Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

December 2005

Elizabeth Ann Macgregor

photo Keith Saunders

Elizabeth Ann Macgregor

Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) since 1999, and previously director of Ikon Gallery in Birmingham for 10 years, Elizabeth Ann Macgregor says she came to contemporary art ‘by accident.’ Majoring in languages at university, she took art history as an ‘outside subject’ and quickly fell in love with it. Yet her focus was traditional art history, with its attendant disdain for the contemporary. After a stint as a volunteer in public programs at the National Gallery of Scotland and a Diploma in Museum Studies, she began developing a passion for facilitating audience engagement with museum collections. That passion grew during the first job that brought her in contact with contemporary art—curator/driver of a gallery housed in a converted bus that toured regional Scotland. Macgregor learnt on the job about contemporary art and the conceptual side of curating, while also handling every other aspect of running a gallery. But it was her experiences with the general public, who were far more open to ideas than she had suspected, and with artists, who awakened her to an entirely different perspective on the world, that cemented her desire to work with contemporary art.

Access and understanding

Where do you think that passion for access, for audience development comes from?

Because I didn’t come at contemporary art from an academic route, I built up my understanding and enthusiasm by direct contact with artists. I’ve always felt myself, even now, as a bit of an outsider. I haven’t studied contemporary art as a discipline. Because I come at it from that outside perspective—and because I’ve had to justify my professional interests to my family, in particular my father who used to tease me, as in ‘Is that the air-conditioning unit or the artwork?”—I learned how to explain art to outsiders. My family was always quite questioning, philosophically, so that tradition of wanting people to think for themselves also played a role. I’ve always seen art as a very useful tool for developing discussion and dissent. If people have the skills to discuss and debate aesthetic issues, that can flow into everything.

And meetings with artists fed into my preoccupation: how to make manifest, as a curator, all that information that you have? The orthodoxy has often been that the art speaks for itself, but I think that’s nonsense. Curators don’t just choose exhibitions on the basis of looking at the work, but rather on the dialogue they have with the artists, which informs the curator’s critical decisions and selection processes. We expect the public to come in without any of the benefits of those clues. So without saying we should be putting up interpretations, what we should be doing is giving the audience some of the insight that we as curators have had.

Sometimes that sense of befuddlement and wonderment can be a positive experience…

If you’re used to it, but if you’re not…! You can be very intimidated. But if someone can provide you with some idea, you start to engage with it. I think the best way of providing that information is to have people talking about the work—both artists and critics. We’ve just started a DVD project called The Artist’s Voice, where we’re getting the artist into the institution ‘unmediated’ as a talking head. The first program is currently in the Level 4 collection.

But that emphasis on access was also hugely important when I came into the director’s position in 1999. I realised that a concerted vituperative attack on contemporary art had dominated the agenda in the major media outlets. And because people were not coming to the museum—because of the door charge, because it was perceived to be in a spiral of decline—critics were able to highjack the agenda. I felt immediately that I had to counter the main message, to demonstrate the breadth and diversity of contemporary art. Although now there isn’t one orthodoxy: contemporary art itself has moved on, there’s more acceptance of different approaches.

To what do you attribute that?

In the UK, for example, the influence of artists such as Damien Hirst was quite profound. He took things out of the normal sector, created media interest and eventually attracted wide audiences. I couldn’t believe how many people came to the Tate the year I judged the Turner Prize and Damien won it! In other words, there was a complete disjuncture between the reality on the ground and the media representation of popular opinion of contemporary art. Who would have thought that Britain, of all places, would now have a contemporary art gallery as one of its biggest tourist attractions? People now rush to be associated with contemporary art.

Sensation and success

Do you think there’s any down side to that popularity?

Absolutely. There’s a problem with the rise of the sensational. I’m very wary of doing things just because they’re sensational. For example, when the National Gallery of Australia cancelled Sensation [the controversial exhibition of young British artists from the Saatchi collection] there was pressure for us to take it. But why should we? First, the MCA had already done a very good show on British contemporary. Second, the show was not really that sensational, it was just being portrayed that way by a particular media spin. I didn’t think we should take it just because it would get a lot of sightseers coming through: what would that really mean in the end? We want to develop a long term engagement with our audience. If you have to keep providing sensation, you are likely either to oversell—and disappoint the audience—or to run out of possibilities. I call it the Lego syndrome, after a gallery in Bradford UK that put on a show with artists doing Lego sculptures that was HUGE! From then on the poor gallery staff spent the whole time explaining to their councillors that they couldn’t do another Lego show, or thinking up ideas of what would be as popular. We all have our benchmarks of attendance for the MCA—it’s exhibitions by Tracey Moffatt and Wim Wenders. But I think these are easy to replicate, whereas if you go too far out of your patch, how do you ever replicate it?

What about the argument that sensationalism creates a particular kind of audience experience that is different in kind to what you hope to encourage as a response to art?

I have changed my position on this somehow since my purist stance in Birmingham. I do think you have to give the audience some kind of visual buzz, although you can’t apply it to everything. Now we think very much about the importance of the visual—it has become more of a mantra, because of the way that conceptual art did eventually disappear up itself—but not as a sensational experience. People expect a more fulfilling experience from the museum. The other thing is that people used to complain there wasn’t enough in the MCA, particularly when there was an entrance fee. What people can do now with free entry is to sample, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I have been accused by certain quarters of the art world of pandering to the suits. What’s wrong with people wearing suits coming in at lunchtime, I ask myself?

Directing, curating, listening

Can you describe how the curatorial program is put together, and how hands on you are?

I’m very hands on! [Laughs] I’m a curator, occasionally they let me do projects! No, I have always been a director, never solely a curator. I was director of Ikon, and because it was a much smaller gallery, I did about half the curating. But now my input would be more like 80/20-80% directing, fundraising etc, and 20% artistic and curatorial. I think it’s incredibly important that the artistic side drives it. If I’m out trying to raise funds for the museum, I need to be able to talk about the program from an informed perspective, not just from having attended a briefing by the curators. That way, you can convey knowledge and enthusiasm about the program, and when you get thrown the curly questions—such as ‘Tell us about that pile of bricks at the Tate’—you can answer them. We have a very collaborative process here that involves the curatorial team, head of marketing and head of education. We also pay a lot of attention to what our front of house staff say. I’ve really tried to foster that sense of openness, about listening to criticism.

In developing the program, marketing might remind us of the need to include a few big names, or of striking a chord outside the art world. We are also mindful of giving the curators opportunity to do projects they want to do, as well as bringing input from outside at times, as with Primavera. We also try to respond to the reality of what artists are currently engaging with. We set up artist and Indigenous advisory groups, where we have robust discussion about what we should be doing. These groups comprise 7-8 members from around Australia, and meet 4 times a year, chaired by a board member.

The exhibition Meridien 3 years ago came out of discussions with the first artists’ advisory group, where there was a feeling that mid to late career Australian artists were under-represented in the program. Artists also give us feedback, and a sense of what’s being said out there, the mumblings in the corner. It’s a good forum for us to be held to account for our decisions. At the same time, these meetings are an opportunity for artists to learn about the processes of mounting exhibitions and running a museum—it isn’t that easy—and for artists to acknowledge that they form only one part of the MCA audience.

There are no rules, no criteria as such in putting the program together. It’s ultimately about what we judge to be the most interesting work at this moment in time.

What do you think are some of the key debates at the moment for artists?

I think Russell [Storer] tapped into a very interesting thought in Interesting Times: artists are thinking very carefully about how to make work in a climate where so many of their values appear to have been forsaken. The impact of Tampa, and the refugee crisis: even if artists are not political as such, they are wondering, how do we respond to it? Do we take to the streets, or make work about it? There are aesthetic issues as well. There are always discussions going on about the ‘return of painting.’ Where did it go? That’s my question. Another key debate is about the physical longevity of video and DVD art. Tapes from the 70s are already deteriorating. How to preserve this work is a big issue. The whole new media area is another talking point.

Uniquely MCA

Where do you position the MCA relative to national and international institutions, and what museums do you look to as models?

The MCA is unique. We are the only institution in Australia that is dedicated exclusively to the exhibiting and collecting of contemporary art. Because of that unique focus, the experience of contemporary art is different at the MCA—it’s holistic, you’re immersed in it, as opposed to the state galleries where your experience of contemporary art is necessarily framed by the historical. And now with the extension of Level 4 to show the permanent collection, it gives the experience another dimension.

We draw inspiration from international museums. The MCA has always seen itself up there with MoMA and the Guggenheim: I’ve always been amazed at how Bernice and Leon [Murphy and Paroissien, founding directors of the MCA] were able to position it way above its actual reality. While we have good relations with the Tate and MoMA, that’s not really where we are positioned. In reality, our peer group comprises the likes of Hammer in LA, the New Museum in New York, MCA Chicago; MCA Kanazawa and Mori Museum in Japan; and the Whitechapel and Serpentine in London. We’re also trying to build up links in other parts of the world, such as South America.

Who are some of the artists who inspire you?

I did two shows recently that I’m very proud of. One is Maria Fernanda Cardoso (RT55, p10): I love the way she takes those natural materials and infuses them with another narrative. Her work has that strong sensual and visual quality that I respond to very well. The other is Mona Hatoum (RT66, p10), whom I’ve known for a long time: I was alarmed to think, when looking at the dates of some of her performances, that I was actually there! Her early works were so visceral and angry and political, yet she’s adapted her new work to a different kind of politics, while maintaining the sensual, the visceral within it. And I have also always been a big fan of painting. I was personally thrilled to pull off the Brigid Riley show. And I’m a huge admirer of Callum Innes and Ellen Gallagher.

What are your ambitions and future plans for yourself and the MCA?

Well, I never plan, so for myself I’ve got a contract for another five years. As for the MCA, the big challenges are to build the collection; to keep the program quality up; and to develop some innovative projects outside our physical confines, with other institutions such as Penrith Regional Gallery and Casula Powerhouse, and outside the building. And we need to fix the building: access is shocking; it’s working against everything we want to do. And it can be done without knocking down the building and starting again!

RealTime issue #70 Dec-Jan 2005 pg. 50,

Interesting times…seditious times

As we go to print the Anti-Terrorist Bill, Sedition clause and all, is about to be passed by the Senate of the Federal Parliament. Even with a few limiting provisos and promises of re-evaluation in 2006, its implementation is a fearsome prospect. We all know that once legislation is passed it’s incredibly difficult to reverse. Paired with the draconian Industrial Relations legislation, the world looks set to pass from conservative fantasy to appalling reality. Our cover, courtesy of activist artist Deborah Kelly, responds to one dimension of this new reality; the incursion of literalist religious beliefs and values into many areas of our political, cultural and social life.

The festival selection: Adelaide, Sydney

There’s not a lot to celebrate at the moment, but the arts festivals are coming on with their inexorable marketing and cultural goodwill. If you could gather the most interesting works from Adelaide and Sydney, you could put together a very fine arts festival, but neither is exceptional in itself. The feeling is distinctly mid 90s. That said, there are more than a handful of works of the moment in each that will draw audiences eager, ever desperate to be challenged.

The Adelaide Festival, for example, has 3 works that comprise a mini-robotics event. The photograph to your right is of Inflatable Bodies by American artist Chico MacMurtrie and the Amorphic Robot Works. Showing at the Experimental Art Foundation, its inflated, mobile arterial trunks will reach and squirm across the floor and up to the ceiling. In dance, ADT will collaborate with Montreal roboticist Louis-Philippe Demers and UK video artist Gina Czarnecki, while Wayne McGregors’ Random Dance (UK) are working with with Jim Henson’s animatronics workshop, lighting architect Lucy Carter and video artist Ravid Deepres. For details about these works see RealTime 71 (Feb-March 2006).

Other works on the Adelaide program that attract are Video Venice (6 of the best from the 2005 Venice Biennale); Callum Morton & David Pledger’s Walk-in, Drive-in theatre/sculpture/cinema/installation hybrid; Lisa Lim’s As Night Softly Falls, a rich program of musics from around the world, but not World Music; parallelo’s long anticipated collaboration with Argentinian artists in Lontano Blu; David Byrne in several manifestations including a collaboration with Fatboy Slim with Imelda Marcos as their subject; Mick Gruchy’s visual response to a concert performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony no.8, the ‘Leningrad’; the always inspiring William Forsythe and his company; and the up-very-close and dynamic Stau from Netherlands choroeographer Anouk Van Dijk.

The Sydney Festival has just enough offerings to keep us on our toes: Sylvie Guillem; Robert Lepage’s one-man multimedia The Andersen Project; the superb Tony Oursler’s spooky “psycho landscape”, Blue Invasion (NY, free in Sydney’s Hyde Park); Antony (the star of last year’s Leonard Cohen celebration) and the Johnsons; Urban Theatre Projects’ backyard performance, Back Home; big hART’s Stickybricks, with the inhabitants of Surry Hills; surreal physical-cum-dance theatre from Australia’s Splinter Group in Lawn; Shirin Neshrat, the wonderful Iranian-American photographer and video artist; and eccentric sculptor Erwin Wurm in Glue Your Brain at the MCA.

Best wishes for 2006

2006 could be a challenging year as the new laws of the land begin to impinge on people’s lives. Artists will, as ever, strive to speak freely, through their art and in public discussion. So will RealTime.

Thanks for support go to our contributing editors and writers, advertisers, funding bodies, subscribers and, above all, our many readers right across Australia. We’ve really enjoyed reaching out to an increasing number of regional centres in 2004-05 (Townsville and Newcastle in this edition) as well as growing our international coverage (South Africa on these pages). In February 2006, we’ll be in Bristol as guests of the the Arnolfini artspace’s InBetween Time festival. While there we’ll run a workshop on writing about hybrid practices and report to you online about the remarkable works we’ll be witnessing.

We wish you well for 2006 in whatever you do, especially in the making and enjoyment of art.

Keith, Virginia, Gail

RealTime issue #70 Dec-Jan 2005 pg. 1

Ruark Lewis and Rainer Linz, Banalities for the Perfect House

photo Marco Bok

Ruark Lewis and Rainer Linz, Banalities for the Perfect House

For the first 15 or so minutes of Rainer Linz and Ruark Lewis’ Banalities for the Perfect House, I try to figure out how all the elements fit together and what drives the piece. I am continually perplexed by its disembodied nuances, begging lots of questions. Even as the work coalesces around me, I have a sense of there being some sort of teasingly elusive internal logic. Along with the intricacy in the construction of the space, the shafts of wood, light and shadows, there is a sense of continual interruption, either by vocal or sound inflection, or a shadow across a piece of text. You read signs, trying to make sense of the words, but they are run together so it’s difficult to understand the space in a whole way. In attempting to read the shapes of the set—elaborate, meticulous spatial structures—there is a huge sense of something hidden which I will never find without looking beyond the work, and for me, this is what animated Banalities for the Perfect House.

The design is architectural, cathedral-like, but not fixed. Sound and architecture work together, moving and plastic. Twelve variously segmented grids are positioned like walls or room dividers, and black and white wall-bars with continuous text are clamped vertically to one wall. There are road blocks that can be shifted and dragged, and now and then people are herded into different spaces. These fixtures, even the fonts and lettering that display the text are on a very human scale, and because of that there is familiarity, despite the teasing quality.

This is a performance work, neither dance nor song, but a transformation of the space with spectral light and sound. Two signs at one end of the space read “Tyranny of distance”, upside down, and “Threnody for a lost overture”, intimating an elegiac sense of loss and survival, so ideas of time, age and memory became important.

On the wall in the foyer, there are photocopies of grids, offering a kind of map by which to navigate the work inside. These depicted structures are reminiscent of how pictures hung on a wall once removed leave shadows, the shapes of spaces in between. Perhaps this is a ghost house, where one might glimpse residues of discontinued and disembodied processes, the detritus of lost practices just lying about like museum pieces, but creating new if unintentional patterns, old material re-collected and reconstituted, a process of denuding and reclothing.

The fabric of the sound seems woven from material so familiar as to have its own peculiar sense of being: Morse code, phone pips, clock time; lists of abbreviated phrases marked by number; facile aphorisms dropped into the mix like dye; cooking instructions; dubious headlines from newspapers read years ago. At first, as part of the soundscape and then proclaimed from a podium by Ruark Lewis, phrases like “The female of the species”, “Trees conceal small books” and “Tools of negotiation”, seem quizzically performed, left hanging. “Give war a chance” and “Mental health is dead” drag behind them a past of absurd bravura.

Lewis’s text was pre-recorded and the sound transcribed by Rainer Linz into a collage, designed to pan from one part of the space to another. Sometimes it’s a delicate micro-sound creeping into the ear, or machine-like and cold. Some of the sounds are more literal, you can hear words. Often there are ambient drones and blurts, electronic beeps and bings, playing with text repetition—stuttering, grinding, purring, bleating, humming sounds. Some of the texture is glossolalic, delivered by Lewis in a machine gun blather, as he walks around the space, reading spools of paper forwards and backwards. Everyone scurries out of his way.

Twice Lewis recites lists of times—“19 minutes past 7”, “7.45” or “a quarter to 8”, each line inflected with a peculiar tonal quality. The second time around, to a bip-bip-bip, it’s with sloppy diction, mistakes, trailings off, like guessing or rough estimates; the bipping is irregular and stuttering.

Over the 50 minutes or so of the work, Lewis defines a pathway connecting various areas of the space, as if visiting different rooms which are characterised by particular texts. In the ‘kitchen’ Lewis sits with Linz reading lists of statements and directives about food, both playing with the vocals through abstraction, rising inflexions and repetitions (“Couscouserie”, “Say no to purée”). In the “Patrick White room” Lewis sits facing a lit square of phrases projected onto the floor, reading aloud from the first 26 pages of The Solid Mandala, as if peering into a pool. More poetic and sustained this time, but still broken, the sound comes from different spots in the performance area.

The audience focuses on the physicality and the fragility of Lewis’s movement with walking stick, progressing through the crowd, like a ball in a slow pinball game, pushing barricades around, making spaces and pathways for himself.

As he leaves the space, Ruark Lewis recites again text from the wall bars, phrases you might have heard already, fragmented. The voiceover and live sound together create a kind of song pattern. The vivid imagery of phrases like “Excited like an animal” hangs, suspended in space.

Banalities for the Perfect House, Ruark Lewis and Rainer Linz, Part 4 of Who’s Afraid of the Avant Garde?, curator Blair French, Performance Space, Sydney, Sept 8, 9, 10

RealTime issue #70 Dec-Jan 2005 pg. 56

Deborah Kelly, Beware of the God, 2005 (installation view)

photo Deborah Kelly

Deborah Kelly, Beware of the God, 2005 (installation view)

Concerned about “the rise of religiosity in the public sphere”, leading activist artist Deborah Kelly has countered with an artwork in public space—on the clouds above Circular Quay on Sydney Harbour as part of the MCA’s Interesting Voices program. A massive projector, courtesy of Sydney Bouhaniche, spells out “Beware of the God” on passing clouds. “I don’t have a problem with God”, says Kelly, “just with people who say they have God on their side.” Religious literalists in the USA, for example, legislate against homosexuality and, in the teaching of science, the Darwinian theory of evolution.

For Kelly, Beware of the God is a little different from her other work: “The words are surely ambiguous, as well as threatening and kind of wonky-funny. I am delighted they can be read so variously depending on your standpoint…Usually, my work is not that slippery. I love it, ‘Beware of the God’ won’t stand still.”

Kelly’s inspiration for a project she’s had in mind since 1993, variously came from Batman, the Angel of Mons (who appeared over World War I trenches and was possibly a lantern projection), and even a 1948 KGB plan to project an image of Stalin onto the clouds for his birthday. The cost of such a projection, however, would have “stripped me of all my assets”, says Kelly, but fortunately Bouhaniche’s generosity and the assistance of friends in running the project saved the day, and she’s grateful for the support of the MCA’s Russell Storer and Christopher Snelling. For the most part, the weather played along: “I have turned into a weather vane.” Not only that, she spent a lot of time “willing the clouds down.”

Aware of the power of multiplatforming, Kelly has a 30-second version of the work playing to thousands on billboard screens in CBD railway stations where the MCA promotes its shows. You can also see it at www.bewareofthegod.com/wp-images/movs/beware.mov. Plaque versions, attachable to your front fence or door, where doubtless they will alarm religious prosletysers, are available from the MCA shop. And for more information, documentation and essays go to www.bewareofthegod.com. Wherever you encounter it, Deborah Kelly has created a far-reaching artwork, all the more powerful for its economy and wit. RT

Deborah Kelly, Beware of the God, projection, Circular Quay, Sydney, Sept-Nov, as part of the MCA’s Interesting Times Focus on Australian Art.

RealTime issue #70 Dec-Jan 2005 pg. 55

Van Sowerwine speaks affectionately of her creations at a Stills Gallery artist’s talk, of the making, naming and keeping of them, these disturbed and disturbing dolls. Here, it’s Sophie in a series of large photographic images that suggest an incident and subsequent distress in Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth. Upstairs in the gallery, on a video monitor, it’s Clara grappling with the torments of the imagination in the wake of a fellow child’s death, and torturing herself in an act of grief-relieving masochism.

As you enter the gallery you come face to face with a large portrait of Sophie, the classically inscrutable doll-face onto which we can freely project. Inside, again staring out at us, Sophie sits alone at the end of a table on which are placed a model cooked chicken and 2 plates of vegetables. In an adjoining image her plastic hand reaches out to touch a very real bright-eyed but very dead fish. Elsewhere she’s on the floor: perhaps simply at rest, thoughtful, or withdrawn and upset. In another image, milk is splashed across the floor, a small toy bear lies on its back, broccoli heads nearby. To the right, another shot of Sophie, this time in profile, perhaps crying, her skin eerily real, yet plastic at the same time. Finally, right down on the carpet, a dustball or dried weed cluster. Like the fish, it’s as if the object has caught Sophie’s gaze, entrancing her, and us, with its reality in an otherwise synthetic environment. There’s a narrative being played out in this series, perhaps as mild as a temper tantrum when compared with Clara’s pain, but it’s up to you to decide. Certainly you can’t escape Sophie’s sense of isolation but, just as intensely, her curiosity about the fish and the dustball—it’s as if you’re stretched out on the floor beside her with the extended concentration span that educators sometimes would deny in children. It’s this play between views detached and subjective that gives Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth its peculiar power. Whether working with stills or animation, Van Sowerwine expertly and vividly suggests emotions from barely inanimate materials. Clara won a Cannes Film Festival Best Mention in the Short Film Palm d’Or.

The photographs in Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth are large and glossy, the details however sometimes raw. Sowerwine explains that the images were taken straight from transparencies without any touching up, the closeup, for example, of Sophie’s hand reaching for the fish, revealing the powdery edges of the body. Sowerwine designs the doll which is then sculpted in plasticine from which a model-maker casts Sophie in silicon. Sowerwine chooses eyes, the hair type, inserts each hair and sometimes makes the clothes. She designed the space for Sophie and worked with a commercial photographer, John Billington, using a Hasselblad. Much of the work is painstaking: lighting such a small figure over a week was, she says, a particular challenge, especially given that Sophie is not as manipulable as the multi-jointed Clara in the film. However, working on the film, says Sowerwine, was infinitely more labour intensive: the team included animator, designers, composer and cinematographer (Billington) over an 8 month production period with a 10 week 16mm shoot with a parallel video recording to check the movement was right.

At Artspace I finally got to experience Mari Velonaki’s magical and curiously affecting fish-bird. Two wheel chairs wander the space, face and skirt each other, pump out messages (on small strips of paper) sufficiently enigmatic to yield many interpretations and not a few eerie personal synchroncities for viewers. Even stranger, they seem to sense your presence, moving away as you advance or sometimes following you. Their association with vulnerability and service, their prosthetic function, makes Velonaki’s mutation of them into apparently sentient beings particularly potent. As with Van Sowerwine’s dolls, the encounter is both eery and amusingly prophetic.

Van Sowerwine, Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth; Clara, animator Isobel Knowles; Stills Gallery, Sydney, Oct 12-Nov 12; Mari Velonaki, fish-bird circle b-movement c, mechatronic system design David Rye,, software architecture Steve Scheding, track system & software design Stefan Williams; Artspace, Sydney, Sep 22-Oct 15

Sydney’s Marrickville Council engaged Bronwyn Bancroft to design a contemporary Aboriginal mural for the Robyn Webster Sports Centre at Tempe Reserve in 2004. The site was recommended for a public art work, based on community consultation conducted as part of the Marrickville Public Art Strategy, People, Place + Art in 2003. The mural also marks the sports centre as a gateway to Marrickville and, strikingly, for many visitors arriving at the airport, a gateway to Sydney and Australia.

Bronwyn Bancroft is a Sydney based artist, Acting Chair of Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative and the Convener of the Indigenous Artist Lobby Group, which is focused on contemporary Indigenous representation in Australia.

The shed itself houses two basketball courts and is 100 metres in length, 15 metres high and 20 metres wide. The trees planted around the shed are still growing, so it looks quite bald and in-your-face. I like that, the work looks comfortable there, it looks like it’s going to grow there.

In the centre there is a snake and on either side is a man and woman; within the context of a man and woman I’ve also done a transgender, the male with empty breasts. The reason for transgender is to reflect their presence in the local community and in all cultures. I set it up so that the man and woman epitomised Adam and Eve but also became the creation story with the rainbow serpent. The snake, again, was evident in the Bible. I make these analogies between different religions and between women and men.

On either side of the man and woman are fish which represent the midden, an archaeological site dating back 60,000-70,000 years. Marrickville Council saved a midden and I wanted to demonstrate this integrity by Council toward Aboriginal people. On the opposite side of the fish is a sand goanna, the totem of the Wangal people, the original inhabitants. Even though most died of smallpox or killings, I didn’t want them ignored. In these ways I tried to put quite a serious debate behind the images but also make the images so that they are easily read.

Humanity. For me the mural represents that man, woman and child are created from nature and ecology. These things have to be respected, not politics. I’m trying to bury divisiveness and create a link culturally. This mural reflects my philosophy on life. I evolve my work through the creative process and during that creative process what I take with me are the stories of the people that I’ve been involved with.

Even though I haven’t designed fabric for 15 years, it seemed like an obvious, natural progression to have something very simple on that shed and something that people could read from a long distance away. The way I placed the units diagonally meant they formed a diamond effect, a shape very important to Aboriginal art in NSW. I wanted to accentuate the fact that NSW Aboriginals are also culturally progressive because the dominant focus [in Aboriginal art] remains on the Northern Territory.

Could you articulate the significance of the 2 colours chosen to paint the mural?

The colour base of the structure was an off-white—eggshell if you want to get technical. It wasn’t difficult to work out I was going to do a mono print. Black and white was too harsh; it was too politically and racially divisive. I wanted to use the symbolic colour of red because it not only symbolises the earth but also blood. When we cut ourselves we still bleed red, all of us. This to me signified the commonality of humanity. Paint was developed using red oxide like soil, so there’s actually pigmentation in the paint that allows it to sustain for 15 years. As a painter I use thousands of colours but with this it was so simple.

In my family we practise Aboriginal spirituality as opposed to the Christian religious doctrine I grew up with. We believe in our ancestors and old people and they guide us. Aboriginal people are still recovering from past abuse that occurred through the church and I would like to increase the debate on that. However, people can read the piece from their own religious context.

Sally Morgan does, she’s a mate of mine. The people I really admire are Uncle Lester Bostock who guides me as a male elder and his sister Euphemia Bostock who refers to herself as the black mum I never had. She brings to me an informed and political debate, having had the lived experience of the Tent Embassy movement from the 1970s. My cousin Robyn Bancroft, Aunty Elsie and my mum, who is a white woman. I admire people who do positive things in Aboriginal art and dislike people who undo all of the hard work that generations of Aboriginal people have fought for.

Bronwyn Bancroft, Commissioned Artist 2003-2005, Robyn Webster Sports Centre Aboriginal Mural, Marrickville City Council, Sydney

If classic Antipodean Gothic can be read in terms of transparently colonial themes, it’s perhaps no surprise to sense a recent resurgence of the Gothic aesthetic, rife with contemporary anxieties, fears and terrors. Indeed, the curatorial premise of this show seems to be in linking the past with the present. Strangely familiar isn’t about art providing a mere spooky or uncanny thrill, however, and there’s a much more plaintive sense in which things could be said to seem ‘strangely familiar’, the return of conservative politics for one. In terms of domestic protest, this is a lot more than an exhibition of work by the Fionas Hall and MacDonald—it’s a uniquely collaborative installation.

Washed up on trestle tables, along the front window of the UTS gallery are 49 dead birds. They range in size from a hulking albatross (it’s amazing how many people referred to it as a Dodo) to tiny colourful kingfishers. They are all immaculately preserved—with arsenic and smelling of mothballs—yet so unceremoniously dead. Outside of the museum context, where stuffed things are so often ameliorated by fake habitats whenever they are put out on show for the viewing public, these prostrate birds form a disturbing shoreline shrine. It’s not hard to make the tangential leap to avian flu, due in any day now from Manchuria. A drape hangs behind the birds enclosing the entire front window, behind which the art proper starts. People entering the gallery hesitate to cross the threshold, the birds warning them off perhaps, with whatever confused notion of the inexplicably sacred (or sordid) we still hold.

Inside the gallery to the left is a woven photographic print of James Cook Island (in Sydney’s Sylvania Waters) by Fiona MacDonald. Seems harmless enough. An artificial island and suburban residential development, each house on its hollowed out crescent replete with swimming pool. Though to risk a very overused photographic cliché, this is a photo with a psychic punctum. The curator, Ricky Subritzky, who was doing some research into Cook in the popular imagination, saw something ‘strangely familiar.’ In an anamorphic moment the shape of the Aboriginal Wandjina spirit appeared, an effect of all the jetties sticking out from the curve and the aerial view. This is the spirit imprinted onto place who wreaks vengeance through extreme weather. A harbinger of global warming perhaps, for societies who pay scant ritual attention to their environment.

It’s clear, casting a glance around the room, that this is an exhibition about bringing it home. The interior is mapped out like a sparse household; with rugs, wallpaper, drape, lamp and shopping bags. For Subritzky, the space is built around ideas of comfort and terror and he began with a synergy he’d detected between these 2 artists’ works, in particular those which are critical of US-style global capitalism. For every benign domestic surface there is a disruptive patterning; raptors sillouhetted onto shopping bags, or flapping around a lampshade diorama, bird nests made out of US bank notes and camouflaged fighter planes in wallpaper. Fiona Hall’s rug, Mire (2005), juxtaposes botanical swamp specimens (their names embroidered in Arabic underneath) over heat images of the Afghanistan landscape. Fiona MacDonald’s silk drape, Crusade (B-1B) (2005), also uses militaristic imagery to kaleidoscopic effect, showing war, as seen by fighter pilots, as like a lurid video game, dehumanising the reality.

In a University Design and Architecture Faculty environment, where things can too easily be reduced to property development and the clean advertising image, it is a relief to see such substance emanating from style. It’s also wonderful to see the birds get an outing from their specimen drawers at the Macleay Museum, in a show which intelligently dovetails museological and visual art curation. The show forms part of the annual Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference, held at UTS at the end of November —and, fittingly, on the conference’s opening day, a young Goth girl student has volunteered to be the gallery attendant and baby-sit the birds.

Strangely Familiar, artists Fiona Hall, Fiona MacDonald, curator Ricky Subritzky, UTS Gallery, Nov 1-Dec 2

In From Mosul to Fairfield, a multimedia installation at Fairfield City Museum & Gallery, Samiramis Ziyeh, an artist of Assyrian background picks up lost connections between her displaced and disinherited community and their homeland using as her central metaphor the traditional dance called Khigga.

Before they learn to walk, Assyrian children, held in the arms of dancing kin, learn Khigga.

In her catalogue Ziyeh notes: “Today’s Assyrians trace their origins to Mesopotamia (now eastern Syria and Iraq) known as the Fertile Crescent which stretched along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Assyrians have endured countless persecutions; the most traumatic of these during World War 1 when 750,000 Assyrians lost their lives in massacres and deportations that virtually exterminated entire villages and emptied whole regions. Large portions of the culture are slowly vanishing due to dispossession of traditional land commencing with the tragic impact of World War 1 on the small Assyrian nation.” There are around 20,000 Assyrian-Australians and many have made their new home in Fairfield, Western Sydney.

The gallery is filled with the rhythms of dahoola (drum) and zoorna (flute) that accompany the dance in which a line of straight-backed men and women linked hand to hand, shoulder to shoulder, skip and stamp the ground in unison.

With each repetition of the dance sequence they travel only the distance of the width of one foot. With each beat, they touch or step on the ground beneath them, affirming again and again that where they stand, in the body and in the present moment, is home.

The installation is dominated by video documentation of Assyrians dancing Khigga in the many places of their dispersal, the earliest footage from Moscow in 1914. Continuity is evident in the serious, dark-eyed faces of these handsome people—even when the ornately decorated clothing and boots of the dancers in Northern Iraq are replaced by the t-shirts (“I’m with the Band”) and sandals of young Assyrian-Australians in Fairfield’s Neeta Shopping Centre.

Samiramis Ziyeh spent 3 years researching and collecting dance forms, music, costumes and objects for this exhibition. She also “stood by the moving spirals of dancers, listening, observing their conscious and unconscious exchanges.” At the outset of the project in 2003 after the first invasion of Iraq by Coalition forces, she says, there was cause for some optimism amongst the community that they might regain at least some of their traditional lands. As the project developed and the war worsened, despair only deepened.

In the centre of the gallery, Ziyeh reflects on this sense of loss, evoking in response a space of contemplation, “illuminating the unchanging human instinct toward community, culture and art.” Using an overhead projector, the artist goes to ground, creating a “pool” amidst a curving line of leaves, twigs and earth. As you gaze down into the screen, a female figure spins; fingers sift sand and water; old hands pass small clay figures to younger ones who place them in circles on the ground.

While tracing the bodies of local Assyrian community members on the walls of the gallery is a powerful idea, this third element of the installation is less effective in execution. Strangely moving, however, are the beautiful traditional costumes which feature in photographs on the walls accompanying the history of Assyrian struggle. In two tribal garments (Tiare and Tkhume, as pictured) originally made on the traditional land and dating back to WWI, you sense the dancing bodies beneath the cloth.

Clearly, From Mosul to Fairfield is a labour of love, entailing personal as well as cultural revelation for the artist and her community. Beyond this inner circle, the exhibition adds another definition to the dictionary of displacement. The resilience of the Assyrian community is echoed in the voices of waves of other immigrants to Western Sydney that speak from static displays in the Fairfield Museum next door. Like the dance it celebrates, Samiramis Ziyeh’s project is ongoing. As I left I had the sense that the artist hadn’t finished, but had simply downed tools for the day.

From Mosul to Fairfield: in a spiral we dance as the earth moves beneath our feet until we are home, multimedia installations Samiramis Ziyeh, Farzin Yekta, Jim Prisuda; collaborators Nicholas Al-jeloo, John Homeh, Dishoo Ziyeh, Donald Barkho, Maureen Beckett; community facilitators Paul Gorgees, Marlin Babakhan, Lina Ishu; Fairfield City Museum & Gallery Oct 2-30

The 3-day ARC Art, Design & Craft Biennial, organised and hosted by Artworkers in Brisbane, was packed with speakers, good sized audiences for most sessions, and, while there was little time allocated to open discussion, unleashed some key issues which kept coming back at us. The gathering of artists, curators and writers from visual arts, craft, design, fashion and new media art from across Australia and beyond made discrete issues of form, criticism and survival mutually accessible and provided some intriguing insights in a time of great fluidity between practices and fields.

Evolution and environment

The opening session addressed the big picture, the evolution of art. The discussion focused on the context for survival and success. Cathy Hunt, Director of the arts consultancy, Positive Solutions, said that for “organisational success, you need a successful environment” where companies are in control of their own destiny, where research and development is built in and risk accepted, and the arm’s length funding principle maintained. She called for changes of attitude so that arts grants are seen as investment rather than handouts, and for sponsors to be called partners. I spoke of the need to see survival and growth in terms of networks and communities, as part of an arts ecosystem, organic and at odds with the forces of fragmentation, and requiring of governments devolution of funds to innovative organisations and consortia who are more in touch with artists and emerging practices. Robert Heather, the Director of Artspace Mackay described how a regional gallery strictly reliant on local support keeps itself in the loop from which governments would excise it by developing a strong regional presence (including the South Pacific) and touring shows.

The following session on artist-run intiatives covered familiar territory, but reminded us just what hard work such operations involve, how critical they are for the bottom-up emergence of new forms in the arts ecology, and how such ventures range from open-ended community-based models to highly focused micro-movements. One thing in particular stood out, a desire to loop into larger networks. For example, Rawspace in Brisbane brings together local and national curators in its program, and Rocket Arts in Newcastle features a mix of visiting and local artists. Isabela Pluta of Rocket Art spoke of the pride involved in being able to “export work.”

Art words

Edward Colless’ reverie on critical writing was apt for the wide-ranging ARC Biennial ambit. He declared Play Station 3 as “setting the cultural benchmark”, surveyed the stages of the Play Station evolution, and celebrated the advertising creations of filmmaker Chris Cunningham—“exquisitely empty stuff [going] directly to the adrenal gland.” Here was a writer talking honestly about what grabbed him and what he thought culturally significant. Rex Butler too spoke of the need “to respond to enigmas.” And both Butler and Tim Morrell spoke of “reviews that should aspire to be as good as art.” Colless’ droll forecast of “art criticism going off-world” in our culture of re-mix and post-production warrants elaboration and publication.

Designing women

Tracey Moffatt was one of several soloists in the conference who played to crowded houses. As stand-up artist Moffatt entertained us with a trip through her latest work with herself in the guise of powerful Scorpio women: Georgia O’Keefe, Hilary Clinton, Bonnie Raitt, Marie Curie, Joni Mitchell, Lee Krasner, Marcia Langton and many, many more, but not including Condoleeza Rice, whom she says she does not respect. Moffatt spoke of her art as arising from obsessions and the need to defeat boredom, which she described as an invaluable state; “creativity comes out of it” and growing up in Brisbane, she said, provided plenty of it.

Three emerging fashion designers spoke variously of the challenges of revealing and hiding the shape of the body, the dynamic of the useful versus the decorative, and the ethical commitment to sustainable materials, eg hemp instead of pollutant cotton. The work of one of the designers, using “a glove as point of departure”, was intriguing. The environment for these young designers is a tough one, a high cost Australian economy in which the target markets are small niches of the wealthy.

The cross-cultural test

Alison Carroll brought wit and wisdom to the issue of cross-cultural exchange, providing a chart with the categories ‘poor’, ‘fair’, ‘good’ and ‘excellent’ into which contacts between nations were allocated. India and Britain were ‘good’ in the 18th century, but not so good thereafter. Something positive was going on between India (Calcutta in particular) and Japan in the early 1900s. “Fragile…and not getting better” was how Carroll described the relationship between Australia and Indonesia. As for the USA, poor in all its cultural connections. And events? Venice Biennale, fair, Asia Pacific Triennial, excellent, and Asialink, her own organisation, 80% excellent. In playing this impressionistic game of evaluation, Carroll made us sit up and think, pinpointing how impact cannot be measured by media response, audience size, number of events and the budget scope. Less measurable indicators, but ones with long term impact, like establishing new horizons, the power of small moves, “touching souls”, and the heat generated, or that shiver up the spine, need to be acknowledged, said Carroll. Lee Weng Choy, director of Singapore’s The Substation, described his own “natural” cross-cultural evolution (involving Malaysia, USA, Philippines and Singapore), contrasting it with difficulties in S-E Asia: “there is no density of exchange, The Substation has to work for it.”

Skilling/de-skilling

There were 2 sessions devoted to “crossover.” While they were significant in bringing together visual art, craft and design, the absence of new media art in the mix was notable. There was occasional but incidental mention of digital work. Brian Parkes, Associate Director at Object (Sydney), described new works he’d seen recently in Europe including digital wallpaper (inspired by William Morris) and an intelligent coffee table able to stand on 2 legs if required. However, other themes began to emerge in “Crossover” that would continue to be addressed from various angles: technical training and the shifting lines bewtween art and craft, and the rise of design at craft’s expense.

The new meticulousness in the visual arts was noted, described as a “resurgence of the handmade”, epitomised by the presence of Fiona Hall on the panel. Hall described her commitment to “intricate crafting” as “connecting to the specificity of the natural world and the natural sciences.” She ascribed the technical foundations of her work to her 70s art school training in design, lettering, “a bit of sculpture”, welding, photography, and drawing (“like doing scales”)—even though finding her place in the art world took some time.

Although Noel Frankham (Professor of Art, Tasmanian School of Art), like the other panellists, applauded the retitling of the Australia Council’s Visual Arts & Craft Board as simply the Visual Arts Board in a time of great fluidity between forms, he worried that in the resultant “blur we might lose our language.” Likewise he opposed the functional jargon of the Creative Industries movement and its desire to “create and entertain.” Sketching a history of the fate of the craft field, he noted its continuing dimunition in art schools and the parallel evolution of marketplace-friendly design courses.

While some worried about the reduction in skills teaching in tertiary education, Adrian Clifford of the design group, Rizen, in another session, was concerned that a new emphasis on technical education was beginning to squeeze ideas and theory out of the universities.

New models

Discussing the relationship between art, science and technology, artists Keith Armstrong and Trish Adams, curator Julianne Pierce and SymbioticA’s Oron Catts outlined the challenges of collaborating with scientists—different ways of working, different expectations and the huge problem of ethical clearances—but also the pleasures of the process. A scientist working with an artist might be called upon to meet the artist’s vision with significant innovations (as in Pierce’s account of robotics scientists working with Mari Velonaki on her Fish-Bird project), or, as in Trish Adams’ case, the scientist might find their role exploratory rather than fully research-oriented. Catts detailed the possible levels of involvement and Pierce outlined the challenges to such work and to new media art in general—mainstream arts and media wariness, a limited gallery focus, a lack of curatorial training, and the functionalism of a Creative Industries approach recently evident in Australia Council CEO Jennifer Bott’s announcement at the Vital Signs conference (p35) that opportunities would be sought for the field in design and engineering!

The following session, New media—where to now? addressed different kinds of opportunities in the new media art engagement with the commercial sector (gaming) and arts institutions (artist and QUT lecturer Deb Polson on her innovative mobile phone commissions and for visitors in galleries in Victoria). Corporate interest in the potential of mobile phone art is also high said David Cranswick (dLux media arts) in his account of the Mobile Journeys project. On the one hand, new media artists don’t want to be relegated to the role of supportive technicians or content providers. On the other hand they want to make the most of the opportunities of new and multiple platforms for their work that could produce income and audiences. As Peter Giles of AFTRS says of the emerging communications model, “a project that spreads across platforms…is inherently both experimental and commercial at this crucial moment in development of the media” (see p21 on the LAMP intiative).

Design issues

For John Warwicker of the Tomato design team (UK), who collectively (if globally far flung) create commercial design for corporate clients as well as their own individual artworks, the line between experimental and commercial, and between design and art is thin indeed. Warwicker’s demonstration of un-fixed (constantly morphing) and label-less logos, spare, witty mobile phone visuals, a giant animated Absolut bottle on an airstrip and a massive chillout room in Japan, suggested the joy of creation and lateral thinking, and recalled Edward Colless’ “exquisite emptiness.” But like artists, Warwicker asks important questions: “What is a screen?” “What is a brand?” “What is change?” He answers: “Art is not change; what changes is the culture and the commodification of art to keep itself alive…[it’s] a primal process of being human.” This blunt Darwinism is matched by his retort to a query about working for the likes of Nike: Tomato has no group ethics, and he has to support mother, former wife and kids and second wife and child, pay 30% of his fee to Tomato and tax as well, leaving very little after earning twelve thousand five hundred pounds a month. Some laughed, some reflected on equivalent compromises between survival and conscience, if on a much smaller scale, in their own life and art.

If innovative art is finding more space in the advertising sphere, speakers on the public art panel gave a sad account of worrying trends: a demand for merely illustrative works, the squeezing out of dissent, art objects used as security barriers and, above all, the redefining and dimunition of public space.

Award-winning designers Alex Lotersztain and Brian Steendyk presented accounts of their fascinating works. Lotersztain is nomadic, working with communities in the Philippines and Africa, oscillating his focus between craft, art and design. In Africa he helped a community of expert basket weavers whose market was failing to come up with new designs with international appeal. Steendyk started out as an architect but moved into design, creating innovative chairs in plastic, and a desirable bath that looks like a hybrid of boat and chaise longue, a thing of beauty in itself. The fluidity of roles and forms in the work of these men is of the moment.

Critical limits

Matthew Collings, the British art critic tied himself (and us) in knots, apparently not happy that he’s popularised the contemporary art of which he is critical, and which, he says, is no less obsure for all its successful repackaging on TV and in galleries; unhappy too about the failure of his own painting to find a niche, and about the ills of postmodernism (“ban it”) despite admitting himself a product of it. As stand-up critic, Collings did a lot of quotable quipping which kept the audience agiggle if uncertain about where he was going (everywhere), declaring contemporary design often more interesting than art, craft as trying too hard to be art (“the Tracey Eminisation of craft”), but with a few interesting things to say about how—beyond the old standbys of form and colour—we read paintings, from Rubens to Pollack, which is about where he draws the line.

Wrap-up

There were other panels I didn’t get to, on Aboriginal art and markets; there was the Rawspace launch, too joyous and crowded to experience some good looking new media art, and there was the closing event, the bizarre Matthew Barney film, De Lama Lamina. This features a street pageant installation created in Bahia with the great Brazilian New York art-rocker Arto Lindsay. Lindsay’s band plays on the float, a performance artist above them builds a geodisic dome from a tree and, in the innards of the massive metal float below, a solarity figure masturbates against the rotating shaft of the engine. If this left us speechless, perhaps it was not a bad thing after 3 days and a zillion words spent worrying at the interplay of visual, art, craft, design and new media art in all their hybrid complexities and functional, educational and commerical perplexities.

If we were enlightened or not about any of this, there was no room for complacency. Speakers reminded us of the impending Anti-Terrorism Bill and its sedition section, of art funding limits and the ongoing difficulties in art education. I think it was Adrian Clifford who said in question time in his session, “We tend to think we’re at the end of history and that there’s little to do, which is garbage. We’ll look back on now as the dark ages.” Artworkers cast a little much needed light, an arc-ing spark in the dark, with a very welcome ARC Biennial.

Ian Bowie was a drummer, a sound engineer, a lighting designer, a production manager, a constructionist, a mentor to many and a wonderful man. He worked with Performance Space and our peer companies over many years contributing enormously to contemporary practice in Sydney. He was an avid recycler with a creative, practical solution to almost anything. He always offered a hand, a piece of equipment or some time to a colleague trying to get a work up on the smell of an oily rag or to a fellow techie in a tight spot. He liked shows with politics, people with guts and great music. Sadly, Ian died on Thursday October 13. We will miss his generosity, his smokey laugh, his can-do attitude, his snake lights and his rock’n’roll stories.

Everyone has their favourites: the garden of programmed robotic flowers that rise, unfold, snap shut, fall again, lines rippling like wheat in wind. The Porsche-like, white, seamlessly cast manta ray. Starfish pinned together into fishing-nets that hang like an island welcome over the entranceway. Forms that are organic, computer-generated, classically-referenced, or based on negative space; thrown into corners, clutching walls, caught in crystal, precarious on floors. An arc of Buddhas chant; another is sculpted out of Easter egg foil. There are boxes of memories and mementoes; paper folded into sea-sponge cells; dress-shoes and a hand-bag cast in lead, coffin-prints, lost accessories. How strange, amongst several fetishistic collections of objects, the thin earth-to-sky abstraction of the Yolngu burial pole. And the winning work, American crater near Hanoi, #2: a negative space marking out the zone of damage. Surrounded by an origami of Viet and American currencies, folded into shirts, all tied (as the people were) floor to ceiling with string.

Ahh, sculpture competitions: much better represented now in Australia than they used to be. By the sea (Sydney), in the park (Werribee), or as here, held within walls. Much more space than before; this, the third Gallery event, seems to have gained kudos, been allowed more space, attracted higher calibre submissions. Newcomers beside old hands. Fewer mistakes.

The first mistake: squashing them in. In the first two National Sculpture Prize exhibitions (2001 and 2003), I actually missed site-specificity: pined for installations in grasses and on plains, Richard Long-type spirals of stone and sand. This time, I’m really glad I’m in this building here. The placing of works is really right: the art is given space. Sculpture is BIG, even when small. Even hanging on a wall, sculpture works out into space, asking questions wider than its dimensions.

The second: I’m not sure it’s a mistake as such, but the previous 2 exhibitions had phenomenal prize-winners, and a lot of work that was very thin. Technique in this year’s entries is incredibly strong: from the very senior Bert Flugelman’s understanding of the effect of light on polished and ground steel, to Drake-Brockman’s programming of motions and rhythms between elements across a large field, to the various manipulations of plastics, tape and paper, foams and foil, optics and animation. These pieces are allowed their worlds. I deeply understand Flugelman’s phrase on the way art reflects “what one might euphemistically call the ‘real world’.” Art also lives; it is. Even reflections on death (Glen Clarke’s Hanoi; Mel Coates’s underwater video of a drowning parachutist) create a space that lives.

Sculpture, more than painting, dissects dimensions in space, and in that dissection time separates: whose is this body Charles Robb reveals, the classic portrait ‘bust’ against the wall, popping a substance through its orifices, a second revealing its insides (heart and lungs)? The best works dissect the forms we think we move with and through in the world.

Alisdair Macintyre draws together hundreds of works of art and art sites he would like to have visited from several continents, miniaturised into one “theme park” which holds them all. As with the dance of the mechanoid Floribots, and Ian Howard’s enormous scrap-yard of life experiences, adults and children alike are held in thrall.

Works in this exhibition spiral, hide, hollow, store, map and conceal. They spread, climb, hover, fold into myriad cells. They engage in damage (what remains after war, or the sufferings of the ecosystem), and hope (what of both art and life survive). It is little surprise Glen Clarke’s Hanoi #2 wins the prize, as it engages in nearly all of these. There is a conscience and a consciousness in these works. The exhibition has a brightness I haven’t seen in years.

National Sculpture Prize and Exhibition, 2005, National Gallery of Australia, Dimensions Variable, Contemporary Sculpture Festival, Canberra, July 15-Oct 9

There’s no doubt that inner-urban Sydney’s Chippendale is already well into the process of gentrification; its huge brick brewery no longer emitting the smell of hops and slated for re-development. The surrounding area is trying to market itself as a bit of a local Soho, with galleries, warehouses, coffee shops and moped stores springing up alongside the old Socialist Resistance headquarters and the untouched Shannon Hotel (a few places-that-time-forgot still remaining). Nestled in these back streets is the new artist-run non-profit gallery Pelt. A beautiful white cube-like space, it’s at first not at all what you’d expect of the new home for impermanent audio. Though with its fully legitimated feel and in prime real estate, Pelt is quite a coup. The gallery regularly calls for expressions of interest for its exhibition program—providing installation, multiple projection and live performance space for artists engaging in the broad areas of sound and visual practice.

Video/installation artist Virginia Hilyard’s is the fourth exhibition to be held at Pelt since it opened in September this year. Her work In the depths seemed perfect for the space, which particularly suits solo work, allowing it due gravitas. Hilyard’s aesthetic has a refreshing clarity, despite her use of intentionally jerky hand-held camera work and Super-8 film stock. The overall effect is all about exquisite grain rather than grunge. We follow the journey of a woman (the artist) climbing the metal stairs out of a limestone cave, then splice straight into her wending her way through a high hedged garden maze (a colonial legacy shot on the Mornington Peninsula). Originally conceived as pleasure gardens for the bourgeoisie, it’s clear she’s traversing more anxious avenues here, with exits guarded Cerberus-like by vicious dogs. Next she’s wandering around inside a mirror maze (shot in a travelling sideshow in Dapto) which she navigates in a polka dot sun frock (a Yayoi Kusama moment). The previously black and white film suddenly changes to intense colour, as she’s back amongst the foreboding foliage of the hedges, before finally entering into an old library (past the spines of musty encyclopedias and their call numbers).

The loop ends at a bleached out window and then keeps going as the film stock peters out into brilliant Technicolour patterns. The sound track, set in speakers at the rear of the room, ranges from clanging metal, to footfall, to howling winds. These are all labyrinthine spaces of eerie entrapment, though our heroine keeps her composure throughout, transcending any conventions of cheap horror. I think we all recognise times when our lives are like this; when the walls start closing in and the contemporary world seems haunted by the psychic and mythic substratum of the old world. How great if we could just revel in it as an aesthetic, relieved of contemporary pop culture, entering into the silences and moody European sensibility of a cinema, one which is textured, full of lights and darks. Virginia Hilyard’s work goes further, affectively gesturing towards a spiritual odyssey as much as a cultural one, suggesting incarcerations of the mind overlaid on real sites.

In the Depths, Virginia Hilyard, Pelt, Unit 2, 46 Balfour St, Chippendale, Sydney, Oct 19-30; http://impermanent.info/pelt

Imagine starkness:

A late evening in the future—Krapp’s den.
Front centre a small table, the two drawers of which open towards audience. Sitting at the table, facing front, i.e. across from the drawers, a wearish old man: Krapp. …
Very near-sighted (but unspectacled). Hard of hearing. Cracked voice. Distinctive intonation. Laborious walk.
On the table a tape-recorder with microphone and a number of cardboard boxes containing reels of recorded tapes.
Table and immediately adjacent area in strong white light. Rest of stage in darkness…. Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape

This is Krapp and these are the minimalist stage settings for the first performance conducted between a live actor and a tape recorder, a dialogue between a man and the recorded voice of his younger incarnations—the year 1958.

The motivation for this critique is prompted by a sense of disgruntlement (similar to that so willingly displayed by the wearisome Krapp!) with contemporary computer based sound-art performance. The bitch is threefold; with history, or rather the alarming fog of amnesia that obscures the recent archaeology of sound art and sonic performance; with the hijacking of the term ‘sound art’ under the cover of these murky conditions and its re-purposing as a synonym for lap-top electronica; and with the death (or dearth) of the performative within this genre. The following scenarios are offered as a rough guide to what habitually goes unacknowledged and an attempt to give an historical tag to the “new” in “new media.”

Imagine intervention

London, August 3, 1972, the Mokka Bar, 29 Frith Street, Soho W1. Outside London’s first espresso bar stands a man with a grudge against the discourteous proprietor, his frizzy haired wife and their poisonous cheesecake; in his hands a sonic weapon playing back audio cut-ups of material recorded on location. The man, who also insists “language is a virus” (nein, mein Liebling, it wasn’t Laurie Anderson) persists in his sonic assault until October 30, 1972 when the Mokka Bar closes down. William Burroughs’ strategic use of audio cut-ups delivered in situ were designed to spread rumours; to discredit opponents; to function as a frontline weapon to produce and escalate riots and as a long-range weapon to scramble and nullify associational lines put down by mass media.

This is pretty serious stuff, and certainly of interest to the federal forces of evil; neither should we overlook the fact that all this could be done with razor blades and sticky tape!

Imagine gesture

The mise en scène is not so stark this time; the setting, a large opulent salon furnished predominantly in red. A young man stands behind another as if in a tentative embrace, their arms outstretched before them, their hands moving together rhythmically, the younger man carefully guiding the elder. In the corner of the salon, next to the tall casement windows, a woman is playing Glinka’s Skylark on the piano. Halfway through the recital the young man releases his gentle grasp on the older man’s hands and quietly steps back to observe Comrade Vladimir Il’yich complete the piece with tolerable skill. An enthusiastic round of applause follows and Lenin beams at 26 year old Leon Theremin, pleased at his encounter with the world’s first electronic musical instrument. We are in the Kremlin, the year 1922, the Revolution is still rosy and the gestural interface is a Soviet concept!

Imagine the future

Today music, as it becomes continually more complicated, strives to amalgamate the most dissonant, strange and harsh sounds. In this way we come ever closer to noise-sound. This musical evolution is paralleled by the multiplication of machines, which collaborate with man on every front…the machine today has created such a variety and rivalry of noises that pure sound, in its exiguity and monotony, no longer arouses any feeling. Luigi Russolo

Anyone with even a vague interest in industrial sound art is simply delusional if they haven’t yet read the Art of Noises, written in 1913 by Luigi Russolo. His “Intonarumori” devices were designed to produce a gamut of machine-like modulated rhythmic sounds emanating from “howlers”, “exploders”, “crumplers”, “hissers” and “scrapers.” The debut performance, Gran Concerto Futuristica on April 24, 1914 at the Teatro Dal Verme in Milan witnessed formally dressed performers defending themselves from a hail of rotten fruit and vegetables, their output balanced by the howls, screams and hisses of the audience.

Imagine ubiquity

Personal computers are now as ubiquitous as the Singer sewing machine in the mid-19th century or the Brownie Box camera in the early 20th. They are marketed in exactly the same manner and generate very similar social effects. These devices ensure, by their ubiquity, a profound level of banality and are successful to the degree that contemporary society reifies the mundane, orchestrated by the televisual cult of the lowest common denominator.

Like the Singer and the Brownie Box, the laptop is a powerful tool that relocates the serial production work of the factory within the home, blurring the boundaries between industrial labour and domestic pastime, spawning yet another generation of semi-industrialised ‘out-workers’ engaged in forms of electronic cultural macramé in which the exponential proliferation of texts, images and sounds ensures a concomitant reduction in the level of significance of the individual artifact.

Imagine the gig

And now to the subject at hand. Imagine a darkened room, front centre a small table, a profusion of wires exposed to the audience.

On the table a mixing desk with microphone and a number of interface devices centre of the table, expensive new laptop, to the left a mouse.

Table and immediately adjacent area in weak white light. Rest of stage and audience in darkness…

Sitting motionless at the table a young man stylishly down-dressed, partially obscured by the lid of the machine, upper half of the face illuminated in pale colour-less light.

It is not hard to recognize the scenario, sitting awkwardly on worn out cushions scattered over an unenthusiastically cleaned concrete floor; as in Vipassana meditation the discomfort is integral to the experience. The audience is transfixed, all eyes upon the pale light bathing the performer’s motionless face. Nothing more of note transpires, beyond the crackle and drone of ersatz industrial audio (proudly flaunting OH&S noise abatement limits) and the occasional flick of the right wrist creating that Wabi-Sabi moment when a glimpse of red light escapes from under the mousing hand!

The experience, save for some incidental movements, is entirely acousmatic in nature (but lacks the intellectual rationale that acousmatics pursued). From the perspective of the audience the performer’s physical presence is merely instrumental, offering no palpable connection between action and outcome (could he actually be doing email?).

So what of this lineage? Acousmatics (from the Greek ‘akousma’, what is heard) has its origins with Pythagoras, 6th century BC, who delivered his oral teachings (oracle-like) from behind a curtain in order to prevent his physical presence distracting his students, a technique designed to grant them a pure focus on the content of his words.

In 1955 the term “acousmatique” was employed by the poet Jérôme Peignon, at the beginning of musique concrète, as an adjective, meaning a sound that we can hear without knowing its cause, and to designate the distance that separates a sound from its origins by obscuring, behind the impassivity of the loudspeaker, any visual elements that may be associated with it.

Then in the early 1970s, Francois Bayle introduced the expression “acousmatic music” while director of the Groupe Recherches Musicales in Paris, employing it to denote a specific kind of music as “an art of projected sounds shot and developed in the studio, projected in halls, like cinema.” Laptop sound performances are in this ballpark but have added a dash of ego-based DJ personality in the guise of a ‘live’ event.

The sparse aesthetic of contemporary laptop gigs makes it is difficult to avoid the sensation of déjà vu (or maybe déjà entendre)—Edith Sitwell probably had a more radical idea when in 1922 she performed Façade through a megaphone, from behind a curtain (at least it provoked an uproar!). Naturally the FSOL (Future Sound of London) had it all well sorted; who needs the hassle of airports, road-cases and roadies who can only count to 2, when it is possible to stay at home in the studio and beam the stuff in! Or dear old Kraftwerk? Their impassivity in front of a row of shiny laptops in their recent performances is a self-reflexive critique, a pastiche of their own earlier mensch-machine shtick, as well as a very intelligent image renovation strategy that bridges generational gaps in music culture.

Maybe those smug and culturally bereft corporate types are onto something with their trite “Think outside the square” mantra—it’s high time for the electronica crew to gaze past the dim light of the 17” rectangle!

A senior music reviewer once challenged my support for young artists and audiences with: “But how do you get them to listen?” To which I retorted,”Clearly you haven’t been to a sound art event. It’s like going to church, or a chamber music recital: heads down, eyes shut, ears open.” Artspace’s recent sound art program Typhoon, curated and hosted by caleb k, was played out across 2 nights of performances and an afternoon of talk, but with performative and visual components that added some intriguing cross-systems dynamics, especially for those who find laptop only concerts tedious.

Joyce Hinterding, large aerial hoops in hand, gathers and shapes found sounds from the aether with the appearance of someone in a slo-mo discombobulating wheel chair. Soft, shuffling static is interrupted by sharp cracks like ice breaking up, cross rhythm hums form as the hoops intersect, the pulse quickens and big Bach organ chords manifest out of nowhere, until the cracks and giant pops fade like a dying camp fire. It’s like watching a magician with wands, or at one point as an aerial was lifted aloft, a haloed nun at the steering wheel. The sounds are heavenly, in several senses of the word.

Fast Mountain Die’s instrumental set begins with bass strums and high overtones followed by a spastic bass outburst, a return to rhythmic security and some melodic simplicity on the way into a sound storm that finally winds down to a blinking aural signal and a thud before filling out with a final satisfying big chord, by which time the musicians have disappeared beneath the keyboard like preoccupied car mechanics.

Robin Fox’s inspiring performance was rapturously received. It’s like seeing what you hear, although not in any way illustrative as sounds and oscilloscope interplay, moving from slow visual and aural blips to staggeringly elaborate spirographic raptures, great oceanic washes, enveloping visual flashes and a final thudding withdrawal. Difficult to describe but utterly engrossing, Fox’s dancing lines and distinctive sonic compositions make for a unique experience in which the performer remains invisible while we focus on his virtual puppetry.

Japanese sound artist Haco’s visibility is key to her performance, her presence amplified by a large, live projection of her hands on her miked laptop computer as she wrings every possible sound out of its body. And what sounds! A few days ago I saw on television, in closeup, mikes and all, the first recording of the chatter of ants. Here too, Haco turns a microcosm into a consuming universe. Strange hums, crackles, grindings and savage downpours flood out as her fingers move across surface, depress keys and, especially, open files. The big moment comes with Force Quit which sounds like the universe diving into oblivion. After all that, a Restart reprise was less than interesting.

Stasis Duo have a performative look, cool and wearing shades, but stillness is everything and the frequently puncuated sound does the moving—static with a bank of pulsings; an isolated note that develops a curious sheen; a big hum that goes up a notch with all the rawness of insect buzzing; watery rushes; contrapuntal crankings and sweet statics; and finally, and at last really engaging, the evocation (not all intended I’m sure, but how do you speak of such things?) of a weird techno-mechanical contraption, clock-like with a stressed spring and dull chime, beating its way to the end of time, dying in a hum and leaving a watery residue.

New Zealand sound artist Lovely Midget commenced her laptop/keyboard composition with a bracing gong and feedback settling back into a big guitar chord. Hark the source! Taste the grape. Throughout, you were never in doubt that Midget was working acoustic guitar sounds from her sonic bank to the nth degree: solo strings, chord clusters and harmonics, until the whole thing mutated into a bristling electronic night forest, growing lyrical and slowing into a spacey fade, but forever accompanied by spooky, hovering feedback.

The eeriness often evoked by sound art reached a new level in Gail Priest’s conjuring of Gertrude Stein in a work in which the pouring and consumption of red wine (by Priest herself), the shifting levels of the liquid, and the playing of the rim of the glass, uncannily unleashed Stein’s voice along with the music of the vessel. The distinctive sound world passes through tick tocks and little crashes into deepening and ever more complex notes as the wine level drops; rhythms grow more complex and a host of wild sounds like spirits set loose tumble forth, until bluntly cut away to leave Stein reverberating into nothingness at the last drop.

Guitarist and singer Jojo Hiroshige from Japan displayed a pair of lightning fast hands that could chord, strum and thrash with the best of them, with a few unusual byproducts like searing siren and struka effects. Most listenable were the NY-type art-rock passages of strange chord patterning and half spoken singing. However the set was dominated by dramatic outpourings (attributed to love gone wrong, but untranslated) and a matching assault on the guitar with not a little feedback art: sound art as melodrama.

Typhoon offered aural delights and some visual and performative correlatives to an attentive, appreciative audience; this was not the church of the laptop, but an enjoyable, open-ended exploration of hybrid potentialities.

“I’m really not interested in artist as hero or artist as superstar”, Ernie Althoff’s voice bristles from the speakerphone. Althoff has been making music since 1977 when he bought his first Superscope C-104 cassette recorder. “They’re terrific machines. They have very responsive keys so you can play them just like an instrument.” He had already heard “bands like Soft Machine where they would have lots of squeaks in their tracks that deviated from your traditional rock music”, and then “‘New Music’ was being played on 3CR at the time”, where he heard a lot of experimental music from abroad.

A short course in electronic music with Ron Nagorcka the following year was to have a lasting effect on Althoff’s enthusiasm and approach to music making and performance. Nagorcka introduced him to a community of experimental musicians who held events at The Organ Factory in Melbourne’s Clifton Hill. Althoff’s compositions featured his Superscope cassette recorders, found objects and cheap homemade instruments and electronics. His approach hasn’t changed that much since then; however the level of sophistication and the refinement of his ideas, machines and performances have.

“I’m building some instruments at the moment.” For the last month, following the release of his new CD, dark by 6 that documents five installations from 2000-2003, Althoff has been attempting to rectify what he sees as an inadequacy in his music making machines. “There is one thing that always eludes me and that’s a bass: a bottom end. I look at the laptop brigade and they’ve all got this very easy bottom end. I don’t want to go down that road, I must admit, so I’ve been concentrating on building a 2-string bass instrument—actually more like an Indian tambura.” A detailed description follows involving 2 small motors, leather beaters, guitar nuts and the physics of string music. However, after studying the history of such instrument types, the machine isn’t responding as Althoff imagined. “It plays what it wants to do rather than what I want it to do and you know, that’s fine, I’m happy to work like that.”

When Althoff was first making music he was conscious of the work of John Cage as well as performance artists of the day and began developing his own techniques in chance compositions and scores while also testing the relationship between the performer and audience. He developed graphic scores for performers and instruments (mostly his own) and his machines were built in such a way that their sonic outcome would be different each time they were ‘played.’ He also began using his voice and breaking down the conventions of performance. “I was the performer, the narrator, the musician and at the end I even became one of the characters by putting on a mask”, he says of one of his earlier performances.

There is an undercurrent of socio-political ideology in Althoff’s use of recycled, found or readily available materials, the ways in which he makes his music and in his approach to performer/audience relationships. “I propose political models by example rather than being didactic. I would never say this is what you have to do, rather, this is what I’m doing, have a look at it. I’m far more concerned with the integrity and quality of the work that comes out rather than the person that’s generating the work.”
Ernie Althoff, Tide Shelf

There is an openness and playfulness to Althoff’s work. “Well, I like to have fun”, he freely admits. There is also a simplicity to his approach—an almost minimal aspect. “I don’t particularly like complexity for complexity’s sake”, he says. “I do like to keep things simple. Often what happens in this day and age, people expect a degree of complexity, but pull the wool away from their eyes by doing something that’s incredibly simple and yet works, well, people are quite dazzled by the beauty of that simplicity.”

Althoff’s installations are elegant in their design and functionality. He states that they are all site-specific and allow the audience to move in and around them as they please. “There is no way I’m going to demand people see my work in a certain way. The thing I like about sound and music is that it’s so ambiguous. Everybody brings their own system of evaluation to what I do and everybody takes a different version of it home and it’s fine by me, I’m quite happy to have it work like that.”

The installations are generally made up of a series of machines that produce percussive sounds. There is little mystery about what is going on. In plain view one can see the apparatus and how it works. Wood (mainly bamboo), rocks, wire, shells, metal and other objects are set in motion by record players, cassette players and fans or are struck by objects extending out of or affected by them. The beauty of these pieces is that they work on different levels at once. There is the moment-to-moment percussive act and then, over time, the installation starts to develop its own sonic character. The installation is the composition itself as Althoff places certain sound producing machines with others after much experimentation and listening.

Althoff’s installations make links with nature through their materials, design, layout and even sometimes their titles, such as The Emergence of Mammals and Song of the Centipede. “Nature’s the best resource we’ve got, basically. I’ve tried to use the natural world and geology, which I see as a strong indicator of the natural world and natural patterns, in my work.”

In the liner notes for dark by 6, Althoff warns that the “documentations presented here should not be seen as replacements for the real-time auditory experience.” On the night of the CD launch (September 3 at Ignifuge in Brunswick) Althoff performed with an array of machines and sound making devices. It seemed to be an improvised performance but Althoff says, “I had the framework worked out. I prefer to leaves things open and rough and then trust myself to do it.”

It’s getting harder for Althoff to find venues to perform in and to place installations. “Back in the 80s I would do 20 to 25 gigs a year, nowadays I do 2. I did all that for those Rechabite Hall shows in 2003 and in a way, sure I got a lot done but in the same way it’s tiring and exhausting because not only do you have to come up with the work, you also have to do all the administration and all the blah, blah with it and sometimes I get a bit jaded about having to do all of it, all the time.”

At the time of the interview there were no future gigs booked but it seems there is no stopping Ernie Althoff. One only needs to see his discography to see how prolific he has been. I ask if he still makes compositional music. “Improvising is too much fun, basically. I like the risk in improvising.”

Althoff’s machines are kept in “a lot of big old cupboards and old bookshelves”, in his garage. “I deliberately make things that disassemble and consequently if I can take things apart it means I can use the equipment again and again for another thing.” It will be worth looking and listening out for what “things” Ernie Althoff assembles next and this time maybe debuting his new “elusive bass” instrument.

dark by 6, Five Installations by Ernie Althoff, CD, antboy 07, www.antboymusic.com

We spend much of our lives in rehearsal—in mimickry, game-playing, education and inner dialogues. Obsessive observation of other lives, whether real or imagined, is another form of rehearsal, a monitoring of the social world, its roles, plots and possibilities, and the theatre is just one place where we do it. For novelist Milan Kundera, however, there is no rehearsal, it’s all life: rehearsal is as unpredictable as life itself. The title of a show by visiting Norwegian dance duo Visibility Zero, …it’s only a rehearsal, shaped my thinking, with a bracing synchronicity, while watching other recent performances in Sydney.

The Pessoptimist

When it comes to prediction, optimists, pessimists and cynics alike have got it all worked out—there’s little need for rehearsal. In director Don Mamouney’s adapatation of a novel by Palestinian Emile Habiby (a former Knesset member and winner of the Israeli Literature Prize for the novel), Saeed from Haifa has played a carefully calculated role for much of his life. It’s about to be undone and he’s not prepared. Saeed’s betrayal of his people to the Israeli government is perpetrated with a kind of wide-eyed innocence—he’s like a modern Candide, joyous and certain. But the best of all possible worlds is only his own and no one else’s. Laughing, he can declare that his spying is “shameful work, but it’s a living”, and he lives without remorse. Even separation from his beloved Yuaad resolves to: “I ceased crying for Yuaad and began crying for myself.” Saeed’s manipulation of his masters and his own people eventually reaches its limits: the spy bosses are too demanding, his son turns to the cause Saeed has betrayed, and the stolen treasure he has secreted is beyond his reach. The world turns Kafka-esque, everywhere a prison, and ghosts are beginning to appear.

The Pessoptimist plays out against the several decades of Palestinian-Israeli conflict realised vividly as large video projections (Assad Abdi)—a relentless if eerily engaging evocation of war, displacement, torture and murder. Saeed’s small but brutal contribution is a microcosm of this bigger picture, revealing the absurdity of his condition—the transformation of a deep pessismism about human value into a joyful, showbizzy drive. The bizarre fusion of optimism and its opposite yields an unexpectedly delirious pragmatism with actor Paul Barakat excelling as Saeed, the expert playing direct to the audience: a fool for the times, but never divine. If it at times overwrought, over-acted and over-produced, The Pessoptimist is grimly engrossing and bleakly comic, never blinking at horror nor backing away from complexities beyond its protagonist’s grasp. If Saaed is the product of inexorable forces, a man trapped in the middle, the production nonetheless leaves us in no doubt that these forces are not equal and that Saeed is ultimately another victim of Israel.

There and Back

Life is much harder to rehearse if you can’t hear it. The Australian Theatre of the Deaf’s There and Back is a comprehensive account of the struggle to communicate, in part with the hearing world, but mostly within the deaf community. In a tale of 3 companions driving to a regional festival in New South Wales, tensions spring up not only about partnerships, sexuality and talent, but also about categories of deafness and systems of communication. Pivotal to Kate Nelson’s script is Evan’s withdrawal from the hearing world. He’s profoundly deaf but resolutely opposed to any remedy, hostile to his girlfriend’s part-hearing engagement with the world of the hearing, and cruelly antagonistic to Fiona, a country girl with a cochlear implant, to which Evan objects in particular, and her English accented Auslan. Evan wants one world, one community, freed from the complexities and dependencies demanded by the hearing world. Although a social comedy, and there’s a lot to laugh at and with, There and Back grows increasingly tense, painful and revelatory. Melissa’s belief in her singing ability, Fiona’s isolated life and Evan’s caustic dogmatism each signal withdrawals into certainty, but on the road and at the festival they are flung into the trial and error of the unexpected, rehearsing and enacting new lives.

For the audience, hearing or not, writer Nelson and director Caroline Conlon have dextrously layered levels of communication-speech, Auslan, mime and, with 3 supporting hearing actors, they have cleverly embedded onstage interpreters in a host of roles. If at times laboured and initially too expository, There and Back is a very strong showing in performance, direction and design from ATOD and Conlon, its new artistic director.

The Candy Butchers

Of circus we assume intensive rehearsal: the risks are greater than those in everyday life. A significant trope of postmodern physical theatre has been what goes wrong when the unexpected enters the well-rehearsed routine, with performer personae deranged or just not up to it. It’s demanding work, requiring that little extra skill, risk-taking and directorial inventiveness. The Candy Butchers takes that conceit and runs with it, lurching into the dark side of the circus and sideshow—tension, betrayal, unnecessary risk, disaster. While we are warmly welcomed with fairy floss, another vendor moves among us with a tray of forks, some of which are later impaled in a fellow performer. But for the most part The Candy Butchers only flirt with evil and accident, the personae of its performers barely sketched in, the plotting loose, although Jess Love is consistently nervy and bashful, and DJ Garner’s virtuosity keeps him well in focus. We are curiously denied the full force of the Azaria Universe personality. However, Candy Butchers definitely has its moments and some substantial ones at that, especially when a whole routine, stage apparatus and all, comes apocalyptically down.

…it’s only a rehearsal

The first part of …it’s only a rehearsal places dancers Line Termoen and Dmitri Jourde in a tight cycle of movement that initially keeps them apart. They glide, they fall, rise up, become aware of each other, circle tenatively until their legs entwine, the faltering piano score quickening, and they collapse into one. But his grip and the application of his weight look oppressive and, later, even murderous with his hands around her neck. Is this a bad spouse scenario? Both perform solos, his furiously energetic, hers relatively languid. He runs at her; it looks like a tackle, but amazingly she absorbs it and the pair sink into sensual embrace. They’ll do it again and, again, the way his hands reach around her neck, the way he sits her on his lap, her weariness, suggest a trap. Or is it foreplay? She lifts him effortlessly before they embrace (she says, “kiss the eyes, but don’t let me steal your breath away”).

In a radical gear change, the performers tell in English and then, at length in French, the story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses of the virgin goddess Artemis who wreaks vengeance on Acteaon, the hunter, after he sees her naked. Is what we first witnessed a modern variation on an ancient theme of male invasion and violation, but one more palpable and more dangerous than an intrusive gaze? The hunter is turned into a stag and eaten by his own dogs. The story is delivered (if untintelligibly for many), with vigour after which the couple return to their dancing selves, he to exhaustion after a barrage of break dancing inflected moves, a head spin and sudden hand stands. She sinks into her sinous self and reaches out…for him? Performed with power, subtlety and a spooky intimacy …it’s only a rehearsal is enjoyable dance theatre yielding moments of fine choreographic inventiveness and an intriguing theme. It also lives up to its title, it is a rehearsal, the rehearsal of myth, its tireless return and reinterpretation in the search for meaning. Only the word ‘only’ niggles; something more serious is afoot.

Sidetrack Performance Group, The Pessoptimist, directed and adapted by Don Mamouney from the novel by Emile Habiby; performers Paul Barakat, Buddy Dannoun, Amanda Mitchell, Hani Malick,Mariam Saab, Ben Tari, video montage Assad Abdi; Sidetrack Studio Theatre, Sydney, Oct 20-Nov 19

Australian Theatre of the Deaf, There and Back, writer Kate Nelson, director Caroline Conlon, performers Michael Ng, Neil Phipps, Medina Sumovic, Anna Hruby, Danni Wright, Gerry Shearim, dramaturg Donna Abela, sound design Blair Greenberg, design Jhulan Aupouri, Felicity Bailey, Maria Lentidoro, Grant Kay, lighting designer Inka Stafrace; Sidetrack Studio Theatre, Sydney, No 23-26

The Candy Butchers-A Circus Sweetmeat, creators, designers, performers Derek Ives, Azaria Universe, Jess Love, DJ Garner, show director Stephen Burton, lighting Marko Respondeck, audio stitching Lynton Carr; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Nov 16-27

zero visibility corp., …it’s only a rehearsal, choreographer Ina Christel Johannessen, dancers Line Termoen and Dmitri Jourde; Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, Nov 1-12

A young man in a motorised wheelchair rather abruptly asks us to follow him into a plush-curtained waiting room. It’s all very luxurious, and I notice the gold-leaf angels painted on the ceiling. There really are angels in this architecture. Unexpectedly one wall begins to move slowly away, pulling the curtains with it. Space expands. The world changes, revealing an intricate, seemingly ramshackle performance environment that swallows the audience whole. We’re not in Shopfront anymore, Toto.

We’re seated amidst an enormous set comprising platforms and islands, with adjoining bridges and a wild profusion of clashing building styles, colours and sounds—a monumental design by Joey Ruigrok van der Werven, with production by the late and very much lamented Ian Bowie. It’s a marketplace cum cargo-cult village, and it’s heavily populated with over 20 performers making themselves at home in dozens of nooks and crannies, communicating noisily through a Babel-like confusion of repeated vocalisations, percussion and scraps of various languages.

In this world, we, the audience, are clearly the foreigners, and we’re left to sort through the fragments of phrases we might understand, trying to put the pieces together. Luckily for us, the locals are friendly, and have prepared a spectacle to welcome us into their home. While it is unclear what this spectacle is about—Creation myth? Cautionary tale? Moral fable? Bedtime story? All of the above?—the ingenuity and enthusiasm of its staging makes this question quickly redundant. The story involves an angel, rescued from the air, carrying a transistor radio, transmitting sound through space and bodies. A boat carrying a performer in a wheelchair sets sail across the sea of audience, and arrives safely at a distant port. A strange bird places her treasures safely in a large metal sphere, high in the air. Up on another wall, a piano is played raucously. Television sets grow on trees (video Sean Bacon), and flowerpots mysteriously transform into drums. The village is alive with sound. This unnameable spectacle is anarchic, energetic, and epic, the airwaves featuring indecipherable messages.

It’s frequently very loud, possessing a joyous, infectious strangeness. Director TJ Eckleberg and associate director Marc Carra run about the edges of this world like demented ringmasters, feeding fragments of rhythms around the room, spreading energy like a virus. Abstract emotive sounds fly rapidly around the town, feeding on each other, riffing on phrases—“Hey you!” “Freedom in the choices!” “You rock!” Some of the audience join in.

By rejecting a model of social competence based on a formal command of language, and by relocating the signifying process of performance in rhythm, pitch, sound and image, the Angels collaborators have levelled the performance playing field, effectively integrating an energetic mixed ability cast. The physical abilities of these performers may be different, but in this world, no one is disabled. In this work Shopfront has created an important enabling place, creating lines of flight for those usually flightless. Disability art? For these young artists, disability is someone else’s word. Highly engaging and vividly realised, Angels in the Architecture is a wild night in the theatre.

Shopfront Theatre for Young People, Angels in the Architecture, director TJ Eckleberg, associate director Marc Carra, design Joey Ruigrok van der Werven, aerial artist Bernie Regan, multimedia Sean Bacon, sound design Trevor Brown, textiles Marty Jay, costumes/props Herbert Peppard, lighting design Ian Bowie; Shopfront, Sydney, Sept 2-11

What is A Thing Called Snake? It’s “a raw mash-up of hip hop, pole dance, performance poetry, rock, punk & brutal burlesque”, according to the flyer—a description that confuses alliteration with literary style. I’m surprised no one came up with “The Bible meets Trainspotting”, or “based on an original idea by God.”

Stephen House’s script is a moral tale devoid of moralising. Its Biblical source is openly acknowledged with characters named Adam, Eve and Snake acting out the ancient allegory in a new setting. Gone is the Garden of Eden; in its place the urban jungle, or at least the squalor of inner-city bohemia. It is in part a love story with antecedents in the late 19th century. Adam and Eve have artistic ambitions—we have not moved far from the Romantic idea of the artist as outsider living precariously on the fringes of society. For all its contemporaneity it is a world that would have been recognisable to the Symbolists and Decadents. The story would presumably lose something if Adam wanted to be a plumber and Eve a hairdresser. No doubt both Adam and Eve fled from comfortable middle-class suburban homes in order to live dangerously. Desire becomes addiction when they are consumed by the desperate pursuit of “the Purple.” It’s a drug, but the name has a poetic ring (like ‘the azure’ of Mallarmé) that suggests a spiritual dimension to desire. That puts them in a line that includes Rimbaud and the Beats, but for Adam and Eve addiction has become destructive.

Enter the transvestite, Snake, with a promise of fulfilling desire at the cost of succumbing to temptation. It sounds familiar and predictable, but House gives this well-worn plot some original twists that lift it above the ordinary. His language ranges from the scatological to flights of poetry, ending with Adam and Eve achieving a kind of redemption through love. In fact the tender, hopeful ending is the biggest surprise of the evening.

For this production the Space has become a nightclub with burlesque acts, pole dancing, rock songs and live jazz. Nearly a century has passed since Marinetti exalted burlesque theatre (‘The Variety Theatre’, 1913) as the antidote to the stultifying conventions of traditional theatre, and it has not lost its appeal. The challenge to achieve real integration of such diverse material remains daunting. Geoff Cobham’s set is on 3 levels with pull-down blinds that also serve as screens for rear-projected video by Justin McGuinness. In front of this are two poles on which Eve (Alexandra Schepisi) and Snake (Vincent Crowley) perform, with Schepisi in particular demonstrating considerable prowess in this exotic form of dancing. Further forward is a small, raised stage surrounded by the audience, sitting at tables adorned with glowing coloured eggs and little plastic bags of a crystalline (but presumably legal) substance.

Schepisi is fragile and desperate but has inner strength that is essential to the lovers’ eventual redemption. Adam (Jason Klarwein) is the weaker of the two, perpetually in danger of falling off the edge. It is not surprising that he, rather than Eve, is the focus of the Snake’s manipulation. In spite of living on the street, both are curiously naïve and vulnerable. Klarwein and Schepisi give brave performances of a script that makes great demands on both of them with its explicit language, nudity and unflinching examination of painful emotions. Crowley is a commanding physical presence on stage as the cunning, worldly Snake.

Peter Nielsen’s sound design is restrained, but it is highly effective when combined with the on-stage playing of saxophonist Chris Soole. Soole’s diverse musical experience gives him a great expressive range and his contribution to the production is vital in providing continuity to the show. He becomes a musical Greek chorus commenting on the action and occasionally participating.

Director Ross Ganf has fashioned an ambitious production that at its best is provocative and disturbing. It could have been staged more simply, to equal or greater effect, but Ganf evidently believes that more really is more. On the other hand there’s no denying that he has elicited powerful and committed performances from his actors. He and writer Stephen House intend to jolt the audience and they have succeeded

InSpace, A Thing Called Snake, writer Stephen House, director Ross Ganf, designer Geoff Cobham, Space, Adelaide Festival Centre, Oct 13-22

Saxophonist Tom O'Dwyer's latest solo release Multiple Repeat is a fascinating, seductive, confusing and at times unsatisfying suite of sound. A significant part of the music community in Sydney and Melbourne has become enamoured with the musical gesture. This includes not only artists working from within the semi-intuitive world of jazz and improvised sound, but also the milieu of highly composed atonal, serialist and microtonal composition, as well as those who straddle both realms like O'Dwyer. Much of this music is characterized by punctums and exclamations, small, jagged little pieces of sound and endless leaps around scales or tempo, a hopping and skipping across sonic relationships. This keeps the listener intrigued, searching for the hidden links and associations, but always off guard, waiting for more as each gesture is cut off or circumscribed without developing into the older classical or romantic models of resolution and conclusion. This is challenging and exciting. It is 'hard listening.' Such music can also be exhausting and uniform.

O'Dwyer has produced a CD which unequivocally pushes the envelope. The early pieces consist of multi-tracked recordings, initially of mostly percussive sounds, with lip clicks and half breathed hints thrown in, producing a truly remarkable splattering of sound and texture, little clunky noises scattering about time and space. It is impressively crafted and striking but also somewhat unsatisfying. The tossing of minutiae across the sonic field leaves little to hold onto or follow moving from one isolated sonic bit to another. After dazzling with his technique in this rarefied musical form, O'Dwyer moves into altogether different material on track 3 of 6. Here instead is an uneven, raspberry-ing of sustained tones and notes, fluttering motifs of considerable beauty which hover about chords before slipping off onto others. O'Dwyer has moved from an exploration of hollowness with the early, percussive materials to one of breathiness. You can feel the gentle yet surging pulse of air as it deflates out of the saxophone and kookaburra-like vocalisations are added to the mix. The playing off and layering of these now established motifs of breath and clunk, with a few dashes of tongue towards the end, define the musical progression across the CD.

The overall effect is one of virtuosic display, with O'Dwyer's absolute mastery of his instrument being more than apparent. Like the musical gesture itself however, the CD simply ends. It does not close or resolve in any apparent manner, there is no drama or finale. This could be interpreted as a classic late Modernist gesture–”This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper”–and it soon has one hitting play again, struggling to catch the fleeting conclusion that is hinted at. This is therefore a wonderfully paradoxical recording which I am still not actually sure if I really like. This is probably not a bad thing.

Warp Records' ground-breaking release and distribution of Aphex Twin’s 1999 single Windowlicker as a unified DVD package (with both the audio visual product and associated artwork designed by director Chris Cunningham), almost single-handedly revolutionized popular music distribution. While the full impact of this belated recognition of DVD distribution is still making itself felt, more DVD music video compilations are coming onto the market. The best and most unified, coherent examples of these are the profiles of music video masters–Cunningham, Spike Jones and Michel Gondry. These exceptional collections allow one to observe each director’s development and–particularly in the case of the Gondry compilation–come with impressive extras and background interviews. Given the important role which Warp played in establishing both cinematic auteur Cunningham and drill-funk, electro and glitch composers like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Autechre and LFO, Warp’s recent entry into the field is an impressive and important addition–the lack of good extras notwithstanding (a dubious audio remix CD is all that is offered, while even the DVD table of contents is confusing).

The Warp compilation is, by definition, a less cohesive viewing experience than the director-based collections. Although Warp tends to focus on electronic musics, there is also the richly drenched neo-lounge band Broadcast (a wonderfully evocative video from Barback, playing with color whorls, oil projections and other appropriately historic motifs) or the weird, echoing, poser electro-schlock rock of vocalist Jamie Lidell (his camp performative excesses aptly serving as the basis for 2 videos here). There is moreover some doubling up with material already available on the Cunningham collection and the diverse but better presented Visual Niches series (E Motion: 2002-3). Such drawbacks aside, this is a great, extensive collection of 31 videos, allowing one to revisit the Aphex Twin trilogy of Windowlicker (the undisputed and much discussed masterpiece), Come to Daddy and Donkey Rhubarb (the latter by director David Slade), all on one DVD. The wonderful central visual motif of all three pieces is the self-consciously narcissistic multiplication of Richard James’ blankly grinning face onto multiple, aggressive, sexualized bodies.

Aside from many other fine videos, there are also several gems not previously available on DVD. There is the amazingly detailed and surprising matching of abstract mecha-style, 3-dimensional forms with Autechre’s beats in director Alex Rutterford’s Gantz Graf. Equally arresting is director Lynn Fox’s Gob Coitus, an almost butoh-esque correspondence of Chris Clark’s slurred glitch breaks with a staggering, twisted and totally transformed, human-animal-machine: mouth open, the tongue rolling up from the glottis, as the crawling, hunched structure of the dancer becomes radically Other.

Another highlight is director Daniel Levi’s brutal, schoolgirl dance sequence for LFO’s Freak, the cinematography of which is strongly influenced by recent Japanese horror film. Through close framing and the manipulation of visual playback time, the screen becomes increasingly filled with high-contrast and drably-colored, violent, young female bodies. The actual reversal of time in the vision playback, with bodies rising against gravity, accords with the highest density of sound and beat near the conclusion of the song. Finally one is left with a prone, ecstatic body, whose seizures are unnaturally in time with the closing high-hat signatures. This is a great music video and along with the revolutionary cinesonic explorations of the body produced by Cunningham, Goudry, Fox, Levi and their peers this is yet another proof that calls for the recognition of dance film as a new genre are completely superfluous.

Room 40: 2004, RM405
www.room40.org

Zane Trow has had an extremely distinguished career in Australian music and the arts. However his latest CD, For Those Who Hear Actual Voices, sadly does not represent his finest hour. Trow's career dates back to the 1970s and listening to …Actual Voices, one cannot help but feel that his compositional methods have been frozen in time.

Although this release apparently had its origins in a live performance for which Trow sampled the chaotic speech of the likes of Antonin Artaud, Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys, there is no discernable sign of these arresting sonic and intellectual references within the CD itself. Instead Trow presents a collection of muted, largely harmonic tones and soft organ atmospheres in a fashion strongly reminiscent of the early ambient movement and artists such as Vangelis and Brian Eno. The latter's proposition of “wallpaper music”–of a series of sounds so gentle and wafting as to function purely as subconscious background listening–may well have been an important development in the history of abstract electronica, however it is hard to see the appeal of such dated motifs in the context of today's more dynamic sound worlds, especially following the horrendous appropriation and reworking of Eno's principles in malls, Starbucks and shopping centers around the world.

After some fairly banal meditative early tracks, Trow does break things up a bit with deeper, more bassy tones and works which, rather than simply hovering or sustaining, become interrupted in unpredictable ways. This is however not enough to seriously challenge the overall mood of meditative sonic filler otherwise produced here. For that small audience for whom New Age sound art and un-provocative ambient music remains a preferred genre, Trow's CD may well still have appeal.

Toydeath seems a bit of a misnomer for this Sydney band. Though the group has always based their work on “circuit bending”–gutting [and rewiring] whatever toys they could get their hands on–their skill is not in the carnage they reek but rather their ability to stitch the twitching remains back together to roam again like Frankenstein’s monster. Paradoxically, after a tune-up and voice box change courtesy of Toydeath, the toys are more alive than ever.

But just as Frankenstein’s monster came to question his place in the world, the band now seems to want something more and so we come to the major development on the group’s latest album Guns, Cars & Guitars–the appearance of actual songs. This is the focus of the first half of the album, both actual songs complete with lyrics and large slabs of songs taken from toys. Whether this is good news or not depends on your point of view. It certainly makes the band’s work more accessible and even 'sensical.' However, it also detracts from Toydeath's previous strengths as it relegates the sounds of screaming and malfunctioning toys to support the songs, rather than allowing the toys to sing for themselves.

I have seen Toydeath performances where they use the toys to great effect, both sonically and to produce a sort of storyline, the performance personas such as GI Joe and L’Booby relegating those behind the masks to mere players in a pantomime along with the other toys. However, this is largely lost in the band’s recorded output as their use of toys translates only as a refusal of electronic music’s current favoring of sonic purity and reverie. This alone remains refreshing, if definitely not new and places the group in a crowd of preset pushers and plunder artists. Perhaps Toydeath's is an art based in performance and such critique is unfair but without the visual reference of the toys themselves and the players' interaction with them it is hard to sustain attention.

Curiously the most interesting moments are towards the end as the songs begin to disappear and the tracks get shorter, slipping into one another–confusion grows and you begin to feel lost in some sort of absurd maze of lo-fi sound. There are certainly moments when the toys shine, most notably when allowed to speak for themselves, producing a low bit rate chorus of confusing half sentences and repeated questions, or better yet when urged to converse with others such as on the track Oh Barbie. Unfortunately though, Guns Cars and Guitars seems to see Toydeath in a bit of an identity crisis, unsure whether they or the toys are on show.

If we can bypass for a while the cheesy ambient chillout connotations and po-mo irony that the phrase invokes, then we can consider that this is indeed what surfacedrift is. Not a “psychedelic” journey, enhancing some sort of altered state, but a carefully guided journey into focussed and attentive listening. These are pieces recorded and mixed with an ear that obviously delights in the textural complexities and aural subtleties of our everyday soundworld. Environmental recordings of the likes of open fires, rainstorms, birdsong and ocean waves are amplified, layered and re-contextualised to form the basis of the mixes of these tracks. Sonic minutiae are repositioned and foregrounded into new and sharper juxtapositions. Regular dynamic and volume relationships are altered–askew. There is a feeling of being drawn into a familiar soundspace, but at the same time reverberant spaces and aural cues seem slightly disorienting, perspectives are shifted and blurred.

Favourable and well-deserved comparisons have already been made with the structured field recordings of Chris Watson’s Weather Report and Francisco Lopez’ La Selva. This is high praise indeed as these CDs (the latter especially for me) are classics of this genre. However what sets this work apart from other purely environmental collages/remixes is the way that these environmental recordings are layered and offset with the improvised playing of found objects. It is here that Tarab’s (Eamon Sprod) live performance techniques intersect with his mixology. In performance Sprod performs using a variety of materials such as rocks, leaves, scrap metal and glass as his sound sources. Using techniques such as rubbing, scraping or dragging he is able to generate a wide palette of textures and rhythmic impulses in much the same way as that most unheralded of sound practitioners, the foley artist. Here however, these foley-style gestures are not aimed at reinforcing the believability of visual imagery or to sync action with sound, but to enhance and subtly focus the environmental recordings. They are mixed so that it is often impossible to tell what is played and what is environmental sound. The intention is not to draw attention to any distinction between performed or environmental sound–the two combine synergistically, complimenting and reinforcing each other to produce a familiar yet hyper-real soundspace. Definitely a journey into sound worth taking.

XI Records, 2002, XI127
http://experimentalintermedia.org/xi/

New York sound/installation artist and composer Michael J Schumacher founded Studio 5 Beekman and Diapason sound galleries–2 of the few in the world. His latest double audio CD Room Pieces features a 75 minute rendition of an installation work, and a set of 4 pieces exploring other approaches to composition, improvisation and instrumentation. The liner, heavy with essays, has plenty of supporting information.

The first disc’s Room Piece XI (2002) is based on an installation of the same name that Schumacher has shown many times. It's a generative piece–the composer establishes a set of parameters including the quality and movement of the sounds, and the computer generates the actual material–similar to the basic action of a screen saver. Room Piece XI is presented here in a stereo mix, while the installation itself is a multi-speaker work, reconfigured each time it is exhibited. The music is designed for gallery rather than concert listening, ie the audience will enter and leave unpredictably. Schumacher has dealt with this issue by creating a continuous stream of mini endings and beginnings, short phrases woven seamlessly together. This device is supported by the dynamics of the piece, which resemble a conversation of voices, rather than a grand dynamic of orchestral swells. These approaches are well thought out solutions to the challenges of sound in galleries. I am reminded of the clever seamlessness of Muzak–Schumacher has substituted the play of popular melodies with fragments of noise and virtuosic instrumental/sonic performances–the whole stretched into a reflective reverie.

Much of the music on both discs sparkles with a superhuman fluidity born of the digital. The compositions have an unusual sense of time, contrasting very slow drone/ambient sounds with hyper-active flickers and fragments. On disc 2, Piece in 3 Parts (2002) begins with violin and percussion performances integrating hi-speed reproduction/replication of those performances. Still (2002) pursues an ambient/computer drone of… stillness, with a nod to the micro-tonal strings of 60s European orchestral avant garde. A reworking of the prior track, Still (2002) [sic] contains the formers' ambient bed, with frantic computer music mutterings, taking the fragmented phrasing of serial composition into an acoustic realm of insects and birds. Untitled (1999), a drone piece, sounds very similar to the granite and glacier music of Phil Niblock, weighing in with a much higher density than the other tracks. Overall, the work exhibits a high degree of crafting and refinement, of contrast, dynamics, phrasing and timing.

Hailing from the incense and thick rugs end of New York, rather than the beer and sticky carpets precinct, Room Pieces is fine wine and fine dining. Rather than becoming decadent, the works such as Room Piece XI have purity and aesthetic spareness tasting faintly of minimalists such as Arvo Part, mixing Western tradition with 60s transcendence.

Sonicartstar, 2005, 001
www.singingbridges.net

Singing Bridges, the debut CD from sound artist Jodi Rose, takes the listener on a global journey through the ears of bridges. A double set, the first CD Vibrations is mostly unadorned field recordings. Compiled in chronological order we accompany Rose on her 10 year odyssey starting with her first recording of Sydney’s Anzac Bridge in 1994 (the seed of the obsession), through bridges in Vietnam, Holland, Finland, Germany, UK, USA, Spain, back to Australia and concluding in Finland.

While on the surface the sonic palette of most of the bridges offer a booming clanking similarity, several of the recordings stand out as significantly different. The Brooklyn Bridge (track 9) presents sonorities that are deep and ponderous–a worldweary under-rumble with metallic shivers and rolling rattles–concluding with an evocative siren in the distance. In contrast the Golden Gate (track 10) sample is full of fast, high pitched zaps and snaps with a natural flange effect conjuring the sci-fi sonicscape of William Gibson's bridge colonies from Virtual Light and All Tomorrows Parties. The MacIntyre Bridge in Geelong (track 11) has tuned cables that can be played like a crossbred harp and gamelan, and the recording of the Heureka Silta (track 12) bridge in Tikkurila Vantaa Finland provides a minimalist electronic static reminiscent of the finest no-input mixing. The Batman Bridge, Tasmania (track 14) sounds significantly different offering ominous tectonic creaks, low spattered static, and an escalating throaty hum–the bridge is breathing.

Rose's process is mostly one of selection and editing, with little intervention, effects or overlays. The 2 exceptions are the original Anzac Bridge piece mixed on 4-track tape which includes reverb creating an epic grandness, and the F6 Coalmining Bridge in Germany–not a suspension cable bridge like all the others–in which she uses small loops to create a post-human industrial scape. The choice to leave in recording noises and stereo dropouts is sometimes effective and sometimes awkward. However it can be seen in the proliferation of different timbres near the end of the CD that Rose is refining her recording techniques, and developing a more rigorous focus for each event.

It is in CD 2 Variations where all the manipulation takes place. Here the field recordings are remixed (using no additional samples) by artists that Rose has met on her travels. With such rich source material it would be hard not to obsess over the rhythms inherent in the booming structures, consequently many of the pieces are heavily beat-based and would work nicely on the dance floor. Tracks such as Kent McPherson's Matinkaari (track 1), Karl Muller's When Bridges Remix: Traversing the Gap (track 2) and Steve Law's stuttering, dark funk Under a Pylon (track 7) have a pleasing combination of experimentation and head nodding appeal.

Gintas K's Under the Bridge (track 3) is highly looped and rhythmic, but concentrates on the smaller sounds found in the recordings–airy hisses, gurgles and bubbles creating a welcome contrast to the epic-ness of some of the other tracks. Ed Osborne's Footfall 2 (track 9) also steers away from grand gestures choosing to lay small modulating tones over a halting rhythmic bed of taps and creaks creating an interesting gap between processed and raw sounds. In contrast Jonas Oleson takes a glitchy multiply processed approach leaving little sense of the sample in Mekong Delta Blues (track 11). Dariusz Roberte (track 5) more seamlessly remolecularises the source material to create sustained ascending and descending tones forming a choral symphony.

The jewel of Variations, if your stereo can handle it, is Untitled #168 by Francisco Lopez. Beginning with an almost inaudible but physically felt rolling undertone the piece builds adding samples of higher and higher frequency and sharpness to create a panicky experience of being sucked…is it down or up? Dramatically, with a minute to go, the intensity stops, dropping us trembling back to the just audible bass.

In an interview (RT66), Rose states that this is not the end of the bridge obsession, merely the end of a stage. She is currently working on linking live feeds of bridge performances across Finland with the intention of realising her dream, a global bridge symphony. If Singing Bridges is the research stage the final event is going to be something truly special.

Tzadik, 2004, 7095
http://www.tzadik.com/

With 4 CDs currently available relatively young New Music composer Anthony Pateras is on a roll. As well as his work with laptop scrambler Robin Fox (Coagulate, Synaesthesia, 2003), there is his superb collaboration with the onetime Lazy duo–Dave Brown (abused guitar) and Sean Baxter (distressed drums/percussion)–known in this new ensemble as Pateras/Baxter/Brown (Ataxia, Synaesthesia, 2003). Now following on from his first release of compositions (Malfunction Studies, Synaesthesia, 2001) is Mutant Theatre on John Zorn’s Tzadik label. Like Malfunction Studies, Mutant Theatre includes works for percussion and object ensemble, recorded by current and former students of the Victoria College of the Arts under the direction of the incomparable Peter Neville. Mutant Theatre also features a duet with Robin Fox as well as Fox’s electro contributions to a larger ensemble piece.

Pateras’ work is highly performative, featuring mundane sound sources such as vacuum cleaners, squeaky toys, Cage-like snippets of random transistor radio contributions, supermarket plastic bags, toy zap guns and a crushed “sacrificial violin.” The sonic contributions of these and other mundane elements adds both texture and an ambience of comic surprise to the proceedings. Therefore listening to recordings of Pateras’ compositions creates a sense that one is at some remove from the performed work. In Malfunction Studies, Pateras tried to address this by using mostly live takes, complete with audience reaction, and a rather flat acoustic space which gave this otherwise excellent CD a rather sonically deadened quality. Mutant Theatre lies at the opposite end of the sono-recording spectrum, with crisp, tightly miked instruments and a precise spatial separation of musical elements and sound sources. This provides a far more satisfying listening experience, though it would still be hard to identify the sound of such elements as a domino sculpture setting off mousetraps baited with ready-to-burst balloons if not for the liner notes.

Pateras’ compositions are also rather less arch here than in Malfunction Studies. The gestural punctums and repeated sonic crescendos of Malfunction Studies have coalesced into an easier to follow, more coherent exploration of texture with sudden strikes of atonal points occuring across discernable, underlying temporal or sonic structures. The selection of tracks on Mutant Theatre also gives a better sense of Pateras’ range and stylistic interests, covering both his wonderfully coordinated prepared piano closely feeding into self-arrested gashes of electronic sound programmed by Fox, as well as a marvelously jumping yet mellifluously flowing solo piano piece. There are also more ambitious percussion ensemble works, and complicated miniaturas played by percussion wizard Vanessa Tomlinson. If Malfunction Studies was the taster, then Mutant Theatre is the banquet payoff, a fantastic selection of hard and soft sounds, crashes and wafts, dispersed explosions and domineering sonic foci, accumulations and decays, chaos and Harry Partch-like coordinations; an endlessly surprising and satisfying New Music selection.

Room40, 2004, RM404
www.room40.org

At first, countless nights of sleeping through The Sinking of the Titanic by Gavin Bryars, given to me by performance company version 1.0 to inspire the making a soundscape for their performance work, A Certain Maritime Incident. At first, thoughts of deep green seas and recurring images of floating bodies. At first, trying to put aside the influence or recollection or subtle reminders. Some time later, Gail Priest sends me DJ Olive's Buoy and I'm staying in a house opposite the dark black abyss of parklands in the south side of my home town, Adelaide. Suddenly a perfect soundtrack for my return. There is an image of someone forgotten. Someone left drifting (we are all drifting), but this time really out at sea. In headphones I detect a constant walking (to where?). In headphones, that first moment of a needle hitting the record. Anticipation of further somethings and then nothing.

I'm kind of warmed by references in the sleeve notes to Melbourne and friends and old houses and borrowed floors and peopled spaces and a stranger who bring cups of tea in a mug with the name Shirley on it. Of looking through the stranger's record collection, finding the albums you'd always wanted to play, or liked the look of, like that group the Art Bears or something. Falling asleep against cat-fur covered carpet.

DJ Olive says: “this is a sleeping pill… listen to it as quietly as you possibly can.” I like instructions, unexpected. Like I knew this already. And music for your movies (ok, a Pram ep reference, had to slip one in), perfect somnabulists. And echoes of images of Derek Jarman, thoughts of a Simon Fisher Turner composition. All suspension and sadness. The milky night (…sudden stars). The aloneness of Buoy, like comforting whispers, whatever. How to talk about the kind of music that, like the bouy Olive speaks of, is not an object or a marker, instead remains cloudy and nocturnal.

I'm also thinking of that song by Mick Karn/David Sylvian, Bouy – cos there's more to this than meets the eye – and romantic swells and really, what are we looking at anyway? I'm probably doing the thing I've always found uncomfortable, to describe images as analogies for sound. And writing a review you need a thesaurus for. Shit. Sound just is. This is not the sound of a night’s sleepover in an inner north Melbourne share house. This is not the sound made for an imaginary movie. This is not the sound of the sea. It isn't anything. But I know I've been here before. And I'm happy to just be here, floating. Letting someone else scan through the short waves. Reluctant but seduced by the signals sent of unknown languages. Happy listening. Boring as that might seem. You can see the changes. The rain doesn't stop, but there's a blanket there and a pile of books half read. Must be morning. Everything flows.

On any Sunday, rain or shine, Newcastle’s harbour foreshore is taken over by motor vehicles and people with a passion for them. Cars crawl bumper to bumper as drivers cruise or ‘lap’ up and down a half kilometre stretch of road between roundabouts. The roadsides and parking bays are littered with stationary vehicles, many with bonnets raised and boots and doors flung wide open. Groups of people gather in and around the metal carapaces to check out body art, engine modifications, state-of-the-art sound systems, interior outfitting and design and, of course, each other. The gathering spills over onto the grassy verges of the roadside where old couches, picnic furniture and eskies are unloaded from vehicles so that the producers of the spectacle may also consume it in comfort and at leisure. The live experience of this DIY culture with its aesthetics firmly grounded in motor vehicles and place is so powerful for the participants that it has a half life most weekday afternoons and Saturday evenings and is augmented by a virtual community (www.newcastlelaps.net). At the same time, the forceful presence of a predominantly youth-oriented car culture in a prime public place, recently redeveloped for recreational uses, has ignited community debate and moral panic.

The spectacle of this Newcastle car culture has captured the imagination of creative teams who’ve seized on the opportunity to showcase, develop, adapt and diversify its grounded aesthetics and performative rituals. In 2004 and 2005 Hammer and Tongs (formerly Freewheels Theatre Company) worked with car culture afficionados to co-produce the site-based, new media performances, Speedcity (director Sally Sussman) and Speedcity: Full Throttle (Stefo Nantsou). Cars, divided and grouped by type (stereo, show, history, works in progress), took turns to lap a straight stretch of road leading onto a large roundabout in the middle of which an audience of the curious and enthusiastic had gathered. Cars were choreographed so that their arrival on the roundabout coincided with sound and video, created by the participants in VJ-ing workshops, detailing aspects of the cars and the attendant ‘lifestyle.’ Quite spontaneously, spectators climbed into cars parked on the roundabout and rode along for parts of the performance. Performers and spectators continued to mingle around the cars for well over an hour after the performance ended.

L!vesites, a progam initiated by Newcastle City Council in 2003 and supported by arts and corporate funds, also draws on the Newcastle car culture and Hammer and Tongs’ Speedcity in Motor/Home, described as “an intimate performance event in motor vehicles.” Livesites director Michael Cohen invited Simone O’Brien to develop her festival hit, Hell on Wheels, performed solo in her XF Panelvan, into “a group performance in non-traditional theatre venues.” O’Brien conducted workshops with local artists and TAFE and Newcastle University Drama students to create an on-site event presenting multiple images of “our domestic transport environments”—private worlds on wheels.

In a public square, a score of motor vehicles are arranged in a large circle. Tables and chairs in the middle of the circle are turned towards a jazz band playing in an open topped convertible. Spruikers talk up business for their acts and, with limited audience capacity, record names on a blackboard to reserve places for the next 10-15 minute set piece. I Left My Heart in a Small Van Disco (DJ Kooky Mama, DJ Kato and DJ Patsan) is a Ford Transit van decked out inside with mirror balls and lights. The DJ sits in the driver’s seat, manipulating the deck over the van controls while about 6 of us dance in the back. It’s a non-threatening introduction to intimate ‘vehicular theatre.’

I grab some popcorn on the way into Huw’s Kombi Cartunes. Huw Parkinson projects his own animations onto a screen set up in his Kombi (orange on the outside, red velvet on the inside) while he plays self-composed accompaniment live from the boot. Next is Aunty Peach (Alison Brazier), a petite and proper looking elderly lady happily knitting and chewing gum on the bench seat of her EH Holden. As we climb into the car (boot and all) she removes the gum, sticking it to the end of her knitting needles. She reels us in with tales, familiar yet strange, and offers of Iced Vovos. I notice plastic insects entangled in the lace decorating the inside of the EH. It suddenly feels very close in the car.

Escaping from Aunty Peach, Hell on Wheels’ Sera Tonin (Simone O’Brien), an 80s fashion devotee in stretch denim jeans and ‘Physical’ T-shirt, stuffs us into her XF Panelvan. She climbs into the back of the van with about 5 or 6 of us and demonstrates her acrobatic skills, even more impressive in such a small and crowded space. After this warm-up act she elicits from us stories of sexual experiences in cars. Then there is some rearrangement of spectators from front to back in the XF as Sera takes over in the front seat for some singing and lip synching with a mechanic’s car lamp to an obviously much loved and very distorted tape of Cold Chisel’s Khe San. We are encouraged to join in a couple of verses and the chorus but Sera and her melodramatic lip-synching steal the show.

Tumbling out of the XF I finally manage to get inside Trail O’Gold (Lauren O’Brien, Yetta Abrahams), a popular act performed in and around a caravan (with spruiker, ‘Sven’ doubling as ‘masseuse’ to his demanding star). Inside, and once she wakes from her post-coital nap, we are offered an audience with the ‘Novocastrian, almost A-grade star’, Denise Logie-Gold. This act gently parodies Newcastle’s love affair with amateur dramatics and minor celebrities. It includes some hilarious local references and a rendition of The Newcastle Song (Bob Hudson 1975), confirming it as a firm favourite on the circuit.

L!vesites offers an extensive cultural programme of fun and lively site-based performance events of which Motor/Home is just one example. The success of the program has much to do with its director, Michael Cohen who is responsive to and draws on community initiatives. He also puts something back into place by drawing on his broad contacts in the world of contemporary performance and utilizes them to train up and build the creative capacities of local artists. In this form L!vesites is an immeasurably important addition to a local scene where opportunities are reduced due to the much documented crisis in the ‘small to medium’ arts sector. It is about to claim Hammer and Tongs and has already erased a whole range of other things around town. Cohen’s cunning use of a corporate sponsored position to generate popular performances is actually creating a vibrant performance scene in Newcastle and expanding the sense of what might be possible and performable in the future.

Newcastle L!vesites, Motor/Home, performance director Simone O’Brien, project director Michael Cohen, designer Tim Neve, production manager Gererd Wilson, sound designer George Calligorous; Newcastle, Fridays in September.

Shock Records, 2004, FOM0011

It’s easy to see why The Necks have generated such a cult following over the past decade; their whole approach flies so defiantly in the face of all that characterises contemporary life. Their music poses questions in an era of pat answers, demands attention in a culture of distraction, and requires time in fast-paced world. The Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami once claimed he took it as the highest compliment when people fell asleep while watching his movies, a comment that came to mind while listening to The Necks’ latest release. Kiarostami’s films carve out a space in which our minds can wander, drifting through the disparate thoughts, memories and resonances evoked by his images. Similarly, The Necks carve music in time which is never the same twice over.

The new release comprises 2 disks, each an hour long. Mosquito begins with an uncertain, staccato dialogue between wooden blocks played by Tony Buck and Chris Abrahams’ piano. There are long stretches of silence, until the tinkering is joined by methodical, heavy notes periodically emanating from Lloyd Swanton’s double bass. A steady rhythmic purr starts up, sounding like an outboard motor travelling parallel to the band, until it branches off on its own path and fades into the distance.

Mosquito summons images of a slow journey up river in a humid tropical clime, with passing river traffic, wooden blocks evoking the night-time calm of a distant outpost of exotic Orientalist imaginings. At one point a mosquito buzzes in the listener’s ears. Seven minutes in, piano chords join the conversation and a structure begins to form, incrementally. In a Necks performance, the journey is the message. The trip has to be seen through to its end or not embarked upon at all—this is not a CD you can dip into. The sounds of the opening return at the end: we are back in port, our dream journey complete as the memories linger.

See Through is more typical of The Necks’ live work. It opens with a prolonged wash of cymbals, a persistent percussive rumble and a piano tracing melodic lines deep in the mix. See Through never leaves its starting point, hovering above the same spot as the trio work the sound, endlessly stretching the aural possibilities. Silences come and go, but always the rumble returns, a shimmering mirage of incandescent sounds on the horizon, continually threatening to burst over the listener or disappear completely.

Mosquito and See Through offer quite different experiences. I preferred See Through’s constantly shifting shimmer to Mosquito’s circular narrative, but each disk provides a unique musical exploration that demands concentration, rewarding the listener with a dream-like realm of infinite possibilities. The effect is only surpassed by the hypnotic energy The Necks generate on stage.

Alias Frequencies, 2004, AF004
http://aliasfrequencies.org

Now based in Köln, Hinterlandt is known to most as Jochen Gutsch. This album offers a snapshot of his musical outings while living in Sydney and, perhaps due to the contrast between European winter and our long, loving summers, this record is overtly pop in its overtones. There’s a sense of ecstatic jubilance, as each of the 4 original tracks (even at their most abstract) maintain a playful demeanor.

Recorded using a range of hand held and live instrumentation, the merging of pop sensibilities, lilting electronic passages and the occasional burst of experimental sound texture mingle well and suggest Hinterlandt’s diversity comes from a long term interest in exploring the possibilities of combination, juxtaposition and collage.

There are some moments of real genius—Gutsch’s cover of Making Plans For Nigel is really something. He breaks down the groove, tugging at the vocal line to create a grittier tune and hurls layer upon layer of delay into the drums to create a slow burning fuse, so that the track unfolds with a slowly building crest. Half way through there’s an explosion of gutsy distortion; you can hear that this guy has really planned his assault on a classic song.

While possibly ironic (as in the title track, New Belief System), the sonic references back to 80s pop moods tend to reduce the effectiveness of the music's transformational qualities. You can’t help but find yourself distracted by the choice of terrible crash cymbals and cheesy synth settings. However, on the whole Hinterlandt has created an enjoyable and eclectic record, furnished with a strong willingness to give anything a try. It’s pop music—but it’s pop music with a bent that’s genuinely endearing.

Room40, 2004, EDRM403
www.room40.org

It’s a tough life out bush and some of those towns don’t last the distance. Times get hard, the townsfolk git and the place just up and dies. That’s where Lawrence English went to make the field recordings for Ghost Towns—dead towns in the Queensland bush. Ghost Towns is a longish piece, 18 or so minutes, but being the only track makes for a short CD.

Ghost Towns is not a field recording, the raw sound is gently treated, but it still sounds like a specific place with specific objects being plucked, struck, or listened to. Like Dziga Vertov with Kino Pravda, English gets at the audio truth through all the possible means and techniques of recording (as against the means and techniques of signal processing).

Sometimes Ghost Towns is up close, everything in your face. Other times it’s spacious, drones in the back, discrete sounds up front. The start is quiet, big gong drum, space between the sounds, insects, birds, and shaky, rattling somethings over a low drone of wind rumble or maybe a distant plane. Some crummy setting-up-the-mic interference noise. The mic and plane take Ghost Towns away from that nostalgic space that deletes the artificial, separates humans from animals, and sees us as noisy intruders.

Another gong, another section break, and into plunky metallic sounds like bike spokes and walking about on old tin. Space has settled into a mid versus close recording, the sound stage shallow compared to the opening. This middle section seems to be about doing something with whatever was at hand, about performing the ghost town.

Scratches and crinkles start to pan about from left to right. In the background metal plates bang like gongs again. Suddenly a great creaking Scooby Doo door right up front and loud, then back into spacious sound. Cockatoos squawk, cicadas drone loud and loud and loud enough to kill. Back to plinking spokes, wires, the interior of an abandoned piano. “Can’t get it on the truck. You never played it anyway. Let’s go.” Dust on the verandah. Rust on the tin. Bass strings flap around, roll down low then stop–like a dead town.

Cajid Media, 2004, CD003
www.cajid.com

Cajid Media's 2 most recent releases could not be more dissimilar. Bruce Mowson's Static Tones constitutes a dry and unrelenting exploration of the aural perceptual effects created by throbbing, pulsing blocks of rather difficult sound. Lawrence English's Transit however is a seductive, beautiful suite which melds field recordings with airy, epic organ effects, gentle musique concrete atmospheres, and dramatic, punctilious aural flourishes.

English's 7 track set was inspired by the concept of travel and aural specificity, its sources moving from Thailand to Tasmania, the urban fringes of Japan, Northern England and Vietnam. While these samples broadly evoke the concept of place, English lifts these discrete elements out of their original context and mixes them so that no specific sites or aural landscapes are directly evoked. The effect suggests a sense of gradual change or horizontal movement from one environment to another (mostly from track to track), coupled with a strong impression of how these once site-specific sonic motifs have become deeply embedded within the warp and weft of these new, abstract aural realms. The sounds have therefore changed from being field recordings–recorded “in the field”, constituting a form of sonic anthropology or record–to become strongly implicated within and affiliated to a broad, gently cycling and moving field of sound, a cloud-like blanket or nexus of mobile elements within which they sit.

The manipulation of the depth of field makes up one of the primary organizing principles of English's composition. Smaller sounds with a sharper attack and decay, such as plucked strings, tapped tubes, lightly-scraped phonograph needles, distorted vocals, ceramic clicks, bird or insect sounds, short sine wave and beeps, and other fragments, occupy the sonic foreground, while indeterminate rumbles or harmonious tones fill the background, providing a deep yet fluctuating bed into which these lighter elements are placed. If there is a weakness across the pieces overall it is in the use of choral-like organ chords or hummed vocals to convey a sense of the epic, the beautiful and/or the mysterious which at times approaches dated, New Age cliches from Brian Eno or Vangelis. English's wavering sonic fields are however too richly complicated to permit his work to actually conform with such worn motifs. It is indeed partly by skirting such familiar references that English makes his evocative materials so easy and pleasurable to listen to. For those looking for contemporary sound art which largely avoids the impenetrable aural harshness or difficulty of much otherwise fine new work, English's gorgeous, evocative collection should not be missed.

Synaesthesia, 2004, SYN012
www.synrecords.com/

Digital culture is obsessed with synaesthesia, especially sound/image convergence. From club ‘visuals’ to automatic ‘visualiser’ plugins for mp3 applications, there’s an ideal of sensory fusion at work which draws on cyber/psychedelic rave culture, and utopian new media discourse.

Ideals aside, digital media forms do create new potential for varieties of ‘machine’ synaesthesia–automatic mappings between sound and image. Visualiser plugins offer specific and more-or-less arbitrary mappings of image to sound. While they can’t (promise to) induce a synaesthetic experience, they do offer a machine synaesthesia that might challenge, reorder, or at least reflect on, our own audiovisual perception. Yet most synaesthesia machines are little more than bolted-on nozzles that turn all your favourite tunes into generic visual sludge.

By contrast Robin Fox’s Backscatter disc presents a highly specific and refined synaesthesia machine. He has assembled a simple audiovisual synthesiser, using simple digitally synthesised audio and an old analog oscilloscope. The oscilloscope is in ‘polar’ mode, so instead of scanning left to right, displaying the conventional ‘trace’ of the waveform, the trace orbits the screen. Waveforms create woven circles, loops, twisting spirals, filigreed knots.

Response is instantaneous, so the screen jumps and twitches in sync with Fox’s audio signature skitters and blips. The sound-vision mapping is supple, the images beautiful and sometimes surprising. The pieces feel quite controlled, even composed, the way they seem to literally reveal new twists and tricks. Overall, the results are staggering.

Antboy 06, 2004/2005
Antboy 04, 2003
www.antboymusic.com

For some time now former Melbourne-based percussionist Will Guthrie has been developing a distinctive and arresting aesthetic in which bowed and/or vibrated metallic objects provide a semi-harmonious, sustained base into and on-top of which are placed a series of scattered scrapes, twangs, clicks and percussive stutters. Building Blocks is one of his most impressive and satisfying releases in this vein, a 3-track suite in which these resonating tones are introduced and built upon before other elements gradually intrude, finally producing a dense and nearly overwhelming net of electronic, ringing sheets and metallic fragments, peaking, lightly squealing and shaking, as they fill the acoustic space. The tones themselves are generated by placing handheld, battery-powered fans against metallic objects (cymbals, sheets of tin, steel drums, springs), which are then miked up. The proximity of the fan to the striking object, its slightly imperfect tempos and hit rate, as well as the carefully judged mixing of this material, helps to give a complicated and seductive ebb and flow to the sustained elements. Chains, toys, springs and chimes are then hit in isolation or placed upon a drum head to create the other discrete elements, causing Guthrie's live performances to resemble a virtuosic display of physical gestures and inter-twinings, as his hands leap about his assembled collection of noise-making devices. As recorded works, these are patient, subtle pieces, the CD clocking in at 50 minutes, in which one progresses from Ligetti-like choral hums and screams, to Guthrie's more distinctive, creaking and sproinging materials.

La respiration des saintes [The Breath of Saints] represents Guthrie's latest direction under the moniker Charlie Charlie, a collaboration with Erell Latimier, initiated since moving to France. Although dense and more difficult it is more sonically challenging and inventive, like some intense early musique concrète testing the limits of organized sound. On this CD-single (which sadly only runs to 14 minutes), Guthrie has smashed together scraps of text from French radio broadcasts, as well as abstract radiophonic materials, and other elements so obscure, so wonderfully perverse and strange, that it is difficult to determine how they were produced percussively—or indeed in any other fashion. It may be that, in his use of barely comprehensible text, Guthrie is referencing such classic works as Pierre Henry's Eurydice, Antonin Artaud's Pour finir avec le judgement de dieu [To Have Done With the Judgement of God] or the radio transmissions from the underworld featured in Jean Cocteau's film Orphée. Whether or not this is the case, Guthrie's composition echoes such precedents gesturing towards an uncharted, haunted realm of sound, close to both death and a collapse of meaning. Thus, unlike Building Blocks, La respiration des saintes exceeds its origins to create a new and essentially spectral, rather than performative, sonic world, unmoored from its origins in percussion and semi-improvised live composition.

The material is densely stratified with a sense of multiple spaces and worlds created and then densely impacted in a kind of sono-acoustic layer cake. It is like listening to a piece of unmapped archaeology, as the listener skates past the side of panels of rock-hard sound layers and spatial devices laid on top of each other, running parallel in a great, deformed mass. Vocals, rumbles, ringing sounds (presumably generated by bowed cymbals or other similar objects), far distant elemental cries, howls of electronics and strange swipes or deformed bleed-throughs of tape, as well as aggressive, closely miked crushings—all of these materials move about the world which Guthrie has created. The foreground tends to be small, discrete, composed of more isolated units of apparently percussive sources, while the almost never-ending sonic depths behind this tends to rise and fall with a diverse and bewildering array of materials. This is a wonderful recording which merits repeated listening precisely because of its unmasterable abstraction, the sense that it goes beyond its absent sound sources to create something truly unknowable and sublime. Although it is frustrating to have such an absorbing CD with only one medium-length track on it, La respiration des saintes is worth having. Through such works, one might yet be able to walk through the mirror with Death and be reunited with our deceased, emotional doppelganger in the Afterlife (“Vous saviez qui je suis?” “Oui.” “Dit que le.” “Ma Morte.” “Parfait.”).

Sharna Vrhowec has a powerful sense of the surreal, and the determination to make it happen. Clearly influenced by her former teacher and mentor, Margaret Cameron, Vrhowec is focused on the ways in which her performance is able to stage something out of the ordinary. She doesn't mind making her audience wait, perhaps too long, perhaps not, in order to create a moment of intensity. Unlike Cameron, Vrhowec's work is not text-based. She uses her body and its trappings.

Traces of Splendour and Decay begins with an installation and concludes with a series of performative snapshots in a strange space in the back of Gasworks Theatre, a cordoned off and converted section of rehearsal space. Not perfect but it will do. A dozen or so people are taken into the space, firstly to file past a naked woman lying face down on the floor. Although inert, this is an after-image of drama, as if the tidal wave has just passed. She lies clutching a tablecloth which is half on/half off a dinner table. Crockery and cutlery is strewn around her, looking like a failed version of that magic trick where the magician whips off the cloth leaving the tableware intact. Because she is naked, the scene is not quite domestic. Furthermore, her body is covered by a long scroll of text. The audience pauses, then moves on.

We sit for some time, not sure if this is time or timing. Lights flash, then we hear the clip-clop of heels. Darkness again. A woman in a revealing black dress is perched on a stool beside a doll's tea service sipping tea. It's all a little bit too precious. She darts an aggressive look at us. Whilst her body is on display, her look challenges ours, disrupts normality. There is almost the sense of a split between face and body. Is the body unable to look back? Not always, though it is coded here as a to-be-looked-at being. The woman challenges us: “Did you hear that?” Was someone crying? Vrhowec retreats to a dark corner to remove her clothes. Having wrapped herself almost entirely in Glad Wrap, she does the most fabulous skitter along a back wall.

It is refreshing to see a young performer who's prepared to manipulate the perceptions of her audience. Nothing was laid out for the casual observer. We had to strain, with time to think about what we had seen and what might happen next. If Vrhowec intends to use movement and not much text, perhaps we might see a more finely nuanced physical expression in future works. It's nice to know that, whatever the content, it promises to be thoroughly outside the logic of the everyday.

Traces of Splendour and Decay, solo performance, Sharna Vrhowec, technical assistance Noel Lloyd, Kristy Ross; Gasworks Theatre, Melbourne, September 14-15

Artrage is onto a winner with Crossfire, although next year the organisers might want to consider a bigger venue, graduated stages and stadium seating. The multi-stage centrepiece event of the Northbridge Festival was an unprecedented crowd puller, packing 8,000 people like sardines into a space less than a square kilometre in size.

Crossfire, a dance-off pitting opposing dance styles against each other on multiple stages decked out like boxing rings, was staged for the first time last year as part of an Artrage fringe event in the outer Perth suburb of Midland. The success of the event saw it moved this year to the crossroads of James and Lake Streets, 2 of the busiest streets in Perth’s entertainment district.

Over 20 different dance groups and exponents of as many dance styles battled it out on 5 stages—one main stage flanked by 4 smaller ones on each side, aided by little more than a soundtrack cue.

While ballet dancers pirouetted on the main stage, a Ukrainian Cossack troupe picked up the pace on stage 2; tappers took on belly dancers, bootscooters faced off Spanish dancers; Perth Wildcats cheerleaders came up against hip hoppers; and African dancers challenged swing dancers in a triumph of split-second timing and choreography. Perhaps understandably, the overwhelming crowd favourite was the final risque round, which saw fitness school pole-dancers pitting sheer athleticism against the raw sexuality of adult industry professionals while between them, calisthenics exponents split, twisted and somersaulted centrestage.

Individually choreographed performances prior to and between dance-offs borrowed from boxing and sporting traditions, with performances preceded by rousing fanfare, hype and hoopla courtesy of raucous hosts, placard-waving girls, EPW wrestlers and sword fighters.

Punters pushed and jostled for space on the streets and in surrounding restaurants, in some cases creating health hazards by jumping onto flimsy barriers designed only to cordon off alfresco dining areas. Meals lay forgotten on tables as restaurant patrons lucky enough to have booked tables in advance of the event stood on their chairs to get a better view.

The successful execution of Crossfire is particularly remarkable considering the conditions under which it was produced. Logistical requirements meant everyone had to get it right the first time, without the benefit of rehearsals, preliminary checks or tests for lighting or sound. As stages could only be erected on the day, lighting was programmed in a virtual computer environment, and a soundtrack pieced together with a lot of foresight and even more guesswork, while dancers were armed with only a schedule and a stage manager to guide them.

The set-up may have been the only thing to miss the mark—stages were spaced 10 or so metres apart to allow audiences to move freely between them, but the capacity crowd meant the only really satisfying view for most of us would have been an aerial one.

Is it ludicrous to imagine that in 10 years time Antalya’s Avrasya (Eurasian) Film Festival might rival Cannes as one of Europe’s pre-eminent film events? The first Eurasian Film Festival and market, held in Turkey from September 24 to October 1 in 2005, was a strategic attempt by the Turkish government to establish an alternative film market and nurture a growing local film culture. Held in conjunction with the annual Golden Orange Film Festival, one of the new festival’s aims was to forge alliances between Turkish and foreign film producers and inspire future co-production activity.

This festival comes abreast of an extraordinary resurgence in commercial Turkish film production. In 2004 local films took 38% of the local box office, followed by a whopping 60% for the first quarter of the year (Anna Franklin, “Local Pix boffo in Turkey”, Variety, April 25-May 1, 2005), a far greater proportion than any country in Europe.

Against a background of limited direct government support for filmmakers, the mounting of the new Eurasian Film Festival beside its 42-year-old Golden Orange counterpart had financial support from the Prime Minister to the Local Municipal Mayor. For the Mediterranean resort town of Antalya, more famous for its ancient ruins and tourism (predominantly German and Russian and annually numbering in millions), this festival is an intervention into the worn-out film festival circuit. Turkey’s dynamic media sector ensured that in the weeks prior to the festival, it was impossible to avoid articles in every national daily paper, while for weeks afterwards the coverage raged on.

The feeling amongst seasoned international guests was that apart from the Turkish films, most of the international feature films in the program had already had fairly wide festival play. Kim Ki Duk’s The Bow (Ki Duk was honoured as a special guest at the festival), Michael Haneke’s Cache, Lars von Trier’s Manderlay, Marc Ruthemund’s Sophie Scholl and Krzysztof Krauze’s My Nikifor had already been well lauded abroad. The festival also featured ‘Silk Road Films’, ‘The Cream of Europe’, ‘Lost Souls: Horror Films from the Far East’ and an Eric Ledune retrospective. The only Turkish film in the coveted 1st International Eurasian Feature Film Competition was Semih Kaplanoglu’s Melegin Düsüsü (The Angel’s Fall).

There was some disappointment with the general lack of talent amongst this year’s crop of Turkish features. However, veteran Yavuz Turgul’s new film, Gonul Yarasi (Lovelorn), also Turkey’s submission to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film, was a favourite amongst many international guests. The film’s leading actor, Sener Sen, featured as the Kurdish outlaw in Turgul’s hit film Eskiya (The Bandit, 1996) which signalled the recent revival in Turkish cinema. Gonul Yarisi won Sen the Best Actor award.

The 2 films that took out the main prizes sparked a heated debate in Turkish media. Turev (Derivative), directed by Ulas Inac, won the Best Film award while Kutlug Ataman’s Iki Genc Kiz (Two Girls), which had its international premiere at the Sydney Film Festival in 2005, received the Best Director Award. Against a tradition of the Best Actress Award going to an established star, such as Meltem Cumbul from Gonul Yarisi, newcomers Beste Bereket from Turev and Vildan Atasever from Iki Genc Kiz shared the award.

Iki Genc Kiz explores the complex social fabric of life in Istanbul through a relationship between 2 marginalised girls from differing backgrounds. Stylistically similar to Turev, with its gritty hard-edged realism, both films display a raw energy for life in contemporary Istanbul, a city in rapid transition. Debut writer-director, Ulas Inac based Turev on a short story from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, in which a young woman persuades her best friend to seduce her boyfriend to prove his fidelity (or not). A naturalistic DV flick, reportedly made on a budget of less than $20,000AUD, Turev is seen by local critics as inspired by the Danish Dogme movement. As Bilge Ebiri has noted, until the advent of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Palm D’Or winning Uzak (Distant), Turkish cinema has rarely exploited improvisation or naturalism as a stylistic or narrative device, no doubt due to the technical challenges that post-synchronised sound poses (“Blinking by the Bospohorus: Discoveries at the 24th Istanbul International Film Festival”, www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/festivals/05/36/istanbul2005.html). The dialogue in some Turkish films retains a staged, theatrical quality. Turgul’s Eskiya, made as recently as 1996, was in fact the first Turkish feature film to use synchronised sound during its production.

In the ensuing debate over the awards, Kutlug Ataman, who is probably more renowned abroad for his cutting-edge contemporary visual art and video installations, argued that the role of film festivals should be to reward films (and actors) that don’t get the exposure or publicity that the more big-budgeted, popular films with their star casts can buy. In this respect both Iki Genc Kiz and Turev (also featured at this year’s Istanbul Film Festival) were appropriate choices.

The exciting discovery was the extremely strong selection of documentaries in the national competition. Interestingly, 10 out of the 15 films were directed by women, and many focused on women’s stories. Melis Birder took out the Jury’s Special Award with her documentary, The Tenth Planet: A Single Life in Baghdad. This film provides much needed respite from the US media’s incessant coverage of the war and instead portrays some intimate moments and everyday challenges of living in present day Baghdad from the perspective of Kawab, a young Iraqi woman. This alternative vision of life in war-torn Baghdad, coupled with Kawab’s screen talent and humour, make this a timely and extraordinary documentary.

Of equal note was Pelin Esmer’s Oyun (The Play) concerning the scripting and performance of a play by some rural women, many of them illiterate, living in a remote Turkish village in the Taurus ranges. With the help of a local teacher they script a play from their personal experiences on topics close to their hearts, such as the death of newborn children, domestic violence, errant husbands and coping with childbirth alone. The play they finally perform deftly critiques, as well as gently mocks, the behaviour of the local men in the village, many of whom form its audience. What makes this documentary really outstanding is the way in which the women’s involvement in their play so clearly becomes a transformative experience, echoing the political role that cinema, and particularly documentary, can play in bringing about social change.

The strength of this documentary program bodes well, not only for the future talent in the industry, but also the potential for more female filmmakers to give voice to a diversity of experiences in a country which is often thought of, unjustly in some instances, to be especially patriarchal. While female feature film directors are few and far between, there are a number of notable female producers working in the industry.

An impressive Closing Awards Ceremony held at the massive Ancient Roman open-air amphitheatre at Aspendos wrapped up the festival on a note of optimism. The extraordinary artists featured at this event—a Whirling Dervish, and the mesmeric Sufi fusion band Mercan Dede who played with Kurdish singer, Aynur—perfectly articulated an eclectic but dynamic, modern Turkish cultural identity. These musicians also feature prominently in Fatih Akin’s musical masterpiece Istanbul Hatirasi (Crossing the Bridge, the Sounds of Istanbul) which received an overwhelming response when screened at Cannes earlier this year. If the closing ceremony is any indication, this festival and film market has the potential to become something much larger and more significant on the international film scene. A film industry journalist sitting beside me on the 1-hour return trip from Aspendos admitted clocking up more than 150 film festivals over the last few years claiming that this was the best closing ceremony that she had witnessed.

Rather than looking west to the European film sector to create links, some of which have already been made (through arthouse filmmakers such as Italian-based Ferzan Ozpetek and German Fatih Akin), this Eurasian festival and market should exploit the unique opportunity to glance eastwards and create a niche for itself, perhaps focusing on those comparatively less serviced film industries, such as Russia and Central Asia. Turkey, as a not-quite-yet-European nation, located in the Middle East with cultural links to Central Asia, seems a logical place to host an event such as this. And I suspect that the festival organisers hope that the Eastern Mediterranean city of Antalya, with its calm seas, beautiful weather, ancient ruins and abundant nightlife, may soon be able to attract the kinds of stars and filmmakers that frolic by the Riviera—and on top of that, lure the international media fanfare and press coverage that follows them.1st international

Avrasya Film Festival and 42nd Anatalya Golden Orange Film Festival, Antalya, Turkey Sept 24-Oct 1

David Perry is one of Australia’s most significant moving image artists. In a career spanning over 40 years, innovation figures emphatically: in his role in the pioneering avant-garde film group Ubu; teaching video and television techniques and making important video art in the formative days of the medium; and in his continued creation of complex experimental film works.

With other experimental ‘filmers’ [a self-description used by Perry to align filmmakers with painters and writers], Perry faced a prevailing anti-art discourse and obsession with the national narrative cinema. His very early film experiments on Standard 8 in the early 1950s stand out as among the first self-consciously ‘artistic’ films in the nation. However, “that was seen to be just a waste of time…the only thing to do as a filmmaker [was] to make entertainment feature films which told stories in a most conventional way”. Perry’s innovative work is overdue for reconsideration and recognition. He spoke to me on the eve of the release of his DVD entitled Old Films and Videotapes.

What’s on the DVD is all the “experimental” work done between 1953 and 2002 that I could get my hands on. It’s actually a double DVD package with a ‘bonus’ disc containing a few health education productions from the 80s which I included as examples of what an idealistic, “arty” film maker might have to do to support him/herself.

Most of the productions included are just as they were when I finished them (apart from the ravages of time and careless projectionists). I did try to do a little bit of grading on many shots and/or sequences to make contrast, brightness and colour as good as possible for the video screen. In one case only have I done a complete re-cut [of A TV Show, 1975].

Mad Mesh (1968) is one of the first ‘video-graphic’ works in Australian art and significant when compared to similar experiments, such as those of Nam June Paik.

Mad Mesh came about when I was working at the ABC’s Federal Engineering Lab. One day I was shown a faulty Image Orthicon tube—a large and expensive device inside TV cameras of the time which converted optical images into electronic signals. One part consisted of a very fine mesh which played a crucial part in the conversion from optical to electronic images. Normally the mesh was totally invisible, although it was possible, by adjusting the internal focus of the Image Orthicon—not the optical focus of the camera lens—to make the mesh visible on a black-and-white video monitor. With magnetic interference, it was possible to deform the mesh.

I had the idea of recording the monitor image on colour film while we deformed the mesh. The effect of the combinations of red, green and blue images in this case was to create complex and restlessly mobile patterns on the film in varying colours.

I think my work with the ABC’s Federal Engineering Lab carried some weight in getting me the job because the college [Hornsey College of Art] also had what it called a “television studio.” [It] was in fact a basic video studio, with a control room, lighting grid etc. In those days there was no distinction made between television and video. Of course, we now know that one is a system of distribution, the other a technology of many and varied uses. How these, the system and the technology, have developed and mutated and blended with the older system and technology, both called “film”, is a fascinating story. I was fortunate to have been there, not right at the start, but nevertheless when the story was just beginning to take shape.

When you came to Queensland for your year-long residency at Griffith University [1975-76], your work there in video seemed to fuse painterly concerns with landscape—both grass-tree scrub and domestic views—with experimentation with the high-tech new medium of video.

The title Interior With Views was chosen quite deliberately to make a connection with painting and art history. There was something highly appealing to me about the way that those really very low-tech black-and-white video cameras rendered the landscape I saw through the windows every time I sat down to work. It was something like the effect of soft charcoal on white paper. But the “painterly concerns” are not just to do with the way the images look, they are also about content, which is a way of touching obliquely on politics. I have always been drawn to French painting because of the way it honours the everyday, the egalitarian without polemics, if you like.

What are your feelings about the way in which funding bodies have gone about funding experimental film?

For many kinds of unconventional films the use of the word ‘script’ is entirely inappropriate. I don’t want to suggest that planning or preparation for an unconventional film is unnecessary, and I certainly don’t think all the production processes can or should be improvised. But there are many kinds of film where planning for what characters will do and say is entirely irrelevant.

What always amused or amazed me was the requirement for a script as part of the assessment process for so-called experimental films. I seem to remember that after I made Album (1970) the Experimental Film Fund called for applications for grants. When I got the application forms I was flabbergasted to see that the central part of any application was expected to be a script. This told me that the people establishing the funding bureaucracy were not visual artists at all. They were, in fact, all wordsmiths—Philip Adams, Barry Jones and Peter Coleman (Peter Costello’s father-in-law—say no more!).” That committee’s ideas flew in the face of all that I’d learned, which was that the first stage of production—for me—was that I started gathering images. They might be shots on film, stills, or even drawings….after a certain amount of time a structure or pattern would start to appear, to suggest itself to me…The whole process is obviously subjective and fraught with danger for bureaucrats, bankers and so on.

Now, of course, talent is something that can only reveal itself in work already done, which creates a Catch 22 for any young person just starting out—how do you prove your talent if you can’t make a work? Films, even the most basic sort, require a modicum of money and practical skills to become realities. The way I did it was to have a job which gave me a very small amount of money to spend. And to have a job where the means of production were available for use after hours—although I was already in my 30s and had 3 children, so you can imagine there was some juggling to be done. But to get back to the subject of talent, and how one proves to others that one has it (how else will funding flow?), if a person is a visual artist rather than a script-writer, it will take a lot of self-confidence, assertiveness, perhaps even naked aggression, to get that talent recognised.

Inspirations

Along with critical exposure to American avant-gardist Bruce Conner’s work, Perry recalls the inspiration of films by masters like DW Griffiths, and of classic European art cinema he originally saw at the Sydney Film Festival such as Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). “The power and intensity of its images, and its editing, have never left me.” Perry’s persistent, pioneering exploration of original moving images recalls Pauline Kael’s famous reference to Dreyer’s cinema as an art which “begins to unfold just at the point where most directors give up.”

Over the last two decades, David Perry’s works have roamed freely across the arts, from documentaries about jazz musicians and artists (maintaining the fascination in Australian alternative cinema with films about artists by artists) to the creation of drawings, collages and paintings, often in residencies which recognise his sustained contribution to Australian art. These artworks continue to develop Perry’s core themes of abstraction (“after all”, he says, “my great love in art is the formal clarity of cubism”) and landscape, featured strongly in both film and video works and with such memorable form in his work during the Griffith residency (he recently visited the Pissarro exhibition at the AGNSW, and says that “the best of Pissarro’s work reminded me of what I was trying to do at Griffith, that is to depict and to honour everyday life”). He’s also been drafting Memoirs of a Dedicated Amateur, “a profusely illustrated account [of his] working life as artist and film maker.”

The child’s song over the opening credits is cut off by the sharp ‘thwack’ of a bullet piercing a metal wall. Immediately we feel the sweat-laden fear of those in a shed being riddled by gunfire. Women wail and men scream as patches of flesh explode in red. Tiny circles of white appear in the walls as bullets penetrate and admit the outside glare. The soundtrack is a terrifying percussive montage of ricochets and bullets striking like raindrops on tin. Welcome to The Proposition.

Occasionally, Australia produces a genre work that manages to perfectly crystallise the messy crosscurrents of thoughts, feelings and fears circulating at the time of the film’s production. It’s as if genre templates sometimes free our writers and directors from the weight of issues bound up with questions of ‘Australian identity’ and a national cinema, allowing these films to unselfconsciously express aspects of our national psyche in a way that so much of our cinema strives for but rarely manages to achieve. To cite 2 in a long list of examples: the Rebel Without a Cause-style Head On (1998) encapsulated the frustrations and pressures felt by a generation of urban Australians growing up in a country of increasing social freedoms but ever-diminishing opportunities in the early to mid-90s, while the courtroom drama Breaker Morant (1979) was a powerful expression of 1970s Australian nationalism and anti-British sentiment. Surprisingly, we’ve had difficulty with the Western, a genre seemingly ready-made for Australia. Perhaps its obvious historical relevance has provoked the old crippling self-consciousness about Australian identity. With The Proposition, director John Hillcoat and scriptwriter Nick Cave have created not only a great Western but pulled off the difficult feat of constructing a genre tale that explores what we were and what we are without ever feeling forced or clichéd.

The Proposition owes a clear debt to both Sergio Leone and the revisionist American Westerns of the late 1960s and early 70s. From Leone comes a fascination with close-ups of battered, lined faces, and an intense focus on a landscape so barren and inhospitable it takes on a kind of alien, hallucinogenic beauty. In its occasionally mournful air and sympathy for brutalised people in a bleak environment, it also resembles Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). From US director Sam Peckinpah comes the sudden, visceral violence, while the common moral code and outsider status of The Proposition’s hunter and hunted echoes the fractured brotherly bond at the centre of Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). Hillcoat is no postmodern collector of empty visual and thematic tropes however. The Proposition doesn’t just pay homage to its genre precursors; it absorbs them, along with well-worn Australian myths and legends, into a wholly contemporary fable.

The opening credits sketch the film’s approach. We see a series of what appear to be 19th century photographs depicting the harsh life of the Australian frontier: white men with creased, filthy faces, and Aboriginal men either strung together with chains or posing uncomfortably in Western dress alongside their colonial masters. After a time it becomes apparent that the film’s actors are in some of these, making it impossible to tell which, if any, of the images are ‘genuine’, and which are re-creations drawing on the visual vernacular of historical photographs. The Proposition doesn’t purport to be a re-telling of history, but rather a film with one foot in a hazy historical past and another in the signifiers we have used to understand and relate that past to ourselves and to others. It is in the interrogation of these signifiers that the work comes closest to the strategies of the revisionist American Westerns.

Following the opening shoot out, the film’s premise is quickly established. Policeman Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) offers captured Irish bushranger Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce) a proposition; the Captain will free Charlie and his simpleton brother if Charlie hunts down and kills their psychopathic older sibling, Arthur. The scene establishes what initially appears to be a well-made but conventional ‘honest outlaw faces off against corrupt policeman’ story, but The Proposition rapidly develops into something much more interesting.

In the opening sequence, Captain Stanley speaks of civilising a town so remote it seems hermetically sealed from the rest of the planet. That this ‘civilising’ process will involve a violent rule of law is evident from the opening, but Stanley is no vigilante tyrant in police clothing. As the film progresses, it becomes clear he lives by a certain ethical code that informs his actions and represents a sharp contrast to the Machiavellian real politic approach to power exhibited by the town’s civil ruler, played with skin-crawling charm by David Wenham. Equally, it becomes apparent that Charlie provides the ballast that helps steer the unstable Burns ‘family’, a gang that includes not only Charlie, Arthur and their brother Mikey, but an Irish teenager and an Aboriginal man and woman. It is around the axis of Charlie and the Captain that the film’s action plays out, as each man’s dreams and emotional investments are battered and bent by an unforgiving country, a hostile Indigenous population and an environment in which power is measured in terms of naked domination.

Hillcoat’s images convey the utter foreignness of this country to Anglo-Irish colonialists born on the other side of the world, through wide-screen vistas of a land baked by relentless heat, dotted with pathetic touches of English life such as the lonely rose bushes tended by Captain Stanley’s wife (Emily Watson). We are made to feel not only the pitiless conditions, but also the fear and desperate desire to dominate anything—everything—that these vast spaces must have inspired. The English abuse the Irish and everyone abuses the Aborigines, as the whites sweat with the knowledge that they are strangers in a land of which they understand almost nothing.

Fear permeates everything in The Proposition: fear of the environment, of the Indigenous population, of violent Irish ‘others’, of European philosophical ideals that to the townsfolk sound like irresolute weakness. Fear and a desire for domination that cuts across racial and class boundaries. The Irish poet outlaw of Australian legend is a murderous psychotic, the colonial boys in blue are dim-witted sadists, the well-spoken upper class mayor an exponent of repressive brute force, and the town’s working population a sullen, easily led mob whose lust for blood is matched only by their squeamishness when presented with the real thing. Hillcoat deploys and inverts the types of our frontier mythology to confront us with a new myth of Australia’s foundation: that of a will to power fed by fear. In the guise of a Western, The Proposition is an exploration of ourselves.

The Proposition; director John Hillcoat, writer Nick Cave, director of photography Benoit Delhomme, production designer Chris Kennedy, producers Chris Brown, Jackie O’Sullivan, Chiara Menage, Cat Villiers; performers Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Emily Watson, Danny Huston, John Hurt, David Wenham; distributors SONY Pictures.

After the nadir of the past 3 or so years, even the mainstream press has noted the improving Australian feature film landscape: increased box-office figures; warmer critical response; and notable, if not prolific, representation at festivals such as Cannes, Sundance and Toronto. The 2005 Australian Film Institute Awards reflect these more encouraging trends, with the most pertinent fact being that there is genuine competition for the main categories to the point where it is difficult to pick a winner with certainty, and there are films conspicuous in their absence of nominations. It is refreshing to have genuine discussion, let alone something approaching controversy at the AFI Awards, where the usual easy task is to predict which underwhelming piece will receive multiple gongs. Admittedly, this is far from a renaissance, but more of a time of continued rebuilding. While we do not have the provocateurs of global cinema or any unified stylistic movements, we do have some assured directorial debuts and some welcome returns to form.

Look Both Ways

It’s perhaps most logical to start by focussing on the pool of nominees who appear in several categories. For Best Film, the Institute’s general membership unsurprisingly offered the 4 top grossing films, at least at the time of writing. Sarah Watt’s Look Both Ways plays the well-worn emotional 3 card trick of challenging the viewers’ perceptions of their own ephemeral mortality, yet does it extremely well. This involves more than simply depicting tragic events, though the narrative is very much a sequence of fatal circumstances surrounding its unheralded ensemble cast. There is an integrity to the scenarios, authenticity of characters and intelligence of observation that staves off any swerves towards melodrama. Stylistically, the successful use of rich watercolour animations and rapid photo-montages to provide insight into the mindsets of the central couple provides welcome visual departures in a film where the cinematography and production design are fairly pedestrian, more reminiscent of low-rent television drama. Nevertheless, Look Both Ways is a thought-provoking film that at least deserves the Best Screenplay award; though admittedly this is the only nominated script I managed to get my hands on.

The Proposition

The Proposition (director John Hillcoat) is an intriguing beast; ambitious and exciting in concept but distancing in practice, the genius in making an intermittently violent, discursive Western is slightly let down by the simplicity of its titled premise. Once a brooding Guy Pearce is charged with a task of sibling assassination in the second scene, the film wanders towards inevitability against a backdrop of sunsets, biblical allusions and the star screenwriter/composer whispering over the soundtrack. It’s difficult to get too involved; what Hillcoat calls Pearce’s “quiet iconicism” may just be a case of a passive protagonist. Still, one can hope it opens up possibilities for the genre, as this country’s recent history is an obvious canvas for broad strokes and blood. But considering The Proposition was a large international co-production with high profile names that took several years to finance, it appears unlikely to pave the way for further weighty historical dramas or Australian Westerns. In any event, the film can expect to walk away with a decent share of the craft awards considering its production designers constructed a semi-mythical 19th century township.

Little Fish

With its triumvirate of global household names and long-awaited second coming of its director Rowan Woods, Little Fish looms as a difficult contender to beat in terms of profile, and in the populist democracy of the awards this may count towards the end result. The film itself is a very watchable, if restrained in terms of incident, drama of the seedier underbelly with visual affectations echoing recent Asian art cinema; languid camera movement and rack focuses punctuate throughout. Everything fits in the right place, but there is something amiss in that the material doesn’t resonate as well as Woods’ The Boys. An unfair comparison perhaps, but while Little Fish shares a similar milieu its familiar commentary on personal histories and material aspiration is not as powerful as a debut that still lives in the memory. Perhaps it is Little Fish’s overproduced score that betrays an erstwhile grittiness.

The Oyster Farmer

The Oyster Farmer (Anna Reeves) is the most unlikely inclusion in the mix for the highest award. It is the prime example of the worst kind of middle-of-the-road local cinema, the type of film where a middle-aged, middle-class audience confuses idyllic setting for good cinematography. Neither dramatic nor comedic, it relies on tanned bodies and frayed denim mini-skirts for its chief appeal. Although to attack such deliberately benign fare seems truculent, it is equally distressing that this film ranks highly in the minds of domestic audiences when other more enterprising and less bloated filmmaking goes unrewarded.

Wolf Creek

In terms of craftsmanship and economy, Greg McLean’s feature debut Wolf Creek takes some beating, and is nominated for Best Direction, Screenplay, Sound, Editing as well as Best Actress and Supporting Actress. The case of Wolf Creek and its digital production methodology, festival circuit tour, rapid and expensive international sale and subsequent perceived snub for Best Film in the AFI Awards has been documented elsewhere, but it is worth investigating further for its revelations about both Australian product and its consumption. It is a well executed horror/thriller with a tight 2-act structure, and like its psycho-ocker protagonist, goes about hitting its targets with disturbing efficiency. An interpretation of the AFI Awards response could be that its filmmaking skill is acknowledged, but it’s merely a genre or commercial piece whose worthiness lies outside ceremonial recognition. An anti-genre conspiracy could be dispelled by the Best Film nomination of The Proposition, albeit its more meditative themes and languorous tone instil it with a greater sense of nobility than the explicit nihilism of Wolf Creek. However, the simplest reason for the fact that it is missing from the top category is that its November release has limited the general groundswell of support: despite the overseas interest, many AFI members hadn’t seen it at ballot time. In any case, it is doubtful this ‘controversy’ has distracted McLean from production on his next horror piece, this time with US studio money.

The Magician

Scott Ryan’s The Magician has not been recognised in the award categories, but is this year’s highest profile film born outside the financing models involving government funding agencies, at least during the actual production phase. As a premise The Magician has much work to do to make it stand out: the ‘mockumentary’ is starting to feel like a tired gag and the hitman is one of the most over-used character profiles in all of cinema. However, The Magician proves to be more than a facsimile of Man Bites Dog (Remy Belvaux, Andre Bonzel, Benoit Poelvoorde, 1992) or You Shoot, I Shoot (Ho Cheung Ping, 2001) and with its loose, relaxed structure has a roguish, jokey charm mirroring Ryan’s central performance. Much of the fun comes from satirising Australian notions of machismo and masculinity, whether it is the sophomoric, homoerotic humour, deadpan observations about paternal responsibility, or arguments about footballers’ ethics.

Life after the awards

Beyond the nominated films there are signs of a shift in the types of domestic projects that can gain distribution. 2005 witnessed the end of the infamous slate of the Macquarie Film and Television Investment Fund, an investor closely linked to a collection of unsuccessful comedies in recent years. As You and Your Stupid Mate (Marc Gracie) and The Extra (Kevin Carlin) vanished over the horizon only to ever be seen again on Channel Nine’s graveyard timeslot, it is hoped the current call for licensing considerations is enacted with regard to these lessons.

Things had to get better, and they have. Whilst the cyclical nature of the industry means that some years will produce a greater vintage than others, there is more to the recent improvement in quality than natural ebb and flow. The Film Finance Corporation, the principal investor in the vast majority of theatrical release features, has had a high profile evaluation process implemented where projects are judged on creative merit rather than initial marketplace attachments. While some cynics have dubbed the organisation “Studio Rosen” after its Chief Executive, initial signs are encouraging. An extensive slate of projects approved through the evaluation door is yet to be released, but upcoming titles include Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne and Ana Kokkinos’ Book of Revelation. A focus on mid-range budget art cinema with recognisable casts and highly competent directors is no bad thing; hopefully it ensures the healthier competition at the 47th AFI awards is sustained and increased in the coming years.

This article was written before the winners of the AFI and IF Awards were announced.

Look Both Ways took out the AFI Awards for Best Film, Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor; Little Fish won Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress; The Proposition won Best Cinematography, Best Production Design and Best Musical Score; and Janet Merewether won Best Documentary for Jabe Babe. Look Both Ways and Little Fish likewise dominated the Inside Film Awards, whose winners also included Janet Merewether and a special award to Wayne Coles-Janess for his documentary, In the Shadow of the Palms. Anthony Lucas won Best Animation in both the AFI and IF Awards for The Mysterious Goegraphic Explorations of Jasper Morello.

Justine Wilkinson introduces her own and Stephen Naylor’s joint response to the See Hear Now festival of multidisciplinary art practices recently held in Northern Queensland:

“See here now!” was my indignant cry as an ardent tertiary music student when I failed to understand how my colleagues could be so blithely ignorant of the exciting things happening in contemporary art music on their very doorstep. Back then it felt like a cry in the wilderness. I just wanted to immerse myself in the riches offered by living Australian artists—composers, musicians, dancers. To become part of the vanguard of new thought, new aesthetics, was a thrilling thing for an ignorant country girl new to the city’s bright lights.”

So it was with a sense of irony that I viewed the title of this festival being held at the other end of the country and over 20 years later. See Hear Now, held over a weekend recently in Townsville-Thuringowa, North Queensland was not exactly ‘a cry in the wilderness’, but it was avant-garde enough to attract an interesting mix of original thinkers and presented a somewhat different approach to art from that normally offered in the provinces.

The festival was set in a converted Pinnacles Gallery, blacked out temporarily with black polythene sheets, filled with acrid aromas of scorched lighting gels and the wash of reverb and hum from the stacks of speakers. The room was strewn with cables, gaffer tape and desks of technology, and one wall was transformed by projected images. Innovation was in the air. The See Hear Now festival invited an informal and sometimes tentative viewing of collaborative improvisations across various art forms. The audience wandered the room, viewing the action from different vantage points, tailing a photographer or filmmaker’s vision or concentrating on the technology in an effort to work out how certain things were achieved.

The first session opened with the Townsville Guitar Orchestra, an ensemble of around 20 younger people performing Australian compositions. This was comfort music—a Latin-sounding piece, a short piece influenced by rock music, nice ensemble sound and some very competent solos; safe ground for those new to contemporary art music in the audience. A number of the performers stayed on for the next item—a seamless progression from solo harp and guzheng (a long zither) played by Clare Cooper to duo improvisation for guzheng and percussion (Ian Brunskill), to solo percussion, before being re-joined by guzheng, keyboard and live electronics (Matt Hill). Here was a shift from the known and/or expected repertoire to the unpredictability of new music improvisation. Wire brush on strings, fingernail patter like rain, battuto bowing, chopsticks vacillating on strings, sliding frets, harmonics, combined with a gamut of bells, chimes, gongs, brake discs, circular saw blades, pipes, metal bars, shakers and woodblocks. The keyboard controlled the electronics, beginning with nature sounds (bush walking and distant frogs) and ending with a rather predictable backbeat under minimalist riffs.

The late work on the Friday evening set the small audience on edge. After percussion, guzheng and electroacoustic soundscapes, the physical animation of two spectral figures (Rebecca Youdell and Jess Jones), walking or sliding amongst the audience wearing flowing dresses enmeshed with dozens of small glowing lights built into the fabric, altered the tone dramatically. The data projectors leap into action streaming images of the pair, diverting the audience’s attention from the real to the reproduced. The figures continue to move through the unsuspecting audience, data streaming interrogating the experience as the images are modulated, split, pixilated and refashioned. The audience is drawn towards the screen as the performers disappear.

Returning in scant petticoat garb, adorned with bundles of sticks and violin bows tied to their backs like quivers of arrows, the women natter and giggle amidst audience. The screen erupts with excerpts from Russell Milledge’s 2004 work Rupture in which a figure falls, thrashing about on the sand of an expansive beach. In the room, the performers tentatively clamber over 3 curved ladders shaped like an igloo. Now blindfolded, scantily clad and wearing high heels, they exude vulnerability as they writhe, twist and squirm over the frame. Bodies and bone maps, indices and intersections; the ungainliness becomes ordinary but never comfortable for the audience. The work is primal. One figure dismounts the frame and gathers the sticks and bows. Constantly, the streaming of digital images compete for our attention. The picking up and dropping of sticks becomes frenzied as the other figure slides through the frame and is reacquainted with terra firma. We are drawn back to the screen with its obscure montage of images. Silence. The audience erupts into spontaneous applause.

The second day saw a range of performances linking Dance North under the directorship of Gavin Webber, the musicians including pianist Robert Nixon, and a group of James Cook University students performing some set works and attempting an audience interactive improvisation. These pieces were interspersed with the extraordinary lighting set and live processed video of Mark Bancroft and Stephen Armstrong and the live photography of Glen O’Malley. During many of the performances visual artists, including Michele Deveze, Gerald Soworka, Bradley Craperi and Jenny Tyack, worked on collaborative paintings and drawings. Challenges abounded as musicians, dancers, and artists attempted spontaneous collaborations. As is to be expected in true experimentation, many of the pieces worked if only in part.

Saturday evening saw 2 remarkable works that demonstrated the solid groundwork necessary for collaboration to flourish. David Salisbury (flute) and Steven Campbell presented Gabrielle Takes a Bath in collaboration with Michael Whiticker and Matt Hill modulating the live performance though sampling and mixing suites. The highlight was Campbell’s extraordinary array of electronic sensors played by raising and lowering his flattened hands. The sight of him playing an almost virtual instrument revealed a truly improvisatory performance, anticipating aquatic gurgles, splashes and ‘ohhh’ murmurs of pleasure as baby Gabrielle cavorted in an invisible tub.

Later in the evening, after Dance North had performed on refectory tables accompanied by JCU music students, a quirky piece entitled Threads saw Karen Gibb enter the performance space soaked to the skin with water. She proceeded to wring out her wet clothes and hair and then enter into a psycho-spatial dialogue with performers Thalia Klonis and Ron Pullman. The trio, augmented by improvising musicians Brunskill (percussion) and Whiticker (voice), masterfully erected a web of unspoken dialogue and supposition as they developed the interplay between 3 insubstantial yet convincing personae.

On day 3 of the festival, what appeared to be a life drawing workshop seemed like a huge leap of faith as visual artists, musicians and life models with theatre backgrounds took to the floor. The model, Karen Gibb assumed a pose and then began to move. Steven Campbell’s double bass pattered as David Salisbury’s sax oozed its way around the space. The feel was jazz and very low key. At first the model and sound seemed to take precedence. Gibb appeared to take cues from the sounds while the visual artists struggled to anticipate the next pose or even its duration. The piece took a turn at the 15 minute mark when, behind the model and musicians, a screen revealed fragmented vignettes of the performance, images reminiscent of Andre Kertesz’s surreal photographic morphs of distorted and fragmented bodies. Soon after this point another model, Thalia Klonis, joined the performance, clothed and animated, challenging and interacting with the nude. The music became enormously rich as the sampling sound artist (Matt Hill using the Max program) and musicians interacted, elevating the performance in conjunction with the stream of images gathered from the entire event. The visual artists kept true to the task, realising strong gestural works.

This festival was, by its very nature, experimental. It tapped into the grand traditions of Dada, Fluxus, performance, sound sculpture and new media art. Special mention must be made of the small group of dedicated, innovative organisers and the massive amount of support the Music Centre of North Queensland invested in the project. For a weekend event, much was achieved, documented and experienced, and some of the art reached fruition. The word ‘cross-arts’ emerged in one of the forums—an uncomfortable term, yet reasonably apt for such an event. It is hoped that See Hear Now has opened up possibilities for future work or similar events to build on the challenge of cross disciplinary collaboration in the distant, but dynamic region of North Queensland.

Justine Wilkinson is Cultural Development Officer for Townsville City Council. Trained as a music teacher, pianist and singer, she has been a music journalist and copyist of new music. Stephen Naylor is a Lecturer in Art Theory and Visual Arts at James Cook University, Townsville. He has worked as a practicing artist for more than 20 years, concentrating more recently on contemporary art theory and writing for art journals.

See Hear Now Festival, director Michael Whiticker; Music Centre North Queensland, Thuringowa City Council, Regional Arts Development Fund and Arts Queensland; Pinnacles Gallery, Thuringowa, Oct 14-16

In The Gathering, a play about those invisible forces in relationships that draw us together and drive us apart, the action is fast-paced and disjunctive, with multiple projection screens adding elements of the fantastic to an otherwise minimal set. Pantomime-style silhouettes, animated shadow puppets, closed circuit camera, medical imagery and an underwater-netherworld environment contribute to the sense of estrangement in the characters.

Initially all we see is a sparse interior—a laundry sink, grimy wallpaper, a door. This impression of grey domesticity is shattered by the sudden appearance of a shirtless glam rocker who belts out a few verses before disappearing through the door through which he entered. A domestic drama ensues. Mora has murdered her husband. She flees to a coastal town in rural Australia with her young daughter Anna. They find an amiable butcher, Frank, who offers them refuge for a few days, and they end up staying for good. Years later, Anna is in Europe in search of clues to the identity of her dead father. It is here that she meets the artist Emil.

The narrative flickers back and forth between Anna and the family she’s left behind, held together by the intrusion of details from each others’ lives—fragments of a broken cup, a painting, a muffled telephone line, a vague memory of the murdered man. Anna finds that she is unwittingly re-enacting her mother’s youth. Themes of migration, exile and being orphaned are explored through occasionally intertextual and often moving dialogue, set against a cinematic musical score by Ash Gibson Greig.

The cast works well together, with some standout performances. Igor Sas is excellent in a number of roles—as Frank, he is the lonely attendant of Mora’s conjugal coolness, but in Eastern Germany he is a drunken Slavic railway worker who moonlights as a nude model, with obvious concern for how Emil represents his smaller appendage. He also plays a mad old painter who has abandoned art in favour of film, which he calls “the new canvas”—what was the moon landing if not artifice, he asks. Co-writer Eamon Flack plays Emil, a fastidious fish out of water, with a similar combination of satire and sensitivity.

Director/co-writer Matthew Lutton is a formidable young talent at 22—before graduating from WAAPA he had already created his own theatre company, ThinIce Productions, and The Gathering is set to tour. Developed in collaboration with the company, this is an ambitious play with real potential and some excellent moments, but which perhaps tries to do a bit too much, at the cost of cohesiveness. The second half risks being a different play altogether, with some of the important narrative trajectories of the first half (Mora’s murder of Anna’s father and her subsequent obsession with the demise of historical murderers) apparently abandoned. However, for an original play by such a young director, this outing indicates a significant talent that will be refined in later years.

Artrage Festival 2005 & PICA, The Gathering, ThinIce Productions, writers Eamon Flack, Matthew Lutton in collaboration with the company; director Matthew Lutton, performers Adrianne Daff, Eamon Flack, Renee MacIntosh, Igor Sas, designer Bryan Woltjen, projections Sohan Ariel Hayes, sound Kingsely Reeve, composition Ash Gibson Greig, production manager and lighting Nick Higgins; PICA, Oct 22-Nov 12

Twist the sinews…

The 7th Totally Huge New Music Festival insinuated itself into Perth’s cultural life over 17 days with numerous concerts, a late night club (unfortunately in competition with the Artrage club), the inaugural Totally Huge Conference, a Ruined Piano Convergence and a major sound art exhibition, You are here…entangle. The exhibition coordinated by Kylie Ligertwood set out to explore how “sound entangles identity, locale, biology and memory” and featured work by both established and emerging West Australian artists Cat Hope, Rob Muir, Alan Lamb, Hannah Clemen, Kieran Stewart and frequent Perth visitor Nigel Helyer.

The highlight was Helyer’s Quint de Loupe—perspex squid like creatures that harbour theremin interfaces, squealing and whining in response to motion stimulus. Combining 2 versions of this work, the Ariel and Caliban’s Children series, the room is swarming so that on the crowded opening night the overstimulated delinquent biomorphs caterwaul hysterically. Returning for a second look on a quiet Saturday afternoon, this sensation of sentience is intensified as the sculptures hang, literally keening for attention like abandoned children. Like many of Helyer’s works Quint de Loupe satisfies in its integration of elements—the objects themselves are unique and slickly designed, their placement in the space considered, the cause and effect an easily negotiable and stimulating relationship.

Also visually arresting is Cat Hope’s Plug. A wig head block is mounted on a plinth, with tresses spilling down, some tortured into hair curlers; however these ebony locks are not made of hair but of everyday ear bud headphones and wires. Emanating from these tiny speakers is a 16 channel soundscape drawn from samples of haircutting—snipping and shearing. It is subtle—people assume they must listen to individual headphones, however the effect is made from the overall trebly soundscape emanating from the mass of tiny speakers, shifting across the web of tangles.

Taking a more lotech approach is Alan Lamb’s Four Bells—4 tractor wheel rims weighing 35 kilos suspended from the beams of the main room in a square formation. Visitors are invited to hit the objects with the rubber mallets supplied producing pure deep notes. Acting as an analogue surround system, the joy is to be found in hitting the “bells” (all roughly the same pitch) and moving around the inner circle to experience the airshifting beats of the clarion tones. Around the walls are unobtrusive poems evoking parallels between the joint entanglement of love and particle physics. The relationship between the poems and the bells is oblique but fleetingly sublime.

Kieran Stewart’s Lucid Harmony occupies its own room out the back of the Moores Building. Rafts of fishing net are strewn across the floor, swathes of red fabric draped from the rafters and old planks of wood define a path to the centre of the installation where you peer over a wooden box to glimpse a circular pan of salt. The drone scape not only fills the room but subtly sculpts the grains of salt into a circular pattern. The elements are all potentially interesting, however there’s a lack of cohesion, an awkwardness and self-consiousness in the spatial placement that fails to transport me.

Hannah Clemen is exploring interactivity through breath. Beneath, Becoming involves an empty chair with a seatbelt like apparatus and headphones. There are detailed instructions, taped down to a table on how to strap yourself into the artwork with breathing notes. While appreciating the concept of the feedback loop—the sound of calm breaths will make my breathing calm, which will in turn calm the machine breaths—I found the work problematic. The actual device has no aesthetic qualities; the spotlight on the chair in an empty room hardly conducive to the contemplative state required, the instructions too pernickety and hard to read if sitting in the chair, and the resultant experience too subtle to be rewarding. While the piece seems technically sound, more development of the total sensory experience would greatly benefit it.

Rob Muir’s Conning the Text is also interactive consisting of 4 mobile phones, housed in clear plastic megaphones. When the numbers are rung (provided on take-home business cards) the relevant phone responds—the ring tone consisting of a spoken wordscape recreating fragments of Edith Sitwell’s poem for the seminal performance Façade. A simple interface, used cleverly, particularly if you understand the relevance of the text, this work went some way towards allaying my scepticism about the faddishness of mobile phone art.

What the hand dare seize the fire…

The Ruined Piano Convergence also featured an exhibition component, the Ruined Piano Labyrinth in the PICA Gallery. Ross Bolleter, a long-time fetishist of the forgotten broken instrument, sent out a call for people to donate their old uprights which were distributed through the gallery with the accompanying stories of their demise. Most are still playable and visitors encouraged to tickle the chipped and cracked ivories. During the course of the festival there were also performances by Bolleter, Domenico de Clario and visiting Slovakian Michal Murin celebrating the considerable compositional potential of these nature-prepared instruments.

Annea Lockwood (NZ/UK), renowned for her “piano transplants,” was also a special guest of the Convergence providing a very public face for the festival by installing a baby grand on Bathers Beach in Fremantle. The piano in fact went missing, only to be found a few days later at a local backpackers where they we were trying to repair it! Lockwood also provided the highlight of the festival, recreating her Burning Piano performance. Despite the chattering crowd gathered in a paddock ready for a bonfire it was a beautiful meditative event, as the tongues of flame burning rainbow colours penetrated the instrument, skittering across the keys faster than fingers have ever managed, eating away at the backboard so that we could see through the body, until the unavoidable total collapse. A worthwhile sacrifice for art.

Totally Huge did indeed earn its moniker. The fragments I was able to experience suggested a mature and expansive new music festival with a distinct West Australian flavour… dust, salt, ash…and all manner of exciting sounds.

It’s the Festival d’Avignon 2003, and 2 choreographers, Australia’s Chrissie Parrott and Grenoble’s Annabelle Bonnéry, hatch a plan. They envisage an exchange that would bring Bonnéry to Perth to work with emerging dancers. This year as part of Artrage the idea came to fruition, with the resulting work, ToMeetYou, the product of a 2-week workshop with 12 local dancers.

Teamed with the Bonnéry solo, 9mn, the works offer a visceral journeying into the shadowy, gritty arena of desire and its intricate relationship with self-identification. In ToMeetYou, the rituals of desire within the terrain of the discothèque are evoked, opening with a solo by Larena Charlesworth spot-lit in a corner of the room, engaged in a series of fluid rhythmic ‘clubbing’ movements. Immersed in an inner world—simultaneously alienated and self-actualised—she continues dancing while others look on. The exploration of movements as relating to the cultural practice of a particular setting is evocative and familiar—it could be the pulsing lights and sticky floor of a nightclub in downtown Grenoble, Berlin or Perth. And it’s not all happy on this dance floor. As soft strains of elektronica thump, bodies engage in tumultuous gendered narratives of abandon, scorn and rapture (of particular joy was the highly charged ‘muscling in’ by Joel Bray.)

Bodies are alternatively buoyed with intoxicated fervour then sullied, flopping to the floor with loud slaps. As the work moves through various phrases—dancers coalescing in duets and groups—a symbol of frenetic emotion is repeatedly indicated by a trope of frantic hand-washing. It’s all a bit desperate, with an underlying sense of the grubby beauty of the moment, at 4am, when everything looks worn.

While Bonnéry’s dancing bodies might indulge in the gritty real, the video by Francois Deneulin screened throughout the piece jostles intriguingly with its fleshy counterparts. Slow hand-held close-ups of the dancers’ bodies—floating belly-buttons and thighs—provide a dreamy ethereality, reminding me of photographer Bill Brandt’s abstracted limbs, where bodies billow in and out of form. Romance here seems juttingly turned on its head—all the more poignant and constructed for the combination.

Bonnéry’s solo piece, 9mn, offered a more intense ‘close-up’—an intimate interrogation of the desire for articulation, and again the jostling contradiction between peace and désespéré. Opening with her back to us—providing a glimpse of her naked torso—eloquent movements run from the very still to sudden bolts of action. It feels like eavesdropping on an inner-dialogue as her body trembles: you can almost hear her breath. An unravelling, a glimpse at frailty, tension, then peace: at one point she gazes at her own body with new-baby wonder.

As an international collaboration positioned by Bonnéry with an emphasis on workshopping—a ‘reconstituting’ of her work with the local—the fusion appeared seamlessly ready-made, her visions blossoming in a southern city. ToMeetYou was re-staged as part of WAAPA’s graduating students’ show, and the word out is that some of the dancers now wish to head to Grenoble.

Artrage Festival 2005, Annabelle Bonnery, ToMeetYou and 9mn, PICA, Perth, Oct 10-11

What do Albert Einstein, Alan Greenspan, Robert Frost and Woody Allen have in common? They, and dozens of others, are all quoted in a floating banner across the top of the LAMP website, each in their own ways encouraging risk taking and adventurous innovation. LAMP (Laboratory for Advanced Media Production) is a new initiative to “provide a guiding light for the Australian Media Industry.” The floating quotes on their site focus on 2 key LAMP themes: bravery in the face of the unknown, and the galloping global engagement with new media.

Peter Giles, LAMP visionary and Head of Digital Media at the Australian Film Television & Radio School (AFTRS), which is host and home to LAMP, describes LAMP’s objective: “to stimulate production of compelling cross-media content in Australia.”

“Cross-media”, according to Giles, means “mobile, broadband, digital TV, digital set top boxes, games consoles etc, and these are increasingly linked by broadband. But emerging media are more important than the platforms. The most interesting examples are hybrid forms, which exist between the platforms. While many producers and broadcasters at the moment are looking at re-purposing linear content, the full potential of emerging media is in interactive services which are clearly different from what has come before them.”

A new narrative

Gary Hayes, founding director of LAMP, describes content that engages with this potential when he talks about the kinds of projects LAMP is keen to support. “We always look for narratives that carry people over platforms, that keep audiences engaged in a world where people are using multiple platforms.” So far, in Hayes’ experience of the first LAMP projects and his longer term experience working in a similar initiative in the UK, the “strongest version of this has a presenter within the project saying ‘go there now because you will get this reward for crossing to another platform to continue the journey.’ These projects keep the narrative engaging throughout and then drop in another call to action on another platform.”

Calling this kind of journey a “narrative” represents a major paradigm shift for filmmakers and film watchers. It gives the word ‘story’, the bastion of the narrative film industry, a new slant. But Hayes says, ‘story’ “does not necessarily mean drama but a good user journey through content.”

Erasing borders

As the definition shifts, the geographical boundaries that define story consumption also loosen. This prospect terrifies some and thrills others. The slippage takes away control by distributors, for example, while for a creative artist it takes the stigma out of geography. No more is there art house versus mainstream for the cinema, nor television versus cinema for that matter. A project that spreads across platforms doesn’t have the imprimatur of one or the other, it is inherently both experimental and commercial at this crucial moment in development of the media.

One of Hayes’ areas of expertise and personal fascination within the shifting definitions of ‘story’ and ‘audience’ is what he calls “personalisation.” “Personalisation is taking part in a play-along quiz with 2 million other people watching TV. The end result is personal to you. Personalisation goes all the way to who you are and what you do with a service that alters and resonates with it. Everything—narrative, interface, the meter, the visuals, the music—may all change. In a completely personal world, you get things that are relevant to you; it is insider service, it morphs.”

Demonstration quality

“Unfortunately,” Hayes says, “we are now seeing media being put out in the same version in every platform. This is a problem because it may kill audiences off; they may say cross-platform doesn’t work—‘why watch mobile video because it’s the same as broadband and I prefer TV.’” The way that LAMP is addressing this problem, according to Hayes, is to “let people see what the future will be. LAMP is about building things and putting them in front of people so they can see and experience the possibilities.”

The LAMP process

The process of building things takes place in LAMP residentials, week-long immersive periods of workshopping content. Giles reports that, “The residential labs are a pretty intensive experience for both participants and mentors.” In the first residential, held in October, Christy Dena, ‘transmedia storyteller’ was the guardian mentor for Insect Men a game/film (gilm they called it) targeting broadband PC, Mobile and Locative media platforms. Hit It TV, “a cross platform participatory musical drama for teenagers” worked closely with interactive designer Catherine Gleeson as a mentor, and Georgina Molloy, a docu-drama hybrid bound for TV and broadband PC, had the guidance of Sohail Dahdal, filmmaker and new media artist. Five other luminary cross-media thinkers and creatives worked closely with the other projects in a process in which “teams pitch and re-pitch their ideas with feedback from mentors and their peers, then create a prototype under the guidance of mentors and with the help of a team of developers. Teams work towards a final project pitch and presentation on the final day of the lab—and we put a VIP audience together to provide feedback.”

The next LAMP residential, coming up in December, will develop 8 new projects specifically for and with the ABC. “A very strong consideration in choosing projects for LAMP is that they have a designated stakeholder”, says Hayes. “Once workshopped at LAMP, they have to go back to their ‘home’ and pitch to their organization which could pick it up and develop it. Then LAMP has done its work, mentored and pushed it into a direction that will be good.” “The ideal outcomes”, according Giles, for the residentials and for LAMP, are “to incubate compelling projects with global prospects and nurture them to fruition. It’s also about developing talent and switching creative people on to the opportunities in this new area.”

In putting together the teams for LAMP residentials, Giles says, “We are generally targeting film and television creative teams rather than technical people.” This is where the LAMP theme of courage in the face of the unknown comes in. The kinds of fears that film industry people have are of technology or of being left behind or, even worse, Hayes says, “a deep paranoia that ‘I think I’m already left behind so I’ll keep doing what I’m dong because I’ll never catch up.’”

A LAMP residential manages these fears by providing “a strong team of mentors who can guide the technical direction of projects” and with the reassurance that LAMP is, as Hayes says, “a place for people to play and make mistakes without major consequences. Mistakes can kill markets off. So it is a sandbox in which to look at a hybrid model. If mistakes are made it’s just a week’s work, and they are a help to identification of other mistakes.”

Giles and Hayes are both upbeat about the progress LAMP has made so far in allaying fears and inspiring adventurous play. As Giles says, “It’s a process of education and I think we’ve made a good start. Developments in the global landscape provide widespread incentive for media producers to find out more. No one knows all the answers but if we can create a forum for discussion and incubation of ideas we are moving in the right direction.” Hayes adds, “Providing a guiding light to anything requires you to keep putting fuel in to keep the light burning brightly, making sure we have a local pool of expertise, people who can carry the flame if one of us falters. We want to avoid putting in overseas expertise all the time, so we need a group of people who can gradually make the light spread across the industry, already lots of media companies are feeling the warmth.”

Underneath the comforting intimacy of Michael Lightfoot’s delicate watercolours, Memories of India, stands a finely crafted peep show box. Look inside and turn the lever to see 2 skeletons indulging in some mischievous love-making. Drawing on the traditions of 19th century carnival entertainment and the craftsmanship of the automata, the absurd mechanical jerks of the figures combined with the voyeurism I enact as I peek and turn creates an unexpected juxtaposition of fantasy and banality. Caught between the spirituality of the North Indian-like miniatures above it and the risqué kitsch of David Archer’s Triple X-Ray Vision, I find myself in a slippery viewing position, one that the 2005 SEX, The Adultshop.com Erotic Art Award Exhibition suggests might characterise our experience of sexuality itself.

Admiring a flowering Vagina Dentata by Christopher Trotter, enjoying the languid beauty of Jacob Ogden Smith’s Modern Man Reclining flaccidly upon a chaise longue, and fronting the bristling eroticism of Pia de Bruyn’s intense drawings of Beth and Freddie#1, I feel compelled to question exactly what I am as a viewer, and what I may become. These subtleties are negotiated in Jason Sweeney’s Imaginary Animals website, where viewers listen to the true life confessions of male homosexual fantasy and watch homo-erotic encounters between the artist and his interviewees. In this web mock-doco, Sweeney explores the interactions between masculinities, erotic aesthetics and fantasy, and although given free access to the site, I am placed, both as a heterosexual woman and as a computer user, outside the interactions taking place. In Sweeney’s virtual world of masked men, I am precluded from participating. However in this space I become conscious of my position as an observer, outside the circuit of desire, while also being sensitised to the erotically charged moments between the artist and his friends. Watching and sometimes straining to hear, it begins to seem inconsequential whether I am viewer or voyeur. Instead Sweeney asks us to consider how, by merging fantasy and the everyday, moments of erotic intimacy may blur and question the lines between fiction and supposed reality and so create other experiences of desire.

The corporeality of desire is explored further in Craig Boreham’s Booth, a sensual video of a male peep show. Inverting the idea of a Mulvey-esque male gaze, Kane (the dancer) becomes an extremely sexual and finally orgasmic object for the men in the booth and the viewers in the gallery. I am implicitly caught up in the voyeurism and erotics at work onscreen, a fantasy of sexualised masculinity that gyrates, pulses and finally climaxes. As the men ejaculate, and the camera zooms in, I am reminded of the viscerality of sex, which is something that Kate Gormon’s video Thumb also delicately demonstrates in the sounds and visuals of an “intense internal suck” (artist’s statement, catalogue). Fleshy, wet lips ambiguously encircle a thumb creating a simultaneously pacifying, sensual and fetishised image that reflects on the sexualised mouth and the sensuality of the corporeal, with all its discharges and noises.

I arrive at Linda Erceg’s DVD animation Punchline which acknowledges “the paradoxical impulse towards intimacy and voyeurism that computer gaming shares with pornography” (artist’s statement). Erceg’s high quality animation design and exploration of the links between virtual cultures and sexualised representations of the body won her first prize in this year’s exhibition. Using computer generated animations of 4 endlessly masturbating nude characters, whose porn star bodies are lit up with strobe lights and zoomed in on by a circling voyeuristic camera, Punchline exaggerates the divide between desiring viewer and the idealised image on screen. The soundtrack, a series of voices telling dirty jokes emphasises this split as each joke overlays the next, re-synching and diverging and thus heightening its impact and the tension that always goes with joke telling—will the audience think it’s funny? (artist’s statement). The disjunctions between soundtrack and visuals further underlines the gap between us, the ‘real’ viewer and the artificial object, asking us to consider how this divide reflects the discrepancies between sexual fantasy and reality.

Constantly repositioning us before its diverse mediums and themes, SEX explores the ambiguous intimacies of sexuality and the erotic. The exhibition goes beyond simply delineating the fluidity of these interactions, excavating the exchanges, fantasies and even ordinariness of what constitutes our experiences of sexuality.

Artrage, SEX, The Adultshop.com Erotic Art Award Exhibition, Bakery, Artrage Complex, Perth, Oct 1-Nov 13

The sight of giant bugs crawling down the side of the Telstra Exchange building in Perth stopped just short of sparking widespread panic; in the current climate of paranoia, a red target centred on the building triggered at least one irate response from an alarmed citizen.

Ian Corcoran’s digital projections tend to have impact—artworks magnified to the size of an entire building facade can make statements in ways that few artistic endeavours can. Illuminosity, the fourth such project the digital media artist and Australia Council Emerging Producers in Community (EPIC) recipient has attempted in recent years, was no exception.

Three prominent Perth buildings provided the canvasses for Illuminosity: the Telstra Exchange, Western Power on Wellington Street and Central TAFE in Northbridge; while the Midland Town Hall, 30kms from Perth was the site of the Midland Projections Program, an Illuminosity side project undertaken by local artists Poppy Van Oorde Grainger and Marye Wade under Corcoran’s direction.

Corcoran worked with 5 distinct groups over 5 weeks to create 110 unique slides of graphics, photographs and images ranging from quirky to downright odd which were in turn beamed onto building facades with the aid of projectors powerful enough to project over distances of 1km or more. Amongst an assortment of poignant letters by immigrant teens, childlike paintings, graphic prints and comic figures were some clear standouts. A giant image of street artist Trevor Bly from the Craigie Boys graffiti art group, with the number 6025 emblazoned across his forehead, found its way onto the website of the Wooster Collective, the world’s biggest street art website (6025 is the postcode of the northern suburb of Craigie, a prominent breeding ground for Perth street artists). A drawing by Michael Lightfoot, a prominent Perth-based watercolourist with a self-confessed discomfort with new media and digital art was another—an obese suited banker sitting amidst a pile of money embedded with corpses and captioned “and still it’s not enough.”

Illuminosity also marks the first time Ian Corcoran has worked with a corporate body, a radical departure from his usual formula of working with underprivileged or at-risk kids, fringe artists and small community groups. The resulting body of work reflects this difference, a structured underlying narrative vastly dissimilar from the arbitrary nature of the other works. Slides produced by Corcoran with 5 senior staff members of Western Australia’s electricity authority, Western Power, were shown over a single dedicated night of the festival. They included a photograph taken in a substation tunnel powering most of the city, superimposed against a silhouette of the city skyline, and a grid of light, an electronic representation of Perth’s suburban power grid. The Western Power workshops also produced arguably one of the most stunning Illuminosity artworks—the hand of God from Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam fresco, reaching out to flick on a light switch.

Aside from thrilling thousands of Perth residents and countless snap-happy Japanese tourists, Ian Corcoran adds another notch to his belt; the sheer scale of the body of work must make Illuminosity one of the biggest events of its kind ever to have occurred in Australia.

When standing alone in a vast expanse and staring at the horizon, what exactly is it that we see? In the world of Ryoji Ikeda we see nothing more than data. C4I opens with a swirling mass of data; permutations cascading across a screen accompanied by a sonic thunder that rattles the diaphragm. A data dance between human beings that strives for infinity. Ikeda might be a new media artist traversing a digital horizon but his work harks back to an old aesthetic debate. Is C4I just a set of systems comprising nothing more than data, or is it a window into another world?

This is the question posed by C4I as a computer generated night time map appears on the screen. The major cities of each country are indicated by light emitting diodes. Connecting each city across the world is a faint trace of telescoped white light—the world wide web in action as if viewed on a war room screen. White lines of data crisscross the night sky until the outline of each country’s land mass collapses into the universal simulacrum. The audience ponders an image of Earth digitally abstracted, one resembling a spider’s web. Silk strands are normally created by natural forces, but in Ikeda’s work, a natural form is always represented by data.

We see pages of a hard cover book, its words—detailing scientific speculation—digitally enhanced, and its pages turning hands-free. The book drops down a shaft, its landing accentuated by an electronic thud that hammers at the foundations of the representation/non-representation debate in an art film that has absorbed the Imax experience. What would the first ‘true’ abstract filmmaker, Viking Eggeling (Symphonie Diagonale, 1921-4), have made of Ikeda’s digital hurricane? Perhaps he’d have viewed the film’s division of one screen into 12 smaller ones, some containing landscapes, others containing an image from the mass media, as miraculous data vibrating into life. A techno-howl threatens to crack the ceiling of Melbourne’s Playhouse. And it was always on the cards that a technological advancement would resolve the representation/non-representation debate; digital technology would propel the debate onto a new horizon, where metaphor and abstraction coalesce in a digital dream, or nightmare, that is nothing more than data.

In C4I the natural world is portrayed as just another creature to be digitally enhanced. A camera cruises through undergrowth; tree branches poised in the night air, straight out of a scene from a slasher flick. The boughs tremble and quake, tangle and integrate, transmute and transmogrify. Infused with colour, movement and light, there materialises from within this natural world an Action Painting. Pollock’s ‘Nature’ is fully realised as the tenets of Abstract Expressionism are blown into another dimension. One that maniacally dismantles its own contention by then displaying to its audience the cool portent of a desert horizon at sunset. Two tiny figures, engulfed by nature’s symphony, scramble along a sand ridge, while a third figure appears from one side of the screen trying to catch the others. Human beings on a technological treadmill, forever lagging behind. Then, to compound this view of the human dilemma in the digital age, Ikeda uses the technology to dismantle the desert metaphor—filling the screen with a set of white lines, a design graph, revealing that natural landscapes—forests, mountains, valleys and streams—are perceptions as much as physical realities, consisting of nothing more than data.

And here lies the immense power of C4I. It is less a work of art and more a natural phenomenon. Impossible it may be, but at times C4I aspires not towards a representation of nature, but to be nature. Something alive; an audio visual organism comprising living data. And whether object on a screen, noise from a sound system, or a window into another world, whether figuration, configuration or something else again, some new horizon, please remember: when confronted by a sign on a gateway indicating the presence of a wild beast, you enter at your own risk.

Melbourne International Arts Festival: C4I, director, video, music Ryoji Ikeda, computer graphics and video editing Shohei Matsukawa, Daisuke Tsunoda, technical director Kamal Ackarie, Playhouse, Arts Centre, Oct 10-11

David Young’s wonderful 7-movement composition Thousands of Bundled Straw (RT 69, p41) has been years in the making, an epic work scored for soprano and combinations of instruments that reveals Young’s compositional life over that period. The final movement was premiered at this concert and the excellent performance was also the first featuring the whole cycle.

The title Thousands of Bundled Straw is an example of the confused English often found in tourist brochures and other printed material mistranslated for English-speaking visitors. In this case, the term is drawn from publicity about Ichibata Yakushi, the Temple of the Healing Eyes, in Japan. According to legend, the temple was founded about 1100 years ago by a fisherman who discovered a statue of the Buddha floating in the sea and subsequently had a dream in which he was instructed to throw himself from a cliff to cure his mother’s blindness. Wrapping himself in protective straw, he jumped, and his mother, rushing to his aid, wondrously regained her sight. Young’s music bears strong influences of Japanese music, theatre and mysticism, as well as ‘Japlish’, the hybrid English that emerges through translation.

Thousands of Bundled Straw is complex, subtly nuanced and infinitesimally crafted. Every sound and gesture seems precisely calculated, yet the music retains freshness and immediacy. Except in the fifth movement, which is for soprano and a guitar tuned to quarter-tones, a clarinet or oboe predominantly carries the principal line, melding variously with violin, cello, trumpet, trombone, bass clarinet and bass recorder to create unique textures. There are percussive sounds made by clicking the tongue, snapping the fingers, tapping the body of an instrument or using woodblocks and drums. These percussive sounds break up passages of music, add emphasis, and sometimes sound like footsteps or heartbeats. In the fifth movement, soprano Deborah Kayser tosses eggs on the floor, making an evocative plopping sound. The overall effect of the music is of a minutely staged drama. One listens intently, as you might for the sounds of frogs, crickets, strange characters and even spirits in an unfamiliar mountain village at night, while overhearing murmured conversation from another room. The work is dreamlike, floating just outside consciousness. Each motif seems to grow out of the previous one, like a perpetual unfolding. There can be sudden shifts in texture and meter and between instruments or blends of instruments, and abrupt pauses. A demanding work for performers, it is quiet, unintrusive and perhaps best staged in an intimate auditorium with low lighting.

Kayser’s dextrous voice does not dominate the music, and is not even present in all movements. Whereas song typically emphasises the vocal line over supporting instruments, here the voice is muted, weaving around other instruments and sometimes barely audible, as if merely a thought. The voice is not the sole bearer of the song. Young’s ‘songs’ are composites of sounds, though the ‘voice’ is the sense in which the song is carried, and other instruments variously form part of that voice. A slurred oboe line might segue into Kayser’s voice or the voice into a clarinet line, producing groans, cries and whispers. Sometimes the voice appears to be speaking, though the ‘words’ are nonsensical. At other times the voice makes singing sounds or emulates the call of a crane or some other sound, going beyond Kurt Schwitters’s Dadaist twittering and Cathy Berberian’s performances of Luciano Berio.

In his program note, David Young reveals that he draws on other forms, such as the literature of Italo Calvino and Georges Perec. Perec developed quirky formal innovations such as writing an entire novel without using the letter E, and a palindrome 5000 words long. Calvino’s fables satirically and surreally postulate strange lands with strange inhabitants. The writers belonged to the 1960s literary group OuLiPo-Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle or Workshop of Potential Literature. Thousands of Bundled Straw is perhaps a potential literature—through its unique sprechgesang based on the sounds and confused meanings of Japlish and through the instrumental writing—languages within languages. These are not conventional songs, neither communicating a narrative nor enunciating ideas in understandable language. But there is beauty in the extraordinary sculpting of each sound, and the sung-spoken content makes us re-listen to normal speech and hear it as abstract form, in the way calligraphy works visually. Above all, there is an intense and clear musicality in Young’s writing—as with Perec and Calvino, the content exceeds the form.

Thousands of Bundled Straw evokes characters in a play who, like those in Calvino’s cities, are invisible and driven by strange apprehensions. It would be interesting to see such music adapted for dance.

Melbourne International Arts Festival: Libra Ensemble, Thousands of Bundled Straw, composer David Young, soprano Deborah Kayser, conductor Mark Knoop, Iwaki Auditorium, ABC Southbank, Centre, Oct 18

Attempting to describe Ngapartji Ngapartji, I feel a tangible sense of the effort it takes to ‘get it.’ And indeed it takes some commitment to understand what is essentially a unique, complex and unprecedented project, and that commitment is one of its integral elements.

Ngapartji Ngapartji is an ongoing, arts-based community development project facilitated through the national arts company Big hART. It engages young people with their language, culture and elders, and reveals itself in a Pitjantjatjara language lesson and stage performance. Its processes are hybrid—neither straight arts, welfare, academia nor linguistics—and seek to meaningfully engage the public with an Indigenous language, culture and story. According to its creative producer, Alex Kelly, Ngapartji Ngapartji explores the notion that “if time is taken to learn elements of a language, and a performance incorporates those elements, then the experience of the show will be much richer.”

The concept at the heart of the work is embodied in its name, which means ‘I give you something. You give me something.’ It’s a core principle of Pitjantjatjara society; a comprehensive idea and practice that, according to the project’s language advisor and teacher Lorna Wilson, makes English words like ‘please’ and ‘thank-you’ unnecessary.

Despite the difficulty in wrapping the public’s head around the scope of the project, Ngapartji Ngapartji, as a work-in-progress, found success at the Melbourne International Arts Festival with sold-out performances on each of its 5 nights. Many of the seats were occupied by people returning night after night to gain the full experience. Lorna Wilson, though not trained as a performer, presented a series of increasingly dynamic language lessons around 4 elements of Pitjantjatjara society: Anangu (person or body), Ngura (country or home), Waltja (family) and Tjukurpa (dreaming and stories). Incorporated in each lesson were short videos—the results of workshops with young Pitjantjatjara speakers in Alice Springs. These digital pieces (which can be viewed online) are compelling, entertaining and very informative about contemporary Pitjantjatjara culture.

The show itself is a series of short chapters in the family story of principal performer Trevor Jamieson, whose father’s country in Western Australia was part of the site of the notorious Maralinga nuclear tests. Trevor incorporated Pitjantjatjara words (“my waltja… my ngura”) in his telling of the tragic events around the tests—and how the international political climate of the early 20th century has left a distastrous legacy for his people and country. Young people and elders joined him on stage in a performance that was collaborative and at times highly emotional. From these short stories, says Alex, “the show is being developed into a more elaborate performance that fleshes out the themes related to this episode in Australia’s colonial history. The full-scale version of the show will be performed almost entirely in Pitjantjatjara language with the inclusion of English words that have no translation, such as Cold War.”

The festival showing was just the beginning for Ngapartji Ngapartji—the future is looking very busy. Building on the favourable responses of Melbourne audiences, Alex Kelly and writer (and Big hART co-founder) Scott Rankin are developing a comprehensive online language course and 75-minute touring performance which will debut in Alice Springs in June next year. “After June, we are hoping for Ngapartji Ngapartji’s return to the Melbourne Festival, possibly a show at the Sydney Opera House and one in Perth, with the potential to travel to the United States in 2007. We are also discussing a weekly language program on Indigenous Community TV, satellite broadcast from Alice Springs,” says Alex.

Undertaking the online course is not compulsory for attendance, but will certainly deepen an appreciation of the performance. Alex, in consultation with Lorna has been developing the language instruction. “The course will feature 24 lessons, taught by young people and elders and run for 6 months leading up to the show. It will require a commitment of around one hour per week, and there will also be forums and means of communicating with tutors.” Enrolments will commence in March in 2006 via the website.

Ngapartji Ngapartji experiments with ideas of exchange between audience and cast, and the nexus between education and entertainment, community development and performance. The risks involved in developing and presenting such a multi-faceted project were evident during the Melbourne season in some spontaneous on-stage moments, and will undoubtedly continue to shape the project. For example, the 6 young Aboriginal people who had participated in the workshops travelled from central Australia to the city for a live performance in a completely unfamiliar environment. While these young people are all multilingual, they are inexperienced teachers and stage performers, and they occupy spaces on society’s fringe as a result of poverty and systemic cultural marginalisation.

In Ngapartji Ngapartji these young people give students and audiences rare insight into their identities. Alex, and Suzy Bates, the arts mentor who worked with the young people in Alice Springs, notice how the experiences affected the performers: “At first they were overwhelmed, but the positive response of the Melbourne public had such an obvious impact on their self-esteem, confidence and cultural pride. The vision is that they will keep working with us over the next 2 years and they will continue to get a greater belief in themselves.”

The community development aspect of the project is central to Big hART’s purpose. The company uses an arts platform to “develop sustainable possibilities for those socially marginalised or at risk, especially young people, and creates opportunities for them to re-engage with broader society and increase skills in the areas of literacy and communication”, says Alex. Ngapartji Ngapartji involves the participation of senior Pitjantjatjara women and young people along with digital media producers, musicians, local artists and social services workers in a dynamic long-term collaboration. “We foresee the outcomes of the project lasting much longer than the duration of the touring show. Ngapartji Ngapartji hopes to preserve and share the Pitjantjatjara language and culture, and be a meaningful exchange between non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians.”

Big hART, Ngapartji Ngapartji, Screen Pit, ACMI, Federation Square, Oct 11-15 www.ngapartji.org. Parts of this article appeared in the Melbourne Festival ArtsZine. Rachel Maher assisted with documenting the Melbourne performance of Ngapartji Ngapartji.

It’s always exciting to experience a festival curated by a new artistic director. The hope is that the works will speak to each other, like a group art show. But time attenuates, and each work is redolent with its own mix of references, sources, and aesthetics. So, what’s the common thread? Well, each show began with an announcement regarding the emergency exits. Terrorism anticipated—we can hardly wait.

Le Dernier Caravansérail

While John Howard was scribbling new ‘anti-terror’ laws on the back of a search warrant, Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil presented Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées), stories from the Other side. Here we all are, perched in the Royal Exhibition Building—a 19th century colonial avatar—watching a French theatre company portray 20th century outrage. The show, in 2 parts, was constructed by Mnouchkine and her company from life stories gathered in Europe, Indonesia, New Zealand and our own Villawood Detention Centre. Text in the production appears as calligraphy on a screen, ghost writing at the back of a cavernous, grey space. A letter from Mnouchkine to one of her informants, familiar and chatty, begins the show, marking a year since their meeting in which tales were told. Moving from micro- to macrocosm, the entire stage is consumed by a storm: grey silk waves threatened to engulf impossibly small vessels purporting to carry human cargo, whether across a swollen river or in waters deemed Australian. Life is reduced to chance.

Finally the waters clear and we watch these lives hung out to dry in a series of vignettes located across Europe, in Asia, Iran, Afghanistan, and Australia. The stage is bare. Props and people are rolled in on wheels by other cast members. This device portrays the limited agency experienced by these figures. The contrast between the huge stage and its human sized tableaux only emphasises the claustrophobia of each situation. What to do in the shadow of the Taliban where every pleasure is under threat? A ‘love story’ is portrayed, ending with a beautiful woman being hung. A man showing a film is shot; a woman is flogged for demonstrating in Iran; young women are kidnapped into sexual slavery in Serbia. Not nice. Nor is their reception in humanitarian way stations such as the French Red Cross camp in Sangatte, now dismantled. Repeated scenes next to train tracks in the Eurotunnel display the bribing of Mafia criminals for a chance to catch a hurtling train. Repeated scenes at the port of Calais. A call to home pretending things are okay. Well they’re not. Whilst this was not Peter Brook, there was something epic that reminded me of his work. I think Le Dernier Caravansérail grew in importance by our knowing that its references were real. Other works might quickly fade, whereas this was and still is particularly vivid. So it’s somewhere between—between artifice and the world, stage and life—that this work achieves genuine import.

Green

Meanwhile, everyone knew about the goat. It was plastered on billboards all round Melbourne. Saburo Teshigawara’s Green offered a refreshing difference in terms of aesthetic choices, not just through his inclusion of farmyard animals. His lighting was interesting—a square was marked out on the stage but not occupied as such. There were moments when lights went on and off. Heterogeneous elements refused to cohere. Although the actual dancing was clearly derived from the one body, Green comprised a range of performers and tempos. One scene looked like it was lifted from a comic strip—a motley row of performers involved in some kind of repeated altercation. A man dressed in Sumo pants sang Mozart. All of this contrasted with the in-itself, the pure opacity of bunnies, goats and cows tethered or roaming. The bunnies begin the piece, wandering along the front of the stage, slowly overwhelmed by the heavy metal music of UK band, SAND. A small woman swoops and picks up the bunnies. She in turn is swooped off her feet. There are several differentials of size, large men dancing, small men, smaller women. It felt like the big men were giants from Greek mythology. Perhaps this fantasy was provoked by the use of humans and animals, a difference between types. Whatever the meaning of the animals, and one could speculate indefinitely, Green allowed the viewer to enter an alternative aesthetic of space and time that was pleasurable in its unfamiliarity.

Fagaala

Red is emblematic of so many things depending on context and culture but, in Fagaala, it means death. In addressing through dance the genocide that occurred in Rwanda, Senegalese choreographer Germaine Acogny and Japanese collaborator, Kota Yamazaki, drew upon a mixture of affect, emotion and energy. Acogny did not re-present what happened but tackled her subject from a variety of directions, shifting from one mode to another. The piece represented not a narrative whole but a multiplicity of approaches. Dancers were not given parts, rather a rolling series of dances, spatial arrangements, rhythms and progressions. Body parts were covered or immobilised, people were lifted and rolled, bodies confronted and menaced each other. At times, the 7 dancers formed a kind of Greek chorus, witnesses to atrocity, but they were also always bearers of their own sexual and rhythmic energies. Sometimes ghosts of the dead but also living dancers with particularities of style and execution. A man covers his head whilst repeatedly thrusting his pelvis in a suggested rape. Another enters covered in a cloud of white chalk that slowly permeates the space. Red string bleeds from another man’s mouth.

In the middle of Fagaala, the lights came up, the music stopped and concrete walls were exposed in a moment utterly without artifice. Although Adorno wrote that, after Auschwitz, poetry is a form of barbarism, there is nothing about Fagaala that belittles its topic. The radical silence generated in this rupture was a response to Adorno’s quandary: that whilst the attempt to astheticise genocide is obscene, suffering has every right to expression. Germaine Acogny managed to evoke the genocide in Rwanda without reducing it to the abject.

Shen Wei

In an altogether different citation of red, Chinese born Shen Wei created a painterly space within which abstracted bodies swirled along pathways suggestive of brushstrokes on canvas. The back wall of the theatre looked like a Chinese watercolour with a large backdrop suggesting handmade paper with small figures of inky paint, moments of black and red which were repeated in the dancers’ long skirts. Accompanied by Tibetan chanting, Folding encouraged contemplative enjoyment, a relief after Shen Wei’s frenetic but underwhelming interpretation of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The thunderous applause which greeted the latter was an interesting contrast to my boredom. For my part, Shen Wei’s close reading of Stravinsky was illustrative and kinaesthetically banal. Perhaps a greater understanding of the music would have transported me to the other planet that everyone else was on. One of the nice side effects of artistic conflagration is the clash of critical opinion. Sometimes you are led to reevaluate the person standing before you in light of their ridiculous opinions but, occasionally, you have to reassess your own experience.

The Gotham Suite

Expectation has a lot to do with it, for example Stephen Petronio’s The Gotham Suite. Billed as the “essence” of New York City, it was bound to both titillate and disappoint. The fashionable excitement in the audience was palpably libidinous. Personally, once I got over the fact that the choreography was not a lot more than classical ballet, I actually enjoyed its unashamed adherence to the lexicon. It’s not just the speed, it’s the assertion in Petronio’s choreography. The dancers ate space at full tilt, throwing limbs and undulating spines in a thoroughly contemporary cultural mise en scene: girls in cutesy outfits, boys in their PJs, backdrops silhouetting New York’s iconic fire escapes. I particularly liked Willem Defoe’s rendition of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven in The Island of Misfit Toys. Petronio also has a company of incredible dancers.

I Want to Dance Better at Parties

Kristy Edmunds chose two local dance works, Chunky Move’s I Want to Dance Better at Parties and Shelley Lasica’s Play in a Room, to feature as part of the festival’s program. I Want to Dance… opens up a space for the everyman. Interview material, reproduced through the spoken word and images, lends a documentary flavour to the depiction of ordinary men on the social dance floor. This contrasts with the trained bodies which form a third term to the sounds and images. Obarzanek makes no attempt to reproduce the ordinary lived bodies intimated through visual and aural means, though there are some cameos which appear to illustrate their subject matter. The work is a weaving of threads, incorporating video projection, photography, sound and movement. Personal narratives are introduced in relation to single performers who mediate our visualisations but group interactions are also used to create atmospheres or contexts for the spoken word. There is a whimsical, poetic feeling to I Want to Dance…, which makes it appealing in its depiction of, and connection with ordinary people.

Play in a Room

Play in a Room is an example of Shelley Lasica’s recent focus on reworking and restaging movement material. This is a work of counterpoint, asymmetry, attenuated connection, and drama. It is dialogical or, rather, polyvalent. Dancers observe, respond, and interact. Viewers also construct scenarios in response to a complex of activities. There are repetitions, familiarities, recent and long-term, but their context keeps changing. Even though several of the dancers are veterans of this work, the dancing enables each to maintain their own manner of movement. The sheer number of performers, along with its sustained elaboration, made way for a societal, rather than, say, molecular, sense of interaction. Not the society of the corps de ballet but one of steadfast singularities. François Tétaz’s remix of an earlier composition was a fantastic addition to the tantalising drama of the work. A string of 5 dancers form and deform into couplets, triplets. They provide a degree of gravitas not simply because, like Proust’s ‘little phrase’, they reappear, remembered and familiar, but because Lasica’s work resides in their bodies and has done so for some time. Play in a Room was successful, satisfying and strangely moving.

Bergasse 19

Finally, Bergasse 19, The Apartments of Sigmund Freud. Having recently travelled to these apartments, now serving as Vienna’s Freud Museum, I was eager to see Brian Lipson portray the legendary meister of the unconscious. I ought to have known better though. But we don’t know, do we? That’s the point. If there is one. Although there are allusions to Freud throughout Bergasse 19, Lipson and Pamela Rabe play a series of cross-dressed characters, identities, family, servants and animals associated with Freud and his zeitgeist. Lipson evokes Freud through a domestic staging of his psychoanalytic ideas, replete with condensation, displacement, oral, anal and genital forms of gratification. He chooses surreal clutter as his preferred topography, along with a tight rollcall of Feydeau style entrances and exits. Double entendres litter the script, enhanced by some interesting exhibitions of toilet humour. I particularly admired the construction of a subterranean underworld in order to show the fate of Freud’s long awaited crap, making its way across stage into the collective unconscious of Vienna’s sewage system. Haunted by the Holocaust, the performance also plays with temporality. Whilst the clock ostentatiously progresses through the famed 50 minute session, we are taken backwards and forwards in time, through several of Freud’s publications, with only a shrinking and growing plant to mark time. I found Bergasse 19 thoroughly entertaining, unruly, seething with contradiction, a worthy enactment of the unconscious as conceived by Sigmund Freud.

Melbourne International Arts Festival: Théâtre du Soleil, Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées), director Ariane Mnouchkine, Royal Exhibition Building, Oct 11-16; Saburo Teshigawara/Karas, Green, State Theatre, Arts Centre, Oct 6-8; Jant-Bi,Fagaala, choreographers Germaine Acogny, Kota Yamazaki , Playhouse, Arts Centre, Oct 13-15; Shen Wei Dance Arts, Rite of Spring/Folding, choreographer Shen Wei, State Theatre, Arts Centre, Oct 13-14; Stephen Petronio Company, The Gotham Suite, choreographer Stephen Petronio, Playhouse, Arts Centre, Oct, 19-22; Chunky Move, I Want to Dance Better at Parties, choreograper, director, Gideon Obarzanek, video projection, Michaela French, Chunky Move Studio 1, Oct 9-15; Shelley Lasica, Play in a Room, choreographer, director, Shelley Lasica, Rehearsal Room, Arts Centre, Oct 16; Bergasse 19, The Apartments of Sigmund Freud, writer, designer Brian Lipson, director, Susie Dee, Grant St Theatre, Oct 14-23; MIAF Oct 6-22

Gregg Whelan and Gary Winters are Lone Twin, UK performance makers with an extensive body of internationally acclaimed work since 1997. Indefatigable travellers, sojourners and conjurers of clouds, Lone Twin alighted on Melbourne for a 4-week residency, wryly referred to as a “Mid-career Survey”, as part of the 2005 Melbourne International Arts Festival.

Walk With Me Walk With Me Will Somebody Please Walk With Me is a ‘performance as lecture’ introducing Lone Twin’s work to date and their preoccupation with walking as their principal means of performance making. Lone Twin walk towards horizons, into literal landscapes and whimsical, obdurately optimistic imaginal terrains.

Unabashed and droll, Gregg and Gary (as we come to know them) engage in a kind of storytelling ping-pong elaborated as a progressive list of numbered ‘points’ read from notes on clipboards. Each point begins “(And) This is …”, followed by phrases and stories which ‘name’ things, locating them briefly in ‘images-as-words.’ We are invited to ‘see’ and imagine for ourselves what is named: “17. And this is waiting for the water to recede”, “26. This is what we do just for the fun of it”, “125. And this is what we do to imagine the future.” The list acquires a logic of its own, a ritual entwined in the event that brings into peculiar relationship new phenomena profoundly connected to the old, the mundane, the forgotten and the as-yet-unperceived. The performance is an act of remembering.

Video plays while stories are told of, for example, walking for 18 arduous hours back and forth across bridges spanning the Glømmer river in Norway: “We walked…and some of the people of the town came and walked with us.” They befriended them, exchanged observations, jokes and songs. A gentle humanity, vitality and absurdity floods into the vacuum left in the absence of a punch line. Details become meaningful and resonant, connections between things becoming things themselves.

The performers gesture, dance, and sing with the aid of an MP3 player, megaphone and laptop, all in a kind of a strange, cumulative loop that both refers to previous works and becomes a performance in itself. The house lights remain on. There is nowhere else but here and yet ‘here’ becomes peopled with others, full of elsewheres, and the experience is slowly bathed in Whelan’s and Winter’s liquid imagination.

Lone Twin are ‘ecologists’. In The Days of the Sledgehammer Have Gone, enthusiastically engaged in “becoming the weather”, they ponder the “sinister and ludicrous past” of water as it circulates in the perpetual hydrological cycle including rivers, clouds, rain—and us. The human body is 75% water and therefore inextricably implicated in this cycle. Gary wonders if these ‘waters’, passed as sweat, may have been encountered before: “my sweat, your sweat, Jimmy Connors’ sweat, Bruce Springsteen’s sweat—which happens to be Gregg’s favourite sweat at the moment.” Sweat figures crucially as the by-product of labour, endurance and a commitment to the completion of extreme physical tasks.

Clad inappropriately in Army surplus ponchos and hiking shoes, various paraphernalia including Norwegian hunting horns and with the ubiquitous clipboards slung around their necks, Lone Twin attempt to make a cloud! Concealed beneath the ponchos, each performer labours buried in multiple layers of clothing, accumulating body heat: Gregg for 6 hours collecting water from the Yarra river that day, Gary for much of the performance with vertical rows of theatre lights one foot away, performing a rain dance that looks like dog-paddle standing up. “This is what I do to feel a part of things; this is what I do to blur my edges.” Either side of more stories and ‘points’, increasingly funny, entangled, gentle, yearning and touching on acts of kindness, the audience is invited to throw cups of Yarra water over Gary and Gregg’s bare torsos—the burden of clothing now removed, rapid evaporation, a cloud. The clouds failed to appear, or we failed to see them. Trying to be helpful, 2 women bending over perilously close to Gary exclaimed: “But there’s steam coming from his pants!” Everyone laughing, talking, grinning. Becoming a part of something, regardless.

Lone Twin understand that it can rain in the mind, and imagination in this work is miraculously transformed into, and imbibed by, sweat; the body, finding fatigue and water, forced to find another place, time and form to flow in. The imaginal is made ‘material’ or realised in the cycle entered into, the economy, the ecology of a vast set of possible inter-connections and relationships.

In To the Dogs, Lone Twin rode fold-up bikes in all directions for 7 days across Melbourne, following lines drawn in the street directory to the fringes of the city. They returned each evening to offer a series of hilarious cumulative performances, missives from each day’s encounters, trials, objects found; stories and images of a Melbourne that was sometimes familiar, and as often not. A Melbourne of dead ends and Michael Bolton songs blaring from cars at intersections. A Melbourne peopled with work—troubles and homesickness, Peter “not suited” to Melbourne, Melbourne not suited to him. Nina, disgruntled with her job, later meeting Peter (Gregg having given her his phone number!). Each performance was a generous series of ‘Toasts’ and ‘Ciaos’, odes and elegies, and wishes of good luck: “To frappacinos/ To Aussie Rules/ To Steve Bracks—nice legs!/ To Gary’s arm/ To a kiss for the winner/ To as far as you can go/ To the edge of the city/ To what’s going on/ To the dogs!!!”

To close their residency, Lone Twin dressed as cowboys in Ghost Dance and shuffled a slow line dance, trance-like, in silence and blindfolded, for 12 hours! Members of the audience joined them, keeping them company, dancing late into the night.

Lone Twin’s performances entertain walking as knowledge. The ecology of water connects people with place, possible pasts and yet to be imagined futures. Dancing together teaches something of becoming an-other, becoming each other. The conviction applied to carrying things out translates into labours of love. Performance: “to carry through to completion, to complete by adding what is wanting” (OED). ‘What is wanting’ is met in Lone Twin’s work with humour, gentleness, optimism, hope, friendship, community and soul. They engage us in the here and now through the eyes of travellers, that we might see ourselves as and become a part of things: that we might enter into the world with grace.

Although the 2005 Melbourne International Arts Festival lacked an overarching theme, any number of threads and correspondences connected individual events. Shows set in hotel rooms; performances for one; improvised street scenes; epic takes on classic texts: festival goers were challenged to compare the interlaced commonality of works while appraising their contrasts. A mosaic of Wittgensteinian family resemblance more than anything else, it was almost as if the various programmed events spoke to one another through the medium of the audience. It became something of an organic tissue of moments: any experience of a particular event couldn’t help but be inflected by the other performances, exhibitions and happenings to which one had borne witness. Is that what a festival allows its audience to become? A medium?

In this, incoming Artistic Director Kristy Edmunds has proven her mettle in going beyond the stated aim of opening up the festival to new audiences (something of a cliché in festival mission statements). Edmunds has demonstrated a keen eye for both the appetites of Melbourne audiences and the ways in which a festival can allow its patrons to enjoy works in juxtaposition and imbue the experience with a richness beyond individual moments.

Private Eye

IRAA Theatre’s Private Eye puts a flaming torch to the social contract between performer and audience. The solitary ticketholder is directed, alone, to a hotel room in one of the upper floors of the sumptuous Grand Hyatt, where he/she is greeted by director Renato Cuocolo. The furnishings are sparse, personal belongings of a coldly functional nature (a notepad, a suitcase, a diary) discretely placed amongst the cool environment of temporary lodgings. Cuocolo converses casually, mentioning the strangeness of living in hotels, of dwelling in unfamiliar cities, before explaining the odd situation which led to his hiring a private detective to observe and record the daily movements of his wife. Before long he directs his interlocuter to another suite higher in the building where his wife greets her guest in a far more intimate setting. Personal effects are scattered about, from a toy accordion to items of clothing. In the participant’s interaction with performer Roberta Bosetti, Private Eye’s exploration of voyeurism, game-playing and the power of the look are suddenly given new angles, the seductive closeness and privacy teasing out one’s presumptions of the audience/actor relationship and forcing the viewer to confront the deeper significances of watching another human perform. I noted that the name of the private eye in question was given as Hemmings, perhaps not so coincidentally the surname of the lead actor in Antonioni’s Blow-Up, and it seemed a perfectly fitting offhand reference to the themes of ambiguous investigation, the exploration of identity and the changes wrought by close observation of an unknowable other. It would be irresponsible to reveal the twist which concludes the evening, but it is certainly one which gave me the most unsettling, almost cruelly humbling experience of the festival, if only because upon returning to street level I was unable to discuss the experience with other audience members. There were none.

Theatre for One

The title of Justin Harris’ Theatre for One: The Late Great Libido: Rock Opera is something of a misnomer, the work being rather a curious hybrid of multimedia, rock, micro-cinema and installation. The (once again) lone audience member is ushered into a curtain-lined booth at one end of which is a television-sized screen divided triptych-like. When the music begins, the 2 outside panels display a tiny landscape of silhouetted CGI performers (on one side a group of musicians, on the other a group of dancers) while the centre pane, sectioned by circular apertures, displays the disembodied head of Harris himself as vocalist. Harris and his minute accompanying band perform 4 big-beat numbers of the infectiously catchy variety, the animated characters articulating every bass slap and wailing sax solo with joyous precision. It’s tasty confectionary which offers little beyond its own purely transient pleasure; like IRAA’s work, there is no one with whom to immediately share the experience, but unlike Private Eye there is no sense of dialogue between audience and actor.

InfraCinema

The pop flavour of Harris’ music and imagery eschews contemplation in favour of a distracted mode of viewing. By contrast, Bruce Mowson’s InfraCinema seeks to avoid such distraction by increasingly minimising any sense of a recognisable referent for its projected video images. Mowson has used infra-red technologies to reduce human figures and cityscapes to a level of abstraction often painterly in style but also profoundly (and deliberately) tedious. Gesturing towards the materialist cinema of the last century, the extended sequences of monotonous, only vaguely pulsating colour invoke similar visual works by Anish Kapoor and require their audience to reflect upon the ways in which they may engage with the artwork. There is no easy way into this presentation, and it is interesting to consider how similar pieces, such as Anthony McCall’s recently toured A Line Describing a Cone (RT66, p26), offer their viewer an “easy way out” via their historical and geographical distance, as well as their positioning as notable works through the mechanisms of art history and canonisation.

Showcase

The audience for Richard Maxwell’s New York City Players’ Showcase is guided into (another) darkened hotel room, and soon enough confronted by a naked man (James Fletcher) lying abed alongside his shadow, an unnamed performer clad in head-to-toe black. The nude businessman begins to explain his situation, announcing the process which has led him to be here, alone in this room with only his shadow for company. There are intimations of sexual tragedy, direct addresses to the small audience, and an eventual dressing in which the bare vulnerability of the earlier oration is slowly covered by a neatly pressed suit. The text is delivered with minimal emotion, a blankness typical of the company’s style. But it is also confoundingly obtuse, circling its subject and forever disallowing deeper understanding of this man’s narrative.

Le Dernier Caravansérail

The displaced modern man of Showcase is put into sharp relief by other, more urgent figures of alienation appearing in the festival. The trope of the exile or displaced individual was iconic for much of the modernist art of the twentieth century, but in the process there often occurred a romanticisation of such figures at odds with the actual experiences under consideration. This is the danger facing any artistic work which seeks to address the diasporic experience: a poetics of exile is not sufficient to map out the political terrain in which exile occurs. To do this, we must first, in the words of Edward Saïd, “set aside Joyce and Nabokov and think instead of the uncountable masses for whom UN agencies have been created…the refugee-peasants with no prospect of returning home.” Ironically, Saïd himself was sometimes accused of the same romanticising of the refugee, but the point remains: to conflate the experiences of exiles, emigres, migrants, refugees, homeless or dispossessed persons into a single figure is a further form of oppression against those in question.

There is no central figure in Théâtre du Soleil’s Le Dernier Caravansérail. Instead, we are presented with an almost staggering number of tales, only sometimes overlapping. Authorial identity is dispersed to produce an almost ecstatic polyphony of narrative voices. The stories from which the piece arises are those of real people encountered by director Ariane Mnouchkine and her cast, and several of the performers themselves contributed personal histories as part of the piece. But more importantly, there is a sense of openness in this vast work entirely fitting with the frequent imagery of turbulent seas and rivers, constant motion and a lack of rootedness (most obviously symbolised in the way characters are never allowed to touch the ground, instead transported by wheeled platforms). If Caravansérail had at its core the figure of an orchestrating director or dramaturg, its meaning would be inextricable from this cult of personality, and as a result could be reduced to a work of personal expression. As it turns out, however, the piece seems to do its best to render its cast and crew transparent vehicles of meaning, dwarfed as they are by the massive space in which they perform.

Small Metal Objects

The spectators attending Back to Back’s Small Metal Objects were as much performers as mute witnesses, situated on a raked bank of seats at one end of the busy Flinders Street Station concourse. Equipped with individual headsets piping an evocative, plaintive score, the opening minutes of the performance saw the passing traffic take on a new significance as we were forced to simply watch the parade of life. When a leisurely paced dialogue between 2 friends joined the soundtrack, the speakers were invisible, somewhere out there amongst the crowd. Slowly they emerge from the other end of the station, companions indistinguishable from those around if it were not for the access we have been given to their private dialogue. Gary (Allan V Watt) is deep in conversation with Steve (Simon Laherty) when he is interrupted by a phone call from a high-powered businessman looking to organise a drug deal; though they are reluctant to disrupt their time together, Alan (Jim Russell) soon turns up to close the deal, enlisting the help of another powerbroker, the psychologist Carolyn (Genevieve Picot) to convince the duo to follow through with the negotiation.

Ordinary commuters were often startled at the sight of a mass of headphoned spectators observing their motions, and several approached the audience to ask questions, offer their thoughts or request spare change. While Gary and Steve were offered as individuals rendered invisible by the strictures of consumer society, we were made all too visible in our act of appropriation. Conversely, the drama played out before us bore testament to the way marginalised peoples are nevertheless inveigled into economic systems which see them only as resources—in this case, drug distribution acting as the dark flipside of economic rationalism.

Bloody Mess

It’s perplexing that so many reviewers appeared to take Forced Entertainment’s Bloody Mess at face value. Certainly, the performance lived up to its name by creating an apparently chaotic staged mayhem in which each performer’s ego prevents an actual ‘performance’ from taking place. Clowns, roadies, narcissistic thespians and a woman in a gorilla suit cavorted across the massive space enacting impromptu dance routines, launching into unfinished lectures or flinging popcorn, streamers and candy in all directions. To a certain point, there is an obvious ‘kitchen sink’ approach: anything and everything goes, as long as it doesn’t appear to add up to anything resembling a definite meaning or message.

But this simplistic reading seems to commit an injustice, ignoring the craft which has gone into producing a semblance of disorder. A great deal of care is required to create convincing chaos, and Bloody Mess in fact features very little that isn’t tightly planned and rehearsed. More importantly, this is a show about the twin poles of chaos and order, and even a cursory survey of the various recurring themes and motifs of the work reveals this to be the case. We repeatedly return to concepts of creation and destruction, whether it be the universe itself, human life, or the creation of a moment of art from the primordial soup of experience. Bloody Mess’s form is fully integrated with its content, offering as much of an experience of becoming as its various lectures and dance numbers.

The Odyssey

Malthouse Theatre’s The Odyssey was a mixed success, stumbling for some of the reasons Bloody Mess succeeded. This version of the classic tale also takes the road of excess, carnivalising Homer’s epic tale through daring aesthetic choices which too often come across as unmotivated, at times even indulgent. It is a lavish and visually arresting production: a rusted metal set evocative of a missile silo’s interior or a grinding turbine; costuming which bridges various periods of warfare from an American Civil War-styled Odysseus to a monstrous and seductive Circe in Nazi drag; a massive and bone-rattling score and sound design; and a complex lighting routine which keeps the space vital for its long running time. This version of The Odyssey makes its set and visual design a kind of character as much as the actors on stage. But its final form does not offer much of a challenge to its audience, essentially following a safe traditional structure somehow at odds with the exciting possibilities offered by the striking set and strong performances (Stephen Phillips impressive in the lead role).

Amongst the 2005 Festival’s diverse program, in which the audience’s role and self-awareness frequently became central, perhaps the most representative work turned out to be Guy Dartnell and Tom Morris’ Oogly Boogly, tucked away in that often overlooked festival corner: the family-friendly events. The audience for this improvised piece was limited to pre-lingual toddlers and their carers, and saw the performers imitating the actions of the children who quickly came to recognise the unexpected power afforded by this opportunity. Being as yet offspring-challenged, I wasn’t able to witness firsthand this experience, but all accounts suggest that the young participants were quick to immerse themselves in the proceedings. Perhaps it helped kickstart their introduction into that Lacanian mirror stage by which their misrecognition of the boundaries between self and world introduced their budding egos to social being. Perhaps the unusual pleasure of pulling an adult’s strings provided them a rare sense of respect from adults. And perhaps they weren’t so different from any other audience, at once witness, judge and performer—and medium.

Melbourne International Arts Festival: IRAA Theatre, Private Eye, Renato Cuocolo, Roberta Bosetti, Grand Hyatt, Oct 7-22; Justin Harris, Theatre for One: The Late Great Libido: Rock Opera, Federation Square, Oct 7-22; Bruce Mowson, InfraCinema, North Melbourne Town Hall, Oct 13-22; Richard Maxwell’s New York City Players, Showcase, Langham Hotel, Southbank, Oct 12-16; Théâtre du Soleil, Le Dernier Caravansérail, director Ariane Mnouchkine, Royal Exchange Building, Carlton, Oct 11-16; Back to Back Theatre Company, Small Metal Objects, concourse, Flinders Street Station, Oct 7-22; Forced Entertainment, Bloody Mess, The CUB Malthouse, Oct 6-10; Malthouse Theatre, The Odyssey, writer Tom Wright; director Michael Kantor, The Malthouse Workshop, Oct 6-23; Melbourne International Arts Festival, Oct 6-22

Annmarie Chandler & Norie Neumark eds
At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet
Cambridge, Mass: MIT/Leonardo Books, 2005, ISBN: 0262033283

As editors, Annemarie Chandler and Norie Neumark accomplish such an elegant thematic and formal structuring of their richly diverse material that, as reviewer, one feels a challenge has been issued. At once intimate and transnational in its articulations, the conceptual and material achievements of this book are difficult to convey.

Despite the ubiquity of that evocative prefix across contemporary networked and distributed media platforms, the affect and activism of art ‘at a distance’ has not been adequately historicised. In response, Chandler and Neumark locate a poetics of distance within the histories and technologies of activist arts practice, focusing particularly on the 1970s and 1980s. For the editors, distance functions as both organising principle and central problematic. The 3 sections of this beautifully designed book are structured by the socio-aesthetic relations of distance, as Neumark explains:

Part I is written at the greatest distance from the projects themselves [where] the aim is to raise and explore issues, concepts, and arguments, rather than detail specific projects…The chapters in Part II approach their subjects more intimately, written…by or with people who were involved in the projects discussed…[and] Part III returns to the voice of cultural criticism with a rethinking of networks, a key figure that appears throughout the book …

Consisting of 20 chapters from writers, artists, curators, academics and activists, this anthology critiques the figure of the network through its enabling conditions of geographic dispersal, collaborative political action, technical modes of distribution and tensions of affect. And it is mail-art, in particular, which provides the aesthetic framework for many of these contributors. John Held, for example, presents a detailed historical analysis of mail-art by exploring the artistic methodologies of foundational figures such as Ray Johnson (‘the father of mail art’), Fluxus artist Robert Filliou, Mark Bloch and Marcia Tucker. Held scrutinises the categorical debates that have shaped the genre arguing that ‘the Mail Art community…was fixated not on the postal exchange, but rather on the aesthetics and distribution of communication.’ Demonstrating crucial links between networked art activism and postal circuits of communication is Simone Osthoff’s insightful chapter on Brazilian artists Paulo Bruscky and Eduardo Kac. Both curator and mail-art practitioner, Bruscky’s transgressive deployment of the institutional frameworks of postal technology resulted in his arrest on a number of occasions. He staged, with Ypirana Filho, Brazil’s First International Mail Art Exhibit in 1975 which was shut down by police within minutes of opening since many of the Latin American participants had included “messages denouncing state violence and censorship.”

Continuing to explore the convergence of network and mail-work is Craig Saper’s dialogue with Anna Freud Banana who, he argues, introduces a “new psychoanalysis” that “mobilises parody as an analytic tool.” Central to this parody is Banana’s name which she adopted after it was coined by her students. As Banana explains, her aesthetic performances allow her “to go Bananas by parodying the bureaucratic codes of the networks our lives exist within: stamps, popular magazines, organisations, governments, corporations.” Also noteworthy for its contribution to political and technological formations of mail-art is Melody Sumner Carnahan’s fascinating project, produced with partner Michael Sumner, titled The Form 1970-1979. This work involved soliciting one line ‘reactions’ to each of the years of the 1970s and predictions for 1979. Correspondents included John Cage, Dick Higgins and Andy Warhol as well as friends and relatives. Although not overtly defined as mail-art, the artist’s book in John Kelly’s recent show at Niagra exhibiting his polemical correspondence with The Australia Council, demonstrates the centrality of the postal within contemporary aesthetico-activist practices.

In addition to the postal system, ‘distance art’ is also networked by such socio-technological forms as ‘telematic art’, telerobotics, video activism and sonic art practice. Exploring the historical and political impact of many of these is Andrew Garton’s contribution about “the theatre of activism”, and the emergence of Australia’s “vintage networks.” Garton has long been involved in using digital media as an agent for social change and he details various collaborative projects which helped to establish “a community of network activists extending the capabilities of computers and modems and their use in the developing world.” Further explorations of “telematic simultaneity” include Heidi Grundmann discussing her curatorial work for the REALTIME and CHIP-RADIO projects of the early 1990s, which raised “serious problems of documentation and interpretation common to all fugitive, process or time based art projects”; a “journey through the archives” with Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, and Don Joyce on the “sonic spontaneity” of Negativland.

‘New media theory’ is continually seduced by network promises: open, decentralised, egalitarian and emergent. Yet as a number of these contributors note, networks are inflected by regimes of power, economies of desire and the restless rhythms of global capital. As Jesse Dean explains in his discussion of the video network, Gulf Crisis TV:

…not all networks are created equal. The notion of net seems to signify a democratic sharing, an equal distribution of nodes, all connecting to other points, without hierarchy. Few networks are like that…networks, like other technological creations are…not simply discovered or invented, but are engineered into existence and put into place by institutions of power.

Similarly, Ken Friedman argues cogently for “art networks” to recognise the fundamental issues of governmentality with which they must grapple in order to achieve “sustainability and resilience.” And Sean Cubitt’s eloquent, if elegiac, critique of “destructive consumerism” reminds us of the socio-political urgency of networked relations: “the miseries of the last factory workers and raw-materials producers are removed geographically from the sites of retail and consumption, the specificity of their work bathed in the indifference of logo-branded goods and services.”

It is idiomatic that Australia occupies a poignant relation with distance. In these xenophobic times, however, how heartening to discover works such as this (also relevant here is Darren Tofts’ recent monograph on Australian media arts) which explore the specificity of location without eliding the impact of transnational flows. Chandler and Neumark’s book should appeal to artists, academics and activists for whom distance must always remain poignant.

See also Darren Tofts: interzone: Media arts in Australia, Thames & Hudson, 2005 (reviewed in RT 71).

Millennial visions too often prove disappointing, and it is perhaps for this reasons that onlookers are reluctant to historicise theatrical movements at the start of a century. It does not take a prophet, however, to see that Melbourne’s first years since 2000 were characterised by a flurry of activity, especially in the formation of new theatre companies promising original structures, novel interpretation and dynamic programming. In a short period, we saw the coalescence and cross-pollination of the now-stalwart Red Stitch Actors Theatre stable in St Kilda, The Store Room venue in Fitzroy North (recently settling into a curatory stance), the consistently strong Theatre@Risk team, The Eleventh Hour group in Fitzroy and the related, though more anarchic mass of The Hoist, Theatre in Decay under Robert Reid’s guidance, and several more. What distinguishes these troupes from the constant turnover of fast-fading projects is the intensity of their idealism, the high number of productions put out in a short period, and the quality of work produced under such pressure. Moreover, though many have maintained a constant presence in Melbourne’s calendar, even those who may have appeared to succumb to the inevitable entropy, have proven able to continue their mission at least until the current moment.

The Eleventh Hour recently returned after a hiatus of 2 years with a pair of works presented under the broad title The Shining Sun is Up. The phrase is taken from a line near the conclusion of the first of the works, but in reality there is little to tie the twinned selections beyond the superficial. This is not meant negatively: the company has here created a pair of productions deeply worthy of consideration, but each could certainly stand alone as a valuable take on an established text.

The Crucible

Arthur Miller’s The Crucible would seem an odd choice, done to death by high school drama classes everywhere. Even those unfamiliar with the original work are probably aware of both the metaphorical themes and the historical import of the play; though The Eleventh Hour’s précis focuses on significant, sometimes canonical works by ‘great’ authors, there would appear to be little The Crucible could offer that has not already been absorbed into the common critical literature which accompanies it. As it turns out, the company restores several scenes deleted from the play since its initial production, and the outcome centres not on the usual allegorical reading of the text (treating the witchhunt as a straight symbol of McCarthy-era US politics) but as a complex psychological drama that goes beyond the socio-political.

The company suggests that much of the internal struggle faced by the protagonists of The Crucible is symptomatic of the marriage breakdown suffered by Miller during the play’s writing, but if this is indeed the case, this production wisely avoids psychologising the work as a simple roman à clef. Instead, dramaturgical attention has been paid to the subtle realisation of character motivations and intentions, and a rare level of sympathy is offered towards the oft-maligned character of Abigail Williams (Nicole Nabout). Equally, John Proctor (Peter Houghton) is presented as a fierce and at times fearsomely unforgivable figure. Apart from some arresting vocal soundscapes which occasionally hover over scene changes, however, The Crucible never quite manages to move beyond the position of expertly-produced drama to become a genuinely original and challenging comment on a contemporary classic.

King John

King John is a more overtly ambitious rendering of a text bearing the connotative epithet ‘lost’, and makes good any claims for the company’s valuable contribution to Melbourne’s current theatrical climate. The producers point out that (as far as they know) Shakespeare’s play has never been performed in Australia, and this alone should be enough to pique the interest of theatregoers. Rather than relying on novelty, however, the forgotten work is articulated through a fictional rendering by World War I soldiers and nurses holed up in a military hospital. Less a framing device than an interlocking of two distinct dramas, the conceit works wonderfully as the audience takes on a kind of double-consciousness, extracting Shakespeare’s tale from the often hilarious and sometimes moving play staged by the wounded. Their stories are never unwelcome intrusions, but their own situations (on crutches, wheelchair bound, romance blossoming) act as both provocative comment on the unfolding drama and entirely enjoyable alternative to the sometimes stiff original text.

Peter Houghton’s officer is for much of the piece blindfolded by a gauze bandage, and upon its removal pauses before curtly confirming his permanent blindness and soldiering on as the King of France. Fiona Todd’s nurse erupts as an increasingly histrionic grieving mother (Lady Constance), hinting at maternal longings confounded without shoehorning an unnecessary plotline into proceedings. In this way, the drama of the Great War soldiers advances gently but thrillingly alongside the ostensible subject of the evening.

Eleventh Hour, The Shining Sun is Up: Part 1 – The Crucible, Arthur Miller, Sept 8-Oct 1, Part 2 – King John, after William Shakespeare, Nov 10-Dec 3, direction/composition Anne Thompson & William Henderson, performers Nicole Nabout, Shona Innes, David Tredinnick, Fiona Todd, Peter Houghton, Evelyn Krape, Christopher Brown; The Eleventh Hour Theatre, Fitzroy

It starts loudly, with a stolen fast car, drag racing down Parramatta Road at 4.20am, going 100, 110, 120 miles per hour. It concludes gently, in a tiny tractor engine-powered boat escaping from Vietnam with a desperate human cargo, struggling to make it to Singapore and safety. To make it to Bankstown…

Urban Theatre Projects’ Fast Cars and Tractor Engines is an oral history project, with actors performing a tightly edited selection of interviews with a diverse range of community residents—a Maori boxer, a former soldier turned refugee, an Aboriginal man and his mother, the Mayor of Bankstown and her mother, a group of giggling African teenage girls, an elderly German woman, and a young Arabic man and his brother. On the opening night, the Mayor declares it to be a “thought-provoking eavesdrop on our community”, and it is, even for those who aren’t locals. The “our” of this community is expansive. It may be from and about Bankstown, and performed in its heart (upstairs in the Bankstown RSL), but you hardly need to be a local resident to be captured by the power of the performance.

These stories are continually surprising which makes for compulsive listening. But what makes the performance so striking is its unique vocal mechanics. The actors are listening to the interviews on headphones as they speak the words, while the audience hears the ambient sound from the location (skilfully interwoven with Oonagh Sherrard’s subtly evocative soundscape and Fadle El-Harris’ video backdrops). Director Rosalyn Oades acknowledges the influence of London-based Non Fiction Theatre Company in pioneering this technique, but she and her actors (stellar turns from veteran Katia Molino and newcomers Mohammed Ahmad and Vico Thai) take it to the extreme. It’s a bizarre simultaneous translation, reproducing every fumble, strange pause, overlapping statement, cough, and stutter. It really shouldn’t work, but it does. The unpredictable and idiosyncratic vocal rhythms, pitch, and timings of the interviewees produces a magical transformation in the bodies of the performers, who occupy a space somewhere between acting, ‘being’, and possession.

The slippages from person to person are mesmerising, registering the impact of each new voice—from reflections on motherhood, how to accept being hit in the boxing ring, finding oneself being shot at but not being able to decide where to dive for cover—given a choice between the latrine trench on one side and thorn bushes on the other. “It’s funny now…but it was not funny then.” The disjunction between body and vocal identity is illuminating—the young Arabic male actor performing the saucy old German woman, and later that same Arabic man being performed by an Italian woman. It never feels like parody, despite the many moments of humour. While there’s an immense amount of craft at work in this performance, a disciplined precision in both the words and the apparently casual body language, it sometimes doesn’t feel like acting at all.

Another refreshing element of Fast Cars is that, despite the obvious integrity of the interview process, the performance manages to avoid sentimentality in re-presenting these personal stories. It’s a tricky line to walk when telling community stories back to the community as theatre. Not everything about the people presented here is likable or noble—the nice old lady who makes tea and shows her collection of photos of the Queen’s visit later tells us that she refuses to shop in Bankstown because there are too many Arabs there now. The old German woman who liked her men admits that she probably wouldn’t have married her husband if she’d known he was a Jew. They’re each flawed and fascinating, and the elegance of the transcript editing and shaping (dramaturgy by Andrew Ma) gives them the time and space to be complicated, real people. This is director Rosalyn Oades’ first full-length work (Fast Cars was originally a 15-minute performance presented in UTP’s Short & Sharp in 2002), and she’s been well supported (especially by artistic consultant Chris Ryan and production manager Simon Wise). Fast Cars and Tractor Engines brings a new level of technological and performative sophistication to community theatre, reinvigorating the form. This is probably the best performance I’ve seen all year and deserves to be embraced by a wider audience.

The tractor engine-d refugee boat is hopelessly lost at sea, but our narrator finally sees land over the top of a gigantic wave—“and we had hope again”. And we do as well.

Urban Theatre Projects, Fast Cars and Tractor Engines, director Rosalyn Oades, concept Tim Carroll, Rosalyn Oades, dramaturgy Andrew Ma, performers Mohammed Ahmad, Katia Molino, Vico Thai, sound Oonagh Sherrard, video Fadle El-Harris, artistic consultant Christopher Ryan; Bankstown RSL, Sept 7-10

A lot of international arts consultants spout long words and are masters of the incomprehensible pie-chart thrown up on a screen. But how many can bring their theories down to the practical problems of an independent artist, a small dance centre or a community art gallery? In Jerry Yoshitomi, though, we may well have found a really practical consultant who is also tapped into the ‘public value’ zeitgeist that promises a post-Rationalist era in the arts.

For this American guru, born in Los Angeles to the children of migrants from Japan who’d arrived as long ago as 1910, sees it as his task to “distill all that academic research being published telling us how to engage new audiences, how to ‘broaden and deepen’ their numbers and experience, and turn it into usable chunks. I advise arts people not to read whole books of such advice, but to read the one useful chapter in 10 different books,” he says.

Or you could just go to a Yoshitomi workshop. He gave them in Sydney and Melbourne in September, plus public lectures in both cities and Canberra as part of the Australia Council’s Leading Voices 2005 program, which also brought in Ruud Breteler from The Netherlands to talk about a theatre focused on non-mainstream Dutch populations, and the English duo of Andrew McIntyre and Gerri Morris to discuss audience-building in both the performing arts and museums and galleries.

Not that you’d necessarily have been wooed by the language used by the Australia Council! The brochure advertising Yoshitomi suggested that “Participants will become familiar with a behavioural model of participation and understand consumer and client decision-making processes by exploring the drivers that influence decision-making and methods to reduce the barriers that discourage participation”. Whoopee!

When I taxed the man himself, it came down to the beautifully simple: “The arts are an emotional experience—they need to be taken back from the rationalists and the elites so that people feel free to be moved. At the Krannert Center in Illinois, for instance, we came up with slogan ‘Come as you are, leave different’.”

Yes, Yoshitomi is admitting that the arts have provided a place for an elite to hang out and divide themselves from the masses. “They almost spit on people at classical concerts who clap at the end of a movement because they were excited by what they heard. But that’s how it was done when that music was first played—and orchestras would repeat that movement. Now, at Krannert they have an ‘afterglow’ session at each concert so that people can drink a coffee and share their experiences with others—maybe even strangers. All the research is showing there’s a great deal of the social gathering to art-going. The arts therefore need to create social opportunities outside the theatre, concert hall or gallery.”

And this will require greater flexibility than Jerry Yoshitomi often finds in “the fixed mindset of executive leadership in the arts—especially in big organisations. At the top they think they know it all—senior management is apparently too busy solving problems to gain the new knowledge necessary to do just that. The fact is you can’t solve a problem with the same consciousness that created it. But the big boys mostly sent younger or mid-level managers to my workshops in Australia. They’ll only actually move when someone of a similar ‘world-class status’ makes a change. Small organisations are much more nimble.”

By way of example, Yoshitomi cites the tiny Nanaimo Theatre on Vancouver Island that worked out (with him) the idea of surveying its subscribers for their happiest arts experience of the past year, took photos of a nice demographic range and threw them into its next year’s brochure, all between April and June. “‘People like me are going there and having fun’ is a great message to get across”, explains Yoshitomi; “though we also used lines like ‘My father and I don’t get on, but we share an interest in music…’. Then we talked about organising neighbourhood parties for subscribers in the off-season. That’s creating social connections in a small town.”

And that was an idea picked up by Fiona Burnett, Melbourne workshop participant, jazz artist and Australia Council Music Board member. “I’d never thought of getting the postcode of my CD-buyers before”, she explained. “But what a resource to use to lobby their local festival organisers to book me for a concert. And I’m also working on the idea of listing my favourite I-tunes on my web-site, then getting users to list theirs. It’s certainly not polluting my ‘art’ to know what works, what can develop and maintain my audience. Self-sufficiency is pretty essential for the independent artist in this competitive day and age”.

Burnett is also thinking outside the comfort zone of the jazz clubs where she normally performs. And that sort of flexibility is required, says Yoshitomi—to find the ‘Echo-B’ audience (under 25s), who need less social organising, but do need more time. “Time’s the big barrier these days. A 3-hour concert is a real problem for them—though they’ll happily slip into a gallery for 15 minutes at 9.30pm (if it’s open) prior to a night at a club. So we need to think up patterns like the 20 minute concerts that the New World Symphony in Miami do—every hour from 7pm. Or the Tokyo plan where they play a big Mahler symphony twice, at 6 and 9pm, either before or after dinner. And let’s face it, just one piece that demanding does allow you to really concentrate.”

Craig Donarski, marketing man at the Sydney Opera House Producers’ Unit was an enthusiastic participant in Sydney. He was particularly concerned about the preponderance of women amongst the SOH Studio’s ‘fashionably wired’ audience. “Only 55% of them are female, but 75% of the tickets are bought by them. They’re dragging their blokes along. Now, we’re already keeping shows down to 70 minutes, and we’ve done things like adjusting the starting time on Thursdays which were a disaster until we realised they had to shop as well that night. But I think we may need to play on the ‘Chicks go to the theatre’ line, and set up a speed-dating area in the foyer afterwards where singles can meet and discuss the show. QPAC already markets Admit One—Share the Excitement to Brisbane singles—and that’s right across the range of shows from the Queensland Theatre Company, the Queensland Orchestra and the commercial Merchants of Bollywood.”

Yoshitomi stressed that these single-ticket buyers are different people from subscribers—whose numbers are beginning to crumble according to the Adaptistration website on orchestra management (www.artsjournal.com/adaptistration). Unamplified references to Mahler or Brahms in brochures for the latter need to be replaced by comments like ‘Brahms, the lush Romantic’ or ‘Mahler, the Monty Python of composers’ for the tyros. And Sasha Iwanick of Melbourne’s Comedy Festival, took up the idea that such “cheat sheets would definitely help to break the elitism down. And then there’s so much technology these days—I’m definitely looking to use mobile phone interactivity to take the Comedy Festival to the people effectively.”

But in a sense, these were mere details. It was the post-Rationalist, emotional stuff that came as the greatest surprise to Yoshitomi workshop participants—we’ve all been entwined in the ‘business of the arts’ and ‘arts economy’ lines for so long. “But why not?”, said Iwanick. “We’re moving towards an experience economy, even at the shopping mall.” And Fiona Burnett “really liked the idea of ‘memory objects’—the power of even those bloody mouse-ears from Disneyland to recall an event, an emotion”.

As Bridget Ikin, producer of the 2005 AFI Awards Winner for Best Direction and Best Film, Look Both Ways, commented recently: “We observed how the film affected people emotionally—revealing a craving for films that speak quite deeply to the national psyche about things like anxiety and fear. So we previewed the film heavily to maximise its positive word of mouth quality.”

The final link in the chain is to sell all this new emotional, even intellectual value back to sponsors and government paymasters. “Arts managers need to be more aggressive”, insists Yoshitomi. “There’s a great spirit of innovation here, a preparedness to scour the globe for answers. But they’re reluctant to sell the combination of emotional and entertainment value because of the taint of ‘entertainment.’ But if sponsors can connect their name to a ‘great experience’, they’ll be happy. And if society can gain a better understanding of, say, Islamic culture as a result of an interesting exhibition, then there’s a clear public benefit which any government should buy.”

Leading Voices: Jerry Yoshitomi, From Transaction to Transformation, presented by Australia Council’s Community Partnerships and Market Development Division with fuel4arts; Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra; Sept 6-17

Dance artist Wendy Morrow’s career spans 30 years and includes work with Monte Carlo Ballet, Scottish Ballet, Sydney Dance Company and DanceWorks. She has worked as a dancer, choreographer and teacher in professional companies and tertiary institutions throughout Australia. She has studied dance and improvisation in New York, Europe and London. Morrow has a strong history in creating innovative models for arts learning, and was recently awarded an Australia Council Fellowship to create new professional development models.

Motives

The Australian independent dance field is small with clusters of artists generally seen to be aligned through shared practice, histories or aesthetics. In the last 10 years or so there have been enormous developments in opportunities created for younger ‘emerging’ dance artists. I believe we now need to balance that with the other end of the spectrum, appropriate professional development models primarily for mid-career and mature artists. I’m interested in the work and thinking of my peers who have established a practice and knowledge-base, but who have become isolated and uncertain about finding a context for their work.

People’s lives are complex; as a maturing artist a kind of relentlessness and fatigue can set in as you try to balance art-making and life. There seems to be a loneliness and isolation that’s chronic throughout the field, that gets stronger as you get older, and becomes a significant contributor to people not engaging. To support mature artists in sustainable practices, we need structures and programs that respect their independence of practice, and can assist to clarify and galvanise their real experiences, while maximising the economic and artistic resources being made available to them, otherwise as a culture, we face the risk of losing valuable people, historic insights and industry expertise.

Strategies

The models I’m developing—Mature Artists Programs (MAP) and Artistic Risk Management (ARM)—are in response to a perceived desire of mature artists to rekindle communities of practice. ARM is a program of facilitated project management to assist generally younger artists to develop frameworks to structure and consolidate their artistic experiences. Artistic development and investigations can be unwieldy, lack structure and have no relevant evaluation processes. Projects where the overall artistic experience is unfulfilling pose real risks to an artist’s future motivation to engage in further artistic research.

MAP comprises a portfolio of projects and initiatives centred around teaching, facilitation and learning. Conceptually it’s a big-picture thing, but for more experienced artists. The idea is to work in small artist-driven clusters to strengthen professional communities. Possibilities include one-to-one facilitation, creative laboratories, structured forums, presentations, professional dialogue, residencies, or something much larger that might take several years. The communication and support provided by these networks goes way beyond practical advice. It aims to establish and maintain relationships among these artists, and addresses issues of sustainability and artistic isolation, and to enable relevant issues to become visible to the field. MAP is concerned with how we can, as experienced artists, enrich and contribute to a broader dance culture.

Two kinds of MAP structures formed the initial pilot study in Canberra, in September 2004, and MAP-Practice at Dancehouse in Melbourne in August 2005. What was your thinking about those?

The pilot for MAP last year explored one model of professional development in a structured framework where the participants determined the content of the program. There was a formal structure which required a fair amount of preparation by participants who were asked to consider an issue within their practice for discussion, and make a 20-minute presentation. Aims were to provide a platform for individuals to identify issues within their practice; utilise the expertise within the cluster to gain insights and clarification about problematic issues through dialogue; develop a stronger community with peers to promote individual and varied practices; and introduce alternative ways of thinking, and circulate knowledge that develops the collaborative nature of professional development.

For the MAP-practice residency at Dancehouse, there was no agenda for people to present themselves in any particular way. It was very personal. Five people with overlapping histories met for 5 days. The point for me was about the conversations which developed during that time; about recognising who these people were now, what they did, what affected them, and how removed they might feel from something that was considered current mainstream practice.

Conversations

Were these conversations held within a dance context, or art practice, or completely outside of these?

The conversations were about ideas on art, and the relationships we have to art in our lives. They were like a continuous improvisation over 5 days. I know these people in a strongly artistic way and their artistic integrity is undoubted, so the conversation moved me into a much wider perception of what professional development might be. It didn’t have to be about skill development, although there was a lot of teaching and learning from each other. It was about people feeling that they’re worthwhile, that their aesthetic is worthwhile, and that there’s a natural respectfulness and belief in art-making that goes way beyond the practice or production of art and which needs recognition. This MAP-practice model is really the centre-pin for my work.

Identity and context

What came out of the MAP-practice group is quite complex, and might be reserved for another conversation. But primarily what we talked about is mature artists determining what they need for their own professional development. When people talk about artistic practice, they often seem to think it’s something you can go and shop for, and you come away with a practice. But it’s just not like that, it’s something integral to the person you are, evidenced by the way that you think, or speak or do things. What seems almost like a guiding principle behind working is, how you can even think about making work when you don’t actually have a basic sense of where you are, and what’s important to you now. That’s what we need to find and reaffirm—our identities and context. If you lack that vital context, you can’t make work regardless of how many opportunities and how much funding is around.

The idea of a creative laboratory for me is that, if you get the right people, the natural hothouse trajectory is really profound, and it doesn’t need justification beyond that. It stirs things up in people, and affirms that they and their ideas are worth something, and they will therefore naturally develop, and move into making work or to produce an outcome of some sort. It’s about actually recognising what art does for people in their lives, rather than have them feel like a machine that has to make art, and have someone come and pick it up and circulate it. I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in what happens when we fall away from the product. Not that you don’t want to make and create something, but neither do you necessarily want to try and fit it into an alien framework, because then you’re beholden to many other things that don’t fit your life, things you’re not attracted to or interested in. So what’s happening to these people? Are we losing them, are they choosing to go elsewhere because the context of working in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney or Perth is not really an attractive one for them?

Communities

It’s not a question of ‘wanting’ to be an artist—you just are, and you can’t help it, because what’s important is the kind of sensibilities with which you engage with the world. For many people the flow is up and down, intermittent; you can’t rely on a financial support system. You have to develop your communities, and that means connecting and then re-connecting to those links that are significant for you, and learning from each other. Sometimes the issue of money is a distraction because it prevents people from making communities. It creates a blaming mentality where you can sit back and complain, and that kind of engagement is counter-productive. If you look outside the realm of the arts, people everywhere are talking about changing the nature of their society, to create different social structures and systems that are more useful in managing their lives. They are not dropping out. They live firmly within the social and cultural milieu, and for them it’s about finding alternatives to the prevailing structures with which they are at odds.

At the age we are now, ideas often require different time scales. Development may not occur within this year’s funding round. We know that underneath the visible there’s a multitude of other things, potentialities we need to give heart to, because if it isn’t in people’s consciousness and allowed to have a life, we will never experience all the viewpoints that individuals and art can offer.

The “black dog”, Winston Churchill’s name for his own depression, is a resonant metaphor suggesting a relentlessness within the self at once inescapable but with a familiarity which seeks mastery: a domesticated companion, dependent and loyal to the death, or a stealthy pursuer, attacking its prey in moments of weakness; something both evil and needy. Either way, it never lets go, so there’s potential romance in this metaphor which creates a fantasy world of epic struggle. For many who saw Clare Dyson’s Churchill’s Black Dog, this challenging and rich mixture yielded a dark and powerful work.

Churchill’s Black Dog is not about the man himself, but his metaphor is a starting point for examining aspects of depression, seeking reality via popular myth. Like the metaphor itself, those myths are composed of half-truths, projection and other defences the mind conjures to protect it from itself. Certainly there’s a popular notion which wants us to believe that suffering is somehow creative and ennobling. Similarly, the theatre can be a safe and glamourised vantage point from which to investigate difficult issues. So to the artists’ credit, the work does not romanticise the issues, attempting instead to depict a debilitating condition—more disease than gift—which also afflicts perfectly ordinary people, eroding their thoughts and stifling their ideas.

But like the metaphor, the medium provides the reality with a certain glamour, as if decoratively laid over experience. Imagery from World War II—performers in pale petticoats carry battered cardboard suitcases, and a 1940s soundtrack—projects a slightly chic nostalgia for familiar values and the fantasised safety of childhood. Half-demolished walls suggest both “slice of life” and dereliction. Bath, table, chair, doorway are places of loneliness and leave-taking and the thick covering of autumn leaves on the floor evokes things fondly remembered as well as detritus, neglect and death.

For a moment, a naked man and woman appear pressed to the wall at the back of stage. Their eyes are closed as if asleep, but their hands reach for each other’s bodies. A girl lies in a bath—there are hard surfaces, the glare of light, ill-health, perhaps blood. A performer carries a suitcase, another collects newspapers, folding them meticulously for some unknown purpose. We see them fold, pack and sweep with immaculate attention, obsessed by a need for order. Performer Brian Lucas sits at the table talking about writing, forming the letters, folding the paper, licking the stamp—all dry, meaningless tasks fulfilling only the mechanics of work, designed to have the appearance of normality, but trivial, obsessive, and made important by the requirements of despair to cling to recognisable, if useless, order.

The fantasy of saving someone, nursing them back from the brink, is replaced by the reality of annoyance with the afflicted, a pretence of concern and the avoidance of the ill. Lucas’ text vividly depicts how damaged people project their own weakness onto others. Curled up under the table, he begins a soft mantra with apparent compassion—”I’m worried about you, are you all right? Can’t you make an effort?”—phrases which become progressively more accusing, until their persecutory nature is revealed in the screamed “You’re pathetic!” Later he recites a litany of facile tips for the deeply depressed (“Take warm baths”, “Visit friends”), which become in turn justification for further persecution.

Epic aggression and naked ambition are also features of depression, themes not as well developed in this work as helplessness and futility, but very telling when looking at the life of a man who coined the phrase the “black dog.”

Churchill’s Black Dog, Created by Clare Dyson in collaboration with performers Avril Huddy, Brian Lucas, Vanessa Mafe-Keane, Elise May; ANU Arts Centre, Canberra, Sept 14-16

Pieces for Small Spaces was Lucy Guerin Inc.’s first curated season of mixed works, developed and shown in the choreographer’s rehearsal space. Although the intimacy of the room might suggest a studio showing, most of the pieces used lighting, music and costumes, testimony to performance as performance (rather than, for example, process). Perhaps because it was the first piece to be shown in a context of emerging artists, Under Your Skin by Kyle Kremerskothen seemed to raise creative questions regarding what to do, what choices to exhibit and explore. Interactions between 2 dancers posed issues of agency; whether the motivation to move arises from the outside, a point on the body, a body part or between bodies. This was a work of relationships in motion, with moments of rupture in tempo and dancerly clarity.

Byron Perry opted for object driven pathos in a creative and entertaining drama between TV and partner. With a television monitor on his head throughout, Perry and Kirstie McCracken danced a duet of control, influence and romance. What was nice was the fealty exhibited towards the object as TV, on the one hand, versus anthropomorphic interpretation, on the other. Sometimes McCracken would relate to the TV as a TV, fiddling with its controls, generating differences of content through channel surfing. And sometimes she would partner “it”, so that the relationship between the 2 was also played out as a human duet. Gogglebox benefited from the longstanding dancing relationship between the two.

Adam Wheeler adopted a Brecht-with-charm approach, introducing each section of A Tale of Soz and Snuf with hand-painted placards. This was an ambitious work that promised to transform the everyday of a haircut into a Dr Strangelove world of madcap eccentricity. I have the feeling that this piece requires big time props that, in the meantime, the audience had to imagine. Its nicest moment came in the form of Wheeler and Susan van den Ham standing, grinning in front of their audience, placard in hand: The End.

Jo Lloyd has used her very own off-beat energy for some time in making work. Mute was danced with Tim Harvey who has danced with Lloyd in many of Shelley Lasica’s works. Lloyd combined large movements that criss-crossed the space with the smallest gestures. Something elastic and glutinous connected the performers as they traversed the room with sustained and intricate kinaesthetic input.

Shannon Bott’s Hang On was the most poignant of all the pieces. Bott and Jacob Lehrer performed the simplest of movements, each dancer showing him/herself through bounces which slowly moved them towards their audience. They weren’t hidden by ‘dancing’ but revealed themselves as individuals in motion. There was text, and other things, but it was their direct and vulnerable expression which I found moving and optimistic.

Finally Antony Hamilton’s scare show, Species for Small Spaces, was an hilarious closing act for the night. This was truly site specific, creating multiple scenes of horror in the back rooms of Guerin’s studio. We were allowed in only a few at a time. I was dragged in by the wrist and the door slammed behind me, no doubt for making loud jokes. I knew something horrible was in the shower—I saw it through the glass. An involuntary scream nevertheless escaped my lips when the doors slid open. Luckily, I didn’t wet my pants.

Pieces for Small Spaces, curated by Lucy Guerin Inc.; Lucy Guerin Inc. Rehearsal Studio, Southbank, Oct 4-8

Reel Dance Installations 02 is about contemporary dance and movement presented through film and video installation as an emergent aesthetic form. At this point in its maturing development, it can be regarded as practice-based research where dancer, choreographer, media and sound artist collaboratively explore the possibilities, as evidenced in 4 medium scale installations in the Performance Space galleries. The installations all articulate physical space, the working material of each of the collaborators, in their various and respective ways. Three of the works achieve this using multiple screens deployed within the spaces, immediately establishing a relationship between static deployment in the room and dynamic representation on the surface of the screen.

The dancers’ movements traverse the spaces the screens occupy—rigid frames projected or contained in monitors become the ‘marks’ around which the performers work, as in A Film of One’s Own [Fugue Solos]. The 4 monitors are placed side by side across one wall, displaying black and white images of choreographer Sue Healy and the dancers she worked with during a 15-year period of collaboration with filmmaker Louise Curham. Lighting, framing, angle and costume evoke the classical dance movie, but surface disruption of the film, using paint, scratching and inking, interrupts any implied seamless flow of image or movement. Sound originates from the optical track of the film as percussive, rippling rhythms, caused by physical carry-over from the picture disruptions into the soundtrack area. As the title implies, looping and sequencing develops movement patterns, both rapid and languid, laterally across the screens. The 4-minute loops generate polyrhythms and interruption patterns from the palette of movements articulated by the dancers, recorded by the camera, selected by the film-maker and organised into a system that never seems to replicate.

The cognitive faculties of the visitor are central to an experience of each of these works, with the process of perception completing the creative cycle. Multiscreen works do not provide a focus for the faculties, as when seated in a live performance. The eyes, the ears, the mind, are required to remain alert differently, in the knowledge that the show will begin again after the piece completes, though probably not in exactly the same way each time. The visitor completes the synthesis of the work of the dance choreographer and the installation artist in this redefined space of performance.

Space and duration are palpable material common to both film and dance, within the space and represented on the screens. Martin del Amo choreographs and performs in A Severe Insult to the Body—the Installation, appearing like a pietã in high heels and jocks. He scans the horizon, steadily, stealthily, moving imperceptibly in the darkened rooms which his spot-lit body inhabits. Sudden body contortions interrupt this steady progress. His centre-framed image appears on 3 small monitors framed in turn to either side of a larger projected image. The edited tapes bring 2 temporal spaces into proximity—between each cut on the single screen and between recording sessions across the 7 screens (the tapes having been recorded from 1997 to 2003). The tape and the physical space is designed and installed by Samuel James, fragmenting this history into a coherent present and bringing a pulse that runs beneath del Amo’s palpable physical presence.

The cognitive faculties are stretched again when peripheral vision is engaged in Premonition. This arrangement seems to exploit the sensitivity of our eyes to movement at the edges of the field of view. As I concentrate on the dancer in the central image of 3 vertical projection screens arranged around 3 of the 4 walls of the room, it is possible for the same dancer to become an ensemble. As a 20-minute loop, the solo dance performance (like other exhibitors’ work previously seen performed ‘live’ at various times at Performance Space) fragments and phases the original coherence into new shapes and durations determined by the tapes prepared for the 3 screens.

Premonition (1998) is the most recent of the 3 works by Mahalya Middlemist and Sue-ellen Kohler. Falling (1991) and Vivarium (1993) are both works that again testify to the longevity of dance and video/film collaborative relationships. These single screen works rely on the fixed, enlarged projected cinema image as the frame through which the dancer moves, in Vivarium, anatomically, in Falling, as a whole-body chiaroscuro of microscopic movement terminated by the fall.

The act of re-presentation within a performance-like space by exhibition curator Erin Brannigan, by the artists, choreographers and performers, extends and enriches past moments of recorded dance movement, bringing them into a dynamic and contemporary present.

ReelDance Installations 02; works by Samuel James, Martin del Amo; Louise Curham, Sue Healey; Mahalya Middlemist, Sue-ellen Kohler; curated by Erin Brannigan, OneExtra, Performance Space, Oct 13-22

One of the most valuable and rewarding characteristics of time-based work is its capacity to create and modulate rhythm: visual and aural ebbs and flows orchestrated to respond to, and to produce a response from, its audience. The emergence of such rhythms is noticeably pleasing in the Counter Voice film works of Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima. Interestingly, the internal rhythms of the works are not only a result of the filmmaker’s sensitivity or proficient manipulation of the subject matter. Rather, they arise from the natural rhythms that emerge as each of a series of actors concentrates on performing a prescribed activity.

Tatsuo Miyajima is well-known for his large scale LED installations which tackle themes of ‘time’: life and death; permanence, impermanence and change, history and eternity. In 2003’s Death Clock viewers were confronted with a countdown to their own deaths, while Mega Death presented at the 1999 Venice Biennale, was a reaction to various historical catastrophes initiated by humankind. Here 4 Counter Voice works are presented: Counter Voice in Water (1995) and Counter Voice in Air (1995), Counter Voice in Wine (2000), and Counter Voice in Milk, filmed and produced in Adelaide in June 2005 expressly for presentation at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia.

In the Water, Wine and Milk versions, actors each engage in the same activity. Seated before a bowl of liquid, they count backwards from nine to one before leaning forward and submerging their faces for a brief period. They then raise themselves and begin to count again, a sequence that is repeated for 15 minutes. Counter Voice in Air features Miyajima himself, suspended from a harness and dangling in space, similarly counting. This is the most overtly strenuous routine. While the others perform relatively calmly, Miyajima struggles, flailing his arms and legs, slowly expelling each number from his mouth with contorted effort. Yet while the actors in the other works do seem more inwardly focused, neither is theirs the peaceful, meditative activity—melodiously chanted countdown, calm faces descending into pools of liquid in a cleansing ritual—that one might imagine. In fact the task is obviously taxing: they splutter and cough, struggle to breathe, wince as the wine stings their eyes, and visibly tire.

The Counter Voice routine has its roots in Miyajima’s Buddhist beliefs. Immersion in the liquid follows as the counter reaches zero. In this way Miyajima rejects the concept of zero as ‘nothing’ and instead embraces it as an expectant state—the promise of new beginnings. Yet what principally arises from the works seems to be not so much a meditation on such belief, as a detailed study of the characters who appear in them. What fascinates is each person’s reaction to the gruelling exercise and their transforming demeanor as the 15 minutes pass. Initial enthusiasm wanes and is replaced by dull stares; erratic movements are calmed; the effort of breathing becomes more pronounced; and individual features are smoothed into similarity by the sheen of water, milk or wine.

In the close-up of the frame we notice every uncomfortable drip and trickle, every strand of hair plastered to the cheeks, every lick of the lips, each blink and sniff and grimace. We notice the way milk catches in a moustache, the specks of sediment on someone’s face dipped in red wine or the way it dyes burgundy a blonde woman’s eyebrows. It’s these details that mesmerise, and, while narrative is no concern—and indeed the preoccupation with eternity and the cyclical nature of history would seem to make the idea of ‘story’ insignificant—there’s still a sense of anticipation and a curiosity as to how each character will fare.

How the performers react to the task—the speed and volume at which they count, the vigour or hesitancy with which they dip their faces into the bowl, the time for which they immerse themselves—creates certain rhythms, both within each and across all the performances. This is particularly the case in Milk. While Water, Wine and Air show only one or 3 characters at any time, 10 Milk actors are constantly displayed in randomly placed freestanding boxes, surrounding the viewer with a clamour of counting and a frenzy of bobbing, dipping, dripping faces. Twenty-four actors on continuous loops create multiple combinations of characters and performances, and consequently a constant, and constantly fascinating, variation in the rhythms, energy and mood of the total work which alternately lulls and surprises.

Tatsuo Miyajima, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide, Sept 9-Oct 30

What kind of future do the arts have in Australia? For a long time the focus has been on survival, and still is, but a new spirit is emerging which not only asks what kind of future but posits possible models, let alone new ways of looking at the arts. Important speeches in recent months from John Doyle (Andrew Olle Memorial Lecture), David Marr (Philip Parsons Lecture) and Lyndon Terracini (Rex Cramphorn Lecture) along with the Currency House Platform Papers and David Williamson’s published concern for the dumbing down of Australians’ cultural aspirations, have coincided with the Leading Voices program. That series of talks, presented by the Australian Council’s Community Partnerships and Market Development division includes speakers from the USA, UK and the Netherlands who ask us to look at audience engagement afresh and to reconsider funding models that inhibit arts participation.

John Doyle

Drama, whether on TV or in the theatre, is addressed by Doyle, Marr and Terracini. Doyle offers a grim account of the fate of television drama as part of a greater cultural degradation: “the ABC has been cut to the marrow and can no longer afford to do much drama, and commercial networks have decided drama is too flakey and expensive. Meanwhile our very fine drama schools are pumping out scores of new young actors each year and there is nothing for them to do…So our local content is reduced to game shows, dancing shows, lifestyle shows and talent quests all creaking under the weight of diminishing returns. Think of something mindless, rope in a couple of celebrities and there’s your show.”

In an inspired Roy Slaven moment, Doyle offered a brilliant alternative: “Big Brother is such a waste of an opportunity. The housemates live in a state of perpetual boredom, unless they’re pissed. Why not engage a house of really smart, gifted young people from various fields: scientists, engineers, mathematicians, builders, a Latin scholar, a poet etc and they have a problem to solve. With a shared incentive of a few million dollars they have to find a solution to Australia’s water problems in 10 weeks—there’s a show!”

More comprehensively, like some of us who look to Canada for models for sustainable and marketable innovation in the media, Doyle suggests a way forward: “Because historically the ABC has been the powerhouse for new ideas that are often taken up by the commercial networks, perhaps the time has come for those networks to subsidize the ABC. After all, the ABC has been the training and testing ground for the commercial networks for 50 years—it’s about time the situation was redressed. What I would propose is a tax deductible levy on pre-tax network profit of around 25% to 30% that is pooled exclusively for ABC Drama. In return, the networks get second viewing rights and the right to franchise any series, on a rotating basis that is deemed commercially viable. The fact is, it is only the ABC, by virtue of being unencumbered by what is popular, that is capable of taking risks. Why is there such a paucity of great locally made drama? Because the ABC isn’t doing it. The Americans would hate such a plan and see it as not being in the spirit of the Free Trade Agreement, but so what? This isn’t cheese or rice we’re talking about. It actually is Culture. A fully funded ABC Drama unit would be to the advantage of the commercial networks. The ABC could become Australia’s HBO.”

David Marr

David Marr focuses on the plight of theatre in Australia outside the mainstream, reinforcing the sad picture delivered by the Theatre Board commissioned Roberts’ report on triennially funded theatre companies who comprise, arguably, the engine room of Australian theatre. The speech is a must-read. Marr’s portrayal, like Doyle’s, is set in an oppressive political regime that impinges on our cultural life, guaranteeing money for the major arts institutions while neglecting the rest. As Marr sees it, “In John Howard’s Australia, libraries, museums, theatres and orchestras are on the same list as ports and roads and hospitals—traditional institutions, and necessary parts of the civic fabric. To understand what’s happened under Howard to the arts in general and theatre in particular—the odd mix of generosity and meanness, celebration and indifference, abuse and support—it’s best to keep in mind the lessons learnt in the kerfuffle over the [James Strong report on the symphony] orchestras: that the bedrock arts policy of the Howard Government is not support for the arts—it’s support for arts institutions. Big, traditional institutions.”

The result is that “Canberra has left the fate of the little theatre companies to the states. And those Labor governments are not responding. In John Howard’s Australia, the little companies have no political friends. The fate of these companies presents intractable difficulties for the theatre industry and for the Australia Council. The Roberts report predicting catastrophe is already 2 years old. Later this year when all the cultural ministers of the States, territories and Commonwealth meet again, it will be discussed again. No one is holding out much hope.”

Nor is everything well with the major companies—more and more plays are programmed with small casts and conservative choices are aimed to guarantee audiences, risk is occasional, and most actors survive on little. Marr also reports that the major companies also suffer the impact of “an ideological obsession [which] has seen the Howard government claw back millions from its arts grants. Again, the rot began with Keating. He introduced the idea that to make the bureaucracy leaner and meaner, its funding should be shaved by a percent or so every year. This strategy comes with the Orwellian name of the ‘efficiency dividend’. Howard made the situation much worse about the time the Nugent money started pouring through, by applying the ‘efficiency dividend’ not just to the administrative budget of the Australia Council but to all its grants—including grants to theatre companies, big and little. Over 4 years it clawed back $10 million from the major arts companies.” Marr reports that the Australia Council and the performing arts industry have consistently argued against the efficiency dividend and its mockery of CPI adjusted grants with the result that “in the May budget Canberra effectively exempted the major companies from the ‘efficiency dividend’—though only the major companies and only for the next 3 years.”

As in health, education and research in all sectors, the failure to develop policy and long-term strategies for development means, says Marr, that “Successful as Nugent has been politically, there’s now a danger of the arts drifting back into the old cycle that was supposed to be broken forever: crisis, report, rescue, flat lining, then back to crisis again.”

Equally problematic is Labor’s failure to develop a coherent long-term arts policy. MP Peter Garrett has requested submissions so that Labor will have some 8 months to formulate policy instead of in the rush up to an election. Unfortunately we had to rush in our submissions by November 30 this year. Much will depend on Garrett’s capacity to consult and whether or not he’ll have any clout: as Marr reminds us, “he’s not even part of the Shadow Cabinet.” We live in hope, although it’s no secret Garrett is in search of “budget neutral” recommendations!

David Marr believes, that those in power “want the arts to reflect well on the government. The ground rules are that they don’t want the arts getting up their noses; they don’t want to be embarrassed; and they want the arts minister to look good.” That means looking after the highly visible mainstream companies, and it also means censorship, direct or oblique, with Marr citing the cases of the Playing Australia rejection of funding applications for the tours of Ros Horin’s much sought-after Through the Wire about incarcerated refugees (22 regional centres wanted it), and Version 1.0’s Wages of Spin, a damning account of the political and media management of the war in Iraq. The Australia Council funded the Escape from Woomera computer game and Hannie Rayson’s Two Brothers really did get up those political noses, a condition doubtless exacerbated by predictable right wing media outrage. The political response, as Marr reports, was alarming in its extremity. So much for the “trust us” promise concerning the sedition laws of the Anti-Terrorism Bill with politicians so easily offended by art.

Marr concludes with a simple request for more money: “Expensive as they are, the arts need more money—not for the sake of the companies, certainly not for the bureaucrats, and not only for the sake of the artists. For our sake. To release this country’s imagination by mining the creativity that’s there, waiting to be discovered. In its private soul searching late last year, the Australia Council gave a figure that would transform the arts in this country: another $40 million a year. It’s peanuts. It’s a few miles of freeway. But there’s no limit to where it could take us all.”

But Marr’s speech deals with much more than money: it’s about who gets the money, how it is delivered and with what constraints. Each of these issues needs to be addressed otherwise new money, if ever gained, will go the way it usually does.

Lyndon Terracini

Lyndon Terracini’s Rex Cramphorn lecture concurs with growing sentiment in the western world concerning the way that art is thought about and acted on in bureaucracies as not only inappropriate but effectively keeping art at a distance from the lives of most people. Terracini doesn’t have the space to detail how this might be reversed, but John Holden does in Capturing Cultural Capital: How culture has become a tool of government policy, an essay published by Demos, an independent UK thinktank (“a greenhouse for new ideas which can improve the quality of our lives) and which can be downloaded from www.demos.co.uk. Holden is speaking in Australia as part of the Leading Voices program and we will be looking at how his proposals relate to the arts in Australia in a forthcoming edition of RealTime. Jerry Yoshitomi, another speaker in the program, recently addressed the ways in which people engage with and actually experience the arts, but in a much more mainstream context (see p40). John Holden wants us to move beyond the restrictive business models that limit government evaluation of the arts to audience numbers and other statistics. He thinks we must focus on “the affective element of the cultural experience” and issues of public value, including addressing the arts in terms of support in the long-term. Holden argues for inclusiveness: “rather than being an add-on, existing in its own space, culture is seen as an integral and essential part of civil society.”

Given his experience of developing art in regional communities through engaging town councils culturally and financially in his Queensland Music Festival, Terracini turns away from what he calls the “fashionable” attack on the Australia Council to pursue inclusiveness with a passion, demanding state and local government support for the bottom-up emergence of grassroots work, amateur or professional, art rooted in a sense of place and community and telling Australia stories. He argues that “we have a top down bureaucratic system of arts and cultural methodology and unless that is reversed we will continue to agonise about the state of the profession to which many of us have given the best years of our lives.” He sees the state government art bureaucracies (the recently purged Arts Queensland aside) as out of touch with grassroots arts and innovation both in terms of limited awareness and dated application and assessment procedures.

Terracini can only outline what he has in mind, and it’s a problematic sketch involving a disagreeable metaphor: “a new structure of cultural creativity, a cultural pyramid which would have a major impact on the way we work within our cultural and artistic communities.” Without the details, the structure reads like the cultural pyramid we know only too well. Our cultural ecology only looks like a pyramid because it is a reflection of the top-down distribution and exercising of power. Our arts ecology is a more complex system of co-existence and mutualism that doesn’t have to be imagined as hierarchical.

One of the arguments that the Roberts’ report didn’t overplay was that the triennially funded theatre companies are a significant breeding ground for the talent that fuels the major companies. Many small companies in and of themselves are unique cultural phenomena who do not aspire to be big but are not short on impact. A pyramid model ratifies old values: excellence at the top and a trickle up effect with talent emerging from the many below. We know that the best work that travels overseas, representing our culture and portraying its idiosyncrasies, rarely comes from the top of the pyramid. Robyn Archer has put to rest the mythic status of the mainstream (Platform Papers, No 5, The Myth of the Mainstream, Currency House, Sydney, 2004).

My quarrel with Terracini’s imagery aside (and the weariness of having to deal yet again with “Australian stories”, what about the heaps of art that doesn’t ‘tell’?), his lecture is another valuable addition, along with those of Marr and Doyle, to a re-estimation of Australian culture. David Throsby’s forthcoming call for an Australian cultural policy in the Platform Papers series should take the debate to another level. For the first time in many years, the number of voices calling for serious acknowledgment of art’s importance (including John Carey’s questioning of it in What Good Are The Arts?) is multiplying. Their quest is not just about funding, but about access, participation, innovation, the nature of the art experience, how we talk about it, and defeating inhibitive government agendas.

John Doyle, The Andrew Olle Media Lecture 2005, Oct 7; David Marr, “Theatre Under Howard”, The 9th Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture on the Performing Arts, Seymour Centre, Oct 9 (PDF available from www.currencyhouse.org.au); Lyndon Terracini, The Culture of Place: Making Australian Theatre, Rex Cramphorn Lecture, NIDA Theatre, Nov 7

The Vital Signs conference and exhibitions from ACMI (White Noise, see p24) and Experimenta (Vanishing Point, p23) combined to prove that not only is new media art ticking over, but it is alive and kicking, fuelled by vision, experiment, R&D, controversy and a sense of enormous potential. This is not to say that the conference itself was a picture of unanimity; on the contrary, its participants numbered detractors, the disappointed and the disaffected, and not a few of the uncertain (“What is it?”, “What is ‘new’?” “What am I?” etc). With over 400 artists, various experts and commentators gathered for this RMIT conference, directed by an indefatigable Lyndal Jones, a range of responses was to be expected. However, while the parameters were set for debates to come, the conference itself could resolve little with large panels of speakers, parallel sessions and precious little time (in the Australian manner) for serious discussion, let alone debate and opportunities to pull together an overview of the state of the field. What Vital Signs did achieve was to live up to the promise of its title in offering evidence of a functioning body of diverse, overlapping and largely emergent practices integral and reponsive to a radically changing world in which art can play a part in everyday life in unprecedented ways. Here are some moments I witnessed of Vital Signs.

The body mechanical & mediocre

CEO Jennifer Bott iterated the Australia Council’s commitment to new media arts but framed it in terms of “the research and development possibilities of new media arts not being sufficiently recognised”, of the potential for the field in “design and engineering” and “access to all industry sectors.” Well, that sucked the air out of a few lungs, and, over the next 2 days, speakers like Mari Velonaki and Stephen Jones kept us mindful that new media art must not be reduced to a handmaid of industry or decoration for science. Lyndal Jones defended new media arts against those, especially visual artists, who see the field as “process-driven”, while also arguing that universities need to see that “our practice is research.”

Media artist Philip Brophy led the first of several attacks on the field, blaming the demise of the New Media Arts Board not on the Australia Council but on artists: “You blew it!” An opportunity had been lost, he said, because “not enough exciting, illuminating works” had been created. Worse, new media artists were whingers (“you believe you are opposed by visual artists”), rhetorical, a-political and not visionary. Brophy decribed the root of his own success in “the accident of being nomadic”, of working across artforms.

In another session, film critic and author Adrian Martin celebrated “the orphic”, “the poetic moments of the audio-visual medium”, but said he had experienced no such moments with new media art works, taking instead his examples of transcendence from intriguing film and photographic images. Martin declared new media art to be “gesturing towards poetry”, but not making it, “strangled by machinery”, short on intervention and yielding “a new slew of cliches.” “We must be vigilant about this staleness”, he declared. Martin offered no examples of new media art he had encountered to demonstrate his claims, only adding that assessing such work for funding had been disagreeable. I wonder what he made of ACMI’s White Noise. For not a few this exhibition offered many transcendent moments. Fortunately, in the same session Melinda Rackham’s account of the triumphs and tribulations of webart gave us just a glimpse of the strange beauties of several works, and an account of the power of network collaborations and “the network as artwork.”

The body is ill

Digital art lecturer Larissa Hjorth’s upbeat account of the social uses of mobile phones in different cultures—the ways the machines are customised by users, shared in Korea, imbued with personalities in Japan in “a warming up of cold technology”, and submitted to creative perversity—contrasted with Lisa Gye’s disappointment with the mobile phone camera in another fascinating talk. Unlike its antecedent, the Kodak Box Brownie, the modern tool was portrayed by Gye as individualised and non-tactile compared with the collectivity of family sharing of photographs and the show and tell that goes with it. Media arts commentator and author Darren Tofts wondered “where is the social” in a culture of “enforced eavesdropping”, of “public space as an annexe of private space” in an “onanistic rather than coital culture.” The post-panel discussion debated the wonders of children multiplatforming and media weaving, or not; the Reality TV-type performance of ordinariness increasingly embodied in the new communications; and whether or not art will, like sex and sport, make the leap to mainstream media platforms. The discussion epitomised the push and pull of the new media for artists and experts for whom the technology is their passion and even the basis of their livelihood, but which commerce deploys in morally suspect ways.

Media artist Ian Haig diagnosed a different kind of sickness, among artists themselves: “a psychopathological relationship with new media”, a condition he has consistently parodied, and an “implicit utopianism” about which he felt cynical. In his own art he has left behind technology, he said, in favour of hybridity, of “works that can’t be pigeon-holed”, that question interactivity (“the toilet as interface”) in the Haig boy’s-own-Freud body of work. His objection to “button pushing literalism” of interactivity, however, reminded me how little of it I’ve seen lately and certainly not in Vanishing Point.

Unbounded & inclusive

As the conference progressed and more works were invoked, reminders of what had been achieved and what was possible started to lift the mood. Talks were laced with discreet retorts to new media art’s critics. Curator and theorist Lizzie Muller’s account of the impressive work of George Khut with biofeedback systems exalted human-centred design that works from bodily awareness and privileges subjectivity. She declared the work as neither passive nor pathological. Choreographer and multimedia artist Hellen Sky mused over “experiential embodiment”, of the experience of being simultaneously virtual and physical when “the real and the virtual fold into each other…I think I’m a cyborg.”

In her search “for a rationale for digital art”, photographer, digital artist and industrial designer Gay Swinn conjured “a diaspora in cyberspace”, claiming digital works as “immanent, not just imitative”, and, in their use of irony and blasphemy, opposed to “those who would make us in their own image.” Cultural theorist Nikos Papastergiardis, in a conversation with Ross Gibson and Pia Ednie-Brown, reminded us that we are “not just bodies but modes of consciousness, not bodies that finish at the skin…that we feel thinking and vice versa.” In the “rising mania for user-centred” works and experiences we must, he argued, develop open-ended, “un-edged, unbound arenas of inclusiveness.” There can be no closing of borders as governments do, or publics fearing complexity—institutions must be open to the new.

An overloaded session on curation told us little about why and how curators choose what new media art to exhibit, but revealed that a lot is going on, from Rawspace’s admirable residencies program in Brisbane to multimedia ventures in Tasmania’s 10 Days on the Island, but with less action in major galleries. Next Wave director Marcus Westbury with his familiar “what I do is in what I don’t do” manifesto (not into art, not into form, not into new media art—”it’s not a form”, “I’m into the circulation of ideas”) made one of the more important observations in the conference—“media art is the folk art of my generation.” The truth and extent of this could have made for a conference in itself, as with the issue raised earlier, about whether or not kids really are wired.

Body growth

As she did at MAAP in Singapore in 2004, producer and curator Yukiko Shikata (Japan) gave us an entertaining and extensive update on developments in the field with accounts of works and events many of us won’t get to experience, exploring biosemiotics, the visualisation of gravity, DNA cooking for kids, data architecture, collective mobile phone art, and the moblab (mobile laboratory) project. As the Moblab bus travels through Japan, collaborations are forged between young Japanese and German artists (www.moblab.org). Shikata described these adventures in “new subjectivities and new expression” as “utopian, but plugged into reality.”

Multiplatforming

Former ACMI CEO John Smithies argued for acknowledgment of new media art’s unique pedigree, its distinctive platforms and tools, its very different engagement with the viewer, its user-driven fundamentals and the revolution in income generation and collection through micropayments. That the film and television industries cannot afford to ignore these developments, emphasised by the successes of Canadian multiplatform broadcasters (see RT66, p19) and the opportunities offered by the AFTRS LAMP program (see p21 in this edition). Nell White and Claire Jaeger described their work-in-progress, the AFC-funded Stowaways Guide to the Pacific, an interactive online program for 8-12 year olds. It’s a narrative embedded with all kinds of information and featuring 2 children on The Endeavour in 1769, but with the capacity to time travel.

Filmmaker Michael Buckley described a changed film world in which “the old feature film as holy grail is going”, where there is a “renewal and diversification” of resources…not locked into old venues” and where makers can create and control their own distribution networks. For Buckley this has also meant seeking out new and diverse financial sources in local government and community services to make work that otherwise would grace no platform. Documentarist Pippa Wischer, offering engaging examples of her own work and others, argued that traditional forms are being incorporated into new ones, that modern documentary has absorbed the interview, the compilation and the mockumentary, in works that can go resolutely beyond the gallery to television, DVD and online. The session chair, dLux media art director David Cranswick, enlarged the picture by describing the potential of the mobile phone platform.

The beleaguered word

In the session on critical writing, the occasionally heard lament that writing on the visual and new media arts was not up to scratch was challenged, the focus shifting to the poor conditions under which it is usually done—unpaid or lowly paid, not having the time to fully engage with new kinds of work, struggling to develop the vocabulary with which to adequately describe it, and getting past increasingly vigilant cultural gatekeepers. Addressing the issue of how to foster a critical voice, Adrian Martin argued that reviewers are not those gatekeepers—it’s the advertisers and marketers, editors and sub-editors, and the ABC, he said, with its bevy of comedian hosts, who dumb down the arts, and conjure a “phantom public” as their rationale. The danger, he said, is that new media art will be sold like the video clip, as fun, fun, fun—false advertising for work and audiences that need to be taken more seriously.

Celebration & ambivalence

The plenary session ranged across a number of issues that had emerged from the conference, or which had not been addressed, like the “crisis at meta-level” (Mike Stubbs, Head of Exhibitions, ACMI) affecting new media arts organisations around the world and not just in Australia. I posited an ‘ecological’ model of new media arts as a set of practices and groups of artists, organisations, festivals and schools around Australia, a cohesive, organic network recently subjected to negative pressures requiring a response that questions current funding models and the attitudes of government agencies. Some didn’t want to go down this path, preferring to discuss ‘the state of the art’, especially given the repeated criticisms that new media art is cliched, utopian/a-political, lacking poetry and technologically fetishistic. It’s a pity that Vital Signs’ atomistic approach didn’t provide some detailed, extensive overviews, instead of the many glimpses of fascinating works, forms, personalities, networks and events that were difficult to assemble into a meaningful picture. Perhaps Darren Tofts’ recently published interzone (see reviews in RT 71) will provide a rare opportunity for doing so in the near future.

Other participants were eager to discuss the means to find new sources of financial support for new media arts. Brendan Harkin of XMediaLab pointed to the significant funds for new media developments in key governement agencies; others spoke of the difficulties of tackling such organisations and the secondary role that artists can end up playing in projects. As Mari Velonaki argued, the artist is the one whose vision requires the scientist to develop the software or hardware that will realise the innovation: spinoffs that benefit science and industry will only ever be occasional.

There were sessions on sound art, video and hybrid practices, which were outside my timetable, but I hope the transcipts of Vital Signs become publicly available and doubtless play a role in the Australia Council’s scoping review on new media art.

Taking shape

In the end, I think Yukiko Shikata’s image of media arts as “utopian but plugged into reality” an apt summing up of where we are in new media arts—utopias have a bad name after the brutal excesses of the 20th century in their name, but if we have no vision where can we go? Above all, we need a comprehensive overview of new media arts in Australia so that we can come to know more precisely what this body is and what its vital signs mean. The conference has provided a rich plethora of detail of the working parts, what drives them, and which Darren Tofts’ interzone and, I hope, the scoping review, will give shape to, as perhaps will the formative Australian Media Arts Organisations (AMAO). The last decade has been a period of critical growth for new media art, but it’s a body still emerging, still forming, developing a sense of itself. Vital Signs was a mirror on this process.

Vital Signs: creative practice & new media now, convenor Lyndal Jones, School of Creative Media RMIT, with the Australia Council, Australian Film Commission, Australian Centre for the Moving Image; ACMI, Melbourne, Sept 7-9 vitalsigns.rmit.edu.au

Small fish

On a bright July day, in the airy open space of Johannesburg’s Franchise Gallery, I am absorbed in watching a goldfish lazily paint flesh onto a cartoon fish skeleton by means of a webcam and computer which translate movements in to brushstrokes as he meanders round his tank. The artwork, Scale Model, by Mitch Said, is part of Return, a group show of similarly playful interactive works by students studying for their Masters in Digital Arts at Witwatersrand School of Arts.

It’s a lighthearted start to my self-appointed mission to explore the landscape of new media arts in the new South Africa. I have family links to the country, and have traveled here a couple of times. On this journey I want to come to understand South Africa in terms that relate to my own work in new media art and to strengthen my intangible link of heritage to the country by discovering contemporary common ground.

Eleven years after the end of apartheid, in a country in the midst of seismic socio-economic change and still revelling in the joy of unfettered interaction within its own population and with the outside world, how are South Africa’s artists, audiences and curators engaging with new media and communication technologies? What is distinctive and unique about their new media art scene and how have contemporary techno-cultural forms taken root in South African soil?

This exhibition is a great starting point as it shows what the next generation of artists is up to. It seems to me less a return and more a departure. Their work is whimsical and playful, with an exuberance and wonder at the possibilities of digital technology and communication. As well as this freshness there is a resourceful quality to the show that mirrors the spirit on the street of Johannesburg. Nicky Nagy’s quirky assemblage of cast-off household appliances that spring to life unexpectedly, Funguye To (“Does it work?” in Slovak), has the trash+imagination aesthetic of the city’s markets where electrical cables are turned into basketware and tin cans become radios and toy cars.

Johannesburg Downtown

After a degree of struggle with well-meaning relatives I brave a trip to the Johannesburg Art Gallery. The JAG is a grand old building in Joubert Park, once the genteel civic centrepiece of the city, now the heart of the city’s pell-mell hawker district. Following the desegregation of the city, white businesses and residents withdrew like a tide flowing north to the suburbs of shopping malls and gated communities—leaving the JAG and other city institutions and colonial relics to take their chances amid a transformed social landscape. The gallery’s surrounding park is now inhabited by what the Johannesburg official tourist website disarmingly describes as “the homeless and the mischievous.”

On the day of my visit this uneasy conjunction is being played out paradoxically on the gallery walls through Guy Tillim’s extraordinary exhibition Johannesburg Downtown 2004. For 5 months Tillim, well known for his photographic portraits of the victims of African conflicts, lived with and documented the lives of the residents of the vigorously squatted high-rises of the inner-city surrounding the JAG. These near derelict ‘bad buildings’, often without any utilities, have become vertical inner city versions of the sprawling “informal settlements” that surround South African cities. My companions and I gaze at his haunting photographs that show the daily struggle of living in the neighbourhoods we have driven through, handbags stashed under car-seats, to get here.

Most of the gallery is taken up by the blockbuster retrospective of William Kentridge, South Africa’s most famous visual artist, who has finally, in a sense, returned home. His historically sensitive fascination with the transformational quality of tools and technologies, evident in all his artwork, establishes for me the idiosyncratic context of South Africa’s economic and cultural relationship to technology. Johannesburg is a city built on seams of gold and the layers and layers of pain of those who have dug it out from the ground. Kentridge’s animated Shadow Procession shows a parade of the dispossessed and the damaged in which men carry tools and men are made of tools, mine-dumps, pit heads and mechanisms become people and melt back into objects. In South Africa both minerals and people have been the raw materials that have fuelled an economy built on inequality. But things are changing. The gold is dwindling and there is no longer a disenfranchised labour force to be sent deeper into the earth to extract it. As the South African economy transforms itself, what role will be played by creativity, innovation and information technology—the ingredients of the knowledge economy that has transformed other countries’ economic models? Already the seeds of this transformation are in place, the IT skills base growing amongst the skill-hungry population. How will the perception of South African culture evolve to express these new realities?

The new cultural entrepreneurs

One man who clearly sees the potential of cultural and economic exchange in an innovation driven and media saturated world is Marcus Neustetter, artist, organiser and co-director with Stephen Hobbs of Trinity Session, a powerhouse contemporary art production team specialising in digital technology and the urban environment. I meet Marcus at Premises, the city centre gallery space run by Trinity Session. He gives me a tour of their headquarters which have the air of a campaign office in the midst of an election. It is exhausting to contemplate their array of activities. A selected list describes 35 projects since 2000, amongst them tactical media art works for the leading European festivals Transmediale and Ars Electronica, community media and training initiatives, an impressive exhibition program at Premises, plus a string of high-level strategic consultancies.

For Trinity Session, the tension between South Africa’s new cultural and social openness and the desperate economic need they perceive in the neighbourhoods around them has resulted in a compelling mix of a socially engaged regeneration agenda, global reach artistic ambition and a gung-ho approach to entrepreneurship that does not wince at ruthless marketing and cultural opportunism. They describe themselves as investigating “creativity as commodity through consultation processes and art and retail experiments”, which includes curating the artworks for the South African Big Brother house of 2004—turning the reality TV show into a showcase for South African contemporary art.

After our tour of the office we head off to a nightclub in Newtown, the city’s cultural quarter. It is 11pm and the stage for Johannesburg’s Make Poverty History concert is being dismantled; it has been a bit of a non-event in the city. In comparison to the self-sufficient, creative, entrepreneurial spirit of Trinity Session, Bob Geldof’s attempt to put culture at the service of African economics seems distant and impotent, even retrograde. An affair, in one newspaper commentator’s words, “of fading rockstars and little else.”

Gumboots in Grahamstown

A few days later I am flying south for the 31st National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. The festival is acknowledged as a barometer of the country’s changing cultural climate, so I’m interested to see 2 events in the programme which show that new media art forms are finding a home in South African culture and developing a distinctive identity.

In Petra, a multimedia dance work, choreographed by PJ Sabbagha, digital technologies are integrated with live performance to explore one of the darkest issues at the heart of South African society. Through a series of beautiful but tortuous duets, the work starkly confronts the way HIV/AIDS has invaded all our relationships: from the intimate and personal to the public and societal. Nathaniel Stern, new media artist, and tireless blogger of the media art scene in Johannesburg, has created a hauntingly poetic digital backdrop—a combination of sombre, abstract textures and live video feed which enacts a disjointed dialogue with the dancers. Reminiscent in its brooding shadowy forms of Kentridge’s parade of coal black despair, Stern’s work is a new media expression of South Africa’s new sorrow.

And finally over at the exhibition hall, in an impressive exhibition of interactive music-making machines, I find the perfect conclusion to my quest to discover a uniquely South African take on new media. Sounds Crazy has been co-curated by Grahamstown’s own Studio for Interactive Sound and STEIM, the Dutch electronic music laboratory. Amongst the fabulous mixture of homegrown and international exhibits are Cobi van Tonder’s Ephemeral Gumboots, a poetic combination of old and new in which the stamping and slapping of the dancer wearing the boots drives a soundscape of rhythmic electronic music. The boots are a contemporary version of one of the most distinctive South African forms of cultural expression, gumboot dancing, born in the bunkhouses of the gold mines; they are the new spirit of creativity and innovation shot through with the memory of South Africa’s deeply layered cultural ground. Van Tonder writes that in her sound art she is “…mining the subconscious. Sometimes you strike gold, sometimes you sweat for months on end without any certain reward. My work is not about technology. It’s about imagination.”

Held annually in a city in the USA, SIGGRAPH is one of the largest gatherings of the commercial digital media sector staged anywhere and is not necessarily part of the new media arts calendar. Held this year in Los Angeles and with over 29,000 attendees, the scale is phenomenal and includes a trade show, conference, jobs fair and an animation festival.

SIGGRAPH is part of a large network of bodies that fall under the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) banner. An acronym for Special Interest Group Graphics, SIGGRAPH has an expansive international membership of researchers, digital artists, developers, filmmakers, scientists and other professionals who share an interest in computer graphics and interactive techniques.

The annual SIGGRAPH conference is very much aimed at the commercial sector and representatives from this sector comprise most of the audience. Many were there to see the big name keynote, director George Lucas and others were there to hock their wares. The trade fair is a massive enterprise showcasing the latest software and techniques from the big animation and development companies right through to education and academic publications on obscure code and algorithms. It is a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse into who is doing what and how they are doing it—and who they’re selling it to.

Hovering around the edges of the corporate melee, and what makes SIGGRAPH an intriguing conference, are the quirky and chaotic events such as the Cyber Fashion Show, the international centre, art exhibition, Guerrilla Studio and Emerging Technologies. Run by a core of dedicated volunteers, these events create a very enjoyable rupture in the commercial overdrive of the main events.

The Cyber Fashion Show is organised and hosted by Psymbiote (“a technology-clad cyborg”) and features a variety of wearable computers, head-mounted displays, ‘smart’ clothes, luminous clothing and accessories, futuristic club wear, CAD/CAM jewellery and bodywear. With a strong Gothic influence and grunge LA attitude, the Cyber Fashion Show provided a sneak preview of “clothing of the future.” Highlights were the wonderful Hug Shirt (by CuteCircuit) that allows the wearer to exchange the physical sensation of a hug over distance and the Report-the-World Trenchcoat (equipped with 10 hidden cameras for 360° panoramic shots) by Japan’s Wearable Environmental Information Networks. Australian new media artist Tina Gonsalves was also included in the parade, showing her Medulla Intima interactive jewellery created as part of a recent residency at Banff New Media Institute.

If, on the following day you were inspired to make you own wearable and interactive clothing, you could head on down to the Guerilla Studio. A makeshift lab, the studio provides an impromptu environment for artists, researchers, musicians and others who are presenting at SIGGRAPH to interact with delegates and provide hands-on demos and workshops. The Guerilla Studio is a great place to escape the SIGGRAPH crowds and get to know some interesting and approachable art and technology practitioners and researchers. Just head on over to the wearable technology table, grab a soldering iron, some circuitry, needle and cotton and an hour later you have technology embedded into your bra strap.

Some highlights of the Guerilla Studio were French/Japanese artist Atau Tanaka demonstrating his new interface under development for Sony. Called Malleable Mobile Music, it is a new generation ‘Walkman’ that takes social dynamic and mobility as inputs to a streaming music re-mix engine. The work extends on simple peer-to-peer file sharing systems towards ad hoc mobility and social computing. Sara Diamond (ex Director of Banff New Media Centre) was also demonstrating The Am-I-Able Design Team projects developed at Banff that focus on fashion, wearables, touch and sensory communication. With catchy names like Company Keeper and Emotional Ties, this experimental clothing line aims to enhance and stimulate social interactions.

The corporate/art focus of SIGGRAPH attracts a range of diverse artists, researchers and developers, most of whom are working for university based research centres or independent labs, running their own businesses or working in the R&D units of large technology based companies. Many of these present their work in the Guerilla Studio or the Emerging Technologies section of SIGGRAPH. Whereas the Guerilla Studio has a freeform style, Emerging Technologies is a more structured event where these centres present their latest innovations and kooky inventions.

Emerging Technologies is probably the most interesting and bizarre section of SIGGRAPH. It’s a kind of Quasimodo’s toybox of body enhancements and intuitive interfaces described in the program as “…digital experiences that move beyond digital tradition…and transform social assumptions. Emerging Technologies presents work from many sub-disciplines of interactive techniques, with a special emphasis on projects that explore science, high-resolution digital-cinema technologies, and interactive art-science narrative.”

Showcasing around 30 projects, the names alone provide an insight into the wonders of Emerging Technologies—Laval Virtual Winner (Virtual VeeJeying); Kobito Virtual Brownies; moo-pong; Interactive Fog Screen; and strangest of them all, Shaking The World: Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation (GVS) as a Novel Sensation Interface.

Developed by NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Japan, Shaking the World is a sort of ‘remote control for humans.’ The device works by attaching 2 electrodes behind the ears that create electrical stimulation through a weak current. The person receiving the charge can be ‘controlled’ through the use of a remote device that regulates the pulse of the current. Many visitors to Emerging Technologies were eager to try the GVS and provided quite a show as they stumbled around controlled by one of the researchers. To add to the overall weirdness of this project, an accompanying ‘promotional’ video showed real-world applications of the GVS, such as remote controlling young children and the elderly!

SIGGRAPH is certainly much more than an industry forum. It provides an overview of where research is heading and the types of experimentation and innovation going on within well-funded research labs. Some projects, like Atau Tanaka’s ‘Walkman’ or many of the wearable projects are investigating social applications, human interactions and communication, whereas projects like the GVS have an eerie and perverse sci-fi edge. SIGGRAPH offers an overview of all this and more, insight into the technological imagination being driven very much by the US and Japan. From the smallest gadgets to the Hollywood machine, SIGGRAPH is an eye-opener into the enormous influence and power of the very well lubricated digital machine.

What would be the ultimate compliment for an exhibition devoted to abstraction in the digital age? A ripped remix of key phrases by Ihab Hassan or George Steiner on the aesthetics of silence, a surround sampling of Susan Sontag’s styles of radical will? No. In the early 21st century, abstraction is sick. Let me tell you why.

White Noise is an overpowering and considerable sensory experience. Curated by Mike Stubbs to showcase the “ongoing relevance” of abstraction in the contemporary art world, it brings together a range of Australian and international works that explore the impact of ‘new media’ on the concept of abstract art. The installation of the works has been astutely designed to maximise our experience of the untranslatable, tantalising illogic of sense at the heart of abstraction. Visitors descend into the Screen Gallery and enter a darkened cabinet of curiosities to be explored via a vertiginous corridor of illuminated frames. Within it, glowing didactic screens recede to a vanishing point, drawing us in like knowing sentinels. The art seems to have already begun. On my first visit to White Noise I shared the experience with a cacophony of primary school kids. One of them disappeared into an installation. Immediately there was an exclamation of such import that I thought he had entered a portal to another world. “Sick!”

And he had. This is exactly what a show like White Noise should do. It should be confronting, intriguing and memorable as an event for the curious and informed alike. This kid had clearly encountered something that was unlike anything he had ever seen or heard before. And may never again. And he had experienced it in a context that was just as engaging and otherworldly as the most chilling ride he went on at Movie World last holidays. The work in question was Peter Bosch’s and Simone Simons’ Aguas Vivas (2002-2005), a mixed media installation in which perturbations on the surface of a moving drum of oil are captured simultaneously as real-time video and still images. If asked what it meant he would have phoned a friend.

For the critically informed cognoscenti of abstraction, White Noise was a bit of a mixed bag. The talking point was undoubtedly Ryoji Ikeda’s spectra II (2002), a beautifully unnerving, immersive work that accommodates one visitor at a time in a ritual of solitude. The journey through a darkened, claustrophobic corridor is punctuated only by the occasional pulse of sound and strobing light. The work’s encroaching terrain samples, in miniature, the architectural topography of White Noise as an enigmatic walk through sensory stimulation, the experience of which is always solitary, beyond communication and thus purely abstract. Another stand-out work was Black on Black, White on White (2005) by local artist Jonathan Duckworth, a beguiling, minimalist exploration of the limits of perception, in which the viewer is challenged to wrestle with the polarisation of light itself. Keiko Kimoto’s Imaginary Numbers (2004-2005) is a visually stunning journey into the metaphysical conundrum of nonlinear systems, which produces a series of dynamic portraits of the beauty of chaos.

On the down side there was a lot of similarity in terms of changing colour fields, data streams and pulsing lights. There was room for variation, too, in the selection of artists. It felt a bit like an Ulf Langheinrich mini-retrospective, with 3 of the artist’s works represented. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t appreciate their presence. Drift (2005), a work commissioned by ACMI, was an isometric workout for the senses. High resolution imagery of glistening octopus flesh writhes strangely on the screen. This is the most illustrative image to be found in the entire exhibition. As it morphs slowly into abstraction, it reveals the infravisible weirdness that haunts all representation.

For me the most pleasing component of White Noise was the Abstraction Now collection of online projects (a series of works originally exhibited in Vienna in 2003). The work here, too, was mixed and, in some instances, little more than exercises in the style of abstraction. But what was most satisfying about it was the assumption of digital literacy in its projected audience. There were no didactic panels alerting us to the fact that these were ‘interactive’ works. Nor, for that matter, was there any sense in the works themselves that explanation was required, either directly by way of instructions to the user or in their aesthetics. From the point of view of abstraction we should expect nothing less. From the point of view of media arts culture nor should we either, as such work should by now be accepted as part of contemporary art; especially so in the context of ACMI’s curatorial commitment to interactive works. The haptic lexicon of point and click, scrolling and rollover was thoroughly subsumed into the interaction, eliciting a dexterity that has become second nature in the age of the human-computer interface. This allowed for a deeper exploration of the works in the context of the exhibition’s thematics, rather than awkwardly foregrounding them as media art works that still require explanation and justification.

White Noise admirably reinforces the long-held tenet of abstraction that art doesn’t have to be about something to engage an audience. The street will always find a use for such things. It is to be hoped that White Noise is a sign of things to come at ACMI, which has the opportunity to cement its curatorial place as a space of bewilderment as much as certitude, exhibiting work that confounds and confuses every bit as much as it pleases the eye, or satisfies the desire for narrative. Recently a cabinet containing Stanley Kubrick’s Oscar for 2001 and his 1997 Golden Lion was installed at the entrance to White Noise. A cabinet of an altogether different kind. I presume it was a commercial for the forthcoming exhibition of the auteur’s archives in November, rather than a reassuring emblem of order in the midst of dangerous abstraction. For the time being anyway abstraction rules, okay. Sick.

White Noise, curator Mike Stubbs, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Aug 18-Oct 23

At the heart of the poetics of technological art is a fascination with the line between things that live and things that don’t, the interaction between beings and objects, between man and man-made. Things that confuse this boundary, quintessentially the computer, are described by Sherry Turkle as “evocative objects”, which lead us to reframe our assumptions about ourselves and our creations. Contemporary new media art’s aesthetic inheritance of the evocative object has evolved through many different traditions of spectacle including the magic show and the Wonder Chambers of the past, which relished the ingenuity of the artificial as well as the prodigies and freaks of nature.

It was a pleasure to see this rich vein of techno-cultural aesthetics explored so ambitiously in Experimenta’s Vanishing Point exhibition. It was particularly satisfying in light of the too-oft-repeated claims that new media art lacks “poetry”, which could be heard over and over again in the lecture halls of the Vital Signs conference taking place up the road at ACMI. Vanishing Point not only showed that there was a distinctive poetics to new media art, but that there is a wealth of subtle and beautiful work being produced in this field. As with the historical spectacles to which it claims inheritance, Vanishing Point was popular with the crowd. Huge visitor numbers and delighted faces were testament to the appeal of this work: as challenging as any form of contemporary art—but with happier audiences.

William Kentridge’s Journey to the Moon (South Africa, 2003) set many of the thematic coordinates for this exploration of the ground beyond the vanishing point. In part an homage to moving picture pioneers such as George Méliès, the film merges live action of Kentridge himself in his studio creating work with hand drawn animation. It revels in the capacity of moving image technology to augment reality (perhaps even to fool us that men have landed on the moon). He uses the silhouette—the form of an object reduced to its essence and ready for imaginative repurposing—to release the alternate potential of everyday things. A coffee pot blasts off into the cosmos, a cup becomes a telescope, binoculars and then a magnifying glass. Kentridge explores the power of cameras and other optical technologies to reveal and document new versions of the world, and places them alongside other systems of knowing and representing reality such as maps and star charts.

Despite all advances in optical technology, the simple shadow and reflection remain powerfully arresting visual phenomena. Both are ways of seeing altered, dematerialised, essentially virtual manifestations of the real. Shadows and reflections symbolise the other side of reality: the magical and the subconscious. In Minim++’s Tool’s Life (Japan, 2001), stark stainless steel objects cast crisp shadows on a white table top. When touched these cold, solid objects release alternative shadows—a whisk becomes a birdcage and rabbits jump out of tea-cups. Minim++ reveal the totemic and mutable qualities of objects through interactive technologies as Kentridge does through film and animation.

Luke Jerram’s Retinal Memory Volume (UK, 1997), a work of almost classic status, is the quintessential version of the dematerialisation of the object. In this piece we do not see a thing at all, but the manufactured perception of a thing. In a darkened booth three flashes of light imprint the image of a chair directly on to the retina of the observer. The phantom chair appears with a strange luminous tangibility in empty space. Jerram turns our attention on the mechanisms by which we see and make sense of our vision. Our own perceptual structures are revealed as a kind of optical technology—the observer as proto-camera.

In Shaun Gladwell’s Pataphysical Man (Australia 2005), the human form itself, its construction and reconstruction through human invention, becomes the focus. A video of a break-dancer spinning on his head is inverted so he seems to be spinning from the ceiling. His splayed form echoes those previous theoretical superheroes Vitruvian Man and Modular Man. The work is a study of the physical forces that govern our embodied existence, and our defiance of them through physical feats and mechanical ingenuity. Through our miraculous optical machines we can easily slow down time and invert space, but by doing so Gladwell reveals and celebrates the concrete physicality of the living body in its labours, struggles and triumphs.

Perhaps the most effective piece in the show was one that put the audience themselves directly within the work and exploited the unique capacity of new media to represent in the same time and space the image of the perceiver perceiving. In Alex Davies’ Dislocation (Australia 2005), 4 small mounted monitors are set back in one wall of an enclosed installation space. You need to approach them closely to see what they are showing. It takes a moment to realise that what you can see is your own back, and those of your neighbours peering at the adjacent monitors. The screen flickers slightly, as if there is a minor disruption in transmission, and someone else enters the gallery, nearer to the camera, talking on a mobile phone. The sense of their presence behind you is spine-tinglingly palpable, as is the illicit feeling that you are eavesdropping on their conversation. But glance over your shoulder and you find the room is empty. The other presence was a phantom, a ghost in the machine. I watched people dissolve in delight over and over again, drag in unsuspecting companions and relish the moment of being duped. Even after this moment of realisation, the images of the ghostly others occasionally behaving in inappropriate ways remains compelling. The small audience shivers at each new arrival like ouija board conspirators.

Within the deceptively simple trick is a wealth of complex affects: delight and disturbance, a heightened sense of our physical and psychological relationships to others and an awareness of the captivating rhetoric of our own images. As the mirror image is a metaphor for self, the mediated reflection of the video image is a metaphor for a contemporary technologised self. We are transfixed by images of ourselves, but particularly by images of ourselves made strange. This is at the root of the new media obsession with mechanical transformation. What we are experiencing in the moment of destabilisation brought on by a perceptual trick is a heightened awareness, which lingers after the event, of what it means to be that mysterious psychophysical structure: a human being in the world.

Experimenta, Vanishing Point, curators Liz Hughes & Emma McRae, various venues, Melbourne, Sept 1-30, www.experimenta.org

Due for completion in November 2006 under the umbrella of the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane’s Australian Cinémathèque promises to present and interpret film as an integral part of contemporary visual culture. Queensland Art Gallery boasts that QGMA will be the first Australian art museum to include purpose-built facilities dedicated to film and the moving image. For QAG’s Head of Cinema, Kathryn Weir, the co-location of art and moving image will result in more frequent explorations of the “lines of influence in visual culture” as well as “profiling influences in cultural production across media.”

While the bricks and mortar are still in progress, the Cinémathèque is already introducing film and video programs into the QAG. Curated by Weir and National Gallery of Victoria’s senior curator of international art, Dr Ted Gott, its launch event is Kiss of the Beast: Gorillas, Wild Beasts and Monsters in Art and Film, an integrated film and exhibition program. Speaking at the launch, QAG Director, Doug Hall, said the new facility aims to “create a cinema literate Brisbane.” Future projects will include involvement in the 2006 Asia Pacific Triennial featuring a Jackie Chan showcase and Andy Warhol’s moving image works as part of a survey exhibition in 2007. Given the emphasis of high profile internationally oriented screenings, the positioning of Australian screen work warrants some discussion. Even more pressing is the status of new media art and experimental practices which remain absent from or under-represented in our national collections.

While Kiss of the Beast’s film program comprises cult monster and ‘mad science’ movies, the exhibition component focuses on representations of the gorilla, which according to Weir occupies a privileged position in humanity’s relationship with nature. It’s privilege, however, is double-edged, as the ape has also come to signify humanity’s lesser drives and desires and Kiss of the Beast explores our perplexing relationship with animals. Featuring not only classic genre films, Kiss of the Beast also includes an array of science imagery, rare scientific literature and science fiction, natural science illustrations, photographs, racialised cartoons, fairytale representations, posters, 19th century and contemporary artworks including Evolution (in order of appearance) by Ricky Swallow and Lisa Roet’s Skull series. The realistic sculptural works of these artists appear as 3-dimensional representations of the Thomas Huxley diagram of skeletons depicting the evolutionary transition from apes to human. Roet’s life-size white bronze primate skulls heavily contrast with Swallow’s miniature cast resin series that culminates in a Terminator-esque cybernetic cranium, thus plotting a trajectory from ape to Arnie!

Speculation, anxiety and outrage about evolutionary science, coloured with colonialism and racism, forms the critical and historical framework for Kiss of the Beast. The centrepiece of the exhibition is Emmanuel Frémiet’s 1887 bronze, Gorilla carrying off a woman, which references an earlier 1859 work, Gorilla carrying off Negress. There is marked similarity between this image and that of Fay Wray languishing in the grasp of mighty Kong; as in many monster films, women are carried in the arms of monsters and this is made explicit in a wall of like imagery sourced from various movies. The images are iconic, symbolic of the bridal threshold, with fragile and sensual beauties helpless in the brutal clutches of presumably malignant beasts. Now an endangered species, the gorilla was only ‘discovered’ in Africa by Europeans in 1847 and museums, as modern institutions that aligned science and spectacle, purchased slaughtered apes to have them stuffed for exhibition. It’s now common knowledge that a minute percentile of DNA differentiates humans and chimpanzees—the beast so feared is perhaps the beast within. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ wild man, Tarzan, was one literary experiment that interrogated the diminished distinction between primate and human. However, even with many literary precedents since classicism (and perhaps pre-Christian animism), it’s predominantly in screen culture and cinema that the beauty and the beast theme has been extrapolated at length.

The exhibition and film program culminates with the 1933 film King Kong and while this provides an historical context that maps the gorilla’s shift from object of scientific knowledge to mass cultural phenomenon, important contemporary explorations are peripheral. At the forum Hollywood Goes Wild, featuring Adrian Martin and Barbara Creed, who is currently writing The Darwinian Screen: The Evolution of Film Theory—these contemporary questions received an airing. With recent advocacy of ‘intelligent design’, contention about evolution continues to burn among religious and science groups. Theorists, such as Elizabeth Grosz and Donna Haraway, have also prominently reconsidered evolutionary debates. Haraway’s strategy is one of ‘counter-myth building’ and her primatology has examined the work of research scientists Jane Goodall and Dianne Fossey who both lived with and observed the apes. There is an urgent message of conservation and understanding—grounded in science—in the documentary and feature film representations of women’s encounters with apes. These contradict the 1932 documentary Congorilla by Martin and Osa Johnson in which, like the 19th century expeditionary adventure stories before them, apes are mindless and savage.

In the films that comprise the Kiss of the Beast program, the beasts and the threat they pose are inevitably destroyed and the Kong that presided over the city atop a skyscraper is also the Kong that lies dead in the street below. The beast, like humanity’s relationship to it, is constantly under negotiation. Now our attention turns to the Peter Jackson remake of King Kong (www.kongisking.net[lc1]). We might, as Creed argues, see via the capacity of film to provide a “zoo-centric perspective”, a film that “allows the beast to talk in its own voice.” According to Martin, we can expect to see “a serious, tragic and in-love Kong, a symbol of wilderness, nature and ecological battle.” Such a shift presents a moment’s pause to rethink the mythic othering of the beast in this time of more pressing biodiversity imperatives arising from environmental awareness.

Kiss of the Beast: Gorillas, Wild Beasts and Monsters in Art and Film, curators Kathryn Weir, Ted Gott; exhibition, Queensland Art Gallery, until Jan 22, 2006; From King Kong to Bride of the Monster, film program, South Bank Cinemas, Brisbane, November; ACMI, Melbourne, Dec 9-18, www.kissofthebeast.com

Find

December 2005

Access and understanding

Sensation and success

Directing, curating, listening

Uniquely MCA

Interesting times…seditious times

The festival selection: Adelaide, Sydney

Best wishes for 2006

Evolution and environment

Art words

Designing women

The cross-cultural test

Skilling/de-skilling

New models

Design issues

Critical limits

Wrap-up

Imagine starkness:

Imagine intervention

Imagine gesture

Imagine the future

Imagine ubiquity

Imagine the gig

The Pessoptimist

There and Back

The Candy Butchers

…it’s only a rehearsal

Shock Records, 2004, FOM0011

Alias Frequencies, 2004, AF004 http://aliasfrequencies.org

Inspirations

Look Both Ways

The Proposition

Little Fish

The Oyster Farmer

Wolf Creek

The Magician

Life after the awards

Twist the sinews…

What the hand dare seize the fire…

A new narrative

Erasing borders

Demonstration quality

The LAMP process

Le Dernier Caravansérail

Green

Fagaala

Shen Wei

The Gotham Suite

I Want to Dance Better at Parties

Play in a Room

Bergasse 19

Private Eye

Theatre for One

InfraCinema

Showcase

Le Dernier Caravansérail

Small Metal Objects

Bloody Mess

The Odyssey

The Crucible

King John

Motives

Strategies

Conversations

Identity and context

Communities

John Doyle

David Marr

Lyndon Terracini

The body mechanical & mediocre

The body is ill

Unbounded & inclusive

Body growth

Multiplatforming

The beleaguered word

Celebration & ambivalence

Taking shape

Small fish

Johannesburg Downtown

Alias Frequencies, 2004, AF004
http://aliasfrequencies.org