Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

October 2007

Shame File Music SHAM050
http://www.shamefilemusic.com/

As anyone who has ever attempted to investigate the history of any experimental art practice in Australia knows, documentation is thin on the ground. When it comes to music and other sound arts practices there is a yawning gulf between anecdote and artefact: works are more often heard about than heard. With this compilation, Melbourne musician and experimental music aficionado Clinton Green has assembled 14 tracks in an attempt to address exactly this problem. Making no claims to be comprehensive (let alone exhaustive), Artefacts of Australian Experimental Music documents examples of Australian artistic participation in that sustained attempt by 20th century music makers around the world to break the stranglehold that conventional musical practice had on sound and tonality within western music.

To some degree these recordings serve as examples of how local artists (although not necessarily locally-based) responded to the myriad influences at play in those eras: jazz, electronic and computer-based composition, Cagean experimentalism, improvisation, minimalism, expediency, amateurism and the restructuring of composer/performer relationships. However, this is not to suggest these influences washed up on Australian ears as some kind of cargo cult, merely that it might be more than reasonable to suggest—citing the evidence presented on this disc—that Australian composers were engaged in similar discussions and interrogations as their overseas contemporaries, while of course simultaneously exploring their own idiosyncratic aesthetic turf.

The majority of pieces are from the period 1965-73, but perhaps the most astounding piece is also the earliest. Journey #1, a proto-musique concete work from 1930 by the hitherto unfamiliar Jack Ellit, is a remarkable assemblage of bird sounds, foghorns, bells, train sounds and material transformations. Ellit left Australia for London, where he worked extensively on soundtracks for New Zealand filmmaker Len Lye in the early 1930s. It is a vivid precursor to much cut-up, sampling and DSP-based [digital signal processing Ed.] music of the last 30 years. Percy Grainger’s eerie mutli-timbral glissando drift produced by his legendary Free Music also has its conceptual genesis in the 1930s, although the recording here comes from later attempts in 1951.

Featured longside Arthur Cantrill’s vocal loop and violin improvisation soundtrack for the 1969 film Eikon, the tape drones and swelling organ of experimental rockers Tully from 1970, and the quaint drawing room anarchy of the Melbourne Dada Group (from 1952 with a young Barry Humphries) are works by some more prominent composers largely drawn from the Melbourne 60s scene. Of particular interest is Barry McKimm’s 1967 Monotony for 8 trumpets in its exploration of harmonic stasis and phasing melody. Green’s extensive liner notes cite the influence of American experimental pioneer John Cage on a number of these artists, the most obvious auditory example being the large swathes of silence (complete with coughing) featured in Sid Clayton’s Yehudi from 1968.

Just like many new music practitioners throughout the 20th century who were raised on a diet of equal parts Cage, Coleman, and Coltrane, the free improv group NIAGGRA bears the scars of jazz, to which many of its members would later return. And yet their work here from 1973 portrays its own particular sense of group action and interplay. So too does the jazz-inflected experimental composition from 1965 by Robert Rooney, which hails from a time when the intrusion of the sounds and techniques of jazz in composed music was still a bone of contention.

Many of these works are decidedly ‘of their time’ (not to damn them with faint praise), but some transcend this categorisation. Certainly the first half of Keith Humble’s computer-generated piece, And Tomorrow from 1972, sounds distinctly contemporary. Green pays tribute to Humble and his important role as an independent advocate for new music and through his involvement in the La Trobe University Music Department. The disc closes with an excerpt of swirling, multimedia theatre in the form of Ron Nagorcka’s Apathetic Anomaly 2 from 1973. This piece for radios, record players and televisions prefigured Nagorcka’s later adoption of the cassette tape as a performance instrument, and is a wild, chaotic and most importantly fun finish to this much needed compilation.

Peter Blamey

Justin Shoulder - U Little Stripper!

Justin Shoulder – U Little Stripper!

photo Alex Davies

Justin Shoulder – U Little Stripper!

WHAT IS IT THAT MAKES A PERFORMANCE NIGHT WORK? A SERENDIPITOUS BREW OF SKILL, TALENT, PRODUCTION AND ATMOSPHERE. BUT SOMETHING ELSE IS NEEDED, SOMETHING ELUSIVE AND UNNAMEABLE TO BOLSTER ALL THESE THINGS. AS WELL AS A GOOD DOSE OF BAD ATTITUDE AND RADICAL POLITICS, A GOOD NIGHT HARNESSES AND PRODUCES A TYPE OF CARNAL FREEDOM, UNIQUE TO SYDNEY, THAT IS IN SAD DECLINE THIS CENTURY.

Matt Stegh and Matt Hornby, who with the help of a small crew produced U Little Stripper! in June at Lanfranchi’s, can take a lot of credit for keeping alive Sydney’s bawdy, larrikin performance traditions. They began with the community event Man Jam, whose purpose was to promote sexy performance by men and poke fun at all-male revues. They were reacting to the absence of men on stage at alternative events, and the plastic aesthetic of mainstream gay performance and striptease. Man Jam produced a couple of nights at unlicensed venues during which a flood of talented, wild blokes strutted their stuff to packed houses. Then, having proved their point, they opened the doors to women, and realised their full potential in a pansexual incarnation. The events were in the subversive Weimar tradition of sex and satire. They moved to 34b on Oxford Street and, although the occasional great show was still to be seen, licensing laws and burnout effectively gagged the original intentions. The boys wisely had a rest. They returned with U Little Stripper! (ULS), a striptease performance night held the weekend before legendary art warehouse Lanfranchi’s was closed.

Lucky early punters were greeted by a human cake in high heels, wearing a ledge crammed with hand-made profiteroles. The stage in the main room was done in black velvet, and the other room was a dance floor which filled during interval.

Justin Shoulder is an exciting young artist who has produced an array of costumes that Leigh Bowery would be proud of. His full face and body sculptures are animist, absurdist, whimsical and monstrous. Shoulder understands proportion and character. He also knows how to inhabit his creations and make them move. He often performs with a percussion ensemble, enhancing the Asian inflection of some pieces. For ULS, he made a shiny red dog with pointy ears, long snout and big shaggy body, which turned out to be a clever series of fringed panels deftly removed one by one. The head-dress stayed on, the final vision a lithe body with dog head, dancing on a red sea.

Vixen Noir is an Australian based US stripper who has appeared at Gurlesque and Vanessa Wagner’s Newtown Hotel nights, and for many years been involved in queer activist performance. She’s slick and sassy, and works in a traditional twenty minute format, with a twist.

Kimo, F2M, relatively new to performing, brings to mind old school queer punk. Almost twenty years ago, Wicked Women pioneered a brand of feminist sex positive performance motivated by the need for dykes to smash shame and political correctness, and flaunt their bodies in public. Kimo is one of many who couldn’t exist without this legacy, and F2Ms are the new frontier. Kimo was crude and celebratory, rewarded like everyone by the hugely supportive crowd.

Max Imum was a schoolgirl lured by Mephisto to the Dark Abyss. In an hilariously sinister performance, Mephisto raped the girl before she turned on him with her fists. It was the classic revenge scenario refreshed by witty repartee, the casting of a fluffy puppet as Mephisto, some fine fight choreography and Max’s joyous, unbridled triumph.

The cops arrived at some stage, and would return the next week during Lanfranchi’s farewell party, when they entered and physically harassed people. But at ULS the jubilation, defiance and excitement were unquenchable.

The two Matts presented a madcap, surreal caper with a whiff of fin de siècle decadence. Dickie and Dickie were limp-wristed ponces who minced about in high cut trousers and cravats, bragging and bitching. It was like a one act play, complete with bizarre medley, choreographed number and semi-coherent dialogue pierced by fey screams. The Dickies slept in matching red satin gowns beneath a silver satin sheet…covered in brown stains. Half the action took place behind beautifully painted peacock screens with holes cut out for the performers’ faces as they dressed for a ball. They emerged in nude suits with knee length gonads and pencil penises.

Simone O’Brien and Nicci Wilkes (Guido) were newly weds in a side-splitting slapstick routine that featured domestic violence, an interactive cake-cutting ritual and a creamy blowjob, throughout which the groom’s yelling could be heard over the Billy Idol soundtrack, all the way to the back of the room. This show featured the best drag—both boy and girl—seen in a long time.

The sexiest man on Sydney stages must be Trash Vaudeville who graced ULS as a slender butch cowboy in tight black flares and ripped knickers. He is that rare thing—a master male hula hoopist who puts his own touch to an array of skilful tricks. After a nude trapeze interlude he gave us multiple hoops at the end, then the big finger.

Annabel Lines, seasoned circus performer, was classy and nasty in equal measure. She began with legs—in suspenders, fishnets and red pumps—disembodied, contorting. Her body gradually emerged, a dominatrix in cat’s eye glasses, black lace and long gloves. Two clowns upstage holding her hoop completed the picture of vaudi glamour.
Christa Hughes, U Little Stripper!

Christa Hughes, U Little Stripper!

photo Alex Davies

Christa Hughes, U Little Stripper!

Christa Hughes has developed a unique gender fuck striptease for events by this collective. She does a mean lip sync to macho soundtracks, tonight’s a leathered up rock star exhorting the stadium to indulge in mind-altering substances. She stripped to Love is the Drug, and finished with her signature tune The Lady is a Tramp, high kicking naked in long black boots. Hughes’ voice is consistently powerful, able to effect immediate changes in emotional register, the dodgy sound system no impediment.

Hughes was followed by her sister Vashti, as Uncle Funky, who gives excellent mike: “Fucken oath, how sexy was that Sheila? I wanna fucken meet her, and I mean m-e-a-t. I can’t help it, I’m a bloke, and I’ve got feelings.” Uncle Funky is a computer nerd who reinvented himself as a professional stripper, in baseball hat and Bonds singlet. With all the élan of his previous incarnation, he stripped down to an elephant glove puppet.

Celia Curtis and Dave Disaster performed a duet in fringed white costumes. It was vintage 1970s irony complete with wind machine, ending in an egg and feather fight. Curtis is capable of better—she is sheer genius at her best—but this was a fittingly funny and cathartic ending to the night.

At least that’s what we thought. The strip karaoke was yet to begin. The pandemonium let loose by the performers had set the room on fire and audience members began to get on stage and strip in an unstoppable stream—men, women, gay and straight. U Little Stripper! had achieved its purpose—liberation.

The strip karaoke revealed the true nature of the night, which was about celebrating what it means to be free and alive: and enjoying your body, to the fullest. Which might not sound like much, but in an age of puritanism, proscription and punishment, could well be the most radical thing of all.

U Little Stripper!, Lanfranchi’s Memorial Disco, Sydney, June 10

RealTime issue #81 Oct-Nov 2007 pg. 34

Robert Wilson, The Temptation of St Anthony

courtesy Melbourne International Arts Festival

Robert Wilson, The Temptation of St Anthony

FOR THOSE WHO MISSED ROBERT WILSON’S SURPRISINGLY ANIMATED, PERFORMATIVE AND VERY FUNNY TALK ABOUT HIS LIFE, ART AND CAREER AT THE 2006 SYDNEY FESTIVAL, ABSOLUTE WILSON, A GENEROUS 105-MINUTE DOCUMENTARY BY KATHARINA OTTO-BERNSTEIN, IS MORE THAN COMPENSATION.

The film offers a talkative Wilson, words from Tom Waits, Susan Sontag (who saw every performance of some works), William Burroughs, David Byrne, Phillip Glass and others, along with images and footage from many shows. There are tantalising glimpses of works Australians are unlikely ever to see and ones they just might have (Einstein on the Beach or Black Rider) or are looking forward to (like the The Temptation of Saint Anthony at the 2007 Melbourne international Arts Festival). The film gives us as much of the personal Wilson as he doubtless allows, some of it fascinating, and plenty of the artist (including the hard taskmaster), and even though there’s no interrogation of the great man’s attitudes, this is an immensely valuable, well-crafted and entertaining document. RT

We are giving away six copies of Absolute Wilson courtesy of DV1.

See giveaways (p56)

RealTime issue #81 Oct-Nov 2007 pg. 34

(foreground l-r) Martyn Coutts, Kate Sherman, Sharon Kerr, Wayfarer

photo Marco Bok

(foreground l-r) Martyn Coutts, Kate Sherman, Sharon Kerr, Wayfarer

GAMES BORE ME. MONOPOLY, SCRABBLE AND SNAKES & LADDERS WERE NEVER 3D ENOUGH. COMPUTER GAMES SEEM LIKE A RUSE: A FANTASY OF AGENCY WHEN IN FACT YOU’RE JUST A PAWN IN THE CONSTRUCT, ABLE TO BE BRUTALLY GUNNED DOWN AT ANY MOMENT. (OKAY, I’M NOT THAT GOOD AT THEM EITHER.) SO I WAS INTRIGUED YET TREPIDATIOUS ABOUT KATE RICHARDS AND MARTYN COUTTS’ WAYFARER, A LIVE, SITE-SPECIFIC, PERFORMATIVE GAME AT PERFORMANCE SPACE. BEING SLOW TO BOOK I WAS NOT ABLE TO BE AN ACTIVE PARTICIPANT BUT, THANKS TO THE MIGHTY ORANGE TEAM, ALLOWED TO HITCH A RIDE.

The first thing I notice is that Wayfarer is no mean technical feat. CarriageWorks is infested with multiple wireless networks allowing two-way audio communication between performers and audience, multiple live point-of-view camera feeds and complex positional tracking. Yet the human remains very much at the forefront of the activity, from the performer and player interaction before and during the game to the roving technicians ready with laptops to solve any little stagefright issues the technology might experience.

The rules of the game are kept simple: the audience teams of four have to direct their performer/player (wayfarer) to run around the cavernous CarriageWorks complex looking for triggerpoints which they swipe, seemingly by pointing at them. This gives the team “loot” and an instruction which they must then get the performer to act on. The instructions are minimal but involve interactivity between players or between players and unsuspecting bystanders: for example, “Follow another wayfarer for two minutes”, “Get 10 cents from a stranger” (the orange team managed to get 50 cents), or “Work with another wayfarer to reach the target.” The most alarming option is the “licence to kill” where one of the wayfarers gets the green light to hunt down the others and steal all their loot. It was not totally clear what this ‘murder’ entailed, and I’m pretty sure no lives were lost in our game, however the non-contact battle posturing between players was certainly amusing.
audience players, Wayfarer

audience players, Wayfarer

photo Marco Bok

audience players, Wayfarer

The use of simple tasks and basic rules means that the strength of the game is in the quality of the interactions: between the performers, between performers and audience, and between audience members. The collective fulfilment of tasks means that the relationship between performer and audience is equal, making the interactions strong, direct and meaningful. The group dynamics of audience-players in their teams is particularly interesting to watch (the benefit of being an observer): who takes the lead, who is the problem solver, who has the most competitive drive? My favourite moment came when one of the members of the orange team who had rarely spoken very politely suggested, “We have six minutes left so if you could just take it up to a quick jog…” And let me say that the green team who won were just a little bit aggressive for my liking!

The most engaging aspect of Wayfarer is the integration of the live performers into the game, and the interplay with CarriageWorks itself. Early in the game, amidst a foyer full of theatregoers there are sudden squeals and shouts as the players tear through the space trying to catch each other. This moment is electrifying, forcing the audience-players to exist in simultaneous states of reality and virtuality which is pleasantly disorienting and even a little bit magical. The performers also return to base or come into visual range, but more of their live interaction in the real world would strengthen Wayfarer. Interestingly some audience members would have been more familiar with the building than others and I wonder how this affected their game. Knowing the space well I found that the activity of correlating real and virtual spatial information added another satisfying dimension. Either way, the audience-players and those living vicariously seemed to find Wayfarer engaging as both game and performance and I eagerly await the next manifestation to make myself part of the action.

performing objects & machines

Wayfarer was not the only activity infiltrating every nook and cranny of CarriageWorks on the final night of Performance Space’s July-August programming. The contraptions created by participants in Joey Ruigrok van der Werven’s Performing Objects and Machines workshop were also let loose on the foyer giving us a taste of the potential of a new generation of makers and theatre magicians. Many people felt that Tobhiyah Stone Feller’s elegantly simple Track Temptation—five segments of railway track suspended end to end, activated like a pendulum allowing them to gently clang—should be permanently installed and used as the interval bell.

Sarah Firth-Smith’s Emerging Artist—a wet-black, mutant tree whose squirming arms drew pictures wherever they made contact with the ground—had a creepy yet strangely endearing autonomous presence. Pongpassakorn Kulthirathum’s mobile audiovisual locomotive was ingenious in its self-contained efficiency; Marley Dawson interacted with and activated some of the heritage machinery left in the rafters; Michelle Outram generated electricity by playing the piano via a pully system; Kat Barron took 3D photos in a pyramid; Agatha Gothe-Snape went lo-fi, activating her paintings with cables and magic bells; and Clare Britton mutated like a Transformer into a giant mobile chook!

making the space work

All this activity, along with the Wayfarer team screaming past and the capacity audience from Version 1.0’s Deeply Offensive and Utterly Untrue pouring out, brought the CarriageWorks foyer absolutely to life. This vibrancy has also been present at events like Performance Space’s Night Time series (RT78, p38) and the recent Underbelly festival (co-produced by CarriageWorks, RT80, p44). But I can’t help comparing the joy of all this with the unease of the opening night of the July-August season when the theatre audience was overwhelmed by a massive department store fashion parade at the other end of the foyer. Of course there are understandable financial pressures on the CarriageWorks management to generate income, but the only way the venue will succeed culturally and develop an audience is by consistently filling its spaces with the stuff that it was actually built for—smart, challenging, bold and intriguing art.

For an interview with Kate Richards about Wayfarer, see RT80, p4. For another Performance Space event in the CarriageWorks foyer directed by Joey Ruigrok van der Werven, see Volta on November 24, 25.

Wayfarer, artists-producers Kate Richards, Martyn Coutts, technical producer-designer Mr Snow, House of Laudanum, programmer-software designer Jon Drummond, Squelch Media, performers Kate Sherman, Sharon Kerr, Ben DeMole, Ryk Goddard, wayfarer unit design Marty Jay, Steve Howarth, erth, screen design Tim Richter, SV2; Performance Space at CarriageWorks Sept 5-8; Performing Objects and Machines, facilitating artist Joey Ruigrok van der Werven; Performance Space at CarriageWorks Sept 8

RealTime issue #81 Oct-Nov 2007 pg. 35

Simon Stone, Martin Csokas, Catherine McClements, Robin McLeavy, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

THEATRE CAN BE FRIGHTENING, EVEN WHEN IT’S FUNNY AND THEN ESPECIALLY SO. VERSION 1.0 AT THEIR MOST BAROQUE AND WITH FINELY TUNED ENSEMBLE PLAYING GAVE US DEEPLY OFFENSIVE AND UTTERLY UNTRUE, A REALLY SCARY IF WICKEDLY COMIC ACCOUNT OF THE SURREAL AUSTRALIAN WHEAT BOARD OIL-FOR-FOOD PROGRAM SCANDAL (SEE P37). ELSEWHERE IT WAS EUTHANASIA—SHOWN IN GRIM DETAIL—IN THE SYDNEY THEATRE COMPANY PRODUCTION OF DON DELILLO’S TENSE FAMILY DRAMA, LOVE LIES BLEEDING; MARITAL PATHOLOGY IN COMPANY B’S WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?—A CLASSIC PLAYED HERE TO A NEW LEVEL OF PHYSICAL EXCESS; AND GENETIC ENGINEERING IN DR EGG AND THE MAN WITH NO EAR, PRETTILY DONE WITH PUPPETS AND PROJECTIONS BUT FULL OF DIRE WARNINGS.

In all of these there’s a sense of entrapment, of finding ourselves looped into unwanted symmetries—like the genetic engineering we both desire (to improve the quality of life) and fear (the monsters it might make of us), the euthanasia that will improve the quality of dying but could excuse murder, the family that nurtures us but whose deeply embedded games keep us from ourselves.

love lies bleeding

In Don Delillo’s Love Lies Bleeding, an aged man on a drip sits in a wheelchair on a bleak American desert landscape beneath the harsh moon-like glare of two huge halogen lamps. He is so still he could be dead, or a dummy, as in one of those verisimilitude sculptures that used to spook us in art galleries. Shortly his double, very much alive, is wheeled on, recalling his first encounter with death as a child and musing on one of his failed marriages, the partners “living in the same skin” and “wishing each other dead in a car crash.”

But this exchange between Alex the artist and Lia his young wife, his fourth, who pushes his chair, turns out to be in the recent past. The play’s present focuses on the man as we first saw him, a comatose stroke victim. However Lia is convinced he is still responsive, noticing among other things his small tics at the approach of a storm. But his third wife, Toinette, and their son, Sean, have arrived, determined to put the old man out of what they perceive as his misery. What unfolds is a protracted argument: Lia in opposition, Sean determined, Toinette going along with the plan but losing her resolve. It’s the ready-made abstractions that mother and son trot out in justification for killing Alex that astonish the young woman, while we wonder if the son is acting out of compassion or a desire for vengeance, for a “life spent waiting” for a man now “holding us back.”

Sean eventually persuades Lia that the deed must be done and sends her walking in the desert. Her acquiescence is not really understood until late in the play. The deed itself however is gruesomely careless: the morphine is past the use-by-date, the euthanasia method taken from uncertain instructions on a website and the symptoms of dying difficult to detect. This waiting is painful. The body slumps.

We move forward in time. Lia is speaking at her husband’s funeral: she “refuses to tell stories.” Her memory of Alex, she says, is of his being, not anecdotes. We return to an earlier time, but with the knowledge now that Lia finally came to accept: “Alex could have gone on forever, I could not.” And then we loop further back to the play’s opening when Alex can still speak and utters the words that Lia most likely refused to hear: “I’m running backwards.” It’s a speech of deep despair from a man losing his sense of self, but it’s finally leavened with humour that Lia might have mistaken for undying spirit.

Love Lies Bleeding is a dream-like morality play, wisely staying short of nightmare, written, directed and performed without sentimentality or melodrama and tempered with occasional black humour (including the curtain call in which the dummy, a very real actor, stands and takes a bow). Paula Arundell’s portrayal of Lia is wonderfully subtle, the initial aura of new ageism giving way to wisdom. Benjamin Winspear brings a poetic animation to Sean’s unswerving sense of purpose; Robyn Nevin carefully reveals Toinette’s growing sense of doubt and, in the little we see of him, Max Cullen plays an essentially quiet, fading Alex with finesse. Little is glimpsed of the difficult younger man we hear about or, a fault with the play, of the artist and his practice. The great strength of Love Lies Bleeding is, as you would expect, in the poetry implicit in the writing and the idea that a coming together of divergent personaiities can yield change that, even if a tad mismanaged, is nonetheless as it should be.

who’s afraid of virginia woolf?

It was a pleasure to be able to enjoy another demanding American play shortly after seeing Love Lies Bleeding. In Albee’s classic love looks close to dead. The vicious co-dependency of Martha and George is a relationship nonetheless, but the symmetry is broken when Martha reveals the secret of their (actually non-existent) boy child to some young late night guests (well on the way into their own marital knot). Martha has betrayed the trust implicit in the fantasy she shares with her husband and, in the course of an overnight binge of drinking and cruel game-playing, a vengeful George (already deeply humiliated) ‘kills’ the son, eliminating a key part of the couple’s relationship.

The power of the play resides in the accuracy of Albee’s heightened rendition of the strategies of everyday dialogue. We observe with growing anxiety and fascination the interplay of Martha’s direct, vulgar assaults and George’s snide commentary on how she speaks and thinks. From the outset neither can give way to the other, they are locked in a pattern of escalating asymmetry until it momentariily collapses, when the words give out, into physical violence and sexual betrayal. Inevitably talk starts up again, but will the relationship ever be the same?

Benedict Andrews and cast get the language games right—and the bigger games too, like “get the guests” and “humiliate the host.” Martin Csokas is particularly effective as George, combining a sense of embittered interiority with a veneer of extroversion. Csoka’s low toned, laidback delivery is occasionally reminscent of Richard Burton’s intoning, without being at all imitative, and he is able to pull off an unbelievably quiet, fast and threatening sotto voce. The only thing I missed was sufficient marking of the occasional sense of intimacy and knowingness between George and Martha when they mutually acknowledge their game playing.

As is to be expected of Andrews, the production speaks to us on many levels. The stylish all-sheen-and-surfaces set by Robert Cousins is a loungeroom in black leather, chrome and two walls of glass. In the first act the glass is behind the performers, in the second it is between audience and performers, the characters appearing as if caged specimens and the glass, table, floor, walls literally awash with their spit, alcohol and a mountain of melted ice cubes which George earlier emptied over the glass table. Sodden, they climb the furniture and slip and slide on treacherous surfaces—the mess of their psychological abjection given its physical correlative.

Once again continuity of vision, embodied in direction and design, is the hallmark of Andrews’ work, the revolving set echoing the same team’s design for The Season at Sarsaparilla (RT78, p11) and the director and designer Anna Tregloan’s glass wall in Eldorado for Malthouse (RT74, p42). Although I found the musical underscoring of the climactic argument undervalued the power of Albee’s dialogue and although I was not always convinced by Catherine McClement’s brittle depiction of Martha (some requisite vulnernability seemed missing), the relentless drive of this Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and the image of a social world drowning in itself made for a grimly satisfying experience.

dr egg & the man with no ear

Like steampunk, if minus the punk, this “modern day fable” for 7-12 year-olds is sci-fi in a retro-ish setting. A man crashes his bicycle, has his ear eaten off by a bull terrier and slips into a profound depression—he sorely misses his ear but is incapable of doing anything about it. Daughter Vivi seeks out Dr Egg, a bald-headed Edwardian scientist type (cf Rolf de Heer’s Dr Plonk) who will grow an ear for the father from a slice of the girl’s body. The result, however, mutates into something else, with a life of its own.

The show is full of striking images—the splendidly frocked Snake narrator, clever alternations between the performers and small puppet versions of themselves (which the actors manipulate), multi-layered design (parallel performances in front of and behind the screen that flies in and out of the Constructivist proscenium), large-scale projections that effectively evoke travel across landscape and city, an elaborate old world scientific laboratory, and witty puppeteering in the genetic engineering of a tomato with a fish and, not least, the new ear that sprouts legs. The magic is reinforced by an onstage solo musician, Biddy Connor, who provides effects and an engaging score from, among other things, percussion, toy piano and vocals.

While all this seems clear enough—a reasonably simple story and ample spectacle—the show sometime feels quite complicated and the transitions from performers to their puppet selves slow and elaborate. The tale is framed by the Snake narrator—appearing first as an animation, weaving through foliage, and then as a glittering human version who has to then elaborately shed her frock. It makes for a very slow start not to mention introducing the (possibly complex) question of why a snake, while a certain moral heavy-handedness seemed already evident—“a story of human folly”, Snake declares—for a show apparently about the complexities of choice in the age of cloning. Annie Lee (from the Kransky Sisters) eventually manages to engage as the reptile, although the headmistressy diction amplifies the show’s retro tone and evokes a quainter theatre for young people of days gone by.

The one-dimensionality of Dr Egg himself—in no way able to represent any of the virtues of genetic engineering—is worrying, and not the fault of performer Colin Sneesby. Although Dr Egg and the Man with No Ear is not a play of character complexity (the father is deeply depressed but invested with just enough gravitas by Brian Lucas; Vivi with feeling and pragmatism by Lara Tumak), the issues are complex. Some of this is conveyed—the new ear creature is a living thing and cute, dammit—but insufficiently because that word ‘folly’ seems to hang pre-emptively over the whole enterprise. Snake asks towards the end, “Who is to blame?”, and you wonder, ‘For what, precisely?’. For a daughter’s concern for her suffering father? The narration and the portrayal of the scientist suggest a crime has been perpetrated, the story however suggests something else. I was confused, as were the youngsters around me. This is a play then not about choice, but a wrong choice—and what other is available to Vivi in her world? Oddly, the writer Catherine Fargher, is no stranger to the complexities of biotechnology whether in her account for RealTime of working with tissue culture (RT65, p17) or in her witty performance, Biohome (RT 75, p 34).

Although theatrically sophisticated and expertly realised as such (director Jessica Wilson), Dr Egg and the Man with No Ear is weighed down with message and the mechanics of production. Fargher’s writing ranges from flat to incisive to droll—“Why exercise when you can simply mutate?” The performances are good though a little more complexity all round wouldn’t go astray. Re-worked, better paced and made less internally contradictory, Dr Egg and the Man with No Ear could enjoy a long life as a relevant and magical work for our time.

Sydney Theatre Company, Love Lies Bleeding, writer Don Delillo, director Lee Lewis, performers Paula Arundell, Max Cullen, Robyn Nevin, Benjamin Winspear, Shaun Goss, designer Fiona Crombie, lighting Luiz Pampolha, composer Paul Charlier; STC Wharf 2, July 12-Sept 1; Company B, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, writer Edward Albee, director Benedict Andrews, performers Martin Csokas, Catherine McClements, Robin McLeavy, Simon Stone, designer Robert Cousins, costumes Alice Babidge lighting Niklas Palantji, sound design Jeremy Silver; Belvoir St Theatre, Aug 8-Sept 16; Dr Egg and the Man with No Ear, concept by director Jessica Wilson and writer Catherine Fargher from a story by Fargher, performers Annie Lee, Brian Lucas, Lara Tumak, Colin Sneesby, designer Jonathon Oxlade, animation Jamie Clennett, composer, musician Biddy Connor, composer James Wilkinson, lighting design Phil Lethlean, producer Performing Lines; The Studio, Sydney Opera House, July 25-27

THE FINE PERFORMANCE STRATEGY BUILT BY VERSION 1.0 OVER THE LAST FOUR YEARS (CMI, WAGES OF SPIN, FROM A DISTANCE…) ARRIVES AT ITS MOST NUANCED AND DELICATE IN A PIECE ABOUT THE DRIEST SUBJECT MATTER: WHEAT. DEEPLY OFFENSIVE AND UTTERLY UNTRUE IS AN INQUIRY INTO THE 2005 COLE INQUIRY INTO THE UN OIL-FOR-FOOD PROGRAM WHICH WAS EXPLOITED BY THE AUSTRALIAN WHEAT BOARD WHO PAID SADDAM HUSSEIN’S REGIME IN IRAQ $300 MILLION IN KICKBACKS WHILE THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT WAS PREPARING OUR TROOPS FOR WAR IN THAT COUNTRY.

The work steals its title from the “polished” rhetoric of the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer. The idea that the Australian Government “went to war to protect its wheat market” was, he declared tersely, “deeply offensive and utterly untrue.” Version 1.0 use theatre as a mode of interrogation, here into repeated attempts by bureaucrats and politicians to create a veneer of truthfulness by using evasion and obfuscation, only to mire themselves and the government in ignominy.

Version 1.0 are at their canniest when they compel the words of their subjects to do the job that has to be done. Words here are objects to be offered in place of meaning. Version 1.0 recycle and rehearse these words, as if testing whether this time spoken slower, faster, funnier or intoned, we might understand what is actually being said.

Not a chance. Blank parody becomes a way to restage meaninglessness. We hear the emptiness, variously desparate, raging and slick, of politicians and administrative bunglers at their best. “I don’t know”… “I don’t recall”….”I can’t remember” becomes a chorus of practiced deniers performing a chamber piece from transcript ‘scores’ on music stands. In a recurrent direct video feed from the CarriageWorks bar, Stephen Klinder drolly recites Alexander Downer’s parochialism for the benefit of the media masses: “You see”, he repeatedly reminds the camera, twee-ly and with pursed lips, “It’s very, very complicated.”

Version 1.0 go to great lengths to unravel the complications of the corruption scenario. In playschool-like skits they physically spell out the money chain, the information chain, the wheat chain, the political chain. Kym Vercoe runs a marathon over a chalked world map, charting wheat markets across the globe. To track the cash flow, the performers enact an escalating transaction scenario conducted between Iraqi middlemen, a growing number of non-existent trucking companies around the world and Wheat Board executives. After aptly playing with a remote control toy car, Michael Long, AWB Sales and Marketing Manager, reveals with disingenuous naivety how the trucking fee was likewise toyed with and casually inflated—here a calculation scribbled on paper on someone’s back and flaunted before the camera. Not at all complicated.

Sean Bacon’s videowork is superbly Brechtian: each testimonial undercut with the biting satire of a suspicious longshot or looming close-up, or a parodic intervention into the scene with images of Iraq—that ominously ‘other’ world. Gail Priest’s lilting Arabic folk music motifs compound these visual statements, becoming tantalising reminders of how we construct the exotically faraway. In a deep corner, at a distance, Saddam Hussein appears on a portable monitor. His televised trial offers a minute backdrop to the events played big screen. Up close, a projected mouse teeters on a piece of cheese placed in a trap. It takes a moment, but we soon notice that the mouse is live onstage, in a cage. Underneath the projected image, an awkward Peter Greary, General Manager of Trading at AWB, is questioned…but doesn’t take the bait.

So many of these moments animate the dry and dusty annals that are the Inquiry report itself. We are told at the beginning that, laid out in reams along one side of the stage, it is “confidential…but can be downloaded online.” This kind of paradox continuously haunts the Inquiry and feeds version 1.0’s unrelentingly coy, cynical tone. Frankly, I’m thankful that they got to all of those words first before we had to read them. What they reveal is the absolute shambolics of due process, the hollow gesture of an Inquiry which hasn’t interrogated or unpacked anything at all. In this sense version 1.0’s performance of a performance of (un)truthfulness is at once deeply abhorrent and utterly entertaining. Next time, Alexander Downer might want to watch his words.

Version 1.0, Deeply Offensive and Utterly Untrue, devisor-performers, Stephen Klinder, Jane Phegan, Yana Taylor, Kym Vercoe, David Williams, video artist Sean Bacon, dramaturgy Paul Dwyer, physical dramaturgy Christopher Ryan, sound Gail Priest; Performance Space, Aug 24-Sept 8

IN LUSH, ALMOST DAMP SURROUNDS, PERFORMERS CAMP BENEATH BANANA PALMS AND DELICATE BAMBOO PROJECTIONS. THEY HOLD COLOURFUL MONKEY-FACED FANS, COYLY PEEPING AT THE AUDIENCE FROM BEHIND BOLDLY PAINTED BABOON EYES. AS GAMELAN RHYTHMS PATTER INTO THE MIX—A DRUMMER SLYLY TAPPING IN THE DEPTHS OF THE STAGE—THE INTIMACY OF THE SIDETRACK PERFORMANCE SPACE SETTLES US INTO A FEELING OF TROPICAL OTHERNESS. WE ARE DISTINCTLY CAUGHT IN THE EXOTICS OF ELSEWHERE.

Don Mamouney’s script for The Tangled Garden restages the theme of encounter between east and west. In an exchange between traditional Indonesian and contemporary theatre work the show has toured Bandung, Jakarta and Darwin. Presented with the rich but awkward resonance of the intercultural moment, the audience is at the centre of this meeting, invited to draw in the steamy scent of greenery known mainly to a different climate. Language is strange, truncated or sometimes altogether untranslated. We are given grabs of what we are accustomed to amidst much that we are not. In this, we function as witness to, and dynamic part of, the east-west meeting itself.

The cross-cultural theme is realised in the fable-like fates of two childhood friends who meet as adults and love the same enchanting woman, Dewi (Maryam Supraba). Ariel (Alex Blias) holds all the rich clichés of western bookish education and worldly knowing, while his counterpart, Ujang (Dedi Warsana) is plainly strong in body, borne of the earth. The premise of the plot is simple—two brothers fight it out, battling their own inner demons, for a woman who cannot choose between them.

The narrative treats this premise with a degree of confusing complexity. We witness the men sacrifice their love of each other for Dewi, they ask the gods to intervene, but then Dewi overrides the decision of the gods and makes her own choice, only to re-decide again later. The men die in a moment of mutual suicide, swap heads upon rebirth, and seem to resolve nothing but the continued itch for Dewi’s beauty and the promise of some good sex to boot.

As the story increasingly entangles itself, nothing much eventuates out of a question that perhaps hasn’t been asked in quite the right way. For a start, the men’s desire is heartbreakingly simple, as is Dewi’s irritatingly undecided response to their continued adulations. Perhaps intended to signify an ultimate philosophical quandary, her flitting between partners strangely reads as more of a precocious yuppy panic. The ‘west’ of intercultural surely erupts in unintended ways here. Why do we care who she chooses? Is the textual premise actually about choice at all?

As a metaphor, the Tangled Garden story replays the central conceit of the production, which is suitably more invested in the dramatic form and process demanded of cross-cultural practice than its narrative outcome. A collaboration between Sydney’s Sidetrack Performance Group and Komunitas CCL in Bandang, Indonesia, the work was produced during four months of exchange, training and dialogue between two theatres steeped in important histories of collaboration and transformational community-building.

The function of the work on this level is clear. Carlos Gomes (direction) and Iman Soleh (movement) have embedded the form with the tension and strength brought to such exchange. The ensemble are well-versed in a physical vocabulary of Javanese dance coupled with an amusing pantomimic mode. Song, image and exquisite Cirebonese mask work illuminate the potential for deep dialogue within cross-cultural practice. Tangled Garden comes alive when body and sound animate the kinds of ideas that text may not. In these moments, chorus performers enact the burlesque hilarity of a burning groin; a humanoid rooster crows the dawning of the day; a guru is less interested in enlightenment than in a crude bit on the side.

Monica Wulff as the goddess Sri Pohaci strikes an interesting presence with a continued watchful eye that transforms into action with a thunderous masked dance sequence, beckoning mere mortals back to order and life. Wulff’s performance is startling partly for its latency: we barely see her move throughout the work, and then suddenly, scatty commedia are focalised with the rhythmic and angular precision of her finely-tuned technique.

With such potential in performers and the richness engendered by the meeting of two different theatrical worlds, The Tangled Garden offers a fusion of east and west in process in ways that its story does not. In practice, there’s no need to choose, but a plenitude available for all.

Sidetrack, The Tangled Garden, writer Don Mamouney, design, direction Carlos Gomes, performers Alex Blias, Gusjur Mahesa, Maryam Supraba, Dedi Warsana, Monica Wulff, movement Iman Soleh, sound Yadi Mulyadi, video Assad Abdi, lighting Yadi Mulyadi, Adji Sangiadji; Sidetrack Theatre, Sydney, Aug 22-Sept 9

A NAKED ANGUS CERINI LIES PROSTRATE UPON A STAINLESS STEEL TABLE. BODY HAIR REMOVED, GENITALS STRAPPED IN A POLYESTER SACK THAT APPEARS TO MAKE HIS SCROTUM SWELL, CERINI INVOKES A NEUTERED MUTE ABOUT TO PUNCTURE THE WOMB AND UNLEASH HIS APOCALYPTIC PERSONA UPON A RUINED WORLD.

Resembling the bastard son of a thousand maniacs, his elevation from the table is accompanied by twitches and spasms that contrast nicely with the rustic sounds of a farmyard dawn. Beyond Cerini’s shattered form, the remnants of a vast white wall lay strewn across the space. A fissure in the wall opens out into a dark embrace, a cataclysmic world enveloped by eternal darkness. Nuclear winter, the lower cerebral cortex or a perverse vision of a tyrannised chicken staring outward from its recently cracked shell…Who knows? Chapters from the Pandemic invites contemplation. Through it, we come to know a tome that is the hidden recess of the human imagination.

Silent but deadly, Cerini’s paroxysms are heightened by sophisticated strobe lighting and high voltage digital imagery. His body becomes a telematic screen upon which is administered a kinetic impulse intermittently interrupted by a shock of pre-recorded sound. As if punished for daring to conceive of a thing so beastly, a sudden overhead snap releases a hidden trapdoor and down upon Cerini descends the plumage of a thousand debreasted chickens. Yet this could also be a snowstorm on a winter’s noon cast down upon the world in some Icelandic myth, or a snap-frozen, now shattered ocean harboring an inverted King Neptune.

Time passes… Day, night…Who can be sure ? Cerini pumps up the vibrato and emerges dripping wet from a movement riff with sweat illuminating his waxed, jerked-off form. Watching him, finger dancing in his mouth in a ballet miniature, we come to appreciate this creation in much the same way as a person might express great sympathy, yet conceal laughter, when confronted by the creature that might have been if Lynch had not scripted the killing of his mutant offspring in Eraserhead. Like that film, this performance momentarily steps beyond the cabal of its own grandiloquence. Most impressive is its subversion of a popular aesthetic form. Animation can make the fantastic appear actual, but Pandemic’s triumph is that it successfully links the actual with the fantastic, minus animation’s usual cute escapism. And even though Cerini’s persona is named Meatwise, we are never in doubt that Meatwise is anything other than an unsealed incarnation of Angus Cerini on a beguiling, disconcerting ride into the lost highway of his soul.

If there is one quibble about this alluring performance, it is that the theatrics are so refined, its effects so special, its production values so slick, that Cerini’s obsessions never quite slash their way into the poetic imagination. I’m enthralled, yes, but never completely moved.

Chapters from the Pandemic, performer, writer, director Angus Cerini, design Marg Horwell, lighting Rachel Burke, sound Kelly Ryall, video Michael Carmody; 45 Downstairs, Melbourne, Aug 11-19

INTERPOSITIONS WAS STAGED AS PART OF THE DARWIN FESTIVAL PROGRAM BY 24HR ART AT VARIOUS PUBLIC LOCATIONS AROUND THE CITY IN A WEEK LONG SERIES OF ROVING INTERVENTIONIST PERFORMANCES. FOCUSED ON THE PERFORMING ARTS AS A CONDUIT FOR INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE, COLLABORATION, AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION AND REACTION, THE EVENT FEATURED TEN ARTISTS: JILL ORR, ANN FUATA, ASH KEATING, JASON KEATS, HAYLEY WEST AND DANIELLE FREAKLEY FROM AUSTRALIA, AND FROM SINGAPORE JULIANA YASIN, KHAIRUDDIN HORI, RIZMAN PUTRA AND LYNN LU.

Jill Orr appeared in a performance entitled A Prayer wearing a nun’s habit. For much of the performance she was on hands and knees scribing on hard pavement, beginning with “I stand on Larrakia land. I pray for the children.” Orr continued with a functional but loose, organic sway and at times stood, gathered herself and then returned again to her cathartic writing. At moments she appeared struck somehow, like a savant illumine in a cinematic pose. Much of Orr’s oeuvre can be characterised as enactment of iconic still imagery. This performance was located in the Darwin weekend markets where the tightly packed stalls created a cloistered tunnel. The stalls’ canvas walls produced dramatic flat planes of light and dark and elsewhere dappled sunlight streamed down on the achingly spiritual scene. In this way the performance related to Orr’s larger body of work. In evidence as early as 1979, in Lunch with Birds where her figure became a vessel, covered in loaves and small fish, Orr is often associated, as performance theorist Anne Marsh has pointed out, with images of sacrifice and endurance.

More typically, the nun is cast by Orr as an institutional character, pertinent in these times of renewed governmental vigour, some say a new colonialism. In this way the performance spoke equally to the past, present and future. On the one hand, Orr’s persona stands in for the ‘alien other.’ This is convincingly conveyed—her dissociation with place is apparent in the prickly contrast of the black cloth and stockings against the pounding heat of the sun. On the other hand, the religious habit does not appear as divisive as it once might have. No longer are conclusions cast in black and white or good versus evil. Rather, the religious figure is read as a universal character—we are all implicated. Orr confirms this: in her original design she may have taken the habit off, but ultimately didn’t need to.

The words chalked on the marketplace pavement were given another life by a passer-by who read them aloud. This anonymous, Indigenous gentleman, old and weathered, didn’t just say them, but theatrically delivered them, giving the performance further resonance, complexity and a sense of complicity. Shortly thereafter another Aboriginal man contributed his own aptly contradictory utterances: “You’re evil, sister” and “We love you, sister.”

The words of a guest speaker at another Darwin Festival event resonated. Gary Lee in his Larrakia welcome to country for the National Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander Award exhibition affirmed that “The federal invasion into Aboriginal communities and the control, disruption and uncertainty foisted upon us, to our lives, should be condemned for what it is—a colonial style land-grab—in the name of protecting Aboriginal children.”
Lynn Lu, Interpositions

A Punch in the Gut: Experiential Knowledge, Empathy and Performance Art is the title of a doctoral thesis by Singaporean artist Lynn Lu currently studying in Japan. The title provides entry into her Interpositions work and a performance practice that she has built extensively over the past 13 years in the United States, North and Southeast Asia and Europe. As Lu affirms, “there are some things in this world that you can only know through personal experience and this kind of knowledge is very different to knowledge you receive from others, knowledge you accept on faith or which is based on logic or inference.”

One sunset on the azure Arafura Sea, Lu rows a rickety rubber boat far from the Darwin shoreline. With increasing distance her figure becomes a silhouette. What occurs is absurd: kneeling in the boat, she pops up an umbrella and a summer rain falls. Elsewhere it is sunny. The rain falls from her umbrella to create a tinkling structure of entrapment. After a time the boat sinks. Lu disappears, consumed by the sea. She has been, in her own words, “dunked” and needs to swim to shore.

Compared with Lu’s previous performances, this can be considered a diaristic piece which the artist has jokingly labelled her “love series”—having recently fallen out of it. According to Lu the performance draws on a strong image that occurred to her from a moment towards the end of her relationship, of being in a private rainstorm and how absurd it is to somebody watching from the outside in apparent sunshine. In this way the location of Darwin brought to bear other associations not necessarily intended by Lu. The Darwin shoreline as Australia’s most northern waters is a deeply ambiguous and politicised space. According to locals on the shoreline, unaware of Lu’s personal metaphor, the performance was cast in more political terms, of being witness to a troubled figure at sea, but not necessarily able to do anything about it.

Rizman Putra’s explosive energy and hilarity was contagious and also rooted in experience. He dressed in various costumes, but most often wore a cute mask, made in the form of a dog’s head, and a full-body lycra suit. The energy with which he trashed plastic flowers against an asphalt surface, chucked a total, full-body tanty, rolled around the floor, four legs bent like a dog, was laudable. Putra is determined to create “a space in which to be silly” and to enact a cliché—“really bad performance.” In general terms the audience followed his chaos assisted through much of the performance with ‘signs’, a performance approach made famous by Bob Dylan and now itself clichéd through appropriation in music videos. Rizman fashioned an acute wordplay on tropes like ‘rock and roll’ and ‘heavy metal’ to a soundtrack of mixes including Elvis Presley and 80s rock band Survivor. Quotation from the genres of poetry, photography, video, music, burlesque and dance were given an airing in Rizman’s tight if chaotic performance.

Singapore artist Khairuddin Hori’s stark yet teasing, porn-like routine was consummately staged in the unsoiled environment of a well chosen sparkling laundromat. Melbourne’s Danielle Freakley engaged her audience with the Quote Generator in which language is stolen, concentrated and overdramatised with well-known quotations assimilated into everyday life to remarkable effect. While Darwin’s Hayley West invited audiences to her market stall for complimentary card or letter writing on their behalf or to exchange small personal items, Ann Fuata focused on the personal and rituals of hair and identity.

A shared strategy was employed across Interpositions, a casual sense of play that was engaging and participatory.

ONE OF THE MOST INNOVATIVE AUSTRALIAN PERFORMANCE WORKS OF RECENT TIMES, GLOW, WAS THE OUTCOME OF A COLLABORATION BETWEEN CHUNKY MOVE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR GIDEON OBARZANEK AND GERMAN INTERACTIVE VIDEO SYSTEMS MAKER FRIEDER WEISS. AFTER PREMIERING IN MELBOURNE AND SUCCESSFULLY TOURING TO THE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE STUDIO, GLOW IS FEATURED IN THIS YEAR’S MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL. AFTER THAT, IT’S OFF TO VANCOUVER’S PUSH INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE FESTIVAL, NEW YORK’S THE KITCHEN (IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PS21 AND THE JOYCE THEATRE) AND LONDON’S SOUTHBANK HAYWARD GALLERY. IN THE MEANTIME, A NEW WORK, AN EVOLUTIONARY STEP ON FROM GLOW IS ALREADY IN DEVELOPMENT FOR AN EARLY 2008 PREMIERE.

In Glow, the audience look down from all sides of the theatre onto a white floor-cum-screen on which a dancer generates an animated environment, initially taut and geometric and then ominously impressionistic. The performer appears to evolve from a huddled form into human shape, creating a world of astonishing shapes and colours around her, one which eventually takes on a threatening life of its own. It’s an intense experience and, dark as its theme appears to be, an exhilarating one, the thrill not simply at the technological magic but in its meaningful integration.

It seems long ago that laser-driven interactivity offered an apparently unique potential for performers to drive their own lighting and sound effects, but it rarely came to much. However, using instead interactive video systems developed by Frieder Weiss with his Calypso software, Glow effectively and convincingly realises the dream. Now, in a new work, Mortal Engine, Obarzanek and Weiss come together again, but this time with Melbourne-based sound artist Robin Fox on oscilloscope and sound and, yes, adding lasers.

For Obarzanek, lasers offer “a way of getting off the screen into the volume of the space, including above the audience in the auditorium.” As well Weiss has got the video and laser systems speaking to each other. The advantage of the laser system is that, as well as being responsive to sounds, it can track more bodies than Glow’s one dancer, allowing Obarzanek a cast of six.

Obarzanek says that for Robin Fox it’s a return to working with the oscilloscope (his recent focus has been on lasers) here projected onto the screen floor, following a dancer (thanks to an algorithm created in Weiss’ Calypso) as well as responding to sound files, as it has done in Fox’s powerful sound art works. Both Weiss and Fox will work live in Mortal Engine, meaning that visuals and sounds can change performance to performance. The company will skill up a trainee in the technology for subsequent seasons.

Compared with Glow, there is an exponential growth in realtime interactivity and its variables in Mortal Engine. Towards the end of Glow, Obarzanek says, the graphics, in relationship to the performer’s body, had become semi-autonomous. He and Weiss wanted to go past the “quite straightforward” approach of Glow to a point where the environment in Mortal Engine, he stresses, “will most certainly have a life of its own.”

Mortal Engine will also be a longer work, 60 minutes to Glow’s 26, but not all of it technologically governed and not all danced. There will be passages created with the dancers where the video-laser system will be in ‘off’ mode and another in which Robin Fox will project his oscilloscope onto a stage emptied of dancers and filled with sound.

Again, the stage floor will also serve as a screen, but given the considerable challenges Glow offered presenting venues (many theatres find it hard to provide the audience overview and some have had to build the appropriate banks of seating), Obarzanek has opted for a raked floor that can be deployed on a conventional stage. Given what he describes as his “aversion to vertical screens”, the rake seems a good solution, especially when complemented with the overhead possibilities provided by lasers. The rake also has panels that unfold from the floor. The design is by Obarzanek working with the company’s production manager Richard Dinnen, the music by Iceland-based Australian composer Ben Frost.

Obarzanek’s vision seems to have a distinctive if lateral cinematic dimension—integrating the screen into his performance spaces in Glow and the forthcoming Mortal Engine, but also in making films. His first venture was a dance film for the ABC, Wet (1998), which he thinks he “took on far too early” and which “made him shy of film.” However, at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival his 10-minute Dance Like your Old Man (2007) won Best Short Documentary against international competitors and the Nova Award for Innovative Australian Cinema. In the film women dance like their fathers while describing their relationships with them. Obarzanek recalls feeling “thrilled and shocked” about winning “because the film was so simple. I generally have an aversion to dance on film, but that makes it a challenge to do it.”

What particulary pleased Obarzanek was being rewarded for making a documentary. It’s what he’s been doing on stage, he says, in works like the poll data-driven Wanted: Ballet for a Contemporary Democracy (2002) and the interview based I Want to Dance Better at Parties (2004) which features men talking about themselves and dance). He suspects that the effectiveness of Dance Like Your Old Man comes from the tension between the images of the women dancing, on the one hand, and, on the other, what they say about their fathers: “it’s more complex, more difficult”, whereas “the dancing is cute but quickly runs out without the words.”

With the fellow creators of the celebrated Tense Dave (2003)—Lucy Guerin and Michael Kantor—Obarzabek shares another aversion, to dance theatre: “We like the idea but we don’t think it works.” But as with dance film, it’s something to take on, now for a second time. The low tech Tense Dave used a giddying stage revolve to great effect, constantly and magically, even cinematically, reframing action and images with limited means. The new work, Two-Faced Bastard, with the same team, is already in the making; “even more low tech, almost no costuming, strong performers and performed to two fronts. Two shows are presented at the same time separated by a curtain with the performers slipping through it from one show to the other. It’s a challenge because you can always hear what’s happening in the other show.” We can look forward to some more theatre magic and, doubtless, as in Tense Dave, Glow and Mortal Engine, human wilfullness tangling with an environment (low tech or high) that appears to have a life of its own.

Chunky Move is in full touring mode: I Want to Dance Better at Parties is soon off to Pittsburgh after a five city tour in the USA and to Vancouver and Christchurch earlier this year; and Glow has been to Sydney and Darwin, the Netherlands and soon travels to Beijing, Shanghai, Dresden and Perth before going on to the USA and UK. Obarzanek has no doubt that the company’s new works, Mortal Engine and Two-Faced Bastard, will provide major opportunities for international touring. Chunky Move will continue to take Australian performance innovation to the world—and in Glow and Mortal Engine, innovation born of Australian and German invention.

CHOREOGRAPHER AND FILMMAKER SUE HEALEY HAS MADE AN EFFECTIVE MULTIMEDIA INCURSION INTO GALLERY 4A’S VARIOUS SPACES STARTING WITH THE SHOP WINDOW ON HAY STREET, CHINATOWN WHERE DANCERS SHONA ERSKINE AND LISA GRIFFITHS OSCILLATE BETWEEN BUTOH-ESQUE SLOW MOTION, ALBEIT WITH WESTERN DANCERLY GRACE, AND SMALL, SUDDEN ARTICULATIONS THAT SUGGEST ROBOTICISED SHOP DUMMIES. BEHIND THEM ON TWO LARGE MONITORS THEIR MOVEMENTS ARE TRACKED AT A SLIGHTLY SLOWER PACE LEAVING PAINTERLY, DIGITAL TRACES. ALREADY, AS YOU TAKE TIME IS PLAYING WITH TIME, OUR SENSE OF IT HEIGHTENED AS A MIX OF INTENDING AND ACCIDENTAL AUDIENCE FORM SMALL ATTENTIVE CROWDS AND THEN EVAPORATE WHILE PEDESTRIANS BREEZE BY, SNATCHING GLIMPSES OF THE DANCE.

These initial movements and disorientations seem apt: Japan is the world leader in robotics, has given us the performative body states of butoh and, as Healey writes in her program (and many before her), to visit that country is to enter a very different time zone, where the fast is very fast and the slow is meditatively so.

Inside the small downstairs gallery space, Rachelle Hickson, in Ritual Room appears to cower in a corner, extending her long body to the full and then contracting, hand across face and fenced in by small cutouts, at her feet, of the letters T I M E. Meanwhile, in accelerated footage, video projections on three walls show on older Japanese woman dressing Hickson in traditional kimono complete with obi and footwear. The letters of TIME are rearranged by Hickson, perhaps in an effort at control, and then by an interloping Kei Ikeda who becomes the subject of the next passage. As geisha makeup is applied to her face in closeup on a video projection (another focuses on the foot and kimono movements of someone—Hickson?) Ikeda leans and rolls against a video image of herself. While these video transformations appear passive, the live action is tense, as if adjusting to new cultural pressures that constrain and fold the dancers’ bodies. In a brisk duet, the pair race in a circle before their bodies merge, falling slowly into each other. It’s interesting that although both dancers seem to experience similar states, Ikeda is Japanese. However, the program tells us she came to Australia as an eight-year-old and, of course, the images of kimono and geisha makeup belong to a very different time for Japanese and Australian alike.

The dancers invite us to follow them to the upstairs gallery where Erskine and Japanese dancer Norizaku Maeda, in Shona in Japan, solo and duet against three screens which they raise and lower. Here we’re immersed in sweeping images of Erskine on Tokyo streets and railway stations and by water ways, sometimes filling the whole space. On screen Erskine is often still, prominent in her red coat as the city world flurries about her, or she moves in near harmony with a group of men in a quirky little dance on the road or lines up with them to fish for carp. Mouthing exaggerated o’s, Maeda abstractly mimicks the carp we see in close-up. There are moments of intimacy in the live performance, where the brief images of urban life give way to a passage in which the dancers lie side by side, hands and arms entwining against city lights. The differentiations between day and night, between tourist time and everyday time, between work and play and between two people further the work’s temporal play.

Lisa Griffiths performs The White Room in exactly that, an adjoining bright space we look into where the performer stands on a narrow light box, one low wall of which is a screen for fascinating images created by Jason Lam. Griffith’s body is almost immediately taut, every extension as if a desire to exceed, but always abstractly, whether leaning out to the wall or tottering on all fours (on toe tips and clenched fists), working from the box’s narrow parameters. The first projected image on the box wall is a black and white negative of a tree growing and then shedding its leaves, and then dissolving into another tree, and another. A later image is of gently waving leaves of grass amidst which a tiny real time Griffith appears. The tension between Nature’s long-term time, amplified by the long whining notes of Darrin Verhagen’s score, and the human body’s urgent drives is palpable, not least in Griffith’s realisation of the exacting choreography.

We crowd into a black box of a room stacked with small mountain of DVD players and monitors. Here Maeda too exhibits a vibrating tension right to his finger tips as his hands gesture into the sole pool of light, as if reaching for something utterly and painfully unattainable. Finally, he simply switches the monitors on and leaves; we stare uncomprehendingly at images from other dance works and everyday family life. Time is retrievable, but how and whose?

The final passage, Norizaku in Australia, takes us into a large space featuring the whole ensemble. As in The White Room, Maeda, like Griffith, is hemmed in, restricted to performing atop a box. Here, expansive, serene, sunny coastline images are projected, but what first draws us in is sand falling from the performer’s cupped hands to the box top in an amplified reflective sonic reverie. On the screen Maeda is seen in the ocean, above the water line, gesturing abstractly from a rock plinth, a performance which he duplicates live—another kind of seeking across time and space? Meanwhile the four female dancers dance near and far in chorus, shaping their hands into binocular shapes with which they regard us and Maeda with touristy brevity to a bouncy pop score from Ben Walsh. Again different kinds of time experience are juxtaposed—the deep time of interiority and the filling-in time of kitsch—and doubtless we learn a little of Norizaku’s alienation, of feeling utterly isolated and intruded on.

Though deftly executed and alternating nicely between the intensity of Maeda’s performance and the neat frivolity of the ensemble dancing, Norizaku in Australia seems rather slight coming after the focused power of its predecessors. But it’s worth recalling that ‘artentertainment’ comes easier to Japanese culture than it does our own. This is something Walsh captures in his scores for Shona in Japan and Norizaku in Australia, drawing on traditional Japanese music and cheeky pop and using his own distinctive instrumentation (was that a piano accordion I heard)?

As You Take Time does not theorise cultural temporal difference, but it yields a pretty good impression of contrasting and overlapping sense experiences, not least from the mix of real and virtual means that Healey and her dancers and media artists deploy and by moving their audience through a range of states themselves. As You Take Time is an intricate, engrossing multimedia dance experience.

As You Take Time, director Sue Healey, performers Norikazu Maeda (Tokyo), Shona Erskine, Lisa Griffiths, Rachelle Hickson, Kei Ikeda, music Ben Walsh, Darrin Verhagen, lighting designer Nicholas Higgins, projection designers Jason Lam, Sue Healey; Gallery 4a Asia-Australia Arts Centre, Sydney, Aug 14-25

TWO MEN IN WHITE LOOK TOWARDS THE FUTURE: CONCERNED, IMAGINING, CURIOUS, THEY PRESENT UNIQUE VERSIONS OF THE HUMAN BODY, RESISTING AND/OR SAVOURING THE TECHNO-EVOLUTIONARY TALE IN WHICH THEY ARE IMMERSED. THE INQUIRIES ARE DELICIOUSLY EVIDENT IN EVERY MOVING FIBRE.

In Erection, choreographed and performed by French Canadian Pierre Rigal and directed by Aurélien Bory, the dancer emerges into movement through an efficient and contained physicality. Erupting from stillness through punctuated arcs isolated in the ribcage, as though hoisted on invisible hooks, he progresses to executing 360 degree flips of his entire body from a supine horizontal position. I watch closely his interplay with various projected minimalist blocks and lines like the bar code motif. It takes me some time to extricate this relationship (hopefully not about human surveillance) and feel his steady emergence from motionlessness to scampering, hands and feet pawing into the mat, taking hold. He chases incidental space between moving lines wiped in left and right at different speeds projected on the white square mat: a world of possible obstacles. It presents a periphery, the precipice to some unknown circumscribed black. He skirts the edges, edges skirting him; he isn’t standing yet.

The second half of the piece is taken up by Rigal’s now fully erect masculinised figure darting about in boxing shorts, delivering his entire body airborne through the chest, dissonant in rhythm, unbounded in a wild cacophony of sound and staccato light. Can he fly in this body? He seems to ask, “What is beyond our verticality?”

The strongest image is Rigal in perfect replication, centrestage, appearing transcendant, Such a crisp projection toys with my perceptions: who is the live Rigal? He enters his own image, crawls into it like a cat suit, eyeballing the audience for the first time. He invites us to see the telos of his futurism in the fullness and security of our own skin.

Andre Gingas’ CYP17 engineers theatrical absurdity through movement choice, structure and storyline. Dancer Kenneth Flak’s early gestures are repetitive and richly textured in quality, establishing a character of quirky vulnerability. He expertly tacks between sitting and standing postures whilst various stills flash onto the back of the three walled structure isolating him from the probing outside world. A mesmerising path is minutely inscribed by his quivering hands into the back edges of the space while we are led into some Kurt Vonnegut-like world of factual abstraction courting obnoxious interruptions from high volume Bollywood samples. Moments of the bizarre are dropped in, literally thrown in by a figure in a white space suit entering from the stage left Exit door. The sudden inclusion of a bone, then the torso of a calico dummy with velcro attached limbs and head, punctuate the exploration by this isolated man in tight white shorts of his externally controlled world with apparently non-human curiosity and physical experimentation. And yet he responds at all times within the bounds of human reaction: fear, desire, disappointment and joy.

The random flicking between scenes, at first repetitive in theme, disconcertingly explodes elsewhere into a classic contemporary dance vocabulary followed by a gymnastic routine. I’m further confused by the performer’s declamatory critique of the USA and reporting of CIA conspiracies. Yet on reflection, how do we come to know something? How far do we go to master our relationship with the world? And. more pertinently, what is the range of our own possibilities?

Mikhail Baryshnikov’s curation of FutureTense presents two singular investigations of the limits and potentialities of human embodiment whilst constrained within the ‘measure of a man.’ Who better to ask than dancers who dwell and creatively dream in their bodies at length?

FutureTense: curator Mikhail Baryshnikov; Erection, performer, choreographer Pierre Rigal, director Auriélian Bory; CYP17, choreographer Andre Gingras, performer Kenneth Flak; Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, Aug 1-12

I SAW CHOREOGRAPHICS, THE THIRD IN THE REELDANCE INSTALLATION SERIES, THREE TIMES, EACH SUCCESSIVE VISIT INTENSIFYING THE PLEASURE OF THE EARLIER ENCOUNTER. THE HUGE AREA THAT PERFORMANCE SPACE NOW HAS ACCESS TO AT CARRIAGEWORKS FOR ITS GALLERY WAS IDEAL FOR THE FIVE-SCREEN SPREAD OF IN SITU II, THE PROJECTION ONTO A BED OF SAND FOR VIOLIN PHASE/FASE TOP SHOT, AND THE FACE TO FACE WALL SCREENS FOR STILL-LIVE. IN EACH OF THE WORKS THERE WAS A HEIGHTENED SENSE OF PATTERNING OF LIVE MOVEMENT INTO SOMETHING ELSE, DETERMINED BY MULTIPLE SCREEN MANIPULATION, RIGOROUS POINT OF VIEW WORK OR COMPUTER-INTERACTIVITY POSSIBILITIES.

Filmed against a white, deep background, In Situ II captures two female performers swirling in long full black skirts, their full sleeves later held straight with inserted poles, thus extending their physical sweep. The dynamic of their swirling is amplified by close-miking of the skirts (we listen through headphones), the swishing soon morphing into something like the rush of giant bird wings. The dancers’ sudden proximity to the camera and equally sudden distance from it is also bracing, the skirts filling the visual as well as the aural space. This immersiveness is further intensified by the dance of images from screen to screen, the makers using just one screen and rapidly building to five, or simply duplicating an image across all screens, working in twos and threes and other permutations.

Suddenly, it’s dark. Fluid movement is replaced with the wringing of water from sodden cloth, the crack of wet material, the snap of washed hair. What was airy and elegant (the costuming suggestive of middle class conservative female dress from the 18th century to recent times) is now liquid and sensual in this bracing Dutch-Moroccan creation from Said Mahrouf (costume designer, artist), Hester Tammes (writer, artist) and Toon de Zoeten (filmmaker). For curator Erin Brannigan the thrill of In Situ II also resides in how it recalls “the famous proto-cinematic performances of Loie Fuller’s skirt dances and the photographic motion studies of Jules Marey.”

In the same space as In Situ, Violin Phase/Fase Top Shot (Thierry De Mey and Rosas, Belgium) is another engrossing installation. You look down onto several square metres of sand onto which is projected dancer-choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker dancing, in turn, on a thin layer of white sand over a dark surface. In synch with the phasing of Steve Reich’s beautiful minimalist, pulsing Violin Phase, De Keersmaeker systematically marks patterns in the sand in a large unfolding circle, travels back over the same line, erasing some traces, scalloping new ones and sweeping to the centre in narrow arcs until she has created a series of petals and the whole becomes a mandalic flower. As she turns at the centre her skirt billows full (in empathy with her In Situ II sisters?), her arms swinging across her torso and out. She kicks and is propelled along the lines she’s created and now softly blurs until she returns to the centre, looks up at us, sucks in a deep breath and disappears, leaving her creation behind. Shot from a 20-metre high crane, Violin Phase/Fase Top Shot is not only exquisite evidence of the commonplace claim that dancers generate or map out space (likewise magically witnessed, and again aerially, in Chunky Moves’ Glow) but also an act of dancerly embroidery visually resonant with the erotic domesticity of In Situ II.

Still-Live (Simon Ellis, David Corbet, Melbourne), the third installation, was located in part in the CarriageWorks foyer where on touch-screen kiosks you could, with a finger, manipulate half-tone images of dancers in short movement phrases (as you can do at www.skellis.net/dad.project/). Inside the Performance Space Gallery the same images were simultaneously projected at human scale, one on each of two facing walls, creating a kind of duet. The staccato delivery and the limited visual information meant that there was never quite enough fluidity of movement to make sense of a dancer’s style, unless you already knew their work, and even then…Curiously it was the antique technology of the hard copy flicker books rather than this digital equivalent that provided just enough flow and a sense of essence; they have been very well-thumbed in our household. If Still-Live felt like the artists were on the edge of something but weren’t quite ready to take us with them, the makers of In Situ II and Violin Phase/Fase Top Shot took us right in with their cinematic magic. The great thing about ReelDance Installations #03 is this sense of risk and exploration, Ellis and Corbet included, but also the scale of the experience (not something for the DVD player at home) and having somewhere just right for its staging.

ReelDance Installations #03, CHOREOGRAPHICS, An Exploration of Dance & the Moving Image, curator Erin Brannigan, Performance Space, CarriageWorks, Sydney, May 26-June 30

THE ANNUAL SOUND ART EXTRAVAGANZA, LIQUID ARCHITECTURE, IS AN INTERNATIONALLY SIGNIFICANT EVENT THAT PROVIDES AUDIENCES WITH A CROSS-SECTION OF THE NEWEST AND BEST IN THE FIELD. WITH PERFORMERS FROM ACROSS AUSTRALIA, THE US, FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND, WORKING IN DIVERSE FIELDS, THIS WAS A FABULOUS SEASON. SOUND ART CAN EMBRACE EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC, NEW MEDIA AND PERFORMANCE ART; THIS YEAR’S LA FESTIVAL FEATURED ALL OF THESE AND ALSO LOOKED BACK AT THE ROOTS OF AUSTRALIAN SOUND ART AND ITS GREATEST EXPONENTS.

The program opened with performances by three younger composers. Dean Linguey performed on an apparatus comprising two sheets of steel suspended from a frame and connected by metal wires. Electric transducers vibrate the closely microphoned sheets and the vibrations are broadcast through a mixer and the PA. Linguey orchestrates a complex polyphonic signal into engaging music by touching or pressing the metal with his hands. Camilla Hannan’s work involves reprocessed field recordings orchestrated into a delightful composition that hovers between music and audio-documentary, taking you into worlds of memory and imagination. Nigel Wright creates engaging experimental musical compositions using a laptop. These composer-performers showcased three of the primary ways of generating sound—using a vibrating object (most musical instruments fall into this category), morphing and blending recordings of ambient, environmental or sampled sounds, and orchestrating synthesised sound. Much sound art traditionally falls somewhere along this continuum. The listener responds to the sound as music but is also teased by the recognisability of particular sounds, and notices how they are transformed and mixed, the melodic or harmonic lines and patterns that develop, spatial effects and the incorporation into the mix of performative by-products such as resonances, overtones and feedback. Every artist establishes a unique language.

australian sound art history

The same night saw the launch of the CD of Australian sound art pioneers, Artefacts of Australian Experimental Music: 1930-1973, compiled by Clinton Green, and a panel discussion between notable composer/performers Pauline Oliveros, Rainer Linz, Robin Fox and Warren Burt (a former Oliveros student). Before a large and interested audience, this evening was a significant moment in the history of Australian sound art, and discussion ranged over the nature and legacy of Australia’s early experimental music and the lack of acknowledgement of the important work that has emerged. In Australia, the field developed particularly in the 1970s through the work of Burt, Keith Humble and Ron Nagorcka and through the establishment of university courses in the area, and has since gained impetus through international travel and recording distribution. But the roots go back to the 1930s and Percy Grainger is counted as a pioneer. The panel concluded that the Australian sound art scene is now firmly part of a global community. Echoing a cry throughout the arts, they lamented the continuing lack of news-media attention and of funding for experimental music and sound art.

Following the panel discussion, Fox performed on early synthesisers retrieved from a dumpster at the closure of an important 1970s Melbourne studio, and blended into the mix some elements from recordings made at the time.

deep listening

Pauline Oliveros, a leader in sound art in the US since the 1950s, is the founder of Deep Listening®, a mediation practice that involves shifting focus from a particular sound to all ambient sound and listening exclusively or inclusively. Her delightful performances with her collaborator Ione were highly refined musical compositions. While in Australia, Oliveros had also performed a remix of one of her 1960s works (see RT80, p51), so the lineage of experimental music and sound art was laid before us.

In the Melbourne leg of LA8, Oliveros and Ione’s Saturday afternoon Deep Listening workshop was not to be missed. After a series of warm-up exercises, our attention was focussed on the nature of listening and the awareness and recognition of ambient sound. We heard unmediated the ambient sounds such as birds, cars and trams that sound artists so often mimic, reuse or parody. Deep Listening is also about experiencing one’s own body, how it hears, feels and itself produces sound, and how hearing and feeling connect. The workshop reminded us of how we categorise sound as musical, unmusical or noise, depending on context, memory, experience and taste.

into the labyrinth

On the concluding night, the audience was marshalled through the rear door of the auditorium into an underground carpark/loading bay—which became a quintessentially urban arena—and given earplugs. Earplugs at a concert? The evening opened with Perth-based quartet Abe Sada (recalling the name of the 1930s Japanese geisha who notoriously suffocated and then castrated her lover), who perform on electric bass guitars connected through effects pedals to massive amplifiers. For this set, they were joined by Robin Fox on laptop, and the performers spread themselves around the space, coordinating their improvisations through aural rather than visual cues, with brief flourishes and squealing feedback overlaying long, rumbling drones. Slow, subtle and introspective, this is darkly beautiful music that partly builds on the aesthetic that emerged in the Hendrix era of the electric guitar, but which draws more on the ethos of sound art to establish a unique and compelling oeuvre.
Justice Yeldam, Liquid Architecture 8

Following Abe Sada was the astonishing Justice Yeldham and the Dynamic Ribbon Device. As well as the Coca-Cola insignia, the term Dynamic Ribbon Device might refer to the contact microphone attached to the large chunk of window pane that Yeldham (Lucas Abela) holds in his hands and against which he presses his face as he bawls his rant, or to the blood flowing from his hands and mouth as the performance progresses and the glass slowly disintegrates. The mike is connected via effects pedals to a large amplifier, so that Yeldham’s cathartic yelling is transmuted into nearly abstract sound, though never abstract enough to blunt the emotional power of his soliloquy. More performance art than sound art, it recalls the tradition of performance and body art from Chris Burden, Mike Parr and Stelarc to Monika Tichacek, amongst numerous others, in which artists violate their own bodies, drawing attention to the nature and vulnerability of human flesh, its colonisation and the possibility of redemption through suffering. Abela’s is art at its most primal.

Runzelstirn and Gurgelstock (in fact one artist, Rudolf Eb.er of Switzerland) followed, with the performer, wearing a pig mask with a mike in it, sitting in a car and declaiming unintelligibly through a mixer and PA. Again, more performance than sound art, it was mockingly ironic, as if revealing the tormented psyche of a commuter caught in a traffic jam, and resonating with the carpark metaphorically as well as literally. Overall, the evening was more urban theatre than concert.

This LA season focussed very much on the listener and the nature of listening. The contrast for the audience between Justice Yeldham’s visceral performance, Abe Sada’s tectonic reverberations and Pauline Oliveros and Ione’s meditative music was profound. Important in sound art is the experience of the body—both the performer’s and the listener’s—its haptic awareness and its location in site and space. Sound art is about the technical means of making and orchestrating musical sounds and it can carry incisive political and social commentary. It is very much about the physical, intellectual and musical experience of listening and the triggering of memory and emotion. The best works touch us at every level. Director Nat Bates’ thoughtful programming has made for a memorable LA festival that has once again revealed the breadth, depth and potential of sound art.

Liquid Architecture 8, director Nat Bates, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, July 11-13, RMIT University, Melbourne, July 14

OVER THE LAST THREE YEARS THE SYDNEY DIRECTORS OF LIQUID ARCHITECTURE, SHANNON O’NEILL AND BEN BYRNE, HAVE CONSISTENTLY DEMONSTRATED A BOLD AND DISTINCTIVE CURATORIAL APPROACH. EACH EVENING IS NOT ONLY CLEARLY CRAFTED TO EXPLORE A PARTICULAR ASPECT OR FETISH OF AUDIO EXPLORATION, BUT TO “DO SOMETHING TO YOU.” THE 2007 SYDNEY EVENT WAS THEIR MOST PROVOCATIVE YET.

surprise sounds

In a controversial move, the opening night seemed aimed at repelling audiences. The program notes claimed an exploration of popular music, but it felt more like a finger to the idea of scenes and acceptance: who is an outsider artist and who an insider; if it’s all about self-expression why are some people perceived as artists, some not? Daniel Green has a developing reputation for his performative video work, and he took a brave leap in presenting a live version of his excruciatingly daggy style, opening with “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” from Cabaret, in enthusiastic yet shaky baritone accompanied by occasional noise bursts on a toy guitar.

The audience was split between aghast and amused. Green continued with a remix travesty of “Maria” from West Side Story with glitched minidisk backing and finished off with a fiendish version of “Tell Me More” from Grease, played from a commercial DVD that supplies sing-a-long karaoke text, to which Green only sang “blah blah.” Knowing, and sometimes appreciating, Green’s work for video, I found this interesting not so much as sonic exploration but rather as a performance work, but to those in the dark it must have been indeed perplexing.

This disorientation worsened with the introduction of Tony Mason-Cox and his accompanist Ann Onymous. Mason-Cox is an insurance salesman who likes to pen a tune or two, particularly a dirty ditty, and enthusiastically sing them in his stumbling way. His first few limericks were amusing, but he seems to have written hundreds and the overload became tortuous, particularly for those with delicate political constitutions. What was most interesting was when Mason-Cox sang a serious song about his stepfather, his voice now frail and uncertain. The sentiment was genuinely moving—which made the audience distinctly uncomfortable. Was Mason-Cox’s inclusion in the program a challenge to sound art elitism or was he wilfully placed out of context? These conspicuously contentious questions charged the Sydney LA 8 opening evening. For those who hung on to the end, the glam rock mayhem of the band Winner was their clear reward.
Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, Liquid Architecture 8, Sydney

Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, Liquid Architecture 8, Sydney

actionist acts

In contrast, the second night promised to be truly terrifying with performances by actionist inspired artists Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock (one person actually, Rudolf Eb.er) and Dave Phillips from Switzerland and local artist Lucas Darklord (aka Thomas Knox Arnold). While Natasha Anderson on contrabass and garklein recorders with electronics might appear to be out of place in this industrial gothic line-up, her deft use of dynamics, texturing and attack gave her performance an intriguing brutality juxtaposed with fragility making her one of the most satisfying acts (conceptually and sonically) of the festival. Conversely, Lucas Darklord’s appearance—militaristic jacket with spiked shoulder pads and half blackened face—promised something more gruesome than we actually experienced, which turned out to be a polite set of dark and murky glitches shifting in and out of a timid apocalypse.

Dave Phillips was certainly disturbing for many with his video collage of human cruelty to animals, accompanied by poetically accusatory aphorisms and unrelenting noise floor. While the piece by Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock—involving a camp-stove with a pot of boiling vinegar, pig nose and a strap-on finger noise activator—looked ready to deliver on its threat of menace, the artist appeared gleeful in denying us any dramatic climax.

The evening ended with the video documentation of a performance by Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock involving a line-up of butoh inspired female performers drinking a variety of different coloured substances on cue to loud music and throwing up for a very long time. While outwardly a performance piece, its roots were in audio—by far the worst aspect of sitting through it was the sound of the women gagging, spitting and sticking their fingers further down their throats to prolong the action. As a very transparent “play” of manipulation and consensual subjugation, set very firmly within the extreme body zone of Japanese performance aesthetics, I was surprised by the agitated response to the piece as sexist by some in the audience. But then again not everyone has consensually subjugated themselves to a decade of performance art…

audio-visuality

The final evening concentrated on audiovisual explorations and did not seem planned to upset the audience, although excessive length did move it into the realm of endurance. The common theme, it seemed, was the re-emergence, for better or worse, of narrative in audiovisual works. Peter Newman has developed a distinctive style—intensely minimal visuals and dramatic bittersweet sounds—and he explored this further, pushing the sweet a little more than the bitter this time. Lloyd Barrett seems to use similar visual processing methods to Newman but opted for a (for some too) clear narrative using text panels to explicate his dream segments, creating a pithy short film feel to his set.

Kamusta (Chris Caines and Jessica Tyrrell) employed two screens—one a slowly setting sun, another a shifting melange of close-up street details—accompanied by a miminally developing soundscape and live voiceover by Caines. While all the elements were clear and considered, the piece as a whole did not develop beyond a kind of ambivalent ambience perhaps created by an unreconciled struggle with the figurative nature of text. Abject Leader introduced a performer to their 16mm film and audio set. There was potential in the beat poet flow of Jamie Hume’s offering, however the parodic gesture at character—safari suit, pith helmet and fake facial hair—felt underdeveloped and stylistically awkward, which along with some ornery projectors resulted in an overly long and difficultly paced set, although Joel Stern’s sounds maintained some momentum.

Cellule d’Intervention Metamkine, the team of French projection and sound artists came on at some time close to midnight for a 40-minute set when many of us in the audience had very little left to invest; however their dynamism was worth the wait. There is an orchestral quality, a Hitchcock-Herrmann grandeur to the work that is both perplexing and invigorating. The very hands-on manipulation of light is alchemical and magical, the structure of the set intriguing in its use of internal climactic steps and troughs. It felt like we were in the hands of dream masters…and when it was over we stumbled out shell-shocked and hazy, trying to remember our way home.

in situ

The festival also featured Terminal, installations by Jasper Streit, Natasha Anderson, Rik Rue and Wade Marynowksy, dotted around the CarriageWorks foyer. A potentially difficult venue due to sound bleed issues, the pieces were well-placed providing little islands of focus for audiences easily dissipated in the cavernous space. Marynowsky’s player piano automaton, Anderson’s abject testicular gloops and Streit’s minimal metal object provided as much visual as audio intrigue.

The curation of Liquid Architecture Sydney this year was wily and thought provoking, the experience of the whole festival being stronger and more satisfying perhaps than the individual performances. Despite the suspicion that programming of extreme acts might repel some audiences, the festival was very well attended with the final night at capacity. Sadly Shannon O’Neill and Ben Byrne have called it quits for Liquid Architecture. It cannot be said that they went quietly.

Liquid Architecture 8, Sydney directors Ben Byrne, Shannon O’Neill, national director Nat Bates; Performance Space at CarriageWorks, Sydney, June 28-30

THIS YEAR, FOR THE QUEENSLAND MUSIC FESTIVAL, ELISION BROUGHT TOGETHER SAXOPHONIST/COMPOSERS TIMOTHY O’DWYER AND JOHN BUTCHER TO DIRECT WHAT REMAINS, A FOUR MOVEMENT WORK (TWO EACH) FOR THE ELISION ENSEMBLE LASTING ABOUT AN HOUR. THREE MOVEMENTS ARE IMPROVISED AND ONE (BY O’DWYER) TRADITIONALLY SCORED. THE IMPROVISATIONS WORK AS GAMES, WITH THE PERFORMERS GIVEN SETS OF INSTRUCTIONS THAT INFLUENCE THINGS LIKE LISTENING AND RESPONSE STRATEGIES.

The usual seating is pulled back so that audience and performers are arranged around the perimeter of the very cubic performance hall of the Judith Wright Centre. The performers (Graeme Jennings, Peter Veale, Tristram Williams and Erkki Veltheim with Butcher and O’Dwyer) are split into two groups, O’Dwyer in one, Butcher in the other, and face each other from opposite ends of the floor. The audience takes up the other two sides.

The music starts with punchy noise bites from the brass and reeds snapping from one group to the other. Contest and bravado alternate, synched up to and fro to make a symbolic conflict-like rap without the stereotypes. Percussion hurtles in as a nutty professor continuo—it’s funny, fast, brilliant, all sorts of things are being hit, bowed or rattled. Butcher comes in with a solo that sounds like strangling poultry. Not to be outdone, the violin from O’Dwyer’s side likewise garrottes some poor beast before a hideous ring modulated feedback guitar makes everyone else sound lyrical. There’s plenty of spatial, timbral, and rhythmic interplay, with an underlying feel that the musicians will break into killing each other any second now. Tension relaxes, and Butcher and O’Dwyer start using the sax stops as percussion—sounds great, rich, lively, like kids in the bath. The first movement ends to the enormous roar of saliva circulating through the cavern of Butcher’s saxophone.

The second movement begins with Butcher’s side playing long fast lines like a bunch of religious ecstatics in a casually loony frenzy. Jump to the other side of the space for frantic table percussion, bass clarinet and a bit of all-join-in, sound switching from side to side of the hall. O’Dwyer pulls some out some beautiful sounds before a great bop solo from Butcher, hip and eccentric, Tuvan throat singer does Coltrane with hiccups. Butcher’s face and neck inflate and explode in a bizarre peristalsis. Time for a brief pause before the third movement.

O’Dwyer moves to a podium up front to conduct what is the most scored of the movements. Much quieter, more of an ensemble feel, you can hear the organisation. Supermarket plastic bags get scrunched and amplified, become percussion. Soft sounds, plosive pats on the keys, bowed cymbals, feedback sax, fade out.

Back to improvisation and the final movement starts with O’Dwyer and Butcher using a ping-pong, no-playing style, where everything comes out except the sound of the sax. Butcher starts up the other soloists for some detailed call and response. It’s like a pushy conversation, or hearing tests where the performers have to guess what and when the other is going to play and try and play along. Someone starts playing stuff so that it sounds backwards. Butcher makes sounds like a crow rattling. The hour is up and it’s over.

So good I went the second night for a repeat performance. I wasn’t the only one. O’Dwyer’s solo was the most sustained and confronting aggression I’ve heard. If music could be heat we would have burned.

ELISION, What Remains, composer-performers Timothy O’Dwyer, John Butcher, ELISION ensemble; Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, July 20-21

TOM HALL STOOD UP FROM HIS LAPTOP AND LEFT HIS SEAT UP ON THE STAGE, HIS TALL FRAME ALLOWING HIM TO COMFORTABLY HOLD THE SMALL RIDE CYMBAL ABOVE THE HEADS OF EVERY PERSON IN THE ROOM FOR A BRIEF MOMENT BEFORE HEADING FOR THE ENTRANCE, DOWN THE STAIRS, AND VERY POSSIBLY ONTO THE STREET. HE HAD BEEN CLANGING THE CYMBAL WITH SMALL STICKS AND PROCESSING THIS SOUND THROUGH HIS LAPTOP AND WHATEVER ELSE HE WAS USING. THIS HAD BEEN VERY ENGAGING, BUT STEPPING OFF THE STAGE FOR A SOLO WAS UNEXPECTED AND EXCITING. ALL TECHNICAL MANIPULATION WAS GONE, JUST THE CLEAN SOUND OF ONE CYMBAL, REPETITIVE AND HYPNOTIC. SOMEONE ELSE IN THE APPRECIATIVE AUDIENCE REFERRED TO THIS AS A BLESSING AND PERHAPS IT WAS.

The other performers, Scot Cottrell and Matt Warren, had become silent at this stage, allowing Brisbane-based sound artist Hall to take the moment, but they were still present in the sound: a rich outburst of not-playing that served to demonstrate that this meeting of minds, and approaches to sonic construction and equipment was more than some dudes trading licks, and let me thank some higher power for that. Improvisation is a special thrill when it works, but all too often the chance for a peek at some kind of ecstatic insight gets lost as macho types take turns demonstrating their chops. Or even worse, no turns are taken at all. This was not the case here; we managed to see some real communication that had a strong dynamic sense. It was exciting, even funny for the audience and seemingly the performers, but this seems to be normal for Tom Hall: he is really genuinely thrilled by sound. He listens to it, captures and manipulates it, recontextualising into performance. His pleasure is infectious.

I’d attended the workshop Hall had run earlier that day. He took us for a wander about the docks area of Hobart, and whilst calmly discussing sounds and things that made them, his fascination became clear. He stares at his environment as well as listening to it, obsessing about bridges and holes in piers. He speculated that a particular bridge may well be totally unique in its position above the water, the way it sits in relation to the prevailing wind around the Hobart waterfront area, and that the sounds it generates might be the only sounds like that anywhere in the world. That it occurs to him to think of this is remarkable in itself, but he then gathers and stores the sound as best he can with his collection of microphones (something else he was quite excited by) with the promise of constructing a work with it.

The group carried out exercises—it was a workshop after all. Simple cupping of the hands about the ear to isolate sounds was a good starting point to get us speculating about the nature of sound in the everyday world, but a genuine moment of clarity came a little later.

Tom handed all the attendees earplugs. We stood on the lawn next to the busy and rather noisy Salamanca Market, one of Hobart’s best-known tourist attractions and a very familiar experience for actual residents. Plugs inserted, the market itself became removed and grew distant quite rapidly. This was strange indeed; we’d not moved. As the silence grew more palpable, I wondered what Hall was really doing here: the idea had been to create sensitivity in the ear itself on removing the earplugs afterwards, but this experience of silence was quite something. I felt strange, disconnected from the world after only a few minutes of this very simple exercise. The workshop group became a mild spectacle to observant marketgoers. We were, as it happened, standing about with fluorescent earplugs visible, not-listening with intent. Intended or not, this added to the odd, isolated feel of this moment.

Removal of the earplugs came after a short walk to a more central spot in the nearby Salamanca Square. I found the rush of sound a relief and, yes, it did all feel louder somehow. Just like the cymbal that was to ring over my head later that evening, there was something quite amazing in this brief, simple moment.

Tom Hall finds wonder in the small and the brief, in the things that go unnoticed in this busy life. Beyond that though, he is fortunate to be able to express this with a clarity one encounters all too infrequently.

HAVING JUST SEEN CLAIRE EDWARDES PERFORMING WITH GREAT SUBTLETY IN THE BRACING SONG COMPANY/ENSEMBLE OFFSPRING CAGE UNCAGED CELEBRATION AND, A WEEK BEFORE, IN A SUPERB CONCERT IN DUET WITH GUITARIST GEOFFREY MORRIS, I WAS EAGER TO IMMERSE MYSELF IN THE PERCUSSIONIST’S FIRST CD, TITLED COIL AFTER THE MAGICAL FIRST TRACK ON THE CD, COMPOSED BY GERARD BROPHY. MY EXPECTATIONS OF TEXTURED, NUANCED AND CHARACTERFUL PLAYING WERE FULLY MET.

Coil is a wonderfully apt image for the album, conjuring something wound, expanding and contracting, full of force but also of a controlled unleashing of sounds delicate and powerful, whether in a music box or a grand pendulum clock or, as realised here, on vibraphone, marimba and drums. The compositions on the CD beat and pulse regularly as we would expect of percussion but, by turns, they dance, muse, grow introspective, dramatic and ache for transcendence.

In Brophy’s Coil (8’39, 1996) little melodies surge, rise, turn back on themselves and take flight again generating a palpable optimism. I wanted to invent words to sing with these sparkling, bell-like vibraphone musings and the rise and fall of their memorable cadences in Edwardes’ able hands. In contrast, Andrew Ford’s The Armed Man (5’42, 2004) is, the composer says, founded on a mediaeval tune. We don’t hear it, besides the tonal range is restricted to a drum kit, but the effect is powerful, a drum solo without a band, hinting at things ceremonial (march, attack, execution) and even rock’n’roll and, for Ford, the Iraq War,

Ross Edwards’ More Marimba Dances (7’05, 2004) furthers the magic of the widely played earlier set and had me on my feet. Edwardes and producer Belinda Webster bring to the trio of dances an enveloping range and depth of sound, the timber ringing with sublime bottom notes and high ripplings, resonating with buried references to music Latin and Asian and Baroque. The first and last dances open with buoyant riffs that you quickly embody—they are the springs out of which the compositions rise before falling and rising again—while the middle piece revels in an elegant tentativeness. Refreshing is the word for More Marimba Dances, and they are never less than utterly intelligent.

Next, in works by Andrew Schultz, Dominick Karski and Damien Ricketson, I found myself in very different, more demanding territory. Schultz’s Winter Ground [12’05, 2000] for vibraphone, is palpably reflective, establishing an ambiguous emotional state and working it over and over, winding and entwining, growing denser by accrual, expanding from a narrow note range into a stream of consciousness reverie with just enough of a rhythmic anchor to keep the work sensually engaging, often quite beautiful, right to the final residue of the repeated ringing of a single note. Something has been completed.

Dominik Karski’s Beginnings to No End [7’45, 1999], writes the composer, comprises “seven short fragments called ‘beginnings’—small pockets of musical material that could have been developed further, but instead collapse unexpectedly.” Fast pulsed, insistent ‘beginnings’ on marimba first simply stop. The impulse to cease soon seems to come from the instrusion of a very different voice. Sweet marimba and gruff bongos dialogue, a remarkable exchange which must have stretched Edwardes, brain and limb until, finally, the marimba takes off on its own, happily monologuing, galloping, riffing, locked into a final pulse with minute diversions, into…

Damien Ricketson describes his Hol Spannen Luiden [18:12, 1997] as “a variation without a theme”, “a recounting of a musical work where the original is never heard”, with a focus on “the nature of memory, in particular processes of recollection and decay.” The most demanding work on the CD, this work requires several listenings before it takes because it forsakes obvious beat and pulse for the very textures of percussive sound—small rolls, the vibration of dropped sticks, the natural reverberation of struck metal, all listened to and pondered in very real time. Once relaxed into, Hol Spannen Luiden is subtly if sparely immersive.

The CD closes with a return to more accessible material but both pieces have their own complexities. Mark Clement Pollard’s Just a Moment (3’20, 1996) has a gentle minimalist-cum-gamelan feel on vibraphone with brisk phasing which yields upper end sparkle and a mid-range pealing, generating rich layering in mere minutes. It’s fascinating that in a reversal of expectation, the cyclical melodic drive for Just a Moment comes from the top end of the instrument, while the occasional mid-range notes suddenly colour the composition from below. Pollard’s One Sweet Moment (3’00, 1997) starts ringing strongly, if hesitantly, like carolling bells, and subsequently takes shape as a continuous pealing with an emphatic beat, the intervals finally opening out, the pulse slowing, decayed notes hanging…These are brief works, but feel big and embracing and leave a glorious ringing in the ears.

Claire Edwardes has located the kinetic energy in these compositions and let them uncoil. With each play of the CD, their magic is released.

Claire Edwardes, Coil, recording engineer, producer Belinda Webster, mastering Don Bartley, Tall Poppies, CD TO193, www.tallpoppies.net
See giveaways (p56).

THERE IS SOMETHING BOTH ENDEARING AND ABSURD ABOUT OPERA AND IT’S NOT THAT IT’S NOT OVER UNTIL THE FAT LADY SINGS. IT’S IMPOSSIBLE NOT TO MENTION THE OPINION OF DR SAMUEL JOHNSON CITED RECENTLY IN THE AUSTRALIAN THAT IT IS AN “EXOTICK AND IRRATIONAL ENTERTAINMENT.” LIKE A CRAZY MARXIST AUNT FROM ANOTHER ERA, OPERA CAN SEEM BOTH HOPELESSLY ANACHRONISTIC AND EMBARRASSING, TOO PRONE TO WEEP OVER LOST CAUSES LIKE, WELL, HUMANITY. IN THE POSTHUMAN WORLD, WE WEEP OVER THE BOTTOM LINE, AND OPERA COMPANIES HAVE MUCH TO WEEP ABOUT IN THIS RESPECT.

But since words have been cannibalised into sound-bites and rhetoric trammelled in the mud of world wars and worse, opera seems well-suited to express our most primal or sublime emotions, and something of those in between. In a cheek by jowl inner suburb in Brisbane sometimes it becomes impossible to edit out the intimate transactions of neighbours. When the phone rang in the home of an elderly Greek couple, the awful pause and ensuing deep male keening accompanied by the broken recitative of a female voice told its own story (their son had died). It seems to me that it would be impossible to render the speechless anguish and profundity of such a moment in any form other than opera (unless in the silent scream of visual art). The American musical has its own fine attributes, but doesn’t quite cut the mustard unless we count George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, a self-styled folk opera. From Artaud onwards, avant-garde theatre has aspired to the total experience of Eastern opera while denigrating Western opera as a bourgeois art form, forgetting that ‘bel canto’ was once as popular as ‘the beautiful game’ [soccer, Ed.]. Beaumarchais’ farcical play The Marriage of Figaro was credited with being the insurrectionist spark that inflamed the French Revolution, and was adapted into an equally subversive operatic masterpiece by Mozart. More recently, John Adams’ controversial modern opera Death of Klinghoffer caused a bitter international debate. The mad old aunt is still dancing away.

l’orpheo

The 2007 Queensland Music Festival wins the World Cup by fielding the first (still one of the finest), and our home team’s very impressive latest, contribution to the operatic tradition. The festival participated in the 400th anniversary of Claudio Monteverdi’s and Alessandro Striggio’s L’Orpheo which is being celebrated world-wide, while mounting the world premiere season of Richard Mills’ and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Love of The Nightingale. L’Orpheo was first performed before a court audience (although Monteverdi’s second lost opera was presented al fresco before a reputed audience of 5000) so that the neo-classical, acoustically friendly venue at the Masonic Memorial Temple with its back-straightening wooden pews chimed. It was a sumptuous feast, not because a lot of money had been spent (it was sparsely but adequately staged in the round), but because of the superlative and enthusiastic rendering by the mainly young cast of Griffith’s Conservatorium singers, and the accompanying musical ravishment.

We were on intimate terms with the inner workings of the period music ensemble led by the disarmingly undemonstrative harpist Marshall McGuire. Violone, harpsichord, theorbo, cornetto, sackbut and regal were some of the instruments rarely seen or heard that made the orchestra as entrancing to watch as to listen to, as on the spot as a jazz combo. The loud cacophany of brass and drums, the harmony and rhythm of ‘continuo’ instruments like the organ, cello and viola, and melodic ones such as the recorder were a combined knockout in their day, and are familiarly dissonant in the manner, say, of Kurt Weill to modern ears. Like the songster Weill, Monteverdi turned out some hot madrigals, although he also wrote church music as well as writing for the more profane medium of the theatre. A kind of brilliant musical ‘bricoleur’, Monteverdi mixed and matched: the opening bars of L’Orpheo are the same as his Vespers. It was this conflux of church music, love songs, and dramatic feelings that defined a new genre. By extolling in then voguish Neo-Platonic terms the ‘civilising’ power of music in the classical Orpheus and Eurydice myth, Monteverdi raised men and women to the heights of the gods in what has been regarded by many as the first humanist manifesto. On opening night, Gregory Massingham as Orpheo had lost his voice. His part was sung by Trevor Pichanick while Massingham performed the role. Pichanick’s bel canto rendition grew wonderfully in stature, and a warm and supportive audience responded to the potentially awkward arrangement with appropriately civilised demeanour.

the love of the nightingale

The Love of the Nightingale tenders a less optimistic, less harmonious version of the humanist project from a soured, latterday perspective of civilisation and its discontents. Based on a darker classical myth from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, it sets up an opposition between liberal, sunny Athens and gloomy, repressive Thrace which has come to its aid in times of war, but really it’s the fracture in any society’s psyche between the ineffectual voice of conscience and dumb violence.

The liberator from the North, Tereus, asks only to marry the King’s daughter, Procne, to the chagrin of her naïve younger sister, Philomele. Five years later and after the birth of her son, Itys, Procne languishes for her sister’s company, and asks her husband, Tereus, to escort Philomele back to Thrace on a visit. On the journey homeward, Tereus rapes Philomele and, in a desperate bid to cover his tracks, cuts out her tongue. Philomele is prevented from asking the most basic question: Why? When the deed is exposed, Procne exacts revenge by slaughtering her own sword-wielding, father-proxy child because: “We did not want that future. A future without questions.” Rather than offering the slaying of the patriarchal line as a solution, there is devastating irony here because one of the questions relates to the murder of children. The only hope—because “the blood had to stop flowing, the anger had to subside”—is radical transformation magically provided by Ovid who has the three protagonists turn into birds. In the opera, the possibility of transcendence is made heartbreakingly transparent in a sort of afterlife coda when Itys asks: “Why aren’t you speaking Philomele? Don’t you want me to ask questions?” Philomele breaks into the pure wordless song of the nightingale and we are brought full circle to meditate on the hope (and hopelessness) of the civilising power of music extolled in L’Orpheo.

Wertenbaker’s libretto is simply marvellous in its self-awareness, and Anke Hoppner as Procne and Leanne Kenneally as Philomele interpretively and vocally outstanding, but I found Mill’s post-romantic score (and I’ll be howled down for this) had too many unnecessary strings, literal and figurative, attached. Nevertheless I was still intensely aware that my mad old aunt was dancing.

L’Orpheo, composer Claudio Monteverdi, librettist Alessandro Striggio, musical director Marshall McGuire, stage director Caroline Stacey, designer Kaoru Alfonso, lighting designer George Meijer, Ludovico’s band, chorus and orchestra staff and students Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University; Masonic Memorial Temple, July 23, 25, 27; The Love of the Nightingale, composer Richard Mills, librettist Timberlake Wertenbaker, conductor Richard Gill, director Lindy Hume, designer Dan Potra, costumes Kate Hawley, lighting Nigel Levings; Opera Queensland, Playhouse Queensland Performing Arts Centre, July 13, 16, 18

IN SEE HEAR NOW 2007, QUALITY COLLABORATIONS AND SYNERGIES ABOUNDED; IT WAS THE AUDIENCES WHICH WERE THIN. TROPICAL TOWNSVILLE’S COLDEST WINTER ON RECORD MUST HAVE KEPT ITS FROST-TENDER INHABITANTS INDOORS, UNWILLING TO BRAVE THE UNSEASONABLE COLD(ISH) SNAP EVEN FOR THE LIKES OF DISTINGUISHED VISITORS, BONEMAP AND JIM DENLEY, CLOCKED OUT DUO AND LAWRENCE ENGLISH. THE COMPENSATORY ASPECT OF SMALL AUDIENCE NUMBERS WAS THE FEEL OF FAMILY GATHERING/MASTER JAM SESSION.

performance 7: lapse

Previous collaboration between Bonemap and Denley was evident in Lapse, the piece straddling the divide between improvisation and rehearsed polish. The aural contortions of Denley’s sax were complemented dynamically by Russell Milledge’s dripping, synthesized percussion in the early stages of the piece. Projections of numbers and computations flickered across the walls, amplifying Rebecca Youdell’s stressed, erratic movements. Youdell, in a vintage black ruffled dress, played to the spotlight, flitted and flirted with the saxophonist, intermittently connected with him, calmed; then the next wave of moaning, wailing sax threw her back to her obsessive scrubbing, quarantined by the circle of the spotlight into her involuntary dance, untouchable.

Youdell bumped against visual artists scratching away at their easels on the periphery, and tangled with an unseen protagonist. Black and white projections of body silhouettes appeared, initially floating and swirling like a Bond film intro, but at times becoming frantic and distorted. Youdell clawed at her costume.

The visual artists laughed, sharing a separate moment, but the laughter almost mocked the dancer’s vulnerability. The projections turned into a hall of mirrors reflecting a filmed Youdell in a red dress torn and pinned together with safety pins. Her shadow interrupted her screen self as she mimicked its movements.

Distorted words filtered through the sax and the laptop. Youdell screwed up her face and tilted her head in an effort to decipher.

Lapse gave away its performance history with a neat wrap up, the music and visuals ending as Youdell faced the audience, styled like a catwalk model, placed her hand under her long hair and flipped it forward to hide her face.

challenges

In contrast, not a few of the festival’s 20 performances were overlong and dawdled scrappily to their conclusions. Works which were solidly captivating in their first half died as the ideas ran thin. This could have been due to the pressures of improvisation.

Another challenge was the role of the visual artists. They tended to be placed at the edges of the action, contrary to the claim in the program: “Visual artists feature…as an integral performing and documenting element, enabling the audience to simultaneously view a number of different visual interpretations of the performance.” However, lighting, projections and distance often prevented the audience from seeing the marks being laid down. Occasionally artist movements at the easels served as an iteration of the larger performance, but mostly it seemed extraneous. Visual art incorporating new media practices were integrated more successfully, with projected film and stills essential to the ambience of many of the multidisciplinary pieces.

performance 4: untitled

Movement artists Nicole Keen and Kate Hooper were wrapped together in a single stretchy white sack centrestage. As they contorted in response to Amanda Stewart’s vocal performance, visual artist Michelle Deveze drew on the cloth. Slower passages allowed her to make deliberately directed work, while at times the movement artists’ staccato responses caused Deveze’s charcoal marks to become random and opportunistic, confined to wherever she could establish contact with her heaving canvas in the moment. A further layer of intrigue was added by local artist Donna Foley’s simultaneous responses using a data tablet, the images projected onto the dancers and walls.

Stewart’s voicework and Foley’s projections carried a heightened synergy underpinned by Foley’s specialisation in the intersection of the visual and aural. Just as Stewart pares back language from the coherent into its component parts, Foley’s calligraphy, using stylus on data tablet, is like pre-writing scribble, almost fooling the audience into believing they could decipher, in Foley’s chaotic, lacy marks, what Stewart was vocalising.

The intensity showed in Stewart’s mobile features and taut neck muscles as she worked rapidly back and forth between two microphones. An unbelievable array of effects was conjured. At times it was like someone quickly turning an old radio dial across stations, or overhearing the sighs, whispers and tragedies of the inhabitants of a whole apartment block all at once.

In between evoking echoes of kissing, popping, chattering teeth, ripping velcro, rain, trains, Morse code from space or a penguin colony in distress with her hoarse, breathy scat, Stewart threw in the odd, tantilising word, which she later described as “a rant for the underlings; women and low caste people.”

Foley’s projected marks changed colour, overlapped, intensified until the screen was practically filled, emptied and the process begun again. The lighting replicated changing weather. Photographer Glenn O’Mallley ducked and wove through the action, adding his shadow to the backdrop as he recorded Deveze trying to tame a ground which behaved like a large, unruly and reluctant animal.

Eventually Stewart’s vocals wound down from disturbing to soothing, ending quietly with “fait accompli…the economics of us…” She walked away from the microphones cueing Foley and Deveze’s last slow lines as they all eyed each other.

These disparate elements married to produce a multidimensional, sensual and random collage. The eye was kept moving, the ear straining and the mind racing to connect the nuances of voice, hand and body: an engrossing journey.

performance 11: after milk wood

Three actors based in North Queensland, Christopher Glover, Susan Prince and John Robertson, performed as an array of characters in a text derived from Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood. The shifts from character to character intensified in pace and visual projections reinforced the rhythm of the dialogue. With the speakers’ faces distorted by the strongly coloured uplights and partly obscured by the projections onto their semi-transparent cage, the focus was firmly on the powerful poetry.

Brisbane-based media artist and composer Lawrence English stood at his laptop computer for the first two-thirds of the performance, recording, mixing and sampling to produce a soundscape playback for the final third. As the actors fell silent and still, English’s playback commenced with a sound like humming machinery, a faint tune and feedback. Bites and echoes of the spoken performance became audible, passages of dialogue were repeated, snippets of biting and nagging, interspersed with a squeaking wheel turning reluctantly. Thomas’s words were rearranged, new dialogue formed between characters in English’s reflexive mixing—the dreams of Milk Wood’s characters disintegrated and reintegrated as night terrors.

This time, the frantic, responsive work of the visual artists at the edges of the performance space added several unexpected elements to the whole. Working on paper with dry media, the rustling, crunching and scratching enhanced the mood of the piece and could be heard in the playback, providing layers of night sounds like rats scuttling and leaves blowing. Deveze, Jenny Tyack, Gerald Soworka and Katherine Cornwall continued to work on through the playback, responding to the mixto which they had already contributed. The movement of the visual artists in the half light of the stage periphery also added a sense of dark things lurking at the barely discernable edges of consciousness during sleep and dreams.

panel 4: spoken music, stationary movement

At a brief forum held at the end of day three, a group of participants examined the potential of movement and text in contemporary performance. Discussion ensued on the hierarchy of forms in each performance, which led, of course, to the question ‘What constitutes Art?’ Group? Language? Neurology? Someone commented that for an infant learning language everything is interrelated, and involves control of movement/hand/mouth/ ear. This neatly encapsulated the tone of the festival, its cross disciplinary experiments and unexpected synergies, and its extended family inclusiveness.

See Hear Now 2007, Multi-Arts Festival, director Michael Whiticker, Townsville, June 21-24

Guy Benfield, Maximum Commune (Ugly Business… on the basis of disbelief.), performance still

IN AFTERMATH, BLAIR FRENCH, DIRECTOR AT ARTSPACE AND CURATOR, BROUGHT TOGETHER A GROUP OF ARTISTS ALL OF WHOM MANIFEST THEIR INSTALLATIONS THROUGH AN EXPLORATION OF PERFORMANCE, THAT IS, THE WORKS RESULT FROM A LIVE TRANSACTION BETWEEN ARTIST AND AUDIENCE. THE IDEA BEHIND AFTERMATH SEEMS TO BE TO EXPLORE THE ESSENTIAL PERFORMATIVITY OF INSTALLATION.

This is not in itself a new idea. French began to explore this notion in detail at Performance Space some years ago while working as its director in charge of time-based art. There, in influential projects like Cerebellum in 2002 with Gary Carsley, artists such as the Kingpins and Monica Tichacek presented video work alongside an exhibition of the ‘part objects’ of Leigh Bowery: his fake lips and costumes. In this show the images and videos were all part objects in that they could represent the whole absent object (Bowery or the other artists and their actions). In other words the objects and the videos were displayed only partly as things in themselves and mainly in terms of how they translated a performance event which was no longer comprehensible in any other way.

The blurb for Aftermath on the Artspace website indicates a similar focus on “the complex relationship of performance to installation art, sharing a genealogy, as they do, in early conceptual and post-object art.” But with Aftermath the emphasis is slightly altered as it “centres on the installation ‘aftermath’ of performance, or conversely, performance as a strategy for creation of material environments.” So rather than the installation being framed as the part object split off from the body of the artist, it now functions mainly as an object in its own right but one which represents “the bleeding back and forth of active models of performance and its post-life.”

guy benfield

Guy Benfield’s performance in Maximum Commune (Ugly Business…on the basis of disbelief) was designed to “re-animate tropes that were once declared obsolete, such as ritual, live action painting…the ‘Art informal’ movement in France, and the Japanese actionist painting movement-Gutai group.” And one should add the anarchic Paul McCarthy’s 1995 work Painter to this list as the most obvious intertext. Like all the artist statements in Aftermath, Benfield’s own descriptions of the work are worth examining for their oddly accurate account of the achievement of their experiments. He describes his essentially citational actions as “droppings” or “situational episodes” in a way that nicely combines the excremental notion of the art object as by-product of an ongoing process with the idea that the foundation of the performance action is its occurrence in space, its situated-ness, the aftermath of which is the installation.

The chaotic deconstructed pavilion motif of this work remained in the gallery for three weeks after the initial performance with a monitor displaying edits of the frenzied video documentation by TV Moore. The humour and energy of this piece reminded me of Benfield’s French Pup/live action (2001) a video work in which a long-haired rock guitarist dips the head of his guitar in paint and smears the walls and a canvas with it. Like Maximum Commune this earlier work is another play on performance and its various afterlives in recordings and documentations. The colour and chaos of the opening action was still in evidence three weeks after the event itself which is already I think the kind of effect the curator was after.
Ann Graham, Aftermath

anne graham

Anne Graham’s In Between Spaces comprised eight adjacent booths designed to correspond “to a normal dwelling: a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen, a studio, a library, a living room, an office and a gallery.” The initial performance (“situational episode”) involved a number of those present (yes me too) blowing up pink balloons for the “rumpus room” while Graham’s partner Tony Bond performed his signature risotto creation to feed all those in attendance. Their performative hospitality was no less sincere for its scale and constructedness. Perhaps this was evidence of what the blurb laid out as “the formal framework for the work” in a number of the “everyday routines that occur while occupying these spaces” in which the spaces become more than simply functional and approach the status of “social sculptures.”

The rooms/spaces were certainly organised and arranged after different activities with a DJ in one room, and hair cutting gear in another. But for me the room with the bars of soap and little carafes of urine was the most suggestive of the “intimate and familiar activities that…will appear strange due to their displacement.” (see RT80, p12).The repeated references in the artist’s statement to the dislocation of “normal” activities and arrangements is reinforced by the origin of these furnishings. The dark wood panels of the booths had been part of an old psychiatric institution and the artist had retained them for precisely this kind of work.

I don’t know if this installation can be described as “social sculpture” which operates on a broader and much more ambitious scale than this. But the sense of invitation to revisit was strong. The poeticised space of the different rooms was not so much a trace of an absent performance but a trigger for multiple interactions and experiences.

franz ehmann

“The new message reverberates in a never-ending forever young. I am with you, for you and amongst you.” I have no idea what the title of Franz Ehmann’s delightful work, forever young, references (please tell me it’s not the Alphaville track from their 1984 album) and his description of it as “a sculptural text food performance event with materials akin to theatre props” may not help those of you who didn’t see it (the polenta and mushrooms he made us on the opening night were delicious). His goofy and self-deprecating way of demonstrating the various interactive components of his installation was less about providing information and more about generating a sense of play so perhaps the title can be understood in terms of this childlike playfulness in the midst of endless reporting of violence and brutality.

Ehmann’s ‘newspaper floor’ was surprisingly sturdy and contained folds and tucks which could be used as spaces for the visitors to inhabit in various ways. Helpful instructions were provided in the form of illustrations on the walls advising visitors to pick up the large balls and drop them again. But on the other hand the news cycle is endlessly self renewing, forever young in the sense that there is always another hideous event to fetishize. This piece evoked both possibilities of eternal recurrence of both creative inspiration and destructive passion.

tony schwensen

Tony Schwensen’s work tends to produce a similarly double register of meaning in which the artist’s clown-like persona—The Fat White Straight Bald Guy of his 2005 Performance Space installation—tends to conceal the very real depths of the images he constructs. I’m thinking of the video work he contributed to the ABC for its 50th birthday video portrait commissions dedicated to Peter Jackson, an elite Rugby League champion undone by the trauma of being a childhood victim of abuse. This is a genuinely moving study of the man and the issue that led to his suicide. Schwensen is one of the few artists I know who can successfully marry this contemporary understanding of vernacular Australia and elite art practice without surrendering an authentic point of view in either domain.

In Rise, a hundred hour long “meditation”, Schwensen claimed to be investigating the futility of attempting to live a self-sufficient life in contemporary Western society with its “rampant and thoughtless consumption.” His time consuming tasks were carried out beneath the banner of the wall text: “Hopes None Resolutions None”, Samuel Beckett’s famous contribution to a planned publication of the New Year’s meditations of celebrity writers.

Schwensen’s self-imposed performance tasks were to include continuous manual water desalination but, appropriately for a work examining futility, the pump gave out after nine hours, thrusting the artist into the fundamental experience of Beckett’s characters, the feeling of duration…the negation of activity and the focus on the passing of time. Adorno noted this as the essential characteristic of Beckett’s Endgame in which Clov’s opening words are “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.” Poor old Schwensen must have muttered these words to himself on a few occasions stuck as he was in gallery for 100 hours with a broken pump and nothing to do.

But duration is also the central experience of much recent performance art. In this sense Rise is typical of the kind of work that Schwensen has been developing over the last five years in that it’s a durational performance in which the unfolding of the event over time is doubled by the presence of the artist engaged in repetitive acts on a video monitor. In Rise two monitors were arranged one on top of the other showing the artist’s mouth in close-up enunciating the slogans “Love it” and “Leave it” as in the redneck mantra about Australia (love it or leave it). In Schwensen’s rendering it’s not a choice—you love it and you leave it—something the artist is practising as well as preaching: he has recently relocated to the US. His unique approach to performance art as time-based physical art and mediated self conscious irony is a way of capturing something elemental in the consciousness of the place he is exploring in his work. He will be missed.

arahmaiani

Arahmaiani’s Make Up or Break Up is a more conventional exhibition of documentary photographs of the artist’s entirely unconventional performative presentations. These are described in her statement as “somewhere between promotions and protests” in which the participants carry a number of wall banners (also featured in the exhibition) “featuring the names of multinational corporations and brands in Malay-Arabic (Jawi) script in public spaces around Sydney.” The sites chosen were at Circular Quay, in the Botanical Gardens and at the Block in Redfern, among other places. Despite their visual appeal these staged events work better as documentation because without knowing what the texts mean there is no possibility of identifying the strategy the artist is employing.
Andre Stitt, Dingo: A treatment towards a new communionsim, performance still

Andre Stitt, Dingo: A treatment towards a new communionsim, performance still

andré stitt

André Stitt’s performance, Dingo: A Treatment towards a new communionism, was more successful in terms of the legibility of its imagery. It involved the artist being locked in a cage with Whumpi the dingo for several hours each day over the three days of the event. The obvious reference is to the Joseph Beuys’ performance, Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me, performed at Renee Block’s New York gallery in 1974.

I don’t have to tell you that this piece received an enormous amount of media attention in Australia. The usual mix of sensationalism and outright dismissal was perhaps most evident in Sebastian Smee’s response for The Australian on August 10, “Piece without bite made me howl.” In this ‘review’ Smee, who appeared to have been glad-handing everyone the day before at Artspace and enjoying the event, had decided after a moment’s reflection that the work “failed as an interesting piece of performance art for one simple reason: it lacked conviction.” I love it when Murdoch hacks pretend to speak in defence of conviction. “Theatre knows it has to engage”, quoth Smee, while “[p]erformance art subsists on the adolescent idea that it can do whatever it bloody well likes.” Poor boy wanted to be entertained. You might say ‘fair enough’ but to attend a durational performance event and expect theatre is a category error of the most fundamental kind, as any half-conscious arts journalist would be well aware.

Yet the piece was conventionally theatrical in a number of respects with the repetitive use of gesture and props and the establishment of the characters and their relationship at the core of the work. Stitt engaged the dingo in a variety of gestural games, dragging different props: a shirt, a felt blanket, a cane, all references to Beuys. At one point he produced a baby doll from his bag but sensibly didn’t over emphasise this reference. Rather than actively engaging with Stitt the dingo tolerated these activities in the interest, no doubt, of a peaceful life, if not aesthetic harmony. The slow evolution of a relationship between Stitt and the dingo was fascinating to witness as it developed from an initial distrust and fear to a sense of relaxed and playful amusement. Regardless of the larger symbolic associations of this work with respect to the current fragility of the relationship between the Indigenous culture of Australia and the European visitor cultures, Stitt’s achievement was in the immensely subtle development of a complex set of themes—nature/culture, excess/containment, structure/anti-structure—obtained through a slow unfolding of the images in the cage.

If I had more time I would explore the extent to which this work is a re-enactment of Beuys. Of course none of us were there in New York and we have only seen the Beuys performance as video or photographic documentation. In this sense it is perhaps more appropriate to argue that André Stitt is not so much re-enacting Beuys as performing the documentation, as Philip Auslander suggests in a recent paper (“The Performativity of Performance Documentation”, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 84 Vol 28.3, 2006).

For now it is enough to note that the work itself poses the question which all the works in Aftermath raise in their own way about the extent of the gap between performance and its aftermath in documentation or in installation. These works all show a systematic effort to undermine the opposition between the live encounter with a performance and the encounters with its products, its afterimages, its flashbacks and hard copy memories.

Aftermath, Performance Installations, curator Blair French, artists Guy Benfield, Anne Graham, Franz Ehmann, Tony Schwensen, Arahmaiani, André Stitt, Artpsace, Sydney, July 5-Aug 18
www.artspace.org.au

Aftermath also featured performances by Yiorgos Zafiriou (Aug 16), senVoodoo (Fiona MacGregor, Aña Wojak) and a symposium with Performance Space and RealTime at Carriageworks (Aug 18) – see RealTime 82

OVER THE FIVE YEARS SINCE ACCA OPENED AT SOUTHBANK, MULTIPLE STRUCTURES GENERATING UNEASE AND CLAUSTROPHOBIA HAVE BEEN CONSTRUCTED THAT RECONCILE, AND AT THE SAME TIME, EXPLOIT THE GALLERY’S CAVERNED INTERIOR SPACES. COLLABORATIVE ARTISTS SONIA LEBER AND DAVID CHESWORTH HAVE MOST RECENTLY BUILT SUCH A MICRO-ENVIRONMENT WITH THEIR INSTALLATION, ALMOST ALWAYS EVERYWHERE APPARENT.

A dimly lit foyer acts as a transitional zone between the bloated scale of the ACCA lobby and the core of the installation. This spartan, rectangular void offers a brief moment of stimulus deprivation heightening the sense of immersion that follows.

Open the next door and partially illuminated in neon-pink is a corridor. It veers slightly, concealing its course. Traversing this eerie segment, a digitised crackling noise from above creates an auditory itch. Fragments of choral music also echo in short bursts down the narrow space. The resulting eclectic theatricality is rather like Lara Croft meets the Vatican, in this consecrated low-rent sci-fi set.

Emerging from the passageway some people grin with excitement while others peer out nervously, overwhelmed, into the dark ovoid central space. Five corridors splay out from this shadowy zone, each illuminated by turquoise or lime-green light. Leber and Chesworth seem to replicate the dynamics of Jeremy Bentham’s panoptic prison architectural system, where a central concealed overseer observes a perimeter structure of permanently silhouetted figures.

Accentuated by the splintered choral singing, the installation equally hints at ecclesiastic architecture, of cloisters and interior domes. By combining panoptic and cathedral inspired space, the installation highlights their shared architectonic logic of an omnipresent overseer. Yet, there is a phenomenological disjunction between these two architectural systems.

The church utilises psychologically uplifting atmospherics to reduce bodily awareness, conjuring a sense of being closer to a godly presence. Ceiling details prompt faces to look skyward, reducing the sensation of being grounded, and an often-grandiose scale translates its unconfined nature with a disembodying effect. Conversely Bentham’s panoptic administration, by making the overseen conscious of their silhouettes and of being forever overheard through tin channels, constructed a constant reminder of physical confinement. Leber and Chesworth work the tensions between these two spatial demands.

The abstracted choral sound bites emanate from above where, hanging in the black interior sky of ACCA’s hulking gallery, rests a circular projection screen. This screen hypnotically offers a slowly spinning dull metal propeller behind which warm hued petal shapes move as though the viewer is pushing up through them.
Almost Always Everywhere Apparent, installation

Almost Always Everywhere Apparent, installation

The quasi-spiritual mood this uplifting movement induces comes with a catch; if contemporary meditation is offered through this simulated, slowed-down centrifuge, the propeller is a barrier that would chop into you. Conjuring physical awareness, the spinning blades deny any sense of potential salvation.

Equally reminiscent of the visceral heaviness of the human body are the noises emitting from the corridors. If the choral music from above seductively evokes the human body in unison and as a hollow instrumental vessel, the noises below come from individual bodies dense with meaty organs from which guttural grunts and groans emerge. Full-bodied gurgling, crying and hissing burst forth as segmented sounds from all directions.

Animalistic yet distinctly human, this repertoire of pre-lingual expression is theatrical in its variety and discordant layering. As gallery-goers veer into the claustral corridors they experience a hiss from the side or an ‘uuuuggghhhhhh’ from the ceiling, like the phantasmic sound track of a ghost ride.

At the dead end of each corridor is a peephole suggesting, as in the panopticon, the opportunity for invisible witness. Lured towards this, figures in silhouette hunch and peer. Observing these observers forefronts the installation’s performative dynamic. The bent over heads appear attached to the wall, bathed in a cool neon glow, their posture suggesting stylised despair, repentance or even some sci-fi cranial procedure.

The videos Leber and Chesworth have concealed behind the peepholes each utilise one of two devices, depicting an upturned hallway so that figures wearing black appear to defy gravity, or showing an overhead perspective (in one, a bird’s eye view of an interior cathedral space). But with these distinctly different perspectival tropes, the artists fail to create an accumulative sense of disorientation. Easily visible monitor edges grounded the images, nullifying the capacity for the videos to further articulate the bodily tensions theatrically constructed by the built space and auditory layering.

Without this concentration of visual detailing the installation threatened to topple into overblown theatrics. Yet, what pulled it back from the brink was the rich complexity of sounds oscillating within its confines. These unstable collisions between spectral and corporeal evocations provided Chesworth and Leber’s phantasmic portal with a surprisingly taut density.

David Chesworth, Sonia Leber, Almost Always Everywhere Apparent, ACCA, Melbourne, Aug 10-Sept 30

SOMETIMES PERCEIVED AS THE LOVE CHILD OF CYBERPUNK—A DYSTOPIAN STEM OF FANTASY ESPOUSING CYBERNETICS AND REBELLION—STEAMPUNK FINDS ITS NICHE IN A PARALLEL WORLD WHERE STEAM-ERA TECHNOLOGY INVADES THE ULTRA SLICK DEVELOPMENTS OF THE MODERN WORLD. THINK COMPUTER KEYBOARDS MADE FROM OLD TYPEWRITER KEYS, VICTORIAN ERA FASHION AND DIRIGIBLES FLYING HIGH IN THE SKY. STEAMPUNK CROSSES GENRES WITH EASE, ENCOMPASSING LITERATURE, COMICS, FILM, MUSIC AND FASHION. IN ALL ITS FORMS, STEAMPUNK CAN BE GRITTY, INTELLIGENT AND DARKLY COMPLEX.

In an ambitious attempt to bring the genre to a contemporary art audience, Infinite Empire contemplates the wide-ranging creative impact of steampunk. Curated by Carole Hammond and developed under the annual CAST Curatorial Mentorship Program, the exhibition showcases seven artists working across the fields of video, sculpture, jewellery, fashion and digital illustration.

Transformed from the usual white cube into a shadowy cavern with black walls and heavily draped entrance, the CAST gallery momentarily becomes another world. Strange mechanical sounds fill the room, emanating from the Lycette Bros video projection, The Modern Compendium of Miniature Automata (2005). Comparable to a scratchy turn of the century zoological study, the video tracks tiny animals winging and squirming their way across the screen. Each preceded by a species card complete with Latin-inspired name, the creatures resemble microscopic marine life yet their bodies sprout tiny gears, twirling spirals and spinning propellers—the newfound species of a futuristic cesspool.

Intrigued by the techniques used in jewellery and taxidermy, Julia deVille creates Memento Mori imbued with elements of memory, death and resurrection. Clustered inside a glass case swathed in black satin is a series of diminutive trinkets. The trophy head of a diamond-encrusted mouse protrudes from a filigreed picture frame; a small bone and skull rest delicately inside a palm-sized coffin while a severed kingfisher wing longs mournfully for flight: each object echoes a distinctly Victorian fascination with the exotically morbid.

Reflecting on the 19th century devotion to function and mechanical grandeur, furniture maker James Vaughan looks to the guts of Tasmanian power stations, breweries and gas plants for inspiration. Layered with scrupulous detail, Vaughan’s functional objects drip with polished brass and glinting copper. Honeycombed metal panels spread like pathways across the centre of The Brilliant Chamber (2005) while concrete and lead create the sturdy base of Art Gas (2005), a fantastically elegant homage to the architectural ideals of a distant era.

In a similar way, the work of Jon Williamson excels in superb attention to industrial detail. Innovatively exhibited on metal barrels lit from beneath, Williamson’s meticulously crafted jewellery speaks of an aesthetic where beauty appears in a slice of twisted metal. Painstakingly constructed from old typewriter components and electric motors, the work transforms obsolete machinery into futuristic relics wrought with mystery and depth.

Victorian grandeur seeps into Sonia Heap’s collection of pinched and cinched dominatrix-style dresses. More like sculptures than clothing, Heap’s designs combine opulent fabrics, buckles, ribbons and perspex corsets to create a look that is expertly contained yet dangerously malevolent. Possessing a perverse beauty reminiscent of Hans Bellmer’s twisted, eroticised dolls, Heap’s work accentuates the feminine form while demonstrating an innate aggression through the vicious pull and fold of binding fabric.

Alongside the Manga inspired work of animator and illustrator Madeleine Rosca, French artist Aurélien Police relies on the creative scope of digital illustration to document his strange race of mechanical animals and humanoid beasts. Coupling anatomical sketches with yellowed 19th century portraits, Police traverses a futuristic landscape where animals travel on wheels and humans absorb machinery. Augmented by tubes, metal pipes and the rusted innards of industry, characters like Sir Ralph Witkins (2003) and Sybil (2005) exude an eerie familiarity—faintly whispering of what we might become.

Although steampunk has a well-defined style and dedicated fanbase, it is not often seen in art galleries. However, like comic art and graphic novels, steampunk persistently pushes its way into contemporary art. In Infinite Empire, like a prickly rash on the pristine skin of utopia, it’s a satisfying itch to scratch.

I WALK INTO THE AIRY GALLERY, A SHED REALLY, WITH WHITE WALLS AND A CORRUGATED ROOF. BEFORE I TAKE IN THE SCENE I’M MET WITH THE INDISTINGUISHABLE VOICES OF SEVERAL MEN AND THE FRAGMENTS OF A CLIMAXING FILM SCORE. THEN SOMETHING MORE COHERENT, “HOW ABOUT AN EGG?”

In her sound installation, Riding School for the Cowboys of Doom, Christine Collins uses the length of one wall of CACSA’s Project Space to house her work. Four speakers sit on the floor, at least a metre apart, each attached to necessary equipment: AKI, Kenwood, TEAC, Annexe. CDs spin in portable players. The eclectic sound gear emulates the crossing over of eras apparent in the soundscape of four filmic narratives and their relationship to three large images that hang on the wall.

Precise traces of Albrecht Durer’s Four Riders of the Apocalypse (1498) gallop across the tryptic of white primed canvas. Elegant, in flight, the riders move. Towards what? The end of the world: death, famine, war and plague. Beneath them the speakers call, talk of extermination, innocence, of hunters and betrayal. “I wonder if any of these girls will file a complaint about you.” A cat meows. The sound of ice clinking in a scotch glass is unmistakable. The evocations of Hollywood hero and anti-hero are ripe in this landscape. Even if their voices aren’t heard, the Lone Ranger and Dirty Harry are present. Here, the model of American manhood competes with the vigilante for airtime.

You have to get intimate with the speakers in order to hear the film stories in isolation. I lean close to the soft fabric to decipher a line, just in time to be distracted by a familiar voice. Darth Vader? No. It’s Sean Connery in Zardoz, a futuristic western: “You wore a mask. You lead me on, like a game.” The play of these dialogues across the gallery is akin to hide and seek. “If you’re bad enough you’ll die” is followed by “Yes” then “booby trap”, “Yes” then “Goodnight.” A car revs and swamps the Dadaist dialogue.

The technicalities of the exhibition are visible, incorporated. The electrical cords snake along the floor between the speakers. The slender copper thread that hangs from the canvas edges of each apocalyptic rider joins the wires of the sound gear below. The associations between these elements are anachronistic yet, like Collins’ versions of the four riders, the soundscape keeps you moving towards something—perhaps an unfulfillable desire to identify each film, to complete a narrative. But if the dramatic closure of the classic western resurrects hope and order, Collins fragments the protagonists and removes visual contexts, opening up territories of cinematic and, with the four horseman, cultural memory that have no need for resolutions.

It’s been said that the values of Durer’s riders change with the times. By placing them in a cowboy context Collins has inverted their classic meaning. Rather than being ready for action, the riders are left afloat, intermingling with the tales of other men. Collins’ considered juxtapositions of masculinity are quietly comical. I am left wondering if this school of heroes will in fact bring on the apocalypse. Or are they simply doomed to suffer the repeated sounds of each other’s manly actions? Can they get the girl in the end?

Christine Collins, Riding School for the Cowboys of Doom, sound installation, Project Space, Contemporary Arts Centre of South Australia (CACSA), Adelaide, July 20-Aug 26

Aphids, the Melbourne based company specialising in international cross-artform collaborations, and RealTime, the magazine promoting innovative Australian art to the world in print and online, have come together to offer a residency for an emerging Victorian reviewer in music and sound art.

Part of the Aphids Residencies and Mentoring Program for young and emerging artists, the residency will take the form of a mentorship with a Victorian reviewer and two visits to Sydney to work with the editors of RealTime. Airfares, accommodation and fees will be covered.

STUCK PIGS SQUEALING’S EISTEDDFOD IS A RIVETTING, CLAUSTROPHOBIC ACCOUNT OF THE MEETING OF INCEST AND SIBLING RIVALRY. LATE ADOLESCENT BROTHER AND SISTER, ABALONE AND GERTURE, HOME ALONE (THEIR PARENTS ARE DEAD), TRAIN UP TO PERFORM MACBETH AND HIS LADY FOR THE LOCAL EISTEDDFOD (FILLING US IN, ON THE WAY, WITH A HISTORY OF THE COMPETITION). HE’S ALL HAMMY AMBITION, SHE APPEARS TO HAVE NONE. IF SHE DID HE WOULD DESTROY IT, UNDERCUTTING AS HE DOES ANY SENSE OF SELF SHE MIGHT HAVE. THERE IS HOWEVER A BOND, FORMED FROM ENFORCED INTIMACY AND THE RITUALISED GAME-PLAYING THEY HAVE EVOLVED. AND THE SEXUAL ABUSE BY THEIR FATHER—IF IT HAPPENED.

Eisteddfod climaxes with a sudden reversal, the sister winning the prize for her performance as Lady Macbeth, the brother collapsing in disbelief, begging her to “be Mum.” The sister, once happy with mediocrity, now has something more—but how much and for how long? Her words from earlier in the play stick: “I want someone to hurt me for a reason.” These children are damaged goods.

Presented in the small space of Belvoir St Downstairs with subtle miking and a clever, hinged stand-alone set-cum-stage which the performers can fold into new spaces, The Eisteddfod is seriously, viciously funny. Written and played larger than life and with a sustained theatrical intensity by Luke Mullins and Katherine Tonkin as directed by Chris Kohn, the play takes us into a world of incest where the lovers are beginning to diverge on their way to complex adulthoods, or an eternal corrupted childhood.

The Eisteddfod premiered in Melbourne in 2004 and was much admired in New York in 2005. It confirms Stuck Pigs Squealing’s radical inventiveness and the acuity and vividness of playwright Lally Katz’s imagination, yielding utterly convincing non-naturalistic dialogue, rich in humour and a revealing perversity in investigating a condition via a flight of fantasy rather than a social document.

Stuck Pigs Squealing, The Eisteddfod, writer Lally Katz, director Chris Kohn, performers Luke Mullins, Katherine Tonkin, designer Adam Gardnir, lighting Richard Vabre, sound designer Jethro Woodward; B Sharp, Belvoir St Downstairs, Sydney, June 6-24

MAJOR BANG, FROM NEW YORK'S THE FOUNDRY THEATRE, IS MINESTRONE THEATRE, A WELL-BREWED, TASTY MIX OF PERFORMATIVE INGREDIENTS—STANDUP, MAGIC, IMPERSONATION, DOCUMENTARY AND MULTIMEDIA THEATRE, AND POSTMODERN DIVERSIONS ABOUT THE NATURE OF THEATRE IN THE FACE OF TERROR. ELSEWHERE IT'S BEEN LABELLED “POLITICAL CABARET.” BUT THERE'S A PLAY INSIDE MAJOR BANG. WOVEN THROUGH A VARIETY OF ROUTINES, IT'S ABOUT A FATHER'S FAILING RELATIONSHIP WITH HIS ADOLESCENT, SCIENTIST SON WHO IS IN THE THRALL OF A FASCIST BOY SCOUT LEADER, MAJOR BANG.

The father works in a food irradiation plant in New York, feels threatened by his son's superior intelligence and inadvertantly allows his security badge to be given by the boy to the scout leader whose intentions are terrorist. The tone is persistently comic, ironic and satirical, the playing virtuosic. Steve Cuiffo is our host, plays father, son and scout leader (in rapid alternations, even using a two-sided costume), mimicks a resurrected Lenny Bruce (rejecting a “war on terror”, he demands “a jihad on terror!”), executes deft magic routines and, with co-performer and fellow host Maggie Hoffman, wickedly corrupts the dialogue of a screened excerpt from the Kevin Costner vehicle, The Bodyguard. Hoffmann plays Cuiffo's boss and potential lover at the factory and demonstrates to us, with a gieger counter-cum-beat-box, that there's radiation in the theatre.

In direct reference to the Kubrick film Dr Strangelove, Major Bang is subtitled How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dirty Bomb. There's enough destructive energy (the equivalent of “three million chest x-rays” at any time) in the play's food irradiation plant to create another 9/11 horror and there's enough lunacy-at-home to pull it off (the performers tell the true story of a boy who invented a nuclear weapon in the family garage in 1995). The 'war on terror' campaign quickly becomes a nonsense, the US government's fear mongering embodied symbolically in a red backpack that hovers, glowing over the action and soon works its way into the narrative. It explodes, but because the company can't afford anything more than a sound effect, the plot line has to be diverted.

Although it ends with a heavy-handed solemnity after a suspenseful and very funny race to defeat Major Bang, the play's strength resides in its DIY approach to the challenge of dealing with the psychological and political consequences of terrorism. The creative recipe comprises whatever performative means are at hand. From the tacky showground set to card tricks, film clips and wild role doubling, Major Bang, alternatively quaint, arch and incisive, is ultimately a quick-witted lo-tech form of theatrical resistance to the US and (as the performers left us in no doubt) Australian governments' moneyed, monolithic hi-tech paranoia making. As the script puts it: “They tried to scare us but it didn't work. We took all the cars and planes and unattended bags, everything they had made dangerous, and we put them out of reach by turning them into jokes and stories.”

The Foundry Theatre, Major Bang, conceived and created by Melanie Joseph, Steve Cuiffo, Kirk Lynn, writer Kirk Lynn, director Paul Lazar, performers Steve Cuiffo, Maggie Hoffman; Adventures 07, Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, July 17-29

“I’M BACK”, DECLARES ANDREW MORRISH, PLAYING TO A WELCOMING OPENING NIGHT AUDIENCE AT THE NEW PERFORMANCE SPACE IN CARRIAGEWORKS AFTER A LONG SOJOURN IN EUROPE AND DESCRIBING HIMSELF AS “A LITTLE MORE RECKLESS”, AGEING AND THEREFORE PERMITTED TO WEAR WHAT TACKY OUTFIT HE WILL. THIS IS MORRISH IN STAND UP MODE, FAST, WISE-CRACKING AND VERY FUNNY, AND WITH AN APPARENT OBSESSIVENESS THAT FITS HIS IMPRO-RIFFING.

From experience we know Morrish in performance is on the road to somewhere. He probably has a pretty good idea where that somewhere is and even how long it might take to get there, if less certain about exactly how. Like a sometimes distracted driver, he’ll chat incessantly while looking out for road signs and landmarks that pop into his head, or not—and then? That’s the nature of improvisation, even this semi-structured variety. No road map. No GPS. Performance is hard enough with lines learnt and moves blocked. In improvisation the road can turn into a tightrope, a path that can run out mid-air, or snap. Then again, improvisors extol the freedom of their medium. Unhindered by various fixities they are psychoanalyst Michael Balint’s “philobats”, in love with the inbetween, preferably without safety nets (Balint, Thrills & Regressions, Maresfield Library, London, 1959). Of course, many an improvisor travels with a rescue kit of fall-back positions, handy set pieces, vocal or physical turns, reliable triggers to carry them through.

“I’m avoiding narrative tonight”, Morrish announces, “but I do have a story. I’ll try to cut it up.” So we accompany him on a journey over the next hour to what turns out to be his mother’s death, but first we hear something of the man she bore: “…an artist, a fat old working class bloke working around Europe getting technique.” The peculiar little Morrish frolics, the discombobulated leaps between verbal dancing, suggest, amusingly as ever, that the technique doses not belong to dance. What’s on his mind is “working class” and how that explains why he can never aspire either to romancing Julia Roberts or applying for an Australia Council grant: he’s working class and “doesn’t deserve better.” He says he’s not bitter that he’s created “a Morrish un-fundable artform: un-copyable, un-ownable sound and movement.” Like the claims made for imrovisation, this is a declaration of independence, as well as of origins. (It would be churlish to dwell on the career safety net offered by performing in state subsidised arts venues. Independence is relative, rarely absolute.)

On the way to his mother’s death, the road does turn to tightrope. We sense a tightening, a somewhat mysterious telephone call motif is established, some words tangle—attributed to the “uncontrollable saliva” of ageing, quips Morrish, making the most of everything—as he does with the CarriagWorks “heritage wall” he realises he is playing against and which nearly takes a bit out of him with one of its left-in-place metal features). Morrish’s quick thinking capacity to pick up on his errors and his tics is played to pomo self-referential advantage, allowing him safe passage to his next point. But suddenly, just as he is about to launch into a key story, his next destination, he realises that it’s not there. All he can do is admit it, and it feels like we’re out there on the tightrope with him. It’s a curiously visceral moment, however brief, before he’s on a roll again.

Morrish is in Europe when he hears of his mother’s impending death. He grapples with Qantas about getting a flight and is criticised by someone for not asking for “compassion discount.” The result is a splendid tirade about a world governed by loyalty points.

The sad conclusion to the story has Morrish transform, in a way, into his mother. He unzips his jacket to reveal a floral frock, and he dances a little dance and “she slips away.” It’s a moment of quiet but intense, considered theatricality.

The balance between moment and momentum in Morrish’s performance was finely held, even the moments of near fall accentuating the accomplished art of a fine philobat.

Andrew Morrish, Solo 1, Letting off Steam, Performance Space, CarriageWorks, Sydney, May 25

Input, updating, memory, computation/comprehension, output. These are what you need for interactivity, writes Jolt artistic director James Hullick in his program notes for Interactacon, an event focused on interaction between humans and computers.

Robin Fox, his face screen-lit, holds a detonator in each hand—game-like t-box sensor interface controllers. A barrage of rapid-fire sliced-in-a-blender sounds mixed with moments of Looney Tunes hilarity, sheets of sheer noise and room rumbling bass move from left to right at dizzying speeds. Fox’s relative stillness contrasts with the moment-to-moment interaction with his computer via the hand-held interfaces, much like a virtuosic jazz musician in the throes of a blistering solo.

The program notes reveal that the software has its own “behavioural” tendencies that “fight back” Fox's inputting. The result suggests war, conversation, laughter, dance, play and love-making—all at a hair-raising, impossible pace, if you can stay with it (a handful of people drop out of the battle early on). Huge dynamic shifts move over and slice into each other with momentary suspensions and windings up and down while Fox’s fingers twitch at the controls.

In Maculae, Natasha Anderson’s gestures are more theatrical and considered. The sensors she's attached to an impressive contrabass recorder allow her to trigger sounds from her playing as well as to add gestural input alongside vocal croaks and clicks. To one side small details from “self-portraits” and the interior of a room are screened, fading in and out and also triggered by her interaction with her instrument.

In contrast to Fox’s minimal spacings between sounds, Anderson creates a more open sonic field where languid movements and long tones are punctuated by sharp spikes of sound and gesture. The processing adds fleeting, decaying loops, watery masses, varying textures and brief abrupt buzzings, creating a cumulative rendering of a kind of subterranean or interior space.

Hullick’s first contribution to the event is Sk-eylike Mind, an interactive score performed by Bolt and comprising flute, clarinet, sax, double bass, percussion and viola. The projected score unfolds in real time displaying, among other things, pitch, directions and rests. Long overlapping tonal notes are textured with shorter gestural events. “Like a machine hum” and “let it ring” are some of the more curious directions in the score.

Hullick’s second contribution also features projected notation—bright dots on a black background are revealed left to right at various heights. The Crank-A-Maphone (a computer-operated instrument comprising a triangular frame within which sit Tibetan bowls, chimes, bells and more, see RT79) realises the score while a series of miked spherical glass objects appear to be improvised on by The Amplified Elephants, an “inter-ability” ensemble that has grown out of the Footscray Community Arts Centre’s Artlife program. The result is a spacious landscape of soft bell-like sounds with occasional metallic punctuations.

Without the aid of the program notes it's difficult to deduce the modes of interaction inherent in some of the performances. Sometimes the interactivity is visible, sometimes not, for example in how the functioning of the Crank-A-Maphone relates to the projected score. But does the audience need to be privy to the workings of interactivity? Isn't it about the overall effect of the interactivity, and especially its sonic outcome? These interesting questions are being posed in events like Interacton and in the discovery of new modes of composing and playing through human and computer interaction.

Interactacon, Jolt Winter Series Concert 4, artistic director James Hullick, artists Robin Fox, Natasha Anderson, James Hullick, Bolt Musicians (David Thomas, Martin Mackeras, Andy Williamson, Bernie The Man, Peter Neville, Erkii Veltheim), instrument engineer Richie Allen, The Amplified Elephants (June Bentley, Jay Euesden, Liz Hofbauer, Robyn McGrath, Enza Pratico), designer Emile Zile; 45 Downstairs, Melbourne, August 23

WHEN I WAS A FOUR-YEAR-OLD MY MUM OFTEN TOOK ME TO THE ART GALLERY. I QUITE LIKED THE IMPRESSIONISTS, THE VAN GOGHS, THAT FREDERICK MCCUBBIN WITH A WOMAN HOLDING HER BABY ON HER LAP. I COULD UNDERSTAND THEM. THE PICASSOS I WASN’T SO KEEN ON. AND ANYTHING WITH A RED TRIANGLE ON A WHITE CANVAS, SPLODGES OF PAINT THROWN ON OR A HORIZONTAL LINE DRIBBLING ACROSS WITH A SHAKY HAND MET WITH ANGER AND FRUSTRATION, AND LOTS OF DEMANDS TO MY MOTHER. “WHY IS THAT HANGING IN THE GALLERY! I COULD DO THAT!” SHE ALWAYS HAD THE SAME REPLY: “MAYBE, BUT YOU DIDN’T.”

Meet another four-year-old. Marla. She’s certainly done it. She’s sold over $300,000 worth of abstract art. Oprah Winfrey’s on the phone. Crayola’s keen to be a sponsor. Her buyers talk of her artwork in hushed tones as if the canvases have been touched by the hands of an angel. They imagine the works as full of her childlike spirit, her innocence. A man sees a door opening onto new worlds. A woman just loves the Mickey Mouse ears. As Michael Kimmelman, New York Times chief art critic says in the film, “…no one is saying fuck you in this picture. They’re just saying I’m a happy girl who likes painting.” But Marla doesn’t want to expound on the symbolism or lack of irony in her work. “No!” is her firm answer whenever doco-maker Amir Bar-Lev asks whether she wants to talk about her art. And Marla doesn’t seem to want to make much art either, not on camera anyway, and not in the colours and techniques she’s expected to.

When Bar-Lev first gets filming, he believes in the work of Marla; she’s at the (short) peak of her success. Parents Mark (a painter himself, keen to push his child into the limelight) and Laura (“if this ends today, I’ll be happy”) let him into their home and the often cynical world of their friend, gallery owner and hyper-realist painter Anthony Brunelli, who sees the possibilities (“these kids could be on a Gap commercial”) and exploits them for all they’re worth.

As Bar-Lev pushes deeper, and the media begin to turn after an expose on CBS’s 60 Minutes claiming she’s a fraud (they plant a hidden camera in the Olmstead house), the filmmaker, along with the audience, starts to have doubts—is she really doing the artwork?; is her father directing or bullying?; does he finish them off himself?; why can’t she seem to create such masterpieces for the camera? But Marla’s dad has read the literature and is always one step ahead. He tells the filmmaker that once you measure something, you alter it. The only problem for him is, it’s hard to control the wayward conversation of a four-year-old. Much is revealed by Marla’s younger brother Zane, who brags: “When I was at the hospital, when I was in mummy’s tummy, I was painting on the table.” Now there’s a child prodigy: I imagine the artworks nestled in his mum’s womb, protected like cave paintings.

Like Maciek Wszelaki's great Australian doco Original Schtick (1999), which covered similar territory about the artist Bob Fischer, this film isn’t really so interested in whether the art’s authentic or not, but at the public and media reaction when things turn sour. Bar-Lev digs into the underlying fears of a community who have no rules to play by when judging whether art is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, who distrust an artworld based on increasing commercialism and who still see art as representing some sort of ‘truth.' If a child can paint a masterpiece, where are the standards by which to judge a Pollock? It’s an old debate but it still seems to upset people. A lot. After 60 Minutes airs, Marla’s parents are assaulted and attacked via email as traitors, even as sinners marked to burn in hell. As Kimmelman points out, people take the idea of modern art as an insult, it says ‘you’re stupid and I’m not’, breeding a collective insecurity.

But what I’m left debating is the widespread desperate desire to dress up a child in adult clothes, spin her around in high heels, and then strip her bare, exposed to the world. But then, here I am in the audience, devouring this wonderful documentary like a wolf, hungry for more to chew up and spit out…

My Kid Could Paint That, director, producer Amir Bar-Lev, editors John Walter, Michael Levine, directors of photography Matt Boyd, Nelson Hume, Bill Turnley, original score Rondo Brothers, A&E Indie Films [US]

JO LANCASTER APPEARS ALONE IN AN UNADORNED PERFORMANCE SPACE, NAKED BAR A PAIR OF BLUNDSTONE BOOTS. SHE STROLLS OVER TO A BASKET, PULLS ON UNDERWEAR AND TURNS, TONGUE IN CHEEK, BRANDISHING HER BOTTOM AT THE AUDIENCE AND WHIRLING A HULA HOOP. THERE IS A SENSE OF MISCHIEVOUSNESS AS SHE PLAYS ON THE AUDIENCE’S FEELING OF AWKWARDNESS. ACROBAT’S SMALLER, POORER, CHEAPER CHALLENGES CONVENTIONAL ROLES FOR THE BODY AND THE PHYSICAL EXPECTATIONS PLACED ON IT, QUESTIONING WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE SHED OUR INHIBITIONS ALONG WITH OUR CLOTHING AND EXPOSE THE VULNERABLE BODIES BENEATH.

Lancaster’s fun-loving opening tumbles, turns and spins are suddenly interrupted by a marriage to a clothes horse. This woman’s freedom is abruptly exchanged for a vacuum cleaner thrust into her hands by a stage assistant. There is something eerie about the way she rocks it like a baby. Now, the cold, hard metallic object restricts her freedom as it lies cradled in her arms. In a final mockery of domesticity, she attaches the suction valve of the vacuum to her breast, creating an image of a suckling parasite.

Lancaster, Simon Yates and Mozes Taplin each perform solo acts exploring how the body is shaped and re-shaped by warring social forces. As in the theories of Foucault, the body becomes a surface on which events are inscribed. The play between the naked body and the meaning of clothing threads through the work.

Placing a giant sheet of butcher’s paper on the floor, Lancaster creases the sheet as if practising origami. She reveals her creation: a dress. It is striking the way domesticity keeps defining her actions. Even now she is, in a sense, folding her own clothes. She holds the dress against her body and, in big child-like scrawling texta, draws scenes of typical suburbia. In a violent movement she suddenly rips a hole in the dress over her genitalia, exposing a crude gash amongst the pretty scenes of flora and picket fences.

With the appearance of Mozes Taplin comes a magical exploration of the contrast between the public and private self. He brandishes a scarf and appears to lose it in various parts of his body. The trick turns into a flirty striptease that tests the boundaries between private whim and public performance.

In the starkest scene of all Taplin, tautly entwined by a rope, tumbles from a height, the cord cutting into and marking his flesh. The temporary etchings that cover his skin remind us of the way people score and brand their bodies as a form of self- expression. ‘Blood’ (in the form of paint) seeps down the rope and, suddenly, it is everywhere, splattering the performance space. It is a violent act and the painfulness of the scene is underscored by a haunting sound-score by Tim Barrass. Sounds of insatiable hunger, gulping and sucking, echo through the room like a soul being wrung from its body. Pre-recorded and live sounds are mixed by the composer onstage creating a metallic, electronic rhapsody.

In another twist to the categories on interior and exterior, traditional ‘behind the scenes’ artists appear onstage, integrated into the performance. The stage operator, Alex White, drolly walks across the space with a placard reading “And now for something a bit lighter.” At another point the audience watch as the performers, with the aid of the stage hands, elaborately and dramatically set up a catapult act using a punching bag as the weight, only to parody the feat in a contrived anti-climax.

Smaller, poorer, cheaper is hilarious and frank physical theatre performance in which the body is constantly revealed in more ways than one. We leave the theatre with a heightened awareness of what we could achieve with our own.

Acrobat, Smaller poorer cheaper, Performance Space, CarriageWorks, Sydney, March 28-April 1

FOR SOME AVANT-GARDE FILM ENTHUSIASTS, THE IDEA OF A DVD PRESENTATION OF THE HISTORIC WORKS OF THE LONDON FILMMAKERS’ CO-OPERATIVE IS SOMEWHAT PERVERSE. AFTER ALL, IN A GENRE KNOWN FOR ITS OBSESSIVES AND PURISTS, THIS WAS AN ARTISTIC CLIQUE WHOSE MEDIUM-SPECIFIC FOCUS BORDERED ON THE HARDCORE. THE LFMC’S OUTPUT IS FAMED FOR ITS RIGOROUS ATTENTION TO THE MATERIALS OF CINEMA, PARTICULARLY CELLULOID AND THE CINEMATIC APPARATUS.

In breaking down the apparatus into film strip, projector beam and screen, some members of the LFMC took a ‘performative turn’, exploring, in Expanded Cinema happenings, the ‘event’ of cinema and the effects of the filmmaker/artist’s intervention in it. The intensity of attention on the film material itself produced a remarkable body of works and attendant body of theory around ‘structural-materialist film’, a uniquely British school within the international avant-garde of the 1960s and 70s which examined, in minute detail, aspects of exposure, duration, the film strip and the film surface.

We can safely assume, then, that a DVD of work that so intransigently constituted around celluloid reality was always going to have an uphill task convincing the purists. The central question that the production of a contemporary format collection of works whose essence is very much located in another medium was always going to be, ‘how does it work’? The SSS DVD seems to suggest that the answer is, ‘with mixed results.’

Many of the works retain their incredibly rich enunciative power about film itself in the domestic presentation format, and the smaller screen even enhances the analytic possibilities of some of the films on this DVD. Almost all the output of the LFMC can be described as a visual ‘study’ of some sort, attesting to both the availability of the Co-op’s optical printer and the art-school backgrounds and lack of film industry ambition characteristic of LFMC members. The interrogation of movement in Malcolm Le Grice’s Little Dog For Roger (1967), with its Muybridgean fixation on the energetic bounding motions of a small dog, is not noticeably diminished by the digital re-presentation. Jeff Keen’s fun Pop art film Marvo Movie (1967) is faded but remains a kinetic delight powered by hyperactive montage and seductive concrete poetry soundtrack.

The incredible energy and incandescence of Lis Rhodes’ Dresden Dynamo (1971) and Mike Leggett’s Shepherd’s Bush (1971, see RT79, p22), however, are muted in this context. The digital images of these extraordinary experiments (Dresden Dynamo with Letraset directly applied to the film, Shepherd’s Bush with the exposure limits of the new step-printer) are somehow less physical and exuberant than their film ‘originals.’ Even so, the phenomenological address of these films, with their droning, reverberant soundtracks, is so potent that the DVD experience is still quite exhilarating. Taken together with Marvo Movie and Marilyn Halford’s playful Footsteps (showing the filmmaker playing the game known as ‘statues’ in Australia), these films lend some support to the nascent conversation around European structuralist film that is challenging the usual ‘dry formalist’ characterisation of this work, and asserting the existence of more affirmative, even spectacular artistic urges.

It’s important to note that the DVD, like most, does not come with public exhibition rights. For any audience in anything but the home setting to be shown this deeply filmic work from the digital format would amount to a travesty. Given the extensive 16mm holdings and accessibility of the National Film and Sound Archive’s Film and Video Lending Collection, which includes some beautiful new prints of films from the LFMC decade in question, it would be a double travesty for any Australian exhibitor to screen off the DVD.

It’s worth remembering, at this point, the violence committed by the By Brakhage DVD on the rentals of that filmmaker’s prints from various film institutions which previously had depended on those rentals for key income. (It is not yet known how the DVD of Shoot Shoot Shoot has affected print rentals of LFMC films from the primary UK experimental film distributor, LUX, though that institution has shifted its attention in recent years away from distribution activities.)

Avant-garde film on DVD, it would seem, is something of a double-edged sword for avant-garde cinema: on the one hand, it is now undeniably denting the income of certain institutions, which were originally set up by filmmakers to support and nurture distribution and exhibition, and making it harder for educators to justify the costs associated with screening 16mm prints in their courses.

On the other hand, DVDs provide unrivalled convenience of access on a format that can open budding cinephiles to the discovery of 16mm’s unique specificity. As many have pointed out, it’s not just postures of willful self-alienation that have kept avant-garde film largely languishing in obscurity. Questions of access have long blighted the wider understanding of experimental cinema and while these are not entirely resolved with the concession to home entertainment DVD, they are at least acknowledged.

The release of the Shoot Shoot Shoot DVD, with its extensive catalogue notes in English and in French, should also begin to correct the international lack of visibility of the British avant-garde cinema, so long dominated by the canonical Americans. The DVD has been produced for home use, and seen in that context, it is hard to imagine a more ideal introduction to this complex national avant-garde cinema. Contextualised with the notes, the body of works collected on the DVD offers an invigorating tour through an intellectually vibrant cinematic decade, and a critical window, before the onset of the putative ‘post-medium condition’, onto a fascinating field of art practice.

SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT: British Avant-Garde Film of the 1960s and 1970s, 120mins, bilingual English/French booklet by project curator Mark Webber; contains the following films: At The Academy (Guy Sherwin 1974), Little Dog For Roger (Malcolm Le Grice 1967), Shepherd’s Bush (Mike Leggett 1971), Hall (Peter Gidal 1968-69), Dirty (Stephen Dwoskin 1965-67), Marvo Movie (Jeff Keen 1967), Broadwalk (William Raban 1972), Fforest Bay II (Chris Welsby 1973), Slides (Annabel Nicolson 1970), Film No. 1 (David Crosswaite 1971), Dresden Dynamo (Lis Rhodes 1971), Footsteps (Marilyn Halford 1974), Leading Light (John Smith 1975). DVD PAL Region free. Publisher: LUX/ Re:Voir

Download it. Read it now. It could be your future. It’s election season and the Labor Party’s policy paper New Directions for the Arts has been released. It’s an intriguing document and an excitingly comprehensive one from Shadow Arts Minister, Peter Garrett. There are many promises, although ‘could’ and ‘will consider’ recur a little too often, making this a sometimes tentative policy document, but at least some very important issues have been put on the agenda. Hopefully costing will be forthcoming once the election campaign commences in earnest. The proposals are a mix of business as usual, if much improved, the regaining of ground lost in the Howard decade and in Australia Council restructurings, some new initiatives and a partial reorganisation of the arts funding chain of command. Given the Howard government’s failure to position Australia in global digital culture, new media art—“some of the most innovative and exciting work produced by artists”—is prominent in the document. It’s expressed in terms of a new generation audience of participant consumers, creative industries and Australian digital content issues.

The Australia Council for the Arts appears frequently in the document, with a commitment from Labor to maintaining the peer review process, making council and artform board appointments transparent, getting the artform board mix right (“practising artists, young people and arts entrepreneurs”), speeding up the grant process (“simplified and faster application processes”), increasing support for R&D and for risk in new work, and supporting artists “through the course of their careers” (including a new approach to the artist and social security). The Australia Council is also seen as a new home for the conservative Australian Business and Arts Foundation and “all suitable existing programs” run by the Department of Communications, Information Technology & the Arts (DCITA), doubtless including Playing Australia, a natural fit for the Council’s Market Development division.

Among other Council-related promises are the development of an Arts and Disability Strategy, a commitment “to dance and to small to medium theatre organisations”, involving a fresh look at Dance and Theatre Board reviews of recent years, and increased attention to regional arts. Council might get to police this one: “Labor will implement a program of mandatory presentations by major performing companies of work created by and featuring young and emerging Australian artists.” Under a Labor government the Australia Council looks set to grow and grow (although the wisdom of monolith-making needs some reflection). Likewise Labor approves of the current government’s AFC-FFC-Film Australia merger, although it will review the associated reforms in terms of their impact on independents. The odd exception is the promised “de-merger of the National Film and Sound Archive from the AFC.”

As well there’s the much publicised Labor Party commitment to music education; Indigenous artists, including the introduction of the resale royalty scheme; reduction of “barriers to live music performance”; a review of the effects of free trade agreements on Australian content; and the establishment of a charter requiring minimal levels of Australian content on the ABC. There’s much in the policy statement to inspire hope in the hearts of artists, producers and audiences. Mention of artists and their needs to Arts Minister Senator George Brandis and Treasurer Peter Costello, however, seems to yield only elitist dismissiveness. Under the Coalition it will be business as usual, and bad business for many artists. If Labor’s arts policy can be made fact and its vision of art as “an integral part of culture and economy” realised, then the impact of many years of neglect by successive federal governments might at last be diminished. RT

AS IN A FAIRYTALE, ONCE EVERY TEN YEARS THE STARS ALIGN IN EUROPA AND WITHIN A SPACE OF TWO WEEKS A SERIES OF MASSIVE EXHIBITIONS DRAWS HUGE CROWDS OF AFICIONADOS. THIS YEAR THE SPECTACLE WAS SPUN INTO A GRAND TOUR WITH THE CULTURAL EQUIVALENT OF SOCCER TRAINS LINKING VENICE, BASEL, KASSEL AND MÜNSTER INTO A PORTABLE VISUAL FEAST. BUT BEYOND THE BABBLE OF ARTSPEAK IN THE EXPRESS TRAIN DINING CARS, NO OVERARCHING CONCEPTUAL THEMATIC COULD POSSIBLY UNIFY THIS EXCESS OF CREATIVITY, UNLESS IT IS A TALE OF THE POWER OF THE MARKETPLACE.

venice, beuys & barney

Ah Venice! where the streets are paved with aqua, where advertising exclusively promotes cultural events (don’t they buy mobile phones or white-goods?) and where Australian taxpayer dollars could be seen in the form of fluorescent yellow show-bags, spreading like a cholera epidemic throughout the city (well at least for the preview days).

Elite and elitist, those Janus-faced words! In Australian parlance the word “elite” is proudly applied to sportspeople and the more dangerous elements of the armed forces. The word “elitist”, however, is reserved as a term of derision applied to the upper echelons of the art world, to serious intellectuals and occasionally to the filthy rich. As a rule of thumb it is not desirable to be one of the elite in this context (although the very wealthy are unlikely to take any heed).

The Joseph Beuys and Mathew Barney exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim gallery, proved to be the pre-opening gala event of Venice. The Italian door bitches proved to be no push-over for the naively un-ticketed, like me, so gaining access to the event required a combination of charm, persistence and psychology.

The B+B exhibition was ploddingly curated as a series of back-to-back displays; a Beuys drawing mirroring a Barney drawing, a Beuys video facing off a Barney video and, of course, Beuys Fat and Barney Fat smeared alongside one another in what seemed a concussively unsubtle attempt at transubstantiation. The spirit of Beuys decanted into the veins of Barney; an undisguised act of deification; or simply smart market re-badging?

Naturally there are parallels between the two artists, each equally possessed of an Asperger-like obsession with ‘self’ coupled with a savvy ‘showman’ persona, eager to manipulate the media. But how do B+B fit into the elite and elitist schema?

As it turns out both could claim to be elite from a sporting perspective, each incorporating physical challenge as part of their creative practice. Barney for instance amalgamates abseiling with mark making and his semi-athletic, semi-balletic performances that have seen him scale the ramparts of the NYC Guggenheim (see page 10 for Barney’s performance in Il Tempo del Destino).

Beuys with typical Germanic pragmatism went in for noses bloodied in boxing matches for Direct Democracy, and how can one be an elitist with a bleeding snout?

Recall the image of Beuys cradling a dead hare, engaged in a deep discussion about contemporary art, claiming that despite being deceased, the hare would have a better natural comprehension that an elitist academic or art critic.

This is the time to reveal the skeleton in my cupboard—I must confess to being a Beuys Scout as a young and earnest art student, even meeting him on a couple of occasions, which only amplified my total awe of his practice and its ethic of RealPolitik but, equally so, of his persona. Beuys was amongst the vanguard of artists who re-established a European cultural agenda, reclaiming it from the thrall of (CIA backed) American abstract art that had dominated museums on the continent throughout the 1960s. One can only suppose that the Guggenheim’s B&B voodoo is an insidious form of neo-colonialism now operating as a globalised cultural industry.

What is conveniently forgotten in the Guggenheim’s attempted transaction is that despite being a mercurial shape shifter, Beuys held a passion for social democracy, for a cultural openness and for art that operated simultaneously in the mundane world and at a deeper spiritual level. This attempt to bring into close association the saintly relics of Beuys (now entirely dissociated from his cultural politics) with the Hollywood scale indulgences of Mathew Barney, illustrates how dumb the übermench of the art world can be, or at least how dumb they think we all are.

venice: in the pavilions

There is a certain irony in the faux cultural identity associated with the individual national pavilions when placed in the context of a powerfully globalised (or at least internationalised) cultural economy. Interestingly enough the coalition of the willing offered rather thin pickings at Venice, whilst in true EuroVision style the non-aligned nations delivered.

Douze points: inside the Russian Pavilion, Wagner’s Flying Dutchman announced an animated, post-apocalyptic cyber-epic, The Last Riot (AES+F group), in which androgynously beautiful but heavily armed teenagers suggest the dissolution of collective Utopias under the fracturing pressure of Global Capital.

The dystopia of The Last Riot was sharply contrasted by the Kabakov’s beautiful installation at the Arsenale where a model utopian city recouped the visionary architecture of 1920s Soviet culture, an interesting foil to the generation currently witnessing the economic chaos and ideological vacuum of a Russia unbound and directionless.

Dix Points: the French Pavilion housed a massive and sophisticated project by Sophie Calle. Unlike many grandstand attempts at Venice, Calle never de-rails into the trite or formulaic (as is the fate of so much successful art!). She is possessed of an emotional focus and obsessive attention to detail that allows her to take a simple, but emotionally charged text (in this case an email) and submit it to a process of collective inquisition that she subsequently manages and produces as a communal response. The result is a combination of Calle’s own creative agenda but also an embrace (and confidence in) a plural voice. The role of ego here is sublimated into one of social responsibility.

Huit Points: some of the most interesting exhibitions in Venice kept away from the zoo of the Giardini and the Arsenale, preferring to be tucked away in elegantly decaying palazzos. The Mexican Pavilion housed a series of mature and engaging interactive works by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer which stood out as some of the only interactive new media works in what was otherwise a very conservative curatorial vision of contemporary practice, and because they functioned at a strongly visceral level.

Hemmer’s Pulse Room contains a lectern-like object sporting two hand-held sensors. At eye level is a single low wattage filament lamp. Each participant stands for a few seconds breathing calmly while staring at the lamp which soon begins to pulse with the heart-beat of the visitor. A friendly attendant then ‘migrates’ the pulse into the ceiling space that supports hundreds of identical lamps, each twinkling with the heart-beats of previous visitors. It is not often that such simple technology can have such an emotional effect, but Pulse Room gives each participant the gift of ascension into a temporary communal heaven.

L’Australie…Daniel von Sturmer’s attempt to transform Cox’s beach-house into a plausible exhibition space functioned well enough in an architectonic way, with its Ikea-smooth mobius strip of plywood snaking through the space; the inclusion of video vignettes on this support was however unproductive and underwhelming.

video hell

I’m beginning to think that the ubiquitous and seemingly mandatory presence of video in art festivals is a conspiratorial form of low-level torture, as yet unrecognised by human rights groups. In this context video consistently fails to adequately differentiate itself from familiar televisual and cinematic formats and formulae. In the rare case that video makes a substantial claim to otherness (say Viola or Ousler) they still short circuit the process of contemplation.

From the perspective of a card-carrying videophobe there are two factors that combine to undermine videographic practice as a truly engaging medium rather than one that primarily signals an economy of informatics and infotainment. The Pavlovian training that most people receive in screen-culture from early childhood generates a deeply ingrained response to video; in McLuhan’s words, The Medium is the Message (or was it Massage?); by adulthood, content is hardly the issue, the format itself is hypnotic.

Notwithstanding the above, the fundamental modality by which we engage with architectural space and sculptural form is radically different and essentially incommensurate with the manner of engaging with the video screen. The former demands a dynamic, spatial engagement that draws upon kinaesthetic and haptic processing, while the latter demands an unblinking, static focus; there are scant examples of work that accomplish a fusion of these modalities.

Ciao Venezia — and so onto the Express Train for an encounter with market forces!

basel bypass

Art fairs are of course, not to be taken seriously—that would plunge one into terminal despair! They are however extremely instructive in the fickle ways of the marketplace and its grip on many aspects of creative production. Adopting the morphology of an Easter show mixed with a rambling American art school graduation exhibition, the Basel Art Fair was all booths, business cards and cash-flow.

The essence of the Basel Fair is ironically exemplified by a work which was not on show but which was on the tip of every dealer’s tongue—Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God, a human skull in platinum and encrusted with 8,601 diamonds, conservatively priced at US $100 million. The terms of Hirst’s Mephistophelean contract are such that while it offers him unlimited fiscal success it progressively robs him of the capacity to be meaningful, stripping him even of irony.

kassel and münster

A tale of two cities: both pounded into oblivion by the close of WWII due to their enthusiasm for Kristallnacht and their capacity to produce panzers. Kassel rebuilt in a hurried Sovietesque reconstruction style, all concrete and rectilinear; Münster choosing a Disneyland simulacra of its medieval past, but both cities adopting art as the focus for their long-term rehabilitation.

As a city venue Kassel has visibly matured over the past decade, the pizza bars and ice-cream parlours now replaced by a host of good restaurants. The city boasts some wonderful open spaces and fantastic public transport; less can be said for Documenta itself, however, which over the past two incarnations has lost the plot. In 1997 the combined Documenta and Innenseit exhibitions pumped the city’s architectural and public spaces full of ambitious, high production value projects, setting a benchmark that the subsequent festival in 2003 failed to match in its rather literal translation of Documenta into documents and documentaries! The current offering is totally anaemic by comparison, the curatorial team pouring energy into devising a typically Germanic polemic schema that they subsequently find impossible to embody in practical terms. The result is a rather perplexing assortment of non-sequiturs stranded in a matrix of curatorial idiosyncracies: irrelevant colour schemes, silly curtains, very low lighting and a penchant for hanging as many large Juan Davila paintings as possible at each of the festival venues, much to the horror of many European critics who found them gauche and ugly, and who am I to disagree? Davila once named a painting As Stupid as a Painter; after Documenta 2007 we could maybe stretch this to As Conceited as a Curator!

The good thing about the Skulptur Projekte Münster is that it is an outdoor event best seen from the saddle of a bicycle so even if the art is crap one cannot avoid having a pleasant time zooming around the cobbled streets and old city ramparts. At its best the work in Münster engages with the architectural and historical fabric of the city in a critically reflexive manner which was certainly the case for the last incarnation in 1997. Again however, the German curatorial team fumbled the ball, delivering the current festival with fewer than half the works shown last time and most of these less directly engaged with an articulation of the urban cultural fabric. Many of the best works are however retained in the city, accumulating as a permanent sculpture park.

One exemplary project is a site specific installation by Rebecca Horn that places small mechanical hammers inside an old fortified tower, once used by the Nazis as a meeting place and by the SS as a torture chamber. The hammers are slowly and quietly chipping away at the decaying walls of the bastion and ipso facto into the difficult history of the Fatherland. Ten years ago this project was flanked by an equally impressive work by Hans Haacke. Morphologically similar to the tower, it took the form of a vertical cylinder built from scaffold planks that contained a fairground carousel. Squinting between the planks one could just see the painted horses merrily dancing by to the fair-ground organ refrain of “Deutschland Über Alles.” Further along the promenade is a German war memorial, once again in the shape of a turret, resonating with both projects.

This year it was hard not to be amused by Mike Kelly’s animal Petting Zoo, we are all suckers for donkeys after all. One could be charmed by Lost Reflections, Suzan Philipsz’ haunting sonic installation in which the barcarole from Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann drifted across the lake, or engaged by the humanist discussions in the marquee that housed Beautiful City, a social sculpture produced by Maria Park. However the perception by many visitors that the level of ambition and quality are declining makes me nervous.

kiefer in paris

Back on the train to Paris to see Anselm Kiefer’s Falling Stars, the first work in the aptly named Monumenta series at Paris’ Grand Palais. In German, Kiefer may be referred to as a ‘Malerfürst’, a term that compresses painter with duke and this is more than appropriate when regarding his Rabelaisian scale exhibition at the Grande Palais. The Palais contains a series of shattered concrete towers, entwined with iron forged sunflowers as well as a series of hangars, containing arrays of massive paintings, reliefs and free standing sculptures. A tour de force, speaking not only of the creative impulse, but flaunting the sheer economic power that the artist commands.

It is the issue of scale, in a variety of guises that strikes a chord. In the first instance the very concept of hosting a solo exhibition in a structure designed to house entire nineteenth century international trade fairs proposes an eccentric vision of how art operates, anachronistically valorising heroic actions and epic forms.

From a personal perspective Kiefer’s work contains interesting scalar contradictions in that the conceptual source is frequently of an intimate and indeed scale-less nature, for example an extract from a poem or text such as Voyage au bout de la nuit by Céline, but which is then manifest at Wagnerian proportions in a surfeit of production.

The second scalar transformation concerns the artist’s touch. Kiefer’s oeuvre is, above all else, tactile and organic, bearing the mark of the skilful hand. At the same time it is not only heroic in physical scale but also appears to multiply in a serial, one might say industrial, scale production. The modest Kiefer show at the AGNSW recently was in fact a small clone of the gargantuan Paris exhibition, palm tree and all. The touch of the hand is therefore deceptive, and may well not be Kiefer’s!

Anselm Kiefer has perhaps mastered the art of eating his cake and keeping it too! Although I’m pretty sure that he is obliged to share it around with the army of elves that he obviously retains in the underground tunnels of his studio in France. I like to imagine him spending time each evening before he retires, laying out the snacks for his willing helpers.

52nd Biennale of Venice, June 10-Sept 5; Basel Art Fair, June 12-17; Documenta 12, Kassel, June 6-Sept 23; Skulptur Projekte Münster 07, Sept 22-30; Monumenta 2007, Anselm Kiefer, Falling Stars, Grand Palais, Paris, opened May 30

CAMPBELLTOWN ART CENTRE’S NEWS FROM ISLANDS IS AN EXHIBITION OF A SCALE RARELY SEEN OUTSIDE OF AUSTRALIAN CAPITAL CITIES AND IS EVIDENCE NOT ONLY OF THE BURGEONING ARTS SCENE IN WESTERN SYDNEY BUT OF THE WISE INVESTMENT BY NSW STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS IN MULTI-PURPOSE ARTS CENTRES IN THE REGION. A WONDERFUL OPENING EVENT COMBINED AN ABORIGINAL SMOKING CEREMONY, TRADITIONAL DANCE AND CONTEMPORARY AUDIO-VISUAL SPECTACLE, ALONG WITH A PREVIEW OF AN ENGAGING, IMMERSIVE EXHIBITION OF 20 ARTWORKS IN THE CENTRE’S GALLERY SPACES, INCLUDING NEW WORKS AND COMMISSIONS.

As we arrived we witnessed New Zealand born Michel Tuffery’s massive projection mix, First Contact, onto the facade of the centre juxtaposing traditional South Pacific performances, from found silent film footage, and their contemporary equivalents. Tuffery’s dynamic vision was melded with iconic patterns and a modern oscilloscopic wave, evoking both ocean and new technology. It seemed to aptly match one of the key questions Aaron Seeto posed in his curator’s statement: “How are ideas of ‘locality’ reinvented within…larger social and geopolitical frameworks which swirl around us like water surrounding islands.”

The large opening night crowd comprised local and visiting artists from around New South Wales and the western Pacific rim along with Campbelltown residents, many of them part of the huge South Pacific diaspora living in the region. There was a palpable sense of occasion and celebration with the smoking ceremony conducted by Uncle Ivan Wellington segueing into Mayor Mollie Thomas’ speech to launch News from Islands.
Echoes of Polynesia dancers

Haka director Paraone Taitin and members of the South West Youth Peer Education program presented the Haka Peruperu (part of Reuben Paterson’s new work Te Puu Oa: the first step in the history of walking). More welcoming came in the form of a spoken and sung Maori powhiri, with the female participants displaying powerful voices. Traditional dance from the Campbelltown-based Cook Islander group, Echoes of Polynesia, successive groups of children, adolescents and adults, was performed with grace and vigour in brightly coloured costumes and high, feathered headdresses. It was here that we saw and felt the full effect of Tuffery’s First Contact as images of the live performers mingled with their forbears.
The Boat (2001), Dacchi Dang

Inside the centre Aaron Seeto has presented works both traditional (exquisitely crafted clothing, shields, bags) and contemporary (photography, video, traditional clothing wittily reworked with modern synthetics, and a range of installations). The large scale walk-in installations (see the photographs on this page) by Guan Wei (a painted oceanscape room with cultural and political dimensions) and Dacchi Dang (a fabric walled refugee boat gathering images from the past) are particularly engaging, while Simryn Gill offers Magrittean wit and Michael Mel provocation in the video of his performance, Am I Black or White (Mel performed another work in person on the next day). It’s a very satisfying exhibition, constantly intriguing both from work to work and in its overall cultural perspective, with contributions by artists from Samoa, Tonga, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, China, Vietnam, New Zealand and Australia.

Thirteen of the artists have been in-residence during the program, there have been artist and curator talks, a related Campbelltown Community Project and there’s an invaluable, handsomely designed accompanying 120-page book of essays and interviews edited by Claire Armstrong.

News from Islands runs to almost the end of October, offering an opportunity to visit Sydney’s south-west to see an impressive exhibition at an innovative regional gallery now making its mark on the Australian cultural landscape. RT

AN AURA OF WEIRDNESS HOVERS OVER ACP EXHIBITIONS, EMANATING FROM EVOCATIONS OF SURREAL WORLDS, LATERAL DOCUMENTATION OF THE OUTER LIMITS OF SOCIAL LIFE AND THE EVERYDAY MADE STRANGE, AN ENLIGHTENING UNEASINESS COMPOUNDED BY THE GALLERY’S STRATEGY OF CREATING IMMERSIVE INSTALLATIONS OF PHOTOGRAPHIC AND VIDEO WORKS. THE NEW GERMAN PHOTOMEDIA EXHIBITION IS NO EXCEPTION.

In the plain white front room, the walls are lined with architect-cum-photographer Thomas Weinberger’s Lux Loci—unpeopled inner city Sydney suburban street scenes, seemingly shot at night, but glowing eerily with something of that odd neutrality, beyond colour terms, of the sky at the moment between the blue of day and the black of night. Some of these streets are mine and I find myself seeing them, literally, in a new light—as not quiet real, almost as if painted, cleansed of superfluity and oddly transcendent, the streetlights’ rays the epitome of the image’s glow. Apparently Weinberger achieves this defamiliarisation by merging long day and night-time exposures of the same site. The effect is unnerving, especially in the largest of the photographs, seen above, yielding a rich if indeterminate suggestiveness.
No Cure, 2006, production still

In the darkened main gallery, you find yourself surrounded by the four huge screens of Boris Eldagsen’s No Cure on which are projected four elderly figures in white hospital gowns, their deeply etched physiognomies tinged with a blue that might be bleeding from a medical scanner. These giants speak in turn, sadly, anxiously, even angrily, as if to you, or across the space to each other, their German recital of bleak song lyrics from The Cure subtitled in English on the opposite screen and counterpointed with Australian composer David Chisholm’s subterranean murmuring of Siegfried’s funeral march. This stillness of the subjects makes this work portraiture, their movements and utterances make it drama.
Natascha Stellmach, Good Girl #3,

Nearby there’s an old white wardrobe. You open it, enter and find yourself in the ACP’s back gallery and, like Alice, somewhere even stranger. On the wall in front of you are roadkill frog skins and a small cut-out photo of a falling acrobat, the bodies all curiously alike; behind you is a doll in a kangaroo suit, the words “Nazi Girl” emblazoned on her t-shirted chest; and in the room itself a bed under which a television set glows with scattered raw images, among them the slaughter of a fowl. On a tree stump sits a copy of the artist’s book, The Book of Back (the title too of the installation) in which a family history is bizarrely (and attractively) documented with fact, fantasy, collage and family photographs. This bedroom is a haunted hearth, its book a bubbling cauldron of the unconscious. The maker, Natascha Stellmach, was born in Germany and lives and works in Australia.

The heightened detail in the imagery of Weinberger and Eldagsen and their mutual, unearthly, transforming radiance is countered by the raw physicality of Stellmach’s objects and her room’s threatening darkness; but all three collectively conjure other states of being that take us into and beyond ourselves. It’s quite an experience. New German Photomedia was part of the Goethe Institut’s innovative gerMANY FACES australia festival.

gerMANY FACES australia, New German Photomedia, Australian Centre for Photography, Aug 24-Sept 29

THE TOWN WAS ONLY JUST RECOVERING FROM THE EXCITEMENT OF OUR NICOLE AND HER KEITH ACTUALLY DRINKING COFFEE IN THE LOCAL COFFEE PALACE, THE ROMA BAR, CAUSING A STAMPEDE OF PAPARAZZI OUTSIDE AND THE SUBSEQUENT DESIGNATION OF THE FRONT CORNER TABLE AS A SACRED SITE TO BE VIEWED AND PHOTOGRAPHED BY PILGRIMS IN SEARCH OF WHAT NICOLE WAS HAVING. PERHAPS ARTIST CHAYNI HENRY WHO MAKES RETABLO STYLE PAINTINGS OF ORDINARY MOMENTS IN HER OWN LIFE COULD BE COMMISSIONED TO CREATE THE NICOLE SHRINE. THE FEBRILE FLURRY SURROUNDING THE FILM PEOPLE SEGUED NICELY INTO AUGUST FESTIVAL TIME.

And have we got festivals and events for you! The Darwin Cup, followed by Garma, then the Telstra Aboriginal Art Award and Art Fair, and the Darwin Festival itself; as the glossy copy from travelNT.com says, “vibraNT, enchaNTment, eNTertainment”, but not a word about iNTervention. On the waterfront, relentless development proceeds, turning the place from a piece of paradise into yet another condominium capital in the north, Gold Coast mirages and gallerias dependent on air conditioning to celebrate what the locals now tout as their unparalleled lifestyle in their own schmick mag, Resident, or should that be resideNT. “Down disconsolate streets” indeed in a town that seems to have forgotten its history, its uniqueness, and which is in danger of perjuring its soul in the pursuit of aspirational lifestyles. Was it ever thus—always waiting to be discovered?

guan wei

Culture Trackers at 24HR Art showed the results of a two-week artists’ camp in Arnhem Land at Injalak bringing together local Indigenous artists and a group of non-Territorian, non-indigenous artists for a potential exchange. On the evidence presented not a lot got exchanged and most of the artists retreated to familiar territory, except for the marvelous Guan Wei in his A Mysterious Land series. Wei places himself smack in the middle of the work as a plump, naked pink figure peering shyly out from behind trees or termite mounds, or scurrying up a likely branch to escape from crocodiles or to slyly observe the natives dancing. In black ink on Chinese scrolls, he exquisitely details images like paper cutouts of every plant and creature encountered in “the forest” or in an entire billabong. These run over 19 delicately drawn panels, all done in situ, one panel at a time .

Meanwhile the festival thrives under balmy night skies down in the Botanical Gardens. You can eat Jimmy Shu’s raita, roti and rendang under the golden paper lanterns strung in the big trees, watch Indigenous dance in the Starshell every sunset, and even look at art. This year the palm tree gallery, Galuku, includes Yolgnu barks and an installation of larritj (poles) as well as the usual range of framed prints. The flow on from Garma includes Sing Sing, featuring the master songman George Telek with David Bridie, and introduced the Morning Star marvel, Hein Arumisore, dancer extraordinaire in concert with Ari Ingram and Darwin’s PNG community choir. At the Supreme Court, the Gyuto Monks are back, installed, chanting and scraping fine coloured sands to make delicate ephemeral art, and sharing sumptuous barbeques every evening courtesy of their sponsor, Fannie Bay Butchers.

constance drinkwater

The sunsets over the silver sea are redder than ever and the markets at Mindil beach and Parap as frantic as ever. Territorians all seem to have adapted very well to the vicissitudes of the tropics, and Darwin is finally a destination as well as the gateway to Kakadu. The prospects are good and the real estate is booming—unimaginable a hundred years ago on the eve of Federation to the desperate denizens of Stephen Carleton’s creation, the northern outpost of Somerset. Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset is a gothic, possibly baroque melodrama that references Capricornia and Coonardoo, and is laced with deadly white powder: strychnine in the damper, arsenic in the scones. The surviving matriarch, Constance Drinkwater, maintains that the English language recollected and practiced amidst increasing unease and disease is her only defence, but it is not enough. A deadly mélange of racial and sexual politics, Darwinian science and sectarian utopianism, Federalism and White Australia fuels the drama and fans the hysteria. The damaged centre resides in her last two surviving daughters, played with compelling intensity by Ella Watson-Russell and Daniel Cunningham as Fortitude and Hope, no less, who may or may not be turning into shrieking curlews foretelling an horrific future as they attempt to outwit the plague that has engulfed Somerset. In a joint venture between Darwin Theatre Company and Cairns Jute theatre, Merrilee Mills has directed a good enough ensemble cast but Carleton’s apocalyptic vision was compromised by unimaginative staging, in particular indifferent lighting and a lacklustre and inconsistent soundscape.

At Browns Mart, The Theatre Practice, a Singapore-based company, presented Play Play. Touted as physical theatre at its most whimsical from a multi-lingual company that celebrates diversity, it failed on all counts. Serving up inane and glorified mime with a plethora of cute sounds created by the four performers in the style of Tinky Winky from the Teletubbies, and staged within a pristine Brooksian white cube by white clad performers, the production lacked insight or élan. Others enjoyed it greatly, but clearly my inner child had been put down for the evening.

the tangled garden

By contrast, The Tangled Garden made by Sydney’s Sidetrack Theatre in collaboration with Komunitas CCL from Bandung, Indonesia, is genuinely whimsical and an utterly beguiling depiction of Sundanese life through the prism of high German romanticism, a genuine celebration of diversity. In part based on Thomas Mann’s story, The Transposed Heads, the intense friendship and concomitant rivalry of the male protagonists propelling the drama and the tragedy is pure blutbruderschaft, and as powerful a myth as any thrown up by the Sundanese. While the music, lighting and mise en scene is captivating the narrative meanders and you begin to wonder if it will come together, but then suddenly it does by way of the galvanizing performance of Gusjur Mahesa. He is the journeyman actor who takes on many roles including an absolutely startling rooster, but to all of these small parts he brings finely observed textures and subtly expressed feeling.

you dance funny

Tracks Dance Company rarely disappoints and You Dance Funny is no exception. Concept, writing and directing is shared by David McMicken and Gail Evans. Evans’ script is biting, political and very funny. McMicken has made dancers from actors and made them dance so good it’s funny. Set in a boxing ring outdoors and presided over by the Strictly Salsa Infernal Couple, Gail Evans and Yoris Wilson, it’s a mixture of carnival tent show and reality television, without either tent or television. La Famiglia Del’Inferno, a Pirandelloesque troupe of dancers, auditions local contenders to fill the vacancy in their troupe. They engage the audience at every level, teach them en masse to dance various hilarious routines and provide points of identification for everyone from Grey Nomad nostalgia, to martial arts, rave party glow girls and everything in between.

Each segment is mercilessly judged by The Producer, Kin Leong in Iron Chef style, and the matriarch nonna, Crena Hemmings, who does a great line in droll delivery reminiscent of Graham Kennedy. You Dance Funny abounds with loving local references and acerbic national and global power points. Everyone dances, every dance style and fad is lampooned, no one gets hurt and everyone laughs. It is profoundly inclusive and sharply critical. No mean feat to dance funny and say something as well. In You Dance Funny, Darwin delivered a unique eveNT, and entertainmeNT.

For more on the Darwin Festival see page 40 for a report on the Interpositions live art program and go to www.realtimearts.net for a review of Red Dust Theatre’s Barracking

IN HIS EIGHTY-EIGHTH YEAR OF ‘FACTUAL’ ACTIVITY, MERCE CUNNINGHAM, SLIGHT AS ALWAYS, IF NOW PHYSICALLY FRAIL, CONTINUES TO EXERT A TOWERING INFLUENCE ON THE ART OF DANCE. HIS IS A MARVELLOUS LIFE THAT REFUSES TO STOP MOVING PERHAPS BECAUSE ABOVE ALL HE HIMSELF MARVELS OVER THE INFINITE POSSIBILITIES OF DISCOVERY THAT HUMAN LIFE CAN GIVE. CUNNINGHAM IS SAID TO BE ONE OF THOSE ARTISTS WHO CONCERN THEMSELVES WITH THE PROFOUND MYSTERIES OF EVERYDAY-NESS, OF THE PROFUNDITY OF THIS ACT OF MOVEMENT WHICH HE FONDLY REFERS TO AS A ‘FACT.’ ACT AND FACT FIGURE IN HIS PRONOUNCEMENTS AS IDEAS THAT RUN DEEP IN SPITE OF HIS INSISTENCE ON THEIR SIMPLICITY. IN 1952, THIS YOUNG MAN’S STATEMENT ON “SPACE, TIME AND THE DANCE” REVEALS SOMETHING OF THE INTRICATE PATTERN OF CONTRADICTIONS THAT A CONCEPTUAL FACT MIGHT REPRESENT:

For me, it seems enough that dancing is a spiritual exercise in physical form, and that what is seen, is what it is. And I do not believe it is possible to be ‘too simple.’ What the dancer does is the most realistic of all possible things, and to pretend that a man standing on a hill could be doing everything except standing is simply to divorce—divorce from life, from the sun coming up and going down, from clouds in front of the sun, from that rain that comes from the clouds and sends you into the drugstore for a cup of coffee, from each thing that succeeds each thing. Dancing is a visible action of life.

That ‘action of life’ became astoundingly visible when I scurried to catch the Cunningham Company’s free performance event at Cottesloe Beach in 2001. The traffic jam, that I imagined was an infuriating encounter with Perth’s peak-hour, proved to be crowds pouring down to the same beach appointment as mine. They converged, as I discovered breathless and all-too-late, with their chickens and champagne, with the kids’ swimsuits, balls and bats, to witness or more acutely to become part of an experience which fused dance and sand, sunset and gossip in an unrepeatable combination. As I stood on the crowd’s edge, the dancers moved, mere specks on a manifold horizon, sweeping together the Indian Ocean, an exquisite interplay of cloud and reclining light, and people chatting, swimming and gnawing on chicken bones, I had a glimpse of what Cunningham conceived as an event. It had everything to do with fact and, at the same time, exposed the spun wheel of chance, of ordinary things coming together with extraordinary force. Sensuously, I was stunned. The tiny image of the man feted at the end of the performance on the constructed stage evaded many in the crowd. That too seemed an apt expression of Cunningham’s ability to provoke a coalescence of life and art and, then, eloquently exit the spectacle.
Merce Cunningham's eyeSpace

Chance, factuality, spirituality and wonder were all there in time and space, breaking effortlessly in and out of complexity. Dance performance achieved in a half hour or so at Cottesloe Beach more significance than ever before, moreso even than in the subsequent and ‘marvellous’ theatre performances of the company. Coexistence within the disparate ecology resonated with such lucidity that it was impossible not to ponder John Cage’s explanation of the Zen Buddhist perspective wherein arbitrariness is but another expression of interconnectivity. In the after-glow, movement, sound and design ebbed and flowed like the unfathomable ocean.

But who is Merce Cunningham and why should the Melbourne International Arts Festival celebrate him and his associates in a comprehensive residency programme? Bluntly, Cunningham and his long term partnership with John Cage established a precedent of artists who think. While this statement might appear counter-intuitive to current practitioners jealously guarding their licence to embody relationships with the world, Cunningham and Cage along with the constellation of artists they gathered into their orbit over the years, interrogated, analysed and proceeded to imagine what making dance, music and design might autonomously and democratically be. Though Cunningham protests its matter-of-factness, the approach exploded performance conventions. Influenced in turn by artists like Marcel Duchamp and James Joyce, by Cage’s immersion in Zen, by Cunningham’s affinity with Einstein’s pronouncements on the time-space continuum, by the growing affluence of the US in postwar conditions, the partnership provoked a quiet and unstoppable revolution.

Their radical point of departure concerns their belief in the innate expressivity of movement, sound and design. Moreover, echoing Duchamp’s ‘ready-mades’, any action or noise could contribute to this expressivity if so composed within the art work. Lines, jumps and squeaks are, simply in their Joycean ‘thing-ness,’ without any recourse to external narratives or overlays, expressive. In order to realise this unadorned expressivity, choreographer, composer and designer would agree upon the duration of the work and then disperse to action their constructions separately. The process created performances whereby relations between elements operating as free agents were dependent on what spectators might detect as meaningful in their coexistence. To further eliminate habitual instincts and preferences, Cunningham’s choreographic processes gravitated around manipulating movement phrases by throwing dice or the I-Ching sticks to determine how units of the phrases were re-built by whom and where and when. The effect of stripping away personal feelings enabled Cunningham to paint the stage as if a canvas: “Imitating the way nature makes a space and puts lots of things into it, heavy and light, little and big, all unrelated, yet each affecting all the others.” Significantly, as well as predicting our current preoccupations with human beings as but one component in complex environmental systems, the compositional methods also foreground process over product, a motivating factor of subsequent postmodern approaches to art.

With Cage’s interest in technological interventions into sound production, it was inevitable that Cunningham would harness film/video and, later, computer programs into his projects. The camera became another dancer through which Cunningham could play with Einstein’s observation that there are no fixed points in space, shifting expectations of focus and increasing relationship variations between things. The LifeForms computer software program likewise provided him with unpredictable wire figures whose shapes and transitions proved ideal partners in his objective screening of choice. Together with digital artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, Cunningham extended the computer’s transformational capacities into giant body sketches and graphic explosions which project into the spatial cosmos of BIPED (1999). If time has proven reassuringly constant throughout Cunningham’s oeuvre, space has been elastic, the tensile stretches encompassing black-box and proscenium arch, arena and now the promised sightlines of Federation Square.

Central to the conceptual unravelling of the Cunningham-Cage partnership lies the collaborative act, the one theatrical premise which, though given alternative parameters, has been reinforced rather than challenged in their life’s work. A host of the most celebrated names in North American art have collaborated with Cunningham across the 60-year span of his company. These musicians, designers, digital artists and filmmakers of past and present—Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Gavin Bryars, David Behrman, Takehisa Kosugi, Charles Atlas, Elliot Caplan and Nam June Paik constitute a random selection from the impossibly long list—have each left imprints in the traceries of relationships that propel the spatio-temporal imagination and the delightful, if deceptive, ‘fact’ of Cunningham. Everything and everyone are likely to turn up in a Cunningham exposition of the art of time-space. The Melbourne residency is a testament to the collaborative inventiveness and reinventions of this most thoughtful of artists: to the significance of his steadfast belief in the power of discovery within the ceaseless dance of our planet.

Cunningham quotations from David Vaughan’s Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years, Aperture, New York, 1997

For program details of Cunningham performances and related Melbourne International Art Festival events, go to www.melbournefestival.com.au

ON THE STAGE OF THE MANCHESTER OPERA THEATRE, CO-CURATORS HANS ULRICH OBRIST AND PHILLIPE PARRENO CHALLENGE LARGE AUDIENCES IN IL TEMPO DEL POSTINO; THREE HOURS OF REFLECTIVE AND EDGE OF YOUR SEAT PERFORMANCE FROM 14 OF THE WORLD’S LEADING VISUAL ARTISTS, TRANSFORMING GALLERY INTO THEATRE. CHEN SHI-ZHENG AND COLLABORATORS RADICALLY REWRITE CHINESE OPERA IN MONKEY: JOURNEY TO THE WEST, A SPECTACULAR ENGAGEMENT WITH RECENT CHINESE HISTORY AND EMERGING YOUTH CULTURE. ON A MUCH SMALLER SCALE, INTERIORS TAKES AUDIENCES OF 20 INTO A SUBURBAN HOME, WHICH COMEDIAN JOHNNY VEGAS IS ATTEMPTING TO SELL. THESE THREE WORKS EXEMPLIFIED THE FOCUS OF THE INAUGURAL MANCHESTER INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL, IN WHICH INNOVATIVE, SOMETIMES PROVOCATIVE PROGRAMMING (ALSO INCLUDING HESTON BLUMENTHAL, PJ HARVEY, LOU REED, DANCER CARLOS ACOSTA, PERFORMANCE ARTIST DAVID HOYLE AND THEATRE DIRECTOR LIES PAUWELS) LOOKS LIKE CONTRIBUTING TO MANCHESTER’S BRANDING OF CHOICE AS THE ‘ORIGINAL, MODERN’ CITY.

interiors

Interiors was a project involving an audience of 20 who travelled together in a bus to a house in the outer suburbs of Manchester to be met by Jeffrey Parkin (Johnny Vegas). Parkin was trying to sell his two up, two down house and the performance, which started in the entrance hall of the house with Parkin asking everyone if the house had ‘spoken’ to them as they had walked in, began a journey through the psyche of a vulnerable man. Offering everyone a drink, Parkin, who fancies himself as a man with a real sense of style because he has watched DIY, home-renovation, reality TV programs, begins explaining why he is leaving this house. He has put his heart and soul into beautifying it with designer wallpaper features, bespoke pan rails and decorative carpets which, as he explains, make it not just a house but a home, and not just “renovation, but romance.”

Drawing on a narrative about a broken man who, it was revealed in the course of the show, had failed business arrangements in Montenegro and a failed marriage, the performance hinged around an effective interplay between the semiotic narrative of the house and the objects within it and the impromptu banter between the performer and his audience. Vegas was both believable and poignant as protagonist, using his skills as stand-up comedian to great effect by interacting with his guests. The house provided a kind of physical manifestation of Jeffrey Parkin’s psyche, with photos, books, mugs, magazines, furniture, DVDs and most importantly the empty nursery, providing hilarious and deeply moving insights into his situation. Despite the moments of comedy it was, however, an uncomfortable audience experience. Deeply voyeuristic and intrusive, the show ended with the audience quietly letting themselves out of the house as our host sat silently slumped at his kitchen table, wearing a cap emblazoned with the Montenegran flag.
Monkey: Journey to the West, Manchester International Festival

monkey: journey to the west

Monkey: Journey to the West was one of featured festival events and involved the unique collaboration between the duo behind the British pop phenomenon Gorillaz (illustrator Jamie Hewlett and musician Damon Albarn of British band Blur) and China’s rising star in theatre direction, Chen Shi-Zeng. This classic Chinese fable from the 1590s is an account of how the Buddhist sutras were brought to China from India by a supernatural monkey, a miserable sand demon, a monk and a pig man. The journey involves all kinds of magical characters: beautiful sirens spinning from floor to ceiling on red ribbons, amazing underwater sojourns with mermaids and flying, singing starfish as well as a raging volcano protected by a fan princess with a black belt. All the while, Monkey is battling the gold band Buddha has attached to his head as a punishment, which floors him with pain every time he acts violently or with anger. Chen Shi-Zeng’s performance as Monkey is one of the show’s highlights; in full body costume the actor creates an idiosyncratic physicality that combines an ape-like walk with a confident lad’s swagger.

The performance is a bold pastiche of traditional and contemporary theatrical styles including projected animation sequences, kung-fu, circus and Chinese opera. The result is a visual feast; spectacular live action and theatrical imagery dovetailing into brilliant cartoons.

Chen Shi-Zeng believes that the story of Journey to the West offers a unique perspective on Mao’s bloody Cultural Revolution of the 1970s, and the show features footage of Mao and military marching in Tiananmen Square. The political message of the work pivots on twin notions of individual and state. In a contemporary context, the show offers an interesting perspective on the rapidly emerging youth culture in contemporary China, represented through the lively and subversive central character.

il tempo del postino

Perhaps the most ambitious production of the festival was a group show co-curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno, Il Tempo del Postino. It provided a theoretical challenge to 14 of the world’s leading visual artists, asking, “what if an exhibition was not about occupying space, but about occupying time?” With the aim of redefining how visual arts can be framed, experienced and interpreted, artists were each given 15 minutes to transform the established gallery exhibition model into a unique shared audience extravaganza.

The event featured works from artists such as Merce Cunningham, Tacita Dean, Douglas Gordon, Tino Sehgal and Anri Sala as well as highly visual theatrical imagery such as gynocentric, dancing stage curtains, interactive mirrors implicating the audience, a symphonic chorus of American auctioneers and Chinese butterflies and surreal Sesame Street-like characters playing tennis. The performances were diverse, exhilarating, visceral and, at times, shocking. The juxtaposing of works forced the audience to work to make meaning of the show as either an integrated whole or a series of disparate works.

French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster had the 50-piece orchestra (providing the score for the first part of the performance) play a Beethoven symphony and gradually, one musician at a time, leave the orchestra pit, in some cases carrying their instruments, exiting by crossing the stage.

As the sound from the orchestra pit became thinner and the tension of the symphony built, the audience were on the edges of their seats, waiting to see the last instrument left, and hear how the solo would sound. A simple metaphor emerged from the work about power and clarity in numbers, of talented groups slowly going their separate ways and the gradual and inevitable demise of generations. By distinguishing each performer and having them emerge from the orchestra pit, where they are usually invisible, Gonzalez-Foerster’s intriguing ‘ending’ to act one was a literal deconstruction of conditioned theatrical expectations.

Act two comprised American artist Matthew Barney’s controversial and shambolic The Guardian of the Veil. The corpse of a sequinned and feathered woman is carried through the auditorium and placed on top of a burnt-out car wreck by four pall bearers in military gear. Barney himself enters the auditorium and makes his way on stage, wearing a black plastic apron and the head of a dog, a representation of Anubis, the Egyptian God of the Dead.

Barney symbolically ‘embalms’ the dead woman, removing engine parts from the hood of the burnt-out vehicle and placing them in funerary urns. Throughout, a female contortionist stands on stage with her back to the audience and her fist positioned between her buttocks. Two men in paramilitary gear drape her in a black rubber veil from head to waist, a sort of literal representation of woman as penis wearing a coloured condom.

After the embalming, another woman, naked apart from stiletto heels and a veil, does a back bend and then urinates copiously over the stage. At this point, a garlanded bull paraded on stage, crosses perilously close to the naked woman, is manually stimulated and encouraged to mount the back of the car. The bull fails to be aroused and is led away. The woman wearing the black rubber veil then removes her hand from between her buttocks and defecates as the curtains are closed.

Many have interpreted this performance as a reflection on the psychological state of Islam and a comment that the horrors of terrorism possibly stem from a phenomenon of sexual repression. With the use of such powerful symbols as bulls, cars and guns, an alternative reading is that Barney has symbolically represented the male ego and its fear of Woman as toxic, leaking and abject. In Guardian of the Veil, this visceral representation of Woman as Dangerous Other is paralleled with depictions of the Middle East as exotic and terrifying.

Currently positioned as the ‘second city’ in the UK, Manchester like other post-industrial cities is faced with the challenge of needing to reinvent itself. An international and uniquely Mancunian arts festival is part of a creative and cultural renaissance in the city, feeding into a growing global profile and a wider cultural awareness within the local community. These three works suggest a festival that is not afraid of ambitious, sometimes overtly political work. With a diverse curatorial strategy, the festival generated an innovative, international program, and for 18 days invigorated the city with its risky, political and brave artistic choices.

Interiors, Two Bedroom House, Old Trafford/Chorlton, writer-devisers Johnny Vegas, Stewart Lee, performer Johnny Vegas, June 29-July 15; Monkey: Journey to the West, adaptation, direction Chen Shi-Zheng, composer Damon Albarn, visual concept, costume, design, animation Jamie Hewlett, Manchester Palace Theatre, June 28-July 7; Il Tempo del Postino, A Group Show, co-curators Hans Ulrich Obrist, Philippe Parreno, director Philippe Parreno assisted by Ann-Christin Rommen, artists Doug Aitken, Matthew Barney & Jonathan Bepler, Tacita Dean, Trisha Donnelly, Olafur Eliasson, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Koo Jeong-A, Anri Sala, Tino Sehgal & Rirkrit Tiravanija, with Darius Khondji, Peter Saville, music director, conductor Ari Benjamin Meyers, lighting Chahine Yavroyan, costumes Ramdane Touhami, Manchester Opera House, July 12-14; Manchester International Festival

FESTIVAL NUSANTARA (FROM ARCHAIC JAVANESE FOR ‘THE ISLANDS IN BETWEEN’ AND NOW INVOKING THE ENTIRE INDONESIAN ARCHIPELAGO) SHOWCASED MORE THAN INDONESIAN CONTEMPORARY THEATRE, DANCE AND MUSIC AT THE BRISBANE POWERHOUSE. IT NEATLY TIED IN WITH INDONESIAN INDEPENDENCE DAY, PROVIDING A FORUM FOR A VARIETY OF CULTURAL ACTIVITIES, WHILE PRESENTING ARTISTICALLY AND POLITICALLY CHALLENGING WORKS THAT MIGHT NOT OTHERWISE HAVE APPEALED SO BROADLY. BY INCLUDING THE INDONESIAN COMMUNITY, THE POWERHOUSE ATTRACTED A UNIQUELY RESPONSIVE AUDIENCE INCLUDING FAMILIES, INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS, LANGUAGE TEACHERS, SCHOLARS AND INDONESIAN ARTS AFICIONADOS. AT THE SAME TIME, THE EVENT ENGENDERED RICHLY COMPLEX LEVELS OF INTERROGATION OF POLITICAL, CULTURAL AND ARTISTIC ISSUES. THERE WAS THE RARE SENSE OF A SHARED PEOPLE’S FESTIVAL AND, BY INTRODUCING THE SPIRIT OF THE CARNIVALESQUE, IT TEMPERED WHAT MIGHT OTHERWISE HAVE BEEN EXPERIENCED AS UNRECONCILED PERSPECTIVES.

The event has been a long term aspiration of Brisbane Powerhouse artistic director, Andrew Ross, whose team included assistant director Fauzi from the Surabaya Arts Festival. The program ranged from a retrospective of provocative images by both Indonesian and Australian photo-journalists to the cheesy pop of zany, youth oriented band Project Pop. The big crowd pleaser was Djaduk Ferianto’s big brassy show band, Kua Etnika, which like Karakatau’s more sophisticated fusion, blends jazz and swing with instrumentation and riffs from around the Nusantara archipelago. It was more easy listening than high art but featured a range of accoustically impressive compositions by members of the Kua Etnika collective appearing, incidentally, under the umbrella of the Bagong Kussudiardjo Foundation. Kussudiardjo was a former student of Martha Graham and a crucial disseminator of American modern dance ideas since the 1950s.

nan jombang dance company

Nan Jombang Dance Company’s most striking image in War of the Plates, a program of three Euro-Minangkabau etudes, was the opening solo. Out of the darkness a bell canto voice intoned its lament, “hati ini… this heart…”, transfixed us for a moment, then suddenly Angga Djamar’s head dived for the floor, liquid red dress cascading down her back as muscular legs rose, reached powerfully into the space, a headless creature searching blindly, articulately with feet on the end of arms. Barely touching down, featherlight, she rebounded, arching airborne into a supine ‘sault. Self accompanied by voice and minimalist percussion, choreographer Ery Mefri’s dancers weave expressionistic suggestions of interiority together with explorations of the folkloric—notably plate dance and the pants-slapping rhythms of ‘randai’, signature motifs of Minangkabau cultural identity. Other traditional artforms referenced, such as the percussive use of brass trays used in the sufi art of ‘selawat dulang’, were played not by musicians but by the dancers themselves. The hand clapping and pants slapping choreography of the final study played dramatically with dynamic contrasts—pianissimo to forte, butoh-slow to exploding with the folk form’s usual momentary gusto and complexity.

Although moving away from the simple repetition of tradition, Mefri only just began to exploit its choreographic potential. Based in the Sumatran capital of Padang, this company has bravely sought a contemporary language for expressing their region’s traditional ethos. There is a self-conscious element that pays homage to Martha Graham, butoh, even Bausch, directly or indirectly, but the indigenous martial art form ‘pencak silat’ yields a rich physical vocabulary of its own. They all combined in this soulful tryptich.

teater payung hitam

While stylistically Mefri seems to explore community, self and identity, Teater Payung Hitam (Black Umbrella Theatre) digs deeper in an attempt to express some primal truth about the alienation of Indonesian society from the mother principle in their work, Merah Bolong Putih Bolong (Red Hole White Hole in the program but better translated as Ruptured Red Ruptured White), written and directed by Rachman Sabur. This reading, occluded behind the more immediate political narratives of the last 50 years, was however not readily accessible to Brisbane audiences.

In a dramatic setting of perilously swinging boulders, carefully laid out rocks of red and white (the national flag, blood and purity, left and right, or… what?) were endlessly manipulated in gestures that spoke of the futility of small acts of resistance against the powerful and patriarchal onslaught of state power, the muscle of dominant ideologies. In another homage to expressionism, men half clad as labourers ducked the granite pendulums, rattled metal pails of grey gravel, gathered like monkeys or clowns and, in groups, assailed the relentless time machine of history. Or alone made valiant attempts to pick up the pieces, to recover order. Such a man, with a pail on his head, his body frail with age, bends to pick up one red stone at a time, but each time he bends, the one already in the pail drops out. Occasionally a saronged wild-haired figure—madman? madwoman?—reels out across the increasing chaos of stones that play a percussive symphony as they thud and roll, clack or rattle. At one point he/she is doused in a shower of red gravel (symbolising menstrual blood, we learn after the show) but nothing seems to change.

When this stricken soul is finally buried against a sound track of buzzing flies, it seems the narrative has just begun. This nation has been built on patriarchal strategies, explained Fauzi. Labour, war, Islam, economic development…Masculine power has dominated the story, and the Goddess has gone underground. The Ur Mother is Dead, and so struggles in vain to reunite with her children. But as her arm rises in silence, fist clenched, from the burial mound, there is no finality but a symbol of hope, “Merdeka!”, the revolutionary cry of freedom.

Teater Payung Hitam are a small, valiant artistic community based in the creative hotbed of Bandung, pushing boundaries politically and artistically, committed to visionary theatre in the avant-garde mould. More installation than dramatic art, their work assaulted our senses with a visceral physicality on the threshold of pain and danger.

butet kartaredjasa

Against these emerging companies Butet Kartaredjasa’s Death of A Critic by Agus Noor was more self assured on all fronts. Seasoned comic artist and founder of Teater Koma, Butet examines the role of the social commentator throughout history. Time moves forth and occasionally back. We check in on Socrates at one point, Napoleon at another: “I was Napoleon’s left hand”, says the critic. There’s an ambivalence to this critic, a grasping for power and recognition that underpins him as the constant shadow of demagoguery but the framing action really implicates the present until, arriving at a prospective Utopia in the Third Millenium, he dwindles away because he is no longer needed. We follow his ranting with colleagues who sold out, his refusal to abandon his vocation, and his vain belief that his service will one day—one day—be acknowledged. This is a two man show cleverly managed by one actor (and a bundle of blankets when the affable serving man, Bambang, a characteristically Javanese-style Sancho Panza to this Don Quixote appears) with video projection (interactive, whimsical and theatrically relevant) and an off-stage chorus-cum-band whose verbal interjections were as apropos as their live sound effects and instrumental accompaniment. By way of translation, the English surtitles were only the tip of the iceberg, but Butet was such an authoritatively engaging presence and so vocally and physically expressive that he took us along with him despite the language difference.

making connections

Though perhaps out of sync with Australia’s declining interest in Asian culture, Brisbane Powerhouse has boldly presented a small but potent festival of Indonesia’s contemporary arts, making a point about the usual overflying of the Indonesian islands in search of world festival fodder. Nor is it another wayang puppet show on a potted palm fringed stage. Instead Andrew Ross presents a selection of contemporary work that is socially and politically engaged, made by Indonesian artists in Indonesia for their own communities. What is pleasing is that this program deliberately avoids the self reflexive business of inter-cultural collaboration that is often producer driven and unevenly credited. But if collaborations are not a high priority for Ross, artistic connections are nevertheless valuable. It was gratifying then that a collaboration between Queensland’s music ensemble Topology, Djaduk Ferianto and Surabaya Arts Festival was also facilitated by this event.

Ross’s objectives are far reaching and include setting up Festival Nusantara as a vehicle for nurturing and marketing the young companies of the region. Ideally however, Ross’s overall vision might benefit if complemented by major festival players in a position to invite mature companies at the level of Bessie-award winning dance company Gumarang Sakti or Bengkel Teater Rendra who have never been seen here despite decades of international European and American attention. Such examples of excellence may be required, in conjunction with the already frequent individual exchanges and collaborations, to turn around our arts sector’s general ambivalence.

Ross appears to reject the wisdom of possibly linking with like minded events such as Queensland Art Gallery’s Australian Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. However, given the close relationship between contemporary performing arts and performance art in Indonesia it would seem to make sense to exploit such an alternative conduit to broader Australian interest. This relationship (exemplified, say, by Heri Dono, performance installation artist first introduced here in the 1993 APT) is as rooted in tradition (where there is less separation between disciplines—one often finds that traditional painters also dance and play dalang/puppeteer) as much as it follows on from the contemporary art movement in Jakarta and Bandung, where the notion of the ideologically progressive auteur found a fine arts following in ITB (Institut Teknology Bandung) long before public theatre became its medium.

Festival Nusantara: Nan Jombang Dance Company, War of The Plates, choreographer Ery Mefri, lighting Jo Currey; Teater Payung Hitam, Red Hole White Hole, writer, director Rachman Sabur; Death of a Critic, performer Butet Kartaredjasa, writer Agus Noor, director Whani Dharmawan, music Djaduk Ferianto; Brisbane Powerhouse, August 8-12

THE LOSS OF TANJA LIEDTKE, ONE OF AUSTRALIAN DANCE’S BRIGHTEST HOPES, IN A ROAD ACCIDENT ON AUGUST 17, IS KEENLY FELT AROUND THE WORLD.

Not yet 30 years old, Liedtke moved a lot of people as a dancer, choreographer and colleague. A tribute, held at Sydney Opera House on August 27 and organized by her partner, Solon Ulbrich, family and friends, highlighted the breadth of her achievements and allowed artists from the UK, family from Germany and colleagues from across the Australian performing arts sector to come together.

Liedtke was due to take up the position of Artistic Director at Sydney Dance Company in October. Having been involved in her recruitment, I remain inspired by the undaunted young woman who swept up the Board and, following her appointment, the Australian dance community in an inclusive vision for the company. Liedtke’s plans were not yet fleshed out, but she clearly understood her new role in the Australian dance ecology.

Liedtke’s career as a choreographer may have been short, but her success was established. Her first full evening production, Twelfth Floor, was nominated for five Australian dance awards in 2006, toured nationally through the Mobile States network and received rave reviews. Liedtke’s most recent work, construct, which premiered in London in May, was another triumph. Allen Robertson, dance critic for The Times, wrote, “The surprise of stumbling across a fresh, fully-formed talent is one of the reasons we keep going to the theatre.”

Liedtke’s choreographic voice was inspired by a rich life experience. Her father’s work took the family of three children from her birthplace in Germany to Spain and the UK. Starting dance aged four, Liedtke studied at the International Ballet Centre in Madrid. She entered Elmhurst Ballet School in the UK but, drawn to contemporary dance, finished her training at the Ballet Rambert School.

In 1997 the family moved to Australia and Liedtke to Sydney where she found Tanya Pearson’s ballet school. Liedtke coached students there until auditioning for Australian Dance Theatre and moving to Adelaide in 1999. She spent four years at ADT, creating roles in Garry Stewart’s Birdbrain, The Age of Unbeauty, Plastic Space and Monstrosity. Liedtke began to make her own work for the company’s choreographic workshop season, Ignite.

In 2003, Liedtke’s talent as a dancer was spotted by Lloyd Newson, Director of DV8, on a UK tour by ADT. Newson invited Liedtke to join his company for the European tour and film for Channel4 of The Cost of Living. She returned to the company in 2005 to become the diva in Just for Show.

During this time Liedtke worked internationally, resetting Ignite productions, To My Suite and Forever You on De Anima Ballet Contemporanea in Brazil, making Angels Fallen for Akademie des Tanzes in Mannheim and Enter Twilight for Tasdance.

In 2006 Liedtke returned to Tasdance to create Always Building. She had also recently created work for David Hughes Dance Company in Scotland. Touring for Twelfth Floor in Europe was planned and her new work, construct, was in demand.

Whilst plans to honour Liedtke at SDC and through her extant work are slowly forming, her cruel loss is felt in Sydney, Australia and the world.
Sophie Travers

construct: tanja liedtke’s final work

Many beautiful and insightful things have been said after Tanja Liedtke’s tragic death, mostly by people who knew her better and were more familiar with her work than I. My thoughts on her come from the perspective of a colleague and independent dance maker who admired her work and, like many in the contemporary dance scene, was very excited about the prospect of her working as the new artistic director of Sydney Dance Company.

I met Tanja last year at Performance Space when she was in Sydney to present her work Twelfth Floor as part of a national tour made possible through Mobile States. I enjoyed the work so much that I went to see it twice. It was a beautifully crafted piece, intelligently composed. The choreography was inventive and original. I was especially impressed with the way Tanja had managed to bring together a group of excellent individual performers (Anton, Kristina Chan, Julian Crotti, Amelia McQueen, Paul White) and made them gel as an ensemble.

After Twelfth Floor, I was seriously looking forward to seeing more of Tanja’s work. That opportunity came in June this year when I happened to be in the UK at the same time as she was touring her new work, construct, to four British cities. I caught up with the show in Manchester, on the last day of the tour. Tanja not only choreographed construct but also performed in it, with Paul White and Kristina Chan.

Construct explores notions of construction and destruction, building and collapse. The bare stage is strewn with objects associated with house building, such as a work bench, a step ladder, wires, rolls of tape and loose timber planks. All these objects are at some stage integrated into the choreography, most notably the planks. In one section, the performers use the timber playfully to create a series of tableaux vivants transforming them from picture frame to blanket, from telephone receiver to toilet seat. In another section, Paul, standing on his head, balances a plank on his feet and performs an extraordinary juggling routine.

For large sections of the work, cartoonish characterisations and stylised, sometimes clichéd gesturing are all used to make visible the artificiality inherent in any kind of construction, no matter if it refers to architecture or the relationship between human beings. In the last third of the work, stylisation is dropped, giving way to a darker, more realistic exploration addressing the futility of construction and the danger of collapse. Tanja’s solo, crouching on the ground, utterly alone and very small, keeping herself entertained by using her fingers as puppets, was especially moving.

I remember thinking, after the show, that construct confirmed the maturity of Tanja Liedtke’s choreographic vision. Even though not yet fully developed, it was impressive and made me curious for more.

Let us hope that construct will eventually be seen by Australian audiences, not only as a memorial to Tanja Liedtke but also as a confirmation of her reputation as a distinctive, consistent and inspired choreographic voice.
Martin del Amo

During our time together at ADT, Tanja was a constant source of inspiration, fun and friendship. She had 1,000 clever ideas a day, and never gave less than 100% effort to mastering the difficult repertoire.

Every event, conversation and moment in her life sparked an idea in her genius mind. Backstage personal jokes turned into marvellous monologues in the show. Far-fetched ideas on the bus became brilliant scenes. Her mind was always at work.

Being employed by her was an opportunity I’m lucky to have had. She was relentless in getting exactly what she was after with incredible attention to detail. One of her greatest attributes was the degree to which she would let people contribute to her work. Although always certain of what she wanted, she was always open to suggestions and ideas.

Kristina and I both agree that the development and performance of construct with Tanja Liedtke was the highlight of our entire careers. It was a privilege to work, live and play with her
Paul White

Tanja and I worked together collaboratively from 2000. She was always 100% focused and committed to her work and her dancers. Every little piece of the puzzle was important to her, both in her choreography and in her relationships with the people around her. She was extremely generous. I always felt incredibly inspired by her and therefore completely devoted to her work and vision, as did many of the lucky people who got to work with her. Tanja somehow knew the exact key to use to open possibilities within individuals and push them beyond what they thought was possible. Sometimes it was trial and error but the journey was always fulfilling. Tanja herself was always up for learning from her peers and dancers, which created a very open and giving work environment. We were all in it together.
Kristina Chan

VISCERAL RHYTHMS THAT GET THE HEART BEATING WILDLY AND THE FEET ITCHING TO DANCE—THAT’S A TYPICAL IMAGE ASSOCIATED WITH PERCUSSION. STRAVINSKY EXPLOITED ITS PRIMAL NATURE IN HIS SCORE FOR BALLET, THE RITE OF SPRING, BUT MANY COMPOSERS SINCE HAVE, CONSCIOUSLY AND UNCONSCIOUSLY, CHALLENGED THIS PERCEPTION BY EXPLORING THE INTRICATE QUALITIES OF PERCUSSION. AWARD-WINNING FREELANCE PERCUSSIONIST CLAIRE EDWARDES SAYS, “I LOVE THE HEAVY DRUMMING WHERE YOU CAN JUST GET CARRIED AWAY…THERE’S DEFINITELY ROOM FOR THAT… I’LL OFTEN PROGRAM SOMETHING LIKE IT, BUT THEN COMBINE IT WITH SMALLER SOUNDS.”

“Like David Young’s new work?”, I suggest. The composer’s To Keep Things Reasonable (Ad Res Modicas Conservandas) was recently premiered in Sydney by Ensemble Offspring and the Song Company at their Caged Uncaged mini-festival [see RT 82]. Amongst other things, it required Edwardes and colleague Bree Van Reyck to gently scratch and rub chopsticks against various metal and wood surfaces. “Yeah!”, she exclaims. “Could you actually hear the rubbing on the woodblock? We couldn’t, being so close to the singers.” She needn’t have worried. The beauty of this delicate work was hearing its subtle techniques pushed right to the edge of silence.

Edwardes finds both ends of this spectrum integral to her musical life and her personal expression: “the softer, more sensual techniques, I guess, are in tune with my feminine side, and the visceral ‘striking’ [she demonstrates] the girl in me who is strong and powerful.”

Along with these attributes comes extreme versatility—the list of instruments available to a percussionist is endless. Edwardes says it’s difficult to explain what playing is like: “Generally, it just feels good—scraping, rubbing, hitting, shaking. I get something different out of [each of these] techniques. Emotionally, you can express different things—like if I compare playing [Morton Feldman’s] King of Denmark, which is all [soft dynamics and played] with fingers and hands, to playing [anything by] Xenakis: I love playing them both.”

Edwardes’ aesthetic of the physicality of playing is clear: physical gestures must enhance sound. She has no time for ego-driven movement. “I have a reaction against moving for the sake of moving”, she says. “This is something I try to be conscious of in my own playing…I move a lot when I play, but [this] comes from the music…it’s about keeping it real.”

Given Edwardes’ enthusiasm for contemporary music, I was surprised that her passion for the new only emerged in her final years as a student at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music—a Hans-Werner Henze’s solo marimba work, Five Scenes from Snow Country, being a major turning point. With its sparse textures and ultra soft dynamics, the work lead Edwardes’ to “realise that not all music plays itself.”

Ten years later—after postgraduate studies in Holland and with a busy schedule of freelance work—Edwardes’ now relishes the freedom that contemporary music gives her. With myriad choices for interpreting new and recent work, a lot of her rehearsal time is spent away from instruments analysing and scribbling furiously on music scores. For Edwardes, the notion of a journey is a useful analogy: it gives the audience something tangible to grasp. “It’s the only way to keep the audience with you…[by providing] threads for them to navigate through [the music].”

And while her own journey so far has been frustrating at times, mostly she’s felt liberated by the whole experience. Curiosity is now a huge asset: “I’ve learnt the importance to let go and not be stopped by thoughts that something isn’t possible…because if a composer wants something—a particular sound—then you have to play it! It’s about keeping an open mind, keeping the gamut of sound worlds open…I’m now constantly foraging in Mum’s kitchen looking for new sounds, and I love it that my Dad thinks I’m crazy because I’m always playing weird instruments.”

We’ve been seeing a lot of Edwardes around Sydney lately: in Cage:Uncaged, the Sibelius Young Composer’s Competition Concert, the TV series Spicks and Specks and the Bad Dog Yoda concert with guitarist Goeffrey Morris, where she launched her first solo album, Coil. And the next few months seem just as busy. Considering most of the pieces in her repertoire won’t get many outings, I wondered how she manages to embody such a diverse amount of work. As I suspected, she’s a damned good sight-reader. Of course, it also gets easier with time. “Composers will always be coming up with new instruments to play and new sounds”, she explains, “but by building up a repertoire of techniques and gestures, you become more comfortable with the sound world.” She insists, however, that it’s not a formula: “It’s more a way of thinking, a certain framework in which to work, so when rehearsing new pieces it’s nice to know that you’ve got things under control. Well, at least you hope you do!”

With so many ‘things’ to hit, scratch, rub and scrape in often very specific ways, I imagined the interplay between the physical and intellectual aspects of playing to be enormously challenging. For Edwardes it comes quite naturally. She loves the “well-rounded experience” of her existence as a percussionist and performer of contemporary music. The challenge lies in maintaining this versatility throughout rehearsals and practise sessions, and this is what keeps her career choice fresh and exciting.

So with great sight-reading skills, score mark-ups and scrupulous analyses, where does that leave improvisation? “I’ve always erred towards a more rigorous style, like the [works of Dominik] Karski”, she admits. “It’s about what you know, what you’re comfortable with…I have a background as a pianist so I’m used to reading scores.” Improvisation is something Edwardes has fairly recently had to embrace—“it’s very in vogue now.” It seems to have been a steep learning curve, but Edwardes—not one to be afraid of challenges—insists that now she’s been introduced to it she’ll include it in her programs.

In 2006, in preparation for their first free improvisation performance (John Zorn’s Hockey), Edwardes and the other members of the Sydney-based Ensemble Offspring participated in a series of workshops run by improvising performer Jim Denley. “We hadn’t done anything like this before, but thought it would be easier to learn as a group—to give it a go! It was a good formal start and a place to gain a few pointers.” She says Ensemble Offspring has since come a long way with their improvisational skills: “We’ve performed Cage’s Four6 twice now and if you look at the difference between the two performances it’s phenomenal…and that’s what the piece is really about: learning to choose sounds.”

Ensemble Offspring is just one of a number of groups with whom Edwardes regularly performs; collaboration is a crucial part of her work as a performer. “Essentially I’m a soloist”, she explains. “I perform by myself, and I like that aspect of my career…but I love performing with other people. I’m a very social person. I love bouncing ideas around, knowing that [they] aren’t the only way of seeing things, the problem solving that takes place, the different personalities, the energy—it’s all great!”

The Duyfken Project, a cross-cultural collaboration with Dutch percussionist Niels Meliefste as Duo Vertigo, exposed audiences across Australia to new works commissioned by local and overseas composers. Edwardes commitment to Australian new music recently won her the 2007 Classical Music Award for Outstanding Contribution by an Individual. And while Edwardes enjoys working with composers, she doesn’t really see it as collaboration: “It is in a way”, she admits. “But essentially it’s the composer who has to bring the notes to the rehearsal… [they’re] the creative force. I shouldn’t direct too much — it’s not my role. [Workshopping] is something that does take place with younger composers, but older composers don’t generally need to do this. They already have a strong sense of what they want and the sounds they like. We’ll normally just discuss things such as instrumentation and style at the beginning.”

So what actually drives Claire Edwardes? Mostly it’s the audience—advocacy for the arts is a huge motivation. Her work as assistant artistic director of Ensemble Offspring is an aspect of her career she’d like to develop further. “I think this is really important for Australia…particularly bringing in trends from overseas…we’re still very isolated.”

Art is obviously important to Edwardes for the spiritual welfare of society. “There is a great quote from JFK about the US: ‘This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor…’ This is a state that I am afraid Australia could be accused of being in at the moment…As performers and promoters we have to work extra hard to get audiences interested in new music—it is not seen as a priority for most people…Contemporary music is so important because it is the development of our culture NOW!”

Claire Edwardes cites funding priorities and a cultural emphasis on materialism as major hurdles for the arts. But in terms of the actual music, she thinks there’s often a huge misunderstanding. “Essentially people are scared of the unknown…I’d like to get the idea out there that music is about feelings and that’s all you have to know.”

Claire Edwardes first solo CD, Coil, is reviewed on page 48 and five copies courtesy of Tall Poppies are available as giveaways to RealTime readers (p56).

SYDNEY-BASED IMPROVISER ROSIE DENNIS IS A UNIQUE AND ELECTRIFYING PERFORMER, CREATING SHORT WORKS, AROUND 20-30 MINUTES EACH, REALISED AT SPEED—VOCALLY AND PHYSICALLY—BUT IMBUED WITH NUANCES AND SUBTLETIES RISING OUT OF HER MANIC RIFFING. IN JUST OVER FOUR YEARS, DENNIS HAS BEGUN TO CREATE A CAREER FOR HERSELF, MOST NOTABLY IN THE UK AND NOW IN EUROPE, WHILE HER HOME, AUSTRALIA, PROVES MORE OF A CHALLENGE BECAUSE IT IS ONLY JUST BEGINNING TO GROW THE PERFORMANCE NETWORKS THAT PROLIFERATE ELSEWHERE. I MET WITH DENNIS TO TALK ABOUT HOW HER WORK HAS EVOLVED AND HOW IT HAS MANAGED TO REACH AN INTERNATIONAL AUDIENCE.

With a quiet seriousness (so different from her performance spin-outs), Dennis conveys a clear-eyed sense of purpose and of careful analysis of the performance path she’s chosen for herself or which, as she tells it, perhaps chose her. “Accident” and “luck” figure strongly in her account of her career. However, while she says she’s not a planner she confesses to having been, at times, a control freak. It was interesting to hear how Dennis, as she developed her craft, moved towards structured improvisation—a model providing both freedom and form. Similarly, she says that being vulnerable is what appeals to her about improvisation, but it doesn’t frighten her. These are not contradictions but perhaps elemental to the art, and life, of this improviser.

An accident really. About five years ago I auditioned for the VCA to go into their director’s course, that was my trajectory at that time. I’d done a couple of short things for the unbecomings season at Performance Space and before that at university as part of my arts degree. So I thought a creative way to get around not getting into VCA was to go back on the floor and train, so that if I was working with performers I’d be in touch and coming from a similar place. At that time, in 2003, the improviser Andrew Morrish just happened to be doing a weekend workshop in Sydney. I almost chickened out but my partner said I needed to go. Andrew said to me on that first day, “I don’t think you’re really a director. I think you’re a performer.” I said okay and I felt really exhilarated after the workshop like something had changed for me. I hadn’t really performed at all before, except at school, just directed.

Andrew said he had a Sunday night thing with just a few artists meeting to perform for each other. I went to that every Sunday. I had a huge appetite. Something had been unlocked and I was finding something new every week, and it helped with the way I’d write. I could do it on the floor instead of sitting down, and new text would come and new doors open.

Yes. The first play I wrote pieced together about 45 Gertrude Stein sentences into a love story which became a show, Can Fish Be Wives (1996), at Downstairs Belvoir during one Mardi Gras. When I think about it, it’s exactly what I do now, poetic text, and it had sound, it had music and it had abstract movement. I was 20-21 and working it out.

My writing was heavily rhythmic, so improvisation helped: as I was walking around the rhythm of my walking was changing the rhythm of the text. I realised the two were feeding each other and I became aware of specific hand gestures and I thought the movement’s feeling the text and the text is feeling the movement and this synergy is good. But at this time I did little movement in my performance work at all. With Elly Brickhill I improvised vocally in darkness at a microphone while she danced in Waiting to Breathe Out (2002-03). By now I was 25 and I was very shy on stage, even after working with Andrew—but that had been for only five people at a time.

The improvising was feeding my writing but it was research still and I was getting frustrated, having more and more questions about things happening on the floor I wanted answered and Andrew said you’re going to have to do it more. He teamed me up with the dancer Martin del Amo and we decided to practise with each other. It’s very specific: we have half an hour each and we perform for each other. So it’s not a collaborative process, not a duo. That began in 2004. We’re still doing it.

The big moment was with Polish in Next Wave in 2004. I thought, okay I’m going to try this now, over five nights, without a very clear theme but investigating the same sort of material every time. I did it and I thought, I’m a performer.

A good leap. Well, it was a ride on a freeway and it was very difficult to slow down and speed is still something I use in my works very particularly. I find the faster I go the more opportunities and options that I’ve got to play with. I’m in the moment but thinking ahead and I’ll stumble and I’ll hear something in the word and that can take me in another direction. I like that.

No, I was just freefalling. I’d have a little clock in the corner and just watch for the 20 minutes to be up and then I’d find an ending. It was a good experience.

That was me wanting to go back to writing. I’d been a control freak in my early 20s and constricting myself about what I wanted to do—terrible in retrospect. But after improvising I now had a real fear of putting something on paper: “God, now I’m going to have to stick to it.” And I still only write down points, but I am going to get older and I’m going to forget things, so I am trying to write things down while they’re all still in me.

I decided it was good to put some structure down because that gave me parameters to work within, which I’ve always done—time constraints, physical obstacles. Having a ‘score’ gave me more freedom to do other things in performance because I wasn’t thinking about where I had to go. That’s what I realised in Melbourne at Next Wave where I was always trying to build to 20 minutes duration. I thought, “Rosie, you don’t have to do that because maybe that improvisation is actually only 16 minutes. You need to be able to give yourself permission to leave when it’s finished or cut to the next section.”

I met the British artist Richard Layzell at the National Review of Live Art (NRLA) in Australia in 2003 and he took me to Perth because we’d done a little bit of collaborating at Time_Place_Space 2 [Dennis was a participant in 2003 where Layzell was a mentor]. I did a late night solo and he got people to look at it. I got invited back the next year to make a piece, which was Access All Areas, and the NRLA director Nikki Milican invited me to Glasgow. I went in 2006.

I did nothing at all in 2005. While at Next Wave I got a call from Performance Space who were looking for a publicist and I needed a job and took it but didn’t feel I could promote my work there. I kept training and doing stuff at Omeo Studio [the Sydney base for Morrish and other improvisers] and eventually the Sunday night program there faded out and I curated the odd event and then went overseas.

The Inbetween Time festival in February 2006 at Arnolfini in Bristol was the week before NRLA and the curators from Portugal’s Festival Trama in Porto saw me perform Love Song Dedication there and asked me to come and do two shows for them. That was really lucky. And at NRLA there was the buzz of seeing so much work. I was really happy. Three months after I got back, Nikki asked me to come back in 2007, but the airfare was a problem. The first time I got Australia Council support. So I discussed it with my partner, about consolidating my work at NRLA and how that would benefit my work here. The travel cost would be an investment worth making in myself as an artist. I wasn’t worried about the airfare—I wanted to perform. In Australia there aren’t as many opportunities, there aren’t as many places to perform.

I’m difficult to program. I’ve approached fringe theatre venues here. I do sit, if weirdly, in theatre and I do move, so I fit with dance, but I’m not really theatre and I’m not really funny. Performance Space was incredibly supportive of me as an artist: last year they co-produced Martin del Amo and I doing solos over three nights. But in Europe there’s a place for short works. Four hundred people come a day to NRLA.

I was in NRLA 2007 and I performed again at Arnolfini in Bristol. A lot of the same people came back and saw my new show, Hitting a Brick Wall; some have seen all three works. I performed at Chapter in Cardiff and did a workshop at the university there. I came back home and then self-funded another trip in May and I’m about to go again at the end of September. Nothing is ever a waste, I meet great artists and I always see work. At the ANTI festival in Kuopio in Finland I’ll do a show, a workshop and a talk, two shows in Lubljana as part of the City of Women Fesitval, and I’ll perform and do a workshop at Lancaster University—people there had seen me at Arnolfini. I’ll be in Experimentica, a live art festival in Cardiff, and the Word About Town spoken word festival in Hastings.

No, I really like Australia and making work here, and I’m turning my focus to how to do more stuff in Australia. I’m running an occasional series called Fantastic Animals at a studio in Annandale because I need to show work, and I invite other artists to join me. And I’m making a new work as a companion piece to Access All Areas so they can be marketed and performed together, the new one as a response to the first. This is rather than making a 45-60 minute piece. I don’t want to do that. I have to be true to what I enjoy.

People have strong reactions, and they are always much older than I expect. I always thought that my work appealed particularly to women. The last two trips overseas have proved me quite wrong about that. I got much more feedback from men. Bizarre. Someone said ages ago. “Your work’s so female.”

I’m drawn to improvisation because it makes me vulnerable on stage. I’ve become quite confident in that vulnerability. It doesn’t frighten me at all, but if I’m not there being exposed then I’m not fully making the kind of work I want to make. The vulnerability is what people connect with.

Is the work about you? People often play themselves, or logical extensions of themselves or adopt personae in contemporary performance.

In London last month someone who knew me thought the performance was about my partner and I, and was alarmed. But I don’t mind if people think the work is about me. The work starts very specifically and then I broaden it.

When I watch the rushes of the film of Access All Areas [titled Quietly Collapsed] I do think, “You’re so intense.” It comes with the speed I’m working at.

I’d said to Sam James, the video artist, I want to make a film of Access All Areas, people respond well to it wherever I go and I can’t take the show everywhere. And it could screen in festivals. Sam suggested we apply for a commission fee from the ABC Dance 4 Film project [a broadcast partnership between the Australia Council, ABC TV, Channel 4 and Arts Council England for the screening of dance films on the ABC and Channel 4 in the UK] and we got $3,000, for a 3.5 minute film. [Sean O’Brien was the other successful Australian filmmaker applicant.]

So much came out of working with Andrew Morrish, from Time_Place_Space and NRLA and, although I said I don’t plan, I did sit down and come up with a five-year plan, a realistic strategy. I’m optimistic about what I’m doing now. I might not do it forever. I’m a true improviser. This is what I’m doing now.

Rosie Dennis is currently touring Access All Areas, Love Song Dedication and Hitting A Brick Wall. www.suture.com.au

LISA O’NEILL IS UBIQUITOUS, BUT ALWAYS SUI GENERIS. ALTHOUGH SHE APPEARS IN A VARIETY OF FIELDS (NEW MEDIA WITH TRANSMUTE COLLECTIVE, PHYSICAL THEATRE WITH SUZUKI-BASED FRANK COMPANY AND THE POP-CULTURISH BRIDE OF FRANK, OR IN SOLO DANCE WORKS), HER MANY PERFORMANCE MASKS AND VARIED PERFORMANCE STYLES ARE ALWAYS IRRADIATED FROM THE SAME INNER CORE. HER STALKING-ANIMAL ATTENTION, HER GROUNDEDNESS, AND THE EXPLOSIVENESS OF A PUGILIST ARE UNMISTAKEABLE. SHE HAS A QUALITY OF SPIRIT THAT, WHILE SEEMINGLY BOTH PROFOUND AND REMOTE, IS ALSO IMMENSELY AND IMMEDIATELY SEDUCTIVE.

As the participant in a total creative process reaching beyond the aesthetic, O’Neill seems to espouse a ‘transaesthetic’ of dance, sometimes incorporating an essentially private mythopoeic vision as in her signature dance piece, Sweet Yeti. O’Neill comments on this, a work that seems to touch on the animist/shamanic origins of dance: “I’m not quite sure what it is people see, but it goes to show that if you are in a transcendental space, a state that I seem always to find in Sweet Yeti, then the audience will go with you and feel and see things that you probably weren’t deliberately intending.”
Lisa O’Neill, Sweet Yeti,

Originally created in 1995, Sweet Yeti has evolved over time as O’Neill continues to remount it, most recently in November 2006. She goes on to say, “Every time I perform this work I feel like I’m home, it’s a really interesting, enlightening and shared experience that stands out for me against my other performance works. I first created and performed the work when I was 22, I am now 34 and, when I performed it last year, it was as though I was outside myself, watching myself dance from another viewpoint. I feel as though my whole life is tucked away in that piece, 12 years of it. This really interests me as a performer. I would love to perform Sweet Yeti for as long as my body can cope. The piece was never about anything in particular, but to this day it seems to be the piece that moves people the most.”

“You are the summation of what you’ve done. Who you are is incidental”, says Frank Theatre’s Jacqui Carroll, which seems apropos. If O’Neill is a product of her sources, then Carroll has been a major influence. Through their long association (since O’Neill was 14), one can place O’Neill in direct lineage both to Martha Graham and Tadashi Suzuki, both hard task-masters. However, rather than dance or actor training, O’Neill talks about the direct transmission of “deep energy fields”, a forceful encounter she likens to being slammed into the back of a car. There is a strong focus on “intentionality” which she, in turn, feels the need to hand on. For the past seven years, along with playwright and theatre scholar Norman Price, she has been developing the Advanced Diploma of Arts (Acting) course at Southbank Institute of Technology. This creative partnership engendered the Pineapple Queen Merde project based on an earlier Price play and, for O’Neill, “highlighted the need for intensely long creative development periods if a work and its performers are to truly reach full potential.”

Since knee operations in 2003 prompted a shift towards acting, O’Neill confesses that “dance as an art form rarely inspires me any more; it is as though I have been shifted into another space through my diverse experiences as a performer and performance maker, my work in the theatre. I find it very hard to watch bodies and limbs moving in space unless the dancer is completely involved with what they are doing, that something more substantial and deeply internal is working behind the motion.” Her interrogation of dance reveals an obdurate passion, even while she wryly concedes that she may be perceived as “this black sheep that appears and disappears. Or maybe this is how I see myself?” The American artist William Baily said that the key was to stay with something and keep making it better, cleaner, more resonant, more intense. O’Neill thoroughly concurs. “In terms of my own arts practice, I have dedicated most of my adult life to a couple of specific training systems for that very reason, applying this philosophy to my rehearsals, performance and art making. I have always concerned myself with the ability to continue growing and developing along the one trajectory, to delve deeper into that space.”

Musing on the career of undoubtedly one of the most hardworking artists in Brisbane helps to make sense of the dramatic new turn she has taken in her latest creative development showing at the Judith Wright Centre: The Pipe Manager (a carefully prosaic title). It is a “stand out project” for O’Neill because it is the first time she has invited other artists to collaborate with her on a solo dance work. They include an illustrator, writer, sound artist, new media artist, video editor, dramaturg and costume designer. It is also the first time (considering her history with the new media group Transmute Collective) that she has resorted to visual media in her own work. Thus the story will be ultimately conveyed through movement, illustration and sound, with minimal subtitles, cartoon captions and a voice over narration.

It is also the first time O’Neill, as dancer, has resorted to story, albeit a bleak and somewhat apocalyptic tale leavened by her propensity for clowning and whimsy. The narrative follows the journey of a woman who, after applying for the job as pipe manager, is asked to innovate and reinvent the archetypal pipe (as in plumbing). At work the woman is under the vigilant eyes of the dictatorial Board of Directors who are hidden away high up in the walls of the office behind glass. When previous managers ran out of inventions they were literally terminated on the spot. So the desperate need to reinvent the pipe becomes a life or death situation. She stumbles across old business files and discovers that previous managers would eventually deconstruct their inventions in order to create new ones. But is deconstructing an invention a viable way to invent anew? And does this necessarily equate to functional, high quality and sustainable possibilities? Alice-like, she falls down a large pipe and finds herself in Yetiland, an alternative reality where she comes face to face with those figures from her workplace who now look surprisingly like, yes, yetis.

O’Neill recalls attending an Arts Queensland meeting where every second word was ‘innovation.’ The Pipe Manager seems to be saying that when ends become subservient to the means of production, frustration constrains the producer to either abstain or go mad. In Hades, compulsory maddening behaviour was considered the ultimate punishment reserved for blasphemy. Sisyphus was forced to keep rolling a stone uphill, only to see it roll back down. But artists and clowns, the ultimate blasphemers, have always risen up against the oppression of creative thought by dogma. They expose literal-mindedness with metaphor. If our most sensitive artists are the antennae of our culture, we must be in deep trouble. Even Brian Lucas, that most intimate of story-tellers, recently produced an uncharacteristic, darkly eruptive parable in revolt against the corruption of language.

The Pipe Manager is a multi-layered, complex and developing piece of work which is endeavoring to come to terms with large issues. It takes on no less than the capitalist imaginary of the unlimited expansion of production and consumption and at the same time, to give O’Neill the final word, reflects on a contemporary reluctance to work along with the forces of nature rather than ride them like a bull. Lisa O’Neill, of all people, has sufficient cred to tackle such themes. There are many of us on the sidelines cheering her on.

The Pipe Manager, devisor, performer Lisa O’Neill, writer Peter Berkahn, illustrator XTN, dramaturg Kathryn Kelly, video production Jaxzyn, soundtrack editor Ramsay Hatfield, costume designer Glen Brown, new media consultant Keith Armstrong; Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, June 8-9

oribotics [network]

There’s something biomimetic on the glass panes of Federation Square’s Atrium—it’s oribots. They communicate with each other, they glow and change colour, they feed on sunlight. These entirely new, living creatures, part of oribotics [network], have grown out of the earlier Matthew Gardiner work, oribotics, a mating of origami and robotics. Each new oribot here is in harmony with its environment, the design shape echoing the folds and facets of the atrium. Communication is powered by built-in low voltage computers and relayed via a wi-fi network. The data stream changes the tricolour LED output. The oribots blossom as they attract data from your movement and stimuli from online fanciers. See and believe. And it’s free.

Matthew Gardiner’s Oribotics [network], Fracture Gallery, Atrium, Federation Square, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Melbourne, Oct 8-Nov 9
www.oribotics.net

coming to a second life near you

Art is quickly establishing niches for itself in the burgeoning Second Life ecosystem-cum-market, sometimes as creative extensions of first world works (Physical TV’s Thursdays Fictions) but increasingly on its own virtual terms. The Australia Council’s Inter-Arts Office has promptly tempted Australian artists to go native in Second Life with the offer of a $20,000 residency ($4m in lindens) which was successfully applied for by the team of Christopher Dodds, Adam Nash and Justin Clemens. Inter-Arts doubtless would like artists to find income as well as renown in Second Life and perhaps help lift the Second Life game beyond bad graphic art and wobbly puppetry.

What the team promises is an “installation, a metaphor for the Tower of Babel, us[ing] voice recognition software that converts the spoken word of real and virtual world participants into 3-D letterform images in an evolving tower of words. The letterforms generate relationships with each other through a combination of visual and sonic manifestations, fragments of narrative, environmental/user awareness capabilities and through interaction with existing data generated within Second Life itself, such as the virtual winds, sunrises and sunsets.”

As often with Second Life ventures there’s a curious desire to manifest the work in both first and second worlds, a kind of insurance perhaps, but here the aim is to engage a different kind of audience who presumably might never think of getting a second life: “The artwork will be a simultaneous installation in Second Life and in a real world gallery, where gallery visitors can be directly involved in its creation via a computer interface.” Apparently most of the dollars will go on the gallery showing (http://babelswarm.blogspot.com).

RECENTLY IN REALTIME AND ELSEWHERE I’VE BEEN CRITICAL OF AUSTRALIAN SHORT FILM AND ANIMATION, SO MUCH SO I’M BEGINNING TO BORE MYSELF (AND DOUBTLESS OTHERS) WITH THE OLD REFRAIN. STILL, I VOICE THESE CRITICISMS FROM A POSITION OF RESPECT FOR THE AUSTRALIAN INDEPENDENT SCENE AND ITS UNREALISED POTENTIAL, WHICH IS WHY IT WAS SO REFRESHING TO ATTENDthe Melbourne international film festival’s AUSTRALIAN SHORT STORIES SESSION.

These weren’t shorts made by superhero writer-directors who think they can do it all, insulting the audience’s intelligence with woeful scripts, lame punch lines, toilet humour and clichéd narrative tricks, and they weren’t shot in such a hyperaware glossy. fashion that I was forced to wonder whether the director wouldn’t be happier making ads. Instead we were presented with genuine, lived-in dramas rooted in experience and a sense of worldly self-awareness. These were films made by people who actually have something to say about their immediate environment, rather than by filmmakers who appear to have little motive other than adding another notch to their showreel by aping overseas trends (trends that are stale by the time they reach these shores anyway).

indigenous short film

Australian Stories, a showcase for Indigenous film, included four animation shorts produced as part of the 12-strong Dust Echoes series that collects Dream Time stories from Arnhem Land, produced by the ABC in association with Deakin University and the Djilpin Arts Aboriginal Corporation. Of these, Mermaid Story (James Calvert, 5mins) was told entirely through music and sound—no narration, no dialogue. Mixing cut-outs, silhouettes and traditional drawing styles, the simple story, about a man who chooses to live with mermaids, thus forsaking his family, was achingly poignant. The Bat and the Butterfly (Dave Jones, 5mins) was perhaps the most impressive. Its characters looked like a cross between gingerbread men, stone carvings and claymation, and the story was told through snatched whisperings and ambient desert sounds, culminating in a powerful tale of cowardice and lack of responsibility versus courage and redemption. Dust Echoes was stunning, with every element in synch, creating a rich, sensory experience—visualising the Dream Time by melding the techniques of the future with the raw emotion of the very distant past.

The live action in Australian Stories was also impressive. Pauline Whyman avoided sentimentality in Back Seat (5mins), a film seen mostly through the blurred POV of the child protagonist, aimed at the Aboriginal family she sees at the end receding through the window of the car driven by her white foster parents. Stark emotional dynamics told the story: close-ups of car locks and windows; a simple Polaroid frame left lingering in the memory.

The hilarious Nana (Warwick Thornton, 5mins) featured a young girl’s comments on the titular oldie, an ancient lady whose good works include beating up alcohol smugglers who threaten the sanctity of her community. In her down time Nana paints, delighting the little girl with her off-the-cuff remark that “I paint the same painting every time. White people wouldn’t know the difference anyway.”

Adrian Wills’ Jackie Jackie (5mins) is a completely warped film about an Aboriginal girl who has to put up with the ghastly prejudices of her white boss at the supermarket where she works. All around her, the robots who work at this place are represented in hypergarish style: blue plastic wigs, clothes in colours that would do Howard Arkley proud. In the end, the boss gets his and the message is clear: stick up for yourself, because self-respect is often all you’ve got. Back Seat, Nana and Jackie Jackie are from the AFC Indigenous Branch’s latest initiative, Bit of Black Business (see page 23).

Darlene Johnson’s Crocodile Dreaming (26mins) starred David Gulpilil as an elder with the power of magic. When his clan’s sacred stone is stolen and thrown into the river, Gulpilil must defy totemic crocodiles to retrieve it. He’s the perfect choice for such an ‘aqua man’, with his ultra-smooth skin and pitch-dark eyes like portals to another dimension. The film is a tour de force, including all the performances (Tom E Lewis is the antagonist); Darlene Johnson is one hell of a filmmaker—the disturbing scene of a crocodile’s revenge and another where one swims quietly above Gulpilil are testimony to that.

When the Natives Get Restless (28min), also from Adrian Wills, is a raw look at an Aboriginal housing estate in Dubbo, a lawless non-place. One resident says, “My life’s not worth living”; another despairs, “I hate Dubbo, hate the estate, hate what it’s done to me.” The point is made that in the city people only hear media versions of what goes on, like a recent riot depicted here. The film takes us beyond that. An interviewee says that ever since settlement black people have not been allowed to work. After you see how subtly and insidiously hardwired this attitude is, you realise this country hasn’t come very far. Here, aggressors come to seem more like victims and we are left shaken with the sense that people are still left to live like this in the 21st century.

animation

The animation component of MIFF 2007 also contained some impressive Australian work. Thomas Fraser’s The Boy Who Loved the Rain (7mins) was a wonderful, impressionistic and atmospheric short, blending all sorts of morphing effects with nature’s rain and the unnatural snow of a TV set, while Susan Danta’s The Bronze Mirror (7mins), based on a Korean folk tale, related with wit, style and grace the story of simple folk bamboozled by their reflection in a mirror. The absence of these two films from the 2007 Melbourne International Animation Festival’s disappointing Australian Panorama, supposedly a showcase of our best recent local talent, is puzzling.

Of the internationals, The Adventures of John & John (William Bishop-Stevens, UK, 7mins) told the story of a couple of geeks who invent a machine that projects thoughts onto a screen. With its fearless crosscutting of variegated animation styles aligned to fierce, black humour and a self-deprecating tone, this one was a cut above. However it was matched by Gitanjali Rao’s Printed Rainbow (India, 16mins), about an elderly Indian lady living in a grey present-day dystopia dreaming of her former life via the multicoloured, psychedelic hues of her matchbox collection, souvenirs of the old country. Taking her cat along for a ride through inner space, she steps into the ultravivid matchbox scenes, perhaps never to return, willing a better life in a transcendental, beautifully rendered testament to the power of the imagination.

Lapsus (Juan Pablo Zaramella, Argentina, 4mins) was loads of fun, its blocky, black-and-white style milking maximum coverage from a nun whose body changes shape and form seemingly against her will. Yours Truly (Osbert Parker, UK, 7mins) was an outstanding noir: found objects from old films and magazines reanimate to provide twisted thrills (think Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid with a Blood Simple sensibility). Spain’s The Lady on the Threshold (Jorge Dayas, 14mins) was disturbing, an unearthly combination of secret sects and voluntary amputation enhanced by the deceptively passive quality of the animation.

experimental

I also caught MIFF’s Experimental Shorts program. Nothing matched the highlight of last year’s session, in which two fat Germans wanked to Mozart. Instead we had Silver Poem (Cristiana Miranda, Brazil, 4mins), a riot of monochrome textures, scratchy film and a great soundtrack. Order-Re-Order (Barbara Doser, Hotstetter Kurt, Austria, 7mins) used video feedback to form all sorts of shapes from cellular blobs of light. It was like diving into a dissected brain to the accompaniment of phased, symphonic, loop-locked music. Stuart Gurden’s Harmonium (UK, 9mins) also played perceptual games, using visual and aural tape loops to create complex inter-rhythms that slowly resolved themselves into a Terry Riley piece overlaid with spoken text by Kurt Vonnegut. Harrachov (Matt Hulse, Joost Van Veen, P Esther Urlus, UK & Netherlands, 10mins) was old school, visually reminiscent of Nosferatu, all stop motion and time lapses, with its depiction of a machine assembling itself. That’s a clichéd theme, but the addition of shots of nature also assembling itself—clouds moving, water rippling—lent the film a timeless quality that was beguiling.

Finally, I’d like to note Paul Winkler’s Popkitsch (Australia, 17mins), a hellish mishmash of the tackiest cultural refuse: a midi soundtrack of “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go” set to flipbook-style animations of kewpie dolls, photos of Hawaiian muscle hunks endlessly replayed, coagulating into a poptrash, shapeless blur…This film sums up the maddening quality of MIFF’s experimental shorts: that thrill of recognition tempered by utter, infuriating banality that makes you question your very will to live with the crushing, yet sometimes bizarrely uplifting, boredom of it all.

THE 2007 BRISBANE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL WAS A CONDENSED AFFAIR OWING TO SWEEPING INSTITUTIONAL CHANGES. DESPITE THE PARTICULARLY BRUTE ILLOGIC WITH WHICH THE NEOLIBERALIST AXE SWUNG THIS TIME AROUND, THE 16TH FESTIVAL NONETHELESS DELIVERED SOME VITALLY SIGNIFICANT FILM EXPERIENCES TO A CITY UNDERGOING AN UNPRECEDENTED FLOURISHING OF FILM CULTURE. OF PARTICULAR NOTE AT THIS YEAR’S BIFF WAS A COMPACT BUT EXCEPTIONAL SUITE OF FILMS FROM THE BROADER ARAB WORLD, WHICH SERVED TO NUANCE AND COMPLICATE OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE PLURALITY OF TRADITIONS IN THIS ‘OTHER’ CINEMA.

mainline

The emergent female sensibility among the thrilling discoveries in these films was particularly evident in the searing Iranian feature Mainline (Khoon Bazi). This harrowing account of a mother’s desperate attempt to get her heroin-addicted daughter clean in time for the young woman’s impending wedding deliberately raises thorny and highly relevant questions of bondage, dependency and fulfillment in a national cinema known more for, as Frances Bonner has put it, “lushness and poetic ellipses” than the investigation of social problems. Co-directed by Rakhstan Bani-Estemad, whose daughter Baran Kosari plays the main character, Sara, it is a powerful addition to the canon of films largely by and about women and a unique glimpse of middle-class life in Tehran, which is revealed to share the same agonies as any urban centre. Shot in mainly black and white, bar occasional flares of orange for counterpoint, Mainline’s formal beauty never aestheticises its subject, serving instead as an elegant frame for the central grimness of its theme.

barakat

!
Female solidarity, or more precisely, its challenges, is the theme of the Algerian film Barakat! (Enough!, Djamila Sahraoui). This bold film turns on the unlikely alliance forged by two women doctors, Amel and Khadija, when Amel’s husband is captured by militants. Amel, young and idealistic, is contrasted with the battle-hardened Khadija, a veteran of the independence war against the French. As played by Fettouma Bouamari, Khadija, whose gender now separates her from the male guerillas she once fought with shoulder to shoulder, is a magnetic personality. A carefully-calibrated mix of roguish irreverence and coruscating cynicism, her contempt for all dogmas reminds us of the plurality of positions and experiences in Arab cultures. As an Arab film, directed by a woman, whose narrative hinges on the intergenerational tensions between these two formidable, professional women, Barakat! survives the slightly heavy-handed treatment of its ending to offer a potent take on the challenges for post-colonial peoples in neo-fundamentalist times.

truth and beyond

Revising Islam to reflect local culture is the theme of several ‘outsider’ films at the festival, including the thought-provoking documentary, Truth and Beyond (Ahmed Muztaba Zamal), which highlights the centrality of music in Bangladeshi spiritual practice. The film’s prologue explains that Bangladesh is home to two distinct branches of Islam, textual Islam and the little-discussed ‘indigenous Islam.’ The latter predates textual Islam in Bangladesh, and involves practices unique to the region that diverge significantly from those of orthodox Islam. Truth and Beyond explores the ecstatic musical celebrations and community gatherings that characterise this indigenous faith and constitute its otherness from the anti-musical piety of the orthodox tradition. Memorable scenes include improvised musical debates in remote villages; a visit to the followers of the prophet Lalon who embrace Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam equally; and a glimpse into the moving ceremony known as the Urs of Saidur Rahman Bayati of Waecia Tarika, where worshippers reduced to tears embrace each other.
Rumi: the Poetry of Islam

rumi: the poetry of islam

Truth and Beyond formed part of a charming body of films celebrating the legacy of the mystical Persian poet Rumi, among which the remarkable Dervish feature film, Takva: a Man’s Fear of God (Özer Kiziltan), stood out for its gripping examination of the clash of economics, conscience and spirituality (see Megan Carrigy’s response, RT80, p30). Rumi: the Poetry of Islam is a low-key enquiry into the life of this most enduring and well-loved Persian poet. This docu-drama announces its ‘otherness’ from the codified forms of non-fiction film via an almost absurdly dramatic English voiceover and proceeds to ‘cast’ two very different Muslims, a Bosnian pilgrim and an Iranian musician, to portray key scenes from Rumi’s life. These re-enactments are rather awkward and jarring at first, but become increasingly endearing as the film progresses. The friction caused by these atypical, seemingly untutored techniques serves to refresh our conception of the documentary’s scope, and activates our understanding of the lived practices of both spirituality and poetry. By the end, the interviews with scholars, Imams and Rumi acolytes build a compelling argument that Rumi’s work (among the best-selling poetry in the US) can act as a bridge between Islam and the West.

the road beneath the skies

In the folklore mode, the most exhilarating experience, however, was delivered by the extraordinary Uzbekistani film The Road Beneath the Skies (Kamara Kamalova). The film purges the dour realist style of its Soviet heritage for a stubbornly specific local expression which resonates with the poetic work of fellow Central Asian auteur Sergei Paradjanov. The narrative about love and loss, told in dance-allegorical form, is striking in its lush colour—particularly gold, lavender, red, and green—which enhances the profoundly surrealistic sequences threaded through the film. For audiences unschooled in the folkloric traditions of Uzbekistan, it is difficult to know when the material drawn from traditional tales ends and when the filmmaker’s own fabulist inventions begin, such is the alchemy of this fusion of folklore and the filmmaker’s recollected dreams. The quiet poise of the film’s venerable female director and her warm responses to a rapt audience after the screening mirrored the creative assurance of this unforgettable film.

…and some mexican bunuel

Another rare opportunity was presented by the festival’s superb retrospective of Luis Bunuel’s Mexican films. Los Olvidados, Bunuel’s first film in ‘exile,’ is a tragedy that follows a group of street kids surviving the slums of Mexico City. Bunuel’s subversion of neo-realist conventions with the insertion of surrealist interjections serves not to decentre but rather illuminate the characters’ troubled inner lives. Simon of the Desert discards realism altogether, using the story of the saint to explore some favourite themes. As the anchorite maintains a desert vigil atop his pillar, he is met with increasingly ludicrous temptations until an overspent Bunuel “suddenly uses the Devil’s frequent flyer points to joyride his protagonist into a 1960s beat bar” (in Quentin Turnour’s memorable words), abruptly truncating this dizzying parable and concluding Bunuel’s Mexican career.

Despite the brutality of the funding cuts, BIFF managed to triumph on the basis of inspired, sometimes audacious selections. The enthusiastic responses of the large audiences—to so many of the films that weren’t new releases from David Lynch—provided what is to be, hopefully, a satisfying confirmation of the old adage about the best form of vengeance being success.

16th Brisbane International Film Festival; Regent Cinema; Palace Centro Cinemas; Australian Cinematheque, GoMA, Brisbane, August 2-12, www.biff.com.au

Matthew Saville’s feature film Noise on DVD

Noise is a sharply observed, suspenseful and often quietly funny account of a naive young policeman (Graham McGann played superbly by Brendan Cowell) struggling with tinnitus, incipient deafness and the fear of something worse, like a tumour. He’s unknowingly on a fateful journey amidst murder investigations in suburban Australia. With the tinnitus as their starting point, Saville, composer Bryony Marks and sound designer Emma Bortignon, have created one of the most involving, haunting and deeply integrated sound worlds in Australian cinema. See the review, page 24.

Noise, Retro Active Films, Australian distributor Madman Films
5 copies courtesy of Madman Films

Coil: percussionist Claire Edwardes' first solo CD

Having just seen Claire Edwardes performing with great subtlety in the bracing Song Company/Ensemble Offspring Cage Uncaged celebration and, a week before, in a superb concert in duet with guitarist Geoffrey Morris, i was eager to immerse myself in the percussionist’s first CD, titled Coil after the magical first track, composed by Gerard Brophy. My expectations of textured, nuanced and characterful playing were fully met. See page 48 for review and read Danielle Carey’s interview with Edwardes on page 14.
5 copies courtesy of Tall Poppies CDs

Absolutely Wilson: the Robert Wilson
documentary on DVD

For those who missed Robert Wilson’s surprisingly animated, performative and very funny talk about his life, art and career at the 2006 Sydney Festival, Absolute Wilson (2006), a generous 105-minute documentary by Katharina Otto-Bernstein, is more than compensation. The film offers a talkative Wilson, words from Tom Waits, Susan Sontag (who saw every performance of some works), William Burroughs, David Byrne, Phillip Glass and others, along with images and tantalising footage from many shows.
See page 34.
6 copies courtesy of DV1

Nominate ONE ONLY of the above and email us at realtime@realtimearts.net with your name,
postal address and telephone number.
Please include “Giveaway” and the name of the item on the subject line.

AS THE CONFIDENCE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION CONTINUES TO EXPAND ON BOTH ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL FRONTS THE YOUNG DEMOCRACY FINDS ITSELF ENTERING A NEW AND EXCITING CHAPTER. HAVING SURMOUNTED THE HUMILIATIONS OF COLD WAR DEFEAT AND OVERCOME THE PURGATORIAL RITE OF BEGGING TO WESTERN POWERBROKERS, MODERN RUSSIA NOW FACES THOSE BURNING QUESTIONS OF IDENTITY MET BY ALL EMPOWERED ADOLESCENTS: WHO AM I? WHERE DID I COME FROM? WHAT DO I WANT TO BE? AND PERHAPS MOST IMPORTANTLY, WHAT DO I WANT OTHERS TO THINK OF ME? IT IS WITH THESE QUESTIONS IN MIND THAT CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN FILMS CAN BE UNDERSTOOD AS PERFORMING AN IMPORTANT DEFINITIONAL FUNCTION.

Since the dawn of the Soviet state, when Lenin supposedly declared cinema to be “the most important art”, Russian filmmakers have borne an exceptional degree of cultural responsibility. Their task is to somehow provide a coherent picture of the largest country on Earth, to express the varied sentiments of the nation’s ethnically disparate and geographically isolated populations while at the same time showing the rest of the world what a centralised and resolute place Russia really is. To achieve this aim the Russian film industry has typically produced an extremely varied output of features. Sophisticated art films and literary adaptations designed for the nation’s urban elites and European festivals are counterbalanced with unpretentious genre pictures: war films, science-fictions and, more recently, melodramas and romantic comedies. Such diversity was again evident last month at the 4th Annual Russian Resurrection Film Festival where the most opaque of existential meditations played comfortably alongside the most formulaic of swashbucklers.

euphoria

At the serious end of this year’s program were two directorial debuts that have garnered considerable praise internationally—Michael Segal’s Franz and Polina and Ivan Vyrypaev’s Euphoria (winner of the Little Golden Lion at Venice and the Grand Prix for Best Film at Warsaw). The latter is a small budget chamber piece that presents a ‘Russiafied’ version of the nihilistic road-movie genre so prevalent in the American independent cinema of the 1980s and 90s. Set in mid-summer amidst the yellow vastness of the Russian steppes, Euphoria’s drama—if that’s what it can be called—centres on a love affair between married mother Vera and the nomadic Pasha and the retribution suffered upon them by Vera’s older, alcoholic and thus hard-done-by husband. An impressionistic work with minimal dialogue, Euphoria conveys its themes of desire and metaphysical abandon less through plot than through sweeping movements of emotion. Otherworldly images, wondrously captured by cinematographer Andrei Naidenov, develop in unison with a superb score by Aider Gainlin to produce an experiential narrative, one in which the viewer’s understanding of the film is less a matter of comprehending the story than of intimately feeling the mise-en-scene, of sensing the atmosphere. At once deeply cynical and texturally beautiful, Euphoria signals a new kind of sentiment germinating in Russia today (one we have already seen in Kirill Serebrennikov’s recent black comedy Playing the Victim). Detached from tradition, here only the present survives, and through it the characters drift aimlessly, content not to think about it. “Thinking”, Euphoria informs us, “only makes it worse.”

franz and polina

More focussed and, I think, rewarding is Michael Segal’s Franz and Polina, so far the winner of Best Film awards at Biarritz and Listopad. Another tragic love story, it tells of an incommunicable bond between a Bellorussian peasant girl and a young German soldier during the tail-end of World War II, at a time when Nazi forces retreating from the Russian front incinerated the inhabitants and villages of occupied East European territories. Perhaps unforgivably naïve to his rulers’ intentions, when Franz suddenly finds himself implicated in the slaughter of innocents he turns traitor to the Nazi cause and escapes with Polina, running a gauntlet of war and merciless winter cold. Plumbing the lower depths of humanity, Franz and Polina (like the best of Russian films) frames its largely speechless human drama in wider horizons, tenuously maintaining an affirmation of life through vivid expressions of natural light and a focus on the living substance of the Earth itself. A finely crafted and beautiful work, it marks the arrival of a considerable talent in director Segal.

beat the enemy

Another film drenched in the Russian love of nature is 80-year-old Vitali Melinkov’s semi-autobiographical comedy Beat the Enemy. Also set in the dying days of World War II, it follows a ragtag propaganda unit’s mission to spread the word of imminent Soviet victory to isolated communities dotted along a remote Siberian river. Standing before Orthodox pacifists, bawdy fisherwomen and the ‘People’s Enemies’ of Soviet gulags, the team present the state’s message with varying degrees of success, prompting premature celebrations from some and the unwavering disdain of others. A gentle comedy, like cheering up a grief-stricken loved one, Beat the Enemy defuses its nation’s deeply troubled memories of totalitarianism with a well-worn Russian strategy. Ideologues (the source of all human suffering) are rendered as morons while the normal folk simply go about life as best they can under the shadow of ridiculous tyranny. Not a flawless approach by any means—after all, bullets have a habit of tearing through denial—but nevertheless one way to maintain a degree of dignity in the face of unfathomable cruelty. Beat the Enemy had its international debut at the festival, opening the seasons in Melbourne and Adelaide.

day watch

Now to the populist end of this year’s program, and to two films, Day Watch and Wolfhound, that emphatically signal Russian cinema’s ascension to a new level of high budget filmmaking. The hotly anticipated sequel to the huge international success Night Watch, Timur Bekmambetov’s Day Watch, picks up where the first film left off, utilising a wilfully daft narrative premise involving a shaky truce between good and evil vampires simply as a launching pad for delirious outbursts of cartoon violence and manic stylistics. A wild and genuinely funny ride, Day Watch is more expensive and ambitious than the original, layering its Gilliamesque world with a technical maximalism reminiscent of Hong Kong director Tsui Hark and the surface level aesthetics of the cinéma du look. At times verging on pure abstraction in its sound and colour designs, what Day Watch lacks in terms of characterisation and narrative logic drifts by inconspicuously beneath a lovingly woven fabric of cinematic excess. Less a story than a sideshow, Day Watch is yet another example of the contemporary action film’s reversion to the early cinema of attractions: an incomprehensible pleasure which will no doubt draw the young’ns away from their gaming consoles when Fox Searchlight distributes it nationally in October.

wolfhound

Unfortunately, the same kind of praise cannot be bestowed upon Nikolai Lebedev’s equally ludicrous sword and sorcery epic Wolfhound, which, somewhat inappropriately, opened the festival in Sydney. Adapted from the best selling novel by Maria Semenova, the film contains all the elements you would expect from something of this kind: a revenge driven hero, a blind magician sidekick, a benevolent princess, her conniving cousin, a powerful phantom menace, a fairy godmother, potentially disastrous setbacks on the way to victory and a delightful pet bat thrown in for good measure. Alas, the ingredients alone don’t make the soup, and where Wolfhound abounds in good intentions it remains seriously lacking in the sophistication of character and wit that international audiences now expect from such romps. Although a massive domestic success, this bell won’t ring in the West; further proof that when Russia tries to emulate the US it always comes off second best.

up off its knees

Other new films to feature on the festival’s programme included Andrei Eshpai’s
menopausal romance Ellipsis, Igor Maslennikov’s costume satire Russian Money, Rezo Gigineishvili’s sex comedy Heat and Pavel Lunghin’s monastic drama The Island, which I reviewed earlier [RT77, p19]. A disparate mix to say the least, but in all a strong indication of a national industry “getting up off its knees” (to use a current national slogan) and moving on with confidence. It’s been a long time down and out for Russia, from Stalin to Brezhnev to Putin. Now it seems the time has come for its resurrection.

4th Annual Russian Resurrection Film Festival, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Canberra, Aug 30-Sept 16

IN THE WAKE OF TROPFEST, INCREASINGLY SHORT SHORT-FILMMAKING HAS BECOME A FECUND TRAINING GROUND FOR WOULD-BE FILMMAKERS AND OTHER FANTASISTS USING LOW COST, HIGH-TECH EQUIPMENT AND FILLING THE LISTS OF EVER PROLIFERATING SHORT FILM FESTIVALS OR BROADCASTING THEIR DIY ON YOUTUBE AND ELSEWHERE. WILL A VIABLE MARKET FOR SHORT FILM ONLINE, ON-PHONE, IN I-POD EMERGE IN TANDEM WITH THE RUSH OF SERIOUS NEW MAKERS? PERHAPS THE AUSTRALIAN FILM COMMISSION’S INDIGENOUS BRANCH THINKS SO.

The wonderful short films of 10-30 minutes (and several 50 minute features) that came out of the AFC Indigenous Branch’s Sand to Celluloid initiative over some 12 years provided evidence of a talented generation putting to good use the carefully constructed programs and partnerships available to it (involving the AFC, SBSi, FTO, Film Australia and other screen organisations and committed individual producers). The Indigenous Branch’s latest initiative, however, has gone with the trend, commissioning 13 five-minute films, offering more opportunities for a larger number of mostly emerging filmmakers than the three to six films made for each of the earlier programs.

Aptly titled Bit of Black Business, the films made for the initiative are precisely that, works tackling issues that continue to preoccupy Aboriginal people and their filmmakers. They attempt to sustain a collective sense of culture and individual dignity, often against great odds, but not without wry humour. In this collection, there’s a marked sense of the viewer engaging face to face with the characters. It’s as if, in grappling with limited duration, the makers have for the greater part decided to work intimately, creating brief narrative episodes from larger lives and shooting often in close-up and frequently with faces looking into the camera. The point of view of children, adolescents and young adults is recurrent as they admire or are mystified by or painfully detached from people much older than themselves.

In Michel Blanchard’s Custard, a young woman visits her home in beautiful waterside country to see her grandmother whom in the voiceover she recalls as tiny and unwell, but also how she made custard for the family. The house is not one she recalls lovingly, deploring the memory of a sick old grandfather shuffling about in the night. She sits with the grandmother in the kitchen and then by the water, the depressed older woman worrying at what killed her husband—alcohol, cancer, schizophrenia (“We’ll all get it now. Oh well, what’s one more thing?”). Back in the kitchen, the young woman pretends to read to her grandmother from the death certificate: “You know what killed him? Acute custardisation.” They laugh and, for a moment, the darkness is dispelled. It’s all that can be done and perhaps it’s enough. She leaves. Murray Lui’s cinematography glows with the glitter of sun on the water and there’s almost a sense of nostalgia in the warmth of the light on the greens and browns of the countryside. It’s just right in tempering the sadness the film generates, that sense of melancholy about the distance between the older and the younger woman. Wisely avoiding dramatic action and focussing on stillness and reflection, Custard makes its five minutes feel satisfyingly full.

Martin Leroy Adams’ Days Like These vividly portrays a growing sense of despair in the face of racism as a young black boxer, urged by his mother to find work as the household bills accumulate, barely gets to first base on most of his interviews despite looking good and behaving well. He has no criminal record but the fact that his father is in prison is enough to guarantee rejection. Beaten up by hostile white boys, he is found by cops, one of whom growls, “Hello, monkey.” It’s a brisk, blunt film, shot with a casual documentary feel. The opening, with the boy in a boxing ring, has him punching at us in extreme close-up. It’s a confronting image and the rest of the film suggests where his anger and strength might be coming from.

Back Seat by Pauline Whyman is one of the strongest films in the collection. It opens with us face to face with a 12-year-old girl in the back seat of a flash American car on her way with her white foster parents to see her Aboriginal mother, brothers and sisters. As in Custard, there’s a feeling of disconnection, again kept at a distance from melodrama and textured with a touch of nostalgia—the car, the stepmother’s hairstyle and the black mother’s home furnished with middleclass thoroughness, intriguing artworks and nicknacks and populated with neat children.

Back Seat deftly lets the story tell itself in close-ups of the girl. She doesn’t get to speak for herself—her stepmother over-eagerly listing the child’s school achievements, crowning it inadvertantly with “I don’t know where she gets it from”). The girl is too shy to communicate with her siblings who giggle at her, so she seeks refuge in the back seat of the car, winding up the window, shutting herself off from the mystery that is her life. A sister cajoles her to return for a group photo, a Polaroid shot which she fingers softly as, soon, the car pulls away and she looks longingly out the rear window. Back Seat implicates the viewer with a heightened subjectivity as we come face to face with an emotionally impossible situation, but at least there’s affection and yearning even if the distance between the child and her real family seems vast. It’s a very different account of a Stolen Generation life, but the same sad story nonetheless and based on the filmmaker’s own. (See also p19.)

Warwick Thorton is an experienced cinematographer (Radiance and many short films) and writer-director (Green Bush). Nana is his tribute to Aboriginal grandmothers. He said, on the opening night of 2007 Message Sticks Film Festival at the Sydney Opera House, venerable Nanas can do what they wish and they can be ‘wicked.’ Again, the point of view is a child’s, a five-year-old, the camera alternating between her and Nana, facing us as they see each other: Nana cooking, later Nana taking food to older people in the district, Nana conning white buyers of Indigenous art, Nana, rifle in hand, catching food (a volley of shots and a close-up of the bodies of wallabies and lizards slapped onto the bonnet of her car), Nana and an aunty on night patrol apprehending alcohol smugglers, throwing the booze into the bush and mercilessly beating up the offenders with big sticks. In a reverse shot the little girl, sitting in the car, looks on, bemused, admiring. The film is a little comic shocker made with electrifying assurance.

Jacob Nash’s Bloodlines is a simple but effective account of a young man building up the courage to telephone the mother from whom he was separated as a child. But we don’t know that until the end of the film. He lives in a stylish, comfortable apartment. He’s naked except for shorts, amplifying his vulnerability, and nervous, the soundtrack beating like a heart. He puts off approaching or even picking up the phone. We look into his face and then, with him, at the photographs of the white family of which he is a part but, at the same time, not. Nash’s approach is simple but focused and intense.

In Kelli Cross’ The Turtle, a boy in early adolesence, withdrawn, baseball cap over his eyes, earphones plugged in, arrives in a remote coastal town where he’s picked up by an uncle who takes him to where his father lived. The lone possesion is a tortoise shell: “all he left behind.” The boy won’t budge. He’s here because he’s been in trouble, presumably with the law. When his uncle can’t start his boat, the boy starts it for him, is persuaded to go out on the water and then, astonished to suddenly find himself in the water at his uncle’s prompting, flips over a turtle, thus disabling it. In a mere moment he has reconnected, however tenuously, with his father and his culture. Like Custard and Back Seat, the mood is reflective and considered, although here there’s a sense of release despite the enormous distance between son and dead father.

Sharpeye by Aaron Fa’aaso is an intruiging tale of a 12-year-old Torres Strait Ilsander boy playing spy for the local army reservists when their island is invaded during a military exercise by Special Forces. The plot is slight and we learn little about the boy, but we do get a strong sense of the pride of these part-time soldiers (elaborately uniformed and equipped with the best) and especially of their joy in victory, which they dance like their warrior forbears.

Trisha Morton-Thomas’ Kwayte has its moments and again they’re built around a child, here a three-year-old. It’s her birthday and her father has arrived home in the morning with a hangover. His wife won’t speak to him and his little daughter supplies him with glasses of water, one after the other, which intially he needs and later feels obliged to accept and which it turns out she has taken from the toilet bowl. The apparently benign “little princess” with her crown and wand has punished her delinquent father—but will she transform him? The ending feels a little thin, but the film’s construction is tight, and the little girl is engaging.

Adrian Wills’ Jackie Jackie has the look of a John Waters movie. An Aboriginal girl, Jinaali, works on the checkout in a sleek supermarket, Sunnyshine, otherwise staffed with glam white checkout chicks in plastic wigs. She hangs up a cardboard sign over her cash register saying “Equal Opportunity Line” and accrues a long ultra-multicultural queue of customers. But our heroine’s appoach is too casual for the grumpy store manager, who would prefer “ladies’ best friend” to “tampon” for her amplified price check. After he castigates her in front of the customers, Jinaali unleashes an Anthony Mundine toy on the manager and then tackles him herself, joyfully denouncing him as racist. It’s light as a souffle and good to look at, but the dialogue is clunky and the film is not as funny or political as it could be, but Wills has a certain verve. (See also p19.)

Of the 10 films in this collection that particularly appealed to me (a high ratio for a 13-film set), some handled their five minutes better than others, but most avoided the temptation to make economy versions of feature films, still a common impulse in short filmmaking where the product is seen as a stepping stone to greater things. The directors were certainly blessed with the guidance of producer Kath Shelper and the mature artistry of the cinematographers, editors and sound staff who worked with them in generating spare narratives and strong images in mere screen minutes. Bit of Black Business does its emerging talent proud, doubtless encouraging the emergence of another generation of fine filmmakers.

AFC Indigenous Branch, Bit of Black Business, directors Martin Leroy Adams, Jon Bell, Michelle Blanchard, Kelli Cross, Dena Curtis, Aaron Fa’aoso, Debbie Gittens, Michael Longbottom, Jacob Nash, Trisha Morton-Thomas, Warwick Thornton, Pauline Whyman and Adrian Wills, producer Kath Shelper, Film Depot, Indigenous Branch of the Australian Film Commission, SBS Independent, New South Wales Film and Television Office and ScreenWest, 2007

WRITER-DIRECTOR MATTHEW SAVILLE HAS REALISED THE PROMISE HE SHOWED IN ROY HOLSDOTTER LIVE (52MINS, 2003) WITH NOISE (108MINS, 2007), A SHARPLY OBSERVED, SUSPENSEFUL AND OFTEN QUIETLY FUNNY ACCOUNT OF A NAIVE YOUNG POLICEMAN (GRAHAM MCGANN PLAYED SUPERBLY BY BRENDAN COWELL) STRUGGLING WITH TINNITUS, INCIPIENT DEAFNESS AND THE FEAR OF SOMETHING WORSE, LIKE A TUMOUR. HE’S UNKNOWINGLY ON A FATEFUl JOURNEY AMIDST MURDER INVESTIGATIONS IN SUBURBAN AUSTRALIA. WITH THE TINNITUS AS THEIR STARTING POINT, SAVILLE, COMPOSER BRYONY MARKS AND SOUND DESIGNER EMMA BORTIGNON; HAVE CREATED ONE OF THE MOST INVOLVING, HAUNTING AND DEEPLY INTEGRATED SOUND WORLDS IN AUSTRALIAN CINEMA.

Noise warrants a more detailed response to its construction, cinematography and performances than I can offer here. I want to focus on the sound. There’s a handful of Australian films in which sound plays a significantly heightened role. I admired Kiss or Kill (1997) directed by Bill Bennett with its heightened buzz of the outback, of wind and wire, for being eerily music-less (sound design Wayne Pashley, Toivo Lember, Gethin Creagh, Best Achievement in Sound, AFI Award 1997). A friend reminded me recently that the sense of interiority achieved in Rolf de Heer’s claustrophobic Bad Boy Bubby (1993) had been created in part by using a binaural head microphone (sound design James Currie, microphone engineer Frederick Stahl). In Matthew Saville’s Noise, Graham’s aural world and ours, alternates between sharply etched everyday sounds (trains squeal, a spoon in a cup clatters, a toy car roars, a street light buzzes) and the painful high, thin hum of the policeman’s tinnitus, competing with and muting the world.

The music score too has a wiry hum, filling out, as the tension builds, with a deep, dark ostinato. Through-composed, it moves deftly across narrative strands (not all the scenes focus on Graham) connecting episodes and enhancing a sense of continuity and escalating tension.

Small details relating to sound are threaded through the narrative—the murder witness wears headphones, one of the reasons she doesn’t at first see the bodies littering the carriage she enters (in later flashbacks to this episode we hear the high treble screech from the phones when she pulls them off); Graham says he’s not getting a signal on his walkie-talkie in the railway station; his girlfriend is gradually revealed to be a trombonist in a police band; she offers a theory of phasing to suggest a way his condition might be treated; words are calculatedy misheard (a senior cop replaces tinnitus with tinea). In contrast to these moments or a momentary focus on a sound (often with a close-up of the object—a grasscutter, a fax machine) there are three key events which envelope Graham and come close to overwhelming us with their sonic intensity.

Distraught with the pressures of home, job and his intermittent but growing deafness, Graham turns on everything in his apartment that can make a noise—radios, alarms, TVs, taps and a giant sound system and sits amidst it all, expressionless, face to face with us, sharing the roar but also an inescapable, tourtuous high pitched whine. In a subsequent episode he finds himself in a sudden fog of deafness, panicky, fighting off his girlfriend’s reassuring touch and, like us, unable to make out her distant blurred words. In the film’s climax, the murderer fires a shotgun into the police caravan that Graham inhabits for a good part of the film (a little sonic cosmos in itself). The blast deafens Graham and, as the killer pursues him and the policeman fires back, we enter two aural realms at once. It’s as if we’re in the deafened man’s occluded world while at the same time taking in the escalating aggregation of Carols by Candlelight (where the girlfriend is playing) on the police caravan televison, Graham’s high whimpering as he struggles to reload his gun, a locked car horn, a baby crying and finally a police helicopter roaring above, its spotlight cast down on Graham like a ray from heaven, offering grace.

The sound we hear now above all is of words recalled from a few scenes earlier when, in a philosophical moment, Graham mused over the prospect of eternal life after death. He speculated that in the “nanoseconds of dying…if all the time you were a fuckwit” you’d be doomed “to be a fuck-knuckle for eternity.” But “if all the time you managed in your life not to be an embrassment, that would be heaven.” In the end Graham is a hero. Our growing empathy for this apparently obtuse young man, out of kilter with his job and his partner, but whose quiet wit has become evident in exchanges with nightshift visitors to the caravan, has been principally developed through virtuosic deployment of sound and music evolving out of and working in perfect tandem with Matthew Saville’s expert script and by placing us deep inside the aural action.

Noise, writer, director Matthew Saville, cinematographer László Baranyai, editor Geoff Hitchins, composer Bryony Marks, sound design Emma Bortignon, producer Trevor Blainey, Retro Active Films, Australian distributor Madman Films

THIS YEAR’S WORLD OF WOMEN (WOW) FESTIVAL OPENS WITH TWO VERY DIFFERENT FILM EXPERIENCES. IN ROSALIND GILLESPIE’S CLIMBERS, A GROUP OF WOMEN TACKLE DEMONS, INCLUDING INNER ONES, AS THEY ATTEMPT TO SCALE MT EVEREST. IN DARLENE JOHNSON’S CROCODILE DREAMING, THE POWER OF A MOTHER’S TOTEM IMPACTS ON THE LIVES OF HER SONS EVEN AFTER HER DEATH.

Climbers (16mm, 29 minutes) was made in 1980 and features the work of Margaret Barr, the influential choreographer and teacher who worked in Sydney from the 1950s creating a body of work motivated by strong social and political concerns. Barr’s 1976 dance drama is restaged and filmed in her studio using ladders, ropes and platforms to depict the tortuous journey. The allegory of women’s struggle for liberation is infused with heroics, acrobatics and some bracing 80s feminism.

In Darlene Johnson’s Crocodile Dreaming (26 mins), the rhythm of a tale spanning time immemorial is cleverly intercut with cultural complexity, full-on suspense and some impressive effects. We’re invited into a private realm reminiscent of David Gulpilil’s own in which the keeper of the clan’s knowledge is also a film star. In a jokey scene, we see Gulpilil abandoning his role in an advertising campaign for more serious matters in his other world, back home, where his half-brother, played strongly by Tom E Lewis, is paying the price for messing with the natural order.

The WOW program offers emerging and established female filmmakers the opportunity to enter short works (up to 55 minutes and from any genre) within a thematic perspective of “seeing the world through the eyes of women.” The weekend of October 25-26 will be a celebratory gathering and a showcase for the talents of female directors, producers, writers, editors and cinematographers in the Australian film industry and in Oceania. On Friday night, 25 October, the finalists in the short film festival will be screened and awards presented.

This year, following the festival, the WOW Tour, comprising four curated screen programs including the finalists in the competition, will travel to over 18 national, regional and remote locations in Australia.

A forum, “From Conception to Screen” will be held on Friday afternoon where industry guest speakers will explore the skills and processes required to progress an idea from its conception to a final product shown on screen, via mobile phones or as a website download. Guest speakers will be videoed and a DVD made for screening/discussion along with industry programs to accompany the WOW touring event.

A selection of works from the Mobile Journeys exhibition curated by d/Lux/Media Arts/ will be featured in the foyer. This exhibition highlights new mobile telephone technologies linking with filmmaking genres. A Bluetooth Zone where exhibition creative pieces will be “zapped” directly to guests’ mobile phones for viewing will be a feature of the exhibition. There is also a new category: an iDRINX award and prize for the best viral, a short film/video up to three minutes in length designed for internet viewing.

WOW Festival 2007, Chauvel Cinema, Sydney Thursday-Friday 25-26 October. For more information: Sil-Nyin Cameron, Festival Director/Co-ordinator wowfilmfestival@nsw.wift.org

IN THIS YEAR’S DOCUMENTA IN KASSEL, GERMANY, HITO STEYERL SHOWED THREE WORKS: JOURNAL NO 1—AN ARTIST’S IMPRESSION; LOVELY ANDREA; AND RED ALERT. THESE REVEAL THE IMPORTANT CONTRIBUTION THAT STEYERL, A GERMAN BASED ARTIST OF JAPANESE HERITAGE, IS MAKING TO FILM PRODUCTION WITHIN A CONTEMPORARY ART CONTEXT.

Artistic film, as opposed to video installation, sits uneasily in the exhibition framework. While video installations often have a rhizomatic structure, viewed as easily in the beginning, middle or end, the more linear time structure of film, which requires a viewer to be present at the beginning and stay at least for most of the film, has presented some exhibition challenges. This year the artistic director of Documenta 12, Roger Beurgel, claimed to have solved the problem by returning film to the cinema, offering an extensive program in conjunction with the main exhibition.

Steyerl’s innovative and challenging work has ensured its being primarily viewed within an art rather than a cinema context. Even in Documenta 12 her two longest video works were exhibited as projections in the key exhibition venues. Steyerl’s work stood out as unique given the marked decline in film work as a whole between Documenta 11 and 12, especially for the form of film Steyerl has been most interested in—documentary. In an interview with her in Berlin in June this year, she explained to me, “there has been a tremendous, conservative backlash in parts of the art world aimed at socially engaged art, which was subsumed under the derogatory identifier ‘documentary’ as opposed to ‘art’.”

Steyerl is quick to point out that mainstream documentaries should not be discussed as ‘art’, unless there is experimentation or formal contestation of the form of documentary making. She remains interested in works which challenge our preconceptions of what a documentary should do. Her own works have consistently explored ideas such as the relationship between fiction and truth, viewer, subject and filmmaker, and the subjective and objective within the documentary cannon. As she explained in a recent article “Documentary Uncertainty”, “terms like ‘truth’, ‘reality’ and ‘objectivity’ and so on are characterized by the lack of any generally valid interpretation and of any clear cut definitions. Thus we are faced with the first paradox: the documentary form which is supposed to transmit knowledge in a transparent and clear way has to be investigated using conceptual tools which are neither clear nor transparent.”

Journal No. 1—An Artist’s Impression deliberately explores this very paradox. Journal No 1 was the title of the first monthly Bosnian newsreel made in 1947 which was lost in 1993 during the Yugoslav war. This newsreel shows, among other things, images of Muslim women learning to read and write in the secular post-war Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito. In her film, Steyerl attempts to reconstruct the newsreel by inviting two staff members from Film Museum Sarajevo to recount its contents to an artist, Arman Kulasic, who sketches their memories. The two accounts of the missing newsreel, however, differ both in the recollection of its contents and its eventual fate. Steyerl then attempts to find the missing film in a search across the new post-war Croatia.

Steyerl eventually finds the newsreel in a house it was taken to for safe storage. But it was burnt in the war, its charred condition rendering it unwatchable: the ‘truth’ of the accounts of this newsreel thus remaining forever unverifiable. The film ends with the artist Arman Kulasic explaining his own experiences of ethnic cleansing during the war and his difficulties in getting a visa to travel to the USA after 9/11 because of his Muslim background. Steyerl’s detective-like search for truth thus ends up creating as many questions on the nature of documentary making as it does on the Yugoslav war and war more broadly.

But while Steyerl is interested in exploring the murky relationship between the representation of fact and fiction in documentaries she is not interested in abandoning the quest for truth altogether. She explains that truth, “as constructed or artificial as it might be”, is the “precondition of any political sphere which deserves this name.” She goes on to say that “as Hannah Arendt pointed out truth is indispensable in political terms. Arendt didn’t mean absolute truth, but simply an agreement about material facts. If this is jeopardised then we have a huge political problem.” So while Journal No. 1—An Artist’s Impression may complicate our preconceived ideas about the Yugoslav war and historical and contemporary documentary making, it does not give up on the idea of understanding and truth as being crucial for political reconciliation and justice.

In an interview about his 1972 film with Jean-Pierre Gorin, Tout Va Bien, Jean-Luc Godard commented that the task for filmmakers, or artists more broadly, is not to make “political films” but to “make film politically.” Hito Steyerl’s films are undeniably “political”—covering subjects such as racism, war and terrorism—but what makes them so interesting is her attempts to construct them politically, to unpick and explore her own position within the framework of filmmaking.

This was very apparent in her 2004 film, November, which was screened in Australia as part of the If You See Something, Say Something exhibition (co-curated by Keg de Souza and myself) at Gallery 4a in January 2007 (RT78, p46). Here she combines old footage she shot as a teenager with her friend Andrea with a contemporary documentary about Andrea’s later involvement as a freedom fighter during the war in Kurdistan, and her eventual murder. The juxtaposition of the earlier feminist action movie—the teenagers create a gang of female outlaws who roam around intimidating men—with the footage of Andrea’s death creates a moving exploration of the transition from idealism and youthful political fantasy to reality. While Steyerl is obviously admiring of her friend she is careful not to posthumously create a heroine. The title November was chosen because of its position after October—the month of the Russian revolution—and describes a time of disillusionment and exhaustion after intense political struggle. In November Steyerl works through feelings of grief at her friend’s death as she seeks an understanding of the political factors which shaped her fate.
Hito Steyerl, Lovely Andrea, installation, Documenta 12

Hito Steyerl, Lovely Andrea, installation, Documenta 12

At Documenta 12, Steyerl loosely returns to her friend in the film Lovely Andrea (shown in the atrium of the Fridericianum). The title comes from a character, “Lovely Andrea”, Steyerl created as a tribute to her friend when the filmmaker herself posed for bondage photographs while in Japan in 1987. Lovely Andrea unfolds like a detective story as Steyerl returns 20 years later to Japan to locate the magazine which published these pictures—a quest, unlike the one for the Bosnian newsreel, in which she is ultimately successful.

Lovely Andrea is an extremely visually seductive and entertaining film. Steyerl focuses on the nawa-shibari style of bondage which involves the capture and suspension of women in the air by ropes. She explores this notion with a young Japanese aerial performer who acts as a quasi guide for Steyerl through the world of contemporary Japanese bondage. The film includes several shots of this woman suspended by ropes, performing various bondage scenarios and intercut with popular culture references including Spiderman, The Pet Shop Boys and Wonder Woman. The film moves like a detective thriller-visual interest sustained through the search and eventual discovery of the pictures.

When discussing the film Steyerl explains that her interest in bondage was not just about finding a missing piece of her own history but was an allegory for modern society. She draws on a 1930 text by Siegfried Kracauer, The Ornament of Mass, in which he described a performance by a group of showgirls, The Tiller Girls. Kracauer was fascinated by how the performers would move their legs as if they were being mass produced on an assembly line. Steyerl explains, “he made a point of choosing a humble, if not outright silly and over-commodified example from mass culture to interpret it as a reflex of the dominant conditions of production of this time: Taylorism. He understood that one shouldn’t complain about this type of culture, but move right through it. The total abstraction of disconnected limbs was not only a machine in the sense of an assembly line, but also presented a way beyond the fateful implications of the ‘natural body’, which became horribly explicit in National-Socialist race policies shortly after. It could not just be read as an allegory of economic bondage, but also the first announcement of its overcoming.”

According to Steyerl the link between this 1930s exploration of the body and her own work is that she sees the self-suspension performance, which the main protagonist of Lovely Andrea develops, in a similar way: “first of all, it is a reflex of an economical situation of self-entrepreneurship, in which we have internalised authority to a point to incorporate both ‘master and slave’ within the same individual. One motivates oneself, pushes oneself to work to the point of self-exploitation. But on the other hand this performance doesn’t stop at visualising this practice, but utilises the same tools that would normally be used for bondage and submission in order to create something completely different. Actually, this performance is much more about flying and floating, about overcoming gravity than about captivity and passivity. So this performance goes right through bondage into a different direction.”

Lovely Andrea is a very ambitious film—attempting to draw from Steyerl’s brief encounter with bondage many allegories about contemporary society. But the comic and at times literal way she does this—particularly her reliance on visual equivalence between the ropes of bondage and the internet as the modern web of life—can come across as a little forced. While Lovely Andrea loosely refers to Steyerl’s attachment to her friend Andrea it does this without the personal involvement which made November so powerful. In many ways it feels like Steyerl is shielding herself, a position at odds with the task the film set itself—the discovery of youthful bondage photographs of the artist. But the film is very clever and interesting if a little less resolved than Steyerl’s other work

Red Alert is a three screen red monochrome video representing an experiment by the artist in abstract video documentation and is a meditation on the 1921 painting of three monochrome canvases by Aleksandre Rodchenko, Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color, Pure Blue Color. Rodchenko wrote of these paintings, “I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue and yellow. I affirmed: It’s all over. Basic colours. Every plane, it’s a plane and there is no more to representation.” Steyerl refers to this avant-garde gesture when she writes, “Red Alert translates this work into video, the assumption being that of these three primary colours only the red one is left. This red is actually based on the colour used by the US Homeland Security office for their highest alert level. It is, if you like, the colour of contemporary fear itself. On the other hand, this work also shows the limit of video, since the moving image has to be frozen in order to translate it into a painting format. And video or concrete representation of reality reaches its limit in the end of constant online transmissions which convey just abstract fear as such, with a minimum of concrete mediation.”

Two of Steyerl’s films, November and The Normality, were shown at the gerMANY FACES australia festival as part of the videokunst.de symposium curated by Anna Munster at the College of Fine Arts, Sydney, Sept 23.

THEY SAY EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE 21. ANY YOUNGER AND YOU THIRST FOR FREEDOM FROM YOUR WORLD. ANY OLDER AND YOU WISH YOU COULD HAVE IT OVER AGAIN. EXPERIMENTA’S AWKWARD PHASE IS NOW OFFICIALLY OVER; WITH TWO CONFIDENT AND POPULAR EXHIBITIONS IN HOUSE OF TOMORROW (2003) AND VANISHING POINT (2005), THE ARRIVAL OF THIS YEAR’S EXPERIMENTA PLAYGROUND REPRESENTS THE BIG PUSH FOR THE ORGANISATION. BIG ENOUGH, IN FACT, TO NOMINATE ITSELF AS THE INTERNATIONAL BIENNALE OF MEDIA ARTS. THE RESULT WAS A CONFIDENT AND ARTICULATE EXPERIENCE THAT SURVEYED SOME OF THE MOST INTERESTING WORKS OF RECENT YEARS, WHILE PROVIDING A MAP FOR THOSE NEW TO MEDIA ART.

The inclusion of Peter Fischli and David Weiss’ video work Der Lauf Der Ding/The Way Things Go (Switzerland, 1987) is an example of the latter; a keystone of experimental art practice that has the instant effect of grounding the viewer on the sensory level. A series of reactions and actions unfolds as an elaborate version of Mouse Trap ricochets across the periodic table with abandon. A tyre rolls down a board setting a pulley in motion that ignites a match that sparks a coal fire, and so on. Though this and a number of the other works are now freely available, including via YouTube, the environment of the playground needs its swings and roundabouts—the perennials and milestones that mark the borders of the sandpit. The Way Things Go should really be part of the science curriculum at high school level; it’s messy, permanently and viciously DIY and still boggles the mind’s eye 20 years on from its creation.

Alongside a number of other video works, this subdivided room of “extreme art on screen” set the tone—making a compromise between accessibility and confrontation. During four visits, I saw the same dynamics: people flocked to the work least likely to appear on DVD. Interactive art came first, especially for children. Only then were the video works taken in. The Black Box gallery was perfect for the collection, and the low light conditions were soothing without being soft.

Giant interactive teacup rides courtesy of Shu Lea Cheang’s Baby Love (2005, RT76, p23) were the main attraction for most, but the meat of the exhibit was in the smaller works that required touch, or its similitude.

In Double Fantasy (Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, USA, 2005), the dream worlds of two children are assembled with miniature tiny trees and buildings. Two meticulously constructed dioramas lie back to back and are suspended in mid-air, a squid-like array of metallic arms curling out from the sides and winding back to point cameras at the tiny figures on either side. A projector rifles through the angles which are carefully plotted to use tilt and deep focus, and we see the stories unfold. On one side, a grim but baroque battle scene, on the other, a joyful wedding in a chapel. The result is as much a paean to romantic imagery as it is deconstruction. The soft light and off-kilter situations are dreamlike and whimsical, soaked in nostalgia. The natural urge was to twist the camera arms to new positions; so common was this impulse that Experimenta had to staff the artwork with an apologetic young minder—play has its rules and regulations. Still, the decision to frame the artwork as open sculpture and allow visitors to examine it from all angles is fair trade for the lack of interactivity. (For more on the McCoys, see RT78.)

As a child you looked up from your bed, watching branches move in the wind through the window. Seeing grim shapes in the half-light, you made horrible things come to life. In Philip Worthington’s Shadow Monsters (UK, 2005), a plain white projection invites closer inspection, for which you have to cross in front of a divider. Immediately, you sense the projection is coming from below and not above; and not only that, but you’re a horrible freak. Your shadow is captured and relayed onto the wall in front of you with a slight delay, with monstrous additions such as tentacles, hairs, spines, spikes and gawking eyes on stalks. Move your hands to make a shadow-play duck and the duck will grow fierce teeth while belching out a grey cartoon cloud. The whizz and pop of the accompanying sound cues complete the circuit. The projection and capture mechanism has been refined and changed after a number of international showings, but the iteration at Experimenta Playground is as good as it gets.

In a similar way, The Manual Imput Station (TMEMA aka Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman, USA, 2004-2006) whittles away expectations as you approach a nondescript overhead projector with a handful of shapes and numbers on a table. Casting your hands into the beam doesn’t produce any results at first. Only when your fingers cross, or you use one of the letters and shapes to form an enclosed form, does the play begin. Form an ‘O’ with your thumb and forefinger and the shadow ‘O’ on the wall lights up in yellow, promptly ‘falls’ as a virtual object, and bounces away with the sound of rolling glass. Before you know it you are are causing smaller shards to rain and shatter. The work generates scientific curiosity; it would be equally at home in a children’s science museum.

Narinda Reeders’ Help Yourself (Australia, 2007) is immediately one of the most effortlessly inquisitive and deliberate pieces of interactive art seen for some time. Parodies of ATM routines have been mounted before, as have playful versions of self-help culture. Their natural combination in Help Yourself is immediately recognisable and satisfying. Your on-screen guide, Lydia, who cannot hear the commands you speak into the microphone very well, is likely to berate you, and will somehow abuse your trust. Advice is generated almost incoherently and always aimed at the heart. Anybody who has experienced the dark wit of the woman inside Westpac ATMs will appreciate this opportunity for revenge.

If Experimenta's projected biennale can be achieved without having to include media arts' greatest hits, then it could go on to be a success and for all the right reasons, commercial and national. More importantly, the first biennale has been curated with kindness and daring and could, in the future, continue to develop its sense that art isn't an endless self-referential game but something you can play with to your heart's content.

The Goethe Institut’s innovative gerMANY FACES australia festival opened September 10 with a screening of FW Murnau’s 116-minute 1926 film classic, Faust, apparently this country’s premiere screening.

The film is a remarkable experience in itself but was transformed in this concert screening by the live accompaniment of American composer Phillip Johnston (who composes in Australia for Bell Shakespeare among others) leading a small cabaret-strength ensemble of clarinet, ukelele, piano, accordion, cello and voice.

As well as scoring a number of contemporary films, Johnston has composed for new screenings of classics by Todd Browning, Buster Keaton and George Méliès. For his account of Faust, he has largely eschewed sound effects and movie soundtrack scoring, treating the film like a music theatre work by providing vocals, set pieces and recurring melodies.

It seemed, however, a strange thing to subject a 1920s film with a calculated mediaeval scenography (for all its expressionist strategies) to Johnston’s deployment of popular American idioms: blues, gospel, jazz. These are embedded in the composer’s engaging melodic minimalism, but at times feel somewhat out of kilter with what we are seeing. Hilary Bell’s libretto (affecting at times) also has to work against the film’s intertitles.

Sometimes, at its plainest, the meeting of Murnau and Johnston worked, elsewhere it simply couldn’t—histories and cultures bashed up against one another. But the experience was frequently rewarding, the film wonderful (the modest visual effects, such as Mephistopheles looming over a mediaeval city, were surprisingly powerful) and the band, the dextrous Johnson included, excellent, singer/speaker Lauren Easton above all. RT

Faust/Murnau, director FW Murnau, composer, saxophone, piano, ukelele Phillip Johnston, accordion Elizabeth Jones, cello John Napier, voice Lauren Easton, Seymour Centre, Sydney, Sept 10; www.phillipjohnston.com

DIVIDED INTO THREE SECTIONS, PIXAR: 20 YEARS OF ANIMATION AT THE AUSTRALIAN CENTRE FOR THE MOVING IMAGE (ACMI) IS DEDICATED TO CHARACTER, NARRATIVE AND WORLDS. THE EXHIBITION INCLUDES OVER 500 PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS AND SCULPTURES. IN MELBOURNE, THE ADDED ADVANTAGE HAS BEEN THE INCLUSION OF ART WORK FOR THE NEW PIXAR FILM, RATATOUILLE (2007), ONLY RECENTLY RELEASED HERE, AS WELL AS THREE CROWD PLEASERS. THERE’S THE GIANT LUXOR JR SCULPTURE AND BALL THAT STARRED IN PIXAR’S FIRST ANIMATION, WELCOMING VISITORS AT ACMI’S ENTRANCE; THE ‘REAL’ CAR-SIZED SALLY CARRERA FROM CARS which OCCUPIES THE GROUND FLOOR LOBBY; AND MY PERSONAL FAVOURITE THE GIANT, STUFFED SULLEY (AND PLASTIC MIKE) FROM MONSTERS INC— IT TOOK GREAT WILL POWER ON MY PART NOT TO IGNORE THE BARRIER THAT SEPARATES THEM FROM THE CROWD IN ORDER TO GET JUST ONE, BIG HUG FROM THE BLUE GUY. UNFORTUNATELY, SUCH DISPLAYs OF LOVE have taken their toll ON SULLEY FROM EARLY ON IN THE EXHIBITION AND NOW, WHILE VISITORS CAN LOOK, THEY CAN’T TOUCH.

The exhibition is exclusive in Australia to ACMI, but has also shown at the Ghibli Museum in Mikata, Tokyo, the New York Museum of Modern Art, the London Science Museum and the National Museum of Scotland. Curated by Elyse Klaidman, Dean of Art and Film at Pixar University, this exhibition is very much a celebration of the more traditional creative processes at work behind the scenes that give eventual life to the digitally animated films that are the more familiar trademark of Pixar.

Beginning as an independent company in 1986, Pixar Animation is still a young studio, yet its success has been nothing short of phenomenal. It has consistently won awards for its short films—including Luxo Jr (1986), Tin Toy (1988), Red’s Dream (1987) and For the Birds (2000)—and the animated features Toy Story (1995) and Toy Story 2 (1999), A Bug’s Life (1998), Monsters Inc (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004) and Cars (2006). It has also been at the forefront of developing its own in-house software programmes (including RenderMan), which have gone on to advance the art of computer generated filmmaking and animation. Add to this the fact that Pixar has also broken record after record (including its own) on box office receipts—with total gross coming to just under $4 billion—and we have a force to be reckoned with.

John Lasseter, Chief Creative Officer at Disney Studios (who recently bought Pixar) and Pixar Animation Studios explains on the Pixar website that “the computer is where we finish our stories.” This exhibition takes the audience on a delightful journey that’s about the lead up to that final stage. The artwork that confronts the viewer appears seemingly endless and displays the complex artistic process that’s required to produce the final animations with which we’re most familiar. Wall after wall and cabinet after cabinet display works such as Dan Lee’s dynamic movement studies of Boo from Monsters Inc; Ricky Nierva, Dan Lee, Geefwee Boedoe and Tia Kratter’s pastel, marker and pen and pencil drawings of Monsters Inc characters in various stages of creation; and the wonderful minimalist drawings by Teddy Newton that include studies of Frozone and Newton’s early digital concept for the title sequence of The Incredibles. There’s also the deceptively simple and experimental collages of A Miscellaneous Superhero and Edna Mode (aka ‘E’) by Newton that capture the viewer’s imagination with their combination of coloured paper cut-outs and richly textured fabrics; the cast urethane resin and polymer clay models that would make Rodin proud; the retro colourscripts of Lou Romano that abstract and condense the characters and storylines of The Incredibles into richly coloured, atmospheric worlds that are reminiscent of Mary Blair’s artwork for the Disney Studios in the 1950s and 60s; the dark and evocative underwater worlds portraying the loveable (and not so loveable) characters from Finding Nemo by Simón Varela; and the totally cheeky acrylic painting of Flik from A Bug’s Life whom Tia Kratter compositionally arranges in a homage to Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man—an ant supplants man in the grand scheme of things.

Dominating the exhibition is a discourse on the symbiotic relationship between technology and art, and this is found not only in the traditional art as early stage processes of the digital animations, but in digital installations on show. Artscape (2005) is an 11-minute widescreen film on a 12 metre screen that links four projectors to achieve its hypnotic effect. The film was created for the Museum of Modern Art exhibition by the director and digital artist Andrew Jimenez (who also worked as digital artist on The Incredibles, Monsters Inc and Finding Nemo) and sound designer Gary Rydstrom. It takes the viewer across the surface of a gigantic display board and into a three-dimensional journey of many of the drawings, paintings and other art works on display in two-dimensional form in the exhibition. The camera pans across work after work in pastels, crayons, painting and gouache. Relying on a device that can be traced back to the 17th and 18th century perspective boxes (examples of which had been on display at ACMI’s 2006 exhibition, Eyes, Lies and Illusions, RT77, p21), but which now uses alternative tools such as Photoshop, images are scanned and layered in space to produce the illusion of depth as the camera explores their terrain. At one point we travel into the world of A Bug’s Life and, as the camera tracks into a crayon drawing, we experience a true sense of its minute scale. The strangely alien-like noises and sound effects that vibrate amidst the thousands upon thousands of blades of grass eventually reveal the thousands upon thousands of ant-faces that hide in their midst.

The Toy Story zoetrope, created by the Pixar animator J Warren Trezevant is, in many respects, the exhibition scene stealer. Influenced by its bigger cousin, the My Neighbour Totoro zoetrope at the Ghibli Museum in Japan, this one is a homage to the history of animation. Updating old zoetrope technology for the early 21st century, the device uses computers to orchestrate the perfectly timed movement of the multiple and slightly varied versions of the sculptured characters of Woody, Jess, Buzz, Wheezy the Penguin and others who occupy a circular disk that spins like a merry-go-round. Strobe lights are introduced and, timed to perfection, the trickery of persistence of vision kicks in: the static images transform and we suddenly see Woody on his horse, riding around the circle; Jess twirling her lasso above her head and down over her body; Buzz Lightyear bouncing on a ball; Wheezy the Penguin jumping into and out of holes in the ground; and the little green alien who stands at the circle perimeter, waving at the viewer experiencing this wondrous technological feat, utterly mesmerized.

It took me over five viewings of the spin cycle before I could tear myself away to take in the crowd sharing the room. Every face—and there were over 30 packed into the space—from 2-year olds to over-60s and appeared as if frozen in time, with enormous smiles plastered across their faces. It was as if every zoetrope performance was being performed for them personally. And as I waved to the little green alien, I could hear many promises being made to the little ones by parents trying to extract them from this very special room and the wondrous toy it housed.

Throughout, a story is told about the way traditional and new media art can and do interact to produce evocative stories. In the words of John Lassiter, “The art challenges technology and the technology inspires art.”

HAVING BEEN BORN AND RAISED IN MELBOURNE, AND BEING PERIPATETICALLY INCLINED, I WAS SURE THAT I HAD SEEN ALL THERE WAS TO SEE IN THE CBD OF MY HOMETOWN. HOW DELICIOUS THEN TO FIND A HIDDEN TREASURE LIKE THE WUNDERKAMMER.

Part shop, part museum, the Wunderkammer, like its 17th and 18th century counterparts, is home to an extensive array of scientific curiosities, artefacts and ephemera. From piranhas in bell jars to the full sized, taxidermied remains of a lioness from the long defunct Bacchus Marsh Safari Park, all manner of strange and strangely beautiful objects compete for the visitor’s attention. And amidst this cornucopia is a collection of works by artists Chris Henschke and Donna Kendrigan.

Collected together under the title Unnatural Curiosities, there are more than six distinct and distinctive works, each of which draws inspiration from earlier cultures of display of which the Wunderkammer (or Cabinet of Curiosity) is one example. Each work is displayed in a custom-built cabinet superbly and lovingly crafted by Lindon Davey-Milne. The works stand up as craft, effortlessly melding into their surroundings. But as works of art, they offer even more. Each piece is aesthetically interesting while offering an intelligent and reflexive critique of the cultures of display in which they themselves participate.

The largest of the works Transplants (2005) is housed in a reproduction 19th century style botanist’s cabinet. Comprising both artefacts and a touch screen installation, the work allows the viewer to engage with a digital interactive titled Garden of Transplants, housed within the cabinet. Navigating the space brings to life science fiction writer Adam Browne’s short story, Orlando’s Third Trance. The garden itself is inhabited by strangely mutated and unnatural organisms rendered in the style of the colonial botanist. The aesthetic overlay of the past on present and future creates a sense of historical all-at-onceness, a sense usually denied or repressed by most scientific descriptions of the world where progress and rupture override renewal and continuity.

Electrococo Salon (2007) also plays with the intersection between past and present by housing an exotic three dimensional, digitally constructed scene featuring 18th century French prints of interiors, electrical circuit diagrams and antique machine parts. This is displayed within a diorama cabinet along with a sound score composed from manipulated voices, jackhammers and harpsichord. The work challenges the viewer to think about relationships between the interfaces of the computer and preceding technologies of display like the diorama.
Kidney Plant, Henschke and Kendrigan

Similarly, Salon of Spirits (2006) and Lunar Mosque (2006) feature stereoscopic images created through the blending of Victorian era Keystone images printed onto Lambda Duratran. Both works reference key moments in both the history of display technologies. Salon of Spirits features images familiar to anyone interested in the spirit photography of the late 19th century. Lunar Mosque features a moon straight out of a scene by French illusionist and cinematographer George Méliès. Both works remind the viewer that the desire for immersion in a three dimensional world extends back beyond the development of virtual reality in the late 20th century.

The evocatively titled Interior Probably Undisturbed (2007) is a beautifully textured digital collage featuring 18th century geological diagrams. The images combine to form a strange volcanic landscape suggestive of close-up cross-sections of scientific specimens. Similarly, New Ocean Fantasy (2007) appears as if collated from items in an ancient oceanographer’s desk drawer. Both works invite us to see differently, to mistake one thing for another, one time for another, one world for another.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this exhibition is its location within the Wunderkammer. As media artists struggle to secure ongoing opportunities in a world of seemingly contracting exhibition opportunities, the marriage, in this instance, of commerce with art has proven to be a savvy choice by the artists and the shop owners. Apart from the obvious concurrence between their thematics, each brings their own audience to this arrangement.

Henschke and Kendrigan are certainly not the first media artists to realise that sourcing new kinds of spaces to exhibit their art is not only likely to bring them into contact with new audiences but also enhances the possibility of creating a market for media arts (they have already managed to sell one of the works exhibited in Unnatural Curiosities). Ian Haig certainly explored this when he exhibited Futurotica at both Sexpo and at the Erotic Museum in Los Angeles in 2004.

In this instance, Henschke and Kendrigan’s work could not have found a more apt home. To some extent it is telling of media arts’ status in the arts hierarchy that artists need to be so inventive in order to get their work seen. With traditional gallery spaces still reluctant to exhibit work that invites physical interaction and media arts organisations being squeezed by slimmer budgets and demands for large audience returns, we may well see more opportunistic manoeuvres like this by artists intent on getting their work into the world.

Unnatural Curiosities, Wunderkammer, 439 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne, Aug 4-Sept 29

ENTERING THE QUT CREATIVE INDUSTRIES PRECINCT I WAS CONFRONTED BY A CONFLUENCE OF SCREENS, EACH OUT TO GRAB MY ATTENTION. DAZZLED, I TEETERED ABOUT UNSURE WHICH WAY TO TURN. THE VERNACULAR TERRAIN EXHIBITION FEATURED 50 ARTISTS FROM AUSTRALIA, CHINA AND JAPAN AND WAS CURATED BY A TEAM LED BY STEPHEN DANZIGER, THE DIRECTOR OF IDA (INTERNATIONAL DIGITAL ART) PROJECTS. IT RESPONDED TO THE IDEA OF ‘VERNACULAR CREATIVITY’ AS COINED BY MEDIA THEORIST JEAN BURGESS, REFERRING TO COMMONPLACE MODES OF CREATION.

With the increasing availability of digital media technologies this creativity is being nurtured in a plethora of new contexts and modes of social interaction, as exemplified by YouTube, Flickr, mobile phone art, Second Life and the neverending torrent of blogs. As the new digital terrain becomes at once both domestic and global, Marshall McLuhan’s mistyped catch phrase “the medium is the massage” looms louder than ever.

The majority of the works in Vernacular Terrain were screen-based. Perhaps non-screen-based works, being dependent on different platforms or on interfaces for interaction, are less attractive to artists because of technical obstacles and limitations of distribution.

Projected onto one wall was Taiwanese artist Chen Yung-Hsien’s Grassing. A plasticine bust of the artist’s head, shorn of hair, eyes closed, evoking transcendence. Rice seeds sprinkled onto the head take root and grow. With time lapse filming, the head is transformed into a mass of leafy green shoots, like a green mohawk. A period of illness spawned for the artist a whole series of works focused on his head, beginning with Release, which involved wrapping it in bacon and salmon strips. The impression is of the need to find tranquility—if by curious means—more usually associated with nature rather than technology.

In the work of Kim Joon (Korea) tattoos come to life on human skin: Chinese characters swell and breathe, while tattooed soldiers steam and explode in jittery motion. The idea came from the artist’s animated tattoo designs for mobile phone screen savers. The work is quite controverisal because tattooing in Korea is still essentially illegal unless the tattooist has a medical degree. Kim Joon associates tattoos with desire, wounded masculinity and processes of imprinting memory. In other works he has used commercial brand labels as oversized tattoos in a critique of consumer obsession with logos.

Almost concealed by the array of massive screens was a set of high-tech glasses through which I viewed the R-rated works of Faiyaz Jafri. These featured animated porcelain doll characters as sadistic “plastic surgery vixens” with fingerless elongated limbs. These nymphs play out bloody Japanese horror scenarios set against computer game generated hallways and rooms. In Déjeuner, a posse of knife wielding girls forms 3D virtual spaces, one inside another. Although Jafri is of Pakistani descent, he grew up in the Netherlands and now lives in New York, and his work reveals its transcultural character in the influence of the Japanese Hentai (perverted sexuality) tradition found these days in anime and manga.

The Australian animator Chris Denaro was artist in residence, developing a new work every 72 hours which was then projected onto the floor. By delving into the endless realm of images available on the photo sharing site Flickr and using a Creative Commons licensed software tool, Denaro collected images of objects, particularly those with over-designed curvilinear design. Splicing them together he formed entirely new objects which had little resemblance to the originals. These new objects resembled Japanese Chindogu (possibly useless inventions) in all their absurdity. The animation software then looped the chimerical forms into mechanised animations allowing them to dance and spin around the floor.

Jin Shan’s video, Hanging Flesh (China), takes us inside a deserted industrial warehouse with long tracking shots. We finally encounter a shirtless figure swaying pendulum-like to an accompanying soundtrack of animal squeals. The viewer soon realises, however, that the camera is inverted. With this image of apparent torment Jin responds grimly to the relentless, dehumanising transformation of modern China.

Other works included Peter Greenaway and collaborator Istvan Horkay’s latest extension of their Tulse Luper project. The high level of sophistication of that work possibly departed from the vernacular theme, but it further revealed how multiple images can be framed, overlayed and threaded through with multiple narratives, not unlike HTML.

Many artists are now taking up the opportunities offered by new media to circumvent the usual gate keepers to reach audiences outside the gallery context. The increasing democratisation offered by online communities contrasts with the fast eroding democracy of established media outlets. The new vernacular aesthetic is already noticeably infiltrating big media in the form of reality TV, homespun documentaries and fake B grade movies. Tom Sherman of Vernacular Video trumpets the death knell for artists who hesitate to immerse themselves in the aesthetic of this latest vernacular. He may yet be mistaken. What is apparent is that many of these works from around the world seek not only to respond to the fast paced, low-fi buzz of the vernacular with more sophisticated and enriching alternatives, but also seek to escape and transcend the popular vernacular itself and still reach an audience.

Photographer and video artist Cui Xiuwen (born 1970) exhibits internationally and has been a leader in bringing the female artist in China to prominence, boldly focusing on sex, previously the province of the male artist. In her digital photographic series Angel, young girls in white, the one here pregnant, populate the modern Chinese landscape. [Ed.]

IDA Projects, Vernacular Terrain, curators Stephen Danziger, Xu Dawei, Lubi Thomas, Michael Perkins, Pauline Doutreluingne; presented by QUT Creative Industries Precinct and Beijing Film Academy in association with Yokohama Art Project and Platform China Contemporary Art Insititute, QUT Creative Industries Precinct Aug 28-Sept 15, QUT Art Museum, Brisbane, Aug 1-Sept 30; http://www.idaprojects.org/

THIS YEAR’S D/ART/07 WAS EFFECTIVELY HOUSED AT THE AUSTRALIAN CENTRE FOR PHOTOGRAPHY, AS WELL AS HAVING A MORE UBIQUITOUS VIRTUAL PRESENCE ONLINE AND AT PERTH’S REVELATION FILM FESTIIVAL. THE FORUM WAS HELD IN THE CENTRE’S FRONT ROOM, THE EXHIBITION OF ONLINE WORKS IN ITS BACK SPACE (ENTRY THROUGH A CORRIDOR WALLED WITH EXHIBITED WORKS ON VIDEO MONITORS), AND OTHER WORKS SCREENED A SHORT WALK AWAY AT THE CHAUVEL CINEMAS. DESCRIBED BY DLUX DIRECTOR DAVID CRANSWICK AS “A REVIEW OF WHAT’S HAPPENING WITH THE MEDIA CONDUIT” WHILE WE WAIT FOR THE IMPACT OF MICROSOFT’S SILVERLIGHT CROSS-BROWSER, CROSS-PLATFORM PLUG-IN, THE FORUM WAS FASCINATING, OFFERING AN INTRODUCTION TO AND INSIGHTS INTO THE ACTUALITIES AND THE POTENTIALS OF THE PROLIFERATING MEANS OF DISTRIBUTION, RELATED LEGAL ISSUES AND, NOT LEAST, INCOME GENERATION. THE MOOD WAS POSITIVE, IF CAUTIOUSLY OPTIMISTIC.

getting the rights right

Copyright lawyer Raena Lea-Shannon, a specialist in digital media and the arts, offered a brisk, vivid history of the legal issues up to the present moment, describing the digital impact as “extremely disruptive to the legal environment.” Napster had “rampaged copyright” and heralded a changed distribution model. The sheer fixity of film’s celluloid acetate and its highly mechanical projection apparatus allowed, she said, “for a great deal of control”, with monopolisitic film companies becoming their own distributors and issuing exclusive licences for different territories and different media (eg theatrical release first, followed by cable, then free-to-air and DVD). Lea-Shannon described this structured temporal model as a source of increasing consumer frustration from the 1980s on. New models emerging from hacking and from Napster drove SONY to Digital Rights Management (content or copy protection, referred to by its opponents as digital restrictions management), creating DVDs that invaded users’ computers and their privacy and which had to be recalled: “life for the end-user had looked like becoming a nightmare.” The invasion is not over. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation puts it:

…DRM technologies do nothing to stop copyright pirates, but instead end up interfering with fans’ lawful use of music, movies, and other copyrighted works. DRM can prevent you from making back-ups of your DVDs and music downloaded from online stores, recording your favorite TV programs, using the portable media player of your choice, remixing clips of movies into your own home movies, and much more. www.eff.org/IP/DRM/

Lea-Shannon described the transformation of the rights we are living through as embracing Open Source approaches and increasingly licensing to the world—blanket licensing enabling a model similar to the collection agency APRA in the music field. For the first time, she said, we have the means for low budget, lo-tech works to enjoy not only distribution but options in delivery platforms and the means to generate income. She added, that there are also increasing ways to discover the very existence of a work via Google or Technorati, which claims to be “[c]urrently tracking 104.4 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media…We search, surface, and organize blogs and the other forms of independent, user-generated content (photos, videos, voting, etc.) increasingly referred to as ‘citizen media.’“

For copyright protection, Lea-Shannon advised artists to register with Screen Rights, the audiovisual copyright society, and to apply for an ISAN (International Standard Audiovisual Number) for an individual work—it’s similar to the ISBN (International Standard Book Number). ISANs apply to both digital and physical media. Lea-Shannon was emphatic: “Never underestimate income from schools.” Screenrights says that universities, TAFEs, government and almost all other schools are licensed by them to copy from radio and television. Presumably web and locative media art will eventually have access to these rights too, where sought.

money for the makers

Created by David Geddes, Andrew Kelley and Simone Govic, Si-Mi is a Melbourne-based digital content online marketplace. The quietly reticent Geddes described the site as dedicated to making available quality screen work of all kinds and creating income for the makers. George Gittoes’ recent documentary, Rampage, is downloadable from Si-Mi for $3.99, shorter works sell for as little as $0.39. Format, platform and cost are decided by the content owner, the artist, who owns the world rights. Geddes says the site’s income comes from a mix of advertising and Si-Mi’s split of the income from sales: 30%. Geddes sees Si-Mi as creating in particular a niche for high quality work: “we target it. It’s the opposite of the bottom end of YouTube video and it’s stuff not picked up by the big companies.” Each work has a 90-second trailer and the profile page is controlled by the artist. While opposed to DRM, Geddes believes that some form of it is going to be necessary.

subscription model

The laidback, affable Brent Hoff from the USA, took us back to a more tangible sales item, a quarterly DVD film and video magazine, Wholphin DVD. It comes complete with notes and interviews, sells for US$50 per annum and was inspired by the success of the McSweeney’s book-cum-magazine-cum-object. McSweeney’s, where Hoff writes about science, publishes Wholphin DVD. Hoff described himself as “not a film man, but a writer.” But film is obviously very important to him; he mentioned one in particular that he was involved in the making of and which he showed later that evening at the Chauvel, Alfredo Garcia’s Yeah Yeah, We Speak Perfect English, Just Serve. It’s a video of a volleyball game, ironically labelled “Walleyball”, using the fence on the beach border between the USA and Mexico as a net and putting the players on the US side at risk of being shot or jailed for life. Among the magazine’s repertoire of documentaries, dramas, fantasies and animations are a number of incisive politically left-of-centre works.

Hoff sees the magazine he co-founded and edits as “free[ing] us from industry constraints and giv[ing] us more control.” While there are sites similar to Si-Mi—the French Dailymotion, Metacafe and others—Hoff likes the physical DVD distribution model. Wholphin also have public showings (Hoff likes the idea of buying cinema down-time for screenings), but the business model is primarily a subscription one, based on the McSweeney’s approach which includes placing copies in niche bookstores and, in lesser amounts, in Borders.

The short form content of the magazine, Hoff thinks, is attractive not only to viewers but also to makers, like David O Russell, Erroll Morris, Dennis Hopper and Steven Soderbergh, who have all contributed works. There are also occasional longer works like Australian Anthony Lucas’ award-winning 26-minute animation, The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello. The combination of well-known names willing to work without big budgets, or any, and new makers appearing in the same edition is highly attractive. Now in its fourth edition, the magazine was in profit by May this year. As for DRM, Hoff sees it as ridiculous, “so hard to police.”

precious moving object

In his talk, Barry Keldoulis, the hard working, persuasive director of GBK gallery, took us to a different kind of content, fine art video. After video art had apparently gone into abeyance in the 90s, I can recall the excitement when the word spread a few years back that a Shaun Gladwell video had sold to a collector for a modest sum. Gladwell, TV Moore and Kate Murphy are just some of the local Sydney video artists of note whose work will be found in key galleries and shows, and will doubtless be joined by Sam Smith, recipient of this year’s Helen Lempriere $40,000 Travelling Fellowship. In an age where mechanical production has been digitalised and gone through the roof and video clips sell for $0.39 and makers hope for successful long tail sales to make their money, how do you keep artworks in specialist markets seriously profitable from the word go?

Grant Stevens was the first video artist on Keldoulis’ books. That was in 2004. The edition of the work sold out. Keldoulis sees video art as “priced like photography”, as having international appeal, and already accruing in value as time passes. Packaging, he says, is not important for the purchasing institution, just the artist’s signature, knowledge that the edition is limited, and the rights to technical upgrade (given the short lives of modern tehnologies). A Jess McNeill work ran to only eight copies, sold at $2000-8,000 each, averaging out to total sales of $40,000 which was, Keldoulis suggested, “viable for an artist.” The selling situation has been improved, he said, with the advent of the flat screen monitor and buyers who like to screen works which “are meditative or intriguing at dinner parties.” Kedoulis said that the notion that rising sales in video have corresponded with “a slump in photographic sales”, and that photography is “not so cutting edge now”, was not entirely true. But, clearly, he thinks there’s something in it.

bright new world

In the closing discussion Raena Lea-Shannon described a future online world with “a massive aggregation of content”, “sophisticated search mechanisms”, “highly compartmentalised audiences”, and big corporations going with everyone else to collection societies—“unless they try to create their own.” But DRM, she claimed, “would go the way of the dodo—it’s impossible to enforce.”

IT’S A CLUNG-TO BELIEF AMONG MANY ADMIRERS OF ART THAT ITS FINEST CREATORS ARE RARELY APPRECIATED DURING THEIR MOMENT ON EARTH. I DON’T KNOW HOW OFTEN THAT CLAIM HAS BEEN EMPLOYED BY THEATREMAKERS TO JUSTIFY AVERAGE WORK, BUT VOCIFEROUSLY NEGATIVE DENUNCIATIONS ARE ALWAYS MORE ENTICING THAN TEPID PRAISE. ANY PIECE ABLE TO INSPIRE ANGER IS, PERHAPS, WORTH A LOOK-IN FOR THAT REASON.

villanus

Welcome Stranger’s Villanus saw a damning critique during the night of my attendance. A vocal audience member made her displeasure known for the last half of the solo show’s duration, sighing and muttering to her companion and asking if they could please leave, now, thank you? When performer Vlad Mijic lay dying, an arrow piercing his gut, apologising for imposing his tale upon his audience, this voice of criticism responded with, “It’s alright darl, it’s just a bit long.” She walked out soon thereafter, the most physical form of criticism available.

Villanus is a profoundly intriguing work, obviously. Mildly engaging performances don’t often occasion walk-outs. Ninety minute monologues that powerfully redefine notions of dramatic structure, character and identity do. Villanus is not without its flaws—there’s a good hour of material stretched out to greater length here. But that good stuff is worth the wait.

Mijic’s Serbian heritage inspires this work. Though he left the country (which wasn’t then a country) at the age of three, his ethnic background later cast him as a villain, one of the bad guys in a war he had nothing to do with. Villanus sees him taking on the role of villain, channelling the monsters of history, offering sympathy to the devil.

It’s a patchwork quilt of vignettes in which Mijic switches identities at an alarming rate—as much to highlight the unstable, projected nature of identity itself as anything else. The set, too, is a junkshop pastiche of roadside hard rubbish, TV screens and cameras, butcher’s paper and packing tape. It’s the stuff Australian culture uses but isn’t willing to offer much value to—just like the dislocated characters Mijic incarnates.

There’s a lot of humour in this ragged work, and much insight, though it lacks the sustained focus necessary to drive home its more provocative points. It’s not for everyone and yes, “it’s a bit long”, but it tends fertile ground worthy of cultivation.
Luke Mullins and Xavier Samuels, Mercury Fur

mercury fur

UK playwright Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur inspired more public outrage upon its premiere, though Little Death Productions’ recent Melbourne staging saw less controversy and more uniform praise. In Britain, Ridley’s publishers Faber and Faber refused to print the play and several critics denounced the piece as degrading and voyeuristic sadism. It’s anything but.

Mercury Fur’s world is one in which the social contract governing civilisation has been torn up and set afire, giving way to an anarchy both terrifying and entirely plausible. Gangs roam the streets with murderous intent, riots occur with no apparent cause, and governments respond by bombing unruly populations. And amidst the chaos, people get on with getting on. Elliot (Luke Mullins) and Darren (Xavier Samuel) are in the business of organising exclusive parties in which salaried businessfolk indulge their wildest fantasies—murdering a child in a bizarre Vietnam War/Elvis impersonator scenario, for instance. That’s when Elliot isn’t peddling the psychotropic butterflies which descended on London during a sandstorm, or trying to negotiate the excesses of the monstrous “family’‘ which has formed around him: the blind Duchess who is a pit of need and wilful self-delusion; Papa Spinx, a ferocious criminal kingpin who arranges Elliot’s clients; and newcomer Naz, the childlike fool with the butterfly addiction who eventually becomes the crux of the work’s moral dilemma.

It’s thoroughly nasty stuff delivered with enough humour, intelligence and relevance to justify its worst aspects. In the wrong hands, any scene calling for an adolescent shrouded in clingwrap to be hefted offstage awaiting a meathook to the rear would be nothing less than sicko-erotica masquerading as cutting edge theatre, but maybe that’s just me.

One of the work’s strengths is its openness—an audience member’s sense of the piece’s target could easily vary significantly from that of the person they’re sitting next to. Has this dystopia been brought about by a malevolent military-industrial complex? Drug use and hedonism in the young reaching some kind of critical mass? Sheer individualistic greed? Or something else entirely—perhaps something even biblical in scale? All are interpretations supported by the narrative, but it’s that tantalising sense of senselessness creeping around the fringes of the work that gives it such power. We’re trapped in the confines of a ruined building along with these characters, after all, and it’s hard to get the big picture when you’re hiding behind boarded-up windows.

The apocalyptic world of Mercury Fur is bound to alienate some audiences, but it is a text which engages with the alienation of the modern world. Little Death’s version doesn’t revel in its monstrosity but respects the bleak vision it requires. Mullins embraces an atypical role, bringing a convincing rough-hewn edge to Elliot. Aaron Orzech is a discovery as the naïf Naz, and Kelly Ryall’s understated score along with Danny Pettingill’s magnificent lighting bank lend an urgency to the piece that scoffs at the nay-sayers. Here’s hoping for a return season after its Sydney appearance.

holiday

So we get to Holiday. Hard to imagine someone calling for its banning, or rousing themselves enough to walk out. Missing its point would more likely result in a quiet snooze, perhaps. It would be missing out, though, on one of the most fascinating productions in recent memory.

But, to be honest, it would be easy to let Holiday pass you by. Ranters Theatre, under the direction of Adriano Cortese and featuring the impeccable writing of Raimondo Cortese, has long concentrated on the kind of naturalism that seems like anti-theatre, eschewing dramatics in favour of a precise, honest observation. Holiday is both the apogee of this aesthetic and a move in a new direction, introducing theatrical elements previously absented from the more minimalist works Ranters is known for.

It’s almost like one of those 3D magic eye pictures—a seemingly chaotic, random array of dialogue which suddenly, powerfully gains a depth that is almost shocking in its richness. The premise is simple: two men (Paul Lum and Patrick Moffat) lounge beside a large inflatable pool, shooting the breeze in snatches of conversation. Their location is only hinted at—a beachside resort, perhaps, or a suburban backyard. Their relationship is equally vague—they may have just met, or they may be old friends. This is theatre of the moment, in which no word exists before it is uttered, no action before it is performed. The relationship between these two is a process, not a product of the past.

But it’s also misleading to use terms like minimalist or naturalist in relation to Cortese’s dialogue. By reducing extraneous elements, Holiday forces us to listen to the words of these two men, and though their talk initially seems like the listless, even bored ramblings of people on a break from the real world, it’s quickly apparent that profound themes are being confronted—religion, politics, history, love, dreams, art and more are all subtly woven into this tapestry. The very idea of a holiday, after all, is to “get away” from it all, but in doing so these men realise that the alternative is a kind of existential nothingness. Throwing an inflatable ball back and forth in order to do something, anything, thus takes on the kind of true absurdity as effective as anything Beckett could have dreamt up.

The inclusion of brief, baroque songs breaking up the work, along with a sublimely understated set design by Anna Tregloan and an evocative soundscape by David Franzke, anchor the piece in a more sophisticated contemporary milieu than previous Ranters’ productions, and add further aspects to contemplate as this gentle and meditative work unfolds. This is contemporary performance of the highest calibre, wrought with deft skill and tempered with a discerning, unwavering hand. Then again, you might just not get it at all.

Villanus, writer-directors Vlad Mijic, Rhys Auteri, performer Vlad Mijic, Welcome Stranger Productions, Old Council Chambers, Trades Hall, Carlton, Aug 23-Sept 2; Mercury Fur, writer Philip Ridley, director Ben Packer, performers Paul Ashcroft, Gareth Ellis, Fiona Macys, Luke Mullins, Aaron Orzech, Russ Pirie, Xavier Samuel, design Adam Gardnir, sound Kelly Ryall, lighting Danny Pettingill, Little Death Productions,Theatreworks, Melbourne Aug 30-Sept 16; Ranters Theatre, Holiday, writer Raimondo Cortese, director Adriano Cortese, performers Paul Lum, Patrick Moffatt, design Anna Tregloan, sound David Franzke, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, Aug 9-22

Mercury Fur plays as part of Griffin Stablemates Program at the Stables Theatre until October 13

LIKE THE COLONISING RABBITS WHOSE STORY IT DEPICTS, MICHAEL WATTS’ NOT LIKE BECKETT HAS PROLIFERATED IN VARIOUS LOCALES. WRITTEN IN ALICE SPRINGS, IT PREMIERED IN 2006 AT THE MALTHOUSE DIRECTED BY MICHAEL KANTOR BEFORE BEING STAGED IN ALICE SPRINGS (WATTS’ HOME) AND DARWIN IN A CO-PRODUCTION BY THE ALICE’S RED DUST THEATRE AND DARWIN THEATRE COMPANY. NEW PRODUCTIONS WERE RECENTLY PRESENTED IN LISMORE BY NORPA AND PERTH BY DECKCHAIR. LIKE MANY OF THE SCRIPTS BY THE PLAYWRIGHT REFERENCED IN THE TITLE, NOT LIKE BECKETT IS A VIRTUOSIC MONOLOGUE, PERFORMED IN PERTH BY SAM LONGLEY.

Watts’ text deals with the fallen vaudevillian scion of a wealthy mining-and-squattocracy family of Australian rabbits. He found fame and fortune by drawing on the prejudices and clichéd scatological expectations of his audiences, before being marooned on the outback hummock where the play is set, his leg cruelly mangled in a trap. Mixing rude bush humour with a dash of Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, the protagonist, Walter Walloon Beckett reminisces about his life and fate as he awaits his final apotheosis and extinction at the hand of a trapper to become a fine felt hat. Even in death, Walter is egocentric. His thoughts do however turn to his absent former lover and performing partner, the indigenous bilby Boo Boo, whose presence is alluded to in Alison Brayford’s anthropomorphic set of painted mammarial rocks.

Director Emily McLean’s production focuses predominantly on the story and on Longley’s lanky six foot presence, the actor skilfully shifting from pathetic self-pity and egoism to unashamedly jocular exposition as he describes Walter’s signature acts of sticking a carrot up his arse and his realisation that all rabbits do is fuck everything in sight. Walter’s show thus morphs from leap-frogging over rabbits in order to fuck them from behind to the more popular performance for his peers of fucking over the indigenous bilbies as vigorously and frequently as possible. Watts’ script has plenty of barbs like this.

Longley’s well paced, well shaped solo is interspersed with sound effects (boom-tish cymbals and so on), sudden bursts of garish front lights and even segues into song (“I Did It My Way”). Generally though, these music-hall elements are rhythmic diversions from Walter’s life story. While McLean and Longley produce a fine show, it lacks some theatrical spark and bite. Particularly odd is a finale played for pathos, Longley doing a realistic dying scene, and much of the promotion and criticism in Perth focussed on Watts’ play as a tragic “love story.”

Watts’ monstrous allegory is not well suited to this interpretation and the somewhat lukewarm response to Not Like Beckett outside Melbourne may be attributable to this, together with a lingering sense that West Australians and Territorians feel they live closer to the frontline of contemporary colonialism and race relations than the distant, self-satisfied urbanites of the east. Certainly, Kantor’s own vigorous embrace of urban themes and iconography by referencing not Sinatra but Sid Vicious in Walter’s singing, by casting the protagonist as a reincarnation of famous Australian vaudevillian Roy Rene, and by setting the play not in the bush but on the once infamous Vault (or ‘Yellow Peril’) public sculpture of central Melbourne, had no counterpart in Perth. While WA could do with more nasty little plays like this, I missed Kantor’s insistence that both Australian history and its theatre is a dastardly mishmash of influences and locales that must be rendered in all of their horrible, clashing complexity if we are to accurately represent our society.

Not Like Beckett, writer Michael Watts, director Emily McLean, performer Sam Longley, design Alison Brayford, lighting Andrew Portwine, Deckchair Theatre, Victoria Theatre, Fremantle, July 26-Aug 12, 2007; Not Like Beckett, writer Michael Watts, director Michael Kantor, performer Russell Dykstra, design Anna Cordingly, lighting Niklas Pajanti, sound Darren Verhagen; Malthouse Theatre,
July 28-Aug 20, 2006

TALYA CHALEF’S IN OTHER WORDS BEGINS WITH THE WRITING ON THE WALL. THE AUDIENCE IS LED INTO AN INTRODUCTORY SPACE WHERE PRINTED QUOTES ACCOMPANY PHOTOCOPIES OF MAPS SUGGESTING A TEXTUAL TOPOGRAPHY TO BE TRAVERSED. INTRODUCTIONS OVER, WE THEN ENTER A VAST PERFORMANCE SPACE THAT MAY HAVE ONCE BEEN A CONVENT KITCHEN. AND THERE’S SOMETHING COOKING AMONG THE THREE MALE PERFORMERS AS THEY SCRAWL WORDS ON CELL WALLS. SOUTH AFRICA’S TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION, PINOCHET’S DEATH SQUADS IN FASCIST CHILE AND AUSTRALIA’S STOLEN GENERATIONS COMBINE IN A BROAD RUMINATION UPON STATE SANCTIONED MURDER AND DISPLACED PEOPLES.

Chalef infuses this performance with a movement vocabulary that oscillates between quiet stillness and violent tremolo allowing us to comprehend the poetry of trauma, as well as the trauma itself. The performance is then sucked into a projected image of a cracked wall, and each performer clings to an edifice accompanied by a striking composition of synthesizer and distorted sounds.

Pain is a visceral experience, one not simply carved into flesh, but also vulcanised upon the soul. And this is nowhere more apparent than when the performers come together slightly off centre for a smoko. They resemble politicians using words to duck and weave, to stall and dominate, revealing the limitations of the English language, accentuated by Tim Stitz stuffing his lean form into a disused fireplace and thereby transforming it into a mini-proscenium, or an Auschwitz oven. When Death arrives, we do not greet it with polite words. Instead, we defiantly resist its presence with paralytic screams. During this performance, it’s the image of Death that haunts us, not the words we use to divert and conceal its ever attending presence. And so it is that Chalef’s ‘other words’ are images. The pain of remembered experience, once probed and investigated, becomes a chemical dream. When remembering, I do not speak. Instead, I feel and see…

A lesser known Kafka story is titled Under the Harrow. The protagonist has his sin carved into his chest by an “Apparatus.” In conceiving of such an image, it was as if Kafka was attempting to transcend the limitations of language. In Other Words functions similarly. We see and experience the pain inflicted upon the individual by political machines that once resided (and still exist to degrees) in three continents. But this is not before the show takes a most interesting turn. A video projection of a woman, superimposed over the actual presence of a male performer (one who has outlined his own image in chalk upon a wall), invites us to consider the liberating possibilities of technology. Thinking and feeling beyond gender, we see pain for what it really is: a kaleidoscope of flesh, blood and viscera, the gulf between anima and animus, and the painful experience of synthesising both into a fully integrated personality.

In Other Words, animateur Talya Chalef, performers Keith Brockett, Tim Stitz, Mark Tregonning, Georgina Durham, Suzannah Bayes Morton, sound design Alex Garsden, lighting Bronwyn Pringle; Basement Space, Abbotsford Arts Complex, Melbourne, August 1-11

Find