Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

April 2006

Polytoxic, Teuila Postcards

photo Dallas Blackmore

Polytoxic, Teuila Postcards

The South Pacific has long been a site for European travel fantasy with its geography strategic for colonialist expansion and its languid and intoxicating mix of palm trees and exoticised otherness. Teuila Postcards, the first full length production for Brisbane dance ensemble Polytoxic, is a well-crafted critique of the fantasy, fusing traditional Polynesian and contemporary dance theatre in a very funny and totally engaging take on all things culturally kitsch and colonial.

Following a prologue which sets up the non-linear travelogue narrative with a delightful departure lazzi, we experience Samoa simulacra. Familiar postcard representations of blue sea, blue sky and grass-skirted dancers manufacture desire for escape and excess. And while a long list of cultural protocols and etiquette projected on screen hints at the complexity and nuance of the host island cultures, these are cheerfully undermined with a final Virgin Blue proclamation, “if all else fails, just smile.”

Accompanied by a cheesy pop soundtrack, ensemble members Lisa Fa’alafi, Efeso Fa’anana and Leah Shelton playfully warp the tourist postcards and juxtapose the dream with the reality. A young woman (Fa’alafi) fantasizes her way through her decidedly unglamorous domestic duties with Prince and Whitney on walkman and her short brush broom as karaoke mike and dance companion. Performing a lipsynched show for tourists, a transgender fa’afafine’s (Fa’anana) elephantine eyelashes flutter with mock humility at her admiring audience as momentarily a thought bubble appears, “Oh, I forgot to feed the pigs.” A 19th century missionary’s wife (Shelton) confined in black lace and plastic represents the early Palagi (Europeans) and their erotic obsession with the ‘native night dancers.’ Breathlessly, she takes tea and enquires, “Is immoral behaviour still the fashion?”

In shorter pieces, Polytoxic never fails to entertain through the cheeky playfulness of multicultural choreography and a clear passion for connecting with audiences. And now, a full length production has allowed the ensemble’s natural flair for comedy to develop. This was most evident in the pure vaudeville of the trio of lipsynching divas who banter their way through a pre-show make-up ritual. In this sequence, the company’s finely tuned choreographic timing was effortlessly transferred to spoken word as their glorious gossip and idiosyncratic turns of phrase brought gales of laughter particularly from members of the Samoan community in the audience.

But behind all the laughs is a commitment to communicate the paradox and complexity of contemporary Polynesia not only through the clever narrative through-lines but also the performance’s choreographic range. The energizing high pace vitality of Polytoxic’s signature style is all the more alive silhouetted against the banal Hollywood rock-a-hula and MTV shimmying. While grounded in a contemporary bass beat and a lot of street style, Polytoxic’s choreographic attention to detail is evident in hand movements and here they often take centre stage: from traditionally inspired finger flourishes evolving from the ordinariness of pegging out clothes to erotically charged hand tableaux (those immoral night dancers again) framed by the porthole sized windows of the simple but inspired set.

Polytoxic happily take the piss out of the touristic and exoticising impulse but crucially give something in return—providing insight into the realities beyond the postcard grin. Fa’alafi, Fa’anana and Shelton are, as always, simply great to watch. And while the performance may be a shade too long, their invigorating style makes their “Polytoxic loves you” by-line so apt. It was clear the audience wanted to say, “Right back at you.”

Polytoxic, Teuila Postcards, creator-performers Efeso Fa’anana, Leah Shelton, Lisa Fa’alafi, Polytoxic in association with Strut and Fret Production House for the Afrika Pasifika Festival; Brisbane Powerhouse, March 18-19

RealTime issue #72 April-May 2006 pg. 35

Upon my initial reading of Nigel Helyer’s “Sound arts and the living dead” (RT 70, p48), I was outraged at his complete lack of understanding of the laptop performances he so confidently criticized and so I casually dismissed his comments as ignorant and self-important, as I imagine many of my fellow laptop performers and improvisers did. However, upon further reading and discussion, I am compelled to reply, feeling that despite its verbose and at times unfounded arguments Helyer’s article does, at its heart, touch on some very interesting and important issues.

“Sound arts and the living dead” opposes what Helyer sees as a historical revisionism of recent years that posits laptop performance as ‘sound art’ at the exclusion of any and all other artistic explorations in sound, be they radiophonics, installation or the sound sculptures he himself produces. Helyer’s own practice has demonstrated an extended, and committed, interest in the sounding of objects, which may go some way to explaining his complaint against laptop performance and what he describes as its “profound level of banality.” Certainly few would argue the banal nature of the laptop and its use in performance—as Helyer points out, “personal computers are now as ubiquitous as the Singer sewing machine in the mid-19th century.” However, is it not equally valid to argue the banality of the guitar as an instrument of modern music?

Laptop performance should indeed be recognised as banal, and purposely so, but this banality cannot be explained as the result of a complete disinterest in performance or commitment to the acousmatic. Laptop performance does not exist entirely in the French acousmatic tradition, as Helyer observes. Instead, it fuses these traditions with those of popular music and more conceptual artistic traditions. Laptop performers exist as workers of ambiguous responsibility who traverse a liminal space between the roles of musician, DJ and artist.

With its banality of instrumentation, coupled with a conscious absence of gestural performance (which itself is contradictory and inevitably incomplete), laptop performance exists as a paradox, presenting an ephemeral space of sounding, grounded neither entirely in existing languages of popular musical performance, musical avant-garde nor more established artistic conventions. As such it sits uneasily between art and music as a discipline, accepted fully by neither, and instead often functioning as an exclusive sub-culture, to its own detriment.

Helyer’s problems with the form arise from what he sees as “an alarming fog of amnesia that obscures the recent archaeology of sound art and sonic performance”, allowing a “hijacking of the term sound art…and its repurposing as a synonym for laptop electronica.” And perhaps this is to some extent due to the exclusivity and isolationism I’ve mentioned as common to laptop performance. However, in constructing his argument Helyer makes the patronising assumption that those involved in cultures of laptop performance are somehow ignorant of histories of exploration in sound, citing examples such the Futurists and Luigi Russolo’s text The Art Of Noises, as well as snidely suggesting younger artists are unaware of William Burroughs, or for that matter that it was Burroughs who initially claimed “language is a virus” and not Laurie Anderson.

Most laptop performers are in fact unusually knowledgeable when it comes to histories of sound and music. And in fact many of the laptop performers in Australia have passed in recent years through the newly established university degrees in electronic and media arts now so popular at institutions such as UTS, UWS, COFA and RMIT, in which they are commonly taught art and music theory side-by-side and emerge well aware of both histories. Prior to this it seems most identified as either sound artists or musicians. However these are boundaries that remain undefined and now seem irrelevant as we acknowledge the work of artists such as Russolo, Burroughs and Cage, in which all sound stands approachable as music, and indeed all music is recognizable as sound.

Far from claiming ‘sound art’ as their own, many laptop performers prefer to consider themselves musicians or, more commonly still, retreat from the argument with mumbled comments that they just work with sound. The use of the terminology ‘sound art’ to describe performative and, frequently, quite musical sound has been championed by publications such as RealTime in an attempt to theorize an inherently elusive art form. Rather than exposing the failures or pretensions of laptop performance, what Helyer’s article highlights is a disjuncture that has emerged in Australian sound culture in recent years in the form of a generational split between older artists who have commonly worked either in the field of ‘sound art’ or music and younger artists who are now emerging in a field where the two seem almost impossible to distinguish.

RealTime issue #72 April-May 2006 pg. 31

The North Melbourne Meat Market is a gracious Victorian building with a vaulted timber ceiling, wrought iron ornament and cobbled floor, part of both local heritage and contemporary culture. A huge open room that a century ago was filled with spruiking butchers haggling with buyers beneath laden meat-hooks is now filled with a hundred seats, lighting batons, projection screen, imagery of a silhouetted city and a PA—a site appropriate to performance with a viscerally urban edge.

Most of Concave City’s 7-work program is for composite art forms, including 2 works for musicians and video. Biddy Connor’s Sleep Won’t Help (2006), for clarinet, trombone and bass clarinet accompanies Kirsty Baird’s montage of old black and white footage of women in lavish costumes dancing in a humorous parody of burlesque. The video’s soundtrack of recorded laughter is morphed, serialised and segued into the score, the clarinet emitting a staccato laughter before moving onto a lyrical, narrative line. The trombone’s mournful, evaluating speech, precedes an accelerating march tempo that mocks the dreamy, lighthearted imagery. The nostalgia of Connor’s work contrasts with Arnoud Noordegraf’s Netherlands-produced 15 minute video Pong (2003), a delightfully surreal comedy depicting a man’s descent into insanity, which is quietly accompanied by Linda Kent on harpsichord.

Wally Gunn’s The Hive (2005), for viola, percussion and pre-recorded audio, evokes the 3 complementary identities of drone, queen and worker as a metaphor for industrial society. Less metaphorical but equally potent is Kate Neal’s Dead Horse 1 (2005), which opens with a driving jazz rhythm that alternates with moody rumination, plenty of contrasting colour and drama; a work suggesting the influence of composers David Chesworth and Frank Zappa. Neal’s scoring for a highly amplified ensemble of strings and electric bass and guitar captures the intensity of contemporary life.

Two works for larger ensembles, though contrasting in mood and style, are Anthony Pateras’s Fragments, Splinters and Shards (2006) and Brett Dean’s Etüdentfest (2000). Pateras’s dramatic, textured work, the longest of the evening, is for computer-based audio with viola, trombone, recorder and percussion, including some uniquely original instruments. Brett Dean’s Etüdentfest (2000) is an eloquent and mature piece for a more conventional ensemble of strings and harpsichord, opening with a moto perpetuo motif that recurs throughout. The writing is balanced and measured, building to a climax through high pitches before decaying and rising again.

The evening’s finale, Kate Neal’s Concave City & A Love Story for Two Cars (2006) is the show-stopper. In the open space between the string orchestra and the audience, 2 cars drive in, one gently crashing into the rear of the other. Two traffic-weary drivers emerge to confront each other and begin an intense, agile and at times erotic dance in, on and around the cars. The miked sounds of slamming doors, indicators and windscreen wipers form part of the score. The excellent dancers—Lima Limosani and choreographer Anton—portray frenetic urban life with power and energy, supported by Neal’s evocative composition for strings. This collaboration is the most effective and powerful blending of media in an innovative concert for the 2006 Arts House program.

Dead Horse Productions, Concave City; Arts House, North Melbourne Meat Market, Feb 10-11

RealTime issue #72 April-May 2006 pg. 30

Devolution

photo Chis Herzfeld

Devolution

One hundred years ago, when Isadora Duncan was envisioning “the dance of the future”, she turned her body towards nature and moved with the rhythm of the wind and the waves. Duncan’s ecological choreography for the new century of liberation fuelled many an unburdened, barefoot dance, all free-flowing limbs and gravitational flow. Yet her cosmic view of nature’s rhythms was an enchanted 19th century romance. The futurists with their militant manifesto for arts violent and mechanic were gathering in the wings.

A century later, dance is a high-tech, futurist affair. Two works at the 2006 Adelaide Festival—Nemesis from Random Dance (UK, 2002) and the Australian Dance Theatre’s new work Devolution—choreographed dancers with machines and moving images on screens to digital audio scores.

The convergence of biological bodies and digital technologies is a frontier for innovation. Live performance has long served up its flesh from within a carapace of stage technology. In these new works, the techno-exoskeleton converges with the performers’ flesh on stage. Yet amidst the biotech convergence of 21st century dance, I sense how Wayne McGregor (Random Dance) and Garry Stewart (ADT) have both retained a fondness for the human body and a fascination with the natural world.

The envisioning of nature in these works trades Duncan’s cosmic vision for the minute and microscopic. The strange ways insects move—with their crisp and crunchy biomechanics, their swiftness, swarm and buzz—are traced across the choreography of both works. At times in Devolution, Stewart’s choreography recalls the movements, stranger still, of plants and protozoa.

The works are elegiac in their evocation of the human body. Gina Czarnecki’s meticulous video work for Devolution manipulates fragments of moving human flesh and flashes of X-ray skeletons. These video images, interspersed throughout the work, invoke prehuman memories of cellular splitting and ghostly after-images of bodily remains. They are haunting representations of emergence and dispersal from the past.

Nemesis

Digital video delivers humanising evocation in Nemesis as well. Ravi Deepres and Luke Unworth have designed a video montage that builds slowly, layer upon time-lapsed layer, with images of the dancers—frozen into poses of exhaustion, anguish and ennui—in the drawing room of an abandoned house. This recovered memory gives retrospective location to preceding segments of choreography accompanied by enigmatic images of other rooms from the house.

McGregor’s choreography for Nemesis is architectural and geometric. Dancers’ limbs extend along the cardinal directions outwards from the torso—back then forward, down then up, left then right. Their shoulders and their hips articulate the destinations of their limbs. Each move is plotted with the precision of a coordinate within a 3-dimensional grid.

Dancers enter, walk and wait. They dance solo and with each other in pairs and trios—lifting, leaning, carrying, placing. Their costumes are neat shorts, singlets and long-sleeved tops in grey and yellow construction colours. Their trajectories are adjacent, though their relations are indifferent. The floor is lit by Lucy Carter with architectural patterns; windows, circles, shafts of light and then a grid give structure to the dancers’ positions and progressions.

Scanner’s audio score for Nemesis builds from rattles, squeaks and breathy winds to ambient chirps and vocal echoes and rises to rhythmic intensities with metallic machine percussion and techno-synth progressions for a fiery ensemble sequence. The house burns, the dancers disperse. And then we are transported—or abducted.

A dancer crawls on stage and then another. Their body-suits are cockroach-black, their arms distorted. Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop designed spikey, flesh-stripped, arm prostheses which flex and flick like insect claws. Orange hexagons tessellate the floor as more dancers enter flicking claws. An insectoid sci-fi combat scene ensues. McGregor’s prosthetic interest in extension recalls ballet’s derivation in fencing.

McGregor dances a final solo scene between 2 see-through screens: a slug-like crawl, a parasite, a worm, while animated centipedes chase each other around the screens. Four years old, the screensaver-like animation shows its age and fades. An online animation records the Nemesis sci-fi game aesthetic (www.randomdance.org). Its robotic insects, honeycomb grids and fine-line text click through to audio loops and low-grade video of the dance.

Devolution

In comparison with Nemesis, Stewart’s choreography for Devolution is fractal and organic. It grows and oozes, unfurls and folds, flips and flows. The dancers are dressed armadillo-like in layered leather skins by Georg Meyer-Wiel and they move as if by feeling, without the aid of sight.

Their heads are often down, their faces turned away. Their arms curl out, a leg folds up. Sometimes they are rooted, fixed like tripods on the spot, supported on 2 knees and an elbow, 2 feet and a hand, 2 hands and a head. At other times, the dancers travel in a pack, with arms and legs entwined and overlapping. Three pairs dance a sequence mouth-to-mouth. A man is left to dance a solo, angular and naked, but not alone.

Waiting in the wings and suspended from the rig are Louis-Philip Demers’ robots which stumble, trundle, scatter in to survey the scene. Unlike the dancers, these mechanical monsters have searching eyes—spotlights that transfix the dancers in their gaze. They intrude upon them and impinge upon their space. The dancers cower and sink beneath the awesome rudeness of the robots’ presence.

The robots’ moves are cumbersome, and sometimes cute. When it’s quiet, we can hear them creak and breathe. But when composer Darrin Verhagen’s clunking, churning industrial score lends aural power to Demers’ machines, we are witness to the mechanical choreography of terror. We hear bones crushing and flesh tearing. The dancers shrink in fear.

A robot drags a dancer across the stage and drops him. Machines attach themselves to dancers, as parasitical appendages that pulse upon the dancers’ bodies with their piston push and shove. As the end approaches, the stage is electrified with action, robots agitated, lights flashing, bodies pulsing. And then a screen descends. The final video is of a clustering of human flesh, shrinking, fading, disappearing. In the curtain call for Devolution, as if to reassure us, only the human performers lined up for the applause.

–

Australian Dance Theatre, Devolution; Her Majesty’s Theatre. Adelaide, March 3-7; Random Dance, Nemesis; Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide, March 15-18

Interviews RT 71, p 2 & 4 for interviews with Garry Stewart and Wayne Macgregor.

RealTime issue #72 April-May 2006 pg. 32

The dancers line up along the back of the stage. We quickly become silent. A woman and a man walk forward beneath the low hooded lights, she further than he. She contorts her body (or does she only point at him), and says: “the night my son was arrested.” His body is frozen (maybe an arm is folded over his head, his body screwed away from the audience). She walks off. And the battle begins. This is how I remember it, and I’m sure I’m wrong. And being sure is a poke in the eye about witnessing, about reporting (telling what was), and the impossibility of that, even while feeling the pleasure of telling (tales). Telling is a freedom, a fragment of freedom, and that’s what we were watching—the fragment’s brief and discontinuous circumstance.

The ‘battle’ is an endless round of violent encounters, so finely worked out that while one contemplates the improvisation of street/gang brawls, one is also amazed by the formations of the body as it fights, and the permutations of bodies as they tangle and untangle, and the timing needed to ‘get-the-job-done’ and to keep the job coming, to prolong and inflame the situation. Then a pause, a still image; the eyes rest upon a moment. It is familiar; we’ve recently seen it on the TV from Cronulla for instance, and we’ve seen it in films; we know the moves and the perpetual energy. It can go on and on, and that’s alarming; and as the bodies physically tire they become sound—gasping and grunting floats to our ears, not by dramatized force but by the real-time exhaustion of the dancers. Sound becomes dance; and sound, as much as narrative, sets up the next 2 atmospheres—compositions 2 and 3 of Forysthe’s Three Atmospheric Studies.

Giving evidence while trying to work out what happened is the atmosphere of the second composition, Atmospheric Study 2, which itself has, language-wise, several compositions to deal with (nothing is straightforward). The woman who tells her story—how she saw what happened to her son (the one arrested)—thinks she’s in composition 1, but composition 2 comes to bear upon her story and its recording, and then composition 3 does too. There are fine white threads taut across the stage, sight-lines (of fancy). She tells her story to a translator who repeats it in (is it) Arabic, transposes more like, replaces one word with another. (We know this as another man intent on describing a painting—the atmosphere of a painting, maybe a painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder, several of which have influenced the work). She asks the translator for the word for ‘bird’, but unfortunately the translator only has one for ‘aeroplane’, and so forth. It’s too late anyway for the woman, who in a hysterical/convulsive ‘state’ twists her body and voice in a horrible display of grief. The trouble is it disturbs nothing/no-one in the scene (life goes on). The translator watches passively, the other man keeps on ‘painting the picture.’ Forsythe has said, about the state of the war-state (world-wide): “Nothing changes. In several hundred years … nothing changes” (The Age, March 10).

And then, after a break, the third composition/atmosphere. A man begins to tell us about a photograph (perhaps it’s a fragment of the same painting in the previous atmosphere) of clouds, but more about the relations between parts, the ‘over-there’ and the ‘over-here.’ The event/bombing unfolds, the whole disaster. Amplified treated voices are wrenched through bodies, flesh slams into the set—a wooden structure wired for sound—and people curl into odd shapes, mutilated. A woman, our woman from atmosphere/composition 1 and 2, is now silent and passive while a sensible man/woman, in charge, at ease with the disaster explains it; it is all necessary and for the greater good, there is no other way, the sense of it is obvious (can’t you see that?), and s/he’s come ‘all this way’ to address just/you, to reassure just/you. Nevertheless, our woman rightly, in his/her presence, quietly dies. Meanwhile, the cloud-man has given us a tour of bits of bodies, buildings, and belongings catapulted (from over-there to over-here) into the scene.

The atmospheres are variations, continuations, escalations of the one atmosphere; glimpses, sections, diagrams, architectures of ruin embedded in live/dead beings. There is no lesson here, that’s the blessing. But there’s also no reluctance to ‘speak’, to make fury in the face of the permanent disaster; to make new problems, not take up those of the ‘authorities’—whoever they are, however they appear. Forsythe’s work is dark (darker and less abstract since I last saw it), his choreography confronts language, it pushes language outward, like the world—making matter that it is. This is difficult to achieve as language at every turn (having a life of its own) can trip itself up (be too readily sweet or bitter). It must be small and tight to keep its nerve, to know what it’s doing (and even then it goes to pieces) with sound and affect in the listening world.

Atmosphere is pervasive, it’s never this or that; rather, it’s this and that and multiple relations of infinite ambiences and densities. And it was so in Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studies; you had to choose what to watch and hear; to change focus was to forfeit this thread for that thread. You could not witness it all, you could not tell the whole story afterwards, only what you thought you had seen. One is unreliable like the next person, no amount of effort will ensure the truth. That’s the strange dilemma of telling and re-telling, of having the insolence (taking the uncool Forsythe risk) to ‘speak of it.’

To make a work that functions equally on several performing registers—movement, theatre, sound, voice, design—with edges of humour, intellect and poetry as well as a politic that knows what it hates, requires an ensemble of skilled dancers who are more than dancers. Timing was critical, delicacy was exquisite, and the heavy hand of ‘what it means’ washed throughout yet never erased actual endurance (on the plane of real-life, and on the plane of ‘I love to dance’ in a field of utterance—sensation). Here, more should be said about the company of dancers and about individual dancers (and about William Forsythe), but the work’s power is at the limits of these; it resides in what seems a philosophy of dance, that as time, in time, is a sort of simultaneity of realms.

The Forsythe Company, Three Atmospheric Studies, choreographer, William Forsythe; Festival Theatre, Adelaide Festival, March 12-16

From out of the dark, to the anxious sounds of accelerated scribbling, tearing and tense breathing, emerges a quivering Fiona Malone, tightly framed by light, close to but looking through us and anxiously into herself. The torso twitches, the arms hang and jerk. A tunnel of light opens behind her. She backs along it, pieces of torn paper falling from her mouth. She is revealed again, collapsing into herself in a small square of light. Now she appears stretched out, trapped in a coffin of green light, twitching the length of her long body, arms momentarily floating, rigidifying. She reappears, half-stooped, moving towards us, almost confident, but the arms are now defensive, as if brushing something away, her head up, then down amidst oppressive crowd noises and metal raspings. In the sudden dark there are cries and crashes as her body hits the floor. In a rectangle of low light she writes with chalk on the floor, her body sometimes a template, but erasing patterns and words as she drags herself across them. For a while she looks free and fluent (even if the expression of it seems to come to nothing) and then tense as she struggles to write on her skin. Voices fill the space, speaking of loss of control and self-destruction. She erases, she writes again, she falters, she cannot bring the chalk to the floor, her arms flail about her. A spot glares from the distance, silhouetting a half naked Malone moving freely. The light then opens out into a low unbounded wash of colour and as the dancer nears us, patterned symbols form and glow on her flesh.
Fiona Malone, Reticence

This is dance as interior monologue, where thoughts and feelings have to be read from the performer’s body (save for the one cluster of rather literal voice-overs). And what we read is anxiety about self-expression, the struggle to record or to dance it (a deliberately limited vocabulary of taut, small gestures and moves, like a body blocked). In the end, comes the recognition that all this is already written, in and on us. In this measured, nervy work, Fiona Malone displays a consistency of tone and a careful development of theme, sustaining a demanding state of being. There are occasional longueurs where small moves seems to express little (Malone stretched out in the rectangle of green light), frustration for some over the opacity of what is actually written, and a desire for the choreography to be more expansive, a little more shaped. Known for her engagement with digital technology in other works, Malone here choreographs on herself an almost animated persona, building an image from one or 2 parts of the body and small gestures, until we get the whole picture.
Kay Armstrong, a.k.a

In a.k.a. Kay Armstrong appeared as entertainer in various modes across the evening: greeting us in the courtyard with glittering top hat, quips and little magic tricks; chatty dancer loaded up with professional gear like artist-as-bag-lady; dancer recalling flamenco hand moves, deftly delivered in long corridors of light, but stamping only to flatten a beckoning pack of cigarettes; and failed stand-up comic, desparate to please. Coming from the artist who gave us the powerfully performed and constructed Narrow House (RT 61, p48), this was light fare, and not enough of it written by the body.
Liz Lea, DhIVA

Written into Liz Lea’s body are multiple histories and cultures of dance displayed with great precision, furious energy and a strength you can feel through the vibrating floor in DhIVA, choreographed by Canadian Roger Sinha. Like Malone, Lea too suggests hesitancy, intially rocking in a reflective mood on a chair before springing into action, or pausing her vigorous dance to declare, “I’m a…I’m a…” But such inarticulacy is strictly temporary as Lea flies into action. Here it’s dance as essay, informed by observations about contrasts between the Western and Eastern dance languages her body so eloquently speaks, the hybridity of ballet (its absorption of European folk dance presented here with hilariously overwrought gusto), and a commitment to Indian dance in particular.

Onextra, Solo Series #2, Fiona Malone, Reticence, lighting Clytie Smith; Kay Armstrong, a.k.a, lighting Clytie Smith; Liz Lea, DhIVA, choreographer Roger Sinha, lighting Karen Norris; Performance Space, March 16-26

New forms, connections, networks

RealTime 72 is rich in reports of new forms, new ways of engaging with audiences and of making new connections—between media platforms, between performance niches (as the contemporary performance touring network in Australia grows), and between nations at the Inbetween Time festival in Bristol.

John Bailey reports on recent performances in Melbourne that stretch form in new directions, making fascinating, sometimes challenging demands on their audiences (p41). As he outlines the D>Art.06 program, David Cranswick, director of Sydney’s dLux media arts, describes the blurring of media platforms and the flexibility of delivery therefore available to the makers of short films and animations (p26). Gridthiya Gaweewong, co-director of the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival tells David Teh about the festival’s innovative approach to programming and screening (p22). Karen Pearlman reviews the finalists of the 2006 ReelDance Awards for Best Australian & New Zealand Dance Film or Video, looking at the continuing challenge presented by the dance/film dynamic (p23). Jonathan Bollen (p32) and Chris Reid (p27) report from the Adelaide Festival of Arts on the impact of robotics integrated into dance and sculpture. Christy Dena attended the Digital Storytelling Conference at ACMI in Melbourne where the multiplying multimedia means of telling were in evidence, much of it online for you to follow up, with some impressive sites in Wales, Canada and the US (p28).

Contemporary performance in Australia has received a much needed boost from the establishment of the Mobile States touring consortium, Melbourne City Council’s Arts House and its Culture Lab program, Performing Lines’ continued support of innovative work, and the Sydney Opera House’s programs in The Studio and now in Adventures in the Dark. Adventures… offers a year-round international program of performance that will expand the local vision of what can be seen outside the usual arts festival context. There are now an increasing number of venues across Australia ready to take on contemporary performance and dance. Keith Gallasch surveys these developments on p38-39.

The invitation to run a review-writing workshop on hybrid art practices at the Inbetween Time festival allowed RealTime’s editors an excellent opportunity to see and discuss new British work, especially in the areas of Live Art, installation and digital media. Inbetween Time proved an idiosyncratic festival, offering audiences all kinds of access and engagement which they took up with enthusiasm (see full Inbetween Time online covereage), suggesting the direction that arts festivals of the future may well take.

Just as opportunities are slowly opening up for performance to tour Australia, cultural exchange between Britain and Australia looks set to expand. Performance Space and Arnolfini are playing a key role in this development through their Breathing Space program which this year featured Australian artists Monika Tichacek, John Gillies, Martin del Amo, Deborah Pollard in Bristol and at Breathing Space partners, The Green Room in Manchester and Tramway in Glasgow. Other Australian artists Lynette Wallworth, George Khut and Rosie Dennis were also featured in Inbetween Time.

The reciprocity evident in these exchanges is vital to their future. Wendy Blacklock, director of Performing Lines, believes it obligatory for the future of performing arts touring. D>Art.06 includes a focus on experimental film and video from the Middle East and also has invited filmmaker Akram Zaatari to the festival. By coincidence, Zaatari is one of the artists selected by director Charles Merewether for the Biennale of Sydney’s Zones of Contact, a great gathering of artists, many from the developing world.

RealTime 73 will feature more from RealTime’s UK visit, including a report on the National Review of Live Art (NRLA) in Glasgow, FACT in Liverpool and Cornerhouse in Manchester. There’ll be a special focus on East London where we visited Rich Mix, a new centre for British-Asian art with a strong social agenda, and a re-vamped LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre), directed by Angharad Wynne Jones with a vision blending the local with the global. Both ventures reflect needs and conditions in the East End, and both are planning for intensive participation. In the same East End we visited the Live Art Agency and Artsadmin to discuss the unique roles they play in the nurturing and dispersal of contemporary art. RT

Located on the rapidly transforming old docks of Bristol, Arnolfini is a handsomely refurbished and busy contemporary arts centre replete with multiple gallery and studio spaces, theatre-cum-cinema, impressive bookshop, reading room and café. Arnolfini’s Inbetween Time Festival of Live Art and Intrigue proved to be an accessible, adventurous and marvellously eccentric event, prototyping a new kind of festival in which the real and the virtual blur and, above all, audiences enjoy new kinds of engagement with artists and artworks. Not only does interactivity take many shapes, digital and personal, but audiences also witness at close quarters the formation of new works.

Outside the building an old, red double decker bus, the Spaghetti Club, stood by the water, providing an all day gathering point for artists and audiences to gossip and critique, while the café was packed and the reading room in constant use. A short walk away, the L-Shed provided more gallery space. Across town, the University of Bristol’s Wickham Theatre and The Cube hosted a variety of performances.

Interaction

Large numbers of the public streamed into the This Secret Location at Arnolfini and the L-Shed, a free exhibition of works exploring the interplay of the real and the virtual. Here they saw their heartbeats and breathing writ large in George Khut’s Cardiomorphologies (Australia); they stretched out between layers of light and sound in Alex Bradley and Charles Poulet’s Whiteplane_2 (UK); activated the flight of clouds of white cockatoos to their night-time Central Australian roost In Lynette Wallworth’s intensely evocative Still:Waiting 2 (Australia); or went it alone into the light and utter dark in Ryoji Ikeda’s Spectra II (Japan). Installations were also busy: multiple screen videos by John Gillies (Divide, Australia) and Monika Tichacek (The Shadowers, Australia) and Deborah Pollard’s Shapes of Sleep (Australia) exhibiting the behaviour of very real sleeping bodies.

In contemporary art, the audience, either alone or in small groups is increasingly becoming an active participant in works of art, triggering events, slipping into immersive sensory experiences, meeting artists one-to-one in structured engagements, or simply following sets of instructions. In Inbetween Time this could range from sharing an elegant lecture-cum-meal of oysters and champagne (later followed by a brief solo visit to see the formerly tuxedoed host, Paul Hurley (Swallow, UK), transformed into a kind of oyster by swathing himself in bacon—an immaculately crafted but slender “angel on horseback” joke); joining in a conversation which is destined not to work (Carolyn Wright, Conversations with Friends, UK); a real kiss which is set in dental plaster (Charley Murphy, Kiss-in-Between, UK); sitting in on a bloody wound fabrication workshop (Uninvited Guests, Aftermath, UK); wandering the streets in headphones alert to the special sounds of Bristol (Duncan Speakman, Sounds from Above the Ground, UK); or finding yourself in a small room with a group of performers who are exploring telephone behaviour for 6 hours (Special Guests, This Much I Know, Part 2, UK).

Performance possibilities

If the public queued for and happily took to This Secret Location and other installations, another audience, often comprising students (in numbers that made us Australians envious) and performance fanciers, packed into the festival’s performance spaces.

Each morning the lecture format would transform as various artists used it for everything from E-Bay Power Selling (AC Dickson, USA), to demonstrations of silent movie slapstick devices (Howard Murphy, A Working History of Slapstick, UK) and robotics (Paul Granjon, The Heart and the Chip, UK-France), and the performance company Gob Squad (Me the Monster, UK) report on their research into fear—seeking out vampires and werewolves in public places.
Grace Surman, Slow Thinking

Other performances manifested themselves more conventionally at first glance. David Weber-Krebs (This Performance, Germany-Netherlands) turned the stage sculptural; Pacitti Company (UK) contracted us before we entered an intimate space saturated with British myth and history and reflections on our dreams and ambitions in the immaculately crafted and performed A Forest; Rosie Dennis (Love Song Dedication, Australia) seamlessly and bracingly hybridised performance poetry, physical performance and the stumblings of love; Miguel Pereira (Portugal) arranged for selected guests to murder his stage persona; Martin del Amo (Under Attack, with Gail Priest, Australia) wrestled with personal demons and Jacob’s angel; and Grace Surman (Slow Thinking, UK) duetted in surreal role reversal with Nic Green (other performers will work with Surman in other cities).

Big picture

What did Inbetween Time add up to? Whether thematised or not festivals sometimes sum up a cultural moment or epitomise a trend. As I’ve already indicated this was certainly the case with the range of ways audiences were engaged and the many hybrid forms in evidence. Tim Atack thought he detected something: “Being left hanging is a familiar motif in Inbetween Time. The themes of being incomplete, unfinished, beyond rescue or beyond recall seem to resonate through a series of otherwise contrasting works” (“Mortality Manifesto”). The fluidity of audience-performer relations and the easy interplay between the virtual and the real, self and other, body and machine certainly underlined the pleasures, in particular, and anxieties of the age with a new and pervasive intensity.

Creative tensions

The contrast between works-in-progress and complete and tested productions also provided Inbetween Time with a curious dynamic, especially given that the Australian works were in the latter category (Del Amo, Tichacek, Gillies, Pollard). Breathing Space UK counterparts will reach fruition at Inbetween Time 2007. As well, this tension extended to some contrasting aesthetic attitudes which we’ll address in the next edition of RealTime when we look at the extensive Live Art phenomenon, of which there is no equivalent in Australia. An enormous range of work is encompassed by the term Live Art, work which appears to hover between performance art and contemporary performance but is open to many more possibilities. In fact, it is most often described in terms of what it is not. Much of it seems solo, low budget and roughly crafted, with a calculated 90s anti-aesthetic or an air of intellectual burlesque and not a little bovva, but there are plenty of exceptions. It certainly has a strong institutional presence in the form of festivals, the Live Art Agency, New Work Network, Live Art Archive (its new incarnation in Bristol after a relocation from Nottingham was celebrated at Inbetween Time), well-established funding patterns, a strong regional presence, some committed venues and producers, and plenty of opportunities to work in Europe.

The Australian works were much admired, though sometimes described in terms of style, control and polish, while British live art and experimental theatre were seen in terms of conceptual power, a process orientation and spontaneity, which the Australians, in turn, sometimes read as under-conceptualised and under-crafted. The debate continued on our travels to Glasgow and Manchester where the Breathing Space Australia artists also toured, and was enriched by the experience of the National Review of Live Art at Tramway in Glasgow and our meeting with the Live Art Agency in London, more of which in RT 72. From my point of view, these differences were welcome, reflecting how different the artistic milieus are in Australia and the UK, thus making the ongoing Breathing Space exchange program between Arnolfini and Performance Space even more vital for what it offers in debate and, above all, ways of working. These creative tensions ran other ways too, even in live art itself, between younger and older generations of artists, not least in the problems of labelling. In a discussion of the issue of definition, writer Tim Atack commented, “This is a form in which the definitions are always being contested and the ground is always shifting, so let’s leave it at that.”

Thanks

Above all our thanks to Helen Cole, artistic director of Inbetween Time, for an adventurous festival of the moment and of the future, and one which brought Australian and British artists together in a much needed and ongoing program created with Performance Space. Our very special thanks go to Helen for inviting the RealTime editors to run a review-writing workshop and securing the funds with which to do it.

The workshop was a wonderfully immersive experience with a fine team of 6 writers who committed themselves to a hard task with vigour and good humour, turning out reviews daily on demand. The writers were Marie-Anne Mancio, Niki Russell, Winnie Love, Osunwunmi, Ruth Holdsworth and Tim Atack. You can read their reviews on the Inbetween Time section of this site.

Our thanks also go to Tanuja Amarasuriya and Tim Harrison for making our 2 weeks at Arnolfini friendly, comfortable and efficient. Thanks also go to the Australia Council’s Community Partnerships & Market Development division for additional funds to extend our visit beyond Bristol to Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and London, as part of the Undergrowth Australian Arts 2006 program.

The workshop has allowed RealTime to meet writers both British and Australian in the UK who will contribute to future editions of the magazine as the cultural exchange between the 2 countries accelerates and intensifies, adding, we hope, a level of documentation, review and debate.

In 2005, Asialink in partnership with the Dance Board of the Australia Council selected 5 Australian choreographers, including Jo Lloyd, to develop new collaborative works in Japan as part of the Asialink Japan Dance Exchange, Neon Rising. In May 2005, Lloyd, Melbourne designer Shio Otani and composer Duane Morrison visited Japan and collaborated with Off Nibroll members Mikuni Yanaihara and Keisuke Takahashi to create Public=Un+Public. Mikuni Yanaihara founded the art collective Nibroll in 1997, a company of 6 directors in the fields of film, dance, music, lighting and fashion producing works seen around the world. Off Nibroll’s work focuses on the relationship between body and image. Public=Un+Public was presented at Yokohama BankART1929 and has now been seen in Melbourne where Lloyd is based and has been building a body of work including Not As Others, seen in the Adelaide Fringe Festival and Next Wave 2006. Eds.
Mikuni Yanaihara, Jo Lloyd, Public=Un+Public

Mikuni Yanaihara, Jo Lloyd, Public=Un+Public

Shown recently in Japan, Public=Un+Public’s Melbourne incarnation was created inside Chunky Move’s Melbourne studio, whose usual box-like dimensions were transformed by Shio Otani into a series of spaces, levels and screens. Two bedrooms at each end were connected by a central sphere, green and grasslike.

The work begins with Lloyd and Yanaihara at each end, in their respective rooms. The screens flanking each room reflect the activities of the other, thereby connecting the women. If this is private space, it’s pretty sparse and depersonalized at best, an external view upon interiority. Perhaps the term ‘un+public’ suggests this, that the private is simply an inflexion of the public. After a series of activities, the women swap ends to continue their individual musings. They are not the same. Yanaihara’s range of emotional textures highlights the secular nature of Lloyd’s boisterous, bouncerly energies.

Takahashi’s accompanying video images undergo simple but mesmeric transformations—silhouetted doorways, interiors framed and reframed; windows upon social, personal space. A crowd of small black figures explodes into what looks like a flock of birds pouring out of a diminishing human form, repeatedly blotting the screen in flying formation. At one point, the width of the room gives way to a single screen, the women leaving us to pay attention to the images. Some beautiful imagery combines with dancing text. Yanaihara was filmed on her bed in her flat (inspiration for the overall design?), the image contracting into the room’s TV, a frame within a frame. A reminder that the realism of video is never more than virtual?

When they returned, Lloyd and Yanaihara interacted in the central space, back to back, back to front, tossing, lunging, swinging at each other, coming together, coming apart. Elements of domination or competition were suggested but nothing was made explicit. A menagerie of shredded newspaper balls were tossed about. Many qualities were explored in this duet, which canvassed a range of relational possibilities. This was the section of Public=Un+Public that appeared the most experimental, a place where the women could have taken the work into another space, beyond its initial dichotomies. My feeling is that more collaborative time is needed in order to fully develop this section, and to integrate it into the piece as a whole. Lloyd and Yanaihara are each strong performers with their own qualities and differences. They clearly have ideas about the work, along with Takahashi’s video projections and Otani’s design structures. If there is an element of cultural difference in the mix, there is also the question of kinaesthetic difference: how to produce joint movement by way of addressing the themes of the whole. This is about the work as performance, rather than installation. In other respects, Public=Un+Public felt very clear, Lloyd’s aesthetic combining well with Off Nibroll’s input and Duane Morrison’s music to create a distinctive and enticing world.

Public=Un+Public, choreography and performance Jo Lloyd, Mikuni Yanaihara, video Keisuke Takahashi, music Duane Morrison with Yuki Kato+Sound Sleep, design Shio Otani; Chunky Move Studio, Melbourne, February 15-19

Calling for a “tuning of the world”, R Murray Shafer was influenced by Pythagoras’ concept of the music of the spheres—the harmonious hum of the universe. But he wasn’t too fond of the overcrowded audio soup that industrialisation and modern living was making of the acoustic environment. While electricity is a natural phenomenon, its technological taming is the foundation of contemporary living and one of the major ingredients of this soup. So I wonder what Schafer’s thoughts would be on Sound+Electricity at Performance Space featuring performances by Carsten Nicolai (aka alva.noto) and Joyce Hinterding, both of whom use this energy source directly to conjure their sonic worlds.

Hinterding has been summoning the hum for quite a few years now. Using large, hoop antennae, she amplifies the under rumble of the electrical grid. It is a warm, caramel sound tonight reinforced by the projection showing 2 mirrored ovals of a flowing bronze substance. Hinterding’s work is meditative, the shifts of tone minimal and incremental. At some point it becomes a duet as lighting designer Richard Manner subtly brings up dim squares of light, shifting the intensity and pitch of the drone. For those of us who have spent considerable time trying to eliminate interference between lighting and sound systems, this is a perversely pleasurable moment. Patience is rewarded with the development of crackles, pops and fizzes fringing the bass tones marking the climax of the work. At its end, there is both relief and a hint of loss plus some very strange flange effect filtering the foyer voices for the next few minutes.

In contrast to Hinterding’s slow flowing release of electrical energy Carsten Nicolai’s sound consists of tightly controlled punctuations and calculations. Nicolai describes his work as “atomising…Every particle carries the same information as the bigger object it came from…a kind of micro-macro thing” (Wire 238, Dec 2003). In this performance each sound element—spit, spark and sputter—is perfectly crafted, a glistening glitch. When these particles combine, the whole becomes an intense, vibrating composition of intricate syncopations. Accompanying the sound are synaesthesic visuals of blue lines snapped to a grid, directly emulating the intersections of audio. These form strict geometries, like insanely complex architectural drawings in constant states of redesign. The entire effect is as physical as it is mesmeric. The rhythmic entwinings create primal pulses and cool melodies which entice the body to movement. Why are we sitting in concert mode? We should be dancing!

This was perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Sound+Electricity. alva.noto is an artist who manages to bridge the esoteric and the accessible. The audience comprised elements of the local sound crowd but the larger proportion were newcomers to this kind of sound event. Of course alva.noto has international appeal but are many here aware that there is also a vibrant experimental scene happening in nooks and crannies around Australia? Hopefully Sound+Electricity not only tuned us in to our contemporary audio ecology but also to the potential to expand the audience for experimental audio.

Carsten Nicolai (aka alva.noto), Joyce Hinterding, Sound+Electricity; Performance Space, March 12

Carsten Nicolai was presented in association with the Adelaide Festival of the Arts and forma UK.

Peter Brook loomed large over the 2006 Perth Festival. Brook mastered a ritual, story-telling frame to bind together “a little of this and a little of that”—theatre for “the brunch eating class”, as The Nation put it. He helped establish a ‘fringe on Broadway’ style, mixing elements of dance, mime, opera, physical expressivity and text which distilled elements of avant-garde dramaturgy into rich flavours within more traditionally acceptable narrative or character based formulae. Canadian director Robert Lepage is Brook’s peer and heir here, a revival of Lepage’s La trilogie des dragons (1987) headlined at the festival.

Dragon Trilogy

A sparse, plastic scenography supported Lepage’s epic scope, offering 3 snapshots of interconnected lives in different cities populated by French-Canadians, Canadian-Chinese, Canadian-Japanese and Anglo-Canadians, their families, and star-crossed lovers. The opening established the tone: 2 Francophone girls recreate their neighbourhood using shoeboxes laid out on a rectangle of gravel (Brook’s proverbial “empty space”, pregnant with potential), bounded by a concrete path along which bicycles, scooters, wheelchairs, wheelbarrows and skaters later zoom. Lepage uses this dialectic between centre and periphery in conjunction with that between fast and slow to alternate between scenes of quiet, centrally located contemplation or intensity, and those later encircled and rendered storm-like by multiple figures rushing about the edges.

Lepage’s now venerable show was remarkable for this effortlessly controlled use of space. The director remains however an unreformed Orientalist. Spectators learnt almost nothing about the Asian characters who ‘featured’, only about Canada’s projection of itself and Lepage’s vision of spiritual redemption through interaction with such outsiders. Orientalist clichés ranging from the opium addled, gambling Chinaman to the avaricious white-slaver abounded. Even Madama Butterfly was uncritically (and implausibly) relocated to US occupied Okinawa. Brook himself brushed aside cultural difference as largely irrelevant, and any dramaturg like Lepage who still quotes with approval “Antonin Artaud saw theatre as Eastern” must be viewed with suspicion by those of us critical of Western fantasies about the ‘mysterious East.’ Nevertheless, in reminding one of the scenographically and performatively expansive modes underpinning popularly successful epic works from The Mahabharata (1985) to Angels in America (1991) to Susie Dee’s Tower of Light (Melbourne, 1999), Lepage’s theatrical skills yield deeply moving work.

Chronicles—A lamentation

Although Polish company Teatr Piesn Kozla developed their expressive style from Jerzy Grotowski and other sources, Chronicles—A lamentation recalled Brook’s gently lulling, melancholy rituals more than Grotowski’s intense and abstracted Catholic mysteries. Amidst earthy hues, unpainted wood and brown costuming, 7 performers sat or stood in an otherwise empty space, each word, musical lament and exhaled expression directed at the audience as they rolled their weight from foot to foot like boxers or capoeira dancers. The Albanian and Polish text was sung in the polyphonic style popularised by the Mystère des voix bulgares CDs. In Edinburgh, spectators were given printed translations of the show’s text, but here the narrative was simply vocalised, demonstrating the error of Brook, Grotowski, Herbert Blau and others. Throughout the 1970s, artists claimed to isolate universally embodied forms of human expression. That Chronicles failed to communicate illustrated their mistake. The performative emphasis on actors speaking at the audience meant that Chronicles functioned as an intriguing collection of physical hieroglyphs which, while designed to have dramatic content, remained opaque to most Perth spectators.

The Drover’s Wives

Though far from Brook and Lepage, The Drover’s Wives also sustained a tension between abstraction, history and narrative. In director Sally Richardson’s dance theatre piece, 5 performers depicted the stories of 2 turn-of-the-century women abandoned by their husbands in the bush. The choreography mixed overt mime (hanging washing, etc) with simple, unison dance. The movement truly shone, though, when a dark sense of abstraction took over. In Richardson’s rendering of Barbara Baynton’s story from The Chosen Vessel (1902; Jonathan Mills’ source for his opera The Ghost Wife, 1999), an unseen swagman raped 1 of these women. The others transformed into beastly presences, on all fours with shoes on their hands, their stomping, leather-shod limbs menacing the wife before she was encircled by tree stumps, as though the very bush itself was attacking. Iain Grandage guided the show’s trajectory, his mildly Sondheim-esque score recalling Lennie Niehaus’s for Pale Rider (1985) and Unforgiven (1992) in its rhythmic combinations of folk instrumentation, strings and cut-down orchestral motifs. The Drover’s Wives was another popular work which frayed under intense scrutiny. Ostensibly an exploration of feminine isolation, the ensemble work rather suggested an oscillation between individual loneliness and feminine community, of women coming together to share domesticity and spatial play. It was moreover not clear why, of the 5 dancers, 2 played specific characters. Who were the other 3? Aspects of the first 2? Finally, the radically different sense of cultural space—and that of the stage design itself—as one moved from bright, projected landscapes of the inland plains to dense, dappled ironbark forests, was not explored. Nevertheless, the broad scope of the production and its sense of light engagement made for stimulating viewing.

Super Vision

Compared to the antiquarian neoclassicism of Chronicles, the Builders’ Association’s Super Vision glistened with modernity. Using digital projection, director Marianne Weems offered 3 sketches dealing with the transmutation of identity via computerised data: a New Yorker helping her Indian grandmother to archive and identify photographs from her life; a man using his son’s name to evade mounting debt; and an Indian-Ugandan repeatedly stopped by US Customs. Images of the son and live close-ups of the other performers were projected onto translucent screens effortlessly sliding in front of the main stage. Behind the performers curved a space bearing the projected sets. The intricate digital designs were laid on black in blocks of line, colour and text reminiscent of the London Underground map. Sound and music underscored the performance, the use of bird calls as an abstract, vaguely digital aural signature echoing Stories From the Nerve Bible (1992) by Laurie Anderson and Brian Eno. Like much slick, postmodernist performance, the scenography and music gave the piece an oddly dated ambience—very mid 1990s, a production buoyed by the sharp rise in interest in the internet and new technologies which has yet to abate. Super Vision was more impressive in form than content, Weems contrasting the strangely flat sense of glossy ecstasy sustained by the efficiency of her onstage technology with ambivalent, mildly dystopian narratives. Even the father’s attempt to flee beyond technology to the Far North seemed borrowed from Anderson’s tale of setting out for the North Pole. A particularly perspicacious narrative detail though was that the traveller was initially identified as a security or health risk because of his racial and geographic origins, but was eventually given a royal welcome once his prosperity became apparent. In contemporary global capitalism, class can trump race. (See also Kate Vickers review on p27.)

Isabella’s Room

Alongside such supremely proficient, crafted works, it was Needcompany’s Isabella’s Room which provided challenging aesthetic defamiliarisation in its radical objectification of onstage materials. Director Jan Lauwers mixed an easy, off-hand performativity with dense allusions. Twentieth century history and life became a room, a clutter of objects and people. Characters died during the narrative, but did not leave the stage. The past remained.

The conceptual centre was an assemblage of African and Middle Eastern art works and objects which Vivianne De Muynck (Isabella) told spectators were first left to Lauwers by his real father, and then to the fictional Isabella by the paternal liar who raised her. Like everything in this production—actors, musical instruments, voices, words—these materials stayed immutably themselves, objects incapable of transformation yet thick with an opaque past. Unlike Lepage, Lauwers did not offer transcendence through sharing culture or history. Rather he relied on a knowing ignorance and distance. Stripped of their colonial contexts, the stone penis, the slave’s shackles and the Ashanti bronze remained simply that: objects about which one knew a little, but which one could not fully comprehend through a blithe, 90 minute show. As one of Isabella’s lovers said: “You’re a liar Isabella! You told me people were good!” Like theatre itself, Isabella’s Room was a world of lies, some beautiful—that she was raised on a lighthouse, betwixt land and sea—but also ugly—the rape of her mother, the bombing of Hiroshima transformed into an aesthetic image, “as if the sun had exploded and scattered its ash over the earth.”

Delivered as a series of interrupted monologues, the performance effected an easy familiarity, mixing storytelling, verbal poetry and physical interactions on an open, white stage. In sifting through the beauty, banality and ugliness of this century of war and love which Isabella endured, choreography was both invested in and yet discarded as wanting. Lauwers compares his dramaturgy to Jean Baudrillard’s description of postmodern society as “beyond the end”, characterised by “extreme phenomena.” Lauwers’ confusing yet entrancing project expressed the political, social, aesthetic and emotional ambiguity of this condition, in which history seems to have ended, yet, as the cast sang in the finale, suffering, life, love and violence “go on and on.” In the end, Lauwers’ concentrated, festive gobbets proved more weighty than Lepage’s 6-hour-long yet pleasingly digestible menu.

Ex Machina, La trilogie des dragons, director-devisor Robert Lepage, Claremont Showgrounds Feb 11-19; Teatr Piesn Kozla, Chronicles—A lamentation, director-designer Grzegorz Bral Octagon, Feb 14-18; Steamworks & Black Swan, The Drover’s Wives, director-devisor Sally Richardson, performer-choreographers Claudia Alessi, Felicity Bott, Shannon Bott, Jane Diamond, Danielle Micich, composer-performer Iain Grandage, designer Andrew Lake, costumes Zoe Atkinson, projections Ashley de Prazer, Danielle Micich; Playhouse, Feb 3-11; The Builder’s Association & Dbox, Super Vision, director/devisor/text Marianne Weems, His Majesty’s Theatre, Feb 14-19; Needcompany, Isabella’s Room, director/script/set/lights Jan Lauwers. His Majesty’s Theatre, Feb 14-18; 2006 Perth International Arts Festival, Feb 10-March 5

The hunting and gathering of grants is a tougher task then ever. It seems that there are fewer of them relative to the population of artists, their value in real terms declines annually and the competition increases as training institutions hatch each new generation of artists. As we await the emergence of a new breed of politician who can grasp the consequences of keeping most artists below the poverty line but can also face the futures that artists conjure, there are indications elsewhere of a growing responsiveness. A few signs of this break in the weather include the steady growth of the Theatre Board’s Mobile States touring initiative, operated by a consortium of venues; Melbourne City Council’s Arts House multi-platform program and its Culture Lab; expanded touring opportunities for innovative Australian work overseas and the development of reciprocal programs, like Breathing Space (see our InBetween Time feature in this edition) and Asialink’s Neon Rising Australia-Japan choreographic program; as well as a range of regional arts developments across Australia, strengthening the potential for greater cultural exchange between cities and country centres.

For contemporary performance practitioners these developments bring with them opportunities for finding new niches and new partners within Australia and beyond. A show that might have once enjoyed a brief season can now be kept in repertoire and reach far flung audiences. Of course, it’s not that easy. The old monoculture of arts funding, where finance for individuals, small companies and projects was sought from one or 2 sources is being replaced by a hive of potential partners (venues, programmers, producers, presenters, agents, consortia, festival directors). This has moved well beyond the challenge of writing and acquitting a grant application—and often you’ve still got to get that money in the bank before the other partners come into play. As was revealed in the RealTime-Performance Space forum on the need for Creative Producers (RT69, p40), artists need help to engage with an increasingly complex arts habitat, not only at home, but also as they venture out across borders and oceans. It’s good news then that the Theatre Board has recently announced three 2-year grants for producers at $50,000 per annum, possibly extendable to 3 years, to develop their own models of working with artists. If it works, this strategy could begin to fill a significant gap in the cultural ecology.

Australia’s major arts festivals and venues need to be part of that ecology, embracing innovation, seeding the audiences of the future. The Melbourne International Arts Festival, first under Robyn Archer and now Kristy Edmunds, leads the way, while Sydney Opera House’s The Studio has become a home for cutting-edge popular entertainment distinctly aimed at younger audiences but blended with more demanding material and cultural events that include NYID’s Blowback and dLux Media’s d>Art. Now Sydney Opera House has launched Adventures in the Dark, the kind of program of Australian, Pacific region and international works usually restricted to the arts festival circuit. Such initiatives offer openings for Australian artists and audiences but also provide rare opportunities for inspiration, dialogue and exchange.

Performing Lines

Performing Lines develops, produces and tours innovative new Australian performance nationally and internationally—across genres including physical theatre, circus, dance, indigenous and intercultural arts, contemporary opera, music, puppetry, and text-based theatre. Performing Lines website

Asked about the vision that drives Performing Lines, director Wendy Blacklock, speaks of a desire “to reflect the current trends in contemporary work as broadly as we possibly can.” Works range enormously, says Blacklock of the company’s 2005-06 program, from large scale (Stephen Sewell’s Three Furies: Scenes from the Life of Francis Bacon seen at Sydney, Adelaide and Perth Festivals) to solo works by Performing Lines regular, William Yang (Shadows, Objects for Meditation), and newcomer Rebecca Clarke (Unspoken, directed by Wayne Blair). The company has assisted Kate Champion (Force Majeure’s Already Elsewhere, Sydney Festival 2005) and, as part of the Mobile States consortium, is presenting emerging choreographer Tanja Liedtke (Twelfth Floor). Both choreographers conjure strange worlds out of the everyday. Powerful contemporary performance works are provided by version 1.0 (Wages of Spin), Branch Nebula (Paradise City, seen as a potent work-in-progress in 2005) and Urban Theatre Projects (Back Home, Sydney Festival 2006). Add composer-musicians Linsey Pollak (another Performing Lines stalwart) and Graeme Leak as The Lab and you’ve got a strong selection of touring potential, a good Sydney showing (deservedly after a tough decade for dance and performance in this city) and a wealth of partners—the country’s leading arts festivals, international festivals, Sydney Opera House, Melbourne’s Malthouse and, not least, the Mobile States consortium (see below).

Blacklock emphasises the importance of large-scale works, like the Nigel Jamieson-Paul Grabowsky Australian-Indonesian collaboration The Theft of Sita toured internationally by Performing Lines and generating profits that could be ploughed back into smaller works. However small-scale works, like William Yang’s, that travel extensively also yield income that supports works yet to prove themselves at home before venturing overseas. As well as nurturing new work, Performing Lines supports creative development but also assists Australian companies in the formation of partnerships in, for example says Blacklock, Wales, Argentina and New York.

Wendy Blacklock is particularly approving of Mobile States—Performing Lines is one of the consortium—declaring it an “extremely healthy” operation, supported by several Boards of the Australia Council, focused “on the work those Boards are interested in” and “growing every time it’s programmed.” As for audiences for touring productions, it’s always a challenge, says Blacklock, but the response to Mobile States has been good. As for regional audiences, Blacklock reports that presenters are “more and more curious, wanting to know about Performing Lines’ work.”

Speaking about the international market for Australian work and the kind of obligations that come with it, Blacklock thinks, “reciprocity will rise to the top of the agenda. We can’t keep sending out Australian work if we’re not able to reciprocate. We’d love to be involved in it.”

Mobile States

The consortium of Australia’s major independent contemporary performance presenters that runs Mobile States comprises Arts House (Melbourne), Brisbane Powerhouse, Performance Space (Sydney), Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts and Salamanca Arts Centre (Hobart). Other venues join the touring network for particular productions, eg De Quincey Company’s Nerve 9 included a season in Darwin.

The criteria for selection for Mobile States touring are that works should “employ multiple languages eg physical performance, projection, spoken word and contemporary music/sound; be conceptually and formally ambitious; contribute to current cultural and/or artform developments; be dramaturgically coherent and have attracted positive critique in press and by peers.” The aim is not just to tour innovative works but also “to provide opportunities for audiences across the country to experience contemporary Australian theatrical performance that would otherwise not be seen outside their home towns.” The Australia Council’s Theatre and Dance Boards and Inter-Arts Office have all committed to funding for Mobile States for 2006-2008, and Theatre to 2009. The Australia Council funds go to presenter organisations to subsidise their costs and additional assistance is sought from Playing Australia.

Mobile States represents a major breakthrough for contemporary performance touring (it has included Jenny Kemp’s Still Angela, Chamber Made Opera’s Phobia, De Quincey Company’s Nerve 9, and now version 1.0’s Wages of Spin and Tanja Liedtke’s Twelfth Floor). The number of shows is small, but given the context of much other movement of new work through arts centres and festivals, it is highly significant.
Sascha Budimski & Anton, Twelfth Floor

Tanja Liedtke’s Twelfth Floor

Developed by Adelaide-based artists in-residence at the Canberra Choreographic Centre, Twelfth Floor is the first Mobile States work to come from outside Sydney and Melbourne. Tanja Liedtke is a choreographer with a rapidly growing reputation and a lot of dance experience. She believes that the strength of Twelfth Floor grew from the opportunity to work with “5 performers I’m close to and respect enormously…and they’re 5 very distinctive individuals. For 2 months we ate, worked and lived together and that seemed a great premise for making the work, and in a city without many distractions. It became a work about human interaction and confinement, small people in their own small worlds.” Discussion, improvisation and research informed the creation of the work, including Sartre’s “Hell is other people…” from No Exit. The result: a show about a group of people confined in an unidentified institution, withdrawing, dreaming, surviving.

Liedtke feels that “a lot of Australian dance is very nice, but that’s not enough, I want to get to the underbelly, to see people as complex—affection and hostility are such great physical premises for dance.” She recalls that the process of creating the works was “not always easy; at times it was tense and tough, but everyone was up to it. After 6 weeks, 80% of the work was there and we rehearsed it for a week of performances (at the Choreographic Centre).”

Asked how the performers accommodated the demands of her choreographic language, Liedtke replies that they had been in her earlier, shorter works but were also bringing new things to Twelfth Floor. As for that language, Liedtke says: “I work from a visual sense of my own body and its history… It’s a long body…long-limbed, very clear and articulate. I always play with what my body can do…” Music is a vital component of the work, in this case created by DJ Trip (of Adelaide’s New Pollutants) in the workshop.

As for influences and inspiration, Tanja Liedtke says her considerable experience with Garry Stewart’s ADT (1999-2003) taught her a great deal about physicality and energy; then she turned to Lloyd Newson of the UK’s DV8 Physical Theatre (2003, 2005) for the conceptual development she felt she needed: “They’re 2 fantastic artists and my work is about tying what I learned from them together.”

As well as choreographing for ADT’s formative Ignition series, Liedtke’s recent work includes 2 pieces for Tasdance (Enter Twilight 2004) and, forthcoming, Always Building, 2006); a short work about angels for Brigit Keil’s Akademie des Tanzes in Mannheim, Germany and 2 works for Brazil’s Ballet Contemporaneo. The concept of building (“and collapse and rebuilding and, as always, based in the body”) is central to her newest creation, which will also show at the Purcell Room in London’s Southbank in May 2007. Liedtke, like many Australian artists, is more likely to be seen overseas than at home. However, the Mobile States tour of Twelfth Floor offers her the excitement of getting her collaborators back together again and a rare chance for national exposure on a 5-city tour.
Jacklyn Bassanelli, Pink Denim in Manhattan

Jacklyn Bassanelli, Pink Denim in Manhattan

Arts House, Melbourne

Melbourne City Council in tandem with the Victorian government is focused on developing venues for the arts: Arts House uses North Melbourne Town Hall, Horti Hall and Meat Market. But it’s not just a matter of programming venues, says Steven Richardson, Artistic Director of Arts House (the Team Leader is Sue Beal), but of nurturing works through the Culture Lab program, which will then become the material for those programs. Culture Lab provides “time, money, space, advice, administration and marketing from the very early ideas stage through to final production. But the approach in these early days”, says Richardson, “is minimalist rather than heavily interventionist.” He doesn’t see Arts House yet in the role of creative producer, rather working with artists with existing agendas and helping them broker partnerships. He sees Arts House’s own partnerships as vital, as a consortium member of Mobile States. Media artist Lynette Wallworth spent time with Culture Lab before heading off to Inbetween Time in Bristol.

Richardson describes the Arts House program as involving “a multi-dimensional process”, with “a curatorial role responsive to the sector.” Artists are supported by Arts House’s own grants program, the funds coming from Melbourne City Council as well as Arts Victoria: “We’re really like a department of the Council.”

What Arts House puts together is “a truly multi-platform program”—visual arts exhibitions, theatre, dance, media arts and contemporary performance. Richardson emphasises that this means a program which can be variously focused, for example the dance and physical performance prominent in the first half of 2006 might not be immediately repeated: “the spotlight will then be on other forms, magnifying their significance.” As well, gaps in the program can be filled from elsewhere in the sector, including interstate work: “we’re keen to foster dialogue”, as is evident in the presence of Sydney’s Sidetrack and others in the program for the first half of 2006.

Arts House also represents the many different ways that a venue can engage with practices but also with communities. There’s a desire “to dissolve the boundaries between audiences and other forms of engagement…to examine the role of arts centres and the relationships between arts centres and to include projects where the artist works with the community,” says Richardson.

The wry title for the program for the first half of 2006 is “Art In a Dry Climate”, reflecting the challenges faced by artists in Australia, but facing them with a wealth of new Australian work that includes version 1.0, Jacklyn Bassanelli (see p41), Ming-Zhu Hii and Sidetrack, a multimedia installation by Cicada (see p24), and Body Corporate, new music from Dead Horse (see p30), a featured season of physical performance, Body Corporate, that includes dance (Chunky Move, The Fondue Set, Tanja Liedtke, Sue Healey Company, OX and others) and the ReelDance film festival. Melbourne City Council’s Arts House is an admirable innovation for nurturing artists and audiences locally and with an intelligent, networked national perspective.

Adventures in the Dark

Philip Rolfe’s vision of contemporary performance includes a wide audience. Each of the works in the first Adventures in the Dark program, says Rolfe, can be “crowd pleasers…but with a very different feel from The Studio program.” Rolfe says of Sydney Opera House’s new program, “It’s an artistic statement.” It’s about the kind of international work—theatrically and conceptually adventurous—that Rolfe thinks audiences should be able to see, free of arts festival constraints.

Rolfe is Executive Producer, Performing Arts at the Sydney Opera House. He and co-producer Wendy Martin have come up with Adventures in the Dark, a body of works that if presented all at once would be like a large slice of some classy international arts festival. But here works are spread across the year and instead of an easy-to-miss-or-access 3 or 4 night festival stand they’ll play anywhere from 3 to 6 weeks. The program comprises significant overseas artists either not seen in Sydney—Improbable, Emio Greco/PC, Mikel Rouse—or those warranting more substantial seasons than they’ve had up to now—Ruby Hunter in Ruby’s Story and Brian Lipson in A Large Attendance in the Antechamber.

Rolfe emphasises that Adventures in the Dark is not just wed to the Playhouse (site of most of the 2006 program) but will use other Opera House sites including its outdoors in years to come: “the program is open to what fits thematically and intellectually.” However, the Playhouse has been revamped, its stage size increased 20% to accommodate physical theatre and dance and it’s been technically improved.

Coming up soon on the program is the renowned UK performance company, Improbable. Rolfe relishes their “reliance on old theatre skills you rarely see these days. The work is not multimedia, although technologically supported. You really see what human beings are capable of in a theatrical context.” Rolfe likes artists “who deal with tradition as well as with new ideas”, and this is clearly key to the selection of works for 2006, including Melbournian Brian Lipson and UK companies, Ridiculusmus and Improbable.

Rolfe notes that the first program is missing an Asian connection, which he hopes to remedy soon. However, he’s pleased with the presence of Vula (The Conch), a work from New Zealand with a director, Nina Nawalowalo, well versed in European theatricality but with a South Pacific vision—here oceanic in concept and performed with great volumes of water.

Music theatre also features in the program in Ruby’s Story with Ruby Hunter, Archie Roach and Paul Grabowksy, and 2 works by American multimedia composer-performer Mikel Rouse—Music for Minorities and, as seen at several Australian festivals, but not Sydney’s, Failing Kansas.

Dance comes in the shape of Norway’s Jo Stromgren Kompani in The Hospital about 3 nurses in “sadomasochistic cycle of pain infliction and relief” and, from the Netherlands, Emio Greco/PC’s award-winning Double Points: One &Two focusing on synchronicity and discord in taut dance duets. ADT’s Garry Stewart will join Nigel Jamieson for Honour Bound, the premiere of a work bringing together dance, film, theatre and aerial performance to confront the injustice of the USA incarcerations in Guantanamo Bay.

Philip Rolfe is firmly opposed to the idea that audiences will only take on ‘festival shows’ during an arts festival and not year-round: Adventures in the Dark offers audiences an inviting challenge to expand their vision of the performing arts.

For many a year in the 90s the prospect for a contemporary performance touring network seemed seriously remote, Playing Australia looked limited and the short-lived Made to Move was, tragically, disastrous for dance. While grant levels remain low, the opportunity to disperse, find new niches and new fuel has grown, linking art habitats, promoting mutualism, and providing new species of hybrid performance and installation places in which to grow, maybe even prosper. Mobile States, and those on the Theatre Board who initiated it, and the vision of the likes of Sarah Miller, Fiona Winning and Wendy Blacklock, and those who joined the consortium, have shown that contemporary performance in all its mutating guises can find and generate audiences—surely they’re ready for it.

Mobile States, Tanja Liedtke, Twelfth Floor, Adelaide Festival Centre May 10-13; PICA, Pert, May 17-20; Performance Space, Sydney, May 24-27; Arts House, Melbourne, May 31-June 3; Theatre Royal (with Salamanca Arts Centre), Hobart, June 8-10

Jim Lasko is the Artistic Director of the Chicago based, Redmoon Theater, a company which has developed an enviable reputation for site-specific spectacle theatre. Redmoon’s artistic process is distinctly collaborative. It involves a panoply of audiences, performers, puppet makers, gadgets, objects, sound, stage and technical designers. Central to the company’s aesthetic is the creation of cultural event as spectacle, transforming public spaces that are “decreasingly used and increasingly neglected.” The Redmoon artistic team uses a site to shape the spectacle’s aesthetic, theme and characters. Recently Sue Moss met Jim Lasko, freelance director Jessica Wilson (formerly of Terrapin), and designer of surreal stage machines, Joey Ruigrok van der Werven whose recent collaborations include Stalker, Marrugeku and Urban Theatre Projects.

JW I visited the United States in 2003 to look at non-text based companies. I met Jim and was inspired by how Redmoon worked with actors, the aesthetics of their site-specific work and the size of their workshop [this comprises 18,000 square feet of converted warehouse space that accommodates both the administrative staff and the enormous ‘build shop’ where sets and props are constructed]. The performers work with objects and materials, generating a spontaneous process and exciting results.

Redmoon works with objects and processes of transformation in public spaces. Through their collaborations the company creates work that has a solid dramatic arc and doesn’t depend on a literal writing process. They offer magic, transformation and possibility.

I floated the idea of working together and Jim invited me to work on Redmoon’s 2003 summer production. This enabled us to witness one another working and handling creative and collaborative processes. As a result of this positive creative working relationship, Jim and Joey were invited to Tasmania to explore the possibilities of a collaborative theatre project in Hobart. At the moment we are in conversation about a project with the working title of Dream Masons.

Jim, what was the genesis of Redmoon. How did your background lead you to this place with this company?

JL I grew up a ‘feral’ child and didn’t read a book until 11th grade despite living in a rigorously intellectual house. I was a physical child, passionate about being part of the physical world and interested in making things.

Once I saw an amazing thing where a bird attacked another bird. My impulse was I had to tell my friends. At some level this need to tell defines what I am and always have been.

I left graduate school where I was undertaking a PhD in theatre. I became enamored with the practice of making and devising new theatre shows based on images. I began to make work that was both object and puppet heavy. In the course of doing this work I came to embrace a lot of shelved ancient theatrical forms—pageantry, puppetry, acrobatics, circus, live music and clown. I wanted to revitalise them, as these forms represented vestiges of my college undergraduate experience.

While studying a philosophy major I thought a lot about the civic role that theatre played in ancient Greek society. Theatre is increasingly marginalised by television, film and mass media. How could I make theatre relevant and bring it back into the centre of culture? Redmoon is committed to the creation of massive cultural events that transform public space in the way that ancient theatre used to. Spectacle theatre gathers people together in a public space where they can share, react and engage together in a way that isn’t mediated.

How do you align that public immersion with your philosophical premise of returning theatre to the centre?

The ideal is that the event attracts and gathers people in public space which has become decreasingly used, and increasingly neglected. In the Chicago context, public space feels more dangerous; people stay home and create increasingly more isolated spaces for themselves. Getting together in the same spot live and by itself, that act is of value. The shows always have a celebration of the act of transformation—that something can be other than it appears to be is an inherently hopeful message.

You want people to look at the experience and call into question something of their own notions about public space, their own lives and what’s possible within humanity. Each production tries to use recycled materials, and make objects from the detritus of public culture. For example what appears as a flight of bats transmutes into tattered umbrellas. This leads an audience to reconsider what is garbage and what is art. At its best spectacle theatre involves deep collaborations with a community, deep insights and research into the community where the work is held and formed. This leads to the rubicon experience, where the ideal meets the realities of finance, the attitudes of city council and public officials. The creative solutions that come out of the process are actually the show. We create a collaborative action outline, a one-page document that walks through some of the major spectacle moments that we want to achieve. The issue of aspiring to the impossible is the constant subtext of a spectacle.

Another theme is the seeming impossibility of the world that is being created. The audience is invited to be willing participants, energetically willing this thing to happen through negating a logical part of the brain. When this happens, the audience become co-creators of the event.

The spectacle can only happen through gathering a team that can contribute to the realisation of the event. Joey Ruigrok van der Werven from Sydney works with Redmoon as a technical designer. I first met Joey through his work, designing surreal stage machines, with the Dutch company Dogtrope. For me, the work of Dogtrope crystallised what was possible.

I gather a number of people interested in building contraptions. They experience the fun of collecting materials and ideas without restriction on what is possible. We made one project titled The Botanical Gardens of Contraptions. The spectators were fascinated. Contraptions are machines in themselves, seemingly innocent, but we can imbue them with story and spirit.

Object theatre plus characters involves the emotions of love and conflict. We are more driven by our surroundings than we think. For example the world floods and we work through the object to arrive at the emotional response of the characters. There is a relationship between character and object. As an extension of the character, the object describes the character’s circumstance. The audience can see themselves.

Building contraptions and objects has social value. Increasingly the world becomes more mysterious through objects such as transistors and iPods. Object theatre can demystify something that can look intimidating. People are then able to transform and look at things through new ideas. When you bring this form of theatre into public spaces which people occupy and walk in everyday, then it is given back to them in a completely different way. It’s transformed and can never be the same. “Remember when…?”

How do you assess a potential performance building or site for the first time?

When I approach a building or see a new site, I watch the way people use the site and understand its history. The creative process involves decisions about what you want to intervene with, accent, defy or augment.

I visualise great, grand scale images. For example I lift up a little boat (using structural rigging techniques) and it sails over the audience. This boat also provides opportunity for character and story development. There could for example, be a farmer, a flock of sheep, windows at night, a wife and water.

JL Social idealism and spectacle have to eventually collide with reality. In spectacle theatre we have to figure out the weight of the boat. Our theatre is grounded in things that are so tangibly real and dangerous we have no choice but to meet reality. Our social idealism smashes against reality.

JW In relation to this type of work being made in Australia, and the idea of creating idealism about what’s possible, that has a national resonance. The wonder of transformative theatre is what happens when the bounds of the normal become abnormal.

With the support of the Australia Council, The Dream Masons will be developed in 2006, produced by Salamanca Art Centre in collaboration with Jessica Wilson as Creative Producer.

Melbourne performances took a turn towards the unfamiliar as 2006 commenced, several toying with form to produce exciting new visions of theatricality. Jacklyn Bassanelli’s solo performance Unholy Site elicited sharply contrasting responses from audiences, centred on the curious and unusual choices made in the formal aspects of the work’s presentation. The show’s subject is not one which would prove difficult to most theatre goers, offering a modern reworking of the tale of Antigone. But the setting in which this narrative is articulated proved to be unsettling, confusing or alienating for many.

Unholy Site

The entire monologue was presented for its small audience as a pre-recorded video image shot in a single take. Sound and lighting were operated by the performer herself while on screen, and even the panning and zooming of the camera were under her control. The screened image was played on a smallish monitor with a stereo player attached, and to one side stood the tripod-mounted camera responsible for the taping. It was quickly apparent that the video was shot in the same space it was now being played, and as the narrative unfolded a number of complex themes could be seen to circulate around this tableau.

Foremost for this viewer was the question of presence and absence: if theatre’s “liveness” is what distinguishes it from many other artforms, what are we to make of a performance whose liveness is conspicuously made absent? And what replaces that sense? Can the unfolding of a narrative as enacted onscreen be seen to have a certain live quality of its own? Unholy Site in this manner took on the air of a posthumous epistle, a letter from the dead as well as a bottled message washed up on our shore, origin unknown. Since it was never clear whether Bassanelli would ever turn up as an actual live performer, or if she was even present in the building, this ambiguity created a kind of double consciousness, an awareness of things deliberately made invisible, a ghosting effect.

A second, interrelated issue raised by the mode of presentation was of the importance of temporality and duration to every narrative. With the tools of the video’s recording so prominently displayed (and still switched on), there was a Marie Celeste type atmosphere wherein we felt that we had just missed the live enacting of events onscreen, while the narrative itself seemed to indicate that these events took place a long time ago. This intentional blurring of the chronology of the story again produced a consciousness of the elsewhere, and elsewhen, without providing any certainty to interpretation.

For critics and audiences for whom story is all, I can understand how this mode of presentation could be seen as a failed experiment. Certainly, the small screen, amateur camerawork and coldness of the image didn’t foreground the text, but at times made it secondary to the site of technology. But for me, the power of the performance was only enhanced by this emphasis on the act of display. After opening, however, the show’s creators reworked the piece for subsequent showings, reintroducing live performance to the piece in order to make clearer the focus of the narrative. Certainly, though the effect would be different, I don’t imagine this alternate version would be any the worse for its changes. Bassanelli’s ability as a performer is manifestly of a standard able to carry the work as a live rendition, with a deftness and nuanced delivery apparent from the outset.

One Way Street

Another solo monologue with more than enough to fascinate and intrigue was Theatre @ Risk’s One Way Street. Penned by Scottish playwright David Grieg, One Way Street is a peripatetic walking tour of Berlin as delivered by a very unreliable guide. An English ex-pat, John Flannery, takes us through the history of that historically layered metropolis, but along the way his own history constantly intrudes upon his narration. We gradually discover a character whose personal past is densely woven into the concrete pavements, bullet-pocked walls and skeletal trees of the city, and our experience of the physical space of Berlin becomes inseparable from the experiences of the teller. Added to this is another level of complexity: Flannery’s status as a (somewhat unsuccessful) writer means that the act of composing his narrative becomes one of the focal points of the play; the writing of history is as much of concern as how that history is to be understood. It’s a rare theatrical example of what Canadian theorist Linda Hutcheon has termed “historiographic metafiction”; that is, postmodern stories which seek to find ways of recapturing history while remaining aware of the status of all history as narrative, and thus susceptible to interpretation. As Flannery attempts to find meaning in the history of the post-WWII city, his reconstruction of events also becomes an attempt to realise the sense of his own past, of what has produced the miserable excuse for a life he finds himself living.

If all of this sounds terribly grim, it isn’t. Grieg’s script handles its subject with a laughing seriousness, and is at times very, very funny. The humour is handled in surprisingly capable fashion by performer Simon Kingsley Hall, whose extensive previous work with Theatre @ Risk has never suggested his abilities as a comic actor. The role, in the hands of another, could easily have slipped into caricature and excess. Over the fairly brief duration of the work, Kingsley Hall slips effortlessly into more than a dozen different roles and accents, distinguishing each immediately with carefully chosen physicalities that never bleed into one another. It’s probably his finest performance to date, and suggests an exponential leap in skill for this performer.

One Way Street was presented as the centrepiece for a series of works under the banner of 20th Century Close Up, all devoted to exploring the history of the 20th century through innovative forms. The remainder of the works making up the season were offered as playreadings, and were a mixed bunch. The opener, Futur De Luxe by Swiss playwright Igor Bauersima, for instance, was a confused story that didn’t live up to its writer’s promise. Other works included plays by Juan Mayorga, Antony Sher and an adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

The Butterfly Seer

Rushdie seems to have been flavour of the month in Melbourne of late, with Indija Mahjoeddin’s The Butterfly Seer taking as its inspiration a segment of the author’s controversial The Satanic Verses. A beautiful prophet is called in a vision to take the people of her town on a pilgrimage across the ocean, and treks across India towards the promised land. The story reaches its climax when Ayesha arrives at the Arabian Sea and leads her followers beneath the waters, watched by an unbeliever who nonetheless has trailed her journey but finally finds his lack of faith prevents him from taking the literal ‘final plunge.’ The dialectic of the piece is a very relevant one: the drama unfolds as a conflict between belief and scepticism, with the ambiguous resolution suggesting a kind of aporia or incommensurability between absolute faith and modern doubt.

Of great interest, however, was the mode of performance chosen by Mahjoeddin. The Butterfly Seer is presented in the form of traditional Sumatran opera known as Randai. Each section of the work commences with a musical performance accompanied by a sung rendition of the story, and then moves onto a performed drama. The style of this drama is highly coded according to the conventions of Randai: characters circle one another, perform with exaggerated gestures and poses, and the interaction is almost always in the form of conflict, whether a verbal debate or physical melee. The show also incorporates puppetry, poetry and martial arts. The result is disarmingly unfamiliar: highly ritualistic and formalised, yet spellbindingly original. The musical component of the program was impeccably delivered, led by multi-instrumentalist Adrian Sherriff as well as Sumatran guest artist Admiral Datuak Rangkayo and musicians Rendra Freestone and Stephen Grant. The physicality of the percussion-based score was of a visceral intensity, musicians often playing their own clothes or indeed bodies alongside the dozens of instruments utilised. The evening’s second half, in fact, began with one performer guiding his audience through the traditional sequence of shouts, claps and thigh-slapping which marks the transition between scenes, and all in attendance were soon joining in with gusto.

Mahjoeddin’s work was a stimulating experiment in applying a form of performance rarely seen in this country to a tale with strong contemporary resonances, and the outcome was mixed. I was initially wary of the performance styles, until I realised that the exaggerated acting and excessively posed stances were in fact conventions of Randai rather than the result of awkward directing. Mahjoeddin explicitly sought the feedback of her audiences, asking them to consider which of the various conventions of the particular form on offer might profitably be used to further effect within the Australian performance landscape, and this commitment to producing a dialogue between different cultural traditions is a deeply encouraging one.

Unholy Site, writer-performer Jacklyn Bassanelli, additional text by Chris Kohn, John Howard, directors Jacklyn Bassanelli, Cat Wilson, dramaturgy Cat Wilson, Margaret Cameron, production concept Margaret Cameron, composer-performer Brea Acton, sound Tom Dunstan, lighting Luke Hails; The Croft Institute, Jan 20-28

Theatre @ Risk, One Way Street, writer David Grieg, performer Simon Kingsley Hall, director Chris Bendall, producer Kirrilly Brentnall, design Isla Shaw, lighting Nick Merrylees, music Kelly Ryall; fortyfive downstairs, Feb 7-12

The Butterfly Seer, director-librettist Indija Mahjoeddin, composer & musical director Adrian Sherriff, performers Tegan Newman-Howell, Wayne Van Keren, Indija Mahjoeddin, puppetry Carol Chong, music performed by Adrian Sherriff, Admiral Datuak Rangkayo, Rendra Freestone and Stephen Grant; song & storytelling by Elizabeth Sisson, production/sound by Todd Maher, lighting Cassandra J Leigh; La Mama Theatre, Carlton Courthouse, Feb 21-25

Viktor Pelevin’s Omon Ra is a novel set in the post-lunar landing era of Soviet cosmonautics. It is the aetiological narrative point that we can follow through to the space program’s inevitable decline in the form of the Mir space station saga, which really seems to sum up other post-Cold War Soviet aspirations. This comic book sense of decline provides the tone for Dorney’s adaptation of Pelevin’s novel, and for Kieran Swann’s design of the Restaged Histories project’s production of Omon Ra. The Soviet space academy is a junkyard, strewn with electronic contraptions—vacuum cleaners, tape recorders, flotsam and jetsam from various conked-out machines—hailing from decades already slightly more dated than the 1970s ‘present’ they are representing.

The narrative ostensibly follows Omon (Anthony Standish) and best friend Mitiok (Leon Cain) as they compete to enter the academy’s training programme for a lunar landing. In essence, though, the piece is more of a philosophical reflection on the human soul. Russian sci-fi, if Pelevin can be read as paradigmatic, is a popular forum for theosophical interrogation in the Godless (post) communist state. Omon’s journey, he learns, is to be a suicide mission: futile and humorous. His journey to the dark side of the moon (and yes, there are Pink Floyd gags here) is also a journey to the dark side of the human soul: that black space where, especially in an atheist culture, questions of transubstantiation, reincarnation or the life hereafter cannot be answered…well, not until you’ve been there.

Director Nic Dorward attacks Dorney’s text with characteristic zeal, and the ensemble cast (which also includes Jonathan Brand and Christopher Sommers) is very strong, providing kinetic, intelligent performances that are most impressive when they are engaging with the piece’s droll Russian humour. There is evidence here of meticulous rehearsal room interrogation of the script’s physical potentialities. This has become the company’s trademark, in a sense—the thread of continuity that links the refreshingly disparate histories that the company seeks to restage.

For all the verve and passion inherent in the team’s approach, there is still a confused quality to the work that cannot be put down to frenetic interpretation or adaptation of Pelevin’s original text. I’m the last person ever to advise Dramaturgy 101 to theatre-makers, but there is some forensic dramaturgical microsurgery needed here to help clarify narrative strands and some basic premises of the action. Other sections (like the space flight itself) are too long and ponderous, and impede the narrative flow just as the play—like the Soviet space programme, and Omon himself—should be hurtling toward its conclusion.

Still, it’s reassuring to watch a group of dedicated emerging artists commit themselves to boundary-stretching and eclectic text-based theatre. Hell, I’m just glad to see someone tackle sci-fi on the Brisbane stage! There is a ‘European’ feel to this company’s aesthetic (and repertoire) thus far that reminds me a bit of the sort of theatre that was taking place at the Gasworks and Napier Street theatre spaces in Melbourne in the 90s. The company deserves the support and attention it is currently receiving and, with some astute and unsentimental dramaturgical excision, should hone this piece into the sharp, chaotic piece of sci-fi absurdism it promises to be.

Restaged Histories project, Omon Ra, adapted by Marcel Dorney from the novel by Victor Pelevin, director Nic Dorward, performers Jonathan Brand, Leon Cain, Christopher Sommers, Anthony Standish designer Kieran Swann, lighting designer Carolyn Emerson, composer Robert D Clark, soundscapes Luke Lickfold; VISY Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, Jan 24-Feb 4

Think Cambodia and a puzzle box opens: a country called Kampuchea of killing fields, land mines, B52 bombing raids and behind it nom de Cambodge, a French colonial outpost of Indochine; of wide boulevards lined with flaming poinciana trees shading pastel stucco villas with shutters, the world of Marguerite Duras’ memory and the purported and convincing setting for two of Tintin’s adventures. Far, far behind that, the early medieval Kingdom of the Khmer centred on the vast complex of Angkor Wat, and the thwarted attempt to sack much of its best statuary by no less than Andre Malraux to fill the musees of Paris. Then come forward again to the 90s and you find a United Nations controlled country, UNTAC, awash with pale blue berets and overwhelming Amercanisation, which has led inexorably to the creation of a parallel economy conducted in US dollars in the reopened hotels for the internationals—the peacekeepers and the non-government organisations—the other for the shattered locals conducted in riel at the markets.

In Cambodia now, all these nomenclatures exist simultaneously in a country that has been transformed through a violent revolution which saw it regress to the year zero. Today it is full of ghosts but is vibrant, quietly thriving and radiating hope. I can only speak of my impressions of 2 weeks in Phnom Penh and the imperative 3-day pass visit to Angkor Wat. Cambodia is the only country whose national flag features a man made structure, the distinctive silhouette of Angkor Wat, the country’s most dependable treasure which survived the ravages of Pol Pol despite being a Khmer Rouge stronghold. Unlike the Taliban, the KR did not blow up their country’s monuments but instead razed the French hotel built within the park precinct. My tuk tuk driver Mr Chuu, who told me this, agreed it was one of their few better moments.

Angkor is a vast gated manicured park with stone causeways across wide moats or barays leading to surprisingly intact and comprehensive ruins of temples and the fortified city of Angkor Thom which at its peak supported a population of a million people at a time when the population of London was 50,000. Today it supports a similar number of people, paying their admission and respects and listening attentively to the local guides conversing in French, Japanese, German, English and Korean. Amongst the tourists are the Cambodian pilgrims for whom Angkor Wat is a source of pride and national identity. Almost every time you come through yet another Escher like stone doorway there are monks making offerings and burning incense before statues swathed in saffron cloths.

Along the road leading to the park and in the art streets surrounding the National Art School in Phnom Penh are shop after shop selling luridly painted images of Angkor at sunset, sunrise and by moonlight, and masonry workshops awash with copies of Angkorian statuary and bas reliefs. In the city and the countryside there is a rich vernacular naïve tradition of sign art, known as chook tip (viz perfect or realistic painting), a legacy of a preliterate society overlaid with socialist realism, pictures to advertise services and wares and broadcast warnings and the recent weapons amnesty is depicted in gory detail on large painted billboards.

The legacy of UNTAC is the plethora of NGOs—amongst a population of 13 million, there are 2,000. However they have been instrumental in the revival of all forms of art and craft, in particular a completely hand made fine silk industry. The leader in the field is Artisans D’Angkor, based in Siem Reap. In their painting workshop tables of artists sitting in rows copy the great works of ancient Khmer art onto silk with fine brushes in meticulous servitude to tradition. Obviously there is a place for such crafts but, combined with the hegemony of The Royal School of Fine Arts still dominated by teachers who studied in Europe in the 60s (sent by the Communist regime to refine the propaganda) and now locked in a time warp, the space for contemporary art is limited and tenuous. But it does exist and was recently revealed at the Visual Arts Open or VAO.

VAO

Curated by key artists Linda Saphan and Pich Sopheap, VAO ran for 3 weeks in the capital, Phnom Penh. It was the culmination of 7 months work—to bring the artists together, hold a fundraising auction, produce a tri-lingual catalogue (Khmer, French, English) and create an excellent website—to show Cambodians doing it for themselves without an NGO in sight. The VAO began with a group show in a Vernissage Khmer style at the New Art Gallery followed by 2 weekends of openings at 6 other spaces, 2 of which were galleries (Sunrise Gallery and Popil Photo), the others smart restaurants, a bakery, a garden bar and a jewelry store situated in the older up-market area of the central city. The VAO was recognized by the artists and the public as a success—hundreds attended the openings and over US$15,000 worth of work sold, making the artists happy and affirming their trust in the vision of Saphan and Sopheap.

The 19 artists exhibiting represented greatly varied backgrounds, generations and historical experiences. Two are venerated old men, Vann Nath and Svay Ken; to be old is a rarity in itself. Vann Nath is one of only 7 people to survive the notorious Khmer Rouge Tuol Sleng prison. He paints over and over again recurring nightmares of the horrors he witnessed: the instruments and methods of imprisonment, torture and execution obsessively detailed but with an individual expressive quality that has developed over time. Svay Ken is of the same generation, a self taught artist who paints still life of everyday things invested by deep care with an iconic significance: armchairs, oil lamps, rows of rubber thongs, a power box—in soft, buttery pastels—simple things that are in danger of being forgotten in the rush to build the new Cambodia.

Amongst the younger generation of established artists born in the 70s: Leang Seckon, Linda Saphan and Sopheap Pich grew up under the Pol Pot regime. Seckon was educated at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and has crafted an idiosyncratic mixed media approach: paintings incorporating stitching and padding and collages using documents and old photographs to express his family history and challenge notions of gender and sexuality. Seckon has already established a strong profile in the region and is sought by collectors and afficionados in the local foreign community.

Saphan and Pich became part of the refugee exodus to Canada and America and were educated in Montreal, Masachussetts, Chicago and Paris. They personify one of the most dynamic elements in Cambodia now, the returning diaspora. Saphan’s work is explicitly postmodernist and addresses ethnicity and history. In her series based on Cambodian sign art of the 60s, she has repainted celebrities with black faces to draw attention to the whitening of faces in received imagery, and to return to Cambodians a sense of the beauty within themselves. She also works in other media and her In the beginning is an elegy for a lost time. In a simple wooden box tray filled with rice, flattish round seed pods are arranged to form the numerals 1970, the year the Americans began the carpet bombing of Cambodia. On the face of each pod Saphan has fixed a portrait photograph of an individual surrounded by a frame of white paint, the Buddhist mourning colour. The seed pods are used in a traditional children’s game, Angkun, played at New Year.

It reminded me of a Japanese raked memorial garden. The photographs are all celebrations of the good life in the time before—the Siahanouk era—which, for Saphan’s family, the patrician Khmer Chinese was the Golden Age when Phnom Penh was “the pearl of Asia.”

After working as a painter and sculptor, Pich has found his métier and materials in using bamboo and rattan to create exquisite 3-dimensional abstract forms which recall the living local tradition of weaving baskets, hats and fishtraps. The interest in a sensuous vessel form was evident in some of his earlier paintings and when he began working in collage papier mache over a bamboo armature he reconnected with his own past in the remote rural provinces, and the improvised artisanship learnt from his father who had taught himself metal casting from first principles to make simple cutlery. Pich shares that passion for primary making, testing the limits of these structures in often large scale works that hold their shape, as if they might have grown that way.

Vandy Rattana, a young law student and novice photographer was born after Pol Pot. His series of intimate interiors, shot mostly in a condemned building returned individuality to the marginalised people who have made this building their home. Other photographs are of his family and, in the portrait of his mother, you can just discern one of those paintings of Angkor Wat hanging on the wall behind her. According to Pich Sopheap, the neocolonialists don’t expect to pay more than US$30 for modern Cambodian Art, the going rate for Angkor Wattage and idealised scenes of life in the countryside—watercolours of diligent farmers and busy fishermen in their picturesque boats, faces unidentified, shaded by their reassuringly timeless conical coolie hats. The VAO challenged this and asserted the position of the Cambodian contemporary artist; it eschewed the merely exotique, resisted a nationalist agenda and provided a space for the artists to declare themselves as individuals.

Visual Arts Open, curators Linda Saphan, Pich Sopheap; Phnom Penh, Dec 9-31, 2005

Suzanne Spunner visited Cambodia as the guest of her good friend, Larry Strange, Director of the Cambodian Development Resource Institute.

I grew up in an environment where there was art around. In our street in Elkington, Melbourne, where my family settled after migrating from Scotland, there lived 3 artists, and as a boy I used to go around and visit their studios. The Rubbos were family friends, and my parents collected art. At university, I studied comparative literature, my first great love being Russian modernism from the 1920s. But at the same time I became increasingly involved with the visual arts, curating exhibitions, writing and editing reviews, and sitting on the committee of the George Paton Gallery [a key player in Melbourne’s contemporary art scene from the mid 1970s]. So, although the love of literature has never left me, I found there was more possibility for working in different ways in the visual arts.

Latin America

Over many years, you lived in Latin America, curating several exhibitions and publishing a great deal on the art of that region. How did you develop your interest in Latin American culture?

I had always been interested in other cultures, it’s a familial thing. In relation to Latin America, my interest was instigated by a friend, an anthropologist writing a book on Shamanism in Colombia. He invited me over to Colombia in about 1981. I was teaching European modernism at Sydney University but I went over during the Christmas break, and I came in touch with cultures I knew nothing about. I was struck by how incredibly literate, albeit in a totally different way, the people were. Over 3 visits, Colombia left a profound impression on me. Although I’d travelled through the Pacific, there was no comparison to my immersion in Colombia in terms of challenging Eurocentric ways of thinking. In 1984 I resigned my academic job, and went to live there. After travelling extensively through Latin America I was offered a university teaching job in Mexico. I had thrown in the towel on my original PhD—on relations between the Soviet and German avant garde—but I changed my topic to take in the work I had been doing in Latin America. My love affair with Latin America continued into the 90s, with exhibitions and a great deal of writing. Essentially I see myself as a writer who occasionally curates. I’d like to be remembered more as a writer, because I love the written word. The possibility of translating something visual into the written word is a wonderful challenge.

When I joined the Getty Research Institute as collections curator in 1994, it was partly through my work in Latin America. But because the collection is mainly European, I was increasingly drawn away from Latin America. I think that was partly a good thing—one can be ghettoised. Joining the Getty was a re-acquaintance with Europe, which was all the better for coming through the lens of working intensely on Latin America.
Cao Fei, Cosplayers, courtesy of the artist,

Cao Fei, Cosplayers, courtesy of the artist,

Dialogue between cultures

How do you see your current role as Biennale curator relative to your role at the Getty, a very different form of curatorial responsibility?

The relation would be that I am interested in what is now the outmoded terminology of world history and world culture, that is, the dynamics of relations between cultures. At the Getty, my ambition was not only to bring Latin America into the fold—in a manner that would retain its specificities as well as its common points with Europe—but also I increasingly worked in Japan and China. I’m convinced that these parts of the world have to be spoken about in the same breath, for example, that to understand Eastern Europe we must understand the cultural impact of East Asia. At this level, then, there is a carry over from even before the Getty, namely that interest in dialogue and understanding between cultures. I wrote the Biennale proposal on a small island just south of mainland China, and ‘zones of contact’ seemed to be the right thing. It’s not that the concept is completely new: there have been many books and exhibitions on ideas of border crossing and hybridity [Merewether worked on Tony Bond’s The Boundary Rider Sydney Biennale in 1992]. Yet the idea of the zone of contact takes it to a different point. A zone may be border or it may be something else, it may be something socio-political or it may be something more intimate, personal, or experience-based. Or it can stand for the work of art itself. That’s to be liberal about the term, but I wanted a degree of flexibility.

What a biennale does

Do you think it’s part of the role of the Biennale to capture the zeitgeist?

A biennale can do that, but there is no one model. It’s a take on contemporary art, but it’s not a survey—it shouldn’t be a survey and it shouldn’t be thematic either. A biennale can capture a certain dimension of contemporary cultural history. The best artists do reflect something about the times in which they live. But, do they refect the spirit of the times? Spirit is the question. Artists may have expressed something which is very personal but that also has wider resonance in their culture. Some artists are very conscious of this, adopting a reflexive relation to the world.

The work of Anri Sala (Albanian living in Paris) and Mona Hatoum is very much engaged with what it means to live in a particular culture. Mona has been able to bring to bear in her work her experience of living in the West from within a Middle Eastern family. Within her practice, a very specific and localised experience—of violence, suppression or displacement—is articulated in a manner general enough to find common ground. Sala, who works in film and video, is particularly interested in specific incidents that become metaphors for something much larger in contemporary life. His video features a horse clearly suffering starvation standing at the edge of a freeway, its form lit by passing cars, its back leg rising as if in fear as each car passes. It has great poignancy in terms of the violence, in the opposition between nature and urbanisation. It’s a very beautiful, poetic work, almost like a haiku.

The concept came first, but it was based on certain artists who were key exponents of it. Clearly it’s not a nation-based show like Venice, so I decided to focus on cities and regions. I also wanted to bring South East Asia back into the fold to a greater extent. In recent years, much SE Asian art has been given over to the Asia Pacific Triennial, which takes a particular, focused approach. It seemed to me that there was still a place for another approach, namely putting it in a larger context. Also I wanted to think more about certain regions, such as the Pacific and New Zealand, Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I was interested in the post 1989 generation, being of the view that where there has been great change there will probably be great art. In the Middle East, Lebanon was my starting point, with artists like Hatoum, but I built up with artists from Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora, such as Emily Jacir and Raeda Saadeh. Going back to Asia, I felt India also had to have a stronger presence. And from my recent work on the Japanese and Chinese avant garde of the 50s and 60s, I knew there was great work there. These were particular regions that I thought had not yet been well represented.

The nature of embodiment

In your view, what is it about the art object that allows for effective transaction of the difficult realities of cross-cultural contact?

It essentially comes down to art’s ability to synthesise and to present a case, or to embody an idea, made in reflection. There’s really no other form. Other forms are oral history and testimony, but testimony is often unbelievable. The most interesting artists are engaged in re-elaboration, rather than testimony or reliving the moment. They have the ability to create an image that embodies an experience or event, without simply documenting it. For example, a number of artists in the show, such as Marepe [Brazil] and Diango Hernandez [Cuba], work with the idea that objects embed within them cultural histories. Baudelaire and Benjamin discovered cultural histories in the junk shops of Paris and Berlin—many artists are doing the same, except they are creating the objects themselves, objects that speak of the cultural histories of colonialism or ethnic wars, or of personal familial histories.

Partaking of the world

I welcome the proliferation of biennales. If a city wants to do it and they think it will benefit their community in terms of fostering relations with other countries, well and good. Undoubtedly there is a national project here—the Biennale is a federally funded national institution. The public goes to national institutions: but they can come away with more than they expected. My intention has been to create as close as possible something that partakes of the world. I’m trying to make it an integrated project, to map the breadth of the participation over the breadth of Sydney. There are 15 venues, but there are no satellite shows. All the venues are part of the same event.

There’s no hierarchy in the event, no hierarchy in the work, or among the artists.

One of the wonderful things I discovered when putting the show together was how the national identity of many artists became difficult to pinpoint. How many Americans? Only 2, but 6 of the artists live in America. How many French? Only one, but she’s Iranian. This is the nature of the world today, this is zones of contact. Hopefully Zones of Contact has allowed us to launch a Biennale that reflects the state of the world. It’s not about globalisation but about the movement of people in a positive and negative sense, and about the plight of being seen to be a foreigner. Given the events in Cronulla last year, I’m particularly delighted at the strong Lebanese presence in the show. That many of the artists are from war torn countries reflects the nature of the world today. It’s taking the argument about globalisation further.

How have you responded to the Biennale’s mandate to include Australian artists?

The Biennale has a mandate, but it’s not hard and fast. In my choice, I wanted to reflect different aspects of contemporary practice, such as artists who are working with the heritage of modernism (Rose Nolan); artists engaged with Aboriginal culture and cultural history (Imants Tillers); different approaches amongst Indigenous artists deeply immersed in the land (Julie Gough and Djambawa Marawili): artists working with indigent Asian culture (Savanhdary Vongpoothorn); as well as conceptual approaches (Tom Nicholson and Ruark Lewis).

Don’t know. I don’t plan, never have. I resigned from the Getty, and you don’t go back. I lived at a time in the US which saw ‘the hunting of the President’, the rise of the Republicans and the Christian right, and foreign policy going from one war to another. I can’t say I enjoyed being there at that level. I felt like I was out of place. So I created a choice: there are many other places to be and things to do.

2006, Biennale of Sydney, International festival of Art, Zones of Contact, artistic director and curator Charles Merewether, June 8-Aug 27, www.biennaleofsydney.com.au

“I was looking for a quiet place to die,” says a narrator in Greta Anderson’s digital video as a foamy river appears onscreen. This melancholy vignette—Uncomfortable Conversation—is one of 3 in Anderson’s Walking and Talking (2005), a series of richly coloured film stills with audio and large, brochure-glossy photo tryptichs. Anderson’s work situates humans in magisterial environments—lush rainforests, towering pine groves—to highlight existential questions. These human dramas, played out in picturesque settings have something David Lynch about them, they’re eerie like fairytales and philosophical like a John Sayles film, but not without humour. “She mentioned Camus, Vonnegut…I thought she’d been to Paris,” continues the narrator, “but she’d just read a lot in the bush.” Another voice, in Confidence, reflects on the childhood killing of a sparrow. “I watch them now when I eat my lunch…” he says, then adds after a meaningful pause, “chicken.” Anderson has said, “I like to think of my work as tinkering with the tradition of ‘easy-viewing.’ The photographs are moments shorn from a narrative. I like how a single frame can suggest an on-going story even though it doesn’t contain it, remaining ambiguous.” Anderson’s video montages more successfully conjure her themes than the photos alone, which lack, say, the strangeness of Gregory Crewdson’s abject landscapes, though they’re technically as accomplished.

This theme, of life observed at a slight remove, features in several works at the Australian Centre for Photography. In fact, the exhibition—If you leave me can I come too?—has the more serious subtitle, Melancholy and Dissociation in Australian Photomedia Practice. You’d be forgiven for anticipating a show about dark emotion and defensive psychological manoeuvres, but curator Bec Dean’s attraction to the cool distancing effect of irony ensures plenty of levity.

In focusing on the various slobberies of blokes’ domestic spaces, Lyndal Walker’s portraits eschew any attempts to objectify, even though each man-boy poses in his underwear. Walker’s large, colour photographs (Stay Young, 2005) snap bare-chested boys surrounded by all the ephemera of share-houses and student life. Her subjects’ presumed willingness to be photographed like this is both touching and amusing, because their particularities and frailties are so baldly on show: their pale, unsculpted bodies, their terrible underpants (one pair sports a half-obscured magnet and a logo that probably says “chick magnet”), the way their possessions emphasize the fleeting moment of their youth (the Return of the Jedi poster, a high-school relic?). One man sits in a bedroom with wallpaint that runs out near the ceiling, conveying both youthful energy and lassitude (“Luke, School’s Out”). Who could be bothered finishing the paint-job, there are more urgent things to be done!, like lying on a vinyl couch with an ashtray full of butts and a longneck (“Pat, Smells Like Teen Spirit”). Walker’s titles read like ironic pop cliches: “Gerry, Feast of the Gods”, “Ford, Barely Legal”, “Rob, Easy Tiger” and the boys’ expressions at least suggest they’re in on the joke. (This is somewhat verified by the story accompanying the exhibition at PICA: “…as word spread of the sittings among Melbourne’s bursting network of bony-arsed bohemian boys who were to be [Walker’s] subjects, they were practically lining up to do it.”)

In the ACP foyer are Ian Tippett’s large colour digital prints, The Last Cigarette, forming a neatly realist counterpoint to Natasha Johns Messenger’s Lost in Space series on the opposite wall. Melbourne-based Tippett continues his interest in the rituals and details of the CBD, this time photographing workers having a smoke. Tippett frames his human subjects amid the monumental geometries of city buildings, savouring a drag in a high-rise foyer or reflected in windows on concrete forecourts. The smokers stand mostly alone, modern pariahs, their faces wreathed in toxic plumes. One woman has closed her eyes as she draws back—she might be in pleasure or pain—but these are rare moments of personal time stolen from corporate routines.

Lost in Space also features contemplative figures in urban settings but Johns Messenger photographs plastic figurines in dioramas and further abstracts them by blurring areas of each print. Strangely, this slippage between the real and the stage-managed lends each scene a tender melancholy, and though the specifics are blurry the emotion is heightened: figures seem to communicate, leaning toward each other, standing under plastic trees or sit alone in whimsical contemplation. Because they’re so minimal we’re left to fill in the blanks: their little plastic clothes look 60s—ski jackets, leggings, boots and beanies; it must be cold—they’re rugged up, the colours are rich and cool. Celeste Olalquiaga calls the diorama a voyeuristic spectacle which gives us “that uncanny feeling of secretly watching what is forbidden or impossible” (The Artificial Kingdom, Bloomsbury, London, 1999). By using this form, Johns Messenger anoints very simple, banal scenes with the enticing promise and pleasure of glimpsing ‘another world.’

Yet another world is offered up in Elvis Richardson’s Slide Show Land (2004-6), a dual projection of family slides taken by American Dorothy E Elsberry between 1951 and 1976. Like French artist Christian Boltanski who famously exhibited found photographs of “dead Swiss” (taken from obituary pages) or school photos of children who died in the Holocaust, Richardson is a recycler, gathering her materials from thrift shops and, in this case, e-Bay auctions. Slide Show Land commemorates what Boltanski calls “small memory”, moments that might otherwise go unnoted because they’re not recorded in history books, or publicly commemorated. By exhibiting some of Elsberry’s extensive family pictures (1600 slides in all), Richardson commemorates an otherwise forgotten ‘ordinary’ life and the poignant particularity of its rituals. Elsberry’s favourite subjects appear to be her horseriding husband, Jack, and celebratory feasts, sometimes both—here’s Jack eating a roast chook at a carefully decorated table. Her photos are raw, direct and amateurish; the 1960 and 70s film stock gives everything a familiar dullish tinge and there’s something particularly American about these table spreads: the superfluousness, the food itself—two ice cream sundaes with Oreo cookies, the gingham table cloths, a cherry pie. Elsberry’s prints testify to the importance of ritual and relationships, and the care and pride with which she attended to occasions. In representing them Richardson, like Boltanksi, seems “not concerned with questions into the aesthetic quality of artistic excellence, but with the banal reproducibility and multiplicity of photography and importantly of the multiplicity (and regeneration) of human life and death” (Paul McNally, review on www.source.ie).

Bec Dean says she was inspired to bring together photomedia that often produced a melancholy effect, even if this was not necessarily intended by the artist, and the other works in this thoughtfully arranged show bear this out in more or less obvious ways.

If you leave me can I come too?, curator Bec Dean; Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, March 3-April 9

2006/Contemporary Commonwealth/ is the second collaborative venture by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and the National Gallery of Victoria. Coinciding with the Commonwealth Games, 2006 is part of the broader cultural component of the Games and adopts the latter’s catch phrase, “United by the Moment”, as a loose, if somewhat ambiguous curatorial concept. It seems to imply social cohesion and collective identity and cautiously engenders sympathy for the idea of the Commonwealth as an “optimistic global association of nations.” But it also partakes of ongoing debates in Australia about questions of national identity, of Australian-ness, broadening its critique to question the relevance of the very idea of the ‘commonweal.’ In this it arouses suspicion of the Commonwealth as prolonging the “hegemonies of Empire.” Is the Commonwealth sustainable as a unified perception of belonging in the face of “migration and displacement”? If the contemporary Commonwealth has become “a network of changing cultural forces”, of unification in the face of mobility, how has this been interpreted by an institution devoted to movement?

The ACMI component of 2006 brings together 14 artists from Commonwealth countries. In his catalogue essay Mike Stubbs suggests that the work of these artists explores “complex aspects of cultural identity, migration and environment…of history, landscape, country and the relationships that divide and unite.” The works assembled in the ACMI Screen Gallery are predominantly moving-image based. Many involve multi-channel projection, which allows for the interplay of juxtaposed narratives of conflicting identity, as in British artist Isaac Julien’s Paradise Omeros (2002), which explores the implications of migration on the psycho-geography of belonging. In this work the central character is physically and mentally dislocated between his home of Saint Lucia in the Caribbean and his adopted home of England. The viewer’s experience is less of watching a narrative of this experience than of navigating a hypertextual assemblage of displacement. A similar collage-like work is Indian artist Shilpa Gupta’s Untitled (2004), which allows the visitor to interact with multiple projections of the artist dressed in various forms of life-style oriented attire. As each mannequin is addressed, they perform in stereotyped ways befitting their mode of dress to the tune of consumer-driven marketing slogans that scroll across the screen, dramatically enacting Gupta’s sense of the transformation of the individual from citizen to homogenised global consumer.

Other works explore the intimacies of relations between place, identity and memory, such as Gamilaraay artist rea’s lyrical and evocative gins_leap/dub_speak (2003-2005). Immersed within 4 enveloping screens, the visitor hears the voices of 4 women recalling their memories of childhood with vivid immediacy. The changing character and rhythms of the local landscape of the Coonabarabran region of New South Wales reinforces the crucial symbiosis of indigenous peoples and their lands, as well as the importance of storytelling as the vehicle of this relation. The importance of local history and cultural memory is also captured, literally, in John Hughes’ The Archive Project (2006), an extraordinary sample of films made by the Melbourne Realists collective of activist filmmakers (see Carmela Baranowska’s report on page 17). These works, made between 1946 and 1952, were determinedly parochial and “refused the hegemony of US and British film, seeking instead to deliver Australian images and stories…to Australian audiences.”

The idea of the Commonwealth as the exportation of a tradition to an unfamiliar and even hostile elsewhere is captured in John Gillies’ Divide (2004). In this single channel work the colonisation of Australia is interpreted as a hybrid of Biblical nation building and English pastoral, in which the wild colonial boy wanders desultorily as a shepherd of both man and beast. Gillies’ portrayal of the establishment of the Australian nation is ambiguous at best.

The work that is perhaps the most overtly critical of notions of Empire and ideologies of the commonweal is Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starrs’ Seeker (2006). Seeker portrays a world in which the progressive forces of globalisation elicit narratives of exploitation, corruption and displacement. The user is invited to construct their own map of personal history and identity by tracing their genealogy on a map of the world. In the process a web-like network of relations develops and is interpreted by flanking screens, which depict alternative stories associated with these vectors, such as the relations between a country’s wealth and its acceptance of refugees, or the death toll in a country riven by civil war. The mobility of personal history converges here with larger diasporas associated with asylum seekers and refugees. The contemporary world emerges as a nomadic state in which people are forever displaced, seeking origins and destinations. This perception of diffusion is echoed in South African artist Berni Searle’s elegiac three-channel work About to Forget (2005), which depicts a stark, ink drawn silhouette of an anonymous group of people in an equally vague landscape. Their relations to each other are unclear and as time passes each silhouette fades into even more profound obscurity, as the ink bleeds and dissolves as if exposed to water.

It is interesting to speculate on how this show would be read without the context of the Commonwealth Games as a backdrop. Themes of post-colonialism, the importance of home and locality are not unique to discussions of the Commonwealth. The critique of what Terry Eagleton famously called “English ideology” has been a staple of contemporary thought since the earliest days of cultural studies, in particular the work of Stuart Hall. What perhaps does emerge as the real focus of 2006/Contemporary Commonwealth/ is an ambivalence towards prescribed notions of community, especially in the face of the discretionary nature of identity and new social formations made possible by our increasing embrace of technologies of mobility. Under such ephemeral conditions, remote individuals may very well be united by the moment.

2006/Contemporary Commonwealth/; Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Feb 24-May 21

“International cinema that kicks against the mundane—films that will blow your mind but didn’t blow their budgets.” So spruiks curator James Hewison on the cover of the program for this year’s IndiVision screenings.

Complementing the AFC’s production schedule, which currently has 12 films at various stages in the pipeline, this public component of IndiVision seeks to showcase quality low-budget cinema, inspiring local filmmakers and audiences alike in the much anticipated upturn in the quality of local features.

The idea of showcasing cutting-edge low-budget international films is a positive one. Considering the liberating, creative potential of filmmaking at the lower end of the economic scale, such screenings might ideally contribute to remedying what I consider the key problem with much Australian cinema, irrespective of budget: aesthetic impoverishment. By this I mean a lack of innovative or classically imbued formal layers and richness when it comes to what mid-20th century film theorists used to consider cinema’s ‘essence’—not narrative or character development, but mise en scène, framing and editing as the means by which a film’s meaning is generated and ‘read’ by the viewer.

Identifying the problem

Australian feature films are commonly either realist works—the ‘gritty’ or more classical surfaces of which render a very traditional narrative—or middlebrow ‘art films’ filled with often laboured images of a calendar-like, clichéd beauty or the sterile hipness common to advertising iconography. For me at least, Little Fish, though not without its merits, combines both tendencies with seemingly arbitrary framing and cutting dominating in its realist sequences while the flashbacks and more ‘interior’ shots feature very tired imagery indeed (notably the sun-spot marked seaside sequences). Yet rather than aesthetic problems, the most common complaint about local cinema is the quality of Australian scripts. The IndiVision production program clearly emphasises this area, including a very US-style approach to workshopping, drafting and input from multiple writers over a long period. This attempt at renovation ultimately reinforces the old idea of film ‘content’ as literary, with cinematic form merely the successful communication of this material. Even if we do come to see an improvement in narrative and character elements, the result will likely be determinedly narrative-centred, conventional films featuring a continuation of aesthetically uninteresting form. Australian films would hence remain stuck in a middle space—too slow and superficially ‘arty’ to satisfy Hollywood-inclined viewers, and too conceptually unambitious and stylistically conservative to cut much weight as internationally relevant art cinema.

Which brings me to the question of what the IndiVision screening program means by “international cinema.” I am not alone in thinking that the most interesting lowish-budget films of recent years come from Northern and Central Europe, South-East Asia and the Middle East. So it was disappointing that 3 of the 6 films in this showcase were from the US. While none of the films screened is actually bad, both the US emphasis and their relative mediocrity are instructive. However, as many of the problems are also those that characterise local productions, this tends to work against the aim of the program.

Down to the Bone

Down to the Bone (director Debra Granik US, 2004, budget AUD$665,000) is a quintessential US indie flick part-financed (and then later duly celebrated) by Sundance, featuring straight (non-ironic) naturalistic performances commonly offered by independent films as the necessary corrective to Hollywood’s realist aesthetic—all the while further entrenching (a more convincing perhaps) dramatic realism as the proper goal of serious feature-filmmaking. The economically depressed industrial area of Ulster in upstate New York, complete with snow-covered spaces of suburban alienation, provides some cultural grit to this story of drug addiction and attempted rehabilitation amongst the ennui-ridden white working class. But this reasonable enough ‘slice-of-life-in-fucked-up-provincial-USA’ never seems able to deepen its account beyond the myopic concerns of drug addiction. The film’s determinedly non-political address means that the national pride of the characters—all of whom are treated with generous humanism—is never dealt with beyond highlighted shots of ubiquitous US flags the characters fly despite clearly being on the losing end of their country’s role in globalisation. A very predictable narrative arc towards existential empowerment and autonomy for the central character as suggested in the film’s final shot is matched by very familiar doco-style realism in the form of hand-held DV images that (like the good but slightly over-studied performances) are asserted as a stylistic means to convince us of the material and cultural veracity of the on-screen milieu.

Close to Home

Close to Home (Vidi Bilua and Dalia Hager, Israel, 2005, AUD$875,000) exhibits a convincing cultural snapshot in the form of a semi-autobiographical account of the young directors’ experience of army service on the streets of Jerusalem. The film is very strong on conveying these young female conscripts’ boredom and growing sense of the absurd as they are forced to arbitrarily check the ID of people who “look like Arabs.” But while interesting, all this authenticity (perennially lacking in bigger-budget productions) ultimately serves a very traditional, modest coming-of-age narrative. As with so many first-time films, good social or cultural autobiography is accompanied by thematic tentativeness. Just as thematic penetration without a convincing cultural setting can be problematic, the film exemplifies the idea that knowing a particular milieu well does not guarantee satisfying cinema if there isn’t matching conceptual insight or analysis. As is so often the case, this lack of boldness is matched by similarly unadventurous formal elements, with DV used in the name of transparency-seeking sterile TV realism.

Allegro

Certainly much more formally and aesthetically extravagant is Christoffer Pfeiffer’s new film, Allegro (Denmark, 2005, AUD$2.1m). In this film a mysterious ‘zone’ of Copenhagen cut off from the rest of the city houses the repressed memories of the central character concerning a past ‘mistake’ he made with his girlfriend (supermodel Helena Christensen), that needs to be put right. Like much other recent ‘neo-baroque’ cinema, fancy spatio-temporal confusions ultimately provide the scaffolding for hackneyed, sentimental romanticism. And the potentially challenging stylistic aspects are seriously short-changed by a fairy tale voice-over that stitches the film’s themes onto the images for us, often unnecessarily concretizing what is fairly clear already. This ensures we’re never lost in the aesthetic and conceptual labyrinth—thereby denying us any potential pleasure and creative possibility beyond the schematically designated story and ideas.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness (Ian Gabriel, South Africa, 2004, AUD$1.3 m) is perhaps a necessarily worthy and dour account of an anguished white former South African policeman’s seeking of forgiveness from the family of a black student and ANC ‘terrorist’/freedom-fighter he killed in prison. The film’s aesthetic elements—notably a desaturated DV image and manipulated pixellation—are seamlessly integrated into its conceptual terrain and strong affective impact (though an excessive musical score worked against these well-conceived stylistics). Potentially controversial in some quarters vis-a-vis the particular outcome of its apparent critique of both Apartheid-era injustice and hard-line black refusal of post-Apartheid reconciliation, the film leaves a complex taste in the mouth. Even though its basic message is reconciliatory, this journey is shown to be far from easy or attainable once a schematic process has been set in train—and neither is watching or thinking through a film that exposes a whole host of class and race politics beyond the Apartheid divide. By comparison, the thematic treatment in the final scene of Rolf de Heer’s The Tracker (a film I otherwise admire)—when David Gulpilil walks off into the desert a hero—seems highly schematic in its liberal left framing of reconciliation.

The nature of the medium

If the aesthetic impoverishment of Australian films is to be reversed, industry initiatives and screening showcases such as IndiVision need to emphasise that film is an audio-visual medium (something the current script emphasis overlooks). It is, then, a pity that the progam this year didn’t feature the daring, even controversial work advertised by the pamphlet tag line. Of course there are issues with getting particular films for a small program such as this. However, the question is whether it was really easier to get this particular (US-weighted) collection, or rather whether a limited or even conservative vision of cutting-edge low-budget filmmaking prevails within the walls of the AFC, the apparently progressive language of their recent bureaucratic and advertising communiqués notwithstanding. I hesitate to highlight Hewison’s curatorial role, his programs at the Melbourne Film festival over recent years have been much more challenging than Sydney’s.

Only Forgiveness, while still a traditional narrative film, through its combination of affective aesthetic strategies as allied with difficult conceptual material, stayed with me for some time. The necessary formal and thematic rigour needed to generate this global holy grail of film-going has been seldom witnessed and experienced by this viewer when attending Australian films—at least since the high-point of Head On (Anna Kokkinos, 1998) and, in terms of low-budget cinema, the more modest The Finished People (Koah Do, 2003). Here’s hoping the IndiVision production program, its excessive emphasis on scripts notwithstanding, does genuinely invigorate the low-budget end of the feature-filmmaking spectrum in this country—diversification would be most welcome. However, in terms of exhibiting supposedly innovative international low-budget independent cinema, this year’s screening program won’t, I think, assist in this regard. Apparently contradicting the aim of the program, its value lies rather in merely highlighting familiar problems.

IndiVision Screenings 06; Dendy Newtown, Sydney, Feb 17-19; Kino Dendy, Melbourne, Feb 24-26

From the opening image of his documentary Darwin’s Nightmare, director Hubert Sauper deftly sets out the key dynamic underpinning his portrait of life around Tanzania’s Lake Victoria. A small shadow reflected on a vast body of water skims silently over gentle ripples. Slowly the camera tilts up to reveal the very real shape of an aeroplane—a vast cargo carrier and a rudely solid intruder into the dreamlike scene below. Although eschewing an accusatory tone, Sauper’s film quietly insists that so long as the ‘developed’ world continues to ride high, both literally and metaphorically, above the people of Africa, they will always toil in its shadow.

Ostensibly Darwin’s Nightmare is about the fish export trade that underpins Lake Victoria’s economy. An astounding 500 tonnes of Nile perch are caught here every day, filleted in factories around the lake, and flown out by vast Russian cargo planes to supply European dinner tables. The perch were introduced into the lake in the 1960s, although the film is vague about the exact circumstances. Once in the lake, this enormous carnivore proceeded to devour every native fish with such voraciousness that 4 decades on they are the only species left—an unmitigated ecological disaster that now provides Europe with a cheap, bountiful supply of fish fillets.

The owners of the filleting and packing factories around the lake have grown rich, while the workers and fishermen live a subsistence existence in the surrounding villages and towns. The area displays all the usual trappings of gross wealth disparity: prostitution, lawlessness, homelessness, a chronic lack of social and medical services, and rampant abuse—particularly of women and children. Sauper and his camera gradually sink into this world, lurching from one ghastly scene to another as if reeling from the sheer scale of the misery.

After the deceptive calm of the opening, we are quickly plunged into the grotesque urban settlements around Lake Victoria’s shores. We pass briefly through an antiquated airport control tower, but then Sauper leaves us disoriented, without the security of establishing shots or clear narrative bearings. It’s night and the picture is fuzzy. Homeless kids fight on unpaved streets and a choir busks, accompanied by a portable electric organ. Shadows lurk in doorways and faces loom out of the night. We meet an attractive young woman—a prostitute to the foreign pilots who fly into the town. Her attempts to sing a song of her homeland are interrupted by a drunken client leering into the camera. She is the first of many locals who drift in and out of the film, offhandedly telling tales of hardship, violence and abuse.

As Darwin’s Nightmare progresses, what initially seems like a sprawling, formless picture of life around the lake becomes a mosaic of impressions that slowly envelop the viewer in a suffocating horror so complete it takes on an almost surreal dimension. Within this impressionistic portrait, a network of gruesome symbioses slowly forms. The fish industry attracts poor farmers from Tanzania’s drought-stricken rural sector, who become underpaid fishermen or cheap factory labour. Those who can’t get work ensuring Europe’s supply of fish fillets live off the dregs that the First World rejects; hundreds of fish heads and stripped bones dumped in maggot-infested mounds every day. Sauper interviews one woman as she picks through the carcasses, hanging them out to dry so they can be sold in local markets. Maggots wriggle through her toes as she works. “My life is good” she proclaims; previously she was starving on an unproductive farm.

Similarly, the chemical by-products of the fish business find a use among those living in the factories’ surrounds. Street kids collect the discarded off-cuts of the packaging in which the fish are transported to Europe. They melt the plastic to create a viscous substance which, when sniffed, sends them into a sleep so deep they are sometimes raped without being aware of what’s happening.

Finally, a large sex industry services the cashed-up foreign pilots, as well as the local workers and fishermen. AIDS is rampant and the local church discourages the use of condoms. Many men infect their wives, who are forced into prostitution when their husbands become ill, thus perpetuating the epidemic.

The whole situation is such a graphic representation of Africa’s social, political and economic relationship to Europe that if it were created in fiction the viewer would recoil from the painful lack of subtlety. Yet throughout, Sauper hints there is an even darker side to all this wretchedness. He repeatedly asks interviewees whether the cargo planes whisking the fish off to Europe are empty when they touch down in Africa. In the film’s closing moments one of the pilots finally confesses they are importing arms that are distributed across the African continent, fuelling the endless civil conflicts in countries like Angola and the Congo.

Sauper’s understated handling of this scene distinguishes his work from the hysterical finger pointing of Michael Moore, or even the more reasoned polemics of filmmakers like Robert Greenwald (Outfoxed) and David Bradbury. Sauper sits with the pilot late at night and lets him tell his own story. The man seems a little drunk and obviously traumatised by the sights he has witnessed. He recalls a flight he made into South Africa one Christmas: “The children of Europe got grapes for Christmas day, the children of Africa got guns.” He pauses, staring ruefully at the floor. “I want to make all the children in the world happy. But I don’t know how.”

Darwin’s Nightmare leaves no position of distance from which the filmmaker, viewer, or even the film’s characters can vent righteous anger. The characters inflict misery on each other and, as the beneficiaries of this situation, we inflict misery on them. And the film offers no easy solutions to the institutionalised global inequalities that have shaped the lakeside milieu. As a local journalist points out to Sauper, to many Africans, UN officials and the like (and perhaps documentary filmmakers?) are just more Westerners reaping the benefits of African suffering. While their countrymen provide the armaments for African wars, aid officials draw comfortable salaries and build successful careers providing Band Aid solutions for the fallout of an economic system from which they will ultimately only benefit.

Sauper’s matter-of-fact, decentred presentation of life around Lake Victoria lifts Darwin’s Nightmare out of the realm of polemical social or political documentary and renders it something more akin to Alain Resnais’ Holocaust film Night and Fog (1955). Both are emotionally cool works about highly emotive subjects, confronting us with the awful truth that humanity’s worst forms of abuse are perpetrated by ordinary human beings performing quite banal tasks. Like the Holocaust, Tanzania’s fish industry is the result of calm and rational, albeit grossly inhuman, decision-making. But while the Holocaust was a clear-cut system of industrialised genocide, the situation on Lake Victoria is the product of a much more diffuse and pervasive global economic system in which we are all imbricated. However much we try to salve our consciences or live in blissful ignorance, we can’t change the fact that our Western affluence is built on the misery of the developing world. And as long as we continue to live in denial, the nightmare scenes depicted in Sauper’s film will continue to haunt our aspirational dreams of affluence.

Darwin’s Nightmare; director Hubert Sauper; producers Edouard Mauriat, Antonin Svoboda, Martin Gschlacht, Barbara Albert, Hubert Toint, Hubert Sauper; France/Austria/Belgium; 2004; distributed in Australia by Potential Films;
www.darwinsnightmare.com

Darwin’s Nightmare was nominated for an Academy Award in the category of Best Documentary Feature. Although screening in cinemas in the UK and France and promoted with large street posters, Darwin’s Nightmare had only a brief Melbourne theatrical release. It is available on DVD through Madman Entertainment. Eds

The Goethe-Institut’s annual Festival of German Films is focusing this year on women—their tribulations political, romantic, professional and sexual, and as actors and filmmakers. It’s not just a matter of fixing on a theme but responding to a wave of new women-centred films, even if mostly made by men. There are other films in the program that are less female oriented but in which women play no less a role than their male antagonists, not least in The Free Will, the festival’s most powerful film.

Sophie Scholl—The Final Days (Marc Rothemud, 2005) recounts the arrest, interrogation and trial of university student Scholl, one of the White Rose Group, for distributing anti-war leaflets in Nazi Germany. Nominated for an Academy Award in 2006 for Best Foreign Language Film, it features a superbly restrained performance from Julia Jentsch as the courageously determined and pious Scholl. Despite some awkward patches where the young Scholl reveals a level of unexpected insight into the regime’s ills, the film keeps in focus both political evil and the consequences of protest based on youthful impulse—friends, family and associates suffered for an ill-executed plan. The screenwriter Fred Breinersdorfer will be a festival guest.

The Red Cockatoo (Domink Graf, 2005) becomes increasingly engaging as it replays a slice of East German history, the weeks building suspensefully towards the building of the Berlin Wall. The film centres on a young man, Siggi (Max Riemelt), a would-be artist and theatre designer with little political awareness, attracted to a young woman in a park (Luise played by Jessica Schwarz) where young people gather in 1961 to play rock’n’roll, only to be beaten up and dispersed by police. She’s married, she’s a poet and committed to the state, it’s just got the wrong leaders. Siggi recognises in her the artist he’ll never be, publishes her book of poems without state permission and the consequences are, again, horrific, involving more beatings, suspicion and betrayals. Veering between teen comedy and high drama, The Red Cockatoo (the name of the club where the young gather to rock’n’roll and the government enforces hilariously hotted-up folk dancing) pays careful attention to its many characters, to the changing mores of a sexually and financially repressed society, and the states of political, artistic and romantic grace so hard to attain.

While Sophie Scholl—The Final Days and The Red Cockatoo continue Germany’s reassessment of its past, both are reminders of the proto-fascism that Western democracies are currently embracing with terrorism as their excuse. Scholl and her collaborators are accused of demoralising German troops, Siggi and his fellows of undermining the state; sedition is the name of the game.

Almost Heaven (Ed Herzog, 2005) stands out for its un-slick relaxed cinematography in the tale of Helen, a would-be country singer (Heike Makatsch) of limited ability (and with a bigger problem it would be unfair to give away), who takes up an offer to play in Nashville but ends up in Jamaica (a welcome bit of on-screen tourism). She finds herself up against a tough young delinquent mother, Rosie (an engaging performance from Nikki Amuka-Bird), local gangsters, wary musicians and tiny-minded hotel entertainment managers. Almost Heaven swings from serious to sentimental with unfortunate ease, and is much, much better on the dark end of the scale. As for a film about a woman with ambition, well let’s say Helen at least goes as far as she can, and as far as the people who need her can go with her. Not quite the “breezy comedy” of the press release, but there are a few smiles to be had, and not a few pleasures.

If Almost Heaven has something of the parable about it, then a trio of smoothly produced features about couples are deliriously rooted in myth and fairytale. About the Looking for and Finding of Love (Helmut Dietl, 2004) tracks a disastrous coupling between a singer and her Svengali record producer into separation, suicide, a voyage into the underworld of the ancients, and a lot of greying hair. For a “romantic comedy” it’s light on laughs, has a laboured plot and a grim outcome à la Orpheus and Eurydice. If only he knew how to express his feelings, and if only she she wasn’t “an ice-cold business woman…a frigid Aphrodite.” Barefoot (Til Schweiger, 2005) is another dark comedy, this time a kind of Cinderella tale for its odd couple. He’s the tearaway scion of a millionaire businessman and she’s a suicidal asylum inmate where he’s a cleaner, temporarily. Though it’s never clear why, he becomes responsible for her and she loves him. The drama and the occasional comedy are over the top. The Fisherman and his Wife—Why Women Never Get Enough (Doris Dorrie, 2005), loosely based on a Brothers Grimm story, features a couple so out-of-sync that nothing can convince you they will ever work it out—but the film is insistent that they try, features an irritating talking fish couple who frame the narrative interspersed with some interesting local colour from Japan and Germany about the market value of ornamental carp. The woman’s business flair, incidentally, is disastrous for the marriage, but so then is his wounded hippy childhood. All 3 films besiege the viewer with strategically placed pop songs and feature 30-something couples with the emotional maturity of teenagers. But that’s festivals for you, you have to take the good with not-so-good, and these films all have something more serious than When Harry met Sally about them although they clearly have their eye on the same market.

For a couple of a completely different order and in what looks to be the standout film of the festival, Matthias Glasner’s The Free Will (writers Glasner, Judith Angerbauer, Jürgen Vogel, 2006) offers compulsive but gruelling viewing as a rapist, Theo (Jürgen Vogel), freed after 9 years of incarceration and medical treatment, tries to live a normal life against enormous odds, primarily his sexual compulsions and a hatred for women. He comes into contact with a young woman, Nettie (Sabine Timoteo) who has recently escaped her father’s psychological abuse. However, The Free Will doesn’t lend itself to easy precis. Comprising long scenes, it is sparely scripted, dramatically sustained, superbly acted, and shot with a technique that is disturbingly immersive (Glasner himself is co-cinematographer). What’s more, it’s completely unpredictable and on occasion truly frightening—getting past the first 15 minutes or so of this 163 minute, painfully suspenseful psychological epic will be difficult for some.

There are many powerful scenes. In one of the strongest, Theo invites Nettie to his martial arts class and instructs her to attack, to choke him. In a situation where he finds control, she finds a shocking release, unable to stop, striking Theo harder and harder in a dance of repeated moves. But however different they are, Glaser reveals in Theo and Nettie a shared inarticulacy, a numb interiority, breathing that sits on the edge of panic, the fear of touch, and the spare worlds and ordered occupations they inhabit.

It’s rare in cinema to feel that you have really entered the life of another, especially someone like Theo, a psychopath with whom you can barely empathise, or the wounded and closed Nettie. Glasner adroitly tests us to the full, and his film stays with us like a bad dream, but one from which we have perhaps intuited something about the rapist psyche and the love that can find no place in it, or for too short a time.

At the 56th International Film Festival Berlin, The Free Will won a Silver Bear for Jürgen Vogel for Artistic Contribution as actor, co-writer and co-producer. It also won a Prize of the Guild of German Arthouse Cinemas for director Matthias Glasner for what he describes as “a tender film about the terror of loneliness [in which] I showed everything that my camera recorded with the same sympathy…no matter what it was, whether brutal or hesitantly hopeful” (www.thefreewill-themovie.com).

The festival also includes 2 panel discussions. Female Vision—Strong Women asks if the number of films focused on women is “a coincidence or is filmmaking about to be free itself from male dominated topics and views? Is it just a German or European trend or does this phenomenon have an equivalent in Australia?”

Festival of German Films 2006, Goethe Institut; Sydney, April 20-30; Melbourne, April 21-30; Brisbane, 26-29 April; Canberra, April, 27-30; panel discussion, Sydney, Female Visions—Strong Women, April 21, 5pm; Which Future for the Arthouse, April 28, 5pm

Over 2 nights the Brisbane Powerhouse presented the live film music of Philip Brophy, the second night featuring a score for Philippe Garrel’s controversial silent film Le Révélateur (1968). Brophy’s background includes work as film director, sound designer, lecturer, film programmer and curator. He is probably best known for his visceral Cronenberg styled feature Body Melt (1993). The first night’s focus on Japanese animation, with vibrant colour and slick sound design attests to the stark contrasts in Brophy’s encompassing versatility. His multi-lateral approach to media is perhaps summed up in his statement, “I become [the media] in order to unbecome myself.”

The soundtrack grants us unimpeded access to the emotional interiority of film and thus easily assumes semantic dominance, hence the challenges confronting the score composer. In Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound, Brophy commendably takes up the challenge of providing a score that goes beyond Brian Eno-esque clichés and the ever prevalent insert-Arvo-Pärt-here.

The rarely screened Le Révélateur is a hauntingly apocalyptic film composed in stark black and white contrasts of a man, woman and neglected child in psychological crisis. Reputedly the entire cast and crew took LSD before shooting; the eyes of the woman as she descends the staircase holding the rail with both hands makes this apparent. The characters, as though trapped in a box, avoid making any connection; like silent puppets they stare out at a bleak world. The now less tangible political context of the film was its birth in Garrel’s traumatic internalisation of the Paris riots of May ‘68, the resulting deflated ambitions and unrealised dreams and the consequent police crackdown and the dispersal of militants, propelling Garrel to Munich where he began filming.

In Brophy’s soundtrack the selection of music is historically decontextualised from the film’s 1968 origins; beginning with the violent and sinister eroticism of the Velvet Underground, it forward tracks through 70s German Krautrock to David Bowie and Joy Division. The harsh discordant guitar chords provided live by Dave Brown are thematically linked to Garrel’s 10 year romance with Nico (of the Velvet Underground). The savagery of menacing, pulsing, jagged edged sounds merges seamlessly with the stripped back and raw cinematic imagery. The cross-fading oscillation between over-exposed whites and an impenetrable darkness is recomposed in the auditory realm via the contrast of shrill explosions of electric guitar with the brooding darkness of the bass. A parallel dialogue between the gruesome aversions of the parents and the hopeful playfulness of the child is suggested in guitar versus keyboard. The protagonists’ persistent closeness to the ground—on their knees or hiding in the grass—is emphasised by scraping, rumbling and granular sound textures. In an additional original move, a female voice is added to the soundtrack coinciding with scenes where the woman turns to face the camera.

Brophy’s soundtrack emulates the stylistic structure of the film; the circular tracking shots of the camera correspond with the child tramping in circles, which correlate well with the repetition and looping of Krautrock. In one scene the child becomes a voyeur, watching his parents violently confront each other on a miniature theatre stage; the silence of the film is now embellished by wailing, distorted guitar. In the latter half of the film the child resolves his anguish, this is marked not only by his escape from the forest, but also his swapping the ever present doll for a can of fly spray. In Brophy’s soundtrack this development is signposted by the introduction of a cover version of David Bowie’s Heroes—perhaps forever embedded in the cinematic psyche with flight since its use in Christiane F as the ‘sound’ junkies flee from the police through the corridors of an emptied shopping mall. We can only wonder how Philippe Garrel would respond, but I sense this is the music he might have chosen.

Philip Brophy, Live score to Philippe Garrel’s Le Révélateur (1968), produced, engineered and mixed by Philip Brophy, guitar Dave Brown, keyboards Philip Brophy; commissioned for the 53rd Melbourne International Film Festival, 2004; Brisbane Powerhouse, March 16

During the Adelaide Fringe Festival the visual arts are often pushed to the periphery by a program dominated by commercial media, comedians and stilt-wearing jugglers. However, sifting through the affected wackiness can reveal some gems that not only reflect the grand democracy of this cultural event (anyone can be shielded under its umbrella provided they pay the registration fee) but also celebrate the possibilities of an artistic medium. The Shoot the Fringe short film workshops and competition is one such treasure. Commencing in 1994, it still has the same parameters: all films to be on Super 8mm format (one reel); the productions must launch straight from shoot to processing, to screening with only in-camera editing; participants are given a week to produce a piece; and the films should capture the spirit of the festival. The resulting screenings are a microcosm of the Fringe itself, ranging from the inventively stylish to the oddly hilarious, the impenetrably abstract, and the mind-bogglingly terrible. The films, however, are often imbued with a sense of personal creative daring.

Californian filmmaker and walking Super 8mm encyclopaedia Norwood Cheek is the event director, and he drives the workshop component and subsequent screenings with a combination of infectious enthusiasm and plenty of technical expertise. Participants arrive at the production workshop with cameras they have stumbled across and in many cases have never used. Cheek imparts shooting techniques as well as information on the often idiosyncratic antique technology; some models have adjustable frame rates and are excellent for stop-motion, others have lenses that distort light in myriad and sometimes unintentional ways. Armed with these tools, the filmmakers have 7 days to get their concept in the can and a further 4 to weave a synchronous soundtrack—somewhat difficult when you have not yet seen your film.

The entrants are a blend of rank amateurs, talented hobbyists and upcoming professional talent. In a forum such as this of course the results will occasionally be dire; of the 41 finished products a sprinkling of films rely on random fragments of obtuse symbolism, circular tracking shots of bars, and tame time-lapse photographic collages of bustling pedestrians. However, the advantage that Shoot the Fringe has over other short film programs is that even the more conceptually numbing entries are shot in striking black and white film, an aesthetic to get any self-respecting romantic excited. And when each film is only 2 1/2 minutes, long, an audience can be unusually forgiving.

Shining amongst the program were numerous films that employed contrasting tones and production techniques. Jonathon Daw’s The Seagull uses stop-motion animation with mesmerising flair. In a throwback to the Norman McLaren Academy award winning short Neighbours (1952) a single frame is taken while an actor leaps into the air and the process repeated until the end effect is of the character flying. Daw adds a surrealist story of a human seagull trawling for food scraps to amusing effect. Balloon: A Love Story by Dan Monceaux is a highly appealing whirlwind romance that deserves kudos for eliciting the best performances of the evening; an impressive feat when your actors are made from rubber and helium. Perhaps the darkest piece was Kathleen Lawler’s Duel, a tract on social decline utilising an animated chess game intercut with disturbing images of random destruction and waste, its eeriness somehow compounded by its silent soundtrack. The free-spirited Drink, Party and Repeat (director Datsun Tran) deftly captured the boozy routine experienced by many during the Fringe weeks, but with added universality; its energy and style suggested it could have emerged from the archive of the Nouvelle Vague.

The eventual winner was Sam Hastwell with a proficiently executed mini-documentary about a busking couple, Eric and Lynda. A very literal take on the festival and its participants, the film’s evocative environment, engaging characters and precise construction make it last in the memory.

The restricted production practices of the films and the development workshop aspect obviously set Shoot the Fringe outside the ambit of the premier domestic short film festivals. But Shoot the Fringe advances beyond gimmickry or quaintness to remind us of the possibilities inherent in underground film. It is extremely rewarding to see a spectacularly well framed shot, a particularly well-struck gag, an inventive technique or a devastating insight when it is done with such unencumbered freedom.

The cinema has long been a potent force in Thai culture. By the 1980s the local industry was generating almost a hundred feature films per year, from teen, horror and action flicks to big-budget epics glorifying national history and mythology. While production slowed in the 90s, more recently, innovative directors like Apichatpong Weerasethakul (The Adventures of Iron Pussy) and Pen-Ek Ratanaruang (Last Life in the Universe) have made waves at international festivals, stimulating much activity at the smarter end of the film spectrum.

Since its first outing in 1997, the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (BEFF) has become a fixture of the city’s cultural calendar. This year marked a departure from the typical film-fest format: a broad program reached beyond the auteurism cultivated by mainstream festivals (of which Bangkok has 3!). While it gathered work from all over the world, BEFF4 was not built around celebrity imports—it was refreshingly focused on local and regional talent.

The program showcased artists’ films, animation and music videos alongside the work of experimental and independent filmmakers. Not only did the directors invite and encourage contributions from non-artists, novice and emerging filmmakers, they also staged seminars and filmmaking workshops offering a hands-on introduction to experimental film production. Newcomers to the director’s chair included a 7 year-old boy, a team of Buddhist monks, and an outspoken senator, whose contribution was a wistful slideshow of Bangkok with the city’s gargantuan billboards edited out one by one.

In keeping with BEFF’s theme, ‘Democrazy’, the directors accepted, and screened, all of the 300+ submissions. The open-air venue—Bangkok’s central Lumpini Park—had itself become charged political turf as the site of a weekly public broadcast (and rally) by anti-government talk-back host Sondhi Limthongkul. As the protests boiled over into a spectacular political crisis, I talked to festival co-director, Gridthiya Gaweewong, about BEFF’s own ‘democratic’ experiment.

This year’s BEFF was itself an experimental format. How would you describe the results?
It was such an overwhelming experience for all parties involved—for us as organisers, participants and audience. One viewer wrote on our web-board that “we turned Lumpini Park into a paradise” for him. I found this very rewarding, after all those sleepless nights. So for the audience, especially the arts/film community, this festival is the major buffet of experimental work for them to taste. This might be an extreme way to deal with democracy and alternatives.

The idea of ‘Democrazy’ actually came from [co-director and filmmaker] Apichatpong who sees video and filmmaking as the most democratic medium today to express one’s perspective, for artists and non-artists alike. The accessibility of technology allows young artists and filmmakers to produce their works much easier than before. As homemade digital video has become acceptable in the mainstream film industry, you don’t need a major studio to back you up as before.

The movie industry is bored by its blockbusters; perhaps it’s looking to the artworld for something new and interesting. But is there a danger that it’ll also get bored by artists, and move on to something else?
The movie industry now simply lacks imagination. They’ll always find something new to attract audiences. They will get bored of artists someday, for sure. But in the realm of art, there’s still more freedom to explore and experiment with new ideas, and find something exciting.

There’s a lot of energy at the intersection between film and contemporary art. Does this have an impact on Thai art? And do artists have any impact on the film industry?
The Anna Sanders films play quite an interesting role in this change [the French Anna Sanders company produces films by visual artists, has a strong Asian focus, and was part of BEFF’s Bangkok Utopia program. www.annasandersfilms.com]. Maybe the international art and film worlds have begun to blur, but not in Thailand. The demand for Asian films has risen quite dramatically—witness the success of Apichatpong at the Cannes Film Festival [for Sud Palad (Tropical Malady, 2004)]. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that artists and filmmakers like him—Tsai Ming-Liang (from Taiwan), or Vimukti (from Sri Lanka)—will be super-popular in their own country.

This is an interesting thing about artists here: some feel like their audience is only outside of Thailand. Some, like installation artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, for example, achieve big-time international success but are not well-known at home. Is this situation changing?
It’s still the same. With the accessibility of information through the net and media, they’re known in their country, but only to a small art community. But we tended to underestimate local audiences for so long, that we almost gave up on them. Our problem is a lack of showcases for the works—no infrastructure. Neither Rirkrit nor Apichatpong do solo shows in Bangkok. No institutions can accommodate such works. There are neither cinematheques nor arthouses; commercial cinemas don’t have the guts to do it. It’s the same situation for Rirkrit: Bangkok has no art museums that could accommodate his retrospective. The situation will change if there are platforms for them to show their work. Most of the local audience simply has no chance to experience it. They hear from the media how great it is, but just never see it.

However, these artists are very influential and important, as catalysts, and as an inspiration for the younger generation. In Thailand’s case, the mainstream film industry is quite separate from the art world. But independent filmmakers and the art world in general are closer than before. There are close ties between some art and film organizations, like Project 304 and Kick the Machine (Apichatpong’s company), which together founded BEFF. And the Thai Film Foundation is working with non-profit art galleries like Project 304, Tadu and About Café. But there’s interest in film amongst artists in general.

How about other media gadgets like digital cameras, mobile phones and the web, which are very popular in Thailand?
We must admit that there are specific classes in this society who can afford and have access to those IT gadgets. They’re quite popular in Thailand, but only in the mainstream new media and screen media. If you turn on the TV (both free TV or cable), screens are divided into so many sections, allowing audiences to interact, vote, send SMS, etc. It’s become part of today’s cultural DNA, especially for the younger generation, who rely so much on blogs and web-board culture. Some video and new media artists incorporate images and texts from the web into their works, but it’s not at the level of a critical analysis of the system yet.

How important was BEFF’s venue, in Lumpini Park? Could you comment on the relation in Thailand between art and public space?
BEFF is a non-mainstream festival. It didn’t even associate with the notion ‘indie’, which in the Thai sense means super-mainstream. We targeted the local art and non-mainstream film community. But we still hoped that more people, the regular park-goers, would come. That’s why we work in public space. But there’s no concept of public space here. The park closes at 9pm, and on the last night of the festival, the guard came and blew a whistle at the audience. It certainly enriched the concept of ‘Bangkok Democrazy.’ People left with mixed feelings, asking themselves: is there real democracy in this land?A program of selections from BEFF4 will be screening at this year’s Electrofringe festival in Newcastle, and at Sydney’s Camera Obscura, September 4.

Gridthiya Gaweewong is an independent curator based in Bangkok. Currently she is working as a co-curator with Rirkrit Tiravanija on Saigon Open City, a two-year art event in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Bangkok Democrazy—The 4th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (BEFF4); Lumpini Park, Bangkok, Dec 23-25, 2005

ReelDance 2006 is the 4th bi-annual dance on screen festival curated by Erin Brannigan since 2000. As a not dispassionate observer, writer and participant I have seen the styles, approaches and personnel of the finalists (10 Australian or New Zealand made short films selected for screening in competition) change intriguingly over this time, sometimes reflecting trends and sometimes setting them.

After the first ReelDance I wrote that the finalists were “not the usual suspects” (RT38, p15). That year they were drawn from art schools, were experimental filmmakers, or mostly unknown choreographer-directors. There was a thrilling sense that, with the advent of a dance on screen festival, the previously unseen would be visible and that artists might lead the way in developing an art form. They could change rules about dance that had been, up to then, drawn strictly along the lines of association with known artists and funding bodies.

In the next 2 festivals the finalists mostly seemed to have lost their edgy freshness, and it was not replaced with energetic or informed accomplishment in the cinematic arts. There were, of course, notable exceptions, and their craft and artistry have had a visible influence on the current year’s work. But many of the selections represented a larger trend in Australian filmmaking—innovative film form was waning, replaced with the mechanical tricks that cameras and editing software could do.

This year we are seeing something altogether different. It is by no means a return to the open-ended, raw experimentation of the first year. Every film is by a well-known artist or team, all have government funding in some form. No more are dancers waving cameras around—and so the wild flashes of brilliance that might have been sparked are gone, but they are replaced with accomplished artistry and a strong commitment to the integration of dance and cinematic arts.

Choreographer Julie-Anne Long and filmmaker Samuel James integrate danced ideas with cinema’s capacities in a loving homage to early film and the surrealists. Satiric, affectionate and funny, Nuns’ Night Out’s grainy black and white 8mm film stock, its stellar cast and its progression from oddball mundane to vaudevillian spectacle erases any trace of a boundary between the perfectly absurd and the perfectly normal, leaving both happily enjoying each other’s attractions.

The pair of films on the program by director-cinematographer Cordelia Beresford working with choreographer Narelle Benjamin are poetically gritty studies of 19th century psychiatric patients trying to reassert their sanity. In I Dream of Augustine the cinematic frame echoes the doctor’s clinical frame, and denatured textbook illustrations contrast with the living, breathing woman, personified by Benjamin, who moves through extraordinary, almost possessed, extremes. Beresford frames the moves unflinchingly, and then reframes the raging emotion with text on screen that gives form to multiple perspectives. The Eye Inside is more explicit on the subject of the authority’s voyeurism and their provocation of their patient’s displays. In this physically expressed version of a true story the wily victim escapes, exposing her ‘madness’ for the performance that it is and her salacious audience for the creeps that they are.

Tracie Mitchell’s Whole Heart is a moody and impressionistic story of a lone woman in an ‘Australian Noir’ outback. In between narrative sequences the woman moves through remembered or imagined locations, groping blindly, mixing her human frailty with decaying plaster, patterned paper and white light. Some of its story devices are rudimentary—a symbolic teddy bear, for example. But when it’s physical, Whole Heart reveals a stronger story; what the body remembers is given voice, light, shade and resonance.

Three Times by Sue Healy dances away from the edge of narrative. It’s a strong and sensual film, rhythmic, integrated and appealing. The polish given to the piece by Digital Pictures gives it a gleaming, almost fragrant luminance. Three Times also feels like an unresolved battleground between abstraction and narrative. It’s a formalist numerical premise articulated by leggy women in silky underwear behaving with an odd intimacy. The figurative within the formalist—an unresolved tension in much contemporary dance—is exaggerated here by cinematic craft that emphasizes character and style.

Alyx Duncan’s Pandora tackles narrative more directly, but falls shy of a strong story. It shows some of the best elements of its native New Zealand’s cinematic traditions—fantastical images and extraordinary textures—and ambitiously tries to bridge mythic ideas with naturalism in a loose and dreamy structure.

The collaboration between director Michelle Mahrer and choreographer Bernadette Walong uses cinema to envision the unseen. The cellular connection of sentient bodies and elemental nature permeates the layers of River Woman. The glowing images are of symbiosis—dissolved and superimposed minerals, flesh, water, light and movement disintegrate and re-form in cycles that speak to the grains of time, stone, earth and air in our own bodies.

By contrast, director Gina Czarnecki and choreographer Garry Stewart envision the body as one with its digital image, creating flows, sparks and rainfalls of sculptural bodies alive in image only. In Nascent, drips of slow moving forms stream across the screen revealing/leaving behind tangled figures like scars, etching spines or swarms, or slow motion ghosts. To quote poet Richard James Allen, “This is not falling, this is called flying.”

If any doubt remains about the efficacy of blending cinematic and choreographic arts, Shona McCullogh delivers the knock out punch with Break. Here the movement of a family shifts seamlessly from ordinary horsing around to extraordinary acrobatic articulations. Dance incarnates the manoeuvres and wounds of the psychological sword fights that slash at families’ bodies in this beautifully resolved balance of the abstract and the figurative, the narrative and the expressionistic, the cinematic and the kinesthetic.

I am confident that Break will bag one of the top 3 spots, and I have my money on Nascent and one of Beresford’s films for the other 2, but I rarely pick the same winners as the panel, so don’t take my word for it. It’s a program worth seeing for what it is and for what it might prefigure in Australian dance on screen.

ReelDance Awards, for Best Australian & New Zealand Dance Film or Video; One Extra, ReelDance, International Dance on Screen Festival and Tour 2006; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, May 5-7; see www.oneextra.org.au for national tour dates.

While current academic research into comparative cognition is spanning temporal and spatial scales, certain artists are quietly getting on with it via spirited investigations of crowd behaviour in all its mesmeric and terrifying glory. In the scientific domain, computer modelling of neural circuits and the behavioural patterns of robots are, for some, showing the way. Meanwhile, natural behaviours (in ants, bees, fish and such) are frequently offered as windows onto the baffling mental processes and social behaviour of humans. While pockets of behavioural ecology are specifically concerning themselves with complex predator-prey interactions and the mysteries of mate choice, the broad research terrain draws on ideas from computational neuroscience, adaptive behaviour, neuroscience, ethology, evolutionary biology, connectionism and robotics.

Instinctive swarm intelligence has been described as the collective behaviour of independent agents, each responding to local stimuli without supervision. The swarming model can be employed to comprehend phenomena as diverse as blood clotting, immune responses, footy crowd behaviour, warfare and freeway traffic patterns.

Cicada (artists Kirsten Bradley, Nick Ritar and Ben Frost) tested these waters in February with an elegant immersive project presented in the cavernous 125 year old Meat Market Arts Space in North Melbourne. The trio work as a self-described “creative team exploring landscapes; urban, natural, sonic, constructed and imagined.” The work marks a shift from previous live theatrical collaborations and from the domain of vast real time projections and soundscapes in the architectural outdoors, as seen in their Electrofringe projects and in Re_Squared, 2003, a work that temporarily transformed Sydney’s Australia Square. MOB is concentrated conceptually, and is surprisingly modest, spare and contained in scale.

MOB, in the words of Cicada, “takes its inspiration from the monumental forces, collective emotions and emergent behaviours of the human crowd.” They have “developed MOB into an abstracted and emotive world which explores and parallels the crowd experience.”

MOB comprised 4 projections on 2 long low screens with a grunty 5-channel speaker array hung in parallel. The audience, allowed in only in small groups, entered at either end and experienced the work as an internal ‘corridor.’ The procedure of presenting new work in this intimate way to small gatherings of people and eliciting immediate feedback is a strategy to be commended. Keith Armstrong, among others, employed this approach in the 2003 and 2004 previews of his significant collaborative Intimate Transactions project (see p25).

As part of the 2-year gestation period for MOB, Ritar filled vast amounts of memory capturing footage of South Korean vigils—including the requisite 80,000 control police—for the impeached president. Possibilities continued and finally, the imagery was pared back to what best served the idea. The visual form of the work eventuated as the barely manipulated footage of tiny Chinese ‘white cloud’ Tetra fish swimming in a tank. (The fish themselves are emblematic of yet another Australian ecological disaster; they represent a badly informed attempt to control mosquitoes that went wrong with drastic impact on local fish populations.) The treatment of the imagery was purely temporal, at 110% speed in places with up to 30 layers of repeated movement in others. Parallels were quickly seen by the artists to do with the synthetic relationship between the evolution of the organic movement and the sound score—both were compositions, both held emotive sway.

The aural encounter with MOB was particularly memorable. For this work Frost, who is now based in Iceland, composed a short libretto: “You have lost yourself/ I have lost myself/ We have lost ourselves.’ The text was sung to his score by an Icelandic children’s choir comprising 13 tender voices from the tiny village of Skáholt (population 40). Again the treatments by Frost of his choral recordings were temporal rather than textual, resulting in a bare, haunting and soaring beauty that marked the composition. In both Bradley and Ritar’s video, and in Frost’s audio the treatment was reduced to a process of interruptions, re-arrangements and repetitions. Frost’s attraction to choral music is cognisant of its weighted history, he says. “The recording was made in a church, and the subtext embedded in this form of music remains like a trace in the final piece.” For a short piece, just over 10 minutes, the composition packs an emotional punch: “the disjuncture between the structural pillars creates the tension and forms the connectivity within the work”, Frost explains.

Sound and movement are of course indicators of crowd behaviour while the parameters of the bounded space—the fish tank, the church the Korean public square—are also under scrutiny. A question for Cicada was the point of distinction between the individual and the collective, and the point of disintegration within the group itself. Cicada continues to inhabit the uncomfortable organic space between sound and image as they work towards the formation of, as Ritar explains, “a true synthetic experience.” This is achieved with refreshing subtlety and intelligence.

Cicada, MOB: Investigation of the crowd as a discrete organism. Part one; Arts House, The Meat Market, North Melbourne, Feb 15-18, http://cicada.tv

“I will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” writes playwright Lillian Hellmann in her brilliant account of testifying before the House Un-American Activities in the 1950s. The memoir, Scoundrel Time (1976), is about Hellmann’s refusal to ‘name names.’ The popularity of George Clooney’s Goodnight and Good Luck points to the continuing fascination with this bleak period.

In Australia at the same time, the fear surrounding the Menzies government’s attempt to ban the Communist Party saw people burying books and taking their kids to be looked after by relatives. Dossiers were kept by ASIO and an “adverse risk assessment” spelt unemployment for many. The 1950s have become a metaphor for our own troubled times with reference to political censorship, surveillance and government manipulation.

John Hughes’ Master Class and his film The Archive Project were among the highlights of the 2006 Australian International Documentary Conference. The film reveals a little known but crucial period in Australian documentary production. This painstakingly edited work is both a guide to the Australian documentary filmmakers of the 1950s and a road map to how we make films now.

The Hughes legacy

Hughes’ earlier documentaries, Menace (1976) and Film-work (1981), and Traps (1985, described by him as “a documentary and narrative drama with a documentary intent”), began his 30 year fascination with the political era of the 1950s: Communism, the Waterside Workers Federation and the ALP split. Only dimly remembered from high school textbooks, these become immediate and present in Hughes’ earlier films. Footage from the past becomes part of a living archive.

Hughes’ long-term filmmaking project is encapsulated in his voice-over at the beginning of The Archive Project. In order to preserve, document and elaborate on history’s traces Hughes says he relies on “exquisite trims—the past generation of memory.” Traps, Australia’s version of Haskell Wexler’s ode to the 1960s protest movement during the 1968 Democratic Convention, Medium Cool (1969), juxtaposes drama with the documentary reality of Bob Hawke’s 1983 electoral victory and the shady dealings of the CIA in post war Australian political life. (In an adroit move, Hughes uses outtakes from a seminal film of the early 80s, Marian Wilkinson and Sylvie Le Clezio’s Allies (1983), about the history of the US-Australia Alliance to extend his argument.)

The main character (actor Carolyn Howard) is a journalist at a community radio station who travels to Canberra to cover Bob Hawke’s first electoral victory then sets out to interview “real” subjects like historian Humphrey McQueen and activist Dennis Freney. It’s erratic and infuriating at times but it is also one of my favourite Hughes’ films.

A different world

If the 1950s and 1980s are different countries, then Melbourne’s history exists as a parallel universe to our own. Melbourne is the ultimate realist city. Unlike Sydney’s reliance on the dazzling brilliance of its harbour landscape the image that recurs again and again in The Archive Project is that of commuters entering Flinders Street Station, the city’s ‘real heart’, where work and leisure are embodied by the constant movement of the crowd. What also makes Melbourne a modernist city is closely linked to its post war art movement—the Nolans, Boyds and Heidi group always found a home here.

While there have been countless books written about these artists and their world, The Archive Project explores the little known story of the independent filmmakers who inhabited this decade. It’s a story about how the everyday reality of life in 1950s Melbourne can be understood in aesthetic and formalist terms. While Hughes, in email correspondence with me, sees these filmmakers participating in a broader modernist project involving the key planks of progress, culture and democracy, “the realist tradition in the twentieth century is really a moment of modernism.”

The Realist Film Organisation

The central problem facing Hughes is that 2 of the 3 key participants are dead. Bob Matthews and Ken Coldecutt were the main instigators of the Realist Film Organisation (RFO). The only other surviving member, Elizabeth Coldecutt, is still active, feistily questioning the Brotherhood of St Laurence’s “ownership” of the early 1950s housing rights films at the launch of Hughes’ film at ACMI. According to Coldecutt it was the more politically radical—and thus forgotten from history—Fitzroy Branch of the Communist Party that was the main instigator.

The RFO, born during the days of hope in the early post war period, was closely aligned to the political program of the Communist Party of Australia. According to Hughes’ narration, among the left there was a “shared vision of a just future.” The provision of childcare centres and libraries was, however, overshadowed by the housing crisis of the post war period—after a 15-year time span when no working class housing had been built. In 1947, 90,000 families were homeless. The inner suburbs of Fitzroy, Collingwood and South Melbourne were particularly hard hit.

While the Realist Film Organisation included films about housing and price hikes, including The Slums are Still With Us and Prices and the People, they also dealt with politically taboo subjects for the 1950s like solidarity with Mao’s China and Indigenous rights. They Chose Peace, the last of the Realist films, was about the International Carnival for Peace and Friendship. While the images remain, Hughes had to reconstruct the narration. Deborah Mailman’s new reading is an eloquent combination of old-school voice of God and today’s political reality—that in 2006 Aboriginal land rights remain an unfinished story:

For the Indigenous people of Australia there has never been a time of real peace. Isolated from the rest of the community into drab settlements, refused the rights of citizenship, they realised only too well the importance of the message the carnival brought and the friendship and mutual support between the carnival delegates became a token of the time when the Aboriginal people will stand in their full stature.

During the AIDC’s Master Class I told John Hughes that The Archive Project reminded me of Chris Marker’s The Last Bolshevik, a meditation on the Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Medvedkin’s attempt to intersect filmmaking practice with a new society. Hughes’ response was one of humility and understatement. And yet, despite the similarity of a broadly defined left project, Hughes’ protagonists break with Marker’s in one crucial respect. Medvedkin was never able to escape from the constraints of the Stalinist system, but the Realist filmmakers instituted a frank and open discussion of Soviet totalitarianism a full 5 years before Kruschev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes. While this ultimately led to Ken Coldecutt’s break with the party he remained under ASIO surveillance for years afterwards and was even denied employment in Stanley Hawes’ new Commonwealth Film Unit, the predecessor of today’s Film Australia. (In another of life’s twists, it was John Hughes who was presented with Film Australia’s Stanley Hawes Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 2006 AIDC.)

Even today, the Realist Film Organisation’s influence on Australian (and particularly Melbourne) film culture remains profound. Its members mortgaged their houses to set up the Olinda Film Festival, the forerunner to today’s Melbourne International Film Festival, the longest running in Australia. Other members were employed at the State Film Centre and their interest in European and arthouse cinema has led to Melbourne’s unique film collection. ACMI holds the collection of the State Film Centre and houses Australia’s most eclectic and successful film program—a monument to our collective film history and a testament to the pioneers of the early Realist Film Unit.

John Hughes, The Archive Project, the Realist Film Movement in Cold War Australia, Australian International Documentary Conference; Hilton on the Park, Melbourne, Feb 13-16

Melbourne-based independent producer, writer and director John Hughes has taught filmmaking and cinema studies and has been a commissioning editor for documentary with SBS Independent. His films include the documentaries River of Dreams (2002) and After Mabo (1997), the feature What I have written (1996) and One Way Street (1992), about Walter Benjamin.

The Archive Project will appear later this year on ABC TV and on DVD with the referenced RFO film.

In 2004 RealTime interviewed Brisbane based media artist Keith Armstrong about his work, particularly Intimate Transactions, as it was being carefully developed and tested with his Transmute Collective collaborators over several years (RT59). The finished work has been acclaimed overseas and is now touring Australia.

Transmute describe the work as a “new form of interactive installation that allows two people in separate spaces to interact simultaneously using their bodies. Each participant uses a physical interface called a Bodyshelf. By gently moving their bodies on this smart furniture they instigate intimate transactions, which influence an evolving world created from digital imagery, multichannel sound and tactile feedback. This shared experience allows each participant to gradually develop a form of sensory intimacy with the other, despite the fact that they are geographically separated and cannot physically see or hear each other…Participants may choose to act in different ways as they begin to understand how their actions affect everything within the environment and the other participant. Hence the work focuses participants upon understanding influences and relationships within the work’s ecologies.”

In the RealTime review of Intimate Transactions, an admiring Greg Hooper commented that the work “continues Armstrong’s development of ecosophical praxis, used here as a pragmatic philosophical take on new media production that chucks out the techno-fetish and puts in a fusion of ecological theory and ethics. New media as experience design rather than commodity production. The pragmatic upshot of Armstrong’s ethical position is the development of work that requires prototyping, interviews with people about their experience of the work, and further prototyping. Perhaps that is the contribution of new media: the introduction of user testing in the arts” (RT 67, p26).

Since then Intimate Transactions has been awarded an Honourable Mention at the 2005 Ars Electronica in the Prix Arts Competition (Sept 2005) and has been shown at London’s ICA in collaboration with BIOS in Athens (Nov 12-13, 2005). It will soon show in Sydney at Performance Space and Artspace before appearing in the Brisbane Festival and Kickarts/COCA in Cairns in July.

Next up, and true to the expanding ethos of multiplatforming, the work morphs into Intimate Transactions: Art, Interaction and Exhibition within Distributed Network Environments, a publication that Armstrong describes as “a hybrid, lying somewhere between an exhibition catalogue and a book/ monograph…approximately 100 pages long [with] a collection of approximately 8-10 written texts of various lengths, 16 pages of colour images, and an interactive DVD.” The publication will document a fascinating interdisciplinary and collaborative creation, one to immerse yourself in as it moves about the country building an ecology of intuitive and sensory empathies. RT

Transmute Collective, Intimate Transactions; Artspace, Performance Space, Sydney, May 19-27

It is 6.30 on a hot and sweaty Melbourne evening and the sun is still beating down as we step into Blackbox for the opening of Liquid Aesthetics. Melburnians like a party with their exhibition openings, but here is a full-on night club experience: the pulsing throb of dance music (does my memory serve me right?), the dimly lit interior, the large screen projections and massing bodies, more intent on the art of connection than Art. It’s a queer experience, not just because the exhibition is the premier visual arts event for this year’s Midsumma Queer Festival, but also because in one movement we plunge from day into night: from the ordinary world into the subterranean world of desire.

In this strange world, B-grade movie images of nubile women clash with guttural animal sounds; violent erotic couplings find themselves accompanied by a forest bird’s song; an animated doll melts her finger in a pot of boiling liquid whilst an exquisitely beautiful and scarred boy with antlers laps milk and honey. Meanwhile in a curtained off cubicle, Monika Tichacek’s The Shadowers (2004) is relentless and, as the camera tracks the journey of spittle sliding down cotton threads, I cannot resist my impulse to gag. Over the top of this mix, the dance music continues to pump and people throng. In this first heady encounter, with its mix of attraction and repulsion, I am unable find the critical distance to make sense of it all.

Susan Long’s big screen montage sampling of B grade movies, The Dolls House (1995), in conjunction with a funky dance compilation by Susan Forrester, sets the pace for the night. It is raunchy and provocative. My second encounter with Liquid Aesthetics is a much more sober and sobering affair. Without its musical accomplice, The Doll’s House has lost its opening night verve. Other works emerge as more powerful forces.

Tichacek’s The Shadowers still asserts itself as a powerful and dissembling presence, perhaps moreso by being curtained off from the other works in the show. I had seen stills from the installation at a recent exhibition at the Karen Woodbury Gallery, but these offer no preparation for the event itself. It is a demanding work concerned with power and desire; a work that is simultaneously abject and erotic, but above all, compelling.

The Shadowers’ evocative and heart rending soundscape seeps out of its space and threatens to overwhelm the other works in the exhibition. Travis de Jonk’s The First Times (2005), with its kaleidoscopic images of erotic couplings, is at times dramatized by the base animal howlings emanating from behind the curtain and at other times appears almost comical, as forest birds twitter in time to the multiplied humping. Owen Leong’s AUTOevacuations (2005), on the other hand, holds its gravity through every change in mood. This delicate and wounded creature just keeps on lapping.

However, Van Sowerwine’s stop motion animation Clara (2004), a work that got lost in the crowd on opening night, now asserts itself as a force. Clara is an acutely observed narrative about loss. In Sowerwine’s hands an awkward and clumsy animated doll, Clara, effects the complex human emotions of grief as she struggles to come to terms with the death of her loved one. In the dullness of grief Clara sticks her finger in a boiling pot of liquid. Even as we feel the searing pain Clara remains oblivious. Here the artist resists the urge for pathos, acknowledging that beyond grief there exists the insatiable drive for survival. In a final scene, Clara observes a replanted flower struggle to live and then begin to bloom. In that moment, she becomes aware of the pain in her finger, puts it in her mouth and sucks it.

The curatorial intention behind this exhibition was to showcase the work of queer identified artists working with the ‘liquid’ aesthetics of screen based installation. The nature of liquid is such, however, that it tends to be hard to contain; sound fills a space, emotions mingle and the repressed slips in with a vengeance. In Liquid Aesthetics there was much spillage, plenty of slippage and a lot of flow. If one thinks critically about queer, this fluidity works. It is precisely liquidity that sets and keeps queer in motion.

Liquid Aesthetics, curators Edwina Bartlem Meredith Martin, Midsumma; Black Box, Victorian Arts Centre, Jan 20-29

Akram Zaatari, Saida, June 6th 1982, courtesy of artist and Sfeir Semler Gallery, Hamburg/Beirut

David Cranswick, director of Sydney’s dLux media arts, sounds both exhausted and exhilarated as we speak on the phone about the organisation’s coming D>Art 06 Digital Media Arts Festival at the Sydney Opera House. The weariness comes from just having relocated dLux from Paddington Town Hall to Day Street, Sydney, once the home of its antecedent, SIN (Sydney Intermedia Network). Coincidentally, part of the 2006 D>Art program is Matinaze Re>Mixed, a retrospective of experimental films and video originally screened by SIN from 1990 to 1997. Cranswick sees this “not as a ‘best of’ program but a record of a transition from film to video to digital and with new effects coming into play.” Keeping in touch with experimental screen history, he says, will be easier come October when dLux launches its online database of film and video-titles, stills and, where possible, how to access the work.

Cranswick’s exhilaration is at having landed a much needed new office for dLux and having D>Art 06 ready to go at the Sydney Opera House where D>Art 05’s exhibition of web, mobile phone and sound art attracted large numbers.

Adding to the appeal of D>Art’s screening program in 2006 is the inclusion of a stronger than ever international component with a focus on Middle-Eastern film and video makers, whether living in the region or part of a culturally active diaspora. Tim Welfare, who has curated programs of Middle-Eastern and Australian art here and in Lebanon, has assembled a substantial program that Cranswick hopes will allow audiences “to look at people and politics, through video, for another view of Middle-Eastern life and politics.” Welfare has drolly titled his program middleasterntalentime.

Welfare has also arranged for the visit to Australia of Lebanese filmmaker Akram Zaatari, who is coincidentally one of a number of Middle-Eastern artists included in the 2006 Biennale of Sydney (see p46). Zaatari works in Beirut where he is also a curator and co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation through which he has explored the photographic history of the Middle East. D>Art.06 will screen Zaatari’s 81-minute film This Day (2003) which muses over archival photographs, reflecting on the ‘truth’ of images that range from “idyllic rural past” to “the strife-ridden present of propaganda and alienation.” Other filmmakers in the program grapple with the representation of the Middle East in Western culture eg Jacqueline Salloum’s Planet of the Apes (2003, 9 minutes), a telling compilation of images of Middle Eastern peoples in Hollywood film from 1896 to 2000. As well as overt political explorations and provocations, there are also films and videos that explore music, urban space and notions of beauty.

D>Art Screen will draw from submitted works, over 200 this year, for its program of new international experimental video: prominent curator and theorist Ross Gibson has selected 17 works for screening. D>Art.06 Imports will feature compilations from the Signes de Nuit Paris annual festival and Video Brasil Sao Paulo. The interest in Australian video is high in South America, and in fact everywhere, says Cranswick, but little South American work is seen here. He is of the opinion that reciprocity is vital: D>Art.06 Imports enacts it.

D>Art.06 Exhibition will also show recent international work in its videotheque with programs from Hong Kong’s videotage and Spain’s La Sala Naranja which presents a range of recent European work. In the same show you can browse the latest in web work, a strong program says Cranswick, indicative of cross platform and multi-platform developments. Increasingly works can be experienced on monitors or computers or mobile phones in what he describes as “a blurring of delivery platforms”, all of them especially suitable for short animations and interactive works. A number of the works, he says, simply involve the downloading of Flash movies. Mobile phone art will be represented by the work of 4 artists. The future of and relationship between delivery platforms from established media channels to new, networked, mobile and personal technologies will be the subject of the D>Art.06 Industry Forum. This ‘update’ will include Mark Pesche’s account of developments in locative media and the role of devices in mapping and tracking social networks.

The forum will discuss the ‘Digital Industries-Creative Industries Future’ paper commissioned by the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts with representatives speaking on behalf of DOCITA, the Australian Film Commission and the Australia Council. David Cranswick hopes that the exchange will “link policy makers and curators, and look at how macro-policy affects the Australia Council and the AFC” and, in turn, the work being produced by artists.” He is eager that what comes out of D>Art.06 Industry Forum. “be taken into account before the paper goes to Cabinet.” D>Art.06 will not only update audiences on the latest developments in experimental film, video, web and phone art, but will also encourage artists, curators, producers and government agencies to share a vision of the future. RT

D>Art.06-Digital Media Arts Festival; Sydney Opera House, April 10-May 6; for program see www.dlux.org.au/dart06

Chico MacMurtrie’s Inflatable Bodies is the latest in a series of works that explore the possibilities of robotics in art. For the Experiemental Art Foundation’s Adelaide Festival of Arts exhibition, MacMurtrie constructed a series of forms resembling birds in flight. Each ‘bird’ comprises 2 thin cones, symbolising wings, with a total span of about 4 metres, suspended near shoulder height from the gallery ceiling. The birds ‘flap’ slowly, suggesting a flock of pelicans moving in single file following a curving line that is intended, MacMurtie says, to evoke the meandering Murray River. The cones are made of heavy fabric, like sail cloth, joined in pairs at a central pivot. A system of air-pressurised bladders inside the cones actuates the pivoting to induce flapping motions, the inflation and deflation of the bladders mimicking the contraction and relaxation of muscles.

The cones are also mechanically inflated, but at periodic intervals the air supply is reduced so that they slowly collapse and droop towards the floor, whereupon the stationary flock comes to resemble a gigantic, disjointed centipede. A computer program controls the flapping and the 20 minute cycle of collapse and regeneration. The movements of each ‘bird’ are slightly asynchronous, imparting a degree of individuality to each specimen. The gallery lights are dimmed so that the birds are illuminated by 14 small spotlights on the floor beneath them, their shadows cast on the ceiling rather than the ground. I sat on the floor of the otherwise empty gallery watching the slow flapping and the gradual collapse and reinflation of the white forms, accompanied by the susurrations of the air pumps, meditating on the vulnerability of wildlife and on how art might imitate nature given the complexity and genius of biological design.

In the days preceding the exhibition, MacMurtrie held a workshop at the EAF. The participants assisted in the realisation of Inflatable Bodies and also conducted their own experiments with robotic technologies. MacMurtrie is the founder and Artistic Director of Amorphic Robot Works (ARW), a New York-based collective of artists and engineers established in 1992. ARW’s central idea is to develop robotic forms that mimic or reflect human, animal or plant forms and movement. For example, an earlier ARW work, Growing Rain Tree (installed at the Contemporary Arts Center UnMuseum, Cincinnati, 2003) is a robotic tree that moves its limbs and rains water that is drawn up from the pool in which it sits. Like many ARW works, it is interactive in that the approach of viewers triggers action. MacMurtrie has also made robots that not only respond to the viewer presence but also mimic their movement, creating a metaphor for human interaction (www.amorphicrobotworks.org).

But why is this an exhibition of art more than of engineering? MacMurtrie notes that robotics is more commonly associated with high-tech industrial development where the emphasis is on the refinement and control of manufacturing processes. Here, the robotic forms are instead intended for contemplation—he describes them as analogues of observed behaviour, emphasising the desire to understand the movement of the body and the significance of that movement rather than the use of technology for technology’s sake. The work’s engineering and computer programming are not immediately noticeable, perhaps prompting the viewer to think as much about what it symbolises as how it functions.

Inflatable Bodies thus recalls Da Vinci’s drawings of human and avian anatomy and his flying machine designs, Renaissance ideas that preceded a period of intense scientific development in the West. MacMurtrie’s work contrasts with the nightmare of Frankenstein’s monster and the inhuman creations of the 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Terminator and Blade Runner movies. In the Adelaide Festival MacMurtrie’s peaceful work also contrasted with the dramatic use of robotic prostheses in Australian Dance Theatre’s apocalyptic Devolution (see p 32 and RT 71, p 2). We recall Isaac Asimov’s 3 laws of robotics—especially that robots must do what they’re told but never harm a human. Robots can mimic physical action and basic deductive and computational processes, but we may not be far from the mimicry of emotional states and the integration of these with decision-making and action at large. Art’s crucial role in examining the forms and implications of technological change has been central to recent EAF programming. Robotic art has the potential to examine human behaviours, attitudes and desires from an advanced technological perspective.

The cyclic movements and the expanding and collapsing forms in Inflatable Bodies induce a degree of melancholia if viewed for an extended period. I almost wanted to stand and flap my arms in sympathy.

Chico MacMurtie, Robotic Arts, Inflatable Aestheticism; Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide Festival, Feb 24-April 8

Experiencing the retrograde nature of human-to-technology interfaces is perhaps the condition of our time. That’s right; forget ‘the postmodern condition’ (so 70s!). We have now arrived at ‘the condition of interface anxiety.’ Hands up those few who can’t relate to this new condition. The frustration that your pronunciation is rejected by the voice recognition software when you ring ‘information’ for a telephone number; the sudden self-doubt when you’re picked at the airport for one of those ‘random explosives trace scans’ (as if suddenly you can’t be sure that you weren’t handling guns/bombs just this morning); the uncertainty when verisign.com fails to process your payment for that journal subscription. Often we never actually find out ‘what was wrong’ but are left to wonder indefinitely: was it my cookie settings, my web browser, my accent, my account balance, or did I just look suspicious? Certainly the time is ripe for creative works which can make these invisible experiences dance before our eyes. This is what Super Vision attempts to do.

Super Vision is the 9th and latest production of The Builders Association, an 11 year old performance and new media production company based in New York. The company integrates stage performances with video, sound and architectural elements. Here a desktop fills the width of the stage with computer screens and chairs spaced along it. About a metre above, another performance level is housed within a rectangular, round-edged frame. Behind is a projection surface with smaller mobile screens around the frame.

The performers sometimes appear as just another layer of the surface, at other times they are revealed to the audience against the background projections. These conjure loungeroom settings, landscapes, moving text and graphic images, depending on the needs of the narrative. At times the audience simultaneously sees a performer interacting with a computer screen on stage and a large-scale projection of the performer’s face captured web-cam style. The stage becomes a space where human presence, data and representation merge. This encapsulates something of my daily reality where those binaries of real/virtual and original/reproduction don’t behave anymore. It seems that the intent of the production shares that age-old artists’ maxim, ‘to make the invisible visible.’

To accommodate 3 narrative threads about identities challenged by computerised data collection the set changes often. The video projections, moving screens and occasional props merge effortlessnessly. Despite occasional problems with the microphones worn by the performers, the technology and performers work well together, creating a pleasing aesthetic: part CNN, part Pixel Chick and part video art shown black-box style.

Prior to the introduction of any new media components into the production, a speech is delivered by a character listed in the program as The Voice of Claritas™ performed superbly by Tanya Selvaratnam. She feeds the audience data gleaned from sales of theatre tickets for the production, outlining the audience demographic. We are told that we have “above average levels of education” and are “knowledge workers”, “professionals” and have “chic connections.” This is then contrasted with the “shall we say, eye-for-a-bargain” demographic of an outer suburbs postcode not represented in the ticket sales at all.

I scan the audience as The Voice of Claritas™ speaks. Rather than feeling constrained by their ‘data selves’, they seem to sense an image that they like and, consequently, are happy to have the data speak for them. Intended to serve as an introduction to and proof of the impact data surveillance has on our daily lives, the spiel has the converse effect. The audience is rendered immune to the full potential of the production. Perhaps the true technology of performance is that which captures an audience’s vulnerability, for it is this that provides us the opportunity to question our ideas and assumptions rather than making us comfortable with the status quo. Super Vision encompasses the paradox of the 21st century Western experience: that incurable mix of privilege and constraint that brings about the condition of interface anxiety.

Super Vision, The Builders Association and dbox; His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth, 14-19 Feb 14-19

Involving direct participation, community arts and television, Digital Storytelling (DS) is also known as witness-contribution, personal storytelling, user-generated content (UGC), participatory TV, scrapbook TV, viewer TV, citizen TV and so on. DS uses digital equipment for personal storytelling or, as ACMI, hosting the Australian conference, puts it, “auto-biographical mini-movies.” DS does not usually involve sophisticated interactive systems nor does it push digital poetics. However, it is influencing mainstream entertainment more than its complex cousins.

Although events such as the National Storytelling Festival (USA; www.storytellingcenter.com/festival/festival.htm) have been promoting personal storytelling since 1973, there is only the one Digital Storytelling Festival, running since 1995 in San Francisco (www.dstory.com). The first DS conference was hosted by BBC Wales, in association with the Welsh Development Agency, in 2003 (see www.bbc.co.uk/wales/capturewales which features “RealMedia movies made and edited by people at digital storytelling workshops around Wales”).

Such is the interest, the conference at ACMI sold out before it began. According to registration data, the attendees were from a variety of sectors, mostly from schools, community organisations and academia and others: digital storytelling practitioners, new media artists, filmmakers and government personnel. The speakers were similarly representative and addressed broadcast convergence, new forms of storytelling, storytelling and the digital generation, and democratization and documentation of “voice.”

Not surprisingly some of the presentations were styled to combine fact and fiction. Nor was it a surprise, given the liberating nature of storytelling, that the keynote speaker for the conference was an active participant in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. In 1962, John O’Neal thought he’d have Civil Rights sorted out in about 5 years and then he could move onto his other passion, playwriting. Needless to say, he has continued to combine writing, performing and directing with his activism. O’Neal also participated in the first ACMI Youth Summit held parallel to the conference. He took the students and teachers through the renowned “story circle” technique before they set off to create their own digital stories. Guided by the themes of quality, diversity and respect, the students traversed the Melbourne CBD with cameras, enacting what Jean Burgess, a PhD candidate at QUT describes as “vernacular creativity.”

Like all art forms, digital works include a continuum of styles and approaches that is often subsumed in one overarching term. Ana Serrano, Director of Habitat, the new media lab at the Canadian Film Centre, outlined 6 ways audiences participate: they can “build” content, for example on Zed TV (www.zed.cbc.ca); “retell”, as with the highly praised locative arts project [murmur], (http://murmurtoronto.ca); “interpret”, as in educational simulation games such as Pax Warrior where you might find yourself in the position of a UN Commander in Rwanda (www.paxwarrior.com); “confess”, as in Things Left Unsaid (www.thingsleftunsaid.com) where you contribute your ‘secrets’ to a scenario; and “effect change” using eco-art at Seed Collective via your mobile phone (www.seedcollective.ca). The projects at Serrano’s laboratory bypass broadcasting and take to the streets, literally, utilising locative technologies.

Most of the practitioners present at the conference seemed, however, oddly unaware of new media arts. Chris Crawford, a first-breed game designer but now an ardent developer of “interactive storytelling”, patiently tried to explain to the participants that what they were doing was not interactivity. Their confused and sometimes offended reactions were understandable, considering the type of interactive storytelling Crawford is aiming at requires an approach and software that is still embryonic. Beyond the ability to change the interface or contribute content, Crawford’s newly launched software, Storytron (www.storytron.com), permits authors to create a storyworld in which the user then initiates events. Crawford’s system is unlike normal storytelling in that the author does not create a plot but rather a world and relationships between characters, ready for reaction when the user interacts with them as a protagonist.

There were many discussions about the effect of DS on the younger generation. Phillip Crawford, producer of knot at home, an interactive digital storytelling site to be launched in April and coming out of the BIG hART community projects (www.knotathome.com), shared his extensive experience of working with young people. It is not enough, he said, for them to tell their story once. They need to rewrite over time, only then can the “dominant story” be changed. Barbara Ganley from Middlebury College (US), asked what happens after a digital story is done? Interested in the “continuing, evolving, non-ending conversation”, Ganley championed the use of blogs. Discussing pedagogical benefits, she highlighted the need for students to form their own voice and feel “connected to self, peers and outside world.” Adrian Miles, active blog and vlog (video blog) practitioner and researcher at RMIT, described blogs as “the revenge of the word upon a twitch generation.” The critical difference, Miles observed, between DS and blogs is time-based: blogs are present stories and DS past ones. Miles also highlighted the shared paradigms of podcasts and vlogs and public access TV. What Miles didn’t mention, but which is relevant here, is Akimbo, a device that allows viewers to subscribe to vlogs and watch them on TV—anyone’s content, broadcast, indeed “pulled” by you to your TV.

Professor John Hartley, of QUT, reflected on the changes to television over the last 50 years. TV has moved from industrial production—a closed, expert system where ideas are protected, standardised, codified and delivered to passive audiences—to being a part of the “experience economy.” Consumers, indeed “prod-users” or “pro-sumers”, are (à la Charles Leadbeater’s “knowledge economy”) an economic force. Announcing a new UGC site, Freeload (www20.sbs.com.au/freeload), SBS’ Paul Vincent spoke about the potential (if changes to multi-channeling laws are in SBS’ favour) for digital storytelling to move off the gallery wall and onto digital TV. Broadcasting UGC through TV channels is a cost-effective way of producing content (if you mix user-vetted and gatekeeper moderation) and an efficient way of gathering viewers. David Vadiveloo, creator and director of the highly successful TV and web work Us Mob( www.usmob.com.au; see RT66, p20) warned that the move to broadcast UGC is potentially unjust if the storytellers are not remunerated.

As a balance to the technology-oriented approaches, Darren Tofts, media arts academic at Swinburne University of Technology and author of Interzone (RT 71, p22-23), warned against an “over identification with the singular notion of the digital.” Beyond a production and publication device, Tofts mused on symbiotic partnerships with technology and cited the machine-human relationships explored in Zoe Beloff’s interactive work, The Influencing Machine of Miss Natalija A (2001). In a wonderfully sensible observation, Tofts reassured his audience “you will get over the medium.” In other words, you will see beyond one manner of expression and what you can do with it. Indeed, despite the digital storytelling title, there is an increasing range of media, broadcast channels and art forms available to match the many voices heard throughout the conference.

First Person: International Digital Storytelling Conference, producer Helen Simondson in collaboration with Joe Lambert from the Center for Digital Storytelling (USA); Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Feb 3-5. Transcripts of the conference will be available online.

She churns the contents of her bag around like lottery balls in a cage, looking for the keys to her apartment. Her uncapped lipstick stuck with bag-grit hits the circular staircase winding back down to the foyer, wet with second-hand rain from dripping umbrellas. A small maintenance-bot passes, climbing above her as it polishes the balustrade. Unlocking her front door she is greeted by an intimate composition of insects and trickling water quietly broadcasting from tiny speakers, fashioned within a Nouveau frieze of audio-poppies that adorn the stairwell and reach for the light streaming from a rooftop window.

Project 3 is an ambitious and provocative showcase of contemporary and historic electronic arts presented by the project’s artistic director Michael Yuen and produced by Three Reasons. Building upon an existing repertoire of works and ideas emerging from Projects 1 and 2, Yuen’s program encompasses a series of sound installations, performances, artists’ talks and public projections as part of the 2006 Adelaide Festival of the Arts.

Sonic Space

At the opening night of Sonic Space—Project 3’s concert of contemporary and iconic modernist sound compositions—I was immediately drawn to an installation of delicate matt-black speakers and cabling that climbed the pristine white walls of the ArtSpace gallery. Silent Music has travelled around the world in various guises, developed by the renowned Canadian-born composer and public sound-artist, Robin Minard. Formally the work simulates life on a variety of levels from poppies in tall grass to a cluster of single-cell organisms. Leaning in close to this exquisite installation, you hear a multi-channelled composition of water and insect sounds trickle from the ornate field of speakers. Like the designers and architects swept up by Art Nouveau in the late 19th century, Minard seems to have taken inspiration from the natural world without disdain for the artificial. In the wake of research into Artificial Life, Silent Music is a poetic response to the propositional complexity of inorganic nature.

The concert opened with Black Aspirin, composed by Christian Haines. Soaked and wooden sounds descended from ceiling-mounted speakers, like heavy drops of rain striking eaves, gutters, or instruments left out of doors. It is difficult to resist the temptation to compare these sounds with meteorological events as they affect the listener physically in the same way that elemental forces do. At one point during the piece, a storm cloud of audio above the audience bottomed out and a ferocious downpour of carefully orchestrated white noise ensued. An elderly woman in the front row clamped her hands over her ears, clearly not coping with the assault on her senses. Although the sound grew louder at this point, I don’t think the audience was beleaguered so much by the volume as the deluge of audio layers. Surrendering to a piece like Black Aspirin is an exhilarating, transforming and strangely comforting experience: like listening to a torrential rainstorm from the vantage point of your own lounge room.

The evening proceeded with a selection of historic experimental works pioneered by composers such as Conlon Nancarrow and Alvin Lucier presented by Tristran Louth-Robins. Nancarrow, a contemporary of artists such as John Cage and Elliot Carter, toyed with the inherited traditions of scoring musical events. It may have been his former career as a typesetter that drew him to experiment with the musical machine language of the player-piano, which he did almost exclusively in his later years as a composer. Audiences attending the concert were treated to a rare delivery of Nancarrow’s work on a pianola, or player-piano, specially acquired for the program. Dubbed as “impossible music” due to its polyrhythmic complexity, it is rare to see Nancarrow’s player piano works ‘live’ outside a musical conservatory or museum. Beginning with a style reminiscent of music-hall theatre, a Nancarrow piece may swiftly spiral into contrapuntal orchestrations on the exceptionally free end of the jazz spectrum. Whereas one can imagine a phantom player at the keys in the early stages of Nancarrow’s composition, such a ghost would need to grow extra arms, legs and perhaps even a tentacle or two in order to play the rest.

In homage to Alvin Lucier was a re-enactment of the American composer’s I am sitting in a room, in which a recording of an opening statement is folded back again and again into a series of recordings and re-recordings. After several iterations, the conversational fragments of this statement decay, and the audience is left with the compound feedback of the room’s variant frequencies. Lucier’s piece is intimately site-specific, relying on the nuances of each performance environment. It is possible that his work could also trigger a Zen-like total and utter annihilation of self, if not for the ‘get-up noise’ of scraping chairs, a few foldback yawns and the scratching of a reviewer’s pencil on paper.

Steve Reich’s Different Trains (1988) is evocative of the train journeys Reich made as a child, travelling between Los Angeles and New York visiting his estranged parents. Reich realised some years later that as a Jew, had he been living in Germany at the time, he would have been travelling on very different trains. The piece was originally performed by the Kronos Quartet. For the Sonic Space program, Reich’s piece was enacted with bittersweet aplomb by the South Australian based string ensemble, Aurora Strings. Different Trains is a minimalist ‘call and reply’ piece combining live performance, pre-recorded arrangements and sampled voice-overs. With great stage presence, the ensemble demonstrated a wonderful maturity of interaction with each other and with the pre-recorded compositions.

As Jon Drummond took to the stage to perform Sonic Construction 2, he had the delightful air of a guest conductor on The Curiosity Show. Coloured ink dropped into a clear vessel of water was relayed—using real time video—to software coded in Max, MSP and Jitter. The software interprets the motion and colour of the ink, triggering a sound event in a process based on the principles of granular synthesis. A sound ‘grain’ is the smallest (and therefore irreducible) particle of sound. The result is a drug-free and neurologically intact synaesthesia. Experiencing the seamless choreography of movement, colour and macro-sound in Drummond’s work lends itself to that phenomenal sensation of universal is-ness or, as a friend of mine once described it, that feeling you get when you sense the “thingy-ness of things.”

Street cinema

After a day of talks given by Drummond, Warren Burt and Robin Minard, Project 3 launched its Street Cinema program, exhibiting a selection of screen-based digital artworks over 9 successive evenings in Adelaide’s West End. The program included innovators such as Somaya Langley, Michael Yuen, Paul Brown, Warren Burt, Gordon Munro, Sonia Wilkie, Luke Harrald and Alex Carpenter, as well as James Geurts who received a commission to develop a work for Project 3. Enigmatically titled Gravitas, Guerts’ abstract video work is a painterly montage of what looks to be interference patterns from a psychic antenna, layered with thermal photographs of obscure figures and objects. The title is perhaps an intentional contrast to the nature of the piece which I read as being playful and conceptually unencumbered.

Perhaps less intentionally, several of the Street Cinema works within Project 3 bring the tenets and aesthetics of late abstract expressionism into the evolving realm of computational theory. Munro’s Evochord is a petri dish of genetic algorithms jostling to grow into something musical. Coloured points of light wriggle and swell to the discordant rise and fall of many singular notes. As if caught in a self-organising matrix, these lights collect briefly into homogenous groups of colour and sound to produce a sublime musical chord, before falling back into organised chaos.

Luke Harrald’s CONflict is a stunning synthesis of abstract sound and vision. On screen, delicate cathedrals of painterly light fade in and out to the bloom of a subtly shifting harmonic. Coded in MAX, the dynamic nature of this work is based upon the Prisoner’s Dilemma: a well-travelled model of logical probabilities used to explain the fundamentals of game theory. The screening of Monro and Harrald’s works feed directly from a computer as an application rather than being captured on DVD. This allows the process behind the development of the work to take effect: meaning that each time a viewer happens upon the piece it is unique, regenerated again and again from dynamic permutations of existing code. The difference between a static DVD recording and the use of a dynamic software application may be lost on the stroller who happens upon the work, watches for 10 seconds and moves on…but maybe not.

Innovation was evident in all the works, contemporary and historical, in Project 3, suggesting the capacity of artists and audiences to continually and mutually redefine relationships between consciousness and perception, art and nature.

Project 3, Contemporary and historical electronic arts, sound, video, installation and artist talks, artistic director Michael Yuen; Adelaide Festival of Arts, March 6-26

The phrase “the NOW now” was coined by English guitarist Derek Bailey, a pioneer of non-idiomatic improvised music. Bailey died in late 2005, and so this year’s festival, the fifth in an annual series, was dedicated to him.
Natasha Anderson & Amanda Stewart

With more than 80 musicians participating, it would be impossible to cover every performance here. Given that I performed on the Friday and Saturday nights, I have chosen to write about the Thursday night, which also happened to be my favourite night of the festival.

The opening act, Robbie Avenaim and Dale Gorfinkel, are a vibraphone duo with a difference. Their instruments are microtonally prepared and activated by machines instead of the usual mallets, resulting in a variety of unusual textures. Their music was like waking up to an alarm clock, only in reverse; the hypnotic quality of the sound pulling the listener into a dream world. Alarm bells gave way to scenes of old children’s toys, followed by distant propellers and, finally, cats purring. By the end, Avenaim and Gorfinkle were literally shaking the sound from their instruments.

The Digits are a young laptop supergroup comprising Ben Byrne, Luke Callaghan, Alex Davies and Ivar Lehtsalu. They only played for 11 minutes but that was enough time to give a demonstration of the sound of systems overloading and crashing, and of faulty networks trying to establish connections. There was plenty of microsonic fetishism to be found here.

Pateras/Baxter/Brown from Melbourne played 3 distinct pieces. Sean Baxter began by dropping various objects on his ‘shit core percussion’, while Anthony Pateras’ busy prepared piano sounded like clattering tin pans in the mid range and collapsing constructions of tiny wooden blocks in the high range. Dave Brown began the next piece by scraping his guitar to produce disturbing moans before moving on to processed high frequencies and occasional boings and twangs like a ruler on a desk. For the final piece Baxter attempted to destroy a plastic plate, then turned his attention to what looked like a hubcap. The band worked itself into a frenzy which eventually broke down into a series of wobbly notes from Brown and a final flourish from Baxter.

Following a short break came an audiovisual performance by Peter Newman, one of the most impressive members of a new generation of media artists currently emerging from Sydney’s tertiary educational institutions. His music is epic, sweeping digital post-rock, like My Bloody Valentine stretched, twisted, filtered and layered into a dreamscape, the crackle of distortion matching the constant flickering of his images, which suggest faces and figures, but which I’m told aren’t actually there. The performance ended with a fade to white video and white noise. Perhaps this is what a near death experience might be like.

Natasha Anderson on electronics and recorders (as in the wind instrument) and vocalist Amanda Stewart allowed silence to be an integral part of their performance. An extroardinary range of sounds sporadically emerged and receded: whistles, breaths, kisses, twittering, chattering. It was often truly startling, with both performers demonstrating extraordinary control over dynamics and timing. They weren’t so much responding to each other as operating as one volatile unit. At times I was reminded of Luciano Berio and Cathy Berberian’s electroacoustic composition Visage, but with the operatics replaced by a 21st century microscopic sensibility.

Following another short break came one of those ad hoc assemblages for which improv festivals are renowned. Xavier Charles from France on clarinet, Jeff Henderson from New Zealand on wind instruments, Cor Fuhler from Holland on piano, Dave Symes on electric bass and Tony Buck on drums. After a long, meandering start, out of nowhere came a driving rock rhythm from Buck and Symes that got people’s heads nodding. This pattern was repeated several times, with ponderous passages punctuated by riffs and grooves, augmented by increasingly intense squeals from the woodwinds. Special mention should go to Henderson who cut an eccentric figure, moving between clarinet and sax, pausing occasionally to play with seemingly random objects on the floor.

Next was the most overtly ‘jazz’ set of the festival. Kris Wanders plays tenor sax loud, with a tone like an overdriven amplifier. The other musicians—Slawek Janicki on (often bowed) double bass, Alister Spence on piano and Toby Hall on drums—couldn’t match him for volume but instead created a dense web of notes. Some much needed space was created when Wanders dropped out, allowing us to hear the intricate interplay between Spence’s piano and Hall’s drums. Spence’s playing was a highlight, a multidimensional sound which changed shape depending on the angle from which one approached it.

The final act of the night was Thembi Soddell on sampler and Anthea Caddy on cello. Soddell has attracted much praise for her visionary and dynamic electroacoustic work. Given that some of her sounds are derived from processed cello, there was much interest in how she and Caddy would sound together. The audience was immediately transported to a haunted cavernous space, like some post-apocalyptic bunker. The scraping, screeching, creaking and crackings emanating from Caddy’s cello had me feeling sorry for the instrument. This was the sound of friction, of machinery long abandoned but still attempting to function. The scenes kept changing, but one was left with a distinctly queasy feeling that something was not quite right—an enigmatic note on which to end the night.

With nightly after-parties featuring some of Australia’s hippest underground DJs, installations, film screenings and even acoustic ecology-style soundwalks, the NOW now has reached maturity. There’s not much more that could be included, except perhaps talks and workshops. The festival and in particular its organisers, Clare Cooper and Clayton Thomas, have had a profound influence on Sydney’s experimental music scene. Overcoming the city’s tendency to cliquey fragmentation, the NOW now has pulled many people from diverse musical backgrounds into its warm embrace. It is a place where improvisation is an ethical as much as a musical approach; the emphasis on finding ways of engaging as equals. Audiences have responded with equal enthusiasm, with more than 300 people attending each of the 4 nights this year. The NOW now plays a vital role in developing local artists and audiences

the NOW now, curators Clayton Thomas, Clare Cooper; @Newtown, Sydney, Jan 18-2,1 http://www.thenownow.net

Find

April 2006

Nemesis

Devolution

New forms, connections, networks

Next

Interaction

Performance possibilities

Big picture

Creative tensions

Thanks

Dragon Trilogy

Chronicles—A lamentation

The Drover’s Wives

Super Vision

Isabella’s Room

Performing Lines

Mobile States

Tanja Liedtke’s Twelfth Floor

Arts House, Melbourne

Adventures in the Dark

Unholy Site

One Way Street

The Butterfly Seer

VAO

Latin America

Dialogue between cultures

What a biennale does

The nature of embodiment

Partaking of the world

Identifying the problem

Down to the Bone

Close to Home

Allegro

Forgiveness

The nature of the medium

The Hughes legacy

A different world

The Realist Film Organisation

Sonic Space

Street cinema

realtime