soundcapsule #1 features sound works from Germ Studies (Clare Cooper and Chris Abrahams), Joel Stern, Adam Simmons, Ernie Althoff, Mark Cauvin, Topology, Rice屎Corpse, James Rushford, Cat Hope, Clocked Out, Jason Sweeney, and a video composition by Brigid Burke.
You may choose to download single tracks or the entire collection as a zip file. (Note for Dec 18 – if you have difficulties with the downloading the 320bps files – they may still be coming online – please come back tomorrow to find them complete.)
Germ Studies is a unique duo comprising Clare Cooper on guzheng and Chris Abrahams on DX7. Both accomplished improvisers, their collaboration is about an investigation into the essence of their contrasting instruments. Chris Reid describes Germ Studies, their double CD, consisting of 198 tracks with accompanying illustrations:
“It is…a deep exploration of musical language. Rather than producing longer, more self-contained compositions, Cooper (guzheng) and Abrahams (DX7) have created a series of sonic moments that flit through conscious awareness, sharply distinguished from each other by the nature of the sound, the sum of which creates a substantial and engrossing oeuvre.” www.realtimearts.net/feature/Earbash/9619
As Germ Studies tracks are quite short the artists have offered 3 pieces.
Stern has appeared in the pages of RealTime for many years, as a writer, co-director of the OtherFilm Festival and as composer/sound artist. In 2009 his CD Objects, Masks, Props was featured in earbash, reviewed by Gail Priest:
“Objects, Masks, Props is perhaps most interesting because rather than the field recordings grounding us in the ‘real world’, serving as markers of concrete space, Stern’s manipulations and combinations create a kind of lucid-dreaming…” www.realtimearts.net/feature/Earbash/9437
Brisbane resident Leighton Craig has been experimenting and composing with keyboard, synthesizer and all manner of instruments since the mid-90s, both solo and in groups including The Deadnotes, and The Lost Domain. He runs the label Kindling Records.
This collaborative piece is part of a larger unreleased suite of improvisations recorded one scorching hot morning in 2006 at Toohey Forest, just south of Brisbane, surrounded by lorikeets, tawny frogmouths and possums.
Adam Simmons is a multi-instrumentalist who first made an appearance in RealTime’s earbash with his 2002 CD Adam Simmons’ Toy Band, Happy Jacket. In RT94 RealTime-Aphids writer in residence Simon Charles offered a profile of Simmons current work:
“Simmons’ creativity and talent for collaboration make him one of the most in demand musicians on the Melbourne scene. His involvement with groups such as Embers, The Australian Art Orchestra, Bennett’s Lane Big Band, New Blood and Bucketrider (to name a few), testifies to his versatility as a performer. This is no more apparent than in his live shows which incorporate an arsenal of wind instruments and creative approaches to composition and improvisation.” www.realtimearts.net/article/issue94/9669
Ernie Althoff’s approach to kinetic art, sound installation and music making has been an inspiration to many younger artists practicing today. Chris Reid wrote on Althoff’s major installation The Middle Eight, as part of the exhibition The Freedom of Angels, Sculpture in a Century of Upheaval, Geelong Gallery, 2009:
“Althoff’s work sets sound free from its metal and timber constructions. Through the twin catalysing forces of electrical power and the composer’s design, sound is now encouraged to flow from musical and unmusical objects. The listener can experience and understand familiar ambient sounds anew, and better understand what it is to engage in the act of making sound or music”. www.realtimearts.net/article/issue91/9497
Mark Cauvin made his first appearance in RealTime with Chris Reid’s earbash review of the debut CD Transfigurations:
“[T]he more you listen, the more you appreciate the immense stamina and concentration required to realise these works at the necessary level of perfection. Cauvin’s Transfiguration leads us to a new appreciation of the musical possibilities of the double bass…” www.realtimearts.net/feature/search/9286
He also impressed Gail Priest with his performance as part of the New Music Network Solo Perspective 2 concert:
“Musician and instrument seem to be in an intense symbiotic relationship as Cauvin summons extraordinary sounds, the correlation of gesture and sound absolutely pure, non-theatrical, yet utterly engaging.” www.realtimearts.net/article/issue93/9606
As one of Australia’s long standing and leading new music ensembles, Topology have appeared many times in the pages of RealTime. Keith Gallasch writes of their versatility in recent performance at Sydney’s Sound Lounge:
“Brisbane-based Topology’s east coast tour gave us a live, working band with a casually theatrical and jazzy spontaneity…Hoey’s viola improvisation on Davidson’s Exteriors (a response to Southern Indian temple architecture) ranged through meditative warblings to passionate flourishes supported by tabla-ish taps on Davidson’s double bass. Babbage’s witty arrangement of Cold Chisel’s Cheap Wine starts out 50s cool jazz and then proves Topology can rock.” www.realtimearts.net/article/issue93/9609
Tyalgum – concise version (1999, 10:11) download 192bps – 14Mb; download 320bps – 32.3Mb
Composed by Robert Davidson, performed by John Babbage (baritone
saxophone), Christa Powell (violin), Bernard Hoey (viola), Robert Davidson
(double bass), Kylie Davidson (piano)
“The small village of Tyalgum is nestled in a spectacular landscape dominated by Wollumbin (Mt Warning)—the first place on the Australian mainland lit by the sun each day, and the core of an ancient, enormous volcano. Commissioned by the village’s wonderful music festival, I spent a week there composing and found my resistance to landscape-inspired music stood little chance against the inspiring forms around me. The piece is a kind of personal mythology in response to the land, ending with a reflection of the intense quiet I often experienced there.” Robert Davidson
Copyright Status: Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial http://www.topologymusic.com/
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Rice屎Corpse
Along with a review of Mrs Rice, the debut CD by Rice屎Corpse, Lucas Abela’s latest ensemble, RealTime also featured an article where Dan Edwards spoke with the Chinese musicians Yang Yang (drums) and Li Zenghui (piano) in Beijing and Gail Priest talked to Abela (glass) in Sydney. A longer version of the interview with Abela was also published.
“Abela: Always when I play, I have this imaginary rhythm section in my head. I think I aurally hallucinate because I’m hearing all sorts of things. In this instance I got this band, and they’re outwardly influencing me as well and I’m hearing them and I’m following a rhythm or following a change of theirs. It added new elements to my playing. And I think it really shows on the album because it’s completely different to anything I’ve done before.” www.realtimearts.net/article/issue92/9510
Earbash review – <a href="http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue92/9504www.realtimearts.net/feature/search/9504
Full interview – www.realtimearts.net/article/issue92/9556
Chris Reid was thoroughly impressed with James Rushford’s Vellus. He writes
“This is a cracker of a CD, one of the best sound art releases I have heard…Rushford’s are well crafted compositions, where ‘resolution’ can be found structurally and timbrally. What works particularly well is his juxtaposition of electronic and acoustic instruments.” http://www.realtimearts.net/feature/Earbash/9438
Rushford also appeared with his trio Golden Fur as part of the New Music Network series. Gail Priest writes of his performance of Alvin Lucier’s Music for Piano with Slow Sweep Oscillators (1992):
“As piano resonances cut through the pure sine tone to produce swirling and beating effects, the sound becomes thick and tangible. Rushford’s touch is gentle and evocative allowing the beauty and meditative nature of the piece to come to the fore. www.realtimearts.net/article/issue93/9606
Cat Hope—composer, musician, academic and tireless advocate for exploratory music in Western Australia—recently launched Decibel, an ensemble of musicians defined by Hope as exploring the “nexus of acoustic and electronic instruments.” Jonathan Marshall reflected on ideas about sound and music suggested by the the Tape It! concert, the ensemble’s first appearance, as part of the Totally Huge Music Festival:
“Hope and her peers…continue to argue that noise art, concrete approaches to sound and to the sample, together with instrumental composition, graphic scores and rules-based ideas, are not incompatible…Just as Cat Hope’s own approach favours the unresolved, so the combination of ideas and processes here might favour an endless, irresolvable dialogue, rather than a new condition of musical interpretation.” www.realtimearts.net/article/issue94/9674
Clocked Out, directed by Erik Griswold and Vanessa Tomlinson, have been extremely busy in 2009. Keith Gallasch describes their Wide Alley concert at the Sydney Opera House Studio this year:
“Clocked Out’s approach displays a meeting of forms across cultures and musical languages but also allows the musics of Sichuan enough time-space to stand on their own: in the presentation of traditional works, in re-framings of native classics and in wilder experimental fusions where traditional instrumentalists reveal how they can transplant their virtuosity to new terrains.” www.realtimearts.net/article/issue90/9442
Clocked Out also presented a concert at Brisbane Powerhouse of Stockhausen: A Message from Sirius. See Greg Hooper’s response: www.realtimearts.net/article/issue91/9489
Most recently, Erik Griswold also co-created The States (with Sarah Pirrie, Craig Foltz). See Greg Hooper’s review www.realtimearts.net/article/94/9672
Jason Sweeny is a composer with multiple pseudonyms. Most recently he has been releasing and performing as Panoptique Electrical, a project which brings together elements of compositions he has made to accompany performance works by artists and companies such as Version 1.0, Victoria Spence and the PVI Collective. Sweeney is also one of the driving forces behind the hybrid performance group Unreasonable Adults. In an interview with Sweeney, Keith Gallasch described the music as:
“…contemplative and dreamy, never soporific… [T]he album [is] neither predictably ‘spacey’ nor mindlessly ambient, although late night listening can yield the relief of high quality distraction and the curious comfort of a free-floating melancholy that Let The Darkness At You generates. www.realtimearts.net/article/issue88/9255
(video excerpt)
While there are many artist who combine video with laptop music, there are very few who also add an instrument into the mix making composer, clarinetist, visual artist Brigid Burke unique. On her performance in Solo Perspectives 2 presented by the New Music Network Gail Priest wrote:
“The final two pieces, Roses will Scream (2007) and Scratching (2009), incorporate live video in a more essential way, overlaying live feeds to affect textures and transparencies on pre-recorded material, both photographic and hand drawn—an impressive feat of multi-tasking. Both pieces for bass clarinet explore the rich range of the instrument, finding an elasticity to its tone and timbre but with an agile, melodic touch.” www.realtimearts.net/article/issue93/9606
Our thanks to the artists for generously allowing us to present their work to you free of charge.
Copyright status is indicated for each work—we ask that you respect the legal terms of these conditions.
Jon Rose, What is music? Sydney 2009
photo by Leith Thomas
Jon Rose, What is music? Sydney 2009
What is Music was founded by Oren Ambarchi and Robbie Avenaim in 1994 and can rightly lay claim to significantly raising the profile of and expanding the audience for experimental music in Australia. Early festivals had a reputation for exploring the wild and anarchic, often involving rock, punk and noise cross-overs, outsider artists and performance art all thrown in with the more serious end of improvisation. Ambarchi says in an interview in 2004 that they wanted to present:
“really high-brow and low-brow stuff.…We didn’t really differentiate…we just threw them together. In the beginning there was more of a [pressing] reason because there were so few gigs in Sydney for experimental artists…We were interested in digging people out of the woodwork…presenting work that was really important but that no one knew about.”
RealTime’s reviews of the festival start in 2002, alas missing some of the crazier 90s manifestations. The festival has grown to serious contender status, playing in venues such as The Studio at the Sydney Opera House and CarriageWorks in Sydney, Brisbane Powerhouse and the ABC Iwaki Studio in Melbourne. The festivals of 2002-2005 increased to mammoth proportions with a plethora of international acts who otherwise may not have come to Australia—Merzbow, Keiji Heino (their performances detailed in the 2004 review by Danni Zuvela), Otomo Yoshihide (see Gail Priest’s 2002 article), Sun O))) and Pan Sonic, and offering festival platforms in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane, increasing interstate touring potential.
What is Music? has always been a festival that invites passionate reactions. The name itself is a provocation, and so writing about the festival has often involved critical discussion on the nature of experimental music as a whole. Greg Hooper’s review of the Brisbane leg of What is Music? 2004 reflects this most colourfully:
“Noise/experimental/microsound improvisation has a long enough history to have developed its own clichés…the formal structures to organise the sound stream are still in short supply. Sometimes it’s a bit like the one-man-band thing…Except nowdays it’s shaving a whale in a cardboard box and every time you hit the footpedal it vomits.”
In 2005 Caleb K (a co-director of the event in 2004) offered an opinion piece on how What is Music? was faring, not only due to irregular funding and financial pressures, but also the changing landscape of experimental music which by then included the NOW now festival. A strong criticism was of the diminishing of local representation in favour of higher-profile international acts. This imbalance has been addressed somewhat in recent years, but unlike the early days the tendency is towards programming established artists rather than emerging (in Sydney at least).
Fifteen years on and the festival continues, now under the sole guiding hand of Robbie Avenaim: a remarkable feat of staying power. The scale of the event has reduced to a more sustainable level with the majority of the activities now happening in Melbourne, but with some events in Sydney and Perth. While it still elicits passionate criticism and discussion (see Gail Priest’s review of the 2009 Sydney What is Music?), there is no denying that the Australian experimental music landscape would be very different if What is Music? had not begun and not had the audacity to just keep on rolling! The challenge for What is Music? now is to maintain its unique flavour in a more established experimental music landscape and increase its engagement with a new generation of music makers. Gail Priest
Ben Byrne will be reviewing aspects of What is Music Melbourne in RT95.
urgent: national cultural policy discussion
Don’t be left out of the loop! Arts Minister Peter Garrett has announced a National Cultural Policy public dialogue, but the closing date for discussion and submissions is February 1. The holiday period hardly seems ideal for serious debate about a critical issue, one akin to the proposed Human Rights Charter for Australia.
If you have the time, and I really hope you have the inclination, I urge you to read Garrett’s October 27 speech to the National Press Club and the Discussion Framework—both can be found at http://nationalculturalpolicy.com.au. Look at the documents and the reponses and, if moved, do add your own.
If you’re not sure what a national cultural policy might look like, go straight to David Throsby’s Platform Paper 7, Jan 2006: Does Australia Need a Cultural Policy? (Currency House, Sydney). In a mere 50 pages Throsby describes the way arts policy has evolved in Australia—increasingly reactive rather than visionary, he says; looks at models in other countries; and makes important distinctions about how we think about culture—as art, heritage, nation, economy and social polity.
The essays by Helen O’Neill and Robyn Archer in the Griffith Review’s Essentially Creative edition (Autumn 2009) have a lot to say about the continued, problematic public and government regard for artists and the arts and especially the way the ‘creative industries’ notion (fraudulent, says Archer) is changing attitudes to and rationales for the arts—requiring them to be socially just, good for the national economy and business-oriented. O’Neill argues for a broader notion of the arts (in line with technological change and creative industries developments) and new funding strategies while Archer defends artists against the predations of new formulae.
These complications are intensified in Marcus Westbury’s Meanjin essay (Vol 2, 2009, Winter), “Evolution and Creation: Australia’s Funding Bodies”, which declares the Australia Council inequitable and, with its “archaic art-form definitions”, out of touch. If short on concrete proposals, Westbury’s essay nonetheless points clearly in the direction of a creative industries model and an expanded notion of the artist and “cultural production.” Westbury is a member of Garrett’s Creative Australia Advisory Group.
Please find the time to read and respond to Garrett’s speech and Discussion Framework. Perhaps even demand time for a more sustained public discussion that can be genuinely bottom-up rather than tossing in ideas for top-down policy making. KG http://nationalculturalpolicy.com.au
Adriana de los Santos (Argentina)
photo courtesy the artist
Adriana de los Santos (Argentina)
the now now festival
A regular for the Sydney summer season is the NOW now festival of spontaneous music. The event has been evolving since 2001, when it started as a humble artist-run initiative at the now defunct Space 3 gallery. The general enthusiasm of its core team, unrelenting dedication and a shift to a more mainstream venue, @Newtown, meant that the 2005-6 festivals reached quite bizarre levels of popularity, attracting a wider scene than your average experimental music crowd. Perhaps to avoid the inevitable rise and rise and potential for sell-out, the festival then upped-stumps and relocated to Wentworth Falls to, well, keep it real. And the program for 2010 looks like it will continue to do just that.
Now organised by a collective (since founders Clare Cooper and Clayton Thomas currently reside in Berlin) and still with minimal funds, the festival will present over 50 artists over three days at what is beginning to feeling like home for the festival, the quaint Wentworth Falls School of Arts.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the NOW now is that even if you’ve heard many of the artists before, you’ve most likely never heard him play with her, or her with her, or her with him and her. Some interesting match ups for this year include Somaya Langley (electronics) with Jon Hunter (guitar, electronics); PEKING, comprising Clare Cooper (surprisingly on bass guitar) with Brendan Walls (guitar) and Stu Olsen (drums); and NHOMEAS—Josh Isaac (drums), David Sullivan (bass, fx loop), Jack Dibben (guitar), Nic de Jong (keys, clarinet) and Aemon Webb (vox, electro Gadgets).
NOW now always includes a healthy smattering of international artists, often collaborating with locals and this year offers, as expected, a European contingent, this year including Kym Myr and Espen Reinertsen from Norway, and Matthias Muche, Sven Hahne and Mani Neumeier from Germany, the latter apparently a legend, having been the drummer of Krautrock band Guru Guru. Perhaps less expected, this year Now now will play host to the Quintet Experimenta from Argentina, featuring Adriana de los Santos (prepared piano, objects), Gerardo Morel (sampler, laptop), Claudio Calmens (electric guitar, wind instruments), Zypce (electric percussion, tuntable, CD) and Claudio Koremblit (visuals, prepared electric guitar). Michel Doneda from France will also appear. In renowned musician Jim Denley’s opinion Doneda is “one of the most important sax players in the world of improv.”
With the addition of MONA FOMA to the Australian experimental music calendar, it seems like January might almost offer international guests a festival circuit.
Beginning the NOW now festival will be the mass improvisatory organism that is the Splinter Orchestra. Somewhere in the middle we’ll also see another experiment in SMS music interaction with Fred Rodrigues S.I.M.S Project (see review). And the whole thing wraps up with Team Music, Jon Rose’s interactive music making netball game—a little something for just about everybody…
Arguably the main problem with the previous long running incarnation of the Sydney Fringe festival was that while Bondi (where the majority of activities took place) was on edge landwise, it was by no means on the edge culturally. Inner city Sydney, meanwhile, has continued to generate grit, grafitti and edgy experimental work, supported by relatively lower rents (and some progressive City of Sydney policies) and creating a thriving, alternative cultural scene.
For many years Newtown and surrounding suburbs have been the zone for a range of artist initiated activity with a recent surge in festival ventures, including the ambitious Underbelly festival at CarriageWorks, the Imperial Panda festival across multiple venues and PACT/Quarterbreds’s Tiny Stadiums event. And that’s before taking into account aspects of the programs of established venues that also,from time to time, offer alternative work such as the Factory Theatre, New Theatre, The Newtown theatre, the Vanguard, Cleveland St Theatre, Seymour Centre and so on.
Drawing strength from these activities, the Newtown Entertainment Precinct Association has galvanized these venues in an attempt to make a new Sydney Fringe Festival planned for September 2010, by and for Sydney’s proudly fringey—well non-mainstream at the least—elements. The list of advisors (named the Black Sheep Brigade) offers hope that this is a genuine venture of alternativeness rather than merely being an ruse of branding-cool.
But as with all the best festivals it will be the artists who define it. Sydney Fringe is currently calling for proposals and expressions of interest, offers of skills and general support, so if you feel you are the proverbial black sheep go to the website for further details. http://sydneyfringefestival.org.au/home
To enter a gallery and be greeted with something other than silence is a nice change. In the case of Brown Council’s Big Show exhibition at Locksmith Project Space, you leave with laughter ringing in your ears. Dressed as dunces, in brightly coloured cone-shaped paper hats and matching bibs, the four performer-artists laugh hysterically on a monitor, seemingly at nothing in particular, at each other’s fake laughter and at their own slapstick comedy acts in Big Show (2009), the second video piece which is projected onto the conjoining wall.
Canned laughter normally comprises brief bursts following punch-lines in sit-coms, but in the case of The One Hour Laugh (2009) it's a non-stop 60-minute endurance performance that, at least for Brown Council, sucks the fun right out of laughing. It's also a fitting accompaniment to Big Show in which there are no punch lines and the performances are laughable, in the worst sense. The acts include two dunces continuously slapping each other’s faces, a gag-inducing banana eating marathon (the bananas are pulled from inside the dunce’s pants) and a wrist- and ankle-untying escape act of undramatic writhing around on the floor.
Last time I saw Brown Council was a rather different experience—they flashed their boobs at me. I was in the audience of NightTime, an evening of short works at Performance Space where, in keeping with the Petty Theft theme, they had 'stolen' the stereotyped feminist act of bra-burning and Beyoncé Knowles’ apparently female empowering yet oddly traditionalist pop anthem “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” (2008) and merged the two in a stoic performance re-asserting the need for radical feminist protest in contemporary times. I found their pop-protest moving (boob flashing may have been done before, but it is still gutsy), however there was an inescapable cringe factor that I put down to the earnestness of the act. It was missing Brown Council’s signature humour.
The One Hour Laugh, 2009, Brown Council
Humour pervades Brown Council’s live performance and performance video practice, allowing them to effectively rip apart conventions of screen, theatre and art history and critique contemporary culture, while avoiding the limitations of didacticism and the defensive reaction of audiences to overt agenda. Like Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night jester, Fester, it seems one has to be “wise enough to play the fool”, since it takes skill and sophistication to combine acute cultural insight and comedy, essentially to say something complex through something stupid. In Big Show Brown Council do just that.
The cartoon-like violence and crude acts of entertainment in the Big Show video belie a sophisticated interrogation into conventions of humour in performance, and expose the hilarity of performance, or more accurately, the absurdity of what performers endure in the name of art. The endurance factor behind Big Show’s apparently light-hearted comedy dawns as your own gag reflex sets in from watching a dunce genuinely retch (after an hour of banana ingestion), as you feel sympathy pains from seriously stinging cheeks and note the frustration, and close behind it boredom, of witnessing the escape artist's continual, flailing failing. The artists' self-inflicted discomfort recalls the performance art tradition that has embraced self-mutilation, debasement and mental anguish with performances that, were they not canonised in art history, might seem to be acts of plain stupidity. Brown Council’s humour suggests that the performance artist is the fool, the butt of their own cruel jokes. While a fair observation, this isn’t Big Show's punch line. As if accentuating the point, The One Hour Laugh aptly provides those over-the-top guffaws you hear when someone clearly doesn’t get the joke.
Rather, by embodying the ‘dunce’, a figure incapable of learning, and enacting soft-core self-harm and generally failing to perform, Brown Council doesn't satirise the performance artist so much as themselves in relation to the performance artist ‘greats.' The inane repetition of slapping and guzzling in Big Show mirrors the postmodern device which Brown Council employ, reiterating and referencing historical artworks and actions, indicating that the collective are worrying at its own capability to learn (and not just loot) from its predecessors.
Brown Council describe the notion “of the Australian artist as a shadower to European and American art histories” as the focus of their earlier 2009 work What Do I Do? (1970-2009). Here they re-enact two Vito Acconci performance pieces, in one repeatedly asking, “What do I do? What do I say?”, and in the other standing blindfolded and being hit with tomatoes. Performing their own “performance anxiety”, as they put it, continues in Big Show with the artists relegated to a corner stool (where I found one of them gallery-minding the show) and donning the dunce’s cap—like the once common form of humiliating punishment for schoolchildren not performing properly.
It is pretty funny that one of the most exciting, emerging performance and video art outfits suffers such performance anxiety and failure complex that it's had to resort to public self-flagellation. Of course, had Brown Council nothing to really contribute to art history the joke of Big Show would just fall flat.
Brown Council, Big Show, Locksmith Project Space, Alexandria, Dec 3-19
The wild child of alternative music culture, What is Music? has been running on an almost annual basis for 15 years. So now that it’s in its teens, is WIM? wilder, or are festival years like dog years making it more than middle aged? In 2009, I think the answer may depend on where you experienced it and how far you and the festival go back.
When WIM? began in 1994 festival founders Robbie Avenaim and Oren Ambarchi both lived in Sydney so the festival had a strong focus here, expanding to Melbourne in 1997 and subsequently touring to Perth and Brisbane some years. As a whole, the festival has become smaller (the large scale manifestations of 2002-5 being unsustainable). Also over the last few years Avenaim, the now sole director, has spent more time in Melbourne so this leg of What is Music? has become the centrepiece, in 2009 offering five events across a range of venues.
For the last two years the main gig for Sydney has consisted of one very long concert at CarriageWorks. (In 2008 there was also a sideshow featuring Avenaim’s band Wog at a smaller venue.) The 2009 Sydney event offered 11 acts over six hours, including a performance and installation in the foyer. Particular highlights for this year were from the improv duos of Jim Denley (saxophone) and Clayton Thomas (double bass), and, in their Germ Studies pairing, Clare Cooper (guzheng) and Chris Abrahams (DX7). Both Cooper and Thomas live in Berlin, so it was exciting to hear them play again and witness their growth as artists as well as the development of the other ongoing collaborative relationships. It was also good to hear Jon Rose perform without the fences, kites or bicycles that he’s recently been manipulating. Instead it was just Rose with violin, laptop and magic interactive bow filling the space with cascading notes and energetic gesture, reminding me of the first time I saw him perform—at the REV festival in 2002.
Brendan Walls perhaps came closest to the older WIM? anarchic spirit with his upturned table of chipped cymbals and broken electronics which created a thunderous apocalypse to accompany a relentless video of riot clashes—at turns shocking and naïve in the representation of good, evil and chaos. David Shea also utilised video featuring a cut-up of the cut-up work of Canadian filmmaker Authur Lipsett. Showing Lipsett’s original film, Very Nice, Very Nice, was a bold move as it allowed us to decide for ourselves whether the collage really needed re-collaging. Although an interesting structural or anti-structural exercise, Lipsett’s version is already concise and thought provoking. I’m not sure Shea added much, besides length, in his re-interpretation.
Miles van Dorssen’s sound sculptures have been features of several What is Music? festivals, and his magnificent Feuerwasser (reviewed in RT85) is hard to top. This year his work was less of a visual spectacle but offered a much stronger sonic focus using spinning horns and speakers to fill the foyer with a rich dopplering drone that even mesmerised some of the punters waiting for the amateur dance concert at the other end of CarriageWorks. Another foyer attraction was Richard Allen’s Egg, a cocoon hanging from a pyramid of piping and intended for inhabitation by an audience member. When swung it triggered an ambient soundscape (with some help from a guitarist). Unfortunately the interval was quite short, and as the evening started bizarrely punctually for a sound gig, there was never much hanging around in the foyer for audience members to engage with it.
Suicidal Variation, WIM? festival, Sydney 2009
The international acts, Anna Zaradny, Robert Piotrowicz (both from Poland) and John Wiese (US) appreared in the final half of the evening. Unfortunately, there is not much detail I can impart as by now each act was so excruciatingly loud that ears had to be blocked in order to stay in the room (and I have to admit I could no longer stay by part-way into John Wiese’s performance). It’s not that I have a problem with loud noise—used structurally, viscerally and/or politically it can be incredibly affecting in a way that makes sense of the music. But here the master level was just so goddamned loud that all intricacies of the works were lost. While Wiese is a self-confessed ‘sonic-extremist’ both Polish artists were actually described in the program notes as “not-so harsh”, even “hypnotising” and “massaging”, however the volume and brutal mixing totally blocked the audience from entering and engaging with the sound. Basically, with fingers in your ears, all artists sound pretty much the same Admittedly the video from Korean duo Suicidal Variation was engaging, offering an intriguing clash of narrative and noise—the kind that is meant to be loud to have a visceral effect—but by then I was already shredded by the sound system so there was no sense of contrast. Avenaim is hoping to bring the duo out for the next festival.
The end of year time slot might bear some blame, but it also seems that the programming consisted of what is now standard festival fare, with no real surprises. Along with the significant lack of engagement with younger artists in the Sydney scene this took its toll on attendance and the overall vibe of What is Music? Sydney. It is also really worth reconsidering the epic one night gig format that the Sydney leg has become. While inclusion in the CarriageWorks program provides profile for the event, the fact that it must then be compressed into one night not only makes it hard to create the momentum of a festival, but it’s a really difficult ask of a listener to concentrate in formal concert mode to four acts in a row, over two unrelenting hours and that’s just the first half. And what is it like for the artists? I’d much prefer a series of smaller, varied events, as programmed in Melbourne, to get my What is Music? festival fix. But then again Arts Victoria actually invests in the Melbourne event.
Nonetheless, keeping the festival going is no mean feat and, of course, the nature of the event is going to change as the culture does. Perhaps Sydney with its troubled funding climate and venue challenges means the What is Music? is growing old respectably here, while the Melbourne manifestation continues to age disgracefully, maintaining the vividness, boldness and wild spirit that Avenaim (and Ambarchi) have fought hard to bring to the fore of experimental music over the last 15 years.
Ben Byrne will review What is Music? Melbourne in RealTime 95 Feb-March
Feeling at first outside her comfort zone when having to review a musical —Thea Constantino’s Heart of Gold at PICA – Urszula Dawkins is quickly taken with this allegory of a quest for independence staged in the town of Paucity. The luscious writing, fine performances and direction that stretch the musical form yield, more than madness and satire, a bleak poignancy in a world where patriotism runs riot.
Top image credit: Heart of Gold, production photos Kim Tran
Evaristo Aguilar, Xantolo
photo Thea Baumann
Evaristo Aguilar, Xantolo
I AM IN THE FIRST COHORT OF PEOPLE TO WITNESS THE WORLD PREMIERE PERFORMANCE OF XANTOLO. TWENTY OF US ARE SEATED IN A SINGLE ROW ON THREE SIDES OF A LOW PLATFORM, IN THE MIDDLE OF WHICH SITS MEXICAN PERCUSSIONIST EVARISTO AGUILAR SURROUNDED BY AN ARRAY OF PERCUSSION INSTRUMENTS, FLOWERS, CANDLES AND BREAD.
Xantolo means day of the dead in the Huastecan language of Mexico and, for Mexicans, the Day of the Dead is an annual holiday of remembrance of deceased relatives and friends. This is the first of five performances on November 2, a day which marks All Souls Day in the Catholic Church and the second of the two traditional days of Mexican observance.
Following a taped introduction outlining the origins of the work, Aguilar begins to play the percussion instruments—wooden blocks and tubes, brass bowls and plates, small cymbals, drums, rattles, metal and wooden chimes and found porcelain and glass bowls. He plays gently, almost caressingly, using drumsticks or his hands, each instrument making carefully tuned resonant tones, and he pours dried grains of corn to create a percussive sound. The 15-minute performance appears ritualised, as if we are being led through prayer or meditation, and the dance rhythms are hypnotic. Limiting the audience to 20 allows an uninterrupted view of the performer and also enjoins audience members as an extended family group sitting closely around the table. The instruments are simple and beautiful and some are symbolically suggestive—the bowls represent the home and corn is a staple food—while others have been designed by Aphids artist Rosemary Joy specifically for this work, evoking the kinds of sounds heard on such occasions and perhaps the spirits of the dead themselves.
This production continues Aphids’ long-established concern with collaborative and cross-cultural performance. Evidently, Joy visited Mexico and witnessed Day of the Dead celebrations in Huastecan culture, which combine pre-Columbian and Catholic traditions, and which are typically festive occasions, with participants in costume singing and dancing, and a table or altar in each home set with flowers, bread (pan de muerto), rosaries and candles. A structured improvisation, the work is part percussion performance and part theatrical presentation, an abstraction of certain characteristics of Huastecan Xantolo celebrations, though perhaps more muted and internal. A window into another culture, it is thus a mirror onto our own.
The Melbourne Recital Centre has on its web-site an interview between its CEO Jacques de Vos Malan and Rosemary Joy and Aphids artistic director David Young discussing the origins of the work. Placed in this context, the performance becomes much more than a fine percussion piece. Aguilar, a professor of percussion in Mexico, has adapted traditional Huastec musical forms for presentation internationally. The Melbourne Recital Centre has taken a bold step in supporting a work with a radically different form of presentation, limiting the audience to 100 in five shifts, but the intimacy and close attention afforded are vital to understanding and appreciating this absorbing work.
Xantolo, percussion Evaristo Aguilar, artist Rosemary Joy, instrument construction Adam Stewart, Rosemary Joy, producer Aphids; Melbourne Recital Centre, Nov 2
{$slideshow} FOUR MALE DANCERS WEARING FETISHISTIC BLACK HIGH HEELS AND TINY GOLD SHORTS STRIKE PROFILE-VIEW POSES AS A YELLOW GLOW EASES UP THE SCRIM. STATIC, THEY PROUDLY SILHOUETTE THEIR OVERSIZED PROSTHETIC COCKS UNTIL THE LIGHTS MOVE INTO PULSING GOLD FLOODS. THEN FEMALE DANCERS APPEAR, RAW TECHNO BEATS ASK FOR PASSION, AND THE STAGE HUMS UNDER COPULATIVE DUETS. THE DISPLAY DELIBERATELY QUOTES CIRCUS-STYLE ENTERTAINMENT; IT IS A SPECTACLE OF GOLD CLOTH, BARE SKIN AND TWISTING LIMBS, EMBRACING EXCESS.
The scene is one of the highlights of Canadian choreographer Marie Chouinard’s Orpheus and Eurydice, which played at the Yukon Arts Centre in Whitehorse this September. Chouinard’s innovative work is celebrated, and occasionally denounced for including spectacle, which remains the case with this work. Originally presented in Rome and then Hong Kong in two acts over almost two hours, Orpheus and Eurydice was pared to 65 minutes in one act by the time it toured Canada, allegedly in response to critics’ complaints about repetitiveness.
Whatever the reasons behind the change, the single-act performance is compelling. And spectacle is an important part of its success because it counterpoints scenes where the dancers are silent. Silent but gorged on desire to speak: a dancer hangs her arms forward from slumped shoulders and staggers in giant, weak steps across the stage, all the while stretching her jaw to form a painfully held O. This dancer, and many others in scenes to come, embodies the empty, black space a mouth would be if Orpheus—and poetry—had never existed.
Montreal-based Chouinard is one of Canada’s most distinctive choreographers. She embraced the role of enfant terrible in the 1970s and 80s by pushing the limits of how much primal and sexual energy a choreographer can demand of herself and her dancers.
So it is familiar Chouinard territory when Orpheus and Eurydice dazzlingly celebrates phalli. Costumes by long-time collaborator Liz Vandal that celebrate the entire body are also a familiar, but never predictable, Chouinard mark: men and women wear gold lame short-shorts and gold pasties most of the time, sometimes with white fur ankle cuffs and hats; the other option is loose blue-grey overalls, worn shirtless.
From her position of deep “erotic body” vocabulary—a vocabulary that knows eroticism isn’t always comfortable or beautiful—Chouinard creates an altered narrative between sexual stereotypes. The dance moves repeatedly between the pain of poetry/music/love lost (Orpheus’ journey into Hades) and the unstoppable force of creative power (emphasizing Eurydice’s role as goddess of fruiting trees). Here, the male is lack (those empty mouth holes) and the female is fleshy presence.
Throughout the performance, all the dancers perform the range of full-empty-full options, from gaping need to voluptuously fulfilled eroticism. The loss of voice is, appropriately, often expressed through the soundscape. Orpheus and Eurydice opens with a male narrator presenting the text of the myth by ‘reading’ surtitles. He speaks into a freestanding microphone, mouth deliberately too close. He crackles his voice with convulsive growls and visually distracts us with neck-to-elbow contortions and twisting feet. Then he leans there, open-mouthed, silenced, too weak to stand. At last, a female dancer comes to lead him away.
In this and many other scenes, the other dancers growl and shriek but maintain one of the show’s main images: strange, open-mouthed expressions that look almost palsied. Their wordless universe consumes their muscle power.
In contrast, when the dancers channel Chouinard’s version of Eurydice, they approach the hunger of body, mouth or stage with gifts that fill space and exude energy outward. The best gifts are from each other’s bodies; dancers use their fingers to pull sounds out of each others’ throats, or each other’s bellies. In several scenes, dancers gently place palm-sized jingle bells in each other’s mouths. When any slack-jawed dancer receives a bell, strength ripples up through their weak-posture spines and they can dance again.
The bells form a simple yet profound metaphor for rejuvenation through erotic love. More than this, Chouinard’s Orpheus and Eurydice makes a statement about the resilience of creative energy. The myth of Orpheus as tortured artist is a story of lack, as many operas, ballets and films have emphasized; consider Jean Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy from the 1950s, or Gluck’s 1762 opera (though in that work Amor restores Eurydice to life and tragedy vanishes).
Marie Chouinard accepts the separation of the lovers, but concludes her work with restfulness, not despair. In the last scene, all 10 dancers repeatedly roll dozens of jingle bells across the stage and across each other’s bodies. Mouths healed, they inhabit a gentle curtain of sound and form a net of gold, reflective light. If traveling to hell and back includes fertility and erotic joy as much as pain, then it too can be embraced.
Compagnie Marie Chouinard, Orpheus and Eurydice, choreography, direction, set, lighting design Marie Chouinard, dancers Mark Eden-Towle, Eve Garnier, Lucie Mongrain, Carol Prieur, David Rancourt, Gerard Reyes, Dorotea Saykalay, Lucie Vigneault, James Viveiros, Megan Walbaum, original music Louis Dufort, costumes Vandal; Yukon Arts Centre, Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada, Sept 18
AT AN AFTERNOON PERFORMANCE AT BENNETT’S LANE, THE GERMAN TRIO LIAISON TONIQUE PERFORMED TWO SETS OF ORIGINAL COMPOSITIONS. WHILE THEIR MUSIC IS STEEPED IN THE JAZZ TRADITION, LIAISON TONIQUE’S IMPROVISED MATERIAL DEPARTS FROM A TRADITIONAL JAZZ VOCABULARY, SHIFTING FOCUS TOWARD THE TACTILE QUALITY OF SOUND.
Joined by local multi-instrumentalist Adam Simmons, this aesthetic becomes all the more palpable. Simmons contributions on the contra alto clarinet, soprano and tenor saxophones are often breathy, rough and always rich in character. His unique voice integrates remarkably well with the trio. As the players move beyond their traditional roles, their instruments blend in unusual ways, creating an intriguing sense of musical foreground and background. Pianist Laia Genc leans into the piano to play its strings, while bassist Sebastian Gramms uses his bow to produce a plethora of effects.
Leaving the realm of jazz completely, Simmons and Gramms engage in an improvised duet. Exploring a variety of effects, their interaction is based on the blending of complex and often very dense textures. There is an obvious rapport shared between these two that suggests a history of working together. Simmons and Gramms first met through an encounter at Music OMI, an international residency program in upstate New York. The purpose of this program is for musicians to learn more about their craft through playing and collaboration. There are no stylistic or technical agendas, but rather an interest in finding common ground on which musicians from different backgrounds can interact.
Simmons comes from a tradition of free jazz musicians such as Anthony Braxton, Albert Ayler and Roland Kirk, this influence felt not only in various sounds and techniques, but also as something that is inherent in their approach. He displays a deep fascination with the freedom and risks that come with improvised music. His passion for finding different ways to present this music has led him to become involved in Music OMI as both resident and mentor. He has since formed collaborations with groups such as Liaison Tonique, and has established himself within an international network of musicians from Europe and America.
Simmons also appears to have an interest in finding ways to connect with audiences unfamiliar with free jazz or avant-garde music. This is perhaps most apparent in his project the Adam Simmons Toy Band: an eight piece jazz ensemble with an added theatrical element. Players perform on a variety of toys, engaging the audience in a sense of play. Sophisticated in its phrases and harmonies, the Toy Band is a vehicle for Simmons compositional work. While this kind of composition might usually appeal more to a specialist audience, the theatricality of the toys sheds a light on the music, helping to broaden its appeal. In a typical performance, an audience will experience a generally chaotic atmosphere, with rubber chickens, bubbles, balloons and improvised solos along with ensemble playing of the highest calibre.
Simmons’ creativity and talent for collaboration make him one of the most in demand musicians on the Melbourne scene. His involvement with groups such as Embers, The Australian Art Orchestra, Bennett’s Lane Big Band, New Blood and Bucketrider (to name a few), testifies to his versatility as a performer. This is no more apparent than in his live shows which incorporate an arsenal of wind instruments and creative approaches to composition and improvisation. A recent CD release, simply titled Adam Simmons, demonstrates his work as a solo performer.
Opening with “Alak-ala”, the CD introduces the fujara—a large folk fipple flute, originating from Slovakia. Using a 7/8 groove with a quasi back-beat feel, the piece gradually moves through and blends overtones, exploiting the full colouristic effect of this instrument. In 5:27am, which follows, we hear short, fast melodic flurries on the piccolo. These fragments gradually evolve into longer phrases. Aside from some variation (a few staccato notes and a flutter tongue passage at the end) this is the basic compositional device from which the piece is constructed. At times it resembles a demented Ross Edwards’ work, its roughness and ambiguity in pitch aside.
The next composition moves into a darker space, created through the low tones of the contra alto clarinet. This piece, “Forbidden History”, is an exercise on the variety of colouristic effects possible on this instrument. Using only one note, Simmons explores and combines its overtones, mixing it with an occasional breath sound. Moving to the shakuhachi, Simmons performs “Tagging”, a work that moves between expansive gestures and abrupt interruptions. Exaggerating this instrument’s breathy character, he uses airy, slurping, coughing, wheezing and vocal sounds, almost to the point of parody. Godel’s Yodel is an exercise in register and note density for sopranino saxophone. Beginning with wild flurries of notes, the texture gradually becomes more sparse, until only single, disjointed notes remain. “Heaven is a Place” also employs a simple device, using only two notes, oscillating a major second apart. There is a constant rhythm throughout, created by Simmons’ finger moving up and down. The click of the key is heard throughout, although the tones themselves fade in and out with the breath.
Simmons’ is a unique voice in Melbourne’s musical landscape. He has an inquisitive approach, investigating all the sounds and characters his instruments can produce. There’s often a sense of humour and light-heartedness in his work that does not detract from, but only enhances its impact.
Douglas Kahn in the Red Box, State Library of Queensland,
photo Chloe Cogle
Douglas Kahn in the Red Box, State Library of Queensland,
AS THE RECENT RE:LIVE MEDIA ART HISTORY 09, THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE HISTORIES OF MEDIA ART, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY IN MELBOURNE CLEARLY DEMONSTRATED, MEDIA ART IS THE AESTHETIC NEOPHYTE NO LONGER. SHORN OF ITS AHISTORICISING PREFIX ‘NEW’, THERE IS A RAFT OF WRITERS, RESEARCHERS, ACADEMICS AND ARTISTS KEEN TO EXAMINE THE ROOTS OF MEDIA ARTS PRACTICES AND MOVEMENTS, AND THEIR BROADER ASSOCIATIONS WITHIN SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE.
Many of these lines of inquiry can be traced back to the social, scientific and cultural spaces, institutions and situations of the mid to late 19th century that brought forth the mediascape with which we have become progressively familiar. However, discernable within these investigations lies a related history of a phenomenon waiting to be discursively unearthed, that of electromagnetism. Whether considered simply as the physics behind electronic consumables or as the invisible frequency spectrum of radio, television and data transmissions, electromagnetism is to some degree intrinsic to most conceptions of media arts, and has a social and cultural history stretching beyond the arts into the natural philosophy of the 19th century which traverses perceived contemporary divides between analogue and digital, between art, science and technology, and between the synthetic and the natural (and, for some artists, the earthly and the spiritual).
American academic and writer Douglas Kahn has spent the last 10 years researching the intersections of electromagnetism, science and art. He is perhaps best known for his book Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, which sought to inject a discussion of the sonorous, audible and noisy practices of artists into the otherwise ‘silenced’ histories of 20th century aesthetics. Kahn recently visited Australia and expanded upon the theme of electromagnetism and the arts during his keynote address at Re:live Media Art History 09, along with a national lecture tour, sponsored by the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT).
This is fitting, as Kahn cites an encounter with the works of Australian artist Joyce Hinterding that explore both natural and synthetic electromagnetism as pivotal for instigating this study: “I was familiar with Joyce Hinterding initially because she was one of the most interesting artists working in sound. But, frankly, I didn’t fully understand what she was doing with pieces like Electrical Storms or Aeriology. Not merely sound pieces, they involved whistlers, atmospherics, Very Low Frequency radio, energy harvesting and the like, ie physical phenomena and concepts that enhanced the poetics and politics of the works. The larger research project that her work occasioned eventually organized itself around electromagnetism. Just as I had experienced in the 1980s with sound in the arts, there was not much scholarly or theoretical work to fall back on. In comparison, however, sound has been ingrained in the culture since antiquity whereas it wasn’t until the 19th century that electromagnetism began to get off the ground, so to speak, in transmitted waves. In ‘historical years’, sound is very old whereas electromagnetism is very young. Aristotle talked about sound but didn’t tune into radio. In one respect, there is little cultural grasp because there hasn’t been time.”
However, Kahn sees an overriding necessity to understand and contextualise electromagnetism, especially as it is the basis for contemporary communications. “To understand Joyce Hinterding, I had to go back to the 19th century, to the birth of modern communications technologies, and become familiar with scientific, cultural, environmental, military and aesthetic engagements with the electromagnetic spectrum. It has demonstrated for me how difficult, time-consuming and invigorating it can be for an arts historian to understand just a few works. Meanwhile, Joyce’s work and her collaboration with David Haines have continued to go from strength to strength. So, they’re not making my job any easier or less interesting.”
Hinterding’s work links back to that of American experimental composer Alvin Lucier and his compositions such as Whistlers and Sferics that also captured the sounds of electricity far above the Earth’s surface, such as solar flares and lightning strikes resounding through the ionosphere. Additionally, an earlier Lucier work, Music for Solo Performer, where amplified brainwaves were used to sound percussion instruments, sourced its natural electrical activity from the biological realm. Hinterding and Lucier’s interest in audible electromagnetic activity in turn harks back to the experiences of early radio and telephone pioneers for whom the seemingly extraneous sounds of electrical interference encountered over the wires were not simply discounted as noise but instead became sources of fascination and pleasure: “The media archaeological precedent for the natural radio work of both Joyce Hinterding and Alvin Lucier comes surprisingly from one of history’s great sidekicks—Thomas Watson—the first name in modern communications: “Watson, come here…” The first telephone test line over the rooftops of Boston acted unwittingly as an antenna.
This was the decade before Heinrich Hertz gave the first empirical proof of the existence of electromagnetic waves, and before anyone knew what an antenna was. Watson listened to the sounds of natural radio for hours at night and into the early morning. They were noisy, musical and mysterious. He was clearly listening to noise for pleasure, predating Luigi Russolo and the Art of Noises by over a third of a century, and listening to electronic music long before its time. Most importantly, he was listening to radio before it was invented.”
The activity of listening out for, and listening in to, electromagnetic activity by artists, inventors and scientists plays an important role in Kahn’s history of electromagnetism, especially as he attributes sound as having played a somewhat prescient role both in the shaping of electronic media in general, and in interpreting the electromagnetic nature of our environment. For example, the principle of electroacoustic transduction—where electrical energy is converted into acoustic energy, and vice versa—enabled these acts of audification (listening in on events and phenomena that are otherwise inaudible, such as atmospheric lightning strikes) and sonification (the realisation of ‘silent’ data or activity as sound, such as brainwaves) to effectively make natural electromagnetism audible, and therefore a potential subject for artistic and scientific exploration.
Kahn has coined the term “Aelectrosonic” to characterise this productive historical interrelationship between sound and electricity: “Music and nature have long performed a duet in ideas of the Aeolian. In the 19th century, many people commented on the Aeolian effects heard in the wind blowing through telegraph lines, heard in the air or with an ear to the poles. Henry David Thoreau wrote effusively about what he heard in the ‘telegraph harp.’ It was along similar lines or, rather, within similar lines that Watson heard the nature of the electromagnetic. There was no word to describe what he heard so I have chosen to call it Aelectrosonic to denote the transduction from electromagnetic to acoustical, with the ‘Ae’ a mark of continuity of natural sound in the Aeolian and a commonality in turbulence.”
In positing the Aelectrosonic, Kahn also seeks to restore some of the implicit, physical specificity to definitions of transduction in order to enrich its application elsewhere: “Metaphors are well-suited to a movement of images whereas ‘transduction’ pertains to a movement of energies, from one energy ‘state’ to another, even though the way ‘state’ implies stasis doesn’t do justice to the movement involved. There is transduction-in-degree and transduction-in-kind. If you imagined the physiological fact of hearing in terms of the former—vibrations in the air moving to the vibrations in eardrum, bones and fluid in the cochlea (some people call this ‘tympanic’)—it would provide an inadequate model for what really happens: the movement from vibrations to the electro-chemical signals of the brain, at the moment of opening ion channels in the cochlea, not to mention the process of reverse transduction in the ear, the brain making vibrations in the cochlea. Thus, what happens in the ear played out along the lines of 19th century communications technologies when the transduction-in-degree of the Aeolian effects on telegraph lines moved to the transduction-in-kind, Aelectrosonics. The nature of music moved into media along the same lines.”
This project is not solely an aesthetic one for Douglas Kahn, who sees it as having both a political and environmental dimension. He cites the conventional technocentric narrative that surrounds communications technologies as the “last/best hope for modernist ideologies of progress: an unimpeded march into the future”, whereas other technologies have “hit the wall of nature.” Uncovering a discourse that locates electromagnetism within the realm of natural phenomena stymies this lionisation of technology as something separate from nature, instead making it subject to, rather than apart from, environmental and social conditions: “Communication technologies have no ‘nature’ primarily because the noises and instability of nature have been exorcised as interference. There is no nature because historians have painted a picture of inventors, patent disputes and business models, imperial and demographic trajectories in which nature does not play a part, despite the fact that the earth was ‘in-circuit’ for decades during the 19th century and the ionosphere from the 1920s through the 1960s.
“This makes it easier for us to imagine, among other things, that there are now innumerable social communities bereft of affiliation with the earth, without any physical habitat. An unnatural reserve is created where communicative activities appear unfettered from materials, energies and environments during a time of accelerated degradation and a fleeting period of opportunity for fundamental ecological transformation. The way that contemporary artistic and activist practices are putting notions of the Earth back ‘in-circuit’ are better aligned with the turbulences and energy systems at the geopolitical and geophysical scales that define the present day.”
Douglas Kahn Lecture Tour, presented by ANAT and Art Monthly Australia, Nov 2009
Valerie Berry, Kim Vercoe, Phillip Mills, Arky Michael, Rosie Lalevich, Missing the Bus to David Jones
photo Heidrun Löhr
Valerie Berry, Kim Vercoe, Phillip Mills, Arky Michael, Rosie Lalevich, Missing the Bus to David Jones
IN A MISSIVE FROM THE 2009 WORLD HEALTH SUMMIT, KEVIN RUDD RECENTLY EXPLAINED THAT BY 2047 ALMOST 6% OF US WILL BE OVER 85 YEARS OLD. NEWBORNS, IT SEEMS, WILL GET A LONGER RUN AT IT TOO, WITH RESEARCH SHOWING THAT AT LEAST HALF THE BABIES BORN IN RICH COUNTRIES POST-2000 WILL REACH THEIR 100TH BIRTHDAY.
With growing attention to what it means to be part of both an ageing society and a more generally ageist culture, artistic representations of, and collaborations with, those whom we call ‘the elderly’ are increasingly imperative. Conversations around the politics and ethics of such work are also vital: how might those who have slipped from visibility and vocality re-access the representational structures from which they have largely been erased?
Theatre Kantanka’s Missing the Bus to David Jones, directed by Carlos Gomes, is one recent attempt to deal with the complexities of ageing that invite an equally complex praxis of theatre-making, storytelling, listening and watching. Set in an aged care facility that thrums with various foreboding decor clichés (the pineapple scent of disinfectant, the shiny vinyl of the easy-chairs; the calming LCD TV ‘entertainment centre’, the muffled AM radio), the space is instantly redolent with the uncomfortable sense that this is what we do with our old people in this country—those who now move slowly, who can’t bend, who forget mid-sentence. Despite our best intentions, we take those loved ones here to die.
Missing the Bus is less a critique of the social, economic and family systems that feed an aged care cultural ‘mentality’, and more an investigation into what happens once you are inside such an institution. To make the work, Kantanka (Gomes, Valerie Berry, Rosie Lalevich, Arky Michael, Phillip Mills, Katia Molino, Kym Vercoe) engaged in a hefty research and consultation process that included visits to a range of aged care facilities—and with a mind to understanding their ethnic, economic and remedial differences—the undertaking of conversation, observation and assistance with what Gomes terms “the micro-universe of aged care.” Artists negotiated with staff, with residents and with families of residents, and then with aged care industry consultants at their first development showing.
Katia Molino, Rosie Lalevich, Missing the Bus to David Jones
photo Heidrun Löhr
Katia Molino, Rosie Lalevich, Missing the Bus to David Jones
Missing the Bus is hence a theatrical—rather than documentary—reflection on ageing that is contemplated through a string of loosely interweaving vignettes and framed by video material (Joanne Saad) that sits in situ on the television set, and on a larger screen flanking the space. Narratives are sad, sentimental, cruel and ridiculous. The actors take on multiple character roles and are adept at feeling their way into the curvature of a sagging weakened spine (Vercoe), or into the verbal arrhythmias of frontal lobe impairment (Molino). We see (and contribute to in our looking) the shaming that happens when control over bodily functions is lost, and we witness the daily contradictions between despair and frivolity as characters live through their letting go of life.
There are some striking images: a still, unmoving slumber opens the work to evoke a certain edge—this is the kind of sleep from which one may not wake. An extraordinary choreography realised by Kym Vercoe allows one character’s hands to delicately butterfly around the space and shyly seek out touch. A therapy balloon game is catapulted into disaster when the balloon is caught, it seems almost unsurprisingly, by dirty poo fingers.Flanking the performances, the video work sits tentatively between documentary and re-enactment genres to spin fantasy images out of the slowness of real time and into the conditional tense of imaginary past or future selves.
Carlos Gomes describes the work as an “imprint of a set of experiences” and “a theatrical reaction to” the aged care “universe.” Audience reaction to this theatrical world might applaud the tight structure of the work, its thematic interest in ageing and the skills of the performers, whose mimicking of the aged seems to spring from an empathy conveyed through exacting repetition of bodily movements. However, the relationship between the theatrical and the social can be vexed: representations of the new “otherness” called ageing are open to critique where they imitate their subjects. Verbatim theatre, on the other hand, ethically avoids mimicry while a company like Back to Back Theatre inclusively creates and performs works by its subjects.
Disability studies stemmed from an earlier history of feminist and ethnic minority politics, and while a similar lineage in ageing studies might still be a while away, if ageing is the next frontier to be challenged, then Kantanka have made a genuine start.
Theatre Kantanka, Missing the Bus to David Jones, director Carlos Gomes performers-devisors Valerie Berry, Rosie Lalevich, Arky Michael, Phillip Mills, Katia Molino, Kym Vercoe, dramaturgy Annette Tesoriero, video Joanne Saad, sound Nick Wishart, lighting Sydney Bouhaniche; Campbelltown Arts Centre, Oct 8-11, Performance Space, Sydney, Oct 21-24
A SUBURBAN HOUSE MADE DISHEVELLED BY CHILDREN: A TERRACED STAGE, FOUR SHALLOW LEVELS OF KHAKI-COLOURED LINO, WELL-WORN FURNITURE, ENGULFED BY THE ORGANIC, OVERGROWN MESS OF PLASTIC TOYS AND WASHING. MY DARLING PATRICIA’S AFRICA, A LITTLE DITTY TO EARLIEST CHILDHOOD, PRESENTS LIFE AS SEEN FROM THE FLOOR. FOR THREE LITTLE CHILDREN, THE SHOW’S PROTAGONISTS, THIS KNEE-DEEP DOMESTIC JUNGLE IS A SPACE OF ENDLESS ADVENTURE. ADULTS, UPSTAGE, ARE REDUCED TO HEADLESS LEGS, ENACTING VERY SERIOUS-LOOKING, BUT INCOMPREHENSIBLE SCENARIOS.
From one visually splendid work to another, My Darling Patricia have been exploring the fraught worlds of the women who raise us: from our starchy, repressed grandmothers, who sabotaged regimented dinner parties in Politely Savage and retreated into gothic, self-annihilating fantasies, to the sedated, distant mothers of Night Garden, wandering through fragile glasshouses in synthetic nightgowns, too distant to comfort. Despite the apparent focus on children’s imagination, it is the tough, suburban single mother, embodied with empathetic grace by Jodie Le Vesconte, who is the complex centre of this new work. Tripping over neglected laundry baskets, she juggles an unreliable boyfriend, hostile social services and temperamental children, in turns neglectful and protective, vicious and affectionate.
Africa could have been a garden-variety condemnation of bogan Australia, depicting the working classes as a social stratum plagued by domestic violence, alcoholism and child abuse. Instead, three children remain sovereign in this domestic chaos, living richly imaginative lives. A documentary on Africa, transformed through their unformed yearnings, becomes the ordering structure for their world. Angry adults roar like lions, a little girl imagines herself a flamingo, and when suburban life becomes unsatisfying they pack their little backpacks and attempt to board the first plane to the savanna.
Africa, My Darling Patricia
photo Jeff Busby
Africa, My Darling Patricia
Patricias endow the puppets with a magnificent fluidity of movement. Operated by multiple puppeteers, bunraku-style, three children truly come to life, with a verisimilitude of attitude real actors could not even approximate, and with beautifully observed details: dancing, moonwalking, gasping for air mid-sob, launching into a cacophony of tantrums when their Christmas presents, gifts from their mother’s ex, are taken away. The older girl accuses her of not being her real mother and threatens to get Madonna to adopt her. Curled up on the floor once the fight has subsided, she pokes her mother’s behind, annoyed that she is focusing on the other sister.
Everyday activities in families fatigued by child-raising gravitate towards the ground, where all adult activity seems a tad less real. The cruelty and the tenderness of this family is all conducted among the washing and the toys; the uppermost level reserved for faceless, abstract conflicts: with the police, institutions, neighbours.
Children’s lush, robust escapism gives way to an uncharacteristically naturalistic denouement. Having erred on the impressionistic side before, Patricias now settle for unadorned, complicated realism. The family has to leave; little friends are separated. Arresting imagery swept aside, one boy is left behind on the bare lino, on which a miniature silhouette savanna emerges, but only momentarily. It is a courageous choice. Africa remains a show about a mother, and childhood as it is: difficult, bearable, un-tragic.
My Darling Patricia, Africa, concept, design, creation My Darling Patricia, concept Sam Routledge, writer, director Halcyon Macleod, design Clare Britton, Bridget Dolan, performers Jodie Le Vesconte, Matt Prest, puppeteers Clare Britton, Alice Osborne, Sam Routledge, composer, sound designer Declan Kelly, lighting Lucy Birkinshaw, puppets Bryony Anderson; Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, Nov 12-29
IF YOU DIG INTO THE SOIL OF ALICE SPRINGS’ EASTSIDE SUBURB, YOU WILL FIND A LAYER OF SHALE PUT THERE BY US TROOPS DURING WORLD WAR TWO TO KEEP THE DUST DOWN. “OCCASIONALLY YOU’LL FIND A PENNY”, ACCORDING TO ONE OF THE LOCALS IN AN ORAL HISTORY RECORDING EMBEDDED IN RED SHOES’ NEW PRODUCTION, UNDER TODAY. IN WW2 THE TOWN BECAME NO 9 AUSTRALIAN STAGING CAMP FOR THE US MILITARY, AND MANY LOCALS WERE EVACUATED SOUTH. IT’S JUST ONE OF THE BURIED SEAMS THAT THIS PRODUCTION SEEKS TO UNCOVER.
The performance—part dance, part multimedia projection—is staged in a drain, a redirected creek that runs between the houses of Eastside and the rocky bulge of Spencer Hill. Patrons are seated along one bank and the work centres on the other, but extends back to take in the hill, two ghost gums, a graffitied storage shed left over from WW2 and a large section of the creek.
At dusk, a low drone sounds from the speakers and figures in black begin to descend from the hills. They are anonymous silhouettes, camouflaged in the landscape. The fading light is used to full effect. Incorporating the natural and built environment has clearly been a priority for director Dani Powell who seeks with this work to “see place as a series of layered stories.”
Under Today, red shoes
photo James Spiers
Under Today, red shoes
Alice Springs (Mparntwe) has a 300-generation history with little built intervention on the landscape. Since the establishment of the Telegraph Station in 1872, however, it has gone through several periods of rapid development: growth spurts and demographic shifts because of gold, war, work, migration and the ongoing process of colonisation. It is refreshing that these shifts are treated here without too much finger-pointing or moralising, just presented as facts underlying our everyday experiences of place. The temptation to sentimentalise ‘the old days’ is largely avoided.
There are some bright pennies to be found in Under Today. At the core of the piece are recorded oral histories, many of which were collected specifically for this work. Listening to these is a pure pleasure, and fascinating as this small corner of the world is described in its previous incarnations. The old trees take part in the show and, among the rewards of the site-specific staging, a bat dances a circle around a performer during a solo.
The staging is a highlight. Light and shadow are exploited to full effect as dancers turn old clothes into shadow puppet theatres, their bodies into frames and later become shadow puppets themselves. The rags on the set become ghostly bodies and are finally burned in a reminder of the role of fire in the landscape and perhaps a nod to the real campfires that sparkle down the river as we watch. The innovative use of this otherwise neglected space is delightful.
At times, the extent of the space and an episodic structure make the movement work inaccessible and it can be difficult to understand what the dancers are communicating. The anonymous figures’ reluctance to directly address the audience detracts from the personal nature of the oral histories. This obscurity is in part a problem of interpretation from a distance: the dancers are perhaps dwarfed by the scale of the projections. Under Today might be more effective on a smaller scale, with more robust choreographic intention.
The production also assumes a sombre mood which doesn’t seem entirely warranted. Is history always so serious? Under Today comes alive in moments when it drops this tone and relaxes into the story, embracing humour, such as when six solo waltzers come down the hill as an old Italian pizza shop owner talks about the history of his business.
Projected maps play across the ground, telling us the Arrernte names for the places we see, many of which have been developed and renamed without permission from the traditional owners. The right language for this country is embedded in Under Today with gentle assurance. Later another map of the suburb’s lots scrolls up the creek bed as the figures enact a town-planner dance of finger pointing and line drawing, a parody of bureaucratic discipline which garners more chuckles.
At its best, Under Today is a wonderful exploration of the depth of experience hidden in a specific place. Given that this is a developmental showing, Under Today is a promising work with a gently archaeological intention which has the potential to reach a much broader audience.
red shoes, Under Today, producer, animateur, director Dani Powell, media artist Alexandra Gillespie, sound artist Guy Webster, dancer/choreographer Miriam Bond, performer/maker Frances Martin, dancer/choreographer Mariaa Randall, performers Kristy Schubert, Matty Day, Fina Po, Rita-Mae Ross, lighting designer Kallum Wilkinson, consultants senior Arrernte women Kumalie Riley, Veronica Dobson, anthropologist Mike Cawthorn; Gosse St Park, Eastside, Alice Springs, Oct 17
Mini Epic (1999), Odd Productions, Garema Place, Canberra in front of the Department of Employment,
photo ’pling
Mini Epic (1999), Odd Productions, Garema Place, Canberra in front of the Department of Employment,
IN REALTIME 93 (HERE BE DRAGONS), WE TOOK A BRIEF TOUR OF CANBERRA’S ASTONISHING CREATIVE COMMUNITY IN THE MID 1990S AND TRACED ITS RISE. IN THIS ARTICLE, I WANT TO EXAMINE WHAT LED TO ITS DISPERSAL, WHERE EVERYONE WENT AND WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW.
In RT93 I also postulated that the loss of such artistic power makes it important to examine what led to such a flourishing and posed a series of questions that I will endeavour to answer here. The answers can’t be completely objective: I was too involved in it for that, but sufficient time has elapsed to try to make sense of what happened and draw out some lessons that could be valuable in rebuilding a coherent artistic community in Canberra capable of producing performing arts of significance.
The conditions for that community were founded in the educational and artistic revolution arising from Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s reforms of the early 1970s. The investment in education infrastructure and the opening up of curricula allowed the creative arts to flourish in the education system and suggested that any young person could consider the arts a valid career option. The creation of the Australia Council in the same era freed the profession from the patronage system that had until then kept the arts in Australia as a vocation that meant grinding poverty unless you were favoured by the wealthy establishment.
A generation of teacher/performers emerged who had access to generous project funding and infrastructure in Canberra. The creation of the Gorman House Arts Centre in 1981 provided Red House Theatre, Jigsaw Theatre-In-Education, Human Veins Dance Company and Canberra Youth Theatre a place to work, share ideas and to perform. As noted in my first article, many talented artists came to Canberra to work with these companies, bringing their families and settling here. Young people in Canberra with an interest in the arts had both an excellent training ground and eventually several major theatre and dance companies (Meryl Tankard, Kailash, Skylark and Splinters) that offered the prospect for continuing their artistic development in Canberra after school and university.
The critical mass that Splinters achieved, according to co-founder Patrick Troy, was based on two factors that drew on the surge of young artists this community produced: firstly, anyone could participate—we estimated that by 1994 some 1,000 people had participated in Splinters’ activities. Secondly, the company’s method was one of constant training and acquisition of new skills, leading to the rapid maturation of young artists and an unassailable confidence.
But by 1998 all four major companies had gone. The reasons for their dispersal are varied, but a common element was probably that they had become too large in scope to continue as they were in a small provincial city. Splinters in particular was used as a springboard by many who eventually headed to the big smoke with their own companies: first, and most successfully, Snuff Puppets (RT50), taking with them Simon Terrill, who has built on Splinters’ crowd theory work (RT87); art-rock band Prik Harness and later Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen; machine artists Triclops International; Temple State’s event installations; and ODD Productions, which carried on the site specific performance practice. Remaining in Canberra was CIA, the vehicle for Splinters co-founder David Branson until his tragic death in 2001 (RT47).
Splinters, in the end, was also suffocated by external factors. The election of the Howard Government in 1996 meant that living on the dole was no longer viable for artists, and the imperatives of economic rationalism and the paranoia of the parliamentary budget estimates process meant that politicians demanded every penny given to the arts be scrutinised. Suddenly administrators were required for every artistic endeavour and arts bureaucrats became VIPs. The insurance crisis of 1997 provided perhaps the final nail in the coffin. Splinters performed (literally) dangerous work with pyrotechnics which we never dared let the local insurance company know about: out of interest I once sent an unexpurgated description of our work and program to Lloyds of London and was given a quote of US$20,000 to cover public liability.
As I argued in a review of the 2000 Festival of Contemporary Arts (RT46), Canberra’s cultural planners need to be brought to account for what happened. The stark facts are that Canberra has had, and gave up, two noteworthy performing arts festivals and since 1998 has had no full-time professional performing arts company of any sort. The ‘key’ funded arts organisations now mostly deliver infrastructure, services or training. In the absence of full-time jobs, theatre and dance artists have no choice but to leave town. As a direct result, any young performer with serious talent also has no choice but to leave Canberra after finishing school if they wish to pursue a career, and will probably never return to live here.
Canberra has always had a strong DIY aesthetic, and supporting pro-am arts is valid. But the city needs to properly acknowledge what it once had and seriously debate whether it wants it again and also how to achieve it. The chances seem slim. Recently, the interventionist Arts Minister, who is also the Chief Minister, agreed to the neutering of the vibrant small Fringe Festival that had grown around the Multicultural Festival by unilaterally transferring control of its funding to the National Folk Festival.
The House That Jack Built, Janine Ayres Areial Dance, Street Theatre
photo ’pling
The House That Jack Built, Janine Ayres Areial Dance, Street Theatre
The once mighty professional dance community in Canberra took a controversial left turn in 1996 when it abandoned the idea of a professional troupe to create The Australian Choreographic Centre. It was a bold experiment but ultimately failed to win the hearts of the public and was recently killed off and its reduced funding redirected to its innovative youth dance offspring, Quantum Leap. Grand dame Elizabeth Cameron Dalman in her bushland Mirramu studio aside, aerial specialist Janine Ayres is one of few left trying to keep and build a company. Her recent production The House That Jack Built (Street Theatre, October 2009) was refreshing and vibrant, with the young dancers throwing themselves into the work with gusto. Ayres should be applauded for having the guts to interpret the uncomfortable relationship between professional and experimental dance and the tribalistic dance of the nightclub world.
The prospects for theatre are no better. While pro-am companies such as Women on a Shoestring made excellent work over the years and The Street is now well resourced enough to support a few local productions, nowhere is there the cohesion offered by a dedicated stand-alone theatre company. Energetic RADA graduate Ian Sinclair, a Canberra native returned, tried in vain for several years to get funding to maintain his small ensemble Elbow Theatre. Eventually he gave up in despair and left town, along with actor Ken Spiteri and writer Mary Rachel Brown, who were beginning to establish national reputations. Gorman House Arts Centre is a shadow of its former self.
While no dance or theatre is taught at tertiary level, the presence of the ANU Centre for Photography and Media Arts ensures a thriving if small sound art scene, strongly supported by artist-run gallery/café The Front. It is a precious little gem, also home to a thriving burlesque movement led by Min Mae. Her Tableau Vivants project—a fusion of burlesque with the contemplative view of nude painting—has evoked the strongest reactions to any art work in Canberra in recent years.
Performance poetry is also showing signs of renewed life. In the 90s, Aktion Surreal took spoken word and performance combined with music into bars and galleries, evolving into publishing collective Abreaktion, while David Branson and poet Hal Judge convened the legendary cRaSh CaBaReT. Judge and Anne-Maree Britton of the ACT Writers Centre also had the vision to engage the hip hop community, with regular Poetry Slams fostering talent such as rapper Omar Musa, who recently won the Australian Poetry Slam at the Sydney Opera House.
My conclusion is this: the arts bureaucracy/peer-assessment model in Canberra, and probably everywhere else in Australia, has reached a state of what Richard Florida calls “institutional sclerosis.” Once an artistic endeavour emerges sufficiently, it takes the coin of the taxman and is forced to comply with the institutional structure that, as we have seen, perpetually marginalises new work. We must begin the campaign afresh for methods that free artists from institutional structures, such as the artist stipend in The Netherlands, the right to draw the dole as arts subsidy, or tax breaks for artists, as exists in Ireland.
The ACT Government is currently reviewing its arts funding policy, for which these two articles will be entered as submissions. I don’t hold out much hope of major change to the bureaucratic structure in a town dedicated to bureaucracy. There are so few left here who still have the energy to try.
In RealTime 95 (February-March), Robyn Archer, Creative Director of Canberra 100, the city’s centenary festival in 2013, will consider the role festivals have played in the cultural history of Australia’s capital in the third part of this series.
RECENT MONTHS SAW A WELCOME UPSURGE IN THE NUMBER OF DANCE WORKS ON SHOW IN SYDNEY INCLUDING A CELEBRATION ON BANGARRA DANCE THEATRE’S 20 YEARS OVERLAPPING WITH THE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE’S SPRING DANCE SEASON. HERE ARE SOME OF THE WORKS SIGHTED AND ENJOYED.
bangarra dance theatre: fire
There was a great sense of occasion and reflection emanating from Bangarra’s 20-year celebration, titled Fire and realised as a hugely generous program mostly of short pieces and excerpts from significant works from the mid 90s to the present (Stephen Page became artistic director of the company, formed in 1989, in 1991). Page spoke to the audience before the show, in part emphasising how hard the company had worked to establish a cultural inheritance and spiritual guidance, although this had not prevented the work being seen by some ‘as not black enough.’
Aptly, the engrossing traditional Yirrkala dances that opened the show were counterpointed at the end of the evening with a Torres Strait Islands-based work, including a fearsomely dramatic Saibai Island-inspired archery dance. In between, the Brolga scene from Corroboree (2001) confirmed the brilliance of dancer Deborah Brown (dance solos are not often a feature of the company’s repertoire); Patrick Thaiday also excelled whenever he appeared, for example as West Wind in Frances Rings’ Unaipon (2004); and the Stephen Page-Bernadette Walong Ochres (1995) was a reminder of just how expertly the company has melded western contemporary dance with traditional Indigenous dance, and with surprisingly much more of the latter shaping each dance’s totality than I had recalled. The company’s social issues works fared less well in the celebratory context, their power only glimpsed and a certain datedness evident, although a dance with blankets was disturbingly memorable. What was never in doubt was a sense of continuity and often remarkable invention.
Bangarra Dance Theatre, Fire, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, Aug 28-Sept 26
vicki van hout: pack
Earlier, I had seen former Bangarra dancer Vicki Van Hout’s Pack, staged as part of the Sydney independent dance presenter Dirty Feet’s program, Tipping Point. In an intense work, four dancers, moving with bird-like alertness and the deep stepping of certain Aboriginal dance forms, map out their space territorially (with tape) and on each other’s bodies (with clothes pegs). Moments of intense, swiftly danced collectivity contrast with power plays and grooming displays—pegs removed gently from pinched flesh. This fascinating work, in which the tipping point seems to be whenever ‘enough is enough’ and the dividing tape is ripped up, fuses contemporary dance with Indigenous inflections to suggest that when it comes to territory we humans are pretty much just another animal. Dirtyfeet producers Anthea Doropoulos and Sarah Fiddaman put in excellent performances for Van Hout alongside fellow dancers Imogen Cranna and Verity Jacobsen.
Vicki Van Hout, Pack, in Dirty Feet, Tipping Point, Cleveland St Theatre, Sydney, Aug 19-22
hiroaki umeda, spring dance
The Sydney Opera House Studio was the wrong venue for Japanese artist Hiroaki Umeda. The first of his two works, the 23-minute While going to a condition, places the performer centre-front of a pulsing video projection, requiring the audience to be, in turn, pretty much in front of him, with a clean depth of field, not either side of the stage. On the other hand, being too close can reduce the scale of Umeda’s relationship with the screen. A quick transfer to standing-room-only put me right, and I was soon enveloped in the mutual staccato of Umeda’s video, the mechanical rattle of the sound score and the performer’s minimalist body patternings.
From initial stillness the turn of a foot becomes an almost shuffle-on-the-spot and then the bend of a knee prefigures a discombobulating body, always erect, vibrating, head down to the very end as huge lines, horizontal, then vertical multiply and flicker blindingly behind, and dissipate. He looks up. End. Against something huge, unnamed and noisy, the performer’s body seems fragile, the movements perhaps involuntary or compulsive-obsessive, although this might be the dancer’s idea of fun. Inspired by “the fluidity and jerkiness of butoh and hip hop”, Umeda seems to go “into a condition”, a state of being in the tradition of performance art where he partly places his work.
The second work, the 25-minute Accumulated Layout, is performed over a square of light cast from the right creating a shadow of the performer on our left. This time movement begins with the performer’s left hand until the light reverses to the left and the right hand moves. As the parallel sound world grows denser and more of the body is consumed by movement, from hand, to arm, to torso, it appears as if this time Umeda is responding directly to light changes and then to the sounds, again yielding a sense of keeping up but falling apart while continuing to function in a world of mixed signals. This is mesmerising, tightly framed work, limiting itself to a minimal movement vocabulary and visual effects in order to maximise a sense of entrapment, or is it transcendance? Is Umeda driven by something deep and visceral or by multiplying external forces?
Hiroaki Umeda, sound and lighting design S20, Spring Dance, Studio, Sydney Opera House
larissa mcgowan, slack, spring dance
Australian Dance Theatre dancer Larissa McGowan’s Slack was the standout work in the otherwise uninspiring New Breed program in the Spring Dance season. McGowan is no Garry Stewart clone. Slack is an original work which opens with a strikingly surreal image—a man suspended by a length of plaited hair below a glaring fluoro tube. In turn he holds the plait and weight of a woman beside him. They appear to dangle and swing in an uncomfortable, possibly manipulative relationship. Eventually released from this suspension the woman must engage in an unpredictable world with an unpredictable body subject to imbalance, loss of control, the clutching incursion of others, until finally a new pattern, almost baroque, emerges, independent of suspension. The ensemble work is taut, disciplined and inventive and Jethro Woodward’s score and Lucilla Smith’s design reinforce the otherworldliness of McGowan’s vision.
Larissa McGowan, Slack, New Breed, Spring Dance, Sydney Opera House, Sept 9-12
Paul White, The Oracle
courtesy Sydney Opera House
Paul White, The Oracle
meryl tankard: the oracle, spring dance
Meryl Tankard’s The Oracle is a very strange work, overburdened with symbolism and structurally awkward but blessed with co-choreographer Paul White’s committed performance, an act of considerable endurance, fitting for a work which evokes a saint’s fear of his body and his search for union with his god. The sacred dimension is establised with the playing of Joao Rodrigues Esteves’ Magnificat rising over the insect sounds of nature while images of the performer are projected like icons and multiplied in Rorschach doublings. The profane is heard in Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, but there are no pagan Young Girls to ritually tempt the solo dancer; his temptations are thoroughly interiorised.
He rocks, he crawls, rippling like a serpent, dances with his huge blanket of a cloak, wrapping it around his head like a turban, flourishing it like a whip, swirling in it like a dervish. At times these images suggest desire, self-obsession, or futile attempts at transcendance. When he dances with a screen image of himself, delusion beckons. At other times he is suddenly afraid, as if having been seen by God. Finally a thin column of light flows from above, widening into a circle. He backs around the perimeter as if not knowing what to do with this ‘holy spirit.’ There appears, however, to be no transcendence, but increasing effort, lunges like siezures, jerks, astonishing hand stands like offerings, moments of abjection—he crawls like Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar. He dances to utter exhaustion. And we applaud him for it, and for the skill and passion with which this torment, this journey to being merely human, where every projected icon is of a false god, the self, has been so cruelly dramatised and endured.
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The Oracle, concept, direction Meryl Tankard, choreography Meryl Tankard, Paul White, set, video Regis Lansac, lighting Damien Cooper, Matt Cox; Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, Sept 16-20
WHAM BAM: THE FIRST 10 MINUTES OF DANCENORTH’S NIGHTCAFE IS A FRENZY OF ACTIVITY AND JAZZILY RAPACIOUS TEXT. FINELY TUNED THEATRICAL RHYTHMS CREATE A SWIRLING SEA OF BODIES, PROPS, MUSIC AND WORDS. DOORS, CHAIRS, HATS AND BOTTLES ARE CARRIED ON, PLAYED WITH AND CARRIED OFF IN QUICK SUCCESSION, CREATING VIGNETTES WITH SLICK- TONGUED HUMOUR DELIVERED WITH SLAPSTICK OVERSTATEMENT.
Establishing speakeasy through noir irony, dancers crawl to a centralising table: a dinner party forms, becoming a multi-focused, mildly orgiastic moving tableau of flinging gaiety. Bottles tumble, drinks are drained, laughter is thrown, laps are sat on and glasses bounce. Drink, movement, sound. Drink, movement, sound. Night Cafe sticks to this rhythm; short pieces of choreography explode then dissolve in a night of tightly organised bedlam. Promoted as a “fun party piece”, Nightcafe is almost vaudeville, almost cirque, almost music theatre and it generates an intense and rolling energy.
The pre-set loneliness of beautifully strange musical instruments acts as a call to their musicians. Waiting for Guinness provides the live music, and what fine music it is. Hard to name or pin down, it’s sometimes Spanish, Cuban, French, Mexican, but most determinedly moves to the uneven beats of European gypsy fusion. These slightly strange and varied instruments perform themselves, making sound distinctive and furnishing the most authentically cabaret elements of the evening. Horns, piano accordion, wooden boxes and the immensely over-sized Mexican bass, the guitarrón, almost cartoonesque in its proportions, make sound the star in a performance that was really a ‘gig’; one that ends up on the dance floor with audience members in each other arms, smiling, moving.
Recently famed for their explosive athleticism textured by piquantly abstracted narratives, DanceNorth has developed a reputation that now conjures slavering expectation. Beware the devil expectation. Originally choreographed by Gavin Webber in 2007, Michelle Ryan has re-staged Nightcafe for a six-week regional tour. As it hit the Parramatta stage it had been touring for a month and this showed in the polished throwing skills and the speedily confident scene changes. It seems Dancenorth have decided that a ‘party piece’ was best suited to a regional tour. Maybe.
But I mourned for the hot athleticism and physically driven poetics of Lawn and Roadkill. I also mourned for relevance and heart. Here dancers are asked to be slapstick actors and the potency of the athletic contemporary body is almost completely squashed. Signature vigour and power are replaced with a strained burlesque. In an ongoing flurry of clichéd facial responses, this burlesque lacks a cellular physical understanding and nuance of delivery that comes only with musical theatre training. Evident is a certain bravado, maybe even condescension to popular entertainment forms. Waiting for Guinness were the most potent element of Nightcafe as these musicians understand and practice cabaret performance.
Audience participation recurred, and we in the front rows shifted with slight terror as the performers approached. I was pulled up to dance twice and had a mighty good time. Some of us were seated at café tables, close to the dancers, and the heat of the performance soaked and stained us with its undeniable energy. But my ears started to bleed from the proximity of the speakers and after 30 minutes I just wanted the show to finish so I could grab some pain killers for a headache that deserved a Marilyn Manson concert.
Dancers Luke Hanna, D’Arcy Andrews, Sally Blatchford, Jessica Jefferies, Danah Matthews and Adam Gardiner all get a chance to star. Short solos all too briefly reveal their movement signatures and it is in these moments that the performance gets a chance to breathe. But lovely moments are lopped off in the rush of ongoing slapstick.
Female dancers must spend the evening on tables in high heels. All cleavage and red lipstick, the women were constantly cast as seductive, lifting their vixenesque dresses to reveal the flesh of the dancerly leg and the arch of a heeled instep. Wolf-whistling men remained surprisingly clothed, dancing in softly comfy leather flats, loose suits and hats. Certainly there was ironic comment on the iconic femme fatal in the “she wore a red dress, no a blue dress” skit, but Nightcafe remained a deeply gendered performance. Dancenorth have, in recent productions, promoted and applauded the physical strength and presence of their female performers. Here they were all bosom and beauty; there was even a slow-mo ‘catfight.’
Despite the refined focus and consistently hectic energy, despite the lively and unusual music, despite the whimsy and practiced skill, this performance remained only mildly engaging: strangely dull in all its frenzy. Beware the devil expectation.
Dancenorth, Nightcafe, choreography Gavin Webber and dancers, tour re-mount and direction Michelle Ryan, dancers D’Arcy Andrews, Sally Blatchford, Jessica Jefferies, Danah Jane Matthews, actor Adam Gardiner, music Waiting for Guinness (Trevor Brown, Tim Bradley, Dave Stephenson, Marko Simec, Natalino Romeo), text Nathan Page; Riverside Theatre, Parramatta, Sydney, Oct 26-28
SUE HEALY IS A MASTERFUL FILM MAKER, CHOREOGRAPHER AND PERFORMANCE-MAKER. SHE CREATES ART WITH REFINED ATTENTION TO AESTHETIC FORMATION AND PLACEMENT. WITH ACKNOWLEDGED JAPANESE INFLUENCES, SHE CREATES WORKS OF SUBTLETY, SYMMETRY AND UNDERSTATEMENT.
So while The Curiosities asks “what is this body we inhabit?” it does so by containing any seepage in a series of frames. These architectural bodies are cleansed, made of bone more than blood, carefully presented. Serial framing holds this dance at a distance, where it is watched more than felt.
Line is everywhere. Multiple squared screens, varying in size, present image and provide light. To the left of the audience a huge wall screen dangles a strangely three dimensional heart in black space. An unrecognisable shape rotates, commanding the dancer to follow. As it shrinks, dancer Adam Synnott is brought to the floor and, as it disappears, he is cast into darkness. A moving box with four blinds that act as a screen morphs into circus stage then to medical exhibit.
The Curiosities
photo Heidrun Löhr
The Curiosities
Linear clarity appears even in the pools of light made into tight, clear circles by lighting designer Jo Mercurio. And the unusual modern dance choreography aligns space into curved spine against lengthened limb. The paddled hand and the extended foot fashion long bones that are placed into space, full of anatomy.
Nalina Wait appears black clad in the huge CarriageWorks black box. Her body becomes a screen and, as she revolves slowly, images of the human heart play on her back, side, front. Wait dances the heart as the seat of emotion, contorting her face into spooky smiles and wretched frowns. Lisa Griffith is bird girl, complete with tail feathers, who flies and speeds, yet remains grounded in the strength and confidence of her dancing. She athletically duets with Adam Synnott as they dance the dynamics and dreams of a species. Their throwing, catching, falling, lifting unions are easeful and practiced, although, like many of the choreographic bites, are all too brief. But perhaps most potent of all is ‘medical’ girl, Rachelle Hickson, who icily presents her body for view with a matter of factness that seems to fit most powerfully with the overarching coolness of Healey’s aesthetic. She becomes goddess in her rational stillness, turning her body over to investigation, unblinking and statuesque.
At one point, a series of wooden canes are used to prop up body bits: the human on display as living mannequin. It is perhaps the moment when The Curiosities becomes most curious. On the moving box is a sculpture of inanimate limbs, pinned for identification, disabled by objectification, no longer flush with life, but weighty with science or circus.
Maybe all these moments rushed by too quickly. I wished and waited for choreographic immersion, for the bites to linger longer. Within each dancing vignette there was a deep understanding of textured rhythm, as flow was punctured by syncopation, only to re-emerge and be lost again. But overall there was a rush to get to the next bit, which tainted the aesthetic understatement with frenetic timing.
Tempering all the coolness, though, is a lingering memory of shining bodies, of flesh made golden and luminescent through the warm tones of light; Mercurio’s treatment of flesh balancing the formality and flushing the dancers with life.
See the Sue Healey Archive Highlight and a video excerpt from The Curiosities.
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The Curiosities, choreography Sue Healy in collaboration with dancers Lisa Griffiths, Rachelle Hickson, Adam Synnott, Nalina Wait, film Sue Healey, composer Darrin Verhagen, animator Adnan Lalani, digital artist Adam Synnott, design Wings, lighting Jo Mecurio; Performance Space, Sydney, Oct 28-Nov 7; www.suehealey.com
THERE’S A PIVOTAL (NOT A WORD TO USE LIGHTLY HERE) MOMENT IN STALKER’S MIRRORMIRROR WHEN TWO MEN FLY TOWARDS EACH OTHER (THEY’RE ATTACHED BY WIRES TO TWO PARALLEL, HIGH GRID LINES THAT RUN FROM THE BACK TO THE FRONT OF THE STAGE), FOR THE FIRST TIME COMING FACE TO FACE, HOVERING IN MERE SECONDS OF NOT JUST MUTUAL RECOGNITION BUT OF AN APPARENTLY PROFOUND SEEING THE SELF IN THE OTHER.
From then on the already similar appearance and unconscious parallel actions of the performers assume new weight, especially when a thin layer of mirroring water eerily floods the stage. From here the duo becomes a mesmerising, alchemical quartet of mergings and transformations—self into self and self into other—until the only outcome would appear to be a dance into oblivion.
There are other duplications and attempted fusions. If the aerial art of the two men (Dean Walsh and David Clarkson—of similar stature, gait, demeanour, heads shaved, wearing only black trunks) allows them the freedom to worldlessly express a curious kinship, then the presence of two transparent life-sized simulacra adds an opportunity, again using art, for a different kind of symbiosis.
Hanging either side of the stage in marionette-like components, these figures take shape autonomously, attracting each man to step in, to be encased, become a still life. But this solitary merging of self into art, to be preserved like a statue, appears unsatisfactory and is abandoned. Either moving in tandem or watching each other dance with self and reflection, flying above the water and then resting on and becoming one with it (bodies begin to fragment as odd half shapes or dissolve in ripples), this is the art that sustains—the anti-gravitational impulse of dance and aerial work—until the final surrender to gravity, merging with the elements from which we derive.
The performers’ faces betray no emotion, nor do their bodies enact anger or ecstasy or intimacy, and despite the challenges they set for themselves—hanging by an ankle and curling the body upwards, swinging while tautly horizontal or dancing with complex articulation in a cradle-like web of supporting wires—there are few signs of physical stress. MirrorMirror is a work of reflection in several senses: the fundamental role of mirroring in life (mirror neurons, learning from mimicry); the phenomenology of self (perceiving oneself in terms of how you perceive others to be perceiving you); reflection as art (either literal representation or abstract capture of patterns of sound, light and movement); and reflection as contemplation. MirrorMirror’s unhurried pacing, its avoidance of suspense in favour of the contemplation of suspension and reflection, allows its audience the pleasures of meditative immersion.
MirrorMirror
photo Pierre Borasci
MirrorMirror
Adding to this contemplative sense is a level of abstraction: the bodies of the performers are close to us (at one point they repeatedly swing up the aisles) and subjected to considerable stress. But as real as they are, they neither display emotion nor adopt discrete personae. There are differences in idiom—one is a dancer, one a physical theatre performer—but theirs is a state of being honed down to that point of discovery of self in another, an extended self (like discovering you have a twin). But it is not portrayed as love, nor as shared sensuality or eroticism. The movement is not without these qualities, nor the water design, but the kinship expressed is not literalised. (The show partly emerged from Walsh and Clarkson discovering they both have Irish ancestry, but save a hint from Peter Kennard’s score for violin, there’s no visible reference to this.)
Like the Hanged Man in Tarot, it’s as if the acts of suspension central to MirrorMirror free artists and audience to contemplate a different reality, released from the passions and distractions of the everyday. Appropriately, we spend a great part of MirrorMirror watching an aerial world in water, upside down. But however you read MirrorMirror, it is a richly suggestive work of great beauty and skill, revealing tireless strength in search of the mysteries of mutuality and the ephemeralities of self. The monkish demeanour of the performers is indeed apt.
The successful realisation of MirrorMirror relies heavily on engineer Max Meyer’s collaboration on a new aerial tracking system, and the magical integration of Joey Ruigrok van der Werven’s design and Sydney Bouaniche’s lighting which so effectively creates a mirror world of incredible clarity and depth.
Stalker, MirrorMirror, concept, direction, choreography David Clarkson, Dean Walsh, dramaturgy, choreography Paul Selwyn Norton, music Peter Kennard, lighting & body cast consultant Sydney Bouaniche, costumes Annemarie Dalziel, set design Joey Ruigrok van der Werven, puppet sculptor, fabricator Kassandra Boswell; Stalker with Riverside Theatres, Noorderzon Performing Arts Festival, Western Sydney Dance Action; Revierside Parramatta, Oct 2-10
TWO DISPARATE ENTITIES, STRUT DANCE’S SHORT CUTS AND CHRISSIE PARROTT’S THE GARDEN, EXPLOIT THE REGISTERS OF WHITEWASHED ENVIRONMENTS; ONE TRACING ENERGETIC ARCS ACROSS REFLECTIVE SURFACES, THE OTHER COMPRESSING THE CLOTS AND CLODS OF HUMAN TIME INTO EARTHLESS PLOTS. IN SPITE OF TITLES WHICH MIGHT SUGGEST MATERIALISTIC BLADES AND BENIGN SCYTHES, BOTH PRODUCTIONS VENTURE INTO ART/IFICIAL TERRITORIES OF THE IMAGINATION, COMPOSING COLOURFUL PLENITUDE.
Strut’s decision to air its brief works’ season in the WA Academy of Performing Art’s Studio A profited from the evocative flow of movement ideas bouncing off the studio’s uncluttered whiteness. The best of the program’s six works purposefully skittled images, shadows and projections around the space, dispersing intimacy into open-ended depth and distance. If thinly sliced, a meta-history of Western Australian contemporary dance was simultaneously delivered for the tasting. In the showing’s worthy democratic frame, where artists of undisputed calibre like Chrissie Parrott, Sue Peacock and Stefan Karlsson move alongside succeeding generations of performers and choreographers, dance indentations do make statements.
And what might these statements be? Experience through time accumulates quality, even if admitting an occasional contradiction. There is nothing new in such an observation except that denial of experience, as is more often than not projected by the state’s arts funding, can impoverish the view. Strut’s charter to support emergent and experimental ventures in accessible and alternative venues, like Studio A, is founded on the assumption that the organisation facilitates pathways to professional vitality. That the funding infrastructure makes little allowance for this reverberated gently but insistently in the white space.
Like solitary birds, the dancers assemble suggestively in a gallery-like formation as if intentionally drawn to highlight choreographic fascination with flight and its inevitable undoing: Icarus, Leda, Odette/Odile and, at the beginning of the 20th century, Pavlova/Fokine’s undulating dying. Winged for flight, creatures desire freedom and upward thrusting power, while regurgitated fear pulls their bodies downwards to stasis and decay. Does natural order drag their flight down or are they doomed by the caging propensity of human symbolism?
The most convincing representation of bird and gravitational pull is Parrott’s Cyg.net. Blue and white projections penetrate the whiteness and, initially, slither over the hardly discernible avian figure, Jacqui Claus, whose movements, like Jonathan Mustard’s score derived from black swan soundings, cry towards visibility. White clustering and dispersing lines turn fleshy and feather-fluted touching the figure’s awakened limbs and swan-like nudging. The dark calls and weightless imagery encounter a body enfolding in swan-dance allusions, refolding into her inevitable demise. Parrott has clearly manipulated Claus’ elongation to interplay with bird-like bewilderment in a destiny and density of human mythology.
While Claus’ bird assumes a mythological status imposed by the weight of texts consciously inscribed upon her being, Paea Leach’s evocation in Sally Richardson’s Standing Bird inhabits an alien Australian landscape, struggling against oblivion. The will to freedom again predominates but, in contrast with Claus’ confinement in light, Leach is framed by shadows, voyeuristically driven by Richardson’s roving lamp. Elevated on a platform, Leach conveys entrapment of another kind through alternating wind-caught sobs and dust averted gazes. Her performance captures that sense of being distant and present in a shimmering mirage that pervades excursions into a desert’s singularity: instead of the compression of time, she is trapped in no time. It is a figment of being totally without flight in a baked earth environment, perhaps the wrong environment, foreign and unforgiving. This wingless bird is left standing under its menacing ahistorical shadow. Leach’s performance gains because of its juxtaposition with Cyg.net as a creature denied its own death.
If Standing Bird illustrated how a performer can overtake the limitations of construction, Study in A Major/We the people, Deborah Robertson’s collection of others operating as a minority-in-mass contributed little to its right to political satire. Similarly, David Corbet and Joseph Lehrer’s ICP (Impression Comparison Perspective), or two men in contact, rolled heavily between harsh falls revealing nothing but flesh given ordinary combativeness and brief, inverted humour. Physicality takes on more effect in Brooke Leeder’s work, Throw your eye over, which catches decay at work in steely revenge through a vision of Miss Haversham re-dressed. Charles Dickens’ moulding cobwebs quicken with a dark downward thrust beautifully executed by Sharlene Campbell whose intensity inverts visions of flight and spatial lightness to insist on a narrative direction which Dickens may have initiated but did not pursue.
Peacock and Karlsson’s Epilogue punctuated the evening’s flight with their professional ease of movement. As a critical mass of two, their chatter pivoted on their emerging pensioner status in the funding stakes and turned the yellow Ikea chairs bright and whimsical. The text, probably unnecessarily miked in this particular space, presented a movement/voice potential that begs further spinning with these dancers’ still youthful and wonderfully articulate physicality. They belong in the gallery of birds, more comfortable than most on their perch in spite of the funding dilemma and, in the weight game, they play against gravitational violence with seductive buoyancy.
The Garden
photo Ashley de Prazer
The Garden
At the Moores Building, Chrissie Parrott’s The Garden twists Short Cuts’ clarity to baroque brocade and rusting bric-a-brac. It is an off-centre realm of beauty and beasts that graze and teeter in artifice and, occasionally, strike seed in gristle. Stamped with Parrott’s signature, The Garden tills brick and mortar, bone and muscle, installation and performance on an estate of weeded humans and ornate musical boxes, excavated from a time which may never have been—somewhere between Rabelais and Dickens. The audience is transported into a corseted world where the leitmotiv of the piece, the fey, romantic beauty (Quindell Orton) in ‘her’ garden of tinkling melodies abides, like all innocents, in fancy. Black-garbed, emasculated men hide and scurry fustily and fastidiously around her, with no small nod to Black Adder, fending off incongruous intrusions of beastliness—the dancing women. These creatures of infinite unpredictability, who cannot be filed, stamped and contained, are the life-force of this otherwise deathly, decorative garden. They invade and, at least from a kinetic rather than logical point of view, take over, bleeding red and black into the Moores Building space, ricocheting off its powdery façade. Weeds they may be but their occupation is glorious.
Leanne Mason, Rhiannon Newton and Jacqui Claus alternately romp and snarl (erotically as the giggling uncertainties of the female school party around me indicated), tossing the pompously maintained aristocratic artfulness into disarray. The three solos vibrate like expressionistic portraitures amidst the drift of predictable scenes, including the human ventriloquist dummy and the honest-John gardener who manfully protects the flower of his love as she tips and faints in self engrossment. The fall-catch duo tenderly managed by Russell Leonard’s attentiveness is effective enough but it is a repertoire concept where the lady, as usual, remains insensible to her saviour’s efforts. Performance bite remains with the unleashed power of the feminine trio in their distinctive flashy pigments, guile (Mason), stalking greed (Claus) and violent hunger (Newton). Why they explode in such brilliance remains untold.
Unfortunately, their heady fermentation in and of The Garden, only occurs sporadically, causing the work to fall on one of its strengths, its conception in and as a collection of artworks in an exhibition space. Overlays between the visual and performing arts raise intriguing issues about expectations of complementary but distinct disciplines. The tensions arising in their mix is evident in the work’s introduction where the audience was forcibly, if audaciously, directed through upstairs/downstairs gallery spaces sprouting musical boxes, technological environments and, in a brief interlude, the slamming of dancers on walls. The surprise tactic worked but cohesion missed its beat. Once seated in the performance environment, those preliminaries meant very little. Many gardens of display and enactment evolved without a tangible thread to draw them all together except for the artifice. Limited time impeded gallery wandering; multiple frames faulted performance structure.
It may be that what is written on two different white surfaces amounts to the same message: that beast and bird might take off into more vivid territories if greater support was to be given to the time of experienced creators’ flights?
Strut dance, Short Cuts, choreographers Sally Richardson, Deborah Robertson, Chrissie Parrott, David Corbet and Joseph Lehrer, Brooke Leeder, Sue Peacock, Stefan Karlsson, WAAPA, Studio A, Mt Lawley, Perth, Oct 1-4; The Garden, director Chrissie Parrott, composer Jonathan Mustard, performers Quindell Orton, Jonathan Mustard, Leanne Mason, Rhiannon Newton, Jacqui Claus, Tom Penney, Hugh Veldon, Russell Leonard, Moores Building Contemporary Art Gallery, Fremantle, Nov 4-15
IN THE NOVEMBER EDITION OF ART MONTHLY, ZITA JOYCE SUGGESTS IT MAY BE DIFFICULT TO ACCESS THE NEW ZEALAND SOUND COMMUNITY, BUT THERE IS NO SHORTAGE OF ARTISTS AND SUPPORTERS. TOGETHER WITH THE DUNEDIN PUBLIC ART GALLERY, THE AUDIO FOUNDATION’S ALT.MUSIC ORGANISATION RECENTLY AUSPICED VISITS BY JAPANESE PERCUSSIONIST HANO SHOJI AND UK FIELD RECORDING LEGEND CHRIS WATSON, IN ASSOCIATION WITH NZ ARTISTS PSN ELECTRONIC AND OTHERS IN AUDIOFEST.
Hano’s solo technique exhibited a fascinating combination of formalism with chaotic free improvisation. Confining himself to the traditional kit, and despite the density of percussive combinations and variety of tones made by hitting the skins at different sites, he always employed the full strike of the drum stick. Hano’s method recalled in this sense mid 20th century ballet or pre-Fusion African-American jazz, where the instrument is used correctly even as one strives to extend its range. Hano’s work therefore possessed relatively little colour or chromaticism, depending largely on temporal variation to construct a series of flows and counterpoints.
Hano also performed with local Dunedin artists, duelling with Rory Macmurdo’s hard-rock drumming. Alex Mackinnon provided destroyed guitar noise, using a near unplayable instrument and a flapping, behemoth amplifier to generate a rich set of dirty textures. Hano was a commanding orchestrator, following a somewhat classical model of free jazz in which each artist has at least one solo, the players working largely in unison or parallel, rather than antagonistically.
Lee Noyes’ contribution dramatised the limitations of Hano’s approach. Noyes has more in common with Australian percussionists Sean Baxter and Will Guthrie, being as content playing the sides of the drums and found instruments as the kit. He ran a metal string over a movable violin bridge placed on one drum, producing a wonderful array of unexpected, changing, resonating notes. His approach suffered from insufficient amplification, but he helped release the gig from Hano’s implicit suggestion that drums must be played as they were designed to be.
The second Dunedin gig featured soundscapes from Sean Kerr and Simon Cuming (Auckland). The electronic palette was appealing without being distinctive, the duo’s work lacking the compositional logic of say Bernard Parmegiani or Janet Cardiff, producing a set of materials which, while interesting, did not cohere. Things livened up when Michael Morley (Dunedin) stepped up, looking like a renegade from Warhol’s Factory (complete with black shades), voicing a harsh wall of guitar feedback. Morley’s indifference to his audience however echoed his music, and while there were great textures, the temporal structure was so opaque as to make the improvisation essentially static.
By contrast, locals PSN Electronic offered a more composed approach to live electronic performance. Susan Ballard, Nathan Thompson and Peter Stapleton used a range of CD players as well as other radiophonic gear to provide a soundscape largely derived from the sound of CDs skipping (1000 faulty copies of their own release). While the palette was familiar to anyone who’s followed glitch, Oval and the Mille Plateau label, the trio maintained interest by allowing their presentation to waver in and out, while nevertheless holding things together with the slippery clicks and cuts characteristic of this style, and a tendency to anchor materials in actual or quasi-subliminal beats. PSN Electronic’s few releases meld buzz and drone well with these models; hopefully they’ll have more to offer.
Chris Watson was the star of the three-night program. He founded Cabaret Voltaire before moving to natural soundscapes in the 1980s and worked on David Attenborough’s blockbuster nature shows. Watson is reluctant to publicly denounce his earlier interest in so-called ‘industrial’, machinic and mediated sounds. His current oeuvre however represents the complete inversion of his previous aesthetic.
Watson is a realist, and while he stresses that recording and re-listening enables him to become aware of creatures and events he is unable to visually perceive—notably the wealth of insect activity that occurs even within an extremely small section of the barren Saharan grasslands and giber deserts—he nevertheless insists that he has not “changed” the sounds which he so skilfully presents. This is an allegedly pure, pre-existing sound world, and not one—as Francisco López, Karlheinz Stockhausen or others would insist—actually created by the microphone.
While the crackling, inarticulate and bizarre rumblings of a Saharan lion provides a highly abstract experience for the average Western listener, Watson’s pieces do not (and are not designed to) grab the listener’s attention. I prefer more overtly manipulated sound, but it is rewarding to hear a fine craftsman present his deliberately seamless edit of over 30 recordings into simple narratives such as day to night to morning (a sequential pastiche of different organisms and hunting noises), or oceanic surface to extreme depths and back up again. Like film critic Andre Bazin, Watson strives to recreate the quasi-spiritual beauty of the world through technological transcription, and this is much to be admired.
Audiofest, artists Hano Shoji, Lee Noyes, Rory Macmurdo, Alex Mackinnon, Peter Porteous, Sean Kerr and Simon Cumming, Michael Morley, Chris Watson, PSN Electronic (Susan Ballard, Nathan Thompson and Peter Stapleton; Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Oct 1, 3, 8
IN THE NO-FIT-OUT SPACE THAT IS THE SHOPFRONT COMES THE STATES, THE THIRD WORK FROM GRISWOLD, PIRRIE AND FOLTZ. THE SHOW IS BILLED AS EXPLORING “THEMES OF GLOBALISATION, DISLOCATION AND IDENTITY FROM AN EXPATRIATE POINT OF VIEW”—GRISWOLD AND FOLTZ BEING EXPATS FROM THE USA AND PIRRIE AN AUSTRALIAN LIVING IN DARWIN, A TOWN SPLIT BETWEEN PERMANENTS AND TRANSIENTS. SO IT’S STATES IN GENERAL AND ‘THE STATES’ IN PARTICULAR.
We enter to Sarah Pirrie, in the role of usher, handing out largish palm cards printed with some of Craig Foltz’s poetry and a few dot point instructions. Things like “cross out the words you don’t agree with”, “tear up the card into little pieces and scatter in the middle”, “read the words out loud.” Instructions differ a little from card to card.
Centred in the space—let’s go with the architects and call it a void—there’s after-party flotsam: election style paper rosettes in red, white and blue, junk on the floor, a chocolate wheel ready to spin. I imagine stale beer and peanut shells in a plasticised paper bowl, occasional piles of crushed chips testifying to jogged elbows and brief apologies. But the design doesn’t go that far. Instead there are nostalgic images—maps of the USA from before it got the U, a projection to the front street-side window of birds, fish, the beach, a landscape from the air. A banner hangs with vaguely readable somethings about the dimpled ocean, transparent membranes, fibrous sheets. The scene is down-home and small scale. A rally for the Party faithful at the community hall but now it’s late and the last to leave are feeling very tired and sort of used.
Erik Griswold announces, “Welcome to the States”, and Alison St Ledger begins wordlessly singing “Amazing Grace” to a seamless accompaniment by Nicholas Ng on erhu. Über-chestnut done ecumenical gospel lite. Post-fundraiser music for a slightly depressed and unpleasantly sobering politico remembering the feelings they had about political change before they went into politics and changed themselves instead.
Into the second song, “If not the Past”, which has text delivered by Craig Foltz. Foltz’s voice throughout the concert is not always as distinct as it could be, maybe problematic acoustics of the space or maybe speaker placement issues (the speakers face away from the audience and toward the performers). Not sure, and a shame because snippets that are clear, “if not the past then perhaps a soundbite of the past”, have me wishing for a better listen. Music stays down tempo, this time though it is more Carole King à la “It’s too late baby, you’ve got a friend”, music I developed a deep, gut-level avoidance response to in the 70s.
Segue into overlapping vocals and a rising hysteria—the mood shifts to performance/conceptual/radio art, Eric Salzman’s Nude Paper Sermon from the late 60s, snippets of culture as new, foreign and rushing past. Stop, and Pirrie-the-usher wanders about pulling down bits of bunting and dumping it on the floor to a slow blues soundtrack of melodica and erhu.
Then it’s trumpet, voice and erhu again sounding out a listless blues. I find the concert lags a little here, sounding a bit like a late afternoon bluesy jam after a few too many beers. I can see how conceptually that fits with a theme of displacement and decline—the expat vision of neither here nor there, the learned helplessness of untappable power, the fading glory of Old Glory.
Break for some audience participation. Foltz spins the chocolate wheel and we all get to follow the colour-coded instructions on our cards—chance and selection in a party atmosphere. And then the final titled work—The Party’s Over—talk and music, serious and reflective, ecstatic—if I could be bothered—but I can’t. Again the work totters at the edge of release, but pulls back, goes no further.
Last, but not least, leave them smiling with a tootling up-beat salsa. We’ve had some sad times, some audience participation, some fun and some flagging, but let’s forget about it now, put the past behind us and move on. Give ourselves something to look forward to, the next country, the next state. Moving along. Getting there.
The States, creators Erik Griswold, Sarah Pirrie, Craig Foltz, vocals Alison St Ledger, Craig Foltz, keyboards Steve Newcomb, Erik Griswold , Chinese strings Nicholas Ng, trumpet Peter Knight; Shopfront, Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Brisbane, Oct 1-3
Hirofumi Uchino, Abel Cross, SMS Interactive Music System (S.I.M.S)
photo courtesy the artists
Hirofumi Uchino, Abel Cross, SMS Interactive Music System (S.I.M.S)
WHAT IS ARGUABLY MOST INTERESTING ABOUT IMPROVISED MUSIC IS THAT IT’S FAR FROM A PASSIVE EXPERIENCE FOR THE LISTENER—YOU CAN’T JUST LET IT WASH OVER YOU. TO GET THE MOST FROM IT YOU HAVE TO LEAP INTO A ROLLING SEA OF POSSIBILITIES ALONGSIDE THE MUSICIANS AND WHEN THEY CATCH A WAVE, YOU HITCH A RIDE, EXHILARATED WITH THEM. WHEN THEY SINK, YOU TOO END UP FEELING SORRY FOR YOURSELF—WATER IN EARS, SAND IN PANTS.
This vicarious and precarious experience was perfectly exemplified by the first ensemble of the evening presented as part of The NOW now fortnightly series. Comprising Aemon Webb, Jack Dibben and Sam Pettigrew each musician explored extensions to their instruments. Dibben created textured feedback by placing cymbals over his guitars laid out on the floor; Webb added staticky features to his elastic-metered drumming; and Pettigrew on double-bass mixed extra-musical sounds—scratching, scumbling and hitting—to minimal melodic lines, which often acted as a coagulant to the mix. At best the three players came together in beautiful soaring swathes of intricately textured drone, at worst we were witness to inward searching which teetered on dissolution, though they always managed to find each other again. As an audience we caught a few waves and then the rest of the time bobbed around looking at the view—not an unpleasant outing by any means.
The SMS Interactive Music System (S.I.M.S) took audience engagement beyond the empathetic to hands-, or rather thumbs-on. The brainchild of Fred Rodrigues, S.I.M.S, allows the audience to control aspects of a concert via mobile phone text messages. While an interesting proposition in terms of audience engagement, I was wary about how this would actually sound. Rodrigues managed to allay some fears in his choice of artists: Adrian Klumpes (keyboard), Abel Cross (bass), Kusum Normoyle (voice and laptop) and Hirofumi Uchino (noise guitar/electronics). With a group of great improvisers, how bad can it get? The answer really does lie with the audience.
S.I.M.S allows the audience to turn on and off a range of effects imposed on each musicians’ output. There are four different effects for each artist, chosen one assumes, for maximum impact in relation to the nature of the sound. For example, the bass guitar can have tremelo (sic), crusher, octave up or low shift applied, while the keyboards can have octave down, stutter, looper and jump ‘tremelo.’ The audience must send a text message with the name of the filter (typed exactly) to the S.I.M.S phone number, to turn on an effect. If it is already on, the effect is turned off. A video screen shows the options with check boxes beside them so we can see what is active at all times. It’s a neat little system (co-programmed by Ankur Badhwar and Claire Herbert) which makes the cause and effect perfectly evident.
In order for the audience to get a handle on the system, each musician does a short solo and we all madly text to try it out. Quickly you learn what each filter does and by the time the musicians are playing as an ensemble, you’ve begun to focus your attention on some specifics. However what an audience finds most satisfying to play with—actions which have dramatic results—is not necessarily the most interesting sonically, in particular the effects that break up the continuity of the sounds, like stutter on the keyboard or split cutter on the voice. An interesting progression within the performance is that at some point, the power of negation becomes more satisfying. Going in and turning off effects is just as much a part of the game as activating them.
Being a performer in the S.I.M.S Orchestra requires a particular level of generous detachment—making musical offers on which the texting masses wreak havoc. Perhaps it is the essential timbral nature of the instruments that dictates how these offers maintain integrity. For example, because we are familiar with the timbre of the voice, it seemed to attract extreme alterations, thus the use of split cutter and random shift was excessive. As Kusum Normoyle reached for her phone to turn them off, you could tell that she did not find this a satisfying effect with which to work. On the other hand we have no idea of the ‘dry’ sound of Uchino’s noise guitar, made up from springs, metal objects and at least 10 effects pedals, thus the play with our controllable effects seemed far less evident. Interestingly it was Abel Cross’ bass guitar that seemed to operate naturally within the ensemble. As we are more accustomed to the sound of effected guitars, Cross’ beatific flitterings across the strings held firm in the face of our perhaps more considered texting whims.
SMS Interactive Music System (S.I.M.S)
photo courtesy the artists
SMS Interactive Music System (S.I.M.S)
Reflecting on the performances (there were also events in Brisbane and Melbourne), Fred Rodrigues stressed that it was most of all an experiment exploring how the more intellectual end of electronic music can engage with the audience, looking for “the equivalent of the sing-along, or lighters held up at concerts.” He was very pleased that, at their best, the concerts became collaborations between performers and audience, and he plans to continue the exploration in future.
But does S.I.M.S make good music? As the nature of ‘play’ preferences the hyperactive and extreme over the subtle, much of the performance was fragmented and scatty, but it was interesting to see that as it progressed the audience usage of effects thinned out and became more considered, allowing an internal structure to take shape. S.I.M.S at this stage doesn’t really make for great music, but it does make for a diverting (and educational) music-based interactive experience. We had fun splashing about even if we never quite caught a wave.
The NOW now series; Aemon Webb, Jack Dibben, Sam Pettigrew; SMS Interactive Music System (S.I.M.S), producer/creative technician Fred Rodrigues, performers Abel Cross, Adrian Klumpes, Kusum Normoyle, Hirofumi Uchino, software engineer Ankur Badhwar, Max/MSP programming Claire Herbert; Serial Space, Sydney, Oct 12
The S.I.M.S software is freely available for download from www.sims-interactive.com. S.I.M.S will be performing at The NOW now 2010, Wentworth Falls, NSW, Jan 22-24, http://thenownow.net
I’M SITTING AT A DESK, SYNCHING MY COMPUTER’S CD PLAYBACK INTO A PAIR OF STUDIO REFERENCE SPEAKERS WITH A GLOWING, INDISTINCT IMAGE OF A TV MONITOR PLAYING BACK A SEPARATE DVD OF THE SAME LIVE PERFORMANCE. NEARLY TWO MONTHS AFTER DECIBEL PREMIERED AT PERTH’S TOTALLY HUGE FESTIVAL THIS SEEMS A PERVERSELY APPROPRIATE MANNER IN WHICH TO REVIEW A NEW ENSEMBLE DEVOTED TO EXPLORING MEDIATED MUSICS AND PLAYBACK DEVICES AS INSTRUMENTS. ALVIN LUCIER WOULD BE PROUD (“I’M SITTING IN A ROOM…”).
Decibel is the brainchild of Cat Hope, and the first performance, Tape It!, offered a veritable hit parade of the Perth sound scene: reed-instrumentalist and MAX-patch master Lindsay Vickery, sound designing legend Rob Muir, art-and-rock-crossover cellist Tristan Parr, as well as Malcolm Riddoch, Stuart James and Dan Russell. A diversity of acoustic instruments combined with—or in some instances vied for attention with—assorted electromagnetic and digital sound reproduction technologies (laptops, reel-to-reel tape-players, guitar amplifiers, speakers, portable cassette-players, turntables etc).
The devices and the performers were variously positioned about the auditorium in order to install the works in various ways, and even in the stereo format in which I accessed this performance after the event, the complexity of spatial effects was impressive. Effects of proximity and distance (William Burroughs’ viral radio montages), focussed presence (especially in Mauricio Kagel’s Prima Vista) and ambiguous distance, all enlivened the performance. Broadly, the program tended to shimmer and shift, to grow but rarely arrest or conclude, producing a wonderfully affective series of effects in which musical resolution was alluded to but deliberately avoided.
Hope’s choice of materials, varying from new works of her own and those of Vickery, Warren Burt and Daniel Thorne, through to adaptations of extant pieces by Kagel, Burroughs and Brian Eno, highlighted composers who exploited elements of indeterminacy, collaborative composition, open works and imprecise, impressionist effects. Far from the rigorous precision of post-Serialist composition by the likes of Brian Ferneyhough, Hope’s contention would seem to be that playback devices are best utilised within more rules-based compositions and performative models.
Indeed, several of the pieces featured live projection of graphic or rules-based scores, suggesting an equivalence between this mode of notation and the tape loops employed elsewhere. This was most evident in Althoff’s Front Row, where the looped sounds on cassette are, as the program note explains, intended to act “as a kind of notation”—here scoring a duel of toys and their sounds. Thorne’s contribution was the odd one out in this sense with his tendency to employ urgent string refrains suggesting a quasi-Romantic set of emotional tensions and attempted musical resolutions which other artists eschewed.
Decibel, Tape It!
photo Ian Henderson
Decibel, Tape It!
Tape It! represented not just an argument in favour of playback machines as instruments—a contentious if not altogether novel concept—but also a coupling of this idea with a specific aesthetic vision of what emerges from the pre-recorded and the acoustic. Hope’s thesis was, in this sense, counter-intuitive but persuasive: that the use of recorded or programmed material produces a greater diversity of only partially predictable outcomes, rather than necessarily supporting closed-off, formal processes of scoring like dots and lines, which have largely tended towards the construction of ever more predetermined outcomes.
Whilst the sonic palette on offer was unambiguously contemporary—the bursts of ringing noise which characterised Decibel’s interpretation of Burroughs, the rapid attacks and micro-gestural acoustic instrumental flourishes of Kagel and Vickery, Hope’s own acoustic drones, the fragmentation of conventional tonality without the imposition of a new over-arching logic such as Schoenberg insisted upon within Serialism, digital glitch, slide and process by Hope, Vickery and Eno, radiophonic sampling by Althoff and Burroughs—the performative logic employed overall by Decibel suggested the present bleeding back into history.
If the much prized staves and points of Western composition from the 18th to mid 20th centuries represented nothing more than an earlier form of “recording” or “playback” technology—the live performer as CD player—then contemporary electromagnetic devices are different from pre-modern ones in character, but not in nature.
In enacting this acoustic, electromechanical cyberneticisation of player and machine, Decibel’s program effected a curious kind of displacement. Despite the spatialisations of Hope, Muir and their collaborators, the sounds seemed strangely unfixed and placeless. Instruments seemed to echo and scratch (notably Kagel), but not sing or voice. There was a kind of materialism to these compositions which simultaneously rendered them as effervescent or impossible to locate metaphorically. Burroughs’ citation of the ever mobile mediascape and Eno’s Music For Airports were paradigmatic here in their articulation of a metaphoric, global or alien non-place.
One cannot and indeed should not reduce Decibel’s multifarious program or explorations to a single effect of what I will here call “aetherisation.” Kagel’s more emphatically theatrical use of the instruments, or Burt’s totally beguiling idea of something which is both ‘noise’ and lulling, suggest a range of processes and moods which are not easily amalgamated under a single affective model or critical paradigm. Decibel is, at least at this point, not about defining or demagogically fixing a unified approach to sound, music, playback and performance. It remains an open project, an exploration.
Nevertheless these trends and arguments over what happened after Serialism, following Cage’s celebration of chance, or what should be occurring in the wake of the rise of electronic composition and noise art as legitimate forms—all of these much debated controversies interact here to produce a number of tensions which Hope’s programming effectively exploits. It was therefore not only musical irresolution which acted as the concert’s dominant motif, but of musical history itself. Indeed, Althoff went so far as to quote the same trains sampled in Pierre Schaeffer’s landmark Étude Aux Chemins De Fer (1948) within his own contribution, driving home the historicist nature of a project such as this.
Hope and her peers (and here I would include Anthony Pateras as striving towards a similar model in his compositions and in his collaborations with Robin Fox) continue to argue that noise art, concrete approaches to sound and to the sample, together with instrumental composition, graphic scores and rules-based ideas, are not incompatible. Whilst there is no doubt that all of these methods productively animated Decibel’s performance, it remains to be seen if they are truly compatible, or should rather be seen as parallel trends which may be employed in conflicted tandem. Just as Cat Hope’s own approach favours the unresolved, so the combination of ideas and processes here might favour an endless, irresolvable dialogue, rather than a new condition of musical interpretation.
Decibel, Tape It!, director, performer Cat Hope, performers, collaborators Lindsay Vickery, Stuart James, Malcolm Riddoch, Rob Muir, Tristan Parr, Dan Russell; West Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Music Auditorium, Totally Huge New Music Festival, Sept 10, http://decibel.waapamusic.com/; http://www.tura.com.au/
IN SPEAK PERCUSSION’S LATEST COLLABORATION WITH FRITZ HAUSER, THE IWAKI AUDITORIUM IS TRANSFORMED FROM ITS USUAL CONCERT SETTING. A SINGLE ROW OF SEATS IS ARRANGED INTO A LARGE SQUARE AND THE LIGHTING RIG IS LOWERED METRES FROM THE FLOOR. TWO PIANOS AND A MULTITUDE OF PERCUSSION INSTRUMENTS ARE SPREAD OUT OVER A VAST PERFORMANCE AREA.
The program opens with Small Talk, a work for solo percussion composed and performed by Hauser. Gradually working his way around a table of small objects, he creates a mesmerising presence. The sounds are often simple, yet the intensity of this piece never wane.
For Speak and Unspoken, the centerpiece of the program, Hauser leaves the stage, but remains distinctly present through his composition and direction of Speak Percussion and special guest, pianist Donna Coleman.
Speak and Unspoken evolved from Coleman’s conceptual image of a pianist surrounded by a sea of percussion instruments. It takes the form of a partly structured improvisation. Opening the work, three percussionists play sparse, contrasting rhythms on woodblocks gradually moving from opposing corners of the room to the piano at its centre. Coleman depresses the piano’s pedal, leaving the sound of the woodblock as sympathetic resonance in its strings.
Following an improvisation passage, the piece enters into a structured section, cued by Hauser off-stage through a changed lighting state, illuminating three timpani. The percussionists play rolls with shifting dynamics, while Coleman plays thunderous clusters.
In the final section, performers play consistent pulses at independent tempi, creating a phasing effect. Percussionists move from sounds with short attacks, to sounds gradually becoming longer in resonance, concluding with resonating federation bells.
These ideas serve as departure points for improvised sections. The performers’ approach to improvisation appears to be in reaction to the sounds happening around them. The resulting sound is a complex blend of textures and klangfarbenmelodie [literally “tone-colour-melody”, where a musical line is distributed between several instruments. Eds]
Hauser’s role as composer not only defines these structures, but also facilitates in preparing an improvised dialogue between the players. This is a bold approach to concert music that challenges the conventional relationship between composer and performers.
The spatial arrangement of the instruments requires the players to blend sounds across the room. Coleman, Matthias Shack-Arnott, Eugene Ughetti and Peter Neville demonstrate great finesse in their musical interaction.
Speak and Unspoken represents an aesthetic interest in the arrangement of sounds in space. This is realised effectively not only in a technical sense, but results in a profound and moving experience. Credit must go to the creative partnership of Hauser and architect Boa Baumann, who oversaw the presentation of this work—space and sound were inextricably linked to delicately crafted and refined music.
Donna Coleman and Speak Percussion, Speak & Unspoken, in collaboration with Fritz Hauser and Boa Baumann, Iwaki Auditorium, ABC Centre, Melbourne, Sept 22, www.speakpercussion.com
I CONFESS TO ATTENDING TO CHURCH ONCE A YEAR, AND BRISBANE’S CANTO CORO IS MY DENOMINATION. FOUNDED BY MUSICAL DIRECTOR MARK DUNBAR AND WITH ITS ROOTS IN BRISBANE’S GREEK AND LATIN AMERICAN COMMUNITIES, CANTO CORO IS A MIXED COMMUNITY CHOIR THAT PRESENTS LARGE CHORAL AND MUSIC THEATRE WORKS WITH THE DISCIPLINE TO TACKLE COMPLEX SCORES AND AN EXTENDED REPERTOIRE THAT TAKES IT BEYOND THE USUAL DEFINITION OF A ‘COMMUNITY’ CHOIR.
In the past Canto Coro have presented such works as Canto General composed by Mikis Theodorakis to poems by Pablo Neruda and Mass by Leonard Bernstein; Little City, 1975: A Love Story, Fatal Shore, Black Cargo by Melbourne-based composer Irene Vela; and Red Cap by Janis Balodis and Ian Grandage.
When many were silent or closeted in despair during the Howard years over the refusal to say sorry, Canto Coro came to the fore. Mark Dunbar, who teaches at the Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts in Brisbane, co-devised and composed the music for a trilogy of three dramatic choral works incorporating performers from the Centre: Hornets Wedding (libretto by Indija Mahjoeddin), Anderson & Ipeta, and Damage. These weren’t easy works but, despite the gruesome colonial history depicted or the bleak realities of street life symbolically portrayed by the young students, Canto refused to take a moralising or simply pious stance. Instead in inclusive, challenging and celebratory ways, Canto Coro remained an unambiguous voice for recognising that it is society itself that needs to change.
After what must have seemed such a prolonged time on the barricades, Dunbar indicated a change of pace for Canto’s 15th anniversary, Canto style. Within the moveable feast of the choir were half a dozen fluent German speakers so that Dunbar nursed to life the concept of arranging lyrics by Bertold Brecht and music by Kurt Weill, Hans Eisler and Paul Dessau from a scratchy old cassette of a concert in which he’d played the flute aeons ago in Melbourne. Thus songs of deAth and distrAction/ a post apocalyptic cabaret was born. This was mounted as an independent production during the Queensland Music Festival 2009 and was a runaway word of mouth success.
Dunbar writes in the program that there is often a vicious irony between the sweetness of the melodies and the stark realities of Brecht’s words. Also the songs belong to a rich theatre tradition which choir members interpreted in poor theatre guise by bringing their own costumes. Both elements united disturbingly in the persona of Mark Shortis who looked as if he hadn’t slept in a week, an effect emphasised by thick stubble and the kohl under his eyes which rolled in wicked emphasis as the MC from hell, convincing us that this man was at the very least a dangerous method actor in his brilliantly insinuating bass rendition of “What Keeps Mankind Alive” from The Threepenny Opera.
At the opposite, perverse extreme from the same opera was the inability of soprano Anna Stephanos to disguise herself as anything but the professional rembetika [Greek urban folk music. Ed] torch singer that she is in a version of Pirate Jenny to die for. The beauty of Libby Schmidt’s soprano singing “The Fraternisation Song” from Mother Courage epitomised the searing musical ironies inherent in this music. And so it went on for another 16 acts in different combinations of voices and collective moods…you get the idea. Likewise the Brisbane Canto Coro Band 2009 was a combination of instruments that was sweet Hallelujah.
Canto Coro Inc, Songs of deAth and distrAction; Ellen Taylor Centre, Brisbane, Jul 19-26
YOU HEAR IT SAID THAT WE HAVE BECOME ‘TIME-POOR’; HYSTERICAL URGENCY IS UPON US LEST TIME SHOULD LEAVE US BEHIND. A TEMPORAL GRID, BINDING US TO THE MACHINES THAT KEEP TIME, SEEMS TO CONTRACT OR DIVIDE WITHIN ITSELF, CREATING EVER-SMALLER INCREMENTS INTO WHICH OUR ACTIONS MUST BE SQUEEZED. WE ARE PROPELLED BY OUR CHOSEN FORMS OF COMMUNICATION; COMPELLED BY THEIR CRUEL ECONOMY. TIME POVERTY IS SYMPTOMATIC OF AN ANXIETY FORMED BY THE INTERCHANGE BETWEEN THE CONSTANCY OF MATHEMATICAL TIME AND THE TURBULENCE OF SUBJECTIVE TIME, OR RATHER, IN THE DESIRE TO SYNTHESISE THE TWO.
To graft general, spatialised time onto subjective time is to forget that time is learnt; we are subjected to rationalised time but have a fundamentally asymmetrical relationship to it. Time takes time. After all, there was a time at the beginning for all of us when we didn’t know time. It is subject to our erratic unfolding consciousness, constantly oscillating with forgotten unconscious imperatives.
That universal mathematical time is a fantasy embodied in the movie camera underlies the formal concerns of Derek Hart’s video art. Reductive, looped, narrative structures—the synthetic thread between here and there; to and from; back and forth—are matched by the artist’s theoretical concerns with the back and forth between the screen and the spectator.
Hart acquired his training in the UK, receiving an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art in 2000. His admiration for the traditions of experimental film and video began when he was an undergraduate student of Time-Based Media at the Kent Institute of Art and Design. During the last five years he has exhibited both in Tasmania and nationally and has extended his practice to include site specific installation and curating. Currently undertaking an Australia Council, Inter-Art Connections Residency, hosted by Hydro Tasmania, Hart is in the process of making a number of works that document water flow in the state’s rivers, lakes and catchment areas. They will combine elemental time with the temporal tracking of two machines—the camera and an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP), used by Hydro Tasmania to collect hydrology data.
This alignment of technologies with a ‘found’ source of temporal flow is perfectly suited to Hart’s structural affinities and also discloses film’s scientific roots. He sets up a dialogue with hydrology, mimicking its research methodologies, which are designed to monitor environmental impact and water flow. Here the camera betrays its complicity as an homogenising apparatus filtering particular data requirements. Hart seems to be making reference to the belief, prevalent in mid-20th century film theory, that the camera is of itself irretrievably ideologically bound to a repressive Enlightenment past. Certainly, in a project that merges dispassionate mechanical and natural temporal flow, the connection is there. In fact, Hart’s interest in experimental filmmaking is made evident in all his work through his attempts to highlight the ambiguities of temporal synchronicity and repetition.
The ADCP is a sophisticated sonar machine that crosses waterways collecting readings of underwater topography and water velocity. The concept of sonar producing images through a cyclical emission and reception of sound waves parallels Hart’s formal and technical interests. His residency projects are in their early stages but he intends to attach cameras to the ADCP machine, augmenting its sensory range. Setting it off down rivers and around lakes, becoming the ADCP with a movie camera, à la Dziga Vertov.
The rhythmic pulsations of the sonar are not just a useful metaphor in describing Hart’s formal approach; they also illustrate a fundamental principle concerning our basic scientific relation to reality. The origins of physics have been thought to stem from observation, over centuries, of the cyclical return of the stars to the same place. Reality, then, is the rhythmic return of an object. In psychoanalytic terms the continual regaining of the object is a desire that is set in motion due to a primal lost object. As Lacan writes, “[r]eality faces man—and that is what interests him in it—both as having already been structured and as being that which presents itself in his experience as something that always returns to the same place” (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis). Hart’s consistent use of variations of the looped video creates an intriguing affinity with these ideas.
Bivalve (2008), Derek Hart
courtesy the artist
Bivalve (2008), Derek Hart
The pace of water flow lends itself to Hart’s filmic sensibility and it appears in a number of earlier works. Bivalve (2008) is a two-channel video installation work that suggests an aquarium-like point of view. The image is split centrally, one side running forwards the other backwards with no sound. The surreal ‘object’ (formed in your imagination in combining the two quasi-symmetrical sides) resembles a white clam or whale-like mouth. Smouldering (2008) is a related piece made in the same year and contains a part of the same white, lipped object in water. Slightly protruding from the surface of the water flow (that has been slowed down) the ‘lips’ take on an eerie eroticism.
Much has been written of the narcissistic identification that occurs watching film at the cinema; the hypnotic diegetic glue that you give yourself up to. Narrative identification is brought to the works by default but the way Hart utilises the loop stifles it; generally the editing is invisible and the point of view static. Gestures and movements that can fold in on themselves (be edited backwards and forwards seamlessly) are central elements around which the cyclical form of these works revolves.
Sound Blocks Pain (2008) written & produced by Yvette Blackwood and directed by LX McGee
Derek Hart’s most recent work, from his solo exhibition Film Stills at The Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre in 2009, relates to much earlier video works that appropriated small segments of repetitive gestures from the films of Jim Jarmusch. The four videos for the Long Gallery exhibition are looped fragments from the works of three Tasmanian filmmakers, Yvette Blackwood, Catherine Pettman and Roger Scholes, who gave Hart permission to use their films.
These videos are more complex, formally and psychologically, than his earlier appropriation works, combining apparent and hidden temporalities. In Eclipse, a black screen lightens to reveal an emotionally distraught woman seen through the windscreen of a car. She is shaking the fist of her left hand with varying intensity. At the height of her grief and anger she is clearly screaming (although the film is silent) and her whole body shakes, the image fading to black again only to return to the start as if merely a shadow had passed briefly over her eternal misery. This work takes the form of a palindrome and actually begins at the end of the original film running backwards; it then runs forwards and so on. However, from the viewer’s temporal perspective the symmetry is false; the film can only ever run forwards.
Disruption of symmetry is also disclosed in a more complex way in Sitting Room. Two women and a man are sitting in a lounge room; a tense surly atmosphere is suggested through their silent, nervous mannerisms. Repetitive gestures of leg swinging, eating and drumming a wine glass are basically all they do, as if unconsciously revealing something through body language. This repeated short segment appears just as it would in the original but in order for the artist to maintain the looped suspension he has divided the screen three ways, one segment for each person. They share a diegetic space but are in fact living in three entirely different time zones, backwards and forwards independently; diegetic time becomes a mise en abyme, an interlacing of multiple quasi-narratives. The filmic object is sutured but when a bottle moves toward the hand of the man the spell is broken.
Philip Watkins is a contemporary arts writer and curator. He writes for various national journals and is currently Exhibition Coordinator for the Hobart City Council’s Carnegie Gallery.
HHH #2 2004, Fiona Foley, image courtesy the artist, Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
A 25-YEAR RETROSPECTIVE OF FIONA FOLEY’S WORK IS CURRENTLY SHOWING AT SYDNEY’S MCA. WHO IS THE REAL FIONA FOLEY? SHE ONCE SCOFFED WHEN I SUGGESTED SHE CREATE A PERFORMANCE PIECE DRESSED AS A BONNETED ELIZA FRASER OF FRASER ISLAND FAME. FOLEY HAS APPEARED IN MANY GUISES: A DEFIANT, SEMI-NUDE BADTJALA WOMAN IN NATIVE BLOOD (1994) AND BADTJALA WOMAN (1995); IN COSTUME AS A SEMINOLE INDIAN MAIDEN (WILD TIMES CALL, 2001); A MASKED AFRICAN-AMERICAN REVERSE KU KLUX KLANNER (HHH—HEDONISTIC HONKY HATERS, 2004).
Foley was present only symbolically in earlier works: her hair clippings in Lost Badtjalas (1991) and in the red chilli and charcoal floor installation Black Velvet II in Meridian at the MCA in 2002. She is visible only as her ‘spoor’— a predator lurking—in the photographic sets Venus and Sea of Love (2007) and more recently as a burkah-clad Islamic Australian woman in Nulla 4 eva (2008). “Nulla”, I’m told, is the local colloquial name for the Sydney suburb of Cronulla. “If you are an ‘other’, can you then be any and all ‘others’? With all the dress-ups, is it just a fashion shoot?”, I once asked. “I don’t think so!”, flew the reply. Paris is Burning perhaps?
roles & masks
Notably Fiona Foley is not alone in this fascinating ‘role-playing’ that has formed a special part of her work. A number of Aboriginal artists have adopted various guises/forms in their work, some blatantly—Tracey Moffat, and later Darren Siwes and Christian Thompson. Others have played with pseudonyms of a kind—Gordon Bennett as John Citizen and, soon after, Richard Bell as Richie—or used masked people as Tony Albert does in No Place (2009). Ego, parody, comedy, wit, shyness or shame?
At the memorial service in 2007 for acclaimed Aboriginal actress Justine Saunders at Sydney Opera House, her partner mulled over his feelings that despite her success in many roles, colonial history and racism within Australia forced Justine from early in her life to carry a deep hurt, a wound, “hidden inside, to question her own self-worth”, he said. This burden scars how many Aboriginal people?
Feminist discussions of the body usually propose a liberating confessional self-representation while post-colonial histories often began with autobiographical telling and imagery. Though cathartic this approach can also fail, clumsily reducing the personal to just another form of stereotype.
speaking through objects
Fiona Foley’s inclusion of herself in her work appears early in her career though in a quite different way, almost ritualistic and honorific. Majoring in sculpture at art school, she took to installation of objects or series of related images around certain concepts. More often than not she was invisible, speaking through objects and other people in her image series. Of late, she has laid out her ideas in constructed sets of photographs accompanied by auxiliary objects. In 2001, the floor of the Tampa Florida Gallery was covered with 30cm deep golden, ripe corn that visitors had to struggle through to view the soft sepia images of Wild Times Call. In her 2004 series, HHH, colourful costumes, like a set of eyeless ghosts, stare out in contrast to the simmering, hateful gaze in the HHH photo series next to which they hang. In Black Opium (2006), a set of traditional Australian Chinese opium pipes accompanies the painting series, and in the MCA show Foley adds her evocative short film, Bliss (2008).
The seven images comprising the recent Nulla 4 eva series (2008) portray a truly multicultural nation. Several social issue sites are visited including the little remembered but historically significant 19th century Chinese opium house meeting place and a playful, if reserved, youthful, contemporary ‘Cronulla’ beach scene. Aboriginal and non-white youths pose slightly self-consciously on the beach—the boys semi-naked, the girls ‘coiffured’ and wearing a variety of outfits that reflect a range of cultural backgrounds. Here, all are ‘wrapped up’ and yet appear perfectly comfortable in assemblage and setting.
an unofficial historian
There is more than one history, even though white, western history dominates. In Australia there is a lack of national in-depth engagement with this history except for our narrow, official, paper-thin view. The ‘history wars’ debate has been intense and highly political over the last decade and still smoulders. Meanwhile, Fiona Foley has taken on the role of a kind of unofficial historian. Nobody has asked for or authorised this role but the history she explores is in fact our common national history, from both sides of the racial divide. Beyond its strong visual appeal, it’s really in this context that I believe her art should be read.
One of the first laws enacted concerning Aboriginal people in Queensland was The Protection of Aboriginals and the Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act (1897). Foley’s Opium—Shackled and Bliss (2008) both talk of the place of Chinese Australians and their relationship with both black and white Australia. Historically this active and visible engagement has been only lightly recorded.
More recently, the Cronulla ‘incident’ was one of contestation, historically as well as physically: contestation of the site—the beach as an Australian social interactive space, for many a ‘sacred’ place. Aboriginal people were never asked for comment about the incident—white Australians simply claimed the site (to keep an escape route open perhaps?). There was no reference to Aboriginal history even though many Sydney coastal and harbour beaches carry Aboriginal names—Akuna Bay, Barrenjoey, Bilgola, Bondi, Coogee, Curl Curl, Dee Why, Elanora, to name just a few.
Successive waves of migrants have washed up on our shores—each challenged as they arrived by the previous wave, each vilified and to an extent subsumed and then dismissed. They are all strangers to us Aboriginal people. Who owns the beach? Aboriginal people, if anyone.
Native Blood 1994, Fiona Foley, image courtesy the artist, Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Native Blood 1994, Fiona Foley, image courtesy the artist, Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
the artist as auditor
Fraser Island is often called the world’s largest ‘sand island.’ To know your country means to watch each small, warm movement, to see movement when there seems no movement, to recognise the residual shadow of each being present and passing.
Fiona Foley has spent long periods of time engaged in auditing Fraser Island in several series of single sign drawings of flowers blooming, skulls, footprints, seed pods, fish bones, nautilus shells, middens, tide lines of leaves, birds, feathers, dingos, flotsam and jetsam. In 2006 she left her own marks in Signpost 1 and 11.
Song-lines—creation begins with the sunrise and a spirit being who crosses the land seeing, hearing, naming and animating the environment. The late 1980s found Fiona Foley working in Maningrida and Ramingining in Arnhem Land where she spent time with local artists Jack Wununwun and John Bulun Bulun. They had both completed single subject song-lines in arrays of bark paintings.
Mukarr’s real purpose was to name all living things.
Jack Wununwun, 1988
The paintings went into the Robert Holmes à Court collection and Wununwun’s were soon part of the important Magiciens de la Terre exhibition at the Pompidou in Paris (1989).
none so blind…
The fellow traveller of invisibility could be that of selective blindness. A contemporary Australian artist accused me (and, to a similar degree, Fiona Foley) of being a ‘traditionalist’; how could one express a sense of the spiritual that one has lost or had driven out of you, apparently never to return, they asked.
Aboriginal art has been used as evidence in land claims and Native Title claims across Australia. The closing scene of Warwick Thornton’s poignant Aboriginal romance Samson and Delilah is set where the couple, though battered, return to country, to ‘heaven’ and happiness. Many contemporary western artists flavour their art and construct their thinking around western mythical cultural sites—Paris, New York, Madrid, Venice and so on. Aboriginal relationships to land and site are ‘same but different.’ Fiona Foley is special, being born, living and practising ‘on country.’
making visible: claiming country
Fiona Foley was born in 1964 in Maryborough Hospital where Destiny Deacon arrived in 1957. Foley is one of the few artists of eastern Australia that I know who is intimately and intensely pursuing a Native Title claim with her family for their traditional land on Fraser Island. It’s an enormous personal commitment and intellectual process that has occupied at least a decade of her life. With all its complications around the personal and social, these intra-family issues are challenging enough. The unconcealed ambition and bitterness uncovered make the inherently complex western legal and political processes appear trivial in comparison.
You didn’t come out of a hollow log
My mother taught me
You came from me.
Shirley Foley to Fiona
Fiona Foley began this journey with her mother Shirley, now deceased, who was born in a little humpy on the water’s edge on the mouth of the Mary River where it enters Harvey Bay opposite Fraser Island. Foley installed the sculpture commission Tribute to A’vange (Mother) in the grounds of Parliament House in Canberra (2001). From this strong relationship emerges a person of considerable intellect with a determination never to be patronised, belittled or ignored. She possesses a strong sense of duty to Aboriginal history and an empathy with those unprotected or disempowered. These ideas and her social commitment are constant and essential elements in the art practice of Fiona Foley, a practice that is neither cynical, defeated nor shallow, that allows the widest imagination in spaces of object, image and personality.
seeing black
White is apparently the combination of all colours in physics and black the absence of colour. When the British came to Australia in the late 1700s it appeared to be a world if not upside down, then definitely back to front. Furred animals laid eggs and swans were not white but black. It was an environment that demanded acute observation to see the unbelievable—the platypus took some time to be ‘discovered.’ The Oenpelli Python wasn’t ‘discovered’ until the 1970s despite it being one of the largest, if not the largest reptile in Australia.
Every mother crow thinks her crow is the blackest
My mother told me
Well I am the blackest!
Fiona Foley
Part of this article originally appeared in Djon Mundine’s catalogue essay “Invisible Women—Invisible People” for the Fiona Foley show at Melbourne’s Niagara Galleries, March 31-April 24, featuring the Opium and Nulla 4 eva series.
Works referred to in this article appear in the retrospective, Fiona Foley: Forbidden, presented by UQ Art Museum and MCA, Sydney, Nov 12, 2009-Jan 31, 2010
Nulla 4 eva II, 2009, Fiona Foley; image courtesy the artist, Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
WALKING THROUGH FIONA FOLEY’S EXHIBITION, FORBIDDEN, WHAT STRIKES YOU FIRST IS THE VARIETY OF FORMATS AND PERSPECTIVES EMPLOYED BY THIS ARTIST THROUGHOUT HER CAREER. THIS EXHIBITION COVERING THE PERIOD 1994-2009 INCLUDES ETCHINGS, SCULPTURE, INSTALLATION, FILM AND PHOTOGRAPHY. A PUBLIC CONVERSATION WITH ALISON KUBLER IN THE WEEK OF THE EXHIBITION’S OPENING ALSO REVEALS THAT MANY OF FOLEY’S MAJOR WORKS ARE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE COMMISSIONS NOT TO BE FOUND IN SURVEYS SUCH AS THIS ONE. A BUSY ARTIST AND TEACHER, FOLEY ALSO HAS A STRONG INTERNATIONAL PROFILE. LOOKING AROUND, YOU’RE AWARE THAT HER FIRST MAJOR SURVEY EXHIBITION REPRESENTS JUST A SMALL PART OF WHAT IS A LARGE AND IMPORTANT BODY OF WORK.
In her photographs Foley switches genre with ease. In Native Born (1994) she reclines in the formal pose of a found image of a Badtjala Woman in grass skirt and beads, adding her own touches in the form of black tights and platform soles. In Wild Times Call (2001) she is pictured in the Bayou Country of southern Florida wearing American-Indian skirt and blouse, the sepia tone of the framed images suggesting documentation of time past, the final group shot situating her among colleagues and clearly in the present. The HHH (Hedonistic Honky Haters; 2004) series comprises eight large format ‘mock’ portraits of African-Americans wearing richly patterned garments the style of which is otherwise copied from those of the KKK. Among the serious gazes ‘burning holes’ in the fabric is Foley’s own. In her most recent photographic project, Nulla 4 eva (2009), she stages scenarios featuring a range of non-white participants in iconic settings—milk bar, beach and a cafe-cum-opium den. In the playfully combative beach scene, Foley dons a full burkah.
There are installations—a thick carpet of corn kernels in Wild Times Call (2001) and the ornate African-print robes worn by the subjects that hang beside the HHH photographs. In Land Deal (1995), familiar elements from colonial history return to haunt us. Flour spirals powerfully across the floor while tomahawks, knives, scissors and looking glasses (objects once exchanged for Aboriginal land) cling tightly to the walls. Blankets speak boldly of Aboriginal women defiled and discarded (Stud Gins 2003). Intersecting the room, the word Dispersed, once used euphemistically to refer to what were in reality acts of murder and forced displacement by colonial governments, asserts itself in 52 centimetre high, heavy metal letters, the D embedded with .303 calibre bullets (Dispersed, 2008).
Amidst the variety of media in the exhibition is a recurring image of opium poppies. They appear in a line of delicate etchings and, in a commissioned work (documented in the accompanying monograph), hanging in an infinity-shaped metal mass (Black Opium, 777 cast aluminium poppies, State Library of Queensland, 2006). There’s a further reference in the Nulla 4 eva photographs in which a multi-racial congregation is casually arranged in a cafe or club, playing cards and mahjong. In the foreground, a young man of possibly Chinese ancestry smokes an opium pipe.
The flowers appear poignantly in Foley’s film, BLISS (2008), which screens in a room of its own. A vast field of pale lilac poppies shifts in the breeze. Inscribed at intervals across these alluring images is a story of exploitation—Aboriginal people paid for their labour in opium ash, a practice officially sanctioned until 1897 when a “Protection” law was instituted that had even more dire effects. A woman next to me is taking notes. “Did you know about this?” she asks.
Conversing with Kubler, Fiona Foley states her pre-requisites for her work: that it is “understated, has aesthetic beauty and packs a punch.” She is, she admits, “an artist by stealth.”
“I want to reach out, pull you in”, she says. “I’m desperate for dialogue. Nothing’s coming back. It’s because people in this country don’t know their own history. Why?” She believes in portraying history as it really is admitting that she too came from a place of not knowing. As a child she asked her mother why there were no Badtjala people left on Fraser Island.
“Did you find out?” asks someone in the audience. “It happens slowly”, Foley answers and quietly lists the iniquities that have threatened to destroy the precious indigenous knowledge held by the first people of this land—venereal disease, punitive state-based violence, starvation, Christianity distorting local custom and ritual, opium addiction, kidnapping… “There’s an immense sense of loss in this country”, she says. “We’re all deeply scarred because of that loss.”
Fiona Foley is an artist of deep political conviction who manifests the depth of her knowledge and commitment in elegant iconic works of art. In person she is also light-hearted and optimistic in spirit. Her works are intriguing but insistent. Ideas recur and transform: the same shapes materialise in dilly bags and in sand sculptures; the same words transposed from blanket to stone; the same images form delicately on paper and forcefully in cast aluminium—insistent reminders of unfinished business. Foley’s work is never obvious. She creates seductive and provocative images that worry at us, like the evidence of truths that are staring us in the face.
Fiona Foley: Forbidden, Museum of Contemporary Art and University of Queensland Art Museum, curators Michele Helmrich, Christine Morrow, Rachel Kent, MCA, Sydney, Nov 12, 2009-Jan 31, 2010. A handsome, large format catalogue on Foley’s career is also available.
HARDER, BETTER, FASTER, STRONGER. NOT UNLIKE THE SOUPED-UP CHARACTERS OF A DAFT PUNK FILM CLIP, EVERYDAY WE ENHANCE OURSELVES WITH AN EVER-INCREASING PROFUSION OF APPENDAGES, FROM SIMPLE ACCESSORIES LIKE SUNGLASSES AND RUNNING SHOES TO THE HIGH-TECH ‘ADD ONS’ OF MP3 PLAYERS, MOBILE PHONES, DIGITAL CAMERAS, THE LIST GOES ON.
Just how this stream of augmenting items might be impacting our sense of identity is explored in new media artist Brad Miller’s video installation augment_me, one of three shows presented at Artspace in Sydney. While not formally connected in any way, Miller’s project and the work of fellow exhibitors James Charlton and Simon Barney do chart some similar territory. In particular, their projects reveal, to varying extents, a common interest in the challenges, and possibilities, that the blurring of the natural and artificial pose to how we experience, perceive and recall the world around us.
A relatively simple set up, augment_me consists of a large video screen that spans the width of a single wall in a darkened room enlivened by an evocative soundscape of rumbling noise composed by Sydney artist Ian Andrews. Running along the screen is a stack of parallel horizontal strips resembling film reels that move in opposite directions and at different speeds presenting a plethora of images in a seemingly endless and apparently self-generating stream. The images have been accumulated by the artist over several years. Some depict obvious augmenting objects like bicycles, laptops, a backpack, an umbrella, yet these are submerged in a substantial amount that appear quite random or only loosely connected to the idea of augmentation, such as snapshots of landscapes, beaches, swimming pools and the like.
The content of the images, however, appears to be of less significance than the relationship between them which is in fact not random but stipulated by a software program specifically developed to re-order the sequence of images in response to audience movement in the room. It is this re-modelled relationship, then, between the viewer, screen and images that appears central to the work and points also to a deeper concern to do with exploring how the viewing experience itself might be enhanced or ‘augmented’ in an interactive cinematic environment.
This tension over whether meaning ultimately resides in how the work is made or in the final aesthetic presentation is common to much new media work and not easily resolved. In the case of Miller’s installation, the diaristic nature and loose relationship of many of the images to the theme does present a challenge to interpretation, however, the more personal and abstract treatment is rewarded by an open approach to viewing. As much as the software’s re-ordering of the images has a destabilizing effect, it also gives way to an appreciation of the poetry in the televisual medium’s capacity to activate memories while simultaneously charting the insatiable, and sometimes disorienting, currents of consumer desire.
installation view of James Charlton, TradeAir, Artspace, Sydney, 2009
photos Silversalt
installation view of James Charlton, TradeAir, Artspace, Sydney, 2009
At the other end of the gallery, walking into the space of New Zealand-based artist James Charlton’s TradeAir, the first thing that strikes you is the smell. The scent of rubber wafts from a sea of recycled truck inner tubes that litter the floor, a subtle clue that this is indeed a sensual installation although not in the ways one might expect.
This mass of black tubes is in fact connected in a network and hooked up to a series of industrial air compressors which inflate the empty tubes when activated by a visitor blowing into one of a number of small fan devices suspended from the gallery ceiling. Beyond the initial thrill of seeing the tubes instantly inflate, the action gains greater resonance upon realising the air capacity of each tube is roughly equivalent to that of your average human lung. Indeed, the black rubber tubes are slightly bladder like in appearance, adding a more macabre dimension to the installation; have these organs been spilled in some kind of crash? Are they awaiting human breath to resuscitate them?
At the same time, TradeAir can of course also be considered in an environmental context. Climate change in particular is now discussed in a discourse of exchange, as polluted air in one part of the world is ‘offset’ by the planting of trees in another, distant place. This telematic dimension to the work is deepened by the fact the artist has installed himself remotely in his studio in Auckland where he receives alerts when a visitor activates a fan to which he can respond by inflating a tube in the gallery at the touch of a button from his remote set-up.
The result is a work that is effective both sculpturally and conceptually. It appears continuous in some ways with earlier investigations like the American artist Ken Goldberg’s robotic Internet installation The Telegarden (1996-2004), but with a harder, more industrial edge. Constructed around a series of technical constraints, Trade Air resembles a post-apocalyptic medical experiment conducted Mad Max style, in a manner neither clinical nor sterile but instead powered by the juices of dirty machinery and the exhalations of one of the most potent polluters on the planet, human beings.
Finally, in the front room of the gallery one finds Sydney artist Simon Barney’s series of unconventional landscape paintings, The Known World. In contrast to the Miller and Charlton installations, which produce a certain kind of sensory overload when viewed in succession, this series demands patient study on the part of the viewer.
Each painting is titled North Road and is rendered in a similar palette dominated by browns and grey-greens that strip the bush-scapes of any nascent romanticism, granting them instead a sense of overall ‘sameness’. But within this cohesive whole, the composition of each painting in fact shows considerable variation particularly in the density of the scrub portrayed—in some it appears thick and impenetrable while others depict a path, or the beginning of a path, cleared through them. This metaphor of path clearing also stands in for the nature of the artist’s investigation into painting. Critical to this exploration is Barney’s use of a silver background that “borrowed from modernism and thereby, supposedly antithetical to landscape tradition, provides the new terrain”, the exhibition statement points out.
The experimental paintings of The Known World, then, occupy a unique place among these three Artspace projects. Not bound by any unifying theme or medium, taken together the three shows reveal just how far contemporary art is diversifying in the variety of subjectivity-engendering experiences it offers to viewers. From an interactive video seeking mental communion between viewer and screen and a telematic art experiment conflating time and space to new ways of seeing ‘into’ the painted canvas, if these projects are any indication of things to come then the future, it appears, increasingly points toward a giant head trip.
Tony Albert, No Place (4), 2009, type-C photograph, image courtesy the artist and Jan Manton Art, Brisbane and Gallerysmith, Melbourne; from Putsch at Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, Adelaide Festival of Arts
AS EVER THE VISUAL ARTS PROGRAM IS AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE ADELAIDE FESTIVAL. BUT FOR THE FIRST TIME THERE’S AN AN AMBITIOUS, CURATED PROGRAM TITLED ADELAIDE INTERNATIONAL AS WELL AS THE WELL-ESTABLISHED BIENNIAL OF AUSTRALIAN ART. IN THE SYDNEY FESTIVAL THE FOCUS IS ON LEADING CONTEMPORARY MEDIA ARTISTS, LYNETTE WALLWORTH (AUSTRALIA) AND OLAFUR ELIASSON (ICELAND/FINLAND) AND A NEW THREE-YEAR PROGRAM THAT CONNECTS THE CITY AND ITS COMMUNITIES WITH THE ASIA-PACIFIC REGION.
adelaide
The first Adelaide International, titled Apart, we are together, is curated by Victoria Lynn, bringing together the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Contemporary Art Centre of SA, Flinders University City Gallery and JamFactory Contemporary Craft and Design. Exploring the festival’s ‘heart’ theme (see page 13), the exhibition will ask, “What does it take to survive, to keep the heart going? What forms of resistance and resilience are at work?” The art will embrace “a spirit of inclusion and hospitality, as well as a celebration of difference…that in being ‘apart’, we can also be ‘together’.”
Apart, we are together will show the work of 11 international artists in a rich cross-cultural mix, including an important Thai filmmaker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady, Blissfully Yours, Syndromes and a Century). The other participating artists are Rossella Biscotti (Italy), Julian Hooper (NZ), Nina Fischer/Maroan El Sani (Germany), Iman Issa (Egypt), Donghee Koo (Republic of Korea), Li Mu (China), Raeda Saadeh (Palestine), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand), Lucy Orta (UK), Jorge Orta (Argentina), Tara Donovan (USA) and Praneet Soi (India/Netherlands).
The Art Gallery of South Australia will present the 2010 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Before & After Science, curated by Charlotte Day and Sarah Tutton, featuring the work of 22 artists and groups, with strong Indigenous representation and many of the works making their first appearance. Day says, “The works will all respond to the resurgence of mythology, spirituality and mysticism across political and social spectrums of this global society.”
In the third component of the Adelaide Festival visual arts program, Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute is presenting Putsch by Brisbane-based proppaNOW. The collective of artist innovators and activists will show large-scale works ranging from painting to installation, printmaking, sculpture and video. As Putsch, the artists Richard Bell, Vernon Ah Kee, Tony Albert, Bianca Beetson, Andrea Fisher, Jennifer Herd, Gordon Hookey and Laurie Nilsen have a clear agenda, to defy white expectations of Aboriginal art and to eliminate self-censorship.
The fourth component of the festival’s visual arts program is, of course, Artists’ Week, wisely re-located to the UniSA’s Hawke Building (the home of the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum) and focused on art and politics (Gerald Raunig), contemporary studio practice (Lucy Orta), “peer to peer urbanism” (Geert Lovink) and “The Edge of Reason” (Michael Taussig)
sydney
In the Sydney Festival, Australian media artist Lynette Wallworth, who had a well-received major show at Adelaide’s Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum during the 2009 Adelaide Film Festival, will be represented at CarriageWorks by three works—Invisible by Night, Evolution of Fearlessness and Duality of Light—now functioning together as a single installation. Wallworth challenges our visual and spatial perceptions in order that we re-consider ethical perspectives. Olafur Eliasson (Denmark/Iceland), in one of the festival centrepieces at the MCA, likewise plays with our perceptions, including our relationship with nature, the artist drawing on his connections with the landscape of Iceland. Titled Take Your Time, the show includes sculpture, photography and immersive, large-scale installations from collections around the world in a show from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
the edge of elsewhere
In an exciting development with regional ramifications, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Gallery 4A and the Sydney Festival are combining to present Edge of Elsewhere, an Asia-Pacific art project spanning three years. The aim is to “bring together some of the most exciting contemporary artists from across Australia, Asia and the Pacific to develop new artworks in partnership with Sydney communities.”
The 2010 selection of artists?is a strong one: Brook Andrew (Australia),?Arahmaiani (Indonesia),?Richard Bell (Australia),?YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES (Korea),?Dacchi Dang (Australia),?Newell Harry (Australia),?Shigeyuki Kihara (Aotearoa New Zealand),?Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba (Vietnam),?Lisa Reihana (Aotearoa New Zealand),?Khaled Sabsabi (Australia) and?Wang Jianwei (China).
Lisa Havilah, director of the Campbelltown Arts Centre, and co-curator with Aaron Seeto and Thomas Berghuis of Edge of Elsewhere, tells RealTime that some projects have already begun. Shigeyuki Kihara worked with Indian and Samoan communities in Minto on a performance in August this year and is involved in an ongoing collaboration with local Aboriginal people and the Campbelltown Pipe and Drums band. In January she will commence work on a project in Chinatown. Lisa Reihana will collaborate next month with a Minto Women’s Tapa group (tapa is a Samoan beaten bark cloth). Edge of Elsewhere is not simply about hosting visiting artists, but is a direct response to the cultural diversity of Sydney itself through regional collaborations. Havilah says that the first exhibition will comprise outcomes from current commissions and extant works by participating artists.
We were shocked and saddened to hear of the death of Nick Waterlow on November 9. He was Director of the Ivan Dougherty Gallery at Sydney’s College of Fine Arts since 1991, a curator of three significant Sydney Biennales (1979, 1986 and 1988), was a senior lecturer in COFA’s School of Art History and Art Education and had been honoured with an OAM. He was also Director of the Visual Arts Board at the Australia Council 1980-83. Before his death, Nick had been working on a book addressing the place of Australian art internationally and was involved with the master planning of a new University museum at COFA. We fondly recall Nick’s keen engagement with Performance Space and the performance community in the 25 years of Performance Art in Australia exhibition and showings in 1994. Respected as a teacher, mentor, writer, curator and historian, Nick Waterlow was affable, accessible, gentle, supportive and quietly influential. He will be greatly missed. Virginia Baxter, Keith Gallasch
janice mcculloch
We were distressed to hear that Janice (Jan) McCulloch, editor and publisher of Art Almanac for the past 30 years, died suddenly in mid-November. Jan was a great supporter of innovative Australian artists and a significant collector of their artworks. In June 2005, Nick Vickers made Art Almanac, “the Bible of the Australian art world”, the subject of an exhibition at the University of Sydney Union’s Sir Hermann Black Gallery with hundreds of the magazine’s covers on display along with 60 works from Jan’s private collection. We got to know Jan in the 1990s when she generously allowed us to use the Art Almanac office on Day Street in the city to lay out RealTime. Sydney’s artworld has lost another significant figure. Virginia Baxter, Keith Gallasch, Gail Priest
Antonia Djiagween, Owen Maher, Seramsah Bin Saad, Trevor Jamieson and Dalsia Pigram, Burning Daylight, Marrugeku
photo Rod Hartvigsen
Antonia Djiagween, Owen Maher, Seramsah Bin Saad, Trevor Jamieson and Dalsia Pigram, Burning Daylight, Marrugeku
THE TITLE OF MARRUGEKU’S LATEST WORK, BURNING DAYLIGHT, SEEMS ON THE SURFACE A CONTRARY CHOICE. THE SHOW CONJURES A NIGHT-TIME BROOME AND ITS DENIZENS—YOUNG PEOPLE AT A LOOSE END AFTER BEING EXPELLED FROM A BAR AND VISITED ON THE STREET BY UNWELCOME GHOSTS FROM THE TOWN’S PAST. WITH ALL THE EASE OF A HOLLYWOOD OR BOLLYWOOD MUSICAL, BURNING DAYLIGHT’S NIGHT PEOPLE SLIP INTO SONG AND DANCE WITH EVER GROWING PASSION, AS IF SUPPLANTING TIME-FILLING WITH AN UNCONSCIOUS QUEST TO FULFIL SOME DEEP, UNSPEAKABLE NEED. THIS IS NIGHT WORK.
Marrugeku’s Broome fantasia is intensified by a design that is a self-consciously stagey abstraction of the town (inspired in part, says a program note, by Tracey Moffat’s films Night Cries and Bedevil) and by the use of the back wall of the bar and a large billboard as projection screens, often worked simultaneously. A large, semi-circular performance area is ringed by the bar, a road leading into the distance and lined with striking boab trees, a tin shed inhabited by musicians and a park bench beneath a pole—which of course must be climbed and swung from in the time-honoured manner of musicals.
The screens evoke the open-air cinemas of tropical towns, the films mimic 40s and 50s B-grade melodramas from Hollywood’s dream factory, while the accompanying karaoke-style singing to the onscreen lyics suggests the present—though the songs hark back to romantic balladry—and the popular fantasy of being a great singer (they’re very good in this show). This is dream work.
Burning Daylight doesn’t delineate a simple story—it’s played out as a street concert-cum-musical (a relative of Les Ballets C de la B’s rooftop party, Iets Op Bach, 1999). This makes the performance all the more dream-like, the floating structure allowing for an immersive historical layering that merges three generations. The films, for example, include photographs from early 20th century Broome, 40s-ish movie recreations of that earlier period and contemporary karaoke sung live. Here the stage performers appear as their grandparents of a century ago. This collapsing of time and condensing of generations is the stuff of dreams but a deft means to engender a sense of history and inheritance.
Burning Dayight in Zurich 2007, Marrugeku
photo Christian Altorfer
Burning Dayight in Zurich 2007, Marrugeku
After their expulsion onto the street, the night dwellers’ tensions and reveries are interrupted by the arrival of a black, whip-cracking cowboy (Trevor Jamieson) dressed in red and prancing like a warrior. He provokes immediate wariness, then confrontation, later attraction and then does battle with the ghost of a geisha (Yumi Umiumare). Either the cowboy is a ghost himself or his arrival has unleashed the past into the present; something is being worked through. The unfolding, largely danced, impressionistic interplay between the townspeople and the stranger is interpolated with the films and their karaoke accompaniment. These are central to Burning Daylight and are based on real events in Broome’s history.
In the first of the three films, Stir Fry (“She was a caged bird in a foreign land. He was a lonesome cowboy. Could he set her free?”), after being struck by her cowboy boyfriend, a Broome geisha elopes at night with another man—dressed in red and perhaps the father of the onstage red cowboy. He is killed by the boyfriend in a shootout. A small boy, whom we presume to be the son of the geisha and her lover, grimly watches his mother place flowers on the lover’s grave. A long stick hangs from the boy’s hand—precursor perhaps to the whip we see wielded by the grown man on stage. The second film, Black Pearl (“Can Love Beat the Law?”) depicts a jealous white bar owner betraying an Aboriginal employee to the police for having an affair with a white man. The woman and her children are removed to a reserve. (A newspaper spinning onscreen is headlined, “Native Woman Entraps White Man: Woman Removed For Her Own Good.”) In the final scene in this film, a small boy dressed in red as a cowboy, steps out from behind a shed and aims his toy gun at the policemen. In the third film, Troubled Water (“They Dared To Cross The Colour Line”) a Malay man married to an Aboriginal woman goes to work on a pearl rigger but is deported when he returns to port, never to see his family again. The son ties his father’s abandoned red bandana around his head.
Jamieson’s cowboy, as the child of an era in which white law not only oppressed Aboriginal people but gave licence for cultural groups to turn on each other, appears then to embody all the accumulated wrongs, despair and anger that unconsciously haunt Broome’s psyche. Yet, like Broome itself and its night dwellers, troubled yet richly creative, the cowboy is an ambiguous figure—a winking, narcissistic charmer, undeterred by his poor reception, hanging out as if expecting sooner or later to fit in, and providing moments of emotional support. Burning Daylight’s choreography resonates with this ambiguity as Jamieson slips in and out of group dancing, withdrawing to observe or suddenly displaying intimacy. The cowboy is reminiscent of the classic trickster, a wicked messenger, bringing the unwanted unconscious to attention.
I’m unravelling and reassembling my dreamlike recollections of the show, and my account of the role and purpose of the cowboy is possibly obvious or wrong (the companion book to the production has varying accounts), although the continuity inherent in the red motif associated with the boy children in the film and the cowboy seems undeniable. What is not clear is why the geisha ghost appears vengeful, forcing the cowboy to engage in a gloriously sustained battle, compelling the night community to join in. Perhaps hers is dis- or mis-placed anger for blighted lives. Certainly the cowboy’s recollection of her seems fond: he places the very same flowers on her grave, upstage, that she placed on her dead lover’s in the film as the scowling child looked on.
If Burning Daylight relies for much of its magic and meaning on the dreamy indeterminancy engendered by the overlaying of historical periods and interplay of artforms and images in a night time reverie, it risks opacity by being less than clear in a key area—the narrative you’re having when you’re not having a narrative. As well, it was easy to miss significant clues because each of the three films actually comprises two discrete versions shown simultaneously on the two stage screens. While this ‘splitting’ again heightens the sense of dream it also undercuts the revelatory transparency the work otherwise achieves. This was compounded, though to a lesser degree, by cast changes that meant characters in the films were played by others on stage; of course that can’t be helped.
Post-show queryings aside, the immediate experience of Burning Daylight was deeply enjoyable. The meticulously crafted film mini-melodramas were indicative of the way the production worked its magic, managing to be at once amusingly parodic and deeply affecting, embracing its audience with popular song and dance forms put to complex purpose. This integrative approach was highly evident in the distinctive choreography, an ever shifting synthesis of modern dance and traditional Aboriginal dance, hip hop, gymnastics, Japanese dance, club moves, martial arts and elements of the African dance of co-choreographer Serge Aime Coulibaly, performed with commitment and confidence. In the DVD that comes with the book of the show, co-choreographer Dalisa Pigram speaks of the challenge of ‘staging’ Aboriginal dance: “Our dance is small, [Serge’s] is so big.” Other than moments when there appeared to be a desire to fill the stage and the dancing could have been more focused, the balance seemed about right. Most exciting was the sense of an emerging, characterful choreographic language, rich in detail, unusual shapes and gestures.
Jamieson, Pigram and Uniumare excelled in solo passages in their very different ways. The latter two absorbed a great length of orange roadworks mesh into their performances—Pigram boldly cartwheeling with it, Umiumare wrapping herself up as a bizarre living sculpture—both expressing, true to the spirit of the show, the creative capacity to take whatever is at hand into their art. Pigram’s solo, performed to Jamieson singing the Pigram Brothers’ “Dear Alistair” (as close as the show gets to referring to the local native title claim), is a central moment in Burning Daylight, expressing intense emotional connection to land and family, in which the release from the plastic mesh, perhaps emblematic of both progress and constraint, seems almost cathartic.
The final collective dance performed to rapper Dazastah’s melancholic, addictive Ikebana Tango (“How come me,/ The past come to haunt my soul,/ How come me,/ The past come to call my soul,/ How come me,/ The past come to taunt my soul/ wanna take me home and won’t let me go”) sustains the sense of a haunting for which there can be no easy exorcism. The night work, the work of dreams is not finished. The dancing however seems more optimistic in its pairings of past and present, its sense of youthful communal strength and, not least, a shared, unique artistry. Burning Daylight is an engrossing entertainment from a skilled, charismatic cast, members of an inventive collaborative team producing a complex work in which a rich culture engages recuparatively with its past.
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Marrugeku, Burning Daylight, concept Rachael Swain, Dalisa Pigram, director Rachael Swain, co-choreographers Serge Aime Coulibaly, Dalisa Pigram, performers, devisors Trevor Jamieson, Dalisa Pigram, Kathy Cogill, Owen Maher, Sermsah Bin Saad, Antonia Djiagween, Yumi Umiumare, designer Joey Ruigrok van der Werven, film director, cinematographer Warwick Thornton, dramaturgy, Josephine Wilson, David Pledger, John Baylis, costume designer Stephen Curtis, lighting designer Geoff Cobham, musical director Matthew Fargher, karaoke songs by Amanda Brown, musicians Dazastah, Lorrae Coffin, Justin Gray; CarriageWorks, Sydney, Nov 11–14
Fiona Foley, Opium #5 – Labour, etching on paper, printer Michael Kempson
Photographed in Tasmania, where opium crops are harvested for use in medicines, the pods on the cover of RealTime 94 appear in Fiona Foley’s video entitled Bliss [see article], part of Forbidden, the MCA and UQ Art Museum retrospective of the work of this leading Australian artist. Opium pods and flowers figure in many of Foley’s creations—on screen, etched, cast and sculpted they are seductively beautiful evocations of complex historical relations between Aboriginal and Chinese peoples at the end of the 19th century, between opium and the law, as well as reminders of the enduring effects of the drug on contemporary global society. Not a few ironies abound in the fact that the greater part of the world’s illicit opium supply still comes from war-torn Afghanistan. Marrugeku’s Burning Daylight is another show, this time a large scale multimedia performance, that draws history into the present, unleashing the ghosts of late 19th and early 20th century Broome to put current anxieties in perspective and to counter forgetting [see article]. Again, the issues addressed are not black-and-white, but interculturally complex. Nuanced thinking is needed more than ever. That would make for an excellent Xmas gift in these absolutist, un-nuanced times: “Send no gifts, give no money. Just think, complexly!” Whatever your ethical, spiritual or aesthetic persuasion, all of us at RealTime wish you a happy holiday and look forward with you to a great year for the arts in 2010.
{$slideshow}WHILE THE WESTERN FOYER OF THE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE WAS GOING THROUGH EXTENSIVE RENOVATION, FOR THE MOST PART IN LINE WITH JORN UTZON’S ORIGINAL VISION FOR THE BUILDING, MAGNUM PHOTOGRAPHER TRENT PARKE WAS PROWLING THE VAST BACKSTAGE, UNDERWORLD AND SAIL LOFTS OF THIS MODERNIST ARCHITECTURAL MASTERPIECE ON AN OPERA HOUSE COMMISSION TO SHOOT BEHIND THE SCENES.
What Parke reveals is gloriously at odds with the still pristine sheen of the building’s exterior. His images, large scale and intimate, could be taken for documentation of the backstage of an ageing Edwardian theatre or a war-time concrete bunker. The heightened sense of otherness that Parke typically conveys in his transformations of the everyday is achieved here in his stark delineation of objects freed of human agency and now regarded in their own right.
At the same time they represent traces of the lives, jobs and skills of technicians, cleaners, performers and other theatre artisans: their graffiti, photographic collections, movie posters, the tools of their trades—lights, trolleys, wig stands, makeup, a fake hand floating in a bucket of stage blood. Parke seduces us into considering the aesthetic power of huge clusters of power cord bundles, alarmingly knotted, snaking airconditioning ducts, battered powerboards, large chalked warnings (“No frigging smoking”), strange props (a suspended “angry” coconut alongside a banana), a fake fish on a plate, and a giant ‘head’, the back of which is labelled, “Pearl Fishers. Must be counterweighted.”
Save for the leg of someone disappearing into the concrete frame of the Opera House sails in one of the largest images, austerely black and white, we don’t actually encounter its inhabitants, even though their presence is felt. But there’s the ghostly aura of a theatre after dark, or abandoned—the last man fleeing. Simultaneously, with his eye for unexpected drama and defining colours (many reds amidst the blacks and deep blues) and surprising patterns (provided by cables, pipes and signage), Parke conveys a rich sense of life and flow, of cultural density and relentless purpose amidst the grit, low humour and affection felt in the movie poster collections and snaps of friends spilling off the walls of untidy offices and well-used dressing rooms.
Once again, Trent Parke has created an immersive world. In other hands and through other lenses this backstage might have been rendered banal or merely ironic or simply documentary. But Parke’s eye finds unexpected form, colour and drama in functional objects, demanding we look again and anew. Doubtless some critics will lament the absence of the human figure, but the bodies of opera house artisans of all kinds are everywhere inscribed in the building, their traces magically writ large. KG
Trent Parke, Please step quietly everyone can hear you, Stills Gallery, Sydney, Oct 28-Nov 28, www.stillsgallery.com.au; Sydney Opera House Forecourt, Oct 22-Feb, 2010, www.sydneyoperahouse.com
IT IS A TRUISM TO SAY THAT HOFESH SHECHTER’S DANCE PIECES ARE AS MUCH ABOUT MUSIC AS THEY ARE ABOUT CHOREOGRAPHY—IN THE DOUBLE BILL (UPRISING AND IN YOUR ROOMS), SHECHTER IS CREDITED WITH CREATING BOTH. INDEED, HIS INTEREST IN THEIR COMBINATION IS HARDLY NOVEL GROUND FOR DANCE, BUT HIS CAPACITY TO SYNTHESISE THEIR IMPACT ON AN AUDIENCE TOGETHER WITH A CINEMATIC SENSE OF IMAGERY IS THE KEY TO HIS POPULARITY
Uprising begins with a steady, slightly metallic beat, a bank of spotlights tilted towards us and haze swarming portentously across the empty stage. From somewhere behind the lights emerge seven male dancers heading downstage with a determined gait. The air is menacing but Shechter subverts the expected and just as the men can go no further, they arrest their charge by lifting a leg to their other knee and holding themselves in a sweetly balletic stance. The line is ordered and controlled—a display of technical acumen certainly—but the image it presents is only a whisper away from collapse. These men are vulnerable in their balancing act.
As the beat continues to drive on, the men slide out of formation looking dejected, defeated even. Shechter reportedly created Uprising in response to the 2006 riots in Paris, though thematically it feels more like a response to the banlieue riots of 2005, which were more palpably and brutally linked to the ennui of disaffected young men. However, to see Uprising as a political statement is problematic. The real source material is testosterone and, as it does in life, it peaks at puberty. Uprising is less an investigation of men and militant outrage than it is a celebratory omnibus of adolescence. Yes, the dancers show us forms of violence, rebellion and manhood, but they are mock displays, the simulated games of boys testing their own limits and not to be taken too seriously—the pants are khaki but the label is American Apparel.
The music is a propulsive assemblage of percussion that whips the choreography along rather than merely accompanying it. In the words of one of the dancers, Chris Evans, Shechter “liberates the dancers from chasing a meaning around” by using music to set the tone. The result is a physical language that, in being both persistent and simple in its intention, is remarkably legible without dipping too often into literalism. The dancers respond with powerful abandon: throwing their arms back as they run head down, breaking formation in fits of individualism, using their hands to slink across the stage like simians, wrestling and caressing. Throughout, flashes of popular dance genres emerge—the negation of the lower body typical of breakdance, the bopping kick of skank—as does the unmistakable urban dubstep of Vex’d with their track Thunder.
With a barren stage and a highly structured beat, Shechter has to find both engaging imagery and fluidity in the bodies on stage. Lee Curran’s sharply focussed spotlights provide pools of visibility that the dancers slide in and out of. Trios and duos flicker past each other in discrete frames like spatial cross-dissolves. When dancers are shrouded in darkness one feels that they have not exited so much as briefly moved out of frame. And when Shechter has all seven dancers working in unison, he is amplifying the human form as a cinematographer might do with a close-up. The result is spare but extremely beautiful.
Uprising finishes with a spurt of bathetic triumphalism. The men construct a limp flag-waving human pyramid equal parts French Revolution, Soviet agitprop and summer camp. In some respects, the finale makes sense as the antithesis of the opening image—asymmetrical and multi-tiered rather than a strict line. But it also feels like a cheap shot. The preceding dance has already done the work of dismantling order and control, but rather than living up to or even coveting the title of Uprising, Shechter shies away from revolution and delivers a safe implication of delinquent folly.
Vanessa Van Durme, Look Mummy,I’m Dancing
photo Fred Debrock
Vanessa Van Durme, Look Mummy,I’m Dancing
A similar whiff of shyness was sensed next door at Look Mummy I’m Dancing, written and performed by Vanessa (Van Durme), one of Belgium’s first post-operative transsexuals. Adapted from her own book of the same title, the show is a sort of staged Bildungsroman that tells the story of Vanessa’s transformation from a troubled boy into a troubled woman.
For a show based on a very fundamental questioning of gender, Look Mummy I’m Dancing manages to shy away from questioning traditional gender concepts. Vanessa begins her monologue with a story of a couple at a checkout line. In both subject matter and delivery it feels like the anecdote of a stand-up comic pointing out the banal universal tropes of married life for us to both recognise and find funny. One expects this cliché of binary gender absolutes to then be undercut by the subsequent story. Yet, save for a few moments of inner conflict, the tone never really shifts. The writing constantly finds ways of being relatable, hackneyed, earnest and predictable.
Occasionally, often in moments of dark, visceral humour, a real theatrical tension is evoked between Vanessa’s delicate aspirations and the staggering pitfalls of her life. And one might argue that it is not her role to do anything but tell her own personal story, rather than speak to the conceptual or the societal. However, too often, the narrative metes out to incidental players the same one-dimensional characterisations that are supposedly the bane of Van Durme’s own existence and skirts across stories with nary a sideways glance at insight.
The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, Anna Tregloan
courtesy the artists
The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, Anna Tregloan
A similar problem befalls Anna Tregloan’s The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Taking the art of public transport eavesdropping and mashing it with the Dadaist penchant for collage, Tregloan has shaped a piece of theatre out of verbatim transcripts of one-sided conversations on trains. The concept itself is cheekily promising, with non sequitur humour and pathos possible at every turn, but the various components never quite slot together.
Tregloan takes advantage of the Meat Market’s extraordinary depth by creating a train carriage out of rows of chairs but, in spite of her design credentials, the set is otherwise underdeveloped and lacking in detail. Tregloan’s 2007 work, BLACK, with its refractive centre of characters, was as much spatial installation as it was performance, and that level of attentiveness to the audience’s relation to space was sorely missed in this new work. The unhindered distances around the performers created an unfocused, centrifugal effect that compounded the fractured nature of the narratives, leaving the audience to forage for meaning from afar.
Le Salon, Peeping Tom
photo Maarten Van Denabeele
Le Salon, Peeping Tom
Wrapping up many people’s Festival experience this year was Le Salon from the Belgian company Peeping Tom. Partly borne out of the Belgian powerhouses Les Ballets C de la B and Needcompany, Peeping Tom is a collective of artists orbiting around the central creative partnership of dancers Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier. Each of the performers, including a mezzo-soprano and an actor, brings their own idiosyncratic talents and foibles to bear. This, combined with the very real emotional relationship shared by Carrizo and Chartier, creates an onstage chemistry not dissimilar to that of an amiably dysfunctional family—sometimes pulling in very different directions but inextricably rooted in the same mire of history, experience and artistic heredity.
Le Salon is the middle section in a trilogy of work that loosely follows a family through a cycle of generation and degeneration. The gently decaying wood panelling of the set is at once an allusion to a bourgeois grandeur of the past and a presaging of the characters’ internal declines. With only a sparse use of text, the theatre, humour and intelligence of the piece is in the bodies and the music. And both, while brimming with technical mastery, are also able to seethe with the signs of downfall. Though at times it threatens to undermine itself with overplaying, Le Salon beautifully delivers what it sets out to do—to intimately make flesh the fear of loss, the fear of death and the fear of not noticing it arrive.
Hofesh Shechter Company, Uprising, In your rooms, choreography, music Hofesh Shechter, lighting Lee Curran; Playhouse, Arts Centre, Oct 12-15; Look Mummy I’m Dancing, writer, performer Vanessa Van Durme, director Frank Van Laecke, lighting; Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre Oct 13-17; Store Room Theatre, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, director, designer Anna Tregloan, sound composer & designer David Franzke, lighting Niklas Pajanti; Arts House, Meat Market, Oct 15-18; Le Salon, Peeping Tom, concept, dancers Gabriela Carrizo, Franck Chartier, Samuel Lefeuvre, Simon Versnel, singer Eurudike De Beul, scenography Pol Heyvaert, lighting Gerd Van Looy, sound Glenn Vervliet, Arts Centre, Oct 22-24; Melbourne International Arts Festival, Oct 9-25
“IT WAS GREAT…BUT IT WASN’T REALLY A FESTIVAL SHOW, WAS IT?” I’VE HEARD VARIATIONS ON THIS SENTIMENT FOR YEARS. THIS PIECE SHOULD BE DOING FESTIVALS. THAT WORK ISN’T FESTIVAL FRIENDLY. I EVEN FOUND MYSELF SAYING SIMILAR DURING THIS YEAR’S MIAF: “IT WAS A DEFINITE FESTIVAL SHOW”, AN INSTANT LATER QUESTIONING MY OWN STATEMENT. WHAT’S A ‘FESTIVAL SHOW’, ANYWAY? IT’S A BIT LIKE ST AUGUSTINE’S DESCRIPTION OF TIME: I KNOW WHAT IT IS AS LONG AS NOBODY ASKS ME TO EXPLAIN IT.
As good a reason as any to dig deeper. ‘Festival show’ doesn’t seem to be used as a qualitative term; you can have good and bad festival shows, good and bad non-festival shows. Neither is it an indication of content, style, medium or audience. Rather, it’s somewhere that all of these things meet.
The simplest way into the problem is to start with the works themselves, and for me the 2009 Melbourne International Arts Festival lent itself to the question very well. One of the program’s centrepieces was a textbook festival work—Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg’s production of Simon Stephens’ Pornography. It’s a truly international piece of theatre on several levels: a German production of an English text, and one which alternates between a local specificity of references and more global, dislocated concerns.
Pornography is composed of seven discrete sequences which are unconnected on a diegetic level. Their common denominator is left for the audience to determine but the title offers a suggestive pointer. Each scenario addresses one aspect of the obscenity of contemporary life, where all hierarchies of meaning and value have been overwhelmed by the sheer bloody proliferation of signification. The characters of Stephens’ text are in a kind of hell, though the German production makes less of this infernal imagery. And each character appears to be suffering the deleterious effects of postmodern excess which manifests itself through a variety of ugly symptoms.
An office worker self-destructively leaks a highly confidential report to a rival corporation, knowing that it will be traced to her; a bullied schoolboy describes fantasies of racism and sexual brutality; drunken siblings wind up forgetting their sorrows in an orgiastic sex spree. It’s an ugly, disturbing work whose jagged edges are softened by those aspects that I identify with its internationalism: though ostensibly set within the days surrounding the London bombings of 2005, the production frequently unanchors itself to inhabit a more ambiguous space. The design is sprawling and often messy, dominated by a massive, mythic jigsaw puzzle depicting a pixelated Tower of Babel.
The atemporal aspect of the production does, in itself, moor it to a certain aesthetic dock, though. Pornography’s stylisation feels very representative of particular recent trends in both German and British theatre, from the Von Mayenburgs and Ostermeiers to the In-Yer-Face UK crowd. All of these are profoundly concerned with contemporary social life, but it is one defined by global concerns and mass-mediated imagery, and it’s no surprise that these works can comfortably travel to international festivals the world over.
Examining the programs of recent international arts festivals from Taiwan to Iceland, I noted two distinct and recurring features. Firstly, there’s the prevalence and ubiquity of that internationalist style of performance, which transcends cultural barriers but often sees the same productions popping up again and again, as if there were only a limited pool of works available from which festival directors may choose. This is of course a misperception, but one that makes sense when we consider that the most obvious place a festival director will look to for inspiration is other festivals. The result is a certain homogeneity to the festival world—some festivals appear a mix-and-match version of the past decade’s MIAFs (or other Australian equivalents).
The second observation I’ve made is more surprising: the converse of those internationalist works are culturally specific productions which reflect the space in which they were produced and wear proudly their difference, their localism. And, interestingly, such productions seem increasingly to be limited to the arts festivals of the country from which they originate. In order to travel extensively, a new work cannot be too based around regional concerns.
Abbey Theatre’s Terminus is a story with little reference to cultural specifics, making it an ideal touring work, but on artistic grounds an odd contender for festival inclusion. It’s a superb and assured piece of storytelling handsomely performed. But it’s also physically static, visually uninspiring and formally simplistic. Three actors deliver three monologues that collectively create a gripping and horrific narrative of death and rebirth, murder and redemption. Supernatural elements add an air of magicalism, but it’s very much a case of a ripping yarn well told. None seemed disappointed by the entertainment Terminus offered, but few would argue that it pushed artistic boundaries. It could work as a radio play with nothing lost; indeed, more than a few audience members admitted to closing their eyes at some points and enjoying the performance as just that. The text is everything here, and this may be due in part to writer Mark O’Rowe’s other role as director. It was great…but it wasn’t really a festival show, was it?
Black Marrow, Chunky Move
photo Proud Mother Pictures
Black Marrow, Chunky Move
Black Marrow, on the other hand, ticks plenty of festival boxes—international cast and creative team; apocalyptic nowhere setting realised on a grand scale; typification of numerous global artistic trends—while failing to satisfy on many other levels. Presented by Chunky Move and choreographed by Icelander Erna Ómarsdóttir and Belgian Damien Jalet, it’s an underprepared mish-mash of concepts that range from the sublime to the plain silly. A primordial world of evolving, mutating bodies spawn from the oily ooze of a molten and bubbling blackness; they copulate violently, dissolve the boundaries of corporeal individuality and ingest the waste from which they emerged. Much of this is striking, visceral stuff, but it quickly wanders off on less bewitching tangents: a suited performer ad libs stilted entreaties to suck on some petroleum; a horrible scene sees a man venturing into a writhing woman’s womb to retrieve a trash baby (the gender politics here are questionable at best).
This is the sort of collaboration and starting point from which great festival works are born, but it proves that there’s no real formula for greatness. Black Marrow works on paper, but it’s ultimately down to the creatives involved and the effort put in during the development process.
Katherine Tonkin and bear, Apocalypse Bear Trilogy, Stuck Pigs Squealing
photo Paul Dunn
Katherine Tonkin and bear, Apocalypse Bear Trilogy, Stuck Pigs Squealing
Stuck Pigs Squealing’s Apocalypse Bear Trilogy is a cross-platform performance centring on a fascinating ur-figure; a bear (or bear-suited man) who appears to catalyse moments of crisis in an individual’s existence. The logic of these works sidesteps the rational to engage with a different kind of experiential knowledge, in which jumbled, solipsistic conversations are secondary to the passage of time itself. The performances by Luke Mullins, Katherine Tonkin and Brian Lipson are cautious, even flat, but this monotony adds to the cumulative sensation of an inescapable dream or, rather, a dream from which one awakes only to find oneself in another.
Apocalypse Bear Trilogy is not an international work; I’d be surprised if it was picked up on the festival circuit. Its concerns are no more parochial than Pornography’s but its scale and ambition are of a different order. It’s an inward-turning piece, one which speaks neither of a local tradition nor the global culture of which we are now all a part. These aren’t the reasons it lacks that festival edge, however. It’s that the ‘festival show’ is, evidently, the show which will attract eager audiences but would be unlikely to tour on its own steam—the work such as Pornography or Terminus or Black Marrow that’s edgy enough to scare off the masses who make Cirque du Soleil a profitable enterprise but not so difficult as to alienate a festival audience. It’s a fine balance.
But while Apocalypse Bear Trilogy isn’t likely to be touring to Taipei and Reykjavik, it’s still a fine work. It’s just not big enough to attract international festival attention, which is why it, and many other deserving works around the world, will remain ensconced in the cities in which they were created. Simple economics—if we’re going to pay to bring your production halfway around the world, it better be worth it. And as mentioned at the outset, ‘worth’ here is less a qualitative judgement than something else entirely.
Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, Pornography, writer Simon Stephens, director Sebastian Nübling, set Muriel Gerstner, lighting Roland Edrich; Playhouse, Arts Centre, Oct 15-18; Abbey Theatre (Amharclann Na Mainistreach), Terminus, writer, director Mark O’Rowe, designer Jon Bausor, lighting Philip Gladwell; Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse, Oct 9-13; Chunky Move, Black Marrow, choreography Erna Ómarsdóttir, Damien Jalet, design Alexandra Mein, lighting Niklas Pajanti; Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse, Oct 20-24; Stuck Pigs Squealing, Apocalypse Bear Trilogy, writer Lally Katz, directors Luke Mullins, Brian Lipson, performers Brian Lipson, Luke Mullins, Katherine Tonkin, design Mel Page, sound Jethro Woodward, lighting Richard Vabre; Lawler Theatre, Melbourne Theatre Company, Oct, 8-24 Oct; Melbourne International Arts Festival, Oct 9-25
{$slideshow}THE FIRST CHOREOGRAPHIC BARS START WHILE THE AUDIENCE IS STILL ENTERING, PROMPTING THE MOST MESMERISING MOMENT IN THIS YEAR’S ENTIRE MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL. FOR PERHAPS 10 MINUTES, HUNDREDS OF MELBURNIANS FILL THE STATE THEATRE IN UNCANNY SILENCE. NOT EVEN LATER INTRUSIONS OF DANCERS INTO THE AUDITORIUM WILL BE AS EFFECTIVE IN REMINDING THE AUDIENCE OF ITS SHEER NUMBERS, OF THE STRENGTH AND THE NOISE AND THE BRUTE PHYSICAL VOLUME OF THE HUNDREDS OF US. KÖRPER (“BODIES”), SASHA WALTZ’S EARLY MASTERPIECE, IMMEDIATELY MAKES ITS POINT: WE ARE BUT BODIES IN SPACE.
A giant leap forward from her earliest work, which amplified the hysterical banality of everyday existence, Körper is a solemn and minimal piece, inspired by Daniel Liebeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. It is a Holocaust-informed work, a bitter showdown with modernism. Foucault proposed that the modern state was based on biopolitics. Nation state was a line drawn around people proclaimed homogeneous. The focus of state power shifted towards creating its citizens. Suddenly, human beings were carded, identified, examined and sorted, vaccinated, educated, surveilled, relocated, detained and sometimes exterminated. Viewed this way, the Nazi concentration camp was nothing but the endpoint of the modernist dramatic arc: eugenics, scientific experiments, violence and mass death nothing but the obsessive reiteration of state power over the human body.
Körper is a solipsistic dance, looking at its own means of production: body literalised; body as matter. Waltz piles up dancers into a glass box: they wiggle and squirm like Klimt’s fish, planar, somnolent. They are held by a fistful of skin, or stacked like bricks in a wall. When pressed they bleed and squirt water. Two women point at each other’s body parts, naming the price their organs would fetch. Dancers tell Bauschian stories of everyday life as lived by their bodies, pointing incorrectly at each body part mentioned: anatomical vertigo builds up as the story-telling accelerates. Pancreas on one’s elbow, two arms outstretched into a digestive system, lungs on the lower back, vomiting from one’s eyes.
The incessant banality of these associations, the refusal to turn bodies into signifying matter, the wilful lack of sophistication, is what makes this powerful dance universally legible. It reveals, in light both harsh and gentle, the fluidity, strength, fragility and resilience of the human body. There is no culture that lacks the knowledge of the body as presented in Körper, a body of flesh and fluids, of fatigue and illness, of uncertain life and uncertain death.
Unquestionably brilliant, Körper received both standing ovations and critical acclaim. Yet, having premiered in 2000, some scenes already fray at the edges with 90s mannerisms: cacophonic, atomised groupwork; a duet of erotic aggression. Crucially, it is a dance made before 9/11: a dance for a time which had forgotten or doubted the materiality of the body; a time which demanded that theatre, that beatbox of reality, pinch and twist real limbs, let real blood. This tough love may have been, at its premiere, paradoxically affirmative. It arrived to MIAF, nonetheless, as a love letter from an already distant past.
More relevant would have been the subsequent parts of the body trilogy, the erotic S (2000) or noBody (2002), in which a post 9/11 body emerges. Mirroring the reluctant, embarrassed detention, classification and torture of asylum seekers, war prisoners, illegal immigrants—sad, but necessary gestures of state power, performed out of protocol, rather than faith—Sasha Waltz’s bodies were now heavy detritus, easily extended, deformed, exhausted, but nonetheless lingered on, inertly resisting disappearance. In place of fragile, but sculpturally dignified bodies in Körper, they became redundant, mere waste.
Medea, the choreo-operatic spectacle that opened the festival, received significantly less audience enthusiasm: premiering only in 2007, it was harder to immediately glimpse the quality of innovation that has not yet mineralised into convention. It shows a new direction for Waltz, an interest in musical and choreographic narrative, started with Dido & Aeneas, her first choreographic opera, in 2005. It opens with a red curtain collapsing, and the dancing ensemble gently rolling onto the stage, bare but for a single-note hum from the orchestra, relentlessly painting the desert of hope that surrounds Medea, the scorned woman and murderer of her own children.
The work achieves a remarkable distantiation: far from a tabloid shocker, Medea is a layered contemplation of irrational violence, relying on the audience’s familiarity with the myth. Pascal Dusapin wrote a chunkily dissonant score for a baroque orchestra, giving Caroline Stein crystalline high notes to the lonely desperation of a woman in a foreign land, abandoned by her husband for a political alliance; a perfunctory barbarian, a stranger. In an interview, Dusapin compared Medea to Faust: a gambler who raises the stakes too high and loses. Heiner Muller, whose Medeamaterial, the middle part of his Argonaut triptych, is used as a libretto by Waltz and Dusapin, saw it as a post-colonial tragedy, of a savage woman seduced “on the bodies bones graves of my people”, stranded between two worlds, neither of which is accessible any longer. For Waltz, who, influenced by Christa Wolf’s feminist re-reading, stresses that Medea was unlikely to have murdered her own children, Euripides’ tragedy is a patriarchal rewriting, revenge over retreating matriarchy, punishing the feared and loathed female.
The Australian audience, better versed in emotional than cerebral theatre, was left to navigate multiple planes of fine meaning making. Rather than tickling the audience into sentimental catharsis, Waltz builds an emotionally complex narrative, all stodgy grief and fatigued revenge. Deceleration into the operatic largo becomes Muller’s complex text, allowing us to take in its dense poetry. Surrounded by a flurry of dancers, Medea is the only speaking character on stage, Jason and Nurse reduced to voices off-stage.
Again, the choreography is architecture-inspired: throughout the opera it mirrors the logic of a frieze, with multiple groups of three or four dancers forming tableaux, each a symbolic representation of the events, or with individuals occasionally dancing a character. As in Körper, Waltz fondly employs simple stage tricks: Glauce, Jason’s young bride, is stripped naked and dressed in a poisoned white gown on stage, and dances while red dye seeps out of her long necklace, smearing both her and Jason with blood. Stein is seldom engulfed by the dancers, joining and splitting away from the stage images, and the choir steps onto the stage for the finale, a thundering, condemning weight of bodies, breaking any separation that may build between the narration and the illustration of the myth. It sounds naff, but it is a heart-wrenchingly sophisticated work, heroically simple in its idea and remarkably original in its execution. The climax, with six enormous industrial fans building a hurricane on stage, the entire theatre trembling to their hum, is devastating without being either melodramatic or obscure. As the bodies of her children (played by Waltz’s own) are taken away, and Jason’s voice calls for her, Medea coolly cuts herself off from the tragedy: “Nurse, who is that man?”
In Körper, each stage moment is a collage, rather than a balanced composition of the parts. Multiple unrelated scenes will unfold simultaneously, sometimes in harmony, sometimes clashing. Medea is more carefully composed, a Gesamtkunstwerk, demanding wide focus but rewarding amply. Yet both pieces wear Waltz’s choreographic heart on their sleeve. Stage images often so simple as to resemble either puritan comedy, or the earnestness of children, offset and modulate the grave emotions and vivid intelligence permeating her work. These works are unlike anything I have seen: mature without being cumbersome, playful without a moment of frill. In a festival particularly strong on dance, they stood head and shoulders above all else. Waltz’s first, overdue visit to Australia has shown local dance a completely new sensibility.
Sasha Waltz and Guests, Körper, direction, choreography Sasha Waltz, design Thomas Schenk, Heike Schuppelius, Sasha Waltz, costumes Bernd Skodzig, music Hans Peter Kuhn, lighting Valentin Gallé, Martin Hauk, performance Sasha Waltz dancers, State Theatre, The Arts Centre, Oct 15-17; Medea, choreography Sasha Waltz, music Pascal Dusapin, text Heiner Müller, performers Caroline Stein and Sasha Waltz dancers, State Theatre, The Arts Centre, Oct 9-12; Melbourne International Arts Festival, Oct 9-25
MELBOURNE FRINGE FESTIVAL IS ALWAYS, INEVITABLY, A LESSON IN READING SPACE. FOR THREE MANIC WEEKS WE LIVE IN A CITY TURNED INSIDE OUT. THE PERIPHERAL NORTH MELBOURNE BECOMES THE NEW ARTS PRECINCT; MARGINAL TRAIN LINES REGAIN CURRENCY; ELEVATORS BECOME PERFORMANCE VENUES. WE TRAWL THROUGH LESSER-KNOWN SUBURBS, BACK ALLEYS, FLOORS-OTHER-THAN-GROUND, FOLLOWING DIRECTIONS CHALKED ON CONCRETE, OR ALWAYS TOO SUCCINTLY REPORTED IN THE FESTIVAL PROGRAM. IF THE SPOTLIGHT OF MAINSTREAM ART FESTIVALS RESTS FIRMLY ON THE CITY CENTRE AND CENTRESTAGE, FRINGE COUNTERACTS WITH A ROBUST FOCUS ON THE MARGINS.
The most interesting works this year were all trying to make us re-read space: re-imagining the city on the one hand, theatrical space on the other. The former were collected in the Mapping Room, presented by Head Quarters, a freshly inaugurated independent artspace, an increasingly rarity in the inner city ravaged by gentrification. Among them, people’s walking tours (of anything from graffiti to op-shops) intersected with site-specific performances. Martin del Amo and Brooke Stamp’s Reverb (1) was a clickety, airy dance, one part oneiric pantomime, one part durational performance, travelling between Bendigo and a small park off Chapel Street. I witnessed the very last performance, the afternoon after the Fringe closing party—its audience a wobbly bunch of black-clad urbanites, colonising a vague suburban space at a vague Sunday time. It was liminal in every sense: shops closing, streets emptying; the rain had just stopped and the performance cancellation had just been revoked. Between a stop-starting fountain, a mesmerised baby boy followed Paula Lay’s solo through the park. Solos and duets appeared at odd angles, drawing invisible lines of attention, demanding the audience move, huddle in unexpected sitting formations, or stare at the sun, obliquely gleaming between rain and dusk. A rich lightness was sustained throughout the event, of which we all became part: a curious, question-posing intervention into normally unquestioned space.
The most singular experience of the festival, however, was bettybooke’s en route, a lesson in falling in love with the city. Equipped with headphones, the audience was given small change and sent to explore the marginal spaces of the CBD, one person at a time. Directions and small tasks arrived over the phone, through signs in space, or hidden in the soundtrack, which featured Sigur Ros, Rilke’s poetry and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological musings. Walking down graffiti-coloured laneways, discovering speciality music shops, garage sales and messages from strangers, one was never sure what was constructed and what incidental to the experience. Yet, led by bettybooke’s invisible hand, one felt safe detouring, taking time, seeing the city anew. Soon enough, the modern-day flaneur was shouting on the street, writing on the walls and even running in front of a tram, holding hands with a complete stranger. Urbanistic art is not a rarity in Melbourne, a city in love with its own hidden spaces, but few performances manage to so completely tear through the bubble of reserve in which we spend most of our lives.
Benedict Hardie, Yuri Wells
photo Lachlan Woods
Benedict Hardie, Yuri Wells
Hayloft Project’s Yuri Wells, on the other hand, was exemplary of the alternative tendency, to re-think stage space. It opened with a quintessentially Gen-Y moment: two saccharine-sweet boys playing a crocodile xylophone and a ukulele amidst scattered props, telling cute stories of encounters with strangers. However, soon the stage is cleared, and Benedict Hardie’s monologue turns our first impression on its head. Using epic narration, some dialogue and a hint of movement, Yuri Wells, a wide-eyed, smiling, socially inept aged-care nurse, is revealed to be a lonely sociopath. With stuttered embarrassment Hardie tells of stalking a girl, kidnapping and locking her up; he digresses, leaves out key details, and occasionally seems puzzled about his own behaviour. It is an oddly polite show that softly, but precisely, steps on its audience’s toes. It masterfully employs the effect of lagged comprehension: as the narrative progresses, the impressions from the initial set-up echo back distorted and reconvsidered. All the seemingly innocuous props assume a retrospectively horrific meaning: a large wooden chest, half-eaten chocolate cake, with the knife still sticking out, Yuri’s loneliness. As the reliability of the story falls apart, all that remains is the bare stage as an empty frame, teeming with ghosts.
Nature League, Tiger Two Times
photo Cy Norman
Nature League, Tiger Two Times
Nature League in North Melbourne, by Tiger Two Times, a quartet of University of Wollongong graduates, was another subtle show that lingered in the imagination. The audience circled a transparent plastic-sheeted glasshouse, barely able to make out the blurred silhouettes of four girls as they settled into a number of vaguely pre-Raphaelite tableaux. It was 20 minutes of little action, but high semiotics: the performers stood in white, embroidered dresses to sweet sounds of nymphish music, pouring water from a jug, throwing flower petals in the air, sitting gracefully or singing in a chorus line. The effect was uncanny, mysterious, leading the audience to a range of controversial reactions: at times, one felt we were joining the performers in a deconstruction and ridicule of the classical idealisation of young women; at other times we were absolutely moved by the sacred miracle of the feminine. Finally, the plastic sheeting was cut through, and we were invited into the glasshouse, now revealed as a stuffy, charmlessly drab construction. The rose petals became pieces of paper, white dresses home-made, water jugs made of plastic, the feminine mystique dead and buried.
Suicide Show,
photo Ponch Hawkes
Suicide Show,
Recently it was put to me that there is a deep unease at the very heart of the Australian culture about expressing strong emotions, palpable in an embarrassed little term like ‘argy-bargy’, trying to diminish the importance of ‘argument.’ A Bit of Argy Bargy is a company more than superficially aware of this distressed national relationship with feeling, as their suicide diptych demonstrates. And No More Shall We Part is another excursion into the anxieties of family life for Tom Holloway, whose Red Sky Morning hit the zeitgeist in 2008. Nicknamed “The Assisted Suicide Show”, it is a traditional, text-based performance following an aged couple through DIY euthanasia. Holloway has found a genuinely Australian dramatic rhythm, attentive to the stutters of superficial conversation covering a bubbling pot of suppressed emotion, and a dramaturgy predicated on the anxious anticipation of no event whatsoever; a humming layering of stress.
The Suicide Show, in contrast, is a gutting cabaret. Director Martin White lets unrealised suicidal urges spill from song to song, exacerbated by relentlessly self-effacing humour. Five men progress through a series of vignettes combining masculine vulnerability and sociological sharpness, minute descriptions and wide oscillations of mood. A chorus line tries to dissuade a friend from suicide with clumsy, distressing ineptness, employing jokes, non-committal friendliness, anxious suggestions he “talk to someone”—someone else. Another drunkenly attempts to jump in front of a train, on a “fine Australian day.”
White exposes the deep-seated fear of the feminine in this grotesque take on mateship, layering both overt misogyny (a macabre placement of “Good Night Ladies” at the end of the performance) and emotional illiteracy, through attentive use of popular songs (from Nirvana to John Lennon). Although it is a testimony to Argy Bargy’s brilliance that one man’s psychotic rocking can blend seamlessly into swinging to music, or that a barbershop quartet number can reveal icy undertones of despair, The Suicide Show generates enormous anxiety as it approaches its end, feeling increasingly like an overture to a funeral. Yet the two shows, against all odds, mitigate the effect of each other. While the slow, impotent sadness of And No More magnifies the humour of The Suicide Show, it is retrospectively illuminated by the cabaret as comparatively both lighter and deeper.
Reverb (1), choreographers Martin del Amo, Brooke Stamp, Forecourt, Capital Theatre, Bendigo, Grattan Gardens, Prahran, Sept 24-Oct 11; en route, bettybooke, concept Julian Rickert, Melbourne CBD, Sept 26-Oct 11; Mapping Room, Head Quarters, Sept 25-Oct 4; Hayloft Project, Yuri Wells, writer, performer Benedict Hardie, co-deviser Anne-Louise Sarks, North Melbourne Town Hall, Sept 25-Oct 10; Tiger Two Times, Nature League in North Melbourne, The Warehouse, Sept 25-Oct 2; A Bit of Argy Bargy, & And No More Shall We Part, writer Tom Holloway, The Suicide Show, director Martin White, Black Box, The Arts Centre, Sept 30 -Oct 10; Melbourne Fringe Festival, Sept 23-Oct 11
THE TITLE OF YUMI UMIUMARE’S EN TRANCE IS A PUN: ENTRANCE (NOUN) AS IN ENTRY, AND ENTRANCE (VERB) AS IN ENCHANT OR ENTERTAIN. THE TITLE SPEAKS TO EXPERIENCES OF BEING IN BETWEEN AND PASSING THROUGH TO SOMEWHERE ELSE. THE TECHNICAL TERM FOR SUCH EXPERIENCES IS ‘LIMINAL.’ THE WORD IS USUALLY GLOSSED AS ‘AT THE THRESHOLD’, ALTHOUGH INVARIABLY IT RAISES MORE QUESTIONS THAN IT ANSWERS OR EXPLAINS.
The effect of Yumi Umiumare’s performance is difficult to describe. Its mode is enacted evocation, its energies exacting. Yet it also feels quite slippery and elusive. It passes through six phases: Maze, Cityscape, Cracked Mirror, Punk Medusa, Tears and Shiro Hebi (White Snake). It moves with a strong sense of progression, but without the certainty of departure or destination.
There are surreal moments of narrative recollection at the opening. As Umiumare enters, dressed in white, she recalls a memory of watching dust particles wander in the sunlight and a dream, it seems, of slicing off two finger tips and running outside to find them before they are eaten by her cat. The violence is softened by reflection; the mood is calm and contemplative. Then the performer is sideswiped by a bus. A mirrored cityscape of pedestrians and passing traffic, created by media artist Bambang Nurcahyadi, is projected onto Umiumare. She seems squashed by the images, trapped between their flatness, confined yet disconnected from their action.
The horizontal is a strong axis in this work. A new sequence of projections shows commuter trains passing silently in opposite directions, travelling in parallel worlds above and below an imaginary horizon. Umiumare releases great swathes of curtain-fringing, which spread across the stage to catch the image of the trains in passing. She grabs her stomach and her mouth. She eats the fringing, overcome with its threads and tangles, overwhelmed by the effort. In a later projected sequence, the performer appears as if floating on the horizontal surface of an Australian river. Her image falls and slides amongst watery reflections of gum trees against the sky.
The passing phases of the work are marked by costume changes. In one dark and angry phase, she wears a leather jacket studded with tiny flashing lights, and on her head a flat video screen. In another phase, serene and light, she wears a white coat and carries an umbrella. Japanese characters fall upon the umbrella like drops of rain. The lights come up on the audience, and Umiumare delivers a lecture on the onomatapoeia of Japanese words for crying. As if to shift our feelings, she sings a Japanese pop song karaoke style, and then she cries, in yellow light, in memory of her mother. In the final phases, Umiumare puts white make up on her body, twists and tangles with the curtain-fringings and pulls them to the ground. The ending conjures the whirling centre of a singularity, as Umiumare descends beyond a bright spotlight from the rear. The final mood is mournful, elemental. The work descends to silence as the blinding spotlight fades.
Akram Khan Company, Bahok
photo Alex Makayev
Akram Khan Company, Bahok
Bahok from the UK-based Akram Khan Company is named after a Bengali word meaning ‘carrier.’ It too speaks to experiences of being in between. A carrier or bearer is always in transit, travelling between points, transporting their load. Eight dancers each carry in their body the evidence of cultural origin, training and tradition. They come from China, Korea, India, Slovakia, South Africa and Spain. But like the performer in En Trance, their destinations are unknown. They are caught on stage in transit, as if in the departure lounge of an international airport or the waiting room of some transcontinental train station. The central scenic signifier is a large electronic display which mimics the sort once used in airports, as it flicks through departures and arrivals, announcing delays and reschedules with an electro-mechanical clatter.
The dancers, wearing street clothes are, for the most part, unencumbered by actual luggage. As the work unfolds, the stories of their journeys emerge in fragments which interact. We learn about as much as can be discerned by observing fellow travellers in transit. One man is frustrated that his flight has been delayed. A woman is desperately looking for someone or something on a piece of paper. Another woman falls asleep on a fellow passenger who leads her, sleep-walking, in a contact-based duet. Another couple pass the time by performing ballet moves and posing cutely for a camera.
Dancing serves as the medium of contact and communion between strangers. When the dancers perform Akram Khan’s sweeping choreography in unison the work embodies the movement of togetherness. But the state patrols its borders with the cultural specificity of language. A Korean dancer is assisted at the immigration counter by a fellow traveller who tries to interpret the officer’s enquiries. But as he speaks in Korean, her efforts at translation are upstaged by surtitles for the audience on the electronic display. His cultural alienation is inscribed with the nostalgia that the sight of a man spitting reminds him of home. For the woman, it is a parcel of her father’s shoes that connects her to the past.
International travel both reinscribes and whittles away the tenets of cultural difference. These are 21st century travellers. They bear the racial distinctions of biological inheritance, but they are also young, fit and roughly equivalent participants in an emerging global culture. The surest symbol of the global is the mobile phone, with which the dancers connect through language to people in other places, beyond those they are with. For the audience, a ringing mobile phone is an anxious symbol of their life outside.
The other more present global symbol is a choreographed group hug. Delivered just before the end, this ensemble act of the dancers embodying their contact with communal pleasure has also become, in various photographs, a symbol for Bahok. The work was originally developed as a collaboration between the Akram Khan Company and the National Ballet of China, but the marks of intercultural encounter are diffuse. The score by Nitin Sawhney is a masterpiece of world music, securely integrating its aural sources within a compelling sonic flow.
Woyzeck, Sadari Movement Laboratory
photo Alex Makayev
Woyzeck, Sadari Movement Laboratory
From Korea, the Sadari Movement Laboratory’s Woyzeck, directed by the company’s founder Do-Wan Im, has been in repertoire since 2001 and toured widely in recent years. Its intercultural aspects are internalised. Do-Wan Im trained at the Ecôle de Jacques Lecoq in Paris. The work is a classic of the European modern theatre, though I wonder whether it has ever received a production of such discipline and rigour.
The company’s 11 performers foreground an extraordinary physical technique. Their ensemble action is expressive, tightly focused and incredibly precise. Their swift transitions during the blackouts between each scene are astonishing. Their physical capacity to abstract the play’s expressionism into ensemble action is materialised through a dramaturgy of wooden chairs. Arranged and re-arranged with each episodic scene, the chairs extend the ensemble action and serve as prison, tower and bed, as equipment for military display and fairground fun, and as material metaphor for Woyzeck’s psychic fracture.
The aesthetic coherence of the production is secured with music from Argentinean composer Astor Piazzolla whose tango compositions are astringent in their orchestration and, like Woyzeck, fraught and fractured. The surtitles elaborate rather than translate. They are succinct poetic encapsulations, arriving after the physicality of each scene is established in the space. Like the karaoke lyrics in En Trance and the airport ticker screen in Bahok, the surtitles in Woyzeck mark the in-between of touring and translation within intercultural creation.
En Trance, creator, performer Yumi Umiumare, dramaturg Moira Finucane, media Bambang Nurcahyadi, installation Naomi Ota, sound design Ian Kitney, costume David Anderson, lighting Kerry Ireland, Space Theatre, Oct 13, 14; Akram Khan Company, Bahok, choreographer Akram Khan, composer Nitin Sawhney, lighting, set Fabiana Piccioli, Sander Loonen, Akram Khan, Festival Theatre, Oct 16-17; Sadari Movement Laboratory, Woyzeck, director Do-Wan Im, music Astor Piazzolla, dramaturg Seok Kyu Choi, lighting Tae-Hwan Gu, sound design Yo-Chan Kim, set design Jae-Yun Cho, costumes Hae-Ju Kim, Space Theatre, Oct 7-9; OzAsia Festival 2009, Adelaide Festival Centre, Oct 3-17
THIS, IN MY OPINION, WAS ONE OF THE GREAT FESTIVALS, BLENDING IN MEMORY LYNDON TERRACINI’S PREVIOUS FESTIVALS, AND LENDING SIGNIFICANT HINDSIGHT TO HIS CHOICES. CERTAINLY THERE HAVE BEEN THE STANDOUT PRODUCTIONS SUCH AS MABOU MINES’ DOLLHOUSE, THE CONTEMPORARY LEGEND THEATRE OF TAIWAN’S KINGDOM OF DESIRE, DECLAN DONNELLAN’S RUSSIAN LANGUAGE THREE SISTERS, LIZA LIM’S WORLD CLASS OPERAS, YUE LING JIE AND THE NAVIGATOR, AND NOW THIS YEAR’S COMMISSIONED NEW WORK, MIRACLE IN BRISBANE.
Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland (1990-97) and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997-2002), was guest speaker with a relevant talk titled “Creating a World without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism.” This overarching theme subtly merged with the festival as a whole. Terracini invited us to embark on a narrative journey. In my own case, the import of this journey didn’t strike home until I saw Miracle in Brisbane.
This was a reworking, with director Rhoda Roberts, of his Italian opera Miracle a Milano by composer Giorgio Battistelli. The narrative of a family and the Indigenous community to which they belong who build a shanty town on the fringes of Brisbane forms the bare bones around which this marvellous creature coalesces, and whose protean vigour seemed barely contained. The theatrical focus of the piece pulled in and out, symbolically showing the workings of an inimical white society and the invasion of country, the Stolen Generation and greedy mining moguls. Hope was offered, I think, by the portrayal of Aboriginal society as genuinely inclusive through mixed marriage, and by the notion of Bringing Them Home. The Queensland Orchestra served as a visceral partner to the dramatic surges in this work. Full orchestral expression was counterpointed with solo accordion, didgeridoo and unearthly dissonant choric voices from the Canticum Choir. A small brass band marches on, wet washing is slapped on stage, oil drums are pounded, spears clatter, bodies chant, clap and slap themselves percussively and vocal solos of great power and beauty all precisely and expressively contribute to make the music an equal moiety in this story.
L’Oratorio d’Aurelia
courtesy the artists
L’Oratorio d’Aurelia
L’Oratorio D’Aurelia goes straight to the heart of what our inner child secretly believes, that magic is real and the world is alive. Red velvet stage curtains become lovers, animals, doors and windows; mice catch cats, ice creams are hot, we can fly like kites. This show had the enchantment of fairytale and fable and some of the dark parts too, with a sinister puppet scene in which the protagonist, Aurelia (the performer Aurelia Thiérrée), has her leg gobbled up by a monster and sews it back on. She is at home in her world of infinite possibility which she inhabits with effortless Gallic charm and grace, occasionally connecting with Jaime Martinez for splendidly inventive and acrobatic pas de deux. There is no one story, each scene seems part of a story you half remember and, as in dreams, things simply occur and have their own logic until time reclaims Aurelia and us as she turns to sand and a toy train runs through her stomach and on in a breathtaking illusion which completes the spell.
Chelsea McGuffin, Regarding the Joy of Others, CIRCA
photo Justin Nicholas, Atmosphere Photography
Chelsea McGuffin, Regarding the Joy of Others, CIRCA
CIRCA’s Regarding the Joy of Others, directed by Yaron Lifschitz, might almost have been created from an opposite perspective, playing with the dialectic of the human creature lost in vast outdoor spaces, a familiar Australian scenario. Set in an industrial desert, Brisbane’s century old iconic gasometer was sculpturally lit, from a distance appearing like the bones of a long gone circus. Laser lights played over the interior and travelled out, illuminating the surrounding wasteland and emphasising the isolation. Lawrence English’s spare and lonely soundscape hauntingly reinforced this sense of the spaces between things. We were left to wander through, to immerse ourselves in this severely modernist installation, left as it were to encounter our own estranged, existential selves in an empty universe. We were, after all, back in the European philosophical tradition. Eventually aerialist Chelsea McGuffin performed a solo trapeze act suspended between towering steel frames. She seemed equally self absorbed and vulnerable in her predicament, but as if tentatively experimenting for herself, searching for new possibilities of relationship with the only trace of connection to the world, her trapeze. Her movements, however hesitant or miniscule, added up to an irresistable and courageous visual poetry of longing.
Two Catholic priests and seven of their activist flock stand trial for an act of premeditated civil disobedience, the burning of the files of hundreds of young men eligible for the military draft in the USA in 1968. The Trial of the Catonsville Nine was a seminal moment for the anti-Vietnam war movement in America, but the parallels to our own times and the reasons why The Actors’ Gang has reworked the original 1971 production, with inclusions from the trial transcripts inserted into the original free verse treatment by priest Daniel Brannigan, might appear obvious. However, it ocurred to me that because we have become so accustomed to weasel words, and our whole scale of values so skewed to the economy, how nakedly defenceless such language seems now. Who will dare break the silence? Passionately delivered by this ensemble cast, however, in an elegantly contrived production where the actors fluidly adopt the roles of officers of the court as well as defendants, this work underscored the crying need for an Australian Bill of Rights. I’m also becoming a fan of quality American acting.
Sunny Drake, Other-Wise, Under the Radar
photo Suzon Fuks
Sunny Drake, Other-Wise, Under the Radar
In the Under the Radar program, Otherwise was like one of those collaged images created from hundreds of smaller images, there’s a lot in them and each image is worth a closer look. Sunny Drake’s funny, energetic, poignant and thoughtful show breaks the silence on transgendered people’s history. The intimacy of scale allowed the autobiographical elements of this work to be fully shared. These were often emotionally rich and telling. The show had a carnivalesque brio with clever prop use and well-integrated animation and use of multimedia, but Sunny himself has no actor’s guile, which somehow made him instantly lovable and engaging. While this is one person’s story of exploring what is “minority normal”, to quote Sunny’s father from a segment of Otherwise, this was not navel-gazing but a richly creative engagement with a world where power and sexual or cultural identity are linked.
The matter of silence was given a different twist in another offering from Under the Radar, Cordelia, Mein Kind, a solo performance by Deborah Leiser-Moore. The performer is obsessed by trauma that runs in families, how it silently occupies our bodies, and even invades our dreams. This deeply textured, multilayered and savagely poetical work takes off from Shakespeare’s King Lear, but unravels personal elements of cultural exile and loss. Leiser-Moore’s Yiddish speaking Polish father escaped to Australia from the Holocaust, but left his family behind. However, he never spoke a word to his daughter about his past until she arranged a trip with him back to Poland, which she documents. His favourite film was a Yiddish version of King Lear with a happy ending! The piece abounded with such astounding ironies and coincidences from real life, I was literally rendered speechless.
In an interview in Rave Magazine, Leiser-Moore declared that the elements of visual and physical theatre with which she engages are such a potent force of communication because “[p]eople have their dreaming from that, they have their own imagination, their own stories. You want people to relate it back to their own world.” This festival was a powerful endorsement of Leiser-Moore’s notion. A beautiful essay by Andrea Goldsmith, “Only Connect” (Alan Jacobs ed. Enough Aready: An Anthology of Australian Jewish writing; Allen & Unwin, 1999) describes feelings of cultural alienation in Australia even in a fifth generation Jew. It wasn’t until events like the Hanson phenomenon, the Children Overboard affair, attacks on Native Title and John Howard’s 10-point plan that Goldsmith began to feel Australian, now that she had something to defend. Ultimately it was a trip to Central Australia and Sir Ronald Wilson’s report on the Stolen Generation, Bringing Them Home (1997), that forged for Goldsmith the terrible parallels of European Jewish and Australian Indigenous experience, and of country as a kind of Aboriginal Torah. Goldsmith relates it back to her own world, discovering in the process the possibility of building a tentative new relation with her Australianness.
The European composer Battistelli described Miracle in Brisbane as a form of ‘voiceless’ protest by marginalised people staking claim to their rights in a world that ignores them. This ‘voicelessness’ took a curious turn at an artists’ forum chaired by Sandy McCutcheon. A lively interviewee, the director Rhoda Roberts seemed about to articulate a vision for Australia perhaps less tentative than Goldsmith’s. She appeared to be on the verge of offering us whitefellas a great gift, if only we would accept it. She swallowed her words. Perhaps she felt on this occasion the odds were against her. I hope not.
West End…Live was a four-day event about which I was less sanguine, having been a long time West Ender. Nevertheless, there was a sad authenticity in the private worlds on display at 17 Browning Street, a former boarding house, if the reconstruction of the lives of the poor and desperate can be so construed. However, the main drag on Boundary Street became electric when it hosted on closing night the marchers from the 275 km Cherbourg Walk. Cherbourg was founded as an Aboriginal reserve in the last century, and Boundary Street was named to define a zone of exclusion for Aborigines from the CBD after dusk. This time they marched up the street to applause—a miracle in Brisbane in which we could all participate. And when Kevin Carmody with local and Cherbourg children sang “From Little Things Big Things Grow” a silence that raised the hair on your neck fell on us all. For this moment we were on holy ground, all of us expressing hopes beyond words.
It was also a very moving conclusion to Lyndon Terracini’s grand narrative in Queensland. His tenure here, as director of the Queensland Festival of Music and the Brisbane Festival, has not only overseen an extraordinary expansion in Queensland’s cultural life, but his sense of engagement and democratic outlook has enhanced Queensland’s sense of humanity at large because he has related it so well back to our own world.
2009 Brisbane Festival: Miracle in Brisbane, composer Giorgio Batistelli, director Rhoda Roberts, conductor Luca Pfaff, soundscape/live electronics Davide Tiso, designer Stephen Curtis, lighting design Bernie Tan, The Queensland Orchestra, Canticum Chamber Choir, performers Deborah Mailman, Djakapurra Munyarryun, Tony Briggs, Nicola Raffone, Casey Donovan, Rachael Wallis, Shaun Brown, Rita Pryce, Micqaella Pryce, Cleopatra Pryce, Gina Reuben, Teila Watson, Violet Love, Dwayne Pierce, Andrew Toby, Leeroy Bilney, Jesse Martin, Garret Lyon, Jeremy Robertson, Theodore Cassady, Jermaine Beezley, Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Oct 1-3; Compagnie Des Petites Heures, L’Oratorio D’Aurelia, creator,director Victoria Thierrée-Chaplin, performers Aurelia Thierrée Jaime Martinez;Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, Sep 23-26; CIRCA, Regarding the Joy of Others, director Yaron Lifschitz, performer Chelsea McGuffin, sound artist Lawrence English; Gasworks, Newstead Riverpark, Sep 29-Oct 30; The Actors Gang, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, writer Daniel Berrigan, director Jon Kellam; Powerhouse Theatre, Sept 24-29; Otherwise, writer, performer Sunny Drake, dramaturg, director Anna Yen, multimedia/animation artists Kate Geck, Ingrid K Brooker, Dana Aleshire, costume/puppet designer, maker Anthea Brescia, set designer Greg Clarke; Under the Radar, Metro Arts, Sep 26-30; Cordelia, Mein Kind, concept, film, co-creator, performer Deborah Leiser-Moore, director, co-creator Meredith Rogers, choreographer Sally Smith; Under the Radar, Metro Arts, Brisbane, Oct 1-3
AT A BREAKFAST MEETING WITH SYDNEY JOURNALISTS, PAUL GRABOWSKY SPEAKS OF A CHALLENGE HE FACED IN PROGRAMMING THE 2010 ADELAIDE FESTIVAL: “HOW TO ACHIEVE A POINT OF DIFFERENCE” AT A TIME WHEN ARTS FESTIVALS CAN LOOK IDENTICAL AND WHEN ADELAIDE IS TO CELEBRATE ITS 50TH FESTIVAL. HE WANTS TO PAY TRIBUTE TO “LOYALTY, SUCCESS AND LONGEVITY”, TO A FESTIVAL “BIGGER IN THE PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS THAN IN OTHER CITIES.” AT THE SAME TIME HE WISHES “TO COMMISSION AND SUPPORT INDIGENOUS ART ACROSS ALL GENRES IN THE FESTIVAL”, SEEING IT “AS THE MOST INTERESTING WORK IN AUSTRALIA” AND ART AS CENTRAL TO ABORIGINAL LIFE IN A WAY THAT IT IS NOT IN WESTERN CULTURE.
indigenous embodiment
To these ends, Grabowsky has woven Indigenous art and collaboration into his program. Building on the huge popularity of the 2008 festival’s Northern Lights installation (by Sydney-based The Electric Canvas) which celebrated Adelaide by ‘animating’ its North Terrace cultural precinct buildings with transformative digital projections, Grabowsky has extended the project to the wall of Parliament House that faces the Adelaide Festival Centre Plaza. With “a sense of irony and poetry”, he says, Aboriginal law from the Central Desert, in Pitjanjatjara language, will be projected onto the building and, on two public occasions, elders will pass on a song to a young man. Northern Lights thus becomes something much more than witty, digital magic.
Australia’s place in Asia and as a country with a culturally significant Indigenous population figures in the music program. The London Sinfonietta is a leading progressive music ensemble whose first program will celebrate the music of the Pacific Rim with works from Mexico (Revueltas), US (Nancarrow, Cage, Adams) and Korea (Unsuk Chin’s Double Concerto, with Australian pianist Lisa Moore). Their second program, Wind & Glass, includes adventurous Brisbane composer John Rodgers’ Glass, performed by the great jazz trumpeter, Scott Tinkler, and a festival commission, Tract. In this new work, composer performer Erkki Veltheim (who plays with Elision, the Australian Art Orchestra and Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu) has set the manikay song cycles of the Young Wägiluk Group from South East Arnhem Land. Grabowksy sees the juxtaposition of “cutting edge new music with one of the great treasures of Indigenous Australian culture as an important moment in Australian cultural history.” The program includes works by UK composers Tansy Davies (Neon) and Gavin Bryars (The Sinking of the Titanic).
The Chooky Dancers from Elcho Island in Australia’s north came to prominence with their indiosnycratic YouTube performance of the ‘Zorba’ dance. They will feature in a festival commission (in partnership with Darwin Festival, Sydney Opera House and Malthouse Melbourne), Ngurrumilmarrmeriyu (Wrong Skin), A Yolngu Tale of Forbidden Love, Skin and Clan, directed by Nigel Jamieson (Theft of Sita, Honour Bound, Gallipoli). Inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the work will combine traditional dance and song, drama, comedy and film to address the complexities of life in remote communities, not least for the young. The work’s title is explained by the festival:
“Ngurrumilmarrmeriyu: A Yolngu word meaning ‘elope’. The literal translation of Ngurrumilmarrmeriyu is Ngurru (nose), mil (eye), marr (heart), miriou (nothing). If you follow your heart and body and marry outside the dictates of your family and community, you lose everything—your kinship, your place in the world, the system of law that lays down all the relationships by which you live.”
Also in the 2010 program is Company B’s highly successful, The Sapphires, the story of the indigenous McCrae sisters who as a singing group entertained troops during the Vietnam War. Written by Tony Briggs, it’s based on the lives of his mothers and aunts. Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute is presenting Putsch by Brisbane-based proppaNOW, a collective of innovative and activist artists including Richard Bell, Vernon Ah Kee, Tony Albert, Bianca Beetson, Andrea Fisher, Jennifer Herd, Gordon Hookey and Laurie Nilsen. Putsch aims to defy white expectations of Aboriginal art and to eliminate self-censorship.
body opera
Grabowksy’s celebration of Australian Indigenous culture offers a sense of history, continuity, intercultural potential and therefore hope. However, global warming data projects the spectre of gradually accelerating annihilation of the Earth’s ecology while popular feature films neurotically repeat sudden apocalypses. György Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre, a festival centrepiece, might then offer some temporary relief from large scale anxieties. Its protagonists come face to face with Death (Le Grand Macabre) in a riotous absurdist fantasy of power plays and miraculous survivals that reveal that there’s more to life than death.
Le Grande Macabre, adapted from the play by Belgian surrealist Michel de Ghelderode, is a widely admired 20th century opera classic, hugely theatrical and richly visceral, funny and frightening. Its sense of rugged but vulnerable corporeality is amplified by truly dramatic singing that ranges from falsetto to stuttering stacatto to gut rumbling bass, abrupt and lyrical by turns and reinforced by a wonderfully suggestive orchestral score ranging from a car horn prelude to the sheer apocalyptic force of the full orchestra. (The excellent 1997 English language version conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen—from a production by Peter Sellars—is available on SONY Classical, CD S2K 62312.)
To give Le Grand Macabre a bit more body, its producers (Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, Brussels; English National Opera, London; Gran Teatro de Liceu, Barcelona and Teatro dell’Opera di Roma) have employed La Fura dels Baus to stage it. For those of you who only know the company from its ensemble work with raw meat and chainsaws and audiences on the run, be assured that its company members have a strong track record of major opera successes, albeit without deserting their impulse to provoke. Central to the staging is a massive remotely controlled body from whose orifices the characters of Le Grand Macabre emerge, their costumes suggestive of bodily organs, while the body doubles as a screen for (psychological) projections. The production is in English and with surtitles.
vulnerable bodies
Looking at the body from another angle, Back to Back’s Food Court is the company’s darkest work to date, a brutal exploration of bullying, not least from a sexual perspective, and performed to The Necks’ insistent musical pulse, played live, and amidst Bluebottle’s eerie, impressionistic dreamscapes. Back to Back put the ‘heartwarming’ label sometimes applied to them to the test in this unique work.
Earlier this year, New York’s Elevator Repair Service gave body to every word of The Great Gatsby in Gatz, a quite lateral, seductive transposition of the book from print to live reading and performance over seven absorbing hours (RT91). For the Adelaide Festival they’ll perform the first chapter of William Faulkner’s 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury. One of the company explained the choice: “Faulkner himself claims to have written the Benjy chapter first and insists that he only wrote the succeeding chapters in an attempt to explain the first one. I liked the prospect of taking his initial inspiration and illuminating it through performing it live.” The rich experience of Gatz is enough of a recommendation to see this new work.
The vulnerability of the body, and of self, is nowhere more strangely focused than in superstition, in the nervous hovering between rationality and delusion. Adelaide innovators, The Border Project in collaboration with Sydney Theatre Company’s new ensemble The Residents, will premiere Vs Macbeth, a reworking of Shakespeare’s play in terms of the superstitions in the text and those historically constellating around “that play”, as well as incidents involving the collaborators as the production has evolved. Cameron Goodall will play Macbeth and Amber McMahon Lady Macbeth, with Sam Haren directing.
In another take on Shakepeare, Melbourne’s The Eleventh Hour (directed by Adelaide-based Anne Thompson, with William Henderson) revealingly transposes The Life and Death of King John, set in the 13th century, onto the bodies and into the mouths of convalescing First World War soldiers, the ultimate victims of unchecked power. John Bailey wrote of the Melbourne premiere:
“[T]he conceit works wonderfully as the audience takes on a kind of double-consciousness, extracting Shakespeare’s tale from the often hilarious and sometimes moving play staged by the wounded” (RT70).
the immersed audience
Another festival commission (with Sydney Festival) has brought together Australian recorder virtuoso Genevieve Lacey and innovative UK filmmaker Marc Silver (www.marcsilver.net) to create an immersive in-the-round installation, en masse, for 50 people at a time, produced by Melbourne’s Arts House. To metaphorical ends, Silver juxtaposes his footage of hundreds of thousands of migrating starlings with an electroacoustic score from Lacey, sound artist Lawrence English and re-mix contributions from international respondents Christian Fennesz, DJ Olive, Nico Muhly, Ben Frost, Steve Adam and Taylor Deupree. At specified times the installation will also include a live performance.
Be Yourself, ADT
image Chris Herzfeld
Be Yourself, ADT
dance about the body
Australian dance companies like ADT (Devolution,The Age of Unbeauty), Chunky Move (Mortal Engine) and Lucy Guerin Inc (Structure & Sadness) are not afraid to tackle big issues. ADT’s Be Your Self (co-produced by Grand Théâtre de la Ville de Luxembourg, La Rose des Vents Villeneuve d’Ascq and Le Rive Gauche Centre Culturel de Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray) creatively addresses the emotional and biological complexities of the self as body. See ADT artistic director Garry Stewart offers valuable insights into the evolution of the work and the nature of the unusual collaborations involved in its realisation.
Byron Perry, Antony Hamilton, Simon Obarzanek, Ross Coulter, Untrained, Lucy Guerin Inc
photo by Untrained Artist
Byron Perry, Antony Hamilton, Simon Obarzanek, Ross Coulter, Untrained, Lucy Guerin Inc
Lucy Guerin’s Untrained (see reviews) is a work on a more modest scale but it wittily and very personally reveals much about the differences (and similarities) between trained and untrained dancers and, by analogy, about all our bodies. The show has the curiously empathetic effect of constantly prompting you to think, ‘How would, or could I, do that?’, at the same time feeling the movement in your body.
Jin Xing Theatre Company’s Shanghai Beauty is a rarity, contemporary Chinese dance. It sounds intriguing, examining “opposing views of the body and the beautiful…through a cross-cultural choreography for 16 dancers who move as one.” Jin Xing was a colonel in the Chinese Army, trained with Graham and Cunningham in the US, and became a woman and the director of her own company, unfunded by the Chinese government until this tour, says a very pleased Grabowksy.
active recall
Paul Grabowsky’s gift to the people of Adelaide on the occasion of its festival’s 50th anniversary is Reel Life: The Home Movie Project. It’s an installation that transforms the Elder Park Rotunda into a giant lantern screening images built from footage from the 1930s to the 1980s, largely in Super8, submitted to the festival and edited from 100 hours of film by Richard Raber and Naomi Bishops of Traces Films, and includes trips, parties and pageants, festivals and events both intimate and epic.
to the heart
The 2010 festival poster and brochure image is of a heart shape, perhaps blow-torched through metal, allowing a glimpse of a warm, golden interior. After decades where empathy has failed Australians, the processes of apology, forgiveness and reconcilation have barely begun. Paul Grabowksy clearly wants to cut through hard-heartedness: “Our festival….aim[s] to remind us all of our better selves, our best selves in a festival which celebrates our right to dream, to emote, to feel.” Nor is he afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve, revealing his intentions and confirming them in a program rich in Indigenous content, local and national talent in an international context, and with an overarching sense of the here and now.
GARRY STEWART IS THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF THE ADELAIDE-BASED AUSTRALIAN DANCE THEATRE (ADT). HIS WORKS BIRDBRAIN, HELD, DEVOLUTION AND G HAVE CONSISTENTLY TOURED INTERNATIONALLY ATTRACTING HIGH PRAISE AND CO-PRODUCTIONS. REALTIME ASKED STEWART TO DESCRIBE THE EVOLUTION OF HIS LATEST WORK, BE YOUR SELF, WHICH WILL PREMIERE AT THE 2010 ADELAIDE FESTIVAL.
The initial impetus for Be Your Self came from a series of discussions between myself, the dancers and a Buddhist teacher Jampa Gendun on notions of self and ‘I’. Central to Buddhist philosophy is an ontological deconstruction of the self. It questions the very existence of a permanent ongoing self and an inherent ‘I’. Buddhism employs a mind training system through analytical meditation to attempt to dissolve the centrality of ‘I’ in our world. The questions ‘What is the self? What is the ‘I’?’ arose repeatedly in these sessions. These questions naturally lead me down a path to this new project.
In terms of ordering the flows of points of view on this, my first decision was to start with the body itself. The body is the most evident and obvious extension of the subject into the world. Our identity is recognized through the spatio-temporal continuity of the possession of one body over a lifetime, despite the radical transformations of our individual morphology—from embryo to inevitable senescence.
Working with a local physiologist, Michael Heynen, we developed text delivered by an actor which describes, via the most dense, physiological jargon imaginable, a series of simple physical manipulations of a dancer’s body. The vast schism between the simplicity of the dancer’s movement and the complexity of scientific language is intriguing and ironic; however the behaviour of the body becomes increasingly complex and unpredictable leaving the limitations of language well behind.
On this new creation I am working closely with Professor Julie Hollege from the Drama Department Flinders University in her capacity as dramaturg. Be Your Self quickly splintered away from Cartesian mind/body dualism into a discourse on the gulf between the rationalism of the biological, scientific body and a body that is volatile and disordered and escapes finite scientific descriptors.
At times, the tone of the work is jagged and chaotic with seemingly illogical stops, starts, interruptions and repetitions, moving through vast shifts in timbre. The work alludes to the multiplicity and fluidity of selfhood. The self is not necessarily a continuous, unified, unfolding logical progression but can be viewed as a complex bundle of competing, negotiating ‘selves’ that we subconsciously edit in order to achieve narrative continuity.
The sound score to Be Your Self evokes the internal function of the body. Working with Sydney based composer Brendan Whoite (formerly of Supersonic) we are developing a composition that turns the body inside out—blood rushing through valves, the electricity of nerves synapsing, gasps of breath and the heart beating as the dancers exert themselves. But rather than treating our emotions, our psyche and our moods as a separate domain from the body, we’ve contextualised consciousness as yet another corporeal system like digestion or respiration.
Be Yourself, ADT
image Chris Herzfeld
Be Yourself, ADT
Further to the task of collapsing the separation of mind and body, I have been working with Professor Ian Gibbons, a specialist in neurobiology at Flinders Medical Centre. For this project he has developed text similar in intention to the physiological description that will be recited at the beginning of Be Your Self to the corresponding moves of the solo dancer. Utilising dense jargon from neurobiology the audience is offered a description of various emotional states and moods that occur as a result, at least partly, via complex neuronal and hormonal processes.
Owing to the deeply fundamental way in which we have internalised Cartesian duality and also the prevailing rationalism inherent in western philosophy and scientific thinking, human emotions have been relegated to a secondary status. Conventionally, emotions and feelings are the antithesis of logos and are associated with the feminine and hence are subordinate to the objective logic of rational, male line of thinking. In Be Your Self emotions are reframed within the scientific schemata. But as any neurobiologist would attest, the current understanding of exactly how emotions are generated falls way short of a fully comprehensive articulation.
Yet current developments in neurobiology are slowly bridging the mind/body gap. It is thought that the brain continuously holds a representation of the body and updates this representation through a constant flow of corporeal feedback. Our somasensory system formulates a multitude of neurological ‘bodymaps’ through which we orientate ourselves within the world. When we drive a car for instance these bodymaps envelop the steering wheel as well as the length, width and volume of the car. Through our bodies we have a sense of the wholeness of the car and the pressure of its wheels on the road as well as its velocity and power.
The neurobiologist/writer Antonio Damasio believes that in seeing, we don’t just register the world with our eyes but our entire body “senses our seeing of the world through our eyes.” Our perception of our world is fully corporeal, not just through specific sensory faculties.
This ability applies particularly to dancers who generally possess an advanced degree of proprioception—the process by which we can automatically register the position of our muscles and joints in three dimensional space. It seems like an unusual statement, but without the body our minds would be completely different. Our bodies create our moods and emotions and these in turn monumentally shape and affect physical behaviour and development of the body.
Lurking beneath the shallows of Be Your Self is the unsettling presence of the body’s liquidity. The integrity of our body as a consistent form is held tight by the largest organ, the skin. Our viscera—our organs and blood—and the internal structures of the body generally remain occluded from our perception or our will to perceive them. Feminist theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Elizabeth Grosz have drawn attention to the leakages of the body that women are so familiar with through childbirth, menstruation and lactation. But associated with this liquidity and the breaching of containment is a barely contained horror, an angst that pervades our relationship with our vulnerable bodies.
Finally, there is the derivation of pleasure from the body through transmuting into an aesthetic domain. The set designed by the New York based architectural firm Diller, Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) for Be Your Self allows us to obscure the totality of the body and to reveal random, singular body parts. When various limbs and torsos are articulated in concert with each other through this device we enter into a probable world where the body is liberated from its structural limitations. In doing so we are participating in a primordial ritual where humans are drawn to re-present the things of the world in a purely aesthetic form.
Perhaps this impulse toward representation in an allegorical schemata is a survival strategy in order to attain another understanding of the world through its re-articulation in a creative form, thus opening up possibilities that don’t exist yet. Or perhaps it is simply a neurologically pleasurable act that momentarily provides us windows through which to escape the self consciousness of our existence.
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ADT, Be Your Self, a co-production with Grand Théâtre de la Ville de Luxembourg, La Rose des Vents Villeneuve d’Ascq and Le Rive Gauche Centre Culturel de Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, in association with Adelaide Festival Centre Pivot(al) program and Adelaide Festival 2010; Her Majesty’s Theatre, Feb 20-28
Richard Green, Kelton Pell, The Fence, Urban Theatre Projects
photo Heidrun Löhr
Richard Green, Kelton Pell, The Fence, Urban Theatre Projects
THE FENCE, URBAN THEATRE PROJECTS’ NEW PERFORMANCE FOR THE 2010 SYDNEY FESTIVAL, PROMISES “AN EXPLOSIVE TALE OF LOVE, BELONGING AND DISPOSSESSION.” TAKING PLACE IN AN UNDISCLOSED BACKYARD IN PARRAMATTA, THE PERFORMANCE INVESTIGATES THE “RESILIENCE AND WISDOM OF FIVE MIDDLE-AGED AUSTRALIANS, FOUR OF WHOM WERE REMOVED FROM THEIR HOMES AND GREW UP IN CARE AS PART OF THE STOLEN GENERATIONS AND THE FORGOTTEN AUSTRALIANS.”
Directed by Alicia Talbot, The Fence features a formidable creative team. The cast includes Helen Dallas, Richard Green, Kelton Pell, Skye Quill and Vicki van Hout, with Wayne Blair contributing as a story consultant, design by Alison Page, composer Liberty Kerr and lighting design by Neil Simpson.
As director Alicia Talbot explains, the title for the work emerged during Urban Theatre Project’s 2002 residency at The Parks Community Centre in the western suburbs of Adelaide during the making of the gut-wrenching performance The Longest Night. One of the community consultants who had been removed from his home at age six for being what authorities declared to be a ‘naughty’ child, described his experience of living in out-of-home care with damning understatement: “All I saw for the next 11 years was a fence.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, this phrase stayed with Talbot, and she’s been “chipping away at the idea” ever since.
The Longest Night opened with the removal of a child, Ollie, from his mother, Bernie, by a Department of Community Services worker. The performance delineates the chain of events that follow. Bernie is an ex-junkie, but she’s trying to get clean so she can get her son back. Unsurprisingly, this journey is far from easy for her, especially when faced with the temptations of an ex-boyfriend who can offer her drugs that carry the promise of taking her pain away. The resultant performance was a unique blend of gritty naturalism, startling physicality, punctured by moments of dazzling, almost surrealist stage magic. This produced moments of acute ethical discomfort for spectators. Whose behaviour is justified here? What responses to emotional crisis are permissible? Who should be forgiven, and how often? Are there limits to forgiveness? By contrast, The Fence tells the story of those removed as children, now middle-aged. Where The Longest Night followed the story of their parents’ struggles, The Fence aims to explore the fallout of removal from the perspective of those who were taken away.
Vicki van Hout, The Fence, Urban Theatre Projects
photo Heidrun Löhr
Vicki van Hout, The Fence, Urban Theatre Projects
Like all of Talbot’s hugely impressive body of work with Urban Theatre Projects over the last decade, The Fence addresses a thorny, uncomfortable and complex topic, and does so without promising any easy answers. But what seems especially remarkable about The Fence is its timeliness. In November 2009, while the performance was still in rehearsal, the Prime Minister issued an apology to recognise the ongoing hurt suffered by the Forgotten Australians—the 500,000 children who, between 1930 and 1970, were forcibly removed from their families and grew up in institutional care. Federal Community Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin stated that “the apology will acknowledge that what happened in the past was both real and wrong. It will make sure that a largely invisible part of our history is put firmly on the record. And it will remind the community of what happened to many of these children—the loss of family, the loss of identity and, in the case of child migrants, the loss of their country.”
For many, this is an apology that has been a very long time coming. But Talbot is hesitant to overstress the topicality of the theme. For her, the critical questions she hopes to reflect on in The Fence are, “What have we learnt from this? How do we care for our children?” She notes that her “aesthetic grapples with where we are”, politically, culturally and geographically, acknowledging the complex histories that surround these stories and the places in which they occur. In the case of The Fence the domestic space within which the performance takes place is uneasily shadowed by institutional proximity. “How does the site evoke other resonances about the story?”, she asks. The backyard in Parramatta is a contested site, one with “deep cultural significance as well as more recent history.” To illustrate this point she describes the artwork of Sally Morgan’s autobiographical My Place (1987), which she believes elegantly outlines the “layers and depth that always underpin psychic and geographic location. This is old territory that we stand on.”
Talbot sees The Fence as “building on a body of work”, including The Cement Garage (2000), The Longest Night (2002), Back Home (2006) and The Last Highway (2008). For Talbot, this represents “a substantial and sustained investigation of an aesthetic”, and continues longstanding collaborative relationships. She does note however that, “devising around big themes to make a story is hard.” In order to make this possible, The Fence, like Talbot’s previous works, has been developed through a deep consultative process, in this case with 25 community members who have had similar experiences to the characters. Talbot acknowledges these community collaborators as ‘experts’, who “look directly at the work” and give their opinion. They are paid collaborators in the development of the performance, attending rehearsals “every 10 days or two weeks” to respond to the work as it develops on the rehearsal room floor. “The strength is in how we make the work”, Talbot says, with the consultative process forcing “ideas to be tested and changed.” In the dialogues that follow each rehearsal showing, the experts measure the credibility of the scenarios, the environment, the characters and their behaviours.
To make performance in such a manner requires a great generosity between artists and experts in order to build a truly shared dialogue from very different perspectives, but for Talbot this multi-layered consultative process ensures that “what comes out at the end is rich”, the performance that results from this process is “a snapshot of people’s lives, made in dialogue with the people who’ve had these experiences.” While she believes that The Fence will “transcend stories of individual homes”, a sense of authenticity is nevertheless critical to her approach to theatre-making. This mode of theatre has been previously described as “fictionalised reality”, and Talbot describes her work as utilising “documentary and filmic frames—but not making a film.” Instead, the rigorous research and the dialogue with community experts is aimed at keeping the performance work grounded, and keeping the questions the performance raises live. This means that for audience members, the “questions stay with you for a long time.”
When asked about her political convictions, Talbot always suggests people “should look at the work”, but she is adamant that each of these theatre works have been deeply political, if refusing to fit neatly within any easily-identifiable political ideology. Talbot acknowledges her kind of sustained, political aesthetic is rare in theatrical circles these days, but has no plans to change direction any time soon. “UTP is such a reflexive organization—the form keeps changing, always driven by questions. It’s an exciting company that enables sustained investigation.”
THE 2010 SYDNEY FESTIVAL IS ANOTHER OF ITS COSMOPOLITAN CELEBRATIONS OF LARGELY CONTEMPORARY ART PRACTICES INCLUDING PROVOCATIVE UPDATES ON THE CLASSICS—OEDIPUS (TWO OF THESE), HAMLET, CANDIDE (ANOTHER TWO) AND SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR. THERE’S SOME STRONG INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMMING AND WHILE THE FESTIVAL DOESN’T HAVE A GOOD RECORD OF CONSISTENTLY PRESENTING AUSTRALIAN, LET ALONE SYDNEY ARTISTS, THE 2010 PROGRAM IS SOMETHING OF AN IMPROVEMENT.
Australian participation includes choreographer Shaun Parker’s Happy as Larry; Urban Theatre Project’s The Fence (see page 16); contemporary classical music group Ensemble Offspring’s collaboration with Pimmon, in Fractured Again; media artist Lynette Wallworth in exhibition at CarriageWorks; the Malthouse production, Optimism; Campbelltown Arts Centre and Gallery 4A’s Asia-Pacific art show, Edge of Elsewhere; Circa 1979, Signal to Noise—a concert, exhibition and free forum to celebrate Australian independent music 1979-85; a concert from Warren Ellis’ Dirty Three and Ed Kuepper’s Laughing Clowns; Australian artists Yvonne Kenny, Paula Arundell and Bangarra’s Elma Kris performing in the Peter Sellars’ production of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Symphony of Psalms; and an Australian cast and musicians in a concert version of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide for the festival’s Opera in the Domain concert.
Lindy Hume’s first Sydney Festival selection defies thematic cohesion, but it does have rare contributions from our region—two shows each from India and New Zealand; a strong music theatre stream; adventurous overseas theatre; a fresh look at a gaggle of classics; four substantial dance works; two strong media arts shows; and a continued commitment to innovative overseas independent bands and solo singer-songwriters alongside reflection on Australian music of the 80s. It’s a good start.
music theatre
Hume is an opera director so it’s not surprising there’s a music theatre strand in the festival including Ruhe, from Belgium; a Peter Sellars’ Stravinsky double bill from the US; a local concert version of Bernstein’s Candide; Dublin’s Pan Pan Theatre’s thrash metal Oedipus Loves You; and The Pirates of the Caribbean-inspired Rogues’ Gallery, songs selected by Johnny Depp and Gore Verbinksi and performed by actors (including Tim Robbins) and singers (Marianne Faithful, David Johansen, Norma Waterson and Sarah Blasko among others to be announced).
In Musiektheater Transparant’s Ruhe (Silence), the audience sit in a room of mismatched chairs in the Great Hall of the University of Sydney with performers from Collegium Vocale Gent for a performance of Schubert lieder interrupted by verbatim 1960s confessions (performed here in English) from World War II Dutch citizens who collaborated with the Nazis. With its strong reputation, a fine choir and unusual form and content, Ruhe could be a festival hit.
Choral work is also central to Peter Sellars’ calculated yoking together of Igor Stravinsky’s choral Symphony of Psalms and the opera Oedipus Rex (1927, surtitled performance text in Latin by Cocteau after Sophocles, narration usually in English). The opera is sparely staged employing African costume and limited decor in the form of seven thrones by Elias Sime, an Ethiopian artist. The choral aspect links the two works otherwise separated by the gulf between hope and despair. What the African cultural transposition will bring to Oedipus Rex remains to be seen, but the austere staging appears true to Stravinsky’s spirit in this, one of his first neo-classical works. The production features Sydney Symphony, Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, American soloists Rodrick Dixon and Ryan McKinny, with Yvonne Kenny and Paula Arundell. If Sellars brings to the works the kind of focus and restraint he has given, say, to a Handel oratorio, then Symphony of Psalms & Oedipus Rex could be a truly memorable musical event.
It’s not exactly music theatre, but Ensemble Offspring’s Fractured Again will combine live acoustic music with electronica, video and sculpture to create a performative installation. Typical of the Sydney group’s sense of exploration, this new work by the ensemble’s director Damien Rickertson is built around a rare glass harmonica—the rims of glasses or a series of bowls conjoined after a design by Benjamin Franklin are rubbed with wet finger tips to produce an eery sweet ringing. The instrument is joined by electronica from Sydney musican Pimmon, plus violin, clarinet and percussion. Video by Andrew Wholley will be projected onto Elaine Miles’ glass installation, which itself becomes a gong in what should be an engaging multimedia experience. We might also gain insights into the repertoire created for an unusual instrument that went out of favour in the 19th century after being associated with madness, in Gaetani’s Lucia di Lammermoor ‘mad scene’ (a starting point for the Fractured Again performance) and Mesmer’s experiments in hypnosis. It’s good to see that there will be three performances; Australian new music is so often limited to one.
Another concert with a theatrical edge, The Manganiyar Seduction, is apparently already booked out. Forty three Rajasthani musicians are housed in a huge wall of small compartments which open one at a time, the music accumulating simulataneously in “a repertoire ranging from ballads of kings and Sufi songs to songs to mark life’s important occasions such as birth, marriage, rains and feasts.”
dance
Ireland’s Fabulous Beast relocates the ballet classic Giselle to a small Irish town where “a lonely Giselle McCreedy cares for her abusive brother. But everyone is quick to exchange gloom for glamour when the new line-dancing teacher arrives in town.” It’s directed and choreographed by Michael Keegan-Dolan and performed with speech, song and video. (It’s intriguing that Keegan-Dolan has chosen line-dancing for a key motif while simultaneously Garry Stewart in his version of Giselle for ADT (G), uses a very different line that rarely stops coursing left to right across the stage. When will Sydney see G? France has.)
From New Zealand Lemi Ponifasio, with his company MAU, comes Tempest: Without a Body, “an apocalyptic response to the sinister escalation of post-9/11 state powers.” Drawing on Shakespeare’s Tempest and fusing traditional and modern dance, the work incorporates Maori activist Tame and is linked to a public forum, the 5th Pacific Thought Symposium, presented by MAU between the company’s two performances on January 10. Tempest: Without a Body is at times intense dance theatre, at others an engrossing, highly synchronised formal gesturing and spatial patterning.
Vancouver-based choreographer Crystal Pite’s Dark Matters, performed by Pite’s company Kidd-Pivot Frankfurt RM, uses dance, a puppet and shadow play to speculate on the mystery of dark matter and the analogous unseen forces that shape human behaviour. Vancouver-based Pite is Associate Dance Artist at Canadian National Arts Centre and Associate Choreographer of Nederlands Dans Theater. The choreography is familiarly modern but with a gripping off-centredness (Pite has danced for William Forsythe) and liquid ensemble work, but it’s the dancer engagement with puppet and shadow that looks particularly intriguing.
Happy as Larry is the premiere of a new work from choreographer Shaun Parker whose This Show is About People (2008; see RT 82) was widely applauded. Here nine dancers explore “the elusiveness and possibility of human happiness” to an electro-acoustic score by Nick Wales and Synergy’s Bree van Reyk. It’s interesting to read that the work is inspired by and loosely based on the Enneagram (literally “nine figures”) symbol, central to an allegedly ancient psychological theory of nine interrelated but discrete personality types, a model subsequently refined by GI Guerdjieff through movement as a means to improved self-knowledge. Brief excerpts of the work shown on DVD at a Dance Massive forum in Melbourne earlier this year suggested the possibility of a fascinating departure from Parker’s earlier works.
theatre
From Berlin’s Schaubühne comes director Thomas Ostermeier’s account of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to a translation into German by playwright Maurius van Mayenburg (Eldorado and Soft Targets, both for Malthouse) for six actors playing 20 characters, a lot of dirt, rain, modern suits and a Hamlet who dresses for the part. Rather than an evolution into possible madness, the production publicity promises that “Hamlet’s emotional decay and growing paranoia are immediately clear in Lars Eidinger’s portrayal.” It’ll be interesting to see how such absolutes play out against the text’s complexities in what will doubtless be a compelling production.
In Optimism, director Michael Kantor and writer Tom Wright (his adaptations for STC include Lost Echo, The Women of Troy, Genesis) transpose Voltaire’s Candide from Enlightenment naivety to a modern Australian “she’ll be right” idiom with Frank Woodley (who won a Glasgow Herald Angel award at the Edinburgh Festival for his performance) as Candide and Barry Otto as Pangloss, each attired as a classic clown. While reviews have admired Wright’s fidelity to Voltaire’s original and the quirky playing there’s been not a little debate about the purpose of the re-telling. The pros and cons of the Enlightenment are fuel for endless debate, especially in these fundamentalist times. I’m keen to see Anna Tregloan’s design, which includes a much admired aeroplane interior for the well-travelled protagonists.
British company Headlong will perform their much-praised new version (by Ben Power and the show’s director Rupert Good) of Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 classic Six Characters in Search of an Author. It’s framed as the making of a film in which real lives and fictional ones tangle during editing, “becoming a sinister parable for a media-obsessed age” (www.headlongtheatre.co.uk). Incidentally, the company’s latest show, Enron by Lucy Prebble, using “music, movement and video”, is playing to sellout houses in London.
From New Zealand’s Red Leap Theatre comes a faithfully meticulous account of Shaun Tan’s graphic novel The Arrival, wordless (of course) and deploying music, movement, puppetry and shadow-play to convey a fantastical world, the realities of displacement and the search for a home.
music
As mentioned, Circa 1979, Signal to Noise comprises a concert, exhibition and free forum to celebrate Australian independent music 1979-85. The keynote address will be given on January 15 by John Cale, regarded as a significant influence on the music of the period, followed by a concert on the 16th. Ed Kuepper’s Laughing Clowns and Warren Ellis’ Dirty Three will be in concert on January 26. While Brisbane has had several celebrations of the period and its local heroes this is a welcome first for Sydney.
Al Green is the festival guest who will pull big crowds to his two concerts with his 13-piece band, but there are plenty of lesser known but significant artists on the program. New York-based Medeski Martin & Wood are inventive composers, breaking free from the all too familar jazz trio format with up-to-date textures and complex beats while remaining accessible. As on their 2009 album Veckatimst and in appearances on late night American TV, the band Grizzly Bear deliver reliably rich harmonies and unusual, soaring melodies. Both bands are giving concerts at City Recital Hall, Angel Place.
New York’s most lateral experimentalists, The Books, offer two 75-minute shows in The Famous Spiegeltent. Paul de Jong plays guitar and sings, Nick Zammuto plays cello and the pair texture their compositions with found sounds and images from “a massive digital library”, “creating their very own brand of folktronica.”
Also of considerable interest is The Handsome Family—Brett (charming baritone, guitar) and Rennie Sparkes (accompanying vocals, bass, banjo). Their tuneful, droll songwriting is rooted in tradition, but with a strong contemporary feel. Of course, there’s also the big ticket number, Rogues’ Gallery, a night of pirate and sea-faring songs produced by Hal Wilner who created the sell-out Leonard Cohen tribute, Came So Far For Beauty. The festival’s opening night, directed by Nigel Jamieson, will feature music across the city while The Black Arm Band, The Manganiyar Seduction musicians and Al Green will appear in Hyde Park.
John Cale (Venice Biennale), appearing at Mona Foma
courtesy ARM
John Cale (Venice Biennale), appearing at Mona Foma
mona foma, hobart
After a succesful first season early in 2009 (see RT 89,) MONA FOMA curator Brian Ritchie has announced the program for the 2010 Festival, January 8-24, promising “musical challenge and intellectual discovery.” How many Australian arts festivals lay claim to ‘intellectual’?
John Cale, founding member of The Velvet Underground, will be the Eminent Artist in Residence with his Venice Biennale commission, the art/music installation Dyddiau Du/Dark Days, master-classes, an intimate solo performance, “collaboration with leading Australian artists and a full-band electric art rock experience.”
In a tribute to another great musician, one who criss-crossed the line between rock and contemporary classical, leading Australian pianist Michael Kieran Harvey will perform his 48 Fugues for Frank. “[This] hommage to Frank Zappa will be an immersive environmental work taking place on all four floors of TMAG’s historic Bond Store.” The concrete poetry of Arjun von Caemmerer’s Lingua Franka will be remixed and reinterpreted by four young artists, Michele Lee, Rob O’Connor, Mat Ward and Aedan Howlett, curated by Hobart-based Leigh Hobba. Jon Rose and Robin Fox will present their aural and video bicycle-driven fantasia, Pursuit, premiered by Performance Space at CarriageWorks earlier this year (RT 90, p48). In a more intimate concert, Eight Hands—Variations on the Theme, Cale will be joined by three great Australian pianists: Paul Grabowsky, Gabriella Smart and Andrew Legg. There’s also a heap of bands ranging from local acts to The Dirty Three. Mona Foma, Hobart, Jan 8-24; program at www.mofo.net.au
Jerk, PuSh Festival
photo Mathilde Darel
Jerk, PuSh Festival
push, vancouver
Can’t face the post-New Year doldrums and want a festival that will inspire? Go to Vancouver! With a theme of “bearing witness”, PuSh International Performing Arts Festival artistic director Norman Armour has announced a seriously adventurous program that includes aptly unusual engagements with media and experiments with audience-artist relations.
New Yorker Reid Farrington’s The Passion Project “compresses the entirety of Carl Dreyer’s classic silent film The Passion Of Joan Of Arc into a 30-minute concentration of movement, projection, installation and sound collage. The audience surrounds a 10 x 10 foot area flooded by four projectors, in which Emily Watts meticulously arranges and rearranges a number of parchment screens in a series of choreographed movements that explode the film into three dimensions.” You can compare the experience with the film at normal duration and a new score by Stefan Smulovitz elsewhere in the festival.
European collaborators Rimini Protokoll (see RT 91) put the audience and ‘experts from everyday life’ at the centre of their works. At PuSh, their show Best Before “pulls the multi-player video game out of the virtual realm and plugs it into an intimate theatre setting. A simulated city evolves as each of 200 spectators add their personal touch, game controller in hand.”
In Jerk (France), in “a play within a play, the audience takes the role of a psychology class visiting [a serial killer] as he serves his life sentence in prison. Fascination, humour, madness and sheer terror are melded in his puppet show recreations of the murders.” Jerk has been created by Gisèle Vienne a choreographer, director, visual and performance artist, with performer Jonathan Capdevielle. In another of his explorations of audience engagement, choreographer Jerome Bel’s The Show Must Go On (France) is performed with 20 Vancouver citizens.
Audience activity is also expanded in a unique music event, radical American saxophonsist Anthony Braxton’s Sonic Genome. “For eight continuous hours, 50+ performers use the compositions and improvisational languages developed by Braxton to create a living sound world. Ensembles form and split apart like cells dividing and reforming into new organisms.” And the audience too divides to follow whatever excites it.
In Kamp, Hotel Modern from Rotterdam have built “an enormous scale model of Auschwitz…with thousands of tiny handmade puppets representing the prisoners and their executioners…Actors move through the set like giant war reporters, filming the horrific events with miniature cameras and live video projection. Through a series of wordless vignettes, these delicate puppets made of clay, wire and cloth, re-enact the atrocities that took place within the confines of Auschwitz almost 70 years ago.”
Poetics: a ballet brut, Nature Theater of Oklahoma
photo Peter Nigrini
Poetics: a ballet brut, Nature Theater of Oklahoma
Meanwhile the wonderully eccentric Nature Theater of Oklahoma (see RT 91, p12; RT 89) continue to stretch the limits of performance with Poetics: a ballet brut. Committed if formally untrained dancers turn everyday gestures into something very special. RealTime writers enjoyed Vancouver production Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut in PuSh 2008. The show makes a welcome return with its lateral investigation, by a performer in rabbit suit, into a case of found photographs. The program also includes William Yang’s China, from Australia. PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, Vancouver, Jan20-Feb 6; http://pushfestival.ca
womadelaide: 13 beautiful people
In an unusual choice for Womadelaide, American indie musicians Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips will play their score for 13 Andy Warhol black and white, silent screen tests from 1962-64. The show was seen at this year’s Melbourne International Arts Festival. The tests used to be shown in Warhol’s studio and at happenings.Thirteen of the 300 tests were selected by Wareham for scoring thanks to a commission by The Andy Warhol Museum and Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. The pair have also created scores for feature films The Squid & the Whale (dir Noah Baumbach) and Clean (Olivier Assayas). Womadelaide, Adelaide, March 5-8, www.womadelaide.com.au
WE ARE CURRENTLY SEEING A RESURGENCE IN THEATRICAL DISTRIBUTION OF ASIAN FILMS IN AUSTRALIA, TARGETING THE GROWING INTERNATIONAL STUDENT POPULATIONS WHO CLUSTER IN THE INNER AREAS OF OUR MAJOR CITIES. HAVING RECENTLY RETURNED FROM BEIJING, I WAS AMAZED TO FIND THAT THE POLITICAL BLOCKBUSTER, THE FOUNDING OF A REPUBLIC, HAD FOLLOWED ME BACK AND WAS PLAYING AT MY LOCAL MULTIPLEX.
The “main melody” film (that is, the type of film whose function is to carry out the ideological work of the Communist government) is a part of Chinese cinema which Westerners tend to know only from textbooks. These films are made primarily for domestic consumption and our film festivals typically spurn them in favour of trendy dissident filmmakers who make underground, miserabilist films about the spiritual emptiness and banal crassness of life in present-day China.
Finding myself in Beijing in the lead-up to the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, I set out to see what I had been missing. In the week before National Day, the main melody film to end all main melody films had been released: Han Senping’s The Founding of a Republic, a two-and-a-half hour epic boasting over 170 cameos by stars including Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Andy Lau, Donnie Yen, Leon Lai and Zhao Wei as well as the participation of directors like Chen Kaige and John Woo.
To set the film in its Beijing exhibition context may give some idea of the massive contradictions which constitute civil society in China these days. I saw it at the Star City multiplex in the basement of the ritzy Oriental Mall in Beijing’s major shopping street, Wangfujing Dajie. As the mall borders on the route of the parade for National Day—where nuclear missiles would soon rumble past Louis Vuitton stores—the streets were crawling with skinny young soldiers with machine guns and plainclothes men making no attempt to hide nasty looking batons.
Once inside the mall, however, another world prevailed. The East Asian mall is perhaps found in its most perfect form in Hong Kong, but it is also familiar to the trendy and upwardly mobile urban denizens of cities from Seoul to Singapore. The brand names are all there: Versace, Louis Vuitton, Lane Crawford. In contrast to the nationalism which was being peddled (and policed) on the street, the promise here is access to cosmopolitan style, evidenced by the fact that Western faces outnumber Chinese ones in store advertising by a factor of about ten to one. Severely slutty and stylishly emaciated Western models loom up one after another, until all of a sudden among them is the Great Helmsman appearing in a multiplex lobby display in the bowels of this new temple of consumption.
The Star City multiplex has six screens and that day it was running a total of 19 sessions, 10 of which were screenings of The Founding of a Republic. The international trade press constantly carps that the Chinese government maintains the high percentage (55-60%) of the domestic box office for local films not only by a quota on foreign films but also by blacking out Hollywood films at prime times of the year such as the National Day holidays. (For those who care, the only Hollywood movie screening was State of Play, a movie which shows American politics in a less than favourable light while also promoting the free, investigative role of the press. Its geopolitical references in China might depend on whether you like to see your glass of civil liberties as half full or half empty.)
The Founding of a Republic was released on 1,700 screens and relentlessly promoted in the media. Consequently it has gone on to become the biggest box office hit in Chinese cinema, grossing over $US60 million. While some might see this as a manipulation of the market, it has the same kind of pre-sold blockbuster status of a Harry Potter or Spiderman movie. The incorporation of a plethora of stars shows that China is successfully developing its own regional star system, and that stars and directors know that they now have a viable economic interest in playing ball with the government. So, Jet has three lines at a dinner party, Jackie sits in a chair during one scene and Andy Lau turns up for a couple of scenes at the end. Of course, their presence also gives the film a set of connotations other than that of simply another main melody film. Just like a cameo by Tom Cruise in a Sundance film, the star implicitly stakes a claim for any film as a part of the entertainment cinema.
In the spirit of dialectical materialism, let us attend to the economic transaction entered into by the spectator when buying a ticket to the film. On a Sunday afternoon I paid the top price of 70 yuan (about $A12) for what was described as VIP entry to the session. While cheap by my standards, I would note that what appeared to be legitimate copies of new Hollywood films were selling in the DVD store of the Fab Endless Culture Plaza for about 27 yuan, and a Big Mac with Coke and fries was 22 yuan. My ticket equated to about 2.5% of an average monthly salary in China. In Australian equivalent terms, that would put the price of the ticket at around $120.
The multiplexing of China has been one of the great recent stories of attempts to incorporate China into the patterns of international cinema. Prior to the Cultural Revolution, China had one of the largest cinema audiences in the world, albeit one based on forms of exhibition outside the patterns to which we are now accustomed. Film exhibition was not something that happened in purpose-built exhibition venues, but part of the wider program of activities in halls, workplaces and parks. With the retreat of the state in these areas, came the complaint from cinema companies that China was heavily underscreened. As Westerners are contemplating yet again the death of the cinema, in China the cinema audience which was destroyed is being rebuilt along new lines in which mall-based multiplexes have led the way in repositioning the cinema as a youthful, consumerist entertainment.
Positioning The Founding of a Republic for a youthful audience is the main problem that the filmmakers strive to solve. The film opens for no good reason with Mao’s plane animated in all its CGI glory and the camera buzzing hyperactively around its propellers. Every time there is an opportunity for incorporating an aeroplane ride into the narrative we are regaled with these CGI effects. A shot of a plane dropping a bomb (which looks to be straight out of Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor, 2001) is the most visible selling point for the film in all its advertising. Here we have to read the danger that the film is trying to avert: the fear that Communism is just for old farts. CGI speaks of youth, the freshness of contemporary pop culture, and the embrace of the future. That it does so in such an awkward fashion in this film is almost endearing. Look on the street and you’ll see that the embrace of cosmopolitan style is no easy thing for China.
Before the film itself, there was the usual assortment of trailers (five—all for Chinese films) and ads to be got through (18! Including five for cars and three for television sets). That a film about the triumph of a Communist revolution should be attended by such an array of capitalist consumption seems completely in keeping with the wider thrust of a society in which Communism has now been emptied of any sense of class analysis.
The Founding of a Republic echoes this evacuation of Marxism from Communism. Mao Zedong has nary a line concerning the dictatorship of the proletariat. The film pictures him as a coalition builder, always ready to reach out to other factions in the Chinese political landscape. He is upset at one point that he can’t buy a pack of smokes as this indicates that conditions are too unstable to allow shopkeepers to do business.
He is also relentlessly humanised. One scene has Mao and Chou En-lai interrupt a discussion of tactics in order to give piggy-back rides to a couple of moppets. When the film ends, I stroll west for 10 minutes to where the stuffed carcass of the Great Helmsman still lies in state, smack in the middle of the contested territory of Tiananmen Square. I pause to nostalgically imagine the mass of Baudrillardian essayists who would once have posed questions about what is real and what is simulation in all of this. The more contemporary line of analysis might be to see all this as a branding exercise with Mao as the face of China’s brand, not too different from Jennifer Hawkins and Myers. Sooner or later these days, everything seems to end up back at the mall.
The Founding of a Republic, directors Han Sanping, Huang Jianxin, Chen Kaige, Peter Chan, writers Wang Xingdong, Chen Baoguang, producer China Film Group, 2009
THE FIRST DECADE OF THE 21ST CENTURY HAS SEEN AN EXPLOSION IN CHINESE DOCUMENTARY PRODUCTION, AS LIGHTWEIGHT DIGITAL CAMERAS HAVE BECOME READILY AVAILABLE AND THE ONCE TIGHT CONTROLS OVER CHINESE LIFE HAVE RELAXED. ZHAO DAYONG’S NEW FILM GHOST TOWN—RECENTLY UNVEILED TO GREAT ACCLAIM AT THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL—IS EMBLEMATIC OF A MOVEMENT GIVING VOICE TO STORIES LONG EXCLUDED FROM THE SCREEN.
Ghost Town is set in the small, remote settlement of Zhiziluo in China’s far south, a former county seat now abandoned by the Chinese government. Zhao stumbled upon the town while scouting locations for another project earlier this decade. “After my first trip to Zhiziluo in 2002, I made trips in 2003 and 2004, staying there for two months each time”, recalls the director. “My original plans to make a film there didn’t pan out, but the people made a deep impression on me and my thoughts often went back to them. I returned again in 2006 and filmed there for 12 months in total.”
Zhao achieves an extraordinary intimacy with his subjects, no doubt partly due to the amount of time he spent living in the town, but also through his approach to the filmmaking process. The nature of digital camera technology allowed him to work without a professional crew and instead recruit townspeople to help with the shoot. Zhao explains, “I had three people assisting me, all local villagers. For example, the truck driver who appears in part two of the film often helped me with sound recording. This way I was able to maintain close relationships with people in the village.”
The involvement of locals is implied in the film’s opening moments, when we see a group of villagers engaged in roadworks staring at the camera, jesting with the offscreen operator. We hear a voice exclaim, “Wow, you can see everything through this lens! Now stand up nice and tall! Look this way!”, to which one of the women in shot jokingly replies, “Fine, go ahead and film. But there’s nothing worth filming here”, provoking laughter amongst her companions. From this opening sequence, Zhao’s camera both participates in, and documents life in the town.
The film’s three-hour length is divided into three chapters, each delving into the lives of a different set of characters. “Voices” follows Yuehan, the pastor of the town’s Christian church founded by missionaries in the 1930s. His 87-year-old father, who calls himself “John the Elder”, is also a priest, having been introduced to Christianity directly by missionaries as a young man. John speaks briefly about the persecution he suffered from the late 1950s, when the missionaries were expelled by the Communists and local believers were incarcerated—in John’s case for 20 years. He claims 95% of those arrested didn’t survive their ordeal.
We follow John and Yuehan as they make their rounds and receive visitors, providing a degree of material and emotional support to their followers. Initially the two appear close, but it becomes apparent that a deep rift exists between father and son, arising from the emotional scars inflicted on John during his two decades in prison.
Part two of Ghost Town, titled “Recollections,” traces the strain placed on personal relationships by Zhiziluo’s backwater status and economic stagnation. Li Yongqiang is a hopeless drunk whose wife is seeking a divorce, while the young driver Pu Biqiu faces harassment from local police and suffers from a lack of work. Pu is involved with a local girl, but when cashed-up out-of-towners arrive in Zhiziluo wanting to buy a wife, her parents pressure the girl to leave Pu so she can be married off.
Ghost Town’s final chapter is perhaps the most confronting, as we follow Ah Long, an aggressive 12-year-old living alone, without parental support or supervision. One night he participates in a disturbing exorcism with other male villagers, calling on the “mountain spirits” to drive out the evil possessing two local men. In the film’s concluding sequence, we see Ah Long sitting lost and alone at the back of the church during a service, watching silently as the small congregation sings a hymn.
At one level the townspeople of Zhiziluo are clearly victims of China’s new economic order, which has seen major coastal cities greatly enriched at the expense of rural areas. Zhao resists straightforward socio-economic analysis however, instead implying the aimless existence of the town’s inhabitants is symptomatic of a broader malaise. “Through the town I began to see and reflect on my own life”, Zhao says of his experiences shooting Ghost Town. “A process of self-reflection is, for me, the essence of filmmaking. As I was living with these people I came to realize just how uncertain their lives and fates were. The empty government buildings in which they live do not belong to them, and the fate of the place itself, of its architecture, was also in question. They were merely floating in the world, without any sense of safety and security, and their existential condition was basically no different from my own.”
The town’s church provides some material and spiritual support, but none of the villagers appears particularly committed to Christian beliefs, which seem no less foreign an imposition than the Maoist doctrines of earlier times. At one point a villager asks John the Elder why they are not allowed to sing and play guitar, to which the aging priest can only reply, “This is what the missionaries taught us.” Furthermore, the church appears powerless in the face of forces atomising the personal relations we see in the film. Even the priest Yuehan feels estranged from his father. The last sequence of the orphan Ah Long sitting in the church feels more like a final affirmation of his isolation than a scene of community belonging.
After lingering with Ah Long, the film abruptly cuts to its final image—a statue of Mao standing forlornly outside a deserted building, the paint peeling off his towering form. The statue’s magnanimous, guiding hand raised over the town looks absurd given the social, political and philosophical vacuum we have inhabited for the previous three hours.
Ghost Town doesn’t purport to provide solutions to the situations it depicts, but rather asks viewers to consider, along with the filmmaker and the town’s residents, how we find meaning in a world seemingly without philosophical or ideological bearings. As Zhao Dayong comments, “Film, like painting, is a method and technique of thought. All forms of creativity are rooted in this question—how to think and reflect.” The tragedy is that Chinese audiences are largely excluded from this process. Mainland television broadcasts only state-approved products and commercial cinemas are only permitted to screen licensed films, meaning documentaries like Ghost Town are rarely seen inside the People’s Republic. Fortunately for international audiences, the questions Ghost Town poses resonate far beyond China’s borders.
Ghost Town, director, producer Zhao Dayong, producer David Bandurski, People’s Republic of China, 2009
AT A TIME WHEN EVERY SECOND ‘UNOFFICIAL’ CHINESE FEATURE FILM FEELS LIKE A SUB-JIA ZHANGKE TALE OF MISERY FROM THE PERIPHERY OF THE NATION’S ECONOMIC MIRACLE, IT’S REFRESHING TO SEE THE MAN HIMSELF EXPLORING NEW TERRITORY. JIA’S MOST RECENT FEATURE, THE DOCUMENTARY-DRAMA HYBRID 24 CITY, CONSIDERS CHINA’S DRAMATIC ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION THROUGH THE STORY OF FACTORY 420—ONCE A STATE-OWNED INDUSTRIAL SHOWPIECE NOW BEING KNOCKED DOWN TO MAKE WAY FOR LUXURY APARTMENTS. THE 19-MINUTE SHORT DRAMA CRY ME A RIVER IS A MORE CONVENTIONAL PORTRAYAL OF THE DISILLUSIONMENT AND ENNUI OF MIDDLE AGE, BUT WITH A PARTICULARLY CHINESE HISTORICAL INFLECTION.
24 city
24 City focuses on Factory 420, formerly a vast military industrial plant that producead parts for Chinese warplanes. Originally situated in Shenyang, northeast China, the factory and many of its personnel were relocated to Chengdu, deep in the country’s interior during the Korean War. As one of the managers recalls, in its heyday 420 was a self-contained city, employing thousands and tending to all their material needs, including meals, housing, schools and cinemas. With China’s move to a market economy, Factory 420 has fallen on hard times and the workforce has steadily shrunk since the mid-1990s. What’s left of the former behemoth is now being moved to Chengdu’s outskirts to make way for a luxury high-rise apartment complex called 24 City.
Jia’s film opens with images of overall-clad workers shuffling in and out of buildings en masse, and a manager addressing the workforce in a dingy meeting hall about looming changes in the factory. The overall impression is one of drab conformity.
From this broad beginning we hone in on the first of the film’s interviewees, He Xikun, who first came to Factory 420 in the early 1960s. Recalling the frugal, self-sufficient ethos of that era, He explains how workers were expected to forge their own tools when they arrived at the factory. Darker memories also surface when He discusses how his dedicated supervisor continued coming to work at a time when most employees stayed away—presumably a reference to the chaotic early years of the Cultural Revolution. Details of the period elude us though, as He Xikun becomes visibly distressed and lapses into silence.
A long series of interviews with former factory personnel follows He’s foreshortened tale, including an ex-party secretary and a woman laid off in the mid-1990s. It gradually becomes clear, however, that 24 City is not a straightforward talking-heads documentary, since at least some of the interviewees are in fact actors. For different audiences this realisation hits at different points; many non-Chinese viewers don’t register the presence of professional performers until Joan Chen appears towards the end of the film. In fact the first actor to appear is Lu Liping—famous in China, but not widely known outside the country.
24 City (Er shí sì chéng jì)
With his undifferentiated mixing of workers and actors, Jia deliberately challenges the assumptions and investments we tend to bring to documentaries, an interrogative approach most clearly illustrated in his ‘interview’ with Gu Minhua, the worker played by Joan Chen. She recounts her arrival at Factory 420 at the end of the 1970s, where she quickly gained the moniker “Xiao Hua” (Little Flower), due to her resemblance to the main character of a famous eponymous Chinese film of that time—the punchline being that it was this role that made the teenage Chen a star in mainland China.
Zhang Zheng’s Xiao Hua (1980) told the story of a young woman’s love for a revolutionary soldier during China’s protracted civil war. The film was typical of the immediate post-Mao era in that it personalised China’s revolutionary history through a love story, in contrast to the collectivist ideals pushed during the Cultural Revolution. It’s a good example of the way China’s mass media—including the nation’s cinema—has long been subject to the Communist Party’s ever-changing ideological line. By using Chen as one of his ‘workers’, and having her reference her early propagandistic features, Jia asks his audience to reconsider and question the historical narratives they have been fed over the years, particularly on the silver screen.
In the end, of course, this reflexive approach leads to a circle of maddening questions. What, if anything, is real in 24 City? More broadly, in a nation where official historical narratives are constantly rewritten to suit the ideological needs of the present, what constitutes the ‘real’ in the history of the People’s Republic? And how do people make sense of their personal histories, let alone the experiences of the nation as a whole, in a country where critical interrogations of the past 60 years are simply not permitted? In this context, the pained silence of the worker He Xikun is perhaps more ‘real’ than the detailed, semi-fictionalised accounts we hear from the actors—but where does this silence leave us in terms of understanding?
24 City (Er shí sì chéng jì)
The heavily prescribed freedoms of China’s new economic order offer no resolution to these questions for Jia, as the film’s final interview makes clear. Su Na—played by Jia’s personal and artistic partner Zhao Tao—is a “professional shopper” who journeys regularly to Hong Kong to procure goods on commission for rich Chengdu residents. Dressed in fashionable clothes and sporting a chic hairstyle, Su has clearly transcended the dull factory grind endured by her parents. Yet with her uncritical embrace of a materialistic lifestyle it feels as if she has simply swapped the manufactured identity of a model socialist worker for the prepackaged image of the fashionable globe-trotting consumer.
The one moment that seems to transcend the historical conundrums at the heart of 24 City comes when Jia’s camera unexpectedly captures a pretty young girl elegantly roller-blading around a small rooftop on the edge of the factory complex. She pauses as the figure behind the camera asks if her parents work at 420. She nods, and the offscreen voice asks if she has ever been inside the factory. She shakes her head before gliding out of shot to resume her graceful turns.
Is this where truth lies for Jia—in quiet moments of subjective personal expression that transcend words, ideology and history? Or is the sequence’s fleeting sense of freedom simply another illusion?
cry me a river
Cry Me a River is a less ambitious film, but an intriguing detour for Jia into quiet domestic melodrama. Four ex-classmates—formerly two couples—reunite in a watery southern town. Over a small banquet, their one-time teacher recalls a poetry journal they founded in their university days titled This Generation, one of the countless literary periodicals that played a crucial role in the liberalisation of Chinese universities in the 1980s. The next day the former classmates pair off, wandering the town and skirting around their shared past in awkward conversations loaded with hidden meanings.
Jia demonstrates his masterful grasp of mise-en-scene by conveying much of the work’s subtext through framing and setting. One couple wander listlessly beside a still lake, lost in thought, hinting vaguely at the passionless state of their marriages and working lives. The other pair move through the town’s canals on a small boat, rocking as they verbally spar, stoking the embers of a passion still gently smouldering, but unlikely to reignite.
Cry Me a River harkens back to Fei Mu’s similarly restrained 1948 classic Spring in a Small Town, set in the aftermath of the Japanese War. Both films centre on characters trapped in the slipstream of larger events which are only elliptically alluded to. Jia’s work is not simply homage however. Cry Me a River updates Fei Mu’s drama by deftly evoking the lost hopes of China’s 80s generation, whose idealism has dissipated under the combined weight of political repression and apathy fuelled by the nation’s increasing material wealth.
In very different ways, Cry Me a River and 24 City show Jia Zhangke turning an ever more nuanced critical eye on his homeland. While earlier works like Xiao Wu (aka Pickpocket, 1997) and The World (Shìjiè, 2004) portrayed the losers in China’s new economic order, these recent films subtly probe the dreams, ideals and ideologies that have shaped China’s people over the past 60 years. It’s this complex, critical approach that makes Jia’s work so compelling and so essential in a country yet to come to terms with its past, in a world yet to come to terms with a rising China.
24 City (Er shí sì chéng jì), director, writer Jia Zhangke, writer Zhai Yongming, producers Jia Zhangke, Shozo Ichiyama, Wang Hong; performers Joan Chen, Lu Liping, Zhao Tao, Chen Jianbin; People’s Republic of China, 2008; Cry Me a River (Héshàng de àiqíng), writer, director Jia Zhangke, performers Zhao Tao, Wang Hongwei, Hao Lei, Guo Xiaodong, People’s Republic of China, 2008.
ON A DRIZZLY, GREY SEPTEMBER MELBOURNE MORNING THE GLAMOROUS AND COSY CATE BLANCHETT, DRESSED IN OFF-THE-SHOULDER CROCHET, CUT A RIBBON OF CELLULOID TO LAUNCH THE AUSTRALIAN CENTRE FOR THE MOVING IMAGE’S PERMANENT, FREE ADMISSION SCREEN WORLDS EXHIBITION. A BIG CROWD STREAMED IN TO SEE THIS HIGHLY ANTICIPATED SHOW, ONE DESIGNED TO DEPICT THE EVOLUTION OF FILM, TELEVISION AND DIGITAL CULTURE.
Organised across three rooms focusing on Emergence, Voices and Sensation, the past, present and future of the moving image is traced across time and framed within an international matrix. A combination of white cube and black box, Screen Worlds incorporates objects designed for the eye with dynamic interactive touch screens.
Emergence is divided into six table displays featuring the arrival of film, sound and colour, television, global broadcast, video games and the internet with each world identified by a circular banner hovering above the exhibits. Emergence is full of objects, screens, still and moving images and even machines, so the banners are integral in providing a sense of cohesion. Wall displays illustrate and expand on the connections providing satellite examples of innovation specific to the era. Precious artefacts representing optical experimentation and pre-cinematic devices include an exquisite collection of Chinese shadow puppets from the late 19th century and a magic lantern complete with slides and the projected illusion of a ship bobbing on an ocean. Peep boxes display single shot ‘actualities’ like Annabelle’s Skirt Dance (WKL Dickson,1896), the flowing robes evidence of the fascination with the particulars of movement in early cinema.
Technological illusion generates “an aesthetic of astonishment”, a phrase coined by the film theorist Tom Gunning to describe the wonder of the illusion and pre-cinematic optical technologies. A range of interactive screens engage the senses. On one visit I noticed a small child letting his fingers lead him through the space, pausing at moments when his touch created action.
One interactive screen invites participants to investigate locations filmed with cameras exported by the Lumière brothers. Touch screens reveal sequences from the 1896 Melbourne Cup, Japanese sword fighting and Italy’s Grand Canal. Vivid colour reproductions of the Salvation Army’s Soldiers of the Cross (1900) sit alongside sequences from the first film produced in Australia, The Kelly Gang (1906), its imagery layered with the bubbling of decomposing nitrate film stock. This film is juxtaposed with Gregor Jordan’s 2003 version of Ned Kelly, forming sequences of diachronic associations.
The diversity of early cinema is represented by the mesmerising rhythms and imagery of key modernist films including Man Ray’s Le Retour à la Raison (1923) and Fernand Léger’s Ballet Méchanique (1924). A big screen shows scenes from epic films designed to generate nationalistic fervour. Sequences include the slaying of a gigantic mythological creature from Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924), mass crowds from Giovanni Pastrone’s ‘super spectacle’ Cabiria (1914) and magical images of characters flying through the air on giant spears from Hou Yao’s Tale of the Western Chamber (1927).
The section celebrating the arrival of sound and colour features a Steenbeck film viewing machine that allows participants to wind celluloid through sprockets to discover the speed of sound film, 24 frames per second. A thick MGM disc, The Hollywood Review Trailer (1929) is a quirky example of early attempts to synchronise sound to the projected image, but the unique value of this artefact is evident in detail on the label revealing that the disc has only been used once.
A lucite television set created for display at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 announces the arrival of TV. Its transparent façade renders visible an intricate system of valves and wires. The diversity of local voices is emphasised with exhibits like “Finding a Voice”, a touch screen collection of sequences representing documentary explorations of Australian Indigenous cultures. Wrong Side of the Road (Ned Lander, 1983) and Two Laws (1981) by the Booroloola Aboriginal community are the highlights of this collection. The impact of popular culture is evident in Bongo Starr’s boots encased in glass in front of a portable Princess Seven television screening his glam rock band Skyhooks on Countdown. The same screen also displays the self-reflexive chaos characteristic of The Aunty Jack Show (1972-3) as characters greet the transition to colour washing over the small screen by attempting to swim through the flood. Animation, comics, posters and a sleeping action figure of Astro Boy showcase an early example of media convergence. The extension of the global village into the skies is illustrated by fuzzy black and white images of the 1969 moon landing alongside screens depicting the astonishment of audiences watching live. Influence of the space race is evident in the JVC Videosphere TV from 1970, a spherical television set with curved screen resembling an astronaut’s helmet.
The room showcasing Australian Voices contains large, stunning objects like the Interceptor car from Mad Max (1979), Dame Edna’s sequined Sydney Harbour dress and a windmill from Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001). An interactive map spread across a large table represents Australian film locations where sites can be illuminated by touch. A showcase of Australian films represented as a collection of small slides allows for an interactive investigation of specific film, television, visual art and digital images. Curated by Indigenous cultural advisors, the Blak Wave exhibit includes records and cassettes by artists like The Warumpi Band alongside Indigenous television programs. Smaller enclaves representing the work of specific filmmakers fringe the edges of the room. The spaces spotlight Tracy Moffatt, Animal Logic, Christopher Doyle, Jill Bilcock, Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin, Cate Blanchett, David Gulpilil and Rolf de Heer (whose space includes a canoe!). Scripts, awards and photo albums are archived here, but the magic is in the inclusion of trinkets like rocks and a tiny model motorbike with sidecar, talismans used by screenwriting team Sue Smith and John Alsop.
A games lab leading into the Sensation space features small screens where participants can play classic games like Bejewelled, Half Life, Lemmings and Tetris and design creatures for the beautiful underwater world of Spore. A big screen invites a public challenge in a range of interactive Wii games. Sensation draws together new and older technologies and it is here that the visitor can become immersed in illusions created by new media. Ty the Tasmanian tiger forms part of an Australian themed Zoetrope. Inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s experiments with time and motion, the ‘flicker fusion effect’ invites visitors to create their own flipbook. The Matrix-style time slice installation uses 36 cameras to capture the action of participants and transmits the video clip via email. Philip Worthington’s Shadow Monsters (2005) adds beaks, claws, scales, horns, teeth, puffs of smoke and wispy strands of hair to silhouettes of bodies, transforming humans into prehistoric animals.
You and I, Horizontal II, Anthony McCall
photo courtesy ACMI
You and I, Horizontal II, Anthony McCall
But the most astonishing immersive installation is kept until last. Behind a curtain at the end of the Sensation area, Anthony McCall’s You and I, Horizontal II from 2006 combines a haze machine with a video projection of solid white light to immerse participant and installation. I noticed that same young boy who greeted the exhibits with a touch earlier, now swimming in the hazy light, his head and arms illuminated by the white neon.
Until the opening of Screen Worlds, the single exhibit occupying ACMI’s ground floor was the Academy Award for Harvie Krumpet (Adam Elliot, 2003). Now this luminous award sits at the heart of Screen Worlds surrounded by relics, machines, screens, games, sounds, light and illusion, an impressive and dynamic history of the moving image.
Screen Worlds: The Story of Film, Television and Digital Culture, free, permanent exhibition, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, opened Sept 20, www.acmi.net.au
IN 2008, I ATTENDED THE FIRST PALESTINIAN FILM FESTIVAL IN SYDNEY, AN EXCITING NEW INITIATIVE FROM CULTURAL MEDIA, A NOT-FOR-PROFIT ORGANIZATION ESTABLISHED IN 2007 TO PROMOTE INTERCULTURAL UNDERSTANDING BY SHOWCASING ARAB ARTS AND CULTURE. THE FESTIVAL WAS A GREAT SUCCESS, DRAWING LARGE AND DIVERSE AUDIENCES. THIS YEAR, CULTURAL MEDIA HAS EXPANDED ITS REACH, SCREENING NOT ONLY IN SYDNEY BUT ALSO IN MELBOURNE AND ADELAIDE. I ATTENDED IN SYDNEY AGAIN, WHERE THE FESTIVAL IS CLEARLY BUILDING ON ITS ENTHUSIASTIC FOLLOWING.
Slingshot Hip Hop, one of the most popular films from the 2008 festival, screened again in 2009, giving Cultural Media the opportunity to take this amazing film to other capital cities. Directed by Jackie Reem Salloum, this beautifully crafted documentary follows the emergence of hip-hop amongst young Palestinians living in Gaza, the West Bank and inside Israel. The film demonstrates the power of hip-hop as an educational tool that gives young people in Palestine the opportunity to speak their minds, to build self-esteem and to connect with each other. The filmmaking process itself even facilitates efforts made by these rappers to support each other despite the walls and the checkpoints that keep them apart, a plight felt most acutely by the group PR from Gaza, desperate to meet their fellow hip-hop artists in the flesh and hold them in their arms.
The Heart of Jenin
The documentary The Heart of Jenin, directed by Markus Vetter and Leon Geller, also tells a story that travels between the ugly walls that divide Gaza, Israel and the West Bank. The film follows Ismail Chatib, a Palestinian living in Gaza whose 12-year-old son, Ahmed Chatib, was fatally shot by Israeli soldiers.
With Ahmed on life support in an intensive care unit inside Israel, Ismail decides to donate his son’s organs to six Israeli children, a decision that gains a lot of media attention and is seen as a compassionate, peaceful act in the midst of a devastating conflict. The film follows his visits to these children and their families as well as offering an intimate portrait of what it means to live in Gaza, capturing the hopes and fears of those most restricted by the occupation.
The short animation Fatenah, directed by Ahmad Habash, illustrates the story of a young woman living in Gaza who faces great difficulties obtaining proper medical care for breast cancer under occupation.
A whole program of shorts showcased new work from around the globe including another animation, Encyclopaedia Britannica, made in Australia and directed by the festival’s artistic director Sohail Dahdal. Arafat & I, set in London and directed by Mahdi Fleifel, was also a highlight of this session, a hilarious story about a young Palestinian Londoner who thinks he has fallen in love for life when he goes out on a date with a woman born on the same day as Chairman Arafat.
Equally quirky was the festival’s opening night film, The Time That Remains, a semi-autobiographical work directed by Palestine’s most celebrated director, Elia Suleiman. The film depicts historical events that have affected generations of Palestinians since 1948, capturing the absurdity of daily life under occupation with candour and humour.
Edward Said: The Last Interview, directed by Mike Dibb, interviews one of Palestine’s most celebrated intellectuals, who spent most of his life living in America. Said gives insights into his life, his writings, his preoccupations, the legacy of his most famous book, Orientalism, and his involvements in Palestinian politics.
Pomegranates and Myrrh
Pomegranates and Myrrh, directed by Najwa Najjar, tells the story of Kamar (Yasmine Elmasri), whose husband, Zaid (Ashraf Farah) is thrown into an Israeli jail for refusing to give up his family’s land when it is appropriated by the Israeli government. The film shows the immense impact these two events have on Kamar as she tries to continue her day-to-day life.
In Sydney and Melbourne, the festival also included an advance screening of Amreeka, directed by Cherien Dabis, a gorgeous story about Muna (Nisreen Faour), a Palestinian single mother who migrates to America with her son, Fadi (Melkar Muallem), with hilarious and horrible results. Amreeka talks about family, racism, culture shock, love and misunderstanding in a way that beautifully connects the major political issues of our time with everyday lived experience. It is this power of cinema to make connections between different places and times that is at the heart of the Palestinian Film Festival.
In recent years, we have witnessed an explosion of touring festivals showcasing national cinemas in Australia. These have become an extremely popular part of the film exhibition landscape across our major capital cities. The most established and successful on the circuit include the Alliance Francaise French Film Festival, the Festival of German Films and the Spanish Film Festival. Other, newer festivals are gaining in popularity including the Canadian Film Festival and the Israeli Film Festival.
The Palestinian Film Festival is particularly significant within this fast growing film festival landscape because of the ongoing struggle of the Palestinian people to have their national identity and their right to nationhood recognised at all. Most of the other film festivals I have mentioned are run by government funded organisations with the express purpose of promoting national cultures in Australia. The Palestinian Film Festival is funded by an independent not-for-profit organisation that fulfils this function for Palestinian culture in the absence of a similar level of government infrastructure.
The Palestinian Film Festival is testimony to the vibrancy of Palestinian film culture, both at home and in the diaspora. The diverse, award-winning films screended this year crossed genres, experimented with form, went out onto the streets, re-imagined intricate family histories, captured deep personal intimacies and celebrated lives lived in all of their complexity.
2009 Palestinian Film Festival, artistic director Sohail Dahdal; Cultural Media director Naser Shakhtour, Palace Norton Street Cinemas, Sydney, Oct 29–Nov 1; Cinema Nova, Melbourne, Nov 12–15; Mercury Cinema, Adelaide, Nov 13–15
WINNER OF THE 2006 PULITZER PRIZE FOR LITERATURE, CORMAC MCCARTHY’S THE ROAD WAS A BOOK THAT SURPRISINGLY CAPTURED THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION, KICKING READERS IN THE GUTS WITH ITS POST-APOCALYPTIC VISION OF A FATHER AND SON DESPERATELY SCAVENGING TO SURVIVE IN A SAVAGE WORLD WHERE ALL SENSE OF MORALITY HAS BEEN ANNIHILATED. MCCARTHY FAMOUSLY DECLINES GIVING MANY INTERVIEWS (PERHAPS WISELY: SEE YOUTUBE FOR A RARE ONE WITH OPRAH WINFREY) BUT HE HAS DEDICATED THE NOVEL TO HIS SON, SEEING IT AS A LOVE STORY—THE KIND OF AFFECTION THAT CAN BE SHAPED BETWEEN A MAN AND HIS BOY.
McCarthy’s books have been ripe for the picking. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, starring Tommy Lee Jones and a bewigged Javier Bardem, was one of the more memorable films of recent years, but The Road doesn’t appear at first to be an easy novel to adapt to screen. For starters, it’s unrelentingly bleak. The despair, agony, horror, barely lets up. Like Cold Mountain (from the novel by Charles Frazier, director Anthony Minghella, 2003), the endless walking on uncertain soil, the rain, the loneliness, the tension over whether to trust strangers, makes it a constant grind. It’s also an incredibly internalised fiction—the monologue of a man who doesn’t talk much, staggering along a road in a wasteland with his son, searching for food and fuel. In the novel the majesty of the sparse prose elevates it to the poetic at times, making certain moments ambiguous (a device the film struggles with). And you can always put the book down when it gets too much (which I did. Often).
Australian director John Hillcoat’s style is well-suited to this tale. His feature The Proposition (2005; RT 70, p18) was an outstanding exploration of violence and the horrors of Australia’s colonial past. Here, transposed to the near-future, he conveys the same intensity in a world where all characters are lost and searching, in a landscape so desolate that to be able to choose to die is a luxury. He brings along some of the same cast and crew from The Proposition (Guy Pearce in a pivotal role; editor Jon Gregory; and production designer Chris Kennedy and costume designer Margot Wilson) and an evocative soundtrack created by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. The music, combined with the outstanding cinematography by Spain’s Javier Aguirresarobe and faultless set direction, make for some unforgettable scenes of environmental destruction: the creaking of dead trees in the wind, always threatening to fall; a series of earthquakes where they are uprooted, almost killing the man and boy; ridges on fire climbing above them; abandoned freeways hovering above empty rivers; an ocean of grey water lapping onto lifeless sand. The film landscape becomes a world completely without sunlight or colour, except of course for the rare glimpses the boy observes: rainbows in a waterfall; a Coke can with bubbles he savours; a cellar treasure trove of tinned food like peaches and fruit cocktail.
Hillcoat comments: “Neither Chris [Kennedy] or myself have ever really liked apocalyptic films that much as a genre. But this felt so different from anything else…we immediately began doing a lot of research in which we were basically looking at man-made and natural disasters that have occurred, and that’s what led us to things like New Orleans post-Katrina, and Mount St. Helens in Washington and mining in central Pennsylvania and around Pittsburgh where that industry left a kind of man-made disaster area in terms of the landscape—what’s left of it. So the process was about utilising all those things and gradually piecing it all together. It was like this huge tapestry.”
Vigo Mortensen (as The Man) and Australian actor Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Son) are superb in demanding and, at times, difficult to convey roles. Along with their packs they carry the burden of the film on their shoulders. Mortensen is always strong, drawn to characters with a sense of justice, often compromised by violent circumstances (the David Cronenberg films, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises) and he has that rare combination of physical strength and deep sensitivity. Smit-McPhee proved he could explore complex emotions well beyond his years in Romulus, My Father (2007) and here his despair, fear and sense of loss are carried in the way he walks and the questions he asks (“Are we still the good guys?”). While his father is teaching him to distrust others (to save his life), the boy resolutely maintains a belief in compassion, a lesson that pays off. Their situation is so dire that much hinges on the gun the father carries and the number of bullets it contains. Each bullet is a little ray of hope: rather than die in a horribly sadistic way (be starved to death; raped; eaten slowly by roaming vigilantes) there’s an easy out. It’s rare in a film to be considering that perhaps the central character, a small boy, may be better off dead rather than facing such a world on his own (as his mother believes before she walks into the snow in a light shirt to freeze to death) and these are the choices the father must grapple with.
With the film’s release date postponed for a year from November 2008 in the States, you get the sense that the distributors might be nervous. Perhaps they think such a film might be a hard sell in a world where people have enough bleak visions surrounding them. But McCarthy’s book is wise enough not to state how the world has come to this dire position. Questions hover over the entire film. Why? How? The same questions being asked now about the economic crisis. About the impact of climate change and habitat destruction. About how we treat refugees. About the kind of environment we want our grandchildren to be born into. Hillcoat’s film doesn’t give any answers. But the questions raised are enough.
The Road, from the novel by Cormac McCarthy, director John Hillcoat, writer Joe Penhall, performers Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce. producers Paula Mae Schwartz, Steve Schwartz, Nick Wechsler, editor Jon Gregory, production designer Chris Kennedy, cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, original music Nick Cave, Warren Ellis. Opens nationally Jan 28.
DAVID CAESAR, AS GUEST JUDGE ON ABC’S RACE AROUND THE WORLD (1997/98), USED TO LOVE GETTING STUCK INTO CONTESTANTS WITH HIS ACID WIT. HIS ONSCREEN CONFRONTATIONS WITH JOHN SAFRAN (NOW TORTURING HIMSELF AND US—IN A GOOD WAY—WITH RACE RELATIONS) IN PARTICULAR WERE FUN TO WATCH. BUT IT’S LIKE HE WAS ASKING FOR IT. YOU WATCH HIS FILMS WITH THE SAME CRITICAL EYE.
Prime Mover begins as a fable… “Once upon a time in Dubbo.” From there it moves into tragedy (a father dies), romantic comedy (boy meets girl, marriage, music, babies), magical realism (his fantasies start to come alive), a road movie (he buys a truck to cruise the highways), a small-time crime thriller (he borrows money from the wrong people), an addiction tale (he gets hooked on drugs to stay awake), a horror film (chased in his truck, his face gets smashed into an ugly pulp), a revenge story (he crashes his truck into the crim’s house), a social realist plot (his wife is torn apart by postnatal depression) and, of course, there’s the tale of redemption (all is forgiven because he did everything to achieve his dreams). The problem is, I was quite happy hanging back there with the romantic comedy.
While Idiot Box and Mullet were gritty depictions of characters skirting the edges of society, Caesar’s more recent Dirty Deeds had similar narrative problems to this latest offering—a great beginning leading to a strange and too-long melange where too much is never enough; Caesar doesn’t appear to know when to stop. It’s a shame because he writes and directs romance and comedy brilliantly but doesn’t seem confident enough to stick with them. From the start Thomas (Michael Dorman) and his “warrior queen of the bowsers” Melissa (Emily Barclay) are inspired characters, bouncing off each other with gentle innuendo, their dialogue a nice mix of the rough and smooth, seductive and fun. When they make love for the first time, he gets her to hold a dirty big wrench. And I settled in for a quirky, offhand romance where the happily ever after happens at the beginning rather than the end.
But when plot quickly overtakes characterisation, the film loses its charm (although Prime Mover could join the ranks of Ozploitation flicks, highlighted in the documentary Not Quite Hollywood; Tarantino would love the truck chases.) Thomas, witness to his father’s grisly death (for which he feels responsible), is a talented ‘pinstriper’ [creator of custom designs on automobiles, Ed], with shiny dreams of his own big rig. He doesn’t seem to realise that driving it will take him away from his lover and new daughter, now abandoned in an isolated caravan in a dusty world where even the pool is concreted over and behind barbed wire. Although she is desperate for his help with a screaming baby who never stops—even admitting she’s scared she’s going to kill her daughter—he sets off once again into the night, and seems surprised when he returns to find her gone. It’s a familiar tale but the dramatic interest seems to lie in what’s happening offscreen with Melissa (Barclay being one of the best young actresses around) rather than the convolutions of bad-boy Ben Mendelsohn and his dumb lackeys.
Prime Mover
photo Mark Rogers
Prime Mover
The magical realist elements are an intriguing addition and work well, inspired by Thomas’ swirling designs. His delusions become grander as he stays awake for long stretches, the drugs reaching in to take him down. His father’s likeness becomes Saint Christopher, the patron saint of truckers, whispering good will and sense into one ear; Melissa materialises as a naughty calendar girl brought to life (there’s that wrench again), encouraging him to turn to the dark side.
Caesar has a romantic vision of the little Aussie battler doing anything to realise his dreams—as in Kenny, The Castle and Crocodile Dundee. And he believes in sustained love too. In Prime Mover it seems early on that Caesar is going to turn a genre on its head, exploring the nature of romance and dreams where a couple hits the road gypsy-style. But he has the dark angel sitting on his other shoulder, encouraging him to go big, appeal to all markets; opt for car crashes, drugs, money, mindless violence. David Caesar has great insight into the joys and challenges of modern relationships; I wish he would just stick with them.
Prime Mover, director, writer David Caesar, producer Vincent Sheehan, performers Michael Dorman, Emily Barclay, Ben Mendelsohn, Gyton Grantley, William McInnes, Anthony Hayes, Lynette Curran, Jeanette Cronin. cinematographer Hugh Miller, editor Mark Perry, production design Nell Hanson, original music Paul Healy
EVERY SECOND FILM I SEE THESE DAYS SEEMS TO BE ABOUT THE TENUOUS RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FATHERS AND SONS. I DON’T KNOW IF IT’S JUST BECAUSE I’VE RECENTLY GIVEN BIRTH TO A BOY AND I’M BEING DRAWN IN UNCONSCIOUSLY, BUT IN RECENT MONTHS I’VE CAUGHT THE ROAD, LAST RIDE, AND NOW THE BOYS ARE BACK, A DRAMA ABOUT AN ENGLISH SPORTS WRITER JOE (CLIVE OWEN), LIVING IN AUSTRALIA WITH HIS SIX-YEAR-OLD SON, STRUGGLING WITH FATHERHOOD AFTER THE DEATH OF HIS SECOND WIFE.
It’s taken 12 years for Scott Hicks to return to work here after the enormous success of Shine. In the meantime he’s been flirting with Hollywood—making Snow Falling on Cedars, Hearts in Atlantis and No Reservations—before embarking on the Emmy-nominated documentary, Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts.
At a recent Q+A in Sydney with Sydney Film Festival director Clare Stewart, where he introduced the film, Hicks spoke of being reinvigorated in his passion for filmmaking after working on the documentary and, when sent the screenplay of The Boys Are Back, he realised that he’d never seen such an honest exploration of father-son relations on screen; the truth of the dialogue struck him most. Based on a memoir (originally set in New Zealand) the script was transplanted to Queensland and then set on the beautiful coast of South Australia (at times it looks like a tourism ad), with the landscape and characterisation once again captured elegantly by cinematographer Greig Fraser (who also worked on the outstanding Last Ride by Glendyn Ivin and Jane Campion’s soon to be released Bright Star).
What The Road, Last Ride and The Boys Are Back all have in common is tour-de-force performances from the central young actors. Scott Hicks obviously has a talent for directing young people (along with seasoned performers like Geoffrey Rush). Six-year-old Nicholas McAnulty is a revelation as Artie, a passionate boy who loses his mother to illness. When his mother dies in bed next to Joe, his delivery of the line “Is mum dead yet?” with such apparent nonchalance hits the mark—he seems able to repress his emotions, just as a grieving boy would, unleashing them at unexpected moments. His exhilarating lust for life (riding on the bonnet of a 4WD as it zooms down the beach; jumping from a great height into a spa with his goggles on) grabs you from the beginning and helps propel the movie, saving it from some slow moments. It’s not often in film that the charisma of Clive Owen is upstaged. Hicks said that they cast a wide net for the role but McAnulty, along with a sweet expressive face, had ‘attitude’ and that’s what they needed. As his teenage brother Harry, George MacKay is also a standout, conveying all the complexities of being the older child trying to find his place in a new family, carrying the burden of his parents’ divorce.
While Scott Hicks directs with a light touch, Clive Owen interrogates the character with typical intensity and much of the screenplay is beautifully convincing, there are wavering elements that don’t quite work. The dead mother reappears to Joe as a kind of guide at difficult moments with Artie, helping him cope. The audience, too, sees her in the flesh, before she disappears from Joe’s vision. While it’s true, as Hicks comments, that many who have lost partners often do claim to see them (after death) to talk things through, it’s hard to get this right on screen. Hicks acknowledges the difficulty, saying that he didn’t want any suggestion of a ghost and also cut back the scenes involving her quite extensively. But it still feels awkward when she appears, somehow detracting from the solidity of the surrounding performances, perhaps because we don’t really get to know her character because she dies early on, and there’s no real chemistry sustained between her and Owens. In the recent animated film Up (Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Pixar, 2009), the old man Carl (voiced by Ed Asner) speaks to his dead wife Ellie too but in this instance it works, the film full of melancholy and pathos because he just speaks aloud; she’s no longer physically present but he believes she can hear him.
One of the bonuses of this year’s Australian feature film viewing has been the chance to see established filmmakers (Hicks, Beresford, Kokkinos, Luhrmann, Connolly, Caesar) screening alongside exciting newcomers (Glendyn Ivin, Rachel Ward, Adam Elliot, Warwick Thornton). The industry, like Scott Hicks, finally seems reinvigorated and it’s been worth the wait. The Boys Are Back is yet another example of a finely tuned drama full of rich, memorable dialogue, spontaneous humour and convincingly restrained performance from Owen and the boys.
The Boys are Back, director Scott Hicks, writer Allan Cubitt from the Simon Carr novel, producers Greg Brenman, Timothy White, performers Clive Owen, Laura Fraser, George MacKay, Emma Booth, Nicholas McAnulty, Julia Blake, Emma Lung, Erik Thompson, editor Scott Gray, production designer Melinda Doring, cinematographer Greig Fraser, original music Hal Lindes. Q+A with Scott Hicks and Clare Stewart, Palace Academy Twin, Sydney, Nov 8.
Drawings for Play Pause 2001-06, Gouache on Paper, collection of the artist.
TO TELL THE STORIES OF THE CITY, MICHEL DE CERTEAU REMINDS US, YOU CANNOT APPROACH URBAN SPACE FROM ON HIGH. YOU HAVE TO BEGIN WITH THE FOOTPATH. FOR DE CERTEAU, THE CITY COMES TO LIFE AT THE GROUND LEVEL WHERE, CLASPED BY THE BUSTLE OF THE STREETS, BODIES WILL ENCOUNTER ONE ANOTHER IN VARYING MODES OF CONNECTIVITY (AS LOVERS, FRIENDS, WORK COLLEAGUES, OBLIVIOUS PASSERS-BY). IN THE CITY AS LIVED-SPACE, PEDESTRIANS TREAD THEIR OWN EXPRESSIVE PATHS OF CIRCULATION AND CONNECTION AND PHYSICALLY ‘WRITE’ URBAN SPACE IN WALKING IT. ON THE STREET, ACCORDING TO DE CERTEAU, THE STORIES OF THE CITY ARE SPOKEN BY A CHORUS OF FOOTSTEPS.
On view earlier this year in the lobby gallery of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Sadie Benning’s latest video installation, Play Pause (2006), captures the chorus of footsteps that make up a day-in-the-life of an anonymous, post 9/11 city. The installation begins, fittingly enough, with hand-drawn scenes of the street, accompanied by an audio-track of echoing footsteps, traffic noises and chirping birds. Play Pause then proceeds to move through hundreds of Benning’s gouache on paper illustrations (created by the artist between 2001 and 2006) which are projected onto two adjoining screens. Arranged in a loose narrative structure and scanned for two-channel projection, the gouaches of Play Pause detail the movements, gestures and everyday practices of a multitude of nameless urban inhabitants. Benning’s characters walk the city, they idle about on the footpath and loiter in doorways; they wait for the bus, travel the subway, watch television, drink, flirt and dance in bars.
Largely black and white, with occasional chromatic flashes of red, green and blue filters, the gouaches of Play Pause favour schematic outlines, bold blacks and grey washes rather than the rendering of intricate detail. They seem child-like and noticeably hand-crafted, reminiscent of the low-fi aesthetic that made Benning’s name as a video artist during the 90s with shorts such as Jollies (1990) and If Every Girl Had a Diary (1992). Shot on a Fisher-Price Pixelvision ‘toy’ camera—that was actually given to Benning by her father, experimental filmmaker James Benning—her early videos are infused with a playful sensibility. They take place in the artist’s bedroom and are often narrated in the first-person (by Benning herself, who appears as a series of close-ups of eyes and lips). Abetted by scrawled notes held up to the camera, puppets drawn and painted on cardboard or objects such as Matchbox cars and dolls, Benning re-enacted the dysfunction and loneliness of adolescence with do-it-yourself charm in these early videos, well before the age of amateur confessionals on YouTube. For all their apparent simplicity, Benning’s shorts are lyrical mixtures of images, music and text. The surface effects of Pixelvision are fleshed out with diaristic confessionals that spoke to Benning’s own lesbian identity, her crushes and confusions and the process of coming out.
Play Pause is a definite departure from Benning’s earlier work. Certainly, there are queer bodies to be found throughout Play Pause—her characters visit leather bars, have gay sex and watch lesbian reality shows on television. That said, the stark minimalism of the drawn line in Play Pause cues us into what this portrait of urban life is really all about—the phenomenological properties of movement, energy and stasis in their own right, as they belong to bodies inhabiting the city from all walks of life. What fascinates about Play Pause is Benning’s continued ability to endow the flat, the drawn and the two-dimensional with a strong physicality. While her earlier videos were often enraptured with material surfaces and an up-close attention to objects, faces and details, they were mainly concerned with the expression of Benning’s own adolescent subjectivity; they matched the effects of Pixelvision (for instance, the heightened textural grain, flattening of space and dull sound that it lends to its images) with the rendering of internal psychic space.
In Play Pause, Benning’s preoccupation with the surface continues through the evocative integration of still drawing and video. Play Pause, however, is not concerned with interiority, much less with the personal autobiography of Benning-the-artist. Directed in collaboration with Solveig Nelson (who also provided ambient field recordings of city sounds for the installation, which are intermixed throughout with Benning’s original score), Play Pause speaks to the city’s chorus of footsteps through highly rhythmic transitions between immobility and movement. Through the gouache drawings and their subtle animation, coupled with the energetic pulse of the installation’s soundtrack, pacing and editing, the work strikingly evokes the very action of walking the city through its stop-start beat and physicality. Benning affectively conveys not just what we might see upon walking this cityscape (sports games, store-front advertisements, dog-filled parks, missed opportunities with another) but, more importantly, what walking the city feels like.
Drawings for Play Pause 2001-06, Gouache on Paper, collection of the artist
Drawings for Play Pause 2001-06, Gouache on Paper, collection of the artist
As the title of Benning’s installation indicates, the piece deliberately oscillates between movement and stasis. Benning’s gouaches will change over every few seconds on the split screen only to cede to durational takes, long shots or close-ups of the still drawings. The sensation of walking is evoked on a number of levels: by the meandering structure and organisation of the drawings, which follow no fixed trajectory and conclude with scenes of an airport and planes taking off (although it remains unclear whether characters are arriving or leaving); and by the juxtaposition of still images against a densely layered sonic atmosphere (the rumble of an underground subway, for example, set alongside drumbeats and electronic percussion). Indeed, it is Benning’s rising and falling score that endows the installation with vibrancy and movement, even when the images on-screen are suddenly arrested.
The stop-start sensibility of Play Pause offers a decidedly physical invitation to its viewer, along the lines of what film theorist and curator Laura Marks would designate its haptic visuality. In these terms, the eye of the viewer becomes restless; our vision is strongly encouraged to move. Instead of being drawn into a perspectival space and the depths of the image, our eyes scan along and across a horizontal surface. Given its interest in the drawn surface, such is the haptic invitation that Play Pause extends to the visitor. Here, the eye can discern the material textures of the ink that has seeped into Benning’s paper or flits between the often speedy alternations of the gouache drawings, moments of unexpected colour on screen and images that seem perpetually on the point of unrest and transition. The haptic actions of the viewer’s eye elicited by Play Pause likewise contribute to the work’s transitions between stasis and movement. We might not walk the city alongside Benning’s protagonists but we emulate the stop-start physicality of the installation itself, through the actions of a roving and embodied eye.
At barely 20, Sadie Benning became the Whitney’s video art darling; included in its 1993 Biennial and once again in the 2000 Biennial. It seems only appropriate that Benning’s latest video installation return to the Whitney as part of its Contemporary Series. This time around, however, Benning is no longer a girl with a video diary. Play Pause suggests the beginnings of a different affective beat from the artist.
Sadie Benning, Play Pause, 2006. Two-channel video projection from hard drive (created from gouache drawings on paper), 29:22 minutes. Director Sadie Benning, in collaboration with Solveig Nelson, collection of the artists; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, April 22-Sept 20
RealTime issue #94 Dec-Jan 2009 pg. 28
SecondLife Dumpster, Eteam, 2007-2009
THE EXPANDED EXHIBITION FORMAT, NOT JUST COMBINING A RANGE OF ARTIST TALKS AND EVENTS BUT AN ONGOING PROGRAM, IS PECULIARLY UNDER-DISCUSSED AS ONE OF THE DISTINCTIVE MOVEMENTS IN THE PRESENTATION OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA WORK. FOR THIS YEAR’S BRISBANE FESTIVAL, THE SHOW TOTAL NOWHERE EMOTION EXPANSION AIMED TO KICK UP SOME COUNTRY DUST BY COMBINING AN ONLINE EXHIBIT AND A TRAVELLING GALLERY.
The online exhibition format of a Flash animation of a truck with video embedded on the sides, echoes the in situ experience. The actual Total Nowhere Emotion Expansion truck travelled around south-eastern Queensland, taking in such art hotspots as Yeronga and Marsden, in the manner of a Big and Really Intense Media Art Day Out.
Curator Vivian Hogg’s assemblage of video and interactive work was marked by a sense of humour and vitality; no droll discourses on materiality, no staid framing of the new.
There is something of a connection in the curatorial impulse that ties to the 2008 project The Last Vestige, in which Hogg took part. In that scenario, a boat floating up the Mekong with unusual dreamlike performances and works by artists (all female) arrived at an electronic dance party. An art vehicle emits more than fumes, trails more than noise, but without seeing every performance and program element of Total Nowhere Emotion Expansion, visitors to the Brisbane Powerhouse might have felt that the real action had happened on the road.
Alongside the artworks, screened a short Flash animation made by students of the Brisbane Youth Education and Training Centre and the Brisbane Youth Detention Centre—a rapid-fire dayglo parade of flags and sports imagery. Rather than being a neat social activist adjunct, this piece oddly sets the primary tone of the exhibit—unruly, uninhibited, unconcerned.
The terrifying and hilarious world of Philadelphia-based Ryan Trecartin’s I-BE-AREA series is often described as parodic and sarcastic; but in situ, out of the confines of the internet, there’s little space for any framing. It is simply as if alien intelligences were told what a soap opera was and how it was constructed, and went about making one that bore no relation to our own. The conceit of an entirely independent, internal, formal language makes I-BE-AREA literally compulsive; characters snap fingers and smack their hands, grimacing for the camera and for each other.
Grant Stevens’ The Wandering (Australia, 2009) has the ambiguity of his other recent work, using a production encased in solemn neutrality to build a sense that everything is going to be alright because the world is ending. Here, dream recollections found online are set against simple clouds and MIDI music—but the scenario is anxious, even noxious. Stevens’ previous video work liked to toy with anxiety; The Wandering drips with nuance and precision by making us perform the work of reading/wandering.
Darren Sylvester’s Don’t Lose Yourself in Tomorrow (Australia, 2004) sits alongside Trecartin and Stevens by adding his own sense of staccato weirdness; the apocryphal Pokémon narrative of epileptic children in front of Pikachu’s lightning bolts is inverted. A boy entombed in a merchandised bedroom is watched by the sentinel Pikachu along his shelves and sheets, waiting for the gift of sound and vision. Olaf Breuning’s Old Homepage of 2003 is precisely that; a revisiting of his famously tedious website in which a sequence of dorky collage and sketchbook images would prompt you to type in the next URL.
Jemima Wyman’s video Whakem’all (Australia/USA, 2006) expanded the range of her paralysing colour vortices to the edges of perception by introducing the dialogic stutter of a massive-headed costumed character (see article). Wyman’s images have always been striking, but in video form (or rather, character-video form) waves of disquiet pass over you, making the colours all the more undulating. Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s 2006 work Bangkok Tanks was by far the most serious of the works on offer, despite sniggering and jokes from the people watching media coverage of Thailand’s 2006 coup.
Eteam’s Second Life Dumpster (New York/Mannheim, 2007-2009) is one of only a handful of works that mounts any form of effective resistance to the overwhelming awfulness and banality of the Second Life environment. A kind of two-world digestive tract spits out garbage items from random users, which during the course of the work became unmanageable and corrupted. This ‘garden of errors’ aesthetic was perfectly suited to the decaying collective fantasy of Second Life itself. As the few users not funded by arts organisations evacuated Second Life by 2008, Second Life Dumpster was a kind of world in miniature.
Fitting within these manic and comic works was New York-based Brody Condon’s DeResFX.Kill(Karma Physics < Elvis) of 2004, a pink infinity where several Elvises (or should that be Elvii?) twitched and gyrated, powered by the Unreal game engine, in which Condon produced several interactive and video works. His talk during the exhibition program was called Known Planes of Existence, a layered reference to his new age and cult-influenced childhood, and the ongoing deployment of planar metaphors throughout the works themselves.
While Condon was apologetic about his own confusion and the nature of the presentation, a seamless retrospective/contraspective made deeply natural links between divergent works. Early work in computer game modification linked through to sculptural elements, linked through to performance installations, linked through finally to Twentyfivefold Manifestations, a mass-scale performance ritual and sculpture garden that is by far Condon’s most elaborate and confident work. The internal logic of Condon’s occult sensibilities is never used to disengage from art history, but rather to insinuate natural and unnatural superstitions that tie Bruce Nauman to Dungeons and Dragons, Bauhaus to the Branch Davidians.
Since Condon’s presentation only had a handful of audience members, some psychic acceleration took place by way of an extended discussion on generative performances. A world is organised and planned, rules established, a community built, footage collected. Just as Condon references the Abyssal Plane, the macroscopic relationship is irresistible; the exhibition’s mutagenic qualities and travel itinerary lent it a generative, open quality. At once almost infuriatingly simple in tone, but irresistibly high in stakes and hopefully influential as a result.
Elke Reinhuber, The Urban Beautician – In Honour of the Unknown Housewife
photo Torunn Higgins
Elke Reinhuber, The Urban Beautician – In Honour of the Unknown Housewife
A KIND OF DILUTED CASUAL URBAN INTERVENTION, OR A PERFORMANCE INSTALLATION FOR THE SUNDAY ARVO BARBEQUE SET? THIS FESTIVAL IS OBSTREPEROUS, YES, BUT IT IS OTHER THAN THE ADOLESCENT AGITATION I REMEMBER WHEN IT TESTED THE CONSTRAINTS OF ITS HOME TOWN A FEW YEARS AGO. IT IS AS IF THE TROUBLESOME SON OF NEWCASTLE HAS MELLOWED, MAYBE RETURNED HOME FOR A WEEK OF CAMPING OUT IN THE LIVING ROOM AND SCABBING LUNCH FROM THE FREEZER. IT EVEN FEELS LIKE WE MIGHT BE WELCOME HERE, FOR ONCE, AS LONG AS WE DON’T LEAVE A MESS IN THE KITCHEN. WE’VE BOTH MOVED ON SINCE THE OLD DAYS, AFTER ALL.
Elke Reinhuber’s domestic performance installation is the crowning hair bun atop the domestic festive spirit. Dressed in the white salon uniform of her “Urban Beautician” persona, she dusts and preens Civic Park as one prepared to lift the corner of the public fountain to dust beneath. Her ultimate intervention is pointedly humble; amidst the plaques to sundry wars and dead local soldiers, she plants flowers, parsley and a memorial plate dedicated to the honour of the Unknown Housewife. Pointed, and displaying anything but the belligerence of the camp of cyberpunk squatters whose stand occupied that same spot in my very first Electrofringe.
The centre of gravity of the festival is not Civic Park this year, mind. Rather, the locus has shifted east to the Renew Newcastle project. There, in the Hunter Street pedestrian mall, an assortment of otherwise disused restaurants and shopfronts have been fished from the jetsam of the shopping strip’s economic shipwreck and converted into art spaces. This arts-space-brokering project has been getting reasonable coverage for its year-round urban revitalisation, and achieves serious momentum by festival time. The spaces are not all at the service of the festival by any means. Indeed, in this diversity of projects there are several that sit below the line of acceptable minimum irony for us Electrofringe crowd. Nonetheless, a goodly proportion are venues—it is Renew Newcastle that provides the wealth of spaces for the festival, and that, perhaps, lends this entire event part of its homely air, with the selection of hand-decorated, informal, idiosyncratic galleries, cafes, boutiques and craft stalls.
The Vinyl Arcade, Lucas Abela with Fred Rodrigues
photo Torunn Higgins
The Vinyl Arcade, Lucas Abela with Fred Rodrigues
Vinyl Arcade (Lucas Abela with Fred Rodrigues) is one such space, wedged between the souvenir and trouser shops. The basement floor of this crypto installation is covered with discarded records, traversed by a toy truck with a record stylus in its undercarriage. Some ingenious sytem of cabling or radio transmitters relays amplified cracks and squeals from the abused needle to the sound system. From the showroom above, the device is remotely operated by boisterously hoonish punters made instantly puerile by that most dangerous of lures, the artistically validated children’s toy. The thumps and clicks of abused records provide a ludic, tactile experience of noise art your grandmother would queue to have a go at. As far as engagement goes, it trounces Abela’s older sit-quiet-while-I-smash-some-glass-on-my-face thing.
Across the way, dLux’s new exhibition, The Garden of Forking Paths, also repays the investment of some playtime. It’s a simple show, computer-game-based art, spanning significant works from the last few decades. Featured pieces include Jaron Lanier’s 1983 Commodore 64 work Moondust, and a 1995 Laurie Anderson interactive CD—from that primordial time when terms like “virtual reality” and “multimedia” seemed to denote intrinsically interesting concepts to entities apart from Australian arts funding bodies. But in context, what may once have seemed grand utopian futurism takes on unassuming playfulness. To my over-stimulated eye, the second instalment of Anita Fontaine and Mike Pelletier’s hallucinatory CuteXDoom game is a addictive, although a more restrained piece, The Path, by Belgian team Tale of Tales, might have weathered better on a less hung-over morning. Neil Jenkin’s curation here creates an exuberant and unitary experience from the DIY psychedelia of Electrofringe and the commercial world of name-brand art, and ties it all together with comfy chairs.
In other mall venues, the space itself is remarkable enough as to be a work in its own right. The most prominent examples are the conversion of two levels of the King Street carpark into an ad hoc zine fair, and the wildly popular op-shop-chic Tortoro’s Tea House in the mall, created by Maddy Phelan. My favourite, though, is the Renew Church, a hidden paragon of 70s architecture just off the main drag that now houses the Renew Newcastle project headquarters. It transpires that a good performance venue transcends both decades and denominations, and the suburban-sacred backdrop is an intriguingly apposite setting for Christian Haines and Paul Gough’s performances. Haines’ delicious spacious tonescape for multiple mobile phones in a darkened room would be worth a listen anywhere, but there is something deeply satisfying about a work based on other people’s phones going off in this most hushed of places. The audio visual works that follow are lovely enough, but none of them elicit, as this one did, a shared sigh from the audience at the end.
John Kilduff, Let’s Paint TV
photo Torunn Higgins
John Kilduff, Let’s Paint TV
Just down the way, perched above the discount store, is that remarkable venue, the China Club. Of the various shows therein, the most unmissable, and the hardest to miss, is Let’s Paint TV: part performance installation, part public sanitation disaster. Curated by Tim Dwyer, the show pits Los Angeles cable TV sensation John Kilduff against a succession of local artists, a selection of exercise equipment and oil paints. The performer splashes some portion of his ill-mixed pigment on the canvas from a walking treadmill and the rest ends up pooling in a puddle of public liability risk. Professing to instruct in cocktail mixing, oil painting and life-coaching simultaneously, Kilduff’s performances are unrelenting to the edge of cringemaking. His persona, a multi-tasking agony aunt, intercuts his painting with trite life advice, re-inventing platitudes of the ‘everyone is an artist’ DIY ethos as daytime television infotainment. With cameo appearances from a reasonable sampling of every performance artist who has ever been inappropriately naked or messy in a Sydney venue of late, the show is possibly the boldest example of the promiscuous collaboration that Electrofringe has made its name, facilitating at the instant that it mocks what the whole thing stands for.
Oh, and there’s also some obligatory twitter-based artwork, and video installations, and enough firewire leads to span the continent. It is Electrofringe after all. But that old focus on technology, and on the strident politics of participation, are backgrounded, uncontroversial. We’re in a society which mainstreams the debauched participation of Burning Man, where culture jamming is repackaged as community cultural development, and where flashmobs and programmable GPS devices provide ubiquitous recreation for the middle class. Newcastle itself doesn’t seem to feel obliged to muster up the objections it might once have in the face of such a spectacle. I’m hard put to explain whether the festival has lost its edge to an advancing society, or is simply representing a more acceptable, even attainable, vision of change than its earlier utopianism. Or am I’m calling the truce too early?
On the final night, the neo-tribalism of New Weird Australia takes over the festival club, in a gentle reassurance that this last possibility is in the race. This is a new music project curated by Stuart Buchanan and Danny Jumpertz (see earbash review), defiantly audio-focussed, refreshingly free from video projectors. NWA’s hand-picked miscellany of musical outsiders offer essays in low-fidelity technopunk, and there is no-one, (out-of-townsfolk nor festival managers) who is safe from the generalised wantonness. It’s hard to say in the mayhem, but I think I catch Alps, Moonmilk and Brutal Hate Mosh performances. Second-hand effects units and broken samplers abound, pumping distorted audio through an overdriven sound system in the old Masonic Hall, obliterating any compering that might bring order to the mess. This is an ‘experimental’ evening in the older sense I still expect from this festival, not as a category in the iTunes store, but in the sense of trying something raw enough that it might not work. It doesn’t, sometimes, and at other times it does, and the frenetic crowd loves the lot. As the licensing police descend on the venue for the 10pm crackdown, and drunken, intoxicated freaks are disgorged onto the streets, as the cascading parties are evicted from corner after corner and squat party after squat party is quashed by noise complaints, the festival finally discovers the limits of this city’s tolerance. There is still, I see, tension enough between the forces of the centre and the fringe to keep the interaction entertaining.
Electrofringe 2009, directors Somaya Langley, Daniel Green, This Is Not Art, Newcastle, Oct 1-5, www.electrofringe.net
IN JAPAN THE RISE OF THE M-BOOK OR CELL PHONE NOVEL (KEITAI SHOSETSU) HAS REACHED STRATOSPHERIC HEIGHTS. MOBILE SITES OFFER A RANGE OF NOVELS—POPULAR FICTION, CLASSICS AND NEWBIES—FOR DOWNLOAD IN SHORT INSTALMENTS TO BE READ ON PHONES WITHIN SPECIALLY CREATED JAVA APPLICATIONS. THE POPULAR SITE MAHO NO I-RANDO (MAGIC ISLAND, JAPANESE ONLY: HTTP://COMPANY.MAHO.JP/NOVEL/INDEX.HTML) HAS OVER A MILLION TITLES, 3.5 BILLION VISITORS PER MONTH AND 6 MILLION REGISTERED USERS; ALL NOVELS ARE FREE TO DOWNLOAD AND MOST ARE WRITTEN BY AMATEURS.
Cell phone novels are not just read on mobiles, they’re written on them too, thousands of words entered with thumbs on a tiny keypad, uploaded to sites where they are voraciously consumed, especially by young women in their late teens and early 20s. By 2007 half of Japan’s 10 best-selling novels were written on cell phones (“Cell phone stories writing new chapter in print publishing’, CNN.com, Feb 26, 2009, www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/25/japan.mobilenovels/index.html).
Popular topics include sex, teen relationships, rape, drugs and violence. One of the most successful writers has been Yoshi, whose Deep Love series about a teenager who becomes a prostitute, was so popular it became a movie, TV show and manga, then a published novel (on paper!), selling 2.6 million copies. With statistics each day telling him how often his stories are being downloaded, Yoshi can change his tack if interest is waning: “It’s like playing music at a club…You know right away if the audience isn’t responding and you can change what you’re doing right then and there” (“Cell Phones Put to Novel Use”, Wired Magazine online, May 18, 2005, www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2005/03/66950).
Australians have been slow to take up the idea of reading online fiction or hypertext in its myriad forms. But along comes Marieke Hardy and, with help from Melbourne’s Age newspaper, she delivers TextTales, subheaded Vigilante Virgin, hyped as an m-book where you pay 55 cents a chapter for 20 instalments over a number of months. Hardy comes from good literary stock. The granddaughter of Frank Hardy, she is Jennifer Byrne’s regular sidekick on the ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club. She has previously written a phenomenally successful blog, Reasons You Will Hate Me, and the award-winning children’s TV series Short Cuts. She has also dabbled in another emerging genre, erotic fan fiction (where writers imagine sexual dalliances with their favourite stars or fictional characters).
Signing up to TextTales is a strange way to experience fiction. After sending a text message saying you are keen to subscribe, and a ‘yes’ to confirm, you are sent a series of texts with links, beeping at 7am, telling you the latest chapter is available to read. Clicking on the link takes you to a URL where the text is downloaded onto your mobile screen. It’s not quite what I envisaged an m-book to be, especially as you can just type the URL into your laptop and see the text online anyway. And also, given you are a paid subscriber, something of a cheat, because you are sent the same URL each time, meaning you are paying 55 cents a time essentially for returning to the same place. Cutting through the hype, blogger Adam Ford observes that rather than being the first Australian m-book it’s more “the first password-protected Australian-authored online-story-in-instalments accessible via mobile-phone-delivered subscription” (Adam Ford, http://theotheradamford.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/whats-so-great-about-being-first-anyway/).
Just as important, Hardy’s text, while nicely characterised, occasionally hilarious and with a topical subject matter (the return of a paedophile into a residential community, with the media waiting outside his house) doesn’t have the necessary momentum to work in such short instalments. With such a text you need to be left hanging on, dying to see what happens next—a screen grabber, perhaps? The text just doesn’t have the right amount of impact. And Hardy is pretty tough on her downtrodden central character, Judy Bowler, not really rooting for her, responding much as the other characters in the tale do:
“The rest of her was no better, coming across like the offcuts of a particularly unpleasant piece of meat before a kindly local butcher had managed to pretty it up a smidge.”
While in a novel the reader has the luxury of gradually getting to know such a character, to engage with their moments of loneliness (as in Alan Bennett’s work where he gets inside their skin), here you struggle to care week to week whether Judy will overcome her antisocial tendencies and find friendship or understanding. And the story itself seems curiously old-fashioned for such a medium: Judy Bowler struggles to get her iPod working—she can never listen to her favourite songs.
While Hardy’s 7,000-worder might work well as a short story in a collection or zine, it represents a wasted opportunity in terms of new avenues of fiction distribution. The information-design of the text too is disappointing, with lots of scrolling through lengthy dialogue, and unnecessary clicking backwards and forwards between chapters. Marketed somewhat obscenely by the Age as “Marieke Hardy In Your Hand”, it will be interesting to see whether more TextTales will follow. The newspaper needs to rethink both the fiction and the technology, but hopefully it becomes more about encouraging creativity and innovation in new forms of writing than just another revenue stream for a paper struggling financially.
AS THE SAYING GOES, “TWO HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE”, SO 10 HEADS MUST BE SPLENDID. FROM A UNIQUE INITIATIVE BETWEEN LISMORE REGIONAL GALLERY AND THE MUSIC FESTIVAL SPLENDOUR IN THE GRASS, IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL, NORTHERN RIVERS PERFORMING ARTS (NORPA) AND ARTS NORTHERN RIVERS, COMES SPLENDID, A NEW EXPERIMENTAL ARTS PROGRAM AIMED AT PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN ART AND AUDIENCE, PUTTING THEORY TO THE TEST.
Through a series of ‘arts labs’ and project commissions, Splendid’s organisers claim that it will “build on the culture of experimentation and interdisciplinary practice in Australia by facilitating opportunities for young and emerging artists to conceptualise and create work for mass audiences” (http://splendid.org.au). Mass audience might be somewhat of an understatement: Splendour In The Grass, boasting 17,000+ in attendance, may as well be its own city-state. Attracting music from across the globe, it is a world-class festival situated in the idyllic setting of Byron Bay, Northern New South Wales.
arts lab
Focusing on ideas generation and artistic collaboration, the Splendid Arts Lab was an intensive three-week residency involving 10 Australian artists (“the Splendid Ten”) and a team of artist provocateurs. It was conceived as an experiment in bringing together young and emerging artists interested in transcending their disciplines and working collectively to generate work for a music festival site.
As Splendid provocateur Tom Barker described it, “making work for Splendour is like making work for a war zone.” Far removed from the gallery or white cube where much art regularly finds itself, the festival is moving, vibrational and explosive; an “assault on the senses” as participating visual artist Carl Scrase, put it. Confronted with this challenge, the Splendid artists were immersed within a think-tank styled residency as a means of unraveling the complexities of cross-art form collaboration.
The Arts Lab took an expanded approach: each week the group was mentored by a series of three to four guest provocateurs including contemporary dancers, visual artists, designers, architects, performance artists, theatre directors and new media artists from across Australia. These provocateurs played the roles of stimulators, supporters and clarifiers. At other times they acted as nurturers and cultivators, encouraging the growth of the group as a responsive, multi-faceted, living organism. Architect Tom Rivard noted, “They are different artists, working in different media and we need to tease out how each of them can bring their discipline and way of working into the process.”
Lab days were vastly dynamic as each provocateur exercised the artists through a sweep of immersive activities, from a crash-course in Jungian psychology to movement workshops that seemed like auditions for Dancing with the Stars. The group was given tasks such as developing performative dinner parties and sent out on missions like “walking meditation”, all with the aim of transforming their relationships to site and audience. Provocateur Mickie Quick said, “It could have been Reality TV’s next big sensation: ‘So You Think You Can Make Art?’.”
Focused on challenging each individual into novel engagement with their own distinctive working methods, the artists were placed within the microscope of the Lab for what coordinating provocateur Rebecca Conroy described as “open art surgery.” As artists spread out their practices on the Lab’s (operating) table, ideas seemed to transplant and cross-pollinate.
processes and outcomes
Beyond this, the Lab became much more than simply a synthesis of artistic team challenges or a collage of practices. Artistic collaboration is not easily deconstructed, nor reducible to the juxtaposition of disparate art forms and working processes. Often the lived space that insulates and informs these practices is at the heart of the act of collaboration, shaping an identity through which art forms take on voice and become personal.
This realisation came through experiencing the qualities of the Lab as a residency. Perhaps it was through cohabitation that the group aesthetic developed. In the domestic activity of sharing house, food and spirit, the artists engaged in an essential dialogue at the core of working together creatively. As multi-media artist Daniel Tanner related, “The best ideas came from sharing a meal or chatting over a tea in the evenings.” As the mutual engagement with an emerging artefact, collaborations can be found even in the most quotidian and customary acts.
Artistic collaboration, in this instance, might be considered as a form of ‘coming-out’; an emergence of process-as-outcome. This entanglement between process and outcome transpired as a very specific challenge of the Lab. As one of participants, “cross-artformer” Dario Vacirca, pointed out, “process is one of our goals…challenging the scale and meaning of collaboration and how it works.” So when is the focus on generating a collaborative process and when is it on producing viable outcomes in the form of art? It seemed a question of articulation: when does art ‘work’ become artwork within collective practice?
scratch first… itch later
The final provocation of the Lab, a project proposal pitch coined “The Itch” (pitch minus p) stretched out this tension between process and outcome. By sounding ideas amongst the provocateurs, curatorium and each other the group generated and solidified their collective vision, mapping-out individual intentions and inspirations about how best to integrate their diverse practices.
The presentations offered closer glimpses into each collaborator, how they worked, their creative voice and style. As the artists showcased their visions of flash dance mobs, interactive mobile phone interventions and performative fantasy environments, what emerged was a front-row demonstration of each collaborator’s working style, their strengths and weaknesses as individual practitioners within the Splendid Ten.
The basis of The Itch was to communicate potential projects for Splendour In The Grass to the panel and facilitate a forum of discussion on how these concepts and ideas could be further developed in the next phase of Splendid. Equally important was The Itch’s function as a testing ground for each artist to enunciate their creative voice within the collaborative language of the group.
Artistic collaboration within Splendid is a continuous negotiation of not only process and outcome, but also self and other; an instance in which boundaries between entities become confused, obscured and fluid. This type of playful self-enquiry, losing and relocating oneself amidst the universality of the others, orientates an exploration of a certain course of exchange. As visual artist Alice Lang acknowledged,“ It has made me analyse the way in which I work, the type of work that I make and the kind of work that can be created through developing creative partnerships.” In these ways the Arts Lab was generative, layered and unpredictable.
Reminding the group of the importance of this “seeding process” and denoting the Lab’s experimental dynamic, provocateur Dominico De Clario reassured the artists that in every creative situation “99% happens after the event. You experience then you think.” Concluding that while the past three weeks had been emotionally, physically, and intellectually demanding, De Clario suggested, “If anything makes you uncomfortable it is really, really useful. It’s a gift, explore this.” Splendid Arts Lab is a fertile site for planting these seeds that will germinate into some larger-than-life cross-art collaborations and innovative artworks at Splendour In The Grass 2010.
Splendid: Art, Ideas, Experience, Arts Lab, lab artists: Alice Lang, Kristy Ayre, Shakthi Sivanathan, Mish Grigor, Dario Vacirca, Lachlan Tetlow-Stuart, Lauren Brincat, Daniel Tanner, Carl Scrase, Dominic Finlay-Jones; mentors Deborah Pollard, Rebecca Conroy, Jenny Fraser, Mickie Quick, Tom Barker, Natalie Cursio, Domenico De Clario, Julian Louis, Tom Rivard, Craig Walsh, Andy Forbes; Lismore, July 20-Aug 7, www.splendid.org.au.
BEGINNING MIDDLE END WAS AN ANU SCHOOL OF ART THREE-WEEK FORUM, FESTIVAL AND EXHIBITION OF CURRENT DIGITAL MEDIA RESEARCH AND PRAXIS WHICH DREW ACADEMICS, POST- AND UNDER-GRADUATE STUDENTS FROM A NUMBER OF AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES..
The wrap-up exhibition was in various states of repair and dysfunction both times I visited, which left me to ponder the relationship between ideas and imagination, technology and affect, and how much grace we need to give works in development when they come up against their limits.
Some of the ‘game’ interactives, required me to stand at x-distance and utilise y-tools to enact z-function, rendering me as robotic as the faces twitching at me from the screen. Other exhibitors, however, were more thoughtfully at work with an awareness of exhibition space and spectator as co-significant and co-intelligent factors.
Although Ryszard Dabek’s sound was not working on one visit, still the idea of the whole worked both times. His installation, Fader (www.ryszard.net/fader), zooms detailed digital images of 1940s worker figures from Warsaw’s Plac Konstytucji against a bare white wall. A video loop of old vinyl records, “endlessly spiralling and repeating”, is complemented by a wash of sound, ghosting the space with voices and instrumental snatches. These circular and circulating images and sounds are like portals into a ship of lost ideals, reflecting on the patchiness of memory, memorial documents, art and history.
By contrast, Luke Pender’s Longing From New Holland ties my hands and my mind. He projects images of convict love tokens (small metal discs) in a rapid-shuffle video loop, below there’s a tumble of 5,000 shabby cardboard replicas in a heap on the floor. The sound component, which “deliberately overlaps messages from these tokens…making it impossible to hear each” leaves one feeling winded. The original tokens—exquisitely detailed, hand-worked and highly individuated homages to passion, hope, and craft—live down the road at the National Museum, and deserve far more honouring than this (www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/community/australian_digital_journeys/luke_penders).
The large exhibition centrepiece, InterANTARCTICA, requires the physical presence of the audience and its bodies’ motions. Driven by a motivation to “impart vital knowledge” about climate change, this interactive work-in-progress—created by Dr onacloV, Michael Bates and 14 students from the University of Sydney Design Lab—presumes a lot about how it effects empathic reaction and supposedly manufactures a response-able relationship to this threatened environment.
I doubt empathic connection is made via manipulating the Tangible User Interfaces, which are clunky and cumbersome and just plain odd. A flashing light bulb telling me I’ve won a brownie point is not going to make me want to change my energy habits. Quite apart from how well, or otherwise, this compares with fully functioning interactives already accessible in public galleries, this interactive has a very long way to go to match the calibre of input from its sound artist—Michael Bates’ eerily evocative 3-D soundscape—or that of the awesome landscape footage gathered by CSIRO base scientists doing the ground-level research work in the Antarctic.
In its current form, and in the current exhibition, InterANTARCTICA is highly problematic (www.interantarctica.com). For full effect, it requires room lights out (bad luck for the other exhibitors). It also relies on spatial configurations to be exactly right—eg exact hanging or standing distance for the projections cameras—for which this gallery was not equipped, and which caused the install to malfunction. Multimedia can be caught in an idealised parameter which is hard to achieve and at times unreasonable to expect. Ironically, this exhibition calls attention to itself, as opposed to the subject and intention that it advocates.
Elsewhere in Beginning Middle End, Anna Madeleine’s stop-frame animation Why read the book when you can watch the movie? shows a real match between intention and achievement. The animation reveals hand drawn imagery unfolding from the pages of a book. Its visual story-within-a-story reveals multi-dimensional narratives and reflects on the intimate, interactive, trans-personal and transformative nature of reading itself. Quirky, poetic, playful, spacious, its elements playfully cross paths and challenge relationships between text and image, fiction and reality, and old and new media. (For other works by the artist: www.annamadeleine.com)
Mitchell Whitelaw’s nylon 3D print Weather Ring—“an experiment in transducing form from temporal patterns”—is perhaps the highlight of the exhibition. It presents 365 days of local weather data in a three-dimensional, ‘bracelet’ form. Its circumference texture is as intriguing as a city’s silhouette (http://teemingvoid.blogspot.com/2009/10/weather-bracelet-3d-printed-data.html). It is complemented by Whitelaw’s Watching the Sky (detail, 14/5/08), a kind of Japanese fan of inkjet-printed, composite images—1,440 to be precise—of collected data from a single 24-hour period, visualised using a simple slit-scan technique (www.flickr.com/photos/mtchl/sets/72157604494499057). Poignant and poetic, these two works are both technically and philosophically exceptional, merging the gap between hard data and sense perception, showing how our world and its changes wears at and touches us.
ANU School of Art, Beginning Middle End, digital media showcase, curator Lucien Leon, ANU School of Art Gallery, Sept 3-24, www.bmefestival.com
THE SLIDE NIGHT MIGHT BE DYING IN THE SUBURBS, THANKS TO THE RISE OF DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY AND FLICKR, BUT IT STILL PERSISTS ON THE STAGE—ALBEIT IN A SLIGHTLY MORE ELEGANT FORM—THROUGH THE WORK OF PERFORMERS SUCH AS WILLIAM YANG AND NOW PAUL DWYER IN HIS SHOW THE BOUGAINVILLE PHOTOPLAY PROJECT. LIKE YANG, DWYER TELLS INTIMATE TALES THAT BELIE THEIR LARGER POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE AND HE DOES SO WITH SIMILAR RESTRAINT, SHARING EMOTIONAL STORIES WITHOUT NECESSARILY EMOTING.
Sitting at a desk on a small trapezoidal stage, surrounded by computers on his right (manned by video artist Sean Bacon and director David Williams), a wall of maps and old newspaper articles on his left and two screens above his head, Dwyer braids together three narrative threads: the story of his late father, the orthopaedic surgeon Dr Allan Dwyer, and his pro bono work in Bougainville in the 1960s; the story of Dwyer’s own academic research there 40 years later; and the broader history of Bougainville itself.
Dwyer tells us about his father’s “beautiful hands”, his revolutionary screw and cable treatment for scoliosis (variously illustrated with x-rays, photographs, an onstage skeleton and a reenactment where the scalpel is a black marker pen), his smoking habit, and most importantly his work in Bougainville. The surgeon made several trips there during the 1960s and we relive them in all their Kodachrome glory with photos, slides and snippets of film as well as some amusing excerpts from the notebook of Dwyer’s then 13-year-old brother who recounts a tale of window seats, lost jackets and slightly clammy pants.
The father passed away before Dwyer had the opportunity to accompany him to Bougainville, however he followed in his footsteps in 2004 when he went on a fieldtrip as part of his research into restorative justice and the performative ceremonies associated with it. Like his brother, Dwyer is endearingly frank, particularly about the practice of fieldwork: he reads out the first polite, hesitant email; lurches through a language lesson; and enacts encounters in Tok Pisin and English. He is also honest about his dependence on the good will of his informants, his efforts to build rapport (Rugby League comes in handy) and his self-consciousness about the colonial connotations and the postcolonial context of the whole ethnographic enterprise.
These themes are dealt with more explicitly in the third strand of this story, which rehearses the history of Bougainville’s mine, its war and now its peace. Dwyer explains how the copper mine devastated the local community and why it lead to the rise of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) and the retreat of the Papua New Guinea Defence Force, which then funded—with Australia’s assistance—various militia collectively called the Resistance. This long and brutal civil war only came to an end in 1998 and since then Bougainvilleans have worked hard to keep the peace and attain autonomy. The performance ends with Dwyer attending a reconciliation ceremony with more than a thousand participants, who witness perpetrators crossing the circle to apologise to their victims, shake hands and begin to forgive each other.
In his program notes, Dwyer suggests “there is something to be learned from the people of Bougainville about how to do reconciliation” but there is something to be learned from him too. In telling three stories of reconciliation, Dwyer causes us to reflect on the nature of reconciliation itself. In Bougainville, reconciliation emerges as a generous intersubjective encounter and a genuine attempt to right a wrong. Between Bougainville and Australia reconciliation resembles resignation, as if Australia were too preoccupied with its internal reconciliations to contemplate an international one right now. Finally, there seems to be a smaller reconciliation—or reckoning—between Paul Dwyer and his father. More than once, he cites John Berger’s classic, A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor, and asks “How does the cure of serious illness compare in value with one of the better poems of a minor poet? How does making a correct but extremely difficult diagnosis compare with painting a great canvas?” The implicit question here is, “How does one compare doctors? How does an MD compare to a PhD?” Perhaps it is indicative of the measurements we all make at some point: how do I compare to my parents, my peers, my neighbours? What is it to be the fortunate child of a fortunate man or the citizen of the so-called lucky country? To whom do we owe a duty of care? To whom do we owe an apology?
Version 1.0 in association with Tamarama Rock Surfers and Paul Dwyer, Bougainville Photoplay Project, devisor and performer Paul Dwyer, director David Williams, video artist Sean Bacon, lighting designer Frank Mainoo, technical assistance Russell Emerson; Old Fitzroy Theatre, Sydney, October 14-31
“WE CARE NOT FOR THE POLLUTED IDEALS OF THE DECADENT EAST, FOR WE KNOW WHO WE ARE!”, BLEATS ANGUS BROWN, THE UNHINGED CHILD PATRIOT AT THE PSYCHIC HEART OF THEA COSTANTINO’S LAVISHLY COMIC MUSICAL, HEART OF GOLD. THIS IS ‘WESTRALIA’—WHERE SECESSION WOULD SURELY GARNER MORE VOTES THAN DAYLIGHT SAVING; AND WHERE SAND, SURF AND OL’ FASHIONED VALUES CLEARLY PROVIDE RICH AGISTMENT FOR NEW WA PRODUCTION COMPANY HOLD YOUR HORSES, CO-FOUNDED BY COSTANTINO WITH VISUAL ARTISTS TARRYN GILL AND PILAR MATA DUPONT.
A beautifully staged rural-gothic extravaganza, Heart of Gold is directed confidently by Zoe Pepper and made larger than life by composer Ash Gibson Grieg and an accomplished cast of actors and dancers. It centres on the hard-done-by Brown family—Iris and her two strange kids, Angus and Violet—who find themselves grappling with the malevolent charms of smooth, manipulative Constable Irving Saddle, an unexpected intruder into their lives in the isolated WA town of Paucity.
Heart of Gold dramatically extends Gill and Dupont’s previous works in the Heart of Gold series, in development since 2004. Its forerunners have largely consisted of sets of lushly produced photographs, tableaux vivants and live art performances memorable for their military-style pin-up girls and lipsticked lifesavers and their conflation of a distinctly Australian 50s kitsch with wartime Hollywood glamour and patriotism, Busby Berkeley style.
Heart of Gold
photo Kim Tran
Heart of Gold
The synergy within this team is palpable, and the performers bring such confidence and accuracy to their hammed-up roles that what could read like a bad school play is frequently stunning in its clarity—in moments of both audacious madness (such as the anthem, Sausages, the National Treat, featuring a chorus of sequined snags) and bleak poignancy. Watching Iris and Irving tango their way through a kitchen courtship dance complete with 50s Latin flute riffs is more than satire: the scene holds real pathos. The same kitchen becomes truly sinister when, amid the dramatic denouement, it becomes populated with a troupe of demented, un-dead soldier girls, who seem as much to offer a last line of defence to poor Iris and Violet as to rally to the cause of regional independence in a world raped and plundered by Saddle and his parasitic kind.
Costantino’s writing is luscious and pointed, the vernacular spot on and the many comic shifts and turns accurately placed. Investing the character of a 12-year-old boy with the role of madman, critical enquirer and unsettling animator of the feminine is a stroke of genius. Angus evokes both weird nationalism and Freudian Oedipal angst, extolling the glories of war as the intruder besets his sister and mother.
Heart of Gold, the musical, carries a distinct layer of shadow, exposing the tattered values and desperate hopes of a world reduced to…Paucity. A kind of gothic vaudeville, its tale of paternalistic violence, feminine subjection and patriotism-run-riot faintly echoes Baz Luhrmann’s preposterous Australia, while sticking firmly to its softly lunatic, sandy terrain. It’s a critically aware, overblown lunacy; a cleverly twisted allegory of a quest for independence.
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Heart of Gold, script, lyrics Thea Costantino, direction, dramaturgy Zoe Pepper, composition, performers Tim Watts, Shirley Van Sanden, Sarah McKellar, Brendan Ewing, chorus Natalya Alessi, Oda Aunan, Maree Cole, Lily Newbury-Freeman, Whitney Richards, sound design, musical direction Ash Gibson Grieg, choreography, costume design Tarryn Gill, set design Pilar Mata Dupont, lighting Lucy Birkinshaw; Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Oct 29-Nov 14
soundcapsule #1 features sound works from Germ Studies (Clare Cooper and Chris Abrahams), Joel Stern, Adam Simmons, Ernie Althoff, Mark Cauvin, Topology, Rice屎Corpse, James Rushford, Cat Hope, Clocked Out, Jason Sweeney, and a video composition by Brigid Burke.
