noise to the great political machinations taking place. So it is today, any politician invoking public opinion or a silent majority is bound to be wielding a fiction. The focus in this Julius Caesar is a very interior one, full of difficult choices and populated by the ghosts of the victims of political logic.

Brutus (Robert Menzies) looks like a harried home body, hair wildly tousled, dressed in a red woolly with white shirt sticking out, certainly a very interior, unfashionable man, marked by his anxieties at very first sighting and not someone who deals with the world, conspirators or Cassius face to face. Andrews choreographs the action so that this isolation, political and domestic, is unmissable. Cassius (Frank Whitten), dressed in a suit, is a watchful businessman, physically relaxed, mentally alert, another man who keeps his distance. Both actors speak with a quiet intensity in a delivery that is lucid, the poetry more conversational than sung, slow and considered, and true to the inexorable logic of the play as it moves towards Caesar’s death. And slow and intense the first half is, capped by a slo-mo murder in mime and Brutus’ washing of the body…in blood—as if he, like Lady Macbeth, has come face to face with the enormity of his crime and nothing will wash it away.
After Anthony’s speech (Ben Mendelsohn playing a truly blunt man, all the rhetoric in the shape of the argument rather than in flourish) many a production slips into decline—there are no heroics to be had in the bickering between Brutus and Cassius or in the nuances of loyalty tested by pragmatism, or in the pathos of Brutus’ suicide. Andrews now accelarates his production and wisely concertinas a number of scenes into one, set at a long table lit only by hundreds of candles. Brutus, Cassius, allies and the ghosts of the recently deceased sit on one side looking out over the audience. Forced to avoid eye contact throughout and driven by the staccato structure this scene yields from Brutus and Cassius an unprecedented emotional intensity that reverberates beyond private tragedy to the destruction of the very republic the pair were defending. It’s a nightmarish scene that builds to sudden release when Brutus and Cassius do finally face each other and Cassius accepts his friend’s strategy, although knowing it means defeat. Andrews’ approach here has a power that might have advantaged the production elsewhere; in this scene it gripplingly prepares us for demands of the play’s final bleak moments. This is a fine, engrossing, sometimes visionary Julius Caesar.

In progress

The Sydney performance scene appears to have been quiet in recent months, but there’s a lot of backroom activity. Showings of works in progress in Performance Space’s Headspace, its hybrid performance laboratory, revealed a number of pieces already far advanced in vision and realisation. Branch Nebula’s Project No 6 (shown with the support also of Performing Lines) seamlessly and erotically fuses skateboarding, BMX-biking, acrobatics and breakdancing in various partnerings—it sounds unlikely but it works beautifully with a hypnotic intensity and not a little physical virtuosity. Karen Therese showed Y. Smith, part 2 of the Sleeplessness trilogy, this time investigating and recreating the life of her mother in moments both delicately intimate and shocking, accompanied by magical images from Margie Medlin. Melbourne’s Neil Thomas and David Wells, as Two Bare Light Globes, gently humoured us with improvised tales and new songs about what it means to be a man in Man Talk. Jeff Stein and collaborators in Il Ya led their audience into one of the strangest experiences encountered in contemporary performance in recent years. Inspired by Emmanuel Levinas the work takes us into spaces that are both physically and philosophically dark, and hard to describe. Stein and company are off to Italy to develop the work further in Romeo Castelluci’s studio.

At Drill Hall, Critical Path presented German dancer and choreographer Antje Pfundtner (interview p12) in a remarkable solo performance for a small audience after the workshop she’d been running for local choreographers. Combining unusual shapings of the body and tales from her own and other’s lives, Pfundtner is charismatic, her performance fluid and idiosyncratic. It’s hoped that Pfundtner will soon return to Australia to perform her work publicly and conduct another workshop.

Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare, director Benedict Andrews, designer Robert Cousins, costumes Alice Babdidge, lighting Damien Cooper, sound/composer Max Lyandvert, Sydney Theatre Company, Wharf 1, opened July 1; Headspace, Performance Space, July 18-Aug 28

For many individual artists and small companies working in performance, the time and energy they expend on self-producing is becoming increasingly exhausting, often threatening to drain their creativity. One solution, often raised but rarely discussed in depth, comes in the form of the ‘creative producer’, a kind of cultural angel of mercy.

On August 8 RealTime and Performance Space held the latest of our popular open forums for artists, this time to address the role of the producer in contemporary performance. Some 50 artists, curators, producers and venue managers listened to and talked with our guests. Rosemary Hinde is the director of Hirano, an agent and a producer of dance across Australia and Asia. Martin Thiele works as a producer in performance, film and new media. Harley Stumm, formerly with Urban Theatre Projects, is now working for Performing Lines. Amanda Card is the Executive Producer of One Extra Dance. Hinde and Thiele are based in Melbourne, Stumm and Card in Sydney. The session was hosted by RealTime’s Keith Gallasch and Performance Space Artistic Director Fiona Winning. What follows is drawn from the complete, transcript. See RealTime-Performance Space Forums on the left of our home page for other forums).

Agents, presenters, producers

You could say that all producers are creative, that they search out and nurture the creativity of others. But, of course, some producers are more creative than others, in particular those who don’t just pick up an already developed work but who are in there from the beginning, with the artists, helping to shape, fund and mount the work, sustaining the artists’ vision.

In the Australian performing arts, our image of the producer, let alone creative producer, is not very clear. There are agents: some look after artists and groups as individual entities, others harness a particular group of artists, like Strut ’n’ Fret (unfortunately unable to make it to the forum) in Brisbane who have effectively put together a stable of idiosyncratic, cutting-edge cabaret performers. Some double as agents and producers, alternating roles as the need arises. There are venues whose programming helps to shape a terrain for artists to work, ranging from the incubators, like Performance Space and PICA, to the Sydney Opera House where Philip Rolfe, Virginia Hyam at The Studio, and other staff will program seasons but also commission some work and follow its gestation and development through to the end. Then there’s Performing Lines. It picks up innovative work it thinks it can tour successfully and sometimes can be in there from the beginning as a producer with artists and projects it feels it can commit to. But its resources, and its brief, for this kind of activity are limited.

Is there something missing from the arts ecology at the moment—a group of independent producers who are not necessarily attached to venues and who are not agents but who work closely with a small group of artists and companies? The forum began to work towards establishing precisely what role the creative producer plays, who needs them and how funding models can accommodate them.

Amanda Card described the evolution of One Extra from an artistic director-driven company to a facilitator for choreographers and dancers to mount works with Card herself as executive producer. The move was in part responsive to local needs: “the bottom had fallen out of the company structure…It was also generational. A lot of people were coming out of companies and wanting to create their own work but there wasn’t a model [and] not enough time to spend in the studio creating the work [while being] administrators, marketers, financiers, whatever.” Card said that One Extra provides those services where possible and as early as possible in the development of new work.

Rosemary Hinde has run Hirano Productions for 15 years: “I do 3 things. I function as an agent. I represent companies with existing productions and tour them within the Asian regions on a tour-by-tour basis. I produce collaborations and co-productions with international partners from Asia—and that’s a big part of my work. Also, where it’s possible, I present Asian companies in Australia—mostly in the areas of dance and physical performance… Artists’ interests, it seems to me, have traditionally been represented and safeguarded by managements and agents. Their role is to represent the artists rather than that being part of the producer’s role.” Hinde thinks that the label “producer” has been widely adopted, but without addressing what the role entails: “Ten years ago when you dealt with Australian arts companies, they had general managers and artistic directors. Now they all have executive producers.”

Inhibiting structures

Both Hinde and Thiele spoke of the problems presented by traditional company structures. Thiele described company producers expending more energy on servicing boards of management than on their creative role, a condition he’s worked on overcoming in his own practice. Hinde put a case for reviewing company structures: “Traditionally, within a funded and not-for-profit context, funding has been driven through the core unit of the company with its general manager and artistic director or executive producer. Historically, that’s been the basic unit and model of arts funding in Australia. Now, I’m actually not sure that that is any more the most economically productive way of deploying funding because it seems to me—and I work with companies. I tour companies that have exactly those structures—that what you’re effectively doing when you fund things that way is to duplicate roles…A company that does 2 seasons a year, it seems to me, doesn’t need a marketing manager. But maybe 6 companies who are grouped together with a complementary set of skills, in the way a festival works with specialist managers who come together and work as a team that service each of those individual companies, might be a better way of looking at it. Performing Lines is definitely one model. Arts Admin in London is also a model that supports companies over time.”

There was further discussion about artists not needing to build their own stand-alone company structures or, certainly, elaborate ones. It was suggested that more than ever before there are various structures to tap into and make good use of—Performance Space, the Sydney Opera House, Melbourne City Council (which has its own Creative Producer in Stephen Richardson), Hirano, One Extra, Performing Lines, and agents who do also act as producers, like Marguerite Pepper and Strut’n’Fret. However some inhibiting factors were described. Rosemary Hinde pointed to the growth of arts centres “which lock up an enormous amount of resources…are hard to access and don’t work with potential national and state partners.”

Anne-Louise Rentell described the Illawara Performing Arts Centre as addressing the producing role for local artists. Rentell is Performing Arts Facilitator in Wollongong, a position created by the NSW Ministry for the Arts to facilitate professional performing arts in the Illawarra region. She describes her role as “a semi-producer.” The centre is well-resourced, programs big companies, has “2 great venues”, so, says Rentell, “we’re ripe to actually provide opportunities for development and to produce local work from the ground up.” In this model the centre provides staff and facilties, but the funding for artistic content is sought from the state and federal governments and, if touring, through Playing Australia. Perhaps then, as with Melbourne City Council, local government could focus on funding creative producers.

Creative status

However, some speakers thought that attitudes to producers would need to change as well as the organisational and funding structures already discussed. Both Martin Thiele and Harley Stumm spoke of the importance of the producer in areas superficially not part of the creative process. Thiele said, “I think a creative producer provides consensual, logistical compliance, financial and technical support to a project or at least oversees those particular elements of a project. I think in [performing] arts, film and television, which are the 3 mediums I’ve worked in over the last 12 months, the producing element is essential.” Stumm commented, “I think a lot of the things that are often seen as ‘dry’ management tasks (budgets, schedules and so on), they’re just a different discourse about the creative process. A budget is a plan for the distribution of resources. So, you can’t do all that work without having a really clear idea of the vision for making that work of art.”

Thiele’s concern is that the performing arts needs independent producers, but that they have no status: “Historically, artists have taken responsibility for self-producing and I think that within the arts support infrastructure there’s still an assumption that artists will take that responsibility. And I think that’s something we need to address because, generally speaking, independent creative producers have very little status within the arts. Within the film industry it’s acknowledged that such support is core and essential. So a producer is acknowledged alongside a writer and a director and, in terms of the budgeting structuring, is what you call “above the line.” So it’s acknowledged that the role the producer plays is a core part of actually creating an artwork, a film.

Another model

Fiona Winning introduced “another model—one of my fantasies—that might sit alongside a series of other models such as [the local government one]. This is of an independent producer with a very lean machine/office. They work with a cluster of artists in quite intense relationships over a number of years to create their vision, whether it be to develop a work, make a new work, to get that on somewhere, to get it toured either nationally or internationally.”

Sophie Travers, director of Critical Path (a NSW dance workshop and masterclass program at Drill Hall, Rushcutters Bay), who has had extensive experience working in the UK, was asked to describe the work of Arts Admin. She said it’s a successful, government subsidised team of producers each working long-term with a particular group of innovative artists on projects, programming time out for artists to do research or take sabbaticals, working across artforms, and offering artist bursaries. Travers described Arts Admin as “pretty much your dream model. I think it’s really interesting that the model is held up around the world and in the UK itself and yet it doesn’t exist anywhere else. So even in the UK everyone acknowledges that that is the model but nobody can replicate it.”

Travers added that, “Each producer has a range of companies that they’re responsible for. But they also have a different skill set. So every time they introduce somebody new, they bring in different cultural networks or different sponsorship. So they’ve evolved with the times, but they’ve kept that one-producer-for-one-group-of-artists. And they really range. Some of them are like an individual who makes one work every five years to companies like DV8. They work across performing arts, visual arts. They pick up projects and put them down again.”

Devolution

Arts Admin, along with Performing Lines and the Mobile States group (a consortium which includes Performance Space, PICA and other spaces around Australia touring innovative performance), are examples of organisations managing devolved funds. The discussion focused on the advantages of this model where a network of independent producers could, with creative verve, lean management, on-the-ground know how, and direct contact with artists, choose the artists they want to work with and develop long term growth in the performing arts. Over post-forum drinks, participants felt that the time had come to research producer models like Arts Admin, to look at the particular needs of Australian artists and to reconsider current company structures and funding models. No small task, but worth the venture given the urgent needs of artists and the the presence of individuals in the arts community capable of becoming committed creative producers.

David Young is a composer and co-artistic director of Melbourne-based and world roaming Aphids. Around composer and company a world of collaborations constellate. The Libra Ensemble are premiering Young’s song cycle Thousands of Bundled Straw for the 2005 Melbourne International Arts Festival. Shortly after comes a showing of Origami, the working title of a new BalletLab work in collaboration with BURO Architects who are designing the huge folding set under instructions from the origami-inspired artist Matt Gardiner (whom Young worked with on Oribotics) and with graphics by 3deep design. Young is working with Jethro Woodward and Eugene Ughetti of Speak Percussion on the sound score, partly electronic and partly live and using graphic notation informed by Gardiner’s work.

When Young says ‘graphic’, he means that the instrumentalists respond to non-musical notation as in Skin Quartet where the instrumentalists follow instructions on how to musically interpret skin tones or tattoos in photographic images. This multimedia string quartet performance recently appeared in the Time Based Art festival (curated by Melbourne Festival’s Kristy Edmunds) in Portland, Oregon, before going on to Les Bains::Connective Festival in Brussels (where Aphids was in residence in 2004), and Johannesburg.

In November, Aphids, will present Gardiner’s new version of Oribotics as an installation at the Asialink Centre with Young again writing music with Jethro Woodward and Eugene Ughetti. Aphids co-artistic director Rosemary Joy is creating new percussion instruments for the show.

Young sees this set of shifting collaborations within and beyond Aphids as organic, “like a theatre or music ensemble, but not all musicians. The sense of an emerging ensemble is a new thing, an evolution of Aphids. It’s like a new species, but I don’t know what it is.”

In December, at the Big West Festival (in Melbourne’s western suburbs) Speak Percussion will present Ughetti solo in Raising the Rattle, a performance of works he’s commissioned from 4 Australian composers, along with elements of Oribotics.

At the end of the year, says Young, “we’re doing the creative development of our next work, which is Nasu [The Eggplant Project], a Belgian/Japanese/Australian collaboration with 3 composers and 3 musicians.” Beyond that, Young is thinking about a new work based on his “fascination with people being so obsessed with space and yet not knowing anything about deep sea life. It’s almost like psychological denial, a blind spot. I want to do a performance at the bottom of a diving pool with an audience in the water.”

Hybrid life

Unlike other new music ensembles, when I think of Aphids, it’s not music that springs to mind, but strange hybrids of installation, sculpture, video, puppetry, song and sound art. The key, says Young, is the artists: “It’s the people and it’s definitely the fact that we’re not bound by an artform or a format even. That completely opens up the possibility of plugging into different venues and presentation formats, adding different artists. It gives us the freedom. And this is something I discovered with the puppetry trilogy, A Quarrelling Pair, about myself (RT64, p38). While essentially most of the people involved were thinking about it as a theatre show, I was very committed to the fact that I didn’t know what it was going to be. It could have ended up being a radio play or a publication or an installation event, or cabaret. I was committed to suspending judgement. And that’s just because I’ve been allowed to do that through the body of work we’ve been creating.”

Process and duration

In that case, sufficient time for development appears to be critical to Aphids’ success. “Yes”, says Young, “it seems that everything we do takes years. And that’s not necessarily through choice. It’s partly pragmatic. These things take a long time to get together. There’s the underground stream that bubbles to the surface every now and again but it’s always running there underneath. Another metaphor is of plates spinning in a circus act. You give one plate a bit of a spin, run to another as it starts to wobble, and sometimes a plate crashes.” One image of nature, one of artifice and risk: “I can’t settle on one or the other. It is a bit of both. I often talk about nurturing and supporting and tilling the soil. And, of course, Aphids—it’s such an organic, garden-y kind of thing…Certainly that’s what appealed to me about being involved as artistic director of Next Wave. It wasn’t my work but I was collaborating through a nurturing, curatorial role. That happens in Aphids a lot.”

Growth is central to the Aphids vision: “You have an idea, you gradually develop it and collaborate, have some workshops, and maybe you make some experimental tests until eventually you create and present a work. Then it’s documented and kind of solidifies. And the intention has always been that it would then live on in some other form. And that might just be the documentation, a publication, the recording or whatever. But it also might be the tour or the re-mount. And that has happened with works in the past but in a much slower way. Ricefields (1998) was one of our first works that toured. But it took 18 months after its first presentation at La Mama before it went to France and Japan and around Australia. What’s happening now is that cycle is not just faster but a bit more robust and it’s gaining momentum. So that gives us a different kind of fuel. It just gives us different areas of activity, generates more work and more opportunities and more ideas.

Rosemary Joy and I are the kind of engine room. We share the administrative, management/production type things. But also in a way we pin down the activities and events that happen. A lot of the strategy of making these artistic processes unfold happens within that context. But then we also have our formal committee. There are 6 people on that. All of them have been involved from pretty much day one across the decade. They’re the sounding board and the foundation of Aphids. Then, of course, there’s Cynthia Troup who provides a critical perspective and research as well as literary and performing skills. There’s an intellectual rigour which she provides which pushes the work.

Thousands of Bundled Straw

The song cycle has had a long evolution: “I started writing it 10 years ago, just after Aphids started up. I was in Japan at the Temple of the Healing Eyes on Lake Shinji-ko in Far West Japan. There’s a myth about a fisherman who finds a statue of Buddha floating in the water. It appears to him in a dream and tells him if he throws himself off a cliff, his blind mother’s eyes will be opened. So he gets up the next day, wraps bundles of straw around himself, jumps off the cliff and he survives, his mother’s eyes are opened and he founds the temple. You can still visit it. The story goes that he put the statue of Buddha in a box within a box within a box in an altar in a temple. It’s revealed every one hundred years.

“In a way, the song cycle is like that, architecturally—boxes within boxes. But at the heart of it there’s the leap of faith. You’re never going to see the weight of meaning or significance that is within, but you have to believe in it, otherwise it can’t be there.

“I remember writing the first song, which is actually in the fifth part of the cycle. There are 7 parts. The fifth part has 7 songs for voice and guitar, which are written for soprano Deborah Kayser and guitarist Geoffrey Morris. And I remember writing the first one in this fishing village just near the temple and very clearly writing it for Deborah and Geoff. Both have performed in all sorts of projects that I’ve worked on and have been significant collaborators in my artistic career. Deborah was the first person to perform my music in public.”

Ten years on, it seemed to Young, “pretty amazing to be literally writing the last few notes—it’s a very tactile thing—and thinking, oh yes, that’ll be Deborah. The whole work will be performed with a major movement at the end which is completely new. There’s something about how the song cycle documents history, not just my own, and what I’ve been interested in, but actually all these other encounters, these influences I’ve had along the way. For example, the text comes in part from a tourist brochure, so there’s a bit of Japlish—hence the title which doesn’t quite make sense—although you don’t notice, which I quite like. There are also fragments of Calvino. When I was living in Italy that gave me cause to connect particularly with a lot of Calvino’s writing. And Georges Perec is another influence; the idea behind his book Life: A User’s Manual is pretty much what is going on in the third movement, the frozen moment that you then explore in time. So yes, geography and literature and, then, individuals. And there are different movements that have been performed in different parts of the world.

Thousands of Bundled Straw is a 54 minute, formally notated concert work, perhaps the last of this kind of work that Young will write: “what I’m interested in has moved. Traditional notation is so inadequate for what I’m trying to do.”

As a song cycle 10 years in evolution comes to fruition, and as Skin Quartet takes him around the world, David Young and Aphids move into new cycles, with Oribotics, Speak Percussion, and, soon, the creative development of Nasu [The Eggplant Project]. Young explains that it’s “a collaboration between 3 composers: Keiko Harada from Japan, George Van Dam from Belgium and myself, with 3 musicians—Natasha Anderson from Australia, Yasutaka Hemmi the violinist we continue to work with, and Yutaka Oya who’s a pianist based in Brussels. For this project, Rosemary Joy is making, especially for Yutaka, a toy piano but one that is preparable and re-tunable. So that happens in December. Then we’ll present it in the 3 countries sometime in the next 5 years.”

Libra Ensemble, Thousands of Bundled Straw, composer David Young, soprano Deborah Kayser, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Iwaki Auditorium, ABC Southbank Centre, Oct 18, www.melbournefestival.com.au

Credo

The Queensland Music Festival opens early morning, out west with Riley Lee and others around the Winton Musical Fence. In Brisbane that night Credo the innocence of God is the big ticket blockbuster, marketed as a high tech multimedia extravaganza linking performers live across the world in a work of innovation, ferocity and spiritual depth. The production is big, filling the Concert Hall stage with percussive contraptions, an orchestra, singers, and 3 big projection screens high up back. The hook of Credo is for musicians from Belfast, Istanbul, Jerusalem and Brisbane to join together live through the miracle of technology—hands across the ocean, jam on the bread of life, smiles of religious tolerance and mutual appreciation. Unfortunately the tech hookup does not develop any sense of live interaction. Each screen is more or less assigned a specific set of musicians. They play, we watch. Might as well be prerecorded.

The general feel of Credo is episodic; bits of music, some singing, cut to live musicians in Istanbul or Belfast or Jerusalem, back to the orchestra, maybe some declamatory wisdom. Individual musicians are a standout, great percussionist on the local stage, fantastic reed player and percussionist from Turkey, plenty of the others as well, but the orchestra is weirdly powerless, at times too far down in the mix to hear. Good bits aside, Credo was disappointing overall, an ecumenical-Lite journey through the religions of the world (what, there’s only 3?). Singing nuns, strummed guitars, kumbaya.

Erik Griswold

More intimate and rewarding was pianist Erik Griswold at St Mary’s—a modest, fully functioning church in South Brisbane. Inside the church the setup is traditional worship, big altar up front, Jesus to the left next to the prepared piano, saints to the right next to the Steinway. Flower arrangement in the middle. Griswold is a rare performer of the rhythmic, prepares his piano honky-tonk style, paper and leather across the strings, a welcome extension to the Cageian tradition. The program is a mix of Griswold’s own compositions—rhythms from the Americas, a bit of Thelonius Monk, traditional Chinese folk songs.

Latin beats on the prepared piano start the show. Shimmering ostinato bass, chimes and tuned snare drums make for a seriously happy rhumba train to Cuba. The preparation of the piano is subtle and sophisticated, sounds are surprisingly diverse yet the pitch remains clear. Set number 2 is on the Steinway, gentle clustered arpeggios, a narrow pitch range, diffuse layers through the reverbing church. The switching between the pianos divides the program into rhythm (prepared piano) and ambient (Steinway). On the Steinway Griswold uses music boxes for inspiration, twirls them with a finger to get them going, then improvises a delicate response. He ties a bunch of seed pods to his hand as a shaker, uses windchimes for spiky notes and overlapping layers. He goes to the prepared piano again, speaks of the similarity between Chinese folk songs and blues guitar. Resonant, rubbery bass, papery sounds in the mid range, damped woodblocks in the upper register, grandeur builds up like a slow and epic pan across the desert mountains. Over to Thelonius Monk on prepared piano plus melodica. Strange nostalgia, half time on the Goon Show, flyboys around the piano for a singalong and a pint.

Finks

Japan’s Leni-Basso has been around for about 10 years. Finks starts with large screen projections behind a sparse stage, bared light on canvas. Dress is neat casuals, greys, subtle blocks of colour. The dancers enter to the corners, bang into mic stands, shove their faces into cameras to leave traces on the screen that decay into bleached out solarised glitch video. The sound design follows the same techno-glitch as the lighting and video—refined minimal, speaking the tech to itself, tightly integrated with the performers.

People get on and off chairs, walk on and off stage, move together and apart. Movements are from martial arts, the scenes are ugly, social aggro with the bruises ritualised out. There is a piggy in the middle torment of the chairs, ganging up on the little guy, holding out the promise of rest but never letting him sit down. In the end the tormentors use the chairs themselves. We get to observe an uncaring anthropology of workplace politics, approach and rejection, what was your name again? Text instructions project onto the screen, dancers become values, filling the variables in a generative dance function. Passionless conflict is the go, carving out a place others will call your own. Maybe this section goes on too long as it systematically works its way through the instructions. Maybe that’s just life as work.

The cameras have been picking up the dancers’ actions, playing them back on the huge screen, looped, distorted, time delayed. We get used to that echo, but gradually the echo goes unbalanced, the video comes first, the live action later. We see the dancers up on the screen, working in pairs, moving in slo-mo, getting somewhere then getting dragged back. Time breaks down, slips about. Space breaks as well, as dancers start to work with their shadows, the shadows of their partners, and the shadows of dancers who are no longer there or not there yet.

Glass House Mountains

Into the 3 largest rooms of the IMA for Elision’s Glass House Mountains Project (Judy Watson visuals, Liza Lim sounds). The Glass House Mountains are a set of eroded volcanic plugs rising out of the coastal plains on the drive north from Brisbane. They’re always referred to as a family, traces of tradition in iconic south-east Queensland. Nearest the IMA entrance, Watson has rows of mounded dirt, classic red, pineapples sticking out—a little farm like you first notice planted around the mountains themselves. Above the dirt hang striped spears, menacing, in flight. But they aren’t spears, they’re boning rods—marker poles once used by surveyors to carve up and quantify the land—ready for sale, ready for the pineapples. Lim’s soundtrack sits low in the room, ominous rumblings, rapid fire scratching, burying the faint unaltered traces of the original kookaburra calls.

The second space is sparse, a projected video pool of water running across axe grinding grooves, the natural sounds of stream and insect. Alongside, Watson has spun Beerwah, the mountain as mother, a translucent fabric veil abstracting the mountain into a container of light. In the corner, cellist Rosanne Hunt interprets Lim’s score where cartography maps the gradient of the mountain onto a musical timeline. Measured, evocative, the cello crackles, breathes and scrapes, paced to the slow drones and pulses of the field recordings that are transformed and embedded throughout the space. My favourite performance of the festival.

The final space has a large end-wall video projection. Shots of approaching the Glass House Mountains from the sea, rowing low down, Captain Cook-like. Satellite imaging, surveillance shots from space, checking the place out from above. On the floor and in front of the projection, are stained canvasses, topographic maps of the whole family of mountains. Sound is unobtrusive, slow, the occasional bird calls clear above the breathing drones.

Sound, image and object evoke the mountains and the history of their representation. Underlying the spaces and objects is a way of working through history for closer relations to the specifics of place.

2005 Queensland Music Festival, Credo: The Innocence of God, artistic director Andrea Molino, QPAC, July 15; Erik Griswold in Concert, St Mary’s Church, South Brisbane, July 23; Leni-Basso, Finks, Brisbane Powerhouse, July 28-30; Elision, Glass House Mountains, Judy Watson and Liza Lim, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. July 21-31

Paul Doornbusch opened the Australian Computer Music Conference with talk of the early days. Sydney, 1950 or ‘51 and Geoff Hill programs the very first music to come out of a computer (one of the first—memory stored as acoustic pulses washing about within 5 feet long lacquer coated tubes filled with mercury). The piece was probably Greensleeves. Hill played it over the phone to his mum, who thought it sounded like a kazoo. Doornbusch has reconstructed the sounds and history on a CD and book. At a later talk Rob Esler gave glimpses of his project to revive some of the classics of electronic composition. Great to be able to actually hear these early works rather than just hear about them.

Conference was busy: concerts, talks, installations, workshops, an informal performance space at night. Ideas in the talks often turn up later in the concerts. The concert hall is a large black barn of a space. In the centre, ringed by speakers, people on chairs are arranged into a tight grid. Arms are folded. Everyone listens. Piece ends, silence, then applause. Repeat until finished. Listening to a machine in company always strikes me as strange. Without a performer there is no need to be with other people except as a convenience—in this case the conference is the only time most of these pieces can be heard. Very different to experiencing music as a sociable (or socialising) medium situated in the active body.

Computer music has been around long enough to have generated its own tradition of sounds and ways for articulating those sounds. Things speed up, things slow down, perhaps it’s time to put away the delay lines for a while. Much would not have been out of place in the (analogue) soundscape of the Barrons’ Forbidden Planet. Contrast the maturity in sound generation with the ongoing problem of maintaining interest in compositional structures across a range of scales—the problem of form in computer music. Computational methods can lead to work that obsesses on novelty in the micro details and excludes any audible evolution across larger time scales. Ends up a random-ish succession of sounds. Unfortunately the information flow of a random series is constant at all scales and it is much more likely that we respond to changes and patterns in the information flow of music rather than to the individual bits of information themselves. Hence we habituate to random sounding music, lose interest, nod off, don’t buy it much.

Luke Harrald successfully tackled musical form by avoiding modelling the audible structure of music directly. Instead, he modelled the “social dynamics involved in music performance” with a system of generative composition based on the tradition of performance indeterminacy developed by Cage, Christian Wolff and others. Under this sort of system the performer’s musical behaviour is constrained and encouraged by a set of compositional rules rather than dictated to by using a strict and determined score. Harrald uses an extension of the Prisoner’s Dilemma equations, normally used to model social situations where cooperation amongst people works out best in the long run (keeping in mind that everyone might be about to shaft everyone else and maybe you’d better get in and shaft them first). The result is the delicate and gentle Surroundings, the highlight of the concert series, sustaining interest both in the moment and the whole.

Other works mixed performer and machine, most used the spatial sound array to great effect. Rob Esler was terrific to watch as the frenetic wild man percussionist does Foley. Angelo Fraietta delivered some excellent manipulation of sounds in space using a very home-made looking, circuit boards protruding, guitar-like controller. Jon Drummond used real time video, projecting dye dropped into sugary water onto the large backdrop screen—the diffusion of the dye drove the evolution of the music. Lovely to look at, hard to make the link between the visuals and the sounds. Scott Sinclair and Joe Musgrove went oppositional with a brutal assault of video and audio feedback that bordered on the unethical. Andrew Brown’s software generated a score that pumped out a few bars at a time to the waiting musicians. Improved as it went along. But for Brown, and the computationally focussed composer, aesthetic judgement is often not an end point but an input into the theory of possible musics their software expresses.

Australian Computer Music Conference 2005, Creative Industries Precinct, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, July12-15

Though the lives of the artists span generations and continents, comparisons between Ed Kuepper and Len Lye abound. Both extraordinarily gifted artists, they have earned their notable place in history as much for their creative contributions as their refusal, or inability, to be ruthlessly commercially minded. In their rejection of the tools of the establishment, both anticipated and performed key ideas of avant garde art. Lye, one of the first to experiment with direct painting onto celluloid, is heralded with birthing the music video. Kuepper’s seminal role in vanguard Brisbane band The Saints drove the development of the intense, defiant sounds of punk music. Continued experimentation characterises both careers.

With the MFLL (Music For Len Lye) show, the connections between these two pioneers of oppositional art reach a rewarding fruition. Brisbane-based curator David Pestorius is well placed to bring these two autodidacts together. A long-time follower and scribe of alternative/independent music, and an art lover and scholar, Pestorius mobilised his awareness of both Kuepper’s and Lye’s art (and status) in the realisation of MFLL.

Tusalava, Lye’s first, extraordinary film from 1928 (a black and white semi-abstract film featuring wriggling microbe-like shapes, laboriously cel-animated over 2 penurious years), is now silent. Originally performed with two pianos, the score, produced by Lye’s long-time friend, Australian Jack Ellitt, has long been lost to history. According to Pestorius, the combination of Lye’s interest in “the relation between the moving image and the movement of their accompanying music” and appreciation of the “very cinematic” dimensions of Ed Kuepper’s important solo work prompted Pestorius to approach Kuepper with a concept to add music to the films, not as a pre-recorded soundtrack, but live. Kuepper came to the project with little to no knowledge of Lye’s formidable legacy, but with his manifold connections to the visual art world and his musician’s meter, he instantly appreciated Lye’s remarkably kinetic work.

Kuepper says he was “inspired by the abstract rhythms” to create the music for Tusalava, and several other famous Lye animations. Rather than try to replicate the original soundtracks, which were deeply, generatively intertwined (a result of Lye’s obsession with synchronicity), Kuepper’s interpretation resulted in freer flowing, rock-inspired pieces for guitar and drums. The Lye Foundation granted permission to use Lye’s films and Music for Films was born.

Success in Brisbane, Melbourne and a show in Sydney at the Opera House brought numerous accolades for Music for Films in 2003. While some purists may prefer the original soundtracks, the adventurous Lye would probably have approved given the energy and spirit of the Kuepper collaborations, especially in the light of Stan Brakhage’s notion of the contemporary sound/avant-garde film performance as an entirely discrete form.

MFLL sees Kuepper continuing to develop music to accompany moving images but this time for specially commissioned short video art pieces by high profile international artists. When, in 2004, the Lye Foundation chose to withdraw permission to screen the films, both Pestorius and Kuepper wanted to continue the project, and so a number of artists were contacted to produce video works. Each artist was provided with examples of Kuepper’s more cinematic music (including those pieces devised for Music For Films) and invited to produce imagery in response. Kuepper was then presented with the videos, from which he devised the final music for the program. MFLL features drumming by long term collaborator Jeffrey Wegener, with whom Kuepper played in 80s experimental “jazz-punk” band The Laughing Clowns. They were joined by cellist Jane Elliot for the most recent performance at the Queensland Music Festival.

The international video artists’ work is brilliant, contributing to the show’s appeal to European audiences (it toured to Berlin, Vienna and Paris to widespread acclaim). French artist Dominique Gonzales-Foerster is as highly sought after as she is selective—her very presence is a coup. Her video piece, After Len Lye’s Free Radicals, is an exceptional digital work, mastering subtle organic forms in 3D animation. One of only a few works to refer directly to Lye, its sparing visual quotation of Free Radicals’ white-on-black scratches teams beautifully with Wegener’s tribal tom drums, echoing the African drums of Lye’s original and creating a sublime, referential—even reverential—artwork. Liam Gillick’s anarchic theme-park work, Public Information Film, is also delightful; a colourful, ironic statement (given that Disney is widely acknowledged to have appropriated Lye’s work for Fantasia) scored with jaunty verve by Kuepper’s fast paced playing and Wegener’s merry rhythms.

The Australian work is also of very high calibre. Eugene Carchesio’s video piece continues the organic minimalism for which he is feted in his visual art and experimental music. For Ian Burn is composed of a single fixed take of a window from which can be seen gently swaying trees. The contrast between the unyielding horizontals of the blinds and the shimmering leaf and bark shapes beyond creates a meditative experience of opposites, enhanced by subdued but resonant music.

Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley’s video, Pangaea, also stands out for its conceptual clarity. Multiple layers of lapping waters and map outlines converge and dissolve; we see a ship sliding past, some quick night-vision shots, and bands of intersecting colours appear and disappear. As Kuepper’s jubilant guitar soars, accompanied by itself (thanks to a synthesiser device enabling multiple tracks) and Wegener’s throbbing drums, text appears: ‘Manus Island.’ In an instant, an array of associations strikes, about boats, water, Australia, the Pacific and ‘solutions’; with the musical crescendo, contemplation is inevitable, fittingly reflective of the music that was initially created for Tusalava, right at the beginning of the project.

Music For Len Lye is both a homage and a dedication to Len Lye (the music is ‘for’ Len), and also a description (the music began as scores for Lye films). Cleverly, it also conjures up MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer’s “LLMF’ (“Live Like A Motherfucker”). When asked about the process of making music Kuepper described it as “fairly intuitive initially, then (with) an element of intellectual appraisal later to see if my intuition was correct.” Judging by the success of the shows, it undoubtably was.

Ed Kuepper’s Music for Len Lye, Queensland Music Festival, Brisbane Powerhouse, July 16-17

In Metaphors of Vision, Stan Brakhage asked “how many colours are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’?” Alex Carpenter’s music asks a similar question about sound. Can we, even for moment, recapture the primal, unconditioned experience of the child? If we (reluctantly) agree with Brakhage that “one can never go back, even in the imagination,” then we must go forward in pursuit of knowledge, of perception in its deepest and most fundamental sense.

The physical impact of Alex Carpenter’s music, heard in a small gallery at high levels of amplification, is so forceful that it focuses immediate attention on the physical sensation and might lead to the conclusion that there is nothing more to it than that.

But Carpenter’s art—with music now increasingly and inseparably linked to video—is also a philosophical investigation into the nature of sound and our perception of it. There are some obvious precedents, the most notable being La Monte Young. Born in the turmoil of the 60s, Young’s work initially seemed to be anarchic, fuelled by drugs and the hippie ethos. His association with the Fluxus movement did little to dispel this impression, as Fluxus was often perceived as flippant and flaky, an impression that the artists did little to correct and at times deliberately and mischievously encouraged. But a key element of the movement was what Henry Flint called ‘concept art’, art that is about ideas, often articulated through seemingly insoluble paradoxes. Young created some of the most notable and philosophically challenging works of concept art, works that revealed a mind which (contrary to superficial impressions) possessed daunting self-discipline. That quality has determined the trajectory of Young’s art ever since, with the side effect of making his work resolutely non-commercial and almost inaccessible.

Carpenter’s music has some affinities with Young’s, while his use of music and video brings to mind Phill Niblock. That broadly puts him under the stylistic rubric of Minimalism, a description that seems as inadequate to describe his work as it does Young’s 7-hour long Well-Tuned Piano. Carpenter wants to evoke a specific response in the listener, an experience of Sound (the capital is deliberate)—sound in and of itself, independent of cultural conditioning, sound as experienced by the child who does not yet know what ‘sound’ is. Is such an experience possible? It is not simply (not that there is anything simple about it) a physical sensation, nor is it an emotional experience (which 19th century attitudes, still dominant in music today, would have us believe is the primary purpose of art). Paradoxically it can only be experienced—if at all—through physical sensation, mediated by culturally loaded artefacts such as guitars, synthesisers and PA systems, and moreover—in this performance—in an art gallery, albeit an ‘alternative’ gallery. If it must be concluded that Carpenter’s project contains contradictions, that is exactly what makes it so interesting.

Featureless landscapes rush past on left and right walls, like riding in a very fast train through the outback, while multiple keyboards, guitar and samples produce a dense, textured wall of sound. The music (Chord from Second Delphic Hymn) is one extended chord with a rich spectrum of high harmonics. Turning one’s head from side to side, or cupping the ears in various ways, reveals more of the structure of the chord in all its jangling, pulsating glory. Beyond the micro-variations in the sound, the music is essentially static. Like the video projection that hurtles at breakneck speed while the landscape scarcely changes, the overall impression is of motion arrested. The Futurists’ worship of speed has been turned on its head; rather than rushing forward into a glorious technological future, this high speed ride takes you to exactly where you are. If this is a philosophical investigation, it is pre-Socratic; at one level, following Heraclitus, everything is in a state of flux, but Parmenides steps in to retort that nothing moves. (There might be Zen resolution to Carpenter’s paradox: according to Hui-Neng, ‘Mind is moving’.)

In a more relaxed mode, a video of slowly turning dancers is curiously compelling. Their circular movements are yet another form of arrested motion, while the lighting and gentle music bathe them in a glowing aura. What appear to be coffee grains slowly being washed away by water form the material for Excavation Pattern 3. The gradual erosion produces constant change, yet in the end no real change. High energy music returns with Emerging like an Infant from the House of Truth, in which furiously repeated notes on keyboards—recalling Guy Klucevsek’s Oscillation series for accordion or the ‘clouds’ of La Monte Young’s Well-Tuned Piano—with the addition of guitars and saxes, assault the ears with frightening intensity. Like most of Carpenter’s work, there is constant change (and, in this case, an extremely active micro-texture) without forward motion.

With an increasingly assured use of video, Alex Carpenter’s work continues to grow in depth and interest. His recently released DVD, Studies in Dynamic Photography (Vanished Records VAN20504), makes his work available to a wider audience.

Alex Carpenter, Music of Transparent Means, De La Catessen Gallery, Adelaide, August 7-8

This year new music ensemble Topology is venturing into uncharted territory in a series of collaborations with jazz groups, pop musicians, vocalists and the rock group Full Fathom Five. Since meeting at university, FF5’s Ian Thompson and Topology’s Robert Davidson have worked together in a variety of improvisational bands, recording projects and art events, so this concert was inevitable, celebrated with the formal launch of their album Future Tense.

For the CD, Full Fathom Five recreated Topology works such as Five Notes with an electro-pop feel, while FF5’s Going Equipped features Topology’s rhythms and harmonics in a quirky acoustic essay. The combination of music styles together with effective visuals developed by staging designer Mark Bromilow and his team and displayed on a huge hanging screen, provided an hypnotic, almost cinematic experience for the Powerhouse audience.

The first half of the concert featured Topology performing works by ensemble members Robert Davidson and John Babbage. Although at times the sound mix was quite strange, with the double bass and saxophone sometimes almost inaudible, the compositions effectively showcased Topology’s refined approach to minimalism. The ensemble creates performances that draw you in as the music slowly grows. Violinist Christa Powell’s tone was exquisite, her playing soaring over the ensemble.

Robert Davidson’s work for solo viola, Spiral, was performed with great intensity and musicality by Bernard Hoey. Throughout, the viola plays a short phrase which is then looped while the next phrase is played. The result is a deeply emotional, almost meditative piece that could easily send the listener into a trance. Previous hearings suggest this performance was at a much faster tempo and therefore perhaps not quite as effective, but the performance was brilliant.

The standout work in the first half was Robert Davidson’s McLibel, based on Britain’s longest-ever trial where fast food giant McDonald’s sued 2 activists. It featured Davidson’s established technique of mixing vocal samples and moulding them with instrumental lines. While the technique of playing with the rhythms of vocal samples is not new, it is the narrative quality of Davidson’s compositions that engage the audience. The performance was outstanding, the instrumental parts matching up with the vocal lines so well it was virtually impossible to dinstinguish between them.

The second half of the concert had Topology and Full Fathom 5 joining forces to perform tracks from the new album. Electronics and acoustic instruments seemingly melt into each other as if always meant to co-exist. Some inspired drumming by John Parker lifted the intensity of the entire ensemble, with the line between minimalism and pop music very blurred indeed.

How can composers who have grown up in the past few decades engulfed in the explosion of musical styles not be influenced by popular culture? It is encouraging to see Topology at the forefront of developing an intellectual and artistic approach to a post-classical music. Perhaps contemporary music in Australia does have a future with ensembles such as these creating a style that bridges the gap between contemporary chamber and pop music.

Toplogy & Full Fathom 5, Future Tense, Topology: Christa Powell (violin), Bernard Hoey (viola), John Babbage (saxophone) Kylie Davidson (piano), Robert Davidson (double bass); Full Fathom Five: Ian Thompson, Sam Korman, Robert Mynard, Tam Patton, Ben Thomson, Josh Thomson, John Parker; visuals Mark Bromilow and Jen Muller, sound Brett Cheney; Brisbane Powerhouse, Sept 8 www.topologymusic.com

In a richly realised thematic program titled Drawing Breath and built around the subject of breathing, the Song Company excelled. The choice of often demanding material from across the last millenium requires fearless vocal virtuosity. Under the direction of Roland Peelman the company displayed it amply. In a host of short works in the first half of the concert, the ensemble performed against the background, aurally and visually, of media artist George Khut’s interactive video as it responded to his breathing (members of the audience tried it themselves in the interval), heightening awareness of our conscious and unconscious relationship with a biological fundamental.

The songs were not only about breathing, for example in its metaphorical connections with spirit, but frequently exploited its character—short, long, breathless, staccato, lost—and the conditions which transform it—drunkenness, love, worship, anger, halitosis and pollution. One of the bonuses of the program was in the opening trio of songs where the voices took on instrumental qualities: Philippe de Monte’s Bonjour Mon Coeur, Claude Lejeune’s Revecy venir du Printans and the Pink Floyd/Jean-Michel Jarre Breathe/Oxygène IV arrangement. The effortless continuum the company achieved in Guillaume de Machaut’s De souspirant/Tous corps/Suspiro left me breathless, while the The Violence of Work (Stephen Cronin to a poem by Geoff Goodfellow) was effectively stressful—punctuated as it was with sharp breaths and disturbing, vocally produced industrial noises. The glides in Hin-yan Chan’s Liquor Mania not only evoked a decline into drunkenness, accompanied by variously pitched hiccupings, but also the magical voices and instruments that are the breath of Beijing opera.

The second half of the concert featured substantial works of the heavy breathing variety—sensual laments, operatic soarings and outbursts. The vocal variety of the program expanded rapidly in Giulio Castagnoli’s Madrigali guerriero e amoroso and Frank Nuyt’s Ai da verde (from Racine’s Britannicus). Where Castagnoli introduces whistling, warbling and weeping in his Monterverdi-inspired meditation, Nuyt’s bracing 2003 work begins with hums and whispers and turns on the drama with rushes of breath, rolled r’s, stamps and claps in a grim 17th century vision that corresponds with our own dark times, closing on a spoken voice against a single, tireless, enveloping chord. A great concert bordering on the overly generous, but at the same time a wonderful opportunity to review the Song Company repertoire, inlcuding many works they have commissioned.

On June 11, in Kangaroo Valley, NSW, and on June 15 in The Studio at the Sydney Opera House, the Song Company presented Brothers in Crime, a celebration of the 60th birthday of Martin and Peter Wesley Smith (the valley is their home). What the concert brought home is not only the affection and respect for the brothers in the musical community, but the totality of their vision—accessible, direct, sometimes satirical, often overtly political works drawing on popular musical idioms and pushing them to new levels of complexity. The first half of the concert came from their powerful 1994 music theatre work, Quito, not only an indictment of Australia’s mishandling of East Timorese refugees in the 80s and 90s but prophetic of our government’s subsequent cruelties to refugees from other countries. The remainder of the concert included a range of works new and old that entertained and enlightened with their gentle wit, whimsy and droll barbs, all done justice by the Song Company.

The Song Company, Drawing Breath, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Aug 28; Brothers in Crime, A 60th Birthday Concert for Martin & Peter Wesley-Smith, The Studio, Sydney Opera House, June 15

“What is the answer?’ [Gertrude Stein, on her deathbed, receives no reply.] ‘Then what is the question?”

The first time I saw a medieval gilt altar-piece in the British Museum (as opposed to a reproduction), I stood in awe, and cried. For the first time I understood the relationship between passion, art, and devotion—both why these artworks were revered and what kinds of reverences they held. Madonnas, the Christ as man and child; delicate, almost boneless human frailty, richly felt and even more richly framed. Caught in the zeugma of such transcendent vulnerability, I am amazed: adoring, aghast, awash, ashamed, I am touched into wonder at the interweaving between the art, my life, suffering, the body, identification and difference. These pulls and tugs forge an empathy between my own and the others’ sufferings.

Standing before Bill Viola’s The Passions—themselves a result of studying medieval and Renaissance devotional works at the Getty Institute (part of a larger multi-participant research programme in 1998)—I am not so forged or tugged. I am not even sure I am touched. I observe hands touching, holding, carrying, moving others on. I am not asked to be these people, recognise them in me. I am, however, moved and carried; I observe and ride the waves of motion-in-emotion that I see. This is a different order of watching being asked of me.

So much has been written and spoken about Bill Viola’s work that I can barely begin to comment. The current viewing season of The Passions at the NGA has spawned so many offshoots and events that it is hard not to be buffeted and distracted by them. Chunky Move will do a short choreographic residency, John Bell will give a lecture on actors’ passions, and good luck to them. But I am not at all sure that these are of any real use.

There is much chatter circulating about whether Viola’s actors’ ‘enactments’ are ‘real’, or ‘not real.’ Surely we can leave that debate to reality TV. I don’t care whether or not Viola’s people are actors. In some of his pieces, I like better than in others what they ‘do.’ But the strengths in the works do not, for me, rely on how well-played or ‘true’ are the passions they represent. It is what they are sculpted into, and their peculiar affect, that concerns me.

Unlike the Getty masterworks, Viola’s contemplations are largely stripped of contexts. They refer to, but enact, their iconographic references differently. The Christ who ‘resurrects’ is in fact still dead, falling again into his devotees’ arms (there goes god). In another, a procession of mourners one by one approach a (mangled? decimated?) body we never see (there goes identification through empathy). We watch instead effects—though limited—of horrors, separations, catastrophes. Indeed, one does not ‘move on’ from the captured moment (or ‘pass through’ death or grief), as some have worried: nor yet examine the different ways we experience them (for example, through laughter, numbness, or nervous breakdown). I am aware not so much of an exploration of variety, but of a pallette which restricts itself intentionally.

Jonathon Lahey Dronsfield (in The Art of Bill Viola review compendium), an ethicist and philosopher, has great trouble with Viola’s restrictions. His essay, “On the Anticipation of Responsibility”, worries that his works carry no “questions that are not predetermined in the works themselves”, that there is nothing left ‘yet to come’; that they take away, even from death, “what cannot be anticipated about it”:

There is no sense of the possibility of our making a contribution to the image, no way we can intervene and assist; …we are left merely to ‘share’ or not in the experience of what is presented,…the prelude to a guaranteed answer…the room for one answer only…[the asserted mystery of things].

Indeed, the joys of The Passions are rarely ones of surprise. Even the intermittent rumblings of the massive installation, 5 Angels for the Millenium, which pre-empt the whale-like leap of swathed human figures from ocean depths, become more subliminal as one stays in that twilit, night-sound buzzing room. The major experience of the work becomes immersion within cycles of emergence and return. As one walks through the entire exhibition from dark to lighter rooms, all the works—enormous, back-projected, or on smaller LCD or medium-sized plasma screens—repetition without progress is a major force. I am not sure if repeated viewing is of any gain.

We now look on the 19th century ‘science’ of physiognomy as a kind of dark horror, exploitative of the disabled, a heinous categorisation of extremes of emotion as a tool of social control. Yet taking measure of emotions is something I believe Viola shares with the theorists and painters (such as Le Brun and the Duchenne de Boulogne) he studied during the Getty project. I say this, bearing in mind that Viola’s work notebooks exhibit a high degree of compassionate and humane observation of the human condition.

In a strange sense, the pieces in The Passions are moving stills. Utilising the body as a tekhne, or art-tool, Viola captures an emotion’s trajectory, much as stop-frame photography would the progressive blooming of a flower. We observe, do not interpret or interfere. But we do watch something follow its full course.

Viola’s video tekhne is of course extremely high: the quality of images and projections; the slowing of the films; the strength of his compositions, brooding and spilling in waves of motion and emotion not just within single frames, but also across and between many. These waves establish relationships between diptychs and triptychs, and between other works in the same and adjacent rooms. One accumulates a rhythmic, rather than verbal, narrative. One’s breathing slows.

What touches is not so much the realism, nor the comprehensiveness, of the enactments—this is not psychoanalysis, nor less a purification ritual, as in Buddhist meditation—but that I am called to accompany the enactments: stay with them, not baulk, turn away, or interfere. And this is what touches me: like the mourners who touch and move each other through the camera frame in Observance, I am moved through, and on. I am entrained and held.

It makes sense that 5 Angels…, a separate work, concludes this exhibition, because it heightens the motion of the whole: from immersion to eruption, and to immersion again. Plasma, miasma, placenta, bardo. Emergence: potentiality. Awash. The breakthrough of an epoch, or the single thought of a single mind. Surges. Another motion wave. In a sense, each of the Passion ‘portraits’ are emergences of feeling through screen membranes. None is about ‘what is yet to come’, but what is coming anyway.

Perhaps for me the favourite: the chosen shapes of Four Hands. Like Buddhist mudras, simple shapes distill symbolic form. The hands perform motions beneath emotion, the shapes beneath shape-making, That is much.

For a show predicated, essentially, on the idea of drawing, Vehicle confounds any preconceived ideas the viewer might bring to it. This vibrant collection of compelling works is as far from the idea of pencil likenesses and conté sketches as it could be, featuring examples of ingenuity and lateral thinking using a wide range of—to this gallery goer—unexpected media. The description “electric drawing”, which was used by several commentators to sum up the show, gives some idea of its impact.

Curator Felix Ratcliff has assembled an impressive group of exhibition participants and has chosen an intriguing curatorial premise: “a range of contemporary drawing-based works…whose conceptual strategies and manipulation of materials constitute and represent dynamic forms of cartographic activity” (catalogue essay).

The Sydney-based trio known as Conductor presented a one-off performance in which they created a large work using real time audio and video-editing devices, electrically-conductive graphite pencils and paper, manipulating a bank of synthesizers and software to represent elements of the aural, the musical and the visual. Both the exciting resulting image and the video of its creation feature in the show.

Julia Dowe’s delicate kinetic drawing, the digital animation entitled white cranes day and night (the cranes are machines, not birds, incidentally) investigates spatial and visual limits utilising a slowly moving gridded formation. On a loop, individual, simplified, linear cranes slowly emerge, line by line, against blue backgrounds symbolic of night and day, only to dissolve or dis-assemble in the same manner. The repetitious use of forms and movement, as the diagram-like outlines of the cranes appear and fade, emphasises the spatial nature of time, creating for the viewer “a mental map of temporal discontinuity” (catalogue notes).

Sculptor Sharyn Woods’ Reinforcement re-interprets and subverts the notion of drawing by using arc-welding burn marks on MDF to create a star-like modernist pattern, based on the unpretentious fence post finial. Other lines and scratches add to the “dimensionality and linearity” (catalogue) of the work, and I found it interesting to appreciate the piece and its shapes taking on board the catalogue references to symbolic associations with fortifications, weaponry such as spears, violence and the military.

Jake Walker’s Untitled, parts 3 & 8 (marker pen on acrylic) are delicately beautiful, flowing, curving, curling ‘landscapes’ in limited palettes in soft tones, dotted in a somewhat pointillist manner and able to be read in a variety of ways. Anne Mestitz “takes a line for a wall”, to use the Paul Klee phrase, turning aluminium cable, paint and car detailing into a 3-dimensional mobile sculptural piece inspired by anonymous verbal exchanges between people. The physicality and beauty of this work, Heresay, are entirely seductive.

Other works also utilise media in inventive ways. Ian Friend’s A Decompensation Episode #2 maps the mental disintegration of a close friend. Using Indian ink, gouache, crayon pigment and casein, this spectral image sits somewhere between the painterly and the drawn. Textile artist Sara Lindsay has utilised gouache on paper to imitate the appearance of the drawn line, such as that made by a coloured pencil. The title, Shima, is Japanese for the word ‘stripe’ as it relates to textiles. The work speaks of the lines traced by a shuttle moving across woven fabric and also functions as “an autonomous directional diagram and motion-map’ (catalogue). Mick O’Shea creates Audio Drawing, a time-based DVD documenting the sights and sounds of his artmaking; movements, textures and the aural traces made by his body and his media as he paints and draws at his “audio drawing table” (catalogue).

Vehicle is multi-layered and intellectually rigorous, with an engrossing and illuminating exhibition catalogue. As a purely visual/aesthetic experience the show functions exceedingly well. CAST gallery is a venue whose aim is to present a varied program of the best in contemporary art; Vehicle is one of the most successful exhibitions I have seen there this year.

Vehicle: Drawing, Maps, Models and Prototypes, curator Felix Ratcliff; artists: Conductor (Michael Robinson, Cy Norman & Pia Van Gelder), Julia Dowe, Ian Friend, Ralf Hanrieder, Karin Lettau, Sara Lindsay, Anne Mestitz, Mick O’Shea, Jake Walker, Sharyn Woods, CAST Gallery, North Hobart, July 2 -31

Melbourne International Arts Festival. Go!

Artistic Director Kristy Edmunds’ programming for her first Melbourne Festival, due to commence October 6, looks wonderfully adventurous. Not only does Edmunds sustain Robyn Archer’s commitment to featuring Melbourne artists (this year it’s Malthouse, Paul Grabowsky, Cuocolo/Bosetti, Back to Back Theatre, Chunky Move, Bruce Mowson, La Mama, Brian Lipson, Shelly Lasica, Red Stitch Actors Theatre, Rebecca Hilton, Uncle Semolina & Friends and Aphids), but she also makes bold programming moves on the international front that give the festival a distinctive, contemporary performance personality.

The works are from artists who transform our sense of time and space, who offer new possibities in performance and who will entertain, irritate and exhilarate. Largely from the UK, Japan and the USA they are: Saburo Teshigawara (Japan, whose sublime work the RealTime team revelled in at LIFT97 in London), Forced Entertainment (UK, wickedly funny, radical highlight of the 2004 Adelaide Festival), Lone Twin (UK, live art heroes), Ryoji Ikeda (Japan, creator of deeply immersive electronic art), Richard Maxwell’s New York City Players (a unique theatrical mini-cosmos), Shin Wei Dance Arts (NY, a hit at the 2004 Sydney Festival) and Ann Bogart’s SITI Company (USA, founded in 1992 with Suzuki Tadashi).

In this edition Chris Kohn (of Stuck Pigs Squealing Theatre) interviews Richard Maxwell in New York; Bruce Gladwin talks about Back to Back’s exploration of sound and space, which has led the company to perform in the Flinders Street Railway Station; and David Young reflects on where his Melbourne Festival work, Thousands of Bundled Straw for the Libra Ensemble, is positioned in his life as a composer and a director of the globe-trotting Aphids.

Process and structure

A recurring theme in this edition is the evolving strategies employed by artists in putting works together: Back to Back and Aphids reflect on chance and vision in the evolution of their work, but also on where they’re likely to go next. Antje Pfundtner, a visiting German dancer and choreographer describes the accidents of life, career and success and how they effect her process. Richard Maxwell talks about writing, casting (of performers trained or not) and the subsequent re-framing of his vision. Brisbane’s Colourised Festival of Indigenous film re-works the form of the film festival and the latest RealTime-Performance Space artist’s forum envisages a new breed of creative producers to help artists, increasingly weighed down with administration and company structures, to realise their visions.

Congratulations!

Innovators in new media arts, performance, photomedia and dance have excelled in recent award announcements. Congratulations to new media artist Melinda Rackham on her appointment as the Executive Officer of ANAT (Australian Network of Art and Technology) in Adelaide, and to her predecessor, Julianne Pierce for being selected earlier this year to curate the 2006 Adelaide Festival Biennale of Visual Art. Amanda McDonald-Crowley, Pierce’s predecessor before she moved to Europe to co-direct ISEA 2004, has been appointed to another internationally significant new media arts position, the directorship of Eyebeam in New York. The renovated facility includes a 5,000 square foot main gallery, new production and education studios, labs, editing suites, prototyping galleries, administrative offices, a flounge/events space, a bookstore and 17 staff.

The $40,000 NSW Helen Lempriere Travelling Fellowship has been awarded this year to Ms & Mr (Richard and Stephanie Nova Milne) for their The Woman Who Mistook Her Husband for Art a witty work about oneness and technology, comprising sound, sculpture, performance and video projected onto a levitating organ. Both College of Fine Arts graduates, the couple propose to take part in a 12-month research residency at the Rijksakademie in The Netherlands, an institution encouraging the kinds of cross-media practices they fancy. Amsterdam is also the place where Marina Abramovic famously ran into Ulay, her partner in life and art and they began their ‘Relation Works’. Two years later they tied themselves together by their hair for 17 hours.

The rich legacy of experimentalist Rex Cramphorn lives on in the biennial Cramphorn Theatre Scholarships ($30,000) awarded this year to performer, director and dramaturg, Nikki Heywood who is undertaking a professional development program in Cork, Zurich, Berlin, Brussels, Prague and Venice, focussing on methods of collaborative performance practice. A key element of her program includes an intensive workshop in Cork with Chicago-based group Goat Island, and attending the Venice Biennale’s 37th International Theatre Festival directed by the man of the theatrical moment, Romeo Castelluci.

Dancer, choreographer and filmmaker Narelle Benjamin, whose most recent work was admired in these pages (RT68, p40) won the Hephzibah Tintner ($40,000) which she will use towards making dance films including one at AFTRS. Cover artist for RealTime 68, photographer Cherine Fahd, was awarded the 2005 NSW Women and Arts Fellowship ($30,000) with which she will make Sleepless, a participatory documentation of the lives of the homeless in Sydney’s Kings Cross.

Fine residency offer

Here’s a generous gesture from a popular home away from home for many artists. Regents Court Hotel in Kings Cross has initiated a Writer/Artist in Residence Program offering a studio apartment for 3-12 weeks for local or international writers and artists who’d like to have some dedicated working time in one of Sydney’s most comfortable boutique hotels (www.regentscourt.com.au).

Congratulations to performance duo Mirabelle Wouters and Lee Wilson (Branch Nebula) on the birth of baby Ubu and to Nick Wishart and Imogen Ross on the birth of baby Curtis. KG, VB

As part the On Edge Festival, a week-long celebration of contemporary new media and performance, Liquid Architecture brought an exciting selection of international and national sound artists to the region. Three shows were held at the magnificent Tanks Art Centre, a series of old fuel tanks from World War II that have been converted into live performance spaces. Acoustically unique due to their cylindrical structure, the venue fascinates audiences, musicians and sound artists alike.

The first Liquid Architectureconcert was a 'beat less' evening of sonic exploration and experimentation and featured 4 acts that approached sound making from varying perspectives. The show was held in an amphitheatre enclosed by tropical gardens and was the perfect setting for such an event.

After opening with warm, melodic tones that created a dreamy ambience, Ai Yamamoto introduced layers of textured sound and harsh industrial noise-a performance aurally intense in parts and thoroughly enjoyable. Robin Fox used an oscilloscope to generate fascinating kaleidoscopic patterns triggered by simple tones generated from his laptop. New York sound artist DJ Olive followed with the most engaging performance of the evening, demonstrating some brilliant avant-turntablism. Graceful to watch, he oscillated between turntables perfectly reproducing a pattern of movement and in rhythm with the vinyl. This clever, multilayered performance included a cut-up of the voice of George Bush (repeating the word “terrorist”), with DJ Olive utilising his laptop to create beautiful washes of sound and then turntables to construct abstract sound collages.

The debut performance of local sound artist Spiral Soundsystem began with minimal ambient pieces that combined deep drones with beautiful, melodic flute playing and distorted digital effects. Popular with the audience, the long second half of the performance strayed somewhat from the theme of the evening with the introduction of beats and dubby bass lines.

Friday night's diverse performance program attracted a large audience for collaborations between sound artists and performers with the audience moving about the space. Fox and Lawrence English (Brisbane) collaborated with David Samford (Brisbane) on an intriguing new circus performance (see Williams), while File_Error and The Impurist (both from Cairns), and Yamamoto and English provided subtle sound interventions throughout the evening, performing under a glorious fig tree. The climax of the evening was Bonemap's spectacular performance, Brink, with DJ Olive on sound (see Winning).

The intimate second concert was a beat oriented night with the audience sitting on the stage or dancing with the artists. Popular local act, the Urban Monkeys, opened with their unique blend of funky breaks and abstract beats. Machina Aux Rock from Victoria delivered an impressive performance, literally rocking the house. The night ended with a minimal techno set from German artist Thomas Brinkman.

On Edge was a thoroughly inspiring festival that stimulated and challenged audiences to think about performance and sound art practices. The Friday night event proved that combining experimental sound making with performance is clearly the way to go to attract an audience in Cairns. Liquid Architecture left quite an impression, perhaps greater than the festival directors realise, and we look forward to it returning next year.

Liquid Architecture, On Edge Festival, The Tanks Arts Centre, Cairns, July 13-16

The saxophone is a relatively new instrument when compared with its orchestral and classical kin. The saxophone quartet, with its short history, is a rare ensemble with a limited repertoire. Ranging from baritone to soprano, the saxophone quartet has an extensive pitch and dynamic range and the ability to produce a vast array of tonal colours. Different timbral nuances can be heard in its shrill and glistening upper registers, smooth mid ranges and thick and reedy low registers. Extended techniques including harmonics, multiphonics, key clicks and tongue slaps add exotic sounds to its palette. Saxophones can combine to create dense textures of layered material or blended textures of sustained tones. In their latest concert, Continuum Sax collaborated with sound artist Gail Priest in compositions and improvisations, expanding further the sound world of the saxophone quartet.

Priest began the concert with a loop-based soundscape spatialised between a pair of speakers. Apart from an annoying buzz from one of the speakers during the first half of the concert, the sonic texture created through the gradual layering of looped material was hypnotic and engaging. Continuum Sax followed with Gavin Bryars Alaric I or II, which was scored for 2 soprano saxophones plus alto and baritone saxophone, to emulate the range of a string quartet. This lyrical work used extended techniques that included circular breathing, multiphonics and use of extreme registers. Although this work combined a variety of tone colours, sections were a little too close to the musical language of Phillip Glass for my liking.

Each of the 3 collaborations between Continuum and Priest explored distinctive combinations of saxophone quartet and electronic music. In Pocalyptic by Priest and Martin Kay, the artists improvised on prepared material made from improvisations by Kay. In the second, Priest improvised with tuned effects, sculpted feedback and samples whilst Continuum worked with aleatoric sketches. In Pari Intervallo Variation by Arvo Pärt, Priest took live feeds from each saxophone, manipulating their overtones. This work was the highlight of the concert.

After a few minutes of the Pärt performed without processing, the initial sounds—subtly manipulated by Priest—now joined the live playing, creating a stunning, unified wash of ambient, pulsating sound. It was almost impossible to distinguish between the live and the processed sound until, towards the end, the saxophones stopped playing, revealing just how much of the total effect was being produced electronically. The metamorphosis was structurally perfect.

Excellent performances of works for saxophone quartet by Australian composers included Four Winds by Andrew Ford and St Mark's Inflection by Jane Stanley. I particularly enjoyed the spatial aspect of Ford's piece as each saxophonist entered and left the stage from different corners. Continuum Sax closed the concert with a rhythmic and energetic piece by Rolf Gehlhaar.

Priest's palette of sounds added dimension and sonic variety to Continuum Sax's performance, although some of the pieces could have been more compelling with surround sound or if the positioning of the performers in the space had been varied. The compositions and improvisations employed a diverse range of colouristic effects, expanding the repertoire and highlighting the capabilities of this versatile ensemble.

Four by Four, Continuum Sax: Margery Smith, James Nightingale, Martin Kay and Jarrod Whitbourn, sound artist Gail Priest, New Music Network, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Aug 20

Approaching Omeo, the artist-run studio/rehearsal/performance space in Newtown, feels like walking to a downtown New York loft in the 1970s. It’s not just the converted industrial grunge and barbed wire festooned entrance, which looks like the studios of The Judson Group, The Wooster Group, and the Grand Union, great innovators in postmodern dance and performance who were named for the places where they worked. It’s that there are artists inside working. They are not waiting for permission from the funding bodies to create work. They are developing a practice in a place—a culture of creative endeavour, a community with a shared aesthetic sensibility.

The Un-coordinated show I saw in August featured works by 7 of the 20 to 30 artists in dance, performance and video who call Omeo home. Martin del Amo and Sam James screened one of their early collaborations, Potsdammer (2000), a short witty video exploration of the clash between space and sensibility; a synthesis of del Amo’s movement improvisation and the camera that allows him to inhabit and re-frame an all too concrete rectangle—a subway passage. The ephemerality of dance and its spaces is briefly overcome, allowing time/space/movement artists to work across multiple moments.

By contrast, Sound Found Movement, devised and performed by Emma Saunders, was only ever in one space and moment and never will be exactly the same again. Saunders shuffles, stomps, swaggers and limps to a strange internal music that she lets us access through her movement. Fascinated, we watch the shifts of her ‘inner voice’—insistent, anxious, calculating, mocking, mundane, trapped, and even the moments she blanks out, the sort of movement equivalent of, “um, what was I saying?” Six minutes into the improvisation a country and western CD starts up, which, for me, muffles the inner symphony a bit, re-shaping it into confrontation with sticky sentiment, and forcing it into an ironic stance. I want to turn it down so I can hear her story better.

In Popular, Brian Fuata verbalised the voices he was hearing while sitting on a stool, unassuming, as himself and someone else. Or maybe twice himself, but assuming none of the intimacies one might expect to have with one’s own mind and body. He asks himself for a smoke. His assent—ungenerous but not begrudging—is a subtextual landmine, strangely potent, tense and suggestive beneath the opaque surface. When music comes it feels as though the bar has become noisy and we can’t listen in to the ongoing conversation. I resent it at first, because I am alarmingly keen to know the outcome: will the 2 men make it or not? But then they merge into one dancer’s body. The outrageously compelling moment of their ordinary conversation is replaced by a parallel sort of magic trick: articulate, generous, and expressive movement pours forth from below the placid surface, replacing the unsaid and the spaces of hesitation with direct and juicy ways of ‘speaking.’

Nalina Wait and Jane McKernan start out articulate in movement and stay that way in Workplace Agreement, a tightly structured duet in which the 2 exchange movement phrases. The fascination is in watching the subtle changes as a movement passes between them. The movement appears to be happening to Wait, dripping off her fingertips, taking over the curve of her compliant and willowy spine. When the same phrase passes to McKernan it becomes intentional, directed, slicing the space, causing currents rather than receiving them. The 2 working together is the subject and the object of the piece. Its title may be a reference to the current AWA debacle, but that aspect is obscured by something more urgent. The title and the dance seem to point to the real possibilities of a work/place agreement, which, in a sense, Omeo embodies. The dancers, like the other artists who work there, agree to come together to work in a direct and creative way on the development of an articulate culture.

So, articulate culture, blossoming of its own accord. Where’s the hitch? The Omeo space has been sold. There will be 3 or 4 more Un-coordinated evenings (curated by Rosie Dennis) before they have to move out next year. Maybe, like the weeds that grow up between the cracks in the footpath, splitting the cement to force life through, the artists will keep carving out spaces. The question is, at what cost to them and to their fragile, ephemeral culture?

Un-coordinated, curator Rosie Dennis; artists Emma Saunders, Brian Fuata, Nalina Wait & Jane McKernan, Martin del Amo & Sam James, Omeo, Aug 12-13; Next Un-coordinated Nov 4-5

Richard Maxwell has been making theatre in New York with his company, the New York City Players, for nearly a decade. He writes and directs all of his shows (except for a notable experiment with Shakespeare) as well as composing and recording the music. The productions share a stripped back, deliberately non-mimetic acting style (often labelled “deadpan” or “declamatory”) and explore the minutiae of social relations between everyday people, often in moments of personal crisis. There are shades of Raymond Carver and James Joyce in his writing—his worlds are populated by the unfulfilled and lost; ordinary types who seem powerless against the greater forces which rule their lives. The work is always tinged with loss, but is also optimistic.

Your plays are often grounded in discussions about community, people in moments of crisis, the relationships between people and the world outside. Where do these characters and worlds emerge from?

I’ve noticed lately how influenced and susceptible I am to environments. If I pass by an environment on my bike, riding home at night, I see, I dunno, just the way something is lit, and it’s kind of something about peering into an interior from the outside. It really sets something off…maybe triggering some memory or something.

In the case of Good Samaritans, the setting of a rehab centre and the title conjure up notions of community service and altruism. What was the spark for this show? Did you want to explore particular themes or environments?

I saw some sort of rehabilitation centre, driving in the middle of nowhere, somewhere in rural Minnesota, and I started imagining what it was like and that leads to this exploration of helping; helping being a good thing, not helping being a bad thing. So you start thinking about good and bad, right and wrong, and start thinking about how they rely on each other, in order to exist; you sort of can’t have one without the other. And also I was thinking about an older couple and what a love story would look like between a couple of that age, because our culture is so…its influences are so mediated. Stories of love, particularly passionate Romeo and Juliet kind of stories, they are relegated to the teens.

You are well known for working with performers who have vastly different levels of expertise. In your new show, Good Samaritans, you have one actor who is trained and another who is not. How did that come about? Was it a deliberate choice?

It wasn’t deliberate. I saw plenty of people, both trained and not trained, it wasn’t designed to split it down the middle, that’s just how it came about. Although I think that it’s no surprise that it ended up that way, because I guess my feeling about it is it doesn’t matter to me how much experience you’ve had; if you’re right for the part, y’know, you’re right for the part.

What was the casting process? I imagine it may be different than if you are working with a cast of more equivalent experience.

We put an ad in this industrial rag, Backstage, which we’ve done in the past. Everyone I worked with in the building of the show I had worked with before, except for Rosemary [Allen]. She hadn’t had any real stage experience I guess, before this, but she’s a girlfriend of a friend of mine who’s in Showcase now. I knew Rosemary socially and the friend told me that she was taking acting classes. It’s a big part, so he was a little sceptical, you know, she’s a full time nurse, but I talked to her about it and she seemed, you know, really interested. My feeling is if people are into it, if they’re willing to commit what it takes to do something like that, that’s half the battle. I have a lot of patience for people if I know they are there with me, so the experience thing becomes kinda negligible.

When working with actors of different levels of experience, do you have to approach direction in different ways?

I work with people who don’t have any experience, I work with kids, I work with older people, and so it does have to change based on who the person is, and some people are more thoughtful, methodical, confrontational, people who need you to explain things, which I don’t mind at all. So it’s just a matter of finding out who and what these people are. I imagine it’s like teaching, you have to base your methods and your templates to every personality that you encounter.

As a director of your own writing, I imagine there must be a kind of internal artistic dialogue going on inside you. How does that manifest itself in the creation of a new work. Do you always bring a complete script to the process?

No, that’s the thing, when you start to know the people you are working with I start to think about the writing and whether it fits them or not. I tend to write for them, based on what I perceive in them, and sometimes I write against them, which is not to say that I am trying to sabotage them. Writing for someone can mean writing against them, sort of playing in the script with what would be expected.

Yeah. It was written with Jim in mind, but I didn’t know for sure that he’d be able to do it exactly. When I say I’m writing for people, I don’t think that I’ve ever looked at an actor I’ve worked with a number of times and said “wow, do I have a show for you.” It’s more like I see them in the part and whatever discrepancies might exist between what I am seeing the character to be and the actor to be I’ll change in the writing, rather than expect the actor to jump. It’s a really nice amalgam actually, in this realm of writing where it’s hard to separate where the person ends and where the character begins. I guess that can be very uncomfortable for people—I find that true with actors actually a lot.

You have created many shows in New York in the last 10 years and have developed a very distinctive aesthetic as a writer and director and as an important innovator in the Downtown theatre scene. In the last few years, touring internationally more, do you find different audiences come with different expectations or offer different responses?

I suppose. It’s hard to ignore or to not think about the fact that this inevitably will culminate in a live performance and, being an audience member myself, going to see other people’s stuff, I think a lot about the expectations that one brings to the theatre. But I imagine that most people coming to see something have seen something already and that if they haven’t then they’ve heard about what it is—“Oh he does that deadpan thing.” I can only imagine! (Laughs). Those thoughts, you can’t deny them, they go in there, I guess they influence things like everything else.

If you look at the title of my next show (The End of Reality), it’s evidence there of what people say, or what people have said and yet I struggle with that because I really try not to make something that is based on the audience being a block of one thing, a monolithic thing that comes and occupies the seats. And that’s kind of the basis for a lot of the fundamental ideas that I hold about performance—that it’s not a block, it’s many individuals and I’m happiest when there are a multitude of opinions and feelings happening at once based on who’s in the seats—it just feels more democratic that way. The less I determine what something means emotionally or psychologically for a character, the more the person in the audience is going to be able to project their own experience onto what they see.

Is that where some of your aesthetic comes from? The “deadpan thing” you refer to? Is it about allowing a more open range of readings?

To a lot of people my beliefs about character seem perverse, because I don’t want to talk about the pretend psychology of what the character is experiencing at all in rehearsal. I mean I have my own ideas, I have to write these characters, so I have my own ideas about them, but I don’t think it’s necessary to; sometimes it can interfere with the work of telling a story or putting on a play, when you have these conversations about what might this character be feeling. I’m much more interested in what, well, what you’re gonna be feeling in a situation where you’re up on stage with an audience or with someone else and an audience, y’know, and what that live environment will yield with everyone present. That’s the situation at hand and so let’s deal with that situation and not try to invent another one.

NYC Players, Showcase, Langham Hotel, Oct 12-16, Good Samaritans, CUB Malthouse, Oct 19-22, Melbourne International Arts Festival, www.melbournefestival.com.au

Geelong-based Back to Back Theatre is a performance company with a formidable international reputation founded on the successes of Soft and Cow in Europe. The company comprises an ensemble of performers (Mark Deans, Rita Halabarec, Nicki Holland, Sonia Teuben, Simon Laherty) “perceived to have a disability”, and “creates work with a view of the world not constrained by convention, logic or the imperative to be normal.” Directed by Bruce Gladwin, the company is joined in production by guest designers, composers, multimedia artists and other actors—Jim Russell and Genevieve Picot in the company’s 2005 Melbourne International Festival show, Small Metal Objects.

Back to Back produces exemplary hybrid performance, placing the performer in multimedia amalgams of physical, aural and virtual space with an architectural sensibility, and bringing together a range of talents and intelligences that challenge the able/disabled binary. Back to Back tackles dark subjects, blending serious contemporary material about mind, body, morality and technology with a droll sense of humour in works that are non-patronising, either for performers and audiences, and sometimes downright lateral.

Intelligences

When he first saw Back to Back, Gladwin recalls he was struck by just how intelligent the work was: “I’d really had very little to do with people with disabilities. Just the label ‘intellectual disability’ implies something not very intelligent. For a director it requires a different approach, which is hard to articulate, for each of the actors. There is an intellectual rigour in the work, but it’s not an academic rigour.”

As a group the company is interdisciplinary says Gladwin: “Some of the actors work with text, some are physically comic, some are classical in their movement, so I start with a diverse palette. There’s a particular pleasure in working with a regular ensemble of the same 5 members. Finding something each year which is for them and which will challenge them is a large part of the approach to creating the work.” Gladwin has been with the company for 7 years and some of the performers 15 years.

Spaces

Gladwin speaks about the focus in Back to Back’s work being on the performer in space. He addresses the new relationships between theatrical space and the performer, and the audience, that have opened up in contemporary performance as it escapes theatrical convention. But he is also increasingly aware of the advantages of these developments for a company such as Back to Back.

“Traditionally”, he says, “theatre spaces require a certain performance style, for example throwing the voice to the back of the auditorium. Working with performers who are not classically trained and with the technology that’s available now, thinking about a new space that could empower these actors—these led us down the path of the inflatable design for Soft.” Audience and performers shared the giant inflatable space, the actors were headmiked and every audience member had headphones, resulting in aural intimacy in a huge space.

“The use of headphones”, explains Gladwin, “came out of doing Soft in a huge dockshed in September and October, in Melbourne with high winds, and wanting to get the speakers as close to the audience’s ears as possible. Then we discovered that there was something very liberating in this. We were liberated from having any particular form of space.

“If you think of a theatre as a physical shelter, an emotional, psychological shelter from the chaos of everything outside, we created a shelter inside an inflatable, like a symbiotic building inside a dockland shed. But with our new show, we thought we could create a shelter with the sound, leaving it open for us as to where we place the show.”

In a bold exercise in site specificity, Small Metal Objects is set in the main concourse of the Flinders Street Railway Station. “Based on some of the thematic ideas we’d developed, we wanted to place the show amidst chaos, so we decided for the Melbourne showing to put it among thousands of commuters at around peak hour, 4pm, 5pm, 7pm and 8.30 in the morning. There’s no set, no lighting, just actors, a bank of seats for the audience and a sound score.”

“The performance isn’t overt”, says Gladwin, “the actors blend in with the public on the main thoroughfare where all the platforms come onto the concourse. The public coming from the trains will see a seating bank holding 100 people, looking in a specific direction but not knowing what that audience is looking at.

“There’ll be 2 narratives going on, one in the written text and the other which comes from the positioning of this seating bank in a public space, and the interplay between the general public and the audience. Both are observer and observed. We did a showing of this work last year and it’s fascinating, the power shifts between them. One person with a limp and 3 poodles on a lead passed by and the audience laughed, just at the visual image. I was suddenly aware of my responsibility—I’d created a monster. Three youths emerged from Platform 4, eyed the audience and chested the air, as if to say, what are you looking at? And you could feel the audience shrink back into their seats. So just as there’s a kind of power interplay between the characters in the story, there’s one between the public and the audience.”

Small Metal Objects is playing throughout the festival: “It’s an experiment for us. We could have gone for a week’s season but we’re taking the length of the festival to give ourselves as many shows as possible. I think the show might be totally different at the end of the season…it’s open to that. The idea partly came from (Melbourne Festival Director) Kristy Edmund’s suggestion when we were talking about tourability. With Soft we’d wanted to tour it more but finding venues large enough was a problem…we found 2 venues in Europe but, talking to other festivals, it was too difficult and expensive for them. So we thought let’s keep developing the ideas but not feel that we had to create a set as grand as Soft’s.”

Hyperrealism

Gladwin feels that the setting for Small Metal Objects will further the principles explored in Soft: “It really does create a performance style, opening up the actors to working in a more filmic way, and with a greater awareness of where their focus needs to be. What we’re interested in is hyperrealism, for the performers to blend in with the images. I’ve been looking at some visual art in terms of that in painting and sculpture, the work of Ron Mueck, which I saw a great exhibition of in Hamburg. In the first 10 minutes of Small Metal Objects the audience doesn’t know which are the actors in the crowd, so it first functions like a radio play with them trying to spot the performers among, say 150 people. It introduces ambiguity—what is real and what is not.”

Moving from a controlled theatrical space to a public setting has required some re-thinking of the sound score. Gladwin says of working with composer Hugh Covill that “usually each moment is scored with a specific piece of music, but we’re doing something quite different this time. We’re running one track of music that underscores the whole piece. There’s a kind of rough synchronisation with movement, but we’re open to the fluidity of the piece, performing it in the chaos of the station, with the actors responding, say, to people coming up and asking them for directions. So there’s an element of improvisation in matching the score with the performance.”

Improvisation is a key element in the creation of Back to Back works, but in Small Metal Objects it will play a role in performance as chance enters into the picture when crowds move from trains onto the concourse. This will be a challenge for the performers. Although, as Gladwin explains, “the script has been generated from improvisation, the characters have been created by the performers and they know the characters intrinsically”, the actors will need cueing and some security. The solution is, says Gladwin, “is to have foldback through their own earphones with me as director offering them direction and suggestions in performance—to encourage and support them in working with the material that’s around them. This will be part of the extended season, for me to develop that role and to see how far I can take it. Is it an aesthetic or am I a control freak? [Laughs] It’s important in that environment for the performers, because the area is over 40 metres long and 20 metres wide, so for them to be able to hear and cue each other, we needed some sort of device and that’s the foldback.”

Productivity

The catalyst for the story came from issues raised in Soft where a couple terminate a pregnancy because the foetus shows signs of Down Syndrome, the rationale being that the child would never get proper support from or work in or love from society. Gladwin thought that “a kind of economic rationalism was attached to the decision. That’s the starting point for Small Metal Objects, looking at productivity, how someone’s perceived productivity equates with their value in society.” In the development of the work, says Gladwin, “I’ll read a lot, for example economic theory, and then I have to offer something to the actors, and they go through their own process of intellectualisation. Sonia [Teuben] created a character who she saw as a success, but it was in terms of the ability to make friendships, as opposed to capital growth and earning an income. From discussions and improvisations we thought we’d set the story in a financial transaction and the simplest one is goods sold in the street, primarily a drug deal, and one that goes wrong between 2 characters who value friendship over the accumulation of wealth.

“It’s a really simple narrative: we’re at the point of putting it on and I’m thinking, is it too simple? But dealing with the space that we’re presenting it in I feel we’ve made the right decision. The narrative in the script is only half the story, the other is the experience of the audience in that space: they’re creating multiple narratives by looking at people in the space and also placing themselves in the story, so we need the space for that to happen.”

Solo opportunities are looming for the 5 ensemble members in Back to Back’s next work, a gallery-based performance-cum-installation extension of the themes of Small Metal Objects featuring 5 discrete performances. This further exploration of productivity and notions of well-being will involve the company working with an economist to create an economic model. The audience will choose from the performances, paying a fee for each with the actors in competition in creating a market.

Back to Back Theatre, Small Metal Objects, Flinders Street Railway Station, Melbourne International Arts Festival, October 7-8, 11-15, 18-22; www.melbournefestival.com.au

Walking by tropical ferns and flowering ginger, we enter a massive circular tank through a curtain of X-Rays—close ups of of the body, of bones, of flesh disappeared. The sound is muffled as if we’re inside skin. We amble through this vast space, surrounded by projected grids of numbers and ghostly images of bodies moving across the oily, curving walls. We circle a rock suspended from the roof, a block of ice drip dripping into the night. There’s a car reclaimed from an era long gone, now a museum of fragile violins, snakeskins, bones, dried leaves, a tombstone angel.

There’s a gap in the circumference of the space, an outside we can feel but can’t see. The sound shifts and external lights reveal undulating, brilliantly green grass rising upwards. Five strange figures teeter downhill, lurch into the space.

We’re at Brink, a Bonemap performance—dance, installation, projection and sound mesh to create an environment of potent imagery and atmospheric experience. Rebecca Youdell and Russell Milledge of the Bonemap intermedia art collective have collaborated with DJ Olive and an eclectic team of performers: Brian Fuata, Su Hayes, Jess Jones, Amanda Le Bon and David Williams.

A shaft of light appears in the distance and we follow. A naked woman sits mutely, a globe of the world for a head. Her globe inclines, begins to bleed from the top axis. Blood runs onto her hands, onto the floor. Her image is projected onto the dark oily walls, a bleeding world/woman in multiple. One long note reverberates around the space.

Another shift in attention: to a woman frocked up in tourist tea towels and turban, her oven mitts outstretched. Balancing atop high heels, she walks unsteadily along a huge industrial chain…a retro cocktail party hostess walking a tightrope that could fell forests. A man in camouflage gear moves erratically, erotically across the space. Switching between languid and jolting vocabularies of movement, he’s simultaneously a tortured contemporary figure and an echo of another era when this site was military infrastructure for another war.

A bizarre messiah, pursued by his followers, climbs over a car, balancing with a long staff as though traversing a river. Is he crossing the River of Lethe? The followers have shed their clothes as though useless memories of a past long gone. A man in a dinner suit lies down in the headlights of the car, he speaks from his prone position, surrounded by the detritus of performance. He keeps on, keeps on talking as the performers move toward him, walk over him, leave him behind talking, talking on.

Two men in a tug-of-war over a shirt are suddenly dwarfed by an extended mirror image outside—2 women in a tug-of-war over a long line of fire in the distance. Spectacular and strangely moving.

These and many other images cross-fade one into another across the space. The audience follows, and becomes part of the action in a joyous pack. Movements repeat, motifs recur. Delicate, vulnerable bodies in landscapes of our making. The permeability twixt inside and out, present and past, fragile and forceful creates a series of powerful currents flowing through the work.

The relationship between the body and the environment is at the heart of Bonemap’s practice. In Brink, they revive a number of images from previous performances made for this and other spaces. While each of the components is strong, the success of this piece lies in the dynamic relationships between the large and small-scale choreographies across space—the movements of performers, audience members, objects, light and image. And the sense of being held by the big sound—stretching time, interrupting action and driving pace.

The performers are a mix of North Queensland dancers, fire artists and theatre-makers and Sydney-based performance makers. Their vocabularies are diverse, but Milledge and Youdell as director and choreographer have capitalised on those differences to build a sense of ensemble that’s both idiosyncratic and impressive. Sometimes I had the overwhelming sense that the punch had been spiked—simultaneously pleasurable and terrifying. The teetering, about-to-fall feeling evoking that physical sensation of being on the brink. Of darkness. Of profound change. Of returning to dust.

Bonemap, Brink, director Russell Milledge, choreographer Rebecca Youdell, sound DJ Olive, Tanks Art Centre, July 15, www.bonemap.com

All around The Tanks Arts Centre, a tropically camouflaged World War 2 naval fuel depot in Cairns, there are advertisements for edges. The well-to-do suburb nearby is even named Edge Hill, with the inevitable Edge Cafe. In The Tanks, On Edge is the inaugural contemporary media and performance week, the brainchild of Cairns’ own axis of edges: Bonemap, KickArts and The Tanks. In his opening speech Nick Mills, director of The Tanks, declares that On Edge intends to “push out to the rest of the country that Cairns is culturally mature”. On Edge does much more than this.

I follow the crowd down the overgrown path to the scent of citronella and the sound of water dripping for Derryn Knuckey’s endemic enigma, billed as a development showing of a Spark mentorship but actually a sprawling, ambitiously conceived and occasionally exquisitely realised evening of performance featuring over fifty performers. The overall structure was elemental: Earth (strange tree monks with a barely comprehensible narrative of ecological destruction), Fire (an aerial sex scene, pyromaniacs, and fiery percussion), Water and Air (video projections over swaying performers in flowing white costumes). For me the work never became more than the sum of its parts, but there was certainly something for everyone. The highlight was the Water section—a beautiful installation of rain falling down from the dangling roots of a huge fig tree over a white lounge setting, a bushie sitting comfortably watching the downpour dripping off his Akubra. The lighting was perfect, producing a magically suspended moment, unfortunately broken by an extended meandering monologue from the bushie. “How ‘bout this rain then? Doesn’t rain like this in Cobar.” A bit tangential, even for me.

The second big night kicked off with The Impurist, candlelit electronic music under the fig tree. After blessedly cool beers we move into the concrete vastness of Tank Five for time motion studies (3 ball) by Brisbane’s Circa. Juggler David Sampford, all in black, including balaclava, stands on a platform, a grid of juggling balls arranged about his feet. All but one of the balls is white, the odd one red. Sound artists Laurence English and Robin Fox use Sampford’s movement of the red ball to control audio samples, its height and motion captured on video and processed to output shifts in pitch, tone and rhythm. Technically, it’s an extraordinary feat, and surprisingly gripping. After virtuosic displays from all concerned we’re left with just the sound of one ball falling and being caught in the dark. A mesmerising and thrilling ride.

Back under the fig tree we get low tech with local Indigenous artists Zane Saunders and Ian Connelly. Connelly enters wearing only a loincloth and body paint, banging clap sticks. Similarly dressed, Saunders responds to the same rhythm using a cigarette lighter. This simple substitution playfully undermines the cliched costumes, sets the tone—they’re having fun, and so should we. They explore the space, intermittently illuminating people and objects, constantly adjusting their improvised loincloths, which threaten to fall off. After a low key physical comedy duet of competing sonic rhythms, they untie and unravel an orange cloth draped elegantly in the fig tree, dispersing small leaves with great ceremony to gracefully conclude a compact and witty performance.

With these, as well as Bonemap’s Brink in Tank Three, additional programs of sound and digital arts (liquid architecture and d>Art.04), and Tina Gonsalves’ video installation, Somewhere in between, not to mention the stimulating Intermedia Symposium, On Edge is an impressive beginning to an important initiative. Expect more surprises next year out on the wild edge.

On Edge, organisers Rebecca Youdell, Russell Milledge, Nicholas Mills; endemic enigma, produced and directed by Derryn Knuckey; time motion studies (3 ball) by Circa, David Sampford in collaboration with Lawrence English and Robin Fox; Spark sound and performance interventions by Zane Saunders, Ian Connelly and The Impurist; Venues: Tank Arts Centre, Kickarts Gallery, CoCA, Cairns July 12-16; www.bonemap.com

Darwin Festival

The new format Darwin Festival has settled into wide public acceptance with rare mumblings about the lack of a grand parade and the loss of the floats—instead the Botanic Gardens festival precinct has established itself as a fully realized concept, a proper festive hub. With winking paper lanterns strung in the large spreading trees and bright fairy lights everywhere, the atmosphere is a Kandyan Perhera, only lacking the elephants. The Star Shell is the scene for nightly performances beginning as the sun sets over nearby Mindil beach and going through till midnight—Indigenous dance and music is the mainstay with concerts and music theatre. The Shell is ringed by foodstalls and bars and the catering has gone up a notch with local icons the Roma Bar serving espresso coffees and Hanuman, the renowned Thai Nonya restaurant, serving a street smart version of their fare with even Jimmy Shu behind the very stylish hotpots. The Galku (or palm tree gallery) direct from the Garma festival in North Eastern Arnhemland segues directly into the Darwin one presenting framed prints from the Buku Langapuy Mulka Art Centre in Yirrkala. The gallery is firmly ensconced—each tree skirted with white ochre and individually spotlit. Even after the prints come down each night the trees form a ghostly glade of dancing dervishes.

Solos

This year the festival program was strong in Indigenous work both in dance, including local Larrakia dancer-choreographer Gary Lang’s first large scale piece, Entrapment, and in a number of solo autobiographical performances—David Page’s Page 8, George Rrurrambu’s Nerrpu, Christine Anu’s Intimate and Deadly, comedian Sean Choolburra’s show and the premiere of Tommy Lewis’ story on film, Yella Fella. Of the shows I was able to see, Nerrpu was by far the most powerful and interesting. George Rrurrambu is a legend, an extraordinarily talented and grounded performer—imagine the danger of Gulpilil crossed with the captivating appeal of Ernie Dingo and throw in some Chuck Berry to mix it up. He sings, he plays guitar and didge, he dances and he’s a mean actor telling his story. Although the show had been polished since its first version in 2003, it lost focus in the second half and could still benefit from further dramaturgy—the material is there and the performer can bring it all alive. His story is amazing, living in the desert and missing the saltwater life of Elcho Island where he grew up on the Methodist Mission. George is the subject of Neil Murray’s anthem My Island Home written in Papunya where Murray and Rrurrambu formed the Warumpi Band in 1981, and I could have done with more of his story.

Cultural exchange

Cultural exchanges from the region also featured in the festival with a large contingent from Indonesia, including a group of dancers and musicians from Makassar, Takbing Siwaliya, who collaborated with the Gupapuyngu Dancers to present an abbreviated version of Trepang, retelling the first meetings on the shores of North-Eastern Arnhemland between Makassarese and the Yolgnu to trade trepang (sea slug). Meanwhile Trepang director Andrish Saint Claire was busy rehearsing a bold new play DiburuaWaktu (Time is a Hunter) by Sandra Thibodeaux and Mas Ruscitadewi which explores the contemporary exchange between tourists and locals in Bali and is set in the Sari Club on the night of the bombing.

Angels of Gravity

The Tracks Dance production, Angels of Gravity, saw the company invited in from the warmth of their customary outdoor festival performance to the mainstage at Darwin Entertainment Centre. But typically lateral, they took the audience on a journey outside first. While waiting to get in , we watched winged abseilers make their balletic way down the nearby high rise Holiday Inn; then we saw things backstage only to have the curtain part and realize we were on stage looking at an empty theatre and, finally, we took our seats and looked back at where we’d been. The show was a quasi swansong—complete with feathers—for dancer David McMicken who once memorably created the role of a beautiful angel many moons ago when we were all young and lithe. Angels of Gravity is about many things, including the dancer’s body and what it can and cannot do as age and gravity bring it down to earth. Tracks’ work is notable for its fearless pursuit in eclectically assembling the different cultures, values, ages, talents, let alone movement conventions and capacities of its performers and always manages to pull off a deeply moving and aesthetic unity. Nonetheless, amongst local professional dancers, The Grey Panthers, NT Fire and Rescue Squad, ballet school kids and the Lajamanu Yawalyu women dancers, Melbourne dancer Trevor Patrick stole the show.

Aboriginal Art Award

The twenty second NATSIAA Aboriginal Art Art award was marked by the retirement of its founding curator, Margie West who began it with the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in 1984. Now it is the preeminent national and international event celebrating Indigenous art and attracts curators, collectors and dealers, artists and art centre managers from every remote community throughout the NT and the Kimberley, as well as loyal local art lovers and newcomers to Darwin who have heard of its big night party on the museum lawns. And every one of them has a view on how it is run—from how the work is selected from the vast number of entries to how the entries are then judged by a panel of two. Over the years the criteria for the choice of judges has settled on one man, one woman, one Indigenous, one non-indigenous, one practising artist, one curator. With these attributes distributed amongst only two individuals it can be a big ask. This year the onerous task fell to Victorian artist Destiny Deacon and Queensland Art Gallery Director, Doug Hall. Last year it was Palawa artist Julie Gough and Edmund Capon from the Art Gallery of NSW—all good choices on the face of it but lacking one ingredient. None of these has experience or knowledge in classical Aboriginal art (both an oxymoron and a meaningful term in the context.)

In North-Eastern Arnhemland large painted poles, or Lorrkon, have recently reemerged as a trend, sliding apparently unremarked into the Category of 3D works when it is more than arguable that they are bark paintings in the round. So last year Galumbu Yunupingu’s startling installation of 3 poles won the major prize, which was fitting and appropriate. But this year the Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Award was won by another pole, remarkably similar, by Naminapu Maymuru-White. Other work in that category was more exciting and culturally significant such as the wall piece of exquisite, finely carved and ochred pearl shells, Riji, by Aubrey Tigan from the Kimberley.

The judges’ task is patently to reward the best, however there has been an unacknowledged but obvious subtext to reward both innovation within tradition and to laud revivals of traditional art practices. But that relies on a depth of knowledge to recognise them in the first place. Against a very shallow field of bark paintings, the winning work by accomplished Yirrkala artist Banduk Marika stood out and signaled a new direction for her. The winner in the works on paper was a weak choice compared to the depth and technical complexity of Denis Nona’s linocut, Sesserae, and the winning work for General Painting, Yam Dreaming by Evelyn Pultara, was easily trumped by a dozen finer, stronger paintings. The overall prize winner, the grass car dubbed a Toyota, was also controversial, raising arguments over craft versus art; but it was a show stopper and the prize money could not have gone to 17 more deserving women.

Dissatisfaction with the judging process was high this year and there was a lot of muttering for reform. Some are calling for the judges to be drawn from the many long standing collectors of Indigenous art who, it is argued, have always been ready to seek out and invest in excellence; this camp is also arguing for the award to be based in Canberra or Sydney and taken out of local hands. There is also a widespread feeling that the pre-selection process, which culls 150 entries from near to 500, is intrinsically flawed because it relies entirely on slides submitted rather than visceral contact with the work. There is also a growing argument that the number of entries warrants a Salon Des Réfuses so that everyone can get a sense of the whole picture.

Alongside the NATSIAA there is now a vibrant and busy program of exhibitions in the local commercial and institutional galleries with more than a dozen exhibition openings in the 48-hour window of opportunity just prior to and immediately after the NATSSIA opening, before all the curators and collectors have gone home or out to the communities. A well organized bus tour is organised to ensure you can see them all in one day!

Alice Springs, at the geographical and psychological heart of this country, captures the imagination of artists, residents and perennial visitors: the harsh grandeur of the desert lands, vast spaces surrounding the town, and a unique social layering that gives a platform to relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The very name, Alice Desert Festival, reveals the land’s integral significance to the arts community here. It is no surprise then, that 3 major shows were inspired by the nature of the desert and promised to explore a deeper understanding of our experience of it.

Red Shoes

a place, the latest work from Alice Springs performance group Red Shoes, is a series of arrangements using text, movement, sound and visual imagery. Animateur Dani Powell says, “questions about place reach deep into the psyche of Australians. The show is about reflecting on this land we love and the history that lives beneath our feet”. The performance is grounded self-consciously here. It is richly coloured with desert gestures, phrases and concepts that have been stylised for the performance: physical motions like kicking up red dust and swatting flies; collaged recordings featuring voices from town commenting on the uses of urban space; lighting and projections that describe horizons and rooftops.

The performance begins with Emily Cox and Nic Hempel walking through the crowd, Hempel extracting stretched notes from a violin, pulling the audience from the street and, like a herd of cattle, through an open gate into a tight space behind the Watch This Space gallery and theatre. a place is revealed in a fenced quadrangle of concrete and red earth, surrounded by industrial corrugated walls and domed by a starry night sky.

In one sequence, Anna Maclean offers a disturbing study of urbanisation and the meeting of the town and the desert through the careful placement of miniature houses and cars on grass squares. The concept of ownership is introduced quite literally by the presentation of a tiny “for sale” sign. Maclean plays out responses to the idea of property through increasingly reckless movements upon the mini suburban streets that she has created. The sequence ends with a very deliberate acknowledgement of Indigenous dispossession and the greed of Western land values.

During Macleans’ urban scene, Sylvia Neale sits quietly by the back fence until the building frenzy sweeps right over her—houses also appear on her knees. It is her agonising wail that punctuates the end of this opening sequence, a raw view of Indigenous dispossession. Neale also contributed to researching and writing the show. This involvement in a place of a local Arrernte artist deepens the relevance of the show. Red Shoes attempts a genuine engagement with complex contemporary history, producing a work that springs perceptibly from the confines and opportunities of the town’s community and landscape.

De Quincey Co

Unconstrained by the limits of a theatre, Dictionary of Atmospheres sprawled along the dry riverbed in the centre of Alice Springs. The Todd River—Mparntwe in Arrernte—forms a spectacular natural stage, its sandy expanses fringed with shady gums. The river is a significant spiritual and geographical icon for the town, a space for Indigenous gatherings and the site of often aggressive move-on tactics of local police. It is into this disputed territory that Dictionary of Atmospheres quite literally steps.

Emerging from the distance into the rich gold light of late afternoon, 3 strange forms shrouded in plastic drift towards the gathering audience. A monologue is delivered by a man up a nearby tree while a fifth figure tears maniacally through the crowd. Following this dynamic opening, the performers settle into a series of collective movements. Their movements dig deep into the sand, responding to the drones and staccatos of live saxophone and recorded soundscape. These are haunting sounds in a powerful space, directing the variously edgy and frenetic, jostling and static improvisations that shape the next hour and form the basis of the show.

Dictionary of Atmospheres is a multimedia production presented by Sydney’s dance-performance group De Quincey Co and based in the Body Weather performance methodology, a contemporary practice “aspiring to generate a reflective performance environment.” For director Tess De Quincey the show is a culmination of 3 years of art-labs (the Triple Alice project) in the central desert “focusing on the nature of the land.”

Reading unfamiliar movement can be difficult for an audience searching for recognisable forms. However, each night a committed group of locals prepared to engage with and experience their environment as translated by the performance. The final stage of the show was by far the most engaging—a fascinating multimedia spectacle. Huge oil-drums housing TVs, intense lighting beneath grand trees and 3 huge video screens gave more stage to the performers in the deepening darkness. A lasting image from Dictionary of Atmospheres is of silhouetted figures moving through illuminated dust surrounded by digital distractions.

The hunt for logic in the performance is encouraged by its title, which implies a catalogue of desert themes and moods. Dictionary of Atmospheres was not forthcoming (though it is an evocative phrase); rather what dominated the piece was the experience of the desert dusk and the ancient presence of the riverbed.

Bek Mifsud

Traces: desires and presentiments is the richly textural exhibition of latest work by visual artist Bek Mifsud. Elegantly occupying the minimalist gallery at Watch this Space, Traces is a collection of black and white imagery of landscape in a variety of mediums. Enormous graphite rubbings and digitally modified photographs, sculpted forms, drawings and texts “pay homage to the legacy of the Great Inland Sea which once submerged the Central Australian region”, says Mifsud.

Recognisable forms abound in Mifsud’s work. The graphite renderings carefully capture the ripples that have been etched into the rocks of the Macdonnell Ranges of Central Australia. But the depictions shimmer: one minute solid rock, the next a pool of water. In Mifsud’s photographs these ripple formations and other watermarks emerge at first as minute studies of geological detail, then distant aerial views of the land. The compositions, though small in scale, sustain long and meditative observation.

The gallery space is commanded by a large central multiform installation. Mifsud’s mass of miniature paper boats, scattered across a glass-covered expanse of rock rubbings evokes the masses of water so absent now—a perfectly dry inland sea. Constructed simply from photocopied pages of text and diary drawings, the boats have an iconic presence, yet they are very fragile.

There is a strong autobiographical thread in Mifsud’s work. The pieces describe her own journey and compulsion to travel to the centre, most obvious in the featured text from her diary entries. Significantly, her investigation of the landscape of the Central Desert is rooted in science and history. The artist’s study of geology was motivated by a desire to inform her art and her journeys into the desert to find striking geological formations is reminiscent of explorers driven by scientific concerns. Her fascination with the allure of an inland sea—and its traces to be found in the desert—finds parallels in the diaries of others before her. The ruminations of explorers, artists and thinkers are sampled in her work, combined with her own words.

Traces is a careful, almost reverent translation of the artist’s landscape. It invokes the absolute proportions of the desert, the residual nature of water, the sheer age of this weathered land and the tenuousness of human interaction with the environment.

Alice Desert Festival, artistic director Craig Mathewson, Sept 2-11; Red Shoes, a place, Watch This Space, Sept 3-4, 9; Bek Mifsud, Traces: desires and presentiments; Watch This Space, Sept 3-4; De Quincey Co Dictionary of Atmospheres; Sept 4-7

Choreographer Antje Pfundtner has spent the last 18 months touring her highly acclaimed solo eigenSinn throughout Europe and South America, and presenting her first ensemble work, selbstinschuld, in 3 German cities. Previously she worked in Europe and the United States with artists such as Michele Anne de Mey, Stephen Koplowitz, Felix Ruckert, Tony Vezich and David Hernandez and studied in New York with David Dorfman and company and Edith Meeks. She has received many scholarships including a prestigious 12 month award from Kunststiftung NRW. Pfundtner was in Sydney in August to run a workshop for Critical Path. From Sydney she goes on to a research project in Poland and then a tour of China and Tokyo.

As this is the end of your first day at the Critical Path workshop, can you talk about how you are running the workshop, your approach to choreography there and in general.

In my work I use a lot of text and movement together, so that’s what I have started to introduce. I think that it’s important to know that my work comes from an autobiographical background, so I get the participants to pick a subject or a story and ask what their personal relationship is to that story. Not that it’s therapy—‘this is what I need to talk about’—but finding a subject that you can talk about and finding a distance from it that can be interesting. It’s perfectly legitimate to pick something abstract and external to yourself, but for me if you want to talk about or present something on stage I think it’s best if you have a personal connection to it. So if you were going to make a piece about accidents I would immediately ask if you have had one or seen one, what they mean to you—even if it does shift onto an abstract level. And then I will introduce some movement material into the workshop, but I am mostly interested in how they personally move.

What are the obsessions and interests of yours that are obviously clicking with audiences? Or is it how you present them?

I think it’s a combination…because I don’t think what I’m saying is particularly new! The solo eigenSinn is a play on words. The title translates as ‘your own sense or meaning’, but it can also be meant in a negative way, that you are very stubborn [‘have it your own way’, Eds]. I tell tall stories in the performance and there is a fairytale of the Brothers Grimm that leads the piece to one particular theme. It’s about a child who wants to develop his own sense of things, and will never do what his mother wishes. God punishes it, it dies and is buried. Then one arm comes out of the grave and they try to put the arm down again, and in the end the mother has to hit the arm with a rock until, finally, the child drags his arm in and has peace. It’s such a brutal fairytale to tell to kids. Of course, in the ‘old school’ it wasn’t wished that a child would think for itself. Whereas now, it’s all about developing your own thoughts, questioning things and positioning yourself. And I connect this to personal stories.

When I was born I couldn’t move at all and people gave up on me and told my mother to buy a wheelchair, that I would never be able to move. But my mother wouldn’t listen and found a physiotherapist who was willing to work with me and 5 times a day for a year she exercised with me so that I could crawl. And then I had another session to teach me to stop crawling!

So the work is about creating your own world. And then there are other stories that are about failure and success, and fake heroism…and it’s not clear if the stories are true or not. So I think they are very human subjects that everybody can connect to. And it works on many levels, on the personal side as well as how artists see themselves, because they really have to find their own position in the world. I demonstrate this in different ways, for example wearing a disco ball on my head—how you want to be the centre of the world and glitter for everyone and in the end you’re just reflecting yourself. I think if you can talk about something without preaching about it then people have the chance to connect with it—or not—it’s still a matter of taste. I think that’s the goal of theatre—that the audience wants to find a part of themselves in the work.

So how does the movement quality illustrate or elaborate on these themes you’ve described?

Well, I like to work with my mistakes and to promote them. The new ensemble piece, selbstinschuld, had a working title which was, ‘If you can’t fix it, feature it.’ I think it’s what you have to do when you are a dancer. If you do a lot of ballet, for instance, you are always confronted with things that are wrong: you’re not turned out enough etc. You are limited in some way, and I think that those limitations are your strongest points often connected to private things. I develop a lot of what some people call “ugly movement”—it has a very distinct aesthetic. And I mix a lot and ‘break’ a lot of movements. I always tell dancers not to deny where they come from. They would say, “Oh, I used to do ballet and then I did karate but now I only do contemporary.” I always tell them in their improvisations, “Well, let me see that you used to do those things because it would make the contemporary really interesting for me, a way that only you could do it.” So I don’t think you should deny the roots that are in your body and the connections and information they have for you.

So what are the special things about your history that inform your way of moving?

I’ve been lucky that I worked with choreographers who encouraged me to find my own way of moving, to use what I had. Some parts of my body are over-extended and I was encouraged to show that rather than correct it. You can develop a new style from this—you might have arms that are too long but you can do amazing things with those arms, create a new aesthetic. I didn’t limit myself because I didn’t have a certain aesthetic in my mind.

Is there something about popular culture or entertainment that informs your work?

I see a lot of movies and I always try to go and see a lot of other art forms. I have a big friendship circle and a lot of them aren’t artists, and I was always a very normal teenager even when I was training hard. I do what 99% of the population do—I watch every TV show that is on and I think I get a lot of information out of that. That’s why you might get that popular culture connection with my work, because I’m in touch with these things.

So how does it feel now being supported by the Goethe Institut and touring your work around the world?

The international touring really started at the beginning of last year. I had been working freelance for various people and companies, travelling around a lot with them, and since 2001 I also started to do my own work. Then eigenSinn in February 2003 was a success—Ballet Tanz reviewed it and there were other articles written on the work. But I wasn’t really pushing or trying to sell my work. And then exactly a year later, someone saw it and put it in the German dance platform. The international producers who come don’t care if you are well known at home or not. And there was such a reaction—one producer takes it and then others do and it’s out there. It was really funny because it was a year old and a lot of people had it on their desk already. So of course you feel like something comes back but at the same time, you realise how absurd it is

.Sydney dancer-choreographer Martin del Amo describes his experience of the Antje Pfundtner workshop for Critical Path on Artshub, www.artshub.com.au

The invitation extended by the 3D series at Dancehouse was a brave one: Artistic Director Dianne Reid opened up the venue to a sizeable number of independent choreographers and allowed them to utilise the space in unusual ways. In so doing, she asked audiences to “move through the different spaces in the building [and] notice that you are moving your own physical architecture. Consider your body as you watch other bodies…” One of the challenges raised by such a brief stems from the 3-week series’ generosity towards its participants creative freedom: rather than offering a tightly curated collection of thematically linked performances, choreographers were given great license in their interpretation of this mission statement. The result was mixed, with some works adhering to fairly conventional formal presentation. A number, however, took the opportunity to really engage with the dynamics of audience/performer relations, working with the three ‘D’s of the season’s title (dance, dramaturgy and design) in intriguing new ways.

Phoebe and Julia Robinson’s Quiet Listening Exercises was first shown at last year’s Next Wave Festival, and is a perfect fit here. Audience members are seated individually around the playing space, each provided with a separate set of headphones through which a glittering, crisp electronic score is piped. The 2 dancers play out a series of minimalist interactions and disengagements, occasionally gesturing towards tiny dramas while at other times refusing the viewer access into their private worlds. It certainly helps that the 2 are sisters, as the familiarity between them adds an extra layer to the work which oftens hints at childhood imagination and past stories. Moreover, I couldn’t help but remove my headset at one point and was startled to find the sisters dancing in silence, in an aural space entirely distinct from that provided the audience. This is a daring work, incorporating long moments of stillness, darkness, and quiet, an “exercise” in which the audience is given the chance to practice the skill of active contemplation.

Revealed through a ceremonious parting of the curtains, Trudy Radburn’s The Petal Waltz, part of the Rouge Room program, is a comic, quirky depiction of a certain kind and quality of performance. We imagine we are witness to a formal event, perhaps a concert requiring evening dress on the part of the 3 performers. Their status as performers can only be a matter of inference for we never exactly see what it is that they do, where their expertise lies. But we imagine they have done something, for we hear sustained applause, a standing ovation perhaps. Our interest lies in examining the reactions of these imagined performers to the appreciation of an imagined audience. The fine visibility of their feelings is made manifest in the contortions of their faces, their mien, their controlled gratification. They face us, each savouring their emotions.

The moment is over. Reactions progress to an exhibition of movements, interactions and responses. Lopsided leg extensions, half-arsed encounters and comic juxtapositions occur between the performers. Small gestures are offered, the animation of a hand having a life of its own. It snakes across and hovers over a pair of breasts, aspiring towards genital gratification—receiving short shrift. Sally Smith has a terrific ability to utilise one part of her body whilst the rest stands by, laconically watching. She can also contort her facial features with an innocent earnestness. Monica Tesselaar has a more Butoh-like approach, holding and sustaining an emotional intensity in full frontal proximity. Phillip Gleeson was different again, working extremely well in duet, maintaining his own energy in the face of extremely different movement qualities. I have a sense that The Petal Waltz is an experiment which will, in the future, leave no possibility unexploited and abandon restraint.

Rochelle Carmichael’s Ellipsis is an ambitious work. Structurally it contrasts a trio of dancers with 2 singular performers. It begins with a highly charged intensity of movement between 3 dancers. Another performer, Paul Schembri, cuts across the space rolling through a hollow metal cube. The cube provided the basis of further interactions, perhaps playing a symbolic part in the unfolding interactions of the dance. The trio of dancers worked like a chorus. One of the most effective moments of the work visually was in the trio’s dance along the back wall, flattening their movements, like some kind of frieze. Ellipsis appears to concern the psychical realm. Its tenor was troubled, frenzied, unresolved. Although the work finished with the trio settling on seats, this seemed to be more of an armistice than a resolution. Perhaps dystopic, perhaps pessimistic or perhaps just about the unconscious, Ellipsis concerns the underside of the human realm as expressed in dance.

The Rouge Room: The Petal Waltz, choreographer Trudy Radburn, performers Phillip Gleeson, Sally Smith, Monica Tesselaar; Ellipsis, choreographer Rochelle Carmichael, performers Jessica Lee, Devereux, Rikki Mace, Rebecca Ann Maguzzi, Paul Schembri, Kelly Way; lighting Stephen Weir; Theatreworks, Melbourne, Aug 26-Sep 11

With On, Lucy Guerin has produced another major work in telling counterpoint to her other great achievement, Melt, also on the same program (collectively titled Love Me) as part of Malthouse’s Spring Season. Where Melt celebrates a fusion of souls in a seamless flow of entwining bodies and digital images, the temperature ever rising, but gloriously stress free and transcendant, On, is a vivid portrayal of a relationship coming apart in a series of emotional cold snaps.

Where Melt grows ever more vividly coloured and open, On is tightly framed in 2 discrete spaces surrounded by darkness. A man and a woman occupy these spaces together and apart, in a state of nerve buzzing tension. They reach out trembling fingers to touch, but can’t make it; they try to kiss but can’t go the small distance. He feels her arm, her face, as if to confirm that she’s there. She dances, he won’t. He can turn her on, but he’s not really there. She can’t move him, she’s frustrated, bored, he’s detached. They’re out of kilter. An argument—we can’t hear the words—bodies thrusting but rooted to the spot. On is about a relationship on the verge of off, in which intimacy is fading and every permutation of the couple’s touching is faltering. She freezes, he cradles her to the warble of a sweet accordion, perhaps the last image of affection, perhaps merely sentimentality, in a soundscape otherwise full of the rush and scraping of the world.

None of this is performed as literal narrative, rather as semi-abstracted but suggestive vignettes, potent images of the knots of love and their dissolution, or cutting. One scene is of the couple tangling in a dance of hands in a small square of light. They live out solo moments, he with a constant turning, self-contained, fluent against the melancholy fall of rain and rasping metal. She gets caught up in projected grids that roll down her body and across her face, as if under other forms of control than just his.

There are moments when you think they’re reconnecting, the tips of tongues actually touch, but he pulls away. Arms and hands tangle again. There’s a similar dance between feet, her foot hooking onto his. Finally, she rocks to and fro before him, he goes to leave, she falls, he catches her, her head lolls, she crumples, he puts her to rest. It’s is if there’s been a death. Adjusting her curled body, he moves a foot to her head, connecting her no longer to him, but to herself, foetally, closed, left.

On is absorbing and disturbing, its miniatures of touch and separation claustrophobically framed in small pockets of light and in the taut choreography enacted by dancers Kirstie McCracken and Byron Perry, their energies compressed and explosive. The sound design (an awkwardly placed reading of a German poem, in German, aside) evocatively parallels the tensions in the relationship but also suggests a bigger world beyond, just as dangerous in its own way.

It was a thrill to see Melt (dancers Kirstie McCracken, Stephanie Lake) on the same program, seeming more sublime then ever and joyously effusive, an immaculate multimedia creation and perfect for a double bill with its dark side, On. Guerin’s other ‘couple’ piece, Reservoir of Giving, began the evening, and its second episode appeared immediately after interval, an unfortunate separation given that the scenes need to be immediately juxtaposed for maximum effect of a pretty minimal idea. While the naivety and pathos of its young protaganists in and out of love is vaguely funny, especially when framed by David Rosetzky’s video cool, there’s not enough substance to take the work beyond a video-clippish conceit. The bringing together of Melt and On, however, yielded a memorable dance experience.

Malthouse: Lucy Guerin Inc, Love Me, choreography Lucy Guerin, performers Kirstie McCracken, Byron Perry, Stephanie Lake, Kyle Kremerskothen, motion graphic design Michaela French, lighting design Keith Tucker, video David Rosetzky, music/sound Franz Tetac, Paul Healy, Darrin Verhagen, Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse, Sept 6-11

“One can say that we perceive the things themselves, that we are the world that thinks itself—or that the world is at the heart of our flesh.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

As in most of her works, the movement in Sandy Parker’s The View from Here comprises a series of gestural moments. I was getting a bit tired of seeing gesture after gesture a few years ago, but now I’m quite glad she’s stuck at it. Expecting Parker to give up on gesture would be a bit like asking Seurat to drop the dots. If one accepts this kinaesthetic preference, The View from Here could be regarded as an extremely successful collaboration of sight, sound, movement and text.

Its serial chain of staccato actions (move-stop-move-stop-move) inaugurated and sustained a certain atmosphere throughout the work; at once human and impersonal. Being neither natural nor fluid, it would be easy to imagine this suturing of small movements as a stream of consciousness. Many of the short pathways of movement were distal in their execution—arm, leg, hand, face—peripheral sketches of a body (not so much a person) following a script. There is thus an ambiguous quality in the tenor of this dancing. It is not expressive because we do not see the person giving form to a (psychic) interiority. But neither is it pure abstraction: the costuming and the arrangement of bodies in space suggests some form of human sociality. This can also be seen in the timbre of the dancers’ performance, in their eyes which look but don’t necessarily register.

Steven Heather’s musical composition supports the sense that these people are performing something of a non-narrative nature. I don’t know how the collaboration was organized, but I experienced his music as a very harmonious complement/compliment to Parker’s work. It also made space for Seigmar Zacharias’ spoken meditation on the interpretive nature of observation. The ambiguity of Parker’s domain (human, impersonal, non-narrative) is ripe for a series of cool questions about the relation between watching and seeing, requiring us to, as Zacharias put it, “Tilt your brain, inventing connections.” He also posed the question of distance, a form of proximity palpable in Parker’s work.

I loved Margie Medlin’s lighting of the space which subtly turned its rough shod features into something beautiful to contemplate. There was a moment when a digital image of the unused proscenium arch was projected onto a neighbouring wall and dissolved into an abstracted half-sister of the original, mimicking but also softening its pastel hues. A warp and weft of displaced patches of colour.

Mostly, the dancers performed a singular series of movements but there were sections in which 2 or more would do the same thing or work with, rather than alongside, each other. Sometimes one person was designated to watch, like us. Just as the movement vocabulary was basically peripheral, the contact between the dancers did not develop a great deal beyond touch. One question which arose for me as I watched the various dancers was: what happens in a body when the detail is in the distal regions? Phoebe Robinson’s limbs happily rotated and twisted in their sockets. Her manner of movement works well with Parker’s style. But again, one could ask: where is the rest of the body/self in the performance of small things? Or do these small things add up to something else, something greater than the sum of their parts? If they do, then that would be a contribution made by the observer to the work. For me, the journey itself was all there was.

I was impressed by the sustained nature of the piece and its rich interdisciplinarity. There were moments of great beauty especially in the visual enhancement of the site. The collaborative effect of sound and music on the work added complexity and interest. But ultimately, it’s a matter of the flesh, that in virtue of which we have a perspective. Even if Stelarc is right that the body is obsolete, the motions of corporeality remain palpable and pleasurable sites of observation.

Dance Works, The View from Here, choreography Sandra Parker, dancers Deanne Butterworth, Tim Harvey, Carlee Mellow, Daina Pjekne, music Steven Heather, text and performance Siegmar Zacharias, design Margie Medlin, costumes Anna Tregloan; St Kilda Memorial Hall, Aug 25-Sept 4

A combination of dance company aims, cultures and choreographic processes cross fertilized with mixed casts, makes for a thought-provoking double bill from Restless Dance Company and the Australian Dance Theatre in the Adelaide Festival Centre’s innovative InSpace program.The 2 companies merged and broke into 2 groups, one working with Garry Stewart, the other with Kat Worth. Taking the use of words as a starting point, each choreographer explores the way in which words furnish identity and signify or cloud meaning. The juxtaposition of the 2 works draws attention to their distinctive lexicons and different approaches to dance making.

Kat Worth explores how abstract the experience of communication can be in a play with the dualistic presence and absence of words. Garry Stewart’s work resides in the conceptual, linguistic interplay between the signs and symbols of the written word and movement, toying with words as carriers of our cultural values. Both works are richly complemented by music composed by Darrin Verhagen and the perceptive designs of Gaelle Mellis and Geoff Cobham.

Present Tense furthers Stewart’s investigation of written language placed side by side with dance, first posed in Birdbrain. Unlike the witty fashion accessory T-shirts in that work, the words here are inanimate, 3-dimensional props, sculpturally filling the space within which the dancers pose figuratively and are humorously book-ended, filling in the blanks to suggest meaning. This is a wordplay game where strangely the actions of the dancers bring character and life to the words. The ever changing juxtapositions between dancers and words form various meanings, relationships, or act as descriptors for previous actions. Short vignettes play out the word script through literal representation or physical and theatrical interpretations.

Birdbrain was high voltage, Present Tense is stripped back, reduced and austere. The costuming and neutral staging provide a blank page upon which letters, words, phrases and individual personalities are writ, sometimes small, sometimes large in the open, white wingless space.

Primarily an existential endeavour, the poignant solo moments of aloneness danced by Gemma Coley (‘lovely’, ‘love’, ‘evolve’), and the reflexivity of being an outsider danced by James Bull (‘us’, ‘them’, ‘other’), brought an emotive quality to this cerebral gameplay.

The second half of the work picks up pace as the descriptors fail: human relationships appear to transcend the need for meaning, rapid-fire moments of pure dance inserted between the graveyard of words, intricate manipulating trios and entwined duets. The placing of words onto sleeping bodies concludes the work, suggesting both are media; conveyors of meaning through signals and signs.

In this work Stewart shares French choreographer Jerome Bel’s attraction to semantic gameplay between objects and bodies, and identity construction via acculturation. Stewart’s richly conceptual and humorous work departs from the purely minimalist propositions of Bel through the inclusion of pure unadulterated dancing and expressive theatrical moments, emphasizing dance over performance art.

Unspoken Outloud focuses on the act of communication itself, suggesting that language, spoken or written, is a complex social construct that will inevitably fail us some of the time. Misunderstandings create multiple meanings. Kat Worth’s work therefore offers resistance to literal narrative, to the prosaic and the abstract, rather inviting the audience to engage with a visceral, physical vocabulary of presence in which meaning is ambiguous.

The work opens with dancers entering one by one, picking their way tentatively over 3,000 books covering the floor, to sit in silent repose and contemplation. Each dancer is slowly revealed through individual actions and short duets. Flowing, intricate phrases unfold over time as each dancer is coupled in turn. Silent empathetic falling, catching and guiding to the floor are ongoing motifs, actions speaking louder than words. Unspoken Outloud focuses on a vocabulary of human relationships beneath words, providing alternative ways to communicate when words get in the way of what we really mean. The work suggests that the meaning of some experiences is wordless but heard, felt, real and understood nonetheless.

The experience of Unspoken Outloud is like watching a painting being revealed gradually, a landscape of human relationships slowly bleeding into view—part animated still life, part visceral obstacle path—as the dancers navigate the sea of books that are swept aside by bodies, momentarily read, stolen and stacked. The evenly paced temporality of this work creates a sense of the ennui that can come with words, although greater variation in dynamic range might have been more suggestive. But the primary strength of Unspoken… comes from a creative process which has allowed each performer to have their own voice. When homogeneity and hierarchy are resisted, labels of difference lose their power. Each dancer possesses their own unique vocabulary and expressive style complementing and synthesizing into a fluid ensemble.

To view this double bill from the single indicator of comparison between the very different abilities of these companies would miss the point. The works encourage us to extend our own vocabularies, to test their dualisms.

InSpace, Restless Dance Company and Australian Dance Theatre, Vocabulary: Present Tense, choreographer Garry Stewart, Unspoken Outloud, choreographer Kat Worth; composer Darrin Verhagen, designer Gaelle Mellis, lighting Geoff Cobham; Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, July 28-Aug 6; inspace.com.au

Earlier this year I was approached by Currency House, the performing arts think tank and publisher, to write an essay about the ramifications of the recent restructure of the Australia Council, particularly for the Council itself. Currency House publishes its Platform Papers quarterly, contributing to much needed debate on the arts in Australia. To date the series of 6 essays has included Martin Harrison on the ABC and the arts, Julian Meyrick on the crisis in the theatre and Robyn Archer on mainstream dominance in thinking about the arts. In my essay, I wanted to look at the evolution of the Australia Council’s engagement with innovation over the decades and also to attempt to go beyond the prevalent managerial model of dealing with the arts, and much of the rest of our lives, by playfully employing a notion of cultural ecology. What follows is compiled from excerpts from Platform Papers No 6, Art in a Cold Climate, Rethinking the Australia Council. I hope you’ll read the whole essay and contribute to the rethinking of Australian attitudes to the arts.

On December 8, 2004 the Australia Council announced an internal restructure in the terms proposed by its Future Planning Task Force. Given that the restructure was internal no consultation with clients, stakeholders or the public was offered. Recognising that the proposed internal changes, including the dissolution of the New Media Arts and Community Cultural Development Boards, would have serious external ramifications, artists and arts organisations met across Australia. Protests ensued and new lobby groups formed. Council conceded to consult, but only about how to best effect the restructure which was formally accepted on April 8, 2005.

The formation of the New Media Arts Board in 1996, although not without controversy, was widely seen as enlightened. Here at last was an Australia Council Board that could formally address experimentation and innovation in the form of the hybrid and new media practices that had been steadily developing over two decades, work that had been difficult to categorise and, consequently, was often neglected or under-funded. But in 2005 the board has been dissolved, its ‘clients’ dispersed to the traditional artform category boards, Visual Arts and Music.

At a time of great cultural diversity and burgeoning new arts practices which connect unprecedentedly with our everyday lives, it is astonishing that the Australia Council has reversed its own evolution. The authoritarian manner in which it effected this change, the further diminution of the role of artists as peers within Council and the silencing of new media arts—no longer represented on Council—sadly parallel the deliberalising of democracies the world over. While there might be enormous diversity on the ground, the ideological push to centralise and to control threatens to yield a monoculture, a condition to which the Australian arts has institutionally been too long inclined.

A significant manager in the arts system, the Australia Council is not only attempting to wind back the clock of artistic evolution but also to usurp its partners, leaving ‘clients’ and ‘stakeholders’ out in the cold. Declaring itself ‘leader’ of and ‘catalyst’ for the arts, the danger is that the manager will lock into autocatalysis and use up available resources to keep itself alive. The restructured Australia Council positions itself above the arts ecosystem of which it has long been a part, albeit in an increasingly difficult relationship, its funding levels essentially frozen, its roles and functions multiplying, its structure rigidly top-down, and less and less responsive to the bottom-up emergence of new ideas and forms that regenerate the arts.

Hybrid and new media arts are part of an internationally admired Australian inventiveness, but if the Australia Council’s absorbing them into traditional artform categories dilutes their standing and their funding, as well it may do, we stand to lose a great deal. We are culturally poor if we cannot live with the paradoxes inherent in new forms. Our cultural ecology includes long-lived species (heritage arts), some of them protected (the major performing arts organisations), but there are others, like new media and hybrid practices, in the throes of emergence. The Council’s Future Planning Task Force declared that new media arts do not constitute an artform. However, they comprise a field of broadly aligned practices that require artistic sensibility, skills and often considerable technical or scientific knowledge. As John Smithies, former head of ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne) has eloquently argued, like any emerging artform these practices already involve a developing ecology of new tools, new channels of distribution and broadcast, extensive new networks, new audiences and new patterns of remuneration.

The Australia Council has always set great store by innovation. As a consequence, it has supported a great deal of remarkable work over its lifetime. However, its decision to dissolve the New Media Arts Board represents the destruction of a vital part of the new media and hybrid arts habitat. This at a time when the field is still emerging, when important loops between its discrete organisms are still being formed, when its international reputation is high—overseas institutions and artists were astonished at its demotion—and its potential is strong in the long term for developing markets and audiences where the digital is pervasive. The restructure was an anachronistic adaptation, an act of regression and, like previous restructures, an admission of the Council’s failure to secure adequate funds for its clients, but a failure for which its constituency will pay.

But this is more than the story of Australia Council maladaptation, it comes at the end of a decade of cooling climate for the arts, in which artists have been portrayed as a backstabbing, self-serving elite who have been outed and the Council wrested away from them. More than that, they have been cut adrift. An ecosystem functions via the many loops formed between its organisms. The loops that link the arts with the universities, the ABC, the Australia Council and the federal government have been steadily cut over the decade. At the same time the funding for basic arts resources, for survival, has seriously diminished in real terms despite state governments attempting to make up the difference. New loops forming with the corporate sector (eg through the Australian Business and Arts Foundation) and private philanthropy are slow to form, less systematic and come with conditions that will not necessarily favour innovation, let alone provocation.

Diversifying resources and manufacturing has not been an Australian trait: the result, agricultural and mineral monocultures. It’s not dissimilar in the arts, where large omnivores consume most of the resources. The difference, however, is that they are rarely exportable; they are stay-at-homes. Even the national companies, Opera Australia and the Australian Ballet, move about very little. Meanwhile individual artists and small companies disperse to find new niches here and overseas, embodying work that is idiosyncratically Australian and widely applauded. But they are kept poor, so that the cultural ecosystem remains predominantly a monoculture.

Could it be that the Major Performing Arts Organisations Board skews the functioning of the Australia Council? Within the ecology of the Council, the Board is self-contained, operating on quite different criteria from the artform boards, where peer assessment is critical, where quality, purpose and, often, originality are paramount. The major performing arts organisations are treated as if they are not part of the greater ecologies of dance, music and theatre. They are assessed as businesses. Meanwhile, the gap between these large companies and the rest of the performing arts field simply grows and grows.

What if Council were to be relieved of the administrative and financial burden of servicing these organisations, who could be funded directly by government? Would that allow Council to focus its energies on the majority of its clients?

However, the Australia Council intends to introduce another species, ‘large-scale projects’, into the system to prove to government ‘that art can make a difference’ and therefore warrant a funding increase that will flow on to the artform boards. The budget of $9 million for the projects represents the takeover of the artform boards’ intiative funds. In a radical departure from the model of Council as responsive to the arts ecology, the new artform board directors will seek out projects rather than respond to grant applications, and then compete for funds from the full Council. If these big projects do not have their roots in the existing arts ecology, if their goals are functional, they will become an invasive species, throwing the system out of kilter. And the Council will have assumed another role, that of producer with its Councillors as peer assessors. More mutations introduced into the system.

At each stage of the Council’s history over the last 2 decades, the impression is of an organisation in adaptive mode—negative, because it has to downsize to make do with less, maladaptive, because it makes wrong moves, or anachronistic—it regresses to an earlier form. It’s time to re-think the Australia Council. Increasingly, artists have had to adapt to the Council’s limitations rather than Council responding to an evolving Australian arts ecology and to the cultural transformations Australians are living through.

The organisation has become unwieldy, proliferating roles, losing its independence as it it becomes more and more an agent of government, drifting, like the ABC, away from the cultural ecology in which it should play a responsive as well as a creative role. I’m asking here what the Australia Council could do for the arts if its attention and energies were focused on what is commonly called the small-to-medium arts sector, which in my estimation is central to the well-being and future of the arts in Australia and their standing internationally.

My vision of is of unencumbered, empowered contemporary arts practitioners emboldened by hybridity and new media and fostered by a pared-back, purposeful Australia Council. Is this nothing but the green dream of an arts fantasist, or can we begin to imagine once again what might be possible?

Excerpted from Art in a Cold Climate: Re-thinking the Australia Council, Platform Papers No 6, Currency House, Sydney, October 2005. A shorter version of this excerpt appeared in the Australian, Sept 28.

Peacock

Recently it has been hard to avoid thinking about Chinese cinema. I’m in Adelaide, listening to the Premier of South Australia and no less than 2 federal ministers trumpeting the first feature co-production between Australia and the Shanghai Film Group. I’m in Melbourne, watching a season entitled Horizons: New Chinese Cinema at the film festival. Then I’m in Brisbane watching another Chinese season, Lost in Time, Lost in Space.

Not only is it the hundredth year of Chinese cinema, but every day it seems we read of the ways in which the massive changes underway in China are impacting on us. As Australia becomes a major supplier of commodities to fuel Chinese production, there is a growing sense that we need to broaden our engagement with Chinese culture, and embrace a nation from which we have, for too long, tried to maintain a distance.

Given this plethora of film events, it seems useful to draw breath and assess the types of filmmaking going on in China, and the possibilities they might represent for Australian cinema industries.

Global impact

It was instructive to read the recent comments of the deputy head of the Film Bureau, the government body which regulates cinema in China. He celebrated the fact that China now had the third largest national cinema in the world, while going on to express regret that last year the industry produced only 3 good films, by which he meant 3 big commercial hits.

The Melbourne Film Festival gave us a chance to sample 2 of these hits—though the fact that 2 of the films had already screened at the nearby Chinatown cinema for several weeks points to the continuing invisibility of ethnic exhibition for middle-class festival audiences. Feng Xiaogang’s A World Without Thieves shows us what our grandchildren will all be doing on Saturday night if the grandiose claims about this being the Chinese century come true. Montage action sequences, a fat soundtrack, and a regionally recognised Hong Kong star (Andy Lau) speaking Mandarin provide a good sense of the current state of the emerging Chinese blockbuster.

Stephen Chiau’s Kung Fu Hustle and Lu Chuan’s Kekexili: Mountain Patrol take the package a further step by incorporating financing and distribution from Sony Pictures, indicating the ambitions of Chinese filmmakers to tap into global markets by using the Hollywood distribution system.

Art cinema

The next level beneath the commercial behemoths is the art cinema release. Shot on 35mm film on a scale which necessitates official government approval, these more cautious, handsome films are easily incorporated into film festivals and pay TV services such as World Movies.

Foremost here is Gu Changwei’s Peacock which screened at both Melbourne and Brisbane festivals. While it is an officially sanctioned production, the film has a history of censorship problems in China. It has a 3-part narrative structure built around a family in the late 1970s, with each part dealing with an adolescent sibling. The period is significant as the end of the Cultural Revolution opened up space for private lives and personal ambitions (a theme also explored in Shanghai Dreams, shown at Melbourne). Sister’s tragedy is that she wants to stand out in the crowd; older brother’s tragedy is that he wants to fit in. The final story of younger brother, who also acts as narrator, ends with the embrace of mediocrity and cynicism. The world may be full of wonders, of brightly colored peacocks—but not for this generation.

Peacock and Letter from an Unknown Woman, which was shown at Brisbane, have the striking production values which stem from the involvement of prominent creative personalities. Gu Changwei is making his directing debut after establishing himself as one of China’s leading cinematographers on famous Fifth Generation films Red Sorghum and Farewell My Concubine. Xu Jingwei, director, writer and star of Letter from an Unknown Woman is a celebrity television actress and enjoys sufficient clout to merit the involvement of a star like Jiang Wen and cinematographer Li Pingbin (of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wong Kar-wai repute).

Underground

In recent years, a divide has developed in Chinese production between these officially sanctioned films and the underground production economy of the Sixth Generation, where films are shot on digital video without government script approval, and the thematic emphasis is on the spiritual and cultural vacuum opened up by the embrace of market values. The most important event in Chinese cinema over the past year has been the attempt by the Film Bureau to heal the breach between above-ground cinema and the unauthorized, low-budgeted, and often foreign financed filmmaking for which Jia Zhangke has been an emblematic figure.

Jia’s The World was the headline Chinese film at all of Australia’s festivals this year. Melbourne went one better, contextualizing it with a retrospective of Jia’s films and his cinematographer-collaborator, Yu Lik-wai.

The World is set in a theme park full of replicas of international landmarks, and will undoubtedly be the subject of much commentary dealing with its savage ironies around China’s position in a globalised world. Jia continues to see the main issue for contemporary China as the relation of urban and village cultures, rather than any more outward looking version of globalization. World culture, like the break dance music of his earlier Platform, is a series of garish, disconnected facades, failing to cover the cultural emptiness which underlies it. The World is a film about the paradoxical smallness of the world for many people whose long-term prospects for happiness are reliant on tenuous personal relationships.

Brisbane and Melbourne both contained outstanding examples of this low budget digital production which has emerged with so much strength in China in the last decade. Brisbane’s best shot was Tang Poetry, a film which inspired strongly divided opinions. It is a deeply minimalist film dealing with a couple of criminals living wordlessly, yet passionately, in a sparsely furnished apartment. A rough approximation might be to suggest Tsai Ming-liang watching a Jean-Pierre Melville film. The title and the interspersed poems alert us to the tactic of saying little in order to suggest much, while there is also a tasty irony to the way urgent descriptions of nature have been reduced to the angular claustrophobia of a cramped apartment whose spaces we slowly explore. The film appears bleak and difficult only to those with no eye for sly wit and minimalist tactics of a rich sparseness.

Melbourne’s low budget triumph was Li Shaohong’s Stolen Life, the story of a young woman’s disastrous liaison with a man who uses and abandons her. It is significant that Li, a Fifth Generation director, who last year made the big budget digital effects film, Baober in Love, has gone on to this cheaper video feature, which looks like it was shot for TV. The smaller scale of the production, with its tight, bold compositions, suits it well—a moving parable of the way that a generation was separated from its children, and the ways that a new generation is unwittingly replicating the sins of the past.

Australian connections

So, what’s all this got to do with the Australian cinema? Why should it rouse our filmmakers from the stupefaction of nationalism which has been a central tenet of our film policies?

Certainly, many sections of the Australian film industry have begun to position themselves as suppliers of post-production services to the Chinese film industry. Melbourne-based Soundfirm has led the way here, setting up joint venture facilities in China. Other companies such as Animal Logic and Cinevex have chased work in the areas of digital post-production and laboratory services on the basis that they can deliver quality results at cheaper prices than their Japanese competitors. The end-titles of Kung Fu Hustle make interesting reading for the list of Australian names and companies which feature in lab work, digital post-production and Dolby sound mixing.

The South Australian Film Corporation, which famously led the nationalist film renaissance in the 1970s, is attempting to get in on the ground floor of post-nationalist regionalism by organizing a co-production, Long, Long is the Road and Far, Far is the Journey, to be shot in Adelaide and Shanghai at the end of the year. The film will be written and directed by Chinese filmmakers with an Australian cinematographer. Director Gu Yi’an, a well-known theatre director in Shanghai, explained to me that he wanted to capture China as seen by a foreign eye. The shoot will move from the Australian summer to the Chinese winter in order to maximize the contrast between landscapes.

The emergence of Chinese cinema, in a rapidly changing set of industrial and aesthetic formulations, is undoubtedly one of the most significant issues in contemporary cinema. From commercial blockbusters aimed at a world market, through to the underground movements which are starting to come up for air, we can only hope that Australian film festivals maintain their attention to seasons such as these, in order to build interest in both China and Chinese cinema. These films not only raise issues about Australia’s familiarity with the country which is fast becoming its main regional partner, but they also confront the struggling Australian film industry with potential opportunities which it needs to explore with all the energy at its disposal.

Melbourne International Film Festival, July 20-Aug 7; Brisbane International Film Festival July 27-Aug 8

Against the terrifying morass of homogenous ‘fun’ and ‘family entertainment’, there is a necessity for cultural choice and wider possibilities. Yet for cinema audiences in Sydney the options are quickly running out.

The press has made much of the fact that cinema audiences in Australia were down 14% in the first half of the year, a decrease that was blamed variously on the popularity of DVDs and home entertainment systems, disappointing releases coming from Hollywood, and ticket prices. But multiplex cinemas are national and multinational chains, the movies don’t matter as much as the food and drink sales. You want to know why so many mainstream movies are simplistic combinations of explosions and dumb humour? The audience is suffering one big sugar rush and can’t face anything more complex.

Now Sydney’s cinema culture is mourning the loss of Glebe’s Valhalla, one of the city’s handful of independent cinemas, and currently up for auction (and it may be sold to a consortium who will develop it into a cinematheque, or it may be converted into apartments). Paddington’s art-house Chauvel cinema has also been closed.

The death of one cinema, and possible demise of another, leaves a scar on the city’s artistic and cultural landscape that may never heal. There are the Dendy and the Palace chains, but these show well publicised first run ‘big’ indie and foreign language movies, not the retrospectives and classics that play in a cinematheque, and rarely the often under publicised documentaries that once played at the Valhalla.

In John Waters’ low-budget comedy Cecil B. Demented, the filmmaking anarchist of the title attacks multiplex audiences as they watch Patch Adams and sabotages the shooting of the thankfully mythical Forest Gump sequel, all in the name of independent cinema. Desperate times lead to desperate measures. What, then, is to be done to save cinema in Sydney?

Screen culture

Sydney has a culture of film, not just in the presence of the industry and the studios, but also manifested through film festivals and special events. These range from numerous culturally specific festivals to the wannabe indulgence of Tropfest. Not only do these events promote the city to both industry and tourists, presumably areas of importance to the government at city, state and national level, but more importantly they function as a crucial element of aesthetic and socio-political culture. These events serve as a conduit between filmmakers, communities, audiences, and emergent talents, acting as zones from which new visual cultures can emerge.

Film cultures need to be continually nurtured. Hence the importance of independent art-house cinemas screening unusual movies. And these are not merely cinemas that will show the latest in avant-garde Asian cinema or the new wave of radical documentary, but all manner of films that reflect the vagaries of cinematic culture: local, national, and international.

An art-house cinema serves many purposes. It should be the place to see a foreign language film that has limited distribution, such as Noe’s Irreversible, or where an audience can see a new print of an old favourite on the big screen, likeTati’s Playtime. It should screen underground movies and retrospectives. The art-house cinema should be a zone where all censorship is suspended, where a movie like Passolini’s Salo or Clarke’s Ken Park can be screened to an audience free of the contrived moral outrage of fundamentalist tongue clickers.

To lose an art-house cinema is to lose choice. The art-house screens films that are rarely, if ever, screened at the multiplex. While the independent chains have to screen the better known indie movies, they have little screen space for retrospectives or true obscurities. Without the art-house cinema the more eclectic, avant-garde and radical films on celluloid are lost, becoming mere DVD ghosts in the machine. Filmmakers and audiences need film as material. The projected image is superior to the digital image. Watching art-house films on home entertainment systems presupposes availability and removes the pleasure of stumbling accidentally into a classic.

In an ideal world there would be extensive government funding for art-house cinemas, but that is not the only answer. Yes, Sydney should have its own ACMI-variant (as should all state capitals) but this is possibly wishful thinking. The situation is critical; audiences and cinemas need to work together.

Programming

Cinemas like the Chauvel cannot compete with the bigger independent chains. As one person put it: “Where would you rather see a movie, somewhere that has saggy seats, or the nice cinema down the road?” It is pointless for the Chauvel to screen the same movies at the same time as the cinemas 5 minutes away. Instead it needs to focus on the neglected, the obscure, and on cult audiences. The cinematheque at the Chauvel screens retrospective seasons and the Valhalla screened all manner of obscurities. The Chauvel should devote itself entirely to this kind of film programming.

Programmers need to adapt and challenge audiences. The midnight movie has helped finance many an art-house cinema, and audiences are out there. The success of the Cult Sinema Mondays at the Annandale Hotel, which has now been running for 3 years, suggests that a loyal local audience who want to see cult movies does exist. The Scala in London survived in part on its legendary Blue Mondays, screening art-house-sex-staples, Thundercrack and Café Flesh weekly to an enthusiastic audience of punks, stoners, leather boys, students and film buffs.

The Chauvel could work together with local universities to run seasons based on academic courses. They could work with film festivals. Absurdly, given the relatively small audiences, the Tibetan, Russian and Greek film festivals are running simultaneously in Sydney throughout early September, effectively working against each other, and against any audience who may actually want to see films in all the festivals.

Commitment

A further problem is that audiences are aging. The demographic for art-house cinema audiences is increasingly middle aged. Young hipsters may want to see more films, but their disposable income is too low and the demands on it too high; a ticket for a rock concert may exceed $50, that’s potentially 3 cinema trips missed.

For people in the industry, or hoping to get into the industry, there needs to be a radical rethinking of what film is. If you are interested in cinema you should demand to see films beyond the multiplex. If you value cinema, explore it, engage with it, don’t merely expect to be entertained by it. For those who claim to be interested in the industry remember that film culture demands real commitment.

Audiences could also contribute to the running of the Chauvel. Why not start a scheme where members ‘sponsor’ a seat for a year? Five hundred people each sponsoring a seat (or a brick, or a fixture, or even a member of staff) for $2000 could raise a million dollars overnight. Is $2000 too much? People spend hundreds of thousands more on buying inner city apartments in order to be ‘where the action is.’ What will these places be worth if in a year’s time the only inner city activity left is shopping?

There are other modes of operation. Could a cinema be run as a cooperative? The Valhalla currently lies vacant, but it is still a cinema. Could it be resurrected through a combination of sponsors and donations? Is there a way in which such donations could be written off against tax? Or should it just be allowed to rot, or handed over to developers?

Following a public meeting on August 11 a group of concerned citizens formed Film Lovers For Independent Cinema (FLICs, Chauvel.blogspot.com ), led by filmmaker Tom Zubrycki, ASDA director Richard Harris, filmmaker Amy Tovey and Jonathan Wald. The group has formed with the twin aims of assessing the need for, and strategic planning towards, creating a publicly funded cinema culture centre, and secondly to keep the Chauvel open. Backed by local film critics and with possible support from within the industry, the campaign is an acknowledgement of the desperate need for good and varied forms of cinema in Sydney.

Currently advocating letter writing, website creation, and campaigning, FLICs emerges from the recognition that something has to be done to save Sydney’s visual culture. Whether or not FLICs will succeed depends on the people of Sydney and the film culture. Now is the time to become involved.

Venturesome selections in a sprawling program characterised the 2005 Brisbane International Film Festival. Of particular note was the formidable lineup of documentaries, an original take on flavour-of-the-month Korean cinema and an intriguing program of experimental and avant-garde films.

David Bradbury’s exposé of the horrors of depleted uranium weapons, Blowin’ in the Wind, is an imposing polemic. Intimate, investigative documentary-making is placed above production values in its address of a deeply verboten subject. Doing away with any pretense at objectivity, the film delivers outrage after outrage, from the handy convenience of depleted uranium weapons to the nuclear industry (why store it when you can offload it to arms companies?), to the unforgettable images of deformed Iraqi babies. Raw and angry films like this are a hugely necessary reminder of the weapons of mass destruction on ‘our’ side. Bradbury was awarded this year’s Chauvel Award (which has previously gone to Robin Anderson and Bob Connelly), underlining the significance of documentaries to the Brisbane festival. The continuing saga around the film’s distribution speaks volumes about its uncomfortable revelations.

Vanua-Tai

Australia’s near neighbours also featured with the welcome focus of the Voices from the Pacific program. Vanua-Tai explores Vanuatuans’ combined efforts to preserve threatened turtle populations and the problems of co-ordination on an archipelago of over 80 islands where turtle consumption is culturally enshrined. Focusing on the efforts to recruit and inform turtle monitors, the documentary’s primary function is as an informational tool, travelling between communities and promoting indigenous action. Refreshingly, this wasn’t ‘white folks speaking for black folks’; producer Jan Cattoni explained at the screening, the islanders themselves were heavily involved in the direction. The resulting film is sensitive (especially in the handling of the inevitable turtle butchery scene) and vivid, threaded through with exuberant vignettes from the community theatre group One Smolbag’s take on the turtles’ fight for survival.

Chris Owen

Like Cattoni, Chris Owen is a highly regarded, award-winning, long-time ethnographic filmmaker working with indigenous communities. His latest film, Betelnut Bisnis continues his ‘participant observation’ of his adopted home, Papua New Guinea, showing the efforts of a small time operator to buy and sell the better, coastal form of betelnut in the highlands, where it fetches a good price. Most memorable are the lovingly photographed scenes of the careful ritual of the preparation process involving the nuts, lime from crushed seashell, and a mustard tree twig, all chewed together for maximum buzz. Owen’s imbrication in the culture is evident in his physical presence, as he talks to the friends and acquaintances who are the film’s subjects; his unflinching eye (some will blanch at the shots of toddlers stumbling around stoned as they learn the ways of proper ingestion) and in the touching scenes where he assists the hapless Lukas in his business endeavours. Owen was also present at the screening of his film to further explain aspects of his gentle, humane look at the world’s fourth most commonly consumed drug (after nicotine, alcohol and caffeine) to a large and fascinated audience.

James Benning

James Benning’s films have been labelled experimental documentaries, though this inadequate description neglects the intense sensory and perceptual exploration they induce. The screening of his 13 Lakes at BIFF delivered a sense of circularity and closure: it was the film we saw being shot in the brilliant Circling the Image documentary that introduced Benning to audiences at last year’s festival. The 13 10-minute fixed-camera shots of lakes are composed of equal parts sky and water, with recombined collected sounds. The experience is both soothing and menacing, tranquil and thought-provoking; as viewers see more and become attuned to the sound mix, we are drawn into the vista and see into it, rather than looking at it. Senses attuned to the slightest movement or sound, in a near-hypnotic state by the final lake of the film, the sound of gunfire comes as a genuine shock.

Innovators

The Owen Land program heralded the return to Brisbane of the distinguished London avant-garde film curator Mark Webber and re-emphasises his commitment to ‘other’ cinema. Framed by Webber’s perceptive but restrained introductions, the 2 programs offered a comprehensive tour through the seminal 70s avant garde work of Land. Like Benning, Land resists categorisation; his commingling of structural-materialist inquiries into the film apparatus and spectatorship with parodic and surreal imagery, autiobiography, critique (of other avant-gardists, notably Hollis Frampton in Wide Angle Saxon) and found footage creates a unique avant-garde sub-genre.

Found footage film flourished with Peter Tcherkassky’s Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine, Bill Morrison’s Light is Calling and The Mesmerist, and Gustav Deutsch’s World Mirror Cinema. All inquire into the phenomenology of film and cinema through montage experiments with old film. Where Morrison and Tcherkassky’s work tends to involve a violation of the image (through forced decay and saccadic editing), Deutsch is more meditative. World Mirror Cinema re-presents 3 lengthy pans (shot at various times between 1912 and 1930) taking in the streetscapes and their cinemas as a springboard to contemplation of life with cinema. Inviting us to reflect on our relation to cinema as a site in social space, the loving attention to the buildings is testament to Deutsch’s architectural background. Careful intercutting emphasises the choreography of everyday life, and the dominance of gestures of pause (slowed-down, the film’s pace is almost elegiac) invites contemplation of the chance participants and the operation of cinematic machinery as a window onto their interconnected lives.

South Korea

South Korea’s golden age of filmmaking includes a thriving experimental sector. The Tony Rayns curated program of independent Korean cinema comprised dynamic and inquiring films that defy cinematic codes and genre boundaries to memorable effect.

‘Edgy’ is often marketing speak for low-budget cinematic self-indulgence but only one of the films in this program fit this paradigm, the 55-minute featurette Anti-Dialectic. An unusually large audience, possibly lured by the promise of philosophical content in the title, endured interminable shots of a smug artist in his apartment, smoking and making languid attempts to sketch an apple. Curiously, the film was titled ‘Half-Dialectic’ in the opening credits, and the catalogue promise that it “skillfully demolishes all theories of dialectical materialism” went egregiously unfulfilled.

The collaborative The Camellia Project, which focused on the increasing visibility and embrace of identity politics by gay men in Korea, was much more interesting. Comprising 3 films by 3 directors, and linked by the setting, Bogil Island, the adventurous films of this omnibus poignantly reflect on notions of escape, disintegration and secrets. Narrative fracturing and a meticulous palette of red and blue mark out the exploration of memory, time and action in film-poem time consciousness.

Containment is the theme of the most stunning films of the New Korean Cinema Reloaded program, Shin Sung-il is Lost (also known as Shin Sung Il is Spirited Away). At a religious orphanage, eating is forbidden and chubby Shin-Sung-il is protected by a giant angel as he dreams of liberation. The ambiguous, experimental narrative, with supernatural elements, symbolism and psychological drama, delivers a sustained critique of organised religion’s hypocrisy and suffocating dogma. Formal innovations include unusual choices of shot, angle and lighting, and apparently random switches between black and white and colour. Any doubts about the degree to which the film’s representational subversion was a conscious authorial strategy were erased by director Shin Jane’s deft handling of questions at the screening, making more films from “shinjaneland, the smallest studio in Korea” a tantalising promise.

War and documentary

War is an ever present theme in contemporary art films and a number at the festival dealt directly with conflict, including Guerilla News Network’s Stephen Marshall’s eye-opening on the ground Iraq documentary Battleground: 21 Days on the Empire’s Edge, the brilliant documentary State of Fear (about government terrorism in Chile), and the sell-out hostage drama Paradise Now. Amidst these, Coca: The Dove from Chechnya, about the activities of human rights activists documenting the litany of murder, abduction and torture the Chechen population continues to suffer, has a special impact. The lengths to which the women go to protect the tapes (hiding, even burying them), the scale and bureaucratic nature of the systematic murder campaign, combined with the unwavering commitment of the dove of the title, lawyer-turned-activist Zainap Gashaeva, creates a truly moving document.

Highlighting the Western media’s indifference in the Chechen human rights tragedy, Coca, like many films in the program, helps us to contextualise and complicate our understanding of a faraway place, its oppressions, tragedies and brave activists. The project is momentous and the documentary a potent force for awareness, a reminder of the power of moving images and the film events that enable us to witness them.

Queensland’s colonial history began in the 1820s, just prior to the invention of photography. Colonisation, like 19th century photographs, reduced the world to black and white, simplifying the complexity of reality. Decolonisation, then, could be seen as a gradual process of recolourising the cultural landscape, restoring it to its true condition.

Now in its fifth incarnation, the Colourised Festival is dedicated to reinvigorating the diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander identities and forms of expression. Under the artistic direction of Christine Peacock over the last 3 years, this small, yet sophisticated cultural festival has become an established event, showcasing a range of recent local, national and international Indigenous visual and performing arts. More essentially, it provides a time and place for people to gather, watch and discuss works that both celebrate and confront reality from a multiplicity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives.

This year the festival spread out across the city to QUT Gardens Point Art Gallery and Theatre, the Queensland Museum Theatrette, the Jagera Arts Centre in Musgrave Park, Metro Arts Centre and in South Bank’s Piazza. Taking Indigenous films literally to the streets, some of Brisbane’s most popular bars and cafes in West End and South Brisbane participated in CINEMA alterNATIVE. Twice daily over 3 days during NAIDOC Week, unsuspecting diners were treated to an intimate viewing of 90 minutes of short documentaries and dramas by Ivan Sen, John Bell, Kyas Sheriff, Kelrick Martin, Steven McGregor and others.

Multiple media

Originally focussed on film as its primary medium of delivery, the emphasis this year was more broadly based, ranging across all the arts, from multimedia to visual art to music. Peacock explains:

We’re trying to take into account the broad base of screen culture now, in the sense that it has actually flowed over into most of the other arts. The reason we’ve taken the word ‘film’ out of the title of the festival is because essentially Indigenous cultures are holistic cultures, so we may be making film, but if you look at the actual discipline of filmmaking it involves a number of artists at various times. We wanted to get away from that idea of being producer and director driven and celebrate the idea that it is actually a collaboration of artists all coming together on celluloid or video tape… Filmmakers are not centre stage anymore, I think. Film is becoming a language that everybody is using to speak with.

An intimate mixed media exhibition explored the relationship between the static and the moving image. Still-Moving by Archie Moore, Leah King-Smith, Ivan Sen and the late Michael Riley exemplified the festival’s ability to cultivate aesthetic and cultural experiences for public consumption. A model of what could be a much larger exhibition of contemporary Australian Indigenous art, the single-room, multi-screen installation brought together 4 sophisticated image makers to question the concept of post-colonialism. Understated, yet confident in its subversive use of technology, multimedia is only rarely as concise and relevant as this.

Peacock comments that, “We’ve used the work of what I would consider probably the most avant-garde of our filmmakers, Ivan Sen and the late Michael Riley. They’ve dealt more specifically in film language than a lot of the other filmmakers. This is only my own opinion, but I feel we’ve actually been caught within a sort of ‘ethnographic’ framework. A lot of Australian film has come out of a tradition of documentary, a great deal of which was about the relationship between the coloniser and colonised. And we were often the subject of those documentaries in the early days, like Pearls and Savages, and of course, that meant that the image of ourselves was defined by somebody else and we became ‘other’ within the society. If you are going to address that as (an Indigenous) film maker, I think that you have to have a very good grasp of film language and you probably have to depart from the traditions of documentary filmmaking that have an ethnographical approach.”

Multimedia message stick

An interesting discussion circle convened in the large, open foyer of the Gardens Theatre located on QUT’s Gardens Point Campus. Facilitated by Zane Trow, the forum featured Indigenous speakers filmmaker, David Wilson from Adelaide and Debra Bennet McLean, from Queensland Community Arts Network who were joined by Gary Ellis, Managing Director of Brisbane International Film Festival, Clare Carmody, organiser of the annual Anne Street Party and Kylie Murphy, Director of the biennial Ideas Festival.

Goori woman, Debra McLean eloquently summarised the need for festivals as a tool of social transformation: “For us the concept of festival is an imperative. Traditionally, we had festival. That’s what corroboree was. We did that from the beginning of time. We came together; we were multi-disciplined, we sang, we talked, we told stories, we made art, we created craft, we designed, we acted, and, hey, we didn’t have film camera but if we had it we would have been using it. [Laughter.] That’s why we embraced the concept of multimedia so easily because it’s our message stick and we will use it powerfully. So when we look at accessing what is currently a plethora of technology, we look at how we can do it our way. We want to use that technology because we are a very embracing culture, we embrace things.”

David Wilson provided a brief overview of Indigenous filmmaking in Australia and looked towards the establishment of a National Indigenous Television Network. Wilson described a developing Aboriginal film industry but queried the idea of a unique Indigenous film culture. Comparing film with other artforms, Wilson delcared, “I would say that in the film industry we still haven’t got there yet in terms of Indigenous filmmaking. And that’s not to say that what’s been done already is not good—you know, there are a lot of good filmmakers out there doing good things.”

An installation by Karren Batton and Eddie Nona simulated a segregated movie theatre while slides of kitsch ‘Aboriginal’ tourist souvenirs illustrated the talk given by Olivia Robinson. An archival government documentary film, The Aboriginal Problem in Queensland, was screened as part of the talk on the paternalistic portrayals of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander identities in the past. This was contrasted with the work of Murriimage/Uniikup Productions as an example of how stereotypical misrepresentations of Indigenous people are being eroded by a new generation of Indigenous film-makers, performers, musicians and visual artists.

Next wave

Cross My Country at the Metro Arts Theatrette included the public premieres of 2 writer-animator projects, this time addressed to younger audiences: Boy and Moth by John Graham and Rebecca Pitt, and Murri Girl by Ross Watson and Shane Togo.

Also screened were 6 films by emerging Indigenous filmmakers, ranging from personal studies of the impact of systemic racism on the individual (Grant Saunders’ True Justice, and Too Little Justice directed by Dean Francis based on a script by Marcus Waters) to short documentaries (Endangered, written and directed by Tracey Rigney for the National Indigenous Documentary Fund, and The Ration Shed, by Robyn Hofmeyr, Lesley Williams and Sandra Morgan as part of the QUT Cherbourg Digital Project) and first person narratives with an experimental edge (Feel My Absence by Kyas Sheriff and Listen by Paula Maling, both part of the Lester Bostock Screen Project 2004). The diversity of style and content of this 70-minute program bodes well for the future of Australian Aboriginal screen culture.

Understanding respect

The festival culminated at the end of NAIDOC Week with a picnic, live music jamboree and film screening. The fine weather brought many hundreds of people—a cross section of residents and visitors to the city—to the South Bank Piazza over the course of the 6-hour event. In between live music performances by Black Star DJ, the Glenala School Band, the Hot Sisters, Dizzi and Dubbs, a program of short films produced for the AFTRS Indigenous Program and the AFC’s Dreaming in Motion and Dramatically Black screen initiatives, as well as music clips by Indigenous filmmaker Doug Watkin, was shown on the large daylight screen.

The purpose and validity of public festivals is keenly debated in arts administration circles. One side maintains that festivals are a form of artificial culture induced by governing bodies. The other side sees authentic local art arising spontaneously from within the community and the need for festivals to revitalise the relationship between the arts and local community on a regular basis. The Colourised Festival sits between these 2 camps, balancing the unavoidable task of ‘framing’ Indigenous culture for public consumption, with an open-ended, experimental approach to engaging with the wider community. This allows a renegotiation of common values and beliefs to take place without fear of accusation or blame. Respect for another culture is not a given but has to be earned through participation, unless, of course, it is a form of superficial politeness. Perhaps one of the most positive things an Indigenous cultural festival can do is to help change social values in real and enduring ways. Christine Peacock is cautiously optimistic about the future of the festival, which is inseparable from the changing relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians: “(You have to) understand what (respect) actually means, to understand what part it plays within society, amongst human beings. It’s an essential value and if it’s missing, then…”

Towards the end of The Take, one of the filmmakers, the writer Naomi Klein, tells the story of a stranger who approached her at a railway station shortly after her arrival in Buenos Aires. He handed her a letter warning: “Don’t be what we have become. We are the mistake that is your future.” The Take is the story of a group of Argentinians striving to reclaim their work, their lives and their future from the ‘mistake’ that in 2001 laid waste their economy.

Argentina enjoyed a burst of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity under the ultra-liberal economic policies of the Menem government of the 1990s, which saw the privatisation of everything from public utilities to street signs. But in 2001 the bubble burst, the currency collapsed, and with no market regulations left the foreign capital that had flooded the country for a decade was withdrawn overnight. As we see in an extraordinary sequence of The Take, the banks’ reserves of capital were literally trucked out of Buenos Aires in the dead of night in armoured vehicles under the protection of police escorts. Argentinians awoke to find the banks bolted and their life savings gone. The country was declared bankrupt in the biggest debt default in history.

In the aftermath of the economic collapse, Argentinian workers began taking matters into their own hands, occupying abandoned factories and setting the production lines in motion, running the enterprises on a co-operative basis. The first of these co-operatives was the Zanón Ceramics Factory, expropriated in October 2001, followed by the Brukman Garments Factory 2 months later. Intrigued by the stories emerging from Argentina, Canadians Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein set out to document the formation of one of these worker-controlled businesses. Inspired by the Zanón model, former employees of the Forja Auto Parts Factory occupied their plant and embarked on a long struggle to transform the moribund factory into a working concern.

As The Take progresses, we come to identify strongly with the workers’ cause, embodied by Freddy who leads the attempt to form the Forja Factory co-operative. We see Freddy with his cute children, his attractive wife and his sympathetic, hard-working colleagues. In contrast, the Forja Factory owner and Argentina’s politicians are construed as duplicitous, self-serving and untrustworthy. The Take’s politics are hardly subtle, but the film is saved from being straightforward agit-prop by the filmmakers’ reflective positioning in the story. They make no bones about their sympathy for the co-operative movement, and Klein explains in voice-over that she and Lewis were drawn to Argentina in the hope of finding a functioning social and economic model that might serve as an inspiration for the movement against corporate-driven globalisation. Once in Buenos Aires, video cameras in hand, they join the front line of the workers’ fight, sitting in on meetings, visiting workers’ homes and at one point getting tear-gassed by police. The filmmakers are participating witnesses in these events and we see Freddy and his colleagues forge a relationship with Lewis and Klein as the story progresses.

Irrespective of the filmmakers’ politics, the Argentinian experience is a stark illustration of just how anti-human and fundamentally irrational unfettered laissez-faire capitalism can be. It’s no news to anyone that police are frequently employed to suppress labour movements and keep workers working, but in The Take we see the opposite scenario unfolding. During the struggle to get the Forja Factory going, the Brukman Garment Factory is surrounded by police mobilised to keep the factory idle and the workers unemployed. It’s a bizarre moment, given the co-operative has been running the abandoned factory as a profitable enterprise, but the action makes clear what is at stake here; Argentina is in the midst of a battle over the kind of capitalism that will be tolerated in today’s world. The co-operatives are based on local trading, grassroots democratic decision making and localised collective ownership. This is a mode of participatory capitalism that places capital at the service of our psychological and material needs, in contrast to the model endorsed by the IMF which allows economic elites to flit capital around the world at will while being completely insulated from the consequences.

The Take is a stirring and emotionally engrossing work, and a confronting portrayal of the misery ultra-liberal economic policies can generate. The film’s major weakness is a lack of historical perspective, particularly evident in the potted history of Argentina offered early in the piece. But where other recent leftist political documentaries like Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and Robert Greenwald’s Outfoxed offer critiques of our media saturated, corporate-controlled world, The Take provides a refreshingly positive portrait of ordinary people attempting to forge an alternative form of social organisation. It remains to be seen how far the cooperative movement can be taken, but in the meantime The Take is an inspiring testament to people’s preparedness to lay their future on the line in the struggle for a more equitable and genuinely democratic world.

The recent closures of the Valhalla and Chauvel Cinemas in Sydney and the Lumiere in Melbourne are signs of dire times for independent film makers and distributors in Australia. But Hatchling Productions, an innovative documentary company based in northern NSW, has ripped a page out of the rock’n’roll survival manual in taking their latest project on the road and, hopefully, to a new audience.

Filmmakers Cathy Henkel and Jeff Canin have packed a Tarago van full of equipment and booked a 5-week tour to screen their latest film in unconventional venues such as Yamba Bowling Club, Rooty Hill RSL and Goulbourn Workers Club.

The film, a documentary about Spike Milligan called I Told You I Was Ill, premiered at the 2005 Adelaide Film Festival and subsequently had sold out screenings at the Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals. It has also been sold to television in the UK, Ireland and Canada and will screen on the ABC later in the year. But according to director Cathy Henkel, “the reason (that) you make a film is to engage with an audience, to share it with an audience. Making a one hour TV program is probably the most unsatisfying experience for a filmmaker because you sit at home and you know it’s being beamed out to the world, but you don’t know who [the audience] are or what they thought of it.”

However, Henkel says that since the film screened on the BBC last week they have had thousands of people visiting the website and giving feedback. “We’ve got an email list which has got 1000 subscribers just from the BBC broadcast the other night, so we’re talking back to them by sending a newsletter with little quotes from Spike…[T]hat’s part of what we’re trying to do, to engage with our audience.”

By taking their film on the road and bypassing the normal distribution channels, Hatchling Productions are reconnecting with a Do It Yourself ethos that was pioneered by filmmakers like Alby Mangels whose adventure films screened in community centres around Australia in the 1970s. Henkel says DVD technology and data beam projectors allow a new generation of filmmakers to find new ways of reaching an audience.

As well as screening the film, they’ve also invited Spike’s daughter Laura on the tour. She tells stories about Milligan as a father, and also reads some of his letters and poems. Then there’s musician Glen Cardier who toured with Spike in the early 80s as part of a show called An Alarmingly Funny Evening With Spike Milligan. According to Henkel, “A lot of our audience saw that show and they’re coming back and meeting Glen 20 years later and buying his CDs and listening to his stories, saying ‘I remember that!’”

“People come to the show because they want to have a more intimate personal experience of this (film) with Spike and with his family. So they come with their Spike books and they want Laura to sign them. At Yamba Bowling Club the audience hung around for 45 minutes because they wanted to chat. Eventually the manager had to shoo us out. One particular guy just really wanted to tell me how much Spike had meant to him, and I think it was a kind of a yearning for his teenage years that he really needed to talk about. So there’s a very personal, engaged experience happening.”

Cathy Henkel says she wasn’t really a Spike Milligan fan until a couple of years ago when she was visiting a friend in Woy Woy on the NSW Central Coast, the town where Spike’s parents retired to, soon followed by his brother Desmond. Although Spike called it “the biggest above ground cemetery in the world’, he would often stay for extended visits and wrote some of his most famous works there, including Puckoon and Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall.

Henkel was in Woy Woy during Spikefest, a festival dedicated to Milligan’s memory and comedy legacy. She said the more she found out about him, the more she became fascinated by him as a character. “I fell in love with him as a person who suffered manic depression (and) was still able to write 83 books, and as a person who was very articulate and outspoken about mental illness. He was a creative genius and struggled so much with this illness and touched so many people. And then there was his activism, his conservationism way back in the 60s. He inspired Bob Geldoff. So I started to realise there was a lot more to this guy than I’d ever known. That was 2 years ago, now I’m an absolutely devoted fan. When people see the film, I think they fall in love with him too.”

According to its recently replaced board of directors, the 52nd Sydney Film Festival was a financial improvement with more sold-out sessions than last year. And the festival did well in procuring new public funding at a time when NSW Government investment in screen culture is conspicuously lacking in preserving Sydney’s arthouse cinemas. Nevertheless, it is clear that of Australia’s major film festivals, Sydney’s is now completely dwarfed not only by Melbourne but also Brisbane and even the new Adelaide event. Its reduced menu (170 films) this year of largely unadventurous fare made clear the festival’s efforts to both cut costs and reduce ‘risky’ selections. Such conservatism not only undermines the cultural capital and historical prestige of the event, it also gives patrons the impression they are seeing the latest in cutting edge world cinema while in fact exponentially lowering both the expectation and the ability of audiences to deal with challenging films. (Audible disapproval greeted some of the more unconventional work this year, mindlessly echoed in the Sydney Morning Herald’s report, with the French film Innocence being jeered for having all its credits at the start—how pretentious!)

A telling sign this year was the lack of a substantial retrospective, which many people saw as a surprise for Lyndon Barber’s first festival as artistic director. I had hoped that the buzz of the extensive Michelangelo Antonioni package last year (most screenings were sold out, and there was a very well attended and lengthy panel session) finally put paid to the theory that Sydney audiences are not interested in large retrospectives of historically influential and demanding filmmakers. Instead, this year we had the latest desperate attempt to pull in a new audience with a series of mainly ‘cult’ music films at the newly sequestered George Street multiplex. This was partially offset by a program of CAAMA (Central Australia Aboriginal Media Association) films at the Dendy Opera Quays featuring substantial follow-up Q&A sessions with key CAAMA figures, making for a fine addition to the festival (see RT 67, p19). Irrespective of merit, such sessions as these should occur in addition to, not as replacements for, big historical retrospectives of key world cinema practitioners.

There were naturally some real gems in the program. The Vietnamese film Bride of Silence (Doan Minh Phuong & Doan Thanh Nghia) was probably my pick of the festival, starting with Rashomon-style multiple accounts of a young woman’s fate after refusing to name the father of her illegitimate child, this before an extraordinary opening out of time and space in the film’s richly symbolic second half. The first-time German feature The Forest for the Trees (Maren Ade) was a compelling low-budget DV-shot film about a young school teacher who tries too hard to fit into a small town (ending up spying on another woman whom she desperately wants to befriend), before a remarkable ending that casts the drama in much starker philosophical terms of responsibility and freedom.

In the Battlefields (Danielle Arbid) was a fascinating account of the effect of Lebanon’s civil war from inside a dysfunctional family, the camera relentlessly but poetically charting social and material decay. While Innocence (Lucile Hadzihalilovic) was derided as much for its openly mysterious set up—a series of country mansions in a large, walled park in which young girls are benignly kept prisoner—as for its credits, I greatly enjoyed the film’s formal bravura and thematic meditation on power, complicity, cultural indoctrination and ‘safe’ enclosure. Even worse treatment was handed out to another French film, almost a third of the audience loudly tramping out of Half-Price (Isild Le Besco) which, despite its untutored DV aesthetic, is really an anti-realist piece about identity and consciousness, relaying the escapades of 3 children left home alone in Paris. A highlight of the documentaries on offer for me was Werner Herzog’s The White Diamond for its light-yet-profound Germanic meditations on sublime nature and colonial Europe as we follow the travails of an English scientist-inventor determined to use his re-designed airship to float through the last earthly frontier, the canopies of Central America.

While enjoying these and other films, I was far from alone in my general disappointment with the festival, even taking into account the myriad pressures involved in keeping the event afloat. There has never been a bleaker time for the screening of non-Hollywood cinema in Sydney, with the Valhalla in Glebe and the Chauvel in Paddington (which housed Sydney’s cinematheque) now closed; and for once, Melbourne cannot be smug, with the demise of the Astor and Lumiere cinemas. While the new cinematheque venue in Brisbane and ACMI in Melbourne couldn’t survive without guaranteed public funding, in cosmopolitan Sydney (where the traditional ‘high’ arts receive consistent government assistance) the exhibition side of film culture is left to sink or swim in the hostile waters of the market.

Considering this bleak climate, and its success in snaring rare additional government funding, the Sydney Film Festival now assumes even more responsibility for bringing local filmgoers the most important and celebrated international filmmaking. On any real account the festival is seriously reneging on this crucial role. For years now Sydney has been consistently denied internationally lauded cinema from Asia (this year again commercial Hong Kong action films dominated), or the most important work from Iran—according to substantial critical consensus the most important filmmaking nation of the last decade or more. If you asked the average subscriber relying on the festival to keep up to date with internationally celebrated ‘art cinema’ what they thought of Abbas Kiarostami, many patrons would understandably be unable to answer. To my knowledge, none of his films since Taste of Cherry in 1998 have been shown—something akin to a film festival in the 60s continually ignoring the work of Antonioni, Godard or Bergman. Judging by the festival over recent years, one would never know Kiarostami is critically regarded as the most important filmmaker working today (a 2000 poll of international critics voted him ‘best director’ of the 1990s). The comparison with Melbourne here is stark: when the festival had a mini-Kiarostami retrospective last year (the director himself was present, introducing screenings and participating in an excellent, packed forum) some audience members complained of over familiarity!

In addition to alienating serious film viewers (who are increasingly resorting to other festivals and DVDs to keep up to date), and giving regular subscribers a skewed sense of cutting-edge world cinema, the Sydney festival seems to presume that a perennially sought ‘new audience’ is incapable of engaging with challenging films. Having participated in screenings of very challenging cinema beyond the official film culture circuit which are extremely well attended by an under-35 audience, as well as teaching undergraduate film studies for 10 years, it seems to me that the festival’s conservativism reflects the populist and middlebrow assumptions and/or mellowing tastes of the demographic that makes up its management, rather than any insight into what appeals to younger film lovers. Its misguided efforts to lure a new generation notwithstanding, the Sydney Film Festival remains a middle-aged and middle-of-the-road event indeed.

The opening days of the Venice Biennale were marked by the monster crowds and queues of the global arts elite, a whirlwind of parties and pavilion openings all overseen by massive yachts jostling for prominence on the waterfront. Money and power rule in Venice, and the selection of weary one-trick ponies Gilbert and George for the British pavilion seemed to exemplify this jaded commercialism. But deep within the Venice alleyways sat the New Forest Pavilion, a group show from regional gallery ArtSway that offered a far more confident depiction of contemporary practice in the UK. The crumbling grandeur of the Palazzo Zenobio provided an unlikely but ultimately fitting stage for the work of 11 artists who had previously undertaken production residencies at ArtSway.

Simon Hollington and Kyp Kyprianou’s Invisible Force Field Experiments (IFFE), recently shown at MOP Projects in Sydney, extends their long-term exploration of the relationship between technology and the uncanny. During their 2003 residency, a performative attempt to create an impenetrable IFFE around the ArtSway building resulted in the inexplicable disappearance of the 2 researchers. In this darkly comical parody of empirical scientific methodology, the Venice installation recreates a recently deserted office of the Scientific Accident Investigation Group (“Making Acccidents Safer”) sent in to examine the unexplained phenomenon. Dusty pinboards, archaic typewriters and outdated, blinking electronic equipment set an atmospheric scene in which to explore DVD documentation of the researchers’ experiments and the investigation findings. The DVD is hilarious and one becomes easily submerged in the layers of fictional proof and truth that inform the world of these mad scientists.

Vicky Isley and Paul Smith’s ‘Boredom Research’ collaboration provides another alternate view of reality in their Theatre of Restless Automata. Three ‘biomes’ are windows into an evolving microcosm of tiny digital creatures. The biomes themselves, sleek black plastic pods, are desirable domestic objects in which to gaze upon an anthropomorphised universe. Whilst the pods are physically located only metres apart in the installation, automata must travel a programmed ‘invisible mile’ to reach the next biome, creating a pleasurable rupture in spatial perception.

Another gratifying world is created in Charlie Murphy’s The Art of Tickling Trout and other Sensual Pleasures. Looking down onto a tabletop screen, one witnesses slightly risqué close-up frames of trout being gently stroked into hypnotic submission, fingers combing through the curling locks of a bull and the twitching muscles of sensitive horse-hide reacting to flies. Innocent and erotic at the same time, the work slyly exposes the secret sensuality inherent in our relationship with animals and their husbandry. The piece was extended through an ongoing series of artist multiples: Best in Show, luscious silk rosettes functioning as subversive awards for the competitive behaviour we display and applaud in society. This edition of rosettes created specifically for the Biennale features the Lion of Venice jumping through a circus hoop alongside subtly seditious gold-embossed phrases (‘Dark Horse’, ‘Unbridled’, ‘Master’). In the context of the Vernissage art market hoopla, similarities to the competitive awards of country horse shows are wittily acknowledged, with the eternally hopeful artist striving for ‘Best In Show.’

Emilia Telese’s striking performance, Life of A Star, also offered up a sizzling reflection on the overly present glamour and glitz of the Biennale. Obsession with celebrity has become a rather morbid characteristic of media in the modern world. Dressed in flaming red Alexander McQeen, hidden behind dark sunglasses and flanked by black-suited henchmen overseeing the crowd/audience and her every move, Emilia’s ‘star’ pranced and played to the paparazzi through the streets of Venice, not speaking and in actual fact doing very little—famous for being, well…famous. By contrast, Sleepwalking, Emilia’s video installation for the Pavilion is a moving and intimate portrait of the artist’s response to her father’s death. Telese retraces a journey her father made to the New Forest shortly before he died, both geographically and physically by recreating the disordered sleep patterns caused by his illness. Her attempt to share an experience that she was not a part of translates into a beautifully paced work that celebrates the relationship between father and daughter. Together the works highlight the disparity between the high-powered international art world and the very pragmatic and sometimes painful world of the practicing artist driven by a very personal creative imperative.

John Gillett’s companion works John Bull War and Peace and The Making of John Bull War and Peace are similarly inspired by the process of artistic creation, more specifically the time it takes to both make and to look at a work of art. In the first video we see looped, speeded-up images of Gillett’s heroic attempt to print out Tolstoy’s famously lengthy novel using only a toy printing set. In the second, the artist documents his performance in real time, and the illusion is revealed—12 minutes is the time it took to make the video. An adjacent glass cabinet displays a 2-foot high stack of A4 paper with (apparently) only the top page of the epic printed, extending the illusion and inviting the viewer to choose between belief and disbelief.

Three powerfully authored digital video pieces from Richard Billingham, Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva and Alistair Gentry share a preoccupation with the British landscape and the long shadow that history casts over the island and its inhabitants. Gentry’s Sea House in particular highlights the precarious nature of existence on a crumbling coastline under threat from rising sea levels. Filming himself from within a water-filled model glasshouse, the artist submerges the viewer in the creeping and ominous power of the sea to both provide and destroy.

Although predominately works using digital technologies (a choice dictated as much by the constraints of exhibiting in a historical building, as in the ArtSway residency parameters), the exhibition displayed a rich diversity of hybrid practice through performance, research, writing, filmmaking and sculpture. The final piece, a website documenting and archiving Anna Best’s extensive body of temporal, process-based work epitomised the collaborative and purposeful cross-disciplinary nature that characterised much of the exhibition. Perhaps the unique situation of ArtSway as a rurally based contemporary gallery offers artists a certain stillness, a place to retreat and consider their practice. In any case, the elegant marble halls of the Palazzo were stunningly inhabited by this powerful body of work from the regions.

New Forest Pavilion, curator ArtSway Director Mark Segal, Venice Biennale, June 8-12

ArtSway is a contemporary visual arts gallery based in the New Forest in South East England creating professional development opportunities for artists including production residencies. www.artsway.org.uk

Out of the Body Encounters brought the intermediary states of comas, dreams and nightmares into the waking world by way of 3 video and new media works. Curated by EAF director Melentie Pandilovski, the exhibition offered 3 distinct speculations on states of existence between life and death, the conscious and unconscious.

Lynne Sanderson, digital artist, VJ and lecturer in New Media at the South Australian School of Art presented an exciting proposition in her work, Lucid Touch. A bio-electrical interface registers the viewer’s sweat, heart-rate, and temperature and responds by triggering one of 17 pre-recorded dream sequences. In this way, Sanderson sets up a direct cause and effect relationship between the body’s quantifiable data and the ineffable, unpredictable nature of dreams. This gives viewers a notional out-of-body experience that is paradoxically tied intimately and rigorously to their own body. The viewer’s tangible physicality becomes a membrane between the dream world and the real one.

In creating the work, Sanderson collaborated with the Centre for Sleep Research to collect dreams from a group of volunteers. These laboratory-harvested dreams were then translated into film and have arguably suffered in translation. Performed by attractive young actors, with an electronic soundtrack and stylised pixilation, the sequences feel more like music video clips than filmic analogues of the dream state. For the most part, the sequences depict plausible situations and linear narratives; strangely, there is little of the eccentric logic of dreams, with their sudden shifts in time, space and subject matter.

Lucid Touch seems to be a propositional version of an ongoing project: a draft of a much more ambitious, dynamic and responsive future state. While the ‘experimental’ nature of much of the work shown at the Experimental Art Foundation might be questionable, Sanderson’s piece represents a genuinely speculative and exploratory work.

Dennis Del Favero’s Deep Sleep deals with a nightmarish chapter in Australian medical history: the strange case of Sydney’s Chelmsford psychiatric hospital and its practice of Insulin Coma Therapy. Between 1962 and 1979 at least 40 people died while undergoing this treatment, which involved putting patients into a 6-week long coma. Del Favero’s response to the incidents is an interactive DVD-ROM in which disembodied fragments of memory and nightmare are combined to recount these dreadful events.

Projected on the wall of a darkened space, the DVD is set in motion by clicking on a hovering cursor which in turn triggers various short vignettes. In highly theatrical style (ranging from film noir-like mode to A Current Affair-style re-enactments) they depict incidents in the hospital and in the aftermath, as well as speculating on the dreams of the comatose patients. On one hand, the interactive element of the work seems slightly arbitrary; potentially, the piece would have been just as successful as a conventional piece of film-making. However, the viewer’s part in causing the work to unfold implicates them in these events (in some small way) and also serves to fragment the experience. In this way perhaps, the work approaches an analogue of the patients’ experiences and of the non-linear nature of memory.

Based in Germay, artists Alexander R Titz and Maja Sokolova presented das Ich von Gestern (‘The I From Yesterday’ or ‘My Yesterday’s Self’). Sheets of glass housed in metal frameworks and hung with tiny speakers received dual projections of a male and female figure. A fuzzy, static-drenched beam of light relentlessly scanned the squirming, shifting figures, seemingly alluding to interrogation, searchlights and the scanning of bar codes. The sound element of the work comprised 2 sets of EEG signals—one from someone living and the other from a brain dead person—locating at least one of the projected figures in a grey netherworld between life and death. Like the other works in the exhibition, das Ich von Gestern seemed haunted by a ghost in its machinery; the sound and projection stalled and stuttered with poetic imperfection. The work was undeniably the most potent physical presence in the space; incredibly satisfying as a sculptural object.

The high profile of new media and video-based work has had the unfortunate side-effect of spawning countless video installations that seem to excuse themselves from the craft, conventions and critical criteria of both video and installation. Hence, at times, one feels inundated with sloppily made films installed with little regard for spatial/sculptural concerns. Not so with Out of the Body Encounters. Rather than validating themselves with their own newness or technical innovation these works thoroughly engage the craft and conventions of film-making, the poetics of objects and space and some rich, complex subject matter.

Out of the Body Encounters, curator Melentie Pandilovski, artists Lynne Sanderson, Alexander R Titz & Maja Sokolova, Dennis Del Favero, Experimental Art Foundation, July 14-Aug 3

In 2004, for the first time, dLux staged their annual d>Art exhibition of web and sound art at the Sydney Opera House Gallery. I reviewed that show (RT 62, p28), and was struck by how the use of such prime exhibition real estate brought these elusive artforms very visibly to new audiences. This year d>Art 05 was back in the Opera House and the web and sound art was joined by a similarly intangible set of works for 3G cell phones commissioned through Mobile Journeys, the initiative of a consortium of arts and industry organisations to develop creative content for mobile devices.

It’s a strange experience to walk into an exhibition and not, at first, be able to see most of the art. Instead the show appeared as a shrine to gadgetry with hints of the Telstra showroom; six iPods delivered the sound pieces, three PCs displayed the web-based works and nine Samsung 3G cell phones, each nestling on a red suede podium, housed the mobile art. The room was full of invisible little artworks trapped inside indistinguishable devices and the process of reaching them (“Step one: press the menu select key, Step two: choose the file icon….” etc.) was laborious.

But getting to the phone works was worth the persistence. Behind the identical interfaces lay an array of creative experiments with this new platform. The most effective pieces played with the qualities native to the technology; intimacy, communication, the projection of private worlds into public spaces, and the possibilities of the small-scale. All the works were tiny, but the best of them were great in their exploration of the miniature.

Tanya Vision’s provocative series of video pieces, Ache Me, engaged with the mobile phone’s illicit potential; its ability to whisper in your ear, to vibrate discretely in your pocket, to, as the Vodaphone ad suggests, get the flirting over before you get home. Her sugary pink movies worked through a series of suggestive transitions, from close-up see-through underwear to the hole of a gleaming iced donut, from the inference of a nipple to melting ice cream. These naughty little visual tricks worked beautifully on the mobile’s miniature screen where their tininess enhanced the ambiguity of the imagery and the effect of a whispered visual secret.

Tina Gonsalves’ one minute movie, Breaking Up, portrayed the disintegration of a relationship through the metaphor of an unreliable phone connection, with an economy of scale that perfectly fitted the mobile platform. Snatches of failed conversation (“I can’t hear you”, “You’re breaking up”, “What?” “We’re breaking up?”) were stuck discordantly together over the blips and fizzes of telecommunication. On the screen an animated figure collaged from random body parts, with oversized mouth and hands, alluded to the way technologies render our bodies as disproportionate versions of ourselves, in this case as talkers and texters.

Traces by Megan Heyward explored the potential of mobile phone art to be intimately site specific. A series of short monologues, in different voices, linked personal memories to particular places. Reminiscences of childhood days at Lunar Park, wild Mardi Gras nights on Oxford Street and adolescent adventures on Anzac Bridge were illustrated with atmospheric visuals that glimpsed Sydney landmarks through someone else’s eyes. The most interesting was the description, by Will Saunders, of the day he painted the famous “No War” protest on the roof of the Opera House in 2003. Saunders’ softly spoken account of the event and the sensational aerial TV footage reproduced on the tiny screen, juxtaposed the scale of the event’s public impact with the personal experience of the act.

Though its location within the Opera House Gallery gave Traces an extra layer of signification, the work was intended and, like many of the other Mobile Journeys commissions, could be enjoyed best by getting out and about with the art in your pocket. All of the phone works were available to ‘take away’ via Bluetooth, if your phone was suitably enabled. Not only was my Nokia from the 90s not enabled, but it was too embarrassed to come out of my handbag. And here’s the rub. Mobile phones make for a lousy gallery display and this is not really the way the artworks are meant to be seen. But, as yet, most people aren’t technologically ‘enabled’, and with 3G download prices continuing to be astronomical, it’ll be a while before many of us are consuming, let alone creating, this kind of content. There is also the lingering question; do people want 3G? If we could afford it, would we all be running around using our phones as video cameras and players?

Whether or not this technology becomes commonplace in the future, right now it’s clear that the possibilities of the form offer an imaginative catalyst for artists. Mobile Journeys gave a glimpse of the kinds of artwork that might fill up our handsets if and when we catch up with the technology. As with last year’s show, d>Art 05 willingly sacrificed the intended context of the artworks to bring them to public attention in a static exhibition. The show was an intriguing glimpse of where artists might go when, and if, the 3G cell phone’s tiny screen breaks out into the great big world.

Mobile Journeys, d>Art 05, Exhibition Hall, Sydney Opera House Gallery, Aug 10-Sept 4

With the expansion of its exhibition aspect, including the curatorial pursuit of mobile media, the ‘traditional’ screening component of d>Art.05 was a little more modest than usual, consisting of one program drawn from an open call for works and d>Art RE:Mixed, a compilation from 1998-2004. Screened back to back, the 2 programs provided a compact reality check as to how both video has and has not developed over the last 8 years.

The 2005 selection featured works by emerging and established Australian artists exploring some of the territories we have come to expect from video art—recontextualising the personal/domestic, impressionist manipulations of landscape, fetishes for textural detail, and computer generated virtualities.

A Little Confession (Jeanette Purkis) is a simple work made more powerful by the juxtaposition of image and audio. A series of blurry childhood photos play as a verité voiceover admits to misdemeanours. None of them are earth shattering—wishing people dead, ignoring girlfriends, hating siblings—but it is the accumulation and the tone of delivery, almost apologetic yet still defiant, which builds a clear picture of the narrator and the frailty of her ego. The quaint Quiff (James Hancock) explores a more body-based domestic perspective as an unruly shock of hair takes on a life of its. It is a well executed whimsical piece of stop-motion animation reminiscent of Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance: Time Piece (Taiwan, d>Art.03), without the hardcore conceptual restraints (Hsieh shaves his head and then has a photo taken on the hour, every hour for a year).

Removed (Hobart Hughes) also employs stop motion animation to depict a shadow which can affect solid objects, developing an increasingly malevolent personality. Technically strong, the obsession with the detail of dust and detritus of an abandoned plot of land allows the work to walk the fine line between abstraction and narrative, although narrative eventually wins. I Was Made For Loving You (Ian Haig) repurposes the creations from his Futurotica installation (2003-2005). Sex toy hybrid monsters pulsate and vibrate with animated motion lines and cartoon exclamations to the pumping cheesy dance track by Nat Bates. Cycling through the catalogue of novelties, the pace increases until the inevitable climax.

Fantasies are also explored in Oggymooton (Bradley Lovett)—a 3D tour of “a town just out of Dakota.” Oggymooton is into signage offering all the wonders of the modern city—Soda Bubble Sellers, The Jail for Evil Ponies, The Tunnel to Dog Heaven. Oggymooton almost makes a point, but doesn’t quite take it to the next level. No Man’s Land (Adam Costenoble) offers a more interesting use of 3D animation, using a game style panning background over which he has placed a figure—himself. Utilising the gestural language of gaming the fragmented figure jumps, leaps, lies down and squirms in jagged edits—a body not quite under its own control and eventually consumed as the pan across the landscape reverses and the screen is colonised by viral static. Though the reverse structure feels formulaic the recontextualising of the gaming style for existential exploration is bold and rewarding.
Somewhere In Between Version 2 (Tina Gonsalves; sound Takeko Akamutsu) develops subtly from recognisable landscape to impressionistic swathes of shifting texture. Eventually we see a hand on the edge of the screen caressing a piece of fabric overlaying the landscape implying an external manipulation of this dreamy territory. Also dealing with landscape was Who Falls…Was (Ryszard Dabek)—a slow pan shot from a train, a video art cliché difficult to transcend.

Retrocognition in Blue by Glen Stewart explores a classic painting viewed through a beaker of water, distorting and abstracting the image. There is an appealing simplicity about this very analogue way of creating filters and effects and the soundtrack, made from the ambient noise of a people in a gallery, also creates a lo-fi appeal. However the work doesn’t quite know where to go in its 6.40 minutes.

Ada Henskens’ Black Stream was the most intriguing work of this collection. Pulsing, writhing tendrils spew out from the centre of the screen with complete ambiguity. What is it? What is it made of? Is it real or computer generated? is there any pattern to the flux and flow? The texture is intense, and the extreme viscerality is utterly engaging—particularly considering there is no accompanying sound. Once again, however, the structural device of reversing the flow is shakey.

L.A. (Khaled Sabsabi) is predominantly sound. An obscure snippet of drawling and manipulated voiceover talks about conventionality—“it’s not their way, it’s our way…there is no in between”—accompanied by minimal video, a dull gloaming at the bottom of the screen. A cheeky way to enter a sound work in a video screening? Force of Horse (Video Diabolico) was equally brief—footage of a horse’s mouth and lolloping gallop are glitchily looped defying any attempt at meaning. A twisted exclamation mark to the end of the 2005 collection.
By its very nature, the ‘best of’ selection d>Art: Re-Mixed is going to have more hits than the 2005 selection: Rapt (Justine Cooper,1998), Cheap Blonde (Janet Merewether, 1998), Fall from Matavai (Denis Beaubois, 2004) and the breathtaking Belgian film Building (Anouk de Clerq, Joris Cool & Anton Aeki, 2003). This compilation confirmed my ambivalence about the d>Art.05 Screen collection—with few exceptions a lightness of content and structure prevailed, revelling in the quaint, whimsical and ironic. Just because linear narrative has been thrown out does not mean that conceptual underpinning, structural development and momentum should be expelled as well. dLux’s annual d>Art program is a good gauge of contemporary practice—hopefully d>Art 2006 will show us that some weight and seriousness has returned to the form.

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