Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

August 2006

pvi, reform

photo Bohdan Warchomij

pvi, reform

In the latest work by Perth based collective pvi, reform, audiences accompany its elite taskforce, the loyal citizens underground—self appointed vigilantes in the fight against the lewd and crude on the streets of Northbridge—on a kind of semiotic scavenger hunt. There is an urgent tenor to our mission as we set out to take the pulse of contemporary Australia. Armed with absurdly inadequate decoys such as newspapers and champagne glasses for cover, we head out to find out just how badly we are in need of reform.

It is worse than we could have ever imagined from the polite confines of nearby PICA (Perth’s Institute of Contemporary Art). James Street, Northbridge is a tough strip with a lot of emotional code strewn on the street. On a Friday night, it is hard to distinguish between outreach, collusion and coercion and the district’s carnality can easily inveigle an unsuspecting audience without the moral compass of the loyal citizens underground to guide it. What a zoo! Littering, crossing against the lights, dressing provocatively, carrying a condom, begging. Such things will not be tolerated.

reform brings to mind a pub-crawl, a progressive dinner or a kerb crawl. Tuned into a live broadcast, we dip in and out of James Street establishments, weaving through the cruising traffic and taking in the rhythm of Northbridge with its cast of bouncers, taxi drivers, clubbers and drifters. A woman queueing at an ATM asks if we are sociologists.

As we head to the Tom Cruise Room at the back of the Pot Black snooker hall for a briefing, the prospect of audience participation is weighing on our minds. Just how far will the loyal citizens underground go? We allay our discomfort by assuring ourselves that everyone on James Street seems to be wired and that props like ours worked for Maxwell Smart and Agent 99. Added to this, Jason Sweeney’s enveloping soundscapes have a cumulative, cocooning effect so that by the end of the show I am staring back at the taxi drivers.

With all pvi’s work you do have to sign up or you won’t get the most out of it. The group’s working methods do not privilege discrete performances over other practices and techniques. The live elements in pvi shows, whether scripted or ad-libbed, are experienced by audiences as inserts in an agitated stream of sound and image. reform’s performances swing between compelling squad formations best viewed as part of the streetscape through to deadpan vox populi interviews played for laughs.

reform is less ambitious than the group’s most recent show, tts: australia, which I saw in Sydney last year, but its finer structure does provide a more satisfying experience. Sweeney’s soundscapes bring coherence to the patterns, slogans and manoeuvres of the work without resolving the disjunction between what we are seeing, hearing and thinking…People don’t seem too badly behaved—but hang on, there are standards to be upheld.

Carried forward by the soundscapes, we venture further and further into Northbridge, as the patrol’s demands upon its denizens grow more and more ludicrous. Insisting that people pick up rubbish on the streets or brushing off a pesky beggar is one thing but hectoring a woman about how inappropriately she is dressed is something else. Despite our best libertarian credentials, the patrol’s ghastly sincerity rubbing up against this woman’s rising aggravation is very funny and we catch ourselves, on edge, laughing. Our reform is complete, we see her flagrantly disloyal and anti-social behaviour for what it is, and our conversion to model citizens at the hands of pvi has been enacted. Only on our return to the haven of PICA are we able to confirm our suspicions about who on the street was a plant and who passing trade.

One of pvi’s hallmarks is a passion for research, so much so that in preparation for tts: australia, 2 of its members undertook an Australian Army Reserves recruitment trial. The group’s commitment to research and its members’ progressive-left politics could generate work with such an interrogative tone that it might feel laden. This is particularly so since the collective’s aim “to question the darker side of technology and the various forms of social control that we live under” has led to a sustained engagement with paramilitary organisations of all persuasions. For audiences, the play of the vocabulary of surveillance and deterrence throughout the group’s work is simultaneously farcical and chilling. I can report, however, that thanks to the humour and humanity of reform, Northbridge’s reputation as a place for perving is secure.

reform, devised & performed by pvi collective with Jackson Castiglione, Ofa Fotu, Ben Sutton; soundscapes Jason Sweeney, production manager Mike Nanning; researcher Dr Christina Lee, on-site performers Chris & Michelle Atkinson de Garis, Alee Bevlaqua, Andrew Bretherton, Michael Ford, Belinda Massey, Sarah Wilkinson; presented by PICA, Perth, May 25-June 4

RealTime issue #74 Aug-Sept 2006 pg. 48

Brian Lucas, Underbelly

photo Fiona Cullen

Brian Lucas, Underbelly

This new work by Brian Lucas is a shocker, in the very best sense. It is a mesmerising and unpredictable turning away from the stripped bare aesthetic of his previous solo ventures in dance theatre. Rather than completing an autobiographical trilogy that includes monster and the book of revelation(s), Underbelly is a thoroughly theatrical diversion, sumptuous and totally saturnine. It is a kick in the guts from an artist who has hitherto delicately dealt in philosophical nuances, often wickedly funny but always tender to the human condition. Here an underlying steel is revealed, and Lucas as performer is less removed. The artist himself seems surprised: “Originally, this piece was called Body Begat, and I thought it was going to be about my mother. But somehow I have arrived at the point where a cold-blooded, psychopathic corporate bitch is about to use a poor fucking baby to keep herself young and beautiful…it could at least have some redeeming features.”

A baroque gilt-edged frame, luminously sketched in by looping rope lights, is suspended in space. While this fulfills the function of a stage within a stage, its metaphorical lustre denotes, as Lucas makes explicit, the performer as fetishised object: “There are a lot of stake-holders—people who have made an investment in you—and they demand tangible outcomes. They want a return for that investment. I mean, after all, it may be art, but it’s also a commercial transaction and you have to deliver. You have to deliver the goods.” ‘Back stage’ Lucas coolly scrutinises himself in a mirror. The anonymous box set reveals a murkily foreshortened perspective as if under intense pressure. Something is threatening to burst out.

A child is immaculately conceived by a hag who dies giving birth. The child is seized by a beast and borne off to its lair. He is rescued by a prince who slays the beast but, disclaiming responsibility, hands the child over to a priest. Glorifying himself by baptising the child, the priest in turn makes a commercial transaction with the asbestos blond in her tower. This corporate horror spills the child’s lifeblood in order to renew herself, but her tower is cast down by the terrors she has visited on others so that she spirals to her death. This ferociously comic, post-apocalyptic fairy story provides Lucas with the opportunity to perform himself as other to himself, or at least ‘to run with the idea’.

This is the most evidently collaborative work by Lucas, and he pays tribute to his ‘dream team’: Brett Collery (soundscape), Bruce McKinven (design) and Morgan Randall (lighting design and operation). By building character to fit the designer’s sculptural, eerily independent replicant shell (as opposed to putting on a costume) and by exploring similar physical patterns, repeated movements are de-familiarised in different contexts. Lucas unites the visceral and the cerebral with sometimes terrible immediacy in an economical format, which builds meaning from all elements of the production. For instance, the monstrous conception takes place to a transcendent, Gaelic version of Silent Night.

Underbelly is part of an ongoing inquiry into the nature of performance, an investigation in which Lucas appears implicated this time round as the criminal. If this is a story about making stories, the creative process is portrayed as brutal, and there is slippage where self-irony seemingly elides into self-disgust: “Repeat after me: I am a mid-career artist, I am a mid-career artist!” But Lucas is a border artist, taking from both zones, acutely aware of the purely contingent nature of subjectivity both in and outside art. In a world where politicians are makers of signs without substance, the predicament of the artist is forlorn indeed. Brian Lucas (a superb mid-career artist) courageously alerts us to the wounding truth central to this Byzantine performance.

Underbelly, creator-performer Brian Lucas, soundscape Brett Collery, design Bruce McKinven, lighting design Morgan Randall; Brisbane Powerhouse, June 21-24

RealTime issue #74 Aug-Sept 2006 pg. 35

Tanja Liedtke's Always Building
front: Jason Lam, left to right: Tanya Voges, Kyle Kremerskothen,
Trisha Dunn, Joshua Thomson

Established in 1981 as Australia’s first dance-in-education company, TasDance has over the past 25 years broadened its role to include theatre-based performance, dance development and dance in community, in the process earning a national reputation for innovation and its repertoire of contemporary Australian work.

Earth is a given beneath any dancer’s feet, regardless of nationality, training or stylistic imperative. Tasdance’s anniversary program, The Earth beneath our feet, features works by 3 choreographers: As the Crow Flies by Nanette Hassall, Always Building by Tanja Liedtke and A Volume Problem by Byron Perry. These pieces offer diverse perspectives on the connections between earth, space, place and the body.

Hassall’s As the Crow Flies is a seminal work from 1988. Using cartography as a starting point, the choreographer explores perspectives of the earth viewed through satellite imaging juxtaposed against the mind’s internal landscape. The dancers engage in a complex physical cartography through hold, lift, fall and counterbalance. The shifting pattern of the dancers’ bodies corporeally represents the images of a satellite earthscape shaped by sand, wind and tide.

The dance is set to Shaker Loops by John Adams. A distinctive feature of the performance and a mark of each dancer’s finesse is the impetus from a push, touch or gesture initiating a new movement sequence. This pattern of devised solos, duos and trios depicts a variety of avian and human perspectives and inter-relationships within a landscape. The trio dance is particularly fluid and sensual, complemented by controlled strength and power. There is little time for the eye to linger as the dancers confidently grapple with the demands of Hassall’s choreography.

Always Building is a work that addresses construction and destruction. Choreographer Tanya Liedtke uses Lego pieces as a visual metaphor to portray aspects of building—a constant cycle of destruction and renewal of individuals, cities and civilisations. Audience members are invited to join 5 dancers each seated at a table. The tables represent the temporal nature of the substrate on which different buildings are already constructed. Each volunteer helps assemble blocks of a particular colour to continue the building. When the completed structures are tipped and the tables are used to sweep pieces to the rear of the stage, we hear a resonance of collapsed and shuffled plastic. Dancers segue into corporeal building blocks, falling, rising, creating and destroying. Lego pieces are used to demarcate the individual, group and society.

One dancer personifies ennui. Working as a controller she listlessly points an arrow to direct the pattern of movement. The Lego blocks remain the constant connector, a metaphor for the continuous cycles of structural and emotional exchange involving patterns of encroachment, construction and collapse.

A Volume Problem is choreographed by Byron Perry in collaboration with the dancers. Lit by a single spot, 2 speakers glimmer like the eyes of a shining temple god resting on a grassed earth cube. In a mesmerising opening sequence 6 dancers move their fingers across, over and around the plinth, animating the speakers.

A static charge from the speakers animates the dancers who p(l)ay homage to the sound source. In a strange inversion it seems that the speakers are dancing the dancers who move in sculptural clusters of twos and threes, emanating a strange beauty. This iconography of speakers, with their ear-phoned, switched on, jacked in sound worlds, assumes life and power. This is a familiar world bent into the unfamiliar. It is riveting viewing.

Luke Smiles’ sound design is an ordering of noise into sense. This accentuates the dancers’ exploration of the speakers’ allure. In response to the static charge and each speaker’s strange potency, the dancers portray the shifts and connections of attraction. Their fascination gives way to separation and isolation as each moves into the lonelier place of recollection and memory.

In the final sequence Darren Willmott’s lighting design accentuates larger than life shadows as the dancers crowd onto the grassed cube. With feet anchored and backs turned to the audience, the group responds with a surreal energy. In one segment only 2 remain on the cube, revealing the possibility and contradiction inherent in patterns of volume and noise. One dancer responds with total passivity, the other with frenetic movement. A Volume Problem is a quirky work of elusive familiarity.

TasDance, The Earth beneath our feet, dancers Floeur Alder, Trisha Dunn, Kyle Kremerskothen, Jason Lam, Joshua Thomson, Tanya Voges; As the Crow Flies, choreography Nanette Hassall, lighting Darren Willmott; Always Building, choreography Tanja Liedtke with dancers, composer Jason Sweeney, set & lighting Ben Cobham, Bluebottle; A Volume Problem, choreography Byron Perry, sound Luke Smiles, Motion Laboratories, lighting Darren Willmott, design Anita Holloway, costumes Alice Richardson, Odette Arrieta-Shadbolt; Collegiate Performing Arts Centre, Hobart, June 29-July 1

RealTime issue #74 Aug-Sept 2006 pg. 35

Play on Earth

Whilst 4 days isn’t nearly long enough to come to grips with this small island republic of 4 million, on first impressions Singapore is an exhilarating mix of people and cultures, high and low-rise, heritage and contemporary architectures. Mandarin, Malay, English and Tamil are the official languages, and ‘Singlish’ I’m delighted to say, is alive and well, lah. And then there’s the food! Singapore is rightly famous for its fantastic mix of flavours. Given that Perth has a strong connection to both Singapore and Malaysia, I still can’t believe that this was my first exposure to Peranakan cuisine, a Malay Chinese hybrid. On the other hand it has to be admitted that the world is divided into those who adore the durian fruit and those who do not; I have discovered that I definitely fall into the latter category.

I was in Singapore with journalists from Thailand, the Philippines, New Zealand and Australia to experience a few days of the Singapore Arts Festival, to learn about the arts and arts infrastructure in Singapore and experience some of the city’s urban revitalisation. For a decade Singapore has dedicated itself to becoming a distinctive global city for the arts, and to making the arts integral to peoples’ lives. Perhaps it’s the compact nature of this island state, not to mention the passion and enthusiasm of local artists, art professionals and bureaucrats, but there is no doubt that the arts in Singapore are flourishing with initiatives that range from secure accommodation for artists and companies, including the fabulous refurbishment of the National Museum of Singapore, to programs of support for artists and companies, and an international outlook and focus. It was great to visit the National Museum of Singapore, which reopens in December following a comprehensive renovation. Spaces are being opened to the public in a carefully staged program of events, both as a means of road-testing the new spaces as they come online as well as promoting the new facilities. Our tour of the building allowed us to experience the international touring exhibition, The Scenic Eye: Visual Arts and the Theatre, curated by Wolfgang Storch. Inspired by René Block and his connections to Fluxus, the exhibition invited a range of artists including Rosemarie Trockel and Thomas Schütte and sound designer Hans Peter Kuhn, to create works that reflect on theatre through installation, sculpture, photography, drawing and interactives.

Festival hardware

The Singapore Arts Festival is certainly the nation’s premier arts event but it sits alongside an ongoing range of programs supporting local artists and companies, and other special events including the Writers Festival and the inaugural Singapore Biennale in September. So if the hardware (buildings) are not only functional but also stylish, I’m delighted to say that the software—to extend the metaphor—is complex, richly textured, quite tough in terms of content and formally sophisticated. The festival itself is extremely comfortable in positioning local art and artists within a regional and international context.

It was quite extraordinary to experience the standard of housing offered to artists and companies, not to mention the calibre of performing arts centres ranging from the purpose-built: the Esplanades—Theatres on the Bay and the recently relocated Drama Centre in the National Library Centre, for instance, to the incredible restorations of heritage buildings such as TheatreWorks’ new home 72-13 and The Arts House. The latter was originally built as a private home in 1827, becoming Singapore’s first Courthouse, then Parliament House before re-opening as a multidisciplinary arts and heritage centre in 2004. While much has been written of the Esplanade Theatre with its acoustically perfect concert hall and outstanding opera theatre, other venues similarly reflect a concern for the highest standards of presentation and great working conditions for artists. Our tour of the new Drama Centre was a case in point. It holds a 615-seat proscenium arch theatre and an intimate black box space with a seating capacity of 120. Equipped with state of the art lighting, rigging and sound systems, the seating is comfortable and the acoustics excellent. I know, because I had the great pleasure of seeing The Necessary Stage’s Mobile there.
Mobile

Mobile

Co-directed by Alvin Tan and Tatsuo Kaneshita with Haresh Sharma as head writer, Mobile is a unique collaboration involving artists from Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines and Japan. This was fantastically provocative, utterly relevant theatre, which illuminated the power dynamics of migrant, often unskilled labour—Thai sex workers and Philippino maids for instance, as well as Buddhist monks and Japanese businessmen—in a global market place. The creative process began more than a year ago and involved 4 playwrights from each of the countries working with Haresh Sharma and the script developed through extensive fieldwork. In Japan, interviews were conducted with various NGOs, activists and academics involved with foreign workers. In Thailand, the creative team visited women’s shelters in Chiang Mai and conducted interviews in Bangkok with NGOs involved in the protection of sex workers and their rights. In Singapore the creative team interviewed migrant workers from various organizations. Mobile has thus been an international collaboration of some complexity and has evolved into a political and intercultural theatre of wit, empathy and intelligence that extends the company’s ongoing fascination with the contemporary realities of what they have described as “multiple Asias.”

Not all aspects of Mobile were equally successful. The play’s framing device of 2 women delegates at an NGO conference had some hilarious moments, but was cartoonish compared to the emotionally complex interior scenes, and the closing scene was disappointing. On the other hand, the ‘play within a play’ portraying migrant workers at an NGO’s conference, was hysterically funny (reminding me of Australian Chris Lilley’s outrageous mockumentary, We can be heroes). What distinguishes this work is the generosity of the exchange between forms and cultures predicated on openness to the potential for change. This richly theatrical provocation moved beyond simplistic notions of accountability and blame into a much more complex space where the tragic and the comic are reframed within the everyday experiences of mobility, labour, social disparity and discrimination. I hope it tours to Australia.

Play on Earth

In late 2005, TheatreWorks moved into the recently renovated 72-13, a converted rice warehouse. This beautiful space—light, airy and modern—is flexible enough to function as a gallery, a cinema and a theatre and could happily inhabit the pages of Wallpaper. So it was fantastic to experience the conceptually and formally ambitious theatrical experiment, Play on Earth, by Station House Opera (UK) in collaboration with TheatreWorks (Singapore), Philharmonia Brasileira (Brazil) and Newcastle Gateshead Initiative (UK) at 72-13. Projected live from 3 corners of the world onto screens above the actors, a narrative unfolds that is immediate yet remote, familiar but unpredictable, alive but discontinuous. The narrative is not really the point but there is a story of sorts tracing the strange and discontinuous nature of relationships across time and place. I was mesmerised by the play between the live (immediate) and live (remote) performances, even when it was something as apparently naff as passing flowers from one continent to another or waving cheerily at audience members on the other side of the globe, but then I’ve always been a sucker for a good trick. This was a remarkably ambitious experiment to be programmed within an international performing arts festival and testifies to the sophistication of the Singapore Arts Festival.

Hotel Modern, The Great War

Another highly imaginative and politically resonant work was the Netherlands-based Hotel Modern’s The Great War. In this production, the audience witnesses in miniature the reconstruction of the landscapes of the Western Front of 1914-18 laid out on tables using sawdust, potting soil, rusty nails and parsley for trees. Rain falls from a small handheld sprinkler; an aerosol jet firebombs cardboard towns; a peaceful field gradually mutates into a sea of toxic mud. Inside a fish tank, ships are bombed by torpedoes and sink; flotsam and bodies bob to the surface. The performers, using digital and mini cameras film and edit live through a vision mixer, which is simultaneously projected onto a large screen. The results are larger than life, and staggeringly and shockingly real.

Composer, Arthur Sauer, brings the narrative to life with an outstanding live soundtrack created by using contact microphones, distortion and amplification. A knock on a table for instance sounds like a grenade on impact; the striking of a match like escaping mustard gas, while a vibrator run over a small tin of marbles sounds chillingly like tanks. The performers constantly construct and reconstruct the experiences of war before our eyes. This live animation is also accompanied by readings drawn primarily from eyewitness accounts, as well as from found letters sent home, written by a French soldier to his mother during a long stay in the trenches. A descriptive excerpt from All Quiet on the Western Front is also used. These readings are replete with the small daily practical issues, intimate details and personal experiences of men in the trenches, lending the production an incredible poignancy and reminding us of the utter waste, horror and stupidity of war.

Compagnie Marie Chouinard

The openness to collaboration and experimentation, the humanity and poignancy of Mobile, Play on Earth and The Great War exposed the potential limitations of a purely formal approach. Canadian Compagnie Marie Chouinard’s bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_variations was a physically rigorous and virtuosic work, utilising—as its title suggests—an interpretation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations as performed by Glen Gould, remixed by composer Louis Dufort. The remix included vocal samplings of Glen Gould speaking in a 1981 radio interview and the resulting composition distorts into something menacing and strange. This somewhat literal approach was reflected by the movement vocabulary. Bodies are distorted, extended and remixed through various prosthetics including crutches—often shortened or attached unicorn-like to the forehead or other equally unexpected body parts—as well as ballet barres, ropes and harnesses. The dancers were further handicapped, often wearing only one pointe shoe with one bare foot, the other often worn on the hand, so that their performances were inherently off balance. Moving sometimes on 2 limbs and sometimes on 4, crouching, rearing, liberated and fettered, they appeared like strange cloven-hoofed creatures, some new hybrid brought into being through arbitrary acts of cruelty.

Ballet barres turn into the appendages of a struggling duo. Crutches protrude unexpectedly, turning movement into something alien but always dancerly. Often, the dancers perform en pointe creating perverse shapes and exploring an inventive gestural language. Nevertheless at 100 minutes (including interval) I found myself getting increasingly restless. The after-show discussion confirmed that this was a formal experiment exploring ‘constraint and freedom’ that sought no reference points beyond its own polished amalgam of crafted capabilities.

Local, regional, global

The theme of this year’s Singapore Arts Festival, “One Season: Many Faces”, was reflected in a growing list of co-productions and a commitment to a form of internationalism that is distinctly Asian and which celebrates the local. Festival Director Goh Ching Lee’s commitment to supporting artists in the making of their work is palpable. With such an outstanding program, it will be interesting to see what Singapore’s inaugural Biennale of Visual Arts delivers. Having adopted the conceptual framework of ‘Belief’, the curatorial team led by Fumio Nanjo, the high profile Deputy Director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, have assembled a rich and varied selection of artists to exhibit. The Biennale, like the Singapore Arts Festival, is sure to be both self aware and sophisticated, political but not didactic and to embrace the local as well as the regional and the international.

Sarah Miller thanks her hosts, the National Arts Council and the Singapore Tourism Board for their generous hospitality. She also thanks Real Time’s Managing Editor for sending her in his stead.

Singapore Arts Festival, June 1-25, www.singaporeartsfest.com

RealTime issue #74 Aug-Sept 2006 pg. 36-

What was great about the fifties is that for one brief moment—maybe, say, six weeks—nobody understood art.

I kept hearing people describe Australia culturally in terms of the ‘tyranny of distance’ and geographic isolation which made me think, yes all those things are true, but they’re ideas that have no poetry in them and it limits what I was actually experiencing. When Georgia O’Keefe left New York at the height of her career to go to New Mexico so she could paint, she would sign off her letters, “From the faraway nearby, Georgia.”

What is that faraway nearby that is here? Places that are supposed to be the most familiar to us, whether it’s our home or our country, or even ourselves in a way, can become far away, or unfamiliar, very quickly because of various forces at work. I don’t make a theme for the festival, as you know, but I do try and find cohesion. A lot of what the artists are dealing with in the festival is about place and home—how you long for the very thing you have in front of you; how you belong—in terms of national identity, cultural identity…So there’s a lot of work in the festival either celebrating a sense of home and place through tender little personal histories, or a really deep questioning—what does it now mean to me to be part of this place, or finding a place in language.

In the 51st (dream) state, the black American artist Sekou Sundiata asks very rigorous questions about language, how it is essentially colonised either in the corporate sector or political speech. Certain words that we used to be able to use now have new meanings or are harder to use—like “radical” or “family.” How does one reclaim that language, because if you don’t you’re silenced slowly. Sundiata’s kind of giving a State of the American Soul Address, questioning empire. He’s also questioning it from his own sense of self. What does it mean to me to be American? What does it mean to be an African-American poet/artist/musician? He’s such a wise man.

We saw him perform blessing the boats at the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow this year, which is also in MIAF 2006. It’s a fabulous performance—very present but also reminiscent in form of work from the early 70s. Ngapartji Ngapartji (RT70, p8), the Big hART show that you’ve developed over these 2 festivals, is a very different look at language in which the audience becomes seriously participatory. It’s also focused on place with Trevor Jamieson’s account of the effect of nuclear testing in the 50s on his South Australian homeland and his people’s dispossession.

Imagine trying to fill out grant proposals for Ngapartji Ngapartji! So many people absolutely thought that it would be impossible for them to pull it together. And, of course, when that sort of thing happens, my instinct is that it’s only not possible if we don’t engage.

Artists are typically having to function across multiple countries. So what does home mean for an artist who’s Australian but collaborating internationally? How did the Indonesians win Robert Wilson? He developed that work (I La Galigo) in different parts of Indonesia for many years. You can see there’s a lot of engaged cross-national/cross-cultural collaboration just to pull these projects together. Bill T Jones’ cast is very international. What is it that drives artists to seek across such huge divides? For me this is the hopeful side of globalisation.

Dumb Type’s Voyage basically starts out with the question of where we are and where we may be going. They always have very strong connections to the natural environment versus the urban hyper built environment. It’s at its clearest in the scene where there’s an astronaut-like figure looking down at the Earth. Robert Wilson uses the ancient Sureq Galigo text of Indonesia’s Bugis people. The work is sung and chanted in Bugis with English surtitles. These people hardly speak that language any more. So it would be akin to Homer’s Iliad. But it’s valuable for the culture: they use it for predicting weather and what they should eat. It’s like a bible, it has a creation myth and the whole text is about how humans try to restore balance and order in the world.

Tragedia Endogonidia (RT 66, p37), Romeo Castellucci’s epic voyage around Europe, is another response to place. There are 11 full-length theatre works built in the cities they’re named after. Some of them could only happen once in a location, others are more mobile. It’s a modern tragedy of what happened in each of those cities. He’s not addressing World War 1 or 2 or any of that. They’re the small things that end up in the back of the papers that can then evaporate, disappear and be done with. But they leave a mark on the place and the culture, especially the culture’s ability to sweep it away instead of dealing with it. So Castellucci really grabs you by the throat and asks you to have a look at something that is horrifically tragic, unexplained and then disappeared. When you look at him aesthetically, it’s almost like he’s layering Renaissance painting and really rigorous symbolism and gesture into a theatrical world. It’s a series of slow tableaux that are quite overwhelming. This is a project that is certainly not for the faint of heart.

How do you see the place of Australian artists in the festival? Richard Murphet is collaborating with Dutch artists from DasArts in a work that takes them to northern Australia to the first point of Dutch contact in 1606 (see Murphet in our education feature p2), and Aphids are collaborating with Swiss artists. What about dance artists Lucy Guerin and Ros Warby who are presenting major new works?

There’s a double bill from Lucy Guerin and Japanese artist Kota Yamazaki, Chamisa 4°C/Setting, but we’re also doing the premiere of Guerin’s new work, Structure and Sadness. She’s using the collapse of Melbourne’s Westgate Bridge in 1970 and principles of tension and suspension, torque and collapse as a means of getting at the choreography. It’s also a metaphor for those forces that are in our bodies, even if we’re not dancers. Westgate Bridge had been so embedded with hopefulness and tremendous engineering but it collapsed due to human error. So she explores that and the tragedy of the people who died, but also the resilience of human beings that makes you dust yourself off and say, we have a job to do and you do it again and this time you succeed.

In a very different physical language, Ros Warby’s Monumental also explores simultaneity, looking at the swan from ballet iconography and the regimentation of the soldier. In her work, she’s constantly unlearning in order to get to a different vocabulary and presence. Metaphorically, she’s addressing the impulse for humans to want to fly, and the gravity that keeps us grounded. And beyond that how tremendous beauty is happening alongside great trauma, How does the spirit both fly and stay grounded?

I’ve also put together a program with Sally Ford called Second Home with first or second generation immigrant Australians performing. What you have running through Second Home is a lament, often for the homeland but also a real celebration of it. It’s really about engaging with the audience and saying these are Australian musicians. They are contributing a great richness to Australian contemporary music but at the same time they’re not being looked at in world music programming inside Australia. Murundak, with The Black Arm Band, a 21-piece ensemble, is very different because first peoples’ issues are radically distinct from immigrant or multicultural issues. Murundak has traditional songs from different parts of the land that are laments for it, and music for healing practices, but it’s also stylised with jazz overtones with a variety of other contemporary musical forms.
Peter Greenaway, The Tulse Luper Suitcases

Peter Greenaway, The Tulse Luper Suitcases

Peter Greenaway’s festival work, which he refers to as “a personal history of uranium”, represents an adventure in form and media, with new feature films, DVDs, a website and an interactive game.

After Greenaway did Prospero’s Books there was a radical drop in his presence in the international scene. But even before DVD he completely anticipated the technology and the viewing behaviour where you would go home and push pods and see multiple screens and layers. A lot of what he’s been doing since is this project, The Tulse Luper Suitcases. The trilogy can be screened in cinemas but also set up as a game installation (The Tulse Luper Journey, ACMI Games Lab). As you go through a layer of the work online you download a minute of the next film. There are 92 layers, the isotope of uranium. And you become the holder of his next film. It’s just astonishing.

Schallmachine 06 looks like another unique combination for Aphids who have that willingness to connect internationally and make a life for themselves beyond their home city. And the work is situated in the underworld beneath Federation Square, each performance designed for very small audience.

It’s a beautiful work and it is complex, a collaboration with local group Speak Percussion and the Swiss-based percussionist Fritz Hauser and architect Boa Baumann. One of the things I love about Aphids is the profound commitment to an intimate engagement with audiences: they’re not trying to reach 5,000 people in one go. That’s not their ambition. There can be a tremendously meaningful, resonant exchange among 5 of you.

There’s much more to look out for in MIAF 2006 to stretch the imagination and deepen reflections on time and place, including American actor Tim Robbins’ direction of an update on Orwell’s 1984; composers Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto in concert; Kota Yamazaki’s dance works Fluid hug-hug and Rise:Rose; leading European experimentalist Jérôme Bel in his dialogue with a Thai dancer, Pichet Klunchun and Myself; Canadian chameleon Marie Brassard in Peepshow (acclaimed for her Jimmy in 2003); and New Yorker Richard Foreman’s surreal Now that Communism is Dead my Life Feels Empty, wonderfully realised by Sydney director-composer Max Lyandvert and actors Benjamin Winspear and Gibson Nolte. It’s a festival that celebrates the rich new possibilities of 21st century art and where not everything will be understood but much is to be felt and learnt.

Claudia Patricia Sarria, one of 5 artists of the collective Helena Producciones, meets me at Cali Airport, Colombia. She guides me onto a bus and we talk in the velvetine seats—me in my shuddering Spanish and she in her interpretive English. She draws the curtains back to reveal the sugar cane fields, the sustaining industry in this city.

In the extraordinary artist-run Festival de Performance, artists working in Central and South America bring their collective energy to a small city, made semi-legendary by sugar, salsa and 80s cocaine. The VI Festival de Performance in Cali runs on its own timetable, when it can raise resources through a generous network of local and international sponsors.

The festival is born of a small group of artists who create work internationally but are bound (by choice or the exigencies of nationhood) to live in Colombia. The predominant aesthetic is of ‘direct action’ and collaboration along with direct participation by the public. Helena Producciones invite a range of experienced artists and theorists to attend the festival and also place an open call throughout Colombia for proposals for live works. The young artists who respond always yield new worlds, keeping the festival risky and playful. The 5-day festival’s scale is modest, the work raw and immediate and this year drew more than 70 artists from Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba, Spain, Australia, England, France and from all over Colombia.

I arrived as a low-key ambassador for Australian works, intending to explore the possibility of exchange with this inventive artist-run group, to learn from their resourcefulness, conceptual clarity and the pleasure they generate. I also wanted to meet the others who support the festival.

Each day there were workshops, street interventions and talks held in various cultural centres, an artist-run space, plazas and disused buildings. The flavour of the festival was infused with the politics of participation, underscored by the workshop program.
Festival de Performance, Cali

Frederico Gúzman, a Spanish artist from Cevilla, ran a workshop in Cali’s main cultural centre, next to the city library. Gúzman lived in Colombia for some years during the 90s and was a key member of El Cambalache based in Bogotá. For 2006, he created an open workshop called Copilandia, a space to play with ideas of free intellectual copyright, trade, barter, hybrids, thievery and sharing. This lead to an ‘action’ that trained a lens on the Free Trade Agreement Colombia is about to sign with the USA.

Gúzman encouraged participants, mostly local artists, to use tactile tools (stencil, ink block, photocopy and web-design) to recast materials and make new meanings. In the background people contributed to a large mural of a steamroller, covering it with graffiti and stencils, peopling it with miniature soldiers, pineapples, texts from lovers, statistics about the distribution of wealth and an array of colour against the bald propaganda image of the green machine itself.

This work resulted in an action on the final day of the festival. The artists from Helena Producciones hired an old industrial steamroller and purchased a mountain of the most luscious Colombian fruits. Gúzman and his workshop participants laid the fruits out in a huge circle. At midday, with crowds gathered, the machine headed towards the mound of fruit. People laughed and yelled at the driver, looking like a toy proletarian or gringo stooge replete with paper hat. The steamroller headed mercilessly for the fruit as the people chanted and squealed for it to stop right at the edge of the cornucopia. With a great cry and immediate chaos, the crowd in a display of pleasure, greed and necessity seized the fruit. This action had an incredible lightness and ambivalence that resonated, with people sharing pineapples and passionfruit into the evening.

La Escuela de Esgrima de Los Machetes was a workshop hosted by masters in the art of machete fighting. The old men and masters of the form, mostly in their 70s, demonstrated and taught this art of jousting to young people for 4 hours each day. Using wooden poles rather than large knives, they spoke about the history of this dance-art form, handed down from over 400 years of black slavery to liberation in Colombia. These men were as nimble as children and laughed as knives glistened around their heads. The technique is based on a hybrid of Spanish sword fighting from the 1600s and cane fieldwork. As they danced to the slapping of machetes, discussions were lead by Abelardo Miranda, a criminal lawyer who talked about the current justice system (a judge-only system), the history of colonisation and living conditions in the city of Cali. Using this loose and eloquent format, the workshop became a history lesson in a hybrid meld of cultures and performance forms.

Throughout the festival a guerilla TV station, El Vicio TV, invited passers-by into a disused bazaar to perform their skills for the camera. In this rich temporary zone people offered up everything from master cocktail juggling to examples of still life painting, creating an atlas of Cali to be screened on national television later this year.

The culmination of the festival was at La Licorera, a defunct alcohol depot comprising 3 massive warehouses located on the edge of the city. From 10am until late into the night there were consecutive performances from over 70 artists, a skating display, murals, DJs and bands. All the elements of this smart, beautiful arts event were activated by the audience.

For my talk, I brought with me documentation of 5 Australian works, showing extracts from Divide by John Gillies, Back Home by Urban Theatre Projects, Wilcannia Mob, a collective music project by Shopfront Theatre, Small Metal Objects from Back to Back theatre and Victoria Hunt and Brian Fuata’s Day of Invigilation.

My selection of works was grounded in their use of public space and intervention and the exploration of the ‘colonial encounter.’ The audience bopped to the “Down River” hiphop sounds created by the Willcannia Mob and reeled at the violence in Back Home, confused by language and wondering about Pacific realities. The response to this small selection of Australian work got knotty amid the translation of language and context and caused a wave of debate.

The main questions that arose were around the means of production, the imprint of ‘funding’ on ideology, content and choice of representation, and the role or ability to translate local realisms, ironies and allegories. Although I offered a context for an Australian experience of colonialism as seen through some of the works, our deeply different histories of war, religion and economics means issues that Australians take seriously are not on the table in a place like Colombia. Attending this festival, I had the chance to engage with artists who grapple with ossified government and the explicit recklessness of capitalism, writ large in the pleasures and chaos of everyday life in Cali.

The home base for talk during the festival was an artspace established privately by the artist Oscar Muñoz and his partner Sally Muñoz. El Lugar a Dudas (“Place of Doubts” or “Room for Doubt”) is a gallery/talk/library space used by young artists for screenings, building, filming and networking. It has a twin flat out the back for artist residencies and the best of the collection of international art books in Spanish and English that the Muñoz’ have collected on their travels. Over lunches at El Lugar a Dudas I tuned in with my meagre Spanish to debates about state supervision of aesthetics and the paradox of funding and control. The Muñoz’ response to this has been to create a micro-hub that can surf zones of uncertainty without scrutiny and can transcend the local means of production for art through international exchange.

Another fascinating organisation that came to my attention during this festival was The Triangle Arts Trust, established in London through the philanthropic support of Robert Loder. Alessio Antoniolli is the Director of Gasworks in London and is also the key organiser for the Triangle Arts Trust, established to initiate and facilitate an international network of artist-led workshops and residencies. Alessio travels the world to meet with artist collectives who want to extend and consolidate their regional connections with other artists. The VI Performance Festival de Cali was in part supported by the Triangle Arts Trust and Alessio’s presence at the festival had knock-on effects, harnessing energy and support for the next wave of actions, artworks and conversation.

VI Festival de Performance-Cali, Colombia, April 25-29. Helena Producciones:
www.helenaproducciones.org; Triangle Arts Trust: www.trianglearts.org

Eldorado

In RealTime 73, Benedict Andrews described German playwright Marius von Mayenburg’s Eldorado as “a luminous nightmare” (RT 73, p15). Andrews has realised his vision of the play for Malthouse in a superb production where the various windows between us and the world are made both literal and transformative, and always grimly revealing.

We enter the theatre viewing ourselves in a huge dark glass window the width of the stage and from behind which a ghostly face appears. Aschenbremmer, a businessman (Robert Menzies), describes a city at war. He presses a button and envelops himself in a white cloud out of which emerge other performers. They too are behind the glass, close to it and head-miked. We hear them acutely. They can play every nuance the script offers. They are near but far. So is the war. It seems like one in a Middle-Eastern city but is happening in the West. The characters nonetheless go about the business of relationships, art and property. Andrews commented in his RealTime interview that “The play was written March to May 2003 when Bush and company were invading Iraq and we were submitted to a constant stream of war pornography in the media, bringing the war near but keeping it far.”

Variations on this near and far dynamic are realised constantly as Andrews, his lighting designer Paul Jackson and the performers work the window. It accumulates finger prints and spittle, it’s leant on, slid down, faces are flattened against it. It becomes a mirror, a window onto an imagined garden, the viewpoint from a skyscraper office. In a very funny street scene Anton (Greg Stone) watches lobsters in a tank through what we imagine is a shop window. Oskar (Hamish Michael) joins him and comically mimics the crustaceans. Max Lyandvert’s sound score takes us outside this window on (or window closed to) the world with a burst of city noise or the rumble of war. The glass itself transforms, magically cleansed of human imprint by dextrous reversals in Jackson’s lighting.

Eldorado commences with war and a crime. In war, opportunists can transform ruin into gold. Here a crime will turn lives to dross. Anton has embezzled his boss, Aschenbrenner. He’s found out and sacked. He hides his dismissal from his newly pregnant wife, Thekla (Alison Whyte), a disaffected concert pianist belittled by her property dealer mother, Greta (Gillian Jones). Thekla’s piano playing goes into decline: art cannot fare well when a secretive husband and a war fuel her paranoia. Anton has sold land to Greta at extortionate prices and hidden the revealing documents which are sought by Greta’s young boyfriend, Oskar. Anton dooms himself, losing his wife and his sanity. Sketched thus Eldorado sounds like soap opera, but Mayenburg’s spare, imagistic writing and his lateral way into and out of scenes (magically segued by Andrews and his stage, lighting and sound designers) constantly open out a narrow bourgeois world into something more frightening. The challenges the characters face, or fail to face, are symptomatic of global phenomena, a world we are already experiencing as increasingly strange. We can feel far from these men and women, the moments of nearness are few, but we recognise the fears and vulnerabilities of Anton and Thekla in particular as purpose and connection drop away.

As it progresses, the play’s proximity to the real gives way too to fantasy. The characters suddenly assemble to sing Blondie’s Heart of Glass (a lateral reference perhaps to Werner Herzog’s film of the same name about a town driven mad?). Aschenbrennen suicides. Anton is haunted by his ghost and soon hangs himself. As Anton’s world disintegrates the heavens rain fine gold foil, in a seemingly endless soft shower, the luminescent nightmare ending with Aschenbrenner’s ghost announcing the city lost but the world still full of stock, still ripe for investment, its inhabitants golden skinned. Eldorado is always around the corner, no lessons have been learnt.

The performances in Eldorado are uniformally excellent, admirably meeting the demands of head-miking, acting through glass and embracing Mayenburg’s lateral language. Lyandvert’s score is sparely incorporated, making subtle use of the piano playing of Thekla’s world and adroitly propelling us into anxious or alarming spaces. My only complaint about the production is that the 2 hangings are too elaborately staged when compared with the excellent economies of gesture elsewhere. In Anton’s case it makes too much out of what should be a moment in a world unravelling.

Benedict Andrews’ consistently inventive direction, the boldness of his vision and its realisation in performance, in Anna Tregloan’s striking design and Paul Jackson’s lighting, is a credit to Malthouse. The association between von Mayenburg and Andrews looks set to continue through Malthouse while Andrews’ relationship with Berlin’s Schaubuhne further develops. This is a bringing together of the near and far that can richly benefit Australian theatre.
Lally Katz and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano

Lally Katz and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano

If Eldorado moves inexorably towards nightmare, Lally Katz and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano is a dream from the word go, dream laid over dream over dream as the fantasy worlds of Alice, Peter Pan, Sherlock Holmes and the Lion from the Wizard of Oz merge into a less than seamless but nonethess magical theatrical whole. Characters bleed from one layer into another with a change of name or costume, and some even bleed into each other, the detective Mr Lally Katz is played by the same actor playing Miss Lally Katz.

For all that it appears to be a wonder world for children, Lally Katz… is full of alarming adult things. It’s an adult version of a rites of passage, looking back over its shoulder with sex on its mind and not a little spiralling relativism, defiling elderly literary fantasies concocted for innocents, and very funny for it too. A big deal is done, Wendy is sacrificed, Lion is a panther inside, Canberra is blown up by a volcano, Greg (whoever he is) has an eternal erection he cannot relieve (nothing is safe from him), but when he does, it is believed the volcano will erupt and the universe will be opened (is that a good thing?). I can tell you no more (it would take too long) save that in Chris Kohn’s more than able hands and with fine and rightly eccentric performances from the brave actors the great baggy Lally Katz… is made almost coherent (and it’s better that it’s not). Adam Girdnir’s staging ranges from intimate doll’s house to the theatre stripped bare, the whole done out with not a few deft theatrical tricks, cunning projections and a soccer goal mouth (the World Cup was on, reason enough). Composer Jethro Woodward on guitar creates an aptly eerie ambience and, with Kohn on drums, some fine song accompaniment.

Stuck Pigs Squealing have done Lally Katz’s rich, sprawling imagination proud, plumbing its depths in a memorable theatrical spectacle that amost tips us over the edge of the known world of theatre.

Michelle Outram, Not the Sound Bite!

At Speakers’ Corner in Sydney’s Domain, the site for decades of soapbox oratory on every conceivable subject, Sydney performer Michelle Outram occupies a perspex box decked with nifty speakers and ‘channels’ speeches by politicians from 1929 to 1992. Jessie Mary Grey Streets’ speech of 1949 was a declaration of independence from a Labor Party averse to even a succesful woman member. The recording has been treated so that Street is silenced from time to time. Outram similarly appears to have a mouth full of water, gesturing as if wishing to speak, occasionally stroking her long hair as if distracted from a daunting task. Paul Keating is allowed a smoother run in his famous Redfern Park speech of 1992 where he acknowledged white oppression of Australia’s Indigenous peoples. The gestures are of cradling, the hands reach out, the head is bowed and the sound is textured with a soft tolling and passages of gently running water. Simplicity and clarity of movement and a sensitive balance between voice and added sound make this an affecting performance. James Henry Scullin’s 1937 ‘Top of the Hill’ speech sends Outram in her speaker’s box into a slow dance of rise and fall to the politician’s soporific intoning. Not the Sound Bite! uses Speakers’ Corner not so much to evoke its specific history (no anarchist, anti-abortion or animal rights speeches here) but to conjure voices from the greater Australian political sphere and put them back into public space.

Briefly…

With Eldorado performed behind glass and Not the Sound Bite! in a perspex box, it was an entirely synchronous pleasure to at last see Brian Lipson wonderfully self-contained in his little room on the Playhouse stage of the Sydney Opera House in A Large attendance in the antechamber.(June 27-July 16). The tiny room is a magical theatre machine, densely decked with foreign objects, arcane scientific equipment, candles, gas ring, an antique projector and Lipson himself, a consummate writer-performer who scarily brings to life Sir Francis Galton with all his prejudices and insights, trumpeting the beginnings of statistical analysis and its nasty bedfellow, eugenics. Meanwhile next door in The Studio, Meow Meow in Beyond Glamour: The Absinthe Tour (as part of the alt.cabaret season) was also doing something outrageous—trying to hang together a show with the help of her audience who do amazing things for her as she beautifully undoes wonderful songs (June 30-July 8). But more of Meow later when we interview this globetrotting, post-everything chanteuse
in RT 75.

Marius von Mayenburg, Eldorado, director Benedict Andrews, translator Maja Zade, performers Gillian Jones, Robert Menzies, Alison Whyte, Bojana Novakovic, Greg Stone, design Anna Tregloan, lighting Paul Jackson, sound Max Lyandvert; Malthouse Theatre, June 10-July 2; Lally Katz, Lally Katz and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano, director Chris Kohn, performers Christopher Brown, Margaret Cameron, Tony Johnson, Brian Lipson, Luke Mullins, Jenny Priest, Gavan O’Leary, designer Adam Gardnir, lighting Richard Vabre, sound Jethro Woodward, video Chris Kohn, Stuck Pigs Squealing, Theatreworks, St Kilda, June 2-18; Michelle Outram, Not the Sound Bite!, Terminus Projects; Speakers’ Corner, The Domain, Sydney, June

The feel on the street is that these are exciting times for independent theatre and performance in Melbourne. Opportunities are opening up through new creative development programs such as Full Tilt at the Arts Centre and Culture Lab at Meat Market. The Malthouse Theatre is programming remounts of independent shows and commissioning emerging artists and the Australia Council and Arts Victoria are providing indirect support through new producers’ initiatives. In addition to this, festivals such as Melbourne Fringe and Next Wave are facilitating a thriving performance scene, providing vital professional support, enabling theatre makers to create the partnerships required to put their ideas to the public. Independent artists are widely acknowledged by funding bodies and producing organisations as a vital part of the arts ecology, who need support to achieve sustainability and growth. The mainstream press, perhaps responding to the buzz, also seems to care about what is going on outside the main stages.

As Alison Croggon noted on her excellent blog last month (theatrenotes.blogspot.com), the nurturing role offered by larger organisations such as those mentioned above can only succeed if there is something to nurture. I have to admit that at times I have found myself despairing at a lot of what is created by independent theatre makers in Melbourne, with a tendency towards reproducing, on a small scale and on the cheap, the unambitious and uninspiring artistic goals of the larger, ‘flagship’ companies. Thankfully, while this is one dominant tendency, there are also plenty of new companies emerging, making their mark by expressing particular artistic visions, not based on commercial, ‘cover band’ models but on inspiration, passion and need. The latest such company to emerge is The Black Lung.

The Black Lung is an appropriately bilateral name for a new 2-pronged entity, a theatre company and performance space located above Kent Street, a bar in Collingwood’s Smith Street hub. It also has 2 co-Directors, Thomas Henning and Thomas Wright, the former an actor, the latter a writer-director. Black Lung announced its arrival on the scene with an opening night party in April. Through a guerilla campaign of text messages, ‘appropriated’ email lists and word of mouth, the organisers drew a huge crowd to the little bar, exceeding its capacity by 200. The company put on an evening of music, performance and visual art, although the density of the crowd in the small venue meant that the focus was on talking, drinking and celebrating, even if no-one knew yet quite what they were celebrating. The bar and upstairs performance space were decked out with a grungy, garage sale aesthetic that has since become Black Lung’s house style. The crowd was heterogeneous but mostly young; most were in their early to mid-20s, and not your familiar opening night theatre crowd. This is not surprising, as Henning and Wright are themselves in their early 20s and their interests go beyond those of mainstream or independent theatre into visual and performance art. This opening blast was not a one-off. In the 3 months since this grand opening, the theatre has sold out most shows—a sign that it is clearly fulfilling a need.

Henning and Wright have managed to set up this space on very little money, lots of hard work and the goodwill of artists and the owners of the bar which hosts them, and to whom they pay no rent. They have shown great maturity in the process, consulting widely with the independent theatre and visual arts community in order to set up a space that will serve its future stakeholders. Posted on the company website is a clearly articulated manifesto which is focussed on its key interest in creating an environment where the members of their own company and visiting artists can develop and expand new works experimental in form and deeply collaborative in nature, and present these to audiences in an affordable and supported environment. Ticket prices have been set at $10, making it an inexpensive and low-risk option—important for attracting new audiences.

This thoughtful, consultative approach has resulted in keen interest from the theatre-making scene. The directors have found themselves immediately in the position of enjoying a demand for their space, which outstrips their capacity to supply. This means that they have been able to curate works based on artistic criteria rather than scrapping around for what’s available. According to Wright, the decision-making process has been based on personal interaction and discussion with prospective companies, keeping process and concept at the centre. “We’ve had a lot of interest from people and we really feel for the time being that it’s very difficult to source people who have a similar concept of work. We’ve kept it really small, and approach people individually. The whole ethos has been to simplify.” The performance space could not be simpler—a tiny white room above the bar with no fixed seating or technical equipment. It seats about 30 at a pinch and shows have to contend with noise transference from the DJ downstairs. This calls for a style of performance that is able to work with these immediate constraints, and the programming so far has reflected that.

The first show in the space, created by the resident company, was an inspired piece of theatrical excess entitled Avast: A musical without music. Written and directed by Henning and featuring Wright in a leading role, as a statement of purpose for the venue it was an excellent choice. Ushered upstairs, we were crammed into a tiny foyer, barely lit, with a television by the theatre door playing static, partially obscured by a cheap devil’s mask. On entering the theatre, we were greeted with a nearly naked man (Wright) playing a character in a heightened state of anxiety, ready to burst out of his skin, on which statements were painted such as “Viggo Mortensen is a cunt.” Wright quickly gave context for this in a wild-eyed, maniacal retelling of The Lord the Rings, with theme music from the film series blasting behind him. I was later informed that this text had been added into the previous night’s performance, by which time they had obtained the soundtrack for added impact. What followed was (barely) a play about 2 half-siblings (Wright and Gareth Davies) arguing over an inheritance, with obscene interjections from a mysterious dark clown (Dylan Young). It was insanely fast-paced, witty, artfully arhythmic, metatheatrical—a breathtaking combination of precision and chaos. The actors created an atmosphere of immediacy and real crisis that I have rarely experienced in theatre and, with the help of the best audience-plant work I have ever seen, a palpable feeling of panic and unease. I was reminded of the work of New York companies Radiohole and NTUSA (RT66, p36), which have a similar practice of blurring actor/character distinctions in order to create a theatrical world that is utterly self-contained and therefore immersive. It wasn’t really “about” much, except for the experience of being there in the room with this thing that we had to deal with—and that was plenty for me. I left feeling drunk on theatre, intoxicated on the experience of simply being.

The next show presented at the Black Lung was Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon, the second show by the young 3-member ensemble and exponents of ‘junkyard theatre’, Suitcase Royale. Joseph O’Farrell, Miles O’Neil and Glen Walton have a close affiliation with Black Lung’s founders, having seen each other’s works on earlier occasions and instantly finding that they shared similar artistic interests. Suitcase Royale, who had met as students of theatre at Deakin University, were coming off an enormously successful first show, Felix Listens to the World, which saw them winning Fringe awards, touring North America to packed houses and presenting as part of the Melbourne Festival. Chronicles had been developed as part of the Next Wave Festival’s Kick Start program and featured in the festival, although by all accounts, including the company’s, it had not reached its full potential in that season, and was significantly reworked in the interim.

Having enjoyed the inventiveness, heart and assuredness of Felix, and with the exhilarating memories of Avast fresh in my mind, I had come to the show with high hopes. I was happy to discover that the show expanded and deepened many of the ideas explored in the previous work. The story revolves around 3 characters who populate a tiny outback town and who are known only by their trades: the Butcher, the Doctor and the Newsman. The very simple plot—part horror, part murder mystery, part Jules Verne-style adventure —functions as a way for these multi-skilled performer/designer/writer/musician/directors to engage their formidable theatrical imaginations. The centrepiece of the endlessly morphing set is a subterranean vehicle run on cow’s blood, constructed from an old wardrobe on its side, barely large enough to fit the 3 actors, full of hundreds of tiny props, many of which are transformed into characters or perform various roles in creating the world of a gothic Australian outback.

This is theatre by accumulation and aggregation. In one moment the actors form a country folk band (they are very good musicians), in another they are operating lights and sound (there is no offstage operator) while creating 3 distinct spaces in a very small room. It is also, most satisfyingly, self-contained theatre. It is clear in the form that the artists who make up Suitcase Royale are all that is needed to make the work. The lack of artifice is empowering, as it demonstrates, live and in front of the audience, that the power of theatre lies in its alchemical quality, the fact that worlds can be created out of thin air, with some imagination and dedication to the work. The show will soon be touring to Sydney.

Avast and Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon are 2 highly satisfying, assured pieces of work, well-suited to the tiny confines of this new theatre space. The Black Lung has renamed the month of August “Thursday” and will be presenting a wide range of theatre, performance art, music and visual arts. Shows and workshops have already been programmed for most of the year. I’m looking forward to following its development.The Black Lung: www.theblacklung.com

Suitcase Royale, Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon, Sydney Aug 4-6 & 9-13, Lanfranchies Memorial Discotheque, 144 Cleveland St, Chippendale.

The Suitcase Royale

Suitcase Royale bill themselves as “junkyard theatre”, scouring the scrapheap and assembling sets and props from the refuse of industrial society. The centrepiece of their most recent work, Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon, is an upended, tricked-up wardrobe jerry-rigged with trapdoors, lamps, cow-horned steering console and all manner of oddments. The rest of the stage is littered with debris, each item slowly revealed as essential to the narrative though rarely employed for its original intended purpose. It’s fitting, then, that the work delves into the sludge of discarded performance modes and generic forms to cook up a narrative gumbo. B-grade horror, science fiction, outback tall tales, murder ballads, pulp mysteries and slapstick are thrown into the mix. The result is a tale of a journey beneath the earth in a “cow submersible”, a machine powered by bovine blood and piloted by a mad scientist and his strange crew.

The protagonist is a reporter known only as Newsman, who through fate and circumstance finds himself joining the mad Doctor on his quest to map the world beneath the Earth’s surface. Also pressed into service is the towering, bearded figure of the Butcher, a proudly homicidal figure who punctuates his sentences with a barked “DEAD!” while slamming his chopping knife into a nearby object. The story, meandering and shaggy, is matched by constant switching from live action to puppetry, miniatures, animation, film and radio recordings. This doesn’t have the slick, commodified “channel surfing” effect of fragmented texts subscribing to the MTV-aesthetic; nor does it reproduce the alienating effect of stagings which juxtapose competing media in a coldly calculated way. There’s a homespun, organic feel to Chronicle’s bricolage, a localised ambience not simply due to the relocation of diverse generic conventions into an outback setting. It helps that the performance I attended was in a tiny theatre above a Fitzroy bar, trundling trams audible as they passed, and the occasional tipsy holler filtering up the stairs.

The performers, Joseph O’Farrell, Miles O’Neil and Glen Walton, possess a vitality that ensures proceedings rattle on at a terrific pace. They pack more into an hour or so than many shows manage at twice the length without overloading their audience’s senses. The balance of light and shade is admirable, the Butcher offering a believably lethal counterpoint to the Doctor’s laughably impotent dreamer and the Newsman’s cynical outsider. At times, the trio’s relative youthfulness oversteps itself through rushed or garbled dialogue, but this rarely staggers the show’s impact since it never seems at odds with the loose, cobbled-together style of the narrative itself. Theatre of this kind is messy and disjointed, but The Suitcase Royale have chosen not to conceal this by attempting to offer the image of a slick, seamless product devoid of cracks.

The Suitcase Royale don’t seem to do things the way they do just because pastiche is popular, or cool, or even original. It’s merely the only proper way to express a tale as ingenious as its creators, as inventive as their tools and as enjoyable as stumbling through a crack in the fence to find yourself in a junkyard paradise. (For more on Suitcase Royale and The Black Lung see p43.)
Caroline Lee, La Doleur

Caroline Lee, La Douleur

There has been a surge of solo shows produced by Malthouse Theatre of late, and the reason for this is quite simple. Though a quick glance over Artistic Director Michael Kantor’s CV is enough to suggest that he’d prefer more large scale ensemble productions, in the economic climate of Australian theatre today this quite simply isn’t tenable. And if the Malthouse can’t afford to mount more than a few large-cast shows each year, it doesn’t bode well for smaller independent companies.

On the plus side, this has allowed a number of one-handers the opportunity to reach a larger and generally appreciative audience. Caroline Lee’s masterful performance of Marguerite Duras’ semi-autobiographical novella La Douleur is a case in point. Directed by long-time Lee collaborator Laurence Strangio, the work was first presented in the miniscule surrounds of the pub-cum-literary hub, the Stork Hotel in Melbourne. It’s difficult to imagine the creative challenge this setting must have presented after viewing the piece in the considerably more expansive space of the Malthouse’s Beckett Theatre.

The audience is split in 2, divided by a raised stage upon which the only items available to Lee are an ornate chaise longue and a spot lit telephone. Lee’s performance carries our visual interest for the entire work. Of course, she is working with an immensely potent text: the narrator awaits news of the death or return of her husband in Paris just after the cessation of hostilities during World War II. Duras creates a moving portrait of grief and the hidden casualties of war. Her central figure is a walking spectre, haunting the stage and whispering to us across half a century. This otherworldly quality to the text is perfectly matched by Lee’s assured, delivery, which denies easy access into the interiority of her character while maintaining an intimacy that rarely falters. We are drawn into her world, but are no more able to make sense of it than she.

The suspended mourning of the piece creates a stasis which lasts for at least half of the show’s duration, but when the first major narrative twist finally emerges we realise how much we have been involuted into the protagonist’s mind, unable to envision the possibility of resolution, of gaining some final knowledge of death or hope. This change brings life, but with life comes a more keen awareness of the reality of death. What was merely a theoretical possibility suddenly strikes home as brute fact, and the final sting in Duras’ tale is a stunning reinvention of what has come before as well as a remarkable commentary on compassion as something grander than simple love.

David Franzke’s sound design is commendably subtle, often noticed only after the fact. Birds, hushed conversations and low rumblings underscore much of what we see, but are so unobtrusive as to appear entirely incidental. It’s a perfect fit since as far as an audience member is concerned La Douleur’s focus at all times must be squarely on the performer. Lee has repeatedly proven herself more than capable of inhabiting complex, daunting roles and in Strangio has found a director able to channel her abilities in a way that maintains the ebb and flow of an original text’s dramatic thrust.

Rebecca Clarke, Unspoken

Rebecca Clarke’s Unspoken is a more raw piece than La Douleur, but carries with it an equally strong confidence in the delivery of intimate, autobiographical material. Clarke has created a frank, almost unnervingly open portrayal of her fraught relationship with her intellectually challenged younger brother.

The piece opens with an evocation of Clarke as a child, shortly before the announcement of the birth of her brother. Clarke’s performance here is unfortunately at its weakest, not so surprising given the inherent difficulties adult actors seem to face when attempting to incarnate themselves as children. Shifting forwards several years, however, Clarke comes into her own as a flighty teen leaving the nest and travelling to university, her sublimated resentment of her sibling sidelined by the fledgling relationship she begins with the “Clown” she meets there. These are the two dramatic poles of the work: Clarke’s long and ultimately failed relationship with a man who eventually reveals his own troubled side, and the transformation of her feelings of anger and resentment towards her brother into something quite other. Director Wayne Blair (the director of the award-winning film, The Djarn Djarns) has coaxed from Clarke some quite remarkably candid moments of self-reflection while restraining any temptation to indulge in histrionics or self-therapy onstage. Once her audience is willing to go on the journey, we’re taken to some deeply affecting territory indeed.

Genevieve Dugard’s set is suggestive of a bayside pier, a raised boardwalk bordering the space and surmounted by wooden pylons and a draped sail. Clarke’s early memories of the beach, sailing in her father’s boat and running along the shore assume a pivotal role in the design. Sculpted sand curls around the pier’s base and becomes a tool for Clarke to express various states, scattering it, tracing lines, sweeping it in violent arcs or euphoric sprays. The final sequence sees the nautical sail providing a second purpose, drawn up to act as a screen for a projected video of Clarke and her real brother.

Unspoken has toured well, thanks to the assistance of Performing Lines, and as part of the Malthouse’s new Tower program of independent works scheduled throughout the year bringing a welcome and fresh addition to the venue. While in many ways quite a different work to La Douleur, both pieces share a commonality too. Each demonstrates simply the ability of a powerful performer to involve an audience in a fragile human story, devoid of theatrical tricks or convention.

The Suitcase Royale, Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon, performers Joseph O’Farrell, Miles O’Neil, Glen Walton, co-directors Thomas Wright, Thomas Henning; Black Lung Theatre, June 2-18; La Douleur, performer Caroline Lee, director Laurence Strangio, design Anna Tregloan, lighting Richard Vabre, sound design David Franzke; Malthouse heatre, June 29-July 3; Unspoken, writer-performer Rebecca Clarke, director Wayne Blair, designer Genevieve Dugard, lighting Stephen Hawker, music/sound Basil Hogios; Performing Lines; Malthouse Theatre, July 11- 22

This year’s Art of Difference at Gasworks in mid May was a trailblazer in its approach to disability arts. Steered by a committee of local artists and arts workers, almost all of whom have a disability, the conference/arts event attempted to create “an inspirational catalyst for professional development change and debate.”

Though the term ‘disability arts’ may conjure for many a scenario of passive recipients being lead into ‘happy clappy’ therapeutic arts experiences by non-disabled artists, this event was to some degree successful in dispelling the stereotype. The event drew professional overseas, interstate and local artists with disability, as well as people interested in art as recreation. The program comprised performance, exhibitions, workshops and sometimes heated debate on key issues.

The disability arts community in Melbourne is small and close-knit, though it also has many connections with the local world of mainstream and fringe arts. It was therefore healthy to have disability arts activists from overseas present, to lob a provocative stink bomb or 2 into the debate. Julie McNamara, performer and disability activist from the UK and Phillip Patston, comedian from NZ, obligingly took on this role during debates on the politics of disability arts. Patston, also active in gay politics, remarked that you would never see a room full of heterosexuals in leading roles at a gay conference. Traditionally and still today, non-disabled administrators, directors, and teachers fill the majority of these roles in disability arts. This mildly radical comment caused quite a stir. There was discussion about how change from this traditional model could come about, as indeed it has in recent years in the UK.

Julie McNamara, UK

There was a small but strong performance program. Some shows were open to the public as well as conference goers and attracted good crowds. Julie MacNamara (UK) performed her one-woman show, Pig Tales, the confronting story of a female child raised as a boy, brutalised by organised religion and the psychiatric system. The sometimes grueling narrative, a miasma of chaos and cruelty, was leavened with wry, bawdy, black humour. This was quite a workout for McNamara, skilfully performed and cleverly staged. Steering clear of didactics, the production integrated issues of gender and disability into the personal story of a likeable, confused, mistreated human being.

Ramesh Meyyappan, Singapore

In complete contrast, Ramesh Meyyappan, a deaf mime artist from Singapore performed his physical theatre work, This Side Up, a light-hearted visual narrative about one man’s battle against the urban sprawl. Using traditional mime theatre, an elastic face and expressive eyes, the artist hilariously conveyed a surreal, cartoon-like vision of the mundane world of work. Deaf signing was adapted through mime artistry to become an eloquent set of signals for any audience. Perhaps the experience of deafness has contributed to the intense physical expressiveness of this performer. His show has travelled the world with humour so light and universal it can appeal across borders. Ramesh also lead a very successful series of workshops in physical theatre at Art of Difference.

Phillip Patston, NZ

New Zealand comedian and disability activist Phillip Patston performed with Sue-Ann Post and graduates of a stand-up comedy workshop, run as part of the conference. Patston delivered a wry, ironic take on the experience of disability with sharp insight into living daily as part of an oppressed caste that is still marginalised in many subtle and not so subtle ways. Being downtrodden can be a rich source of humour.

Dance, music, visual arts…

There was a joint work in progress from members of Restless Dance Co from Adelaide and Weave Movement Theatre from Melbourne, which gave useful insights for the many artists and arts workers attending into the genesis of dance performance involving performers with a range of disabilities. There were performances also from Louis Tillett, internationally acclaimed singer-songwriter from Sydney, and Michael Crane, a Melbourne writer who incorporates a wide range of musicians in his performance pieces. Local music artist Akash presented a striking installation. All these artists identify as having a disability, though they do not restrict their work to a narrow preoccupation with disability issues. Other human preoccupations may often seem a more interesting source for art.

The visual arts were well represented in works by artists such as Ross Barber from Queensland, the Colour Gang from Gippsland, Richard Morrison, Glenn Sinclair and Arts Project Australia (www.artsproject.org.au). The local disability visual arts scene is a thriving one, producing much impressive work.

Leadership, access, recognition

There are ongoing political debates to be had around disability arts. Why should it be segregated from the rest of the arts? This mirrors broader social questions around disability and segregation, in general still alive and well, despite slow advances. Why aren’t more people with disabilities in positions of power and leadership in the arts? Why aren’t more people with disabilities accepted into arts training institutions and so on?

Art of Difference has taken a step away from routine ways of looking at disability arts and has given a brief insight into the wide spectrum of artists and arts activity identified with disability. Maybe this can shift perceptions a degree or two. From recreation to high-level creation, art functions in many ways for people with disability, as for the rest of the community. At the same time, there are still many doors to be opened to achieve full access and recognition for these artists and the work they create, work which emerges from a unique viewing platform on the theatre of humanity.

Janice Florence participated in Art of Difference as a dance artist in the Weave-Restless project and as a speaker in several panel discussions.

CARNI (Contemporary Artist-run New Initiative, Melbourne), is not paradise. On this damp Thursday night in winter, the fabric of the former tannery feels rather desolate. But the audience for Paradise 2—the incessant sound of a falling tree is not at CARNI, or the place and its limitations are incidental: the performer’s first line shifts the scope of our setting straightaway to a vast and conceptual horizon. “We are in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, the Earth, more exactly at latitude 37°49’S and longitude 144°58’E.”

In Paradise 2, Rosa Casado introduces herself as “a human being, a European woman”, “in front of you, standing.” To objectify herself in such reductive, irrefutable terms produces a few smiles and someone laughs. Yet Casado’s audience discovers that she is open to risking absurdity. Her aspiration is not to disguise but to practise the possibility of being undisguised and, more broadly, of unmasking that which may seem self-evident. Paradoxically, she remains, somehow, inscrutable.

Written in Spanish, and translated into English by Elvira Antón, Paradise 2 is Casado’s first ‘fixed’ script for solo performance. Insofar as it is motivated by a precise regard for efficient communication, the work might be described as an illustrated lecture. Its rhetorical quality follows especially from the succinctness and sometimes awkward terseness of the lines: many feature definitions sourced in the Royal Spanish Academy’s ‘official’ dictionary of Spanish.

The spoken lines alternate with the execution of a drawing of the earth and other planets of the solar system, in chalk, over the extent of the concrete floor. Casado squats to do so, pulling a small construction lamp as its electric chord allows, lighting the ground and only occasionally her face. Her approach to the drawing and its style are as deft and stark as her use of spoken words. By a methodical repetition and variation of these elements, reflections on a holiday in West African Mali open out, steadily, into reflections on subjecthood in the global context. “I am a foreigner in Mali; a foreigner who travels for pleasure is a tourist.” And Casado brings the preconditions of her own journey into narrative, spatial and, so, perceptual coincidence with that of Ibrahima Boyé. This man is personally unknown to her, but “a biped, mammal, Senegalese”, and “a foreigner in Spain; a foreigner that travels to a country to stay is an immigrant.”

There is an island at the centre of the room: a hollow, elongated sculpture about 20cm high made from dark chocolate, and dotted with chocolate palm trees. Lit by a single, bare bulb, this island is implied as the sun of the solar system that Casado is sketching. Its shape is based on that of Fuerteventura in Spain’s province of Las Palmas. Amongst the 7 Canary Islands, Fuerteventura is considered the oldest in geological terms, and its sweeping beaches are the longest. For these reasons it has been perhaps most insistently mythologised as the place in the Atlantic Ocean where sensory delight and perfect gratification are guaranteed—indefinitely.

Although the choreography of Paradise 2 telescopes to conclude at the chocolate island, Casado does not begin there. She visits it intermittently: having used a word related to economic thinking or analysis, she breaks and chews through one or more palm trees. Thus speaking, drawing and eating, Casado treats distinctions between tourism and migration as a pattern of assumptions about money and consumption, freedom and responsibility.

Together the palm trees amount to nearly 400 grams of chocolate. As each is taken, the sampled sound of a falling tree is set into reverberation. Casado’s chewing and swallowing is unhurried, yet resolute, her gaze never faltering from the possibility of direct eye contact with members of the audience. This eating is neither private nor necessary, but nor is it powerless, or defensive: it is a highly controlled display of over-gratification. The quantity of chocolate that passes her lips becomes abject, as does the denuded island, though Casado herself does not. Even so we must hear the tree trunks splitting relentlessly. Over the 35 minutes of the performance, these accumulate into a soundscape that suggests a collapse of any difference between the depletion of natural resources and of human dignity—and we are all complicit.

Casado works without (both lacking and outside) a proscenium. Yet the premise behind Paradise 2 proves highly traditional, in the sense that she undertakes to recreate an image of the world; in this case, the world as a matter of ordinary words and gestures—and desires that the capitalist marketplace makes ordinary through constant justification and fulfilment. Now having witnessed Paradise 2, I am aware of a new desire: to be confronted and stimulated by Casado’s next work.

Rosa Casado has trained in ballet, studied physics at the University of Madrid and theatre at the University of Theatre, Istituto d’Arte Scenica. “Her current artistic work is centered on rewriting reality by means of de-contextualizing ordinary daily acts to explore new ways of “thinking” and “doing” and on developing interdisciplinary spaces to promote contemporary artistic practice” (magdalena.actrix.co.nz/guests/rosa.html). She performed and conducted a workshop at Magdalena Aotearoa, New Zealand in July.

Paradise 2—the incessant sound of a falling tree, Rosa Casado in collaboration with Mike Brookes, CARNI (Contemporary Artist-run New Initiative), Preston, Melbourne, June 8. Presented as part of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies’ interdisciplinary panel series Performance and Politics.

In this stark and disquieting solo, Adam Broinowski presents the body as the broken remainder of discourses of war and terror that seek to erase and remove it from vision. With war reduced to triumphalist rhetoric and video game images, what remains of the body? At a ‘safe’ distance from the suffering of others occurring in our name, how are images of war internalised in the bodies of democratic ‘free’ citizens? As the late Susan Sontag observed, “there is no ‘we’ when regarding the pain of others” (Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003). In the breakdown of the democratic ‘we’ produced by the relentless progression of images of violence and suffering, Broinowski intervenes by performing his intimate nightmare visions of the body politic.

First vision. From behind tensed crossed wires that surgically quarter the stage (a dissection? a rifle sight? a cage?) and covered in grey fur (a scruffy and broken koala-like beast with a melted face of clay) Broinowski glides onstage glowing fluorescent green. This strange, clearly damaged human/imal twitches awkwardly under the night vision green, the kind of light in which so often we watch other humans violently erased in ‘smart bomb’ footage. The sheer misery of Broinowski’s broken animal brings to mind Steve Baker’s thoughts on “botched taxidermy”: “a fractured, awkward, ‘wrong’ or wronged thing, which is hard not to read as a means of addressing what it is to be human now” (Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal, 2000).

I imagine tracer fire across this wrong(ed) animal body as he disturbingly thrusts fingers into the eye holes of the mask as if to tear off his ruined face, or as if, like Oedipus, he has been forced to see far, far too much. Beneath the mask is a flesh-toned skullcup that also erases Broinowki’s face, smoothing it out, leaving him eyeless and hairless. In his mouth is embedded a small wireless camera, through which he looks out at us in the dark. He looks without seeing, yet records everything. De-humanised, he becomes a seeing machine, with the technological apparatus that produces an image literally hard to swallow.

Second vision. The stage is drenched in red fluorescent light, a photographic darkroom for this dark time. Shorn of his fur, Broinowski re-enters dragging a bulging balloon that wobbles amusingly yet pathetically. He’s unable to tame the beast that is the balloon, its sheer stubborn excess of materiality escaping the flow of the rhetoric of violence.

Third vision. The subtitle “animal reflections” is here literalised, with a large mirror that slides painfully down the performer’s back. Later, it becomes the reflective ground upon which he kneels, giving this warring body a long hard look at itself. This body is at war with itself, with the animal within, and with the framing discourses of terror surrounding, demeaning and erasing the human. For the first and last time, he speaks:

There is no animal as cruel as human
There is no animal as bright
A thousand suns, each one brighter than the last
A desert full of empty shells
All is gone, all is gone, all …

The being that Adam Broinowski presents looks without seeing, and kills without either touching or caring, possessing a cruelty far beyond any other predator.

In the end all we have left are images of ourselves recorded earlier, blindly, from the mouth, a reflection of the strange and frightening animal we have become: the audience.

Vivisection Vision: animal reflections, performer-director Adam Broinowski, lighting Stephen Klinder; Performance Space, June 1-3

Chunky Move: Singularity

We enter a cavern, large, deep and dark, filled with 6 enormous squares. Some are like small stages, others large cots. Each contains a person. As we mill expectantly, a young woman screeches, asthmatic animal breathing, pacing her square in choreographed lunges and pelvic thrusts. Her sexuality repulses. A man in a suit stammers his way through a series of micro-movements, clever clockwork. He is shy and inadequate. Each square in turn gives way to the repeated performance of a solipsistic mantra. A young woman falls backwards again and again; a man moves sections of his body as if they were separate, independent of the whole. Quiet violence erupts. The audience swarms around the action, and then drifts away.

Dysfunctional is too weak a word, too close to functional. This work attempts to depict that which is beyond sanity. But for the hysterical breathing, the madness presented here was almost aesthetic, the 6 performers assuming the shape of insanity rather than its lived experience.

The large squares move, slowly joining, bringing our introverts into contact with each other. How would these introverts interact? Some patterns were inhibited, others augmented. When this gave way to the group it was somewhat disappointing. Perhaps a group of such individuals was bound to amount to little, a slow decline towards the entropy of the floor.

One of the strongest aspects of Singularity was its reinsertion of each individual into some context of the everyday, whether in lifts, at a party or on public transport. These moving tableaux were wonderful, adding the social, the normal, to that which is not. My favourite section was a party scene that alternated between bubbling interaction (normal state) and complete exclusion (the girl’s perception of an evacuated humanity). A girl, radically alone, at a party full of people. This was stunning, scary, like the vision of a psychopath. It would have been great if all the everyday settings were likewise elaborated to contrast the individual’s experience with the social norms of everyday life.

Some parts of Singularity worked better than others, some bits could have been cut, and others developed more physically and emotionally. However, its general thrust, to represent and recontextualise pathological forms of experience, had real integrity.

Kage: Headlock

In the absence of dialogue physical theatres can sometimes look odd in their mute reinterpretation of everyday life. In depicting a primarily physical relationship between brothers, Headlock evoked a fairly realistic field of action, barely announcing itself as physical theatre. Three boys hang out, playing their favourite fantasy of championship wrestling, sometimes literally, sometimes through sibling rivalries. Competition borders on aggression. Each boy has a distinct personality, always framed in relation to the others. One boy, Matthew, is deaf. The others protect and taunt him in turns. We come to realise that these are memories, that time has intruded upon childhood. Another brother, the eldest, has died—we don’t know how exactly, though we know he was the ringleader. Perhaps he skated too close to danger. Perhaps his fearlessness turned to self-destruction. In any case, there are now only 2 boys, one of them going to prison.

Headlock was measured in terms of a single night, Shane’s first in prison. It moved imperceptibly slowly, signalled by a digital clock looming larger than Melbourne’s landmark Nylex clock. Time does not flow here. It jumps, then freezes. Shane’s despair is softened through the intercession of flashbacks and the appearance of his dead brother offering advice, provoking memories. To what extent did memories help Shane survive prison life? Or was memory a means of escape? Headlock created a strong contrast between the trio of siblings as an ensemble and the isolation of adulthood. The status of Shane’s memories is thus ambiguous.

The strength of Headlock lies in the relation between the 3 boys and in its stark contrast with the reality of prison life. The physical nuances of their play established the jouissance of their relationship. I watched Headlock with an audience of school children. Their attention reciprocated the action onstage; they understood the sheer stuffing around, killing time of childhood.

Headlock raises issues of childhood and danger, play and destruction, aggression and love. Its exploration in a largely physical domain worked very well where class disadvantage vies with the creativity of children in the generation of 3 life histories.

Body Corporate:Chunky Move, Singularity, choreographer-director Gideon Obarzanek, performers Kristy Ayre, Antony Hamilton, Paea Leach, Kirstie McCracken, Carlee Mellow, Lee Serle, designer Dirk Zimmerman, sound, Darrin Verhagen, lighting, Niklas Pajanti; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, May 12-28

Kage Physical Theatre, Headlock, director Kate Denborough, performers Luke Hockley, Byron Perry, Gerard Van Dyck, text David Denborough, design Ben Cobham, Andrew Livingstone (Bluebottle); Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, May 18-June 3

PICA’s annual Putting on an Act program encourages artists to stage short works of any genre or style, eliciting some of the best (and worst) “one-shot” performances of the year. Fresh from teaching the history of Fluxus and performance art, I particularly warmed to the more unstructured pieces.

Throughout the 1960s, John Cage, Yoko Ono and others composed works by penning a series of instructions (“Enter space containing a radio and 3 musical instruments. Roll a dice to determine which station to tune the radio to and which instrument to play in which order” etc). The point was to defer the artists’ status as authors of something aesthetic and so make everyone a potential artist and everything a potential aesthetic object—the aesthetics of the everyday. Cage himself though was often lax in detailing the power play involved in handing out such obscure directions to his acolytes. Instruction Art Space from Clyde McGill and Mark Parfitt constituted in this sense a re-interpretation of the idea whereby instructions became potentially oppressive, exhausting and often nonsensical, endlessly thrown out to us by authorities as varied as train station announcers, advertisers, bosses and cops. One-word instructions were read out over the sound system (“Rotate!” “Think!” “Run!” “Tangle!”), while another set was projected on the back wall with additional confusion provided by the 2 performers shouting their own instructions at each other. The pair then struggled to respond with what they had to hand: a tube, some rope, 2 chairs and 2 small tables. They charged around, producing a predictable but thoroughly enjoyable, unstable chaos of flying furniture, shouting, clambering about, bodily contact, arm-locked whirling and other flailing attempts to keep up with their orders. As one exclaimed while the lights dimmed, “I’m buggered!” or as that great authority figure Malcolm Fraser quipped, “Life wasn’t meant to be easy.”

A more considered approach was offered by Greg Burley’s Second Law of Homecoming, a superb monologue about his slip into insensitive monomania during a period of share housing. Obsessed with the first few bars of one of Neil Young’s songs, he related how he had played this 10-second refrain hundreds of times a day to allay a gap in his mind (thoughts had ceased to come to him spontaneously, a phenomena which did not have the calming effect some might attribute to it) and to cope with his intimidatingly stoic, unresponsive housemate. At the finish of this encounter, Burley explained how he had finally understood and empathised with his housemate at the very point that the latter had calmly, sadly and without malice asked him to move out. Although the narrative itself was delightful, its true charm came from Burley’s deliberately un-aesthetic delivery. Words and explanations were lingered over, giving them a poetic beauty and ambiguity, while Burley’s unhurried, simple vocal delivery and slightly halting presentation imparted a sense of the everyday. Burley himself remained beguilingly opaque.

My third pick of the season was the more overtly theatrical monologue Running, from writer-performer Kym Cahill and director-animator Tim Watts. Cahill re-enacted her childhood terror of being abandoned in broad daylight, far from civilisation, in an old graveyard as her school bus with her best friend sped away. As though laying out a lifeline, Cahill began by coiling a rope from the seating (the bus) to the rear of the stage. She then walked the curves of the rope while relating to us her dubiously ‘educational’ task of identifying the dates on the graves she passed. Then, as the bus threatened to leave, Cahill’s voice rose, her chest heaved and quaked. Behind her a simple animation flickered on the back wall: empty desert sands and an increasingly tilted, far horizon. A rolling pattern of horizontal lines in the brown earth established the fervid dynamism of her dash for the bus. The disorientating affect of this exaggeration of distance accompanied by Cahill’s escalating gasps was effectively emphasised by the inversion of foreground (the projected sands on the wall) and background (Cahill moving towards the audience as though through molasses), before her character fainted.

For my own part, after also enduring Tomàs Ford’s Unpleasant Tone (literally that: a single tone played and tweaked to an empty stage) and a work by Abe Sada (massive rumbling bass feedback played underneath the seating), as well as the more than 28 other pieces over a 4 day program, I felt like fainting myself!

Putting On An Act, Instruction Action Space, concept/performance Clyde McGill, Mark Parfitt; Greg Burley’s Second Law of Home Living, concept/performance Greg Burley; Running, by Weeping Spoon Productions, writer-performer Kym Cahill, director-animator Tim Watts; Unpleasant Tone, concept/performance Tomàs Ford; Abe Sada (Chris Cobilis, Katerina Katherine Papas, Bassta! Pex, Cat Hope), concept Cat Hope, Andrew Ewing; PICA, June 13-17

The precinct surrounding Brandenburger Tor looks a mess, as always. It’s not a giant building site anymore, but Adidas has, in compensation, installed a giant football directly in front of the ungainly monument and the square is seething with the same tourist crowd (wearing their Goretex jackets, bumbags and disorientation like a uniform) who populate the centre of every major city.

Directly to the left of the mammoth ball is the gleaming glass facade of Günter Behnisch’s new Akademie der Kunste, the main exhibition space for Berlin’s second Sonambiente. The first was organised by Christian Kneisel 10 years ago to mark the 300th anniversary of the Akademie and attracted diverse luminaries from Laurie Anderson and Brian Eno to Nam June Paik. The resuscitation of the festival by his assistant, Matthias Osterwold, coincides with the rather less solemn occasion of the World Cup, and perhaps has trouble competing with the mega event (in spite of this year’s lineup including Pipilotti Rist, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller).

The 2006 festival features some 40 international artists as well as the work of 20 students from the Akademie itself, and is spread across 5 major venues alongside a host of ancillary facilities, from subway stations to glass recycling bins. It’s an ambitious festival, and one that takes the architectural fragmentation of the city as a core theme, which goes some way to explaining how visually rich this audio festival is.

It’s the hungover day after opening night, and out of a doorway that we cannot directly see through emerges snatches of opera, fragments of a voice. We’re at the entrance to Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s enormously impressive installation Opera for a Small Room. Inside stands an unmarked wooden box, reminiscent of a shipping container, set at an angle to the walls. Light streams out from windows cut into all 4 sides, and on closer approach we see that this little house is packed: crammed with old records, faded Turkish rugs, dented school furniture, 8 record players, a crooked chandelier and an empty chair sitting in the middle of all this comfortable chaos.

The chair looks recently vacated, so it is faintly unnerving when the arm of a record player swings of its own volition and plays an aria from an Italian opera that sounds familiar. A north American voice growls over the song, “she was walking down the road with her shoes in her hands… where the fuck was she going?” and from that moment on we’re lost, mesmerised, nailed. From 24 antique speakers littering the room and jutting out from the walls a story unfolds in stops and starts—made up from fragments of opera, waves of orchestral music, footsteps, pop songs and the corruscatingly lonely voice. It’s as much theatre as installation, a radio play built into a museum diorama. Our ears adjust to the low fidelity vinyl played through horn speakers, the voice mumbling from a space only a few feet in front of us, so that we are delightfully confused when the precise and vivid sound of a rainstorm breaks over our heads. Involuntarily I step back and look up to see if it is not, in fact, raining on the roof of the gallery, only to glimpse high definition speakers bolted up on the walls. It’s a clever trick that plays on suspension of disbelief: the mistake is that assuming “everything here in this box is not real” implies that “everything not in this box is real.” But the finesse of the piece is not merely technical.

The power of illusion that Cardiff and Miller’s work carries is set off by their rich sense of narrative and association. Their art verges on filmmaking, as Atom Egoyan once observed during an interview with Cardiff (www.bombsite.com/cardiff/cardiff.html), and this piece is driven by a few biographical fragments, real and imagined, about R Dennehy, a man who collected records. The immediate sensuality of the work—you can smell the dust on the carpet—is a relief after all the snap, crackle and abstracted pop of the Rice Krispy theorists that one sometimes associates with experimental sound art.

Another sort of memorial to an absent figure is constructed by the Adelaide born artist Jo Dudley, whose Tom’s Song was installed in what looks remarkably like an indoor basketball court in the now vacant Polish Embassy on Unter den Linden. As in the work by Cardiff and Miller, we are presented with a blank wooden box standing at the centre of the room, although higher and narrower, more like a coffin for an elephant than a garden shed. Inside, on the floor, are 16 record players arranged geometrically. The space can be traversed via a raised walkway, and above hangs a similar arrangement of simple music boxes fed by punched paper scrolls. The entire structure has been delicately synchronised to perform as a giant music box a croaky and dulcet love song originally recorded by the artist’s grandfather, who sings “It’s June in January because I’m in love.” There’s something inherently creepy about those lyrics when we know that the dead man’s song was recorded in the southern hemisphere, probably in the suburbs of Melbourne, but in Berlin the covertly morbid implication is contradicted by the high summer outside the gallery. Instead of really listening to the lyrics, we find ourselves sort of fascinated by the precision with which the voice flutters first from one corner of the room to another, and the tidiness with which the various simple analogue instruments are orchestrated with each other, although the illusion of rudimentary technology is dispelled when we learn that the entire system is computer controlled and the music boxes are fitted with optical sensors.

Skip forward a couple of days to the launch of Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani’s new films to a packed audience at the Volksbühne on Rosa Luxemburg Platz.

In 1956, Alain Resnais made a short film on the Bibliothèque Nationale, a loving architectural homage to the building as reservoir of all the knowledge in the world, as an archive and simultaneously as a sort of power station driven by thoughts. Fifty years on, Fischer and el Sani show a split screen film of the same building. Now, due to the relocation of the collection, it’s an abandoned space as thoroughly decommissioned as Battersea Powerstation, and queerly reminiscent of it. There’s a melancholy to the slow dolly shots that scan ranks of unoccupied desks and empty bookshelves, sharpened by Patrick Catani’s (who has collaborated in the past with Sydney’s System Corrupt) haunting soundtrack, that buzzes and blisters across the room like a geiger counter accompanying a picnic in Chernobyl. The film is more like the documentation of an abandoned space station than an institutional critique in the style of Candida Höfer, and so in hindsight it should have been no surprise to see this work paired with a recreation of the most famous scene in Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), this time shot in an abandoned radio hall in East Berlin, and accompanied by live music by Robert Lippok and Johann von Schubert.

In spite of the extraordinary strength of these works, along with persuasive installations by Kris Vleschouwer, Julian Rosefeldt and Candice Breitz, there is an impression that the festival lacks the depth and breadth of its forerunner a decade ago. Pippilotti Rist’s musical collaboration with Gudrun Gut seems haphazardly installed, as if the artist didn’t have the time to carry out the installation herself; Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s work had already been exhibited as a solo show at Kunsthaus Bregrenz in 2005. And there were some dubious curatorial decisions—such as the wall of footballs that vainly tried to tie the exhibition in to the frenzy of the World Cup.

Sonambiente Berlin 2006, directors Matthias Osterwold, Georg Weckwerth; Akademie der Kunste and other venues, Berlin, June 1-16, www.sonambiente.net

The Elision ensemble’s 20th birthday offering was presented in Brisbane, Sydney and on ABC Classic FM in a concert of Australian works, each exhilarating, challenging and consistently realised in virtuosic performances from various permutations of the ensemble in partnership with musicians from Germany, USA, France and Finland.

Chris Dench’s Agni-Prometheus-Lucifer (2006) for a 15-strong ensemble, celebrates the immortals, those figures in mythology (Vedic, Greek, Christian) who are neither humans nor gods and are variously associated with fire and light. In his program note and a brief talk at the concert, Dench noted the key role of percussion in the 10 works he’s created for Elision and embodied in the playing of Peter Neville. This new work commences with a carefully phrased percussion passage suddenly joined by the disparate voices of the ensemble who just as quickly become one. The violin takes the lead, lyrically but quietly, firmly in the body of the ensemble, the first of many voices to rise up, either gently or impatiently and passionately. A series of crises follow, perhaps indicative of the aspirations and the failures of the work’s subjects, or their overwhelming luminescence, interspersed with passages of transcendent delicacy figured in a warbling recorder or, finally, in a delicate entwining of flute and violin against quietly shimmering percussion—a fading of the light. Was it a settling for something less than immortality, or simply acknowledgment of the beauty of the quest for transcendence?

John Rodgers’ Amor (1999/2006), for “intertwined flute (Paula Rael) and oboe (Peter Veale)”, as the program notes put it, made its first appearance in Elision’s spectacular realisation of the composer’s Inferno in a Port Adelaide warehouse at the 2000 Adelaide Festival. The 70-minute work with large-scale instrumental forces fused concert with installation, climaxing with flautist and oboist playing instruments made of ice that melted their way to the work’s conclusion. Here the 2 instruments are real and remain intact, but once again the music expresses the painfully enforced togetherness of Francesca da Rimini and lover Paulo for eternity in Dante’s vision of the Inferno—simply for the sin of lust. The score demands seriously entwined playing, much of it quite theatrical and suggesting a passionate dialogue, furiously paced and full-bodied as bursts of breath, sighs and whispers are wrung from the players and their instruments. The musicians read from the same score, playing cheek by jowl until, facing each other, the flute finds its way into the mouth of the oboe. The final sustained, quietening notes suggest perhaps a post-orgasmic escape from torment, just as the melting of the ice instruments in the installation version seemed to propose release from a hell that was, after all, only a cold religious conceit. Whatever its dialectic, Amor stood on its own as an entrancing, dramatic duet.

Timothy O’Dwyer’s Gravity (2006) for solo improvising saxophone and oboe, trumpet, percussion and viola, gave us the remarkable playing of UK saxophonist John Butcher. Here is a player with a truly distinctive voice combining purity with power, forming utterly distinctive crystalline aural shapes and earthed guttural rumblings, sustaining and working them for long periods without recourse to the frantic gearshifts common to many inheritors of bebop and improvising traditions. O’Dwyer adroitly places Butcher’s improvisational language within his own compositional framework, allowing freedom for the soloist against scored and semi-improvisational responses from the ensemble. After a quiet percussive opening that aptly (for a work titled Gravity) entailed the clatter of dropped mallets, Butcher’s tenor sax fluttered its way breathily into high, sustained notes. The oboe warbled with a Middle-Eastern cadence, the percussionist’s wire brushes swiped the air, the viola slipped into a deep glide and a drum roll presaged the entry of full bodied sax play, a mellow gurgling morphing into staccato phrasing and, over the oboe’s ‘kissy kissy’ outburst, sailing into the stratosphere. In brief, the ensuing episodes yielded a wonderful totality of soloist and ensemble sounds. In the final movements, enhanced by trumpet, the sound world opened out even further, the saxophone evoking horns both French and fog, the cosmos vibrating to flights of percussion and Butcher’s ethereal playing. Gravity, as O’Dwyer’s program note reminds us, is not just about things that fall, but “the ‘tendency’ of 2 objects of mass to accelerate towards each other.” Gravity’s strength is not only in the anti-gravitational push of Butcher’s playing and the rich moments of freefall, but in the push and pull between soloist and ensemble—subject to the score and to the less predictable forces of players and conductor, all given the freedom to improvise. Gravity was an engrossingly vertiginous experience.

The major work of the concert was Liza Lim’s Mother Tongue in its Australian premiere after a first performance at the 2005 Festival d’Automne in Paris where it was performed by Ensemble InterContemporain, co-commissioner of the work with the festival and Elision. Written for soprano (the Finnish artist Piia Komis, who also sang in Paris), 15 instruments and a text by Melbourne poet Patricia Sykes, Mother Tongue is an ambitious work, metaphysically and musically. Lim told her Sydney audience that she’d been inspired by a linguist friend who had worked on the revival of the Indigenous Yorta Yorta language of north-eastern Victoria. The connection of language to the land and its expression of intimate human relationships are central to both the poem and Lim’s music. As she foretold, the instruments whisper and sing with the soprano in Mother Tongue. They certainly do—language and music are as one.

The complex, imagistic poem with its English text and 5 words taken from other languages celebrates language but also fears its destruction, portraying it ecologically, subject to the forces of nature, economics and politics (a poetic companion to Louis-Jean Calvert’s Towards an Ecology of World Languages, Polity Press, 2006). But musically, where Lim has a great capacity to make words dance, the work reminds us of possible origins of language in song and movement (as argued by Stephen Mithen in The Singing Neanderthals, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2005). Piia Komis is called on to mine every aspect of her vocal capacity, committing herself to it with passion and remarkable precision. Lim’s writing suggests a pre-language requiring Komis to leap from Sykes’ words into howls, yips, growls, sudden pitch shifts and huge glides, from guttural surges into bird trills and pure soprano flights. Mother Tongue is above all dramatic, operatic even, an expression of a great range of feeling both restrained (passages of serene beauty, especially in the glorious 3rd movement with its opening sea imagery and ‘boy soprano’ voice from Komsi) and unleashed (Lim knows how to make a chamber ensemble sound like a full orchestra and Komsi knows how to ride with and over it). As ever, Lim’s orchestration is utterly distinctive, whether eerily plumbing the sonic depths or creating waves of percussion that rattle like rain or sing like talk.

Mother Tongue is a magnificent work, and as demanding as you would expect from Lim. Absorbing it in one sitting is simply impossible, and even after several listenings, thanks to excellent ABC Classic FM streaming, there is much to assimilate. For a work about language and nurturance, the first 2 movements are often fiercely vigorous, exploring every dynamic of voice and ensemble. I keep returning to the 3rd movement, Longitude of Loss, where Sykes writes and Komsi sings, “my oar is my tongue”, and the work ends quietly with the plangent, “I am hanging by my mother tongue.”

The job of corraling Elision’s birthday riches into one wonderful gift fell to conductor Jean Deroyer, a regular with the great Ensemble InterContemporain and an ideal interpreter. No piece was less than demanding and Deroyer and the ensemble played as one, showing off every work at its best.

Mother Tongue, Elision 20th Birthday Concert, Verbrugghen Hall, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, June 11

Clockwise from top left: Kevin Blechdom, Singing Sadie, Suicidal Rap Orgy, Justice Yeldam

My last tax-deductible expense for 2005-2006 was the entrance fee to record label and twisted empire DualpLOVER’s End of Financial Year Party (although I didn’t think it appropriate to ask for a receipt). The event not only celebrated the turning of pages on a ledger but also 10 years of survival for this most independent of independent labels.

Over the years DualpLOVER has had 31 releases, their artist stable including Garry Bradbury, Sweden, Alternahunk, The Funky Terrorists, Singing Sadie, Nora Keyes, Toxic Lipstic, Suicidal Rap Orgy and Abela’s various manifestations. The label covers a schizophrenic mix of styles ranging from electronica, hiphop, folk and noise to some completely ineffable genres. On top of this DualpLOVER also includes a brokerage for CD and DVD duplication and print production. But it all began in 1994 with the recording of Lucas Abela’s beloved Kombi. Its dodgy wiring amplified any noise made in the van via the stereo. After spontaneous driving concerts he decided to record it. But no one seemed to want to put it out…

Lucas Abela: I showed it to the local experimental labels back then which were mostly in Melbourne—Dorobo and Extreme—but they weren’t really on the same tangent I was aesthetically or musically and I don’t think they really understood what the A Kombi album was. Many people still don’t understand the importance of the A Kombi record [laughs]. But 2 years later Damian released the Hiss album. It was a bit of an inspiration to me so I forked out the money and put out A Kombi and got some really good feedback. The first people to write back to me were Gregg Turkington from Amarillo Records, a mentor label to me, Merzbow and Yamataka Eye. Banana Fish magazine, which is like the noise music bible, wrote back to me for an interview and ended up doing a 12 page spread. So I decided to make a proper go of the label. At that point Swerve approached me…

Swerve: I’d just got back from overseas and I moved into a house with Lucas. I was in a noise band called the Burning Spastics. In the 90s we used to play at the Waterloo Tavern to about 3 people on average. I had to clean out my bank account to get on the dole so I said to Lucas, why don’t I chuck all this money in and I could be the shifty silent partner-slash-financial backer. And then we put out Alternahunk. It was around that time that we started the brokerage…

LA: Initially we just wanted to consolidate labels. There was Sigma Editions, and Jerker Productions with Oren [Ambarchi] were just starting up. I was doing Rebirth of Fool 1 and Peeled Hearts Paste, so we thought let’s put all those jobs into the factory at once and get a cheaper price…I guess news of that spread and more people started asking us and then we started doing things overseas. The CD and DVD brokerage side of the business has come to offset the label side of the business so that we feel we can take more risks in releasing music we are interested in.

First we released bigger overseas acts like Merzbow and Yamataka Eye who I love dearly but who [now] I don’t feel I need to promote. As a label I am more interested in things nobody knows about, bringing new things into the world.

S: They’re not some carbon copy of something else. Sometimes they are trying to be something else but they’re just not and that’s pretty cool.

LA: Acts that have a certain sense of otherness to them. They don’t really fit in with the scene generally. I like things that sit outside movements, or even if they are in a movement they are a step aside of it. They are doing something new with it, or they’re trying to fit in but they can’t.

How much does shock value play in it—what is the ratio of shock value to sound?

LA: Depends if it works with the act. Suicidal Rap Orgy is pretty much the most shocking act we’ve put out—penises on stage, wanking, the most revolting lyrics you can possibly think of…

LA: Quite disgusting debauchery. But we didn’t pick it for its shock value. I just thought it was funny. The reason I was attracted to Suicidal Rap Orgy is because there was nothing else like it. There still isn’t!

S: The most shocking thing at any of our gigs is the audience. People get so fucked up… they go berserk… all manner of chaos and the feeling that we’ve totally lost control, just whipped them in to a frenzy.

S: It’s uncharted waters. People can’t find anything to cling onto and go, ‘Ah this is like a rock gig where I stand there and rock on my heels, this is somewhere where I go and dance, or this is somewhere where I sit on the floor and listen.’

LA: I think we’ve got an intelligent audience as well. In terms of experimental or new musics in Australia, we put on the only shows that are highly visually entertaining and I guess that, as well as the audio being really good, brings a new dimension to the way they react to a show. I always try and book colossal line-ups. A gig is a festival to me.

S: The very, very far future, the end, will come when one of us dies, ‘cause we’re both stubborn…I’ve started organising this zine fair along with a guy from the Goulburn Poultry Fanciers. It’s 2 fairs old now, but with the next one I want to put on a drive-in theatre and, if that works out, then we’ll start having a short film festival…

LA: Rebirth of Fool 4 is going to be a DVD, so people can send strange, weird footage to us, found footage.

S: A CD-R label as well. Instead of doing 500 runs of the more accessible music that we release (laughs) we could do short order CD-R runs.

LA: We’ve just published Swerve’s zine, probably doing more zines and publishing. I’ve made one film. I want to make more films…whatever we do creatively will be done as DualpLOVER, so it’s not just a label it’s a family of businesses.

In the near future we’ve got the Kevin Blechdom tour. She’s a singer songwriter [USA] with electronic backing and banjo and keyboard accompaniment and one of the best shows that I’ve seen. Really good songs. If she wasn’t on Chicks on Speed I’d sign her in a second…she’s doing electronic music so differently to everyone else.

As an afterthought, I emailed the lads about how they saw the future of music, with the rapid development of MP3 download culture.

S: I think downloadable MP3s are probably only around 5-10 years off as far as taking the majority market share. But during the transition I think people are going to be doing shorter runs at home on CD-R to begin with and moving up to the 500 minimum for pressed CDs. This is for the market we work in, which is pretty small.

LA: It’s hard to say. Some people will always want a tangible product but that mindset is quickly disappearing with a new generation of kids raised on downloads.

The future of music is, as always, live music. That can’t be downloaded so we’ll keep moving into touring acts and promoting as well as doing the label, which may become completely digital one day soon.

Kevin Blechdom is presented in association with Straight Out of Brisbane (SOOB) and, August-September, will be touring Brisbane, Lismore, Newcastle, Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Wagga, Wagga, Medlow Bath, Wollongong and Canberra supported by various dualpLOVER artists including Justice Yeldam (Abela). www.dualpLOVER.com

Rob Muir and I are standing on his front porch before what looks like a gigantic, buffed metal loud-hailer, over one metre tall. He can’t remember what this soon to be installed giant is officially titled, so we nickname it “the proboscis” (we later establish that it will be called transMUTE when it’s set up at the new East Victoria Park Station, due to open 2008). There is a strange gurgling echoing through its depths, then Rob claps sharply in front of it and it goes silent… “Reset”, Muir explains. I lean forward and scratch on the point of its central protrusion, tap around the amplifying cone and speak harshly to it. My voice comes back to me as high speed bird twitters and chipmunk talk and the same sequence is repeated in big, slow, bassy waves, rumbling within the profundity of the cone and its associated sub-woofer.

transMUTE is the latest in a line of collaborations authored by Muir—here with sculptor Stuart Green and programmer Dave Primmer. The list of Muir’s associates is impressive. He’s worked several times with ruined piano maestro Ross Bolleter. His recent pieces with Cat Hope under the moniker of Metaphonica have extended the aesthetic possibilities of the mobile phone while in 1989 he produced with Rainer Linz one of the many radiophonic programs he has put together over the years for organisations such as WA University’s 6UVS-FM (now RTR-FM). Muir has also collaborated with various performance artists, as in his 1993 piece with Mike Nanning at PICA, Wigwam For a Goose’s Bridle, in which various electrical devices were ‘played’ using a dimmable lighting board, much as one would play an electronic piano—only here engine whirls, clicks and flashes of lamplight made up the ‘notes.’ In 2003, Muir also contributed a selection of audio grabs as inspiration and accompaniment for the improvised performance, Rest In Silence, by performer Tony Osborne at the Blue Room Theatre.

With output ranging from theatre scores to rock band recordings, and the early years of Evos New Music (now Tura Music Events), Muir’s work is difficult to categorise. Musician Cat Hope initially introduced Muir to me as a “sound archivist”, and this seems a fair characterisation. While he no longer works with the extremely detailed tape cut-ups for which he was renowned in the 1980s, he retains a passion for unearthing lost or hidden sound universes. Like Bolleter’s work with aged, neglected instruments—which Muir composed into an evocative, melancholy sound world on their CD, The Night Moves on Little Feet (1999)—he still seeks the neglected, the old and the marginal from which he crafts recordings that are at once novel and yet rich with the sonic and emotional patina of time and space. For example in New Teeth for the Mrs (2003), a piece composed for Club Zho, Muir provided melodramatic musical accompaniments such as one might have heard on daytime TV to an edited audio letter originally recorded in a 1960s home and which Rob had found on an old reel-to-reel tape player. Suffusing this odd and sadly ironic little study is the sense of the absence and presence of the aged couple who are documented on the recording, and their unfulfilled longing for immediate communication with their physically distant children for whom they are composing the tape. One catches glimpses of the family, of intense feuds never fully resolved, but whose details remain opaque, lost in the mists of time and in the airwaves—much as the couple who made the recording have themselves now disappeared from this mortal, aural coil.

Rob Muir’s sourcing of the sonic marginalia of contemporary life is not however purely historicist. His project is also social and spatial. In 2001, for example, he entered the at times alarming world of kids who passed through the suburban Community Centre of East Victoria Park. This included not only children enjoying nearby sports equipment, but also street kids, youth gangs and other groups. The artist collaborated with this community to collect recordings for use in an installation entitled Giving the Kids a Voice. The final work featured a selection of randomised compositions played through a set of headphones located near the community centre. The result is a truly amazing selection of highly processed, distorted and seriously thumping bass beats, hip-hop rhymes, youthful play and sometimes disturbing conversations (in which one unidentified young woman notes that she, her mother, her sister and her best friend are all currently pregnant—but that in 2 days she would not be pregnant anymore). Muir’s moulding of gleeful beat-boxing, masculine posing, and discussions of the aesthetics and dangers of tagging and graffiti creates a hard sound realm of ridicule, threat, urbanism and angry, pleasurable vigour. While Muir concedes that it was not easy to get the kids to talk to him, various strategies—such as placing the earphones onto his subjects’ heads so that they could hear his distortion tricks and other effects to render them anonymous or amusing—enabled him to overcome their resistance.

Muir cites as a particular highlight of recent years his 2002 collaboration with Alex Hayes, Project 44, temporarily installed at Mount Magnet, WA. The piece featured 20 44-gallon drums fitted with speakers that resonated with a range of field recordings and sound art referring to the containers’ histories (industrial noises, oily, glutinous exclamations, gentler watery plashing and so on). Though sonically and musically complex, Muir was particularly satisfied with an incidental phenomenon whereby the vibrations within the drums meant that any dust, sand or dew lying on the lids created intricate, often apparently gravity-defying patterns changing as the compositions played. Many audience members camping at the site brought their children over to observe this entrancing, early morning dance of moisture and grit.

It is a strangely visual anecdote coming from Muir who otherwise insists that sound artists should prioritise the sonic over the visual. But it is indicative of this artist’s embracing, holistic approach. Whether working with other artists or with audiences, Rob Muir remains committed to producing multi-disciplinary work that is rich with the emotional, spatial and sonic fullness of a parallel world, complete with its own memories, patterns and terrestrial tremors.

transMUTE, sound/concept: Rob Muir, sculpture Stuart Green, programming Dave Primmer; main platform, East Victoria Park Station, from 2008

There is a new and vibrant energy boiling in the underbelly of the Melbourne art scene, repositioning the body with the political. It has been on the rise for sometime with artists such as Catherine Bell, Andrew Atchison, Ash Keating, Alex Martinis Roe, Penny Trotter and Sarah Lynch reigniting the powerful medium of performance art.

The evening of Thursday July 7 was an important night. This energy seemed to be in the air with a powerful and brave performance by Timothy Kendall Edser at West Space and Danielle Freakley’s one night project, We Must Support Ourselves, at Spacement Gallery where she strategically exhibited the artists with their art.

Edser’s Tension 10, part of a series of performance based works, transformed West Space into a New York-style gallery with stark fluorescent lights cast over a large white catwalk-cum-plinth in the centre of the room and partitioned by a wall in the middle. At the far end of one side Edser stood completely still, wearing only underwear, vulnerable, facing the wall.

It was immediately interesting to observe a typically conservative Melbourne audience navigate their way around the artist whose simple act made people huddle at the back of the room or cling to the gallery edges in small groups. There was a sense of anticipation. As in the works of Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Mike Parr and Clinton Nain, the mere presence of the human body generated a potent energy.

Edser appeared like a Ron Mueck figure and as the evening progressed he seemed to assume an even more sculptural presence. Then at 7 o’clock, having remained absolutely still for over an hour, he ran towards the wall dividing the plinth and with 2 charges forced his body through the barrier to the other side.

As he lay shivering in the rubble of his own construction, the gathering stood in silent shock unable to establish an appropriate response to something more than a performance. Edser had obviously injured himself. His back was scratched, and he appeared to be in a state of physical and mental trauma. The documentation of the performance is held at Westspace, however the real art of the performance—the narrowing of space between work and creator, between vulnerable performer and awkward audience—had already been realised.

News of the death this month of Bronwyn Oliver saddened us deeply. The enigmatic work of this artist always surprised and inspired. (Bruce James once called her “Queen of the Uncanny”). Though she was prolific her sculptures took time to emerge and appeared on our radar intermittently. It was always a particular pleasure to come upon a new piece, or one we hadn’t seen before, to feel the antigravitational pull of her organic shapes, the perfect combination of delicacy and strength inherent in the eerily familiar objects she made, like missives from nature itself. Though we had hoped to meet her but never did, in 1991 for Writers in Recital (curated by Martin Harrison and Jonathan Mills) we came close. In a performance entitled Small Talk in Big Rooms we created a misguided tour for an audience on the move interacting with some of the contemporary works on display in the Art Gallery of NSW. At one point, we came upon Bronwyn Oliver’s Unicorn and though it appeared both fragile and forbidding, we felt compelled to approach and then to lie alongside it, to enter its powerful force-field.

An exhibition of Bronwyn Oliver’s work is currently showing at Roslyn Oxley Gallery, Paddington until Sept 2. www.roslynoxley9.com

Art Basel is the largest and richest art fair in the world, a weeklong face-off amongst prestige galleries in the cavernous halls of the Basel convention centre. It’s an obligatory appointment for collectors and dealers, very much the business end of the art market. However aside from all of the dour deal making of the central fair, Art Basel offers some extraordinary secondary events. Art Unlimited is a subsection of Art Basel that specialises in unusual, outsize and complex works. It provides a forum for works too ambitious to be accommodated in the small booths that fill the exhibition hall, and caters to a different sort of customer: the public institutions that can purchase an installation of, say, 12 x 8 metres that generates as much noise as a small building site and has energy requirements that are measured in kilowatts. Also, unlike the main fair, Art Unlimited is curated as a stand alone exhibition, so that the large works ‘communicate’ with each other, as curators like to say, rather than simply jostling for attention. This year’s Art Unlimited comprised work by 74 artists from 26 countries and was curated by Simon Lamuniére.
Martin Kersel, Tumble Room (2001)

The absence of constraint and the desire to create a spectacle turn Art Unlimited into a sort of amusement park for middle class adults. It’s crowd pleasing stuff: as the Danish scandal artist Kristian von Hornsleth said, “Unlimited is cool. We sense the budgets and the freedom attached.” The fairground impression is reinforced by the monumental entrance provided by German artist Julius Popp’s Bit.fall (2006). Bit.fall is an interrupted waterfall in which short streams of water are precisely released via electronic gates so that letters are formed, printed onto open air. Words and phrases tumble down: “Airbus Execs fear Investigation”, “Peace hopes for Iraq.” The content was fed live from Internet news sites. Popp has effectively created the world’s largest and wettest news ticker.

Not quite as big, but louder and at the centre of the hall stood Martin Kersel’s Tumble Room (2001), a typical Californian bedroom for a teenage girl, a space of pink walls, posters and innocuous furniture. What sets this bedroom apart is that it is set in a large circular steel frame mounted on industrial ball bearings. The entire structure spins around its horizontal axis: the floor and the ceiling sickeningly and lurchingly swap roles. It moves slowly at first, so that the teenage girl who inhabits it can clamber about—as an associated video attests—but then faster and faster. By the end of the exhibition the piece seemed to have more to do with the trapped violence of Chris Burden’s The Big Wheel (1979) than Alice through the Looking Glass—the imperfectly glued down furnishings had long since broken free of their moorings and smashed each other to kindling, turned glass into shards, tore posters to shreds. The work had effectively destroyed itself, a concrete mixer full of the refuse of family life. The piece takes itself to its own logical conclusion, starting as the embodiment of a child’s fantasy of the inversion of the everyday through to a nightmarishly literal illustration of the parental exaggeration: hey, it looks like a bomb has gone off in here.

Off to one side I enter an unmarked entrance, because the weird schadenfreude of the people staring at the trashed bedroom is giving me the creeps. A mistake. Douglas Gordon won the Turner Prize in 1996 for doing spooky work and it has gotten spookier. Black Star (2002) is a darkened hall punctuated geometrically by fluorescent tubes giving out ultraviolet light, so that, not for the first time in a gallery, we feel like we are wandering in an abandoned space station. Our teeth glow and our dandruff shimmers. Other lingering visitors give us blinding Cheshire Cat smiles. Over the top we hear Gordon read from the gothic novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (James Hogg, 1824), a tale of schizophrenic breakdown or satanic possession, depending on your point of view, recited in a mordant Scottish brogue. Is this futuristic archaeology, are we aliens investigating the ritual beliefs of 19th century Protestants? We didn’t know, but we liked it.

Luca Pancrazzi’s extraordinary Il paesaggio ci osserva (2006) (which according to the whimsy of catalogue babelfish translates to “the landscape observes to us”) reminded me of how much I’ve always admired men who play with train sets. A blank doorway leads us into a maze punctuated by a couple of surveillance monitors showing a blurry, nondescript landscape. A couple more turns and at the centre of the maze we discover a model city built at eye level. The miniature town is bisected by a river, and on one side what appears to be an industrial estate is made entirely of old computer components that, when arrayed in rows, provide an impeccable precinct of Bauhaus and international style structures. On the other side of the river is an old city composed of typewriter and linotype parts, set off by the frob of an IBM golf ball printer suggesting the dome of an urban nuclear power plant squeezed in amongst the slate roofs of a 19th century central European city. We leer over this landscape like Godzillas, delighted by the simplicity and inventiveness of the diorama, and it is only then that the security monitors make sense. They are filming the city. I almost run back to look, only to see a shadow of movement above the town. The cameras themselves are embedded in the city, but so small that they are almost impossible to find: presumably medical cameras, endoscopes—the things used for colonoscopy. It was as if the journey through the maze had made me bigger, much bigger, and here I was, looming like a giant predatory reptile over a terrified Lego town. Oh, what art does to us.

Romeo Castellucci's Societas Raffaello Sanzio has astonished Australian festival audiences, lovers of contemporary performance above all, with Giulio Cesare in Adelaide and Perth in 2000 and Genesi, from the museum of sleep in Melbourne in 2002. The company is returning to Australia for the 2006 Melbourne International Arts Festival, bringing with it the unique opportunity to see films of the whole cycle of Castellucci's most recent work and to hear him speak about it at the end of the Sydney screenings at NIDA and in Melbourne at ACMI.

In “Castellucci: theatre of remnants” (RT66, p37), Max Lyandvert wrote that “in 2001 Societas Raffaello Sanzio embarked on a major new project, a cycle of 11 episodes/productions called Tragedia Endogonidia, an open system of representation that, like an organism, changes and evolves with time and geography, with the name ‘Episode’ assigned to each phase of its transformation. This system forces a radical re-thinking not only of creation, but also of the whole theatrical system. The aim is to represent a tragedy of the future….Tragedia Endogonidia has developed over a period of 3 years with a total of 11 episodes in 10 European cities, each an interdependent episode but a complete production in itself. …Tragedia Endogonidia connects with each city where the work is presented, the focus being on the tragic remnants of the community’s relationship with life on Earth, and even the possibilities of a future on a new world.” The 10 cities are Cesena, Avignon, Berlin, Brussels, Bergen, Paris, Rome, Strasbourg, London and Marseilles.

The makers of Tragedia Endogonidia film cycle, Video memory, Cristiano Carloni and Stefano Franceschetti studied animation and painting in Urbino. Since 1993 they have been working together in the field of electronic arts by making videos and video-installations. They have said that they are not out to document Castellucci's vision but have used their “digital marquetry technique” to capture the essence of the work, “to create other objects of contemplation.” They have been described as involving Castellucci's works in their videos “by means of an artisan technique very similar to [using] the chisel: every single frame passes under their hands in order to be carved and assembled.” The films stand on their own but also serve as a document of a remarkable series of creations.

Max Lyandvert tackles the difficult task of describing the effect of Castellucci's work when he writes: “The arresting power of the imagery and the sound of Castellucci's theatre invites rich psycho-emotional reaction, happily bypassing rationalism, plunging the viewer into a space which is at once foreign and familiar, a space which is a type of core, a fundamental where the intellect and the senses are neutralised.”

Sydney performer Jeff Stein (who has worked with Max Lyandvert and others on their performance collaboration, Ilya in Castellucci's studio) has formed a partnership between Performance Space, RealTime, NIDA, UNSW Media Film & Theatre and the Italian Institute of Culture in Sydney to bring the films and Castellucci himself to Sydney with the support of the Melbourne International Festival of Arts.

Although many members of Sydney’s performance community will make the pilgrimage to Melbourne to see the Brussels episode of Tragedia Endogonidia, here’s an opportunity to immerse yourself in the epic cycle to which it belongs. RT

Tragedia Endogonidia, video memory by Cristiano Carloni and Stefano Franceschetti, music Scott Gibbons, director Romeo Castellucci, Societas Raffaello Sanzio,
www.raffaellosanzio.org, Parade Theatre, NIDA, 215 Anzac Pde, Kensington; Session 1 (Films 1-6), Thurs Oct 5, 7pm; Session 2 (Films 7-11), Fri Oct 6, 7pm,; Sat Oct 8, 8pm, Romeo Castellucci talk

The abandonment of David Hicks & social democracy

As we go to print Nigel Jamieson’s Honour Bound is premiering at the Sydney Opera House as part of its innovative Adventures in the Dark program. The quest for national security as part of the ‘war on terror’ has become an excuse for a radical reduction in human rights by governments around the world, most blatantly in the case of the US incarceration of David Hicks. Consequently, Hicks has become a living symbol of what could happen to any citizen given the draconian nature of Australia’s anti-terror legislation, and that includes the special place it holds for journalists, cartoonists and artists, all less than assured by John Howards’ ‘Trust me.’ Australian artists of many kinds and in many media have kept their audiences alert to the issues pertaining to refugees, political spin and the escalating erosion of social democracy. Filmmaker Curtis Levy’s documentary The President versus David Hicks has been widely seen. Now writer-director-designer Nigel Jamieson, with ADT’s Garry Stewart, sound designer Paul Charlier, video artist Scott Otto Anderson and co-designer Nick Dare, brings a mutimedia performance perspective to one man’s plight and the ramifications for social democracy.

ARTIST [AS] EDUCATOR

Our 2006 Education and the Arts feature is revealing about the advantages and the tensions embodied in the dual roles of artist and teacher in tertiary arts education. Some of the artist-teachers interviewed by our writers see themselves as artists first who enjoy teaching and the benefits it brings (contact with students, academic networks, salaries, paid research). Others who started out as artists have become full-time teachers but have managed to take time out to pursue artistic projects to regain a sense of wholeness and authenticity. Most don’t see the artist and teacher roles as exclusive, after all some make art within the university with student and staff collaborators and they find their practice-led research deeply satisfying—that’s if they can secure it and if not swamped by increasing bureaucratic responsibilities. There is also a feeling that in institutions and departments that are producing the practising artists of the future it is vital that students have at least some contact with artist-teachers who work beyond the university. Teachers in dance and film, in particular, emphasise their up to date knowledge of the field and the contacts they can provide students.

A recurrent theme in our survey is the importance of research, respondents feeling that it’s where they can sustain their practice while teaching and fulfil their obligations as academics. Not surprisingly the balancing act metaphor frequently comes into play, but it’s not just between being an artist and a teacher, but a 3-way creative tension between artist, teacher and researcher. The pressure is on universities and government to recognise artistic practice as research and not just in postgraduate degrees but as part of the teachers’ ongoing academic life. Another interesting dimension to this issue was raised in the articles on the artist-teacher in new media art and film. Pat Laughren observed that film schools have increasingly become the home for sustained practice of documentary film making. Despite proliferating, as many articles in this edition attest, new media art is going through a hard time on a number of fronts. While artist-teachers have played a key role in its development, Christy Dena sees the university more than ever as a vital home for the field.

Unleashing art as research: SPIN

In 2005 our education feature, Postgrad [R]evolution, focused on creative doctorates and practice-led research degrees, revealing the challenges to traditional academic notions of research, problems of assessment and resources, but also the joy of having one’s work recognised for the knowledge it provides the world. In this edition, QUT’s Richard Vella announces the launch of SPIN (Speculation and Innovation: Applying practice led research in the Creative Industries) in collaboration with RealTime (p10). SPIN is an online, peer-reviewed journal that includes papers and artworks and is aimed at giving a public profile and much deserved credibility to artists whose research will develop their own and inform the practice of others globally.

Margot Nash’s new feature film, Call Me Mum, premiered at the 2006 Sydney Film Festival. Nash is one of the filmmakers who appears in Tina Kaufman’s contribution to our feature in this edition on the artist as educator (p17). She lectures in screenwriting at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS).

Nash started out as an actor in theatre and television, moved into photography and then cinematography and editing in the independent film sector. She’s made short films and documentaries and in 1994 she wrote and directed the feature film Vacant Possession. With Pamela Rabe in the lead role, this intense film about race and dispossession premiered at the 1995 Sydney Film Festival and was nominated for Best Directing and Best Original Screenplay in the AFI awards that year. From 1996 to 2001 Nash ran documentary workshops in the Pacific for Island women.

Engagingly intimate, Call Me Mum requires its audience to listen as attentively as it looks as a string of interlocking monologues addressed to camera unfold, alternating between locations: an aeroplane cabin, a hospital ward and a suburban home. The audience becomes confidante for the protagonists, but in discretely different ways for each of them.

Nash sticks adroitly to her formula—the protagonists never come face to face. We glean meaning from their recollections and expectations, overlapping narratives and symbolic parallels, for example around the word ‘mum.’ Even on the plane mother and stepson sit separately, occasionally glancing in each other’s direction, refusing to answer yelled slights.

Kate (Catherine McClements), white and formerly a nurse, and foster son, 18-year old Warren (Dayne Christian), are on a plane to Brisbane. He’s determined to be returned to his Torres Strait Island mother, Flo (Vicki Saylor), but risks being seized by the state and institutionalised. Kate rescued him from one such place when he was a child and condemned as irredeemably brain-damaged. She gives him a life for which, with his tunnel vision, wicked wit and abrasive sociability, he is never grateful, announcing to a TV news show that Kate stole him.

Kate addresses us frankly and assertively; she has nothing to hide, neither her love for Warren nor her anger at his betrayal. She is determined to keep him free. However, she is caught between Warren’s fantasy of reuniting with his real mother and her struggle with her own parents, Dellmay (Lynette Curran) and Keith (Ross Thompson), who live in a fantasy world of conservative righteousness (which has no place for familial loyalties).

If the aeroplane cabin looks real enough, Dellmay and Keith’s home is all floral prints and pastel lighting, cozy and self-contained, though there are moments of pained reflection and bickering over social class and bog Irish origins as well as dismay at their “mad” daughter’s adoption of Warren.

Meanwhile, Flo, propped up in a hospital bed gradually and quietly reveals to us the appalling story behind Warren’s condition, growing more honest as she goes, admitting guilt over years of alcoholism and sexual betrayal. There are moments of respite as she sings songs from her island home. She hopes to bond with Kate, to offer her a sea shell symbol of sisterhood, though she fears she will be once again be seen as ‘that rubbish.’ Finally, the hospital room around her turns lushly tropical as she yearns for her birthplace. But does the son she’s not seen since he was a baby have any place in this fantasy? Even if he does, we have just witnessed the conclusion to his journey, a nightmarish vision out of David Lynch, a cinematic jolt that removes us momentarily and shockingly from our intimate attentiveness and the pleasant cutaways to tropical island waters.

The writer of Call Me Mum is Kathleen Mary Fallon. An adventurous practitioner in experimental fiction and writing for performance, Fallon wrote the bracing, feminist novel Working Hot which won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for New Writing in 1989. Her opera, Matricide—the Musical, with composer Elena Kats Chernin, was produced by Chamber Made Opera in 1998 and in the same year a concert work for which she wrote the text, Laquiem—Tales from the Mourning of the Lac Women, was produced, composed and directed by Andrée Greenwell and performed at The Studio, Sydney Opera House. Fallon teaches writing in the Department of English at the University of Melbourne.

Fallon originally wrote Call Me Mum as a stage play, the much workshopped but unproduced Buy-back: Three Boongs in the Kitchen based on Fallon’s 30-year experience as the foster mother of a disabled Torres Strait Islander boy. The tough content and Fallon’s penchant for the surreal and the overtly political seemed to have scared off directors and producers. What was next intended as a set of 4 discrete monologues based on the same material for SBSi thankfully became a feature film in which Fallon’s vision has been subtly shaped by Nash’s own, closing in on the characters and defining their realities through Andrew de Groot’s camera and Patrick Reardon’s production design and their carefully scaled gradation of these worlds from the real to the almost illusory. This nuancing is inherent in the writing, in Kate and Warren’s stubborn directness, Flo’s lyrical, confessional musing and the bitterly and wickedly funny dueting of Dellmay and Keith.

The performers handle the language more than ably with Christian and Saylor excelling and Curran and Thompson capturing the curious poetry of righteousness with admirable restraint (Thompson’s “not sorry” tirade is both in writing and performance unnervingly beyond satire). McClements has the hardest job, the plainest and most expository text and, in delivery, sometimes borders on the theatrical. But eventually she draws us in, especially in the rare moments when her love is glimpsed and we learn how fighting for her foster son has made her “the monster Warren says I am today.”

Margot Nash is to be applauded for taking on Kathleen Mary Fallon’s unique story and giving it a very special life. The apparent simplicity of the multiple monologue structure belies many subtleties and transformations, most markedly in Flo’s growing revelations and DellMay and Keith’s developing motivation for their betrayal, while Kate and Warren appear the sorry if sometimes obtuse victims of others’ fantasies and failures. These complexities can be read in many ways. In a narrow, naturalistic feature film culture it’s critical that other voices be heard, other visions seen. Call Me Mum is a finely crafted and disturbing venture into the politics of race and the possibilties of filmmaking.

Call Me Mum, director Margot Nash, writer Kathleen Mary Fallon, producer Michael McMahon, director of photography Andrew de Groot, editor Denise Haratzis, production designer Patrick Reardon, composer David Bridie, Big and Little Films, 76 minutes.

This journey begins with my awakening to my Indigenous identity. This awakening has taken more than 40 years.

The awakening is performed…I walk from the place now known as Busselton—where my grandmother was known as black—to Kellerberrin—where my grandmother was known as white. I carry a pack with food, clothes and shelter. I also carry a digital camera, a handheld computer, a Global Positioning System (GPS) and a mobile phone. A modern nomad.
Mark Minchinton

Twice a day I stop, take a GPS reading and 5 photographs and write about what I hear, touch, see, smell, taste, find, feel, think or imagine at the place I have stopped. Each day, I choose 2 of these photographs and send them with a text to a website.

After teaching performance full-time for many years at Victoria University, performer Mark Minchinton went half-time for 2 years working towards a 3 month artist-in-residency in 2003 at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia.

Minchinton spent lots of time mulling over his venture, one “with a number of agendas, personal, artistic and institutional.” Void: Kellerberrin Walking was a 6-week walking performance from Busselton, in the southwest, to Perth and then Kellerberrin via Wyalkatchem. The total distance traversed was “some 500-700 kilometres—there was lots of wandering!” Throughout the trip Minchinton wrote about what he was seeing and feeling and encountering, and relayed it to his online audience.

On the technical front he had to work out how to keep a growing audience (including many overseas) informed using a mobile phone as the tool for an early example of “the roving blog.” He hadn’t realised that every 3 days or so he could have stopped at small towns linked by a community Internet service, but his own way allowed him to transmit 2-3 times a day.

The experience was “fantastic, much better than sitting in university meetings…and I was paid to do it!” Minchinton discovered, among other things, that “humans are meant to walk long distances—and sleep in the middle of the day.” He slept incredibly well, a revelation for a life-long insomniac. Walking 6-10am was followed by camping and hammock sleeping and then walking again from 4-7pm.

For the first time Minchinton felt he was “bringing together concerns about my own identity and a political program I believed in…a fusion of the personal, the political and the artistic.” He revelled in the “everydayness” of a performance that coincided with his turning away from teaching undergraduates after many years. At almost 50 years of age not only did he feel jaded (“teaching the young is fine, but did they like being with me?”), but also he had a son almost his students’ age (“I get this stuff at home!”).

The experience of the 6-week performance confirmed more than ever Minchinton’s passionate advice to his students: “Forget worrying about form; deal with something that has real meaning for you. That will determine the form.” He likes walking in itself and as a form, and has another big adventure in mind.

Critically, Minchinton’s WA walking took him close to his Australian Aboriginal heritage, something that had been kept hidden in his family. The preparation for the venture, from 2000 on, had involved intensive research into his family history and determined that the performance would be in Western Australia, originally his family’s home.

Minchinton subsequently moved into half-time postgraduate teaching in performance and half time as Director of Moondani Balluk (“embrace people” in the language of Victoria’s Wurrundjerri nation), Victoria University’s Indigenous Academic Unit. Being one of the few senior staff in the university of Aboriginal descent, Minchinton says he leant his weight to such initiatives.

As for being an artist in a university, Minchinton thinks it’s an issue of how much you implicate yourself in university practices and how much you set yourself apart. It’s important, he thinks, to “work with colleagues to turn around expectations”, to assert for example that artistic practice in the university is research. “We teach artists and they do postgraduate work and we take their money, so we have to recognise what they do, and the university needs to recognise that its staff need to do artistic research.”

Above all Mark Minchinton sees teaching as playful and performance as “an embodied ethics.” Whether his own discoveries as he “tramped through landscapes known and unknown” or his students’ everyday encounters, “it’s a matter of observing and absorbing, of how you approach an Other, how you depart, how you make decisions. I don’t care if the student is going into television, performance art or real estate, at least they have a grounding in the understanding of others.”

Mark Minchinton, performance maker, is an Associate Professor at Victoria University and Foundation Director, Moondani Balluk Indigenous Academic Unit.

Although the online version of Void is no longer available, the background to the journey appears on a number of websites including: www.newint.org/issue364/born.htm

At the core of the 200-year old conservatoire culture is the aim of training a musician for a dedicated career as soloist or orchestral player. Because this is an unsustainable goal, behind it lurks the real prospect of a sense of personal failure for music graduates, many of whom have been forced to undertake what they have been led to believe is a lesser career as a music educator, or give up music altogether for some other pursuit. In the last few decades, the rhetoric about music careers has been slowly changing. There is a growing recognition that a typical music graduate is unlikely to have a career which is focused entirely on professional performance in elite musical contexts.

Educators now talk about “portfolio careers.” For music graduates and un-credentialed musicians with strong industry profiles, teaching part-time at a tertiary music school is an attractive element of a portfolio career. But what of practising musicians who pursue full-time permanent employment in a tertiary music school? How do they cope with the demands of a dual career? To find out I spoke to 4 composer/performers who hold permanent jobs in tertiary music schools about the benefits and challenges of this career choice.

Robert Davidson, QUT Creative Industries

Robert Davidson’s Brisbane-based ensemble, Topology, is the major vehicle for the dissemination of his works, although he has written for other combinations. Based at Queensland University of Technology’s Faculty of Creative Industries, he came to academia after years of believing it would not combine well with his career as a practising musician, a belief based on his experience of American musicians such as Steve Reich who adamantly avoided academia. He changed his mind after realising that many Australian composers he admired were full-time academics, and concluded that university teaching would feed into his arts practice better than the computer programming he was doing to supplement his income.

Jim Kelly, Southern Cross University

In the 1970s and 1980s jazz guitarist Jim Kelly had a lucrative career as a session musician in Sydney playing all styles of contemporary music. As popular music became more electronic he decided it was time to revive his live performance career. In the meantime, however, the cost of living had gone up but gig fees had stagnated, so as an additional source of income he turned to private teaching. Kelly found he had a knack for communicating his ideas about guitar playing and improvisation, and even wrote a book on improvising. In the late 1980s he was recruited by the Northern Rivers College of Advanced Education (now Southern Cross University, Lismore, NSW) as a full-time lecturer in its new contemporary music program.

Thomas Reiner, Monash University

Although Thomas Reiner sees himself as primarily a composer, he also has a background in systematic musicology (he has written a book titled Semiotics of Musical Time). Based in Monash University in Victoria, Reiner formed a group, re-sound, a collective of experimental performers and composers, in 1996. From this point his artistic practice shifted more from notated scores towards collaborative structured improvisations that evolved into compositions through workshopping and rehearsal. Reiner admits that his university position provides financial security but adds that his teaching and research have become integral to his creative practice.

Stephen Whittington, University of Adelaide

Stephen Whittington is based at the University of Adelaide but maintains a professional practice as a composer and performer. As a contemporary classical pianist he gives recitals but is also strongly involved in electronic music, installations, multimedia and film. Recently, for example, he performed live soundtracks to 4 films at the 2006 Sydney Film Festival with Ensemble Offspring. Whittington also enjoys the security of an academic position but says if he had to make a choice between teaching and his professional musical practice the latter would win out.

Learning from teaching

All 4 musicians were positive about the benefits of being artist-educators. Robert Davidson teaches a broad range of courses in the small Department of Music and Sound at QUT including world music, musicianship skills, composition, non-linear music for multimedia and cross-cultural music techniques. He commented, “It’s amazing how much you can learn by having to teach something.” This is a common experience amongst academics who are required to teach subjects they may not have any particular expertise in, and thus are forced to engage with the material in an intensive way to be able to explain it coherently and inspire their students. The trade-off for all the hard work is an increased understanding of the technical and aesthetic aspects of genres and techniques that can feed back into the teacher’s own art practice.

Learning from students

Because students come into courses with such varied backgrounds, skills and interests both Whittington and Davidson suggested that they learnt as much or more from their students as the students learnt from them. This was particularly the case with postgraduate composition students who typically come into a program with established professional careers, a significant body of work, and very varied approaches to musical creativity. Reiner suggested that rather than teaching postgraduate composition students about how to compose, his role was helping them “find a way to think of how their work is making an original contribution to knowledge.” This approach, expected for students undertaking creative projects at doctoral level, had filtered into his own approach to composition. As a result of his teaching he felt that his work had become more “grounded in a clear aesthetic outlook.” As an improvising musician, Kelly believes that it is important to “keep aligned with young people” as well as working with musicians of his own age. He cited the case of Miles Davis who kept his music fresh by performing and recording with much younger musicians. Working in a university context has allowed Kelly access to a pool of younger musicians to work with professionally. He is recording a duo guitar album with one of his students, Matt Smith, later this year, and has regularly played with non-guitar students, mostly drummers and vocalists. Whittington, Davidson and Reiner also cited examples of collaborative work with students. Reiner, for example has released Conversations (Move CD), an electroacoustic collaboration with students Steve Adam, Philip Czaplowski, Robin Fox, Russell Goodwin, and Peter Myers.

Inside and out

Access to fellow staff members as collaborators can be another advantage of an academic position. Kelly has regularly worked with all the performers on the Southern Cross staff, including d’volv, a guitar trio creative collaboration with Peter Martin and Jon Fitzgerald. Another example is Davidson’s work with colleague Andy Arthurs on Deep Blue, an ARC Linkage grant partnership between QUT and the Queensland Orchestra. Whittington, however, said he was more likely to collaborate with artists outside the university, especially from other disciplines.

The time challenge

There can be big challenges to maintaining an academic job and an artistic career simultaneously. In the era of diminishing government support for education and demands for increasing levels of accountability, music academics are increasingly involved in higher teaching loads, burdensome administrative responsibilities, expectations to apply for grants and sponsorships and pressure to upgrade their qualifications. Indeed the lack of time to devote to creative work and performance was a common theme explored by all four musicians. Jim Kelly said that although he was able to maintain an active local and national performance schedule it was almost impossible to tour. For example, he had to turn down the opportunity to do a month-long Australian and New Zealand tour with Manhattan Transfer because he knew that the disruption to the teaching program would be too great and that making up the classes when he returned would be exhausting.

For Reiner, the changing conditions of the workplace mean that it is no longer possible, as it was in the past, to put aside a month or 2 to work on a creative project. His solution to create enough time is to get up very early several mornings each week. Both Whittington and Davidson stressed the importance of maintaining a balance between the academic job and artistic activity, neglecting neither and giving full attention to both. This requires careful planning and excellent time management. Davidson believes that a very focused approach to composing and instrumental practice can produce good results in concentrated periods of time.

Research pressure

In addition to artistic output there is also an expectation for artist-educators to produce research outcomes from creative work, even to the extent of having to write research papers about creative work. This can be a challenge for artists who are not used to this way of thinking, and don’t have writing as their primary skill. According to Reiner there is a real danger in the intellectualisation of creativity, a danger that spontaneity will fall by the wayside, and this is often the assessment that the artistic community gives to music created in a university context. Davidson felt that we have to be careful that creative music doesn’t become like science as it has in certain American university contexts. Both Davidson and Whittington believe that a great deal of energy is spent arguing in the university context about the value of creative work as a form of research. There are also significant frustrations involved in the way artistic activities are perceived at the government level. Although, for example, all academic staff in universities are expected to apply for research grants, the Australian Research Council currently does not fund creative or performance activities.

Teacher as role model

The value to the students of having lecturers who are active professionals in the industry was stressed. Davidson emphasised the idea of the role model: that there was no other way to learn to be an artist apart from being around other artists. Whittington felt that “the artist as a teacher sets an example of what is required to be an artist: the dedication, the passion, the desire to communicate, the desire to create.” By involving his students in his professional work, Kelly considered that he was not only teaching his students how music should be played, but also how to behave professionally on the job. Reiner believes that he is able to encourage his students to become more reflective and more self critical about their work, an essential skill for career development.

Despite the frustrations of administrivia and other time-consuming demands of working in an academic environment, the career of the artist-educator appears from my discussions to be a stimulating and rewarding one in the music field. This is not surprising since there is a long tradition of very prominent Australian musicians holding down full-time academic jobs. Two composers (Barry Conyngham and Roger Dean) even became vice-chancellors and continued to be artistically productive.

One of Australia’s leading composers, Michael Smetanin, has held since 2002 the Chair of Composition at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, an institution employing a high percentage of artist-educators. Although he had taught part-time since 1988, this is his first full-time teaching role: for most of his career he received commissions and awards so frequently that he was able to devote most of his time to composing. He thus has first hand knowledge of the life of both freelance artist and full-time academic.

Sometimes you see the different ways students approach compositional problems. Not that I then do the same myself, but it’s good to see that different angle, it keeps you a little bit sharper. I suppose as you get older you can maybe get a little bit more confident in your own technique, and that might make you feel a little lazy. You can see that happening with a lot of composers, as they get older the music is not as interesting anymore.

Hopefully. I enjoy teaching. I like teaching composition, it’s quite good fun really. It keeps me perhaps more energetic, not as complacent, and it’s fun to be with younger people. And more than anything else it keeps you feeling happy with yourself: it’s not so much that it’s making a direct benefit musically or technically, it’s more psychologically, it keeps you on the ball a little bit more.

Compared with when you were composing full-time, are there advantages to teaching?

For so many years it was a struggle financially. Sometimes it was great, but I had some really tough financial times. So this job is a privilege and a luxury really. Sometimes you get stressed out about the difficulties of the institution and having to deal with a new set of problems, like the lack of funding for tertiary institutions. That takes its place.

I don’t write 3 chamber pieces a year anymore, which is a good thing. In some ways it’s good not to have that necessity to be churning stuff out, because I think you might find artists who, once they’re under the gun and making more so-called art than they really should be, the quality is going to suffer. In a way making a little bit less these days is a good thing because the quality is going to remain high, if not improve. I don’t feel as if I’m slackening off.

Largely no. I think that if I was to suddenly decide that I want to write 3 chamber pieces a year I’m sure I could. But from time to time I feel that some of the red tape can be a little bit of a nuisance. I think that more of the clerical work is being pushed onto academics.

In the past might it have been easier to produce creative work while holding a position like yours?

Yes, I think that the pressure on how much work an academic actually does has increased little by little for decades. In the early stages of a piece I really like to have consecutive days of peace and not be bothered by niggly bureaucratic stuff.

Generally. It’s best to start a piece in a break. I work better if I have a good number of days together, consecutively. It’s not so bad when I’m getting towards the end of a piece, I can pick it up coming home at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. But I don’t like working at night. When I am further into a piece I can work on a bit longer because I already know it. Most composers will probably tell you that they write the last few minutes of their piece much quicker than they wrote the first few minutes. So it depends on which stage I’m at with a project as to how fast I’m working and how easily I can walk into the studio and pick up on it.

As sound is a small but growing culture it is not surprising that a significant number of the leading practitioners across the country are also the key educators. The increased interest in sound practice over the last 5-10 years is directly reflected in a developing range of courses offered through art schools, conservatoriums and arts faculties. This article surveys 6 key artists who continue to play a significant role in educating the next generation of sound artists and explores the tensions and pleasures of balancing an evolving practice and educational responsibilities.

Dr Alistair Riddell, ANU

Alistair Riddell is Lecturer in Computer Music, Centre for New Media Arts (CNMA), Australian National University (ANU). He started his full-time teaching at ANU in 2002 after working intermittently in Melbourne and the USA.

“The roles of educator and artist embrace an interplay made up of many subtle components: concepts, knowledge, experience, creativity, aspiration, inspiration and pedagogical expectations. I’d like to think that teaching benefited my practice but I think it is more in terms of being in a positive position with respect to the arts. You want to feel that when you teach or simply communicate, you inspire.”

When asked how he balances personal practice and teaching Riddell replies, “The bureaucratic and teaching demands of academia are ever present. To at least attempt to ameliorate this situation I can teach what I practice and vice versa. That is certainly the mantra of ANU. However, the trick is to keep the pedagogy current and relevant…Teaching does clarify certain aspects of practice. There is nothing like teaching something in order to really learn it. You have to know what you are talking/thinking about much more than you might just by practicing it.”

It appears that the pivotal point for Riddell is the nature of the interaction with the students: “Educators need to be able to remove themselves from a discussion with students up to a point and just listen to how the student expresses their ideas and concepts…I am very dependent on students providing me with feedback on contemporary aesthetics, events and technology. I actively cultivate a bilateral exchange of information on an informal basis and attempt to organise, support or participate in student events if and when the opportunity arises.”

Philip Samartzis, RMIT

Now Senior Lecturer & Coordinator of Sound, School of Art, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Philip Samartzis’ role gradually evolved from being an AV technician at the Phillip Institute, while studying Media Arts, into teaching. He believes this allowed him to “look at issues from both sides to implement the most effective strategies, to resolve problems…Although I had aspirations to teach formally I felt I lacked the experience to offer students the broad perspective that would benefit them. However as I moved from undergraduate to postgraduate study I was offered more and more casual teaching until a full-time position became available in the Media Arts Program at RMIT.

“I have always considered myself an artist first”, declares Samartzis, “and an educator second…(T)he experience I have accumulated as an artist provides direct and longstanding benefits to my students. I often draw upon my own experiences to illustrate real world situations that are likely to confront students at different stages of their careers, such as how to secure cultural support, or how to develop publication and exhibition opportunities. However teaching has had a profound effect on my art practice. It regularly makes me question the choices that I make in the development and execution of a project, and to consider the benefits that can be derived from my work beyond my own personal aspirations.”

Like Riddell, Samartzis sees the interaction with the students as key to the productive interplay of artist and educator. “Teaching allows me to test ideas upon students in order to gauge reactions, and affords the opportunity to explain concepts and/or methodologies within a critical culture centred on robust debate.”

On the issue of balancing academia and practice Samartzis is positive: “I actually enjoy splitting my time between teaching and artistic commitments. I like the social discourse and academic rigour that the university provides, whilst simultaneously enjoying the time and support I receive for professional development.”

Cat Hope, WAAPA, ECU

Lecturer in Music (Composition), Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), Edith Cowan University, Cat Hope is a relative newcomer to full-time teaching. She has been working for over 10 years as a composer, bass player and more recently as a multimedia artist. She was invited to teach at WAAPA 2 years ago after conducting several guest lectures.

Hope sees the interplay of roles as “complex, intertwined and probably very personal…[which] is changing now with the introduction of the RQF [Research Quality Framework]. Fortunately I teach at a university that rewards artistic practice as it would research in more classic academic areas…but I think if you are passionate about a subject, students pick up on it with a similar enthusiasm and that makes it better for everyone.

“Teaching inspires my practice in that it provides facilities and access to performers that I could have only dreamt of before. I often come across interesting material while researching lectures or [finding] a focus for a student, and that leads to something new for me…Being back at university has made me look more into music, whereas I was heading in a multimedia direction…I’ve really got into research, it’s the part of university life I relate to most. I was doing a lot of that as an independent artist but now I get paid for it.”

In terms of balancing the demands of academia and creative practice Hope says, “You must make time somehow to allow yourself to grow and change…The research day for academics is becoming a thing of the past, which is a shame because that provides an invaluable window for artists.” In order to sustain her practice Hope also began a PhD in Sound at RMIT when she commenced full-time teaching.

Andrew Brown, QUT Creative Industries

Andrew Brown, Senior Lecturer, Music & Sound, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, turned to teaching quite quickly. “I had a teaching qualification and decided to use it after realising that touring in rock bands was not an attractive long-term option.

“It is important that teachers maintain an active artistic life, as this keeps them grounded in the experience of practice and the enjoyment of the art. It also helps keep them up to date with trends and changes in the field. It is also useful for artists to teach, because it requires them to reflect on and articulate ideas and techniques. This provides an additional clarity to practice and often assists in an artistic development with greater intention. Keeping connected to young people enthusiastic about music is also continually uplifting.”

To balance practice and teaching Brown tries “to blend them where possible so they don’t seem like separate activities. For example, performing as well as presenting papers at conferences, developing tutorial materials as a way of consolidating my own understanding, working collaboratively with students on artistic projects, and shifting teaching activities toward my evolving artistic interests.”

Garth Paine, UWS

Garth Paine is Senior Lecturer in Music Technology, School of Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney. He turned to teaching full-time in 2002 after a 16-year career working in theatre, dance and museums with his company Activated Space. “Academia seemed like an option that allowed me to offer something from my years of experience whilst continuing to grow creatively.”

Paine sees that the emphasis on research is one of the benefits of working within academia. “Creative practice is central to all my teaching and, within that, exploration, innovation and discovery are paramount. This approach makes the praxis between research/practice and teaching a real and vulnerable one. It’s where students are exposed to the nature of both the practice-based and industry research I undertake and how that informs both my own practice, my passion for experimental sound, and the framework in which I position my teaching.

“Maintaining a balance is very difficult. I have used ARC funding mechanisms and industry partnerships to grow my research workload in areas that are important to my practice, hence making more space for artistically relevant research within the academy. However, most of my composing and performing is done in my own time outside the academy, even though this is, to some extent, quantifiable as research.”

Julian Knowles, University of Wollongong

Prior to working in universities, Julian Knowles, Head of the School of Music & Drama, Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong, worked in post-production as a freelancer and for the ABC, spent time in England with the indie band Even as we Speak and was active in the electronic/experimental scene. In 1993 he was approached by Michael Atherton to consult on a new course being developed at the University of Western Sydney and was soon after appointed as a foundation staff member of a “contemporary focused music degree.” Eventually he became Head of the School of Contemporary Arts. In 2005 he moved to the University of Wollongong. He declares, “I can honestly say it was never my intention to teach…I probably landed one of only a handful of jobs in the country which provided scope to explore my musical interests in a contemporary focused department.

“I am a strong believer that those who teach should be actively engaged in practice themselves. This positions you at the centre of new developments and stops you from becoming out-of-touch…In order to educate professionals, you need to understand the details and dynamic of professional life…It is often said that Generation Y need convincing of the authenticity of a source of knowledge, therefore it helps in this regard.

“Whilst I hate the idea of teaching as a cloning program, I do bring fresh ideas from practice into the teaching context at a fairly swift pace. In this sense, my students become part of my own enquiry into where practice is heading. This conversation keeps us all interested in what we are doing.”

Knowles points out “working for an academic institution places a range of demands on you, so the ‘educator’ these days is also an administrator, manager, researcher, curriculum designer, community/industry links broker and so on.” In order to find some balance he has “taken some radical steps in the past, including moving a step or 2 down the institutional hierarchy in order to regain some space to be a balanced practitioner/teacher/manager as opposed to a manager. I’m embarrassed to admit I have only had one bout of study leave since 1994. I have spent a lot of my career in a climate of shrinking budgets and radical organisational change.” However he is keen to point out that the issue of balance is just as present outside the institution “given the state of funding in the small to medium arts sector.”

Good teacher, better artist?

Clearly my interviewees think that maintaining a practice as an artist has a very positive effect on their teaching. But in the long run, is teaching integral to their practice and do they feel it makes them better artists?

For Cat Hope, the answer is no. “There are opportunities at university that could benefit me as an artist (equipment, networks, research materials and funds), but that could never make you a ‘better artist.’ A wage could never make someone a better artist, but it may help him or her to create and experiment. And what better way to make a wage than working in an area you love?”

Andrew Brown believes that teaching is certainly influential but not integral to being an artist. “I think that if I were wholly devoted to being an artist I may be a better artist than I am. Being a good educator is also rewarding but time consuming…I would certainly be a different artist if I was not an educator because educational interests and interaction with students have influenced the direction of my creative practice (as have my interaction with others artists and other art forms).”

Philip Samartzis differs: “I don’t think I could operate as effectively as an artist without the academic community from which I have drawn much of my inspiration over such a long period of time. However in order for both my academic and creative aspirations to grow I sometimes need to escape the university environment to focus on my art practice for concentrated periods…Teaching is an integral part of my practice and I will continue to do it as long as I have the flexibility to move between my various academic and artistic commitments and interests.”

Garth Paine feels that working within the academy “allows me to be more conscious of my artistic development as research, and to make time and space for that maturation…The goal of working within the academy must be for it to serve both the artist/educator and students—for the praxis to enrich both parties.”

Julian Knowles thinks the roles of teacher and artist must be integrated: “Whilst universities function as de facto patrons of arts practice through the allocation of an unfunded research load, I am not comfortable with the idea of the university as a simple financial crutch. ‘Teaching as survival’ therefore does not appeal to me…I see it as a choice to work inside the academy and I find it stimulating to be part of a learning/research community. Teaching to me is about giving something back and interacting with young/emerging artists.”

Alistair Riddell muses, “I don’t think I could say that I’m a better artist for teaching. I might be a better person, whatever that means, but I’m not sure I could say that either…Perhaps, more than anything it is a process of living, a state of being lucid and exchanging with others a dynamic for living, a past for a present.”

Cat Hope is currently in Singapore on an Asialink residency at Theatreworks. Philip Samartzis will present Immersion 4, improvised live collaborations between Australian and German artists at Interface: Festival of Music and Related Arts, Berlin Sept 14-Oct 6. Andrew Brown’s current projects include building generative music software for children, in particular jam2jam software, http://explodingart.com, and live coding performances, http://runtime.ci.qut.edu.au/pivot/entry.php?id=8#body. Garth Paine, in collaboration with Michael Atherton, will be releasing the Parallel Lines CD through Celestial Harmonies later in 2006, and his Meterosonics project can be viewed at http://www.meterosonics.com. Julian Knowles, in collaboration with Donna Hewitt will perform at the 2006 International Computer Music Conference in New Orleans, USA November 6-11. His sound design can also be heard for Michael Riley’s Poison (1991) exhibited in Sights Unseen, National Gallery of Australia until Oct 22. Alistair Riddell is presenting FyberMotion, an installation in collaboration with textile artists Belinda Jessup and Lucie Verhelst, Aug 1-11, Belconnen Gallery, Canberra.

High profile, practising artists are not employed full-time in dance courses as readily as you may find them in visual arts, music and literature departments. This is partly due to the time-consuming training regimes and maintenance of practice that dancers and choreographers must undertake along with touring commitments that require chunks of time off. It’s also partly due to the stigma attached to ‘educational choreographers’ in this country.

While full-time appointments may be scarce, an abundance of artists supplement their working year with casual teaching in tertiary institutions, which offers practical support, teaching experience and a chance to try out ideas. Bernadette Walong points out that the University of Western Sydney “has provided employment and research-related opportunities to NSW-based and interstate artists such as Kate Champion, Rakini Devi, Julie-Anne Long, Dean Walsh and Kay Armstrong.” Other dance artists who have worked itinerantly in courses around the country include Gavin Webber, Sue Peacock, Tracie Mitchell, Sue Healey, Claudia Alessi and Chrissie Parrott.

Four professional dance artists working in universities offer their views on the relationship between practising their art and teaching, how the university benefits their practice, and how students and institutions benefit from artists.

Bernadette Walong, University of Western Sydney

Bernadette Walong is a choreographer, performer and consultant on dance and education. She has worked with Bangarra, Meryl Tankard, Dance North and the Australian Ballet, and has created dance films in collaboration with Michelle Mahrer and Richard James Allen. Walong has been an Associate Lecturer in Performance at the University of Western Sydney since 1999 and is one of 2 dance staff there.

I teach at UWS on a part-time basis. This allows me a certain amount of flexibility to accommodate my work as a practitioner. Annual leave is dedicated to any international activities. In the past, and prior to the current workplace agreements, larger blocks of time away were easier to negotiate with the option of making up time lost by working additional hours/days.

My role as an educator impacts on my practice and vice-versa. The 2 contexts involve different playing grounds, but they emerge from the same foundations. Of course my expectations of a student are not entirely the same as those of a professional. I like to call them “professional students.”

Teaching has definitely strengthened the facilitation skills I bring into my practice. My communication and inter-personal skills have benefited as I am forced to be clear in my approach. And I am more conscious of the value of the individual—it expands the possibilities within a creative situation because I am able to entertain a much wider variety of perspectives.

As an independent artist I have been extremely lucky to manage part-time work and my practice. Tertiary dance courses fill the gap that our lagging industry has created for independent artists. Working in this environment has also enabled me to refine my choreographic practice and research both conceptually and physically as I can play/experiment with ideas over longer periods of time.

The benefits that UWS gain are mainly through connections to industry practice. Being employed part-time means I am continuously updating information relating to the field of practice as passed on to students. Secondly, students who have applied to the course have been aware of my work as a choreographer/performer prior and external to UWS—many students had studied Ochres (co-choreographed for Bangarra) as part of the HSC dance curriculum. This influenced their choice of institution.

I can genuinely say that students want to believe that they are getting the real deal, that is, learning from people they know have a professional track record. Learning from practicing artists—living and breathing, not simply documented in a textbook—means they have a direct connection with their field of study. This is a valuable and important tool for tertiary institutions because education should not be isolated from practice. The issue is research and creative learning, as opposed to the institutional trap of regurgitated knowledge.

Judith Walton, Victoria University

Judith Walton is a Senior Lecturer in Dance at the Department of Human Movement, Recreation and Performance, Victoria University. She is one of 5 staff in Performance. Her recent works include no hope no reason, a multimedia performance as part of the 2004 Melbourne International Arts Festival, Lie of the Land, a Gateway commission in Adelaide with visual artist Aleks Danko, and Project Eudemonia, a series of interventions with Rachel Fensham for the PSi10 (Performance Studies International) conference in Singapore in 2004.

In recent times I have taken leave without pay in the need for artistic autonomy—to be independent of the institution and its rapid transformation into a business. This has been my ‘strategy of freedom’ that François Deck articulates: a way of removing myself from the economic function of the institution (in Brian Holmes’ Artistic Autonomy and the Communication Society).

I don’t divide myself, only the time I spend on different activities. Everything that I have gleaned from making and performing is available when I teach and vice versa, and the whole of my life experience obviously informs both activities.

I perceive my art practice as separate from the university that has, nevertheless, supported it financially through my wage. That is, my job has indirectly funded my art practice. There is a general awareness of the growing control exerted by the institution on artistic and cultural production and the very real danger that art making can become harnessed to function, productivity, economic viability, and used as a justification for the institution’s claim to the fostering of a civic society. In a small and perhaps inconsequential way the removal of my art practice from the institution is a resistance to the dominant urge for art consumption, and a conscious reclaiming of the self-governing, playful, open, unknowable, experimental situation that, for me, art making requires.

In short, there is an incompatibility between the making of art and the ideology of the university. In my role as an art educator, these concerns form part of a continual critical debate that informs my strategies and tactics for maintaining an environment conducive to art education.

Performance is understood through the thinking and practice of performing. Art education should set up systems of inquiry to precipitate the making of art. This encompasses the identification and creation of theories, discourses and practices that enliven, extend, question, interrupt, disseminate, challenge, confirm, fail, reinvent, and disturb the making of art. A fundamental principle of Performance Studies at Victoria University is the involvement of practising artists in the teaching of performance.

Cheryl Stock, QUT Creative Industries

Cheryl Stock is Associate Professor of Dance at Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology (QUT). She has had a successful career as a choreographer and academic and was a founding member of Dance North in Townsville, Queensland. Her most recent work, Accented Body, is presented as part of the 2006 Brisbane Festival.

I guess I’m really an all or nothing person, so for me to do my practice as I want to, I do it very rarely. With Accented Body, I was given 4 months professional development leave. The preparation had to happen outside of that of course. But teaching and creative practice are actually really integrated for me. For example, I draw on my skills as an artist and as an academic in working with the research students. But it is hard to do your own practice, especially as head of department.

With Accented Body I have had access to the most amazing technology through the institution and have been able to bring in international artists. It is a cutting edge project and this is due, in large part, to the facilities offered by the university and my exposure to the work of artists and staff in other fields here. That exposure has actually shaped the project into what it has become. So I don’t mind spending all of my time being Head of Dance if once every 5-7 years I can do a project like this, which wouldn’t be possible without the institution.

Because of the focus on practice as research at QUT, and given my experience in the professional field of dance, I have taken on a role facilitating the work of other artists by encouraging them to take on higher degrees. So I have become more of a creative producer/director—and that applies to the Accented Body project as well—drawing together staff, students and artists across a variety of fields of practice.

It’s important for the students to know that the people they are working with do have a practice… They are very nurtured in this tertiary institution. They are supported by postgraduates who come in and tell them about ‘the real world’ and show them by being role models. And we support those artists through their research at QUT. If we didn’t have that nexus our course would be irrelevant.

Michael Whaites, WAAPA

Michael Whaites is a choreographer and performer who has had an impressive career working with choreographers such as Twyla Tharp and Pina Bausch. He returned to Sydney in the late 1990s and has pursued a career as an independent choreographer and dancer. This year, Whaites became Lecturer in Contemporary Dance at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts and Artistic Director of LINK, WAAPA’s graduate dance company.

Three quarters of my time is spent with teaching and administration. At this early stage teaching and working full-time at a training institution (6 months into the job), I am finding that dividing my time between teaching, organizing the company and being creative is quite a challenge.

I take the opportunity to reflect on my own work by teaching composition and improvisation. But ultimately, imparting knowledge and information, trying to be clear and concise, is really at odds with the kind of receptivity and intuition I use in creating my own work.

The financial stability of teaching benefits my practice, and teaching [provides] an ongoing relationship with performers. To be able to plan and create with consistency is the most appealing aspect. This is a relief given the difficulty of securing funding in the sector as an independent practitioner wanting to work with a group, and the additional problem of time lag when you do submit an application.

From an artist WAAPA gains professional experience, knowledge and connection to current practices and industry professionals. For example, I have recently negotiated the acquisition of repertoire for the company from Twyla Tharp—a first in Australia. We will be able to perform 7 of her early choreographic works, which I believe are some of her best, showing the beginning of contemporary dance as we now know it. I have also organised a tour to Europe and Russia for the company with the dancers spending 2 weeks at P.A.R.T.S in Brussels, the dance school associated with Ann Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Rosas Dance Company.

I offer a practical understanding and real sense of the industry which helps students inform their choices when they graduate. I am also providing them with opportunities to connect with the industry. That places them in a much better position once they are out there looking for work.

The view from outside might suggest that artists as educators enjoy a somewhat privileged position in that they have steady incomes, access to facilities and networks not readily available to many artists, and perhaps also studio access and professional development opportunities as a part of their employment conditions. They also enjoy the company of peers and connections to professional networks. To cap this off, many receive research funds and professional advancement through exhibiting their work, which they can still sell on an open market in which they might also compete for public and private commissions.

The view from inside is somewhat different. Increasingly these days artist-educators have heavy demands on their time, many of which are not related to their artistic or even directly to their educational practices. Full time tenured positions are the exception, not the norm, and training for most must now continue to PhD level if they are even to be considered for an assistant lecturer’s position. For casuals and many part-timers, pay ceases altogether during non-contact times such as semester breaks and alternative employment must be sought to cover these periods. Against all of these demands the artist-teacher must maintain a viable and respected practice. What for many people might be considered ‘free’ time is more and more absorbed by the competing demands of the studio and the institution.

Five artist-educators practicing within the photomedia field were invited to consider a range of questions about the importance that their teaching practice has for them as artists and the issues, both positive and negative that arise as they maintain a balance between the roles. Central to the discussions was the degree to which their practices as artists and educators were mutually supportive and stimulated each other. The artists responding were: Martin Jolly, Head of Photomedia at the Australian National University School of Art; Kevin Todd, Senior Lecturer, Studies in Art & Design at the University of the Sunshine Coast; Helena Psotova, Lecturer, Photography Studio, Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania; Mark Kimber, Studio Head of Photography and Digital Art Media at the South Australian School of Art; and Matthew Perkins, Studio Coordinator Photomedia, Department of Multimedia and Digital Arts at Monash University.
Helena Psotova, Basel II, 2002, from the series True Fictions

Helena Psotova, Basel II, 2002, from the series True Fictions

The real thing

Engagement with students seems to be a source of constant stimulation for all respondents. Most cited the continual engagement and debate with students on issues in and surrounding the arts as a source of inspiration, increasing and encouraging a self-critical attitude and maintaining a flexibility in their approach to their own development. No doubt it remains true that students want to engage with a teacher who is aware of issues relating to practice through being engaged with practice. This goes far beyond mere technical issues. Mark Kimber declares that “as an educator and an artist I cannot ask students to take on challenges and risks in their work unless I am constantly doing that myself”, while for Helena Psotova, “the passion for art seems to be validated in [students’] eyes by having a teacher who is active in making art.” Martin Jolly makes the point that the commitment to “the seriousness and importance of art” can only be demonstrated if the teacher is also an artist whose practice remains personally challenging and is more than “just going through the motions of exhibiting.”

Another benefit of engagement with students is the pressure that they exert on a lecturer to maintain contact with technological and cultural changes. Mark Kimber stressed the “sense of energy that invigorates (his) practice that comes from constantly being surrounded by people…discovering the thrill of art for the first time,” something a solo artist can very easily lose sight of.

A model artist?

Some respondents stressed that they did not use their own practice as a base for teaching or as an example for students. This is important because it cuts across the possibility of emulation (always an issue)—students developing an expectation that work like the lecturer’s will be preferred. Issues of maintaining objectivity in relation to the educator’s role are generally foremost in the artists’ minds. Kevin Todd remarks, “I don’t use my own work for teaching as I feel it is important for me to keep that in the studio and to allow for a ‘professional distance’ from students.”
Kevin Todd, (re)creating nature, forms#1 and 2.

Kevin Todd, (re)creating nature, forms#1 and 2.

Part-time artist

There would seem to be 3 vital requirements for maintaining a healthy visual arts practice—time, resources and energy. Rarely are the 3 available together at appropriate levels. Ironically, the maintenance of one may militate against the other.

The competing pressures for the time of an artist-teacher effect the nature of their studio work in a number of ways. It can mean that the practice is “necessarily sporadic, ‘part-time’, project-driven”, says Martin Jolly. Most only get the opportunity to concentrate fully on their ‘studio’ practice during semester breaks and professional leave which can reinforce the primary identity as artist first and foremost. Some responses suggested that the demands of the institution were too great for the maintenance of practice at the level desired, having become “competitive and time-demanding.” Add personal priorities and this can become a “frustrating and exhausting combination”, says Helena Psotova.

Matthew Perkins says, “The situation where you do not have the time and the energy to dedicate to your practice to the best of your ability can be incredibly depressing.” This is a serious issue for the artist producing work which he or she feels may be below their best, and yet is still under the obligation to exhibit. He goes on to say that at least working within an institution allows him to focus more effectively than a collection of part-time, often non-art jobs had in the past.

The positives

The primary values of working in institutions are tangible and probably quite predictable. They include such things as: a salary; access to equipment and sophisticated technology (vital to the media-based artist); contact with professional networks within and across disciplines; visiting artists and writers; research and curatorial opportunities; travel opportunities and so on. A key but less tangible benefit cited by all was constant contact with peers. Todd said, “I found working full-time as an artist isolating.” The value of an income is obvious but also allows artists the chance to develop independent projects at their own cost, over time and to pursue and develop personal major projects. The institution also allows artists to engage with people in other disciplines on a technical and conceptual level so the resources available often extend beyond the art school.

In some institutions there is a strong recognition of studio-based research. New knowledge and methodologies in practice then ‘trickle down’ into the teaching environment and into the formulation of critical theory. Also educator-artists are constantly involved in self-education; the profession requires this discipline if they are to be relevant and perform at their best. This is inherent in the artist-educator’s situation in the university and may not be so pressing for artists outside of it.

More promotion, less art

On the downside, artist-teachers said that promotion to management level almost always meant that policy planning and administrative duties tended to tip the balance away from maintaining a healthy practice and, in any case, were not part of contact with students, which the artists really enjoyed and found relevant to their practices. Another issue cited was pressure to fit into bureaucratic definitions of research and output in the context of higher degrees and grant funding. Mention was also made of policies that affect the art-training environment, such as a move to more vocationally based training. New priorities for funding universities may not impact well on art schools, so there is some anxiety about what the teaching environment will become. At all levels the increase in administrative work was reported as “steady and constant.” One of the worst aspects of this is that contact time with students is often the first casualty.

The multi-skilled artist

In terms of identity, it is clear that being an artist today is almost never a single activity. Artists tend to be involved in curation, historical, theoretical and critical writing, with artist groups and running spaces, as well as being socially engaged. In this sense the artist-teacher is just another example of the multi-faceted role of the artist.

Balancing act

Some respondents have considered moving from full to part-time to better pursue their practices but, conversely, part-timers stressed the high expectations of the institutions as somewhat unrealistic, including often lower classification and rate of pay for part-time work. Such a shift is only realistic where their practice is generating sufficient income to sustain the balancing of roles, but this point may not arrive until the mid-life of the artist-educator.

Matthew Perkins sums up the artist-educator role thus: “I am equally passionate about teaching as I am about practicing art…It is great to be in a position where I can talk about, in a very passionate way, what I am passionate about. Many professions take this for granted…If I took away teaching and could just practice art then I could achieve so much in my practice just because of time and focus. But teaching is a very satisfying profession. It affects your personal growth in unseen ways—confidence, communication, your ability to critique…It’s a bit of a chicken and egg type equation…To me [the roles] are integral.” This view is doubtless true for all artist-teachers who tolerate the tensions and stresses that accompany teaching for the benefits it continues to bring to their practice and personal growth as artists.

Filmmaking, more than most creative pursuits, is not only a collaborative medium; it can also be a very expensive one. Of course, it’s possible to make short films, and these days even features, on the smell of an oily rag, using what Tropfest founder John Polson once described as “a digital camera, some friends and a free weekend.” But those with more vision and ambition need to go through much more preparation, writing scripts, seeking development funding, creating working partnerships and raising the money. And filmmakers, more than most, are used to disappointments and hold-ups: projects are knocked back, people go on to other work, and finances fall apart.

IN FOR THE LONG TERM

Margot Nash, UTS

To get a film into production can take years; take one of our filmmaker teachers as an example. Margot Nash, who teaches at the University of Technology, Sydney, began making films in the early days of the feminist film movement of the 1970s and 80s with We Aim to Please (1977); she was one of the makers of the seminal documentary on women’s work, For Love or Money (1983), with Megan McMurchy and Jeni Thornley; and made her critically acclaimed first feature, Vacant Possession (1995). After a number of years with several projects in development, she was asked to direct Call Me Mum (2006, see review, page 23), which premiered at this year’s Sydney Film Festival. At the first screening, she explained how she had taken a 6-month leave of absence to direct the film, but when the finances fell apart, she went back to teaching half time. Second time lucky, she took 6 months off and made the film, but when she returned to work she still had to finish the sound post-production, so worked three-quarter time while doing that.

Leo Berkeley, RMIT

Film production is a complex, multi-layered activity, and one that some filmmakers are admirably suited to teach, although their reasons for doing so may also be complicated. Leo Berkeley teaches in the School of Applied Communication, RMIT University in Melbourne. His first low budget feature, Holidays on the River Yarra (1991) was critically very well received, but he then spent years working on several follow-up feature projects that never got off the ground. As he explains, he got into teaching as a way of earning a regular income at a stage of his life when he really needed one, and found it occupied most of his time. Recently however, frustrated by the standard processes, he has made Stargate, a 300-minute fully improvised drama with a cast and crew of friends which was screened at last year’s Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF), in the “extreme narrative” strand, while his 12-minute Machinima work screened at the 2005 Machinima Film Festival in New York. (“Machinima, where real time 3D computer gameplay is recorded as video footage and then used to produce more traditional linear videos.” Berkeley, http://conferences.aoir.org/viewabstract.php?id=564&cf=5). “I enjoy teaching film and TV production because students keep you on your toes”, he says. “I like passing on the things I have learnt through experience and my reflection on that experience, and it gives me access to equipment and facilities that are central to my creative practice.” So, is the filmmaker a teacher, or the teacher a filmmaker?

BETWEEN ROLES

Margot Nash tells of “a wise teacher friend of mine (who) once responded to my question, ‘what makes a good teacher’, by saying `I think it helps if you are learning something too.’ Certainly my experience as a screenwriting teacher means I’m constantly learning about film and the craft of screenwriting and this in turn feeds back into my own creative work. I’m a writer-director and I teach screenwriting at UTS which means that I am always on the lookout for interesting films to teach and for new approaches to screenwriting. Reading and analysing scripts and finding constructive ways to respond to student work in order to encourage good work to develop means I am constantly exercising my critical faculties (like exercising the body, one’s critical and creative faculties need to run around the block pretty well all the time to remain sharp). This kind of work can only help me as a practicing filmmaker. I feel very lucky that I am teaching something I am also practicing so I am constantly in a learning situation.”

Trish Fitzsimons, Griffith Film School

Trish Fitzsimmons is a filmmaker and writer on film who is a senior lecturer in the School of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Griffith University, Brisbane. Her films include Retreat (1990), Above Water (1991), and (with Mitzi Goldman) the documentary Snakes and Ladders: A Film about Women, Education and History (1987), and she’s currently working on several projects. She explains, “It’s only by continuing with my own practice that I can be an effective teacher. For me, a hallmark of university teaching (compared for instance with high school teaching) is that one is teaching from a constantly expanding fund of knowledge based on one’s practice in whatever field (from Latin to film and all points in between) and on knowledge/scholarship of what others in the field are up to. Teaching in a university I also feel that an important part of my job is to theorise practice and to be involved in producing an historical record of practice, so the job description becomes very wide indeed.”

Ben Ferris, Sydney Film School

Ben Ferris is director of the relative newcomer, the Sydney Film School, and a pioneer of the global resurgence in “one take” cinema. His film The Kitchen screened alongside Russian Ark at the Inaugural One Take Film Festival held in Zagreb, Croatia in 2003. In 2004 he went on to win the Grand Prix at the same festival for his one-take film Ascension, and has been invited back this year as an international jury member. He sees the interplay between the roles of filmmaker and teacher as fundamentally harmonious. “As a filmmaker, I view teaching as a very important process in the development of my skills. As a teacher of film, my practice as a filmmaker keeps my ideas fresh and relevant.”

AHEAD & BEHIND

“One advantage is that one can more easily take on long term projects”, explains Trish Fitzsimons. “For example, in the mid to late 90s I made a doco that observed a group of male prisoners taking part in a set of workshops, and then followed them for 3 years afterwards. This kind of project would be very difficult with conventional documentary funding structures. And currently I have funding from Film Australia and the Pacific Film and Television Commission to develop a doco that again follows characters for a period of a couple of years. From a permanent tertiary education position one can take on projects that are less commercially oriented, and that have a strong research dimension, that would not be easily possible without a full-time wage coming in. The disadvantages are certainly that you produce work more slowly and that in teaching and working across such a wide sphere it is easy for hands-on skills to slip.”

For Margot Nash the disadvantages are to do with time. “When I was a fractional appointment and not working full-time I managed to carve out enough time to develop scripts, script edit other projects and work on developing projects as a director. Now I am full-time it is almost impossible: teaching full time in real terms means over 40 students writing short film scripts I’m reading, plus another 20 or so starting to write long form drama, plus 6 post-grads, and 2 of these submitting full length feature scripts. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. The net result is I haven’t looked at my own creative work for months—although I do think about it a lot.”

Pat Laughren, Griffith Film School

Time and time are the issues for Pat Laughren who teaches in the School of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Griffith University, and is the maker of social and film history projects. His very extensive filmography stretches from Exits (1980) to Stories from the Split: the Struggle for the Souls of Australian Workers (2005), an oral history documentary treatment which premiered at The Great Labor Split 1955—Fifty Years Later Conference in April 2005, in Melbourne. (His other films include Queensland’s Silent Films: the Newsreel years 1910-1930 (2004), The Fair Go: Winning the 1967 Referendum (1999) and from 1994 Red Ted and the Great Depression). As he says, “there is time to work on projects which may not be able to be supported otherwise in such a sustained way. But of course there’s little opportunity to respond immediately and ‘lose’ yourself in a production. There’s always a class, meeting or other commitment to be factored in. That’s not a complaint. Just a description.”

“One of the most exciting things about teaching for me”, explains Ben Ferris, “is when the students challenge me about my process. This keeps me on my toes, and forces me to constantly examine my approach to filmmaking. This is what excites me as a filmmaker: to question the status quo; to challenge conventions; to investigate the creative process. The only disadvantage that I can see is not having enough time to do both properly. It’s a delicate balancing act and if tipped the wrong way, focus on one can easily compromise the other.”

A SENSE OF COMMUNITY

Being an independent filmmaker can be very isolating. As Margot Nash says, “There are so many of us hunched over our computers trying to get films made and competing with each other for small amounts of money. In the old days when we had the Filmmakers Co-op I had much more of a sense of community. When I started working at UTS I think it was both the contact with students and with the academic community that gave me a sense of community again. The students…keep me up to date with what’s happening out there.”

For Ben Ferris, practising filmmaking is a more communal experience than most other art forms, “however, having a community of practitioners, teachers and students around you on a daily basis is exhilarating. It forces dialogue about the inexhaustible aspects of filmmaking on a regular basis, and allows your ideas to be tested and provoked, rather than letting them sink in a vacuum. Personally, while I am prone to be intensely private in the development phase, I like working with people, and it is one of the great attractions of filmmaking as an art form.”

DO STUDENTS BENEFIT?

Margot Nash thinks that students engaged in creative study benefit if their teacher is actively engaged in creative work rather than teaching something of which they have no active first hand knowledge . “It makes everything more real and much more lively. I know my students appreciate my industry knowledge and contacts as they always say so on student feedback forms. I take a very practical and pragmatic approach to teaching screenwriting, as well as a creative one. I bring technical knowledge and a current understanding of the Australian film industry to the classroom and I also write references for students and often try to find work experience for them.”

“I’ve always felt that when I’ve completed some of my own work that it is a buzz for our current students,” says Trish Fitzsimons. “My teaching is certainly constantly informed by practice. As far as possible within the Griffith Film School, we bring in other current practitioners, especially graduates, so our students have a sense of being part of a creative community. And whilst I never employ students for free on funded elements of my projects, it can be good for both parties to get students doing some exploratory work.”

Pat Laughren believes that it’s for the students to say what the benefits are, although he’d like to think it’s a sense of contact and engagement with issues beyond the strictly assessable. But for Leo Berkeley it’s that students recognise the value of the knowledge that comes from the practical experience of making a film. “Teachers who have both extensive and current film production experience have a lot to offer students, so in my opinion if filmmaking is to be taught in universities, there have to be opportunities for university teachers to keep making films.”

TEACHING TO SURVIVE?

“Unfortunately the kinds of films I have chosen to make have never made me a lot of money and I have never enjoyed being a ‘gun for hire’, making films I’m not interested in”, explains Margot Nash. “So even though I love teaching and get a lot out of it, it has always been connected to survival. I do not see it as integral to practice although it certainly enhances my practice. However, on reflection I wonder if I would have continued as a filmmaker if I had had to do something else to make a living, and had not had the option to continue to practice and develop my craft in the class room.”

For Trish Fitzsimons, being a doco filmmaker/social historian working in an audiovisual mode, university teaching is a huge privilege and a very satisfying career. “My goal is to take a long view, to keep growing creatively and intellectually and that that will also sustain me as a teacher. As part of this I am currently doing a Doctorate of Creative Arts, with Ross Gibson through UTS, and I’m off to Brazil in early August to give a theoretical paper about documentary voice at the Visible Evidence conference. That kind of professional opportunity is certainly valuable to me and should help me to guide my students in future, especially postgraduates.”

“Given the sort of projects I’ve been working on over the last years (essentially, social and film history projects), the students challenge my comfortable assumptions about what’s worth doing. And how it might be done”, comments Pat Laughren. “I hope I offer them some of the same. One trick of the trade is to find some serendipitous union between a project you want to do and the conditions in which you can approach it. The university/film school is still a place where a certain amount of disinterested research (in terms of topics, forms and techniques) can prosper and an agenda can extend beyond the limits of, say, the broadcast schedule.”

Leo Berkeley has some strong opinions, and some demanding questions. He believes that teaching is integral to practice if teaching is connected to research. If a filmmaker is developing their own experience and pushing the boundaries of their practice, then this can feed productively into teaching, the way it does across most other university disciplines. At the present time, however, he believes that “universities are moving away from an environment where active filmmakers can get involved in any meaningful way with teaching. The increasing focus on research has a related focus on postgraduate qualifications for people working in higher education, and not many filmmakers have a Masters or PhD degree. This increased focus on research raises a number of interesting issues for filmmakers who are already working within the university sector as teachers. There are growing possibilities for screen production to be included as the major, if not sole, component of a higher degree by research. More and more productions are occurring as ‘research’ within Australian universities, yet their status at the present time is quite ambiguous. These productions are often made by experienced practitioners and are specifically developed to extend the boundaries of that individual’s creative practice or the field they are in. It seems strange that this potentially significant sector of the industry has so little visibility or status.”

ADDRESSING THE ISSUES: ASPERA

Concern over the status of screen production courses within the education sector and the relationship between the screen production education sector and the wider Australian screen industries led to the formation in 2004 of the Australian Screen Production Education & Research Association (ASPERA), now the peak discipline body of Australian tertiary institutions teaching and researching film, video, television and new media as screen based production practices. It represents 16 institutions offering degrees at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, including bachelor, master and doctorate, in various screen production disciplines. By playing an active role in shaping quality education for those planning to or working in research and production for the screen, addressing issues of concern to the sector, and liaising with industry, secondary and TAFE sectors on matters of mutual interest, it aims to lift the profile of the screen-based industries within the wider economic, social and cultural development of Australia.

In fact, tertiary education institutions do seem to be finding a new place within the screen production community. Trish Fitzsimons remarks, “From a broad perspective I think that universities are a vital source of documentary and creative arts practice that might not happen with the same depth and integrity if all the work was produced with the pressures of freelancing.” Pat Laughren comments, “In terms of the wider industry, we may be the last refuge of a certain kind of institutional filmmaker that once inhabited places like Film Australia or the public broadcasters. Privilege indeed!”

Alice Springs-based Beck Cole, of the Warramungu and Luritja nations, is an Australian Film Television & Radio School (AFTRS) graduate and has worked extensively on Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) productions. Her documentaries include The Lore of Love (2005), about 18-year old Jessie returning to her Pintubi homeland to learn the lore of love from her grandmothers, and Wirriya: small boy (2004), a moving portrait of a 7-year old boy, Rocco from a Central Desert community. Wirriya won best film at the 2004 Women on Women Film Festival in Sydney. Cole’s short drama Flat (2002) was shown at the Sundance and Edinburgh Film Festivals in 2004. The suspenseful short drama, Plains Empty, screened at Sundance in 2005 and other international film festivals. Lisa Stefanoff interviewed Cole in Alice Springs about her career in documentary and drama filmmaking.

I actually didn’t think that I was going to be a filmmaker. I started training as a journalist. After a few years of studying journalism I discovered that the degree of stories that you can investigate were quite restricted in that they were often set in the present, in a current affairs sort of world which I didn’t find hugely exciting, or hugely creative or visual. So I began to explore the documentary genre, primarily in the field of radio but later on film and video. And that of course became a huge interest of mine and began the journey that I then went on.

I actually began working in the media when I was 16. I got a cadetship at Imparja Television. I would go to high school during the day and I would finish there at 3 and I’d work at Imparja from 3.30 until 8.30 at night in the newsroom. [After] about 6 months I started writing and presenting stories and then I began working as a news presenter and weather reader, which was very fantastic for a 17 year old girl from Alice Springs. Lots of fun! Going to the hairdressers’ every day after school—very glamorous!…I specifically enjoyed writing stories. I finished school and went to Charles Sturt University where I studied for 3 years—Batchelor of Arts in Communication and Sociology. [Then] I went and worked at ABC Television in the Indigenous Unit, and that’s when I started making films.

I’d been doing that for a few years and applied to AFTRS to do documentary directing, which was a really tough year but fantastic, experimenting. It’s like being in a big toyshop, you know? Shooting documentaries on film, and meeting new people and making some sort of wacky way-out films which you’ve got to get out of your system…And also, on and off, [I worked] with CAAMA.

Did you see anything at film-school, or were you taught by anybody, that had any major influence on you?

I think the best thing about going to film-school, for me, was exposure to films from all around the world and to filmmakers, Australian documentary filmmakers—Dennis O’Rourke, Tom Zubryzci, Pat Fiske. …Pat was a really large influence on me because—well I guess the men were as well—but she shoots and does sound and directs and was happy to go off on a motorbike and make a film about women with breast cancer, and that really excited me. With no money she sort of managed to do that and they’re such beautiful films.

I made one about a fighting, kick-boxing coach/priest, Anglican, called The Good Fight. And he was just a great character. He works with homeless kids…and troubled youth in Dulwich Hill in the western suburbs of Sydney. [It’s] sort of a character study film. And the second one’s completely different. I’d won a grant on the first film from Kodak for stock and processing and it was enough to make a 10-minute film on Super 16. We designed this whole concept for a documentary about a haunted house in Junee and the family that lives in this house and, you know, the ‘ghosts’, and the history of the house, and the place, which was really fun. I worked with a female DOP on that, which was really an interesting experience, and primarily a female crew too, which was good. [It] was really stylised and shot on film and really, sort of, controlled. But it’s a fun film. I enjoyed making it. It has a huge score. We had like a 35 piece orchestra come in and do the score, and incredible titles, and you know, it was just completely indulgent, but I learnt so much on that film, The Creepy Crawlies. The Crawlies is the name of the family. The woman of the house was part-Aboriginal and would cover herself in white powder and keep herself and her kids out of the sun so they wouldn’t, you know, tan up. [S]he was ‘touched with…a speck of tar’, or something really ridiculous. [Laughs]. That sort of sparked my interest in the story.

Two of your recent documentaries made at CAAMA—Wirriya and The Lore of Love—are very intimate films and they’re about families. Not your own families. There’s a striking balance in them between observational material and your main characters’ narration of themselves in action on screen. How have you developed that style?

I didn’t realise I had developed that style [laughs] until you just pointed it out… Well, look, I think it’s important that the subjects in the film have a voice. Often in observational documentary it can be really easy to interpret it as a filmmaker, but if you involve the central characters in writing the narration, which I always do, and voicing the narration and of course therefore controlling what they say and how they represent themselves, to a degree, I think it just helps create an intimacy in the film and a connection between the central character and what an audience is seeing happen in their lives. It gives them a more interesting point of view, I think, and particularly for a half-hour film it really makes it more succinct, and helps you join the gaps.

The other thing that’s striking to me about Wirriya and Lore of Love is that the narrators are young people, and they’re telling stories about their place in a world where their elders are quite important to them.

I’m interested in what young people think about culture, and I’m interested in what young people think about family, and the challenges and pressures of living in a contemporary lifestyle with Aboriginal heritage, and Aboriginal customs that you have to deal with as well. They’re the things that you don’t hear people talking about and you don’t get an opportunity to ask kids about very often and if people find those films interesting, that’s probably the reason why, because it is a fresh voice.

In Wirriya you reveal young Ricco’s boredom, his cheekiness and his care for [his aunt] Maudie, his adventurousness. In The Lore of Love, Jessie’s older, so I guess there are more sophisticated emotions like jealously, and love and shame…[T]hey’re almost themes in these films, these emotions. Was that your intention?

That’s a very deep question Lisa…[I]f you depict a character really well an audience will emotionally connect with them. And if you are close enough to the subject, and spend enough time and they trust you and you trust them and you’re working together, well then you are emotionally connected with them and they do say things and they do, you know, open up to you. That’s what’s so important to me about those films, that I had really fantastic relationships with both of those kids, Ricco and Jessie, and their families. We connected emotionally, and that’s represented in the film.

You’ve also moved very deftly and fluently between documentary and drama. Has documentary been a training ground for [drama]?

Writing scripts for documentary is so difficult that it’s like scripting drama. I do like to have realism, [drama that] could be interpreted as real life, like documentary. Like Flat, for instance. A professor of documentary has put it on the cover of his book thinking that it was a documentary, which is really peculiar. [Laughs].

Flat’s about a young girl living in a block of housing commission flats in Alice Springs, Central Australia, who gets a handycam and just films a day in her life. She lives just with her father, who’s largely absent, and she’s the primary carer of her little sister, and is also experiencing a budding love relationship. So it’s a mixture between what she shoots with the camera and the static shots of the world in which all this unfolds.

When you talk about realism and making your films feel as real as possible, in a drama, what elements are going to conjure ‘the real’ the most?

For me it’s the way people interact with one another. I find a lot of films way too dialogue driven. I sit at home and we barely talk to each other! We grunt, or things are said through gesture largely, and I like the communication of gesture. I think it’s really a big thing in Aboriginal language. And things are left unsaid, but things happen.

You made Flat as part of a series of shorts funded by the AFC’s Indigenous Branch initiative Dreaming in Motion and you went on to be supported by the AFC to make a half-hour drama film called Plains Empty.

Plains Empty has sort of been with me for a while, on many different levels. [A] large part of my ‘youth’ has been sitting around talking about ghost stories and country and travelling and being in remote places. I guess it’s a film that has all of those elements, which are all things that I find really fascinating. It’s a ghost story, and it’s a fun way of representing history, and in this case a female history. Also I’m just playing around with the genre and challenging myself. I wanted to use special effects and CGI. I see these initiatives as a training ground for me to work with people in different departments and learn various skills.

It’s set in Coober Pedy, the opal mining town in South Australia. It’s about a young Aboriginal woman who moves out to a mining camp with her man. She’s left alone for long periods of time and begins to see strange things. So it’s a film about isolation and discovering ghosts and finding closure. [She meets an] old miner who lives nearby and the town isn’t welcoming for women—it’s a really sort of dangerous place, because there aren’t many women out there.

How do you work with a cinematographer like Warwick Thornton to translate your vision onto screen.

…[Y]ou have faith that they’ll interpret it the way that you want it to be interpreted, and will bring their own elements to it. Warwick and I have worked together on and off for years now and we spend our entire lives talking about films, looking at books, at films and, you know, we understand our styles. …We work really well together, and it just sort of gels. It’s a great working relationship.

A filmmaker needs to always challenge an audience, to make them think about things and see things that they might not get to see, or might not have been exposed to or have thought about. …As a woman it’s really important to give women a presence on screen, especially Aboriginal women…on screen, as characters, and behind the scenes as well. I guess to make an audience watch and interact and respond to your film you need to entertain them.

Do you feel that as a heavy responsibility, to make films that are speaking to Aboriginal people and filling the gaps of all those stories that have never been told?

I don’t think I’ve ever seen it as a burden…For documentaries I’m initially making that film for the family I’m working with and it’s really important to me that they like it and their families like it and it can be passed around on DVD and the whole community will watch it. And you know, that’s going to happen anyway. Well, you hope that will happen anyway. But if you think about that sort of thing too much it becomes really daunting and…you’d crush yourself. You have to just be free and an audience will find the film, it will find its audience. That’s sort of my philosophy! I think it’s true, I think that happens.

It’s a feature film project, part of the AFC’s Long Black initiative. We’re up to second draft now. My film’s called The Place Between and it’s about a young Aboriginal woman in South Australia who is released from gaol and has to rebuild her life. So it’s a character piece and it deals with the prison cycle, and family and sexual abuse, and friendship and love. It’s ultimately a love story. [Laughs]. A love story set in Port Adelaide, which I’m very excited about, I have to say.

Well, I spent a lot of time growing up in Adelaide and around Port Adelaide, It was always sort of ‘the Aboriginal area’ of the city and it’s such a fantastic location. Really, you know, it’s a port, and it’s dying, and it’s going nowhere, even though it’s a port! It’s just a great location, and Adelaide’s a really fascinating place to make films I think.

I’m working as a writer and director on a documentary series called First Australians [writer-directors Rachel Perkins, Beck Cole, writer Louis Nowra], It’s 9 one-hour episodes exploring the history of Indigenous Australia. It’s being made with SBS and others. It’s basically a history of black Australia in a really well-researched, well-funded capacity. Yeah, it’s going to be one of our largest documentary series.

What do you call it—dancefilm, dance on camera, video dance, dance on screen…? Whatever it is, it was the topic of the first Screendance, State of the Art Conference held at the American Dance Festival (ADF) in Durham, North Carolina.

And within which critical discourse does it sit? This vital question was raised by Douglas Rosenberg, conference convener, keynote speaker, dancefilm-maker, and professor and founding director of ADF’s Dancing for the Camera in his opening address. Rosenberg’s multiple titles were typical of the conference participants and attendees, most straddling at least 2 areas of making, teaching, curating and theorising this fastest growing form of creativity in dance. The question of critical discourse proved to be the crucial one, underpinning all of the debates about name, form, structure, production processes, aesthetics, purpose and future of…whatever it’s called.

Papers, screenings, and workshops pushed us to consider, for example, dance on camera in academia (presented by a panel of 5 academics who have done heroic work in bringing the form into universities in America): cinematic visions of Butoh (Daniele Wilmouth, filmmaker and academic); popular film and dance (Karen Backstein, film theorist); and the range of cinematic and artistic possibilities offered by the apparatus of the screen (Alla Kovgan, filmmaker and curator, on choreographic cinema). Olive Bieringa, director of The Body Cartography Project, examined generating video material kinesthetically; Evann Siebens and Keith Doyle, ‘dance media artists’, explored improvisational shooting techniques; Daniel Conrad, filmmaker, considered the techniques of getting dance off the stage; and Billy Cowie, filmmaker and research fellow at University of Brighton, looked at framing; and more. Other presenters brought us ideas about new media (Harmony Bench, UCLA PhD candidate, in a paper on Hyperdance); about motion capture (by Michael Miles, motion capture developer); dance film in conjunction with live performance (John Crawford, assistant professor of dance and media arts at the University of California, Irvine); and even “new models for knowledge transfer between practicing collaborative and cross media artists” in the form of a report by Katrina McPherson, video dance artist and author of the recently published Making Video Dance (Routledge, 2006), reporting on her own “Opensource” conference in Scotland.

Australians contributed 3 papers. Filmmaker Tracie Mitchell, spoke about her own developing ability, and that of dancefilmmakers at large, to “move fluidly through the lands of dance and film”, describing her art as “like a visual poem rather than a linear story.” Her film Whole Heart, which has been screened widely and shared a prize in Australia’s 2006 ReelDance Festival, demonstrated her premise, by moving coherently between the naturalistic and the expressionistic. Whole Heart’s widespread acceptance in the Australian film community (AFC funding, Melbourne Film Festival and Dendy Awards screenings at the Sydney Film Festival) indicates that at some level, our “film industry” is really all art house.

Richard James Allen described this ‘art house industry’ phenomenon in his screening and paper on dance and drama hybrids in Australia/New Zealand dancefilm. He pointed out that dancefilm-making offers a potential escape from the stifling and unimaginative aspects of our ‘industry’-wide insistence on naturalism, and called upon Australian filmmakers to work with the fantatistical, the physical and the vertiginous possibilities of the choreographic sensibility. His screening of Cordelia Beresford’s The Eye Inside, Shona McCullagh’s Break, his own Thursday’s Fictions and Madeleine Hetherton’s Together demonstrated the potential of dance drama hybrids to be cinematic, provocative and engaging experiences.

My own paper on ‘Editing as a form of Choreography’ came from a perspective which is as deeply influenced by training, teaching and creating in cinema as it is by my 20 year professional career in dance. My challenge was around the question of understanding the cinematic potential of editing as well as its choreographic potential—a challenge which was not taken up materially so much as it was philosophically through the question: “Is dance on screen a dance art, a cinema art or a visual art?”

This question ultimately produced the critical framework being sought by the conference. Animated discussions between myself, Rosenberg, Kovgan, McPherson, Allen, Professor Ellen Bromberg of the University of Utah, the conference “Respondent”, dance film producer and chair of South East Dance, Bob Lockyer, and the formal and informal contributions of all attendees, lead to a diagram of 3 overlapping disciplines: dance, cinema, and visual art. Unlike the typical result of these models, it was determined that the ‘ideal’ screendance production was not necessarily a mix of all 3. Rather, each approach and each overlap provided a way of comprehending a given work:

A dance on screen which prioritises dance as its central discipline will foreground the composition and exhibition of the danced movement.

A dancefilm that is working in the overlapping areas of cinema and dance will prioritise the directorial vision and emphasise the collaborative coordination of all of the elements of cinematic production from script to mise-en-scéne to sound mix.

A video dance that is based in the thinking of a video art maker, a performance art maker or a visual artist will have its effect through techniques, schools, theories and premises of those disciplines.

As Rosenberg hoped, determining this framework for critical discourse through the distinctions within these approaches has an immediate and profound impact on all other areas of discussion. Educational programs can identify whether they are built around the study of one, 2 or all 3 of these approaches and their attendant histories, aesthetics and production processes. Festival directors can articulate whether their interests lie in the ‘art’ film approach of a visual experience, the dance aspect of dance film, or the cinematic realisation of ideas. Or, if the festival embraces a ‘successful’ film in any combination of the 3, they can determine how a given film ‘succeeds’ within its approach. Critics can likewise respond to work from within an articulated and informed framework of either their own perspective of what the form should be or their informed reading of the maker’s intentions.

Most importantly, the articulation of the framework for critical discourse around ‘screendance’ (which is ultimately my term of choice since it embraces film, video, new media, installation and future media) allows artists to identify their own priorities and to educate and develop themselves within and around the history of their own approach and mix of influences. Identifying and knowing our frames and histories may save us from the danger Lockyer warned us of in his summary of the proceedings: that as the form matures, unless we know our own history, we are doomed to rewind and repeat our steps.

Karen Pearlman is co-artistic director, with Richard James Allen, of The Physical TV Company, whose award-winning cinematic dance films have been seen in festivals and theatrical or broadcast screenings around the world.

Lee Whitmore’s The Safe House deservedly won the 2006 Yoram Gross Animation Award in the Sydney Film Festival Dendy Awards. It’s a luminescent recreation of a pivotal moment in Australian history as experienced through a child’s eyes and ears. Whitmore, the animator, writer and director of the film has drawn on her recollection of the Petrov affair of 1954, specifically the Russian couple’s taking refuge in her neighbour’s home, the safe house of the title, after their defection.

The voice-over narration (Noni Hazlehurst) is of the adult Lee looking back to 1954, but the visual structure is focused very much on the child Lee’s world—the joys of play and eating threaten to drown out important news on the radio, and the holiday reunion with friends governs all. However, newspaper photos, more radio news, local gossip, the sound of Evdokia Petrov crying in the night and glimpses of the couple through a hole in the fence constellate to suck the children into the popular conception of the Petrovs as spies, which they act out as a grim little game.

What Whitmore has so ingeniously done is convey the child’s limited view of the world, either through not understanding or picking up prejudices or being deliberately locked out of adult conversation. However the story depicts the gradual erosion of those limits. As Whitmore says in a Film Australia press kit interview: “I think it aroused my curiosity about things outside our home and our street, and caused me to sense perhaps for the first time that all was not well in the world outside” (www.filmaust.com.au).

Above all, the power of The Safe House resides in Whitmore’s consumate talent as an artist. The images look like they come straight from a beautiful children’s picture book but moving with simple ease and constantly transforming—from bright sun into the dark blue of night, in brush stroke rain on the window or a gust of wind through a child’s hair. The children’s joy in water is vivid, in a backyard canvas pool, under a hose, in the bath or looking out over the glittering night time harbour. Scenes are animated with cinematographic verve, again often emphasising the child’s perspective, or taking us far above to an aerial view of the cozy island of suburbia where Whitmore lived and the Petrovs hid.

Whitmore also effectively deploys black and white imagery. The film begins with glimpses of the terrified Evdokia Petrov, focusing on an image of her lost shoe amidst the airport turmoil. Later in the film we see in full Whitmore’s versions, like stark animated woodblock prints, of press photographs of Evdokia Petrov agape at flashing cameras, struggling to board an aeroplane, held tightly by USSR officials, the camera focussing on the hands and that lone lost shoe. Then we see the image of the shocked face in the young Lee’s mind when she hears Evdokia crying. At the film’s end, when Lee recalls that nothing was ever quite the same and that the family soon left the suburb, she imagines the Petrovs living out their years of refuge walking their dog in darkened suburban streets—it’s a haunting scene.

The Safe House is full of wonderful details: glimpses of Whitmore’s father at work (he was a freelance illustrator and commercial artist); the family all ‘in class’ drawing neigbour Ted dressed like a Roman emperor; there’s a walk through lush greenery to a creepy harbour-side cave; and an awesome steam train filling the sky with billowing smoke. This is a world writ sensually large as seen by a child, if recalled by an adult. In her Film Australia interview, Whitmore says that she’s always preferred to draw from memory.

The period feel of The Safe House is central to the film’s success. I was about the same age at that time and can vouch for the accuracy of much of Whitmore’s detail as well as the impact of the Petrov affair. The radio news broadcasts, although freshly recorded (except for the actual report on the Sydney Airport drama) also sound just right. Whitmore says that she made a model of her street, drawings of her old home (“very big drawings in pencil based on old photographs, of every conceivable angle, rather like the sketch perspectives architects make”) and “a lot of research on period detail: the look of cars and trains, the details of newspaper headlines and postmen’s uniforms, the furniture and the phones and the clothes of the time” This came easily says Whitmore because she started out in film as a production designer on Stephen Wallace’s Stir (1979) and John Duigan’s Winter of Our Dreams (1980)

The self-trained Whitmore works traditionally, making her work on glass and filming it as she goes, “a process of animating the moving elements in a shot…rubbing out and painting in the new position and re-painting the background that had now been exposed.” However, for the first time she worked with digital technology, allowing her to immediately review what she’d done and “to do much more complex and detailed animation than would have been possible using film technology.” The Safe House preserves the best of traditional animation techniques not only aided but extended by digital technology. Even so, the film was 4 years in the making.

Lee Whitmore, the maker of other wonderful animations, Ada (2002) and On a Full Moon (1997), has created a gentle, acutely observant film with moments of tension and dark images that linger. It’s a film for children, and adults too, in which childhood, history and politics can come seamlessly together, a rarity in Australian film.

The other contenders

This year’s Dendy Award Animation Award nominees also included strong contenders, Carnivore Reflux (directors Eddie White, James Calvert, producers Huy Nguyen, Sam White,The People’s Republic of Animation, 7 mins) and Gustavo, director Jonathan Nix, producer Andrew Etheridge, Cartwheel Partners, 4 mins). The hilarious Carnivore Reflux is a richly coloured fantasy in which humans ingest every conceivable living edible and then, rapidly losing their gross fat, vomit it up into fantastic living creations. It’s largely a meat-eater’s nightmare, meticulously realised, funny at every step with some of the feel and look of the Terry Gilliam Monty Python animations. Gustavo is another fine work from Jonathon Nix in which he takes the vibrating line drawing common to one tradition of screen animation and turns it to surreal advantage as a lone man grapples with his rampant hairiness. Nix subjects his audience to some vertiginous point-of-view perspectives in this grim comedy of the personal. Had The Safe House not been in the running, Gustavo would have been my best bet for winner by a hair.

The Safe House, animator, writer, director Lee Whitmore, producer Denise Haslem, Film Australia National Interest Program produced in association with SBS Independent. 26 minutes.

Great political films don’t express one-dimensional certainties, but rather explore the complexities of life under various systems of power. They are both specific in what they tell us about a particular time and place, and universal in their exploration of human-made suffering. It’s too early to say whether Mohamed Al-Daradji’s Ahlaam will join the ranks of great political films, but its depiction of contemporary Iraq reveals a specific reality of unimaginable misery, while also making a more general point about the nightmarish consequences of arbitrary, absolute power.

The film shares more than a little ground with another classic tale of human endurance under conditions of war and oppression—Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945). Like Rossellini’s Neorealist classic, Ahlaam was shot on location in the immediate aftermath of war, with the cast and crew living very much in the shadow of ongoing violence and fear. The title translates as ‘Dreams’, an ironic comment on the shattering of Iraqi people’s lives and hopes, and a level of daily horror in post-war Iraq so extreme it has taken on an almost surreal quality. But while the tribulations of the population in Rome, Open City are underpinned by a belief that they are fighting for a better world, Ahlaam contains no such consolation, illustrating a key difference between 1945 and our contemporary situation. Ahlaam offers no political or philosophical redemption for the suffering we witness on screen; the ‘liberators’ here are as ethically and philosophically bankrupt as the government they are displacing.

Director Mohamed Al-Daradji returned to Iraq in the wake of the US-led ‘liberation’ having fled his homeland following the murder of his politically active cousin in 1995. He was deeply disturbed by what he witnessed in post-war Baghdad, particularly the sight of numerous psychiatric patients wandering the streets, their hospitals destroyed in the US bombing. It was his experiences assisting a friend to round up some of these patients that inspired the story of Ahlaam.

The film begins in a Baghdad psychiatric hospital the night US forces begin pounding the city in preparation for their invasion. Bombs rain silently from the sky, racking the city with concussive explosions. Two hospital patients—a man and a woman—pace their cells with fear and gaze at the flames from their barred windows. As the electricity fails and the building is plunged into darkness, a young doctor attempts to calm the patients and restore power.

From this opening the film travels back in time to trace the paths that brought these 3 characters together. Their tales traverse a range of class and social divisions, but each one’s life is marred by the brutality of the Ba’thist regime. The least developed story concerns Doctor Medhi, whose university career is interrupted when his application for postgraduate study is refused due to his dead father’s communist affiliations and he is conscripted into the Iraqi army.

The second narrative strand focuses on Ali, the male patient we see fearfully sinking into his bed as the bombs fall on Baghdad in the opening scene. Like Doctor Medhi, he is an ex-draftee, formerly posted to a desert outpost near the Syrian border. We see him on leave in pre-war Baghdad, and journeying back to his post with a neurotic friend and fellow soldier. Ali and his comrade dislike military life and are appalled by the cruelties of the military police, who keep a watchful eye over the army of mostly reluctant conscripts. His friend talks of desertion, but Ali argues that sitting out their service and the Ba’thist regime is a less risky option.

Radio news broadcasts form an aural backdrop to the quiet of their desert outpost. From one of these we learn UN weapons inspectors have been expelled from the country. Soon after, Ali and his friend sit on the ground eating their evening meal. Ali rises to make tea, stepping into a small bunker to boil some water, the peaceful quiet of the desert hanging heavy over the scene. The calm sense of waiting is deliberately protracted, not to build tension—there’s a bleak sense of inevitability about what is to come—but to illustrate the remorseless logic of the game that the Iraqi, US and British governments are engaged in. Men in safe, faraway capitals engaged in a war of words, while violence rains down on ordinary people caught up in the machinations of global power play.

When the strike finally comes, it’s sudden and almost without sound; the ground trembles and Ali is deafened by a blast, his hearing returning only as a muffled rumble overlaid with piercing tinnitus. He stumbles from the bunker into a landscape suddenly plunged into night. The camp is strewn with men cut in half or missing limbs; his comrade lies riddled with shrapnel. He picks up his friend’s limp body and stumbles into the desert, walking for hours until he is tackled by a jeep load of military police and arrested for desertion. Confused, deaf and utterly shell-shocked he is sentenced to mutilation and incarceration in a psychiatric institution by a military court. In one of the film’s most horrific scenes, the terrified Ali is strapped down and his ear severed without the use of anaesthetic, before he is cast into a hospital for the insane. Nothing in the film conveys the brutality inflicted on the Iraqi people by the Ba’thist regime quite like this sequence of swift and arbitrary ‘justice.’

Ahlaam’s third narrative strand centres on the title character, a young woman we see living an apparently idyllic life in pre-war Baghdad. She spends much of her time with her fiancee, dreaming of their future life together. He is an opposition activist, however, and their wedding is rudely interrupted by plain-clothed police dragging him from the celebration. Ahlaam is left sobbing in the dust. She is still wearing her dress when we see her in the hospital—a mocking reminder of the ordinary life she once imagined for herself and her husband.

Al-Daradji’s film is unflinching in its depiction of the reality of life in Saddam’s Iraq, but circumstances actually worsen when the story returns to the present and the psychiatric hospital is struck by a US bomb. The patients stumble through holes in the walls into a city that has gone from a state of repression to one of violent anarchy. Looters pillage shops and homes, and gunmen roam the streets. Into this scene come the first American troops, waving their rifles in the face of every Iraqi they meet and barking orders like parodies of professional soldiers. The bewildered patients endure abuse, rape and sniper fire as they roam a cityscape devoid of compassion, dignity or hope. In this chaotic environment Doctor Medhi’s efforts to protect his patients and treat them with some degree of kindness come to nothing.

Ahlaam concludes on an utterly despairing note, but the film is not a condemnation of any one group or even one specific war—it is a deeply affecting cry of pain from a people who have been bombed, betrayed, abused and had every atrocity imaginable perpetrated upon them. The film allows no position of observance, or emotional or intellectual distance. It is not a piece of analysis. It makes every viewer live through this trauma to force them to ask how this could happen.

The film’s pessimism was no doubt sharpened by the conditions under which it was made—conditions that directly reflected the situations dramatised on screen. The cast and crew were unable to travel anywhere in Baghdad without an armed escort, and one of the policemen providing protection was killed during filming. Despite the police presence, members of the crew, including the director, were kidnapped by Ba’thists during the shoot and were beaten and threatened with execution before being handed over to the Americans for a week’s Abu-Ghraib style “interrogation” (to quote the director). The 18-year-old sound recordist was shot in the leg during the initial abduction and the director’s 15-year-old cousin (and the film’s boom operator) has allegedly suffered long-term mental problems from the abuse and humiliation he suffered at the hands of US forces. In the final credits we are informed that the actor playing Ahlaam’s father was killed soon after shooting was completed.

Ahlaam is an unrelentingly harrowing experience, but it is redeemed from charges of excess by its grounding in a reality that is beamed into our lounge-rooms every night. It is an important film not only because it confronts us with the depravity of a conflict whose duration and sheer awfulness has rendered most of us numb, but also because it serves as a warning about the potentially apocalyptic end point of our current global political course.Ahlaam, writer/director/producer Mohamed Al-Daradji; producer Atea Al-Daradji, performers Aseel Adel, Bashir Al-Majid, Mohamed Hashim, Iraq/UK/Netherlands; 53rd Sydney Film Festival

Details of Ahlaam’s production were taken from the author’s email correspondence with the director.

There’s a sour adage coined by George Bernard Shaw many educators would be familiar with: “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.”

It’s a nasty jibe and one that is roundly repudiated by the professional lives of theatre practitioners currently teaching in Australia’s tertiary education sector who retain a commitment to working in the performing arts while mentoring the next wave of directors, actors, animateurs and designers.

Richard Murphet, VCA

For almost all his working life, Richard Murphet, Head of the Theatre Making Department at the Victorian College of the Arts, has combined his work as director and writer with teaching. He has reached a point where, while a permanent employee of the VCA, he can negotiate regular time off in blocks to work on his own projects. This is necessary, he says, because “I’m pretty obsessive, so if I’ve got a group of students, I get completely involved with their work. So it’s not just time, it’s emotional time as well—just getting your head clear.”

He won’t be taking time off from the VCA this year, but he’ll be relieved from teaching duties to act as artistic director and mentor for a project with DasArts, the Dutch performing arts training academy (RT68, p42). The scale of the work is daunting: 24 young artists from VCA and DasArts will travel to North Queensland where, 400 years ago, the Dutch first made landfall in Australia. The students and their mentors will stay with 3 Aboriginal communities in Cape York, before returning to Melbourne. The task is then to create a work based on their research and experiences to be performed as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival. Murphet likens the process to the Dutch explorers’ voyage all those years ago: crossing vast expanses of unknown seas, not knowing what awaits at journey’s end.

It’s the type of undertaking that being part of an educational institution can sometimes provide. Initiated by the VCA, the project, according to Murphet, demonstrates the commitment the institution has to educators who not only teach the arts, but do the arts. Teaching has provided Murphet with other networks and opportunities. In 1996 he received a National Teaching Fellowship allowing him to travel and establish enduring connections with fellow practitioners in Belgium and Holland. It was also through his work at VCA that he met one of his most crucial collaborators, Lisa Shelton, who was formerly head of movement there.

Mary Moore, Flinders University

Mary Moore, an established theatre designer who teaches in the directing course at Flinders University Drama Centre, has also found herself working on large projects with her institution’s support. Commissioned to produce Memory Museum (RT46, p37), for the Centenary of Federation, she asked the Drama Centre to be a partner in the project. Moore believes the project wouldn’t have been possible without the support from the university. Because of the “immense educational value” of the project due to its experimental nature, the university was willing to allow staff and students to participate.

Moore finds little conflict between her roles as teacher and artist; in fact they complement each other. “I always try and find ways in which [students] can access the industry.” If there are clashes between classes and a rehearsal she has to attend, she will often invite her students along to observe. This provides a definite benefit for her students she believes, giving them an insight into the industry from an insider’s perspective.

Tim Maddock, University of Wollongong

Tim Maddock is busy. He’s formerly from Adelaide where he played a key role in the 1990s theatre scene with Brink (including co-directing a wonderful account of Howard Barker’s The Ecstatic Bible for the 2000 Adelaide Festival). While a relatively new appointment to the position of Performance Coordinator at the University of Wollongong’s School of Music and Drama, he’s also currently immersed in pre-production for The Hanging of Jean Lee (RT 73, p34), a new music theatre work by Andrée Greenwell for The Studio, Sydney Opera House. “It’s proving to be a challenge to manage the time,” he admits, “and I suppose I’m reliant on the university having a flexible enough structure and valuing the notion that I maintain a professional identity in order to be able to continue working as a professional practitioner.”

His involvement in Greenwell’s project came as a result of his role at the university. Greenwell delivered a lecture and had gone on to mentor on a project in the Music and Drama School. Their discussions led to Greenwell inviting Maddock to direct The Hanging of Jean Lee.

Maddock came to teaching through a change in his personal circumstances—he’d had a child and could no longer be quite so casual about earning money. However, a regular income was only part of the attraction: “The proportion of my work being done in universities was increasing…I was supervising productions of plays by Sarah Kane and Martin Crimp and all this interesting stuff and thinking this scope of work and experimentation and creativity going on in the universities feels more alive and more engaged than a lot of the professional practice.”

Helmut Bakaitis, NIDA

Big projects outside the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) aren’t possible for Helmut Bakaitis, Head of the directing school there. Although impressive in Max Lyandvert’s production of My Head was a Sledgehammer in 2001, his commitments mostly limit him to “fairly small cameo roles in the odd movie and television series.” This has meant that his work as a writer has suffered. His drawer, he says, is full of unfinished scripts that he is determined to complete. “My dream is to retire one day quite soon and put down all the ideas in my head on paper or on the computer.” Not that he would want to give up teaching completely. Bakaitis has had a long involvement in youth theatre and continues to be inspired and invigorated by contact with young artists.

Teaching, he says, has helped him develop his skills, particularly as a director and a writer: “I think I was a bit of a touchy-feely type of person and now I’m much more able to be diagnostic and clear in what I want to achieve in conjunction with the artist, which is a skill that I’ve honed through teaching here…Dramaturgy was one of the skills I came with and I’ve continued to develop that through the playwrights’ studio.”

Angela Punch-McGregor, WAAPA

Angela Punch-McGregor was appointed to the role of lecturer in acting at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) at the beginning of this year. She has also taught at most of the other major performing arts institutions in Australia. While well known for her acting work in film and theatre, teaching and directing are her primary focus these days.

She values the support she has from WAAPA, who have a commitment to providing their students with educators who have a profile and standing in the industry. Punch-McGregor describes the interaction with her students as “joyous.” She is also looking forward to the connections and networking that will be available to her as part of what she sees as a global network of institutions teaching the performing arts. South-east Asia, especially, she believes, will provide opportunities for teachers and artists alike given the establishment of European-style performing arts schools in cities such as Hong Kong.

Interplay of roles

For all the interviewees, there was a significant interplay between their dual roles of artist and educator. For Maddock, teaching has made him more “compassionate” as a director as well as forcing him to clarify his communication methods. This is echoed by both Bakaitis and Moore, who, unprompted, also voice the view that teaching has clarified not only the way they communicate, but also their ideas. Bakaitis and Moore also derive tremendous inspiration from contact with their students.

Punch-McGregor finds the roles of teaching and directing are intertwined. As a director she is concerned with “what is going be to visually and audibly most effective…At the same time, if I’m not getting what I want, I have to instruct in order to get that from the performer.”

For Murphet, teaching and creating his own work provide a kind of balance: “I’ve always found they really feed one another fantastically. When I get worn out—just hitting my head against the problems of putting work out—it’s good to go back to teaching. And when I get drained from teaching, it’s good to go out and do my own work.” His students also reap the benefit of having artist-educators by getting an accurate picture of the realities of being an artist. Murphet says, “Every time I go to direct a play…I don’t know how to do it. I start at the beginning and I ask, ‘What’s directing about?’ and then I gradually find it. And that’s fantastic for (the students), because they feel they know nothing and that’s the state you have to be in when you’re doing art.”

Benefits for students

And what else do students gain from having artist-educators? According to Maddock it’s having teachers whose theatre practice is fresh and alive: “I think when you stop doing it, you calcify and your ideas about doing theatre become frozen in time.”

Bakaitis’ view is that it is crucial that performing arts students have educators who are also working in the industry: “All you’ve really got to offer the students is your address book and your contacts and if you can’t give them current contacts, then what’s the point?” Murphet also acknowledges the benefits for students if teachers can plug them into networks, but thinks it’s of greater importance to infuse them with the excitement of constantly interrogating theatre as a form.

For love or money?

Money is always an issue for an artist trying to survive by their art alone, but none of the interviewees would give up teaching completely if project funding came flooding in. Mary Moore, particularly, relishes her working environment: “This particular relationship [with the Drama Centre] is very special…It’s not really about the hours or the remuneration or any of those things. It’s like a company.”

Both Murphet and Bakaitis say they would like more time for their own work but they would grieve the loss of contact with bright, artistically ambitious young artists if they left their positions. Maddock, too, appreciates the university environment’s vitality and the openness to experimentation. For Punch-McGregor, money has simply never been a reason for choosing any particular path: “I regard it as a privilege to work in this industry.” These committed artist-teachers are nurturing students as colleagues, future collaborators and fellow travellers.

“They’ve sold out.” “They’ve got it easy.” “They’re working too hard.” Some of the new media educators interviewed for this article felt this was the way non-educators regarded them. Have they sold out, do they have it easy or are they working too hard? And are these the sort of questions that will bring us closer to understanding a new media educator-artist in Australia circa 2006?

An artist getting a day job is nothing new; an artist getting a job teaching art isn’t either. So what is new about a new media artist choosing to move into education? Johannes Klabbers, Course Coordinator and Senior Lecturer, BA Multimedia Arts, School of Visual and Performing Arts, Charles Sturt University, vividly recalled his motivation for moving into education many years ago:

There were trucks full of incontinent sheep thundering down the main street (the campus is in a regional town)…but it was when I saw the Macintosh 8100AV with 128MB of RAM with all the software you had ever dreamed about, which I could access 24 hours a day, that I signed on the dotted line.

Klabbers, who has worked with photography, video installation art and then with “all forms of media new and old that are available to an artist: image, text, sound, performance”, also had the “idea that facilitating the learning and development of creative people would be fun.” Likewise Mark Cypher, Senior Lecturer and Program Chair of Multimedia, School of Media, Communications and Culture at Murdoch University, who uses computers as a “new sculptural medium”, enjoyed teaching “immensely” and “discovered [he] was getting paid for it.” Hugh Davies, Lecturer, Digital Imaging and Manipulation and Multimedia Production, Photography and Screen Department, Adelaide Centre for the Arts, TAFE, is a sculptor, film and “alternate reality experience” artist who also found “teaching to be very infectious…the more you do, the better you get and the more you enjoy it.” For Troy Innocent, Deputy Head (Research), Senior Lecturer, Multimedia and Digital Arts, Art and Design, Monash University, who has been exploring the “language of computers” through virtual worlds, academia provided an “opportunity to both reflect upon and articulate my approach to new media arts to others.”

For last year’s RealTime Education edition, new media postgraduates were asked how they chose their institution and department (RT68). They unanimously cited the supervisor as a critical factor in their decision-making. For the majority of educators interviewed for this article, however, the experience was quite the opposite. Cypher exclaimed, “You don’t choose the institution, the institution chooses you!…and the reasons are never really clear for why you get or don’t get lucky.” Ann Morrison, Lecturer, Information Environments Program, School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Queensland, who works with installations using various media, added that positioning herself in an IT school was an intentional environment choice to “implement more technology into [her] own art practice” and selecting a “university that valued research” was so that the “teaching loads were lighter.”

Exhibiting more or less?

All the teachers gave positive responses to the question of whether academia has effected their exhibition output. Innocent is exhibiting “more or less the same—as [he is] based in an institution that recognises art practice as research activity.” Davies and Morrison found their practice slowed at first but picked up again once they, as Morrison put it, “learnt how to ‘work’ better within a university system.” Both Klabbers and Cypher feel that less is more now. Cypher concentrates on “making 1 or 2 really good works a year and then spends the next year or 2 pushing those works internationally.” A perennial problem, regardless of how supportive a department, is the need for academic credit for creative works. But in addition to this age-old, discipline-wide issue, is that of peer recognition of new media.

New what?

Cypher has observed a “lack of understanding about new media, both theoretically and practically from…both within art schools and in the general humanities areas.” In an attempt to circumvent such misunderstandings Morrison takes a multi-lingual approach: “I speak IT, Interaction Design, Humanities and Visual Arts/New Media Arts speak depending on who I am discussing my ‘research’/ artwork with.” On the topic of new media curricula, Innocent laments that although there is an improved synthesis of practice and theory “we are still dealing with the legacy of new media arts study as largely an activity involving the acquisition of technical skills.”

Although access to technology, to ‘grunt’, is a factor in new media artists choosing academia as a job, it was also noted that universities are not early adopters. Despite blogs being a few generations of net-phenomena behind us, students at some institutions are unable to be even introduced to them due to bans, not to mention prohibitions on citing web-based material regardless of their peer-reviewed status. Davies highlights the point that many of the technical skills being offered in tertiary education, even at third year levels, are now being taught in most high schools. Education, he adds, is not keeping pace with technology.

Misunderstanding extends to the students too. Younger students, Davies observes, “are often not concerned about creative development but high grades.” Cypher and Klabbers are both concerned that students are more focused on attaining employment than developing creativity. This approach is ironic, Klabbers continues, since “most prospective employers are more interested in finding people to work for them who are flexible, who are problem solvers, who can apply creative ideas in a range of contexts, than in which version of the software they are familiar with.”

Then what?

UK media performance group Blast Theory recommended in their Adelaide Thinkers in Residence report, New Media, Art and Creative Culture (2004), that the outcomes required for R&D and cultural funding should be broadened to facilitate blue sky thinking; something that universities are ideally poised to actuate. Innocent concurs:

New media arts study can effectively work as a research lab to nurture a synergy between concept development and technical/production skills. There is the opportunity and time for students to take risks and play with possibilities within the relatively safe environment of the university. These opportunities are less likely when working within the industry or in an arts practice that may be limited by access to gear, expertise, space to play etc.

Morrison recommends that universities “be prepared to allow experimental machines with admin access and no firewalls.” Davies wants to see teaching through new media rather than just about new media, using “game-based learning and web research based assignments.” Innocent champions a hybrid space of a lab and studio environment that facilitates a more creative space. Ideally though, Innocent muses, it would be best to have the students acquire skills through independent research “so that the studio can focus more on other issues such as concept, interaction design, language, theoretical background, context etc.”

Teaching vs practice

Morrison found that referring to her works-in-process to her students caused them (her works) to stall because the students started implementing them. Now Morrison invokes her own works only when they are a “fait accompli.” Cypher observed that he found it more difficult when he was teaching in exactly the same area as his art practice “because the last thing you want to do when you come home after talking about art all day is to make art.” Now that there is a slight difference in what he’s teaching he is more freed up. All of the academic artists acknowledge that the long hours they’re working do affect their practice, but just as much as anyone with many jobs. Red tape and internal politics were also listed as being stifling, as one interviewee succinctly relayed it: “Money. Cynicism. Money. Fear. Money. Laziness. Bureaucracy. Money. Bean counters.” However, ongoing financial support relieves the mind of thoughts of pennies, leaving room for pixels and punch cards.

Networking

Interviewees also cited collegial networking as a benefit of academia. Davies comments that he has “access to opportunities that come with the networks of other artists and, being within an institution, I also think that there is a certain prestige that being an educator holds that being a mere artist does not.” For Klabbers too, the contacts he has made through his work at the university have facilitated projects such as the Wagga Space Program and the UnSound festival (RT 64, p10). Klabbers explains that in “a small city like Wagga the university is very important to the economy and the wider community, especially the arts community.” Cypher has “most definitely benefited from being employed by a university [because now he has] a truly international practice and [is] lucky enough to work with the smartest people…constantly engaged with ideas that have been the prime motivating force of [his] professional life”.

Potential artist-students

Davies recommends, “[a]rtists should be more involved with universities but it’s a 2-way relationship. Universities must also support artists and allow and encourage students to work with artists. Mentorships should be more readily available to students.” Klabbers recommends artists become students “for developing your critical faculties.” Morrison offers tactical advice, specifying a degree-agnostic approach where you “[s]hop around and don’t necessarily do a whole degree, but choose some courses from one, and some from another to gather the skills you need to do your own work.” Likewise, Innocent champions a faculty-agnostic approach and cites the Master of Electronic Media Art (MEMA) at his institution that “is open to artists, designers, computer scientists and software engineers”, which facilitates “interfaculty supervision across Art and Design and Information Technology.”

And as for new media artists teaching new media art? All recommended it, with the caveat that it is not for all. It depends on the person, and whether they can live with a “growing together of diverse elements into a newly evolving entity, that never fully congeals” (description on Mark Cypher’s website of his work Concrescence, Beapworks, 2006). It is probably prophetic that when the internet was being developed that although the creative exploits of the medium, such as Will Crowther and Don Woods’ Colossal Cave Adventure (1973-77), were rife they were created in addition to official research. Funding went to strictly academic and military investigations and not to art. Perhaps in the current arts funding crisis and with the help of the new media artists cited in this article, academia has the potential to offer a new home for new media art.

In Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), the protagonists are trapped in a realm of extra-theatrical consciousness. Between fleeting moments of purposeful, deliberate action in which they perform their minor roles as footmen in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, these forlorn characters are consigned to limbo, pondering the nature of reality and the parameters of their autonomy. In moments of intense role-play, the characters are malleable and compliant, driven by some inexplicable, pre-determined set of rules they are simply doomed to enact. Outside of these episodes, they lack purpose and agency, and are equally condemned to consider the futility of their existence.

I was reminded of the play by Adam Costenoble’s recent exhibition at Firstdraft gallery, The Passage, which invites participation through a number of mechanisms that evoke similar themes. As with the artist’s former projects, The Chamber and The Mountain (both 2005), The Passage aims to reconfigure our experience of audio-visual installation by making large-scale, structural elements a central component. Installation here is more than a tokenistic reference to a technicality of display, instead drawing overt attention to the relationship between spatial and perceptual encounters in a gallery context.

In The Passage, the idea of literal confinement explored in earlier works is expanded to incorporate psychological and philosophical dimensions, resulting in a doubling of interior/exterior dynamics that demands self-reflexive and physical engagement on the part of the viewer. Upon entering the darkened gallery, one meets what is effectively a room within a room. Its long narrow design (like a hallway, complete with doorways) heightens this relation to domestic scale, as does the volume of its interior, but moreso in the way it is pressed against the gallery’s far wall. This leaves the rest of the space as a voluminous void, impersonal and generic in contrast to The Passage’s intimate zone of engagement. The gallery, then, becomes the first of 2 thresholds to be crossed. Through a translucent scrim that forms the facing ‘wall’ of the installation, 2 projections radiate light from either end of the enclosure. The shadows cast by single bodies inside create a further screen-image on the partition as they move around, suggesting a distinction between active participant and idle observer, but one that is immediately negated via the relationship such partial visibility establishes between watching and being watched.

This initial confusion of agency and acquiescence is further elaborated once inside. Fixed in a linear sequence along the floor are a series of push buttons that activate different video tracks as you move along the space. On each screen a duplicate image of a male figure hovers in a nondescript, composite landscape of endless dirt and ominous rolling clouds. Facing off against one another, the first of these figures holds a rather large and menacing gun. Constant static interruptions, jump cuts, and the flickering, shifting boundaries of the bodies foreground the volatile, fragmented relationship between physical and psychological states, the real and the virtual.

With each advance a narrative unfolds: the screen figures progress through phases of boredom, agitation and finally violence, at which point—in a conflation of murder and suicide—upon the participant’s prompt, one shoots the other. Inserted between the video channels, and activating this sequence of events, the participant is apparently complicit in the scene they are perpetuating. Upon turning back and re-activating each stage, the sequence restores itself in reverse, with each of the figures returning to their original jaded disposition.

In a dystopian contradiction, this performative scenario collapses states of progress and retrogression, transformation and inertia, in on themselves. Though conceptually complex, its development is nonetheless truncated in accordance with The Passage’s condensed physical space. Indeed, a more nuanced, elaborate disclosure of the characters’ opposing temperaments (passive/aggressive) and our ambiguous relationship to them would be more effective. Regardless, The Passage astutely renders the categories of protagonist, participant and spectator indistinct. The sameness of the screen figures—copies of the artist and of each other—is one element that accentuates genericism and arbitrariness: multiplied and infinitely consumable, they are locked into a cyclical enactment of death and restoration. The participant, by means of their spatial positioning and interactive engagement, is wholly implicated in this cycle. Beyond the facade of independence, empowerment and reciprocity, a system of repetition and limited potential is revealed. Like Stoppard’s hapless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the pre-determined trajectories of both the virtual and ‘real’ entities in Costenoble’s theatrical domain throw into relief questions about our ability to intervene in the world at a large, and the potential for any genuine autonomy.

It is precisely the pivotal element of a foregone conclusion that dismantles the problematic of pseudo-interactivity the work initially seems to raise. The interactive component of The Passage is superficial; however, this ineffectuality is knowingly indexed to the work’s conceptual concerns. Rather, it is at the level of functional dependency that The Passage founders. For example, a critical aspect of The Passage’s manifestation hinges on the screens playing static while the structure is unoccupied, so that work lies in chaos when it is 'dormant' (its protagonists consigned to extra-theatrical limbo elsewhere), and is activated by the presence of a participant. The push button immediately encountered upon entering the work controls this function. At first touch it triggers the initial video track so that the virtual figures appear, but relies entirely on the participant depressing the switch a second time before they leave to reactivate the static track. When this is overlooked, it significantly skews the work’s dynamic, since the screen protagonists are always ‘present’ and visible from outside the empty structure, which confuses the notions of contingency and purposelessness on which The Passage turns. Furthermore, over the duration of its display, the intended experience of the work was undermined by the malfunction of technical components after several weeks.

Given this first exhibition of The Passage was identified by the artist as an early iteration in the project’s development, initially made possible by the Firstdraft Emerging Artist Studio Residency, my comments are less about identifying ‘failure’ than considering the work in relation to the increasingly popular practice of user-testing in exhibition contexts. The repositioning of this phase of artwork development—out of the studio or laboratory and into the gallery—challenges preconceived notions about the function of spaces and frameworks for public display in a manner that accommodates the shifting paradigms of interdisciplinary methodologies. Embedded in this schema of continual development, perhaps a future version of this thoughtful, provocative artwork might also incorporate the possibility of rupturing the absurd confines of prescribed existence identified here—a hopeful alternative. In the absence of such potential to escape the cycle of a hopeless reality, The Passage stubbornly refuses to offer any false consolations, resolutely displacing hope with despair.

Two recent shows in Brisbane highlighted the breadth and diversity of practice in the arena of digital culture. Innovation and some novel interpretations of interactivity figured in both The Harries: National Digital Art Award, and physical theatre company Zen Zen Zo’s latest show, Sub-Con Warrior 1.

The Harries National Digital Art Awards

Special Commendation, Janice Kuczkowski for Emperimentations in limits of tolerance #1

Founded last year, the Harries emerged from a unique partnership between the arts community and a branch of the Queensland Government, the Skills Development Centre. During the initial building of the Queensland Health-funded SDC, Arts Co-ordinator Jade Walsh says, as per Government policy, they were required to spend a percentage of building costs on art. “Being a centre for innovation, SDC staff decided that they could contribute more to the art community than by purely procuring art and decided to develop and coordinate an annual National Digital Art Award, with science being the link between health and art.” An advisory board of professionals from the arts community was established and 8 months later they launched the inaugural The Harries: National Digital Art Award. This year’s award attracted numerous entrants across a range of digital formats, awarding 3 prizes across the categories of static, dynamic and best emerging artist.

As you enter the dynamic (moving images) exhibition, to the right is a set of black cubes from which to view the videos. Frustratingly, these are only shown in excerpted form; however, even truncated, several works stood out. Trish Adams continued her delicate investigations into biomedical art originated from her own cells. Her Harries entry, the video Changing Fates (2006), like previous works, features time-lapse video-micrograph digital images of stem cells in Adams’ signature deep red, this time juxtaposed with material objects linked to Adams’ grandmother, Mollie—photographs, an elegantly inscribed fountain pen and writing samples. The concluding image, showing both Mollie’s portrait and the beating cluster of Adams’ stem cells (now cardiac cells), speaks poignantly about the cathexis of objects in family relations, while continuing Adams’ contribution to the contemporary conversation about such medical research.

Appropriately for a show that “aim(s) to be living proof of [the] art-science nexus”, biomedicine features in other works, including Michele Barker and Anna Munster’s Struck, a multi-channel video and sound installation exploring medical imaging. Featuring a ghostly figure on a blue-black background (resembling Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and intermittent white text referring to neurological damage and hysteria, Struck received the award for the Dynamic category ($8,000). While it does little to dispel the feeling that text on screen tends to detract from rather than enhance imagery, there are beautiful touches (the tendrils of white liquid unfurling in space and the complex layered soundtrack of muffled shrieks and gasps), and a clever connection with the popular obsession for medicalised, forensic displays of corporeality.

The back wall is given over to large multiple projections showing works in their entirety. Magda Matwiejews’ lush digital collage animation, Insect, is the most striking, which is fortunate, since its central position means it dominates the field of vision. Insect features a very beautiful young woman naked and floating through a series of Baroque tableaux on gossamer wings. Associations can be made to both the fruity imagery of Pipilotti Rist’s Homo sapiens sapiens installation and the darker, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch side of human-insect relations as the key character mates with various plants and an amorous dragonfly.

Genevieve Staines’ interactive installation, Time Space Frames, was located in a small side room at the far end of the exhibition. As you approach, it appears as though the old-style single lens reflex camera is pointed at the wall, but peering through the viewfinder, we see that there is a hole in the wall, through which the video can be seen. The video features landmark Brisbane buildings ‘processed’ through a range of digitally animated architectural interventions; blinds, cracks, windows and bricks appear, then disappear. The integration of these techniques with the existing aesthetics of the buildings is seamless; the ‘new’ facades look real, if improbable. When the viewer depresses the button, the ‘shutter’ closes and re-opens (complete with shutter sound-effects) to reveal a different video sequence. Time Space Frames playfully collocates old and new technologies. Through the viewer’s ‘use’ of the old analogue camera to reconfigure urban landscapes, Staines reflects on the role of photography in ordering memory and perception and demonstrates a critical, exploratory approach to animation and interactivity. Staines won the Emerging Artist award ($2,000).

Linda Dement won the Static Prize ($8,000) for White Rose and Janice Kuczkowski received a Special Commendation and $1,500 for The Limits of Tolerance.

Zen Zen Zo

The phone call came the morning of the show. “Hello Danni. This is Sub-Con Warrior Electra, contacting you on behalf of the Gamemaster. I have a few instructions for you…”

I was told to come early, dress warmly and wear comfortable shoes “as the terrain of the Sub-Con can be unpredictable.” Appetite whetted, I turned up to the secret location where I was greeted and ‘processed’ by eager Sub-Con cadets attired in the heights (or is it depths?) of geek-chic. A coach pulled up and disgorged a seemingly endless payload of excitable teenagers on excursion. The performers, clearly loving their roles as library nerds and chess club refugees, waxing lyrical about ‘the game’, were utterly charming and soon put the roiling mass at ease. Their impeccable role-playing and outfits—from spectacles bound with band-aids to lemon cashmere twin-sets, too-snug knitted vests over check shirts, pants cinched unhealthily high and sensible shoes—drew guffaws, and easily disarmed both sarcastic teenage comments (theirs) and evident discomfort (mine).

After some opening group callisthenics, we were herded into a hall where we heard from the Gamemaster (Rob Thwaites) and teams then self-selected based on the desired level of participation: Alpha (high participation and ‘danger’, perhaps surprisingly a hit with the teens) and Omega (low participation and ‘puzzle solving’—me and some bemused parents and teachers). We all donned yellow plastic raincoats (‘assimilation suits’), the purpose of which presently became clear. Entering the game proper (Sub-Con), we were faced with our opening challenge—to neutralise the fire spirit with ‘water fruits’ (water-filled balloons in fruity colours). From that splashy opening (unsurprisingly, another huge hit with teens), we were shepherded through a series of ‘worlds’ simulating those in computer games.

Our guides through these worlds (a carpark, an inner-city street, an apartment) were more spectacularly dressed characters, embodying classic computer-game clichés. In a fun twist, the high-tech blue-haired warrior, the dreamy prophet, the butch commando, and steely gladiator were all played by female actors who ramped up the burlesque and won hearts with cheeky attitudes and snappy dialogue. Hunter, the lantern-jawed commando replete with camouflage stripes and beret, complimented her ‘boys’, saying, “That’s hot!” (to much giggling) at every available opportunity. My guide, Asimov, was an energetic ‘scientist’ bedecked in forearm computer/telephone and chest-mounted video screen, which was integrated well into the performance (though I couldn’t help but be reminded of Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik’s TV-Bra antics).

Six other key characters emerged—warriors Rush (Katie Hollins), Spill (Dave Sleswick), Mercury (Carly Rees) and Frost (Kevin Kiernan-Molloy), the child, Andi (Aideen McCartney) and Big Boss (Co-director, Steven Mitchell Wright), who presided over proceedings with devastatingly acid camp. These, too, were instantly recognisable as assemblages of computer game clichés—the deadly black-clad vixen, the pink-haired flirt, the funky street warrior etc—and also played with great gusto and skill. Jagged haircuts and futuristic makeup held up well during exhilarating fight sequences. The opening contest, where participants chose their ‘fighter’ was both familiar and strange; as doubtless intended, it was just like playing Streetfighter with human characters. Only these were no ordinary humans. Zen Zen Zo is famous for the superb athleticism of its performers, and their impressive physical feats elicited gasps and cheers. We were herded into cars to shelter from a zombie attack (genuinely unnerving), and then led to another world where the interactivity extended into new territory—the introduction of a reality TV element. Some of the audience watched others perform challenging moves on closed circuit TV in a successful but underdeveloped experiment. This was only touched on in the 4 audience-performances on the night, but has further potential for expanding the boundaries of interactivity in physical theatre.

The attention to detail in the costumes, keenly observed gestures (eg the praying mantis-like back-and-front jig that signifies ‘waiting’ performed by many a computer game character) and comic repetition of character phrases, demonstrated a masterful engagement with game conventions. Though the Big Boss’s lightning fast comebacks visibly withered some of the more insistent attention-seekers, the teens’ general reaction was positive. To evoke genuine mirth rather than sarcastic sniggers in teens, as Sub-Con frequently did, is a genuine achievement; the sassy attitude and ironic play with these gaming stereotypes was perfectly pitched for this tough crowd (skimpy costumes and gorgeous girl and boy performers probably didn’t hurt either).

Sub-Con Warrior-1 is a dance between celebrating and critiquing computer game culture. The challenge of representing computer games in the ‘real’ world has been met with a production that takes the concept of ‘immersion’ literally. The lost-child narrative and some rather heavy-handed dialogue on the ethics of gaming brings the production into the murk of the media effects debate, which fortunately is leavened with frequent humour and the bonhomie of pantomime. The Directors’ Notes, by Lynne Bradley and Steven Mitchell Wright, point out that while there are disturbing phenomena related to computer game culture (such as the hikikomori or self-isolated in Japan), “it’s easy to be self-righteous…gaming represents a highly creative and educational space.” Elaborating that space to include interactive physical theatre, Zen Zen Zo has concocted a show oozing with enthusiasm and excitement, and created much anticipation for the 2007 re-staging.

Poet, choreographer and filmmaker Richard James Allen’s new book, The Kamikaze Mind, is an alphabet of lateral definitions, home-made and re-vamped aphorisms, mini-poems and micro-narrative fragments that add up to what the writer calls “a dictionary of a floating mind.” Whether encountered on a sustained reading or casually dipped into, the entries are fleeting glimpses of the mind of an astronaut who has “launched himself into a black hole” where everything is in flux, everything relative, where truths crash into their opposites and, if you’re lucky, something transcendent flies out of their fusion.

The entries comprise quips, absurdities, plain silliness, jokes good and bad, short-lived profundities and (to use poet Richard Tipping’s term) “zen bombs”, unnerving koans to linger over in a litany of uncertainty. As in an adroit musical composition, theme and variation deliver readers from the maelstrom into a quasi-Buddhist calm. However, falling into the black hole of this literary astronaut’s mind can at times be distressing. Where does the relativising stop? How can the astronaut be so irritatingly quaint, cute and obvious when he’s also so smart, witty and wise? It’s that kind of trip, the kind of challenge that Allen offers. And, dancing in and around the entries, are photos of the writer tumbling through page space.

In her launch speech, poet Judith Beveridge applauded the publishers, Brandl & Schlesinger, as innovative and courageous for taking on a unique work: “The Kamikaze Mind occupies that ground where a lot of good, enchanting and powerful writing resides—in the chinks and spaces between established genres. …This is a dictionary that prides itself not on a defensible construction of meanings, but on eccentric, almost capricious, floating, unbounded explanations, definitions that are filtered through experiences and feelings rather than explanations imposed from a literary or intellectual distance.”

The ‘kamikaze’ (Japanese for ‘divine wind’) of the title is perhaps a worry with its connotations of suicidal wartime murder. The astronaut may be in free-fall but unless you take exception to the book, he’s no killer. However, Beveridge suggested the title “could be interpreted metaphorically as explosives come to disarm us, shake us up—then, perhaps, simply to disintegrate, go back into the void once they’ve been expressed…What is Richard proposing—a militaristic Buddhism perhaps, or Buddhist militarism? This book is constantly playing with definitions, even as early as the title.”

The Kamikaze Mind is Allen’s ninth book and received the 2006 UTS Chancellor’s Award for Best PhD Thesis. Next for Allen is the premiere of the film adaptation of his last book, Thursday’s Fictions.

In the era of the emergent e-book, many publications have lives beyond the printed page. The Kamikaze Mind comes as the complete digital package with downloadable animations, wallpapers and ring tones. The images are by Karen Pearlman and the excellent, gamelanish ring tones by composer Michael Yezerski. The Kamikaze Online Mind Project is “conceived as an ongoing interactive digital arts event…a multiplatform meeting of creative minds” and promises updates, new ring tones, animations and “wearable quotes” as well as reader responses (www.thekamikazemind.com.)

Richard James Allen, The Kamikaze Mind, Brandl & Schlesinger, 2006, launched at Gleebooks, Sydney, May 11. Cover and book design Andras Berkes-Brandl. www.thekamikazemind.com

Intimate, quirky and running late, First Run, a new Perth multimedia, film and performance art initiative, began its visual offering in the dark space of the Bakery Artrage Complex. The unexpected fits in well here: moody, under lit, the floor dotted with beanbags and chairs, strewn with artists, filmmakers and an assortment of other viewers, there’s a blend of the familiar and the disruptive which complements the experimental expectations of an event like this.

In the juxtaposition of short documentaries, animation, features, music videos and performance art, there was nothing thematic, apart from their localness, about the multimedia work on view. The audience was given the rare opportunity to engage with a range of works without the usual sensitisation. It’s here that microcinema and performance art are at their most profound, thriving on the fragile relationship between viewer and media. For instance, the short film Spell Me Freedom (director Dean Israelite), deals with the situation of asylum seekers through the story of one man’s escape from a detention centre. His subsequent journey to the city and the decision he faces between attempting to survive in an alien environment or returning to imprisonment and his best friend is a kind of visual protest. Cut through with grainy flashbacks, the film’s rapid movement between camera angles, its harsh lighting and eerie soundtrack capture the desperate situation of asylum seekers. Israelite’s production crew included 3 former refugees, and the rawness of this film forces us into unexpected discomfort that is tempered by the space he offers for a response: any response.

On the other hand Tim Watts and Wyatt Nixon Lloyd’s Greed For the Animation (Weeping Spoon Productions) is a comical, purposely unwieldy 2D animation that satirises consumerism and obsession with possessions through the adventures of a would-be filmmaker. Inventive, fun and even surreal in parts, Watts and Nixon Lloyd’s farcical animation also pokes a little fun at the profundity with which we approach these kinds of artistic endeavours, while managing not to take themselves too seriously either.

During the intermission, the flashy, toothy, spoken word performance of Tomas Ford’s Cabaret of Death, preying on audience passivity, appropriated the glam of pop for humour and ultimately drew attention to the strangeness of the audience-performer relationship. The sometimes excruciating vulnerability of Ford’s performance, which was interrupted by a few technical difficulties, reflected my own as I silently hoped his next act wouldn’t involve me.

The breadth of First Run’s presentation and the informal experimentalism it offers audiences suggests that it has the potential to provide an important forum for the development of media arts in WA. As the First Run organisers have noticed Perth lacks a thriving experimental media scene where artists can gather, create, experiment and get their work out there on a regular basis. I’m sure that these monthly showcases will change that.

Anoma Wijewardene’s Quest, promoted as Sri Lanka’s first digital art exhibition, was shown for 3 days in June at the National Art Gallery in Colombo. The foundation for the work is a set of digital photographs Wijewardene took when she visited the north of the country after a ceasefire agreement in early 2003, halting the civil war.

There has been a brutal separatist war with the Tamil Tigers fighting the Government forces for a separate homeland. But with the ceasefire, the road to northern Sri Lanka opened up and people travelled to towns that had been out of sight for 2 decades. Wijewardene also took the journey to the other end of the island and, like so many others, was devastated by what she saw. Documenting her travels using a digital still camera, her experience became the catalyst for Quest.

“From the initial photographs, it took a long time, maybe a year and half or so to actually evolve in to the idea of a digital art work”, says Wijewardene. “I had been looking at a lot of video art around the world. I found some of it very powerful, and I wanted to do it. But how do you do it? I didn’t think I could.”

Wijewardene questioned the possibility of making the work in Sri Lanka. Could she get the necessary technical help? “I knew I couldn’t do it without the funding,” she recalls. The nature of the project required creative people with different talents.

Though working in digital art is a new experience, Wijewardene is an established artist who has exhibited and sold her work internationally, including in Sydney. Her previous works have been more abstract, but with Quest, there is a clear purpose. “It’s the least subtle of anything I have done”, she acknowledges, “but it doesn’t necessarily mean that’s how I am going to continue. But maybe for this subject matter, that is how it was meant to happen.”

By August last year, she had raised the necessary finance to make the work. International non-government organisations and Sri Lankan businesses contributed to the project. The exhibition was held in 2 separate spaces at the National Art Gallery. The first space contained prints of stills that had been digitally manipulated, arranged around the walls. Next to each print was a quotation—inspiring words from a diverse group of people including writers, political activists and human rights defenders.

Though the digitally altered stills and the quotations were interesting, the experience provided in the second space, which contained the video art, was much more powerful. Each of the 4 walls had different projections and an evocative soundscape tied the work together. Sequences were created from the quotations and stills found in the first space. The text moved over images that showed the destruction caused not only by 20 years of ethnic fighting, but also by the recent tsunami. The application of digital filters over the images enhanced their presence, conveying a sense of destruction and tragedy, while the quotations offered hope and optimism.

The multiple projections enabled the text to be presented in the 3 languages spoken here: Tamil, Sinhala and English. The appearance of the different scripts within the same space was an important acknowledgement of the multicultural make-up of the island.

“All my paintings are some kind of a quest”, Wijewardene says about the title of her exhibition. “It was ‘questing’ why we are at this point in our lives in this country. I am questioning why this country is self-destructing in an un-winnable war…I have no answers.”

Wijewardene claims her art is “dense with many allusions and suggestions.” This definitely applies to her digital work also, especially the video installation. “There is an interest in fusion.” she says, “and not just fusion of mediums and ideas, but a fusion of cultures, of nations and of races. It’s to do perhaps with my background. My father’s half-English. My mother and he are of different religions, different castes. And I went to the temple and the church as a child. I went to school in India and art college in England. I am interested in the need to belong. I question what is home.”

“Needing to fly flags is very natural”, she adds, “but it also comes from a place of such fear and isolation. I couldn’t figure out where on Earth I belong and finally I realised I didn’t belong anywhere. I don’t belong and I am fine—I am comfortable with that. But it took a lot of agony before I could accept it.”

It is the idea of a home, of “needing to fly flags,” that is perpetuating the conflict in Sri Lanka. Though there is a ceasefire in place, there are killings occurring every day. And there is an attitude among many people that another round of war is inevitable. In this context, Quest became an important intervention.

In Sri Lanka, there is little sense of public expression or outrage about the senseless violence and death the conflict is causing. Life continues, as does the killing. Quest provided a timely space for audiences in Colombo to reflect, on an emotional level, on what is happening to their small island. That space lasted only for a short period of time. Nevertheless, it was a necessary space from which something positive may grow.

Anoma Wijewardene stresses that the intention of Quest was not to make a statement about Sri Lanka’s tragic situation. “I am not trying to pass a message on. I want to explore these issues of loss, of identity, of grief for myself. I am exploring my heart, and clearly it reaches out to other people’s hearts too.”

Kate Champion has created 2 major dance theatre works with her company, Force Majeure, Same, same But Different (2002) and Already Elsewhere (2005). The company has been invited to take Already Elsewhere to the prestigious Biennale de la Danse de Lyon in September, one of the largest dance festivals in the northern hemisphere, programming some 50 dance events over 3 weeks. The festival program includes works by Needcompany, Les Ballets C de la B, Kim Itoh, Compagnie Marie Chouinard, Pockemon Crew and many others from around the word. All the works focus in some way on the city and urban life and Already Elsewhere, with its images of suburban trauma, is no exception.

The invitation is a coup for Force Majeure and for Champion’s vision of creating innovative large scale works where her design collaborations with Geoff Cobham have been magical and her choice of performers from around Australia first class. The Managing Editors of RealTime are also guests of the festival and will report on their experience of it, and on the European response to Already Elsewhere, in the December edition of the magazine.

Kate Champion’s extensive career includes solo works, performance and rehearsal direction for London’s DV8, choreography for numerous Australian dance and theatre companies (including Company B’s Cloudstreet) and commercial choreography. Her work for Dirty Dancing is touring internationally, often taking Champion with it—and she’s rightly proud, she says, to have convinced the dancers to play to each other rather than just to the audience. Champion is also the winner of substantial peer recognition: Helpmann Awards for her solo show About Face and for Same, same But Different in 2002.

Already Elsewhere is in part inspired by the photography of American artist Gregory Crewdson. The scenario entails a series of images reminiscent of Crewdson’s ultra-realist, sometimes surreal cinematic vision of suburbia. Something appalling has happened, possibly an earthquake, perhaps worse, rendering inhabitants and neighbours dazed, bored, impatient, violent and damaged. With some of the eerie resonance of the alienated communities of Don Delillo’s novel, White Noise, or Werner Herzog’s film Heart of Glass, Champion’s Crewdson-inflected vision has a peculiarly Australian feel, of playfulness even in the face of disaster.

Oh, huge. It’s what I initially wanted to do but I’d had trouble raising the resources to be able to direct group work. But it didn’t fulfil itself until a combination of things took shape—returning from DV8, receiving a creative development grant, Brett Sheehy of the Sydney Festival being interested and commissioning it. The aesthetics of my solo shows helped give me the confidence to do Same, same….

By naming it, the work can be perceived as if it’s a new thing. I actually worked with (sound designer) Paul Charlier, (designer) Geoff Cobham and my brother (performer Stephen Champion, then ex-Circus Oz) on a show called Suspense at the Seymour Centre in 1983. It was like a precursor to Legs on the Wall—a circus show with dance and words and an immersive environment. Same, same… and the company confirmed that work. I think it’s just something we always knew. It was just getting the opportunity to have a public forum for it to be real.

In the Macquarie Dictionary “irresistible compulsion” is the first definition. I really responded to that in terms of artistic compulsion, how it feels like something you almost don’t want to do but have no choice. It’s also defined as “acts beyond one’s control”, which is how I feel as a director sitting in the theatre watching the work, which I didn’t used to feel as a performer. And in legal documents, because of terrorism and other man-made acts, ‘force majeure’ has been added to ‘acts of God.’ And I found that related to my sense of being labelled—you know, is it dance, is it theatre? Whatever else we can’t explain we’ll stick into ‘force majeure.’ The negative side is people think it’s a wanky French name that means major force, which wasn’t my intention.

The company offers you continuity, for example working recurrently with Geoff Cobham and Roz Hervey.

They’re both associate directors and we’ve decided to take a difficult Australian geographical situation and see it as a strength. It’s quite expensive to fly and accommodate more than a third, often two-thirds, of the company in Sydney but my long-term relationships with the artists is at the core of Force Majeure. There are performers in New South Wales I’m interested in and may work with in the future but there’s a shorthand, a history with these artists that can’t be replaced. Jeff and Roz are in Adelaide, Veronica Neave in Brisbane, Byron Perry and Kirstie McCracken are in Melbourne. It’s quite a commitment to maintain it.

Back in 2001, you talked to RealTime about your solo works About Face and Face Value (RT42, p6-7). You were interested in just how many selves are in oneself. In fact you said that you didn’t know which self you would be that day.

I feel like that every time I go for an interview. And I think there’s something about being observed: the object being observed alters its behaviour.

This idea is most obvious in the solo works and certainly in Same, same, But Different it manifests itself in different ways. Already Elsewhere scarily evokes ephemerality.

That’s true. It’s a limbo piece. The idea of self was definitely less at the forefront this time. I was thinking more about the moment—that sense of an unexpected event altering one’s state of being. So, you may be many selves that you’re familiar with and how they fluctuate. But a rupture of that entity when you can never be the same again because of that event, when you yearn for what was before or can’t go forward to a new sense of self or selves—that can be excruciating, a timeless place.

It sounds like depression, but it’s a state that I think until you’ve experienced it, extremely and intensely, you can’t understand. You end up perhaps not recognising yourself or discovering new things about yourself. There are people who live through disasters and never adjust afterwards, not always because they’re traumatised but because they can’t let go of that moment.

In About Face a woman was stuck in a room, unable to remember who she was. And for me, that’s similar to the limbo state of Already Elsewhere. Until someone or something can penetrate it, you’re stuck there. It can be apocalyptic—within your own body. And it can last a lifetime. I’ve seen people haunted by it. I have relatives who’ve lost an 18-month old child to SIDS, and my father died by accident. I don’t feel in that state any more but I can see in people’s eyes the sense of being haunted and stuck when they’re in that state. There’s a connection I think you make, for instance, if I met a stranger whose father had died in the same way, I would feel a phenomenal familiarity that I might not feel towards someone closer to me.

Theatrically it’s a difficult thing to deal with because it doesn’t necessarily have a dramatic arc and I really tried to resist that. I never wanted it to be narrative but it was interesting to sustain, to truly go into the state of being, to honestly stick to it to create an overriding, hovering mood.

There are a number of micro-narratives that may or may not have a middle or an end or a clear beginning.

The very subject matter was the inability to be released from that state. And not everyone is in the same state of inability.

You were inspired by the work of US photographer Gregory Crewdson. You saw these images and thought, that’s where I want to go?

You’re often looking for triggers for the work. I’m working on Peribanez [by the 17th century Spanish playwright Lope de Vega] for Company B at the moment. It’s so freeing when you work on a devised dance theatre work compared with a play structure. At the same time, I’m very interested in how you can bring that sense of narrative into a poetic work. It’s such a fine balance.

Starting with a story in a dance theatre work can make it terribly banal or almost sitcom-like. And I found Crewdson’s images really exploded this sense. I could sense an incredible story before and the potential aftermath just from that one image. The collaborators all had that same sensation when we looked at these photographs and were mutually inspired. We have often found photographs more useful for inspiration to begin work than something like a story.

The submerged house is such a strong image. It could be anything: post earthquake, post bombing.

There were burnt trees at the back, but we weren’t specific. The tsunami happened while we were rehearsing. The roof was like an archaeological time capsule with stories emerging from it episodically but as a continuum, without blackouts.

The set must have been quite an investment. It’s a substantial piece of work.

It’s a strong commitment we have. I have a real aversion to dance pieces where you see that the set is an afterthought or it’s had to be cleared away because more dance space is needed. Give me less dance space, I’m happier. We had to rehearse with the roof from the beginning, with height, dirt and water—you want to exploit every aspect of the set so the performers can live it.

First of all waiting to see if everyone’s available. Thank God they can all do it. You can’t deny that getting an invitation from such a prestigious festival bolsters you, gives you more energy to push through the difficulties of presenting it. We’ve got 5 days to re-rehearse it and we haven’t done the work for 18 months. The text has to be translated, and the set has to go ahead of us so we have to rehearse on a mock set. We’ve added it up and the opportunity outweighs all the problems. All those presenters who could never make it to Australia, you can invite them. It’s like the ultimate showcase and the Australia Council understands that.

I have toured a lot with DV8 both in 1992 and 1998-99; I’ve taken work on Lloyd Newson’s behalf to Russia and Scandinavia; and there are not many countries in Europe I haven’t performed in. I think, if you can generalise, the audiences are definitely more literate in non-narrative, atmospheric, poetic, non-linear, even foreign language work. They see more of it and understand it better. I’m really looking forward to seeing how we’re received. And I’m thrilled that we’re the first Australian company to be included in the festival!

Force Majeure, Already Elsewhere, Le Toboggan, Sept 13-15; Biennale de la Danse 2006 Lyon, Sept 9-30, www.biennale-de-lyon.org; www.forcemajeure.com.au

When Francesca Rendle-Short saw Tanja Liedtke’s Twelfth Floor in its first version, fresh from its creation in a residency at the Australian Choreographic Centre, her account for RealTime (“Words for escape”, RT 60, p44, 2004) caught the audience’s rapidly growing sense of involvement, immersion and complicity:
We’re stuck on the twelfth floor, somewhere, nobody knows. What’s going on? Does it matter? From the second the lights go down, as sound score and movement begin, we are caught, arrested, transfixed. Choreographer, Tanja Liedtke, doesn’t let us go until she decides to. Soft-footed, funny, athletic, delicate, violent in places, and violating, Liedtke knows how to pull us every which way: and it works, although we hold our breath, suck in air, so close does the performance come to very nearly imploding, with us, the audience, as co-conspirators.

What was engrossing above all, and just as breathtaking when I saw the work at Performance Space during its national Mobile States tour, was the assuredness of Liedtke’s vision, so thoroughly through-choreographed, so virtuosically danced and enacted, with a highly integrated design and soundtrack. Details were attended to meticulously (the words that a big man writes on the walls in chalk and on the object of his tender desire) and sustained; the one window to the outside world, high on the wall, glows with the normal flow of time and weather as opposed to the unstructured time of this room on the twelfth floor.

The setting for Liedtke’s dance theatre work is an eerily ambiguous space. Is it a state of mind, an institution for some damaged goods or just your standard, dangerous high-rise accomodation? Any of these, all of them? In an interview for RealTime (RT 72, p39), Liedtke told me that what emerged from the Canberra workshop was “‘a work about human interaction and confinement, small people in their own small worlds.’ …The result: a show about a group of people confined in an unidentified institution, withdrawing, dreaming, surviving.”

A big man, seemingly barely out of adolesence, writes carefully in chalk on the walls in words and long lines, closed in on himself. Two boys hoon about, at play in exquisite team work, dance with their heads in buckets, casually defy gravity. A stern woman, a mother or institutional authority figure with a prima ballerina presence, allows a girl into the room, but first takes away her shoes. The girl is playful, unconsciously sensual, a lyrical figure amidst the sharp-edged athleticism of the boys and the rigid tottering of the woman. She and the big man gradually and intimately bond. Meanwhile the boys’ attention is elsewhere, on their sexual fantasies, masturbating against a chalk drawing and soon, in a wrenching scene, transforming their hostility to authority into a violent assault on the assertive woman. The boys exit. The girl climbs the wall, and disappears. Is she free?

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.” Twelfth Floor gives us both and it is a credit to Liedtke that the binarisms that drive her scenario and steer her dangerously close to cliché are kept in check by the sheer power of the performance and the totality of its vision. However, once you step outside this twelfth floor room, the sense of complicity that Rendle-Short refers to takes hold. Yes, Twelfth Floor is ‘not nice’ but it is not complex. The older woman is power embodied in a uniform and the gestures of ballet pitted against the free modern dance spirit of the girl. Her rape is horribly realised in performance but is not nice in the worst sense, that she should be punished for the sins of power that doubtless lie elsewhere. The girl (although wonderfully danced by Kristina Chan to reveal sensuality, intimacy and a capacity for flight) is a cipher for freedom: we have no sense why she is in this place except as captive. The big man is rescued momentarily from his interior world by the girl and that entails a wonderful physical release from his weight—again a simple binary (if a more effective one). And the boys? Wonderfully vivid, funny, seductive and finally gross, but their exit is a blank in the scenario: they are tools of the plot, symbolic ciphers.

Given the sheer power of Liedtke’s theatricality and the choreographic and design intricacies of Twelfth Floor it might appear churlish to ascribe to it cliches and a crude thematic dynamic. You might think it PC of me. But the work derives not a little of its power from these very elements with which it propels its narrative and its expression of the extremes of affection and hostility. Liedtke’s capacity to express something more is doubtless in her reach as a rapidly maturing choreographer and director of dance theatre. A different kind of power in Twelfth Floor resides in the richness of its observations of play and intimacy, stillnesses and waiting, its evocation of interior states. Many a dance theatre director has avoided using narrative to structure their work (see the interview with Kate Champion, p31). It’s understandable, because narrative brings with it many obligations, many traps, and what can appear simple and effective as story is too often empty, or replete with exhausted values.

Thanks to Mobile States, Twelfth Floor has introduced a significant talent in Tanja Liedtke to audiences around Australia. The work was almost always breathtaking (even if the seductive viscerality of the experience was tempered by reflection) and inspired thoughts for a greater future for Australian dance.

Twelfth Floor, concept & direction Tanja Liedtke, choreography Liedtke with performers, creative consultant Solon Ulbrich, performers Anton, Kristina Chan, Julian Crotti, Amelia McQueen, Paul White, design Gaelle Mellis, lighting Gus Macdonald, sound artist DJ Trip, video Closer Productions; Mobile States; Performance Space, May 24-27

‘Mid-career’ isn’t the prettiest term. In dance circles, it usually connotes an independent artist who has been around long enough to prove their worth, but hasn’t joined one of the professional companies as a permanent member—no longer a bright young thing, but not an established icon. It can also act as a discrete euphemism for ‘underemployed.’ And the sad truth is that there aren’t many opportunities for mid-career artists. There’s the occasional commission, perhaps, and the tiring process of applying for funding. There’s often a great degree of isolation. In all of these areas, With a Bullet: The Album Project is a collaboration so obviously valuable that one wonders why something like it isn’t a permanent staple of the dance calendar. Bringing together a group of independent choreographers to work together on a series of pieces, each responding to a common theme or working through a shared principle allows experienced artists who often work individually to pool their knowledge, bounce off each other, retain their distinctive styles or test out somebody else’s. Luckily, With a Bullet is also terrific fun.

The choreographers involved are Simon Ellis, Luke Hockley, Gerard Van Dyck, Shannon Bott, Phillip Gleeson, Michelle Heaven, Jo Lloyd and Natalie Cursio, who initiated the project. The general brief given by Cursio was to create a work for any number of dancers using the first song to which they ever choreographed a piece, whether it was as a child dancing around the lounge room or as a mature artist. The task was not to recreate that initial experience of dance, but to respond to it, reinterpret the song, or devise an entirely new encounter with it. The results are massively varied in character and style, but all in some way offer a retrieval of the innocent love of sheer movement and playfulness, which is often the spur to dance.

Simon Ellis’ piece opens the evening with an ironic take on Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Ironic (though this aspect didn’t seem to trouble audience members laughing at the track’s kitsch value), in that it offers a pair of disenfranchised women clearly undergoing some kind of loss, unable to connect with each other and quite evidently not having a lot of fun. It’s a subtle work, but an intriguingly multi-layered way to kick off proceedings. At the other end of the evening, Jo Lloyd uses Yes’ Owner of a Lonely Heart as the soundtrack to recreate the sense of pleasure of a group of 8 year-olds cavorting around the house. But here it’s pyjama-clad dancers at the peak of their talents. Being able to reconnect her performers (including herself) to the artless and uninhibited side of childhood is certainly a triumph for Lloyd.

Cursio’s own contribution (set to Leif Garrett’s disco hit I Was Made For Dancing) is a highlight: a catapult ride through a sex-and-crime filled narrative that alternates between soap opera, action film and pulp noir. It’s clever, catchy, and laugh-out-loud funny, three qualities that really do define With a Bullet as a whole. It’s far from the arch seriousness of much contemporary dance, while never losing a sharp, knowing edge.

Body Corporate: With a Bullet: The Album Project, concept Natalie Cursio, choreography Simon Ellis, Luke Hockley, Gerard Van Dyck, Shannon Bott, Phillip Gleeson, Michelle Heaven, Jo Lloyd, Natalie Cursio, performers Shannon Bott, Natalie Cursio, Simon Ellis, Jo Lloyd, Jacob Lehrer, Gerard Van Dyck, designer Matt Delbridge; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, June 22-July 1

Are there really It and Other? Or really no It and Other.
Zhuangzi, Inner Chapters, 4th century BC

Two bodies, David Corbet and Jacob Lehrer, traverse the darkened space from separate sides of the room. There are qualities that reflect the dancers’ histories: the studios of Melbourne, London, Sydney and companies such as Strange Fruit, DV8, and Born in a Taxi. Their bodies are marked—and marked very well—by these practices, bullets marked by the calibre of the barrels through which they’ve been fired.

Each performer dances within a certain aesthetic style I find I either like or do not. I find myself even wishing they would NOT dance certain things. And then suddenly the process lifts itself into a different qualitative place. The 2 bodies begin to merge and roll, intertwine and release—territory familiar from contact improvisation. Mellifluousness like honey takes over. The question of who is one or the other loses grip and for me, the real performance begins: like the eye circling a Mobius strip, they and I become both without and within.

The best of contact improvisation always teases at this fabric. Within such intimacy, who can draw the distinction between acted, or acted-upon? This is as complex a relationship as that between foot and earth, mother and child, mouth with atmosphere. One dancer leans into, shares skin with another; a dancer walks, talks, bounces off/with/in the room.

In Excavate, Corbet walks sideways along the walls. He climbs up Lehrer’s body as if it were a mountain, or an elephant, or a set of steps. High-seated as a rajah, he blinds Lehrer with his hands and steers his face; yet Lehrer also self-directs, propelling the double-bodied monster into the audience. A masterful moment: threatened with collision, my own body merges with the event. Have we all together, in watching, playing, dancing, been becoming a new beast, a new consciousness, from the very first steps?

My responses thence become twofold. I marvel at the elasticity and liberties their process allows, but also wonder at the restrictions that arise within the distinct narratives that emerge.

There’s plenty of “men’s business”: noir fights, jamming fists, back-alley brawls. And just look at the publicity stills! Bam, Smash. Pow. But what troubles me is not the violence, but what inhibits their investigation during these actions. I feel the world go small.

It’s quite reasonable to argue that clear narrative markers are necessary to link an audience to a work—ah, now I know where I am, even if only for a moment. But in these very moments, the hard edges become somewhat static. For instance, where do these men’s hands go and not go. What and how do they touch, and not touch. What is more violent than completing a violent action. What multitude of qualities, dialogues and choices is in those hands before they smash the other player into the wall?

Reality is more complex than this. After the performance, when I ask “What stops you there [from going further, from going elsewhere]?” Corbet looks deeply thoughtful, but at the time can’t find words to respond.

In Melbourne in the early 1990s, I remember seeing Libby Dempster’s Whisper Corraggio—a piece about political incarceration—and whilst there wasn’t a rough hand laid on anyone, nonetheless one left the theatre devastated.

Of course, this is a different piece. But I wonder what other tendernesses, irritations, teasings there might have been, within the very enactments of the violence. I am thinking also of how the room itself might respond: in this performance, we sometimes have the performance environment (walls, spatial dimensions, projection, sound) acknowledged as animate and co-creative, but often not.

Lehrer responds with an obvious answer that of course they wouldn’t go so far as to smash each other’s brains. A fair response, but, frankly, nobody’s been fooled; and interestingly, on the night I attended, un-dance-educated members of the audience knew that was not the question.

The partial reality Corbet and Lehrer smash into when they dig does carry its own beauty and risk. And movement between fluidity and edges, expansion and stasis, is perhaps inevitable. But perhaps too, at this stage in their prolific creative partnership, the “next thing” might rest in further un-limiting their questions.

Excavate: A two-man dig, David Corbet, Jacob Lehrer; Australian Choreographic Centre, Canberra, May 16-20

Find

August 2006

Play on Earth

Festival hardware

Mobile

Play on Earth

Hotel Modern, The Great War

Compagnie Marie Chouinard

Local, regional, global

Eldorado

Lally Katz and the Terrible Mysteries of the Volcano

Michelle Outram, Not the Sound Bite!

Briefly…

The Suitcase Royale

Caroline Lee, La Douleur

Rebecca Clarke, Unspoken

Julie McNamara, UK

Ramesh Meyyappan, Singapore

Phillip Patston, NZ

Dance, music, visual arts…

Leadership, access, recognition

Chunky Move: Singularity

Kage: Headlock

The abandonment of David Hicks & social democracy

ARTIST [AS] EDUCATOR

Unleashing art as research: SPIN

Robert Davidson, QUT Creative Industries

Jim Kelly, Southern Cross University

Thomas Reiner, Monash University

Stephen Whittington, University of Adelaide

Learning from teaching

Learning from students

Inside and out

The time challenge

Research pressure

Teacher as role model

Dr Alistair Riddell, ANU

Philip Samartzis, RMIT

Cat Hope, WAAPA, ECU

Andrew Brown, QUT Creative Industries

Garth Paine, UWS

Julian Knowles, University of Wollongong

Good teacher, better artist?

Bernadette Walong, University of Western Sydney

Judith Walton, Victoria University

Cheryl Stock, QUT Creative Industries

Michael Whaites, WAAPA

The real thing

A model artist?

Part-time artist

The positives

More promotion, less art

The multi-skilled artist

Balancing act

IN FOR THE LONG TERM

Margot Nash, UTS

Leo Berkeley, RMIT

BETWEEN ROLES

Trish Fitzsimons, Griffith Film School

Ben Ferris, Sydney Film School

AHEAD & BEHIND

Pat Laughren, Griffith Film School

A SENSE OF COMMUNITY

DO STUDENTS BENEFIT?

TEACHING TO SURVIVE?

ADDRESSING THE ISSUES: ASPERA

The other contenders

Richard Murphet, VCA

Mary Moore, Flinders University

Tim Maddock, University of Wollongong

Helmut Bakaitis, NIDA

Angela Punch-McGregor, WAAPA

Interplay of roles

Benefits for students

For love or money?

Exhibiting more or less?

New what?

Then what?

Teaching vs practice

Networking